বিভাগ/বিষয় নিরপেক্ষ

সুপারিশকৃত লিন্ক : জুন ২০১৪

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।

৭ comments

  1. মাসুদ করিম - ১ জুন ২০১৪ (৯:২৮ অপরাহ্ণ)

    জাতপাত আর লৈঙ্গিক অসমতা ভারতকে সবসময় পেছনে টেনেছে আজো টানছে।

    Indian rape case: tenacious problems in a fast-changing but troubled country

    The mango trees lie on the edge of the village, offering sanctuary from the bitter sun of the north Indian plains. A shelter, a playground, even a shrine for some, they are now a place of death.

    This weekend the trees and the parched fields around them are a crime scene, trampled by local officials, politicians who scent a vote-winning cause, policemen with ancient Lee-Enfield rifles, fast-talking Indian TV reporters and a stream of onlookers from other villages. All stare at the branches of the largest tree, from which two girls were found hanging at dawn last Wednesday, hours after they were abducted and gang-raped. The cousins, aged 14 and 15, had disappeared the night before and were last seen being hauled across the fields by three local men.

    The crime was the latest in a series that has shocked India and badly damaged its image overseas. It combines many of the most tenacious problems in this fast-changing but troubled country: embedded social hierarchies built on prejudice, ritual and violence; huge inequality; patchy and politicised policing; and violence to women.

    Government statistics show 244,270 offences against women reported to the police in 2012 in this nation of 1.25 billion. But campaigners say that this, a 6% rise on 2011, is only a small fraction of the total of such crimes.

    In the village of Katra Sadatgunj, a backbreaking seven-hour drive over 200 miles of rutted roads from the capital Delhi, police officials stress that “steps will be taken”. “Now there is tension, but it is temporary. The situation will be normalised,” said Superintendent Maan S Chouhan, in charge of day-to-day policing in Badaun district, one of the poorest parts of one of the most deprived states in India.

    But the situation will not normalise for Sohan Lal, a farmer who says he is around 50 years old and has lived in the village all his life. At dawn last Wednesday he found his daughter and her cousin hanging from the tree. Talking to the Observer in the family’s earthen-walled house, he pointed to the mud stove where his youngest daughter, who cannot be named under an Indian law to protect rape victims from social stigma, used to cook dinner when she returned from the village school. “She was always studying and working. That’s what she liked best. She wanted to be a doctor,” he said.

    Neighbours confirmed the picture of an earnest, modest young woman. “She was very quiet and never in trouble,’ said Narendra Kumar, 21. “Some boys and girls around here exchange texts and so on, though we can’t really meet in the open much. But she didn’t.”

    Her best friend was her cousin. On Tuesday night the pair set off into the fields just after dusk. Few Indian villages have proper sanitation, so half the country’s population use fields instead. For women this poses particular problems, as strict traditions on modesty mean they can only go in the dark. This leaves them vulnerable to harassment.

    A further factor put the two teenagers in greater danger. Katra Sadatgunj is a Dalit village, meaning it is home to a community from the lowest ranks of the Indian “caste” hierarchy. Dalits, formerly known as “untouchables”, still face systematic discrimination across India. Though in urban areas “caste” identities are weakening, they are still strong in rural areas and particularly in northern parts of the country.

    When the girls failed to return, Babu, Lal’s brother, went out to look for them. There is little electricity in Katra Sadatgunj, – perhaps for an hour a day at best and then only a weak current – so the village was in darkness. But Babu found them by torchlight as they were being pulled and pushed by three local men, aged in their early 20s. He backed off when one threatened him with a home-made handgun, he later told the Indian Express newspaper.

    Of those who reported rapes in India in 2013, 98% named parents, relatives and neighbours as the accused. The men seen by Babu were neighbours, living just 100 metres from the mango trees on the edge of the village.

