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10 SUNDAY, JULY 23, 2017 DT News Indo-Bangla border changes due to continuous river erosion • Nuruchsafa Manik, Khagrachhari SPECIAL The Indo-Bangla border has been changing due to continuous river erosion caused by the incessant monsoon rain in Khagrachari. Around eight hectares of land surrounding the Feni river in Khagrachari’s Matiranga upazila. Hundreds of Bangali settler families are living in fear in these areas. In the recent years, river erosion has become more intense due to lack of governance, locals claim. However, the Bangladesh Water Development Board (BWDB) have evaded the matter by saying that they were unable to monitor the area due to lack of road communication. Besides patrolling the area, the Bangladesh Border Guards (BGB) has been using their own funds and working with the locals to prevent the situation. They have been continuously trying to stop the river erosion by dumping concrete blocks and sacks of sand. Although India has demarcated their boundary with barbed wires, Bangladesh has yet made any such effort. Thus, in some of the areas, the river has been considered as international maritime boundary. Bangladesh is losing its land mass every year due to the lack of river governance, whereas new shoals are emerging at the Indian side. BGB 40 Battalion Commanding Officer Lt Col Md Khalid Ahmed said that BGB has taken the responsibility of protecting 40km of the Indo-Bangla border areas. He added: “39 international boundary markers have completely submerged and 16 of them are now in the river. We have collected these information by conducting a joint survey with India and then notified the authorities concerned. Bangladesh will be in a crisis without adequate river governance.” BWDB Deputy Divisional Engineer (Khagrachari office), Md Nurul Absar Azad, said: “The government has taken the initiative for river governance in order to stop the erosion of rivers at the border. On July 11, after a discussion chaired Many agricultural lands have been affected by the erosion of Feni river BGB jawans are helping the locals to dump concrete blocks to prevent the land from the river erosion of Feni DHAKA TRIBUNE DHAKA TRIBUNE by the prime minister, a project has been approved regarding this matter. The construction of this project will start in the next dry season.” Hundreds of crops and agricultural lands in Matiranga are now in crisis. Whereas, to avoid any such a predicament India has created a concrete dam around the bank of Feni in Tripura state’s Amarpur. To ensure the movement of Border Security Force (BSF), they have also constructed roads in the border area. In contrast, Bangladesh has not made similar efforts which rendered much of its land mass to go under the river. A local from Bornal Amtoli village, Chinglaprot Marma, said that he has lost around 0.4 hectares of land due to river erosion in the past few years. His entire family depended on what they earned by cultivating crops on this land. Another local, Komol Bikash Chakma, said: “Twenty days ago, I took a piece of land on lease for cultivating crops from a local, Yusuf Mia. Within a few days of sowing the seeds, around 0.64 hectares of this land went under Feni river due to the incessant rain. I also took a loan to buy the seeds and fertilisers. Now, I do not know what to do.” A local from Dewan Bazar area, Md Mizan, said: “All my life, I have noticed India building dams around the river to protect their surrounding areas. I have not witnessed such an effort being made by Bangladesh and that is way so much of our land is getting submerged in the river every year.” Predicting a severe land mass crisis, Chairman of Mantiranga Bornal union, Ali Akbar, suggested that the government should start dumping concrete blocks promptly to protect the areas around the river from being flooded. He added: “The union’s Tholapara, Kadamtoli, Noyapara and Amtoli area have already lost around 2 hectares of agricultural land due to the river erosion. Around three hundred Bangali settler families have been also affected in Motumog Karbari area, Dewanpara and other surrounding villages.” • US friendly fire kills 12 Afghan policemen • Tribune Desk WORLD An errant US airstrike has killed 12 Afghan National Police officers who were fighting the Taliban and wounded two others. Helmand provincial police chief Abdul Ghafar Safi said on Saturday that the death toll in Friday’s airstrike was determined after a site inspection of the compound in Gereshk District. The Pentagon confirmed the airstrike on the Security Forces compound happened during a US-supported operation against Taliban insurgents in the area, and offered its condolences to the families of the security forces who were killed. While much of Helmand province is under the control of Taliban, Afghan national security forces have been waging fierce battles to retake