বিভাগ/বিষয় নিরপেক্ষ

সুপারিশকৃত লিন্ক: আগস্ট ২০১৩

আজকের লিন্ক

মুক্তাঙ্গন-এ উপরোক্ত শিরোনামের নিয়মিত এই সিরিজটিতে থাকছে দেশী বিদেশী পত্রপত্রিকা, ব্লগ ও গবেষণাপত্র থেকে পাঠক সুপারিশকৃত ওয়েবলিন্কের তালিকা। কী ধরণের বিষয়বস্তুর উপর লিন্ক সুপারিশ করা যাবে তার কোনো নির্দিষ্ট নিয়ম, মানদণ্ড বা সময়কাল নেই। পুরো ইন্টারনেট থেকে যা কিছু গুরত্বপূর্ণ, জরুরি, মজার বা আগ্রহোদ্দীপক মনে করবেন পাঠকরা, তা-ই তাঁরা মন্তব্য আকারে উল্লেখ করতে পারেন এখানে।
ধন্যবাদ।

আজকের লিন্ক

এখানে থাকছে দেশী বিদেশী পত্রপত্রিকা, ব্লগ ও গবেষণাপত্র থেকে পাঠক সুপারিশকৃত ওয়েবলিন্কের তালিকা। পুরো ইন্টারনেট থেকে যা কিছু গুরত্বপূর্ণ, জরুরি, মজার বা আগ্রহোদ্দীপক মনে করবেন পাঠকরা, তা-ই সুপারিশ করুন এখানে। ধন্যবাদ।

৩০ comments

  1. মাসুদ করিম - ১ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (১২:৫৮ অপরাহ্ণ)

    পাক-মার্কিন আলোচনার বিষয় – ড্রোন হামলা, আফগান যুদ্ধ, জঙ্গি ইসলামের বিরুদ্ধে যুদ্ধ, জ্বালানি, শিক্ষা – সারা পৃথিবী এই আলোচনার বিষয়গুলো নিয়ে জানে। কিন্তু কার্যক্ষেত্রে এসব নিয়ে আলোচনা হয় না এটাও সবাই এখন জানে। দেখা যাক পররাষ্ট্র সচিব জন কেরির পাকিস্তান সফর শেষে আমরা কী জানতে পারি?

    Kerry, Aziz meeting underway

    Kerry flew into Pakistan on Wednesday night to hold meetings with the top political and military leadership aimed at easing tension over US drone strikes, the war in Afghanistan, and the fight against religious extremism.

    The two teams were holding consultations today on a number of issues including the fight against militants as US troops withdraw from Afghanistan, US-Pakistan strategic relations and drone attacks inside Pakistani territory.

    A Foreign Office spokesman said the two delegations were discussing matters pertaining to resumption of strategic ties between the two countries, drone attacks as well as Afghanistan.

    The delegations were also scheduled to discuss matters relating to energy and education.

    Prior to the start of his meeting with Aziz and his team, Kerry on Thursday paid tribute to the polls, which marked the first time that an elected civilian Pakistani government completed a full term in office and handed over to another at the ballot box.

    “This is a historic transition that just took place. Nobody should diminish it,” he told US embassy staff.

    “I think President Zardari deserves credit… It is an enormous step forward. It is historic. In the 66 year history of Pakistan that has never happened. So change comes over time,” he added.

    Kerry will also hold talks with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif as well as with outgoing President Asif Ali Zardari and army chief General Ashfaq Kayani.

    It is Kerry’s first visit to Pakistan as Secretary of State although he has visited the country in other capacities before and he is the most senior US official to visit the country since Sharif was sworn in as the country’s new prime minister.

    Although ties between the two countries have remained deeply troubled in recent years, a more stable government under Sharif, with a clear majority, may offer a new opportunity to rework relations along realistic objectives.

    Since winning the election, Sharif has said he wants to strengthen Pakistan’s relations with Washington, but that the US must take seriously concerns about drone strikes.

    He has made economic growth and resolving the energy crisis the top priority of his new administration, but Kerry will be looking to stress that more must be done on militant havens.

    Pakistan, where anti-American sentiment runs high, complains that the US fails to appreciate the sacrifices it has made in fighting terror, claiming to have lost 40,000 people since 2001.

    Pakistan faces mammoth challenges posed by a domestic Taliban insurgency, the external threat posed by Afghan and foreign militants on its soil, a crumbling economy and an energy crisis.

  2. মাসুদ করিম - ১ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (৪:২৩ অপরাহ্ণ)

    লেবাননে ‘জ্যোতির্বিদ্যার তথ্য’ বিবেচনা করে ০৮ অগাস্ট রোজার ইদ ঘোষণা করে দেয়া হয়েছে আজ। আমরাও কিন্তু একই ভাবে ঘোষণা করতে পারতাম আমাদের দেশে রোজার ইদ ০৯ অগাস্ট।

    Fadlallah Institute sets date for Eid al-Fitr

    The Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah Institute announced that Eid al-Fitr marking the end of Ramadan will begin on Thursday, Aug. 8.

    “On the basis of astronomical data…, Thursday August 8 is the first day of Eid al-Fitr,” a statement from the institute said Thursday.

    Eid al-Fitr marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan.

  3. মাসুদ করিম - ১ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (৭:০১ অপরাহ্ণ)

    রুশ প্রশাসন থেকে এক বছর রাশিয়ায় অবস্থানের জন্য একটি অস্থায়ী কাগজ পেয়েছেন এডওয়ার্ড স্নোডেন, এখন বিমানবন্দরের ট্রানজিট এলাকা থেকে রাশিয়ার এক অজ্ঞাত স্থানে রাজনৈতিক আশ্রয়ে চলে গেছেন তিনি, আশা করা হচ্ছে আগামীকাল কোনো এক সময়ে তিনি সাংবাদিকদের সামনে বক্তব্য রাখবেন।

    snowden-3-3

    Snowden Gets Asylum Papers From Russia, Leaves Airport

    Edward Snowden, the US former intelligence contractor who has been holed up in a Moscow airport for more than a month, has been granted temporary asylum and finally left the airport Thursday, a Russian lawyer who has been helping the US fugitive said.

    Anatoly Kucherena told RIA Novosti he had given Snowden an official document granting one year’s temporary asylum in Russia, allowing him to leave the Sheremetyevo Airport transit zone where he has been staying since arriving in Moscow on a flight from Hong Kong on June 23.

    A source at Sheremetyevo confirmed that Snowden had left the airport, with a security official saying he crossed the border into Russia around 3:30 p.m. Moscow time. Kucherena said Snowden left the airport in “an ordinary taxi.”

    Snowden is wanted in the United States on espionage and theft charges after leaking classified information about the US National Security Agency’s surveillance programs. He applied for temporary asylum in Russia on July 16. Washington has repeatedly called on Moscow to reject Snowden’s request and send him back to the United States to stand trial.

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    • মাসুদ করিম - ৭ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (৭:১০ অপরাহ্ণ)

      স্নোডেনকাণ্ড অসন্তুষ্ট ওবামা পুতিনের সাথে মস্কোতে তাদের নির্ধারিত শীর্ষবৈঠকে যোগ দিচ্ছেন না।

      খবর এখানে : Obama cancels Moscow meeting with Putin over Snowden।

  4. মাসুদ করিম - ৩ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (২:১৪ অপরাহ্ণ)

    দাউদ নবি বা দাউদ রাজার সমাধি জেরুজালেমে অবস্থিত। ইহুদি খ্রিস্টান মুসলমান তিন ধর্মেরই তীর্থস্থান – অটোমান রাজাদের দখলে থাকার সময় এটা ছিল মসজিদ, এটাকে সিনাগগে রূপান্তরের সিদ্ধান্ত নিয়ে ইসরায়েলের প্রত্ন কতৃপক্ষ গত ছয় বছর ধরে পুনর্ণির্মাণের কাজ করছে কিন্তু অত্যুৎসাহী কিছু কট্টর ইহুদি গোষ্ঠী প্রত্নতাত্ত্বিকভাবে মূল্যবান অটোমান আমলের সুদৃশ্য টাইলস ধারাবাহিকভাবে ভেঙ্গে সিনাগগ নির্মাণের কাজেই যেন অদৃশ্য শক্তির কাজ করল, কারণ এসব সুদৃশ্য টাইলস প্রতিস্থাপনের কোনো চেষ্টাই প্রত্ন কতৃপক্ষ করেনি এবং বর্তমানে প্রত্ন কতৃপক্ষ প্রকল্প বাস্তবায়নের ‘ফাইনাল টাচ’ দিচ্ছে। আর এভাবেই দাউদ নবি বা দাউদ রাজার সমাধির সম্পূর্ণ ইহুদিকরণ সম্পন্ন হল।

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    Who is ‘Judaizing’ King David’s Tomb?

    Nir Hasson

    A serious act of vandalism, a string of coincidences, and a decision by the Israel Antiquities Authority have combined to change the character of King David’s Tomb on Mt. Zion from a Muslim site into a synagogue.

    On Tuesday this week, two painters were busy applying the last coats of paint on the building’s doorposts, thereby completing six years of extensive renovations. For the first time since the 16th century, every last trace of the building’s Muslim past has been erased; the site, holy to Judaism, Islam and Christianity, has for all intents and purposes become a synagogue.

    Two policemen who were patrolling Mt. Zion on the night of December 19, 2012, heard knocking coming from the tomb. They entered the room and found two men smashing the ancient ceramic tiles covering some of the structure’s interior walls. The tiles were created by Ottoman artists in the 17th century as part of renovations to the tomb’s structure, which then served as a mosque. Similar tiles can be found at the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount.

    During their interrogation, one of the suspects said he was a bachelor looking for a wife. He claimed he’d been told to break the ceramic tiles because “they were blocking his prayers.” The police recommended indicting him on the charge of violating a sacred space, a serious crime carrying a jail term of up to seven years. The State Prosecutor’s Office has yet to make its decision, however.

    All parties involved in running the place from Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch, the rabbi of the Western Wall, and the National Center for the Development of Holy Sites to the Israel Antiquities Authority expressed their profound shock over the incident and concluded that better security was necessary. But two weeks after the two men were caught breaking the tiles, Israel Antiquities Authority employees came to work in the morning to discover that someone had returned and completed the job of smashing the tiles overnight.

    This time, the damage wasn’t just partial: Every last Islamic tile inside the tomb structure had been systematically destroyed. The incident raised some troubling questions about the various authorities’ policy on King David’s Tomb.

    The vandalism took place just one day before security cameras were set to be to be installed. The lock of the door leading to the tomb did not show signs of tampering. But it gets odder: According to every assessment, whoever carried out the damage must have worked many hours inside the tomb using machinery – and not hammers – yet no one heard a thing; the police received no report. “It seems everyone had an ear infection that night,” said one of the site’s guards.

    Rabbi Avraham Goldstein, the head on the Diaspora Yeshiva, however said it is possible yeshiva members didn’t hear the vandalism as it was taking place.

    “We’re not connected to this act in any way,” he said. “It would seem there are ways of accomplishing such destruction without anyone knowing,”

    Shortly after the incident, the Israel Antiquities Authority held a meeting. It seems the authority has replicas of the tiles because of renovations done on the tiles in the past. It was possible to reconstruct at least some of the decorations as most of the experts involved recommended. Nonetheless, Shuka Dorfman, the director general of the authority, decided not to restore the wall. Within a few months, all the renovations were completed, the walls remained bare, and King David’s Tomb lost virtually every remnant of it Muslim past.

    Because of the chain of events, a group of Jerusalem researchers in various disciplines got together and to protest the Israel Antiquities Authority’s decision not to restore the tomb’s walls. “Deciding not to reconstruct the tile work….is first and foremost rewarding the vandals who achieved their goal,” wrote the scholars, including Prof. Ora Limor, Prof. Elhanan Reiner, Dr. Amnon Ramon, Dr. Doron Bar, and Dr. Nirit Shalev-Khalifa.

    The Israel Antiquities Authority does not deny that the decision represents a victory for the vandals but claims that the authority also benefitted by having the ancient walls behind the tiles exposed. This assertion aggravated the scholars even further. According to Dr. Shalev-Khalifa, who has published an article on the tiles of King David’s Tomb, “the tiles weren’t a matter of decoration; they were the ultimate artistic expression of the Ottoman Empire.”

    Dr. Yuval Baruch, director of the Jerusalem District of the Israel Antiquities Authority said “the tiles were irreversibly damaged. Therefore the choice was either a full reconstruction of the 17th century tiles or exposing the hewn rock walls of the original structure. Because a full restoration is not in keeping with the Israel Antiquities Authority’s mission, the authority chose to preserve the walls instead… No attempt has been made to hide remnants of different eras.”

    Historical revisionism

    The tomb on Mt. Zion, holy to three monotheistic religions, is a microcosm of Jerusalem. It has been the source of innumerable quarrels for nearly 1,000 years. Jews and Muslims believe this is the burial place of biblical King David. Christians believe that the hall on the second floor of the structure was the location of Jesus’ Last Supper.

    In the Jewish tradition, the identification of the site as the tomb of King David is in dispute and Judaism, in fact, was the last of the religions to ascribe holiness to the site. Jewish tradition started to view the location as the burial place of King David and his descendants, including King Solomon and King Hezekiah, only in the 12th century, some 2,200 years after King David’s death.

    For most of the Ottoman period, the authorities barred Jews and Christians from entering the structure and it became an elaborately decorated mosque. It was only after the 1948 War of Independence that the site’s importance to Jews became more pronounced than ever before, as the other holy sites – the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem – ended up on the Jordanian side of the border.

    By 1967, King David’s Tomb had, with enthusiastic government support, become the holiest site in the State of Israel. Traditions, symbols and ceremonies linked to the site were renewed or invented. This is also when the tradition of smashing tiles started. In 1950, acclaimed poet Uri Zvi Greenberg was apprehended with a hammer in hand after he’d smashed an ancient plaque written in Arabic.

    In 1967, after the Six-Day War, the Diaspora Yeshiva made its home there. The ultra-Orthodox school, which caters to the newly observant, currently controls the warren of buildings around the tomb. Until 1980, the yeshiva also managed the tomb itself. Today the tomb is the under the jurisdiction of the National Center for the Development of Holy Sites and the official rabbi of the Western Wall and holy sites, Shmuel Rabinovitch, but the yeshiva is still deeply involved in the tomb’s affairs.

    In recent years, the Judaization process at the site has greatly accelerated. A partition dividing men from women has been installed; a large bookcase filled with Jewish religious texts was placed in the mihrab (the mosque’s semicircular wall niche indicating the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca) and hiding it; and prayer services and lessons take place there on a daily basis. According to Dr. Doron Bar, who studies the site’s history, the smashing of the tiles is the last stage of this longer process.

    Academics raise the white flag

    As the character of the site changed so it has also become holier and holier. People from Diaspora Yeshiva, right-wing activists and Haredi groups have begun to co-opt the archeological digs to asserting proof has been found the foundations of the tomb’s structure date back to the Second Temple Era with a much more ancient tradition of holiness than previously thought.

    In addition, Mt. Zion is attracting peculiar Haredi groups, hilltop youths, newly religious Jews and converts often motivated by hatred of Christians and Muslims. The churches in the neighborhood have often been targeted in price-tag attacks, shorthand for anti-Arab hate crimes. Jewish extremists originally used the term to describe vandalism and violence that targeted Israelis as well as Palestinians and was aimed at preventing or avenging evacuations of West Bank settlers.

    Many blame the vandalism at King David’s Tomb on these groups. In an interview with the Kikar Hashabbat website, Yossi Shwinger, the director general of the National Center for the Development of Holy Site, called them, “a crazy sect of delusional people.” Evidence of Kool-Aid at Mt. Zion popped up three months ago when an American in the process of converting to Judaism built a small altar in a Diaspora Yeshiva courtyard, cut the heads off of four doves, and burned them as an offering on his improvised altar.

