THE Bangladesh government has ordered mosques and libraries to be purged of all books written by Abul Ala Maududi. The chief of the state-funded Islamic Foundation has said the late Jamaat-i-Islami founder’s books encourage “militancy and terrorism”. He added that the decision was taken as Maulana Maududi’s works are “against the peaceful ideology of Islam”. It appears there is a political angle to the Awami League government’s decision. Observers have said the government wants to keep a check on the activities of the Bangladesh Jamaat-i-Islami allied with the Awami League’s arch-rival, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. Maulana Maududi’s works have influenced the ideology of the various chapters of the Jamaat in the subcontinent.
Bangladesh’s state minister for religious affairs told parliament the other day that the government would withdraw books written by persons ‘identified’ as having been involved in ‘war crimes’ and ‘crimes against humanity’ during the 1971 war.
Banning books is a perilous proposition. Demo cracy and tolerance demand that opposing viewpoints and ideologies be heard, as long as they don’t promote hatred and violence. Though many people may not agree with Maulana Maududi’s politics or his worldview, banning his works does not seem prudent. All shades of opinion must be represented in public discourse and debates about the subjects the Jamaat founder has written on — politics, religion and their intertwining — must continue. While it may be true that Abul Ala Maududi’s writings have contributed to increasing conservatism in society, to say they encourage terrorism is debatable. The Jamaat believes and participates in parliamentary democracy both in Pakistan and Bangladesh, while religious extremists have no qualms about violently overthrowing such a system. It can be safely assumed that Al Qaeda, the Taliban and similar extremist movements power their ideological engines by exploiting geopolitical issues and narrowly interpreting religious texts, not studying Maulana Maududi’s works.
BY now it’s an open secret: the strategic dialogue between the US and Pakistan is for all intents and purposes being run on this side by the Pakistan Army. Perhaps that isn’t a surprise because the government in Islamabad has virtually surrendered the national security and foreign policy domains to the generals. Opinion will as usual be divided. One camp will argue that the generals will never let a civilian government stand on its feet and will never give it the space to govern. The other camp will argue that the civilian government has proved woefully inept in matters of governance and the ad hoc, devil-may-care approach of the politicians has created a vacuum that the army has been forced to occupy in the national interest. The truth, as ever, lies somewhere in between.
At this point, on the eve of the latest ministerial round of the strategic dialogue, it is important to revisit the purpose behind initiating the dialogue. The US-Pakistan relationship has historically been an uneven one, with periods of intense cooperation followed by periods of acute disillusionment and suspicion. The strategic dialogue was meant to demonstrate that US commitment to Pakistan goes beyond narrow security aims and that the US wishes to help Pakistan sort out its economic, development and political challenges. That is why areas such as energy and water and social issues such as health and education have been given so much prominence in the dialogue.
And that is why the Pakistani government’s seeming lack of direction and purpose when it comes to preparing and guiding the dialogue is so surprising: any potential help on the social, development and economic front from an outside power with deep pockets like the US should be grabbed with both hands, given the country’s precarious position.
In the absence of leadership from the civilian side, the army is trying to shape the dialogue in line with its own vision for Pakistan. The emphasis that Pakistan is expected to lay on water disputes with India during the talks with the Americans can be read as an attempt by the security establishment to focus on regional security issues. The message to the Americans: help Pakistan cope with regional pressures, especially India’s growing influence in Afghanistan, because that way the Pakistani state will be able to operate in a more secure environment and focus more fully on putting its own house in order. Whether one agrees with that vision or not, the fact of the matter is that the civilian government needs to get its act together first. A dialogue emphasising social, economic and development issues should be led by the civilians.
The National Academy of Sciences creates virtual blacklists of scientists who dare to disagree with ‘the consensus.’
While most people understand that governmental entities are politicized, there are some we like to think maintain enough integrity to serve the public good. We hope, for example, that the Centers for Disease Control would be free of politicized determinations for what to do about swine flu. And we hope that the Food and Drug Administration were more concerned about whether a drug were beneficial than about how the cost of that drug might influence new healthcare legislation.
One such entity we have relied upon for non-politicized information is the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), which Congress has turned to many times over the years to help work through the ramifications of highly complex issues. Unfortunately, the NationalAcademy seems to have lost its way, and is morphing into a climate-alarm propaganda organ of the U.S. government. There is no lack of evidence that the NAS has gone off the science reservation and into the government’s pocket. As I pointed out in May, science reporter Seth Borenstein wrote:
Ditching its past cautious tone, the nation’s top scientists urged the government Wednesday to take drastic action to raise the cost of using coal and oil to slow global warming.
