WARSAW: A US envoy was in Minsk for talks with longtime Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko Friday, video from state media showed, as Washington pushes for prisoner releases in the repressive Moscow-allied country.
Lukashenko, in power since 1994, has waged a massive crackdown in Belarus since 2020 protests against his rule, with more than 1,000 people still in prison.
Minsk said US President Donald Trump’s envoy John Coale was in Minsk for “negotiations” with Lukashenko.
Previous such visits have led to prisoner releases.
“Negotiations have started today, they will continue tomorrow,” a Telegram channel run by Lukashenko’s team said.
It published a video of Lukashenko greeting the US official.
In September, Belarus released dozens of political prisoners in a US deal, in exchange for the easing of some sanctions.
The Viasna rights group says Belarus currently has 1,227 political prisoners.
These include Nobel Prize winner Ales Bialiatski, protest leader Maria Kolesnikova and Lukashenko challenger Viktor Babaryko — held largely incommunicado since 2023.
Activists, journalists and ordinary people who participated in or backed the protests are among those behind bars.
In September, Minsk had released veteran regime opponent Mikola Statkevich, but he refused to leave for Lithuania and is back in jail.
The crackdown in Belarus has forced hundreds of thousands into exile.
US envoy in Belarus for talks with longtime leader
https://arab.news/8fjbp
US envoy in Belarus for talks with longtime leader
- Minsk said Trump’s envoy John Coale was in Minsk for “negotiations” with Lukashenko.
- Previous such visits have led to prisoner releases
Spain fines Airbnb 64 mn euros for posting banned properties
- The fine is final, the consumer affairs ministry said in a statement, adding the US holiday-rental giant must “correct the violations by deleting illegal content“
MADRID: Spain’s leftist government said Monday it had fined Airbnb more than 64 million euros ($75 million), notably for posting listings for banned rental properties, at a time the country faces a housing crisis.
The fine is final, the consumer affairs ministry said in a statement, adding the US holiday-rental giant must “correct the violations by deleting illegal content.”
The ministry said 65,122 adverts on Airbnb breached consumer rules, including the promotion of properties without a license or those whose license number did not match with data in registers.
The fine is equivalent to six times the illegal profit made by Airbnb between the time the company was warned about the offending adverts and before they were taken down, the ministry added.
A tourism boom has driven the buoyant Spanish economy but fueled local concern about increasingly scarce and unaffordable housing, a top priority for the minority coalition government.
The world’s second most-visited country hosted a record 94 million foreign tourists in 2024 and is on course to surpass that figure this year.
But residents of hotspots such as Barcelona blame short-term rentals for the housing crisis and changing their neighborhoods.
In June, the consumer rights ministry also ordered online accommodation giant Booking.com to take down more than 4,000 illegal adverts.
“There are thousands of families who are living on the edge due to housing, while a few get rich with business models that expel people from their homes,” far-left consumer rights minister Pablo Bustinduy said in the ministry statement.
“We’ll prove it as many times as necessary: no company, no matter how big or powerful, is above the law. Even less so when it comes to housing,” he added on social network Bluesky.
