Fire broke out at a multi-storey building at Green Cozy Cottage on Bailey Road in the capital around 9:50pm on Thursday ( Feb 29 ). So far 46 people have died in the tragedy, most of them died from smoke inhalation than by fire burn. There was a clothing store on the third floor of the building. The rest were restaurants. The restaurants had gas cylinders in it. Gas cylinders made the fire intense and it has spread terribly. Amin Mohammad Group is one of the leading real estate companies. They constructed the building Green Cozy Cottage. The Green Cozy Cottage was managed by Amin Mohammad Property Management Services Limited  (AMPM) which is a sister concern of Amin Mohammad Group.  According to some sources, Amin Mohammad Group handed over the flats to AMPM in 2015.  AMPM holds all the rights of the building including it's security, safety measures, personnel for guarding, and lifts. After the tragic incident, Most of the senior officials mobile phones were found switched off. Additionally, executive director of Amin Mohammad Group, Mohammad Tanvirul Islam, left Dhaka by a Turkish Airlines flight early Friday (March 1), an intelligence agency and immigration at the airport said.  On the other hand, senior officials were absent in the head office of Amin Mohammad Group in the capital. The lawyer of Amin Mohammad Group, Zahid also refused to talk to reporters when contacted.

In a setback for China’s real estate sector, the Hong Kong court ordered the under-debt real estate company Evergrande to liquidate after two years of running out of cash and defaulting in 2021, The New York Times reported on Monday. The order will set off a race by lawyers to find and grab anything belonging to Evergrande that can be sold. It reported that after the company defaulted in 2021, investors around the world scooped up the property developer’s discounted IOUs, betting that the Chinese government would eventually step in to bail it out. Evergrande is a real estate developer with more than USD 300 billion in debt, sitting in the middle of the world’s biggest housing crisis. There isn’t much left in its sprawling empire that is worth much. And even those assets may be off-limits because property in China has become intertwined with politics. Evergrande, as well as other developers, overbuilt and overpromised, taking money for apartments that had not been built and leaving hundreds of thousands of home buyers waiting on their apartments. Now that dozens of these companies have defaulted, the government is frantically trying to force them to finish the apartments, putting everyone in a difficult position because contractors and builders have not been paid for years, The New York Times reported. The order is also likely to send shock waves through financial markets that are already sceptical about China’s economy. What happens next in the unwinding of Evergrande will test the belief long held by foreign investors that China will treat them fairly. The outcome could help spur or further tamp down the flow of money into Chinese markets when global confidence in China is already shaken. “People will be watching closely to see whether creditor rights are being respected,” said Dan Anderson, a partner and restructuring specialist at the law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer. “Whether they are respected will have long term implications for investment into China.” The New York Times said in its report that China needs investments from foreign investors now more than ever in its recent history. Financial markets in mainland China and Hong Kong, which has for years been entry point for foreign investment, have received such a blow that officials are scrambling to find policy measures like a stock market rescue fund to shore up confidence. And China’s housing market shows little signs of returning to the boom days, in part because Beijing wants to redirect economic growth from construction and investment. Rising diplomatic tensions between the United States and China, which has led to large outflows of foreign money from China, is not helping. Investors are looking to the resolution of the Evergrande case to see how China will handle disputes over its deadbeat companies, of which there are dozens in the property sector alone. Specifically, they will want to see whether the people who are now tasked with carrying out the liquidation will be recognized by a court in mainland China, something that historically has not happened. Under a mutual agreement signed in 2021 between Hong Kong and Beijing, a mainland Chinese court would recognize the Hong Kong court-appointed liquidator to allow creditors to take control of Evergrande assets in mainland China. But so far only one of five such requests to local Chinese courts has been granted. The New York Times reported that Monday’s decision, which was handed down by Judge Linda Chan, had already been delayed multiple times over the past two years as creditors and other parties agreed to adjourn to give the company more time to reach an agreement with creditors on how much they might be paid. As recently as last summer, it seemed as though Evergrande’s management team and some of its offshore creditors that had lent the company money in U.S. dollars in Hong Kong were closing in on a deal. The talks hit the brakes in September when several high level executives were arrested and, eventually, the founder and chairman, Hui Ka Yan, was detained by police. The court’s decision on Monday was “a big bang,” Anderson said, that will “lead to something of a whimper as liquidators chase assets.”  Source: ANI

The cause of the blaze that has killed at least 25 people is unclear, but mining accidents are not uncommon in China, as it tries to improve safety conditions. A fire at a coal company's office in China's northern Shanxi province on Thursday killed at least 25 people and injured dozens more,  according to Chinese state media. Shanxi is a major coal-producing hub in China.  What we know about the China coal mine company fire  Reports said the fire broke out at the Yongju Coal Industry Joint Building at 6:50 am local time. The blaze appeared to be in a building with offices and dormitories and not where coal was being mined. The cause of the fire is still being investigated. By Thursday afternoon, the fire had been contained and rescue operations were underway, state broadcaster CCTV reported. District officials said rescue and emergency services have evacuated 63 people. It was unclear whether the dead were among those, according to a CCTV report.  Mining accidents are not uncommon in China. Lately, coal producers have been under scrutiny as Beijing tries to improve on safety standards at mines.

