Belarus is going to strengthen its relations with the United States of America on the basis of mutual respect, as Alyaksandar Lukashenka stated today accepting the credential letters from the new US ambassador, George Crol. In his turn George Crol emphasized that the objectives and the strategy chosen by the American government towards Belarus stay the same, namely “the forward improvement of the relations with Belarus, based on the positive actions of the Belarusian government towards democracy.”

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In the closest future Russia will send to Belarus modern antiaircraft and missile complexes C300, Syargey Ivanou, the chief of the Russian Ministry of Defense, announced. The Minister underlined that it is not important whether it will be rent or any other form of the handing over. “The most important thing is that they (complexes) will be prepared for action”, the Minister said.

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Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko said there is a need to improve the procedures for obtaining and using free foreign humanitarian aid in Belarus. "After the department for humanitarian activities was organized, we began to keep records of free foreign aid. But we have not reached the final end. We do not see every user of this aid," Lukashenko said while meeting with the government and the presidential administration on Tuesday.

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Today the editor of Vaukavysk independent edition “Mestnaya Hazeta” Andrey Shantarovich received a letter from the Minister of Information Uladzimir Rusakevich. In this letter the paper is notified about possible liquidation. According to Shantarovich, it is the government’s revenge for the coverage by the paper of the conflict between Mikalai Autuhovich, Vaukavysk businessman, and the tax police.

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Kanan Makiya probably understood pre-invasion Iraq as well as anyone living outside the country. In 1989 he wrote, as an exile and under a pseudonym, the required-reading analysis of Saddam Hussein`s dictatorship, a chilling book called "Republic of Fear." But the Iraqi-born academic, who has returned to live in the Baghdad house expropriated from his father, now says he miscalculated how much Iraq had changed in the decade-plus since he wrote his book. "I admit I did not understand the full extent of the rot," he says. "A totalitarian state had metamorphosed into a full-fledged criminal state." Makiya`s observation bears on the challenge the United States now faces in Iraq and on the debate over prewar intelligence failures. But it has significance beyond Iraq, too, as we think about repressive governments in North Korea, Burma, Belarus, Cuba and elsewhere. What does it mean for a totalitarian state to become a mafia enterprise? What provokes such an evolution? And what implication does it have for the chances of recovery?

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A number of officials of the joint Belarusian-Cypriot venture "Mobile Digital Communications" (the trade brand known as Velcom) were detained on 21 October.

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