At least two people have been killed and scores injured in clashes between textile workers and police in Bangladesh, police have said.
The violence broke out as workers protested over unpaid salaries in the outskirts of the capital, Dhaka, on Saturday.
“Law-enforcers had to fire rubber bullets from shot guns to disperse the workers who hurled stones and bricks at our officers,” Shafiqul Alam, a police inspector, said.
Why did Inspector Shafiqul Alam not just say, factually, that police “fired rubber bullets”? Why did he say that they “had to fire rubber bullets”? Granted, this police spokesperson is hardly alone in using this ideological euphemism. Police spokespeople in many countries do so. Even worse, theoretically “fair and balanced media” use this euphemism as well, whenever police kill people.
“So far two people have died.”
Workers coming to work at the Nippon Garments factory north of Dhaka found a notice at the gate saying authorities were closing the factory for a month, citing losses and falling orders.
Angry protest
They then took to the streets to protest, and police said as many as 15,000 people were involved in the protests.
Maleka Begum, a police official, said at least 100 workers and a number of police officers were injured in the clashes.
The protesters were demanding three months’ back pay, she said.
Bangladesh have ordered an independent probe into clashes between riot police and protesting garment factory staff on Saturday that left two workers dead and around 100 injured: here.
A gay Bangladeshi couple have been battling to gain citizenship in Australia for 10 years. The Refugee Review Tribunal knocked back their claims three times, and three times a higher court has overturned the rulings: here.
The Bangladeshi finance minister recently warned that some 20 million Bangladeshis - one-sixth of the population - are threatened with displacement through rising sea levels: here.
A team of British researchers have been rebuilding fossils of 300-million year old spiders using computer 3-D technology- they say they are providing a clearer picture of how some extinct species once lived on early Earth.
Professor Brasier, who is a palaeobiologist at the University of Oxford, said: “This amber is very rare. It comes from the very base of the Cretaceous, which makes it one of the oldest ambers anywhere to have inclusions in it.”
‘Sticky droplets’
He added: “These spiders are distinctive and leave little sticky droplets along the spider web threads to trap prey.
“We actually have the sticky droplets preserved within the amber. These turn out to be the earliest webs that have ever been incorporated in the fossil record to our knowledge.”
His studies revealed that the spider that spun the web is related to the modern day orb-web or garden spider.
Scientists think the web became trapped in conifer resin after a forest fire and then became fossilised inside the resulting amber.
Mr Hiscocks and his brother also found the fossilised remains of an Iguanodon jaw bone on the coastline.
The brown recluse spider, Loxosceles reclusa, has a bad and largely undeserved reputation. Across the U.S., people fear the bite of this spider, believing it is an aggressive attacker and certain to cause devastating necrotic wounds. Research on brown recluse spiders has proven these assertions to be false: here.
Japan’s Yukio Hatoyama has revealed he dislikes whale meat, a newspaper has reported in an unusual confession for the prime minister of a country that defies Western criticism of whaling.
“I hate whale meat,” Hatoyama said during a meeting with his visiting Dutch counterpart Jan Peter Balkenende on Monday, the Sankei Shimbun reported on Saturday.
Most Japanese (and most people in other countries where there still is whaling, like Iceland and Norway) don’t eat whale meat. Continuing whaling just serves the special interests of small minorities, at the detriment of the global ecosystem. Time to stop it forever.
November 12 2009. A major review of Japanese government spending could spell the end to whaling in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, according to Greenpeace, after the review committee proposed massive cuts in subsidies to a body which funds the so-called scientific research programme: here.
US President Barack Obama arrives today in Tokyo at the start of his first trip to Asia. While he will also stop off in South Korea and the APEC summit in Singapore, the central focus of the tour is China and the underlying economic and strategic rivalry between Beijing and Washington: here. And here.
Visiting US President Barack Obama faced a mass protest in central Tokyo on Friday as activists demanded the withdrawal of the 47,000 US troops still based in Japan: here.
Some of the assertions by Mr. Cheney in his interview with the prosecutor on May 8, 2004, appeared to conflict with testimony at the 2007 trial of his chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., who was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice and whose sentence was later commuted by President George W. Bush.
This Plamegate scandal, of course, was the Bush administration’s revenge against Valerie Wilson’s husband for proving that the Bush clique used forged documents to justify starting the Iraq war.
US Labour Secretary Hilda Solis and former Chilean president Ricardo Lagos are set to arrive in Tegucigalpa tomorrow as part of a commission that is to monitor the creation of a power-sharing government in Honduras: here.
The leadership of Honduras’s Congress has met to begin consideration of an accord that could reinstate ousted President Manuel Zelaya, but they failed to set a date for bringing the issue to the floor: here.
The documentary, Afghanistan, on the Dollar Trail, which was aired this month on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) program “Four Corners”, is a well-produced exposure of the corruption and criminality that has accompanied the “reconstruction” of Afghanistan since the 2001 US invasion.
