0 Shopping With Sustainability in Mind When Alden Wicker founded the sustainable fashion and travel blog Ecocult in 2013, creating a gift guide was “kind of a stretch,” she said. Not anymore. “In the past two years, we’ve suddenly seen so much innovation,” said Ms. Wicker, a New York-based journalist. “There are a large number of brands attacking sustainability on every front. Brands trying to detoxify their supply chains. Brands who’ve signed on to the Bangladesh fire and safety accords to make factories safer. Really, there’s something for everyone.” Below, Ms. Wicker shared her 2019 holiday hit list and tips on where and how to shop for the eco-conscious people in your life. The conversation has been edited and condensed. What are some things to keep in mind when you are trying to shop sustainably? For a lot of people, the most sustainable gift is not an object but a donation to a charity that’s meaningful to the other person. If you’re trying to pick out an object for someone, it’s really unsustainable to buy something he doesn’t want or she’s not going to use. I try to select things almost anyone would use or would be to almost anyone’s taste: something rather minimalist, not necessarily plain but classic. A good shortcut is BuyMeOnce — the online store does all the research and picks out all the best things in every category; things with long warranties that are built to last. Which eco-friendly gifts do you especially love? A set of sheets from Coyuchi. They are so incredibly cozy and delicious. They’re organic and certified nontoxic and great for everyone in your life trying to detoxify their products. For tech products, the Nimble portable charger. Everyone needs a portable charger. And Woodwe — it makes laptop and iPhone cases from real sustainable harvested wood and stone.
If you’re traveling anywhere with the people you’re gifting, buy them an experience on Lokal Travel. It finds locally, sustainably, ethically run tour groups in various locations that benefit the communities in a meaningful way. In terms of fashion, a pair of shoes or a gift card to Nisolo. It’s a shoe company that sells really classic boots and shoes for men and women, all ethically made in Peru by artisans paid a living wage. Or something from the French brand Pülü; it makes sweaters out of guanaco fiber. Guanacos are a lot like alpacas. The fiber is super luxurious and better than cashmere: It’s lighter, softer, warmer. Pülü sources the fiber directly from a farm full of happy guanacos in Argentina. And the sweaters are really fairly priced: about $400 compared to a Loro Piana vicuña sweater that’s 10 times as much. A cool Finnish brand is Lovia. For every product, the company tells you how much it cost for every part of the supply chain, and who made it and how. It makes this amazing little purse called the Kapy mini pouch. I love how versatile it is. It’s a little teardrop-shaped pouch with removable straps — you can turn it into a mini backpack, a wristlet or a cross body purse. Another one is a Swiss brand called Qwstion. It makes these long-lasting quality duffels and backpacks. You switch the strap around and it becomes a briefcase or a backpack or a duffel. It’s versatile and androgynous. My next suggestion is kind of weird. I normally wouldn’t recommend cleaning products as a gift but this brand, Blueland, creates incredibly sustainable cleaning products. It’s great for people who want to get all the toxic products out of their homes. The company sends bottles by subscription and you add the water. The carbon emissions are so much lower because the bottles weigh less — it’s not shipping water. And the packaging is just so pretty. What about gifts for men? Instead of going for the whole fancy shaving kit, just give him a simple classic safety razor. The waste from them is nil. You don’t need a whole package of nonrecyclable expensive things. Get it in gold and it looks really beautiful in the bathroom. And stocking stuffers?