    “The restoration work necessitated a heroic effort on the part of the Israel Antiquities Authority and doing battle with all the eccentrics and madmen who flock here, but at the end of the effort the authority flew the white flag of surrender,” says Dr. Amnon Ramon, a researcher at the Jerusalem Institute and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and one of the originators of the scholars’ protest over the authority’s decision not to reconstruct the tiles. “I’m simply wondering out loud if this desecration didn’t serve someone’s best interests.”

    “It used to be a multicultural space despite the disagreements,” adds Prof. Ora Limor, a historian at the Open University. “David is a powerful character and everyone wants him to himself. Each of the three religions involved has its fingerprints here and the ceramic tiles were the Muslim fingerprint. At this point, I’m really worried about the Last Supper.”

    Goldstein, however, said the diverse history of the tomb’s structure cannot be erased with many Muslim characteristics permanently in place.

  5. মাসুদ করিম - ৩ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (৩:০৬ অপরাহ্ণ)

    শুরু হচ্ছে ফেলানী হত্যার বিচার

    শুক্রবার বিজিবির এক সংবাদ বিজ্ঞপ্তিতে জানানো হয়, কুচবিহারে বিএসএফের এই বিশেষ আদালতে আগামী ১৩ অগাস্ট বিচার কার্যক্রম শুরু হবে। মামলায় সাক্ষ্য দেওয়ার জন্য ফেলানীর বাবা, মামাসহ একটি প্রতিনিধিদল ভারতে যাবে।
    ২০১১ সালের ০৭ জানুয়ারি কুড়িগ্রামের অনন্তপুর সীমান্তে পঞ্চদশী ফেলানীকে গুলি করে হত্যা করে বিএসএফ ১৮১ ব্যাটালিয়নের চৌধুরীহাট ক্যাম্পের জওয়ানরা।

    ফেলানীর বাবা নাগেশ্বরী উপজেলার দক্ষিণ রামখানা ইউনিয়নের বানার ভিটা গ্রামের নুরুল ইসলাম নূরু ১০ বছর ধরে দিল্লিতে কাজ করতেন। তার সঙ্গে সেখানেই থাকতো ফেলানী।

    দেশে বিয়ে ঠিক হওয়ায় বাবার সঙ্গে ফেরার পথে সীমান্ত পার হওয়ার সময় কাঁটাতারের বেড়ায় কাপড় আটকে যায় ফেলানীর। এতে ভয়ে সে চিৎকার দিলে বিএসএফ সদস্যরা তাকে গুলি করে হত্যা করে এবং পরে লাশ নিয়ে যায়।

    কাঁটাতারের বেড়ায় ফেলানীর ঝুলন্ত লাশের ছবি গণমাধ্যমে প্রকাশিত হলে বিশ্বজুড়ে আলোড়ন সৃষ্টি হয়। বাংলাদেশ সরকার ও মানবিকার সংস্থাগুলোর পক্ষ থেকে কড়া প্রতিবাদ জানানো হয়।

    বাংলাদেশের সীমান্তরক্ষী বাহিনী বিজিবির পক্ষ থেকেও বিএসএফের সঙ্গে বিভিন্ন বৈঠকে ফেলানী হত্যার বিচারের জন্য চাপ দেয়া হয়।

    বিজিবির সংবাদ বিজ্ঞপ্তিতে বলা হয়, গত মার্চে নয়াদিল্লীতে বিজিবি-বিএসএফ মহাপরিচালক পর্যায়ের বৈঠকে ফেলানী হত্যার বিচার দ্রুত শুরু করা হবে বলে আশ্বাস দেন বিএসএফের মহাপরিচালক।

    এরই ধারাবাহিকতায় সম্প্রতি বিএসএফ সদর দপ্তর সম্প্রতি ‘জেনারেল সিকিউরিটি ফোর্স কোর্ট’ গঠন করে এবং আদালতে সাক্ষ্য দেয়ার জন্য বাংলাদেশের দুইজন সাক্ষী, একজন আইনজীবী এবং বিজিবির একজন প্রতিনিধিকে ভারতে যেতে বলা হয়।

    সে অনুযায়ী স্বরাষ্ট্র মন্ত্রণালয় কুড়িগ্রামের ৪৫ বর্ডার গার্ড ব্যাটালিয়নের অধিনায়ক লে. কর্নেল জিয়াউল হক খালেদ, কুড়িগ্রাম আদালতের পাবলিক প্রসিকিউটর আব্রাহাম লিংকন এবং ফেলানীর বাবা মো. নুরুল ইসলাম ও মামা মো. আব্দুল হানিফকে ভারতে গিয়ে সাক্ষ্য দেয়ার অনুমতি দিয়েছে বলে বিজিবির পক্ষ থেকে জানানো হয়।

    ফেলানির হত্যায় হিলাল ফয়েজী ও আমার তাৎক্ষণিক প্রতিক্রয়া।

    রাষ্ট্রযন্ত্র কিংবা ক্ষমতার মদমত্ত রাজনীতির স্বীকার-অস্বীকার, বাদ-প্রতিবাদকে তুচ্ছ করে দিয়ে জ্বলন্ত সত্যটুকু জেগে আছে ফেলানি। বাংলাদেশের কুড়িগ্রামের নাগেশ্বরী উপজেলার রামখানা ইউনিয়নের বানারভিটা গ্রামের ভিটাবাড়ি ছেড়ে তোমাদের পরিবার যেমন প্রতিবেশী ভিনদেশে ঠাঁই নিয়েছে, তেমনি তোমাদের মতো আরও লাখ লাখ ‘অতিদরিদ্র’ সেখানে গেছে বাংলা প্রান্তর থেকে। বাংলাদেশের অগণিত মুসলমান মেয়ে এমনকি হিন্দু নাম নিয়ে হলেও দিলিল্গ-মুম্বাইয়ে গৃহপরিচারিকার কাজ জুটিয়ে বিচিত্র হিন্দি ভাষায় পেট চালাচ্ছে। ক্ষুধা এবং দারিদ্র্যের কাছে যে এক সময় সীমান্ত এবং ধর্মীয় পরিচয় অগ্রাধিকার হারিয়ে ফেলে ফেলানি!
    মাত্র পনের বছর বয়সের এক কিশোরী তুমি ছিলে এ ধরাধামে। নয়াদিলিল্গর উপকণ্ঠে তোমাদের পরিবার ইটের ভাটায় কাজ করে নয়া ভারত নির্মাণের উপকরণ উৎপাদন করছিল। তোমার বাবা ‘বাল্যবিবাহ’ নামক অভিশাপটি সম্পর্কে সচেতন ছিলেন না বরং ‘কন্যাদায়’ শব্দটির পীড়নে তিনি অধীর ছিলেন।
    অতএব, ২০১১ সালের দ্বিতীয় শনিবার তাই বাংলাদেশের কুলাঘাট এলাকার একটি ছেলের সঙ্গে তোমার বিয়ে ঠিক হলো। শরীরের রক্ত আর ঘামের দামে আয় করা হাজার তিরিশেক টাকা আর কিছু গয়না নিয়ে তাই দিলিল্গ থেকে বুধবার ৫ জানুয়ারি রওনা হলে তোমরা দু’জন,বাবা আর মেয়ে। পশ্চিমবঙ্গের সীমান্ত পাড়ি দিতে দালালের সহায়তা নিয়েও যখন কাজ হলো না, তখন মই নিয়ে শুক্রবার ৭ জানুয়ারি ভোরে কাঁটাতারের বেড়া পেরিয়ে গেলেন তোমার বাবা নুরুল ইসলাম। পেছনে তুমি। এমনি উষাকালে পার হওয়ার সময়ে কাঁটাতারে পরনের কাপড় আটকে যায় তোমার ফেলানি। তোমার তখন মাঘের হাড়কাঁপানো শীতে ভয়ে চিৎকার করা ছাড়া আর কী করার ছিল জানি না। সেই গগনবিদারী চিৎকারকে থামিয়ে দেওয়ার মতো হৃদয়হীন শব্দ উৎপাদন করতে জানে সীমান্ত-রাষ্ট্রযন্ত্রের উদ্যত রাইফেল। যার নিক্ষিপ্ত বুলেট তোমাকে চিরদিনের মতো স্তব্ধ করে দিয়ে রক্ত ঝরিয়ে ঝুলিয়ে রাখে সেই কাঁটাতারে।

    ভারতের যেখানেই গেছি ভারতীয় সীমান্ত রক্ষী বাহিনীর আবাসিক এলাকাগুলোতে বাড়ির দেয়ালের বাইরে দুটি রং দেখা যায় — সাদা ও নীল — ওই দুটি রং বদলে লাল ও সবুজ করে দেয়া উচিত। ভারত সরকারের কাঁটাতারের বেড়া আগলে রেখে যারা বাংলাদেশের নাগরিকদের সরাসরি গুলি করে হত্যা করছেন ও যখন তখন নির্যাতন করছেন তাদের বাড়ির লোকদের মনে করিয়ে দেয়া দরকার ভারতীয় সীমান্ত রক্ষী বাহিনী সাদা নীল শান্তির বাহিনী নয় তারা মানুষের সবুজ প্রাণ থেকে রক্ত ঝরাতে ওত পেতে থাকে।

    ফেলানির মতো নিরস্ত্র অসহায় মানুষকেই তারা গুলি করে মারছে, আজ পর্যন্ত কোনো অপরাধীকে হত্যা করেছে এমন খবর পাওয়া যায়নি — আর কাঁটাতারের বেড়ার এপার থেকে কেউ তো তাদেরকে গুলি করছে না যে তাদেরকে সাথে সাথে হত্যার উদ্দেশ্যে গুলিই করতে হবে।

    আর কাঁটাতারের বেড়াটাই অবৈধ। তারপরও কাঁটাতারের বেড়াটা ভারত সরকার যখন করেই ফেলল, তখন তার প্রধান কাজ হওয়া উচিত কেউ কাঁটাতারের বেড়া টপকে ভারত সীমান্তে গেলে তাকে আবার বাংলাদেশ সীমান্তে ফিরিয়ে দেয়া, আর ফেলানির মতো কেউ কাঁটাতারের বেড়া টপকে বাংলাদেশ সীমান্তে চলে গেলে বাংলাদেশের সীমান্তরক্ষী বাহিনীকে সেটা অবহিত করা। ভারতীয় সীমান্তরক্ষী বাহিনী হয় দায়িত্বে অবহেলা করছে এবং শেষ মুহূর্তে দায়িত্ব পালন করতে গিয়ে গুলি করছে অথবা ভারতীয় সীমান্তরক্ষী বাহিনী জাতিবিদ্বেষ ও মানববিদ্বেষের মতো অসুস্থ মানসিকতায় আক্রান্ত। যেটাই হোক না কেন এর দায় ভারত সরকারের এবং তাকে তার সীমান্তরক্ষী বাহিনীকে ঠিক করতে হবে। কোথায় থাকে তার সীমান্তরক্ষী বাহিনী যখন বাংলাদেশের সন্ত্রাসীরা সীমান্ত পেরিয়ে পশ্চিমবঙ্গে বহালতবিয়তে থাকে অথবা ভারতীয় বিচ্ছিন্নতাবাদীরা ভারত সীমান্ত পার হয়ে বাংলাদেশে চলে আসে?

    • মাসুদ করিম - ১৪ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (১১:৪৬ অপরাহ্ণ)

      ভারতীয় সীমান্তরক্ষী বাহিনী জাতিবিদ্বেষ ও মানববিদ্বেষের মতো অসুস্থ মানসিকতায় আক্রান্ত

      ফেলানির বিচার শুরু করার সময়টিতে পিটিয়ে মানুষ হত্যা করেছে বিএসএফ।

      বাংলাদেশিকে পিটিয়ে হত্যার অভিযোগ বিএসএফের বিরুদ্ধে

      নিহত নূরনবী (২৪) পাটগ্রাম উপজেলার জগতবেড় ইউনিয়নের মোহাম্মদপুর গ্রামের সোলেমান মিয়ার ছেলে।

      তার লাশ এখনো ভারতীয় কোচবিহার জেলার রানিনগর-৩৫ বিএসএফ ক্যাম্পে রয়েছে। নিহতের মামা গিয়ে লাশ সনাক্ত করেছেন।

      লালমনিরহাট-৩১ বিজিবি ব্যাটালিয়নের পাটগ্রাম বিজিবি কোম্পানি কমান্ডার সুবেদার জোনাব আলী বলেন, এ ঘটনায় বিএসএফের কাছে চিঠি দিয়ে প্রতিবাদ ও লাশ ফেরত চাওয়া হয়েছে।

      “জবাবে তারা (বিএসএফ) ময়না তদন্তের পর লাশ ফেরত দেয়ার কথা বলেছে।”

      স্থানীয়রা জানান, নূরনবীকে ধরে নেয়ার সময় বিএসএফ সদস্যদের ছোড়া পাথরের আঘাতে আহত হন ধারাকান্ত গ্রামের জবেদ আলীর ছেলে মোস্তাফা (২২)।

      তাকে প্রথমে পাটগ্রাম উপজেলা স্বাস্থ্যকমপ্লেক্সে এবং পরে রংপুর মেডিকেল কলেজ হাসপাতালে ভর্তি করা হয়।

      মোস্তফা সাংবাদিকদের জানান, গত সোমবার গভীর রাতে বাংলাদেশি ২২ রাখাল কানিরবাড়ি সীমান্তের ৮৬২ নম্বর মেইন পিলারের কাছ দিয়ে ভারতে গরু আনতে যান।

      ফেরার পথে চোংঙ্গাখাতা সীমান্তের ইছাগাছি এলাকার সোলোঙ্গা নদী সাঁতরে তারা আসছিলেন। এ সময় সেখানের একটি বেইলি সেতুর উপর থেকে চোংঙ্গাখাতা বিএসএফ ক্যাম্পের টহল দলের সদস্যরা একটি লোহার খাঁচা ফেলে নুরনবীকে আটক করে নিয়ে যায় বলে জানান মোস্তফা।

      মোস্তফার ধারণা, আটকের পর বিএসএফ সদস্যরা পিটিয়ে হত্যার পর নুরনবীর লাশ নদীতে ফেলে দেয়।

      “লাশটি ভারতীয় অংশের বেইলি সেতুর ভাটিতে আটকা পড়ে। পরে তা উদ্ধার করে রানিনগর ৩৫ বিএসএফ ক্যাম্পের সদস্যরা। তারাই বিজিবিকে খবর দেয়।”

      নিহতের মামা কাশেম বলেন, সমশেরনগর বিজিবি ক্যাম্পের সদস্যরা নিহতের লাশ সনাক্ত করার জন্য তাকে বিএসএফের কাছে পাঠায়। সেখানে তিনি নূরনবীর লাশ সনাক্ত করেন।

      “নূরনবীর পিঠের নিচে ও কোমরে আঘাত ও মাথা থেতলে দেয়ার চিহ্ন দেখি। তাকে নির্যাতন করেই হত্যা করা হয়েছে।”

      নূরনবীর স্ত্রী শারমীন আক্তার স্বামীর মৃত্যুর খবর শুনে বাড়িতে শুধু বিলাপ করছেন। তাদের একটি সন্তান রয়েছে।

      তিনি বলেন, “স্বামী ভুলে ভারতে যেতে পারে তাই বলে বিএসএফ হত্যা করবে?”