    But they were from the Yadav caste, still low in the hierarchy but higher than the Dalits and powerful in the village. The area is demographically dominated by Yadavs, the state government is run by a Yadav family and the police in the village were Yadavs. Dalits are often landless labourers, dependent on employment offered by small landowners from higher castes. “What can we do? They are powerful. We are not. They lord it over us,” said Lal, the bereaved father.

    One teenage boy in the village described how attempts by Dalits to defend their unmarried sisters usually ended in a “thrashing”. Chouhan, the policeman, described it differently: “Relations are happy and healthy between communities … They help each other with agriculture.”

    Lal said that when he went to the local police station, staffed by Yadavs, they refused to investigate, asking him his caste. Four hours later he received a call from another officer, telling him to “go to the mango trees, the body of your daughter is there”.

    The girls had been hanged, suspended by the cloth, pink for one and green for the other, they used as headscarves. Postmortems showed they had been repeatedly raped, but doctors were unable to establish, officials said yesterday, if they had committed suicide or been hanged.

    One senior officer, requesting anonymity, suggested the families of the dead girls might have murdered them on learning of the “shameful” gang rape. Such “honour killings” do occur in northern India, and though there is no evidence to back the claim many locals appeared yesterday to have assumed this was one. “They did the right thing, the family. Absolutely,” said Jitender Saath, 22, from a neighbouring village.

    Much of the attention in India has focused on the failings of the police. Those from the village who refused to search for the girls – one is implicated in the rape – are now in jail and have been dismissed from the service. The conviction rate for rape in India is relatively high – around one in four of cases that make it to court. The three neighbours have now been detained.

    Legal changes introduced after the gang-rape and murder of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student in Delhi in December 2012 have made rape a capital offence. Mulayam Singh Yadav, a heavyweight politician in Uttar Pradesh and member of the national parliament, said this was too harsh, because “boys will be boys … [and] make mistakes”.

    The 2012 Delhi gang-rape provoked widespread anger and an unprecedented debate on the causes of the wave of sexual violence in India. Some pointed to a clash of urban and rural lifestyles, to Bollywood films, to the country’s skewed sex ratio. A series of reforms appears to have made little difference in places like Katra Sadatgunj.

    Yesterday Rahul Gandhi, vice-president of India’s Congress party, visited the village and spoke to Lal. “He spent about 10 minutes here,” said the farmer. Afterwards “he promised he’d get me justice. Let’s wait and see.”

  2. মাসুদ করিম - ২ জুন ২০১৪ (৫:৪৬ অপরাহ্ণ)

    হালাল ‘লালবাতি অঞ্চল’ নিয়ে হল্লা

    Post by Masud Karim.

    Halal prostitute hoax magnifies Muslim media myths

    As a recent fake news story illustrates, satire not only fuels the flames of mistrust between Islamophobes and Muslims, but also gives an opportunity for introspection. By Sya Taha.

    Last week saw a news piece written in French about a new bar in Amsterdam that would offer “halal prostitutes”. The story was then picked up by other websites who published their own versions of the story in English: Egyptian website OnIslam, Moroccan website Yabiladi and Jordanian website Albawaba (The first two have since taken down their stories).

    The source of this titillating news appears to be a Belgian “news agency” called Nordpresse. The author of the original article, a certain “Jean Abdelrottenstein”, had a very curious surname – a composite of a common Arabic name and Dutch for “rotten stone”. The address for the new bar, “Hot Croissant”, doesn’t exist in Amsterdam (the name also sounds too delicious to be true).

    Nordpresse is actually a satirical website with a journalistic flavour that regularly produces articles with some political analysis, but always in jest. Its name is a play on Sudpresse, an actual Belgian news agency. (The French equivalent Le Gorafi plays the same role, parodying Le Figaro, a legitimate news site.)

    I believe that allegories and satires are useful tools that can help us understand political issues better. If details of the original story have become too normalised and commonplace, placing the story into a fictional context can often work to help us understand the different concepts behind the issue. For example, tales like Animal Farm and 1984 by George Orwell can help us better understand totalitarian regimes, just as The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood can help us understand patriarchy and religious fundamentalism.

