German MP Jörg Dornau, onion farmer in Belarus
Jörg Dornau, who based the far-right Different for Germany (AfD) in 2016, is an agricultural engineer by coaching – and he runs a farm in Belarus. Situated just a few kilometres from Lida, within the north-west of the nation, he rents its 1,500 hectares from the regime of President Alexander Lukashenka and produces onions.
These information are shocking in themselves, however the unbiased Belarusian journal Reform Information has revealed some disturbing particulars. The German media had already reported on the Belarusian enterprise of the “Onion King”, as Jörg Dornau is thought in his dwelling nation, after he was fined €20,862 by the federal government of the Free State of Saxony in August 2024 for hiding his unlikely enterprise enterprise.
The Belarusian journalists have now established that Dornau’s farm has employed prisoners – who seemingly embrace political detainees, given the character of the Lukashenka regime. Cybulka-Bel, the corporate he registered in Belarus, held a contract with the close by Lida jail. The authors of the article stress that its inmates aren’t obliged to work. Nevertheless, these prisoners who do enroll can earn the good-looking sum of round 5 euros for an 11-hour working day on Jörg Dornau’s farm.
Girls and warfare in Ukraine
Battle can have a dramatic influence on conventional social roles, as was demonstrated by the Second World Struggle and the years that adopted. In Ukraine, this historic legacy just isn’t so pronounced, though extra ladies at the moment are serving within the military.
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The Ukrainian journal Wonderzine studies on a coaching programme, Iron Girls, to organize ladies for jobs as drivers of bulldozers and excavators. The scheme is the initiative of Beredskapslyftet, a Swedish nonprofit. The intention is to assist Ukrainian ladies get expert up for the home labour market, which is struggling cruelly from a scarcity of male staff because of the warfare.
The Ukrainian authorities can be offering coaching for girls. In seven areas of the nation, there at the moment are bus-driving programs particularly for them.
Russians and the “collective West”
The unbiased Russian portal Verstka has discovered a research printed by the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences which analyses opinion polls carried out over a number of a long time on how Russians understand themselves and different ethnic teams residing of their nation. One of many report’s findings issues the “consolidation of Russians within the face of the collective West”.
In 2023, 79.9% of these questioned agreed that “Russia [was] an distinctive nation that’s basically completely different from the West and [should] subsequently comply with its personal path”. This determine is – brace your self – eight occasions increased than in 1998, simply earlier than Vladimir Putin got here to energy. Again then, solely 9.5% of Russians had been of this opinion. In keeping with the identical survey, two thirds of these questioned (68.5%) thought that “Western influences are destroying conventional Russian values”. Within the late Nineties, solely 16.3% of respondents shared this view.
Though the Russian Federation is a multi-ethnic nation, with greater than 190 completely different ethnic teams residing on its soil, half of these questioned in the identical ballot imagine that “Russia is above all of the nation of the Russians, and the state ought to symbolize their pursuits”. And nearly 43% of respondents imagine that “Russians are extra clever and have extra skills than different peoples”. The survey seems to indicate the dimensions of Russia’s creeping megalomania through the Putin period.
Verstka unearthed one other statistic that illustrates a baleful results of Russia’s present “distinctive” path: in two and a half years of warfare with Ukraine, Russian troopers coming back from the entrance have killed or significantly wounded almost 5 hundred individuals. Drawing on public courtroom and police information, they discovered 242 instances of murder and 227 instances of significant harm dedicated by people who had fought in Ukraine. The perpetrators of the assaults are principally former prisoners who agreed to hitch the military in trade for a lowered sentence, and the victims are primarily their kinfolk. Nevertheless, the authors of the article imagine that there are in all probability extra instances, as not all the information is accessible.
Floods in Poland
Poland is slowly recovering from the catastrophic floods in September, which brought on in depth harm to cities within the nation’s southwest. The blame recreation has already begun, and this time the local weather disaster has a correct position within the dialogue, notes Paulina Januszewska in Krytyka Polityczna. In the meantime, Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who not too long ago toppled Poland’s hard-right populists, brought on an uproar when he blamed the poor state of the nation’s dams on… beavers.
His assault on the rodents, which actually perform hydrological engineering that’s estimated to be value billions (their dams stabilise water ranges and sluggish the circulate of rivers), has provoked some annoyance amongst environmentalists, who principally voted for events of Tusk’s governing coalition.
The brand new Polish authorities has thus far did not introduce any critical environmental laws. This has not stopped Donald Tusk from declaring, with all his statesmanlike authority, that Poland is not going to settle for both the EU’s Inexperienced Deal because it stands or its Nature Restoration Regulation. And but specialists agree that the extent of the flood harm in Poland is due not solely to local weather change but additionally to misguided practices: the felling of mountain forests, the development of synthetic riverbanks, and overdevelopment of flood plains by property builders.