The NAS specifically called for a carbon tax on fossil fuels or a cap-and-trade system for curbing greenhouse gas emissions, calling global warming an urgent threat.
The academy, which advises the government on scientific matters, said the nation needs to cut the pollution that causes global warming by about 57 percent to 83 percent by 2050. That’s close to President Obama’s goal.
“We really need to get started right away. It’s not opinion, it’s what the science tells you,” said Robert Fri, who chaired one of the three panels producing separate climate reports.
But it gets worse. With a recent publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the NAS seems to have comprehensively studied history and decided the proper role model for their institution is...Joseph McCarthy. The NAS has published a new "study" in the PNAS attempting to boost public trust in catastrophic climate predictions, which have been undermined recently by reports of scientific corruption, partisanship, skullduggery, and worse. Specifically, the "study" seeks to marginalize scientists who have dared to dissent from the "consensus" the United Nations (UN) asserts on climate science.
With such antics, the National Academy of Sciences risks losing its credibility, which is really all it has to offer.
The study, entitled "Expert Credibility in Climate Change," examines the publications and other activities related to climate science and the climate policy of 1,372 climate researchers (me included), then sorts those scholars into two bins. In one bin the researchers placed scholars supposedly “convinced by the evidence” (CE) which led the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to conclude that anthropogenic greenhouse gases have “very likely” been responsible for “most” of the “unequivocal” warming of the Earth’s average global temperature in the second half of the twentieth century.” In the other bin lie those scholars “unconvinced by the evidence (UE).” One qualifies for the “unconvinced group” by having “signed statements strongly dissenting from the views of the IPCC.”
The PNAS study was coauthored by climate-panic rationalizer-in-chief Stephen H. Schneider, the Stanford biologist who famously told Discover Magazine that, in order to prompt action on climate change, “We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have…each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
Scholars were categorized as ‘unconvinced by the evidence’ if they had done so much as object to a proposed policy by governments or express lack of agreement with some aspect of the IPCC.
My personal objection to the study is that they didn't give me my propers: I'm much more widely published than the PNAS study gives me credit for, and the data they used in judging me doesn’t accurately reflect the reality of what I've published, nor in what quantity I've published it (and I’m sure I’m not alone). Granted, I don’t fit too readily in the simplistic bins they set up in the study: I’m skeptical of computerized climate models, projections of future climate conditions, and most climate policy prescriptions, but I accept the validity of fundamental greenhouse theory.
But setting aside my personal beef, there are fundamental problems with this study-cum-propaganda-poster, namely, the approach used to create its sample of “unconvinced” scientists, and using Google Scholar to rank the scientists in terms of "expertise" and "prominence."
Let's look at the selection process first. The selection process can be found in the "supporting materials" the PNAS study references, and here is how they describe the process by which they picked the scientists worthy of examination:
We compiled these CE researchers comprehensively (i.e., all names listed) from the following lists: IPCC AR4 Working Group I Contributors (coordinating lead authors, lead authors, and contributing authors; 619 names listed), 2007 Bali Declaration (212 signers listed), Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS) 2006 statement (120 names listed), CMOS 2008 statement (130 names listed), and 37 signers of open letter protesting The Great Global Warming Swindle film errors. After removing duplicate names across these lists, we had a total of 903 names.
For UE researchers they relied on 12 lists, ranging from the Science and Environmental 1995 Leipzig Declaration (80 names) to the 2009 newspaper ad by the Cato Institute challenging President Obama’s stance on climate change (115 signers), for a total of 472 names.
Someone needs to publicly clean house at the NAS, washing the institution’s hands of public policy pronouncements and renouncing efforts to turn them into a propaganda organ for climate alarmists.
The lists themselves appear here, and problems are easy to spot. (Readers who access the lists will notice that the list repository itself has issues. They claim to have 15 lists, but a quick count shows 16.) For example, the various lists and petitions used to compile the names of the unconvinced include researchers skeptical of the underlying science as well as those only skeptical of climate policy recommendations. As a result, scholars were categorized as "unconvinced by the evidence" if they had done so much as object to a proposed policy by governments or express lack of agreement with some aspect of the IPCC. That's how, for example, Roger Pielke Sr.—a highly esteemed scientist who believes climate change a potentially catastrophic threat—got thrown into the "unconvinced by the evidence” group.
