Govt must provide more clarity regarding election, reform, and trial.
Urgent measures needed to prevent a deadly outbreak
The HSIA situation is clearly concerning, and must be addressed before a major accident occurs
We find no word strong enough to express our shock and consternation at the manhandling by some Rab elements of media correspondent Atiqur Rahman in Meherpur. He was roughed up to the point of being taken to hospital. What was his fault? He had merely asked a Rab vehicle parked in the middle of a side street to be removed to make way for the rickshaw he was riding home on, following Tarabi prayers after day-long fasting....
The Supreme Court's rejection of the government's 21st plea for time extension for implementation of the 12-point High Court directive issued in 1999, to effect separation of the judiciary from the executive, has brought to the fore the government's long-winded failure to accomplish the task. Apart from the time extensions sought and received by the past AL government, the BNP-led alliance government has had a disgraceful track record of dithering on the constitutional obligation whose requirements were clearly spelled out through the HC directives some half a decade ago....
There is no stronger test of a political party's real character than power and authority. Success in an election only adds to this acid test....
It is no secret that the pollution of the water in Gulshan-Banani-Baridhara Lake has crossed the limits of tolerance. However, the latest report shows that the extent of the pollution could be much greater than generally believed....
A shoddy plan of the power ministry has fallen through. Thank God! But why does it have to be threats of fund suspension from the development partners to make the government come out of its deviant ways? While one feels happy that sanity has prevailed in the power ministry at last, what it was up to by way of implementing small power plant project is mind boggling. But for the World Bank intervention this project would have been pushed through by means that would be patently dishonest....
King Gyanendra of Nepal has offered an olive branch to country's political parties in a bid to settle political unrest by pledging to hold parliamentary elections in early 2007. The political parties, clamouring for early return of democracy in the country, expectedly were not pacified by the announcement and instead urged the King to hold polls much earlier and not seek to cling to power. The King, who seized all powers in the Himalayan kingdom in February this year, by dismissing the elected prime minister, seems in no mood to heed this demand and, consequently, the stalemate persists. Nepal, embroiled in the twin problems of political unrest and a long drawn insurgency by the ultra leftist "Maoists", remains in crisis with little sign of early resolution of any of two vexed issues...
The more we delve into the government decision to switch from a multi-stream syllabi to a so-called unified system at the secondary level, the more dumbfounding it gets. Education in an incrementally growing knowledge-based society, right across the globe, is not the thing to be played around with; much less at the secondary level providing the building blocks for an edifice of a meaningful national future for our younger generations....
In1513, Niccolà Machiavelli wrote inIl Principethat when everybody can tell you the truth, you fail to get respect. So, what does it mean? Respect is when you play hide and seek with the truth. Don't smoke in front of your parents. Don't curse in front of elderly people. Never challenge the authority of a powerful man. Hold it if you are going to tell a friend that he sucks. Respect has a lot to do with suppression of facts. It is much about lying to others....
Ideology and modern day terrorism go hand in hand. In Europe one saw, in the late sixties, for the first time, highly motivated groups with radical views against the establishment, using violence as a means to make their point. These terrorist groups, in devising their attack strategy exploited the vulnerability of the civilian underbelly of the state. H.Eclestein in his book "Internal war" in 1964 wrote that "Terrorism is not simply the act of a demented few but represents a deeper academic impulse against repression in its most fundamental sense. Terrorism increases among political activists as well as among psychopaths in direct ratio to control and rationalisation of modern technological society and the seeming failure of other parts of revolutionary activity"....
The series of clashes at Kanchpur between the factory workers and the police that left hundreds hurt, valuable property damaged and highway traffic blocked for hours was most regrettable as the violent eruption was utterly disproportionate to a rumor floating about a worker having disappeared at the behest of some security guards in a textile unit. It was, as though, a mountain made out of a molehill....
