A T-44 tank was put on an observation platform near a former gunpowder depot at the Brest Fortress Memorial.
It is Memorial Director Valery Gubarenko who suggested putting the tank and turning the muzzle of its gun in the western direction. The memorial's staff find it symbolic as such tanks were in service with
the First Mechanized Corps, commanded by General Semyon Krivoshein, which liberated Brest in 1944.
The tank was delivered to the memorial as part of preparations for festivities that would mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Belarus from the Nazi invaders in 2004. During his recent visit to the fortress, Aleksandr Lukashenko ordered that the renovation of the memorial be completed by this time. However, the memorial so far has not received the necessary $2 million. It even does not have 60 million rubels ($30,000) to pay for the constructed boiler house and completed refurbishments.
According to Mr. Gubarenko, the fortress is among the several dozen Belarusian properties that the government wants to be entered in the UNESCO World Heritage List. A special commission is to decide on the matter after inspecting the memorial.
In the Brest region's first known case of panderage this year, a Ukrainian man has been charged with traffic in humans.
The 44-year-old resident of Dnipropetrovsk together with some other, still unidentified persons are said to have accosted and intimidated three girls from Kobrin and one from Brest, planning to sell them to
German pimps.
The police say that the man was arrested in early August and originally charged with drug trafficking, and his other crimes came to light late last week.
In the first known case of cybercrime prosecuted in Brest since the new Criminal Code came into force, a 26-year-old sales officer with a local private company has been charged with "unlawfully accessing computer data" under Article 352 of the Code.
According to the Brest city police department, the man, whose name is not disclosed, copied web access logins and paroles stored in a PC belonging to the head of the company's sales department to illegally use the Internet. The damage to the company from this unauthorized use is estimated at 1,062,000 rubels. The Brest police have also launched criminal inquiries into several reports of virus spread and cyber theft.
A lyceum for gifted children from across the Brest region will open in the regional capital on September 1, when the new academic year begins.
The decision to open the school is part of the regional government's program to reform the system of general school education, Mikhail Tikhonchuk, head of the regional government's Education Department, told BelaPAN.
The authorities decided to found the lyceum for talented teenagers residing in villages after some of them put up an excellent performance at subject Olympiads among school students. All those wishing were to apply for admission before August 21. Admission tests were held on Thursday and Friday. The winners and honorees of national Olympiads were admitted without examinations.
The school will have three ten-grade classes that will consist of 20 to 25 students each. The majors will be maths and physics, the Russian language and literature, the Belarusian language and literature, and the English language. The school is expected to have a lyceum curriculum devised by the education ministry. The students are to attend lectures at Aleksandr Pushkin Brest State University once a week. The students will have classes in the building of School No. 26 and live in a dormitory of Brest State Technical University until the renovation of the lyceum's building that formerly housed a vocational school is completed. The
youths will not have to pay any tuition fees and will board out free of charge. Their parents will only have to contribute a monthly amount equivalent to the Base Rate (14,000 rubels).
The Brest Regional Court agreed with a lower court that Georgy Kozulko, a former deputy director general of the Belovezhskaya Pushcha national park, did not act in violation of laws by photographing in the park.
On August 22, the Regional Court upheld the decision by a district court judge in Kamenets that annulled the fine imposed on Mr. Kozulko for visiting the ancient forest. Mr. Kozulko, who holds a kandidat's degree in biology, is known for accusing the Belovezhskaya Pushcha management of commercial logging disguised as cutting down trees hit by beetles. He was stopped in the park on May 11, 2003, as he was bicycling along the main tourist route. In an area where a windstorm had brought down a lot of trees two years before, he ran into Belovezhskaya Pushcha Director General Nikolai Bambiza and Deputy Director General Ivan Batan, who ordered the biologist out of the park. Mr. Kozulko had his camera seized and the film exposed to light.
Afterward, the park management filed a complaint with the district government, accusing Mr. Kozulko of violating environmental regulations by shooting beetle-infested trees without official permission and "collecting data for the press." Mr. Kozulko was fined by an administrative commission of the Kamenets District Executive Committee, but Judge Galina Prikhozhko of the District Court annulled the fine, saying that commission and the park's chief security officer
failed to produce evidence that the park's regulations had been violated.
According to the biologist, a park officer in the presence of the judge threatened to throw him out of the forest if he visited it once again.
The administrative commission then appealed the ruling to the Brest Regional Court, saying that the Belovezhskaya Pushcha regulations banned unauthorized persons from staying on its territory without an official permit.