TSHU makes really beautiful reusable and super absorbable handkerchiefs. And it plants one tree for every purchase. Or Wyldaire — it makes really fashionable hats for men and women that fold up so you can put them in your suitcase, all made from sustainable materials. I also really like nail polish by Rooted Woman. It’s featured on an online retailer that sells nontoxic beauty products by and for black women called BLK+GRN. That would be a great place to find something for a friend who’s struggled with finding beauty products that don’t cater to white people like myself. It has gifts cards, too. What resources would you recommend for eco-conscious shoppers? I really like Done Good, which has a partnership with Ecocult. It’s a website and also a browser plug-in. It’s approved a variety of brands as being ethical and sustainable. If you install the site’s button, it will overlay a skin on different retailers’ websites and say this one’s good and this one’s not good. Finally, what should people with a green mind-set avoid? Avoid Amazon. The list of things that is wrong with Amazon is very long. If you can only find it on Amazon, it probably means the product is not reputable enough to be sold on other sites. And do your shopping early because next-day delivery is causing a lot of mayhem both in terms of climate change and dangerous driving. If it’s Dec. 20 and you don’t have time, donate to charity and call it a day.
02 What Are Borders For? In northern Vermont in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, where I grew up in a town whose name was French but where everyone spoke English, the nearby Canadian border was not imposing. Dirt roads crossed the line where New England’s maples become Quebec’s, with no signs to warn passing hikers when they were under foreign trees. On the main highway north to Montreal were a pair of what looked like tollbooths, adorned with flags stitched with a big red leaf or stars and stripes. And when bored customs officers asked you to halt your vehicle, the inquisition to which you were subjected—at least if your Saab or pickup truck
bore Vermont plates—was perfunctory. Documents often weren’t required. You could expect to be asked two questions: where you were headed and if you had any liquor. There were benefits, in high school, to living near a province more libertine than our wholesome state. On Monday mornings, louche upperclassmen sometimes turned up in the cafeteria with tales of having dashed north, over the weekend, to where the drinking age was eighteen, for a case of Molson Ice. But the pull of difference was matched with a sense, at least as strong, that the border didn’t so much divide two nations as amble over a contiguous region. Sure, people on our side of the line pronounced Gallic place names in mountain English. (Calais sounded like “callous.”) But our shared climate and past helped feed a sense, among humans who also shared the complexion of February snow (this no doubt helped), that we had more in common with one another than with citizens of our vast nations who lived in far-off Vancouver or Phoenix. Such cross-border ties are extremely common, of course, among the many millions of people who live near one of the hundreds of boundaries on earth. Most of the oldest borders date from a couple of centuries ago; many count their age in decades. And the ease with which many people straddled them was until very recently exemplified along the now notorious gran linea to our south, which before the nineteen-nineties neither the United States nor Mexico saw fit to mark with anything more forbidding, along most of its length, than an occasional rock pile in the desert. In a part of the continent once thought too dry to cultivate, that porosity was no less vital for Hispanic ranchers and Native Americans than for the builders of what became an agricultural juggernaut, in California and across the U.S. West, which has long depended on willing workers from the south. Now Donald Trump’s dream of “sealing” that border has pulled it into the center of our national life. But as the scholar Matthew Longo underscores in “The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security and the Citizen after 9/11,” although the policies that Trump is pursuing may stand out for their cruelty, they aren’t nearly so much of a departure as we may like to think—either from aims held by his predecessors, or from larger trends in how borders have been changing. In fact, Trump has revealed a new consensus among our political classes—and among hundreds of nations on earth—about what borders are, and what they’re for.
