The Belarusian Republican Youth Union is an organized youth group in the Eastern European country of Belarus. The goals of the BRSM are to promote patriotism and to instill individual moral values into the youth of Belarus, using activities such as camping, sporting events and visiting memorials. The organization, which was created by a merger of other youth groups in 2002, is the successor of the Leninist Communist Youth League of the Belorussian SSR. While they are only one of a few youth groups inside Belarus, it is the largest and receives much backing from the Belarusian government. The BRSM has been accused of using methods of coercion and empty promises to recruit members and that the organization is being used as a propaganda tool by the Lukashenko Government.

Read the rest of this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarusian_Republican_Youth_Union

_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:

1856: Anglo-Persian War: Bushehr, a city on the southwestern coast of the Persian Gulf in present-day Iran, surrendered to occupying British forces. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushehr)

1905: Legislation on the separation of church and state in France was adopted, triggering civil disobedience by French Catholics.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1905_French_law_on_the_Separation_of_the_Church...)

1946: The Doctors' Trial, the trial for crimes committed in Nazi human experimentation during World War II, began in Nuremberg, Germany. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctors%27_Trial)

1961: Tanganyika gained independence from Britain (Tanganyika would become part of Tanzania three years later). (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanganyika)

1979: A World Health Organization commission of eminent scientists certified the global eradication of smallpox, making it the only human infectious disease to have been completely eradicated from nature. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/smallpox)

_____________________ Wiktionary's Word of the day:

resoundingly: With a loud, resonant sound. (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/resoundingly)

_____________________ Wikiquote of the day:

Man is appealed to to be guided in his acts, not merely by love, which is always personal, or at the best tribal, but by the perception of his oneness with each human being. In the practice of mutual aid, which we can retrace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can affirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support — not mutual struggle — has had the leading part. -- Peter Kropotkin (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Peter_Kropotkin)