Former rector of the Gomel medical university professor Yuri Bandazhevsky, sentenced by the Belarusian court to eight years of jail, was awarded an honorary title as the honorary citizen of the French town Clermont-Ferrand for his studies on the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster. This message is contained in the letter, sent to his family members by the town’s mayor Serge Godard. The scholar’s wife and daughter will visit Clermont to be handed in their husband’s award. The visit will be arranged by the French embassy in Belarus.

---

Dutch affiliate of the international human rights organization Amnesty International allocated on its site an appeal with a demand to find out truth about the destiny of the missing Belarusian oppositionists – Dmitry Zavadsky, Yuri Zakharenko, Viktor Gonchar and Anatoly Krasovsky.

---

In the year 2003 Baghdad will host the “Week of Belarusian culture”, while Minsk – the “Week of Iraqi culture”. A concomitant agreement on that, reports “BDG”, has been achieved at the recent meeting of the Belarusian Minister of culture Leonid Gulyako and the Iraqi ambassador in Minsk Salman Zeidan.

---

Technical personnel of the OSCE office in Minsk started operation on January 12. The foreign officials of the new OSCE office in Belarus will commence their activities on February 3, BelaPAN was told by the counselor for the programs of the Belarusian OSCE bureau Dmitry Aleshkevich.

---

All Belarusian TV and radio stations will have to pass another re-registration by June 1. The frequencies will be distributed and licenses will be issued by the Ministry of information, headed by Podgainy, rather than the Ministry of communications, as was the case previously. The concomitant ruling of the Council of Ministers was personally signed by Premier Gennady Novitsky on December 30, 2002. The lawyers of the Belarusian Association of journalists fear that the decision will significantly contract the number of non-state electronic media.

---

“Amnesty International’s” German affiliate forwarded to the prosecutor general of Belarus Viktor Sheiman a letter with a call to urgently release the incarcerated journalists, sentenced for publishing critical essays about Alexander Lukashenko.

---

The Minsk city court sentenced law-enforcers Alexander Bely and Maksim Ostrovlyanchik to 15 year incarceration. The two policemen used to work at a police station, where they beat unto death a detainee Nikolai Nagorny. The court found out that the law-enforcers were beating and harassing the man for six hours and the victim died from heavy bleeding. Medics revealed numerous broken bones and bruises. For the first time over the past decade the court ruled such a heavy penalty for policemen. Up until now they usually passed milder verdicts against murderers and torturers from police. Usually they would be sued for mere power abuse.

---

In 1994 when flying over the territory of Belarus, the pilots of the Finnish jumbo-jet, en route from Helsinki to the Rodos island, noticed an object in the sky, resembling a missile. Finland’s leasing newspaper “Helsinki sanomat” reports that the leadership of the “Finnair” company and the State department for air travels determined not to make the incident public back then. According to the periodical, aero bus A-3000 was full of passengers and flew 10km above the earth’s surface, when both pilots noticed a fiery rocket before their eyes. The captain reported to the Belarusian dispatchers about the unidentified object, but only received a confirmation message, telling that his information was accepted all right.

---