Blaming the Karzai administration conveniently ignores the fact that pay-offs and bribes have been integral to the US invasion and occupation from the outset. Washington brought down the Taliban regime by buying off a series of warlords who were notorious for their thuggery and criminal activities, including involvement in the drug trade. Karzai was simply installed as the frontman for the puppet regime constructed on this basis.
The documentary follows director Paul Moreira as he seeks to track down how some of the estimated $US18 billion in reconstruction aid to Afghanistan has been used. Last year, a host of countries and organisations attended the “International Afghanistan Support Conference” in Paris. The assembled delegates voted to finance the building of 680 new schools in the country. Moreira makes it his initial task to inspect some of these schools in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.
Moreira stumbles across one by chance. It is a girls´school in which “a few minor details are missing for the situation to be perfect”, comments the narrator, “details like walls and a roof”. The students are forced to have lessons outside, with only a damaged portable blackboard to suggest a classroom setting. There is no protection from the cold. Snow begins to fall. A teacher comments that the students cannot be expected to learn when they are more concerned about staying warm.
Moreira contacts USAID, which can suggest only one other newly-built school to visit in Kabul. Upon arriving, a billboard depicts a modern facility in a pristine surrounding. The next shot is of the school itself. It consists almost entirely of tents. Although the government promised 18 months ago that construction would be finished within two years, all that has been built are a brick wall and some bathrooms.
A presidential run-off election planned for Nov. 7 seemed headed for collapse Saturday, with the main challenger to President Hamid Karzai, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, widely expected to pull out of the race: here. And here.
More than 1,000 American troops have been wounded in battle over the past three months in Afghanistan, accounting for one-fourth of those injured in combat since the U.S.-led invasion in 2001: here.
In a series of public appearances on the final day of a three-day visit marked by blunt talk, Clinton refused to discuss the subject, which involves highly classified CIA operations. She would say only that “there is a war going on,” and the Obama administration is committed to helping Pakistan defeat the insurgents and terrorists who threaten the stability of a nuclear-armed nation. …
During an interview broadcast live in Pakistan with several prominent female TV anchors, before a predominantly female audience of several hundred, one member of the audience said the Predator attacks amount to “executions without trial” for those killed.
Another asked Clinton how she would define terrorism.
“Is it the killing of people in drone attacks?” she asked. That woman then asked if Clinton considers drone attacks and bombings like the one that killed more than 100 civilians in the city of Peshawar earlier this week to both be acts of terrorism.
“No, I do not,” Clinton replied.
Earlier, in a give-and-take with about a dozen residents of the tribal region, one man alluded obliquely to the drone attacks, saying he had heard that in the United States, aircraft are not allowed to take off after 11 p.m., to avoid irritating the population.
“That is the sort of peace we want for our people,” he said through an interpreter.
The same man told Clinton that the Obama administration should rely more on wisdom and less on firepower to achieve its aims in Pakistan. …
A similar point was made by Sana Bucha of Geo TV during the live broadcast interview.
“It is not our war,” she told Clinton. “It is your war.” She drew a burst of applause when she added, “You had one 9/11. We are having daily 9/11s in Pakistan.”
Capturing a feeling that Clinton heard expressed numerous times during her visit, one woman in the audience said, “The whole world thinks we are terrorists.” The woman said she was from the South Waziristan area where the Pakistani army is engaged in pitched battles with Taliban and affiliated extremist elements - and where U.S. drones have struck with deadly effect many times.
A detailed study of the events leading up to the BP Texas City refinery explosion of 2005. Litigation is still ongoing for this incident, which was preventable.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration will announce the largest fine in its history on Friday, $87 million in penalties against the oil giant BP for failing to correct safety problems identified after a 2005 explosion that killed 15 workers at its Texas City, Tex. refinery, federal officials said Thursday.
The suspected cause of the explosion that killed 15 workers at BP’s Texas City, Tex., plant in 2005 was the escape of flammable hydrocarbons that were ignited by the backfire of a truck.
The fine is more than four times the size of any previous OSHA sanction.
According to documents obtained by The New York Times, OSHA issued 271 notifications to BP for failing to correct hazards at the Texas City refinery over the four-year period since the explosion. As a result, OSHA, which is part of the Labor Department, is issuing fines of $56.7 million. In addition, OSHA also identified 439 “willful and egregious” violations of industry-accepted safety controls at the refinery. Those violations will lead to $30.7 million in additional fines.
This is an NPR audio on this.
Oil giant Total UK on Friday admitted health and safety breaches in connection with the massive Buncefield oil depot explosion: here.
The Honduran coup regime and representatives of the ousted President Manuel Zelaya reached an agreement late Thursday that would pave the way for Congress to restore Zelaya to office and allow him to serve out the remaining three months of his term. We go to the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa to speak with Andrés Conteris, who has been holed up at the embassy since Zelaya took refuge there last month.
