Legislating Legacy
NEED TO KNOW
Legislating Legacy
BELARUS
Russian military interrogators tortured Ukrainian soldiers and civilians in a government-owned camp in Belarus, according to a Radio Free Liberty investigation conducted with the Poland-based Belarusian Investigative Center.
“These ‘filtration’ camps cannot be created without authorized government officials who must give their consent to this,” said Yulia Polekhina, a Ukrainian human rights advocate who accused Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, an autocrat and ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, of allowing the Russians to use the state-owned facilities.
“When people are beaten, tortured, and denied medical care, this is a war crime,” Polekhina added. “And this cannot happen without the consent of the authorities.”
Hundreds of Ukrainians, including children, were cycled through the camp in Naroulia, Belarus, about 40 miles from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant across the border in nearby Ukraine, wrote the Kyiv Post, citing the investigation. Many were then transported to Russia. Lukashenko’s administration did not comment.
The camp highlights how the former Soviet republic of Belarus is helping Putin to invade and subjugate another former Soviet republic, Ukraine. And those efforts are unlikely to stop anytime soon.
That’s a remarkable about-face for Lukashenko, who a decade ago began making efforts to distance Belarus from Russia and draw closer to the West, mainly to help his country’s economy. But in 2020, he realized he needed Russia too much to maintain power to continue.
That’s because that year, hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets after an election that he was accused of rigging to win a sixth term after 26 years in office. Belarusian security forces used rubber bullets, tear gas, flash grenades, and batons to put down the protests. Lukashenko has long denied that any violence occurred.
Now, undergirding Lukashenko’s security state, meanwhile, are even closer ties to the Russian military, including security guarantees that include Russian nuclear deterrence, as the Jamestown Foundation detailed. Russia also provides loans and cheap energy to its former satellite.
At the same time, the Russification of Belarus is steadily on track – the Belarusian language, which like Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, is rarely heard on the streets of the capital Minsk and other large cities anymore, wrote the Associated Press. The language of instruction in schools is now Russian. Business and government affairs are also conducted in Russian.
Meanwhile, Lukashenko is now making sure there won’t be a repeat of those protests when the country holds its presidential elections in January. For example, he recently warned that he would shut down the Internet if protesters took to the streets, noted the Kyiv Independent.
Exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who now resides in Canada, told her allies not to flood the streets in January, arguing that they shouldn’t expend energy on a “ritual” preordained to rubberstamp the autocrat, Reuters wrote.
The regime has bred its critics over the years, critics who continue to fight. Belarusians like ex-police officer Viachaslau Hranouski are working to counter Lukashenko and Putin. As the Guardian reported, Hranouski is now fighting the Russians on the front lines for the Ukrainian military to undermine Lukashenko’s most important ally – and by extension, Lukashenko. “The only way to defeat him is to fight Putin,” he said.
However, a recent constitutional change is making any effort to dislodge Lukashenko or his ilk harder.
Earlier this year, Belarus held the inaugural congress of the All-Belarusian People’s Assembly (ABPA), a newly formed constitutional body made up of carefully chosen loyalists, which has unprecedented powers including the ability to overturn decisions made by other state bodies, parliament, and the courts, the European Council on Foreign Relations wrote. They can remove anyone in power, including presidents, lawmakers, and judges, too.
This so-called supreme body is essentially a way for Lukashenko to hold power after he steps down, wrote World Politics Review.
“Shaken by the images of hundreds of thousands of Belarusians calling for his ousting, the embattled Lukashenko told a convening of the assembly in February 2021 that a permanent body would act as a ‘clear safety net so as not to lose the country’ should the ‘wrong people come to power,’” the magazine wrote. But it was also a move that “reassured Belarus’ long-time ally Russia that the country would continue to operate under the Kremlin’s sphere of influence long after the Lukashenko era ends.”
THE WORLD, BRIEFLY
‘Choosing Disorder’
FRANCE
French Prime Minister Michel Barnier resigned Thursday after losing a no-confidence vote in parliament a day earlier, plunging the country into political turmoil, CNN reported.
On Wednesday, 331 out of 577 lawmakers voted against Barnier’s administration, which had used a constitutional mechanism to bypass parliamentary approval for its 2025 budget proposal.