While China’s social, cultural, and religious engineering with its non-Han Chinese communities continues, Beijing has accelerated the process of Sinicization of Tibet so much so that even business firms dealing with Tibetan goods have been asked to use ‘Xizang’ in place of Tibet while marking their products from the region.    Last week, China’s e-commerce giant Weidian which operates over 90 million online retail outlets with a trading volume of 100 billion yuan ($13.7 billion), issued a notice to all its platform merchants to either use word ‘Xizang’ in the place of Tibet or face rejection of their goods, South China Morning Post said. Though no deadline has been issued for the acceptance of this transition, the management of the e-commerce company has asked its online retailers to display the word ‘Xizang’ on products sourced from Tibet, the Hong Kong-based daily said. No reason has been cited for the sudden decision to paint everything identified with Tibet with Chinese brush. However, the process of calling Tibet as ‘Xizang’ received a renewed push after Foreign Minister Wang Yi, during the third Trans-Himalaya Forum for International Cooperation in Nyingchi city on October 5, called for using ‘Xizang’ as the official translation for Tibet, which was annexed by China in 1950, a year after the CPC won the civil war. The two-day Trans-Himalaya Forum meeting was attended by representatives from 12 countries, including Nepal, Bhutan, Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a statement. At this meeting, as per media reports, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in his speech repeatedly used the word ‘Xizang’ while referring to Tibet, a region which is home to 3.5 million people. For example, he said, “China welcomes friends from all other countries to Xizang to personally witness Xizang’s tremendous achievements in its economic and social development.” But push came to shove when Chen Wenqing, a Communist Party of China’s politburo member and Chief of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, in his address to a group of provincial security chiefs in Gannan in Gansu province on August 27 called for taking a clear stand to safeguard the unity of China, oppose ethnic separatism and ensure national security. He said they “must take the initiative to prevent and control risks and resolutely maintain the long-term peace and stability of not only the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) but also of prefectures with Tibetan majorities in the surrounding four provinces,” state-backed Xinhua news quoted Chen Wenqing as saying. These provinces with Tibetan majority are: Sichuan, Yunnan, Gansu, and Qinghai. Analysts say such developments show Chinese leaders are not fully convinced about the stability of the Tibetan region despite years of harsh crackdown on the people of the region. In the Tibetan region, monasteries are subjected to monitoring, monks and nuns are harassed and often persecuted by Chinese authorities. In the name of social management, it is alleged that large scale collection of data of Tibetans through DNA extraction, iris scans and facial recognition are being carried out. Early this year, the world was in for a deep shock when three UN experts in their report said that roughly one million Tibetan children have been separated from their families and forcibly placed into Chinese state-run boarding schools, as part of efforts to assimilate them “culturally, religiously, and linguistically into the dominant Han Chinese culture,” Time, an American news magazine, said while quoting the UN experts’ report. Giving chilling details of forced cultural dissociation of Tibetan children from their roots, the UN report quoted by Time said Tibetan children from rural areas are placed in residential schools, where lessons are “conducted solely in Mandarin Chinese with scant reference to Tibetan history, religion, and certainly not exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama.” Sinicization of Tibet and its culture, tradition and way of life has been speeded up since Xi Jinping became CPC General Secretary in 2013. In September 2020, when China and entire parts of the world were grappling with deadly coronavirus, Xi Jinping attended the seventh central symposium on Tibet, considered to be China’s