By Rater Zonaki

Hong Kong, China — “Life is so cheap in Bangladesh,” a senior journalist pointed out to a Bangladesh Army colonel who had come to his office to intimidate him. “My life can be ended at any time … by any of the violence that goes on around us. Why are you so concerned about my life?”

The colonel, an officer of the Directorate General of the Forces Intelligence, had come to warn the journalist to stop speaking out against lawlessness during the two-year state of emergency that ended in December, 2008.

The DGFI is known for the specialized torture cells it maintains in the country’s garrisons, used to interrogate suspects. Many of the country’s politicians have experienced the taste of torture in those cells.

Bangladeshi authorities routinely prove that life is cheap in the country. The poor man’s life is cheapest of all. An incident occurred last Saturday at Tongi in Gazipur district, near the capital Dhaka, that illustrates this point.

Around 1,500 workers reporting for work Saturday morning at Nippon Garments, a readymade garment factory, were met by a notice stating that the factory would be closed for a month. They had not been told of this closure when they ended their day’s work on Friday, and their monthly wages of US$30 had not been paid.

This is a frequent occurrence in the country’s readymade garment industry. Employers or their loyal staff terminate ordinary workers whenever they wish, often by verbal notice, as most workers do not have written contracts that detail their employment status and salaries.

It is a “national tradition” in Bangladesh that the laws favor those in power, not the ordinary people. This has often caused frustration among the people, who then demonstrate to express their demands, regardless of their legitimacy or logic.

The outraged workers of the closed garment factory demonstrated on the Dhaka-Mymensingh highway. When factory authorities failed to meet the workers or respond to their demands, they got impatient and began vandalizing vehicles.

The government sent riot police to control the situation. The police suddenly started firing indiscriminately at the demonstrators, killing at least three people – a rickshaw-puller who had gone to rescue his garment-worker wife, a pedestrian and a mason. Many others were wounded by police bullets.

The media claimed there were even more deaths, and accused the police of a cover-up to suppress the truth. But Home Minister Sahara Khatun denied that anyone was killed by police gunfire. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina seems to have ended the issue simply by declaring that none would be spared if found guilty.

Unfortunately, Bangladeshis already know that they cannot expect justice from their politicians. Deaths due to police gunfire or other unwarranted violence are quite common. The police torture or kill people in custody. Political parties also kill their rivals in open attacks.

In recent years, for example, a number of people were killed in Sherpur, Jamalpur and adjacent districts when police opened fire on farmers who were demanding fertilizer to grow their crops.
Around eight villagers of Shibganj in Chapainawabganj district were killed by police gunshots for demanding electricity, after being forced to pay electric bills without having received even the minimum power supply.

UA

(Submitted by reader)

The price of gold has touched an all-time high after a large sale of the precious commodity by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to India.

Gold struck a high of $1,095.05 an ounce in London, against $1,084.50 late in New York on Tuesday.

The IMF plans to sell more than 400 tonnes of gold

Buyers moved in after the IMF decision to sell 200 tonnes of gold to India’s central bank.

Gold and other commodity prices have surged recently as investors have moved away from the US dollar.

Spreading risk

The sale to India was nearly half the 403.3 tonnes of gold the IMF has targeted for sale over the coming years.

“The question now is, who buys the rest of the IMF gold?” Bart Melek at BMO Capital Markets said in a note to clients.

“We suspect it may be China, other Asian countries, Russia or even India again, as they hold relatively little gold relative to their very large foreign exchange reserves, and may want to diversify away from US dollars.”

The price of gold is typically strong in the October to December period because of the higher demand for jewellery in the run-up to Christmas and the Indian festival of Diwali.

BBC

A painstaking analysis of thousands of genes and the proteins they encode shows that human beings are biologically complex, at least in part, because of the way humans evolved to cope with redundancies arising from duplicate genes.

“We have found a specific evolutionary mechanism to account for a portion of the intricate biological complexity of our species,” said Ariel Fernandez, professor of bioengineering at Rice University. “It is a coping mechanism, a process that enables us to deal with the fitness consequences of inefficient selection. It enables some of our proteins to become more specialized over time, and in turn makes us more complex.”

Fernandez is the lead author of a paper slated to appear in the December issue of the journal Genome Research. The research is available online now.

Fernandez said the study drew from previous findings by his own research group and from seminal work of Michael Lynch, Distinguished Professor of Biology at Indiana University and a recently elected a fellow of the National Academy of Science. Lynch’s work has shown that natural selection is less efficient in humans as compared with simpler creatures like bacteria. This “selection inefficiency” arises from the smaller population size of humans as compared with unicellular organisms.

“In all organisms, genes get duplicated every so often, for reasons we don’t fully understand,” Fernandez said. “When working efficiently, natural selection eliminates many of these duplicates, which are called ‘paralogs.’ In our earlier work, we saw that an unusual number of gene duplicates had survived in the human genome, which makes sense given selection inefficiency in humans.”

