Shahidul sings in Shamim Osman’s tunen Ashif Islam Shaon and

Ahmed Zayeef

Taking a U-turn, the father-in-law of slain Narayanganj panel may-or Nazrul Islam yesterday claimed that ruling Awami League lawmaker Shamim Osman had no involvement in the seven murders.

Shahidul Islam at a press confer-ence in the capital said the MP was a victim of dirty politics. He also

claimed that Shamim had saved Nazrul from false cases and conspir-acies many times. “Now the killers are threatening Osman,” he alleged.

However, at a programme in Narayanganj only three days back, he had demanded death penalty for the lawmaker when Shamim’s phone conversation with the main

accused in the case, Nur Hossain, was leaked by several media. Family members of the six other deceased also attended the programme.

Following the leak that made people believe that Shamim had helped Nur to � ee, the lawmaker of Narayanganj 4 from a press conference at his Gulshan residence admitted the matter.

Shahidul yesterday came to the capital from Narayanganj to the Dha-ka Reporters Unity auditorium to an-

nounce that he believed Shamim had not been involved in the murders. He, however, did not inform his daughter Selina Islam about the conference.

He also did not answer any ques-tion of the reporters and left the auditorium in a hurry amid police protection.

“If you ask me any question, I will have a cardiac arrest,” he said before leaving.

PAGE 2 COLUMN 4

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B1 | BusinessVisiting Dutch minister said the compensation provided by the Western retailers so far to the Rana Plaza victims is not as much as promised and called on the companies to give more.

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7 | InterviewBernard-Henri Lévy is France’s most celebrated public intellectual. A renowned philosopher, he has authored many books over the years.

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8 | WorldMore than 50 pro-Russian rebels were killed in an unprecedented assault by Ukrainian government forces, which raged into a second day yesterday after a newly-elected president vowed to crush the revolt in the east once and for all.

11 | Op-EdIt’s time for Narendra Modi to get down to business – to deliver on what he promised his countrymen. The new Indian premier is entrusted with an

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15 | SportHeartbroken Caroline Wozniacki su� ered a morale-sapping defeat at the French Open on Tuesday in her � rst appearance since the break-up of her

romance with star golfer Rory McIlroy.

INSIDE

WEDNESDAY, MAY 28, 2014 | www.dhakatribune.com | SECOND EDITION

Joishthya 14, 1421Rajab 28, 1435Regd. No. DA 6238Vol 2, No 58

INTERPOLE WARRANT AGAINST NUR HOSSAINP2

Local AL and BNP leaders plotted Ekram’s murderKey suspect confesses before court, murder weapons recoveredn Mohammad Jamil Khan with Our

Correspondent in Feni andKailash Sarkar in Dhaka

Local leaders of both the BNP and Awa-mi League were involved in the murder of Ekramul Haq and plot of which was hatched around three months before the murder.

Investigators of the case yesterday di-vulged the information after interrogation of the arrestees.

The arrestees admitted that the killing was � nanced by local BNP leader Mahtab Ud-din Chowdhury Minar while disgruntled lo-cal Awami League leaders joined the plot to kill the Fulgazi upazila chairman, they said.

Minar, who faced drubbing twice to Ekram in upazila polls, was arrested by the Detective Branch of police from the capital’s Mirpur area.

Masudur Rahman, deputy commission-er at the DMP Media Centre, said a team of Detective Branch’s North Division arrested Minar from a house at Dhaka Cantonment in

Mirpur area in the afternoon.Paritosh Gosh, superintendent of police

in Feni, also con� rmed Minar’s arrest and said the other culprits would also be arrest-ed shortly.

Twenty-� ve-year-old Abidul Islam Abid, a key accused in the case, yesterday provided a confessional statement before a Feni court, narrating how the murder was executed.

In his confessional statement to Senior Ju-dicial Magistrate Khairul Amin’s court, Abid – son of district Mohila Awami League secre-tary Layla Jesmin – said Ekram’s enmity with Jihad Chowdhury, the mastermind of the killing, developed when Jihad failed to run in the upazila election on Awami League ticket.

The con� ict took a turn for the worse between the two when Ekram suspended Jihad from the local Awami League commit-tee. However, local lawmaker Nizam Uddin Hazari intervened and the suspension order was withdrawn, police sources quoted Abid as saying.

PAGE 2 COLUMN 1

Police recovers sharp weapons, arms and ammunition from a bus owned by Nur Hossain, the prime accused in the seven-murder case of Narayanganj yesterday DHAKA TRIBUNE

Bangladesh racing to achieve MDG on maternal mortality n Moniruzzaman Uzzal

Maternal mortality rate in Bangladesh has declined by more than 66% over the last two decades. Authorities concerned express hopes that the country would be able to achieve the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target on time.

Speaking ahead of National Safe Mother-hood Day, Abu Zafor Md Musa, director of primary health care at the health directo-rate, told the Dhaka Tribune that the mater-nal mortality rate had been dropping around 5.5% each year and Bangladesh was likely to achieve the target of 143 deaths per 100,000 live births under the MDG -2015.

According to a 2013 survey by di� erent UN organisations, the estimated maternal mortality rate in Bangladesh stood at 170 per 100,000 live births, Musa said, adding that a 2010 study by the NIPORT found that 6,848 women died during childbirth each year.

The government also has plans for re-ducing the maternal mortality rate to 63 per 100,000 live births by 2030, he added.

In 1990, the rate was 574 per 100,000 live births, according to health directorate’s health bulletin-2013; while the Bangladesh Maternal Mortality Survey by National In-stitute of Population Research and Training (NIPORT) in 2010 put the rate at 194 per 100,000.

Health specialists told the Dhaka Tribune that around 65% of the mothers died during

PAGE 2 COLUMN 5

News2 DHAKA TRIBUNE Wednesday, May 28, 2014

'Bring culprits of Narayanganj,Feni to book'n Emran Hossain Shaikh

Expressing concern over the recent kill-ings and abductions, Awami League-led 14-party alliance urged the government yesterday to bring the culprits of the Narayanganj and Feni cases to justice.

They also urged Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to appoint an experi-enced politician at the Home Ministry to accelerate its activities.

The leaders of the 14-party came up with the suggestions during a meeting of the alliance at the Awami League President and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s political o� ce in Dhanmondi.

“It has become a tradition to search for elements of conspiracies in every incident. The government should un-cover the facts of the Narayanganj and Feni killings by carrying out proper in-vestigations,” said a party leader, quot-ing the Awami League Organising Sec-retary Bahauddin Nasim.

Nasim said though a vested quarter had been hatching conspiracies against the government, it was not logical to smell conspiracies after every incident. l

Ershad issues show-cause notice on GM Quadern Manik Miazee

Jatiya Party Chairman HM Ershad has reportedly issued a show-cause notice to his brother and the party’s Presidi-um member GM Quader for “violating party discipline.”

When contacted, Ershad told the Dhaka Tribune: “Yes, I have served a show-cause notice on him.

“I have asked him to explain the matter and withdraw his comments.”

Regarding GM Quader’s remarks, the JaPa chief said: “He should not have made such comments in public that tarnish the party’s image.”

GM Quader told the Dhaka Tribune around 10pm that he had not yet re-ceived any such notice.

On Monday, the JaPa leader made several remarks on the party’s internal issues while talking to a Bangla daily. l

Khaleda: Hasina will have to cryone dayn Mohammad Al-Masum Molla

BNP Chairperson Khaleda Zia yester-day said her party’s movement would continue till the resignation of thegovernment and warned that the movement could not be stopped even at gunpoint.

Khaleda made the comments when family members of missing BNP lead-ers – Laksam upazila BNP President Saiful Islam and Laksam municipality BNP President Humayun Kabir – went to her Gulshan residence to meet her.

She listened to them and asked them to keep patience, and said pro-grammes would be announced soon after reconstituting the party and the government would be ousted to ensure people’s security.

“People of the country have united against the government. We will an-nounce movement programmes soon. Ousting the government, we will return peace in the country,” she said. l

Bangladesh racing to achieve PAGE 1 COLUMN 2childbirth because of three complica-tions: severe bleeding during pre and post-delivery, epilepsy, and obstruc-tive and belated labour.

The rest of the deaths were mostly caused by indirect reasons including is-chemic heart disease, jaundice, anaemia, tuberculosis, congenital heart disease and overall lack of essential health care.

According to Bangladesh Economic Survey 2013, the rate of institutional delivery was only 29%; while around 31.7% women used midwives during childbirth; 61.2% women used contra-ceptive methods; 54.6% experienced adolescent pregnancy; only 25.5% women went through medical check up during pregnancy, while around 70% women su� ered from malnutrition.

Professor Dr Rashid-e-Mahbub, president of Health Rights Movement Bangladesh, told the 6,000 people in each ward of a union and it was not a daunting task to identify the pregnant Dhaka Tribune that the government has already introduced a community clinic for every mothers and bring them under regular health check up.

Answering to a question on the low

percentage of institutional delivery, Dr Mahbub said not all pregnancies re-quired institutional delivery, but added that there must be a system of referral to send the obstructive patients for de-livery at the health institutions.

Sources at the health and family planning directorates said 8,428 com-munity health care providers, family welfare assistants and female health assistants were trained as skilled birth attendants in recent years. A three years course on midwifery was also in-troduced at the NIPORT in 2012-2013, with 525 students currently studying the subject and 700 others expected to enrol in the next session.

Apart from the district and upazi-la hospitals, safe child delivery is also provided at 581 community clinics and more than 1,500 union mother and child family welfare centres.

Meanwhile, Bangladesh is going to observe Safe Motherhood Day 2014 today, with the theme “Let us ensure safe motherhood.” Di� erent public and private organisations have drawn up elaborate programmes to observe the day, which has been observed in the country since 1997. l

BEPZA and JETRO signs an agreement in presence of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina yesterday on the third day of her Japan visit FOCUS BANGLA

n Sheikh Shahariar Zaman

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has of-fered a pair of Royal Bengal Tigers to Japan so that Japanese people, espe-cially school children, can become ac-quainted with the nature and culture of Bangladesh.

The gesture came as Bangladesh and Japan have agreed to take their bilat-eral relationship to a new height after the prime ministers of both countries launched the Japan-Bangladesh Com-prehensive Partnership Agreement.

“Both the prime ministers also de-cided to detail the modalities at the earliest,” said a joint statement is-sued by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasinaand her Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe, after they had an o� cial talk on Monday.

The prime minister went to Tokyo on a four-day visit on Sunday at the invitation of Abe and had an audience with Japanese Emperor Akihito.

The Japanese prime minister an-nounced his commitment to provide up to 600 billion Yen (equivalent to $6 billion) of additional � nancial assis-tance, of which120 billion Yen (equiv-alent to $1.2 billion) will be given to Bangladesh within the next four or � ve years.

Prime Minister Hasina asked her counterpart to consider a range of spe-ci� c projects like a Ganges Barrage, building multi-modal tunnels under the Jamuna River, a railway bridge over the Jamuna River, a multi-modal Dhaka Eastern Bypass, and the ecological res-toration of four rivers around Dhaka.

Abe expressed his decision to in-struct relevant ministries to start re-viewing rules of origin of generalised system of preferences (GSP) for knit-wear in order to boost Bangladesh’s exports.

The Japanese prime minister under-scored the urgency of an improvement of investment potentials in Bangla-desh, including infrastructure develop-ment and stable energy supply, in order to further facilitate and promote Japa-nese investment in Bangladesh.

The two prime ministers also wel-comed the memorandum of under-

standing signed between JETRO and Bangladesh Export Processing Zones Authority, which reserves important facilities in � ve EPZs in Bangladesh for Japanese investors.

They rea� rmed the importance of strengthening energy cooperation, in-cluding in the area of peaceful uses of nuclear energy as a stable energy sup-ply, stating that it is the key in the eco-

nomic development of Bangladesh. Hasina also expressed her hope that

Japan will examine the possibility of cooperating with Bangladesh for a nu-clear power plant project in the future.

Japan has highly e� cient and en-vironment-friendly coal-based power plant technology and Bangladesh un-derlined the need for that to be made available to the countries in need.

The two prime ministers shared their intent to discuss and promote wider regional development and im-prove the investment environment to attract foreign businesses, including from Japan.

Hasina rea� rmed Bangladesh’s sup-port for Japan’s aspiration to become a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council while Abe

expressed his intention to share Ja-pan’s experience, including dispatch-ing experts for the proposed project of establishing a Peace Building Centre in Bangladesh.

“The two prime ministers shared the importance of an early reform of the United Nations Security Council so as to re� ect contemporary geo-political realities,” the statement said. l

Shahidul sings in Shamim Osman’s tune PAGE 1 COLUMN 6During his speech, Shahidul ruled out the allegations brought against the controversial Narayanganj lawmaker.

“I think those who leaked the phone conversation were involved in the murder. If they knew where the prime accused was hiding, why did not they arrest him?” he said while reading out a written statement.

“A vested quarter is trying to im-plicate him. That is why he has been blamed for the murders all of a sudden. If talking with Nur is an o� ence, then Shamim Osman will clarify that.

“But I want to ask if this conver-sation had created such controversy, the leaked conversation among Mayor [Selina Hayat] Ivy’s close aide Abu Su-� an, businessman Chan Mia, Selim and Nur’s bodyguard should have created more uproar. But everyone is silent about that,” he alleged.

Shahidul also urged the police to interrogate Abu Su� an who along with his aides had been the planner and � -nancier of the seven murders.

“Shamim Osman talked with Nur Hossain many times between April 27 and 29. This does not prove that he had helped Nur. But it proves that those

who leaked the conversation, helped Nur to � ee,” he said.

After the recovery of the six bodies, Shahidul claimed that RAB had com-mitted the abduction and murder in exchange for Tk6 corer given to them by Nur. Upon the allegation, three

RAB o� cials were sacked and later arrested.

In the meantime, a senior RAB o� -cial claimed that Nur � ed to Kolkata on April 28 through Benapole border.

Shahidul yesterday claimed that on April 27, Shamim asked Nur to appear at the Ri� es Club as the family mem-bers alleged Nur’s involvement. “In front us, he at � rst quizzed Nur about the abduction softly and then in harsh voice. But Nur denied.”

According to Shahidul, at that time Nur misbehaved with the lawmak-er. “Why are you asking me the same question repeatedly? You have become lawmaker just a few months back. I have been the undeclared MP of Shid-dhirganj. I could have killed Nazrul whenever I wished,” he quoted Nur as saying.

“These all prove that Shamim Os-man was not involved in the incident,” Shahidul said.

Nazrul’s wife in dark When contacted, Selina said she had seen the press conference on televi-sion. Asked if the written statement was read out on behalf of Nazrul’s fam-ily members, she said: “I do not know what I should say now. I will not make any comment now. First, I have to talk to my father [Shahidul]. “He did not in-form me about the press conference.”

Other families smell Shamim’s medi ationTalking with the Dhaka Tribune last night, several members of the families of six other people said they thought Shahidul had arranged the press conference being in� uenced by the Awami League law-maker and wanted to gain some bene� ts.

Shahidul’s such move would also harm the investigation, they feared.

Mizanur Rahman Khan Ripon, the younger brother of Moniruzzaman Swapan, said: “We think the written statement was prepared by someone else. It indicates that he is in� uenced by Shamim Osman.”

Slain Sirajul Islam Liton’s brother Saiful Islam echoed Ripon saying that otherwise Shahidul would not shift his stance. l

Local AL and BNP leaders plotted Ekram’s murder PAGE 1 COLUMN 2On May 19, Jihad called a meeting with Abid, Shiblu, Ruti Sohel, Sifat and Ad-nan at the town’s Salam Community Centre after sunset, where he told the men that he wanted help kill Ekram the following day.

Another meeting was also held at the Mizan Moydan later at 11:30pm, where Jihad elaborated the mur-der plan. As per the plan, Jihad used one of his relatives, whose namecould not be disclosed for the sake of ongoing investigation, to sendthree weapons and bullets in aschool bag to Abid on the morning of May 20.

According to Abid’s confession, the men waited for Ekram on the Academy Road from 8:30am while Jihad kept making phone calls to Ward Councillor Shiblu, who split the men into di� erent groups.

One group was given the task of blocking Ekram’s vehicle, another was assigned to launch gun attack while the third one was for attacking the vehicle with sharp weapons.

Around 20 more people also gath-ered at the scene to apply distraction

technique. Jihad updated them about the slain upazila chairman’s chang-ing location which he was constantly being reported by a close associate of Ekram – whose name also could not be disclosed for the sake of ongoing inves-tigation.

Just before the attack, Jihad phoned the attackers saying Ekram had just left the Diabetes Hospital and would reach the entrance of Bilashi Cinema Hall – the scene of the crime – within minutes.

Being alerted by Jihad, the group of attackers got ready to stop Ekram’s ve-hicle with an auto-rickshaw.

In his confessional statement, Abid also mentioned that Jihad asked Abid and the others to meet him at the Feni Rail Station on the evening of the at-tack, where Jihad told them that BNP leader Minar Chowdhury had given him Tk1 lakh. Jihad then gave Tk20,000 to the men who left for Dhaka the same night.

Sources said Abid was asked by the court what he had done to assure his own safety after committing the crime to which he answered that he had con-tacted district Awami League Joint

Secretary Jahangir Md Adel and ruling party MP Nizam Uddin Hazari over the phone soon after the incident.

However, no contact was made with them after they arrived in Dhaka, Abid added.

Murder weapons recoveredIn other developments in the case, police and RAB forces in Feni yester-day arrested four more people in con-nection with the killing and recovered weapons assumed to have been used in the murder.

Separate raids in the districts led to the arrests of Mir Hossain Shwapan, Jahidul Islam, Sajib, and Abdur Rauf. A US-made 7.65mm pistol, two bullets and two magazines were recovered from Sajib’s possession, said Feni RAB Camp In-Charge Major Mohiuddin, adding that the weapons were suspect-ed to have been used during the mur-der.

Shwapan, Jahidul and Sajib are resi-dents of Brinchi area in Feni, while Ab-dur Rauf is the general secretary of the AL’s Kazaribagh union unit.

They all are known associates of Awami League leader Jahangir Adel

and Councillor Shiblu – both are key suspects in the case.

Abul Kalam Azad, inspector of Feni Model police station and investiga-tion o� cer of the case, said they had recovered four bullets and a US-made 7.65mm pistol used in the attack from a TV box from the o� ce of Jihad.

A special six-member probe team led by Deputy Inspector General of Chittagong Mahbubur Rahmanwould reach Feni soon to collect more information from the arrestees, Azad added.

A list of 40 suspects has been pre-pared by the investigators. Rashedul Islam, o� cer-in-charge of the DB po-lice in Feni, told the Dhaka Tribune that raids were being carried out in di� erent areas of the district to hunt down the accused.

Two key suspects in the case – Adel and local Awami League leader Ziaul Alam Mister – have still remained out of police net.

On May 20, Ekramul Haque, a two-time elected chairman of Fulgazi upazila, was shot and burnt alive by criminals in the Academy area of Feni district town. l

Sheikh Hasina’s Royal Bengal diplomacyBangladesh, Japan agree to strengthen bilateral relations

Shirin: Modi to actively consider Teesta dealn Tribune Report

Newly elected Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said his new gov-ernment would actively consider the issue of signing the Teesta water shar-ing agreement and implementing bor-der deal with Bangladesh.

Bangladesh Parliament Speaker Dr Shirin Sharmin Choudhury, who is now on a visit to the Indian capital, told journalist yesterday, reports BSS.

“We have discussed di� erent issues, including expansion of trade and busi-ness and further strengthening of co-operation in economic development, power and energy sectors between the two countries,” she said.

During the meeting, she on behalf of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, on her own behalf and the people of Bangla-desh had invited Modi to visit Bangla-desh at a convenient time, Shirin added.

Modi accepted the invitation cor-dially and expressed willingness to vis-it Bangladesh, she added.

She said during the meeting she told Modi that his (Modi’s) initiative to invite the heads of government of the SAARC countries to his swearing-in ceremony as the prime minister was an “excellent” initiative and through this he (Modi) has given a message for de-velopment of the region after further strengthening the SAARC activities.

When asked whether the existing bilateral relations between Bangladesh and India under the new administra-tion would continue, Dr Shirin cate-gorically said the ties would be further cemented in the days to come as Bang-ladesh's relationship with India was strengthened through the country’s War of Liberation.

During the meeting, the Indian pre-mier congratulated the Bangladesh government, headed by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, on its huge victory in the last general elections, said Dr Shirin.

Bangladesh High Commissioner to India Tarique A Karim was with the Speaker at the meeting. l

3NewsDHAKA TRIBUNE Wednesday, May 28, 2014

BNP: Khaleda can hold rally anytime, anywhere she wishesn Mohammad Al-Masum Molla

The BNP said yesterday said its chief Khaleda Zia can hold a party rally in the capital whenever and wherever she wished, even if the government does not allow it.

“Our leader can hold a rally when-ever and wherever she wishes, along with the people. Abandon any thoughts of barring her from doing so. Not even the pharaohs, Hitler or Yahi-ya could stay inpower for long, and you have to face the same fate,” said BNP acting secretary general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, gearing his comment at Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

The authorities concerned recent-ly prevented the party from holding rallies in the capital.BNP Chairperson Khaleda Zia was supposed to attend the foiled gatherings at the Engineers Institution auditorium and the Su-preme Court premises on Thursday and Saturday, respectively.

Addressing a discussion at the

National Press Club yesterday,Mirza Fakhrul said the ruling Awami League was killing democracy once again and misleading the people.

“Before the January 5 elections, they told the people that it was a constitutional obligation. Now they are saying they will remain in o� ce for � ve years... Could anyone guess on August 14 that the tragedy that would occur on August 15?” the BNP leader said, referring to the coup in 1975 that overthrew the then BKSAL government headed by President Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

Fakhrul also claimed that Awa-mi League’s rebirth took place under the auspices of BNP founder Ziaur Rahman, and he played a vital role in Sheikh Hasina’s return homefrom exile in India.

“BNP never undermines Sheikh Mujib’s role and similarly, there is no scope for undermining Ziaur Rahman’s role,” he said.

Fakhrul said during AL’s tenure,

Zia was portrayed as a villain in school textbooks. Zia, a military ruler turned president, held power from 1976-81.

“Ziaur Rahman proclaimed the country’s independence. Who says what, does not mean anything,” he added.

Khaleda Zia, meanwhile, is sched-uled to hold a rally this afternoon at the ferry terminal in Munshiganj to protest against the killings, abductions and disappearances across the country.

At a press brie� ng yesterday, BNP joint secretary general Ruhul Kabir Rizvi said preparations for the rally are almost complete and so far, they have not received any objections from the local administration in Munshiganj.

“We still have not faced any ob-struction, but whenever we are ob-structed, we will inform you,” Rizvi told reporters.

Rizvi added that Khaleda willstart for Munshiganj from her Gulshan res-idence at 1:30pm and address a rally there at 3pm. l

Buriganga recovery project committee formedn Mohosinul Karim

A 10-member committee has been formed to make recommendations to the government about implementing the Buriganga River recovery project.

The committee, led by ALM Abdur Rahman, additional secretary at the Water Resources Ministry, was given 15 days to submit a report after visiting the project sites.

It was asked to � nd out about dam-age that might be caused to bridges in the area when the project is imple-mented, said an order issued by the ministry yesterday.

There is a possibility of damaging several bridges during the river recov-

ery drive.The approved project will be implemented through the channels of the Dhaleshwari, Pungli, Bangshai, Turag and Buriganga river systems.

The government would take steps to relocate the bridges based on the sug-gestions, the directive said.

Committee members include WDB Director General Sahidur Rahman, Department of Environment Director Sultan Ahmed, LGED Superintendent Engineer Khalilur Rahman, BIWTA Director Mohammad Ali, Roads and Highway Department SE Tushar Kanti Saha, Bangladesh Railway Director Ab-dul Haque, WDB Chief Engineer Sohrab Uddin and Institute of Water Modelling head of department Abu Saleh Khan. l

HC summons expat secretary n Nazmus Sakib

The High Court yesterday asked Expa-triates’ Welfare Secretary Khandaker Shawkat Hossain to appear before it in person on June 3 to explain his failure to implement a previous order on regu-larising the jobs of 77 o� cials-sta� .

The bench of justices Ashfaqul Islam and Ashraful Kamal passed the order following a contempt of court plea by 11 o� cials and sta� of a Manpower, Em-ployment and Training Bureau project under the ministry. The lawyer for the petitioners said on April 7, 2011, the HC had ruled for the regularising of 77 of-� cials-sta� s of the revenue sector. The secretary has been summoned since the order was not implemented. l

Another case to realise Tk451cr from Hall-Mark n Md Sanaul Islam Tipu

Sonali Bank authorities yesterday � led another fresh suit against Hall-Mark Group Chairman Jasmine Islam and Managing Director Tanvir Mahmud to realise defaulting loan amounting to Tk450.84 crore from Hall-Mark Fash-ions Ltd.

The case was � led against the duo with the Artha Rin Adalat 1 (Mon-ey Loan Court 1) of Dhaka by Abdus Salam, executive o� cer of Ruposhi Bangla Hotel Corporate Branch of the state-owned bank.

After a preliminary hearing, Judge Md Rabiuzzaman took the case into cognisance and ordered the defen-dants to submit their written state-ments by June 29.

Since March 25 this year, the bank has � led 14 cases so far against the Hall-Mark Group to realise an out-standing amount of Tk839.09 crore.

The case statement says the ac-cused were given the loan in phases

from 2011 to February 28 this year. The company imported deferent garment accessories with the loan.

On January 12, the bank gave the ac-cused a � nal notice to pay the amount. But the company did not pay any heed. Later the bank issued a legal notice upon the company to give back their dues. l

Eight killed at Lohaigram in Qaisar’s presence n Udisa Islam

A new prosecution witness against ac-cused war criminal Syed Mohammad Qaisar said yesterday that the accused and his cohorts, along with the Paki-stani Army, had carried out atrocities at Lohaigram Sahapur during the Lib-eration War and killed eight unarmed civilians, including two women.

Phul Mia, 62, testi� ed at the Inter-national Crimes Tribunal 2 as the ninth witness against Qaisar, the former Ja-tiya Party state minister who is facing 16 charges of crimes against humanity committed in Habiganj in 1971.

The witness is the incumbent sec-retary of Gazipur district unit Sramik League, the labour wing of the ruling Awami League. He is from Bhandarowa Jamalpur of Habiganj.

During the war, he worked as an informer for the freedom � ghters in Madhabpur-Noapara areas and used to plant land mines.

In his testimony, Phul Mia said the accused, along with the members of his “Qaisar Bahini” and the Pakistani occu-pation forces, had gone to Lohaigram on May 15, 1971 and he had heard the sound of continuous � ring.

When they left the place after an hour, the villagers informed the wit-ness that at least eight people, includ-ing his two uncles Abdul Aziz and Zahir Uddin, had been shot to death. “When the Army killed the civilians, Qaisar was present at the scene along with his associate Lengra Hamid,” Phul Mia said.

After his daylong deposition, the de-fence counsel started cross examining him. The tribunal later adjourned the trial until today, keeping it incomplete. l

TRIAL AGAINST MOBARAK

Prosecution replies to enquiries of tribunaln Udisa Islam

In the trial of Mobarak Hossain alias Mobarak Ali, the prosecution made re-plies yesterday to the enquiries of the tribunal, which they had put forth at the end of the closing argument ses-sion last week.

The trial was stalled since the pros-ecution, during its rebuttal on May 21, failed to give explanations to many of the tribunal’s questions.

Prosecutor Syed Haider Ali yester-day gave explanations for their unat-tested documents and the sources. He said the documents had unfortunately remained unattested since the deputy commissioner of Brahmanbaria said the main copy was in his o� ce. The DC is also the in-charge of the district’s Muktijoddha Council.