highest-level meeting on Tibet, where he proposed three goals for the complete assimilation of Tibetans into Chinese mainstream life. First goal included, strengthening of political and ideological education in Tibetan schools by replacing religious texts with the CPC rulebook; second goal emphasized upon by the Chinese President, included strengthening of border defence and frontier security of Tibet by crushing any dissent brewing in Tibet; third goal included replacement of Tibetan scripts with Chinese characters. The third goal was also emphasized during a three-day seminar on Tibet in Beijing in August this year. The seminar, backed by the United Front Work Department, which oversees ethnic and minority affairs in China, was participated by 320 scholars, including 40 from outside mainland China, Xinhua news said. Their stand was that by replacing Tibet with the word ‘Xizang’ would lead to enhancing China’s international discourse on Tibet. Across state-backed media, the word ‘Xizang’ has been in use in China since 2019. According to South China Morning Post, the English language editions of People’s Daily, tabloid Global Times, official Xinhua news agency and broadcaster CGTN have been using ‘Xizang’ in their English language reports for the last five years. But no state-backed news outlet has ever completely replaced Tibet with ‘Xizang.’ Both names often figured in the Foreign Ministry statements also. After the October 5 direction, stress is being laid on calling Tibet as ‘Xizang’. The Chinese government says the move is a part of its effort to mainstream Tibetans’ life in China. In hindsight, however, the move is a part of forced cultural assimilation of Tibetans, which is being undertaken when the international community, including the US and the European Union have raised concerns over increase in human rights violations of Tibetans in China. Source: Tibet Press:

The social media giant is making another round of mass layoffs as it seeks to reduce costs. The company has sunk billions into its metaverse venture. Facebook parent Meta is cutting another 10,000 jobs, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in an email to employees on Tuesday. Another 5,000 open positions would also remain unfilled, the tech giant said. The mass axing of staff comes after a previous round of cuts that saw 11,000 jobs culled in November. Zuckerberg called 2023 a "year of efficiency," saying Meta was planning on reducing costs by about $5 billion (€4.67 billion), down to $89-$95 billion. What did Mark Zuckerberg say about the job cuts? "This will be tough, and there's no way around that," Zuckerberg said. "It will mean saying goodbye to talented and passionate colleagues who have been part of our success." "As I've talked about efficiency this year, I've said that part of our work will involve removing jobs — and that will be in service of both building a leaner, more technical company and improving our business performance to enable our long-term vision," he added. The job cuts will first target Meta's recruitment team, with further cuts hitting the company's tech groups in late April and its business groups in late May. Meta shares rose by 6% in early trading as news of the cuts was made public. Tech companies cutting back across the board The Meta company — which owns social media platforms Facebook and Instagram as well as messenger service WhatsApp — has invested billions in shifting its efforts toward developing an online platform that takes advantage of 3D technology. But the project has become an investment sink, with billions already having been lost on the venture. In February, Meta posted lower fourth-quarter profit and revenue, sparked by a downturn in the online advertising market and competition from rivals including TikTok. Meta is not the only major US tech company to be cutting back on jobs. Rival social media platform Twitter has also made considerable cutbacks following the takeover by billionaire Elon Musk. Online retail giant Amazon also put construction of its second headquarters in Virginia on hold last month after the biggest round of layoffs in the company's history. The vast job cuts in the tech industry come after many companies bloated their payrolls during the coronavirus pandemic to meet the sudden surge in demand for online services.