Or consider the Cato ad mentioned above, of which I was a signatory. That was primarily a policy statement responding to President Obama, who said, "Few challenges facing America and the world are more urgent than combating climate change. The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear." The Cato advertisement says virtually nothing about the IPCC's verdict on climate science. It simply argues that the signatories were not convinced that the evidence of climate change is cause for alarm (which is a subjective judgment). And even by the IPCC’s own standards, the science is not “beyond dispute." After all, if the "science was beyond dispute," the IPCC would have said that they were "absolutely certain," rather than that it was only "very likely" that mankind’s greenhouse-gas emissions “mostly” caused observed warming.
The National Academy of Sciences seems to have comprehensively studied history and decided the proper role model for their institution is...Joseph McCarthy.
The Canadian Open Letter to Stephen Harper (2002) was another case of mixed policy and science, but had little relevance to whether one would be convinced or unconvinced about the current IPCC assessment of climate science. The thrust of the open letter (which I signed) was that the scientific evidence of climate change did not warrant adopting greenhouse-gas controls under the Kyoto Protocol.
Another problem with the methods used in collecting scientists’ names for the study regards timing. The hunt for the unconvinced uses petitions that date back to 1992, well before the IPCC was making statements suggesting high confidence that humanity was changing the climate. A person’s expressed belief about climate science in 1992, based on the data available in 1992, sheds no light at all on whether that person is, today, in the “convinced” or “unconvinced” category as defined by current knowledge. Let’s look at a few examples.
The 1992 Statement mixed policy judgment and science assessment, reporting on a 1991 survey of scientists which showed "there is no consensus about the cause of the slight warming observed during the past century." At that time, the IPCC had only published its First Assessment report, which did not come close to matching the most recent levels of confidence the IPCC expresses. In fact, the preface to the report’s overview admits that "there are many uncertainties in our predictions particularly with regard to the timing, magnitude and regional patterns of climate change, especially changes in precipitation," and that "these uncertainties are due to our incomplete understanding of sources and sinks of greenhouse gases and the responses of clouds, oceans and polar ice sheets to a change of the radiative forcing caused by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations." Signing a petition in 1992 has little relevance with regard to whether one is "convinced" or "unconvinced" by the data accumulated over the subsequent 18 years (or whether one is still alive, for that matter).
Signing a petition in 1992 has little relevance to whether one is ‘convinced’ or ‘unconvinced’ by the data accumulated over the subsequent 18 years (or whether one is still alive, for that matter).
The 1995 Leipzig declaration stated: "There does not exist today a general scientific consensus about the importance of greenhouse warming from rising levels of carbon dioxide. On the contrary, most scientists now accept the fact that actual observations from earth satellites show no climate warming whatsoever." By 1995, the IPCC had only completed its Second Assessment Report, stating that "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on climate," and also that "there are still many uncertainties." Again, how does signing a petition that evaluates climate science and policy in 1995 allow one to be categorized as "unconvinced" by data that only became available more than a decade later?
Now, let's consider whether Google Scholar is the right way to rank scientists in terms of expertise or prominence. As Lawrence Solomon points out in the National Post, Google Scholar isn't up to the job:
Does Google Scholar really limit itself to scholars? No. Search “Al Gore” on Google Scholar and you will find some 33,200 Scholar hits, almost 10 times as many as obtained by searching “James Hansen,” a true scientist and easily the best known of those endorsed by Prall as a bona fide believer. Neither does Google Scholar limit itself to “just the scientific literature.” Google Scholar finds articles in newspapers and magazines around the world: 113,000 in the New York Times, 22,000 in Economist, 21,000 in Le Monde, 16,000 in The Guardian.
This latest NAS slide into politicization should send a serious wakeup call. This disease’s progression has become clear. A few years ago, the NAS shamelessly defended the thoroughly demolished "hockey stick" graph which claimed to show that current temperatures lack a historical precedent. Early this year, the NAS issued a blatant call for a specific climate policy, going far beyond serving as an objective voice of scientific explication. And now it has allowed a badly flawed study in its flagship publication that effectively creates a blacklist, in order to delegitimize scientists who might disagree with a vague “consensus” position on climate-change science. With such antics, the NAS risks losing its credibility, which is really all it has to offer. Someone needs to publicly clean house at the NAS, washing the institution’s hands of public policy pronouncements and renouncing efforts to turn them into a propaganda organ for climate alarmists. The alternative will be declining trust in the NAS, and the further erosion of the public’s belief in scientific pronouncements in general.