The budget, aimed to reduce France’s deficit to five percent of its gross domestic product (GDP), included $63 billion in tax hikes and $42 billion in spending cuts, with measures such as delaying pension increases tied to inflation.
Opposition lawmakers from the left-wing New Popular Front (NFP) and far-right National Rally (RN) united to oppose the bill, with left-wing Mathilde Panot and RN leader Marine Le Pen accusing the centrist Barnier of provoking voters with harsh fiscal policies.
Barnier, who was appointed just four months ago, will stay on in a caretaker role until President Emmanuel Macron appoints a new prime minister.
The no-confidence vote has left France without a budget for 2025 and missing a prime minister, adding pressure on Macron to appoint a leader capable of navigating the fractured political landscape.
France’s parliament is split into three factions following early elections in July, divisions that have made it difficult for Macron’s centrist bloc to form a stable majority. Snap elections cannot occur until mid-2025, leaving the centrist president reliant on a fragmented legislature.
The political crisis has compounded Macron’s already waning authority, halfway through his second and final term as president, Al Jazeera wrote.
Rising unpopularity after pension reforms and austerity measures has left the president vulnerable to calls for his resignation from opposition leaders, including Le Pen, who placed the blame for the government’s collapse on Macron.
But Macron, addressing the nation on Thursday, said he would not resign and placed the blame on the far-right and the far-left: “They chose disorder,” he said.
Meanwhile, France’s debt is approaching 111 percent of GDP – its highest level since World War II – and uncertainty has pushed borrowing costs higher.
The political instability also threatens Macron’s efforts to position France as a leader in European defense and integration, particularly amid concerns over the war in Ukraine and potential shifts in US foreign policy with Donald Trump’s return to the presidency.
Midwife Crisis
AFGHANISTAN
The Taliban in Afghanistan banned women from attending courses training them to be midwives and nurses, blocking women’s last route to higher education and creating a dire health threat in the country, the BBC reported.
This week, five private medical training institutions across Afghanistan confirmed to the BBC that the Taliban had instructed them to close indefinitely.
Women also reported being ordered not to return to their classes the following day. Videos circulated online of some students weeping at the news, as well as others singing in defiance as they left the training colleges. Women were recently banned from raising their voices.
“They even told us not to stand in the courtyard because the Taliban could arrive at any moment, and something might happen. Everyone was terrified,” one student told the BBC. “For many of us, attending classes was a small glimmer of hope after long periods of unemployment, depression, and isolation at home.”
Since the Taliban’s takeover of the country in August 2021, females cannot attend school after the sixth grade. The Taliban had promised to readmit girls into school once issues with the system were resolved, for example ensuring the curriculum was “Islamic,” but to date they have not kept this promise. As a result, 2.5 million females are missing from schools and universities, the United Nations said.
Training to be nurses or midwives in further education colleges was one of the few avenues still open to women seeking higher education and a career. Officials in the Ministry of Public Health successfully lobbied Taliban officials in February of 2024 to allow women to obtain nursing and midwife training, told NPR.
One motivation for this exception to the banning of higher education for women was that females are not allowed to receive medical treatment from male medics without a male guardian present.
Now, this new decree will have a dire impact on maternal health and women’s health in general, in a country with one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the world, Human Rights Watch wrote.
“This new decree … will result in unnecessary pain, misery, sickness, and death for the women forced to go without health care,” said Human Rights Watch’s Sahar Fetrat.
About 17,000 women were enrolled in the courses. Meanwhile, a UN report last year estimated that Afghanistan needed an additional 18,000 midwives to meet the country’s needs.
“This is bad news for all Afghan people,” one student, turned away from her classes, told NPR. “Because men cannot become midwives in Afghanistan.”
Smoke and Fire
ROMANIA
Romanian authorities are investigating allegations of election interference after declassified intelligence showed that far-right presidential candidate Călin Georgescu’s unexpected success in the first round of voting was linked to a covert TikTok campaign and widespread cyberattacks, France24 reported.
Georgescu, a political outsider and NATO skeptic who had previously praised Russian President Vladimir Putin, was virtually unknown before he won 30 percent of the vote in the first round of the Nov. 27 presidential election, the news outlet wrote.