Defence counsel Tajul Islam op-posed the explanation saying that the prosecuting could not change anything

at this stage of the case. He added that if the prosecution got the scope to ex-plain its fault, then prejudice might be garnered against the accused.

The tribunal then said it had asked for the explanation for their satisfac-tion and the prosecution did it, stating: “There is nothing to oppose as the doc-ument was exhibited earlier and it is in record of the tribunal.”

The prosecution also placed a peti-tion for a change in the formal charge yesterday. Conducting prosecutor Sha-hidur Rahman pointed it out as a “cler-ical mistake” as there was a mismatch of time (am and pm) mentioned in the formal charges and the framed charges.

Tajul again opposed the matter say-ing that the correction could not be accepted at the end of the proceeding. He pleaded time to submit a written objection on the matter and the tribu-nal set June 2 for the submission of the petition. l

Sikder doctor found guilty n Moniruzzaman Uzzal

The committee formed by Bangladesh Medical and Dental Council to investigate the alleged assault on Shihir Morol, special correspondent of the daily Prothom Alo, by Dr Sha� ul Azam has submitted its report to the BMDC president.

Prof Dr Abu Sha� Ahmed Amin, president of BMDC, told the Dhaka Tribune last night that they had received the inquiry report, but he refused to divulge any details right now.

BMDC had formed the three-member committee headed by Prof Dr Rashid-e-Mahbub, former president of

Bangladesh Medical Association. The other two members were Additional Attorney General Murad Reza and Deputy Registrar of BMDC Dr Arman Hossain. None of them is the members of BMDC.

The BMDC president said the primary inquiry report was sent to the disciplinary committee.

The members of the committee were asked to sit immediately to review the report and submit it to the executive committee which would take the � nal decision, he added.

When asked about the � ndings, Dr Rashid-e-Mahbub also denied disclosing any information about the report.

Seeking anonymity, a reliable

source told the Dhaka Tribune that the probe committee found Dr Sha� ul Azam guilty of the attack. Finally, BMDC would announce the temporary cancellation of his registration, according to the source.

On May 13, Shishir Morol went to ZA Sikder Women’s Medical College Hospital to investigate an allegation levelled against Dr Sha� ul Azam.

But Sha� ul and his associates assaulted him. They also con� ned him in a room for two and half hours and beat him up severely.

Sha� ul, assistant professor at Chittagong Medical College Hospital, was working full-time at ZA Sikder Women’s Medical College Hospital without taking leave from CMCH. l

Some rickshaw and van pullers cross locomotive tracks, taking their lives at risk, only to save some time near Mohakhali in the capital yesterday SYED ZAKIR HOSSAIN

WB likely to give budget support for FY 2015-16 n Asif Showkat Kallol

The World Bank is likely to extend bud-get support to Bangladesh in the � scal year 2015-16 instead of the next � scal year (2014-15), o� cial sources said.

An o� cial said it is not possible for them to give budget support in the next � scal year because of time con-straints as the budget will be placed at the parliament in the � rst week of next month.

Finance Minister AMA Muhith ear-lier hinted that the government would seek $500 million as budget support from the global lender. But an Eco-nomic Relations Division o� cial said the � gure would be of $300 million.

The matter was discussed brie� y on the sidelines of the spring meeting of the WB and IMF which took place in Washington DC in early April.

During his visit to Bangladesh, Ex-ecutive Director for South Asia MN Prasad advised that the � nance min-

ister should seek budget support after placing the budget for the next � scal year at the parliament. He also said ob-viously it is not possible to give budget support this � scal year.

Earlier, Bangladesh got budget sup-port in 2008 with the conditions set by the global lender.

The ERD o� cial said the govern-ment will have to carry out reforms of various sectors. After discussion with the WB, it will be decided where re-forms will be made, he added.

The o� cial said the country would not have much trouble in implement-ing the reform programmes as it is suc-cessfully running the IMF’s extended credit facility loan programme.

Arastoo Khan, additional secretary of the Economic Relations Division, said discussion on WB budget support continues. “We will seek o� er from the World Bank for budget assistance with-in a short time and hope that we will get it for the � scal year 2015-16.” l

Farzana sells a cigarette to a man in front the capital’s Hazaribagh fruit market yesterday. The nine-year-old girl – whose parents refuse to take care of her – has to live with her grandfather at the market and earn what she can by selling cigarettes and betel leaves MAHMUD HOSSAIN OPU

IUB honours Dr Anisuzzaman

n Tribune Report

Kazi Nazrul Islam-Abba-suddin Ahmed Research and Study Centre of Inde-pendent University, Ban-gladesh (IUB) celebrated National Poet Kazi Nazrul Islam’s 153rd birth anni-versary on Sunday at its Bashundhara campus in the capital.

While celebrating the birth anniversary, the cen-tre also launched IUB Jour-nal on Nazrul-Abbasuddin and honoured Bangla Acad-

emy President Professor Emeritus Dr Anisuzzaman of Dhaka University who has recently been awarded the Padma Bhusan by the Indian government.

Dr Anisuzzaman attended the programme as the chief guest and IUB Vice-Chancel-lor M Omar Rahman presid-ed over the programme.

The celebration includ-ed speeches by scholars and musical performance by noted artist Yasmeen Mushtari and the students of IUB. l

4 NewsDHAKA TRIBUNE Wednesday, May 28, 2014

I am Jebin Akter, Father’s Name: D.M. Obaidul Haque, Roll-562801, Reg. No-870518 Session-2012-13, Board- Dhaka. I lost my admit card. G.D No-1378, Narshigdi Model Thana, Narshingdi.

LOST

One held with 500 litres of liquorn CU Correspondent

Police arrested a pick-up van driver on the Chittagong-Cox’s Bazar highway in Chadaha area under Satkania upazila of Chittagong early yesterday and seized around 500 litres of contraband liquor from the vehicle.

The arrested Md Ilias, 23, is the son of Abul Kamal, and is from Rahmaniya Para of Chunti area under Lohagara upazila of Chittagong, said police sources.

AKM Emran Bhuiyan, assistant su-perintendent of police of Satkania cir-cle in Chittagong, said on a tip-o� , a patrol team of Satkania police chased the Chittagong-bound pick-up van  on the highway at 3am.

“Police detained the driver and seized 500 litres of contraband liquor, which was in 75 polythene bags, after searching the van,” said the ASP.

A case was lodged with Satkania po-lice station. l

Krishi Bank o� cial among 3 abducted n Our Correspondent, Cox’s Bazar

Police are conducting drives to rescue the three people, including an o� cial of the local Krishi Bank branch, who were abducted on Monday at midnight from Eidgarh area of Ramu by uniden-ti� ed criminals.

Two of the victims are Baishari Kri-shi Bank Cashier Jitendra Kumar and businessman Md Selim Uddin. Police could not name the third victim.

They were picked up from Beng-doba area of Eidgarh-Baishari road around 11:30pm when they were going to Ramu in a CNG auto-rickshaw. They were later taken toward the hilly areas, OC Saikul Ahmed of Ramu police said.

He said police teams are conducting drives in and around the area to rescue the victims. “BGB personnel have also joined the operation,” the OC added. l

‘Society should consider worker’s health and safety’n Tazlina Zamila Khan

A healthy workplace and workforce are very important for portraying a better image of the industry, Danish Ambas-sador Hanna Fugl Eskjær said yester-day.

Addressing a seminar “Occupation-al Health and Safety Impact 99% - To-gether We Can Change” organised by Western Marine Shipyard (WMShL) and GIZ, the German Development Cooperation at Rupashi Bangla hotel in the capital, she said: “Health and safety of workers is a prime concern which must be brought under consid-eration by the society. And I am hope-ful when industries in the country will follow Western Marine in this respect it will make a great change in Bangladesh which shall take the country one step forward toward progress.”

Other speakers said the GIZ supported the WMShL to implement and attain a renowned international standard in workplace health and safety. The WMShL is the � rst shipyard, and one of the few businesses in Bangladesh to obtain OHSAS 18001 status.

OHSAS 18001 is internationally ac-cepted as a method of assessing and auditing occupational health and safe-ty management systems.

A recent survey of the ILO (Inter-national Labour Organisation) says, around two million people die every year due to work-related injuries and

160 million su� er from work-related diseases every year. As a result, it im-pacts the workers and their families. It causes income loss, su� ering, insecu-rity and disability. It also hampers the reputation of the employers.

Hasnat Alamgir, associate professor at the University of Texas, said: “Work and health are related. Work hampers health. In our country, workers can do jobs till the age of 40. Later, they have to retire due to a lack of physical strength.

“Employers know how to protect workers, but they still let the labours die, which is very sad. When a worker becomes disabled, the employers shift the burden to the government because having disabled workers is a burden to the society.”

He also stressed on engineering, ed-ucation and enforcement to ensure oc-cupational safety.

He said: “Awareness on safety is-sues, training on safety procedures and rules to enforce safe workplaces can prevent the safety problem issue.”

The publication “Healthy Business, Healthy Workers, Healthy Commu-nities” was formally launched in the seminar by the speakers.

Labour and Employment Minister Mujibul Haque Chunnu said: “The Government of Bangladesh and the owners should prioritise safety for the sake of workers. Western Marine has achieved the OHSAS 18001 status which is an example for others.”

Syed Monjurul Islam, Shipping Min-istry secretary, said safety brings peace for both workers and owners. If the owners follow a systematic process to ensure safety like Western Marine, oth-ers will also do the same.

The Western Marine Shipyard Man-aging Director Sakhawat Hossain said: “We spend money on training and safe-ty. Now all of our workers wear safety tools like helmets and boots, and the accident rate has also come down.” l

No bar to holding Muktijoddha Council polln Nazmus Sakib

The Appellate Division stayed an HC order yesterday, which had blocked the polls of Muktijoddha Kendriya Command Council, scheduled for June 4, for six months.

Justice Hasan Foez Siddique, the chamber judge, passed the order following a petition lodged by the government, Attorney General Mahbubey Alam told the Dhaka Tribune.

On May 25, the bench of justices M Moaz-zam Husain and Md Badruzzaman stayed

the elections in response to a writ petition � led by Kabir Ahmed Khan, a candidate and former chairman of the organisation.

On December 8 last year, the govern-ment appointed an administrator at the freedom � ghters’ organisation. However, to hand over the responsibility to the elect-ed representative, an election schedule was announced on April 14. The petitioner � led the plea arguing that elections of the council’s central, district and upazila levels could not be held on the same day. l

10 hurt in Savar poll clash n Our Correspondent, Savar

At least ten people were injured in a clash in Jirabo bus stand area of Ashulia yesterday as supporters of two chair-man candidates broke into a � ght over the control of a poll-ing centre during local union parishad by-elections.

Witness said the clash took place as some unruly fol-lowers of chairman candidate Soid Ahmed tried to enter Dewan Edris College polling station to manipulate votes.

On information, police rushed to the spot and calmed the situation immediately, during which they arrested two people.

During the clash, both sides exchanged blank � re to cre-ate a sense of panic. l

One more held in siblings’ gang rape n Our Correspondent, Sylhet

Police arrested another youth yester-day for his alleged involvement in the rape of two sisters in Beanibazar of the district on Sunday.

Selim Ahmed, 28, was arrested on the information provided in the case � led by the plainti� , the victims’ fa-ther, said OC of Beanibazar police Abul Kalam Azad.

Local police on Monday arrested another suspect Nazrul Islam, who is the brother of the main accused Joynul Islam, the son of Makdam Ali from Pail-gram of the same upazila.

“We are interrogating the duo to get information about the others respon-sible. If needed, we will take them to court, seeking remand,” the OC said.

According to the case, seven-eight masked men entered the house at Charkhai union early Sunday by break-

ing open the door and threatened the parents with knives and sharp weap-ons. “At one stage, they tied up my wife and I and pounced on our daughters,” said the father.

The plainti� could only identify Joy-nul.

Meanwhile, the victims, admitted to Osmani Medical College Hospital after the incident, were released yesterday at noon after a forensic examination was conducted, SI Abdus Sattar of the hospital’s One Stop Crisis Centre told the Dhaka Tribune.

When contacted, Deputy Director of the hospital Dr Tonmoy Bhattacharya referred to the college authorities for information about the examination.

College Principal Morshed Ahmed Chowdhury did not answer the call made to his mobile phone. However, college sources said it might take two more days to get the forensic report. l

RMG worker murderedn CU Correspondent

A readymade garment worker was hacked to death early yesterday by un-known miscreants at her residence in Shapla Residential Area in Chittagong.

The victim, Sajeda Begum,32, was a worker at Gawus Fashion Limited in the city.

Sarif Rokonuzzaman, assistant sub-inspector of Akbar Shah police sta-tion, said some unidenti� ed miscreants entered the victim’s house around 3am yesterday and hacked her indiscrimi-nately, leaving her dead on the spot.

In the morning, the locals found the body after breaking the door of the house as Sajeda did not respond after being called several times.

On information, police recovered the body and sent it to Chittagong Medical College Hospital morgue for an autopsy. l

A large number of passengers are seen at Kamalapur Railway Station yesterday because of the transport strike on bus routes to North Bengal and greater Mymensingh BANGLAR CHOKH

Awareness on safety issues, training on safety procedures and rules to enforce safe workplaces can prevent the safety problem issue

WEATHER

5NewsDHAKA TRIBUNE Wednesday, May 28, 2014

PRAYER TIMES Fajar 3:46am Sunrise 5:11am Zohr 11:56am Asr 3:17pm Magrib 6:40pm Esha 8:06pm

Source: IslamicFinder.org

Source: Accuweather/UNB

D H A K ATODAY TOMORROW

SUN SETS 6:40PM SUN RISES 5:12AM

YESTERDAY’S HIGH AND LOW35.0ºC 23.6ºC

Kutubdia Rangamati

WEDNESDAY, MAY 28

F O R E C A S T F O R T O D A YDhaka 34 27Chittagong 32 26Rajshahi 32 23Rangpur 32 24Khulna 34 25Barisal 34 27Sylhet 35 24Cox’s Bazar 32 27

THUNDERSHOWER WITH RAIN

Confusion over CNG auto strike withdrawalOwners say the three-day strike to continue when the government claims to have strike a dealn Abu Hayat Mahmud

The government and CNG-run Au-to-rickshaw Owners’ Association made confusing statements yesterday about the withdrawal of the 72-hour ongoing strike enforced by the auto owners.

The Ministry of Communications and Bangladesh Road Transport Au-thority held a meeting at the ministry yesterday evening with a section of leaders of the Bangladesh Sarak Parib-ahan Sramik Federation in an e� ort to put an end to the strike.

Following the meeting, BRTA Chair-man Nazrul Islam told the Dhaka Tribune: “Leaders of the auto-rickshaw owners assured us that they would suspend the strike from today [Tuesday evening].”

But when contacted, Barkat Ullah Bhulu, president of Dhaka Metropolitan CNG-run Auto-rickshaw Malik Samity Oikya Parishad said none of their mem-bers were present at the meeting and there would be no withdrawal of their strike till their demands were met.

“The ministry did not contact us. They only held a meeting with one of our elder brothers, Osman Ali, the gen-eral secretary of the Bangladesh Sarak Paribahan Sramik Federation,” he said.

“We have neither suspended nor withdrawn the strike,” he clari� ed.

The three-day-long strike came into force yesterday.

The Dhaka Metropolitan CNG-run Auto-rickshaw Malik Samity Oikya Parishad called for a halt of tra� c movement, demanding an extension of the economic lifespan of the vehi-

cles by four more years, based on Buet recommendations.

Bhulu hoped that the ministry would call them today for a meeting.

“If the government meets our de-mand, we will withdraw the strike,” he stated.

Meanwhile, the commuters in the

capital expressed mixed reactions to the ongoing CNG strike.

Some sighed with relief at the thought that tra� c congestion would ease, which they said was mostly cre-ated by the auto-rickshaws, and some reacted with despair that the strike would a� ect their daily commute.

No auto-rickshaw was seen operat-ing over the city thoroughfares since the strike started in the morning.

However, the CNG-run auto-rick-shaws that are for private use only are operating on the city roads as usual.

The auto-rickshaw commuters ex-pressed their dissatisfaction with the ab-

sence of auto-rickshaws on the roads.They said they had to wait for pub-

lic buses for a long time and became sandwiched in the heavily crowded city transport.

Sajjad Hossain, a resident of Nakha-lpara, said: “The absence of auto-rick-shaws on the city roads seems to have given the city’s busy thoroughfares a relief in comparison with other days.”

“The number of CNG-run autos has not only grown, but also outnumbered the human haulier, other sorts of three wheelers and battery-run and paddled rickshaws,” said Sajjad, a student.

According to Farida Aktar, a private bank employee, she prefers taking public buses rather than taxi cabs and CNG-run auto-rickshaws, because of their high fare.

She demanded that the government take steps to reduce the number of three-wheelers on the city’s busy road.

A private university student Sadia Islam who was waiting for a public bus at Kakoli Bus Station in Banani, said: “I have been waiting for a bus for about half an hour, but am unable to get into any because of the overcrowding of people.”

“I used to take CNG-run auto-rick-shaws, but today [Tuesday] none of them are in sight,” she added.

She alleged the auto-rickshaw strike added to the transport crisis in the cap-ital city.

The Dhaka Metropolitan CNG-run Auto-rickshaw Malik Samity Oikya Parishad said earlier that it would ob-serve a 72-hour strike to press home a number of their demands. l

Two shot in clash over cable TV business in capitaln Ashif Islam Shaon

Violence erupted when two groups of men, who are involved with the rul-ing party, collided over business rival-ry that left two injured in the capital’s Mirpur area yesterday.

Witnesses and police said Jubo League activists, along with leaders Pallab, Riad and Hazrat Ali Bhutto, of Ward 13 were hanging out in front of Baishakhi Bhaban in the area when another group of Jubo League activists

led by Mahbub and Kamrul arrived on motorbikes around 2:15pm.

They suddenly opened � re at the � rst group using small � rearms, which in-jured Bhutto, 42, a local Awamil League leader, and Mainuddin, 42, a passer-by.

Bhutto was hit by bullets in his throat and right shoulder, while Mainuddin was shot in his abdomen.

The � rst group retaliated with bul-lets and, with the help of the locals, chased the attackers away.

However, Kamrul of the second group

was left behind by accident. He got caught and was beaten by the � rst group and then handed over to the police.

Both Bhutto and Mainuddin were rushed to the Dhaka Medical College Hospital for treatment. Doctors said Bhutto is in a critical condition.

Sub-Inspector Emanur of Rampura police station said they had rescued Kamrul from the mob and recovered two pistols and two rounds of bullets from the spot. They also seized a mo-torbike used in the attack.

Imtiaj Ahmed, deputy commission-er of Dhaka Metropolitan Police, Mir-pur Division, said they had arrested some youths from the spot.

“We will interrogate them. Besides, police teams are conducting raids in the area. The situation has been brought under control,” he said.

Accroding to locals, Riad and Pallab have a cable TV business. Their feud started with Mahbub and Kamrul when they tried to take over Riad and Pallab’s market with their own business. l

USTC VC calls emergency syndicate meetingn CU Correspondent

The vice-chancellor of University of Science and Technology Chittagong (USTC) expressed solidarity with the demonstrating employees’ demand yesterday and called on an emergency syndicate meeting tomorrow to resolve the ongoing deadlock.

The campus sources said the teachers, doctors, o� cials and employees of USTC, under the banner of “Teachers-Doctors and O� cials- Employees Samannay Par-ishad,” observed the four hours work ab-stention for nine consecutive days.

A protest rally was held at the Mow-lana Bhasani auditorium of the campus during the work abstention.

At the rally, Professor Dr M Rezaul Karim, VC of USTC said: “Due to the ab-sence of Treasurer Professor Sisir Ku-mar Deb, who now stays in Dhaka, the � nancial activities at the USTC and the BMH hospital under the USTC are being acutely disrupted.”

Dr Kamal Uddin, joint secretary of “Teachers-Doctors and O� cials- Em-ployees Samannay Parishad,” Anwarul Islam Bappy, member secretary, Dr Ba-diul Alam, head of the surgery depart-ment,  Professor Dr Mostafa Kalam of the medicine department, were pres-ent, among others, at the protest rally.

The VC, also the chairman of the USTC syndicate, called an emergency syndicate meeting on May 29 regard-ing the issue, said campus sources. De-manding the implementation of service rules, the teachers, doctors, o� cials and employees started to observe daily work abstention for four hours since May 18. l

Pond grabbing continues in Rajshahi, defying High Court rule n Our Correspondent, Rajshahi

A vested interested group is defying the ban by the High Court by continu-ing to � ll-up ponds and lakes in and around the Rajshahi city. They are tak-ing advantage of the negligence of the city authorities.

As a result, water bodies, includ-ing canals, lakes, ponds and wetlands have declined to a great extent.

The High Court gave a directive to stop � lling of all kinds of wetland in and around the city on December 13, 2010 following a writ petition.

According to Rajshahi Development Authority (RDA), in 1961, there were 4,238 ponds, canals, wetlands in the city, in 1981 the number was 2,271, in 2000 the numbers have stood at 729

and now city has only 214 water bod-ies which showed that the authorities concerned do not have any control over the vested interested groups’ ac-tivities.

In many cases, the RDA as well as Ra-jshahi City Corporation could not take strict action against land grabbers as a section of the public servants with in-stitutions help facilitate such illegal oc-cupation by preparing fake documents and being reluctant to take any action.

Following the example of these in-� uential quarters who have success-fully carried out the grabbing of water bodies, Al-Amin Rajshahi Ltd (ARL) has the audacity to � ll a pond stretch-ing six-bighas.

A good number of labourers have been involved in � lling the pond for a week.

The labourers � ll the pond at night in a bid to dodge the eye of authorities.

Earlier, the owner of the Compa-ny tried to � ll the pond in 2009. Then the Rajshahi Development Authority (RDA) noticed his activity and gave di-rectives to the company to stop it.

Locals said the local ward councilor Kamruzzaman Kamu was looking after the � lling work so that the pond was � lled smoothly without any hindrance.

Professor Nazrul Islam, city unit Jamaat leader, and Mahbubul Islam Bulbul, former president of city unit Islamic Chhatra Shibir, are among the directors of the company.

When contacted, Kamruzzaman Kamu told the Dhaka Tribune that he wanted to � ll the pond so that a mosque and graveyard adjoining the

pond could be saved. Mujibur Rahman, one of the direc-

tors of the ARL, said he could not say anything in this regard without the permission of the board of directors.

But the he acknowledged that they had not taken any permission from RDA to � ll the pond, adding that they would submit an application to the au-thorities’ concerned seeking approval to � ll the pond.

Azmeri Ashraf, acting urban planner of Rajshahi City Corporation, told the Dhaka Tribune that they had already served two show cause notice to the company, but they have to receive a reply.

“If the company does excavate the pond within 10 days, strong action would be taken against it,” he added.

Mayor of Rajshahi City Corporation

Mosaddak Hossain Bulbul said he hasn’t received a complaint in this regard.

“Necessary actions would be taken in this regard,” he said.

According to Wetland Conservation Protection Act, if anyone wants to � ll a wetland for any purpose he/she has to take permission from the Rajshahi De-velopment Authority and Department of Environment, said Tonmay Shynal, coordinator of Bangladesh Environ-mental Lawyers Association Rajshahi region.

In 2013, Rajshahi City Corporation (RCC) has planned to conserve 53 nat-ural water bodies in the city, in order to retain its surface water resources for protecting the environment from further degradation, but hasn’t imple-mented any actions as of yet. l

Abducted child rescued in Cox’s Bazar, 4 heldn Our Correspondent, Cox’s Bazar

Detective Branch of Cox’s Bazar police rescued a boy and detained four al-leged abductors in a drive from West Larpara area adjacent to city’s bus ter-minal a day after he was abducted.

Victim, Nur Kamal, 13, son of Nur Bashar, from Ruhullardeba area under Ratnapalang union of Ukhia upazila in the district.

The arrested are Jahid Hosen, 25, son of Omar Hakim, Md Jamal. 28, son of Abdul Gafur, Lal Mia, 40, son of late Ali Hosen all from the city’s West Lar-para area. Another arrestee Md Aiyub, 32, son of Piyar Ahmed, is from Tetoar Sikdar area in Sadar upazila in Cox’s Ba-zar, said police sources.

O� cer-in-Charge Manzur Alam of Cox’s Bazar DB police told the Dhaka Tribune that the boy was abducted around 10am on Monday from the bus terminal and Tk50,000 was sought as ransom from the victim’s family by the abductors.

The family informed the matter to the DB police and they went on a drive to rescue the boy after tracking down the possible location of the abductors, the OC said. l

SBMCH forms probe body over patient’s deathn Our Correspondent, Barisal

Barisal Sher-e-Bangla Medical College Hospital authority formed a probe committee regarding the alleged death of patients due to inadequate oxygen cylinders.

Dr Qamrul Hasan Selim, director of SBMCH, said they decided to form a three-member probe-committee head-ed by Dr Saidur Rahman, head of med-icine unit.

The step was taken after allegations over the death of three patients, in-cluding an elderly and infant patients, within 48 hours this week. There was a scarcity of oxygen cylinders in the child and medicine departments as the avail-able ones were being used in di� erent departments, the SBMCH director said.

The committee was asked to submit their report within three working days. The hospital now has a su� cient sup-ply of oxygen cylinders, the SBMCH di-rector observed.

However Dr Saidur Rahman, head of the probe committee, said he is yet to receive any letter about this and will begin the investigation after receiving the letter.

It was alleged by the relatives of the deceased that two infants died last Fri-day night and the following morning and one Kazi Nurul Islam, 60, admitted at the medicine unit, died on Saturday afternoon due to respiratory problems as the oxygen cylinders were not sup-plied in time.

The relatives went on a rampage when they found out that three oxy-gen cylinders were lying unused at the nurse’s sickroom.

Habibur Rahman, SBMCH store in-charge, said there was no shortage of oxygen cylinders in the hospital since all cylinders were immediately dis-bursed to the di� erent wards as per their demands and fresh there is always a steady supply as they are bought a couple of days before the stock is ex-hausted. l

CNG-run auto-rickshaw drivers did not come out with their vehicles because of the strike yesterday. The photo was taken from a Tejgaon garage in the capital SYED ZAKIR HOSSAIN

Some day labourers, who crush bricks at a construction site in the capital’s Mohammadpur area, return home by the improvised vehicle they use for crushing the bricks yesterday. They use the vehicle apparently to cut transport cost MAHMUD HOSSAIN OPU

6 NationDHAKA TRIBUNE Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Manpower shortage hits Pirojpur livestock deptn Our Correspondent, Pirojpur

People in rural Pirojpur are unable to take care of their cattle because there is a lack of medication and vaccination facilities as a result of the livestock of-� ces in the district being a� ected by a multitude of problems, including man-power shortage.

Local sources said most of the live-stock o� ces at all of the six upazilas in the district are ill equipped with inad-equate sta� and medicine.

People in the villages assert that if they are not provided with su� cient vaccination for their livestock, an epidemic might break out among the poultry, cattle and other animals.

According to livestock o� ce sourc-es, a total of 30 posts have been vacant

at di� erent livestock o� ces in the dis-trict which is responsible for the ad-verse e� ect on their services.

O� cial sources said the posts of ad-ditional livestock o� cer, o� ce assis-tant and night guard at di� erent live-stock o� ces have been vacant for ages.

Last year, district Livestock Depart-ment could not achieve their target be-cause of di� culties.

Only 93,000 dairy animals were vac-cinated against the target of 253,000 last year.

Also, only 2.9 million poultry birds were vaccinated against the target of 8.25 million, the Livestock Department sources said.

Abul Basar, a resident of Indurkani village under Zia Nagar upazila in Piro-jpur, fears that his three cattle might

have contracted a disease as he could not to vaccinate them last year.

He said when his cattle fell ill, he took them to Pirojpur district town as he could not get any support from Zia Nagar livestock o� ce.

“When I went to their o� ce, the of-� cer advised me to go to the district town saying that they do not have the medicine.