There are 5,072 miles (8,163kms) of railways in Pakistan and they are gradually falling apart. The death of our railway system is one of the great post-colonial tragedies, and is in stark contrast to the story in India where the state rail company turns a healthy profit and the network is expanding all the time. Ours is contracting and the latest contraction involves the suspension of six more passenger services due to what are said to be financial hardships faced by the railway service. In recent years there has been a succession of inept managers at the top – remember Sheikh Rashid and his proposed bullet train? – and the current lot are no exception. The General Manager of Pakistan Rail speaking to a private TV channel on Saturday said that these six trains were incurring a loss of Rs1.5 billion annually, and that the engines used to haul them would be better employed pulling the 60 freight trains stuck at various locations for lack of motive power.
Just as the news of cutbacks was breaking so was news of new acquisitions. China is to supply 75 locomotives to Pakistan over the next 45 months and an agreement has been signed with a Chinese bank to finance the deal. This contradicts reports in some parts of the media to the effect that the agreement to purchase had been retracted – and once again confusion reigns. There is still a PC1 floating somewhere in the ether relating to the purchase of 150 locomotives from the USA in order to meet our operational requirements; and meanwhile the platforms are crowded with passengers awaiting trains that might take years, never mind hours or days, to show up. We used to be proud of our railways, as proud as we were of our national airline. Sadly, both have fallen into wrack and ruin. If we could now manage to disable the entire road network we would have completed a job of destruction that would bring joy to the hearts of our enemies.
Zijin Mining Group Co, which was found releasing pollutants into a local river that killed thousands of tons of fish and rendered its waters unsafe for human consumption, has been ordered to suspend operations. Some of its top managers are in police custody, and the head of the local environmental watchdog has resigned.
The company is, however, sure to resume production after some technical rectifications. Zijin is not just a public limited company. It is a major contributor to local government coffers. And, local officials hold personal stakes in the miner.
Company executives say the pollution was caused - another instance of which ocurred again on Friday - due to a technical glitch, and that the pollutants released into the river are not as lethal as reported.
Even the local environmental protection authorities have concluded that the river water is now fit for human consumption.
The fact is, this is not a simple matter of a technical error. It is the combined outcome of long-term corporate negligence, and dereliction of duty by the local environmental watchdog. Both parties have to squarely take the blame and must be held accountable.
The Zijin story reveals a cover-up of some magnitude on the part of the company, as well as by the local officials.
The local communities along the river banks were not apprized of the serious nature of the problem until nine days after tons of dead fish began to fill the river.
The company maintained that the action was "for stability's sake." Such brazenness is more often than not a bureaucratic pretext for information control. That Zijin's managers spontaneously assumed such a responsibility indicates their close association with local government officials.
Yet, it is evidently a lame excuse. Keeping the public in the dark is certain to backfire. In this information era, no firewall is airtight. And, the supposed "stability" built upon information control has been proved, time and again, to be fragile and unreliable.
Well-known Chinese historian and intellectual Zhu Xueqin has publicly responded to charges that he had plagiarized part of his doctoral dissertation, by asking the university concerned to initiate a probe that would clear his name.
The professor of history at ShanghaiUniversity has asked officials at FudanUniversity, from where he received his doctorate in 1992, to investigate the matter, and has even offered to quit from his post if they determine that his thesis was in fact plagiarized. He has won wide acclaim by seeking a fair way to prove his case.
Zhu, as is evident by now, is unique in making such an effort to remove the stain of plagiarism, which has dogged other persons of high standing such as Wang Hui, professor of Chinese at Tsinghua University, and Tang Jun, president and chief executive officer of Xin Hua Du Industrial Co.
Wang has refused to answer similar charges, while Tang has been busy denying the allegations and offering justifications instead.
Academic dishonesty has not been rare, and the lack of an effective mechanism to address falling ethical standards in academia has helped foster the practice of plagiarism in recent years.
Weeding out dishonest practices in Chinese academia will be a difficult and arduous task, but establishing a supervisory institution that handles all plagiarism related cases is one first step in the right direction.
