The working title of a new documentary I am working on.

More information here

http://bangal.ee

ID Card is a big thing here in the UK. It looks like the Labour Party is setting up contractual obligations which will ensure that the ID project will survive Labour’s defeat in the next elections. However the Tories are on to this and have written to the 5 companies bidding for the contract telling them that no such obligation will be adhered to.

And in this very week when the Labour government made a big song and dance about using the “naughty boys” of the hacker world to combat “cyber-terrorism” it is worth remembering what one hacker did with ID technology. (scroll down for the article)

It is all fluff of course. Nothing is beyond hacking…not even the industrial golden goose called the iPhone. The whole cyber-terrorism thing that Estonia flagged up was a pretext for further ingratiating itself with big, protective Uncle Sam. And now we find this self-same poodling nonsense come to the UK as the plan is rolled out with the connivance of technology companies.

It comes as no surprise to me that those who least understand politics and who take a wholly technological approach - technologists whether hackers or mainstream - will benefit the most from these expensive and needless schemes. They think the solution to the world’s social and political problems are tecchie related. No don’t laugh, its true. Hence its entirely consistent to find that India’s ID card scheme is being headed by Infosys head honcho Nilekani. His appointment is equivalent to a cabinet minister. And get this ….his own company will be bidding for the project. You can’t make it up.

Cultural activists are trying to determine what has happened to Shahidul Alam.

Only a couple of years ago, a mate of mine - Sarwar Tamizuddin - was locked up by Indian border guards. He spent something like three months in prison before he got bail.

Please get the message out and please get Alam released.

MI5 torture allegation today. http://bit.ly/ZmDtb Compare that with the story written by an unheard of journo earlier in the week in the Indie. http://bit.ly/y769n. Rachel Shields, unless I am mistaken,  is not noted for writing about Bangladesh. In fact, apart from a few articles dealing with serious issues,  most of her articles are about lifestyle and fashion. And yet she is suddenly able to write about murky goings on in Bangladesh? What is murky are the MI5 torture allegations today. Is Rachel’s article a kind of spoiler or does it, like the tanks outside Heathrow in the past, help to establish a climate in which this government can seek to find a pretext for its activities?

As we prepare to go to Venice to start interviewing Bangladeshi migrants - I get news that the most notorious trafficker Ahmed Sheikh Turab - the man who by his actions drowned 283 people in the Med and who used to boast that half the Bangladeshis in Rome were there because of him - has finally been sentenced for his role in that tragedy of christmas eve 1996.

From left to right

Ilish mach (Hilsa fish)

kumra (butternut)

potol vorta (pointed gourd)

shutki (bombay duck)

Want bite-sized Bangladeshi news? Then two services are online at the mo:

http://twitter.com/bdnews24

and

http://twitter.com/bdnews

If anyone knows anymore please let me know ( Rezwan?)

The BNP has yet again walked out of parliamentary proceedings in Dhaka. This time it is complaining about seating arrangements. A BNP party spokesman said “We have only been allocated 4 seats at the front, and that is insufficient to even hold Madam Zia’s spectacle case let alone our lawmakers.”

READ THE BBC REPORT HERE

A study last year by World Vision found Bangladesh had the highest rate of child marriage in the world. Fifty-three per cent of girls were married before the age of 15, it said.

“The Rajendrapur Conversation will be an annual conversation between architects, engineers and poverty researchers in the North with poor people, ngos and practitioners in the South. It is a partnership between the Brooks World Poverty Institute at The University of Manchester and the BRAC Development Institute, Rajendrapur, Bangadesh.”

Good old Joseph Stiglitz is involved and my ex-head of department, Prof David Hulme, when i was at the IDPM in Manchester!

A couple of days ago I blogged about the news of the Thai military maltreating Bangladeshi and Burmese migrants and effectively consigning them to their death on the seas. Now we hear that the labour recruiters are shamelessly exploiting all the uncertainty to extract even more money from the anxious relatives of these migrants.

published in the Pakistan Observer. Chauvinist and ill-informed bilge by some clown called Ibn-e-Rehmat.

Thai soldiers tied up our hands and then put us in boats without engines. These were towed into the high sea by motorised boats and left to drift.

“We were without food and water. The Thai soldiers clearly wanted us to die on the boats.

Read it HERE