For most of the twentieth century, the “hard boundaries” that did exist were militarized for actually military reasons. These included contested frontiers like Kashmir and a few Cold War hot spots, like the D.M.Z. crossing the Korean peninsula, where opposing armies and world views stared each other down through rolls of concertina wire. Now such scenes are replicated along borders dividing countries whose shared system of government is democracy and whose armies are at peace. This is seen in the more than two thousand miles of heavily guarded barbed wire that India has erected between itself and Bangladesh; or the electrified fence with which South Africa confronts Zimbabwe; or the potato fields that Hungary has laced with menacing barriers to keep out refugees. Since the start of this century, dozens of borders have been transformed from mere lines on a map into actual, deadly features of the landscape. These are places where, as the geographer Reece Jones notes in his book “Violent Borders,” thousands of people each year are now “losing their lives simply trying to go from one place to another.” The once obscure field of “border studies” has won new impetus from the global refugee crisis. But a surge of recent scholarship, of which Longo’s book is perhaps the standout, makes clear that there’s much to be gained from zooming out to examine the history and present of borders everywhere. The ways that borders are evolving in the twenty-first century, in step with changing technology, have profound implications for the future of human rights and international relations—and for the vision of sovereignty that’s shaped both since the first governments embraced the principle of jurisdiction over a strictly defined area of earth. Many ancient cultures espoused ties to particular landscapes and the resources or fishing holes they contained. But for several millennia after our species’s first city-states flourished along the Tigris, few such seats of political power presumed to identify precisely where, in the no man’s lands between their cities’ walls, one’s realm ended and another’s began. This continued as certain of those city-states, later on, became empires. When, in the second century A.D., Rome’s legionaries lodged a ribbon of limestone across Britannia’s north, they cared little if Scottish shepherds ambled south with their sheep or hopped Hadrian’s Wall. That boundary, like the famous Ming-dynasty battlements outside Beijing that we call the Great Wall of China, was a military installation—erected to slow invaders from adjoining lands, yes, but also to project power outward.
The builders of these walls never presumed their domains’ edges to be anything more than provisional; they were less concerned about preventing people from crossing or inhabiting their realms than with maintaining access, when they did, to their taxes and toil. The Mayans may have walked the fields and forests, in Meso-America, to mark where one of their ahawlels’ lands ended. But Malaysia’s negeri city-states—in which rulers maintained firm control over the river systems but made little effort to control the hinterlands beyond their banks—were more indicative of a planet whereon, until several hundred years ago, few people conceived of political territory as exclusive real estate. As medieval fiefs evolved into early states in Europe, their edge-lands were still comprised of what their minders called “marches,” and what we came to call frontiers—contested zones where who was in charge, and whether laws obtained at all, was often in doubt. The key moment in the transition to what scholars call the modern state system arrived in the middle of the seventeenth century, with the famous treaty that ended the Thirty Years’ War. The Peace of Westphalia was signed by a hundred and nine principalities and duchies and imperial kingdoms, all of which agreed, in 1648, that states were now the only institutions allowed to engage in diplomacy and war, and that they would also now be accorded the right to “absolute sovereignty” over their territory. There’s a reason that the great majority of political maps we’d recognize as such date from this era: Westphalia gave states a vested interest in laying claim, with the help of the mapmakers they employed, to jurisdiction over a defined patch of sod. This led to some beautiful maps—and implanted in people’s minds, for the first time, shapes like the one we now associate with France. But few efforts were made to make those maps’ borders clear to inhabitants. The question of whose sovereignty certain shepherds lived under, in notoriously liminal zones like the Pyrenees or Alsace, would remain murky well into the era when sovereignty began to be transferred from kings to laws. As the Harvard historian Charles S. Maier recounts in “Once Within Borders,” a factor that helped change this, in the nineteenth century, was the spread of new technologies—the telegraph, the railroad—that enabled central governments, even in countries as vast as the United States, to think that they might actually be able to govern all of their territory. Another was a series of increasingly bloody wars in Europe and elsewhere that culminated, between 1914 and 1918, in a conflict that saw humankind kill off some sixteen million of its members. Near the end of the First World War, Woodrow Wilson proposed that the international