At the national conference on education held in Beijing last week, Premier Wen Jiabao declared that the nation would foster a batch of high-quality Chinese universities that will be on par with world famous schools of higher learning by 2020.
To effectively meet this goal, strict ethical standards are a must.
The United States Department of Justice has intensified its investigation into the Control Component Inc (CCI) bribery case and has been nailing more Chinese firms, but its Chinese counterparts have been silent.
Apart from the judiciary, there are a host of agencies under the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the government that can intervene. Yet none seems to have done so.
The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the CPC is waiting for "more specific" information on the suspected violators to decide whether to start a probe.
The State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (ASAC) set up a special panel last year after the first list of suspected bribe-taking Chinese enterprises was released. But nothing has been heard either from the ASAC or its panel since then.
Instead, the onus of investigating the case has been given to the suspected enterprises themselves. The outcome: A couple of the enterprises have said none of their officials had received any bribe from CCI, with one saying it never had any business contact with the US company. The others have not even bothered to respond.
The US Department of Justice has named dozens of Chinese bribe-taking enterprises on its latest list. The suspected firms say they are innocent. So, what is the truth?
The public wants the "competent authorities" to speak up. And there are a thousand reasons for them to do so. Either they do that, or they issue a statement saying taking bribes from overseas companies is not a crime, not even a moral issue.
In March of 2000,Pat Buchanan came to speakat HarvardUniversity’s Institute of Politics. Harvard being Harvard, the audience hissed and sneered and made wisecracks. Buchanan being Buchanan, he gave as good as he got. While the assembled Ivy Leaguers accused him of homophobia and racism and anti-Semitism, he accused Harvard — and by extension, the entire American elite — of discriminating against white Christians.
A decade later, the note of white grievance that Buchanan struck that night is part of the conservative melody. You can hear it when Glenn Beck accuses Barack Obama of racism, or when Rush Limbaugh casts liberal policies as an exercise in “reparations.” It was sounded last year during the backlash against Sonia Sotomayor’s suggestion that a “wise Latina” jurist might have advantages over a white male judge, and again last week whenconservatives attackedthe Justice Department for supposedly going easy on members of the New Black Panther Party accused of voter intimidation.
To liberals, these grievances seem at once noxious and ridiculous. (Is there any group with less to complain about, they often wonder, than white Christian Americans?) But to understand the country’s present polarization, it’s worth recognizing what Pat Buchanan got right.
Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, published a book-lengthstudyof admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities. Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favor black and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Russell K. Nielipointed out last weekon the conservative Web site Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the working-class.
This was particularly pronounced among the private colleges in the study. For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar qualifications.
This may be a money-saving tactic. In a footnote, Espenshade and Radford suggest that these institutions, conscious of their mandate to be multiethnic, may reserve their financial aid dollars “for students who will help them look good on their numbers of minority students,” leaving little room to admit financially strapped whites.
But cultural biases seem to be at work as well. Nieli highlights one of the study’s more remarkable findings: while most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances. Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America.”
This provides statistical confirmation for what alumni of highly selective universities already know. The most underrepresented groups on elite campuses often aren’t racial minorities; they’re working-class whites (and white Christians in particular) from conservative states and regions. Inevitably, the same underrepresentation persists in the elite professional ranks these campuses feed into: in law and philanthropy, finance and academia, the media and the arts.
This breeds paranoia, among elite and non-elites alike. Among the white working class, increasingly the most reliable Republican constituency, alienation from the American meritocracy fuels the kind of racially tinged conspiracy theories that Beck and others have exploited — that Barack Obama is a foreign-born Marxist hand-picked by a shadowy liberal cabal, that a Wall Street-Washington axis wants to flood the country with third world immigrants, and so forth.
Among the highly educated and liberal, meanwhile, the lack of contact with rural, working-class America generates all sorts of wild anxieties about what’s being plotted in the heartland. In the Bush years, liberals fretted about a looming evangelical theocracy. In the age of the Tea Parties, they see crypto-Klansmen and budding Timothy McVeighs everywhere they look.
This cultural divide has been widening for years, and bridging it is beyond any institution’s power. But it’s a problem admissions officers at top-tier colleges might want to keep in mind when they’re assembling their freshman classes.
If such universities are trying to create an elite as diverse as the nation it inhabits, they should remember that there’s more to diversity than skin color — and that both their school and their country might be better off if they admitted a few more R.O.T.C. cadets, and a few more aspiring farmers.