However, the Regional Court said that the charge sheet against Mr. Kozulko had been drawn up incorrectly and contained no evidence of his wrongdoing. In addition, the regulations that were referred to proved to be without legal force, as they had yet to be entered in the national register of legal acts.
A modern telephone exchange manufactured by Germany's Siemens was launched in the regional capital of Brest last Thursday.
The EWSD v.15 switch replaced a 1959 ATS-21 unit that once served Soviet government offices and the central residential area.
The Siemens exchange can serve up to 10,000 numbers, while occupying just 30 square meters of space.
The huge old apparatus filled a whole story – 1000 square meters.
Participating in the launching ceremony were Vasily Dolgolyov, chairman of the Brest Regional Executive Committee; Belarusian Communications Minister Vladimir Goncharenko; and Wolfgang Hub, Siemens' sales officer for the CIS and Central Asia.
After the ceremony was over, the VIPs proceeded to a school of general education in the village of Chechni near Brest to attend the opening of an Internet class there. Computers for the class had been donated by Siemens.
According to Yury Ostapchuk, sales director with the Brest Regional Telecommunications Enterprise (Brestobltelecom), his agency plans to provide free web access for the school from September 1, 2003 to May 31, 2004.
Ivanovo, a district center with a population of 16,000 in the south of the Brest region, celebrated its 580th anniversary on August 23.
The city is known to have been first mentioned in the historical chronicles in 1423 as Yanovo.
Prominent Belarusian artist and composer Napoleon Orda (1807-1883)
was born in the Vorotsevichi estate outside the city. A monument to him was unveiled in Ivanovo in 1998.
Nowadays Ivanovo does not differ from other small towns in the Brest region. It has a butter and milk powder plant, a building materials factory, and a malt plant. The anniversary festivities, which began at 2 p.m., featured the "Happy Birthday to You, Yanovo!" show, a friendly soccer game between the local Belsolod and Tornado from Pinsk, and demos of rescue operations staged by squads of the city emergency situations department.
Exhibitions of photographs, local industries' products, folk crafts, flowers and stage costumes were held. Youths were invited to an open-air dancing party at midnight.
The Holocaust center in Brest has petitioned the city government to allow it to erect a memorial sign in
the area of a former Jewish cemetery, now occupied by the Lokomotiv stadium.
As the center's leader, Arkady Blyakher, told BelaPAN, Nadezhda Yashchuk, chairwoman of the City Soviet of Deputies, has given her general consent. According to Mr. Blyakher, the site gets a lot of foreign visitors, who wonder why there is still no sign marking the
former cemetery.
This week, the center intends to file an official request with the Brest City Executive Committee. The stadium displaced the cemetery in the 1950s, although tombstones were removed during Word War II.
"It sounds sacrilegious, but 1st Minsk Street in Brest is paved with tombstones from the cemetery," said Mr. Blyakher. More tombstones have been found in other parts of Brest and underneath the stadium itself.
The design for the monument, made by Brest architect Nikolai Vlasyuk together with students at the Brest Polytechnic School under the Holocaust center's order, envisages the use of tombstones, Mr. Blyakher said, adding that the sign could be placed on an unoccupied piece of land in front of the stadium. "We realize that we need an official permit to launch the project, and a lot of finance to extract the tombstones and fill the gaps with asphalt," he said.
Seven officials with the Brest Custom House have been arrested on charges of organized crime and power abuse.
The deputy chief of the house's Fourth Department and six officers of the department are accused "of failure to fulfill the official duty of collecting taxes from travelers," according to the press center of the
State Control Committee.
In the fall of 2002, the accused allegedly formed a criminal ring led by the deputy chief. As a result of their criminal activity, a total of $2 million (3.8 billion rubels at the official rate) was not collected in customs payments from passengers, the press center said.
A seasonal worker was brutally murdered in the village of Zalesye near Pruzhany, Brest region, on the night between August 17 and 18.
The man had arrived from Petrikov, Gomel region, to work as a tractor driver for the period of harvesting, the press office of the Brest regional police department told BelaPAN.
The police suspect that the driver was killed by his roommate, also a seasonal worker, who is believed to have delivered 12 axe blows to the victim's head as a result of a quarrel.
A sharp rise in the crime rate has occurred in the Pruzhany district in recent months, according to the press office. The police blame it on the large number of migrant workers who had been invited by local farms and the district authorities, which are preparing for the annual national harvest festival Dazhynki that Pruzhany will host this September.
27 August 2003
