Tuesday, July 10, 2012
Here's why male and female orgasms are poles apart
Brendan Zietsch at the University of Queensland, Australia, and Pekka Santtila at Abo Akademi University in Turku, Finland, think they can help to answer the question.
Archeologists to examine Kuakata 'antique' boat
A three-member team from Department of Archaeology of Khulna Division set off Tuesday morning for Kuakata where an ancient wooden boat recently surfaced from beneath the sandy beach.
The ancient boat which is believed to be belonging to the first Rakhine settlers from Arakan province in Myanmar over 200 years ago was found on June 29 during the low tide.
As soon as the ancient boat surfaced, a group of local people started looting precious brass sheets from the boat joints, a The Daily Star report said on June 4.
Abdul Baten, regional director (acting) of Department of Archaeology, Khulna Division, told The Daily Star on Tuesday that on seeing the report and informed by the locals from Kuakata, the Khulna division office sent three experts to assess the importance of the wooden boat.
Research Assistant Md Golam Ferdous is leading the team with draftman Md Jahandar Ali and photographer Md Abdus Sama along.
The team was assigned to send a thorough report detailing their findings to the Khulna division office, the regional director informed.
“We responded quickly as soon as we got the information about surfacing of an ancient boat. We corresponded with the Thana Nirbahi Officer (TNO) in Kolapara to get updates on the situation. But first, our team needs to assess and submit a report on the boat,” he said.
“We will forward the report to our headquarters in Dhaka for further direction,” he added.
The director, however, did not comment on the antiquity of the boat saying “We are yet to see the report from our team.”
“You know the boat is quite large and it is partially buried under the sandy beach. It is technically difficult to heave up the boat. We may have to wait till winter for the water to recede,” he said.
“Then it comes to budget. A venture like this needs a budget and planning,” the director said adding that all these await the report and direction from the head office in Dhaka.
Yves Marre, the initiator of a traditional boat museum under the banner “Protection and Preservation of National Naval Heritage of Bangladesh told The Daily Star that if the boat is 200 years old, it is a national treasure.
“Reports suggest that it is a boat used by the first Rakhaine settlers who escaped from war-torn Myanmar 200 years ago. It is a treasure that must immediately be protected and preserved,” Marre said.
French born Bangladeshi, Marre with his project has so far replicated 65 types of traditional wooden boats of Bangladesh and exhibited those boats in France and other European countries.
Talks are underway to open an exhibition of those boats in the naval museum of Greenwich in London soon, he said.
Consisting of a timber made of Gorjon tree, the boat is 72 feet long and 22.5 feet wide and only two feet of its upper portion has emerged from the sandy beach near the tamarisk garden in Kuakata.
Monday, July 9, 2012
Sohel Taj’s resignation leaves AL faced with unpleasant questions
THE long-drawn saga of Tanjim Ahmed’s resignation as a member of parliament finally came to a close, with the speaker of the ninth Jatiya Sangsad accepting his resignation letter on Saturday and subsequently declaring the Gazipur 4 seat vacant when the parliamentary session resumed on Sunday. Tanjim, popularly known as Sohel Taj, also resigned as the state minister for home affairs on May 31, 2009 nearly five months into the tenure of the Awami League-Jatiya Party government. According to a report front-paged in New Age on Monday, he announced on Sunday his decision not to be ‘active in politics’ but to do his best ‘for the welfare of the country and its people.’ While he insists that he has resigned ‘willingly’ and ‘for valid reasons’, without quite specifying the reasons, his comments, in the aftermath of his resignation as the state minister and now, as reported in the media, tend to indicate that he may not have been allowed to work to his satisfaction. On Sunday, for example, he said, ‘When I thought I was unable to keep the commitments I made to the people with the constrained authority, I willingly resigned because I did not embark on politics for position or power.’