Pakistan Railways has spread consternation among travellers by cancelling six passenger trains, three of them from Saturday, two more on Monday, and the sixth on July 29. The plea taken has been that the trains cost the cash-strapped Railways Rs 1.5 billion a year. The Railways authorities seem to have found a new way of saving money: not providing the service. The railway unions have reacted unfavourably to the decision, arguing that such losses were being caused by the Railways administration’s addiction to luxuries. A union spokesman has pointed out that the cancelled trains ran full, and thus could not have been running at a loss. If that is how the Railways intends to deal with losses, it might as well go out of business. However, in that case, it would not be able to provide the luxuries it presently does to those in its service. It should always remember that the purpose of the Railways is not to further the interests or lifestyles of its servants, but facilitate the ordinary citizen.
However, now that the Railways has been handed over to the ANP by the PPP when it formed the central government, it is perhaps too much to hope that the Railways would be properly administered. The Minister in-charge, Ghulam Ahmad Bilour, has not improved the running of the Railways, and it seems he has acquiesced in this hamfisted method of improving Railways finances. He appears to have taken the Ministry solely to promote his party’s ancient pro-Indian agenda by allowing India an overland rail route to Afghanistan, not because he has any intentions of so running the Railways that its messed-up finances are revamped, all the while improving the service provided to the ordinary traveller.
The Railways provides a cheap solution to the problem of moving both goods and people and is subsidised the world over because of this. The solution to its problems is not closing down routes, or even raising fares, but reforming the way they are run. This the government must do, even if it means ignoring the ANP agenda.
The Friends of Democratic Pakistan met in Islamabad on Saturday and Pakistan’s Foreign Minister informed them of the losses suffered by Pakistan in terms of civilian and military personnel killed, as well as the financial losses due to lost markets, investments and trade. He also made it clear that unless the FoDP fulfilled its commitments, Pakistan could not, as he put it, “win” the war against terror. Apparently, there was an agreement to start implementing the Integrated Energy Sector Recovery Report. However, the real point was once again missed by the FoDP and it would seem by the Pakistani government as well: that unless Pakistan is given the access to the markets of the US and EU, it will continue to suffer economically because of the disastrous US-led “war on terror”. Already, since 9/11 Pakistan has suffered losses of over $ 43 billion. Even more critical, it has lost 3000 civilians, and 2,550 security personnel as well as over 7000 citizens injured. And no one has tallied up the costs to the environment and the social structures of the country. In other words, what the Pakistani government should be doing is informing the FoDP that it simply cannot afford to remain in this US-led mess of a war anymore since the costs on all fronts are too great and the main players like the US have failed to live up to any of their commitments. As for the FoDP, they have been holding continuous meetings but nothing substantive has come Pakistan’s way from them. In fact, the IMF and World Bank continue to insist on distortions in our economy that target the poor more than the rich. If anything, the IMF and the economic managers thrust on the country by them will lead Pakistan further down the road to economic disaster and political instability. It is time Pakistan took a hard line posture towards what is fast becoming the farce of the FoDP.
As has been the common practice and tradition, a minister of the government has assured the people ahead of the holy Ramadan that there would be no shortage of sugar during the holy month and that government would fix the price of the item so that consumers can procure it at cheaper rate. The minister also stated in details the arrangements for ensuring smooth supply of sugar.
Industries Minister Dilip Barua on Saturday hoped that there will be no crisis of sugar in the holy month of Ramadan and sugar price will remain stable during the entire month of fasting. Import of two consignments of sugar, each having 25,000 tons, has already been finalized and is expected to arrive in the country by mid-Ramadan. Barua said price of per kg sugar would be fixed at between Tk 40 and Tk 45 at the mill gate of state-owned sugar mills so that the price in retail market can be kept within commoners purchasing capacity. Earlier, on Thursday, Bangladesh Sugar Refiners Association (BSRA) sent a letter to the Industries Minister for fixing the sugar price at Tk 45 per kg at the mill gate as in the last year.
The Industries Minister said the government has planned a buffer stock of 100,000 tons of sugar through domestic and international procurement to meet additional demand. The BSFIC would import 50,000 tons of sugar. Besides, the corporation would procure another 10,000 tons of sugar locally. The government has a stock of 40,000 tons of sugar. Bangladesh largely depends on imported sugar to meet its annual demand of 1.4 million tons as the state-run sugar mills can produce only 125,000 tons.
