World

Millions of Turks have been glued to their screens, watching a crime boss tell wild stories about international drug smuggling, murders and the murky ties between politicians and the mafia.

But the gang boss starring in these videos is real, and his claims have set off a political tsunami that has unsettled President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government, leaving his popular interior minister particularly exposed.

Roman Protasevich doesn't look like much of a threat to Europe's last dictator. A fresh-faced 26-year-old, he has never been elected to public office nor has he stood as a candidate. What this blogger and co-recipient of the European parliament's Sakharov prize for freedom of thought has done, however, is regarded as just as dangerous by Alexander Lukashenko's regime. He has helped to ensure that the world knows about the pro-democracy movement in Belarus.

The Belarusian journalist and activist was on his way back home to Lithuania when his Ryanair flight was diverted from its route on the pretext of a security alert and “escorted" to Minsk airport by military aircraft. It was clear that Protasevich was the target of this operation when police arrested him along with his Russian girlfriend, Sofia Sapega, a law student, before allowing the flight to resume.

Nexta, the channel on the social media platform Telegram that Protasevich co-founded and formerly edited, has become one of the main tools in the Belarusian resistance movement that developed since last summer's disputed presidential elections in which Alexander Lukashenko claimed victory. Pro-democracy campaigners use the channel to inform supporters of the details of protests as well as to publicise reports and images of brutal attacks on protesters by the security services.

Within Belarus, the government's control of digital as well as traditional media is tightening relentlessly. Last week Minsk blocked the independent news website tut.by, the country's most popular non-state media outlet. On Monday further restrictions on journalists were announced, including a ban on the live coverage of unsanctioned protests and on organising or participating in “mass events" that they report on.

The fact that Nexta has its offices in Poland means that Minsk has so far been unable to shut it down. But as Protasevich discovered on Sunday, Lukashenko's regime is willing to break international agreements in order to catch, punish and silence those who defy him. There are real questions about the safety of leading Belarusian opposition figures living in exile – especially Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the woman widely regarded as the real winner of the August 2020 presidential election.

Scientists called Wednesday for a key 14-day time limit for growing human embryos in the lab to be relaxed as they outlined new ethical guidelines for the fast-changing world of stem cell research.

In its first update since 2016, the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) said the decades-old rule had little scientific merit, although they stopped short of giving the green light for researchers to breach the time constraint, which is baked into law in some countries.

Defying election results and court rulings, Samoa's veteran leader Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi is determined to cling to power, convinced only divine intervention can end his 22-year rule of the Pacific island nation.

Malielegaoi is not accustomed to losing -- until recently the 76-year-old's authority was virtually absolute in a devoutly Christian nation of 220,000 where respect for one's elders is deeply ingrained.

Syria's Bashar al-Assad said Western criticism of Wednesday's presidential election has "zero value" as he cast his ballot in a Damascus suburb.

Commenting on US and EU criticism branding the vote "neither free nor fair," Assad said: "Your opinions have zero value", an AFP journalist reported.