    A selection of Muslim-related news found on Nordpresse reveals articles like a scientific discovery in Great Britain of pigs that have been genetically modified to be halal, and the first non-halal kebab restaurant to open in France. Another one that caught my eye was about a vaccine against homosexuality discovered in Russia and already pre-ordered by the governments of Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan and Yemen. If the latter appears as a reaction to the promulgation of homophobic laws in these countries, then doesn’t the former say something about the current state of media reporting about all that is good and halal?

    Such satirical articles are also a popular technique used by the right-wing to spread racist and Islamophobic ideas. These aim to entrench (false) claims that imams are uneducated, irrational, and declare absurd fatwa to please Muslims who are prone to do anything remotely ridiculous just to satisfy their worldly lusts without going against the rituals demanded by their imaginary god.

    These articles complement the seasonal feature of “media myths” about Muslims. In a recent article, Nesrine Malik of The Guardian collected five popular media stories about British Muslims and explained the truth behind these stories. Meanwhile, Muslims have been resisting these media representations with a pinch of humour, using the hashtags #MuslimRage and #MuslimScareStory on Twitter.

    In the context of marginalised and resentful Muslim-minority populations in Europe, these articles on “halal prostitution” and “halal-certified pigs” aim to inflame the sentiments of Muslims – especially Muslim readers who are not critical or vigilant enough of what the media serves up. But what I find difficult to understand is why websites that have primarily Muslim audiences would reproduce news such as this.

    One possible explanation is that these sorts of articles serve as a mirror to Muslims themselves. They highlight the “halal-ification” of consumer goods as a capitalist innovation aimed at capturing the Muslim market. Examples of such products are halal wines and halal beer that claim to contain only a miniscule amount of alcohol, halal bacon made from turkey meat, and halal nail polish that claims to allow water to seep through.

    Viewed through this lens, “halal prostitution” seems like a bad joke that pokes fun at how Muslims can come up with halal versions of practically anything, especially what has long been considered haram by the orthodoxy.

    Contrary to the orthodox belief that our minds can lead us astray (as told to me in all seriousness by several Islamic teachers), logical thinking is a precious gift bestowed only to humans by our Creator (17:36). We are encouraged to verify information with our senses – indeed, we will even be questioned about whether we used these well. So before you forward that article, do some verification first.

    And if “halal gambling” ever makes its appearance, I’ll be the first to tell you.

  3. মাসুদ করিম - ৪ জুন ২০১৪ (৪:৪৯ অপরাহ্ণ)

    Let’s Talk About Tiananmen

    The violent suppression of protesters around central Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, ordered by the ruling Communist Party, is one of the most crucial moments in modern Chinese history. It has been almost 25 years since what many here call the “6/4 incident,” which may have killed anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of people — the exact figure cannot be determined because of official censorship — but China’s central authorities still have not reflected on this expression of violence, one which mobilized tanks and guns. Instead, the government has expended vast sums on what it calls “stability maintenance” to stifle the voice of the people, all the while refusing to publish the names of those killed, missing, or detained after 6/4. Meanwhile, the families of 6/4 victims continue to be harassed by secret police. Through it all, many Chinese people have chosen to remain silent. That has to change.

    Even today, the 6/4 incident is the great forbidden zone in Chinese discourse. In 2012 and then 2013, as the June 4 anniversary approached, authorities issued orders prohibiting Chinese media from discussing it. On June 1, 2012, Chinese propaganda authorities — collectively called the “Ministry of Truth” by Chinese netizens in a nod to George Orwell — issued a directive reading in part, “Please delete information referring to 6/4 anywhere on the Internet.” On May 27, 2013, the Ministry of Truth issued this directive: “Please block the following keywords from searches on Chinese Weibos [microblogging sites]: ‘Tiananmen,’ ’89,’ ’64,’ ‘June 4,’ ‘Li Peng Beijing’ [then-premier Li is believed to be one of the main architects of the 6/4 crackdown], and ‘demonstrate.'”