But question has arisen as to whether the fixation of price of sugar by the government will be able to ensure the sale of sugar at the fixed price. At least the experience of the people gathered last year amply tells that the market does not abide by the rate fixed by the authorities. It may be pointed out that there is usually higher demand for sugar during the month of Ramadan every year and this causes spurt in the price as the business syndicates go all out to earn lofty profit.
The same thing happened last year also. On the eve of the Eid-ul-Fitre last year the price of sugar had shot up to Tk. 60 per kg as against Tk. 42 per kg four weeks ago. Taking the advantage of the higher demand for sugar in the month of Ramadan , dishonest businessmen extracted extra money from the consumers by raising the price of sugar abruptly. Wholesalers reportedly procured sugar at the rate of Tk. 39 per kg from the refiners, but sold it to retailers at the rate of Tk. 55 per kg to earn lofty profit. And the retailers sold sugar to consumers at the rate of at least Tk. 60 per kg. There was visibly nobody to answer why the wholesalers after purchasing sugar at Tk 39 sold it at Tk. 55 per kg holding the consumers hostage to their greed.
While the rhetoric continued among the refiners, wholesalers and retailers over the exuberantly high price of sugar and the consumers were forced to bear the brunt of the soaring prices of sugar last year, the government apparently was sitting almost idle as helpless spectator. In the light of that sad experience, it may be difficult for many to be hopeful that the government decision to import only 50 tons of sugar this year will be quite enough to stabilize the sugar market in the face of the market manipulation by the sugar syndicates who are allegedly waiting to exploit the occasion. In view of this, the government should take all necessary measure, alongside importing increased quantity of sugar, to keep the market stable by thwarting the evil designs of the syndicates and ensure smooth supply and distribution of sugar in the market . Above all, market monitoring is a must for ensuring that sugar is sold at the fixed price.
Liberty: coalition moves tentatively towards a humane regime
Reviews into sentencing, torture and terror laws must affect real change and there's a chance they could
The price of liberty is eternal, not occasional, vigilance. So it is as well to approach a clutch of reviews announced by the coalition – on sentencing, on torture, and on the terror laws – with a measure of scepticism. Gordon Brown's career repeatedly showed that it is easier to review than to do. There must be a danger that after each of the three has run its course, the British state will continue to take liberties.
But the chimes of freedom do seem to be flashing a little more brightly than for a while. From Ken Clarke's bluntness about the futility of much imprisonment to Theresa May's easy wins in scrapping ID cards and restricting stop and search, security is being carefully weighed against liberty, instead of automatically trumping it. The real tests lie ahead. Liberal whispers about reducing pre-charge detention from 28 to 14 days will have to build into shouts if they are to prevail over howls of police anguish. The toughest decisions of all concerns control orders, which have allowed a handful of suspects – sometimes barred from knowing the case against them – to be held under virtual house arrest ever since the old policy of internment in Belmarsh collapsed in the courts. The situation constitutes the most egregious current departure from the rule of law, though libertarians should not pretend that there are not rare cases where lethal threat is credibly suspected and yet difficult to prove. It is encouraging that Ms May has recruited the former director of public prosecutors, Ken MacDonald, to oversee her officials as they chart a way through this choppy course. Having stood firm against political demands for 90 and 42-day pre-charge detention, while also professionalising the prosecution of terror, he stands as good a chance as anyone of devising a robust regime which is also principled and humane.
For every one of these encouraging signs, there is also an awkward question which the opposition ought to be pressing hard. Is the splitting-off of plans to admit intercepts in open court from the wider terrorism review a sign of the coalition being spooked by the spooks? How is the government's rhetoric about "ancient liberties" to be squared with its plans to savage legal aid, which is the only means by which many citizens can make these liberties effective? How is freedom served by festering Tory delusions of ripping up the Human Rights Act? Why is the review into the UK's embroilment with torture not to enjoy full inquiry powers to compel witnesses to attend?
Sadly, a leaderless Labour party is not in any condition to give voice to the salient questions. This is most obviously so in connection with torture, since a steady drip of documentary evidence and testimony from Guantánamo detainees is embroiling the Blair regime ever more deeply in the saga of rendition, but the eerie silence goes wider too. Whether out of conviction or habit, Labour is clinging on to its recent authoritarianism despite losing all authority. Days after Jack Straw doffed his cap to Michael Howard's "prison works" mantra in the Daily Mail, the party's dismal response to Ms May's terror laws review was to castigate the coalition for ringfencing development expenditure without giving the police budget the same protection.
