COMMERCIAL banks sitting with unpaid bills against inland L/Cs are causing troubles to other banks suffering from capital shortage. Their indifference has raised concerns at the central bank which has earlier set November 27, 2013 as the cut off date to clear the snags. As reports said, most of these inland bills refer to banking scams at Sonali Bank, Agrani Bank and such other banks in which dishonest business houses such as Hall-Mark and Bismillah Groups have swindled money using...
THE country’s Hindu community has come under attacks due to post election violence at different places as news reports said raising questions about the government’s lack of preparedness in the first place to foil such attempts despite alerts from responsible quarters at home and abroad about the possibility of such incidents. Initial reports said Jamaat-Shibir and BNP activists had carried out the attacks but some news paper reports have also blamed the rival Awami League candidates in the polls for...
Take Afghanistan team into account The Bangladesh under-19 Cricket team failed to enter the semifinals in the Asian U-19 Championship concluded in Abu Dhabi on Saturday despite the fact that eventual finalists Pakistan and India were in same group. Bangladesh finished 3rd behind group champions Sri Lanka and the war ridden Afghanistan in Group B. Fourth team Malaysia could not collect a single point. Bangladesh could not sail despite beating the Afghans, who, however, overpowered Sri Lanka for a berth...
Rahul Singh : “After the general election I will hand the baton over to a new prime minister,” he declared at the press conference. “I hope it will be a UPA (the Congress Party-dominated alliance) chosen Prime Minister. I am confident that the new generation of our leaders will also guide this great nation successfully through the uncharted and uncertain waters of global change.” The implication of what he said was that Rahul Gandhi would henceforth be leading the Congress...
Syeda Lutfa Shahana : Superstition surrounding the disability is prevailing in our country. Most of the parents of visually impaired children are not aware what caused visual impairment and the rights of visually impaired children. The disabled people are being deprived of getting necessary health facilities and their other rights are being violated due to the superstition. Disability is not the result of curse. Disability should be regarded as natural. All of us are disabled in some form or the...
Nicholas Crafts :Recent growth in the euro area has tracked the experience of much of Europe in the 1930s all too closely. Unless policies change, this stagnation is likely to persist. In some ways, the euro area’s prospects are more challenging than the parallel with the Great Depression suggests. If only things were as bad as in the 1930s-how’s that for a thought to put matters in perspective?The aftermath of the Depression in Europe gives a vivid demonstration of the...
Tony Edson :The recent arrest of Indian diplomat Devyani Khobragade has unleashed two kinds of outrage: protests by Indians upset over her treatment by New York police, and, mostly outside of India, anger over Khobragade’s alleged crime of forcing a domestic employee to work long hours for a fraction of the prevailing wage after having pledged in a visa application to follow U.S. labor and wage laws.Less attention has been paid, however, to a more insidious problem: how international diplomatic...
A NEWS report in a national Bengali daily on Friday said that Jagannath University has finalized the appointment of 10 section officers and one store officer at a syndicate meeting held on January 4. Out of them nine are university Chhatra League leaders which is the students’ front of the ruling party Awami League and the remaining two also belong to party university units but their selection was carried out under the VC’s discretionary quota. The appointment was hastily approved...
Sir Frank Peters :December 13 is Pupil’s Liberation Day- a memorable and auspicious occasion for many Bangladeshi school pupils, regrettably not all.It was on this date in 2011 that eminent Bangladesh High Court justices Md. Imman Ali and Sheikh Hassan Arif outlawed the barbaric practice of corporal punishment in schools declaring it:”cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and a clear violation of a child’s fundamental right to life, liberty and freedom”.While some children have reason to celebrate their “Liberation Day” from...
THE tea industry must have a new lease of life to expand both in acreage and also in per acre output to increase the total annual yield to supply the expanding demand of the domestic market. This industry which used to fetch huge foreign earnings in the past is not enough now to meet the domestic demand and a news item published on Monday said the country now imports four to five million kg of tea instead of exporting it...
A NEWS report in a local daily on Sunday said that the imports of rice has phenomenally increased over the last six months compared to the same period of the previous fiscal year. Imports at that time covered 2,10,738 tonnes of rice, while it was slightly over 13,232. tonnes in the same period under the last fiscal as per trade figure released by Bangladesh Bank (BB) recently. The import of rice and wheat and other items like lentils, coriander, cloves...
Tim Hanstad and Roy ProstermanWHEN Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines in November, killing more than 6,000 people and leaving more than four million homeless, one group was particularly hard hit: the landless poor. More than a thousand of the dead lived in a single squatter camp.While natural disasters may seem like equal-opportunity destroyers, they are not.The developing world’s landless poor routinely bear the brunt of these disasters. Families without secure rights to land (and that is a majority of rural...