    One could argue that Chinese don’t want to look to the past anyway, they want to look forward — but the facts don’t support that argument. Over the past 20 years, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau, and other parts of Greater China have consistently paid annual tribute to the 6/4 incident. To stop related information from filtering into the mainland, the Ministry of Truth issued a June 2, 2012, order that “every Weibo [platform] must, starting at 16:00 today and lasting until 24:00 on June 5, refrain from sharing any video or picture originating with IP addresses in Hong Kong, Macau, or Taiwan.”

    Here on the mainland, mainstream Chinese society largely keeps a hushed silence around the anniversary, one aided and enforced by propaganda authorities. As a result, public comments about 6/4 from well-known Chinese are exceedingly rare. Here’s a revealing exception that proves the rule: In July 2013, Jack Ma (or Ma Yun in Chinese), the founder and executive chairman of massive web platform Alibaba, and one of the most successful and admired businessmen in all of China, reportedly said that Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader in 1989, made “the most correct decision” with regard to the Tiananmen protest. (Ma later claimed that his remarks were misinterpreted). The implications of Ma’s statement received strong criticism from some netizens both at home and abroad, showing that the power of Chinese civil society is growing, even in a time of hardship.

    After this outcry, on July 17, 2013, the Ministry of Truth responded predictably, issuing this directive: “Please clean up all comments that maliciously attack Ma Yun’s views on the 6/4 question, and directly close all hostile accounts!” (Disclosure: I used to work for Tencent, an Internet company that competes in some respect with Ma’s.)

    This incident illuminates the authorities’ continued unwillingness to allow any discussion of 6/4, even if, as in Ma’s case, the speech is arguably pro-party. The censorship is so tight around 6/4 because any public mention of the incident might start a discussion among the people, and the government would no longer be able to hide the truth.

    But we don’t have to keep silent. I think that the demonstrations at the end of the 1980s were a laudable attempt by Chinese people to seek democracy. Chinese who love democracy, freedom, and human rights should carry on the courageous work that those protesters started.

    Specifically, we can lobby the governments, legislatures, NGOs, and academics of democratic countries to put human rights first when dealing with China. More mainland Chinese could also try to attend the annual vigils and other commemorative activities in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau, and help build museums and monuments to 6/4. We can also try harder — in the Internet, in our media, and in the academy — to find ways around the censorship that seeks to stifle discussion of 6/4. We must work harder to demand responsibility for the massacre, speed up the release of prisoners of conscience, put an end to one-party rule, and establish a democratic China. This is the best way to memorialize those pioneers who shed blood and sweat to fight for democracy and freedom.

    What China Loses by Forgetting

    By Ai Weiwei

    In the last month, in two separate cities, I was involved in events related to the rewriting of the history of Chinese contemporary art. In Shanghai, two of my works, “Stool” and “Sunflower Seeds,” were included in an exhibition commemorating the 15th year of the Chinese Contemporary Art Award. A half-hour before the show opened, local officials had my name erased from the exhibition’s wall text and barred the artworks from being displayed. A few weeks later in Beijing, under similar pressure, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art excised my name from publicity information about an upcoming show honoring my late friend Hans van Dijk, with whom I had founded one of the first experimental art spaces in China. I decided to withdraw all my pieces from the exhibition in protest.

    In both cases, the works in question were deemed uncontroversial in themselves. The point was to remove any reference to me and my work to keep me out of the public eye in the run-up to the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. My lawyer and friend Pu Zhiqiang has suffered worse: He and four others were recently detained for discussing Tiananmen — where he’d been one of the student protesters — in a private gathering.

    Pu Zhiqiang is one of the few people in this country who insists on not having his history completely erased. I, too, was censored not for the content of my work, but because I am a person who insists on the facts, who wants an admission of history and who has constantly voiced these concerns on the Internet. These are all sins in China today — especially now, with this anniversary upon us.