community might prevent such horrors if it followed his Fourteen Points, which became central, in January, 1919, to the Paris Peace Conference. Key among them was the principle that some of the globe’s borders be redrawn “along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.” This vision was born from a war fuelled by the desire of Bosnians and others for self-rule. It also reflected an idea—that any national group should aspire to and defend a sovereign bit of land—that’s animated countless struggles since, for “self-determination” or its opposite. But this idea also had its drawbacks. One was the danger, as another world war soon made clear, of imagining a map of Europe that furnished for each of its language groups what the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel termed a Lebensraum, or “living space.” Another was that Wilson’s dictum pointedly did not extend beyond Europe—and especially not to Africa, whose vast acreage had only recently been carved into territories. Those territories were anything but “clearly recognizable” to the colonial owners who tacked a big map of the continent to the wall of a Berlin ballroom, in 1884, and drew their borders with scant regard for the language groups and ancestral homelands they crossed. Such are the tortured roots of our current international system. The United Nations’ expectation that each of its member states respect the territorial sovereignty of its neighbors has formed, since 1948, the core of its efforts to maintain world peace. That most of the U.N.’s members have bought into this notion is why, in the late twentieth century, many of the world’s borders came to resemble the United States and Canada’s. In the nineties, there was a brief turn from this project, as celebrants of globalization hailed a borderless world augured by, for example, the European Union’s opening of internal frontiers. Now that vision has collapsed, eroded by mass migration and anxiety. For scholars like Longo, we have entered an era of “bordering” without precedent. What changed? For Longo, the answer, in large part, is 9/11. Since the attacks in New York, he argues, there has been a profound shift in how borders are conceived, installed, and sustained. The most obvious change has been a physical escalation. Over the past eighteen years, for example, the U.S Border Patrol grew to employ twenty thousand agents, becoming the nation’s largest enforcement agency. Throughout the world, anxiety about terrorism has helped drive a trend toward states erecting boundaries to deny entry to potential bad actors. It has seen one prominent U.N. member state, Israel, build some four
hundred and seventy miles of barriers, through the territory of its Palestinian neighbors, whose purpose is “security” but which in effect seizes land not regarded by the U.N. as its own. These developments have occurred at a time when the number of people worldwide who’ve been displaced by violence is at an all-time high—some seventy million, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Many of those refugees hail from a region destabilized by the United States’ invasion of Iraq, in 2003, and its War on Terror. In the early two-thousands, Mumbai, Madrid, Bali, and London experienced their own terrorist attacks, and, as Longo details in his book—which is distinguished by his efforts to actually speak with the officials responsible for executing the ideas that he’s interested in—those countries gladly followed the United States’s lead. Dozens if not hundreds of states around the world turned questions of customs and immigration enforcement, once left to anonymous bureaucrats, into pressing matters of national defense. Not a few scholars of politics and law, in those years, began to try to understand what was happening to the world’s borders. Perhaps the most prescient was Wendy Brown, whose book “Walled States, Waning Sovereignty,” was published in 2010. Brown noted the burgeoning popularity of walled borders, years before Trump’s rise, and predicted that nativist politicians would continue to build boundaries that, she argued in a preface to the 2016 edition, would “not merely index, but accelerate waning state sovereignty.” What she meant was that nation-states were reacting to their dwindling ability to control the movement of information, money, and humans over their territory by building “visual emblem[s] of power and protection that states increasingly cannot provide.” But by doing so, they only highlighted their lack of control, enriching the traffickers and syndicates that have profited from having to find new ways to get their desperate clients and wares, obstacles be damned, where they want to go. About the latter point, Longo can’t disagree. But he has a different argument to make about what “bordering” tells us about the future of states. Sovereignty, to his mind, hasn’t so much waned as transformed. Governments today have never known so much about the people they govern, or been more determined to know more about those entering their territory. For these same reasons, they’ve come to share the once indivisible responsibility for policing their edges. This is the second plank of the post-9/11 shift: with the hardening of physical