      গতকালই এক বন্ধুকে বলছিলাম, বিএসএফ বিশেষ অর্থে ‘বর্ডারলাইন পার্সনালিটি ডিসঅর্ডার’ এ ভোগে বলেই সীমান্তে মানুষ হত্যা বন্ধ হচ্ছে না — তারা তাই বারবার প্রমাণ করছে।

    • মাসুদ করিম - ১৯ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (১১:১৫ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

  6. মাসুদ করিম - ৪ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (১০:২৮ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    পশ্চিমে নিরাপত্তা শঙ্কা, ইন্টারপোলও সতর্ক

    বিভিন্ন দেশের কারাগার ভেঙে আল-কায়েদা জঙ্গিদের পালানোর ঘটনায় উদ্বিগ্ন হয়ে পড়েছে যুক্তরাষ্ট্র ও এর মিত্রদেশ ফ্রান্স এবং ব্রিটেন।

    দেশগুলো তাদের নাগরিকদেরকে বিশ্ব ভ্রমণে, বিশেষ করে মুসলিম দেশগুলোতে ভ্রমণে বিশেষভাবে সতর্কতা জারি করেছে।

    শনিবার বিশ্বব্যাপী নিরাপত্তা সতর্কতা জারি করেছে আন্তর্জাতিক অপরাধ পুলিশ সংস্থা, ইন্টারপোলও। সংস্থার ১৯০টি সদস্যদেশকেও সম্ভাব্য জঙ্গি আক্রমণের বিষয়ে কড়া নজরদারি করার পরামর্শও দেয়া হয়েছে।

    গত ৩১ জুলাই তালেবানরা পাকিস্তানের একটি সুরক্ষিত কারাগারে হামলা চালিয়ে শতাধিক বন্দিকে মুক্ত করে।

    ২২ জুলাই ইরাকের আবু গারিব কারাগারেও হামলা চালিয়ে প্রায় ৫০০ আল-কায়েদা জঙ্গিকে মুক্ত করে আল-কায়েদার ইরাক শাখা। ইরাকের কারাগার থেকে পালিয়ে যাওয়াদের মধ্যে জঙ্গি সংগঠনটির বেশকয়েকজন শীর্ষ নেতাও রয়েছেন।

    অন্য এক ঘটনায় ২৭ জুলাই ব্রাজিলের কারগার থেকেও ১১শ’র বেশি কয়েদি পালিয়ে যায়। দেশটিও ইন্টারপোলের সদস্য।

    ইরাকের কারাগার ভাঙার পর আল-কায়েদা নেতা আয়মান আল জাওয়াহিরি বুধবার যুক্তরাষ্ট্রের গুয়ানতানামোবে কারাগার থেকেও তাদের বন্দিদের মুক্ত করার ঘোষণা দিয়েছেন। কোন প্রক্রিয়ায় তারা বন্দিদের মুক্ত করবে তা না জানালেও অতীতে পশ্চিমা নাগরিকদের অপহরণ করে কারাবন্দি সঙ্গীদের মুক্তির জন্য ব্যবহার করেছিল আল কায়েদা।

    ইন্টারপোল সম্প্রতি ইরাক, পাকিস্তান ও আফগানিস্তানের কয়েকটি কারাগার ভেঙে ইসলামি জঙ্গিদের পালিয়ে যাওয়ার ঘটনার পেছনে জঙ্গি সংগঠন আল-কায়েদা জড়িত থাকতে পারে বলে ধারণা করছে।

    কারাগার ভাঙার ঘটনা সম্পর্কিত তথ্যগুলো পর‌্যবেক্ষণ করতে এবং জঙ্গিরা অন্য কোথাও সংঘবদ্ধ হচ্ছে কিনা তা দেখতে সদস্য দেশগুলোকে অনুরোধ করেছে পুলিশের আন্তর্জাতিক এই সংস্থাটি।

    এদিকে একই কারণে যুক্তরাষ্ট্র তার নাগরিকদের বিশ্ব ভ্রমণের ওপর সতর্কতা জারি করেছে। উত্তর আফ্রিকা ও মধ্যপ্রাচ্যের দেশগুলোতে অগাস্ট মাসের কোনো এক সময় মার্কিন নাগরিকরা বড় ধরনের হামলার শিকার হতে পারে বলে গোয়েন্দা তথ্য রয়েছে দেশটির কাছে।

    এছাড়া হামলার আশঙ্কায় ২১টি মুসলিম দেশে রোববার মার্কিন দূতাবাস বন্ধ রাখছে যুক্তরাষ্ট্র।

    এদিকে ইয়েমেনও সেনাবাহিনীর একদল সদস্য দেশটির প্রেসিডেন্ট প্রাসাধে ব্যর্থ হামলা চালানোর পর সেদেশে ভ্রমণে নিষেধাজ্ঞা দিয়েছে যুক্তরাজ্য।

    এছাড়া রবি ও সোমবার ইয়েমেনের রাজধানী সানায় যুক্তরাজ্যের দূতাবাস বন্ধ রাখার সিদ্ধান্ত নেয়া হয়েছে। ব্রিটেনের নাগরিকদের দ্রুত ইয়েমেন ত্যাগ করার পরামর্শও দিয়েছে সেদেশের সরকার।

    ফ্রান্সের পররাষ্ট্রমন্ত্রণালয় জানায়, তারাও রোববার ইয়েমেন তাদের দূতাবাস বন্ধ রাখবে।

    এই অগাস্ট মাসেই ইতোপূর্বে ভারতের মুম্বাই ও কেনিয়ার নাইরোবিতে ভয়াবহ হামলা হয়েছিল বলে স্মরণ করিয়ে দেয় ইন্টারপোল।

  7. মাসুদ করিম - ৭ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (২:১৪ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    উত্তর রাজস্তানে এক টুকরো সিন্ধু বা হরপ্পা সভ্যতার নিদর্শন খুঁড়ে বের করেছেন ভারতীয় প্রত্নবিভাগ। কিছুদিন পরেই এই কাজ চূড়ান্তভাবে শেষ হবে।

    ASI unearths a slice of Harappa in north Rajasthan

    Artefacts dating to the Harappan era have been excavated in Karanpura of Hanumangarh district in Rajasthan, the first time remains of the Indus Valley Civilisation have been found in this part.

    “The excavation has brought to light house complexes built of mud bricks of both Early (3300-2600 Before Common Era) and Mature (2600-1900 BCE) Harappan periods. Even though scattered remains and fragments of baked bricks are available, it was not found in any building,” said Archaeological Survey of India superintending archaeologist V.S. Prabhakar in a lecture at the India International Centre here Monday.

    “The presence of bichrome ware consisting of red ware, decorated with black and white-coloured painted motifs, is also noticed from the Early Harappan period, a few of which continues during the Mature Harappan period,” he added.

    “Presence of rhinoceros bones point to the marshy environment the Harappans were accustomed to,” said Prabhakar.

    Harappan pottery along with terracotta bangles, grinding stone fragments, beads of agate and an animal terracotta figurine were excavated.

    Numerous copper artefacts reveal trade ties people here had with other civilisations.
    Apart from motifs like circles, pipal leaves on various items, graffiti on pottery and artefacts like the spindle whorls are distinguished features.

    The Indus Valley civilisation is one of the earliest urban civilisations and also known as the Harappan civilisation.

    Karanpura is located on the right bank of Drishadvati river, now Chautang, in the upper reaches and is located between Siswal, Haryana (upstream) and Sothi, Rajasthan (downstream). The river is dried up now.

    The archaeological remains at Karanpura were first discovered in 2010 and the excavation branch started work in December 2012. The work will end soon.

  8. মাসুদ করিম - ৭ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (১০:৩৫ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    আমেরিকা যুক্তরাষ্ট্রের কেন্দ্র ওয়াশিংটনের রাজনীতিবিদ প্রশাসক ও বুদ্ধিজীবিদের অবশ্যপাঠ্য দৈনিক দি ওয়াশিংটন পোস্ট কিনে নিলেন স্টিভ জবসের পর আমেরিকার সবচেয়ে সৃষ্টিশীল ব্যবসায়ী জেফ বেজোস। দৈনিক পত্রিকার ভবিষ্যৎ বাজার/বিতরণ ব্যবস্থাপনা কী হবে সেটাই এখন দেখার জেফ বেজোসের কাছ থেকে, কী উদ্ভাবন তিনি ঘটাতে পারেন তার উপর নির্ভর করছে অনেক কিছু — আমেরিকার কেন্দ্রে প্রভাব বিস্তারের খেলো ‘ক্রয়চাল’ নিশ্চয় আমাজন কিন্ডল স্রষ্টার উদ্দেশ্য নয়?

    Bezos the Innovator Is What News Business Needs

    One can only hope that Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) and the new owner of the Washington Post (WPO), doesn’t mean it when he says he won’t be involved in the Post’s day-to-day operations. This is precisely where fresh thinking is needed in the newspaper business.

    Nobody needed to be told that the industry is in trouble and maybe terminal decline. In discussing the sale, Washington Post Co. Chief Executive Officer Donald E. Graham frankly admitted defeat, noting that he “couldn’t see how to grow the paper and began to wonder if there was a better owner.”

    It would be hard to imagine a more intriguing one. Bezos is among the most creative and disruptive innovators American capitalism has ever seen. Many Internet billionaires have, you could say, had success thrust upon them, playing at projects they thought were cool and discovering that the world agreed. Bezos is different. He brought deliberate vision and remorseless commercial logic to the overthrow of existing ways of doing business. He’s no accidental revolutionary.

    This is what makes his acquisition of the Post so exciting — that, and the strategic, operational and financial room for maneuver that such a deep-pocketed owner can provide.

    Various commentators (including Henry Blodget at Business Insider, an Internet news-and-comment site in which Bezos has invested) point to possible synergies between news and the Amazon model. Like newspapers, Amazon is in the content and distribution business, and via its Prime service it has found a new way to collect subscriptions from users. Amazon understands the economics of physical and virtual delivery — the puzzle that’s defeating newspapers all over the world.

    User-generated content is another intersection. A hallmark of Amazon’s success as a retailer has been its focus on customer service and use of customer reviews, something buyers now take for granted across all e-commerce. Empowering consumers and recasting them as producers has been an Amazon specialty. Bezos found a way to engage with and make money from shoppers in a new kind of community — and it’s the heart of his business, not an afterthought. Notice that the online news business is increasingly preoccupied with social media, user-generated content by another name. Bezos might try to marry these ideas in new ways.

    So many other complementarities suggest themselves that a deal that surprised almost everybody is already looking like something that had to happen. A newspaper in every box? An accelerated shift to all-digital? Maybe both. The challenge that’s eluded the industry so far is to manage the upheaval and thrive commercially at the same time. Bezos may find the answer, and we wish him well.

  9. মাসুদ করিম - ১৫ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (২:১২ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    ১৪ আগস্ট সকাল থেকে আমি টুইটারে কায়রোর মুরসির সমর্থকদের সিট-ইন ক্লিনআপ নিয়েই ছিলাম। কায়রো এখন যুদ্ধক্ষেত্র, এর চেয়ে বেশি কিছু বলার সামর্থ্য আমার নেই, ইচ্ছেও না।

    Post-coup violence in Egypt: LIVE UPDATES
    19:10 GMT: Interim PM Hazem El-Beblawi says the two protest camps in Cairo have been completely cleared and no more protest camps will be allowed.

    19:01 GMT: 43 police members were killed in clashes with Pro-Morsi protesters on Wednesday nationwide; 211 others sustained injuries, the Interior Ministry said. They added that Muslim Brotherhood supporters torched 7 mosques across the country.

    18:53 GMT: Interim Prime Minister Hazem El-Beblawi calls for minute of silence for “fallen martyrs.”

    18:52 GMT: The US State Department says America’s aid policy on Egypt is still under review. The situation in the country remains fluid, but the State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki still would not characterize it as a “civil war.”

  10. মাসুদ করিম - ১৯ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (১১:০৬ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    দাউদ ইব্রাহিমের প্রধান জঙ্গি সহযোগী, ভারতে জঙ্গি হামলার ‘চলতাফিরতা এনসাইক্লোপিডিয়া’ আবদুল করিম টুন্ডার ভারতে আটক হওয়ার পর দিল্লি পুলিশের কাছে পুরো উপমহাদেশ জুড়ে টুন্ডার বিচরণের যে বিবরণ এই ‘ডক্টর বোম্ব’ দিয়েছেন তা আরো একবার প্রমাণ করল পাকিস্তান আর্মি ও আইএসআই পুরো উপমহাদেশ জুড়ে সন্ত্রাসের হেড কোয়ার্টার হয়ে উঠেছে। এবং লাদেনের পর এখন তাদের সবচেয়ে সম্মানিত ‘সন্ত্রাসের অতিথি’ দাউদ ইব্রাহিম যে তাদের হেফাজতে আছে ও থাকবে টুন্ডার ভাষ্য থেকে তা আবার জানা গেল।

    Abdul Karim Tunda tells police he was in constant touch with ISI

    Abdul Karim Tunda, one of India’s most wanted terrorists who has been arrested, has told his interrogators he was in constant touch with Pakistan’s ISI and worked closely with it and also met leaders of several anti- India outfits during his stay in that country.

    A top Delhi police official while stating this today said that 70-year-old Tundla claimed during his interrogation that underworld don Dawood Ibrahim whom he met in Karachi several times stays in a safe house in Pakistan’s port city and is guarded by Pakistan’s intelligency agency ISI.

    “He(Tunda) claims that Dawood first called him to meet in 2010. He says that the underworld don stays in a safe house in Karachi and is guarded by ISI. His movements is restricted and monitored by the intelligence agency,” the official said.

    During his stay in Pakistan, Tunda told the police he had been in touch with organisations like ISI, LeT, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Indian Mujahiddin and Babbar Khalsa and had been meeting people like Hafiz Saeed, Maulana Masood Azhar, Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, Dawood Ibrahim and several others wanted by India.

    Calling the scope of his interrogation a ‘vast canvas’, the official said that Tunda, an expert bomb maker, is a bigger catch then Abu Jundal, a key Mumbai attack handler, for security agencies because of his intensive networks across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal.

    “He has met the leaders of almost all anti-India organizations and even their small operatives. Tunda was constantly in touch with ISI and has worked with them closely,” the official said.

    Tunda had an excellent network of operatives through which he sent men and material into India, the official said, adding he has been sending explosives and Fake Indian Currency Notes (FICN) in India.

    Tunda, a close aide of Dawood, was arrested on Friday after being on the run in several countries.

    According to the police official, Tunda is running a number of madarsas in Karachi under the name of Mehdud-Taleem-Islam-e-Dar-Al-Funoon for which he gets a lot of donations for individuals and organizations. Here he indoctrinates youth to join jehad and gives them training to use arms and ammunition.

    There is a batch of around 200 youth of all age groups in every batch, the official said.

    The penetration level of his network and structure can be gauged by the fact that that in September-October 2010 when Babbar Khalsa International (BKI) leader Wadhawa Singh wanted to push explosives in India through Bangladesh he contacted Tunda for it, it was stated.

    “The explosives which were assembled outside Pakistan were to be sent somewhere in Delhi or Punjab. However, the plan failed as Tunda’s operatives were arrested in Bangladesh before they could execute the plan,” the official said.

    “Tunda has got great oratory skills through which he influences people, especially youth. He is a sort of ‘motivational speaker’ who encourages his disciples to join Jehad. Due to his ability to ‘motivate’ people he remains in great demand by terrorist organizations to give a ‘pep talk’ to their men,” the official said.

    To carry out a terror attack, you need a man, motivation and a bomb. Tunda provides all of this and that is why he is so popular among all terror outfits. His job is recruiting, motivating and providing explosives, he said.

    According to police sources, Tunda, who was born in India in 1943, became radicalized and joined Jehadi forces in 1985 after some of his relatives were killed in communal riots in Bhiwandi, Maharashtra.

    In Mumbai, Tunda met and befriended one Jalees Ansari. Both of them constituted their own Tanzeem namely ‘Tanzeem Islah-ul-Muslimeen (Islamic Armed Organisation for Improvement of Muslims).

    In 1993, Tunda and Ansari had set off a series of explosions in Mumbai and Hyderabad and seven separate bomb blasts on trains. After Ansari’s arrest in January 1994, Tunda fled to Dhaka, police said.

    Sources said that, it was Tunda who taught Ansari to make bomb who later earned the dubious distinction of being ‘Dr Bomb’.

    He returned from Dhaka to India to mastermind the deadly 1996-1998 blasts. In almost all the blasts in Delhi during 1996-98, Tunda’s men, who were from Pakistan and Bangladesh, had detonated bombs.

    Tunda claims that after 1998, it is the first time that he has returned to India, but investigating agencies are verifying this.

    Sources said that the investigation is revolving around what Tunda has been doing during the last 15 years. Why was he coming to India this time and how Pakistan based various terrorist outfits and ISI carry out and control terror modules in India.

