Exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya has accused Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko of playing games with the West by drip-feeding releases of political prisoners ahead of an election on Sunday in which he is set to extend his 31-year rule.

With many of his political opponents either jailed or exiled abroad, 70-year-old Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko is back on the ballot. When the election concludes on Sunday, he's all but certain to add a seventh term as the only leader most people in post-Soviet Belarus have ever known.

Gradually, as expected, the world calms down. Of all the "terrible" decrees of Trump, almost nothing has happened so far, except for the US withdrawal from the WHO and the climate agreement, as well as the removal of rainbow flags from US embassies.

Pope Francis on Thursday urged political, economic and business leaders at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos to keep close oversight of the development of artificial intelligence, warning the technology can exacerbate a growing "crisis of truth".

President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, a close ally of Russia’s leader, Vladimir V. Putin, has been making signs of reaching out to the West. He is all but certain to win an election on Sunday.

A close ally of Vladimir Putin, Lukashenko has been nicknamed Europe’s last dictator, and has brutally cracked down on opposition figures and made the country a key staging ground for Russia’s war in Ukraine. Among the many dissident leaders now in exile is Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, whose husband remains in prison in Belarus.

Belarus’ authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko is all but certain to extend his more than three decades in power in Sunday’s election that is rejected by the opposition as a farce after years of sweeping repressions.

DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters ... democratic world you call elections has nothing in common with this event in Belarus. Because it's mostly like a ritual for dictators, when they are reappointing ...

Since the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, opened on the same day as Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47th president in the USA, the news coverage of the WEF annual meeting 2025 under the theme 'Collaboration in the Intelligent Age' was less than it otherwise would have been.

In addition, PACE calls on the Georgian authorities to take immediate and effective measures to resume Georgia's path to European integration, as well as to respect citizens' rights and freedoms and release all political prisoners by the beginning of the Assembly's session in April.

The intergovernmental commission on economic cooperation between Armenia and Georgia is an important format. This was stated by visiting Georgian foreign minister Maka Botchorishvili at a joint press conference with her Armenian colleague, Ararat Mirzoyan, in Yerevan Thursday.