In prior research on protein structure, Fernandez’s team found that some proteins are packaged more poorly than others. Moreover, they found that the least-efficiently packed proteins are structurally stable only when they bind with partner proteins to form complexes.

“These poorly packed proteins are potential troublemakers when gene duplication occurs,” Fernandez said. “The paralog encodes more copies of the protein than the body needs. This is called a ‘dosage imbalance,’ and it can make us sick. For instance, dosage imbalance has been implicated in Alzheimer’s and other diseases.”

Given selection inefficiency, Fernandez knew that paralogs encoding poorly packed proteins could remain in the human genome for quite a while. So he and graduate student Jianpeng Chen decided to examine whether gene duplicates had remained in the genome long enough for random genetic mutations to affect the paralogs dissimilarly. Fernandez and Chen, now a senior researcher in Beijing, China, cross-analyzed databases on genomics, protein structure, microRNA regulation and protein expression in such troublesome paralogs.

BN

PUBLISHED ON NOVEMBER 1, 2009

Filipino nurses have the longest record of migrating, as well as the longest history of abuse. This abuse is a result of aggressive, profit-driven, exploitative policies of both their point-of-origin and destination countries. One of these is Canada, one of the most popular destinations now for Filipino nurses.

By JHONG DELA CRUZ
Bulatlat.com

ALBERTA, Canada — When the United States shut its door to foreign nurses in 2008, many turned to Canada. Also a First World country with a large number of nurses due to retire soon, Canada is now fast becoming a leading destination for foreign nurses, particularly Filipino nurses.

The Philippines is known as the world’s leading exporter of nurses. The trend began in 1960s when its government minted a labor-export policy to help keep its economy afloat. It resulted in its own healthcare system suffering a “national haemorrhage” as more health professionals leave in droves for “greener pastures.”

But the Filipino nurses who migrated to countries with a shortage of nurse, such as Canada, are also being exposed to exploitation, misleading integration programs and policy changes.

Some 240,000 immigrants are entering Canada every year since 1992, said a study on internationally educated nurse published by the Canadian Nurses Association (CNA) in 2005. It cited the Philippines as one of Canada’s top five sources of immigrants.

Another study on global migration in 2003 reported that Philippine-trained nurses comprised the largest group of internationally educated nurses in primary “receiving” countries such as Canada. Mostly women, they have been entering Canada through its Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP).

BUTA

By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON – United States President Barack Obama’s extraordinary efforts since his first days in office to reassure Muslims in the Greater Middle East about US intentions in the region have suffered a series of setbacks that threaten to reverse whatever gains he has made over the past 10 months in restoring Washington’s badly battered image and influence there.

From Pakistan – where Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got an earful of growing anti-US sentiment last week – to the West Bank and East Jerusalem – where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has successfully defied Washington’s demands that he freeze Jewish settlement activity – events appear to have strayed far from the president’s original game plan.

As for the vast territory that lies between, the badly tarnished election victory by Afghan President Hamid Karzai raises new questions over the viability of a conflict Obama himself called as recently as August, “a war of necessity”. Meanwhile, Iran’s failure so far to accept a US-backed plan to export most of its low-enriched uranium (LEU) for reprocessing looks increasingly likely to foil his hopes for detente on that front.

A series of devastating bombings in recent weeks has also raised the specter of renewed ethnic and sectarian violence in Iraq, while a widely anticipated US rapprochement with Syria – as well as the resolution of the protracted political impasse in Lebanon – appears to have stalled.

Few analysts in Washington blame Obama alone for the lack of substantial progress on these fronts. In a number of cases, unanticipated events, like the rapid deterioration in security in Afghanistan – and forces over which the administration exercises little or no control, such as the hardline governments and domestic politics of Israel and Iran – have sabotaged his hopes.

But disappointment is clearly on the rise among those here and in the region who believed that Obama’s realist foreign policy strategy of “engaging” foes, and his oft-repeated determination to achieve a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict “from day one” of his presidency promised rapid improvement in Washington’s standing after eight years of decline under former president George W Bush.

“There is a general concern now, especially in the Arab world, that the administration is not delivering with respect to any issues in the region,” said Chas Freeman, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia who withdrew his appointment to chair the National Intelligence Council (NIC) this year in the face of a media campaign by neo-conservative critics close to Israel’s Likud Party.
“I think there’s been quite a difference between how Obama as a person is perceived and how the US government as an institution is perceived,” he added. “I think what may be happening is that Obama is sinking into the generally negative view of the US government in the region rather than transcending it as he once did.”

“He started really well, particularly in his speeches in Istanbul [in April] and in Cairo [in June], in changing how the region perceives America and in setting forth a vision of the kinds of relationships he wanted,” said Steven Clemons, director of the American Strategy Project at the New America Foundation.