    His journey and who all did he met in all those years will be probed, the source said.

    During interrogation, Tunda told police sleuths that almost all those who are wanted in India, from Hafiz Saeed to Maulana Masood Azhar and from Dawood Ibrahim to the Bhatkal brothers of Indian Mujahideen are in touch with each other in Pakistan.

    “Tunda, who was in direct touch with ISI was introduced to Hafeez Sayeed by the Pakistani intelligence agencies,” the official said.

  11. মাসুদ করিম - ১৯ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (২:৫৩ অপরাহ্ণ)

    অবহেলায় অনাদরে চিকিৎসার অভাবে চলে গেলেন বরেণ্য লোকসঙ্গীতশিল্পী আবদুর রহমান বয়াতী। জন্মেছিলেন ১৯৩৯ সালে ঢাকার সূত্রাপুর থানার দয়াগঞ্জে, তার বয়স হয়েছিল ৭৪ বছর।

    সোমবার সকাল সাড়ে সাতটায় রাজধানীর সাতমসজিদ রোডের জাপান-বাংলাদেশ ফ্রেন্ডশিপ হসপিটালে চিকিৎসাধীন অবস্থায় তিনি শেষঃনিশ্বাস ত্যাগ করেন। তার বয়স হয়েছিল ৭৪ বছর।

    হাসপাতাল সূত্রে জানা গেছে, শিল্পী আবদুর রহমান বয়াতী গত মাস থেকে হাসপাতালে চিকিৎসাধীন ছিলেন। এর আগেও কয়েকবার তিনি এখানে চিকিৎসা নিয়েছেন।

    জানা যায়, বরেণ্য এই লোকসঙ্গীতশিল্পীর স্ট্রোক হলে চিকিৎসা নেন। এরপর তার প্রস্রাবের বিভিন্ন ধরনের জটিলতা ধরা পড়ে।

    কিন্তু, সব চিকিৎসাকে ব্যর্থ করে দিয়ে সোমবার সকালে তিনি শেষঃনিশ্বাস ত্যাগ করেন। রেখে গেলেন অসংখ্য গুণগ্রাহী ও ভক্তবৃন্দ।

    বর্তমানে তার মরদেহ এ হাসপাতালেই রয়েছে। তার ছেলে মোহাম্মদ আলম সকাল পৌনে ৮টার দিকে হাসপাতালে এসে পৌঁছান।

    শিল্পী আবদুর রহমান বয়াতীর প্রায় পাঁচশ একক অ্যালবাম রয়েছে। ১৯৩৯ সালে ঢাকার সূত্রাপুর থানার দয়াগঞ্জে জন্মগ্রহণ করেন এই বরেণ্য শিল্পী।

    আবদুর রহমান বয়াতী ছিলেন একাধারে গীতিকার, সুরকার, সংগীত পরিচালক এবং শিল্পী। তার বিখ্যাত গান ‘একটি চাবি মাইরা, দিল ছাইড়া, জনম ভরে চলিতেছে; মন আমার দেহঘড়ি, সন্ধান করি, কোন মেস্তুরী বানাইয়াছে’ আজও শহরে ও গ্রামে গেয়ে চলেন সাধারণ মানুষ।

    তার গানের কথায় দেহতত্ত্ব ছাড়াও মাটি ও মানুষের কথা উঠে এসেছে। এক সময় গান গেয়ে তিনি দেশ-বিদেশের শ্রোতাদের মাতিয়ে রেখেছিলেন।

    শুধু তাই নয়, মার্কিন যুক্তরাষ্ট্রের সাবেক প্রেসিডেন্ট জর্জ বুশ সিনিয়র তাকে হোয়াইট হাউসে আমন্ত্রণ জানান। সেখানে জমকালো অনুষ্ঠানে গান গেয়ে ব্যাপক প্রশংসা পান তিনি।

    জানা গেছে, বরেণ্য এই শিল্পী আর্থিক কষ্টে ছিলেন। চিকিৎসকরা বেশকিছু পরীক্ষার-নিরীক্ষার পরামর্শ দিলেও অর্থের অভাবে তা করতে পারেনি তার পরিবার। এতে এই লোকশিল্পী অভিমান করেছিলেন। চিকিৎসা করাতে চাইতেন না। ওষুধ দিলেও খেতে চাইতেন না।

    খবরের লিন্ক এখানে।

  12. মাসুদ করিম - ২১ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (১১:০৯ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    চিন সীমান্তে পেশি আস্ফালন ভারতের, নামল হারকিউলিস বিমান

    স্বাধীনতা দিবসের আগের দিনই ইঙ্গিতটা দিয়েছিলেন প্রতিরক্ষামন্ত্রী৷ চিন সীমান্তে অবস্থান নরম করা তো দূর, আগামী দিনে প্রকৃত নিয়ন্ত্রণরেখা বরাবর সামরিক কার্যকলাপ আরও বাড়াতে চলেছে ভারত৷ সপ্তাহ না পেরোতেই সে কাজ শুরু করে দিল ভারতীয় সেনাবাহিনী৷

    গত এপ্রিলে যে দৌলত বেগ ওলডি সেক্টরে প্রকৃত নিয়ন্ত্রণরেখা লঙ্ঘন করে প্রায় ১৯ কিলোমিটার ভিতরে ঢুকে আসে চিনা সেনারা, সেখানেই মঙ্গলবার সফল ভাবে অবরতরণ করল বায়ুসেনার বৃহত্তম পরিবহণ বিমান সুপার হারকিউলিস সি-১৩০জে৷ কম্যান্ডিং অফিসার তেজবীর সিংয়ের নেতৃত্বে এ দিন দৌলত বেগ ওলডিতে পৌঁছেছে বায়ুসেনার ‘ভেইলড ভাইপারস’ এবং আরও কয়েক জন উচ্চপদস্থ অফিসার৷ এই পদক্ষেপ করা হল এমন একটা সময় যখন চিনের উপ-বিদেশমন্ত্রী ভারতে রয়েছেন৷ রাজনৈতিক মহলের মতে, পেশি আস্ফালনের ইঙ্গিতটা যথেষ্ট স্পষ্ট৷

    ১৬,৬১৪ ফুট উচ্চতায় দৌলত বেগ ওলডির এয়ারস্ট্রিপটি পৃথিবীর উচ্চতম বিমানপোত৷ দুর্গম ভূপ্রকৃতি ও খামখেয়ালি আবহাওয়ার কারণে চিরকালই সেনাবাহিনীর কাছে কঠিন ঠাঁই অত্যন্ত গুরুত্বপূর্ণ এই সেক্টর৷ ১৯৬২ সালে চিন-ভারত যুদ্ধের পরে বিশেষভাবে প্রকৃত নিয়ন্ত্রণরেখায় নজরদারির জন্যই তৈরি করা হয় এই সেনাঘাঁটি৷ আবার, এই সেক্টর-সহ গোটা দেপসাং উপত্যকার অধিকার নিয়েই চিনের সঙ্গে ভারতের তরজা অব্যাহত৷ হারকিউলিস-এর মতো শক্তিশালী বিমান সেখানে কাজ করতে শুরু করা তাই সামরিক দৃষ্টিভঙ্গীতে খুবই তাত্‍পর্যপূর্ণ৷ হারকিউলিস মূলত ব্যবহার করা হয় জ্বালানি সরবরাহ ও সেনা পরিবহণের কাজে৷ যুদ্ধকালীন পরিস্থিতিতে একসঙ্গে অনেক সেনা পাঠানোর প্রয়োজন হলে হারকিউলিস গুরুত্বপূর্ণ ভূমিকা নেবে৷

    বায়ুসেনার তরফে একটি বিবৃতিতে জানানো হয়েছে, ভারত-চিন যুদ্ধের সময়ে ১৯৬২-৬৫ সাল পর্যন্ত দৌলত বেগ ওলডিতে নিয়মিত বিমান চলাচল করেছে৷ কিন্ত্ত তারপর প্রায় চার দশক পরিত্যক্ত অবস্থায় ছিল বিমানপোতটি৷ বছর ছয়েক আগে থেকে ফের এই গুরুত্বপূর্ণ ঘাঁটিতে বিমান চলাচল শুরু করে বায়ুসেনা৷ চণ্ডীগড় থেকে একটি দুই ইঞ্জিনসম্পন্ন এএন-৩২ বিমান নিয়ে আসা হয় এখানে৷ কিন্ত্ত এই বিমানের ভার বহন ক্ষমতা খুব বেশি না হওয়ায় ২০ টন বহনক্ষমতাসম্পন্ন হারকিউলিস বিমানটিকে এখানে নিয়ে আসার সিদ্ধান্ত নেওয়া হয়৷ এত বেশি উচ্চতায় হারকিউলিসের মতো ভারি বিমান অবতরণ করানোটা বিশ্বরেকর্ডের দাবিদার হতে পারে বলেও জানাচ্ছে বিবৃতি৷ বায়ুসেনার বক্তব্য, দৌলত বেগ ওলডিতে হারকিউলিসের উপস্থিতি সামরিকভাবে ভারতের অবস্থান অনেকটাই শক্ত করবে, তার সঙ্গে সঙ্গে সদর্থক প্রভাব পড়বে সেনাবাহিনীর মনোবলেও৷

    India lands biggest war plane in Ladakh of Indian-controlled Kashmir

    The Indian Air Force (AIF) on Tuesday landed its biggest war plane C 130J-30 Super Hercules aircraft in Ladakh province of Indian- controlled Kashmir, officials said.

    The aircraft was landed at the world’s highest Daulat Beg Oldie (DBO) airstrip located at 16,614 feet (5,065 meters) above sea level in the Aksai Chin, over 500 km north of Srinagar city, the summer capital of Indian-controlled Kashmir. “In a significant capability demonstration move by the IAF, a C 130J-30 Super Hercules aircraft landed at Daulat Beg Oldie (DBO), the highest airstrip in world at 0654 hrs (local time) today,” read an official statement. The aircraft, according to officials, took off from Hindon Air Force Station under the Western Air Command.

    Daulat Beg Oldie links the ancient Silk Route to China. “Considering the very limited load carrying capability of AN 32 and helicopters, a decision was taken by the IAF to land the C130J- 30 aircraft which is capable of lifting up to 20 tons,” read the official statement. “With this enhanced airlift capability the IAF will now be in a better position to meet the requirements of land forces which are heavily dependent on the air bridge for sustenance in these higher and inhospitable areas.” Ladakh is gateway to the highest battlefield in world – Siachen Glacier.

    কিন্তু চীনকে বেশি চিন্তায় ফেলেছে ভারতের নিজের বানানো যুদ্ধবিমানবাহী রণতরী আইএনএস ভিক্রান্ত।

    India launches first indigenous aircraft carrier INS Vikrant

    India launched its first indigenously-built aircraft carrier on Monday, a landmark moment in the US$5 billion project that seeks to project the country’s power and check the rising influence of China.

    When the INS Vikrant comes into full service in 2018, India will become the fifth nation to have designed and built its own aircraft carrier, pushing ahead of China to join an elite club that includes Britain, France, Russia and the United States.

    “It’s a remarkable milestone,” Defence Minister AK Antony said as he stood in front of the giant grey hull of the ship at a ceremony in the southern city of Kochi. “It marks just a first step in a long journey but at the same time an important one.”

    The ship, which will be fitted with weaponry and machinery and then tested over the next four years, is a major advance for a country competing for influence in Asia, analysts say.

    “It is going to be deployed in the Indian Ocean region where the world’s commercial and economic interests coalesce. India’s capability is very much with China in mind,” said Rahul Bedi, a defence expert with IHS Jane’s Defence Weekly.

    On Saturday, India announced its first indigenously-built nuclear submarine was ready for sea trials, a key step before it becomes fully operational. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called it a “giant stride” for the nation.

    “All these are power projection platforms, to project India’s power as an extension of its diplomacy,” Bedi added.

    New Delhi is spending tens of billions of dollars upgrading its mainly Soviet-era military hardware to bolster its defences.

    Successes in its long-range missile and naval programmes have been tempered by expensive failures in developing its own aircraft and other land-based weaponry, leaving the country highly dependent on imports.

    INS Vikrant is two years behind schedule after problems in sourcing specialised steel from Russia, delays with crucial equipment and even a road accident in which vital diesel generators were damaged.

    Overall, India lags far behind China in defence capabilities, analysts say, making the success in beating its regional rival in the race to develop a domestically-produced aircraft carrier significant.

    China’s first carrier, the Liaoning, which was purchased from the Ukraine, went into service last September. Beijing is reportedly planning to construct or acquire a bigger ship in the future.

    Jane’s claimed earlier this month that it has seen evidence that China might be building its first carrier in a shipbuilding facility near Shanghai.

    India already has one aircraft carrier in operation – a 60-year-old British vessel acquired by India in 1987 and renamed INS Viraat – but it will be phased out in the coming years.

    India’s ally Russia is also set to hand over a third aircraft carrier – INS Vikramaditya – later this year after a bitter row over the refurbished Soviet-era warship caused by rising costs and delays.

    The INS Vikrant, which means “courageous” or “bold” in Hindi, is a 40,000-tonne vessel which will carry Russian-built MiG-29 fighter jets and other light aircraft.

    While its hull, design and some of its machinery is domestically made, most of its weaponry will be imported as well as its propulsion system, which was sourced from GE in the United States.

    “Its primary role will only be to defend our naval fleet and it will not be used for ground attacks,” retired rear admiral K Raja Menon said.

    “It’s a defence carrier so it will attack platforms that are coming to attack our (naval) fleet … without air defence our fleet just cannot survive,” Menon said.

    C Uday Bhaskar, a retired naval officer and former director of the National Maritime Foundation in New Delhi, said the ship would “enhance India’s credibility” – but it “would not alter the balance of power with China”.

    “China’s nuclear expertise and ship-building capabilities are of a higher order,” he said.

    The Indian navy is currently working on 39 ships and has begun planning to make another two aircraft carriers, Bedi said.

  13. ইমতিয়ার - ২২ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (৩:৫২ অপরাহ্ণ)

    কী বলেছেন ব্রাডলি ম্যানিং তার রায় ঘোষণার পরে? এ ব্যাপারে প্রেস কনফারেন্স করেছেন তার লিগ্যাল টিম, যাতে তুলে ধরা হয়েছে ম্যানিং-এর বক্তব্য। এখানে পাওয়া যাচ্ছে পুরো বিবরণ : ‘If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society.’

  14. মাসুদ করিম - ২৫ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (২:৪৩ অপরাহ্ণ)

    নওয়াজ শরিফ কী করছেন কোনো খবরই রাখিছ না, কেন? কারণ নেওয়াজের খোঁজ খবর নিয়ে কোনো লাভ নেই — সন্ত্রাস, আঞ্চলিক সম্পর্ক, তালেবান এসব নিয়ে নওয়াজ শরিফের উত্তর কী হবে মুখস্থ, পরে দেখা যাবে, এটাই তিনি সবসময় ক্ষমতায় থাকাকালীন বলে এসেছেন, এখনো তাই বলবেন, তবে তৃতীয়বারে একটু স্মার্ট হয়েছেন শোনা যাচ্ছে বলছেন, দায়িত্ব ভাগ করে দিয়েছি তারা দেখবে।

    A slow surrender?

    IT’S an old trick of Nawaz’s: the more you see, the less you know. And he’s at it again.

    DCC, NSC, CDNS, none of it matters really until you get the A, B, C right. I.E. It’s not the name that matters, it’s the configuration and the quality of the decisions that do.

    Before the election, Nawaz seemed to be on the right track.

    The NSC was anathema because it represented all that the politicians had come to loathe: institutionalising what was the de facto arrangement of power — military on top, the civilians thrashing around below.

    Before the election, Nawaz seemed to get that the DCC is more miss than hit not because of its existing configuration, but because it didn’t have the right ammunition.

    Give the DCC a proper secretariat, a dedicated staff that can help the principals make sense of things, and much of the fog would automatically lift — at least on the civilian side, because the military already has all the paper-churning backup it needs in GHQ and Aabpara.

