March 23 ZUBR activists held a regular action in the capital`s leading universities, disseminating flyers reading "Who will bear responsibility for disappearances?" and containing calls "Think! Decide! Act!". That came as a true assault on alma mater. "ZUBRs" got inside the most overcrowded auditoriums and, paying no heed to embarrassed professors` protests, read out the text of the leaflets and then went on to spread them among the excited youth. The actions took place in the Belarus State University, Belarus State Economic University, Belarus State University of programming and radio-electronics, Belarus State Pedagogical University and Minsk State Linguistic University. They circulated thousand of flyers in each of them.

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Minsk, March 23. Minsk city council ruled to take away a stripe of land, leased to McDonalds for the construction and maintenance of the fast food restaurant for a term of 39 years. The site will become a permanent property of the Belarusian State University, BelaPAN quoted McDonalds` PR manager Olga Troyan as saying.

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Head of the local organization "BPF Renaissance" Ales Pikula was beaten up in Baranovichi. Over the last couple of years the BPF chair was attacked more than once: twice by police and one time by the Russian National Unity mobs.

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Charter`97 became the first Internet-resource, which exchanged banners with the resistance movement`s site ZUBR. The message, e-mailed to us by the ZUBR web-master confirms that similar proposals had been directed to other leading on-line Belarusian resources and portals.
Resistance movement ZUBR web-site

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Belarusian Helsinki Committee got a hold of a scandalous letter, signed by the Justice department of the Mogilev region council and circulated between the district courts and prosecutors` offices. "In the first six months of 2001 it is necessary to run meetings among the court and procuracy personnel on the clarification of the policy of the head of state, as concerns legal construction and legislation norms, that guarantee people`s rights and freedoms," - reads the Plan of the major ideological events of the Mogilev region council.

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March 22 concluding session of the Central Electoral Committee of the Republic of Belarus, which was to summarize the outcomes of the first round of "by-elections" into the "house of representatives" ended in a scandal. Oleg Mozgo, Yuri Voskresensky and Vassily Silchuk - contenders in the 105th constituency, declared a hunger-strike right in the assembly hall.

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Issues of further development of the bilateral cooperation between the military of Belarus an Iran were discussed March 22 in Minsk, during the meeting between Belarusian Defense Minister Alexander Chumakov and his colleague from the Islamic Republic Iran Ali Shamkhani.

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Mass staff reductions are presently taking place in the country`s TV-making company "Vityaz". 500 technical workers and engineers were left out of the working process by now. At the same time the plant`s leadership plans to form 150 new working places. But this is nothing compared to the new series of mass dismissals lying ahead, says head of the company`s trade union Vassily Shteforuk. Had it been not for the trade unionists, the number of fired workers would be way greater.

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Due to the serious shortage of manpower in agriculture, where every forth tractor needs repair and every tenth has no driver to ride it, the state is forced to draw another 12 thousand mechanics and farmers to work in the fields. Lack of the labor force will partially be made up for by the university and college students, as well as by the state plants` personnel.

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Husbandries of only two districts of the Gomel region - Elsky and Kalinkovichsky - paid their workers wages in due time and full-sized. Most farms suffering from payment delays are allocated in Petrikovsky, Zhlobinsky and Lelchinsky districts. In total, by the beginning of February the farmers were owed by the state over $695 thousand, which is 70% of the overall indebtedness.

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