Mohammad Masudur Rahman, of-� ce assistant of Pirojpur Livestock Department, said there were 409,999 cows, 9,604 bu� alos, 96,535 goats and 2,525 sheep in the district.

He said a livestock o� ce at each upazila should have one livestock of-� cer, one veterinary o� cer, and a livestock assistant, a veterinary com-pounder, one o� ce assistant, but in

reality it is di� erent. He claims that if necessary meas-

ures are not taken immediately to � ll the vacant posts and supply medicine, an epidemic will break out among the poultry, cattle and other.

No livestock o� ce in six upazilas ex-cept Bhandaria and Mothbaria have a livestock o� cer while Swarupkati, Na-zirpur and Mothbaria livestock o� ces only have veterinary surgeons.

The post of livestock assistant o� cer have also been vacant, but there is no initiative to ful� l the posts, sources said.

Jul� kar Ali Khan, veterinary � eld assistant at Pirojpur Sadar upazila, said there were seven unions under the upazila. But there were only three veterinary � eld assistants to cover the vast area.

“As a result we could not provide satisfactory services to our clients,” he said.

Moreover, there is no refrigerator at the livestock o� ce where medi-cine and vaccines could be persevered properly, he added.

District Livestock O� cer Dr Abdul Jabbar Sikdar said they are unable to provide proper services to people as they are faced with many problems such as manpower and medicine short-ages.

AKM Shamimul Siddik, deputy commissioner, told the Dhaka Tribune that as cattle is the main income sourc-es for the people in the southern region they would try their best to recruit more sta� to ease su� erings of people there. l

Schoolgirl yet to be rescued n Our Correspondent, Bandarban

A schoolgirl who was abducted 20 days ago from Alikadam upazila of Bandar-ban district has not been rescued yet.

The victim, Sabina Yasmin, 14, is the daughter of Saber Miah. She is a stu-dent of Class VII of Ali Kadam Moitree Junior High School. Monowara Begum, the victim’s mother, said Momena Sultana Bebi, Sabina’s maternal aunt, had gone to a physician with Sabina on May 7. Sabina has remained missing since that day.

Monowara alleged that Bebi had ab-ducted Sabina. She added that Bebi had a connection with human tra� ckers and might have handed her daughter over to them. Later, she � led a case ac-cusing Bebi of abduction. l

Section 144 imposed on Satkhira bus terminal n Our Correspondent, Satkhira

Local administration imposed Section 144, which prohibits the meeting of � ve or more persons, on the Central Bus Terminal in Satkhira Sadar upazila yesterday.

The prohibition order was placed because of a clash between two groups of Awami League who were � ghting for control of the terminal on Monday af-ternoon. Three people were injured in the � ght.

Con� rming this, Sadar Upazila Nir-bahi O� cer Asaduzzaman said they had imposed the order to maintain law and order.

“The situation is now calm here,” said Enamul Haq, o� cer-in-charge at Satkhira Sadar police station. l

Mother killsher son n Our Correspondent,

Jessore

A mother allegedly killed her son at Biswaspara under Chaugachha upazila in Jes-sore on Monday.

Police said Nargis Begum, the mother cried out after strangulating her one and a half month old child, Na� s Hasan, in absence of her husband at night, in order to establish that her son had died naturally.

Suspicious locals in-formed the police about the incident and the police re-covered the body and sent it to Jessore Medical College Hospital for an autopsy.

The police arrested the mother. Akram Hossain, o� c-er-in-charge of Chaugachha po-lice station said Nargis Begum had confessed to the police that she had killed her son. l

BGB-smuggler clash leaves15 injuredn Our Correspondent,

Jessore

Members of Border Guard Bangladesh and smugglers engaged in a clash over the re-covery of bottles of phensidyl, which left at least 15 injured, including BGB personnel, at Muchipara of Baroanchra un-der Benapole port police sta-tion on Monday.

The smugglers entered Bangladesh via the border with sacks containing bot-tles of phensidyl and aban-doned the drugs when the BGB chased them.

When BGB men were re-turning to their post with the con� scated drugs, the smugglers ambushed them and began a � ght which left 15 injured. The BGB person-nel later raided nearby vil-lages and nabbed three of the smugglers.

Jessore 26 BGB Lt. Colonel Matiur Rahman said: “A case has been � led against a num-ber of people, among whom 25 have been identi� ed.” l

11 BNP, Jamaat men sent to jailn Our Correspondent, Habiganj

Habiganj Juba Dal Organising Secre-tary Jalal Ahmed and Chhatra Shibir President Khalilur Rahman were de-nied bail in an explosives case yester-day and sent to jail.

Habiganj Municipality Juba Dal Gen-eral Secretary Sha� kur Rahman, Organ-ising Secretary Morshed Alam Sujon, Jamaat activist Amjad Hossain Moni, Krishakdal General Secretary Sha� kur Alam, Chhatra Dal activists Mahbubur Rahman, Rabiul Alam, Habibur Rah-man Pappu, Shipon and Mamunur Rashid Mamun were also sent to jail.

According to the police, on October 30, some people participating in a proces-sion vandalised quite a number of shops and bombed the Chowdhury Bazar area in the district town with cocktails.

The next day, Sadar police � led a case under the Speedy Trial Tribunal Act against more than 50 Juba Dal, Chhatra Dal and Shibir leaders and activists and the abovementioned ac-cused went on the run.

They surrendered to the court of District and Sessions Judge Md Mah-bubul Alam and sought bail from him, but the court denied the request and sentenced them to jail. l

Local people form a human chain in Jamalpur district town yesterday, demanding measures to establish a medical college hosp ital in Bypass area DHAKA TRIBUNE

7Long Form Tuesday, May 27, 2014DHAKA TRIBUNE

n Mahwash Badar

Anyone who has ever trav-elled abroad will tell you that no matter where you go, no matter how devel-oped a country it is that

you’re travelling to – if you’re a British national or a Caucasian American, the doors become friendlier. The security becomes less pressurising. Visa queues are shorter. Procedures are simpler.

If you’re a brown Pakistani man (or even woman) who is travelling to another country – that’s a whole other story. You’re working in the Middle

East, chances are your salary is just a little bit above the basic working wage – or anything that will get you a bed-space with seven other human beings. Respect is minimal.

You’re not supposed to ru� e any feathers. Or demand for rights. Your children are thousands of miles away studying (because you can’t a� ord education for them here), your wife probably has another job to help make ends meet and your job squeez-es every drop of your blood into a tiny container that helps build the skyscrapers and that little container is thrown away quicker than you can say “burj” as soon as your company decides to say bye bye.

Pretty much the equivalent of … well, I don’t know. What is that the equivalent of? What analogy do I draw to represent the utter misery that is being a Pakistani in this super-power dominated world?

As if the current state of the coun-try, what with its years of dictatorship and lack of infrastructure, hasn’t driven us insane enough, there is the added bonus of inviting religious extremists and letting them destroy everything we hold near and dear.

Sure, apologists will reason it saying “this is not true Islam” and whatnot. But my question is when – seriously – when do we set aside the debate of what is true Islam and what isn’t?

Let the clerics and the religious scholars sit in their mosques. But once and for all, eliminate and annihilate

the savage, beastly, cowardly, immoral men who buy the bodies of fragile, poverty-stricken, desperate men, strap them with explosives and send them into markets � lled with innocent wom-en and children. Finish these abhorrent elements in the society that attempt to throw us back to the Stone Age.

A recent article in the New York Times reported on the World Health Organisation (WHO) declaration of the polio emergency in Pakistan.

Last year, a polio worker was killed in Peshawar, as well as another who was shot dead in Khyber Agency. Sever-al were kidnapped in Bara. In January this year, gunmen killed three health workers taking part in a polio vaccina-tion drive in Karachi, not Kabul, not Sierra Leone, not Riyadh, Karachi.

My heart boils and burns as more devastating news and reports � ood the channels. The New York Times article further stated that according to a report, the highest refusal rates for polio vaccination were recorded in wealthy neighbourhoods of Karachi because they had “little faith in public health care.” In North Waziristan, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) have had vaccination forbidden for years. Pakistan thus has 59 polio cases to report, the highest in the world.

Being a mother, it scares me. It keeps me awake at night. It reminds me that even if I run far away from the borders of my own land, its demons will continue to haunt me and my future generations. I Google “Paki-

stan” on the news and everything that is reported is about death, destruction, squabbling politicians, ailing children, extremists blowing up things and a struggling economy.

I raise my eyes to our neighbouring country and see what could have hap-pened if we were still a United India.

Maybe we would have been polio free too. We would have been a uni� ed part of a process of being the world’s next big force to reckon with, of being a part of the next blazing economy.

I � nd myself deeply wishing that Jinnah hadn’t made this mistake – that he had thought about the future of Pakistan. He didn’t think of the obscu-rantist mindset that he had propelled forward, the countless millions that

died at the hand of this vague agenda that fails to unite us as a nation. I look at the years of struggles that Pakistan faces, the fall of Dhaka, the provincial wars, the stark separatist mindsets and I wonder what Mr Jinnah was thinking when he decided to leave the Indian National Congress (INC).

We share more with our Indian brothers than our ancestral DNA. Our food, language, clothes, lifestyles are

more like them than the Arabs we so badly want to mimic and ape. I stare at the green passport with the same self-loathing as the fat 16-year-old girl with pimples on her face who is told that she cannot get married because she will always be blind, diseased and fat and her elder, stronger, prettier, better-educated sister will snag all the good catches because she ended up with the better caretaker after the divorce of their parents.

I am ashamed of being a Pakistani today.

I am ashamed that I belong to a country that kills human rights law-yers and sitting governors, and issues death threats to university professors.

I am ashamed that we believe in spaghetti monster theories and pie in the sky conspiracies and risk the future of our children.

I am ashamed that we have rejected our scientists just because they believe in a di� erent dogma.

I am ashamed that we cannot protect our women, we cannot protect our children and we cannot protect our men from the evil that is extrem-ism, fundamentalism and the foolhar-dy idea that Pakistan is a great nation. Pakistan is a � edgling, � ailing state.

And those 59 children, whose legs can never work anymore, the family

of Raza Rumi’s driver, those who shed tears for Salman Taseer, for Perveen Rehman, for Rashid Rehman, for Dr Murtaza Haider and his 12-year-old son – every single person who went out to have a normal day and never made it home alive – are all paying the price of the empathy, respect and awe YOU show cowards like Mumtaz Qadri. l

Mahwash Badar is a clinical psychologist.

Jinnah made a mistake and I am ashamed of being Pakistani

Mahwash Badar is a clinical psychologist by profession and one of a handful of liberal Pakistanis who dare to speak the truth. On May 12 she wrote an opinion piece for Pakistan’s Express Tribune Blogs, titled ‘Jinnah made a mistake and I am ashamed of being Pakistani.’ However, due to the invisible hand of the ISI both this article and her Twitter pro� le @MahwashB have vanished. Below is a reproduction of the original article

Jinnah didn’t think of the obscurantist mindset that he had propelled forward, the countless millions that died at the hand of this vague agenda thatfails to unite us as a nation

I am ashamed that we cannot protect our women, children and men from the evil that is extremism, fundamentalism and the foolhardy idea that Pakistan is a great nation

Pakistan is always plagued with one form of chaos or another REUTERS

The media in Pakistan is under stringent scrutiny by the regulatory authority. Geo TV’s license being suspended is an example of the authority’s diminishing tolerance REUTERS

I Google ‘Pakistan’ on the news and everything that is reported is about death, destruction, squabbling politicians, ailing children, extremists blowing up things and a struggling economy

Over 50 rebels killed in biggest Ukraine assaultn Reuters, Donetsk

More than 50 pro-Russian rebels were killed in an unprecedented assault by Ukrainian government forces, which raged into a second day yesterday after a newly-elected president vowed to crush the revolt in the east once and for all.

Reuters journalists counted 20 bod-ies in combat fatigues in one room of a city morgue in Donetsk. Some of the bodies were missing limbs, sign that the government had brought to bear overwhelming � repower against the rebels for the � rst time.

“From our side, there are more than 50 (dead),” the prime minister of the rebels’ self-styled Donetsk People’s Republic, Alexander Borodai, told Reu-ters at the hospital.

The government said it su� ered no losses in the assault, which began with air strikes hours after Ukrainians overwhelmingly voted to elect a 48-year-old billionaire confectionary magnate Petro Poroshenko as their new president.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has declared Moscow’s right to in-tervene to protect Russian speakers in Ukraine, demanded an immediate halt to the o� ensive. Moscow also said it would not consider a visit by Poroshen-ko for any talks.

Until now, Ukrainian forces have largely avoided direct assaults on the

separatists, in part out of what they say is fear of precipitating an invasion by tens of thousands of Russian troops massed on the border.

But the government in Kiev appears

to have interpreted Poroshenko’s big election victory - he won more than 54 percent of the vote in a � eld of 21 candi-dates, against 13 percent for his closest challenger - as a mandate for decisive

action.After rebels seized the Donetsk air-

port on Monday, Ukrainian warplanes and helicopters strafed them from the air and paratroopers were � own in as

part of the assault.Shooting carried on through the

night and on Tuesday the road to the airport bore signs of � ghting. Heavy machinegun � re could be heard in the distance in mid-morning.

On the highway to the airport, a truck - the kind that rebels have used to ferry dozens of � ghters across the re-gion - had been obliterated by machine-gun � re. Blood was sprayed across the road and splattered as far away as a bill-board seven meters above.

“The airport is completely under control,” Interior Minister Arsen Ava-kov told journalists in the capital Kiev. “The adversary su� ered heavy losses. We have no losses,” he added.

“We’ll continue the anti-terrorist operation until not a single terrorist re-mains on the territory of Ukraine,” First Deputy Prime Minister Vitaly Yarema said on the margins of a government meeting.

Borodai, the rebel prime minister, also said the airport was now under government control. A hockey stadium in the city had been set ablaze, but the � re was put out.

The battle marks the � rst time the government has unleashed the full lethal force of its aircraft and ground troops directly at the Donetsk rebels, a group of local volunteers and shadowy outsiders led by a Muscovite that Kiev and Western countries say is a Russian military intelligence agent. l

Wednesday, May 28, 2014DHAKA TRIBUNE World8

El-Sissi backers scold Egyptians to voten AP, Cairo

The government and media harangued voters to go to the polls yesterday in the second and � nal day of Egypt’s presiden-tial election, worried that turnout was weaker than expected in a vote in which the front-runner, former army chief Ab-del-Fattah el-Sissi, is trying to garner an overwhelming show of support.

There were no o� cial � gures on turnout in the previous day’s voting. But monitoring groups said Monday saw moderate in some places and often thin or non-existent in other areas, particu-larly where Islamists — el-Sissi’s top op-ponents — dominate.

El-Sissi, who removed Egypt’s � rst freely elected president last year, is poised for an almost certain victory. His only rival in the race is left-wing poli-tician Hamdeen Sabahi, who � nished third in the 2012 presidential vote but is

not believed capable of taking more than a symbolic amount of votes from the re-tired � eld marshal.

But the 59-year-old el-Sissi and his sup-porters have been counting on a large turnout to send a message to the West — as well as his domestic opponents, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood — that his removal of Islamist Presi-dent Mohammed Morsi was not a coup but a popular revolution, similar to the

2011 uprising that ended autocrat Hosni Mubarak’s almost 30-year-long rule.

For the past 10 months, el-Sissi has had near unanimous support from Egypt’s government and private TV net-works, newspapers and radio, which have been lauding him as the nation’s savior and presenting him as the only one able to lead Egypt. They have praised authorities’ � erce crackdown on Morsi’s followers, which has killed hun-dreds, as part of what they called the war on terrorism.

After the impression that Monday’s voting was thin, many of the news channels’ numerous political talk shows were furiously berating people who hadn’t voted. “By sitting at home, they are wasting what we have accomplished the past year ... our war on terrorism,” Hayat el-Dardiri, host of a talk show on the pro-military Faraeen TV, said on her Monday evening broadcast.

She pointed to Monday’s images of dancing and singing by el-Sissi support-ers who did turn out at the polls and chided those who didn’t.

One voter called in to private TV sta-tion Sada el-Balad, weeping as she said there not enough people at her polling station. “I am going to die,” the caller said. “Does this respectable man (el-Sis-si) deserve this from us?”

On Tuesday, many TVs were showing empty polling stations. Egypt’s deep di-visions were on full display Monday, the � rst day of voting. At some Cairo poll-ing stations, lines of el-Sissi supporters waved Egyptian � ags and wore clothes in the national red-white-and-black col-ors. Men and women danced to pro-mil-itary pop songs.

However, in strongholds of the Broth-erhood — which has dominated all other elections since Mubarak’s ouster — the polls were virtually deserted. l

Iran court summons Facebook CEO over privacy violationn Reuters, Dubai

A conservative Iranian court opened a case against instant messaging services WhatsApp and Instagram while also sum-moning Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg over complaints of privacy violation, state news agency ISNA reported yesterday.

The case underscores the growing strug-gle between moderate Iranian president Hassan Rouhani’s drive to increase internet freedom and demands by the conservative judiciary for tighter controls.

The Iranian court in the southern prov-ince of Fars opened the cases against the social networks after citizens complained of breaches of privacy.

“According to the court’s ruling, the Zi-onist director of the company of Facebook, or his o� cial attorney must appear in court to defend himself and pay for possible loss-es,” said Ruhollah Momen-Nasab, an Iranian

internet o� cial, according to state news agency ISNA, referring to Zuckerberg’s Jew-ish background.

Zuckerberg, whose company owns

WhatsApp and Instagram, is unlikely to heed the summons.

Iran is still under international sanctions over its disputed nuclear activities and it is di� cult for US citizens to secure travel vi-sas, even if they want to visit.

Internet use is high in Iran, partly be-cause many young Iranians turn to it to bypass an o� cial ban on Western cultural products, and Tehran occasionally � lters popular websites such as Twitter and Face-book.

Rouhani, in remarks that challenge hard-liners who have stepped up measures to censor the web, said earlier this month that Iran should embrace the internet rather than see it as a threat.

A Rouhani administration o� cial said Iran would loosen internet censorship by introducing “smart � ltering”, which only keeps out sites the Islamic government con-siders immoral. l

Nigeria: Missing schoolgirls locatedn Agencies

Nigeria’s military has located nearly 300 school girls abducted by Boko Ha-ram almost seven weeks ago, the coun-try’s chief of defence said.

Air Chief Marshal Alex Badeh, Ni-geria’s Chief of Defence Sta� , said on Monday that any potential armed res-cue operation was fraught with danger as the 223 girls still held hostage could be caught in the cross� re.

Boko Haram � ghters kidnapped 276 girls from the remote northeastern town of Chibok on April 14, leading to global outrage.

“The good news for the girls is that we know where they are but we can-not tell you,” Badeh told reporters in the capital Abuja, as the hostage crisis entered its seventh week. “We can’t go and kill our girls in the name of trying to get them back.”

Nigeria’s government and military have been sharply criticised for their slow response to the mass abduction. l

Ukraine PM rejects direct talks with Russian AFP, Kiev

Ukraine’s premier said yesterday that Kiev did not trust Russia enough to open direct negotiations aimed at end-ing a deadly insurgency in the separat-ist east of the ex-Soviet country.

“In current conditions, bilateral ne-gotiations without the presence of the United States and the European Union are impossible,” Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk told a cabinet meeting a day after pro-Western billionaire Petro Po-roshenko was con� rmed as the winner of Ukraine’s presidential election.

“If you sit down at the table with them alone, they will de� nitely cheat you,” Yatsenyuk said in televised re-marks.

Poroshenko had said on Monday that he would welcome a chance to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin and that such talks could be arrange by the middle of next month.

Yatsenyuk became prime minister following the February ouster in Kiev of a Russian-backed president and his leadership has never been recognised as legitimate by Moscow.

The two neighbours held talks un-der EU and US mediation in Geneva in April that produced an agreement to try to end the rebellion but whose terms were broken by both Russia and Ukraine within days. l

Palestinians to unveil unity government by Thursdayn AFP, Gaza City

Palestinian president Mahmud Ab-bas is to unveil a unity government by Thursday, ending seven years of rival administrations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, an o� cial said.

“We have � nished consultations on the national consensus government,” Azzam al-Ahmed, an envoy from Abbas’s Fatah movement, told AFP Tuesday after talks in Gaza with its Hamas rulers. “The announcement will come from the president in the next two days.”

The Palestine Liberation Organi-sation, which is dominated by Fatah, signed a surprise reconciliation deal with Hamas on April 23, giving the two sides � ve weeks to draw up an “inde-pendent government” of technocrats headed by Abbas.

Prime minister Rami Hamdallah of the West Bank-based Palestinian Au-thority is to head the new government, an o� cial said Thursday.

Hamas, which has its own Gaza prime minister, Ismail Haniya, saying it had “no objection” to the decision.

Agreement on a unity government would pave the way for long-delayed presidential and parliamentary elec-tions. Hamas won a landslide victory in the last parliamentary polls, in 2006.

But the European Union and the United States have refused to have any dealings with the Islamist movement until it renounces violence and recog-nises Israel and past peace deals.

Representatives of the rival factions have held several rounds of talks to heal the bad blood since Hamas expelled Fa-tah from Gaza in deadly clashes in 2007.

The two sides signed reconciliation deals in Cairo in 2011 and Doha in 2012, but neither accord was implemented.

Hamas enjoyed Egypt’s support un-der president Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, but has been un-der unprecedented pressure from Cairo since the army ousted Morsi in July. l

The new European Parliament

38

42

190

52 21364

46

41

65seats751

Source: europa.eu * Members of the European Parliament

Far left and Nordic greensSocialists, social democratsGreens and regional partiesLiberal democrats, centristsChristian democrats, conservatives

Conservative anti-federalists

Non-aligned, inc. far rightRight-wing eurosceptics

Number of MEPs* by political affiliation

Others

Provisional resultsat 0800 GMT

A pro-Russian � ghter takes position behind a car as a truck full of pro-Russian � ghters heads towards the battle during clashes against Ukrainian forces near the airport in Donetsk AFP

Cameron to EU leaders: Don’t be railroaded by EU Parliamentn Reuters, London

British Prime Minister David Cameron warned fellow European Union leaders yesterday not to be “railroaded” by the European Parliament into choosing a candidate to head up the next Europe-an Commission.

In a series of phone calls to leaders ahead of a summit in Brussels later on Tuesday, Cameron stressed they should choose who they want rather than be strong-armed into selecting a candidate backed by the European Parliament.

“We need to follow the correct pro-cedure for that, which is that the Euro-pean Council has the right to nominate, that we shouldn’t be railroaded by the parliament,” a spokeswoman for Cam-eron said, referring to the body which groups EU leaders.

Cameron conveyed the message in phone calls on Monday and Tuesday to 10

EU leaders. He also spoke with European Council President Herman Van Rompuy.

Under EU rules, leaders nominate a candidate for the top job, which has sweeping legislative powers, “taking into account” elections to the European Parlia-ment. Whoever they choose must be ap-proved by a simple majority in parliament.

But Cameron is concerned that one of the leading candidates is arguing that EU leaders should choose him based on the outcome of the European elections. Cameron wants leaders to � rst identify reform priorities and to then pick some-one suitable, his spokeswoman said.

Cameron sees the candidate, for-mer Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, as too federalist and likely to damage his hopes of reforming Britain’s EU ties. Juncker has been cho-sen by the EU’s main centre-right polit-ical group, the European People’s Party, to be their candidate for the top job. l

Iraq attacks kill 27n AFP, baghdad

A wave of attacks in Iraq, including a suicide bombing at a Shiite mosque in Baghdad, killed 27 people yester-day, the latest in a protracted surge in bloodshed. In the deadliest attack, a suicide bomber blew himself up at the entrance to a Shiite mosque in central Baghdad’s Shorja neighbourhood as worshippers were performing ablu-tions ahead of mid-day prayers.

At least 19 people were killed and 34 wounded in the blast at the Abu al-Ti-man Husseiniyah, near the headquar-ters of the Baghdad mayoralty, security and medical o� cials said.

Security forces barred journalists from taking photographs or videos of the aftermath of the scene, a common occurrence in the wake of deadly vio-lence in the capital.

No group immediately claimed re-sponsibility for the bombing, but Sunni militants often target Iraq’s Shiite ma-jority, whom they regard as apostates. l

Northern hemisphere hits carbon dioxide milestone in Apriln Reuters, Geneva

Carbon dioxide levels throughout the northern hemisphere hit 400 parts per million (ppm) for the � rst time in human history in April, an ominous threshold for climate change, the World Meteorological Organization said.

The 400 ppm level in the atmo-sphere, up 40 percent since wide use of fossil fuels began with the Industrial Revolution, is rapidly spreading south-wards. First recorded in 2012 in the Arctic, it has since become the norm for the Arctic spring.

The WMO expects the global annual average carbon dioxide concentration to be above 400 ppm in 2015 or 2016. Rising concentrations of the heat-trap-ping gas raise risks of more heatwaves, droughts and rising sea levels.

“Time is running out,” WMO Secre-

tary-General Michel Jarraud said in a statement.

“This should serve as yet another wake-up call about the constantly ris-ing levels of greenhouse gases which are driving climate change. If we are to preserve our planet for future genera-tions, we need urgent action to curb new emissions of these heat-trapping gases.”

Almost 200 governments have agreed to work out a deal by the end of 2015 to slow climate change as part of e� orts to limit the average temperature increase to two degrees Celsius (3.6 de-grees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times.

Temperatures have already risen about 0.8C (1.4F).

In April, the UN’s panel of climate experts said that greenhouse gas con-centrations, led by carbon dioxide,

would have to be kept below 450 ppm to give a good chance of achieving the 2C goal.

The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is seasonal, since plants absorb more in the summer months, causing a peak in the spring. The north-ern hemisphere, with more human-re-lated sources of the gas, has a more pronounced seasonal cycle.

Carbon dioxide remains in the at-mosphere for hundreds of years. It is emitted by fossil-fueled vehicles and coal-� red factories and power plants as well as by natural activities such as breathing.

During the last 800,000 years, the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide � uctuated between 180 ppm and 280 ppm, and has probably not been above 400 ppm for millions of years, scien-tists say. l

In strongholds of the Brotherhood, which has dominated all other elections since Mubarak’s ouster, the polls were virtually deserted

9Wednesday, May 28, 2014DHAKA TRIBUNE World

Delhi court orders Kejriwal’s release from jailn Agencies

The Delhi high court yesterday ordered Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriw-al’s release from Tihar jail. The court accepted the bail bond of Arvind Kejri-wal � led by his advocate in a criminal defamation complaint.

Earlier on Tuesday, Kejriwal agreed to furnish personal bond to get bail in the criminal defamation complaint � led against him by BJP leader Nitin Gadkari.

The former Delhi chief minister, who has been lodged in Tihar jail, ac-cepted to do so on the suggestion of Delhi high court earlier in the day.

Kejriwal’s lawyer told HC that a per-sonal bond of Rs 10,000 has already been signed and � led before magistrate.

During the proceedings, the bench suggested that Kejriwal should furnish bail bond and challenge the magisterial orders once he comes out of jail. It also questioned how a habeas corpus, � led on behalf of Kejriwal, applies against a judicial order.

A writ of habeas corpus is used to bring a prisoner or detainee before the court to determine if the person’s im-prisonment or detention is lawful. Ke-jriwal’s counsel argued that his deten-tion is “totally illegal” as only a person in custody is required to furnish bail bond. l

In landmark talks, Modi and Sharif focus on terrorn Agencies

India’s new Prime Minister Narendra Modi raised a broad swathe of vexed bilateral issues with his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif yesterday, adopting an unexpectedly tough line in a swiftly arranged détente aimed at rejuvenating frosty ties, the Hindustan Times reported.

Held in the backdrop of rare bonho-mie over Modi’s invitation to Sharif to attend his inauguration, the two lead-ers appeared to stand their ground over core issues that bedevil relations but more willing to be � exible to push for-ward a slow-moving peace process.