territory. Nato and US troops are in Helmand to assist Afghan troops. Safi told press that the dead were police officers who were operating with the army in the area. The Helmand governor, Hayatullah Hayat, said it was believed the police officers were not in uniform, which may have resulted in mistakenly identifying them as Taliban fighters. A Taliban statement meanwhile claimed a victory and said 16 Afghan soldiers were killed. Iran accuses US of nuclear deal sabotage • AFP, Vienna WORLD Iran on Friday vented frustration over fresh US sanctions which it says “violate” the terms of a 2015 landmark nuclear deal, raising its concerns at a meeting with major world powers in Vienna. “We talked in detail about the sanctions and the instances that the Americans had delayed in fulfilling their commitments, the instances where they violated the deal,” Tehran’s lead nuclear negotiator Abbas Araqchi told reporters. “We showed one by one the instances where the American side in the last year and a half acted without good will and even acted with ill intention. US was “trying to sabotage the situation, to threaten or scare off foreign companies to invest in Iran”, Araqchi said. The regular quarterly meeting to review the deal heard, as Washington already confirmed earlier this week, that Iran is sticking to its side of the pact with the US, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany. •
News 11 SUNDAY, JULY 23, 2017 DT Neil Armstrong’s moon bag sells for $1.8m Sotheby’s Cassandra Hatton displays the Apollo 11 Contingency Lunar Sample Return Bag, used by Neil Armstrong on Apollo 11 to bring back the very first pieces of the moon ever collected, during a media preview for Space Exploration auction in New York on July 13, 2017 AFP • AFP WORLD A bag Neil Armstrong used to collect the first ever samples of the moon — which was once nearly thrown out with the trash — sold at auction Thursday for $1.8 million, Sotheby’s said. The outer decontamination bag, which was flown to the moon on Apollo 11 and still carries traces of moon dust and small rock, was sold on the 48th anniversary of the first moon landing in 1969. Auctioneer Joe Dunning introduced the lot as “an exceptionally rare artifact from mankind’s greatest achievement.” It sold to an anonymous buyer on the telephone following a sluggish five-minute bidding war. Its previous owner was an Illinois lawyer, who bought it in 2015 for $995. But even with the buyer’s premium added to Thursday’s $1.5-million hammer price, the bag fell short of Sotheby’s pre-sale estimate of $2-4 million. Sotheby’s said it was the only artifact from the Apollo 11 mission left in private hands. After Apollo 11 returned to Earth, nearly all the equipment from the mission was sent to the Smithsonian, the world’s largest museum. But an inventory error left the sample bag languishing in a box at the Johnson Space Centre. Staff were about to throw it out before offering it to a collector who ran a space museum in Kansas, keeping it unaware of its provenance. When the collector was later convicted of theft, fraud and money laundering, the FBI seized the box from his garage to auction it off for restitution. The bag — which has a tear and is made of the same fire-retardant material as space suits — was offered four times for sale, before the Illinois lawyer bought it in 2015. Noticing dark smudges inside, she sent it to NASA for testing, which confirmed in 2016 it was indeed moon dust from the Apollo 11 landing site, and that it was the decontamination bag listed in the Apollo 11 stowage list. A legal battle ensued over ownership, which ended in a federal judge ordering NASA to return the bag to the lawyer — who then offered it for sale. • Interpol circulates list of 173 suspected members of IS suicide brigade • Tribune Desk WORLD IS fighters in Raqqa in 2014 Interpol has circulated a list of 173 Islamic State fighters it believes could have been trained to mount suicide attacks in Europe in revenge for the group’s military defeats in the Middle East, the Guardian reports. The global crime fighting agency’s list was drawn up by US intelligence from information captured during the assault on IS territories in Syria and Iraq. European counter-terror networks are concerned that as the IS “caliphate” collapses, there is an increasing risk of determined suicide bombers seeking to come to Europe, probably operating alone. There is no evidence that any of the people on the list have yet entered Europe, but the Interpol circulation, designed to see if EU intelligence sources have any details on the individuals, underlines the scale of the challenge facing Europe. The list, sent out by the general secretariat of Interpol on 27 May, defines the group of fighters as individuals that “may have been trained to build and position improvised explosive devices in order to cause serious deaths and injuries. It is believed that they