Whatever may have been actual reason, Tanjim’s resignation looks to be part of a pattern that has emerged over two generations. It is pertinent to recall here that his father, the late Tajuddin Ahmed, the war-time prime minister who, in the absence of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the undisputed leader of the final phase of the nation’s struggle for independence, practically gave political leadership to the war of independence in 1971, was dropped from the Sheikh’s cabinet. Tajuddin’s younger brother, Afsar Uddin Ahmed Khan, who was the state minister for housing and public works, too, was made to leave his position after a short stint. Tanjim’s mother, Syeda Zohra Tajuddin, had also faded into political oblivion much before she was afflicted with old-age complications. Simply put, since independence, the top leadership of the Awami League has been, and may still be, disinclined to the idea of the Taj family having an organic involvement with the party.
In any case, Tanjim’s resignation, especially given the twists and turns it had to go through, thanks to the caprice of the AL leadership, leaves the ruling party faced with some unpleasant questions. His assertion that, as a minister and lawmaker, he was ‘unable to keep the commitments’ he had ‘made to the people’, which, according to him, were to fight ‘corruption, irregularities and mismanagement’, certainly casts the AL-Jatiya Party government in poor light. Moreover, Tanjim’s resignation looks set to be viewed as a result of the unfavourable relations that the top leadership of the Awami League has had with the Taj family since independence. In the end, the post-independence AL leadership could go down in history as having stood in the way of the development of an organic relationship between the Awami League and the Taj family, which would be sad indeed.
Saturday, July 7, 2012
Inside Israel's super-secret intelligence agency
This article is adapted from "Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel's Secret Wars" (Levant Books), a new book detailing the history of the Israeli intelligence community by CBS News national correspondent Dan Raviv and Israeli journalist Yossi Melman.
As tensions continue to mount between Iran and Israel, Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman offer detailed reporting on how Israel's intelligence agency operates inside Iran.
There've been more than a few reports suggesting that Israel's foreign intelligence agency - the Mossad - hires Iranian dissidents to carry out sabotage and assassinations inside Iran.
But a study of fifty years of assassinations by the Mossad - including conversations with current and former operatives and those who work with them in countries friendly to Israel - yields the conclusion that the assassins inside Iran are Israelis.
The Mossad has a special operations unit - a kind of Mossad within the Mossad - called Kidon (the Hebrew word for bayonet), which has over the years developed unique methods for infiltrating enemy countries, and for murdering Israel's enemies without leaving a trace.
The Mossad benefits from unmatched linguistic capabilities, in part because Israel has many citizens whose families moved from Arabic- or Persian-speaking countries. Israeli operatives have traveled into Iran using the passports of other countries, including bogus documents produced by skilled Mossad forgers, and genuine passports where the photographs might be altered slightly.
Insight into the psyches and behavior of members of the super-secret Kidon squad can be found - perhaps surprisingly - in the pages of a novel called "Duet in Beirut," published only in Hebrew (in 2002), by Mishka Ben-David, a former intelligence officer in the Mossad's operations department, which runs and coordinates Kidon.
From the book and other sources it is understood that Kidon is so compartmentalized that its office is not inside the Mossad headquarters. Kidon combatants - who dubbed themselves "The Team" - hardly ever go there. Even when interacting with Mossad operatives from other units, Kidon men use assumed names. In the field, members use a third name - and sometimes even fourth and fifth identities.
Their training includes almost anything one might imagine is needed for an intelligence operation: surveillance, shaking off surveillance, studying objects and memorizing everything about them. They become proficient at remembering codes and securely communicating during missions without raising suspicion.
Because they are the cream of the crop, Kidon men and women are the ones the Mossad director selects for very dangerous missions - including complex operations of an information-gathering nature - that require top professionals.
Despite tactical successes in Iran in recent years, the Mossad and its top political master, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, know that the entire Iranian nuclear weapons program will not be demolished by assassinations of nuclear scientists and military officers.
Yet, any delay in Iran's nuclear work represents an achievement. Israeli strategic thinking (exercised in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere) holds that temporary disruptions to an enemy's dangerous projects are sufficient cause for taking significant risks.
Meir Dagan, Mossad director from 2002 to 2010, was pleased by past missions in Iran and the "cleanliness" of their execution: no clues, no fingerprints, not even motorcycles left behind. Iranian authorities could only guess who was attacking, in broad daylight, in their capital.