The candidates to lead the party all claim they want to learn the lessons of the past, and move towards a future in which Labour is the sole progressive force. But only the outsider Diane Abbott has thus far shown much appreciation of the linkage between the party's waning popular appeal and its seeming indifference to freedom. A black woman, Ms Abbott appreciates that civil liberties are not the preserve of some imagined chatterati, but of pressing practical importance at the bottom of the heap. The other candidates would be well advised to give that some thought. The tide is turning towards liberty, and a Labour party that swum against it would deservedly sink.
As the holy month of Ramadan approaches it would be inconsistent if somewhere somebody had not manufactured a crisis related to a vital commodity that will affect all and sundry. This year it is to be sugar that may be the crisis of choice, with the more pessimistic of pundits predicting that its price may rise to Rs100 or more per kilo. The tale is one of good intent gone bad and calls into question the competencies of those at the top of the Trading Corporation of Pakistan (TCP). It appears that the $50 million contract that the TCP made with a Chinese import company for 100,000 metric tons of the sweet stuff may not be fulfilled despite their having been granted an extension of the deadline for the first delivery. Do not for one moment deceive yourself that the sugar is en-route from China because it is not; it is coming from South America, Brazil to be precise, and our embassy there has confirmed that the port from which the sugar is to leave is congested and delays are likely. So how has the TCP got itself – and us – into this bitter-sweet tangle?
Perhaps the first thing to understand is that there is no Plan B, and the government is in a bit of a tizzy as there is no secret stock of sugar which may be fed into the markets to prevent a shortfall. An unintended consequence is almost certain to be a ballooning of local prices and the hoarding of what stocks there are. The chairman of the TCP has called an emergency meeting for Saturday, the outcome of which we are as yet unaware, but during which he is expected to cancel the contracts awarded to Yunnan and Sadat and further seek damages from them for their failure to fulfil the order. The Chinese had won the order after putting in a tender so low that it practically gave a heart attack to our indigenous sugar importers and a $50 million credit line was opened to them through the National Bank of Pakistan. Had the deal come off we might have saved ourselves as much as $10 million on a single contract. The Chinese may lose the $1 million earnest money that they deposited but the sugar, if it ever arrives, is going to be costly; certainly more than the $488 per metric tonne that was quoted against a market rate above $700 per metric tonne. That a figure so far below the market rate was accepted as credible by the TCP and, what is more, accepted from an importer who has previously defaulted, makes one wonder if there may be a few fake economics degrees held by the directors of the TCP. We now await the reports of pre-shipment inspection companies, but the word circulating in official circles is that the TCP, via a basket of failed contracts, has incurred losses of Rs4.5 billion. And the sugar? Still in Brazil.
There are 5,072 miles (8,163kms) of railways in Pakistan and they are gradually falling apart. The death of our railway system is one of the great post-colonial tragedies, and is in stark contrast to the story in India where the state rail company turns a healthy profit and the network is expanding all the time. Ours is contracting and the latest contraction involves the suspension of six more passenger services due to what are said to be financial hardships faced by the railway service. In recent years there has been a succession of inept managers at the top – remember Sheikh Rashid and his proposed bullet train? – and the current lot are no exception. The General Manager of Pakistan Rail speaking to a private TV channel on Saturday said that these six trains were incurring a loss of Rs1.5 billion annually, and that the engines used to haul them would be better employed pulling the 60 freight trains stuck at various locations for lack of motive power.
Just as the news of cutbacks was breaking so was news of new acquisitions. China is to supply 75 locomotives to Pakistan over the next 45 months and an agreement has been signed with a Chinese bank to finance the deal. This contradicts reports in some parts of the media to the effect that the agreement to purchase had been retracted – and once again confusion reigns. There is still a PC1 floating somewhere in the ether relating to the purchase of 150 locomotives from the USA in order to meet our operational requirements; and meanwhile the platforms are crowded with passengers awaiting trains that might take years, never mind hours or days, to show up. We used to be proud of our railways, as proud as we were of our national airline. Sadly, both have fallen into wrack and ruin. If we could now manage to disable the entire road network we would have completed a job of destruction that would bring joy to the hearts of our enemies.
