Vladimir Putin is looking forward to deep integration and is hinting at a political takeover

However, Belarus’s leader upsets Vladimir Putin by cosying up to the West

Minsk, Jan.13.– A giant statue of Lenin still stands before the forbidding House of Government in Minsk, built by Stalin in 1934 and occupied by the Gestapo a few years later. But behind this totalitarian façade now sits a government that is trying to work out how to reform Belarus’s economy while following a political trajectory set a quarter-century ago by the country’s authoritarian leader, Alexander Lukashenko. Now he must also fend off Russia’s looming threats to its independence. This is not an easy circle to square. But Mr Lukashenko is no ordinary politician.

A former collective-farm boss, Mr Lukashenko was swept to power in a landslide in 1994, three years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He has ruled Belarus ever since, making him Europe’s longest-serving president. Unlike his peers in other European former Soviet republics, who rejected the old system as they asserted independence, he cherished the Soviet legacy.

Los Angeles, Jan.7.– Los Angeles County has agreed to conduct a purge of its voting rolls, in a move that could strip perhaps 1.5 million inactive voters from the lists of those eligible to cast ballots.

The county made the deal in a settlement last week with Judicial Watch, a conservative public interest firm, saying that under a recent Supreme Court ruling, it has a duty to remove names of people who appear to have either died, moved from the county or lost interest in voting.