    That was before the election.

    After the election, are we witnessing a slow surrender?

    Nawaz being Nawaz, it’s never easy to say. Inscrutable and insular at the best of times, he’s taken it to a new level this time — just ask any of the desperate PML-N leaders always asking around about what their boss is thinking, or even up to.

    But there are some clues to what Nawaz is thinking, if not planning and doing.

    First, you have to go back to the basic Nawaz mould. He did and seems still to consider himself heir to the Mughal throne.

    Ardeshir Cowasjee used to tell a brilliant, possibly embellished, tale about this particular tendency of Nawaz.

    The prime minister’s office once rang up Ardeshir to inform him that Nawaz wanted to pay a visit to the splendid Cowasjee home in Karachi. He wasn’t told why, but since no one says no to a visit by the prime minister, Ardeshir agreed.

    When an advance team arrived at his home to secure it and map out the visit, an objection was raised.

    The little wooden door through which all visitors entered the Cowasjee home required everyone to stoop a bit, to avoid banging their head against the beam above the door.

    The prime minister doesn’t bow his head before anyone, Ardeshir was told by the prime ministerial advance team, you’ll have to use a different entrance to receive him.

    Heir to the Mughal throne means Nawaz will only do things when Nawaz is ready to do them.

    The election, Nawaz decided, was a referendum on electricity, so that was his first priority. When terrorism quickly forced itself to the front of the queue, Nawaz’s default response kicked in: I’m not ready yet, I’ve got five years, I’ll deal with this in my way, on my own clock.

    Terrorism, India, Afghanistan, Punjab, intelligence, police, CDNS — they’re all inter-linked and nowhere has the Nawaz imprint been made yet.

    If it rested at that, perhaps it would not matter that much. But there is one significant difference between Nawaz 3.0 and the earlier versions: while he’s not ready to decide, he’s letting others decide.

    It matters less that the leaner, supposedly more focused CDNS will have one more civilian member than uniformed; what matters is that the uniformed members can be expected to speak as one and they alone have a semi-institutionalised form of decision-making and input-taking.

    How that squares with Nawaz’s pre-election promise of the civilians leading and the military following isn’t hard to figure out: it doesn’t.

    The second clue to what Nawaz is thinking was doing the rounds for weeks and confirmed in his speech this week: he and his team had no real idea how bad things were.

    That things were bad was obvious enough; just how bad they are has only dawned on the N-League leadership after coming to power. Reality has caused Nawaz to pause, to take stock first before figuring out what has to be done.

    Politics is of course, and unhappily, supreme here. The right thing to do is secondary to the politically advantageous, or least disadvantageous, thing to do.

    The go-slow approach — for now — is less about figuring out what to do, but about figuring out how to fit the new, post-election, since-coming-to-power information into the political matrix of decision-making.

    Yeah, for example, dialogue isn’t going to go anywhere, but take it off the table quickly and what could that mean for peace in the realm — Fortress Sharif, Punjab?

    The third clue comes courtesy the very small circle that speaks to Nawaz on such matters. Call it the ‘C’ choice: confrontation or co-option.

    Confrontation is off the table, Nawaz’s aides claim. Don’t think about it as wresting power back from the army, they explain, think of it as finding ways to take everyone along.

    Even talk of co-option makes Nawaz’s aides squeamish; they’d rather not frame civ-mil relations in a way that suggests one side emerging ahead of the other. Seen from that perspective, the CDNS makes sense.

    An institutionalised role for the army; a decision in which there was some give-and-take (no NSC, but significant say); a group that presents a joint front; a body that allows one side, the military, to press its case, while the other side, Nawaz, makes up his mind — it gives the veneer of forward movement, while allowing the state of suspended animation to continue.

    Essentially, the heir to the Mughal throne keeps his robes, while the original power centre doesn’t have to get its guard up. A neat, temporary arrangement, if ever there was one.

    Except, passivity on the civilian side can lead to that most familiar of denouements: where everyone begins to see the heir to the Mughal throne is dressed in the emperor’s clothes.

  15. মাসুদ করিম - ২৫ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (৩:২৪ অপরাহ্ণ)

    জরিপ বলছে আমেরিকার ৬০ শতাংশ মানুষ চায়, সিরিয়ায় রাসায়নিক অস্ত্র প্রয়োগের প্রমাণ মিললেও তারা চান না আমেরিকান প্রশাসন সেখানে সামরিক অভিযান চালাক, এবং শুধু ৯ শতাংশ মানুষ মনে করে সিরিয়া নিয়ে ওবামার কোনো পদক্ষেপ নেয়া উচিত। কিন্তু ওবামা তো ২য় বার আসার পর থেকেই হতাশায় দিন কাটাচ্ছেন, তিনি কী করবেন? এরমধ্যেই তিনি চিরাচরিত প্রথা অনুযায়ী ব্রিটিশ প্রধানমন্ত্রী ডেভিড ক্যামেরনের সাথে আলোচনা সাঙ্গ করে রেখেছেন। এখন শুধু ইরানকে তিনি কত ভয় পান তার উপরই সব নির্ভর করবে মনে হচ্ছে, দেশের জরিপের ফলের উপর কেউ যুদ্ধভাবনা ঠিক করে না — আমেরিকান প্রশাসন তো আরো করে না।

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    Poll || Most Americans oppose intervention in Syria even if chemical attack confirmed
    About 60 percent of respondents in a Reuters/Ipsos poll said United States should not intervene in Syria’s civil war, while just 9 percent thought President Barack Obama should act.

    Americans strongly oppose U.S. intervention in Syria’s civil war and believe Washington should stay out of the conflict even if reports that Syria’s government used deadly chemicals to attack civilians are confirmed, a Reuters/Ipsos poll says.

    About 60 percent of Americans surveyed said the United States should not intervene in Syria’s civil war, while just 9 percent thought President Barack Obama should act.

    More Americans would back intervention if it is established that chemical weapons have been used, but even that support has dipped in recent days – just as Syria’s civil war has escalated and the images of hundreds of civilians allegedly killed by chemicals appeared on television screens and the Internet.

    The Reuters/Ipsos poll, taken August 19-23, found that 25 percent of Americans would support U.S. intervention if Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces used chemicals to attack civilians, while 46 percent would oppose it. That represented a decline in backing for U.S. action since August 13, when Reuters/Ipsos tracking polls found that 30.2 percent of Americans supported intervention in Syria if chemicals had been used, while 41.6 percent did not.

    Taken together, the polls suggest that so far, the growing crisis in Syria, and the emotionally wrenching pictures from an alleged chemical attack in a Damascus suburb this week, may actually be hardening many Americans’ resolve not to get involved in another conflict in the Middle East.

    The results – and Reuters/Ipsos polling on the use-of-chemicals question since early June – suggest that if Obama decides to undertake military action against Assad’s regime, he will do so in the face of steady opposition from an American public wary after more than a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    Some foreign and U.S. officials – notably Republican Senator John McCain, whom Obama defeated for the presidency in 2008 – have called Obama too hesitant in deciding whether to act in Syria. But several Americans surveyed in this week’s poll, including Charles Kohls, 68, a former U.S. military officer from Maryland, praised Obama’s caution.

    “The United States has become too much of the world’s policeman and we have become involved in too many places that should be a United Nations realm, not ours,” Kohls said in an interview. “I don’t think we ought to” intervene in Syria.

    Kohls said the possibility of a chemical attack did not alter his belief that the United States should stay out of Syria, or any war for that matter.

    Obama’s administration has come under increasing pressure from various governments, including those in France and Israel, to respond more forcefully to what many have called an unfolding humanitarian and political crisis.

    However, Obama does not appear to be feeling much pressure over Syria from the American people.

    In this week’s Reuters/Ipsos survey of 1,448 people, just 27 percent said they supported his decision to send arms to some Syrian rebels; 47 percent were opposed. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.9 percentage points for each number.

    About 11 percent said Obama should do more to intervene in Syria than sending arms to the rebels, while 89 percent said he should not help the rebels.

    Obama is considering a range of options. The most popular option among Americans: not intervening in Syria at all. That option is backed by 37 percent of Americans, according to the poll.

    Less popular options include air strikes to help the rebels (supported by 12 percent of Americans); imposing a “no-fly” zone over Syria that would ground Assad’s air force (11 percent); funding a multi-national invasion of Syria (9 percent), and invading Syria with U.S. troops (4 percent).

    Deborah Powell, 58, of California, said she initially opposed any involvement by the United States but now supports arming the rebels.

    “I was against any involvement after watching a (television) program that said if we give (rebels) the weapons they could turn them against us, but I think now we need to give them the weapons,” Powell said.

    Asked what changed her mind, she said: “What’s going on over there is terrible.” However, Powell praised Obama’s wariness toward getting the United States involved in another war.

    Some Americans believe the use of chemical weapons has changed the game in Syria, and that the United States should get involved as long as other countries did, too.

    Jonathan Adams, 56, of California, said that he was “happy that we didn’t get involved from the start and I’m glad Obama was cautious. But I think we have gotten past the point of where we should’ve been involved in some way.”

    He said reports of chemical weapons use “went way past the line.”

    Obama spoke with British Prime Minister David Cameron, a top U.S. ally, and agreed that chemical weapon use by Syrian President Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces would merit a “serious response,” a spokesperson for the prime minister said in a statement.

    Syrian opposition accounts that between 500 and well over 1,000 civilians were killed this week by gas in munitions fired by pro-government forces, and video footage of victims’ bodies, have stoked demands abroad for a robust, U.S.-led response after 2 1/2 years of international inaction on Syria’s conflict.

    Syria sought to avert blame by saying its soldiers had found chemical weapons in rebel tunnels.

    Obama has been reluctant to intervene in Syria’s civil war, but reports of the killings near Damascus have put pressure on the White House to make good on the president’s comment a year ago that chemical weapons would be a “red line” for the United States.

    The United States is repositioning naval forces in the Mediterranean to give Obama the option for an armed strike.

    The White House declined to list what options were discussed on Saturday and said Washington was still gathering details about the attack.

    “In coordination with international partners and mindful of the dozens of contemporaneous witness accounts and record of the symptoms of those killed, the U.S. intelligence community continues to gather facts to ascertain what occurred,” it said in a statement.

    American and European security sources have said U.S. and allied intelligence agencies made a preliminary assessment that chemical weapons were used by Syrian forces in the attack. The United Nations has requested access to the site.

    Obama spoke to Cameron after the White House meeting. A spokesperson for the British prime minister said the two men noted increasing signs of Syrian government culpability.

    “They are both gravely concerned by the attack that took place in Damascus on Wednesday and the increasing signs that this was a significant chemical weapons attack carried out by the Syrian regime against its own people,” the spokesperson said.

    “The fact that President Assad has failed to cooperate with the U.N. suggests that the regime has something to hide.”

    Cameron also spoke to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Harper spoke to French President Francois Hollande.

    বিস্তারিত পড়ুন : Barack Obama studies options after Syria gas attack, consults UK’s Cameron।

    • মাসুদ করিম - ২৫ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (৬:১৩ অপরাহ্ণ)

      David Cameron and Barack Obama moved the west closer to military intervention in Syria on Saturday as they agreed that last week’s alleged chemical weapon attacks by the Assad regime had taken the crisis into a new phase that merited a “serious response”.

      In a phone call that lasted 40 minutes, the two leaders are understood to have concluded that the regime of Bashar al-Assad was almost certainly responsible for the assault that is believed to have killed as many as 1,400 people in Damascus in the middle of last week. Cameron was speaking from his holiday in Cornwall.

      The prime minister and US president said time was running out for Assad to allow UN weapons inspectors into the areas where the attack took place. Government sources said the two leaders agreed that all options should be kept open, both to end the suffering of the Syrian people and to make clear that the west could not stand by as chemical weapons were used on innocent civilians.

      A spokesman for No 10 said: “The prime minister and President Obama are both gravely concerned by the attack that took place in Damascus on Wednesday and the increasing signs that this was a significant chemical weapons attack carried out by the Syrian regime against its own people. The UN security council has called for immediate access for UN investigators on the ground in Damascus. The fact that President Assad has failed to co-operate with the UN suggests that the regime has something to hide.

      “They reiterated that significant use of chemical weapons would merit a serious response from the international community and both have tasked officials to examine all the options. They agreed that it is vital that the world upholds the prohibition on the use of chemical weapons and deters further outrages. They agreed to keep in close contact on the issue.”

      The dramatic upping of the stakes came after the international medical charity Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) reported that three hospitals in Damascus had received approximately 3,600 patients displaying neurotoxic symptoms in less than three hours on the morning of Wednesday, 21 August. Of those patients, 355 are reported to have died.

      Dr Bart Janssens, MSF’s director of operations, said: “Medical staff working in these facilities provided detailed information to MSF doctors regarding large numbers of patients arriving with symptoms including convulsions, excess saliva, pinpoint pupils, blurred vision and respiratory distress.”

      He said the reported symptoms strongly indicated “mass exposure to a neurotoxic agent. This would constitute a violation of international humanitarian law, which absolutely prohibits the use of chemical and biological weapons.”

      France’s foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, said on Saturday that “all the information at our disposal converges to indicate that there was a chemical massacre near Damascus and that the [regime of Bashar al-Assad] is responsible”.

      The foreign secretary, William Hague, said last week that “this is a chemical attack by the Assad regime” and “not something that a humane or civilised world can ignore”.

      Obama has been reluctant to commit American forces to what has become a bitter and protracted civil war. However, he said last year that use of chemical weapons would cross a “red line” triggering a more robust US response. It was confirmed yesterday that the US navy is deploying an extra missile warship to the eastern Mediterranean ahead of a summit to debate the massacre.

      The summit will be held in Jordan’s capital, Amman, in the first half of the week as a consensus hardens that the nerve agent sarin was used in the attack in rebel-held east Damascus early on Thursday. Biological samples taken from victims of the attack have been passed to western officials in Jordan after having been smuggled out of Syria over the past 72 hours. Questionnaires have been distributed to officials in the three most affected communities, asking for scientific and environmental details, as well as for organ tissue and clothing worn by victims.

      Officials, who have not identified themselves but claim to be part of an international response, have also made phone contact with rebel officials, seeking photographs of the rockets that are thought to have carried the gas.

      France, Britain and Turkey have blamed the Syrian regime for the attack, which came as its military forces were advancing into the area.

      Syria has continued to deny responsibility as the UN’s disarmament chief, Angela Kane, arrived in Damascus to try to negotiate access to the site of the attack for an inspection team that was sent to investigate three earlier alleged attacks. The team has been in the capital for the past six days and has been pressing for permission to make the journey – only a short distance from its hotel.

      Rebel groups in the area say that they will guarantee safe passage. However, the Syrian government has not agreed and the UN fears that the journey is unsafe without a negotiated agreement.

      The US secretary of state, John Kerry, spoke to Syria’s foreign minister, Walid al-Moualem, on Thursday, the State Department revealed on Saturday. Kerry told him the Damascus government should have let UN inspectors have access to the site of the alleged gas attack, the department said.

      Kerry called “to make clear that if, as they claimed, the Syrian regime has nothing to hide, it should have allowed immediate and unimpeded access to the site rather than continuing to attack the affected area to block access and destroy evidence,” a State Department official said.

      The chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, General Martin Dempsey, will travel to Jordan along with the head of the US central command, General Lloyd Austin, and chiefs of staff from Turkey, Britain, France, Qatar, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Italy and Canada.

      The addition of a US destroyer takes to four the US Mediterranean flotilla, one more than normal. US defence secretary Chuck Hagel said no decision has been made to use the warships in operations against Syria. Speaking on Friday, officials in Washington said no response to Syria would involve sending troops into the country.

      Two of Syria’s three main allies, Russia and Iran, have supported calls for a transparent and credible inquiry into the attack. Both accuse rebel groups of having carried out the atrocity. Syrian state television said on Saturday that its forces had found tunnels in rebel areas in which chemicals were stored.