Both sides described the meeting as “constructive” and “cordial”, saying their foreign secretaries will meet soon to de-cide how best to take things forward.

Reading from a prepared statement, Sharif said it was possible to turn a new page in bilateral relations given that both prime ministers were in o� ce with clear mandates.

“I urge that we should change from confrontation to cooperation and not engage in accusations and counter-ac-cusations,” Sharif said.

“My government stands ready to discuss all issues. We owe it to our peo-ple to overcome the legacy of mistrust.”

Modi surprised many when he invited South Asian leaders, including Sharif, to his inauguration this week, an unprecedented gesture that analysts said was aimed at building strong ties

with neighbours.While the move triggered a sense of

rare bonhomie and hopes that the two sides would push to resolve their long standing disputes, Tuesday’s meeting saw India raise its core concerns, in-cluding its unhappiness with the slow progress in the 2008 Mumbai attack tri-al in Pakistan as well as border cease� re violations by Pakistani forces.

India’s Foreign Secretary Sujatha Singh told a press conference that she and her Pakistani counterpart will be in

touch to see how best to take the ties forward.

“PM (Modi) underlined our con-cerns related to terrorism,” Singh said, adding that New Delhi expected speedy trials into the 2008 Mumbai at-tacks and for Pakistan to “abide by its commitment to prevent its territory and territory it controls being used to stage terror attacks on India.”

Singh said the possibility of full trade normalisation was also discussed.

The talks, also attended by top ad-

visers to the leaders, went on for about 50 minutes. Before walking into their meeting held at a sprawling former royal palace in the heart of New Delhi, Sharif, wearing a dark suit and a red tie, and Modi in a brown Nehru jacket posed for the cameras, smiling warmly and locked in a � rm handshake.

Over the past year or so, relations between the nuclear-armed rivals have remained in a diplomatic freeze with former Indian Prime Minister Manmo-han Singh lacking political capital at home to push ties. But a huge election victory this month for Modi has raised hopes that he can reach out to his Paki-stani counterpart Nawaz Sharif in a way Singh could not.

“In South Asia, personality and per-sonal relationships have a bigger role to play ... Modi’s warm welcome has put an end to negative voices from here (in Pakistan),” Hina Rabbani Khar, Paki-stan’s former foreign minister said, an-alysing Tuesday’s meeting. “Modi has a thumping majority, Nawaz Sharif a simple majority... there is a real chance here to resolve core issues.”

Modi and Sharif appear to have al-ready struck a personal rapport. Hours after the two interacted at Modi’s in-auguration, the Indian prime minister tweeted: “Earlier in the evening in my conversation with Prime Minis-ter Nawaz Sharif he shared some very emotional things...Nawaz Sharif ji told me that he stays in Islamabad but goes to meet his Mother once in a week. l

Malaysia releases satellite data on MH370n AFP, Luala lumpur

Malaysia yesterday released raw satellite data used to determine that missing Flight MH370 went down in the southern Indian Ocean, information demanded by passen-gers’ relatives who are frustrated over the failure to � nd any wreckage.

The Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) said it had worked with Inmarsat to pro-vide 47 pages of data communication logs recorded by the British satellite operator, as well as explanatory notes for public con-sumption.

Analysts said it would take time to draw any conclusions from the raw, highly techni-cal data.

The families of the 239 passengers and crew on board the Malaysia Airlines plane had called for the information to be made public after a massive and costly search for the � ight, which mysteriously diverted from its Kuala Lumpur-Beijing route 11 weeks ago, found nothing.

O� cials, relying in part on the Inmarsat data, have said they believe the plane ended up over the southern Indian Ocean where it crashed into the sea, possibly after running out of fuel.

The numerical data used the Doppler e� ect -- the change in frequency of waves from a moving object -- to decipher the Boe-ing 777’s � nal � ight path.

Inmarsat’s interpretation of the data was subsequently veri� ed by the international investigation team, which includes the DCA

and the air safety boards of Britain, China and the United States.

But, with no sign of the plane found since its disappearance on March 8, relatives and friends are sceptical.

“The � rst thing we’re going to expect feedback on is does the data look right,” Sar-ah Bajc, whose partner Philip Wood was on the missing jet, told CNN.

“Is it as complete as we’re being led to believe it is?” the American said.

Another � ight route?Bajc and other relatives said in a May 20 report to the governments of Malaysia and Australia, which is coordinating the search e� ort, that they wanted to know if another � ight path had been possible.

“There is no mention on why they are so sure the Inmarsat data is highly accurate and reliable, to the extent that they have thrown all resources there,” the report said.

Malaysian Selamat Umar, whose son Mohamad Khairul Amri was on the ill-fated jetliner, was also critical of the satellite data, which is being released almost two months after the incident.

“I am not convinced at all by the data. Why are they releasing it now? Before when we asked for it, they did not want to release it. What can we do with it now?”

Malaysian authorities have been tight-lipped on details, saying they can only di-vulge information once it has been veri� ed and when its release will not a� ect investi-gations into the plane’s disappearance. l

Myanmar mulls religious conversion curbsn AFP, Yangon

Myanmar is considering restrictions on religious conversion, according to a draft bill released in state media yes-terday, the � rst of several controversial proposals stemming from a rising tide of Buddhist nationalism.

The proposed legislation, put for-ward by the ministry of religion and yet to be debated in parliament, would re-quire people who want to change their faith to get approval from a special-ly-created local authority.

“No one shall apply to convert re-ligion with the intention to insult, de-fame, destroy or misuse any religion,” said the report in the Myanmar-lan-guage newspaper The Mirror.

It added that under the proposed law any violation could attract a two-year prison sentence.

Religion has become a deeply sensi-tive issue in Buddhist-majority Myan-mar, where several outbreaks of an-ti-Muslim violence in the last two years have left around 250 people dead.

A highly controversial plan to im-pose restrictions on interfaith marriage is also being considered but details have yet to be revealed.

Rights groups have reacted with alarm to the proposed marriage curbs, saying they would threaten religious freedom and women’s rights. l

Vietnam, China trade barbs after Vietnamese boat sinksn Reuters, Hanoi/Beijing

Vietnam and China traded accusations yesterday over the sinking of a Viet-namese � shing boat not far from where China has parked an oil rig in the dis-puted South China Sea, as tensions fes-ter between the two countries over the giant drilling platform.

Hanoi said some 40 Chinese � shing boats surrounded the Vietnamese craft on Monday before one of them rammed it and it sank. Vietnamese � shing boats operating nearby rescued the 10 � sher-men on board, the government and the coastguard said.

China’s o� cial Xinhua news agency, citing a government source, said the vessel capsized after “harassing and colliding with” a Chinese � shing boat.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said Vietnam caused the inci-dent with its “insistence on forcefully disrupting China’s normal operations and its dangerous actions on the seas.

“We urge the Vietnamese side once again to immediately stop all disruptive and damaging (activites),” he added.

Scores of Vietnamese and Chinese ships, including coastguard vessels, have continued to square o� around the rig despite a series of collisions this month after the platform was towed to the site. Each side has blamed the other over those incidents. Until Monday, no

ship had sunk.The disputed incident took place

around 17 nautical miles from the Hai-yang Shiyou 981 rig, which is drilling between the Paracel islands occupied by China and the Vietnamese coast. China calls them the Xisha islands.

“A Vietnamese boat from the cen-tral city of Da Nang was deliberately encircled by 40 � shing vessels from China before it was attacked by a Chi-nese ship,” the head of Vietnam’s coast-guard, Nguyen Quang Dam, told Reu-ters by telephone.

Xinhua said: “Crew aboard the boat were saved after their ship jostled a � shing boat from Dongfang City in southern China’s Hainan province and overturned in the waters near China’s Xisha Islands.”

Vietnam has said the rig is in its 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone and on its continental shelf. China says it is operating within its waters.

In another area of the sea, to the north, one � sherman was killed and one disappeared when their boat was rammed by a “strange” vessel on Sun-day, a Vietnamese o� cial said.

“We haven’t had enough information to say where that strange boat came from. In this sensitive time, of course we think it’s a Chinese boat,” Pham Thi Huong, vice chairman of the Ly Son gov-ernment, told Reuters by telephone. l

Thai troops swoop on former ministern AFP, Bangkok

Thai soldiers swooped to detain a fu-gitive former cabinet minister yester-day after he emerged from hiding to become the � rst member of the ousted government to publicly denounce a military coup.

In dramatic scenes played out in front of stunned journalists, Chaturon Chaisang, education minister in a gov-ernment ousted by the army last week, was marched out of the Foreign Corre-spondents’ Club of Thailand by troops.

The veteran politician was holding a press conference in de� ance of an or-der for him to report to the junta.

He decried the coup-makers as in-experienced, warning of burgeoning resistance to the power grab as well as the potential for the army to “be more cruel than you might expect”.

Analysts say the junta’s move to detain scores of political � gures from across the kingdom’s bitter divide is aimed at quelling potential opposition to the May 22 coup.

Despite warnings by the top general of a widening crackdown on dissent, protesters have been gathering in small but vehement rallies in Bangkok.

They pose a direct challenge to a ban on political assemblies -- under martial law -- which is backed by sweeping curbs on the media and an overnight curfew.

An army spokesman said former premier Yingluck Shinawatra had been released by the military and allowed to

return home, the � rst o� cial con� rma-tion of her whereabouts since she was detained last week after reporting to the junta.

Yingluck, who was removed from o� ce by a controversial May 7 court ruling, signed an agreement to report her movements to the military, Colonel Winthai Suvaree told reporters.

‘Coup no solution’Chaturon was among the � rst batch of people summoned by the military in the hours after it took power, citing the need to restore peace and order to the kingdom following months of some-times violent protests against Yin-gluck’s government.

He refused to report to the authorities, telling a packed press conference Tues-day that he wanted to show his opposi-tion to the coup -- the latest in a string of 19 actual or attempted army takeovers in the kingdom’s modern history.

“The coup is not a solution to prob-lems of con� ict in Thailand,” he told re-porters, cautioning “from now on there will be more and more resistance”.

Army spokesman Winthai said the ex-minister’s case will now be handled by a military court. The junta has said that those who defy its order to hand themselves in face up to two years in prison and a 40,000 baht ($1,225) � ne.

Thailand has been unable to heal a fes-tering political rupture since 2006 when Yingluck’s brother Thaksin Shinawatra was ousted by another military coup. l

Anti-coup protesters take part in a gathering at the Victory Monument in Bangkok yesterday. From teachers and tour guides to � nancial consultants, a small band of anti-coup protesters from a spectrum of Thailand’s divided society is taking to the streets to defy the kingdom’s new junta AFP

India’s newly sworn-in Prime Minister Narendra Modi (R) talks with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif as they shake hands during a meeting in New Delhi yesterday AFP

Editorial10 DHAKA TRIBUNE Wednesday, May 28, 2014

CODE-CRACKER

ACROSS1 Festive jollity (5)6 Top airman (3)7 Gather for oneself (5)10 Approaches (5)12 Given shoes (4)13 Scolds (5)15 Water pitcher (4)16 Slender stick (3)18 Was ahead (3)20 Back of the neck (4)22 Advantage (5)23 Jetty (4)25 Combine (5)27 Coming after (5)28 Sister (3)29 Large antelope (5)

DOWN1 Worked by hand (6)2 Frozen treat (3)3 Brought up (6)4 Moves quickly (7)5 Tree (3)8 Donkey (3)9 Alone (4)11 Uncooked (3)14 Obliteration (7)16 Part of the eye (6)17 Protect (6)19 Wicked (4)21 Female swan (3)22 Craft (3)24 Consume (3)26 Large cask (3)

CROSSWORD

How to solve: Fill in the blank spaces with the numbers 1 – 9. Every row, column and 3 x 3 box must contain all nine digits with no number repeating.

SUDOKU

How to solve: Each number in our CODE-CRACKER grid represents a di� erent letter of the alphabet. For example, today 16 represents G so � ll G every time the � gure 16 appears.You have two letters in the control grid to start you o� . Enter them in appropri-ate squares in the main grid, then use your knowledge of words to work out which letters go in the missing squares.Some letters of the alphabet may not be used.As you get the letters, � ll in the other squares with the same number in the main grid, and the control grid. Check o� the list of alphabetical letters as you identify them.

CODE-CRACKER

CROSSWORD

SUDOKU

YESTERDAY’S SOLUTIONS

CALVIN AND HOBBES

PEANUTS

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We can’t � nd our conscienceMay 21

nds“They should know that arrogance will never pay, that their power is not permanent. It is indeed for a short while and will vanish with time.

How unfortunate one will be to leave the world as a corrupt soul, for he will be a sinner in this world and also in the eyes of God.”

Nobody pays any heed to the sermon contained in the last paragraph, propagated since time immemorial, for it sounds like a cliché. This sort of sermon might have some appeal to the timid millions, but it is of zero value to the mighty ones.

If there is anything new to say, then please do try, but stop wasting your time and energy on this sort of outdated lecture.

ZAWords such as “conscience” and “faith” are not included in the modern man’s vocabulary. Get with the program.

Ashraf Khan ZA: Modern man’s vocabulary? When you don’t have faith and conscience, you suggest having violence, bombs, killing, and brutality? Is this the modern man’s vocabulary? May God save us from the likes of those who believe in this!

Ahmed sarkar Ashraf Khan: I agree! What did ZA mean by modern man’s vocabulary?? What program is he talking about? Programs of violence, looting, and setting people on � re? Ah modern man!!

New York the Great #ThrillingCitiesMay 20OsmaniaPrefer the Lou Reed album to this pu� piece. It’s curiously dated (Times Square is cleaned up/boring, the Commies have left Moscow and that London is vibrant enough to make its own case).

NYC certainly has the best � lm directors making � lms about the city though (Marty/Woody/Spike etc).

Zero-AgendaNew York didn’t exactly leave the best of im-pressions on me when I visited the city as a wee child; however, I have fond memories of sifting through stacks and stacks of CDs and records with my older brothers in a tiny little record shop in Madison Avenue (if memory serves) called Coconut. For some reason Hootie and the Blow� sh’s “Cracked Rear View” was the only CD I insisted listening to while at that store.

JayNew York is one of the most fun cities to live in. There are amazing opportunities in New York for the people who are willing to work really hard to make their dreams come true.

Padma bridge cost up by Tk3,000crMay 22Vikram KhanCost is up by Tk3,000 crore extra because the government � atly refused to punish those in-volved in corruption.

Government land for RMG relocationsReports to the parliamentary standing committee on the labour

ministry indicate around 11,000 workers at 16 factories have lost their jobs so far following government safety inspections.

With inspections continuing by the Accord and Alliance, industry sources privately fear that many more, possibly hundreds, of factories may be found unsafe and forced to close.

The outlook for workers is bleak as factory owners are focusing on retrenchment of jobs in order to pay for the cost of building and safety improvements.

In principle, long-term co-operation between buyers and factory owners may well help bring new investment and better factories o� ering more secure jobs.

However, this does not change the immediate picture and the government is convening a crisis committee to look at ways of alleviating the unrest which these job cutbacks are expected to create.

While this committee may help bring up the issue of job losses, it does not address the cause of the crisis, only its symptoms.

The government can and should be far more pro-active. It owns or controls a large amount of idle land which can used to create new export processing zones, where new, safe factory buildings can be developed and leased to factory owners.

Both owners and workers in factories which are closing due to safety issues can bene� t from such freeing up of underutilised state land.

This would be the most e� ective way for the government to alleviate hardship and help the industry to invest for future growth.

The greener, healthier transportCyclists are becoming a much more common sight again on the

roads of Dhaka. Dedicated user groups have been critical to reinvigorating

the image of bicycling in the city. Given the capital’s tra� c problems and the environmental and health bene� ts of encouraging more people out of cars, this is a trend which should be encouraged.

Meanwhile, there is a nascent but very promising industry developing around bicycle manufacturing. A number of companies have already made a name for themselves as cutting-edge cycle producers in the international market. With cities as di� erent as Copenhagen and New York undertaking cycling initiatives, the government would do well to pay more attention to this industry as an area of export growth.

Cycling provides an economic and environmentally-friendly option to reduce the heavy congestion and pollution that plagues Dhaka’s streets. It also has great health bene� ts for cyclists themselves.

However, this practice is still limited to a few because of the dangers cyclists face, such as potholed roads and aggression from car drivers. Initiatives by the municipal government to install dedicated bike lanes will encourage many more people to take to cycling. Having more people on bikes in turn will help more people feel safer to pedal on the roads and make it more common for our commuter culture to include cycling.

In tandem with improving public transport options by investing in better bus services, this will go a long way towards improving the urban environment and the happiness and health of Dhaka residents.

Cycling is an economic and environmentally-friendly option to be encouraged

The government should be pro-active in providing land to help the industry invest for future growth

BNP: Withdraw army o� cials from RABMay 21

khanadilI fully support this. RAB has been totally politicised and turned virtually into an extortionist murderous group of the AL government. Among all institutions, that are either incompetent or corrupt, Army is the only institution in the country that people still have high regard for. By withdrawing its personnel from RAB, the Army must help restore its dignity and integrity, at the earliest possible.

AnonWell, I am afraid this band-aid solution may be futile. The root cause of the pervasive anarchy and lawlessness is the systematic weakening and destruction of state organs by the successive governments (and it raises my ire when I hear criticism coming from the opposition camp; when in power they did exactly the same thing, and would do it again with a vengeance once back in power).

Today, there’s no accountability, no oversight, no responsibility anywhere, so everything goes. How many serious crimes like murder, arson, rape, extortion, you name it, ever get solved? Zilch, nada. Welcome to Anarchistan.

Is Modi trouble for us?May 21NSWhat more trouble can Modi cause us than what our own leaders, both legally or illegally elected, have already caused?

Curious reader NS: We can only smile! Yes, our troubles are with us although others are causing some, too. Dear writer, Mr Modi is not referring to what you referred to. Be sure he would deliver what he pledged. I don’t see any reason why some Bangladeshis are anxious about illegal migrants at such numbers generated in the minds of Mr Modi’s campaign strategists, whereas there is no basis for such allegations. Rather more than 4 lakh Indians are working illegally in Bangladesh (� fth largest source of India’s remittances).

Fish traders attack a mobile court

May 23

VKIncredible! Those traders try to poison people and

become angry when action is taken against their crimes. Poisoning people is an attempt of murder

and the authorities should “treat” the criminals involved accordingly!

Bigshots ‘causing accidents’ in Cox’s Bazar

May 21

VihanNobody is above the law, NOBODY!

Ways of being humanMay 22

EndiThis is called the exercise of “hair splitting.” On

reading this article one may also ask how “human” is to be de� ned. Some parameters will be set up, which will again be treated as our fancy, and the

arguments will continue ad in� nitum. Yes, to attain full citizenship many rights have to be surrendered

but, more tragic than that, one has to surrender his common sense to attain the identity of super

intellectuals like this author. Please, stop this sterile intellectual exercise. We understand what

civilisation is very well with our bare common sense.

BSF captures another Bangladeshi

May 22

MZBSF is out of order. What is with our government?

Why doesn’t it do something constructive? Thousands of our people have been killed by BSF!

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

n Garga Chatterjee

With every passing day, the praxis of representative de-mocracy is getting hollowed

out. I consciously borrow this term oft-used by Arundhati Roy. This is true all over the world, including the Indian Union. Here, I would like to focus on a speci� c type of hollowing – a very insidious one at that.

There are elected institutions and bodies that claim representation legally. What has been a part of the hollowing out process is the result of a con� ation of representation and legality, and the reversal of the causal relationship between them that exists in human collectives. This has danger-ous implications for our future.

Power and resources per se do not confer a legal right of governance - without the ethico-moral princi-ples that creates a semblance of that right. Even extreme asymmetries in power between the ruler and the ruled does not take away the value of these principles – even if the extreme asymmetry, does create, in transience, a milieu of governance that is bereft of disturbance.

However, in the mind of the ruler, and in the impression of the ruled, there is a tension – a tension of having no claim to such power. In the

past, what conferred such power and hence, legality? And what were the ethico-moral underpinnings of such claims?

Monarchy – from empires to small feudal domains – was till very recently the commonest system of governance. The king of Nepal claimed to be Vishnu himself, in a human form. Muslim rul-ers in India mostly ruled in the name of the ruler above him, in a system of hierarchical allegiances, all with obeisance to Allah and essentially part of a Caliphate. Most Hindu rulers claim descent from the Sun or the Moon or other celestial deities.

This was true for caucasians whose kings ruled in the name of many gods and their orders and in later days, as the representative of the

Christian God on earth. The underly-ing point is – the claim to rule legally, came from a body or power which in some sense represented collective welfare and destiny – in these cases, divine powers.

Without the hinge of an ethico-moral frame from where power emanates, a legal right to govern and rule was not without dispute. Also, the disputes of who the ruler is and wars between rulers, would � nally be reconciled at the end to such claim of speaking for or representing the divine – the divine being important as it, in a sense, had a connection with all humans.

It was, by de� nition, imagination and reverence, something in which most had a stake. What is to be gath-ered from this is that even in the mind of a monarchic ruler – the right to rule and the legality of the strictures of the ruler – did not � ow solely from mate-rial power of law enforcement, though that is how that right was executed. Representativeness is a constitutive part of that legality.

Here is where the present comes in. A ritual of representation is di� erent from the human, ethico-moral process of representation. While the ritual is at best a medium of representation, it is certainly not an end in itself. In a rational-scienti� c society, where the only

admissible categories of human behaviour and collective action have to be measurable ones and e� cient from the point of view of industrial planning – the ritual of representation – being amenable to measurement and e� ciency computations – dei� ed as the source of legality. Ethico-moral principles are much

more problematic – they cannot be “measured” – and the form of democ-racy that is best hold within itself such ethico-moral underpinnings, that is par-ticipatory democracy, is “ine� cient.”

In this machine view of the dem-ocratic process, whatever you feed in from one end of this quasi-industrial process, if it involves non-banned thoughts, election noti� cations, voting booths and candidates, the output at the other end is, by de� nition, repre-sentative.

The next connection is not hard to make. Legality also � ows from this “representativeness.” The silent but real weeding out of the ethico-moral core from legality and the right of governance has ominous implications. The rulers of today, unlike erstwhile ones who had to come up with complex connections with the divine,

can outsource those itchy doubts on their own legality to the said industrial process itself.

In some sense, this makes rulers of hollowed out democracies more dangerous, as they are more con� dent of their legal right to wield power and at the same time have, in their minds, nothing to reconcile or prove. With that con� dence comes a reversal ofthe causal chain of how rights emanate.

Now, what is legal is necessarily

representative. And then as a corollary, what is illegal is necessarily unrepresentative. The ever-shrinking fate of dissent in such societies, in particular, contemporary India, is hard to miss. This is also inextricably tied to the development of other sources of representation in these societies – some of them “illegal.”

Some of the “illegals” are also rituals unto themselves in turn term the dominant ritual as “illegal.” Given the ideologies of unitary representation they share with dominant forces, it is sad but true the space for a plural, participatory democratic process with an ethico-moral core is disappearing in India.

The new rajahs, both the “legal” and the “illegal” ones, are godless. The rituals, backed either by high court and police or “people’s court” and red guards, both increase this process of making a democratic society full of catacombs. This is not a long-winded argument to return to some old despotism. One must continue to hope that life lurks there in spite of the “legal” and “illegal” assaults on democracy. After all rituals can only exclude ethico-moral churnings and not destroy them. l

Garga Chatterjee is a freelance contributor. He can be followed on twitter @gargac .

n Mohammad Ali Sattar

The wound that the country received from the seven mur-ders is still raw. A pall of gloom

looms in the air, confusion runs high in people’s minds as the law takes its own course.

Even before the blood could dry out in the bloated corpses of the seven souls, we have another gruesome kill-ing in Feni. Then another in Noakhali, then in Laksham, and then …

Shocking revelations are meted out to the members of the public each day. We wait with baited breath for more truths to unveil. Our patience and perseverance is being tested every day. We did not deserve this. We have the right to live our lives, so says the state.

The alleged complicity of the law enforcing agencies, local political goons, and high-ups of the society makes the matter even more awful, distressing, and repulsive. The out-come of all this would be the ultimate loss of conviction in every individual and institution. That’s the peril one ought to be apprehensive about.

Ekram was murdered in broad daylight. This was more brazen, more furious, more pathetic. The way it was carried out speaks of the nature of revulsion those killers carried in their hearts while committing the act, thanks to the instigator who succeed-ed in instilling malice in their tender minds.

Gunshots, indiscriminate stabbing, and setting the bleeding body ablaze to burn him alive making sure he does not breathe anymore – the charred re-mainder was all that could be rescued.

It was political rivalry that took his life. Look at the young healthy boys who were involved in the killing. I was taken aback to see the youngsters paraded before the TV camera.

These youngsters could have easily been a boon for their families and the nation. If only they were guided on the right path. But they were not, and that’s the tragedy of this nation.

Things have been deteriorating so fast that we have actually lost track. Trackless minds hardly keep pace with the events that are taking place in every corner of the land.

From Feni we travel to Noakhali and Laksham to collect another account of death and murder. It is a recurring cycle. The only di� erence is that every new act is committed with more vengeance and horror.

We understand from the later rev-elations that these were the outcomes

of political rivalry. If that is so, our politics is undoubtedly in ugly hands.

These hideous hands need to be neutralised. How should we go about it? Who is the saviour? Where is the ideal theorist who is going to come up with a solution to cleanse our politics?

We say the politicians are respon-sible for all of this. Will they take it sportingly and admit their faults? We know the answer.

Rather, these leaders, enjoying everything at people’s cost, would hark back claiming their innocence and putting the blame on anyone else. Pointing � ngers is so simple, because it doesn’t need the authorisation of the law. So if the leaders do not take responsibility, who will? Who is going to ensure the security of our children?

The contention between the di� er-ing factions of the ruling party is now in the open. Since the opposition has been e� ectively drawn to the side-lines, the � eld is now only left to the ruling party members.

They have taken over the law of the land. A sense of impunity has grasped their thoughts and actions. They have turned so desperate that elimination of their rivals is the only solution to their internecine struggle.

The crime is never carried out perfectly, but these people have a way of getting away with anything. They commit horrid crimes following carefree planning with the unending blessings of the godfathers. They are sometimes even backed by law enforcers who help with the maiming and killing.

Then they can simply go into hiding or � ee abroad. And chances are they might just make good on their escape for the time being. They have the golden opportunity to re-emerge after a few days, months, or even a decade, only to come back and say the allega-tions were false. They start their lives over and plan the next target.

The police chief informs us that these are stray incidents. Our con-science doesn’t move, our lips don’t � utter, our speech doesn’t slur, and our visions are not blurred. Our hearts don’t ache when we tacitly give in to the barbarity of these blemished humans.

We embrace the same person to make him the next commissioner, next mayor, or the next member of the par-liament. We have started rotting along with our politics. The stench in the air is overwhelming. l

Mohammad Ali Sattar is a DT columnist.

11Op-Ed Wednesday, May 28, 2014DHAKA TRIBUNE

n Khawaza Main Uddin

It’s time for Narendra Modi to get down to business – to deliver on what he promised his countrymen. The new Indian premier is entrusted with an

overwhelming mandate to promote the best national interests in keeping with the BJP’s polls manifesto.

For Sheikh Hasina, who retains premiership through constitution of the 10th parliament even without a ballot, it’s time to react to the “un-wanted” regime change in New Delhi. She lacks a popular mandate and thus seeks blessings from the BJP the way Congress patronised her Awami League.

Modi invited Saarc leaders to the swearing-in ceremony and US Pres-ident Barack Obama was welcome. Hasina, who failed to manage the West after her “reelection,” described Modi as a “great friend of Bangladesh” and her country as his second home. The appeasement suggests her team is Modi-fying party policy.