Most of the world has shied away from having any truck, notably barring provision of humanitarian assistance, with a Taliban regime that is increasingly beginning to resemble the hard-line medieval version that had disquieted the world at the turn of the last century. At a time when even leading humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGO) have stopped their essential and laudable work in Afghanistan after the Taliban banned women NGO employees and volunteers from working in the country, and at a juncture when the Taliban was barring Afghan women from all access to higher education, it would surely take a country with very little scruples to sign oil exploitation contracts with a Taliban regime that no other country in the world has recognized. China’s Xinjiang Central Asia Petroleum and Gas Company did exactly that last Thursday when it signed a contract with Afghanistan’s Taliban-led administration that gave the Chinese company the right to extract oil from the Amu Darya basin in northern Afghanistan for the next 25 years. First things first – where is it that Afghanistan finds itself 16 months after it came under Taliban control? As The Asia Foundation described in its 11 January study titled ‘The Future Forecast: Asia in 2023’, possibly the only positive development in the country has been a relative improvement in the security situation as most of the violence reported before August 2021 was attributable to the Taliban insurgency. The Foundation went on to say that “Unfortunately, on all other fronts the hardships that Afghans must endure have continued to grow, with rapidly rising poverty and unemployment, a collapsing economy, and desperately inadequate public services. Yet, faced with these unprecedented challenges, the main highlights of the Taliban’s rule in 2022 have been draconian restrictions on women’s right to work, to go to school, or to participate in activities outside the home, even visits to public parks with their families”. It lamented that calls from the international community for the formation of an inclusive and consensus-based government with a mandate to clarify Afghanistan’s future political system and priorities had proved to be ineffective as these had rebounded off deaf Taliban ears, and it concluded that “As a result of these unilateral policies, Afghanistan’s current regime remains unrecognized by the international community. The Taliban’s insistence on maintaining their highly authoritarian and restrictive model of governance could push this overwhelmingly aid-dependent country into a humanitarian catastrophe and a possible return to civil unrest”. Despite this less than satisfactory situation prevailing in Afghanistan, attempts by certain regional countries, prominent among them being China, to accord de-facto recognition to the Taliban regime through the back door have been ongoing for quite some time now. Several of Afghanistan’s neighbours, including China and Pakistan, have accepted Taliban-appointed diplomats. Beijing and Islamabad have even gone to the extent of formally accrediting Taliban-appointed diplomats, which, as Giorgio Cafiero pointed out in Al Jazeera, underscored how the Taliban’s international isolation was relative and fragile. That has also put other neighbouring countries, which have historical stakes in Afghanistan but have thus far not accepted Taliban-appointed representatives, in a predicament. India is one such example. It has been repeatedly requested by the Taliban to accept the posting of a Taliban-appointed Ambassador in New Delhi, but has not consented. India, over decades, has contributed significantly to Afghanistan’s development without getting involved in the fighting that has raged across the country through much of this period. It is now watching with some concern the growing Chinese influence in Afghanistan, and New Delhi too would be under some pressure to resume its own development projects in the region, even if just to push back against the growing Chinese influence.  Zhou Bo, a former senior Colonel in China’s People’s Liberation Army, wrote five days after the Taliban took control of Afghanistan last year that “Afghanistan has long been considered a graveyard for conquerors – Alexander the Great, the British Empire, the Soviet Union and now the United States.  Now China enters – armed not with bombs but construction blueprints, and a chance to prove the curse can be broken”. Al Jazeera reported that Beijing has offered the Taliban economic and development support on the condition that Afghanistan cooperates with China vis-à-vis Uighur armed groups and avoids targeting Chinese interests, particularly the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It opined that China could help the Taliban circumvent Western sanctions, explaining that “Chinese companies investing in Afghanistan could decrease the harm caused by the West’s financial warfare, which in turn would benefit China in terms of its ability to access the war-torn country’s prized rare-earth mineral reserves, copper, lithium, iron ore, and other natural resources”. Also, “As China, Russia, and Iran grow increasingly cooperative in their efforts to challenge US hegemony, these powers might come around to viewing the Taliban as a partner through which they can expand their influence in Greater Central Asia”. It is in this backdrop