    Modern China’s forgetfulness did not start or end with Tiananmen. Even before the summer of 1989, dozens of darker, crueler incidents lay hidden in Chinese history. Today’s leaders cannot acknowledge their stated ideology before 1949, the principles that helped the Communists gain power over the Nationalist government: establishing a democratic and law-abiding society, ending the one-party system and having an independent judiciary. In 1989, the students in Tiananmen Square asked for those same things. Since then, they’ve become unmentionable.

    During Chairman Mao’s lifetime, he started dozens of political movements, none of which have been re-examined by the party in a forthright way. Huge topics such as the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward lack any accepted accounting. Because there is no discussion of these events, Chinese still have little understanding of their consequences. Censorship has in effect neutered society, transforming it into a damaged, irrational and purposeless creature.

    In the West, there are those who think that a new group of leaders can somehow bring change to China — that “reformers” can eventually outweigh the “hardliners” within the party. Yet while China has progressed in many ways since 1989, the system has not. How can it, when those who run things refuse to analyze or discuss the morality of past decisions? How can a government that alters or even completely erases history, acknowledge its faults and adjust its actions in the future?

    We Chinese are not blameless either. While Chinese society has undergone some of the most extreme changes in human history in the last 25 years, in the realm of values, very little has changed. Most of us are first and foremost concerned with our day-to-day needs and ambitions — jobs, education, apartments — and won’t exert much effort or sacrifice to achieve anything beyond that.

    China has chosen to forget, or to allow forgetting — an attitude the West will find hard to understand. This provides China a way to liberate itself from heavy self-criticism, as well as a heavier moral burden. More important, it frees Chinese from responsibility for their actions and acquiescence.

    If China has pulled off an economic miracle since 1989, this self-imposed amnesia is also a sort of Chinese miracle. The mindset will not change until Chinese themselves understand that the lack of accurate information about their own past injures their well-being just as much as the polluted air or corruption.

    How long can China continue on this forgetful path? With the Internet and globalization exposing citizens to truths that are self-evident elsewhere in the world, the country is facing an internal crisis of credibility. The loss of trust and moral common ground between individuals and the state is the most dangerous issue facing the regime today. China cannot move forward unless it first confronts this problem — rather than suppressing it like so much else in our history.

  4. মাসুদ করিম - ৭ জুন ২০১৪ (১০:৫৭ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    জন্ম কোথায় ফুটবলের? সেপ ব্লাটার তো সায় দিচ্ছেন, ফুটবলের জন্ম চীনে!

    Football origin: what’s the true story?

    Images of a beaming FIFA President Sepp Blatter and a small blue certificate in the Chinese city of Zibo proclaim it as the birthplace of football, to the fury of English experts.

    A map in Zibo’s Qi State History Museum shows a thin line stretching from China to Egypt, then to Greece, Rome and France, before finishing in England, commonly known as the home of football after the rules were codified there in the 19th century.

    The track represents the path of football’s development, according to the museum, with the certificate — signed by Blatter — honouring China as “the cradle of the earliest forms of football”.

    But international experts are sceptical of such claims, pointing to a ” tenuous ” link between the ancient Chinese game of cuju and the modern sport, and questioning FIFA’s motives.

    Statues of cuju players stand on street corners and posters on bus shelters depict the supposed forebear of the modern game.

    What’s cuju?

    Different types of cuju existed in ancient China, but the competitive game still played today involves keeping a leather ball stuffed with feathers off the ground without using arms or hands, before heading or kicking it though a hole above head height.

    A gladiatorial version with much physical contact emerged in the Warring States period which unified China almost 2,500 years ago, and was popular with soldiers exercising their legs after days on horseback.

    But experts outside China believe there are huge differences between cuju and modern football.

    Historians say other ball sports existed around the same time as cuju emerged, including a Greek game known as episkyros.

    An ancient stone carving at the Acropolis Museum in Athens shows a Greek athlete balancing a ball on his thigh, and some say episkyros evolved into a game played by the Romans, called harpastum, which was then transported to Britain.