The landslide has presented Modi with the luxury to become rude or generous, whatever deemed suitable, with others. Contrarily, Hasina, hand-icapped by de� ciency in legitimacy, cannot a� ord to assert what a national leader should bargain for.

Opinion analysts are locked in debates over whether Narendra Modi, after assuming o� ce, would really deport illegal migrants or in� ltrators. I don’t � nd any reason why it would be a concern for Bangladesh.

As someone who has earned a repu-tation for his service as Gujarat’s chief minister, Modi can’t a� ord not doing something on this issue. He should be appreciated for any move to send back Bangladeshi criminals from India for

we will then be able to try them.But, in his references, Modi is

wrong on a few counts. The number of illegal migrants is exaggerated, and the absconding criminals are not in� ltrators as they chose India as a safe haven. Hindus who migrated to India after 1947 would be excluded from the deportation drive as the BJP manifesto con� rms.

Now, Delhi should be told to take back more than 420,000 of the Indian nationals who are working illegally in Bangladesh (out of 500,000) and are sending money through dubious channels. Is it a matter of pride for a bigger country to have a smaller one as the � fth largest source of remittances in such a manner?

India has been a bene� ciary of smug-gling that often instigates Bangla-deshis being killed. Indian authorities should be ashamed of the factories manufacturing illicit drugs (ie phen-sidyl) near the border, to be smuggled into Bangladesh.

These issues may not draw the attention of the Modi government as the Hasina administration is far from making eyeball-to-eyeball arguments, so the prospect of issues such as shar-ing the waters of common rivers and settlement of land boundary disputes being resolved is not bright.

Those who say that Modi’s post-polls policy would be di� erent from his pre-election rhetoric are probably unaware that the crackdown on the so-called illegal migrants is an electoral agenda. BJP will, its manifesto says, “address the issue of in� ltration and illegal immigrants in the Northeast region.”

Modi’s corporate backers would want to see Bangladesh as an undis-turbed market. Accordingly, his men have started the propaganda – BJP is making a U-turn, or a Teesta deal is in the o� ng.

Modi may be proactive, only to serve corporate India, about removal of some barriers to trade in selected cases. He may act restlessly on issues

such as road transit through Bangla-deshi territory or the use of Chittagong port by Indian traders. “Now or never” may be Modi’s overture to Hasina.

Dr Gowher Rizvi ruled out a re-gime-centric perception in Indo-Bang-ladesh relations. But he addressed a gathering at Dhaka University a few years ago, saying that with Congress ruling India and AL Bangladesh, it was the golden opportunity to strike deals like the one on transit. Professor Har-un-or-Rashid contested him, saying it was a matter of the foreign policies of two nations.

It was more of a relation between Congress and the AL. If New Delhi wants friendship with Dhaka and if track-II diplomacy of people-to-peo-ple contact is to be upheld, a shift in India’s policy towards Bangladesh is essential.

If Delhi strives for mere gains from Dhaka by initiating, for example, a transit from India-to-India through Bangladesh (to connect seven sisters), it will not be sellable to the Bangladeshi people. Transit or trade cooperation through multilateral arrangement is not a choice for India, as bilateralism is the mantra of not only the Indian establishment, but also of the intellectuals.

When India’s President Pranab Mukherjee refrained from voting in the national elections to maintain neutral-ity, External A� airs Secretary Sujatha Singh took an arrogant position in the electoral a� airs of another country only to rescue an unpopular AL. The top Indian diplomat has o� ended the Bangladeshi people by joining the conspiracy to hold a farcical election on January 5.

If MODI (modern outlook for de-velopment of India) means business with Bangladesh as a whole, the new administration has to break the status quo built in an atmosphere of honey-mooning between Congress and the bureaucracy. He has the authority to bring changes.

What will the equation between a politically bankrupt regime and a representative government be? Well, Sheikh Hasina can follow India and allow the election of a strong, popular leader in Bangladesh who can best serve the national interest. l

Khawaza Main Uddin is Executive Editor at ICE Business Times.

Facing up to Modi

If New Delhi wants friendship with Dhaka, a shift in India’s policy towards Bangladesh is essential

The police chief informs us that these are stray incidents. Our conscience doesn’t move

Pointing � ngers is so simple, because it doesn’t need the authorisation of the law

The new rajahs, both the ‘legal’ and the ‘illegal’ ones, are godless

Rulers of hollowed out democracies are con� dent of their legal right to wield power and at the same time have, in their minds, nothing to reconcile or prove

The new rajahs

We rot along with our politics

Time to get down to business AFP

Vidya Balan tries 122 looks for Bobby Jasoosn Entertainment Desk

Vidya Balan is back! As an aspiring Hyderabadi woman detective in di-rector Samar Shaikh’s “Bobby Jasoos.” The � rst look of the � lm was recently revealed at an event in Mumbai. Pro-duced by Dia Mirza, Sahil Sangha and Reliance Entertainment, the � lm has Vidya playing the central character with Ali Fazal playing the male lead.

For the role of a female detective in the movie, Vidya has tried 122 looks during shooting of the � lm, reported Hindustan Times.

Apparently, she invested two weeks to decide on the various looks required to enact the role. “She underwent 122 changes, out of which around 12 were shortlisted. Each one required her to wear a di� erent costume and sport complementing make-up. She would try six to eight looks every day and was extremely patient while selecting which ones � t the narrative of the story,” says a source close to the � lm’s team.

Some of the looks tried by Vidya were of a dabbawala, a peon, a teacher and a f i s h e r - w o m a n among others.

Film produc-er, Dia Mirza, also comment-ed on this long process of short-listing: “It was

one fun-� lled experience of discoveries and experiments. Our costume designer Theia Tekchandaney and our make-up artiste Vidyadhar worked tirelessly to conjure images that would be entertain-ing to watch, whilst remaining in sync with the demands of the script. I am thrilled and wowed by the many trans-formations of the versatile Vidya Balan.”

The trailer of the � lm will be launched by the end of this month and t h e � lm will be released on

July 4, 2014. l

EntertainmentDHAKA TRIBUNE Wednesday, May 28, 201412

Exhibition Bornil PandulipiTime: 12pm – 8pmGallery Shilpangon Second SightTime: 12pm – 8pmThe Daily Star Centre, 64-65Kazi Nazrul Islam AvenueDhaka

Mukh O Mukhosh 5Time: 11am – 8pmGalleri Kaya, House no. 20Road no. 16, Sector no. 4, Uttara

TheatreDog, Woman, ManTime: 7pm – 9pmGoethe Institut BangladeshRoad 9(new), House 10Dhanmondi

TODAY IN DHAKA

Is Mim replacing Faria in Morichika?

Moushumi and Golam Rabbani's face-o� n Entertainment Desk

A new reality show titled “Seylon Gold Twenty20 Star” will be aired tonight at 8pm on ATN Bangla. To-day's episode will feature Moushumi and director Golam Rabbani who will compete in a face-o� round with their teams.

The game show is named after cricket’s popular form Twenty20 as each competing team faces 20 ques-tions. All the participants of the show are � lm actors, sportsmen, television actors, directors, models and singers. The show commenced with six teams and 36 participants. Four teams will play the semi � nal round. The win-

ning team will be announced as the “Star” of the show, while the celebrity who will give the highest number of correct answers will win the title of “Man of The Series.”

Moushumi is the captain of the team “Film Star” with members Omar Sunny, Shimla, Nipun, Amin Khan and Jayanto Chattopadhyay as par-ticipants. On the other hand, Golam Rabbani Biplob is leading the “Star Di-rector” team with Nargis Akter, Shah Alam Kiran, Jakir Hossain Raju, Aruna Biswas and Giasuddin Selim as partic-ipants.

The programme is directed by Ashraful Islam Rony and Jillur Rah-man. l

Theatre festival marks Enamul Huq’s 72nd birthdayn Shadma Malik

On the occasion of Dr Enamul Haque’s 72nd birthday on May 29, a theatre festival has been organised by Nagar-ik Natyangan to honour the veteran theatre activist. The festival begins today at the National Theatre Hall of Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy.

The event will open with the stag-ing of “Shei Shob Dingulo,” a play based on the Liberation War. Written by Dr Enamul Huq, the play is direct-ed by Haque’s wife Lucky Enam, who is also a seasoned theatre activ-ist. The play highlights the contra-diction of opinion amongst people when it comes to the Liberation War.

On the thespian’s birthday, Nagar-ik will stage “Pushi Biral O Ekjon Prokrito Manush,” a translated ver-sion of Arthur Miller’s “Pussy Cat and a Real Man.” Adapted by Proi-tee Huq, the play — written on the

context of the Second World War — depicts di� erent social problems including corruption, greed, dishon-esty, and is relevant to the existing societal context.

On the concluding day, the festi-val will showcase Manik Bandopad-hyaya’s “Pragoitihashik,” which is based on the ancient ethnicity of Ben-

gal. The play has been adapted by theatre activist Mahmudul Islam Selim under the direction of Lucky Enam.

Dhaka Tribune had the op-portuniy to catch up with Dr Enamul Haque and learn about his take on theatre, culture and the Liberation War.

“I have been involved with cultural activities as I consider it to be the way to understand one’s country and its people. We can reach the core of hu-manity, which was the true spirit of our Liberation, through cultural activities,” said Haque.

“Through our plays, we showcase our social realities and bring forward the possi-

ble solutions in overcoming the pre-vailing challenges. Also, we inspire the young generation to get involved in the art of theatre and be a respon-sible citizen,” he added.

An actor-director-playwright, Dr Enamul Haque won appreciation for his performance in stage plays such as “Acholayotan, Bishorjan,” “Dewan Ga-zir Kissa,” “Baki Itihash,” “Nurul Diner Sharajibon,” “Janotar Rangoshala,” “Shoroma” and others. Plays directed by him include “Chirokumar Shobha,” “Kholosh, Janotar Rangoshala” and “Amra Kobore Jabo Na.” l

Hillol-Tinni’s custody battlen Entertainment Desk

About a year ago, TV actor Hillol � led a case claiming the custody of his daughter after the couple’s marriage ended on a bitter note.

In 2012, Hillol and Tinni’s marriage broke down causing quite a stir in the entertainment industry.

Their daughter Warisha was placed in her mother’s care after the di-vorce. Recently, Tinni’s Facebook post caused people to take notice of the di-vorced couple once again.

Tinni wrote: “Hillol’s drama is nev-er ending. He is suppose to move for-ward with his life, being married to Nawshin and all.

Instead, he is trying to take my child away from me. If Allah exists, he will surely give fair judgment.” She asked her well-wishers to pray for her and the child.

Dhaka Tribune caught up with Hil-lol after coming across the Facebook status and the indignant actor defend-ed himself by stating that Tinni’s life-style is “inconsistent.” He said: “It’s natural that a normal parent will ask for his/her child’s custody.

We all know that Tinni leads an in-consistent life and her schedule is not

favourable to raise a child, I am wor-ried about my daughter’s security and think it is unhealthy for her to remain

in Tinni’s custody.I face obstacles whenever I try to

meet my daughter or even talk to her

over the phone. Such actions on her part provoked me to claim my daugh-ter’s custody.” l

A old photo shows the duo with their daughter

Coldplay’s Ghost Stories tops British music chartsn Entertainment Desk

British band Coldplay’s new album “Ghost Stories” went straight to num-ber one in the charts on Sunday, the Of-� cial Charts Company said, becoming the fastest-selling album of the year.

The group’s sixth studio album and sixth successive British number one al-bum, it sold 168,000 copies since going on sale on May 19, a � gure the Charts Company called “staggering.”

“A new Coldplay album always makes a huge impact, and Ghost Stories is no exception,” Martin Talbot, chief execu-tive of the O� cial Charts Company, said in a statement. “The boys have made it a perfect six ‘number 1s’ out of six albums today. That is some achievement!”

Coldplay knocked last week’s num-ber one album, “Xscape,” a collection of previously unreleased songs by the late US singer Michael Jackson, o� the top perch into second place. l

Brazil World Cup song hits the wrong notesn Entertainment Desk

The o� cial World Cup song is de� nite-ly striking the wrong chord with many, in host country Brazil.

Since the recent release of Fifa’s “We Are One (Ole Ola),” hordes of fans in Brazil have been slamming the o� cial 2014 Cup theme song. Many expressed their frustration on Twitter under the tag (hash)Volta Waka Waka a plea for the return of the widely loved song that the Colombian artist Shakira performed for the 2010 tournament in South Africa.

Although Brazilian Claudia Leitte is also featured in the o� cial theme, critics say they do not understand why Cuban-American rapper Pitbull and Bronx-born Puerto Rican singer Jenni-fer Lopez were chosen for the song.

They also complain that the song is mostly in English and Spanish, leaving only a few seconds at the end for Leitte to sing in her native Portuguese.

“What I don’t like about the mu-

sic is that it’s a poor, dull, generic pop theme,” said Gaia Passarelli, a Brazilian music journalist and a former VJ for MTV Brazil. “It’s a shame considering Brazil’s rich musical tradition, which is admired all over the world.”

Shakira does have a song on Fifa’s o� cial World Cup album, the driving “Dare (La La La).” Featuring Barcelo-na players such as Argentina’s Lionel Messi and Brazil’s Neymar had been viewed nearly 27 million times on You-Tube in the three days since its release. But it’s not the designated o� cial song for the event.

Naming an o� cial Fifa song dates back to the 1966 Cup in England. Since then, fans have hummed to favorites like “Un’estate italiana” by Edoardo Bennato and Gianna Nannini in Italy 1990 and “La Copa de la Vida” by Ricky Martin in France 1998. While Shakira’s catchy “Waka Waka (This Time for Afri-ca)” was popular, Placido Domingo’s “El Mundial” for Spain 1982 was less so. l

n Afrose Jahan Chaity

Redoan Rony’s second � lm “Morichika” has been in the news again as the rumour of Nusrat Faria being replaced by Bidya Sinha Saha Mim is in the air.

Rony, whose directorial debut “Chorabali” won the Na-tional Film Awards in � ve categories, con� rmed the name of the � lm to the news media.

He also announced Tahsan and Nusrat Faria to be the leading actors of his upcoming � ick. Several national newspapers including Dhaka Tribune published the news after talking to the stars.

But, a leading national daily reported yesterday that Bidya Sinha Saha Mim, a sizzling star of the

� lmdom nowadays, will be seen opposite to Tahsan in “Morichika.”

When Mim was approached to learn about the issue, she said: “I think Redoan

Rony can clarify this issue once and for all. I do not have the liberty to comment

on the issue at this moment.” Dhaka Tribune tried contacting the di-

rector on his mobile several times, he did not answer.

On the other hand, Nusrat Faria also expressed her shock when she was ques-

tioned about the switch. She said: “I signed for the role which is of a photographer who

is a fun-loving girl.I have received some surprising phone

calls asking whether Mim is replacing me. I seriously don’t have any idea. Redoan Rony

did not tell me anything about including Mim.However, Tahsan did clarify a few things.

He said: “I guess there are two leading female characters in the � lm. But, Rony is the best person to answer your inquiries.” l

13DHAKA TRIBUNEWednesday, May 28, 2014

Sport 1414 15 Wozniacki beaten on court after losing in love

Did you know?Brazil are the only

country to have appeared in every

World Cup � nals, 19 � nals tournaments from 1930 to 2010. And they

have automatically quali� ed for the 2014 tournament as hosts

Makelele signs for Bastia amid tax inquiry

Lukaku hattrick leads Belgian romp in warm-up

(L-R) Sabbir Rahman, Mithun Ali and Soumya Sarkar quench their thirst with coconut after a heavy � tness session during the Bangladesh national team’s camp at Sher-e-Bangla National Stadium yesterday MUMIT M

BANGLADESH A TOUR OF THE WEST INDIES

Robiul, Taijul keep Sagicor at bay

The Bangladesh A bowlers did an im-pressive job on the opening day, Mon-day, of their � rst four-day match in the West Indies as they restricted hosts Sagi-cor High Performance Centre from run-ning away with a big � rst innings total.

Fast bowler Robiul Islam and left-arm spinner Taijul Islam – claiming three wickets each – in particular led the visitors’ bowling unit as Bangla-desh A crawled back in the game to re-strict Sagicor to 292 despite a brilliant 140 from Jermaine Blackwood and two big partnerships upfront.

Captain of the A side Nasir Hossain invited the hosts to bat � rst and the decision took just four balls to prove right. Robiul’s outswinger was too

much to handle for Sagicor skipper Kraigg Brathwaite who returned with-out troubling the scorers. However, Na-sir and his troops had to wait 22 overs for the next celebration as Blackwood joined Assad Fudadin to reconstruct the early damage with a 112-run part-nership.

The 22-year old Blackwood was the dominant force in the partnership and also scored at a good strike-rate. When Fudadin fell victim of a run out for 22, Blackwood and Leon Johnson added 85 runs to set a platform for a big total.

Nasir shu� ed his bowlers and even-tually part-time o� -spinner Naeem Islam brought the breakthrough by claiming the dangerous Blackwood who hammered 23 fours and a six o� just 160 balls.

Taijul broke the brief 28-run fourth wicket partnership between Jonathan Carter and Johnson which still left the home side on 225-4. Taijul � rst re-moved Carter for 12 before he trapped the set batsman Johnson leg-before for a well-made 56.

The dismissals enabled the sec-ond-string Bangladesh side to regroup and the bowlers carried the momen-tum to strike down the last � ve wickets for 52 runs. Robiul claimed the tail in consecutive deliveries and the right-arm quickie will be on a hat-trick when he bowls his � rst ball in the second in-nings.

Bangladesh A openers Imrul Kayes and Shamsur Rahman added � ve to their total in the only over they faced before the day’s play ended. l

Third straight win for MSC

Mohammedan Sporting Club extended their � ne run in the Nitol Tata Ban-gladesh Premier Football League to three consecu-tive victories beating Feni Soccer Club 3-2 at the Bang-

abandhu National Stadium yesterday. The visitors went ahead in the 21st

minute courtesy of a Mathew Mendy strike which was canceled out by Ni-gerian defender Ubom Henry in the same half to give balance to the score-line. However, Tapu Barman and Zahid Hasan Emily netted one apiece in the second half to salvage all three points for the Black and Whites. The victory helped Mohammedan to reduce the gap to two points with arch rival Aba-hani with a game in hand. The Inde-pendence Cup champions, however, remain at third place with 32 points from 17 matches while Feni � nd them-selves at second place from bottom in the points table.

Feni’s Gambian coach Omar K Sisse had to play a starting eleven without his key mid� elder Landing Darboe for the � rst time since the start of the second phase of the league. Darboe missed the match due to suspension

and his coach later admitted missing his services dearly in the mid� eld.

Mathew Mendy broke the deadlock in the 21st minute with a brilliant solo e� ort. The Gambian mid� elder drib-bled past two defenders as he drifted into the penalty area before skipping past another defender to slot home past Mohammedan keeper Titumir Titu. Titu rescued Mohammedan from conceding another in the 32nd minute

when their defense collapsed which let Kabba Jobe run free towards the goal. Titu sprinted out of the box to clear the ball away before Kabba could � nd full control of the ball.

Mohammedan equalized in the 37th minute through Nigerian defender Ubom Henry to give parity to the score-line as he headed home from a high corner by his compatriot Damian Chi-gozie. Wahed Ahmed almost produced an assist which could have put Black and Whites ahead a minute later. The national striker used his pace to enter

into the penalty area and showed great skill to skip past a defender before cut-ting the ball into the middle which was blocked by a Feni defender before it could � nd Emily who was ready to pull the trigger. But the Black and Whites didn’t have to wait long as Tapu Bar-man scored a wonder goal � ve minutes into the second half to put his side in front for the � rst time in the match. The right-back apparently seemed to have attempted a curled cross from the right � ank which, however, bam-boozled everyone as it � ew inches over Feni keeper Nehal to � nd the back of the net.

Zahid Hasan Emily extended Mo-hammedan’s lead to two goals in the 73rd minute as the unmarked forward calmly provided the � nishing touch to a low cross of Wahed Ahmed inside the box to make it 3-1. It was Emily’s eighth goal in the league this season. Feni Soccer’s substitute mid� elder Azmal Hossain Bidduit reduced the margin of defeat from penalty in the 90th minute after Tapu had brought down Sayed Rashid Torza inside the box which left the referee with no option but to award a spot-kick.

Table toppers Sheikh Jamal will face reigning champions Sheikh Russel in a crucial tie today at 5.30pm. l

Mashrafe backs Imran to shine

Veteran Bangladesh paceman Mashrafe Mortaza praised the appointment of assistant coach Sarwar Imran at the Sher-e-Bangla National Stadium yester-day, informing the media that it will be easier for the cricketers to communicate freely with the former national coach ahead of the home series against India.

“We have all worked with him (Sar-war Imran) before and the biggest ad-vantage will be the level of communi-cation with Imran sir. We can discuss freely with him and I think it’s a very good decision,” said Mashrafe.

“It’s important to discuss our weak points with him and language will play an important role,” he said.

The 30-year old fast bowler noti� ed that he has been working with Imran since the tour of Zimbabwe in 2001 before going on to acknowledge the fast-bowling mentor as one of the most experienced coaches in Bangladesh. Mashrafe heaped praise on Imran, thanking the assistant coach for mak-ing him learn the trade of the in-swing-ing delivery.

“I started my career working with him. Especially, I learned the art of in-swing from Imran sir. And I am eagerly waiting to discuss about my bowling,” said Mashrafe.

“I think it’s a great opportunity for the other young fast bowlers to discuss and work with Imran sir as he has a lot of experience,” he added.

Mashrafe also reserved special men-tion for new bowling coach of the Tigers, ex-Zimbabwe captain Heath Streak, appreciating the former fast bowler’s

career. Although Mashrafe said he has very little idea about Streak’s coaching skills, he expressed his hope that the newly recruited bowling coach will have a good time in Bangladesh.

Meanwhile, the ‘Narail Express’, who has often experienced turbulent times throughout his career owing to injuries and several operations, informed that he was targeting a new start after re-turning to � tness from his latest injury.

“You can say it’s a new start for me as a player constantly battles with him-self during the period of injury. It’s nat-ural for a player to get upset mentally after an injury and the same has hap-pened with me,” said Mashrafe.

“I think it’s very important to bounce back physically after su� er-ing an injury but the most important thing is to make a comeback mentally as I think cricket is all about mental strength,” he added.

Ahead of the home series against India where the hosts will be taking part in three one-day internationals, Mashrafe said Bangladesh will need to play as a team as they have a dearth of match-winners in their side.

“Every team has match-winners in their side except Bangladesh. I think only Shakib (Al Hasan) will not be able to turn the fortunes around of a game single-handedly,” said Mashrafe.

“You can remember when Shakib was man-of-the-match in the Asia Cup [against India in 2012], we had three other half-centuries in that game. So we have to play as a team which we have been unable to do in the last six months. That is why the results went against us,” he concluded. l

Lone 3-dayer ends in draw

The rain-a� ected three-day game be-tween Bangladesh Under-19 and Madhya Pradesh Cricket Association (MPCA) U-19 concluded in a draw at BKSP yesterday.

Replying to Bangladesh U-19’s � rst innings total of 221 all out, MPCA re-sumed their � rst innings on their over-night score of 167 for the loss of three wickets. However, following two and a

half hours of play in the third and � nal day, rain interrupted proceedings with MPCA batting on 244 for eight wickets.

Without much delay, the game continued as MPCA lost their last two wickets for 30 runs to be all out for 274 in 112.1 overs.

Opening batsman Arpit Gaud’s 64 was the highest score for the visitors while Mehedi Hasan and Saleh Ahmed picked up three wickets each for the home side.

Later, the hosts posted 100 runs in their second innings from 37 overs losing four wickets before the umpires removed the bails to call it a day as the game ended in a draw.

Munim Shahriar scored 27 runs with the help of � ve boundaries while Zakir Hasan added 19 to the tally.

The � rst four-day game of the series will begin tomorrow at Khan Shaheb Osman Ali Stadium in Fatullah.l

Women’s cricket league begins today

Mohammedan Sporting Club will take on Indira Road KC in the opening game of the Metropolitan Women’s Cricket League 2014 at the Dhanmondi Cricket Stadium today. Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) president Nazmul Hassan will inaugurate the 14-team competition.

Mohammedan, Dhaka Cricketers, Khelaghar SK, Indira Road, Ansar and VDP, Kalabagan KC and Rayer Bazar Athletic are pitted in Group A of the league while Abahani Ltd, Dipali Jubo Sangha, BKSP, Jahurul Islam City Crick-et Club, Urban Sports, Gulshan Youth Club and Orient Sporting Club will compete in Group B. l

Siddik fails to qualify for US Open

Siddikur Rahman failed to qualify for next month’s US Open Championship as the Bangladesh golfer � nished joint 68th among 105 participants in the En-gland section at the Walton Heath Golf Club yesterday.

The two-time Asian Tour winner carded two-over (74) and four-over (76) in his two rounds to total six-over (150) over the 36-hole quali� ers conducted by the USGA.

Meanwhile, China’s Liang Wen-chong and Shiv Kapur of India are set to make their US Open debuts next month after coming through sectional qualifying.

Kiyoshi Miyazato, Lee Kyoung-Hoon and Toru Taniguchi were tied for second and Azuma Yano and David Oh, who were joint � fth, also earned tickets to the June 9-15 US Open at Pinehurst Resort.

Separately Kapur, who also played the British Open in 2006 and 2013, to-talled 131 to place � fth at Walton Heath Golf Club and qualify for his third ma-jor tournament.

Further sectional quali� ers will be held in the United States on June 2.

Siddikur is expected to return home brie� y before � ying o� for the Queen’s Cup in Bangkok which starts on June 5.l

Bangladesh U-19 (1st innings)221 allout in 59.2 oversMPCA U-19 (1st innings)274 allout in 112.1 oversBangladesh U-19 (2nd innings)100/4 in 37 overs(Munim 27, Zakir 19, Shreyansh 2/25)

Match Drawn

BRIEF SCORE

Tapu Barman scored a wonder goal � ve minutes into the second half to put his side in front for the � rst time in the match

Mohammedan captain Zahid Hasan Emily (R) congratulates Tapu Barman after the latter scored a superb goal against Feni Soccer Club during their Bangladesh Premier Football League match at the Bangabandhu National Stadium yesterday MUMIT M

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Brazil team bus attackedThe bus carrying Brazil’s World Cup squad to their � rst day of training on Monday was kicked and punched by demonstrators angry at what they con-sider exorbitant spending on football and not enough on social programmes. A small group of striking teachers attacked the bus as it left Rio de Janeiro for the mountain town of Teresopolis, where the squad will be based during the tournament. The teachers covered the bus with stickers as Barcelona players Neymar and Dani Alves looked on from inside. –Reuters

Injured Falcao trains in Argentina Star Colombian striker Radamel Falcao, boosted hopes that he will be � t for the World Cup, as he trained with the national squad in Argentina on Tuesday. The 28-year-old Monaco player, who has scored 20 goals in 51 int’l appearances, su� ered serious knee ligament damage in a French Cup tie on Jan 22 and has not played since. Despite his 4-month absence, he was

named in Colombia’s provisional 30-man squad with June 2 set as the deadline day for the � nal list of 23 players to be decided. –AFP

Eng mid� elder Wilshere ‘� t for WC’Arsenal mid� elder Jack Wilshere, who missed the last two months of the season after fracturing his foot, says he will be � t to play for England at the World Cup. The 22-year-old, who has won 15 caps, told Sky Sports that he had been training for the last six weeks and was over the injury he sustained playing for Arsenal against Stoke City on March 1. Asked if he was close to

peak � tness, he replied: “I am. I have been training for a long time. I am yet to play a game, but I have been training for six weeks.” –Reuters

United States 1 England 0 (1950)England arrived at what their � rst World Cup � nals appearance in, hailed as potential winners having lost just four times in 30 matches. Faced with a team of part-timers, England selectors rested star player Stanley Matthews. It proved to be a fatal error as with substitutes not yet permitted Matthews sat helplessly on the sidelines as a goal by Haiti-born Joe Gaetjens, who earned his keep as a dishwasher in a restaurant, earned the Americans a 1-0 win. Neither side made it through to the next round. The match was immortalised in a book and in a � lm called the ‘Miracle Game’. –AFP

GREAT WORLD CUP SHOCKS Episode 1

Brazilian fans carried Joe Gaetjens o� the � eld after the US shocked England in the 1950 World Cup

This photo is often said to depict Joe Gaetjens’ goal against England and goalie Bert Williams. However, a closer look reveals the ball appears to be on the outside of the net and Gaetjens isn’t diving on the play, as teammates remember

Deco cleared of doping

Former Chelsea, Barcelona and Por-to mid� elder Deco was on Tuesday cleared of doping and had a one year ban lifted by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).