that news broke last week of the contract to extract oil from the Amu Darya basin that the Xinjiang Central Asia Petroleum and Gas Company had signed with Afghanistan’s Taliban-led administration. The contract was signed in Kabul by acting Taliban Minister of Mines and Petroleum Sheikh Shahabuddin Delawar and an official of the Xinjiang Central Asia Petroleum and Gas Company. Acting Taliban Deputy Prime Minister Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar and Chinese Ambassador to Afghanistan Wang Yu also witnessed the signing ceremony, State-run Bakhtar News Agency reported. It was the first major public commodities extraction deal that the Taliban administration has signed with a foreign company since taking power. As per the 25-year contract, the Chinese company will invest $150 million a year in Afghanistan and its investment will increase to $540 million in three years, even though the current security scenario does not assure it of attractive returns. The Taliban-run administration will have a 20% partnership in the project, which can be increased to 75%. In 2012, up to 87 million barrels of crude were estimated to be in the Amu Darya basin. Delawar informed that under the deal the Chinese company will be extracting oil from an area covering 4,500 square kilometers (1,737 square miles) collectively in Sar-e-Pul, Jawzjan, and Faryab provinces. He added that “Over 3,000 local people will get jobs in this project”, and that a condition of the deal was that the oil extracted would be processed in Afghanistan. Deputy PM Baradar said on the occasion that “In terms of natural resources, Afghanistan is a wealthy nation. In addition to other minerals, oil is the wealth of the Afghan people on which the economy of the country can rely”. Afghanistan is estimated to be sitting on untapped mineral resources worth more than $1 trillion. Baradar added, “Recently, several projects were approved by the Economic Commission, and with their undertaking, fundamental steps will be taken for the prosperity of the country and public welfare”. Chinese Ambassador Wang Yu called the deal important for the economic growth of war-torn Afghanistan and a positive step towards close relations between Kabul and Beijing. He said, “The Amu Darya oil contract is an important project between China and Afghanistan”. Meanwhile, a Chinese State-owned company is also in talks with the Taliban-led administration over the operation of a copper mine in eastern Logar province, a $3 billion deal for which was first signed under the previous Afghan government but has since fallen by the wayside. The pariah status of Taliban-administered Afghanistan in the eyes of most of the rest of the world has not prevented China from pursuing an active strategy aimed at working towards surreptitiously granting de-facto recognition to the Taliban. If accrediting diplomats and other similar actions were initial steps in this direction, the resumption of economic activity is what China would have really desired. That fits in perfectly with China’s consistent policy of preying on vulnerable and deeply distressed nations, mainly, but not exclusively, through entrapment in a vicious cycle of debt and steep repayment of debt via the BRI. Most other countries would view investments or projects in today’s Afghanistan as not being worth the risk in the existing unstable milieu, but not Beijing. It has long had covetous eyes on Afghanistan’s vast untapped resources, and the temptation of a West-free playing field is proving just too much for it to resist, the risks notwithstanding. If that means signing contracts with pariahs who were till recently called terrorists, thereby virtually granting them recognition, for the current Chinese regime that does not seem to pose any headaches. Another notable aspect of the contract is that it has been concluded at a time when just like in neighbouring Pakistan, Chinese nationals are increasingly being targeted in terrorist attacks in Afghanistan. In fact, the announcement of the contract came just a day after the Taliban administration said that its forces had killed eight Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) members in raids, including some who were behind an attack on a hotel catering to Chinese businessmen in Kabul last month. More recently, a suicide bombing in the heart of Kabul on the evening of 11 January targeted members of a Chinese delegation that was due to meet Taliban officials in the Afghan Foreign Ministry. The suicide bomber detonated himself near the Ministry, causing at least 20 casualties. The ISKP claimed responsibility for the attack.  