      The Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, has remained silent since Thursday. Hezbollah leaders roundly condemned car-bombings of two mosques in Lebanon’s second city, Tripoli, one day later, which killed 42 and wounded hundreds. The mosques had been focal points of anti-Assad rhetoric in the largely Sunni north.

      Lebanon, an unstable multi-confessional state, has been perennially on edge since the start of the Syrian uprising with occasional flare-ups in violence that threaten to drag it into the chaos consuming its powerful neighbour. The remains of 20 such rockets have been found in the affected areas, activists and local residents say. Many remain mostly intact, suggesting that they did not detonate on impact and potentially dispersed gas before hitting the ground.

    • মাসুদ করিম - ২৫ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (৭:০৩ অপরাহ্ণ)

    • মাসুদ করিম - ২৬ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (১০:২৯ অপরাহ্ণ)

      ওবামা যুদ্ধার্থী,সিরিয়ায় সামরিক হস্তক্ষেপের পক্ষ-বিপক্ষ নির্ধারণ চলছে এখন, গ্রীষ্মকালীন অবকাশযাপন ছেঁটে ডেভিড ক্যামেরনও প্রস্তুত,রাশিয়া বারবার মনে করিয়ে দিচ্ছে পশ্চিমা শক্তিরা এখনো সাবধান হোক জাতিসংঘকে পাশ কাটিয়ে সামরিক হস্তক্ষেপ হবে নগ্নভাবে আন্তর্জাতিক আইন লঙ্ঘন।

      Lavrov: Unilateral Western Intervention in Syria Against the Law

      Military intervention in Syria would be a “most brazen violation of international legislation” if held without the UN’s backing, the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry said Monday.

      “Paris and London are both calling for the destruction of chemical weapons in Syria even without approval from the UN Security Council. This is a very dangerous, slippery slope,” Sergei Lavrov told journalists in Moscow.

      Britain and France, as well as the US and Turkey, have said they are considering an attack on the embattled regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, which they accuse of using chemical weapons against the rebels it has been fighting since 2011. Assad denies the accusations and blamed a gas attack that allegedly took place last Wednesday on the insurgents.

      The Syrian crisis can only be resolved through political reconciliation, Lavrov said.

      Russia will continue to push for an international conference on Syria – the so-called Geneva 2 – that is to bring representatives of both Assad and the opposition to the negotiation table, Lavrov said.

      He conceded that the current plan to hold the conference in September is “not realistic” anymore, but gave no new prospective date for the event.

      US Secretary of State John Kerry confirmed that Washington still supports the idea of the Geneva 2 talks and is working to convince the Syrian opposition to participate, added Lavrov, who spoke to Kerry by telephone on Sunday.

      • মাসুদ করিম - ২৭ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (৩:২৫ অপরাহ্ণ)

        • মাসুদ করিম - ২৮ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (১২:০৪ অপরাহ্ণ)

          রাশিয়ার সংবাদসংস্থা ইজভেস্তিয়ার (Izvestia) সাথে সাক্ষাৎকারে সিরিয়ার প্রেসিডেন্ট বাশার আল-আসাদ বলেছেন, তিনি সিরিয়ায় আমেরিকান সামরিক হস্তক্ষেপ আশা করেন না। তার ভাষ্য অনুযায়ী সিরিয়ায় তার সেনাবাহিনীর রাসায়নিক অস্ত্র ব্যবহারের প্রশ্নই ওঠে না — তিনি এর জন্য সিরিয়ায় তার সরকার বিরোধী বিদ্রোহী ও বহিরাগত সন্ত্রাসবাদী সামরিক শক্তিকে দায়ী করেছেন, যাদের মদত দিচ্ছে আমেরিকা, কাতার, তুরস্ক ও সৌদিআরব।

          AFP_EastNews_51_XxjpbeE000966_468

          Bashar al-Assad not expecting an American invasion

          August 27, 2013 Alexander Potapov, Yuri Matsarsky, Izvestia

          Izvestia: Mr. President, the most pressing question right now is what the situation is in Syria. What areas are still under rebel control?

          Bashar al-Assad: The issue is not the areas that are under the terrorists’ control and the areas that are under the army’s control. No army in any nation can ever be fully prepared everywhere in the country.

          The terrorists are taking advantage of this, trying to penetrate wherever the army is not present. The problem is not in the areas where there are terrorists, though this changes daily and hourly. The problem is the large number of rebels who come from abroad.

          The main reason for the continuation of military action is the large number of terrorists who are steadily entering Syria from abroad. In addition, these terrorists still receive funding and weapons from abroad.

          Izvestia: This interview is going to be translated into numerous languages and read by many world leaders. What would you like to say to them?

          B.A.: I would like to explain that terrorism is not a bargaining chip that you can keep in your pocket, take out and use whenever you want, and then put back. Terrorism, like a scorpion, can sting at any moment. So you can’t support terrorism in Syria while opposing it in Mali.

          Izvestia: Last Wednesday, the rebels accused the Syrian government of using chemical weapons. How can you respond to this?

          B.A.: It’s nonsense: First they make accusations, and then they gather evidence. So, on Wednesday, they made accusations against us, and it wasn’t until two days later that the American government announced that it was beginning to collect evidence.

          According to the accusations, the army used chemical weapons in an area that is allegedly under rebel control. In fact, in this area there is no clear dividing line between the army and the rebels. And can a government really use chemical weapons or any other weapon of mass destruction where its forces are concentrated? These kinds of accusations are therefore exceptionally political.

          In recent weeks, we held talks with the U.N. about the work of the commission, and, finally, experts came to Syria. Their findings will be presented at the U.N.

          Izvestia: Will you allow the United States to act toward Syria as it acted in Iraq, trying to find a pretext to invade?

          B.A.: This is not the first time the issue of invading Syria has arisen. Since the crisis started, the United States, France and Great Britain have been trying to carry out a military invasion, but they have not been able to convince their own citizens or the world at large that their policy is wise or advantageous. It has also turned out that the situation here is different from the one in Egypt and Tunisia.

          Another obstacle to military action is the widespread understanding that the events in Syria are not a popular revolution or demand for reforms. They are terrorism. In such a situation, the Western leaders cannot say to their citizens, “We are going into Syria in order to support terrorism.”

          Izvestia: Let’s talk about Russia. What will happen if Russia succumbs to Western pressure?

          B.A.: With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States thought that Russia was annihilated forever. But when Vladimir Putin came to power, Russia started to defend its positions more and more emphatically. As a result, a new cold war has started.

          You may ask why Russia is supporting Syria. Russia is not defending President Bashar al-Assad — the Syrian people can elect any president they want. Russia is defending the principles of independence and nonintervention in the domestic affairs of other governments.

          Moreover, Russia is defending its interests in the region, as it has a right to do. These interests do not stop at the port of Tartus. The terrorist strikes in Syria threaten stability throughout the Middle East. Destabilization here would also impact Russia.

          We also shouldn’t forget about the thousands of Russian-Syrian families who form a cultural and human bridge between the two governments.

          Izvestia: Will there be talks with Russia about the supply of oil, goods and weapons? I would particularly like to ask about the contract to provide S-300 systems — have they been supplied to you?

          B.A.: It goes without saying that no country can reveal the presence of specific weapons or agreements to supply them — this information comprises the secrets of a government and its armed forces.

          However, I’d like to say that all contracts that have been made with Russia are being respected. Neither the crisis nor pressure from the United States, Europe or the Persian Gulf nations has prevented their fulfillment. Russia is giving Syria what it needs to defend itself and its people.

          Izvestia: What kind of aid does Syria expect from Russia: economic or military?

          B.A.: Russia’s political support, as well as the scrupulous fulfillment of military contracts despite American pressure, has markedly helped our economic situation.

          Izvestia: Mr. President, whom do you consider your major allies, and whom do you consider your opponents?

          B.A.: The countries that are standing with us on the world stage are Russia and China; on the regional level, Iran is with us. However, I can say that there are positive shifts in the world: Some countries have begun to change their positions.

          There are governments that have openly supported the terrorists in Syria, such as Qatar and Turkey. Qatar sponsors the terrorists, and Turkey trains them and gives them safe passage. Now, Saudi Arabia has replaced Qatar as a sponsor.

          Izvestia: What do you expect from the Geneva 2 conference?

          B.A.: The mission of the Geneva conference is to lay the groundwork for a political resolution in Syria. But we can’t start a political dialogue before foreign support of terrorism stops. We expect from Geneva the continuation of pressure on the countries that are supporting terrorism in Syria. They must halt the covert supplying of arms and sending of mercenary terrorists to Syria.

          • মাসুদ করিম - ৩০ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (৬:০৫ অপরাহ্ণ)

            হয়তো ব্যাপারগুলো সত্যিই এতটাই সহজ, ব্রিটেন নেই তাই ফ্রান্স আছে আমেরিকার সাথে সিরিয়াকে শাস্তি দিতে সিরিয়ার উপর সামরিক হস্তক্ষেপে। এবং এটাও হয়তো খুবই স্বাভাবিক বুশের সঙ্গী টনি ব্লেয়ার যেমন ছিলেন সমাজতান্ত্রিক তেমনি এবার ওবামার সঙ্গী ফ্রঁসোয়া ওলন্দও সমাজতান্ত্রিক।

            France stands firm on Syria despite shock UK vote

            French President François Hollande said Friday that the UK parliamentary vote against taking military action in Syria would not affect France’s will to act alongside the United States in “punishing“ Syria for an alleged chemical weapons attack.

            France has not changed its position on a possible military intervention in Syria, French President François Hollande said on Friday, following a vote in the UK’s lower house against the motion.

            Hollande told French daily Le Monde in an interview that he supported taking “firm” punitive action over an attack he said had caused “irreparable” harm to the Syrian people and said he would work closely with France’s allies to punish the Bashar al-Assad regime.

            Asked if France could take action without Britain, Hollande replied: “Yes. Each country is sovereign to participate or not in an operation. That is valid for Britain as it is for France.”

            French defence officials said openly on Thursday for the first time that the military is preparing for a possible operation, but stopped short of announcing armed intervention.

            Hollande, who does not need parliamentary approval to launch an attack, stressed in an earlier interview the importance of a political solution rather than a military one, but only if world powers were “capable” of stopping the civil war in Syria, which has killed more than 100,000 people since it began two and a half years ago.

            “We will only achieve this [political solution] if the international community is capable of bringing a stop to this escalation of violence, of which the chemical massacre is just one illustration,” Hollande said after meeting Syrian opposition leader Ahmad al-Jarba on Thursday.

            On Tuesday he said that France was ready to “punish” those behind the “heinous” chemical weapons attack outside Damascus on August 21.

            Barack Obama was seeking international allies on Friday after the UK vote, which came as a stunning defeat for Prime Minister David Cameron and left the US president isolated both abroad and at home.

            Several US naval ships have been making their way to the eastern Mediterranean Sea in recent days, while two French anti-air frigates were heading in the same direction. France also has a dozen cruise missile-capable fighter aircraft at military bases in the United Arab Emirates and the Horn of Africa nation of Djibouti.

  16. মাসুদ করিম - ২৭ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (১২:৪৩ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    এডওয়ার্ড স্নোডেন যখন আমেরিকান প্রশাসনের ন্যাক্কারজনক নজরদারির আভাস দিচ্ছিলেন তখন ওবামা, নজরদারির কথা স্বীকার করে এগুলো সব সন্ত্রাসবাদ ঠেকাতে করা বলে তার গ্রীষ্মাবকাশে চলে গেলেন, আস্তে আস্তে সবাই জানতে পারল সন্ত্রাসবাদ ঠেকানোর নামে ইউরোপ দক্ষিণআমেরিকা এশিয়া অস্ট্রেলিয়া সর্বত্র আমেরিকার ‘ন্যাশনাল সার্ভেইয়েন্স এজেন্সি’ কিভাবে নজরদারি চালিয়েছে — আর সর্বশেষ চাঞ্চল্যকর তথ্য এসেছে আমেরিকার এই নজরদারি প্রতিষ্ঠান ‘জাতিসংঘ’এর দপ্তরেও, বিশেষত এর ‘টেলিকনফারেন্সিং সিস্টেম’এর উপর ব্যাপক নজরদারি চালিয়েছে।

    image-408245-galleryV9-edjz
    image-536664-galleryV9-bfsf

    Targeting Foreign Governments

    In an internal presentation, the NSA sums up its vision, which is both global and frighteningly ambitious: “information superiority.” To achieve this worldwide dominance, the intelligence agency has launched diverse programs with names like “Dancingoasis,” “Oakstar” and “Prism.” Some of them aim to prevent terrorist attacks, while others target things like arms deliveries, drug trafficking and organized crime. But there are other programs, like “Blarney” and “Rampart-T,” that serve a different purpose: that of traditional espionage targeting foreign governments.

    Blarney has existed since the 1970s and it falls under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, at least according to the NSA documents, which state that it is based on the cooperation of at least one US telecommunications company that provides services to the agency. The NSA describes the program’s main targets as “diplomatic establishment, counter-terrorism, foreign government and economic.” These documents also say that Blarney is one of the “top sources” for the President’s Daily Brief, a top-secret document which briefs the US president every morning on intelligence matters. Some 11,000 pieces of information reportedly come from Blarney every year.

    No less explosive is the program dubbed “Rampart-T” by the NSA and which, by the agency’s own accounts, has been running since 1991. It has to do with “penetration of hard targets at or near the leadership level” — in other words: heads of state and their closest aides.

    This information is intended for “the president and his national security advisors.” Rampart-T is directed against some 20 countries, including China and Russia, but also Eastern European states.

    The Americans recently drew up a secret chart that maps out what aspects of which countries require intelligence. The 12-page overview, created in April, has a scale of priorities ranging from red “1” (highest degree of interest) to blue “5” (low interest). Countries like Iran, North Korea, China and Russia are colored primarily red, meaning that additional information is required on virtually all fronts.

    But the UN and the EU are also listed as espionage targets, with issues of economic stability as the primary concern. The focus, though, is also on trade policy and foreign policy (each rated “3”) as well as energy security, food products and technological innovations (each rated “5”).

    Bugging the EU

    The espionage attack on the EU is not only a surprise for most European diplomats, who until now assumed that they maintained friendly ties to the US government. It is also remarkable because the NSA has rolled out the full repertoire of intelligence-gathering tools — and has apparently been taking this approach for many years now. According to an operational overview from September 2010 that is rated “secret,” not only have the Americans infiltrated the EU mission to the UN in New York, but also the EU embassy in Washington, giving the building in the heart of the American capital the code name “Magothy.”

    According to this secret document, the NSA has targeted the European missions in three ways:

    The embassies in Washington and New York are bugged.
    At the embassy in New York, the hard disks have also been copied.
    In Washington the agents have also tapped into the internal computer cable network.

    The infiltration of both EU embassies gave the technicians from Fort Meade an invaluable advantage: It guaranteed the Americans continuous access, even if they temporarily lost contact with one of the systems — due, for instance, to a technical update or because an EU administrator thought that he had discovered a virus.

    The embassies are linked via a so-called virtual private network (VPN). “If we lose access to one site, we can immediately regain it by riding the VPN to the other side and punching a whole (sic!) out,” the NSA technicians said during an internal presentation. “We have done this several times when we got locked out of Magothy.”

    Of particular note, the data systems of the EU embassies in America are maintained by technicians in Brussels; Washington and New York are connected to the larger EU network. Whether the NSA has been able to penetrate as far as Brussels remains unclear. What is certain, though, is that they had a great deal of inside knowledge from Brussels, as demonstrated by a classified report from the year 2005 concerning a visit by top American diplomat Clayland Boyden Gray at Fort Meade.

    Spies Spying on the Spies

    Furthermore, NSA technicians working for the Blarney program have managed to decrypt the UN’s internal video teleconferencing (VTC) system. The combination of this new access to the UN and the cracked encryption code have led to “a dramatic improvement in VTC data quality and (the) ability to decrypt the VTC traffic,” the NSA agents noted with great satisfaction: “This traffic is getting us internal UN VTCs (yay!).” Within just under three weeks, the number of decrypted communications increased from 12 to 458.