Deco’s decorated career ended un-der a cloud last September when he was found guilty of taking a banned di-uretic by a laboratory in Rio de Janeiro.

But CAS, upholding the player’s ap-peal, ruled that Deco was completely innocent of the charge, claiming there were major doubts as to the validity of the Brazilian control.

A fresh test was ordered by world football’s governing body FIFA by the o� cial anti-doping laboratory in Lau-sanne which detected nothing untow-ard with the sample. l

Torres gets a foothold in Spain World Cup squad

Chelsea striker Fernando Torres con-siders it a “spectacular prize” just to get back into Spain’s squad for a World Cup friendly, but has vowed to � ght to secure a ticket on the plane to Brazil.

The 30-year-old, who last played for Spain almost a year ago at the Confed-erations Cup in Brazil, was named by coach Vicente del Bosque in the nation-al squad for a warmup game against Bolivia on Friday.

The announcement gave a sliver of hope to the 50 million pound ($84 mil-lion) striker, who su� ered an alarming slump after becoming one of the world’s most feared goalscorers at his peak.

“I am delighted to be here after al-most a year since the Confederations Cup. Delighted. Keen to get started,” Torres told reporters at the squad’s Ma-drid training ground on Monday.

Del Bosque has put o� naming the full World Cup squad until at least May 31 to check on the � tness of key players at Real and Atletico Madrid after their Champions League � nal clash.

Team doctors are particularly wor-

ried about Atletico’s Brazilian-born striker Diego Costa, who left the pitch after just nine minutes because of a hamstring problem.

Team doctors say Costa will have to rest for at least 2 weeks, taking him peril-ously close to the opening Group B match against the Netherlands on June 13.

But Torres knows he has only made the list for Friday’s Bolivia friendly, so far.

“I am going to take advantage of this week and enjoy it,” he said. “For Brazil, being here is a big step but not de� nitive.”

Bosque brought in Torres for the friendly while omitting rivals Alvaro Negredo and Fernando Llorente.

Torres, known as “El Nino” - The Kid - said the past year had been “strange” with lots of changes at Chelsea.

“It’s been a disappointing year be-cause we did not win anything after many years in a row of achieving titles. On a personal level, too,” Torres said.

“So it has been a spectacular prize to be able to be here and forget the clubs and focus on the World Cup. A World Cup that is around the corner. And to � ght to be on the de� nitive list and be able to go to Brazil.” l

Italy unhappy over food problems

Italy are unhappy to hear that food un-� t for consumption has been found and con� scated from their World Cup hotel in Brazil but say it will not be a problem for them.

Team doctor Enrico Castellecci told reporters that Italy were planning to take most of their food in any case and everything served to the players would

be checked by their own sta� .“Obviously, we are not pleased

about this news, we’re not happy that it’s happened exactly at the place we are going to,” he said at Italy’s training camp outside Florence.

The Gazzetta dello Sport newspaper said Italy would travel to Brazil with 20 tonnes of goods, including food and sporting equipment.

Brazilian health and safety o� cials

raided the England and Italy team ho-tels for the World Cup on Monday and con� scated � sh, butter, ham and other food past their sell-by dates.

O� cials discovered 25kg of seafood and margarine past the sell by date at Italy’s hotel in Mangaratiba, around 100 kilometres from Rio de Janeiro, and another 24kg of meat, sauces, cheese and sugar that had no visible sell-by date. l

Makelele signs for Bastia amid tax inquiry

Former Chelsea and Real Madrid star Claude Makelele on Tuesday signed a two-year deal to coach Ligue 1 side Bas-tia as a tax fraud investigation against him gathered pace.

Swiss authorities have agreed to a French request to help with an inquiry into Makelele’s assets.

Makelele, 41, will take up his � rst full managerial post with the Corsican side, having been assistant coach at Paris Saint Germain since December 2011 with Carlo Ancelotti and then Laurent Blanc.

“It’s an exciting challenge, a di� -cult one but I feel ready - I’ll be bring-ing all my experience and hunger for football,” said Makelele, who played 71 times for France.

Makelele succeeds Frederic Hantz, who in a four- year spell gained Bastia promotion to Ligue 1 and a 10th place � nish last term.

The Swiss government’s o� cial bul-letin released Tuesday announced an accord to help investigate Makelele’s as-sets held in the UBS bank in Switzerland.

When the request was made in April, Swiss media said it could be linked to Makelele’s investment in the Swiss side Servette FC. Former Servette president Marc Roger, who organised the sale of a stake to Makelele in 2004, has said he owned between � ve and 10 percent of the club’s shares. l

Milan to sack Seedorf, hire Inzaghi as coach

AC Milan are set to � re coach Clarence Seedorf and replace him with youth team coach Filippo Inzaghi, Italian me-dia said on Tuesday.

Seedorf is only four months into a two-and-a-half year contract and has overseen a considerable improve-ment in results, but rumours about the Dutchman’s future have been rife for several weeks.

Club president Silvio Berlusconi met chief executive Adriano Galliani to dis-cuss the move at the former’s villa in Arcore, around 20 kilometres outside Milan, late on Monday night, media re-ported.

Italy’s three sports papers, Gazzetta

dello Sport, Corriere dello Sport and Tuttosport, all carried similar reports, which were unsourced.

Seedorf, 38, who spent 10 years of his playing career at Milan, took over at the end of January to replace Massimiliano Allegri, who was � red after two-and-a-half years in charge.

Former Italian prime minister Ber-lusconi had been chasing Seedorf for several months before � nally appoint-ing him, yet the Dutchman quickly fell out of favour.

Although Seedorf had no previous coaching experience, results improved markedly under him with 11 wins in 19 league games, compared to � ve in the previous 19 under Allegri. l

Lukaku hattrick leads Belgian rompRussia win, Japan toil to beat Cyprus in warm-ups

Romelu Lukaku scored a hat-trick as World Cup dark horses Belgium eased to a 5-1 win over minnows Luxembourg in the � rst of three pre-� nals friendlies they will play before travelling to Brazil.

Meanwhile, Defender Atsuto Uchi-da spared Japan’s blushes with a 43rd-minute winner against Cyprus in their � nal home World Cup warm-up Tuesday while Russia on Monday start-ed their World Cup countdown with a 1-0 win over Slovakia while Australia were held to a 1-1 draw by South Africa.

Lukaku, who had an excellent sea-son on loan with Everton from Chelsea scoring 15 goals in the Premier League, was joined on the scoresheet by Tot-tenham Hotspur’s Nacer Chadli and VfL Wolfsburg’s former Chelsea attack-ing mid� elder Kevin de Bruyne.

The game was also notable for the � rst appearance in the Belgian colours by Adnan Januzaj, the Manchester United teenager who had been coveted by several other countries for whom he was eligible to play before he � nally opted for the ‘Red Devils’ in late April.

Januzaj did not disappoint after he replaced playmaker Eden Hazard displaying some nice deft touches, though, he will face far sterner exam-inations come the � nals in Brazil.

Belgian coach Marc Wilmots despite the weak opposition selected a � rst

choice side, save goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois, who was rested following his side Atletico Madrid’s 4-1 Champions League � nal defeat by city rivals Real on Saturday.

Lukaku � red the Belgians into a third minute lead but a lapse of con-centration allowed Aurelien Joachim to level 10 minutes later.

Lukaku, though, restored the one goal advantage in the 23rd minute and completed his hat-trick with a brilliant individual goal in the 53rd.

Lukaku gave way on the hour mark as Wilmots blooded another young debutant in Divock Origi, who plays in

the French championship for Lille the club where Hazard made his name be-fore his move to Chelsea.

Chadli added a fourth after being set up by De Bruyne, and the provider turned goalscorer in the dying seconds as he converted a penalty.

Belgium, who will also play Sweden away on June 1 and then Tunisia in Brus-sels on June 7, will be appearing in their � rst World Cup � nals since 2002 where they have been drawn in Group H.

They begin their World Cup cam-paign proper against Algeria on June 17 before going on to play Russia (June 22) and South Korea (June 26). l

Fifa President Sepp Blatter (C) smiles as he visits a football academy named after him, near the West Bank city of Ramallah yesterday REUTERS

Belgium’s Romelu Lukaku (R) celebrates next to Kevin De Bruyne after scoring against Luxembourg during their international friendly match in Genk on Monday REUTERS

SportDHAKA TRIBUNE14

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Zia, Saiful on equal points Grandmaster Ziaur Rahman and Saiful Islam Chowdhury gathered 2.5 points each after 5th round in the Elite Group of the 6th KIIT International Chess Fes-tival at Bhubaneswar, India yesterday. Among the other Bangladeshi players Mohammad Jamal Uddin, Mohammad Sirajul Kabir and Sarwar Hossain Ullash earned 2 points each, Kazi Mahbub Afzal posted 1.5 points, FM Mohammad Fahad Rahman, Mohammad Abul Kashem and Monir Hossain Monir bagged 1 point each. Zia lost to Ravi Teja of India in the 5th round while Sheraj and Jamal beat Kashem and Monir respectively and Saiful got a walk-over. Ullash lost to GM Semcesen Denial of Sweden, Fahad lost to Michelle Catherina of India and Afzal lost to Vaishali of India in the same round. Earlier in the 4th round, Zia drew with India’s Saravanan Krishnan, Ullash won against Manoj Kumar, Saiful lost to GM Petrosian Davit of Armenia and Fa-had lost to Indian Chakravarthy Reddy.

–RM

MPCA U-17 dominate day oneBangladesh Under-17 team began their 25-day long tour of India with their � rst three-day game against Madhaya Pradesh Cricket Association (MPCA) Under-17 at Holkar Stadium, Indore yesterday. After being put in to bat � rst, hosts MPCA rode on Rishabh Choubey’s 91 to end the � st day on 259 runs for the loss of just four wickets. Rishabh clobbered 12 boundaries in his 161-ball innings. Top order batsman Sanket Shri-vastava also added 51 o� 103 balls. A� f Hossain Dhrubo picked up two wickets for Bangladesh while Kamil Ahmed and Sha� ul Hayet bagged a wicket each.

–Tribune Desk

Bale out of Wales friendly Champions League hero Gareth Bale will miss Wales’s friendly international away to the Netherlands next week, the Football Association of Wales announced Tuesday. The former Tottenham Hotspur winger scored Real Madrid’s key second goal in extra-time against city rivals Atletico Madrid in Lisbon last weekend as the Spanish giants won the Champions League � nal 4-1 and lifted the European Cup for an unprecedented 10th time. However, injury has now seen him withdraw from the squad Wales manager Chris Coleman will take to Amsterdam.

–AFP

Moroccan champions book Club WC place Moghreb Tetouan quali� ed for the 2014 FIFA Club World Cup by winning the championship of host nation Morocco at the weekend. Other quali� ers for the tournament include Spanish giants Real Madrid, Mexicans Cruz Azul and New Zealand out� t Auckland City. The South American, Asian and African champions will complete the seven-club line-up for a competition won last year by Bayern Munich. A 2-1 home win over Renais-sance Berkane gave Tetouan 58 points in the 30-round league, three more than defending champions Raja Casablanca, who lost 1-0 at Olympique Sa� .

–AFP

Palestine into AFC Challenge � nalPalestine took a step towards quali� ca-tion for next year’s Asian Cup in Australia with a 2-0 win over Afghanistan in the semi-� nal of the AFC Challenge Cup in Male on Tuesday. Ashraf Al Fawaghra scored both goals, either side of half-time, as Palestine continued their unbeat-en run in the eight-nation tournament. Palestine will play the winners of Tuesday night’s second semi-� nal between the Philippines and hosts Maldives in the � nal on Friday. The champions will secure a place in the Asian Cup.

–AFP

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DAY’S WATCH

South Bangla Bank National Junior TT begins

Dhaka, Rangpur, Narail and Bangla-desh Army moved into the third round of the girls’ team event of the South Bangla Bank 2nd National Junior Table Tennis at the Shahid Tajuddin Wooden Floor Gymnasium yesterday.

In the boys’ team event, Bagerhat, Rangamati, Barguna, Manikganj, Rang-pur, Narail, Sylhet and Gaibandha won their respective � rst-round matches to progress into the second round.

State minister for youth and sports Biren Sikder inaugurated the meet as the chief guest. Bangladesh Table Tennis president Abdul Karim, general secretary Zobera Rahman Linu and South Bangla Bank managing director Md. Ra� kul Is-lam were also present on the occasion. l

Prime, Surjodoy post wins in premier handball

Prime Sporting Club and Surjodoy Krira Chakra registered victories in the Cute Premier Division Handball League at the handball stadium yesterday.

Prime Sporting, who led the � rst-half by 15-7 goals, outplayed Bangla Club 33-12 with Imran netting 10 goals followed by Ashik with nine goals. Mush� qur of Bangla Club scored three goals.

Later, Surjodoy Krira Chakra reigned over Old Ideals by 28-16 goals. The eventual winners led the opening half 16-9. Abdur Rab of Sur-jodoy was the highest scorer with nine goals while Sanjib contributed six goals in the rout. Bilal of Old Ideals also scored six goals. l

Romario criticises former team mate Ronaldo

Former World Cup winner Romario launched another attack on Brazil’s or-ganisation of the World Cup on Monday and accused former team mate Ronal-do of inconsistency.

The once deadly striker said com-ments by Ronaldo, who works on the tournament’s organising committee but professed himself embarrassed at Bra-zil’s shortcomings in an interview with Reuters last week, were opportunism.

“Everyone knows what I stand for,” the outspoken federal deputy was quoted as saying by UOL, a leading Bra-zilian news website. “I don’t change sides depending on how the game is going.”

However, Romario said the organi-sational problems, including stadium construction falling behind, blown budgets and the failure to deliver much-needed transportation projects, did not mean he would be cheering against the home side.

“We’ve already lost o� the pitch,” he said. “Now we have to hope and pray that we do well on it.”

The World Cup starts on June 12 and Brazil will be bidding to win a record sixth title and their � rst on home soil. l

Suede Bangladesh felicitated the intellectually challenged players who � nished 4th in the Dhaka Metropolis School Table Tennis Championship at its New Eskaton o� ce yesterday. Shamsur Rahman Sharif, the minister for lands was the cheif guest. AFM Iqbal bin Anwar Dawn, the additional director of Walton was alspo present and handed over the gift hampers to the players. It would be mentionable that the players competed with normal players COURTESY

A woman walks past a gra� ti referencing the 2014 World Cup and with Brazilian soccer player Neymar’s face covered with a mask, in Rio de Janeiro on Monday REUTERS

Glamorgan sign Sammy for T20

Glamorgan have signed West Indies all-rounder Darren Sammy to play in English county cricket’s Twenty20 Blast tournament, the club announced Tuesday.

Former West Indies captain Sammy is set to head straight to Welsh county

Glamorgan’s Cardi� base from the In-dian Premier League in time for their � rst home match of the Blast campaign against unbeaten Sussex on Friday.

He will stay with Glamorgan, who although a Welsh side play in all of En-gland’s senior county competitions, until the start of the Caribbean Premier League, another domestic T20 event. l

Li stunned at French Open

Former champion Li Na, the sec-ond-seeded Chinese superstar and Aus-tralian Open winner, was sensationally dumped out of the French Open in the � rst round Tuesday, beaten by a tearful Kristina Mladenovic.

Li, the 2011 champion, went down 7-5, 3-6, 6-1 to the 103rd-ranked blonde Frenchwoman -- the Roland Garros ju-nior champion in 2009 -- to su� er her � rst opening round defeat in Paris in eight visits.

The 2hr 06min loss on a windswept and chilly Suzanne Lenglen court saw Li undone by 37 unforced errors.

Mladenovic, who was Australian Open mixed doubles champion this year with Daniel Nestor, goes on to face Alison Riske of the United States.

It is a familiar scenario for Li who failed to get beyind the fourth round of the six Grand Slams which followed her 2011 Roland Garros breakthrough.

Mladenovic, who was 36 in the

world last August, was in tears after her victory, her third over a top 10 player.

Li’s shock defeat means that both Australian Open champions have been knocked out in the � rst round after Stan Wawrinka’s listless defeat on Monday.

Also making an early exit on Tues-

day was Bulgarian men’s 11th seed Grigor Dimitrov who lost 6-4, 7-5, 7-6 (7/4) to giant Croat Ivo Karlovic.

Karlovic � red 22 aces and wasn’t broken by Dimitrov who won the Bu-charest claycourt title this spring and was a semi-� nalist at the Rome Masters

having seen o� the Croat on the way.The 35-year-old Karlovic, whose

last win in Paris was seven years ago, has now equalled his best French Open performance and next faces either Dan-iel Brands of Germany or Austria’s An-dreas Haider-Maurer.

Romanian fourth seed Simona Halep reached the second round with a 6-0, 6-2 win over Russia’s Alisa Kleybanova and next plays Heather Watson of Britain.

Other early winners were Svetlana Kuznetsova, the Russian 27th seed and 2009 champion, who beat Georgia’s So� a Shapatava 6-3, 6-1 while 43-year-old Kimiko Date Krumm of Japan, a semi-� nalist in 1995, lost 6-3, 0-6, 6-2 to Russian Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, the 24th seed.

Spanish � fth seed David Ferrer, last year’s runner-up to Rafael Nadal, began his 12th Roland Garros by coasting past Igor Sijsling of the Netherlands, 6-4, 6-3, 6-1. Ferrer, 32, has reached the quarter-� nals or better at his last nine majors. l

Root desperate to avoid more England agony

Joe Root has said England’s much-vaunted attempt to rebuild their standing with their fans, let alone the rest of the cricket world, will come to nothing if they su� er yet more humilia-tion during the ongoing one-day series with Sri Lanka.

England, in classic early season En-glish conditions, were bowled out for just 99 as Sri Lanka cruised to a huge 157-run victory in the second ODI at north-east county Durham’s Chester-le-Street headquarters on Sunday to level the � ve-match series at 1-1 after the hosts won in a rain-a� ected opener at The Oval.

The series continues at Manches-ter’s Old Tra� ord on Wednesday and with crowds appearing to be down after England’s 5-0 Ashes series loss in Aus-tralia, Root -- bowled for a third-ball duck by Lasith Malinga at the weekend

- knows a repeat of the Durham deba-cle won’t go down well with the paying public.

“We don’t want fans turning up for games and seeing a performance like that,” said the Yorkshire batsman after Sunday’s drubbing. “It’s quite embar-rassing.”

“The one way to get people to come and watch you is to win games of crick-et and we have to make sure we can do that consistently, earn the right for people to want to come and watch us.”

But Root insisted England, who will hope to welcome back captain and opener Alastair Cook at Old Tra� ord after he missed Sunday’s match with a groin strain, had not lost faith in their collective ability to win the series.

“We played some really good cricket at The Oval, which was not even a week ago now,” said Root .

“If we do play at the top of our game we’re going to beat sides like Sri Lanka.” l

Wozniacki beaten on court after losing in love

Heartbroken Caroline Wozniacki su� ered a morale-sapping defeat at the French Open on Tuesday in her � rst appearance since the break-up of her romance with star golfer Rory McIlroy.The 23-year-old Dane’s three-year relationship with the Northern Irishman ended last week after McIlroy got cold feet over their future while sending out

wedding invitations.The break-up did not have an immediate impact on his form as he swept to victory at the European Tour’s PGA Champion-ship at Wentworth at the weekend.But it was a di� erent story for former world number one Wozniacki who slipped to a 7-6 (7/5), 4-6, 6-2 defeat to Belgium’s Yanina Wickmayer on a chilly Court Two.It was 13th-seeded Wozniacki’s earliest defeat in Paris since her debut in 2007.l

Younis wants World Cup call-up

Pakistan batsman Younis Khan said Tuesday he hopes to revive his one-day career in time for next year’s World Cup.

The 36-year old has been out of the one-day side since March last year fol-lowing a run of wretched form, with the last of his six hundreds coming against the West Indies in 2008. But Khan, who is one of Pakistan’s modern Test batting greats, insisted he wanted to end his limited-overs career on his own terms.

“My desire is to walk away on my own conditions, playing in every form of the game I am available to play, rath-er than being dropped,” he told report-ers at a team camp ahead of the team’s tour of Sri Lanka in August.

“I surely would like to grab the oppor-tunity to play the World Cup,” he added.

Next year’s edition is to be held in Australia and New Zealand, and Pa-kistan is due to get plenty of practice against the hosts in a UAE series from October to December. l

(L-R) German national football team general manager Oliver Bierho� , Mercedes Formula One driver Nico Rosberg of Germany and German golfer Martin Kaymer pose after a German national soccer team news conference in St Martin, northern Italy yesterday REUTERS

France’s Kristina Mladenovic celebrates after winning her French tennis Open � rst round match against China’s Li Na at Roland Garros in Paris yesterday AFP

SportDHAKA TRIBUNE 15

Transport strike in Dhaka, Rajshahi divisions haltedn Tribune Report

Transport owners and workers in Ra-jshahi division called o� their strike for 10 days yesterday evening hours after a similar strike had been suspended in eight Dhaka division districts until to-morrow.

The association of Dhaka divisional northern bus-truck owners and work-ers called o� their strike that started at 6am in Gazipur, Dhaka (north), My-mensingh, Netrakona, Kishoreganj, Jamalpur, Sherpur and Tangail to press home their seven-point demand.

The demands include removal of the Netrakona deputy commissioner, with-drawal of illegal vehicles from roads, ending police extortion on vehicles and execution of a deal with the govern-ment.

Communication Minister Obaidul Quader, State Minister for Home Asa-duzzaman Khan and top police o� cials sat in a meeting with the leaders of the association and assured the trans-port owners and workers that their de-mands would be met.

In view of the assurances, the strike had been put on hold until tomorrow, Mamtazuddin, president of Mymensin-gh District Motors Owners Association, told reporters yesterday.

On Sunday, transport owners and workers in Rajshahi division called a strike in all eight districts of the divi-sion, demanding ful� lment of their six-point demand, which is similar to the seven-point demand of the association in Dhaka.

Our correspondent in Rajshahi re-ported that the transport leaders and workers held a meeting around 7pm

yesterday about calling o� or suspend-ing the strike.

“We sat in a meeting upon a request from the central leaders,” Manzur Rah-man Peter, convenor of the Rajshahi association, told the Dhaka Tribune. “The meeting decided to suspend the strike for 10 days.”

Meanwhile, people in these districts su� ered terribly because of the strike. Businesses came to a halt at many plac-es as no freight-carrying trucks operat-ed for a long time.

Our Gazipur correspondent reports: Su� erings of long-route commuters mounted as long-distant buses did not operate through the district.

A passenger named Bokul Begum said she had waited for a bus for around an hour from 11am to go her Gazipur home but had not got any.

Gazipur Tra� c Sergeant Md Kamrul Islam said passengers were going to their distant destinations through the local bus services.

The picture of passengers’ su� erings was worse in Sirajganj than anywhere in the eight districts, with people get-ting stuck on both sides of the Bang-abandhu bridge, reports our corre-spondent in the district.

A large number of people were seen waiting for train at the Sa-danandapur Rail-ways Station.

The inter-city Silk City Express bound for Dhaka

from Rajshahi arrived at the station around 12 at noon although it was scheduled for around 10am.

Passengers were seen scrambling into the train, which had already been packed with passengers. Many passen-gers struggled for room on the engine of the train, failing to get into the train.

There were allegations of extortion by the police.

When the superintendent of police was informed about it, an extortionist was arrested.

A clash between bus and truck work-ers took place over realising extortion, leaving at least � ve people injured.

Our Bogra correspondent reports: Earlier in the day, transport leaders and workers vowed to continue their strike until their six-point demand, including their deal with the government, was ful� lled.

Vice President Abdul Mannan of Ra-jshahi Regional Committee of Bangla-desh Sarak Sramik Federation said they had sat in a meeting with the adminis-tration on Monday but there had been no results. l

16 Back PageDHAKA TRIBUNE Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Power to get 2.4% budget hikeExpenditure of Tk7,200 crore to be provisioned for subsidyn Aminur Rahman Rasel

The power division is getting Tk9,284 crore in the upcoming budget, which is Tk224 crore or 2.4% higher than the allocation for the outgoing � scal year, o� cials have said.

They said an expenditure of Tk7,200 crore will be provisioned for subsidy in the power sector,which is higher than the subsidy of about Tk5,500 crore in the outgoing � scal year’s budget.

Industry insiders said although the government had hiked the power tar-i� during the current � nancial year, its mounting dependency on expensive oil-� red power plants might be the rea-son behind higher allocationfor subsidy.

In FY 2009-10, the allocation for the sector was Tk2,102.2 crore and it was Tk5,981.88 crore in FY 2010-11. In FY2011-12, the allocation increased to Tk7,185.8 crore, which then went up to Tk7,889 crore in the next � scal.

Sources said in the primarily-� xed budget of FY2014-15, Tk3,294 crore will be kept for the Power Development Board; the Rural Electri� cation Board will get Tk98.90 crore; the West Zone Power Distribution CompanyTk204 crore; the Electricity Generation Com-

pany of Bangladesh Tk810 crore; De-sco and DPDC will get Tk50 crore and Tk147 crore, respectively.

Additionally, the government is allo-cating Tk521 crore for the development of power transmission under the Power Grid Company of Bangladesh.

The Dhaka Tribune has also learnt about allocations of Tk250 crore for the Coal Power Generation Company of Bangladesh; Tk104 crore for the North West Power Generation Company and Tk885 crore for the Ashuganj Power Station Company.

Buet professor and energy expert Ijaz Hossain stressed the installation of low-cost coal-based power plants in or-der to reduce the electricity tari� .

“It is unfortunate that we are paying a lot of money but have not yet gotten rid of load-shedding,” he said.

Summit Group Chairman Muham-mad Aziz Khan told the Dhaka Tribune: “I think that the power sector is the most important infrastructure of a country. The government should not roll out only � ve-year projects or plans... The gov-ernment’s ambition should span over 10-15 years. The present government has come up with the 2021 outlook for the sector. I think that should continue.” l

Tipoo blames law ministry for confusionn Udisa Islam

After almost one month of silence, Chief Prosecutor of the International Crimes Tribunal Golam Arif Tipoo ad-mitted yesterday that there had been a con� ict persisting within the team over his holding o� ce and blamed the Law Ministry for creating the confusion.

He said the con� ict was delaying the case against Jamaat-e-Islami even though a seven-member prosecution team was at the � nal stage of press-ing the formal charges. He, however, hoped that the case would continue once the ministry resolved the issue.

He made the comments while talk-ing to reporters at his residence.

Tipoo formed the team in March to deal with the Jamaat case with Tureen Afroz as its coordinator. In a resolution taken during a prosecution meeting on May 11, the team was asked to hand over the case documents to the acting chief prosecutor.

In response, Tureen wrote to Tipoo seeking directives on the matter and

the team stopped working on the case. Members of the team think that the re-sponsibility of the case might be given to some other prosecutors.The chief prosecutor came to the tribu-nal on Monday for the � rst time after he had joined the prosecution o� ce on April 30 after his treatment abroad.