“But those words have not been followed up by the kind of deep restructuring of policy vis-a-vis Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, and the Palestinians that [former President Richard] Nixon implemented toward China,” he added. “If he had done so, the trend lines we’re seeing in the region might not be as negative as they appear at the moment.”

Of all the problems he faces the region, Afghanistan is the most urgent and time-consuming. Obama has been considering a recommendation from his military commanders to add some 44,000 US troops to the 68,000 already deployed there in order to repel Taliban advances and gain time for Washington and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies to build national and local governance capacity and the Afghan army so it can hold its own.

The request comes just eight months after the same military institution told Obama that a total of only 75,000 US troops were needed to achieve the same goal. In the intervening period, not only has the Taliban made greater far greater strides – and killed more US and NATO forces – than anticipated, but the discredited election, combined with the Karzai government’s notorious corruption, is virtually certain to make a US-led counter-insurgency campaign that much more difficult.

By calling the conflict against the Taliban a “war of necessity” and subsequently ruling out any drawdown of US forces, most analysts believe that Obama will approve if not all, then at least half of the military’s request.

AT

It is almost a year since Barack Obama was elected as the US president. His election – and the end of George Bush’s tenure – was celebrated by many in the United States and around the world.

His message of change had struck a chord at home and abroad but the expectations he raised were high.

Rob Reynolds goes back to Chicago to the scene of that historic moment 12 months ago as Al Jazeera assesses the reality of the Obama presidency after the euphoria.

A math question: How many soldiers will it take to contain the mounting rage of hundreds of millions of people?

By Arundhati Roy

Red terror?: A tribal woman with her children in Dantewada

The low, flat-topped hills of south Orissa have been home to the Dongria Kondh long before there was a country called India or a state called Orissa. The hills watched over the Kondh. The Kondh watched over the hills and worshipped them as living deities. Now these hills have been sold for the bauxite they contain. For the Kondh it’s as though god has been sold. They ask how much god would go for if the god were Ram or Allah or Jesus Christ?

Perhaps the Kondh are supposed to be grateful that their Niyamgiri hill, home to their Niyam Raja, God of Universal Law, has been sold to a company with a name like Vedanta (the branch of Hindu philosophy that teaches the Ultimate Nature of Knowledge). It’s one of the biggest mining corporations in the world and is owned by Anil Aggarwal, the Indian billionaire who lives in London in a mansion that once belonged to the Shah of Iran. Vedanta is only one of the many multinational corporations closing in on Orissa.

If the flat-topped hills are destroyed, the forests that clothe them will be destroyed too. So will the rivers and streams that flow out of them and irrigate the plains below. So will the Dongria Kondh. So will the hundreds of thousands of tribal people who live in the forested heart of India, and whose homeland is similarly under attack.

In our smoky, crowded cities, some people say, “So what? Someone has to pay the price of progress.” Some even say, “Let’s face it, these are people whose time has come. Look at any developed country, Europe, the US, Australia—they all have a ‘past’.” Indeed they do. So why shouldn’t “we”?

…

In 2008, an expert group appointed by the Planning Commission submitted a report called ‘Development Challenges in Extremist-Affected Areas’. It said, “the Naxalite (Maoist) movement has to be recognised as a political movement with a strong base among the landless and poor peasantry and adivasis. Its emergence and growth need to be contextualised in the social conditions and experience of people who form a part of it. The huge gap between state policy and performance is a feature of these conditions. Though its professed long-term ideology is capturing state power by force, in its day-to-day manifestation, it is to be looked upon as basically a fight for social justice, equality, protection, security and local development.” A very far cry from the “single-largest internal security threat”. Since the Maoist rebellion is the flavour of the week, everybody, from the sleekest fat cat to the most cynical editor of the most sold-out newspaper in this country, seems to be suddenly ready to concede that it is decades of accumulated injustice that lies at the root of the problem. But instead of addressing that problem, which would mean putting the brakes on this 21st century gold rush, they are trying to head the debate off in a completely different direction, with a noisy outburst of pious outrage about Maoist “terrorism”. But they’re only speaking to themselves.

The people who have taken to arms are not spending all their time watching (or performing for) TV, or reading the papers, or conducting SMS polls for the Moral Science question of the day: Is Violence Good or Bad? SMS your reply to…. They’re out there. They’re fighting. They believe they have the right to defend their homes and their land. They believe that they deserve justice.

Odd that the Centre was ready to talk to Pakistan even after this, but is playing hard when it comes to the poor

OI

Song:             “CHEEN AUR ARAB HAMARA”
Singer:            MUKESH,
Lyrics:             SAHIR LUDHIANVI,
Music Director:  KHAYYAM
Film:                “PHIR SUBAH HOGI – 1958”

This film was based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel: Crime and Punishment.