    Occasionally this espionage verges on the absurd in a manner that would fit in perfectly with a John le Carré novel. According to an internal report, the NSA caught the Chinese spying on the UN in 2011. The NSA succeeded in penetrating their adversary’s defenses and “tap into Chinese SIGINT (signals intelligence) collection,” as it says in a document that describes how spies were spying on spies. Based on this source, the NSA has allegedly gained access to three reports on “high interest, high profile current events.”

    The internal NSA documents correspond to instructions from the State Department, which then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signed off on in July 2009. With the 29-page report called “Reporting and Collection Needs: The United Nations,” the State Department called on its diplomats to collect information on key players of the UN.

    According to this document, the diplomats were asked to gather numbers for phones, mobiles, pagers and fax machines. They were called on to amass phone and email directories, credit card and frequent-flier customer numbers, duty rosters, passwords and even biometric data.

    When SPIEGEL reported on the confidential cable back in 2010, the State Department tried to deflect the criticism by saying that it was merely helping out other agencies. In reality, though, as the NSA documents now clearly show, they served as the basis for various clandestine operations targeting the UN and other countries.

    Experts on the UN have long suspected that the organization has become a hotbed of activity for various intelligence agencies. After leaving Prime Minister Tony Blair’s cabinet, former British Secretary of State for International Development Clare Short admitted that in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003 she had seen transcripts of conversations by then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

    Snooping on Partners

    Short’s statement, which sparked a vehement reaction at the time it was made, has now been confirmed for the first time by the NSA. According to an internal document, the intelligence results had a key influence on “American negotiating tactics at the UN” in connection with the Iraq War. Thanks to the intercepted conversations, the NSA was allegedly able to inform the US State Department and the American Ambassador to the UN with a high degree of certainty that the required majority had been secured before the vote was held on the corresponding UN resolution.

    Snooping on negotiating partners is so rewarding that the NSA engages in this activity around the world, and not just on its home turf. There are secret eavesdropping posts in 80 US embassies and consulates around the world, internally referred to as the “Special Collection Service” (SCS) and jointly operated with the CIA.

    The presence of these spying units ranks among the agency’s best-guarded secrets. After all, they are politically precarious: There are very few cases in which their use has been authorized by the local host countries.

    The small SCS teams (motto: “Vigilantly keeping watch around the world”) intercept communications in their host countries. The required antennas and dishes are usually disguised. According to the documents seen by SPIEGEL, such “concealed collection systems” as they are internally referred to at the NSA, can be hidden behind “roof maintenance sheds” on embassy buildings. Highly classified technical surveillance operations in diplomatic missions such as embassies and consulates are referred to internally in the NSA under the codename “Stateroom.”

    The SCS teams are often disguised as diplomats and their actual mission is “not known by the majority of the diplomatic staff.” According to the Snowden documents, such an SCS branch exists in Frankfurt, another one in Vienna. The existence of bugging units in embassies and consulates is to be kept secret under all circumstances, as it says in the material: If it were leaked, this would “cause serious harm to relations between the US and a foreign government.”

    বিস্তারিত পড়ুন : Codename ‘Apalachee’: How America Spies on Europe and the UN।

  17. মাসুদ করিম - ২৭ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (১:৩৪ অপরাহ্ণ)

    তিন দশকে আফ্রিকা মধ্যপ্রাচ্য ও এশিয়ায় জ্বালানি তেলের ব্যবহার বেড়েছে তিনগুণ (৩০০%)। এই তিন দশকে পৃথিবীতে জ্বালানি তেলের ব্যবহার বেড়েছে ৪০%।

    oil-use-1980
    oil-use-2012

    Note that petroleum consumption in Europe has actually declined over the decades, a trend the EIA attributes to the continent’s energy-efficiency policies, as well as the euro zone’s recent economic stagnation. The countries that were part of the Soviet Union also saw a sharp downtick after the collapse of communism.

    Meanwhile, North America’s fuel use has grown only modestly since 1980 and has actually declined in recent years, due to stricter fuel-economy standards. Here’s EIA: “Motor gasoline consumption, which makes up almost half of total U.S. liquids fuel consumption, fell by 290,000 bbl/d between 2010 and 2012 as the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards led to improvements in vehicle fuel economy that outpaced highway travel growth.”

    But the real story, of course, has been in Asia, which has nearly tripled its fuel consumption since 1980, driven largely by stunning growth in China and India. “If China’s use of petroleum continues to grow as projected,” EIA notes, “it is expected to replace the United States as the world’s largest net oil importer this fall.” (The rapid growth in Middle East consumption, where burning oil for electricity is common, is another important and little-noticed story.)

    The end result? The world is now using a record amount of oil even though Europe and the United States are paring back. And even as companies are finding new sources of crude in the deep ocean, tar sands and shale rock, they’re struggling to keep up and global crude prices are much, much higher than they were back in 1980.

    The interesting question is what happens in the years ahead. Perhaps technology will enable us to keep finding new sources of crude and demand can keep growing for decades to come (although that won’t be very good news for climate change). A second possibility is that the rate of oil production will soon peak and the world will have to cut back — with China and India slowly taking a bigger and bigger share of the market, since they get the most benefit from a marginal barrel of oil. See Chris Nelder for more on that argument.

    Or there’s a third scenario: More recently, some experts like Stanford’s Adam Brandt have suggested that the world’s oil demand isn’t bottomless and that Asia could soon hit “peak demand” the way Europe and the United States appear to have, thanks to a saturation in travel demand and new efficiency regulations. This obviously hasn’t happened yet, but see this recent post for more on this argument.

    বিস্তারিত পড়ুনঃ These maps show how Asia is taking over the oil markets।

  18. মাসুদ করিম - ২৭ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (২:৩৯ অপরাহ্ণ)

    গতকাল সকালে ঘুম থেকে উঠে নিজের মোবাইলে প্রথমেই ঢুকলাম নিউইয়র্ক টাইমসে, একেবারে নতুন একজন মানুষের সাথে পরিচয় হল তার মৃত্যুর সংবাদের মধ্য দিয়ে — মুরিয়েল সিবার্ট, প্রথম মহিলা যিনি ১৯৬৭ সালে সম্পূর্ণ পুরুষশাসিত নিউইয়র্ক স্টক এক্সচেঞ্জে শেয়ার ব্যবসা করার জন্য একটি আসন কিনেছিলেন, তিনি ‘মিকি’ নামেই সমধিক পরিচিত ছিলেন এবং সেসময়ের প্রচলিত ইহুদিবিদ্বেষের শিকার হয়েও ওয়াল স্ট্রিটের সবচেয়ে সফল ব্যবসায়ীদের একজন হয়ে উঠেছিলেন।

    26-SIEBERT-OBIT-articleLarge

    Muriel Siebert, a Determined Trailblazer for Women on Wall Street, Dies at 84

    Muriel Siebert, who became a legend on Wall Street as the first woman to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and the first woman to head one of the exchange’s member firms, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 84.

    The cause was complications of cancer, said Jane H. Macon, a friend and board member of Ms. Siebert’s firm, the Siebert Financial Corporation.

    Ms. Siebert, known to all as Mickie, cultivated the same brash attitude that characterized Wall Street’s most successful men. She bought her seat on the exchange in 1967, but to her immense anger, she remained the only woman admitted to membership for almost a decade.

    She was one of the pioneers in the discount brokerage field, as she transformed Muriel Siebert & Company (now a subsidiary of Siebert Financial) into a discount brokerage in 1975, on the first day that Big Board members were allowed to negotiate commissions.

    She also was the first woman to be superintendent of banking for New York State, appointed by Gov. Hugh Carey in 1977. She served five years during a rocky time when banks were tottering and interest rates were skyrocketing.

    Ms. Siebert was known, to her delight, as a scrapper who refused to acknowledge defeat. She donated millions of dollars from her brokerage and securities underwriting business to help other women get their start in business and finance.

    When she was honored for her efforts in 1992, Ms. Siebert used the luncheon celebration to warn that it was still too soon for women to declare victory in the battle for equality on Wall Street.

    “Firms are doing what they have to do, legally,” she said. “But women are coming into Wall Street in large numbers — and they still are not making partner and are not getting into the positions that lead to the executive suites. There’s still an old-boy network. You just have to keep fighting.”

    She continued fighting the old-boy network all her life. She was one of the first women, in the early 1970s, to fight to end the sexist practices then prevalent in Manhattan social clubs, spurred by an experience she had at the Union League Club. She had arrived there for a board luncheon meeting of the Sales Executive Club and was not allowed in the elevator.

    “I had to go through the kitchen and walk up the back stairs,” she recalled. She was so angry during the meeting that her male colleagues asked what was wrong. When the lunch was finished, they tried to take her down in the elevator with them. When she was again rebuffed, they joined her in walking down the stairs and through the kitchen.

    That experience, and other similar episodes, led her to testify before government bodies about the discriminatory policies of many New York clubs. In time, women were permitted to become members. This was particularly important because of the deal-making and networking done at these clubs.

    Ms. Siebert also successfully lobbied in 1987 to get a ladies’ room on the seventh floor of the New York Stock Exchange, near the entrance to the luncheon club she frequented. She accomplished this in her typical fashion. She warned the exchange’s chairman that if a ladies’ room was not on the floor by the end of the year, she would arrange for a portable toilet to be delivered. The room was installed, and women no longer had to trek down a flight of stairs.

    She once explained her strategy for dealing with obstacles: “I put my head down and charge.”

    Muriel Faye Siebert was born in Cleveland on Sept. 12, 1928, the second of two daughters of Irwin Siebert, a dentist, and his wife, Margaret. She attended Western Reserve University for two years but left in 1952 before graduating because her father became ill.

    She came to New York in 1954, she once said, “with $500, a Studebaker and a dream.” She was hired as a $65-a-week trainee in the research department at Bache & Company.

    “The way it worked, everybody who was already there got to give the new kid one of their junk industries,” she told The New York Times in 1992. “I got airlines, I got motion pictures — things nobody wanted in those days.”

    She changed jobs three times because she said men doing the same work were being paid more than she was. She also discovered when job hunting that when the New York Society of Security Analysts sent out her résumé under the name Muriel Siebert, she received no inquiries, but when the society later distributed it under the name M.F. Siebert, the results were quite different.

    She eventually decided to strike out on her own and become the first woman to purchase a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. She was turned down by the first nine men she asked to sponsor her application before a 10th agreed.

    The exchange told her that if she was admitted, her seat would cost $445,000, and in an unprecedented move, the exchange insisted that she get a bank to lend her $300,000 of the total price. The banks, in turn, refused to lend her the money unless the exchange admitted her. “There would be no loan until I was accepted, and I couldn’t be accepted without the loan,” she said.

    After nearly two years she got the loan, from Chase Manhattan, and she was elected to the New York Stock Exchange on Dec. 28, 1967. It proved to be a historic day but one that was not soon repeated. “For 10 years,” Ms. Siebert said, “it was 1,365 men and me.”

    She continued to encounter resistance, and not only because she was a woman. Ms. Siebert also encountered anti-Semitism, which at the time, she said, was not uncommon in the trust departments she dealt with.

    In 1969, she founded Muriel Siebert & Company, becoming the first woman to own and operate a brokerage firm that was a member of the New York Stock Exchange. On May 1, 1975, after the federal government did away with fixed commissions for brokers, Ms. Siebert declared her company a discount brokerage firm.

    Two years later she put her company in a blind trust and accepted Governor Carey’s appointment as state superintendent of banking. Her five-year term was controversial, as she took the lead in engineering mergers and acquisitions. But in the end she liked to say that no New York bank failed during her tenure.

    In addition to the Albany post, she directed New York City’s Municipal Credit Union, its Urban Development Corporation and its Job Development Authority.

    In 1983, Ms. Siebert returned to Muriel Siebert & Company after losing a bid for the Republican nomination for the United States Senate; she was beaten by Assemblywoman Florence M. Sullivan, who was then defeated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Democratic candidate.

    In 1996, she took her firm public through an unorthodox merger with J. Michaels, a Brooklyn chain of furniture stores. As part of the arrangement, she liquidated the assets of J. Michaels and named the holding company the Siebert Financial Corporation, of which she owned a 97.5 percent share; the remaining 2.5 percent was former J. Michaels stock and was publicly held.

    Ms. Siebert, who never married or had children, is survived by a sister, Elaine Siebert.

    Ms. Siebert, who was often sought out for pungent quotes as a market pundit and occasional critic of Wall Street practices, produced an autobiography in 2002, “Changing the Rules: Adventures of a Wall Street Maverick.”

    In 2007, she celebrated the 40th anniversary of buying a seat on the New York Stock Exchange by ringing the closing bell.

    Ms. Siebert often appeared in public with Monster Girl, her longhaired Chihuahua, and a successor, Monster Girl 2. She claimed affinities with Monster Girl, noting that they were “not intimidated by the big dogs.”

    This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

    Correction: August 27, 2013

    An obituary on Monday about Muriel Siebert, the first woman to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, using information from a spokeswoman, misstated Ms. Siebert’s age and year of birth. She was 84, not 80, and she was born on Sept. 12, 1928, not 1932. The error also appeared in the headline and in a front-page capsule summary. (Ms. Siebert had given her birth year as 1932 during her career.)

  19. মাসুদ করিম - ২৯ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (৯:৫২ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    গতকাল অপরাহ্নে ‘সালমান খুরশিদ’ প্রথমে টুইট করলেন, ৪৮ ঘণ্টার মধ্যে সিরিয়ায় আক্রমণ শুরু করবে আমেরিকা, তারপরেই টুইট করলেন, রাতেই সিরিয়ায় আক্রমণ শুরু করবে আমেরিকা, এটাই তার শেষ টুইট — এরপরই @IndiaMEA যে ভারতের পররাষ্ট্রমন্ত্রী সালমান খুরশিদের নামে নকল হ্যান্ডেল বানিয়ে (সালমান খুরশিদ টুইটারে নেই) সিরিয়া যুদ্ধের আতঙ্ক ছড়ানোর কাজ করছে তা নজরে আসল ভারতীয় পররাষ্ট্র দপ্তরের, জানানো হল টুইটার সদর দপ্তরে এবং ডানা ঝাপটানো বন্ধ হল নকল ‘সালমান খুরশিদ’-এর।

    efake salman khurshid

    Amid reports of an impending Western military strike on Syria over the alleged use of chemical weapons, a fake Twitter account of External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid caused a flutter on Wednesday, saying the attack was to begin soon.

    The government complained to the San Francisco-headquartered company and the fake account was blocked within hours.

    The imposter Twitter handle ‘Salman Khurshid @IndiaMEA’ complete with a picture of the external affairs minister, had the posts: “US SECRETARY OF STATE INFORMS OUR GOVERNMENT THAT AN ATTACK ON SYRIA WILL STARTS WITHING 48 HOURS”.

    Another one went:” Phone talks with British FM W Hague Intervention against Syria to start tonight. India expressed concerns.”

    Its first post went” “This is my official account on Twitter. Welcome! S Khurshid, Minister of Ext. Relations, India.” It also claimed the minister has spoken to the Russian foreign minister on the Syrian crisis.

    Soon the Twitter account of India’s external affairs ministry spokesperson Syed Akbaruddin was flooded with queries asking if the news was true.

    @AkbarMEA, the Twitter handle of the official spokesperson, replied to all queries saying: “The handle @IndiaMEA is a fake one masquerading as Minister Khurshid’s account. He does not have a Twitter handle.” And “@IndiaMEA is a fake account and has been reported to @Twitter.”

    Within a few hours, the imposter handle was blocked with the message “Sorry! That page does not exist!”