The confusion was created because th Law Ministry, in a gazette noti� cation on April 13, said in Tipoo’s one month absence, senior prosecutor Syed Haider Ali would work as the “acting chief pros-ecutor.” The ministry, however, neither issued any further notice nor withdrew the gazette after Tipoo’s return.

The chief prosecutor said yesterday that there was no provision for such a po-sition in the International Crimes (Tribu-nals) Act 1973 and that he had never faced such a situation in the last four years.

Tipoo had earlier termed as illegal, the appointment of MK Rahman as the “chief coordinator” of the prosecution team – who was relieved from his du-ties as the additional attorney general on May 19. MK Rahman stepped down

from the position of chief coordinator the following day.

The chief prosecutor said yesterday: “Those who ordered the handover of all the materials related to the Jamaat case are not ready to try the party for some reason. But there is no scope to become hopeless as we are committed to do it.”

He con� rmed that none of the high-er authorities had asked them to stop the proceedings against Jamaat. “If there is any possibility of a U-turn from the government side, then someone would have told us before the investi-gation agency submitted its report,” he explained.

He said: “The ministry will have to solve the problem as they have created it by going beyond the law. We are waiting for the end of the con� icting situation and seeking immediate action as we know the government is committed to the trial.”

Hopeful about the Jamaat trial, Tipoo said: “The people of Bangladesh want to try Jamaat and there is no reason to hold the process back. No doubt, the proceedings will be in progress again.” l

Lonely, rare Painted Stork to get a homen Tarek Mahmud, Chittagong

A young Painted Stork – locally known as “Rongeela Bok”– was found alone on a hill in Chittagong City on Thursday. It was later handed over to the Wildlife Management and Nature Conservation Department on Monday for release in the Bangabandhu Safari Park in Gazipur.

Currently, a few can be seen in the coastal areas.

The three-feet tall bird is the biggest ever Painted Stork found in the Chittagong region, said Bangladesh Forest Research Institute (BFRI) Director Dr Md Mokhlesur Rahman.

Sayedul Alam Sohel from Paschim Pahar Residential Area of the BFRI found the bird lying on a hill slope there and informed the authorities.

During the rescue drive, the bird, which still cannot � y, was found to be sick. Later the BFRI authorities gave it treatment and food, said BFRI Field Investigator Mainuddin.

He said the stork’s nest was found in a bamboo-clump on the BFRI campus where it had grown up.

On Monday night, BFRI Director Mokhlesur handed the stork over to Divisional Forest O� cer Abdul Khaleque of the Wildlife Management and Nature Conservation Department in Chittagong. It will be released in Gazipur’s Bangabandhu Safari Park.

According to 2012 “Birdlife Internation-al” of the IUCN, the Painted Stork, named for their distinctive pink tertial feathers, is a large wading bird of the stork family. It is found in the wetlands of the plains of trop-ical Asia, south of the Himalayas in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and extending into Southeast Asia.

As per the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species published in 2012, the Painted Storks are “former residents” of Bangladesh

and now a straggler to the coastal regions.However, Ronald R Halder, in his book

“Birds of Bangladesh” published in 2010, termed the Painted Storks migratory birds.

The Painted Stork generally has a heavy yellow beak with a down-curved tip. The head of the adult is bare and orange or red-dish in colour. The long tertials are tipped with bright pink.

The body of the adults is whitish while the primaries and the secondaries are black with a greenish gloss. Their legs are yellowish to red. The short tail is black with a green gloss.

The common size of a standing Painted Stork is about 93 to 102 centimetres (37 to 40 inches) tall, 150 to 160 cm (59 to

63 inches) in wingspan and they weigh about 2 to 3.5kg.

Males and females appear alike but the males of a pair are usually larger than the females.

The Painted Storks eat small � sh, frogs and occasionally snakes in groups in shallow wetlands. They forage mainly in the day but may forage later, even at night, under exceptional conditions.

Their breeding season begins in the winter months, shortly after the mon-soons. They breed in their platform nests, materials of which are carried by the bird. Those nests are typically placed in a tree on an island or in an otherwise undisturbed area. l

Retractable spikes installed only � ve days back on the city’s Hare Road to prevent vehicles from going the wrong lane goes out of order, causing further annoyance to vehicle owners and drivers RAJIB DHAR

Interpol issues red warrant against Nurn Tribune Report

Interpol has issued the red warrant against Nur H o s s a i n , the prime accused in Narayanganj seven-mur-der case.

The France-based international organ-isation of police yesterday posted Nur Hossain’s pro� le on its Red Warrant page on wanted people.

According to the Interpol website, the red warrant was issued against Nur for his alleged involvement with six crimes, including murder, hiding evidence of the crime, kidnapping/ab-ducting persons with intent to wrong-ful con� nement, wrongful restraint, impersonating a public servant and

group involvement in crime.On May 22, Bangladesh police

sought the help of Interpol for the cap-ture of Nur Hossain.

A letter had been sent to the Interpol authority in this regard, Narayanganj Superintendent of Police Khandaker Mahid Uddin told the Dhaka Tribune.

On May 12, Rapid Action Battalion Additional Director General (opera-tions) Col Ziaul Ahsan said they had speci� c information that Nur Hossain had � ed the country through the Bena-pole border on the night of May 2 and he had been in Kolkata.

However, police o� cials were still uncertain about Nur’s whereabouts.

Narayanganj ward councillor Nazrul Islam, lawyer Chandan Sarkar and � ve others were abducted on April 27 by some criminals who were allegedly assisted by three top o� cials of RAB 11. Their bodies were later found in the Shitalakkhya Riv-er on April 30 and May 1. l

‘RAB to be on duty during Ramadan’n Mohosinul Karim

State Minister for Home Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal yesterday said the Rapid Action Battalion would be deployed to maintain law and order during the month of holy Ramadan and Eid shopping.

The RAB authority earlier an-nounced that the elite force would not patrol city streets and carry out duties at check posts anymore.

Meanwhile, Inspector General of Police Hasan Mahmood Khandakar said, “The announcement of the RAB authority was a strategic stance. RAB personnel will perform duties during Ramadan, if necessary.”

The minister and the police boss made the disclosure after a meeting held in the ministry.

“Special security measures will be taken at markets, bus stops and railway stations during Ramadan. Closed-cir-cuit television cameras will be installed in all shopping malls in the capital in Ramadan,” said Asaduzzaman. l

Editor: Zafar Sobhan, Published and Printed by Kazi Anis Ahmed on behalf of 2A Media Limited at Dainik Shakaler Khabar Publications Limited, 153/7, Tejgaon Industrial Area, Dhaka-1208. Editorial, News & Commercial O� ce: FR Tower, 8/C Panthapath, Shukrabad, Dhaka 1207. Phone: 9132093-94, Advertising: 9132155, Circulation: 9132282, Fax: News-9132192, e-mail: news@dhakatribune.com, info@dhakatribune.com, Website: www.dhakatribune.com

www.dhakatribune.com/business WEDNESDAY, MAY 28, 2014

B3 IMF’s Lagarde says bank reforms slowed by � erce industry pushback

B4 As India’s new govern-ment gets to work, a promise to investors

FY15 budget allocation to see lowest growth in 5 years n Asif Showkat Kallol

The budgetary allocation for the next � s-cal year is going to be increased by 12.5% from the original allocation of the outgo-ing � scal year.

It would be the poorest growth in pub-lic spending in last � ve � scal years.

The total outlay is being increased from Tk2,22,491 crore in 2013-14 to Tk2,50,302 crore in 2014-15 – which is little over what Finance Minister AMA Muhith has long been saying, “it would not cross Tk2,50,000.”

The growth of budgetary allocation was over 16% in 2013-14, over 17.21% in 2012-13, about 24% in 2011-12 and over 16% in 2010-11.

Despite the lowest growth, economists were critical of the huge allocation as the government has to cut the size due to un-der utilisation as well as weaknesses in resource mobilisation. They also appre-hended that the huge revenue target is unlikely to be achieved – based on which the huge budget is going to be allocated.

Eminent economist Dr Mirza Azizul

Islam would, however, term it a big budget that would create huge pressure on the credit market, crowding out the private sector loans and putting pressure on the investment situation in the next � scal year.

The price situation would also be af-fected due to the de� cit to be created out of the huge budget, he told the Dhaka Tri-bune yesterday.

The � nance minister would � nalise the budget size after holding discussion with the Prime Minister after her returning home from Japan, said an o� cial.

According to � nance division sourc-es, the bank borrowing target would be Tk31,509 crore in the next � scal year. This is due to more ADP outlay than what was estimated earlier.

The total budget de� cit is estimated to be of Tk67,500 crore, which is 5.08% of GDP.

“We had no plan to cross the budget outlay of Tk 2,50,000 crore, but it is now crossing the threshold due to increased ADP,” said a senior o� cial of the � nance division. “We are under pressure to raise the allocation.” l

Retailers’ compensation inadequate Says Dutch minister on payment to Rana Plaza victims. Tofail rules out possibility of labour unrest amid factory closuresn Tribune Report

Visiting Dutch minister said the compensation provided by the Western retailers so far to the Rana Plaza victims is not su� cient and called on the companies to give more.

She assured of talks with the European Union colleagues to col-lectively convince the companies in this regard, expecting positive outcome “in the coming weeks or months.”

“We will interact with stakehold-ers and meet our EU colleagues to see what we can do jointly to reach out to the companies and encour-age them (for compensation). You will see some actions in the com-ing weeks or months,” said Lilianne Ploumen, Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Coopera-tion of the Netherlands.

“We feel that victims needed compensation,” she added while ad-dressing a joint press conference of Bangladesh and the Netherlands at a hotel in Dhaka yesterday.

The press conference was preceded by a consultative meeting between the two countries, which was attended by representatives from International Labour Organisation (ILO), the EU and Australian government. Bangladesh’s Commerce Minis-

ter Tofail Ahmed also spoke at the presser.

He ruled out any possibility of la-bour unrest for factory closures as the jobless workers are being employed by other factories – new and old.

On Monday, State Minister for Labour and Employment Mujibul Haque Chunnu expressed anger at the closures of � awed factories without giving time for relocation

or remediation, which made “thou-sands of workers jobless.”

He said if such closures contin-ued making workers unemployed, the country’s RMG sector might face another labour unrest ahead of Ramadan.

Dutch envoy to Bangladesh Ger-

ben de Jong and Bangladesh’s Se-nior Commerce Secretary Mahbub Ahmed were also present at the press conference.

The consultative meeting dis-cussed the initiatives taken to improve safety in Bangladesh’s ready-made garment sector and the progress made with the initiatives.

Dutch minister said Bangladesh has done a lot of things to improve

the RMG sector in last one year after Rana Plaza collapse.

She said almost one third of to-tal factories have been inspected and out of 1,500 factories inspect-ed, only 19 were found with serious � aws, which faced complete or par-tially closure.

“Besides, publicly accessi-ble database of workers has been launched, Labour Act has been amended, 130 trade unions have been registered and minimum wag-es increased by 77%.”

“But the challenges remain re-garding the appointment of all 200 factory inspectors, making workers’ database more elaborate, stopping harassment of workers and ad-dressing some remedial issues.”

Tofail Ahmed said only 2% of to-tal factories inspected were found � awed, which is same of the global average of vulnerable factories,” he said.  

About the recruitment of 200 factory inspectors, he said 67 have already been appointed and others will be recruited soon. l

TOAB tourism fair begins Fridayn Tribune Report

A 3-day international tourism fair be-gins in Dhaka on Friday to promote the country’s tourism industry.

Tour Operator Association of Bangladesh (TOAB), apex body of the country’s tour operators, will organise the fair titled “EBL-BTTF-2014 International Tourism Fair” at Bangabandhu International

Conference Centre (BICC). It would be the 5th event TOAB is

organising with around 100 exhibi-tors from six countries – Malaysia, Thailand, India, Nepal, Bhutan and host Bangladesh, a pre-event press conference was told at a hotel in the city yesterday. Tourism Malaysia will have a major stake.

Commerce Minister Tofail Ahmed is scheduled to inaugurate

the fair and Civil Aviation and Tour-ism Minister Rashed Khan Menon would conclude close it on Sunday next.

The participants include nation-al tourism organisations (NTOs), airlines, tour operators, hotels, re-sorts, travel trade bodies, � nancial and educational institutions.

During the exhibition, the exhib-itors would o� er special discounts

on airfares, tour packages and a host of other promotional o� ers. Colourful cultural shows will be staged every evening.

A seminar titled “Memorials of Liberation War and Our Tourism” and a discussion titled “Tourism and Skilled Workforce” will be held on the sidelines of the fair.

The fair will remain open from 10am to 8pm on all the three days. l

We will interact with stakeholders and meet our EU colleagues to see how to reach out to the companies. You will see some actions in the coming weeks or months

ANALYST

B2 Stock Wednesday, May 28, 2014DHAKA TRIBUNE

Stocks rally as � at session breaksn Tribune Report

Stocks rallied after two consecu-tive � at sessions yesterday on buy-ing pressure mainly on � nancials, food and allied, cement and tele-communications issues.

The benchmark index DSEX rose 37 points or 0.85% to close at 4,416.

The comprising blue chips DS30 rose 13 points or 0.8% to 1,602. The Shariah index DSES gained 7 points or 0.78% to close at 985.

Chittagong Stock Exchange (CSE) Selective Categories Index, CSCX, was up 60 points to close at 8,478.

Turnover at the DSE stood at Tk240 crore, up by 1.8% over the previous session. Out of 294 issues traded, 161 advanced, 82 declined and 51 closed unchanged on the DSE � oor.

“Market bounced back and surpassed its tri-sessions’ bearish spell,” said IDLC Investments, in its market analysis.

The consequent buying motive in some of large caps stepped up DSEX above 4,400 points level, it said. Since national budget 2014-15 is on its way, investors has been monitoring the market phenome-

non and its behavioral impact. It said as the cloudy phenomena

sustained in the last few sessions, participants could not drive much certainly, keeping total turnover still low.

Lanka Bangla Securities said a � rm up move amid improved mar-ket turnover value indicts that the investors are gaining con� dence to buy stocks at current level after a month long bearish tone.

It said investors might have got a positive vibe hearing approval of $169m for 13 projects under foreign aid Japanese government’s pledge for $6bn economic assistance.

“Experts have considered it a time be� tting way of stabilising the currency rate and squeezing the de� cit in balance of payment.”

Market bellwether banking is-sues gained 1.2%, followed by ce-ment, food and allied, tannery, pharmaceuticals and telecommu-nications.

Lafarge Surma Cement was the top turnover leader with shares worth Tk17 crore changing hands followed by Grameenphone, Square Pharmaceuticals, Mercan-tile Bank, Heidelberg Cement, Eastern Housing Ltd, BSRM Steel and Meghna Petroleum.l

News from trade serverICB: ARGUS Credit Rating Services Limited (ACRSL) has rated the Corporation as "AAA" for long term and "ST-1" for short term in consideration of � nancials of the Corporation up to 30 June 2013 (audited), Q3FY14 (unaudited) and other relevant quantitative as well as qualitative informa-tion up to the date of rating declaration.NBL: Credit Rating Information and Services Limited (CRISL) has rated the Company as "AA-" in the long term and "ST-2" in the short term in consideration of � nancials of the Company up to 31st De-cember 2013 (audited) and other relevant quantitative as well as qualitative informa-tion up to the date of rating declaration.ONEBANKLTD: The Company has informed that it has credited the bonus shares for the year ended on December 31, 2013 to the respective shareholders' BO Accounts on May 20, 2014. Cash Dividend and proceeds of Fractional Dividend have also been disbursed through Bangladesh Electronic Fund Transfer Network (BEFTN) system on May 21, 2014.IPO Subscription: Tung Hai Knitting & Dyeing Limited subscription date 18-22

May 2014, NRB upto 31 May 2014. @ taka 10, face value taka 10 and market lot 500. Far East Knitting & Dyeing Industries Limited subscription date 15-19 June 2014, NRB upto 28 June 2014. @ taka 22, face value taka 10 and market lot 200. Shurwid Industries Limited subscription date 08-12 June 2014, NRB upto 21 June 2014. @ taka 10, face value taka 10 and market lot 500. Saif Powertec Limited subscription date 06-10 July 2014, NRB upto 19 July 2014. @ taka 10, face value taka 30 and market lot 200.Dividend/AGMAMBEEPHA: 15% cash and 20% stock, AGM: 16.06.2014, Record Date: 28.05.2014.MBL1STMF: 3% cash, Record date: 02.06.2014. AIBL1STIMF: 5.5% cash, Record date: 02.06.2014.ORIONPHARM: 15% cash, AGM: 22.06.2014, Record Date: 21.05.2014. PURABIGEN: 15% stock, AGM: 29.06.2014, Record date: 21.05.2014. SALVOCHEM: 10% stock, AGM: 27.08.2014, Record date: 25.06.2014.

ISNLTD: No dividend, AGM: 17.06.2014, RD May 20, 2014.GOLDENSON: 25% stock, EGM and AGM: 21.06.2014, Record Date: 15.05.2014. MERCINS: 10% cash, dividend for the Public Shareholders (B-Group) only, AGM: 16.06.2014, Record Date: 15.05.2014. CMCKAMAL: 12.50% stock, AGM: 30.06.2014. Record Date: 29.05.2014. RUPALIBANK: 15% stock, AGM: 31.05.2014, Record date: 14.05.2014. LEGACYFOOT: 5% stock, AGM: 21.06.2014, Record Date: 12.05.2014. BDTHAI: 5% stock, AGM: 21.06.2014, Record Date: 25.05.2014. MEGHNACEM: 15% cash, AGM: 29.05.2014, Record Date: 14.05.2014. MONNOSTAF: 10% cash, AGM: 26.06.2014, Record Date: 19.05.2014. INTECH: 10% stock, AGM: 23.06.2014, Record Date: 15.05.2014. ISLAMIINS: 15% stock, AGM: 09.07.2014, RD: 12.05.2014. BXPHARMA: 10% cash & 5% stock, AGM: 21.06.2014, RD: 18.05.2014. STANDARINS: 15% stock, AGM: 18.06.2014, RD: 15.05.2014.

CSE LOSERS

Company Closing (% change)

Aver-age (%

change)

Closing average Closing Daily high Daily low Turnover

in millionLatest

EPSLatest

PE

Phoenix Insur -A -8.40 -8.40 32.70 32.70 32.70 32.70 0.007 3.00 10.9PragatiLife Insu. -A -8.13 -8.13 157.10 157.10 157.10 157.10 0.079 2.38 66.0Samata LeatheR -Z -7.14 -7.11 28.60 28.60 28.60 28.60 0.014 0.09 317.8ISN Ltd. -Z -4.55 -4.78 10.37 10.50 10.50 10.30 0.016 0.20 51.9 Argon Denims Limited-A -3.97 -3.86 55.76 55.70 57.00 55.00 0.201 4.04 13.8AIBL 1st Is. M. F.-A -3.85 -1.83 7.50 7.50 7.50 7.50 0.011 1.49 5.0Apex SpinningA -3.75 -3.75 77.00 77.00 77.00 77.00 0.015 1.85 41.6Rupali Life Insur.-A -3.69 -6.55 78.42 80.80 81.50 77.00 1.882 5.33 14.7Meghna Life Ins. -A -3.25 -3.19 119.08 119.00 119.50 118.10 0.149 6.45 18.5Familytex (BD) Ltd.-A -3.23 -4.36 27.22 27.00 28.00 26.80 7.062 4.64 5.9

DSE LOSERS

Company Closing (% change)

Aver-age (%

change)

Closing average Closing Daily high Daily low Turnover

in millionLatest

EPSLatest

PE

Standard Insurance-A -6.50 -6.35 33.21 33.10 34.00 32.00 1.979 2.88 11.5Savar Refractories-Z -5.29 -4.31 55.50 55.50 55.50 55.50 0.003 0.52 106.7Rupali Life Insur.-A -5.17 -4.94 78.16 77.00 82.10 73.10 19.334 5.33 14.7BD Fixed Income MF-A -3.61 -2.77 8.07 8.00 8.20 8.00 0.117 0.56 14.4Familytex (BD) Ltd.-A -2.89 -3.50 27.26 26.90 28.00 26.80 53.138 4.64 5.9Samata LeatheR -Z -2.60 -2.60 30.00 30.00 30.00 30.00 0.105 0.09 333.3Salvo Chemicals-B -2.53 -0.85 23.32 23.10 24.00 21.40 14.673 1.16 20.1Imam Button -Z -2.41 -3.57 8.10 8.10 8.10 8.10 0.016 -1.85 -veAFC AgroBiotech-N -2.13 -2.03 55.51 55.10 57.00 54.70 20.956 2.32 23.9Renwick Jajneswar-A -2.01 -1.22 300.78 296.70 307.50 296.10 3.459 3.92 76.7

CSE TURNOVER LEADERS

Company Volume shares

Value in million

% of total turnover

Daily closing

Price change

Daily opening

Daily high

Daily low

Daily average

LafargeS Cement-Z 277,500 19.38 11.49 70.50 2.62 68.70 70.70 68.70 69.85BD Submarine Cable-A 44,600 8.13 4.82 181.90 2.13 178.10 183.70 179.50 182.31Familytex (BD) Ltd.-A 259,500 7.06 4.19 27.00 -3.23 27.90 28.00 26.80 27.22Grameenphone-A 21,400 5.67 3.36 265.30 0.61 263.70 266.00 262.30 265.09Mercantile Bank -A 305,365 5.62 3.33 18.60 3.91 17.90 18.70 17.80 18.41Square Pharma -A 20,440 5.50 3.26 269.40 1.05 266.60 270.00 262.20 268.85Southeast Bank-A 253,111 5.18 3.07 21.10 4.46 20.20 21.20 20.10 20.47UCBL - A 176,941 4.68 2.78 26.60 1.53 26.20 26.70 26.10 26.47BSRM Steels-A 58,340 4.32 2.56 74.00 -0.13 74.10 75.00 67.00 74.13BEXIMCO Ltd. -A 167,280 3.82 2.27 22.70 -0.87 22.90 23.20 22.60 22.85Hwa Well Textiles-N 89,000 3.74 2.22 41.90 -0.48 42.10 42.40 41.70 42.04UNITED AIR-A 302,219 3.46 2.05 11.40 -0.87 11.50 11.50 10.40 11.44Eastern Housing -A 53,682 3.26 1.93 61.90 8.03 57.30 62.70 58.40 60.79Appollo Ispat CL -N 117,200 3.23 1.91 27.50 -0.36 27.60 27.90 27.40 27.57HeidelbergCement -A 6,000 3.16 1.87 529.60 2.40 517.20 533.00 517.00 526.72

DSE TURNOVER LEADERS

Company Volume shares

Value in million

% of total turnover

Daily closing

Price change

Daily opening

Daily high

Daily low

Daily average

LafargeS Cement-Z 2,494,000 174.35 7.26 70.60 2.62 68.80 70.90 68.60 69.91Grameenphone-A 369,665 98.11 4.09 266.00 0.72 264.10 266.30 260.00 265.40Square Pharma -A 345,102 92.76 3.86 269.40 1.20 266.20 270.00 243.00 268.79Mercantile Bank -A 4,115,166 75.85 3.16 18.60 3.91 17.90 18.80 16.20 18.43HeidelbergCement -A 136,000 71.48 2.98 529.00 2.20 517.60 530.10 500.00 525.61Eastern Housing -A 1,045,143 63.50 2.64 62.10 8.19 57.40 62.70 52.10 60.76BSRM Steels-A 788,800 58.62 2.44 74.10 0.27 73.90 75.10 68.00 74.31Meghna Petroleum -A 199,574 55.83 2.32 279.10 0.25 278.40 281.50 255.00 279.73Familytex (BD) Ltd.-A 1,949,500 53.14 2.21 26.90 -2.89 27.70 28.00 26.80 27.26Southeast Bank-A 2,474,583 51.32 2.14 21.00 3.96 20.20 22.00 18.20 20.74Bangas -A 86,863 44.35 1.85 517.60 3.48 500.20 519.80 500.00 510.58BD Submarine Cable-A 237,589 43.27 1.80 181.60 2.19 177.70 183.50 160.20 182.13Olympic Ind. -A 188,920 42.91 1.79 227.20 1.56 223.70 228.80 205.00 227.15Matin Spinning-N 892,000 39.62 1.65 44.30 -0.45 44.50 44.90 43.90 44.42CMC Kamal Tex. -A 1,592,179 39.29 1.64 24.70 1.65 24.30 25.10 22.00 24.68

CSE GAINERS

Company Closing (% change)

Aver-age (%

change)

Closing average Closing Daily high Daily low Turnover

in millionLatest

EPSLatest

PE

Eastern Housing -A 8.03 4.99 60.79 61.90 62.70 58.40 3.263 1.56 39.0Delta Brac HFCL-A 6.40 6.40 66.50 66.50 66.50 66.50 0.033 5.05 13.2NLI 1st M F-A 5.49 4.03 9.55 9.60 9.80 9.30 0.019 1.36 7.0Rahima Food -Z 4.70 6.42 60.17 60.20 61.00 58.00 0.872 -1.01 -veMercantile Bank -A 3.91 3.37 18.41 18.60 18.70 17.80 5.620 1.16 15.9Hakkani P& Paper -B 3.90 4.27 29.30 29.30 29.30 29.30 0.015 0.28 104.6Apex Tannery -A 3.89 4.23 144.73 144.30 147.00 142.00 0.767 4.35 33.3City G Insu.-A 3.77 3.53 22.00 22.00 22.00 22.00 0.007 1.84 12.0Bangas -A 3.52 2.91 512.97 517.70 520.00 504.00 1.154 5.87 87.4Eastern Bank - A 3.45 3.83 27.10 27.00 27.50 26.20 0.044 4.72 5.7

DSE GAINERS

Company Closing (% change)

Aver-age (%

change)

Closing average Closing Daily high Daily low Turnover

in millionLatest

EPSLatest

PE

Eastern Housing -A 8.19 4.40 60.76 62.10 62.70 52.10 63.501 1.56 38.9Modern Dyeing -Z 5.96 6.67 80.00 80.00 80.00 80.00 0.020 1.61 49.7Kay & Que (BD) -Z 5.60 4.68 13.20 13.20 13.20 13.20 0.013 -0.92 -veRahima Food -Z 4.86 5.71 59.79 60.40 61.00 57.90 7.504 -1.01 -veBATBCL -A 4.61 3.91 2,235.67 2,251.00 2,259.20 2,100.00 26.600 82.80 27.0Apex Tannery -A 4.50 3.03 143.99 146.40 147.70 130.00 10.893 4.35 33.1Midas Financing-Z 4.40 5.55 19.20 19.00 19.30 19.00 0.048 -6.91 -veStylecraft -A 4.31 4.57 1,030.00 1,027.50 1,040.00 1,015.00 0.206 47.83 21.5Reliance Insur -A 4.27 3.90 63.21 63.50 66.40 58.00 0.447 5.84 10.8Southeast Bank-A 3.96 2.52 20.74 21.00 22.00 18.20 51.316 3.04 6.8

SECTORAL TURNOVER SUMMARY

Sector DSE CSE TotalMillion Taka % change Million Taka % change Million Taka % change

Bank 335.21 13.96 32.15 14.17 367.35 13.98NBFI 64.08 2.67 4.47 1.97 68.55 2.61Investment 42.23 1.76 2.29 1.01 44.53 1.69Engineering 199.42 8.30 12.56 5.54 211.99 8.07Food & Allied 196.12 8.17 12.47 5.50 208.59 7.94Fuel & Power 152.63 6.36 17.19 7.58 169.82 6.46Jute 0.91 0.04 0.00 0.91 0.03Textile 309.31 12.88 30.22 13.32 339.52 12.92Pharma & Chemical 348.72 14.52 19.42 8.56 368.14 14.01Paper & Packaging 0.25 0.01 16.60 7.32 16.85 0.64Service 66.74 2.78 3.52 1.55 70.26 2.67Leather 53.29 2.22 19.03 8.39 72.31 2.75Ceramic 7.25 0.30 0.77 0.34 8.02 0.31Cement 274.54 11.43 25.54 11.26 300.07 11.42Information Technology 14.15 0.59 1.01 0.45 15.17 0.58General Insurance 30.71 1.28 0.45 0.20 31.16 1.19Life Insurance 92.41 3.85 4.48 1.98 96.89 3.69Telecom 141.38 5.89 13.80 6.09 155.19 5.90Travel & Leisure 18.58 0.77 4.15 1.83 22.73 0.86Miscellaneous 53.49 2.23 6.66 2.94 60.14 2.29Debenture 0.17 0.01 0.01 0.01 0.18 0.01

Daily capital market highlights

DSE Broad Index : 4415.75168 (+) 0.85% ▲

DSE Shariah Index : 985.51150 (+) 0.78% ▲

DSE - 30 Index : 1602.32375 (+) 0.81% ▲

CSE All Share Index: 13628.51240 (+) 0.78% ▲

CSE - 30 Index : 11216.92380 (+) 1.02% ▲

CSE Selected Index : 8478.03750 (+) 0.72% ▲

DSE key features May 27, 2014Turnover (Million Taka)

2,401.56

Turnover (Volume)

56,710,645

Number of Contract 59,670

Traded Issues 294

Issue Gain (Avg. Price Basis)

153

Issue Loss (Avg. Price Basis)

134

Unchanged Issue (Avg. Price Basis)

7

Market Capital Equity (Billion. Tk.)