The ISKP’s involvement in these attacks against Chinese nationals in Afghanistan is interesting, as it has long been held that the ISKP in Afghanistan is a creation of the Pakistani intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). A report of the Afghan Institute of Strategic Studies had noted that, “the presence of ISIS in Afghanistan is not genuine. It is an intelligence game played by some of our neighbors”. Pakistan, the report added, supported the ISKP as part of a “hedging strategy”. EFSAS has also touched upon the ISI’s involvement with the ISKP, including in its commentaries of 27-03-2020 and 10-04-2020. A recent RFE/RL report observed that “Pakistan is believed to have an extensive network of spies and proxies in Afghanistan and despite a mostly warm relationship with China, Islamabad is conducting its own independent policy, both courting Taliban leaders and cooperating with the United States”. It quoted author and analyst Ayesha Siddiqa of the London School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) as saying that Pakistan is suspicious of Chinese officials conducting their own outreach to insurgents and developing their own power base in the country. She opined that this meant that despite their oft-claimed “iron brotherhood”, China is not very confident of Pakistan in Afghanistan, and that Beijing will need to tread carefully in the country if it choses to venture there alone. As all this plays out in Afghanistan, the contradiction that China, which uses extensive draconian and inhuman measures against its own Muslim population, even innocent civilians, in Xinjiang, but sees no shame in signing contracts with those who over decades have used terror tactics and been termed terrorists by the whole world, is both glaring and discordant. Source: EFSAS Commentary

Facebook changed its parent company name to "Meta" on Thursday as the tech giant tries to move past being a scandal-plagued social network to its virtual reality vision for the future.    The new handle comes as the company battles to fend off one of its worst crises yet and pivot to its ambitions for the "metaverse," which would blur the lines between the physical world and the digital one.    Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp -- which are used by billions around the world -- will keep their names under the rebranding critics have called an effort to distract from the platform's dysfunction.    "We've learned a lot from struggling with social issues and living under closed platforms, and now it is time to take everything that we've learned and help build the next chapter," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during an annual developers conference.    "I am proud to announce that starting today, our company is now Meta. Our mission remains the same, still about bringing people together, our apps and their brands, they're not changing," he added.    The company's critics pounced on the rebranding, with an activist group calling itself The Real Facebook Oversight Board saying the platform is harming democracy while spreading disinformation and hate.    "Their meaningless name change should not distract from the investigation, regulation and real, independent oversight needed to hold Facebook accountable," the group said in a statement.    The social media giant has been battling one of its most serious crises ever since former employee Frances Haugen leaked reams of internal studies showing executives knew of their sites' potential for harm, prompting a renewed US push for regulation.    - 'Metaverse' -    Reports from a consortium of US news outlets have used those documents to produce a deluge of damning stories, including blaming Zuckerberg for his platform bending to state censors and highlighting how the site has stoked anger in the name of keeping users engaged.    Facebook noted in a filing that from September "it became subject to government investigations and requests" relating to the documents leaked to lawmakers and regulators.    The company told AFP it issued on Tuesday to employees a "legal hold," which is an instruction to preserve documents and communications because it faces inquiries from authorities.    A Washington Post report last month suggested that Facebook's interest in a metaverse virtual world is "part of a broader push to rehabilitate the company's reputation with policymakers and reposition Facebook to shape the regulation of next-wave internet technologies."    However Zuckerberg, in a more than one-hour streamed message that showed him exploring virtual reality worlds, said the vision is the future.    "Within the next decade, Metaverse will reach a billion people, post hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers," he said.    The company noted during Zuckerberg's presentation "a dozen major technological breakthroughs to get to the next generation metaverse."    Facebook has just announced plans to hire 10,000 people in the European Union to build the "metaverse," with Zuckerberg emerging as a leading promoter of the concept.    The metaverse is, in fact, the stuff of science-fiction: the term was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel "Snow Crash," in which people don virtual reality headsets to interact inside a game-like digital world.    Facebook has been hit by major crises previously, but the current view behind the curtain of the insular company has fueled a frenzy of scathing reports and scrutiny from US regulators.    "Good faith criticism helps us get better, but my view is that what we are seeing is a coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false picture of our company," Zuckerberg said in an earnings call on Monday.    Google rebranded itself as Alphabet in a corporate reconfiguration in 2015, but the online search and ad powerhouse remains its defining unit despite other operations such as Waymo self-driving cars and Verily life sciences. Source: AFP/BSS AH