    বিস্তারিত পড়ুন : Fake Salman Khurshid account tweets on Syria cause flutter।

  20. মাসুদ করিম - ২৯ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (৩:৪৯ অপরাহ্ণ)

    ভারতের বতর্মান ‘টাকাযুদ্ধ’ শুধু ভারতের নয় সব ‘এমার্জিং মার্কেট’-এর কিন্তু সেটা শুধু তাদের একার থাকবে না, আমাদেরও হয়ে উঠবে কারণ বাংলাদেশ এখন ‘এমার্জিং মার্কেট’-এর ঠিক নিচের অবস্থানেই অবস্থান করছে। দুজন অর্থনীতিবিদের দুটি লেখা এখানে তুলে রাখছি খুব দ্রুতই এসব প্রসঙ্গ নিয়ে আমাদেরও ভাবতে হবে।

    The India of 2013 is not the India of 1991

    M. K. Venu

    With simple ideas that do not require big bang reforms, India can weather the storm caused by global and domestic economic factors

    There are ways of looking at India’s present economic woes marked by a rapid fall in the value of the rupee caused by persistent inflation of the past few years and the high current account deficit (CAD) of about $85 billion (4.5 per cent of GDP) which needs to be funded through uncertain capital inflows year after year. The description of the present crisis by various economic and political analysts by itself tends to carry shades of ideological bias. Some well known economists on the far right prefer to describe the external sector situation as worse than the 1991 economic crisis India had faced. This narrative suggests the 1991 crisis was marked by a severe, external sector crunch and it acted as a trigger for the big bang reforms of the early 1990s. This section believes that the present crisis may be worse than that of 1991 but the government this time round is much more complacent, and less inclined to implement drastic reforms to revive growth.

    Then and now

    Of course, not everyone agrees with the narrative that the India of 2013 is worse than it was in 1991. Actually it is not. And more of the same kind of reforms is perhaps not the answer either. The world was very different in 1991 when western economies were still strong and looking outward, trying to deepen the process of economic globalisation. Today, major OECD economies are looking much more inward than before, trying to fix their own domestic economy and polity. Emerging economies like India, which managed to avoid until 2011 the negative impact of the global financial crisis, began to dramatically slowdown after 2011. Most of the BRICS economies have lost over four per cent off their peak GDP growth rates experienced until 2010.

    After 2010, excess global liquidity flowing from the West, the consequent high international oil and commodity prices fed seamlessly into India’s domestic mismanagement of the supply of key resources such as land, coal, iron ore and critical food items to create a potent cocktail of high inflation and low growth, and a bulging CAD. The key difference between 1991 and 2013 is the availability of global financial flows. In 1991, western finance capital had not significantly penetrated India. Now, a substantial part of western capital is tied to India and other emerging economies where OECD companies have developed a long-term stake. The broader logic of the global capital movement is that it will seamlessly move to every nook and corner of the world where unexploited factors of production exist and there is scope to homogenise the modes of production and consumption in a global template. This relentless process may indeed gather steam after the United States shows further signs of recovery. Indeed, some experienced watchers of the global economic scene have said that a recovery in the U.S. will eventually be beneficial for the emerging economies. This basic logic will sink into the financial markets in due course. At present, the prospect of the U.S. Federal Reserve withdrawing some of the liquidity it had poured into the global marketplace is causing emerging market currencies to sharply depreciate.

    In a sense, the depreciation of 15 to 20 per cent this year of the currencies in Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, Indonesia and India can be seen partially as a knee-jerk reaction to the smart recovery of the housing market in the U.S. and the consequent prospect of the Federal Reserve gradually unwinding its ongoing $40 billion a month support to mortgage bonds over the next year or so. But eventually, a fuller recovery in the U.S. will mean better economic health globally.

    Besides, some tapering of liquidity by the U.S. Federal Reserve is inevitable as such an unconventional monetary policy cannot last forever. The U.S. Federal Reserve balance sheet was roughly $890 billion in 2007. It has ballooned to a little over $3 trillion today simply by printing more dollars. Such massive liquidity injection by printing dollars in such a short period is probably unprecedented in American history. This is also unsustainable because sooner rather than later, such excess liquidity could send both inflation and interest rates shooting up in the U.S. — which again may not be good for the rest of the financially connected world.

    So what should India learn from the current situation? One, it needs to understand that cheap, finance capital flowing in from the West is a double-edged weapon. If not used judiciously to enhance productivity in the domestic economy, such finance will tend to become an external debt trap. This lesson is as important for the government as it is for the Indian capitalist class which has shown a tendency to use cheap finance and scarce resources such as spectrum, coal, land and iron ore to play stock market games in collusion with the political class. Of course, this is a systemic issue and needs to be addressed at the level of electoral funding reform. Indeed, this is more important than “fresh economic reforms” that blinkered economists advocate.

    Using natural resources

    India still has time to work towards insulating itself from the vagaries of global finance causing much weakness in the currency and the current account. To begin with, the government can easily generate $20 billion or one per cent of GDP by allowing higher coal and iron ore production from its large reserves. Our annual coal imports have gone up from roughly $7 billion five years ago to about $18 billion now. The increased dollar outflow was largely avoidable because India has among the largest coal reserves in Asia. India could have saved $10 billion simply by producing more domestic coal. The government must, under a specially regulated dispensation, maybe under the Supreme Court’s watch, revive the export of iron ore from Karnataka and Goa where much of the mining has stopped following judicial intervention. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh spoke about making a special plea to the Supreme Court to restart mining and exports from here. This could add another $7 to $8 billion to the foreign exchange reserves. These are simple ideas which do not require “big bang reforms,” as some overzealous economists might suggest.

    If some of these resources are produced optimally and gold imports are brought down by about $20 billion, to the levels that existed before 2011, the CAD should be back to the comfort zone of less than three per cent of GDP. The moment CAD comes below three per cent of GDP, the overall sentiment would definitely change for the better.

    Food security mechanism

    Further, a more rounded food security mechanism can help insulate the poor from rising food inflation. This can free up the Reserve Bank of India to then look at the manufacturing inflation as a dominant basis for making monetary policy and help ease interest rates for industry. All this needs a dramatic improvement in governance and a return to normality in the strained relations between the bureaucracy, the political class and the judiciary. Some argue that this can only happen after the general election, whenever it is held.

    The capitalist class also has a big lesson to learn. It merely used cheap, western finance all these years to ramp up stock prices based on cornering scarce resources like land and minerals. All such companies are today quoting at 80 per cent below their peak values seen in 2010 when the economy was still doing well.

    These companies today are in a huge debt trap and their interest payments far exceed their earnings annually. Worse, Indian companies have a massive exposure of close to $200 billion of loans from abroad and the sharp fall in the rupee is making their repayment even more difficult.

    Many big business houses thought they could use cheap, global money to create financial, not real wealth. For a while this worked and some of the stock market-created wealth went into the funding of elections. This game is over now. So, the big learning is that there is no substitute for creating real wealth accompanied by higher productivity. Excessively cheap global money is an illusion which gets shattered in a business downcycle.

    India’s Economic Crisis
    By SIMON JOHNSON

    In 2005-6 the consensus among leading international policy makers, including the finance ministers who make up the governing body of the International Monetary Fund, was that economic and financial crises were a thing of the past. The United States and Europe had evolved beyond the potential for serious instability, and middle-income emerging markets had learned hard lessons from their experience over the previous decades, so their policies would be much more careful going forward. Serious crises, if they occurred at all, would be limited to war-torn, low-income countries.

    This view was completely wrong. We are now partway through a full cycle of crises, beginning with the United States (from 2007) and Europe (from 2008 in earnest). It is now the turn of emerging markets to face real problems, including India, a country that experienced great and long overdue success for 20 years.

    There are several types of emerging market crisis. One of the more common varieties starts in the following manner. There is a boom, based on natural resources or finding new niches for manufacturing exports or even implementing sensible liberalization measures. The private sector expands and more prominent companies find it increasingly easy to borrow overseas. Dollar (or other foreign currency-denominated) loans become attractive because they carry a lower interest rate than does borrowing in domestic currency.

    International investment banks beguile the local elite – the economic and political people who make policy decisions – with stories of how their country and the world has changed, so it makes sense to borrow more. This is not a hard sell. Policy makers want to believe they have found the special elixir of economic growth and, in recent years, to believe they have “decoupled” from the prolonged recessions and slow growth in the United States and Western Europe.

    And issuing debt – “increasing leverage,” in the jargon – feels like alchemy during good times. If you put less money down to buy an asset (i.e., less equity and more debt in your purchase) and the asset appreciates in value – then you have a made a great return on your equity. But you are almost certainly not thinking about risk-adjusted returns, i.e., what happens when asset prices fall. Less equity means the value of your debt will exceed the value of your asset that much sooner.

    Put all this together, and you have a classic recipe for vulnerability. Capital inflows (borrowing overseas plus foreigners coming into the local stock market) tend to keep the exchange rate more appreciated than it would be otherwise. This encourages imports and discourages exports, so it is easy to develop a current account deficit (meaning that the country buys more goods and services from the rest of the world than it sells).

    This is sustainable as long as the capital continues to flow in – particularly as long as companies can issue debt in dollars. But as John C. Bluedorn, Rupa Duttagupta, Jaime Guajardo and Petia Topalova of the I.M.F. point out in a new working paper, “Capital Flows Are Fickle: Anytime, Anywhere,” at least since 1980 “private capital flows are typically volatile for all countries, advanced or emerging, across all points in time.”

    No one is immune from the fickle nature of credit in the world economy. International banks love countries until about five minutes before they start trashing them to clients – for example, because they feel (as now) that growth in China and other emerging markets is definitely slowing.

    Shifts in sentiment are unavoidable. The question is: how leveraged are you when this happens and how much debt do you need to refinance while markets are feeling negative about your prospects?

    While the generic description above is a helpful framework, the Indian situation has important special features, as Devesh Kapur of the University of Pennsylvania and Arvind Subramanian, my colleague at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, have stressed. In particular, policy makers have not made the mistake of trying to cling to a fixed exchange rate (i.e., there is no explicit commitment to peg the rupee to a precise rate relative to the dollar).

    As a result, the rupee is able to depreciate without too much drama, and this by itself should, over time, help to reduce imports and increase exports. India’s foreign debts are mostly private, and the government’s fiscal position, while not strong, is also not as weak as seen in Latin America in the 1980s or some European countries more recently.

    (To be precise: there is a large annual budget deficit – the headline number is around 9 percent of gross domestic product – but recent growth and a significant degree of inflation mean that debt relative to G.D.P. is projected to be around 66 percent by the end of 2013. This is gross debt, as reported in the I.M.F.’s latest Fiscal Monitor; the I.M.F. does not compile data on net government debt.)

    Indian foreign exchange reserves remain at relatively strong levels, at least in comparison with past crisis experiences elsewhere.

    This is not to play down the pressures. The effect of exchange rate depreciation is to push up domestic inflation, in part because much of India’s oil is imported (and world oil prices are in dollars, so depreciation immediately pushes up the domestic price in rupees).

    Weakening confidence in the Indian economy has been compounded by some policy confusion in recent months, which has further encouraged domestic residents to move funds out of the country. But the central bank’s signaling of its intentions is likely to become clearer, with some tightening of policy, including modest interest rate increases, following the appointment of Raghuram Rajan as the new central bank governor. (I worked for Mr. Rajan in 2004-5, when he was chief economist at the I.M.F., and I was his successor in that position.)

    Still, there is political pressure to keep the economy growing ahead of elections in early 2014, so we should not expect fiscal policy to tighten. And if the Federal Reserve does indeed tighten monetary policy in the United States – currently referred to as “tapering” its purchase of bonds – that will tend to push up interest rates and is likely to attract more capital out of emerging markets.

    The Fed’s mandate is, by law and by convention, to worry about the United States economy, although officials in Washington are willing to provide outside assistance when things get sufficiently bad (e.g., the dollar funding provided to European banks, directly and indirectly, in the darkest days of 2008-9).

    Terrence Checki of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York got it half right when he said recently, “Fundamentals are fundamental,” and “experience suggests that one cannot overstate the importance of sound economic management, strong fiscal positions, credible proactive monetary policy and rigorous financial-sector oversight.”

    He was talking about the American perspective on what emerging markets need to do – and the trajectory that countries like India must convince foreign investors they are on.

    Of course, Mr. Checki was not talking about the United States, where economic management is shaky, the fiscal position is weak (and another budget crisis looms in October), and monetary policy has struggled to keep up with dealing with the consequences of failed financial-sector oversight (an unfortunate development in recent decades, for which the New York Fed shares responsibility).

    When the United States faces a serious crisis, as in fall 2008, the world becomes unstable and capital flows into the United States, because the dollar is the ultimate reserve currency.

    When a country like India faces crisis, for domestic reasons but also perhaps because of what is happening in the United States, capital tends to flow out of that country and toward safe havens (like the United States).

    You can wring your hands about this system as much as you like – and central bankers around the world have been complaining even more than usual in recent weeks. But this is the way the world works, and this is how it will work for the foreseeable future.

    The message is borrower beware, always. As the United States heads toward its next crazy confrontation over the federal government’s debt ceiling, heavily indebted emerging markets face serious risks.

  21. মাসুদ করিম - ৩০ আগস্ট ২০১৩ (৫:২৭ অপরাহ্ণ)

    সিমাস হিনিকে (Seamus Heaney, 1939-2013)বলা হত ইংরেজি ভাষার বেঁচে থাকা কবিদের মধ্যে মহত্তম, সেই কবি আর বেঁচে নেই, আজ ৭৪ বছর বয়সে তিনি মৃত্যুবরণ করেছেন, কিছু দিন খেকেই তিনি অসুস্থ বোধ করছিলেন এবং ডাবলিন থেকে দূরে কোথাও যাচ্ছিলেন না।

    seamus-heaney-2-540x304

    Digging

    Between my finger and my thumb
    The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

    Under my window, a clean rasping sound
    When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
    My father, digging. I look down
    Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
    Bends low, comes up twenty years away
    Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
    Where he was digging.

    The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
    Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
    He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
    To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
    Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

    By God, the old man could handle a spade.
    Just like his old man.

    My grandfather cut more turf in a day
    Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
    Once I carried him milk in a bottle
    Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
    To drink it, then fell to right away
    Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
    Over his shoulder, going down and down
    For the good turf. Digging.

    The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
    Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
    Through living roots awaken in my head.
    But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

    Between my finger and my thumb
    The squat pen rests.
    I’ll dig with it.

    Seamus Heaney dies aged 74

    Ireland’s Nobel laureate, the poet Seamus Heaney, has died aged 74 in hospital in Dublin after a short illness, his publisher announced this morning.

    Heaney won the Nobel prize for literature in 1995 and was celebrated for his many collections of poetry during his lifetime. In 2010 he won the Forward poetry prize for Human Chain, for a volume of verse inspired by his experiences after a stroke; his earlier collection The Spirit Level was shortlisted in 1996, as was District and Circle in 2006.

    Heaney was born on a small farm near Toomebridge in County Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1939, “the eldest child of an ever-growing family”. In his Nobel address in Stockholm he spoke lovingly of his childhood in a three-roomed thatched farmhouse at Mossbawn where, in their early years, he and his siblings passed “a kind of den-life which was more or less emotionally and intellectually proofed against the outside world”.

    After attending boarding school at St Columb’s College in Derry city as a scholarship boy – a transition, as he has said, “from the earth of farm labour to the heaven of education” – Heaney went on to study at Queen’s University Belfast, where he joined a generation of “Northern poets” that included Michael Longley and Derek Mahon. He published his first major collection, Death of a Naturalist, in 1966.

    Many of the poems he wrote in the 1970s and the 1980s, during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, are unflinching threnodies for a terrible time.

    On receiving the David Cohen prize for lifetime excellence in writing in 2009, Heaney chose to sum up his achievement in poetry by reading his lyrical evocation of a moment during his honeymoon, The Underground, and his sonnet A Drink of Water.

    The Underground sees him and his wife “Honeymooning, moonlighting, late for the Proms”, running down the corridor from the underground to the Royal Albert Hall. Heaney imagines himself as an Orpheus who won’t look back, and therefore keeps his bride. A Drink of Water recalls a memory from his childhood, of an old woman who drew water every morning, “Like an old bat staggering up the field”, who is revealed later as a muse of sorts to the poet. Heaney said it was “about receiving a gift and being enjoined to ‘remember the giver'” – something he said he would always do when remembering that evening.

    At the close of his Nobel address he spoke of “poetry’s power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry’s credit”: “the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being”.

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