2,265.39

Market Capital Equity (Billion US$)

27.46

CSE key features May 27, 2014Turnover (Million Taka) 177.04

Turnover (Volume) 5,257,949

Number of Contract 7,421

Traded Issues 208

Issue Gain (Avg. Price Basis)

107

Issue Loss (Avg. Price Basis)

97

Unchanged Issue (Avg. Price Basis)

3

Market Capital Equity (Billion. Tk.)

2,173.33

Market Capital Equity (Billion US$)

26.34

Prepared exclusively for Dhaka Tribune by Business Information Automation Service Line (BIASL), on the basis of information collected from daily stock quotations and audited reports of the listed companies. High level of caution has been taken to collect and present the above information and data. The publisher will not take any responsibility if any body uses this information and data for his/her investment decision. For any query please email to biasl@bol-online.com or call 01552153562 or go to www.biasl.net

The cloudy phenomena sustained in the last few sessions, participants could not drive much certainly, keeping total turnover still low

B3BusinessDHAKA TRIBUNE Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Banks, FIs urged to � nance only green projectsn Tribune Business Desk

Bangladesh Bank Governor Dr Atiur Rahman has suggested banks and � -nancial institutions (FIs) not to � nance any venture that can harm the nature, saying that � nancing green and envi-ronment-friendly ventures can facili-tate Bangladesh clean its environment.

“We’ve to keep the nature un-harmed for our existence and, banks and FIs should not � nance any ven-ture that will harm the nature … they need to be careful that their � nance is not used to fell trees and � ll up ponds, rivers and canals,” he told the opening session of “Green Bankers’ Conference 2014” in Dhaka yesterday.

Deputy Governor S. K. Sur Chowd-hury, Country Manager of International Finance Corporation (IFC) Bangladesh Kyle Kelhofer, Professor Saiful Haque of Institute of Energy, Dhaka Univer-sity and BB’s Executive Directors M. Mahfuzur Rahman and Ataur Rahman also spoke at the session.

Atiur said the central bank has cre-ated re� nancing windows to promote banks and FIs in � nancing green and environment-friendly ventures.

“We’re committed to practice digi-tal, nearly paperless, sustainable, green banking operations by making the best use of the information technology and related professional skills,” he said.

The governor said BB’s di� erent initiatives particularly IT-based green

banking activities through online banking, e-banking, e-commerce, on-line CIB, automated clearing house, e-tendering, e-recruitment are moving ahead in full swing. “We’re now think-ing to introduce e-noting.”

He said the central bank is heading the banks and � nancial institutions to a new horizon of green banking, where six green products were o� ered for re-� nancing initially, 44 green products are now open under BB re� nancing scheme in 2014.

“And good news is, an avenue has been opened for innovation and re-search … if any bank or FI comes up with innovative green product that tru-ly contributes in environmental con-servation, BB will seriously study that for further decision,” he added.

BB will also try to enhance the size of its re� nance scheme to facilitate large scale investments in green alterna-tives, he said, adding that in addition, the FIs should take initiatives to attract green bonds, green private equities for enhancing sustainable � nancing.

About the challenges, Atiur said all banks have their general credit policy for the lending sectors but the nature of di� erent sectors varies from the en-vironmental perspective. For example, he said polluting industries like tan-nery di� ers from the investment in poultry. So preparing sector-speci� c environmental policy guideline for banks is a big challenge, he added. l

Ananda Shipyard and Slipways Ltd and Ellicott Dredges LLC, a dredger manufacturer in US are assisting the country’s government by supplying dredgers for maintaining the navigability of rivers to improve irrigation, check bank erosion and reduce � ood damages. State Minister of Water Resources Mohammad Nazrul Islam Bir Pratik visited the yard of Ananda Shipyard and Slipways Ltd at Meghnaghat yesterday

City Bank recently signed a merchant acquiring agreement with Biman Bangladesh Airlines under which the City Bank American Express card members will be able to purchase air tickets from Biman using their cards from Biman’s sales outlet in Bangladesh. Mashrur Are� n, the bank’s DMD and COO and Mohammad Shah Newaz, director of marketing and sales, Biman Bangladesh airlines signed the agreement

Lotto Bangladesh recently held a prize giving ceremony of the competition named Sonar Bangla Gorbo, which about drawing pictures and writing stories. The former president of Khulna Press Club, Begum Ferdoushi Ali was present at the ceremony as chief guest along with the company’s CEO Abdullah Al Mosaddek

Bangladesh Dyed Yarn Exporters Association has recently signed a group insurance contract with Pragati Life Insurance Limited for its employees. Managing director and CEO Md Jalalul Azim of Pragati Life Insurance and Salahuddin Alamgir, president of Bangladesh Dyed Yarn Exporters Association are seen exchanging the contract

The board members of Prime Bank Limited unanimously elected Azam J Chowdhury as the new chair of the board at the bank’s 417th board meeting. Azam J Chowdhury is the chairperson and owner of East Coast Group. In addition, he is the chairperson of The Consolidated Tea & Lands Company Bangladesh Limited and Bangladesh Trade Syndicate Limited, an associate of TNT Express, a global express company

IMF's Lagarde says bank reforms slowedby � erce industry pushbackn Reuters

Progress in completing banking re-forms to plug gaps highlighted by the 2007-09 � nancial crisis is too slow and is being hampered by � erce industry lobbying, the International Monetary Fund said yesterday.

IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said banks were holding more capital now than they did in the run-up to the � nancial crisis when taxpay-ers had to shore up the sector.

“The bad news is that progress is still too slow, and the � nish line is still too far o� ,” Lagarde told a conference on economic inclusion in London.

While the task of reforming banks is complex, progress is also being held back by “� erce industry pushback” and fatigue that is bound to set in at this point in a long race, she said.

“A big gap is that the too-big-to-fail problem has not yet been solved,” Lagarde said, referring to the belief in markets that governments will still step in to rescue the biggest banks to avoid the mayhem seen when Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008.

The IMF estimated that the implicit subsidy or cheaper funding costs from being too big to fail amounted to about $70bn in the United States and up to $300bn in the euro zone. Mark Carney, chairman of the Financial Stability Board, a regulatory task force for the Group of 20 economies (G20), has said he wants the too-big-to-fail phenomenon “cracked by Christmas” but faces challenges in Europe and Asia.

Lagarde also called for regulators across the world to agree a framework

for winding down big banks in trouble.“This is a hole in the � nancial archi-

tecture right now, and it calls for coun-tries to put the global good of � nancial stability ahead of their parochial con-cerns,” Lagarde said.

After the bruising experience of the � nancial crisis, trust among in-

ternational regulators is still not high enough as some countries continue to take extra initiatives on bank capital to keep local taxpayers o� the hook.

The FSB is worried that such mea-sures, like the Federal Reserve’s plans for extra capital requirements on for-eign lenders in the United States, will

split capital markets.Lagarde said, “We need to be mind-

ful of the risks of fragmenting the global � nancial system and hamper-ing the � ow of credit to � nance invest-ment.”

“But complexity is not an excuse for complacency and delay,” she said. l

ILO: Developing countries see swelling middle classn AFP, Geneva

Workers in developing countries are increasingly moving to better jobs and joining the middle class, but 839 mil-lion workers still earn less than $2 a day, the International Labour Organi-zation said.

“The developing countries are gen-erally in a process of catching up with the advanced economies,” ILO chief Guy Ryder told reporters in Geneva ahead of the release of the agency’s an-nual World of Work Report yesterday.

Between 1980 and 2011, per capita income in the developing countries like Senegal, Vietnam and Tunisia on average grew 3.3% each year, which is far faster than the 1.8% growth seen in advanced economies, the report said.

Today, more than four in 10 workers in the such countries are considered to be in the so-called “developing middle class” - meaning that they earn more than $4 a day - up from fewer than two in 10 two decades ago, it said.

Yet, more than half of all workers in the developing world - some 1.5 billion people - are in precarious positions, without contracts and social protec-tions and often wallowing in poverty.

Around 839 million of them - a full

third of all workers in such countries - earn less than $2 a day. That however is down from more than half of all work-ers in such countries in the early 2000s, the report said. Improve worker rights, create growth

In its analysis of the situation in 140 developing and emerging econo-mies, the ILO concluded that nations that tackled working poverty, invested in creating quality jobs and in getting workers out of precarious employment had weathered the global � nancial cri-sis far better than those that did not.

“The investment in human capital is coming through in improved growth,” Ryder said, adding: “one needs to de-part from any simplistic notion that development can be kick-started by re-ducing worker rights.”

Since the global � nancial crisis of 2007, the convergence between condi-tions in the developed and developing worlds has picked up speed.

Some 30.6 million more people have been added to the global ranks of the unemployed since the crisis began, leaving a total of 199.8 million people jobless last year, with the number set to swell to 213 million by 2019.

The global unemployment rate has stabilised at around six percent - a level

expected to remain through 2017 - but advanced economies have su� ered the biggest rise in jobless numbers.

Developed countries have on av-erage seen their unemployment rate stabilise at around 8.5%, up from 5.8% before the crisis, while developing countries su� ered only a brief hike before their jobless rate fell back to around pre-crisis levels of 5.4%, the re-port said.

And the crisis has a� ected working conditions everywhere.

“Many developing countries, nota-bly in Latin America and Asia, are mak-ing e� orts to tackle inequalities and improve job quality as well as social protection,” lead author of the ILO re-port Moazam Mahmood said.

“By contrast,” he said, “a number of advanced economies, notably in Eu-rope, seem to be going in the opposite direction.”

Migration patterns shifting The shift in opportunities is meanwhile impacting migration patterns.

Some 231.5 million people last year were living in a country other than the one they were born in, the report said.

While the European Union by far re-mains the favoured destination, with

51% of migrants settled there, migrants have since the crisis increasingly been moving between developing countries, the ILO said.

More and more educated young people from crisis-hit developed coun-tries are also emigrating to emerging economies, the report found.

“Already south-south migration is on the rise while workers are also leav-ing advanced economies, particularly some hard-hit European countries, for work opportunities in developing countries,” Mahmood said.

Some 213 million people will enter the labour market over the next � ve years - 200 million of them in emerging and developing countries, the ILO said, voicing optimism that most of the new jobs created will provide a decent living.

“For the � rst time in history, over the next several years, most new jobs in the developing world are likely to be of su� cient quality to allow work-ers and their families to live above the equivalent of the poverty line in the United States,” the report said.

Despite its optimism, ILO acknowl-edged that 85% of the workforce in the developing world will still be living be-low the US-equivalent poverty line in 2018. l

Euro rallies in Asia after ECB chief’s comments n AFP, Tokyo

The euro rallied in Asia yesterday after the single currency tumbled on weak German business data which boosted speculation of further monetary eas-ing measures by the European Central Bank (ECB).

In midday Tokyo trading, the euro rose to $1.3662 and 139.29 yen from $1.3618 and 138.80 yen in Tokyo on Monday. US � nancial markets were closed Monday for a public holiday.

Gains in the European single currency came as investors look to key US data lat-er in the day for guidance about the state of the world’s number one economy.

“The euro found some footing against the dollar after 4 consecutive days of drops and economic releases to-day will likely cap dollar strength again as both durable goods orders and con-sumer con� dence could come in below expectation,” Credit Agricole said.

On Monday, ECB chief Mario Draghi said the bank was “alert” to the risks of persistently low in� ation, amid specu-lation of further interest rate cuts to

avert possible de� ation. “At present, our expectation is that

low in� ation will be prolonged but gradually return to close to 2%,” Draghi told a central banking forum organised by the ECB in Sintra, Portugal.

“Our responsibility is nonetheless to be alert to the risks to this scenario that might emerge and prepared for action if they do.” he added.

In� ation in the 18 countries that share the euro is currently way below the ECB’s 2% target, picking up only fractionally to 0.7% in April.

Further measures from the ECB would tend to weigh on the euro, but the central bank was likely to hold o� launching huge bond-buying measures similar to that unleashed by the US Federal Reserve and Bank of Japan.

“There was a modest euro-positive response to Draghi’s comments even though he made clear that the risk of a ‘pernicious negative spiral’ of low in� a-tion and weak lending risk derailing the eurozone’s � edgling recovery, mandat-ed fresh ECB action,” National Australia Bank said. l

China President stresses market forces in reformsn Reuters

China President Xi Jinping has empha-sized the importance of free markets in the country’s economic reforms, state media said yesterday , another indication that the government is persevering with plans to bring about sweeping changes.

Allowing market forces to allocate resources would mark a new stage of growth in the world’s second-biggest economy, Xinhua news agency said Xi told the Politburo on Monday.

As part of plans to alter the economy and reduce dependence on exports and state investment, Beijing unveiled in November its most ambitious plan for change in 30 years that would allow free markets to have a bigger role.

The key question is how to handle the relationship between the market and the government, Xi told the Po-litburo, an elite body made up of the country’s 25 most powerful leaders.

China, he said, had to reduce the amount of resources directly allocated by the government and cut the amount of direct state intervention in micro-economic activity. Remaking China’s growth engine is one of the most im-portant jobs faced by Xi’s government, which is under pressure to produce re-sults before some leaders retire at the next change in leadership in 2017.

But change has been made trickier still by China’s slowing - and maturing - economy, which is expected to cool to a 24-year-low in growth of 7.3% this year. l

B4 Back PageDHAKA TRIBUNE Wednesday, May 28, 2014

DILBERT

As India’s new government gets to work, a promise to investors

n Reuters

India’s new � nance minister, Arun Jait-ley, committed himself to repairing pub-lic � nances and restoring investor con-� dence as a new administration took charge yesterday promising better days for millions of discontented Indians.

Jaitley, an urbane corporate law-yer and close party colleague of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was formally named to the key � nance post, a day after the cabinet was inaugurated fol-lowing a sweeping election victory for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Modi campaigned on a promise to cut bureaucratic sloth and � ght corrup-tion. Analysts say his party’s decisive

win gives him the mandate to advance reforms that stalled under the scandal-ridden government of his predecessor, Manmohan Singh.

On Tuesday, he met his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif, whom he had invited for his inauguration in an unprecedented gesture that his team said was aimed at building strong ties with neighbours.

The BJP has long taken tough posi-tions on national security, Pakistan in particular.

However, the BJP did seek to make peace with India’s nuclear-armed rival while in power more than a decade ago, and Modi is expected to stress the need for a peaceful region to keep the focus

on restoring economic growth. Growth dropped to a decade-low of below 5% under the outgoing government.

“We have to restore back the pace of growth, contain in� ation and obvious-ly concentrate on � scal consolidation itself,” Jaitley told reporters.

Public � nances are in dire straits as government spending has outpaced revenues. The new administration will immediately need to take a decision on slashing subsidy spending which is threatening a budget blow-out and a sovereign ratings downgrade.

Jaitley, a student leader who was jailed during a period of emergency in 1975, will also be handling the impor-tant defence portfolio for the transition.

Smaller governmentModi, who built his reputation as an economic moderniser by putting his home state of Gujarat on a high-growth path, has moved to streamline the cabi-net towards a more centralised system of governing.

Several government ministries have been clubbed under one minister, aimed at breaking decision-making bottlenecks widely blamed for dragging down economic growth. The new ad-ministration has 45 ministers compared with 71 in the outgoing government.

Many supporters see Modi as India’s answer to the former US President Ron-ald Reagan or British leader Margaret Thatcher, committed to shrinking the size of government. One foreign editor has ventured Modi could turn out to be “India’s Deng Xiaoping”, the leader who set China on its path of spectacu-lar economic growth.

“I am sure the political change itself sends a strong signal to the global com-munity and also domestic investors,” Jaitley said. “I think over the next few months by expediting decision-making processes, I am sure we will be able to build that.”

The chief of the BJP, Rajnath Singh, will be the country’s new home minis-ter, charged with the task of ensuring internal stability and calming the anxi-eties of India’s religious minorities who see his party and its hardline Hindu af-� liates as pursuing a partisan agenda.

Modi himself has been dogged by allegations that he didn’t do enough to protect Muslims during an upsurge of violence in 2002. He has denied the charge and a Supreme Court-ordered investigation acquitted him of any re-sponsibility.

He named Sushma Swaraj, one of the party’s best-known faces in parlia-ment, as foreign minister. Swaraj, who has led the health ministry in the past, is seen as a moderate within the BJP. l

Arun Jaitley is administered oath of o� ce by President Pranab Mukherjee (unseen) as a Cabinet minister at the presidential palace in New Delhi REUTERS

Bank of Japan, more con� dent about recovery, quietly eyes stimulus exitn Reuters

The Bank of Japan has begun shifting its focus from supporting growth to ways of phasing out its massive stimu-lus, taking � rst tentative steps towards a potentially momentous move for the world economy.

Current and former central bank-ers familiar with internal discussions say an informal debate is under way on how to prepare for an exit from the BOJ’s 13-month-old “quantitative and qualitative monetary easing.”

The stimulus is a centerpiece of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s campaign to end two decades of de� ation and � tful growth, and BOJ Governor Har-uhiko Kuroda has vowed to keep cheap cash � owing until his 2% in� ation tar-get is in plain sight.

But with in� ation now past the half-way mark and signs that the economy has weathered last month’s sales tax in-crease, Japanese central bankers are al-ready thinking about the next chapter.

First of all, Kuroda and his team are keen to avoid market confusion and volatility that the U.S. Federal Reserve triggered in May 2013 when it � rst sig-naled the possible “tapering” of its ex-traordinary stimulus.

With the BOJ churning out 60-70 trillion yen per year ($589-687 billion), withdrawal symptoms could be simi-larly acute and the lesson for the BOJ is that signaling a tapering too soon or being too speci� c could back� re.

With that in mind, the BOJ has no plans to trim the stimulus or publicly suggest the eventual drawdown any time soon, say those familiar with the internal debate.

But whereas weeks or months ago that debate would center on the poten-tial need for more easing, now there is a strong sense within the BOJ board that the stimulus so far has worked well and the next step, albeit distant, could be policy tightening, not further easing.

Deputy Governor Kikuo Iwata under-scored that shift, reminding markets that the 2% in� ation goal worked both ways.

“The BOJ’s current policy intends to prevent not just de� ation but in� ation from well exceeding 2%, such as to 4% or 5%, for a medium- to long-term pe-riod,” Iwata told a seminar on Monday.

Hideo Hayakawa, a former top BOJ economist who maintains close con-tacts with those inside, says the central bank needs to clarify what will it do af-ter the battle with de� ation is won.

“If 2% in� ation comes into sight, the BOJ should taper its asset purchases,” Hayakawa, a senior executive fellow at private think-tank Fujitsu Research In-

stitute, told a Reuters Investment Sum-mit last week.

In public, Kuroda has become more vocal about the need for government structural reforms, which shows he wants the BOJ to shift from boosting economic demand to playing a sup-porting role as Abe promises deregula-tion to boost Japan’s growth potential.

Mixed viewsKeen to shore up public con� dence in the BOJ’s in� ation goal, Kuroda regu-larly brushes o� questions about an exit strategy saying the focus should remain on battling de� ation.

There is no hard deadline for curtail-ing asset purchases and Kuroda keeps reminding investors that the BOJ will not hesitate to ease further if economic recovery appears at risk.

But central bankers are now express-ing more con� dence in their policy and if the economy keeps improving the de-bate will intensify about how long the BOJ should maintain its stimulus after it reaches the two-year mark in April 2015.

Right now, there is no agreement yet among the nine policy board members on that.

Some, including Kuroda and former International Monetary Fund econo-mist Sayuri Shirai, stress the “open-ended” nature of the policy. They argue the BOJ can keep buying government bonds and other assets until there is convincing evidence that 2% in� ation will be sustained, say people familiar with the internal debate.

Former market economist Takahide Kiuchi, however, wants the current framework to be reviewed next April because he fears loading up on too much debt will make an exit di� cult.

Since the launch of its extraordinary asset-buying scheme in April 2013, the BOJ has been scooping up about 70 per-cent of newly issued government debt, including nearly all new 10-year bench-mark bonds sold by the government.

Public remarks and private con-versations with some of the central bankers suggest the rest of the board, including two former business execu-tives, stands somewhere in between.

According to central bank insiders, at least two policymakers believe the BOJ should stay “ahead of the curve” and seek the exit once there are early signs that in� ation is approaching 2%.

Such debate may have been academ-ic when in� ation was well below 2%, but will matter more if prices near the target.

“Bond market players don’t want to think about an exit and don’t see any need to think about it yet,” said Nori-atsu Tanji, bond strategist at Barclays

Securities Japan, explaining why yields have stayed low despite an improving economy.

“But things may change if consumer in� ation exceeds 1.5% around autumn of this year,” he said. That will prompt investors to price in the chance of a fu-ture tapering.

Change of heartThe key concern, for now, is to pre-vent premature expectations of taper-ing from disrupting the bond market, where the government continues to pay 0.6 percent interest on 10-year bonds despite its heaviest debt load in the industrial world.

BOJ o� cials do not want to discuss how long the stimulus may last and what might trigger its withdrawal, which in part re� ects considerable di� erences within the BOJ on how to communicate its plans.

Some say the BOJ should clarify the conditions under which tapering might start, possibly in October when it updates its twice-yearly economic projections.

“The BOJ may need to change its message to markets at some point later this year,” said a person familiar with the bank’s thinking. “The key is to avoid a spike in bond yields.”

Others worry that even mentioning a possibility of an exit could jolt markets.

Yet the very fact such discussions are taking place marks a change for the BOJ and Kuroda, whose prime concern has long been that the stimulus could be scaled back prematurely.

Last month, he surprised markets by saying the BOJ’s massive easing has boosted demand enough to essentially eliminate any slack in Japan’s economy.

At a news conference last week fol-lowed by interviews with two major business newspapers, Kuroda went further, stressing that demand has been revived enough and it was now up to the government to remove supply bottlenecks by bringing more women into the workforce and making it easier to start new businesses.

Some academics argue the BOJ is too coy about tapering and should start talking about it now rather than wait until markets start fretting about a pos-sible exit.

“They should be talking about taper-ing at a minimum, and they should begin preparing � nancial markets for a regime after 2 percent, a shift from stimulating aggregate demand to stimulating aggre-gate supply,” Harvard economist Dale W. Jorgenson told the Reuters Summit.

“It’s not too soon to begin managing expectations of changes that will take place within next 12 months.” l

Researchers: Twitter sees growth in emerging marketsn AFP, Washington

Twitter is seeing strong user growth in the Asia-Paci� c region, helping the messaging platform compensate for a slowdown in the US and Europe, a re-search report said yesterday.

The report by eMarketer forecasts that Twitter’s global user base will in-crease 24.4% in 2014, led by big gains in countries such as Indonesia and In-dia, and to a lesser extent Argentina, Mexico and Brazil.

The research � rm said its � gures on current Twitter usage are lower than company estimates - 183 million at the end of 2013 - “because we rely heavily on consumer survey data to weed out business accounts, multiple accounts for individual users and other sources of potential double-counting.”

Twitter in April estimated the monthly active users at 255 million, which led to a slump in its share price because it suggested sluggish growth.

The eMarketer report said Twitter’s worldwide users will hit 227 million this year, and nearly 400 million by 2018.

In its analysis of worldwide users, eMarketer said the Asia-Paci� c region

had already overtaken North America with more than 30% of all Twitter us-ers.

And the � gures exclude China, which bans the US messaging service.

“In 2014, the Asia-Paci� c region will account for 32.8% of all Twitter users, compared with 23.7% in North Ameri-ca,” the report said.

“And by 2018, Asia-Paci� c will more than double North America’s share, breaking the 40% mark in terms of worldwide market share. If China is on the Twitter map by that point, that share is likely to be signi� cantly high-er.”

The research said Twitter user growth in the US “is maturing” and will taper o� into single digits by 2015.

“Twitter’s US user base gets outsize - but appropriate - attention because it accounted for nearly three-quarters of Twitter’s total ad revenues in 2013, according to company reports,” said eMarketer.

“The US will remain the single larg-est country in terms of the number of individual Twitter users throughout our forecast, but currently, it still rep-resents just over 20% of all Twitter us-ers worldwide.” l

With London ‘� x’ under � re, China seeks bigger sway in gold traden Reuters

China has approached foreign banks and gold producers to participate in a global gold exchange in Shanghai, people famil-iar with the matter said, as the world’s top producer and importer of the metal seeks greater in� uence over pricing.

The Shanghai Gold Exchange (SGE) got the go ahead from the central bank last week to launch a global trading platform in the city’s pilot free trade zone, a move that could challenge the dominance of New York and London in gold trade and pricing.

Beijing’s plans to open up gold trad-ing comes at a time when the bench-mark price-setting process for pre-cious metals is under scrutiny. Barclays Plc became the � rst bank to be � ned over attempted manipulation of the 95-year-old benchmark London gold market daily “� x” last week.

State-backed SGE has asked bul-lion banks such as HSBC, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, Stan-dard Bank, Standard Chartered and Bank of Nova Scotia to take part in the global trading platform, two people ap-proached by the exchange said.

SGE, the world’s biggest physical gold exchange, where domestic banks, miners and retailers buy and sell gold, could also open up the international

platform to foreign brokerages and gold producers, they said.

“China wants to have more voice in gold prices,” said Jiang Shu, an analyst with Industrial Bank, one of 12 banks al-lowed to import gold into China. “The international exchange is the � rst step towards gaining a say in gold pricing.”

“If you don’t allow foreign players to participate in your market actively, or do not push Chinese � nancial institutions to participate in the international mar-ket, then China’s strong gold demand is only a number, not a power,” he said.

HSBC and Standard Bank declined to comment, while the other banks and SGE were not immediately available for comment. The global platform will � rst host spot physical contracts for gold and other precious metals, before aiming to launch derivatives down the line, said a third source who is directly involved in

the launch of the international exchange.“We are not just encouraging foreign

banks but also producers and other en-tities,” added the source.

China, the world’s biggest buyer of raw materials from copper to coal, is pushing hard to establish pricing bench-marks for a number of commodities.

Gold, along with oil, could be among the � rst to be opened up to foreign players. The free trade zone in Shang-hai is set to see international energy trading by hosting the country’s � rst crude oil futures. l

Asian voiceThe Shanghai exchange is looking to launch three yuan-denominated physical gold contracts, of 100 grams, 1 kg and the bigger London good delivery bar weigh-ing 12.5 kg, said another source who has received a draft prospectus from SGE. l

An itinerant merchant uses the new Caisse d’Epargne “Dilizi” billing system, that allows credit card payments thanks to a credit card reader and a smartphone, on May 27 in Lille, northern France AFP