Persistent water crisis in Rangamati hills demands interventions
Mass awareness campaigns, proper law enforcement vital
Address the problems identified by customs inspectors
The present tension between politicians and press in Bangladesh is unfortunate because ideally it should not occur in democratic polity. Press or broadly media is a link between people and politicians. Politicians and media need each other and there should exist personal, political and professional relationships between them. As late Enoch Powell, the British political leader once said: " For a politician to complain about the press is like a ship's captain complaining about the sea."...
We are deeply saddened by the unfortunate and tragic death of Dr. David Kelly who by profession was not only an expert on biological weapons but also by nature an extremely conscientious man. He has served the cause of truth. But the truth eventually turned out quite costly for him. It caused his untimely death. Dr. Kelly had never been in media glare in his long and distinguished career as an arms expert. Therefore, the media attention after the British department of defense revealed his name as the probable source for the BBC story which alleged that the government had 'sexed up' the Iraq dossier, visibly unnerved him....
Allow me to talk about two federations of farmers. One lies in Tushvandar union of Lalmonirhat district called Tushvandar Federation of Farmers (TFF) and the other, in Mohendranagar union under the same district and is named as Mohendranagar Federation of Farmers (MFF). Both the locations are 1 to 2 hours drive from Rangpur. Farmers' cooperatives or federations are not new phenomena in this part of the world and hence should not inject any interest, whatsoever. But the reason I desired to drive there is the composition of the clients in the committee that the federations are comprised of. The members are drawn exclusively from households owning up to 100 decimals of land, called functionally landless and marginal households. It means, by and large, the federations that I am referring...
Killing of 54 Muslims during prayers in an Imam Bargah-cum-Mosque in Quetta on July 4 was a powerful reminder that the monster of sectarianism still strikes at will; the state seems powerless. Since early 1990s this demon has devoured thousands of Muslims who differ on some points from majority. Over the years the state has been able to prosecute and sentence a handful of the killers while most were let off by courts for lack of evidence....
Yet again, we hear of complete indifference to the sanctity of our surroundings by a group of greedy and selfish people. How else can we describe the felling of 12 thousand trees in an area spanning 24 acres of land just eight days after a nursery for medicinal plants was inaugurated there by the Minister for Environment. And that too in an area owned by the forest department. So naturally when the news came to his attention, the minister wanted to know how it happened and called an inter-ministerial meeting. The outcome of that meeting was even more revealing....
The state minister concerned has done some tough talking to DESA and DESCO, the two state-run power service bodies. Iqbal Hassan Mahmood in a review meeting with the heads of the organisations gave them until the end of this year to improve their performance or shutter down....
Mao's assertion that 'all powers grow out of the barrel of the gun' perhaps applied to totalitarian system. In democracies one needs popular mandate to derive authority. It has been empirically seen however that the authority so derived also quickly fades away when it is bereft of a moral content. The ruling dispensation is then left only with the state-endowed crude physical power as sole means of ensuring public obeisance. Nevertheless it never proved adequate to govern increasingly complex human society. Yet this remains to be an universal arrangement throughout the developing world where the civil society is still to shape the country's governance which is purely the exercise of state power through its integral organs to achieve the state's overall objective....
When Barrister Syed Ishtiaq Ahmed passed away on 12 July, messages of condolence and tributes poured in from legions of people who had known him, admired him, respected him and loved him....
Criminality has been showing its ugly fangs and people can perhaps absorb the shock of crimes of almost every denomination. Nevertheless, the attack on a wedding party last Saturday, which left a woman dead and many others injured, including elderly guests and children, was too much to put up with. It was an act of unspeakable barbarity even when judged in the context of our murky socio-political reality....
We have had a surfeit of free-trade rhetoric signifying very little in terms of equitable business opportunities across the globe. It's, therefore, a breath of fresh air that Dhaka will host a special SAARC meet preparatory to the WTO ministerial meeting slated for September in Mexico. South Asian commerce ministers and secretaries will interact between August 9 and 10 to adopt a common stance on the next round of WTO negotiations. Set against the achievements and failures of the WTO negotiations since the fourth ministerial round in Doha, they will use the Dhaka meeting as a platform to unify their positions within the SAARC group on trade and commerce....