    There the modern game was born when the Football Association rules, drawing on a public school mob game, were written by Ebenezer Cobb Morley in 1863, and have since changed very little.

    For British historian Tom Holland, football began in the 19th century.

    “I’m afraid I don’t know anything about the classical origins of football, for the simple reason they don’t exist,” he said.

    British football author Jonathan Wilson agreed, saying that the 1863 rules “were then spread across the world by British sailors and traders”.

    “At no point did they come upon a local form of football that needed to be eradicated before the British game could take root,” he said. “Rather foreign cultures took on those laws and interpreted them in their own way.”

  5. মাসুদ করিম - ৮ জুন ২০১৪ (৮:৩৯ অপরাহ্ণ)

    তিন দিনের উপবাসে রক্তে উৎপন্ন হবে নতুন শ্বেত কণিকা তাতে সঞ্জীবিত হবে শরীরের সম্পূর্ণ রোগ প্রতিরোধ প্রক্রিয়া। কেমো নেয়া শরীরের জন্য বয়ে আনতে পারে সুসংবাদ।

    Fasting for three days can regenerate entire immune system, study finds

    Fasting for as little as three days can regenerate the entire immune system, even in the elderly, scientists have found in a breakthrough described as “remarkable”.

    Although fasting diets have been criticised by nutritionists for being unhealthy, new research suggests starving the body kick-starts stem cells into producing new white blood cells, which fight off infection.

    Scientists at the University of Southern California say the discovery could be particularly beneficial for people suffering from damaged immune systems, such as cancer patients on chemotherapy.

    It could also help the elderly whose immune system becomes less effective as they age, making it harder for them to fight off even common diseases.

    The researchers say fasting “flips a regenerative switch” which prompts stem cells to create brand new white blood cells, essentially regenerating the entire immune system.

    “It gives the ‘OK’ for stem cells to go ahead and begin proliferating and rebuild the entire system,” said Prof Valter Longo, Professor of Gerontology and the Biological Sciences at the University of California.

    “And the good news is that the body got rid of the parts of the system that might be damaged or old, the inefficient parts, during the fasting.

    “Now, if you start with a system heavily damaged by chemotherapy or ageing, fasting cycles can generate, literally, a new immune system.”

    Prolonged fasting forces the body to use stores of glucose and fat but also breaks down a significant portion of white blood cells.

    During each cycle of fasting, this depletion of white blood cells induces changes that trigger stem cell-based regeneration of new immune system cells.

    In trials humans were asked to regularly fast for between two and four days over a six-month period.

    Scientists found that prolonged fasting also reduced the enzyme PKA, which is linked to ageing and a hormone which increases cancer risk and tumour growth.

    “We could not predict that prolonged fasting would have such a remarkable effect in promoting stem cell-based regeneration of the hematopoietic system,” added Prof Longo.

    “When you starve, the system tries to save energy, and one of the things it can do to save energy is to recycle a lot of the immune cells that are not needed, especially those that may be damaged,” Dr Longo said.

    “What we started noticing in both our human work and animal work is that the white blood cell count goes down with prolonged fasting. Then when you re-feed, the blood cells come back. So we started thinking, well, where does it come from?”

    Fasting for 72 hours also protected cancer patients against the toxic impact of chemotherapy.

    “While chemotherapy saves lives, it causes significant collateral damage to the immune system. The results of this study suggest that fasting may mitigate some of the harmful effects of chemotherapy,” said co-author Tanya Dorff, assistant professor of clinical medicine at the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center and Hospital.

    “More clinical studies are needed, and any such dietary intervention should be undertaken only under the guidance of a physician.”

    “We are investigating the possibility that these effects are applicable to many different systems and organs, not just the immune system,” added Prof Longo.

    However, some British experts were sceptical of the research.

    Dr Graham Rook, emeritus professor of immunology at University College London, said the study sounded “improbable”.