All the Land is ours but we are Homeless

By Sahir Ludhianwi

China and Arabia are ours
India is ours too
There is no place (for us) to live
But the entire world is ours

Our hovel has been snatched away
And the (city) benches too,
Now wandering the streets
Is this life caravan of ours

Our pockets are empty
Therefore they curse us:
That sentry of ours
And that warden of ours

All the existing buildings,
The rich have divided ownerships
The foothpaths of Bombay
Are now homes of ours

To get sleep, we qalandar
Come to the sea port:
Where every coolie
Is a confidant of ours

Incomplete is our education:
We cannot find work.
Who would know
The depth of the hidden pain of ours?

Feeble is our condition
But our blood is strong.
Of steel is made
Every youth of ours

Together we will adorn
This country in such a way
That the entire world will gape
In astonishment at this country of ours

China and Arabia are ours
India is ours too
There is no place for us to live
But the entire world is ours.

Translated from Hindi/Urdu by B. R. Gowani

26/10/2009

Women’s access to economic and financial resources is critical not only for the achievement of gender equality, but also for sustainable economic development.

Sewing workshop

That is the focus of the 2009 World Survey on the Role of Women in Development. Lead author Naila Kabeer says when women do well, the economy does well, but the reverse is not always true.

“Cross-country studies, studies over time all show that gender equality contributes to economic growth – equality in education and equality in labour force participation. But there are reasons for concern, and that is economic growth does not seem to have quite the same positive impacts on gender equality.”

Ms. Kabeer points to the slow pace in lowering maternal mortality as an indicator that countries are not investing enough of their wealth in women’s health and well-being. The study calls for expanding women’s access to credit and other financial services. It also recommends that countries make gender equality in employment a core component of their national development strategies.

Bissera Kostova, UN Radio.

(duration: 1’08”)

UMM

By Rabindranath Tagore
Translated from Bengali by Prasenjit Gupta

To Thine Auspicious Lotus-Feet:

Today we have been married fifteen years, yet not until today have I written you a letter. I’ve always been close by your side. You’ve heard many things from me, and so have I from you, but we haven’t had space enough to write a letter.

Now I’m in Puri on a holy journey, and you are wrapped up in your office work. Your relationship to Calcutta is a snail’s to its shell–the city is stuck fast to you, body and soul. So you didn’t apply for leave. It was the Lord’s desire, and so was His granting me my leave application.

I am Mejo-Bou, the second bride in your joint family. Today, fifteen years later, standing at the edge of the ocean, I understand that I also have other relationships, with the world and the World-Keeper. So I find the courage to write this letter. This is not a letter from your family’s Mejo-Bou. Not from the second wife.

Long ago, in my childhood days–in the days when my preordained marriage to you was known only to the Omniscient One who writes our fates on our foreheads–my brother and I both came down with typhoid fever. My brother died; I survived. All the neighborhood girls said, “Mrinal’s a girl, that’s why she lived. If she’d been a boy, she couldn’t have been saved.” Jom-Raj is wise in his deadly robbery: he only takes things of value.

No death, then, for me. It is to explain this at length that I sit down to write this letter.

When your uncle–a distant relative–came with your friend Nirod to view your prospective bride, I was twelve. We lived in an inaccessible village where jackals would call even during the day. Fourteen miles from the railway station by ox-cart, then six more on an unpaved road by palanquin; how vexed they were. And on top of that, our East-Bengal cookery. Even now your uncle makes jokes about those dishes.

Your mother wanted desperately to make up for the plain appearance of the first bride with the good looks of the second. Otherwise why would you have taken all the time and trouble to travel to our distant village? In Bengal no one has to search for jaundice, dysentery, or a bride; they come and cleave to you on their own, and never want to leave.

Father’s heart began to pound. Mother started repeating Durga’s name. With what offering could a country priest satisfy a city god? All they could rely upon was their girl’s appearance. But the girl herself had no vanity; whoever came to see her, whatever price they offered for her, that would be her price. So even with the greatest beauty, the most perfect virtues, a woman’s self-doubt can never be dispelled.

The terror of the entire household, even the entire neighborhood, settled like a stone in my chest. It was as if the day’s sky, its suffusing light, all the powers of the universe were bailiffs to those two examiners, seizing a twelve-year-old village girl and holding her up to the stern scrutiny of those two pairs of eyes. I had no place to hide.

The wedding flutes wailed, setting the skies to mourn; I came to live in your house. At great length the women tabulated all my shortcomings but allowed that, by and large, I might be reckoned a beauty; and when my sister-in-law, my Didi, heard this, her face grew solemn. But I wonder what the need was for beauty; your family didn’t love me for it. Had my beauty been molded by some ancient sage from holy Ganga clay, then it might have been loved; but the Creator had molded it only for His own pleasure, and so it had no value in your pious family.

PB