The Cabinet today (Monday)  cleared the draft of Finance Company Act, 2021, in principle, keeping several clauses of executive punishment for breaching the law alongside criminal offenses. The approval came from the weekly cabinet meeting held with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in the chair. The Premier joined the meeting virtually from her official residence Ganabhaban, while her Cabinet colleagues at Bangladesh Secretariat. “The new law has been designed making changes to the Finance Institutions Act, 1993 as it (existing law) is not so effective in this present context,” said Cabinet Secretary Khandker Anwarul Islam while briefing the reporters after the meeting at the Cabinet Division. As per the proposed law, he said, the existing financial institutions would turn into companies but they won’t require fresh registration or change their present memorandum of associations. According to the bill, Anwarul said, none can run a finance company in Bangladesh without taking a license from Bangladesh Bank. The bill also precisely defined loan defaulters as well as fixed the ceilings for the amount of deposited money and interest rates, he added. During the approval of the draft law, he said, the Cabinet also gave an observation for the authorities concerned to review whether the bankruptcy issue of a company can be solved outside the court, and the issue can be incorporated in the proposed law. The Cabinet Secretary said now the court declares a company bankrupt, which is time consuming issue to remove the bankruptcy-related complexities following the High Court’s judgment. Besides, the Cabinet cleared the draft of Leader and Deputy Leader of the Opposition (Remuneration and Privileges) Act, 2021 in order to replace the Leader and Deputy Leader of the Opposition (Remuneration and Privileges) Ordinance, 1979, which was promulgated during the military regime. “No major change has been brought in the proposed law,” he said. It also approved the draft of Bangladesh Homoeopathic Treatment Education Act, 2021 in principle, which will replace the Bangladesh Homoeopathic Practitioners Ordinance, 1983. The meeting cleared the draft Bengali and English versions of the National Financial Inclusion Strategy. In addition, the Cabinet also approved the draft of an agreement to be signed between Bangladesh and Botswana on visa exemption for holders of diplomatic and official passports. Source: BSS AH

The government has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Serum Institute of India Pvt Limited and Beximco Pharmaceuticals Ltd (BPL) to get three crore dodges of SARS-Cov-2 AZD 1222 (Oxford/Astrazeneca Vaccine). Additional secretary to Health Service Division Mostafa Kamal and representatives from Serum Institute and Beximco Pharmaceuticals Limited of Bangladesh signed the MoU at the Health Ministry in presence of Health Minister Zahid Maleque on Thursday. As per the MoU, Serum Institute will provide SARS-Cov-2 AZD 1222 (Oxford/Astrazeneca Vaccine) to Beximco Pharmaceuticals Ltd (BPL). The Health Minister said, “Once the vaccine is developed, the Serum Institute will provide three crore dodges of vaccine in the first phase, and BPL will bring it to Bangladesh.” “We would be able to provide the vaccine to 1.5 crore people once it’s available in Bangladesh as two shots of vaccine is needed for one person,” he said. The process to bring Oxford/Astrazeneca Vaccine will start in January next, said Zahid adding that a decision was taken in principle that Serum Institute will provide the vaccine at the same price they would procure. Zahid Maleque on Sunday said discussions are underway with different countries for procuring Coronavirus vaccines once those are available. “Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) will soon be signed with those companies that are currently in the advanced stage of vaccine production,” he said. The minister came up with the remarks while talking to reporters at the secretariat. The ministry has adequate funds for procuring vaccines and more will be sought from the Finance Ministry, if necessary, he said. “Everyone won’t get the vaccine at a time as it’ll be distributed in groups. The country has all the preparations to fight the second wave of Covid-19,” Zahid Maleque said. Source: UNB AH

Young generation imbued with the spirit of the Liberation War has called upon Jatiya Oikyafront top leader and also Gono Forum president Dr Kamal Hossain to leave the party associated with the anti-liberation force Jamaat-e-Islami. A group of young people under the banner of ‘Young generation imbued with the spirit of the Liberation War’ handed over a memorandum to Dr Kamal Hossain at his office in the city on Sunday afternoon. In the memorandum, the youths demanded that Dr Kamal has to announce formally to leave the company of Jamaat, leave the company of the patronizes of Jamaat and leave the company of people who distorted the history of Liberation War of Bangladesh. Mazharul Kabir Shayan, coordinator of the young organisation, said some 150 youths of different government and private universities went to Kamal Hossain to hand over the memorandum. Receiving it, Dr Kamal thanked them and told them that they would discuss the matter with party leaders, said Mazharul. During handing over the memorandum, JSD President ASM Abdur Rab, Nagorik Oikya convener Mahmudur Rahman Manna, Gono Forum General Secretary Mostafa Mohsin Montu and its Executive President Subrata Chowdhury were also present. MHK