But the intimidating impact that Dagan aimed to create in Iran seems to be exhausted. This is reportedly apparent to Tamir Pardo, the new head of the Mossad, who has a reputation for knowing that one should not push one's luck. Iran is becoming more dangerous for Mossad and other foreign intelligence operatives. One can expect a halt, at least temporarily, of the assassination campaign.
Dagan, in retirement, has become outspoken in his opposition to a military strike by Israel against Iran. When he spoke to Lesley Stahl on CBS's "60 Minutes" in March, Dagan warned that retaliation by Iran and its proxies could be highly damaging to normal life in the Jewish state. Dagan also believes that an attack by Israel would unite most Iranians around their regime and would give Iran's scientists and engineers a major reason to speed up their underground nuclear work.
His private advice boils down to pointing out that there is still plenty of disruption to be accomplished within Iran by sabotage, assassinations, and a truly innovative weapon - cyberwarfare. The worm called Stuxnet that took over Iranian nuclear lab computers was a product of Israeli and U.S. intelligence agencies working together; and it was not the only computer virus created by the highly skilled programmers in both nations.
While Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak seem skeptical that international economic sanctions will persuade Iran to cancel its nuclear bomb program, Dagan and other former and current intelligence officials believe that sanctions are biting and could be a major factor in the ayatollahs' thinking.
Only last week, most of Europe stopped purchasing Iranian oil. Tension in the Middle East is likely to rise, and predicting when - or how - the crisis over Iran may be resolved is truly impossible. There is a high likelihood, however, that the Mossad - and its even more secretive Kidon unit - will somehow be involved.
Conspiracy or not, there are rights violations
When questions are raised about possible hidden motives behind the works of international organisations such as Human Rights Watch, they should certainly not be dismissed off. Many such organisations in the global arena, particularly when it comes to the issue of various races and nations, have often displayed a bias, or a tendency to selective interpretation, or downright service to some propaganda. So, as New Age reported on Saturday, when the government rejects the US-based organisation’s report on war crimes and BDR rebellion trials as ‘false, baseless and concocted’ and ‘a part of international conspiracy and false propaganda against it’, there is certainly no reason to think that the government, under normal circumstances, is completely wrong.
However, the trouble for the government this time around is, what they – Human Rights Watch - are saying is not very different from what ordinary people and rights groups in the country have been saying for long.
Take the example of the BDR Mutiny Trial. A persistent concern, among many other things, has been the mysterious death of more than 50 soldiers of the erstwhile Bangladesh Rifles, also suspects in the trial, while in the custody of the investigating authorities. Despite much protest from the families of the victims and concerns raised by local rights groups, the government has so far failed to investigate the deaths. Or for that matter, take the case of the Rapid Action Battalion. From March 2004, when it was formed, till March 2012, 711 people have died at the hands of the Rapid Action Battalion and 70 more in joint operations of police and RAB. Even after the incumbents came to power on the back of an electoral pledge to stop extrajudicial killings, more than a 100 have died in the hands of the RAB, while there has been an alarming rise in enforced disappearances. And yet, the law minister on Thursday claimed ‘law enforcement agencies took action in a given situation’.
Unfortunately for the government, most of the allegations leveled by the Human Rights Watch, this time around, ring true. Extrajudicial killings carried out by law enforcers have been going on rampantly for a number of years, while concerns and apprehensions about the BDR Mutiny Trial or the War Crimes Trial, are concerns shared by many people in the country. Going beyond that, as most local rights groups concur, the government has been directly and indirectly responsible for a number of other forms of rights violations, including repression of opposition groups.
So, if the government feels that Human Rights Watch, or for that matter any such similar organization, is taking part in a conspiracy, than it falls upon the government disprove the allegations leveled by them, rather than just ‘crying foul’. Unfortunately, when 50 BDR soldiers die of mysterious heart attacks while in custody, while over 700 die at the hands of just one law enforcement agency in eight years, than the government has literally handed over the ‘recipe’ for a conspiracy. Rather than cry out with counter-allegations, the government must ensure that rights violations are brought to an end, so that in the future no organisation, as part of a conspiracy or out of genuine concern, can accuse the government of such misdeeds.
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