    Chris Mason, Professor of Regenerative Medicine at UCL, said: “There is some interesting data here. It sees that fasting reduces the number and size of cells and then re-feeding at 72 hours saw a rebound.

    “That could be potentially useful because that is not such a long time that it would be terribly harmful to someone with cancer.

    “But I think the most sensible way forward would be to synthesize this effect with drugs. I am not sure fasting is the best idea. People are better eating on a regular basis.”

    Dr Longo added: “There is no evidence at all that fasting would be dangerous while there is strong evidence that it is beneficial.

    “I have received emails from hundreds of cancer patients who have combined chemo with fasting, many with the assistance of the oncologists.

    “Thus far the great majority have reported doing very well and only a few have reported some side effects including fainting and a temporary increase in liver markers. Clearly we need to finish the clinical trials, but it looks very promising.”

  6. মাসুদ করিম - ৩০ জুন ২০১৪ (১২:১২ অপরাহ্ণ)

    চলে গেলেন কবি আবুল হোসেন

    কবি আবুল হোসেন আর নেই। বার্ধক্যজনিত রোগে ভুগে রোববার মৃত্যু হয়েছে তার।

    কবির ছেলে সেলিম এফ আর হোসেন বিডিনিউজ টোয়েন্টিফোর ডটকমকে জানিয়েছেন, রোববার রাতে রাজধানীর স্কয়ার হাসপাতালে তার মৃত্যু হয়েছে।

    মঙ্গলবার কবির জানাজা হবে বলে জানান সেলিম। তার আগ পর্যন্ত মরদেহ হাসপাতালের হিমঘরে থাকবে।

    আবুল হোসেনের বয়স হয়েছিল ৯২ বছর। তিনি দুই ছেলে ও দুই মেয়ে রেখে গেছেন। তার স্ত্রী প্রায় দশক কাল আগে মারা যান।

    ১৯২২ সালের ১৫ অগাস্ট খুলনা জেলার ফকিরহাটের আড়ুডাঙ্গায় জন্ম আবুল হোসেনের। অর্থনীতিতে স্নাতক ডিগ্রি নিয়ে সরকারি চাকরিতে যোগ দিলেও এর মধ্যেই সাহিত্য সাধনা চলে তার।

    যুগ্মসচিব হিসেবে অবসরে যাওয়ার পর ধানমণ্ডির বাড়িতেই প্রায় পুরোটা সময় কাটাতেন তিনি।

    আবুল হোসেনের কাব্যগ্রন্থের মধ্যে রয়েছে- নববসন্ত, বিরস সংলাপ, দুঃস্বপ্ন থেকে দুঃস্বপ্নে, এখনও সময় আছে, রাজারাজড়া। ইকবালের কবিতা বাংলায় অনুবাদ করেছেন তিনি।
    বিবিধ গদ্য শিরোনামে প্রবন্ধগ্রন্থ, অরণ্যের ডাক শিরোনামে অনুবাদ উপন্যাস এবং আমার এই ভুবন ও আর এক ভুবন শিরোনামে স্মৃতিকথাও রয়েছে তার।

    সাহিত্যকর্মের জন্য একুশে পদক ও বাংলা একাডেমি পুরস্কারে ভূষিত আবুল হোসেন আরো অনেক সম্মাননা ও পুরস্কার পেয়েছেন।

    বাংলাদেশের যে কয়জন কবি ও সাহিত্যিক কবিগুরু রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর ও জাতীয় কবি নজরুল ইসলামের সংস্পর্শ পেয়েছিলেন, তাদের মধ্যে আবুল হোসেন একজন।

    বাংলা কবিতার আধুনিক ধারার পথিকৃৎ হিসেবে তাকে অনেকে বিবেচনা করেন।

  7. Pavel - ১ জুলাই ২০১৪ (১২:০৭ পূর্বাহ্ণ)

    ভাল ভাল ক‍‍বি লেখক চ‍লে যাচ্ছে কিন্তু তাদের মত আর তৈরি হচ্ছে না

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