The results shocked observers and triggered scrutiny from Romanian intelligence, which attributed his meteoric rise to a “highly organized” social media effort.
On Wednesday, intelligence reports declassified by outgoing President Klaus Iohannis revealed that a TikTok account spent $381,000 in just one month starting on Oct. 24 to boost pro-Georgescu content – in violation of electoral law and the platform’s own rules. The campaign allegedly utilized influencers and identical messaging to target voters, the BBC reported.
At the same time, cyberattacks targeted Romania’s electoral systems. Authorities discovered around 85,000 hacking attempts aimed at stealing access data, breaching election systems, and potentially altering results.
Attackers reportedly used sophisticated techniques to maintain anonymity, methods Romanian intelligence described as “typical of state-sponsored actors.” While no conclusive evidence directly implicates Russia, separate intelligence assessments say that Moscow views Romania as an “enemy state” and a priority for “aggressive hybrid actions.”
Russia has denied any involvement.
Georgescu has rejected the allegations as a coordinated attempt to block his candidacy, claiming in an interview Wednesday that he did not know the influencers or funders identified in the intelligence documents.
Georgescu faces pro-European Union reformist Elena Lasconi in a runoff scheduled for Sunday. Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu, who came third in the first round, has endorsed Lasconi, emphasizing Romania’s commitment to its pro-EU future.
The controversy has also drawn scrutiny and raised fears in the EU, Politico noted.
This week, the European Commission, concerned about the Romanian situation, ordered TikTok to preserve internal documents about its recommender systems, political advertising breaches, and manipulation risks under the Digital Services Act (DSA), a bloc-wide law.
The order extends to elections across Europe, including the German vote in early 2025, as part of broader efforts to safeguard electoral integrity. TikTok has pledged cooperation, with officials saying the company looks forward to clarifying facts amid growing speculation.
DISCOVERIES
A Fish, a Civilization
Archeologists working in Belize have discovered the oldest example of a network of man-made canals and ponds used to trap freshwater fish, a 4,000-year-old construction that may have helped the region’s semi-nomadic inhabitants develop into an advanced civilization – and much earlier than initially thought, according to a new study.
“It seems likely that the canals allowed for annual fish harvests and social gatherings, which would have encouraged people to return to this area year after year and congregate for longer periods of time,” said study co-author, Marieka Brouwer Burg, professor of anthropology at the University of Vermont, adding: “Such intensive investments in the landscape may have led ultimately to the development of the complex society characteristic of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization.”
According to the study, the miles of zigzag, earthen canals used to channel annual floodwaters into holding ponds to capture freshwater fish were built as early as 4,000 years ago by semi-nomadic archaic hunter-gather-fishers of the Late Archaic period (2000-1900 BCE) in the Yucatán coastal plain.
Researchers believe the inhabitants of the region were harvesting enough fish to feed up to 15,000 people a year. And after about 1,000 years, the waterways were used by these people’s Maya descendants when they started to settle in permanent farming villages.
“The early dates for the canals surprised us initially because we all assumed these massive constructions were built by the ancient Maya living in the nearby city centers,” said study co-author Eleanor Harrison-Buck of the University of New Hampshire. “However, after running numerous radiocarbon dates, it became clear they were built much earlier.”
The waterways were found using Google Earth imagery and drones, a method that recently helped scientists to locate undiscovered Mayan structures.
After discovering the canals, the research team conducted digs in the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary, the largest inland wetland in Belize. They found barbed spearpoints near the canals, suggesting that they might have been tied to sticks and used to spear the fish.
Researchers believe that the ancient fishing channels may have played a role in helping advance the Mayan civilization, which is known for its impressive pyramids and complex cities as well as its advanced systems of writing and arithmetic, because its ancestors had already built a foundation for them.
Specifically, the canals helped the ancestors of the Mayans to diversify their diets and feed the growing population, allowing them to form a thriving society earlier than initially thought. The discovery also challenges previous notions that the society’s development was due to the development of agriculture.
“For Mesoamerica in general, we tend to regard agricultural production as the engine of civilization,” said Harrison-Buck. “But this study tells us that it wasn’t just agriculture – it was also potential mass harvesting of aquatic species.”