can travel internationally, to participate in terrorist activities.” The data was originally collected by the US intelligence “through trusted channels”. The material was handed over to the FBI, which transmitted the list to Interpol for global sharing. Reliability of the sources US intelligence is apparently confident about the reliability of the sources used to compile the list. But western counter-terrorism forces have said they face an uphill struggle identifying potential suspects, who have access to a mountain of false documents, double identities and fake passports. Interpol stressed the list’s transmission came as part of its role circulating information between national crime-fighting agencies. “Interpol regularly sends alerts and updates to its national central bureaux (NCB) on wanted terrorists and criminals via our secure global AP police communications network,” a spokesman said. “It is the member country which provides the information that decides which other countries it can be shared with. In 2015 the UN considered there were 20,000 foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria, of whom 4,000 were from Europe, but there has not previously been a specific list of those fighters including those born in the Middle East who have been identified as potential suicide bombers. The speed with which IS fighters are likely to attempt to reach Europe will depend on a range of issues including whether the group tries to set up a new base in Syria in the wake of the impending fall of Raqqa, its last major redoubt in north-west Syria. There is a growing suggestion that IS fighters will shift south from Raqqa to the defensible territory stretching from Deir el-Zourez-Zor to Abu Kamal. US Army Col Ryan Dillon on Friday estimated there were around 2,000 IS militants in the city, who he said were using civilians and children as human shields. The distance between SDF forces on the eastern side of the city and on the western fronts is now just under 2km. The United Nations estimates that about 190,000 residents of Raqqa province have been displaced since April, including about 20,000 since the operation to seize the provincial capital began in early June. US diplomats this week admitted that the SDF forces, due to their ethnic make-up, will be constrained from going south of Raqqa to pursue IS as far as Deir Azzour, saying this may be the task of the Syrian forces under Bashar al Assad, or even Iranian-backed Shia militia. • Bangladesh Public Relations Association (BPRA) celebrated 38th anniversary of its founding bu cutting a cake at the National Press Club in Dhaka on Saturday. The function was attended by Samakal Editor Golam Sarwar, National Press Club General Secretary Farida Yasmin, BPRA President Mostafa-E-Jamil, Secretary General Moniruzzaman Tipu and journalists and public relations officers from different organisations, said press release. BPRA was founded on July 22 in 1979 COURTESY Govt, Green Delta sign deal on healthcare project • Tribune Desk METRO Health Economics Unit (HEU) of Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and Green Delta Insurance signed an agreement for implementation of second phase of Shashthya Shurakhkha Karmashuchi (SSK) project. Green Delta has been working as the scheme operator of the SSK since launching of the programme on March 24, 2016, said a press release. Now the HEU is initiating the second phase in Kalihati, Ghatail and Modhupur of Tangail and Green Delta will be continuing its services as the scheme operator. SSK is a “dream project” of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina for the population living below poverty line. The World Health Organization (WHO) has brought a concept titled “Universal Health Coverage (UHC)” to ensure health care for everyone, regardless of their social status. The Bangladesh government has also taken up the challenge to achieve the UHC by the year 2032 through implementing the SSK project. The project was initially taken up in Kalihati of Tangail district and was seen as a huge step in revolutionising the healthcare delivery system for the poor by introducing micro insurance. The poor people selected under certain criteria will get a card to receive treatment for 50 diseases commonly found in them. The treatment will take place in government health facilities of the district. The government will give Tk1,000 per family each year as the premium for a pool fund. One family will get Tk50,000 treatment a year. The signing ceremony was held at the health ministry office. HEU Director General Md Ashadul Islam and Managing Director and CEO of Green Delta Insurance, Chartered Insurer Farzana Chowdhury ACII (UK) signed the MoU on behalf of their respective organisations. •
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Page 23 and 24: Showtime Films coming out this Eid

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