barriers came the rise, unprecedented in history, of cross-border collaboration in the name of surveillance. This obtained even in the most neutral of boundaries. In the summer of 2003, I returned home from a visit to Canada and was asked for the first time, by an officer dressed in the stiff new duds of the Department of Homeland Security, to hand over my passport. I can still recall being struck, as he scanned its barcode into a computer, by a thought that now seems quaint: the government was endeavoring to track and store data, accessible in real time, about every time any person left or entered the U.S. Borders were once where sovereignty ended, or began. Now they’re places where states partner with their neighbors to manage and monitor who and what moves between them. This trend toward “co-bordering”—the joint management of overlapping jurisdictions—is a momentous change, Longo writes. It’s also a product of our era, in which national defense has become a matter less of confronting rival states than of working out more efficient ways to, in the words of one Pentagon official, “magnify our focus down to the individual person level.” At the U.S.-Mexico border, one U.S. official says, this means working with his Mexican counterparts to build a “layered detection system that focuses on risk-based screening, enhanced targeting and information sharing.” Another puts it this way: “The wider we make our borders, the more effective we’ll be.” The quote neatly summates what Longo calls the trend to “thick” borders, witnessed around the world. In the U.S., these trends have been formalized in treaties to which we’re now party with both Mexico (the 21st Century Border Initiative, signed in 2010) and Canada (the Beyond the Border agreement, from 2011), which allow for joint surveillance and policing hundreds of miles to either side of where the respective countries meet. The agreements also foster more electronic forms of coöperation: the building of “inter-operable” databases that contain biometric and biographical data for the hundreds of millions of people who call the continent home or have visited its shores. In a 2012 report, D.H.S. put it tersely: “Our vision for the northern border cannot be accomplished unilaterally.” The fact that Canadian Mounties are now empowered, with cause, to board an American vessel off the coast of Maine suggests a rather different vision of sovereignty than the one conjured by “America First.” Europe is even further ahead. The E.U.’s member states haven’t merely banded together to head off migrants—whose fingerprints whatever E.U. state they land in is rule-bound to collect. They’ve also made data on the inhabitants of the Schengen Area, which lacks
border checks, available to one another. Across the sea in North Africa, Tunisia and Egypt have been pushing for regional border-security arrangements to confront continued instability in Libya. The member nations of the East African Community—Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and South Sudan—now maintain shared patrols around Lake Victoria. Even India and China, never models of trusting bonhomie, have since 2013 had an accord in place “to improve security along their 4,056-kilometer border . . . [and increase] cooperation on a military-to-military basis.” As in the nineteenth century, technology is what has enabled the state to maintain—or aspire to—control. In recent months, a few U.S. cities banned the use of facial recognition on their streets. But an arguably bigger story about the same technology—by which F.B.I. and ICE agents have been making extensive use of millions of driver’s-license photos culled from state D.M.V.s—highlights how our laws will struggle to keep pace with overreach. (Another example can be glimpsed in the D.H.S.’s push to legalize and expand its officers’ practice, recently revealed, of collecting DNA from detained migrants.) In China, facial recognition is already being used on a mass scale. And in Xinjiang, the home region of the oppressed Uyghur minority, the state has even taken to installing an app on the smartphones of everyone who resides in or enters the region. The app transmits to Communist Party police users’ private habits, as well as their daily travels around the Internet. Data has already made tech companies rich, and its strategic import to modern governments is plain. “Data is the new oil,” one Brazilian researcher explains. “Every government has become dataholic.” This emerges, in Longo’s account, as the reason that borders, quite apart from their use for the staging of populist or authoritarian dramas, have become so important: they’re where it’s legal for the government to capture the information that its bureaucracies covet. There was a time when you had to commit a crime, or be suspected of committing one, to have your fingerprints and photograph taken by an officer of the state. Now all you need to do is take a trip. For many scholars, the solution to all this lies in addressing the violent inequality that’s pushed a quarter billion people to leave their countries for a better life. This, for anticapitalist academics like Reece Jones, would entail some familiar-sounding steps. The most prominent is open borders—one of those odd issues where, less for moral than for
macroeconomic reasons, libertarian and left-wing positions congrue. Lifting limits on migration has been espoused by writers as divergent in outlook as the Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley, the author of the 2008 book “Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders,” and Suketu Mehta, whose important new book “This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto” cites the same strong evidence: more immigrants means more jobs. In rich countries where productivity is declining as fast as the birth rate, Mehta insists, “the immigrant armada that is coming to your shores is actually a rescue fleet.” But even if we begin to understand this, the main reason that hard borders aren’t going anywhere, Longo argues, has nothing to do with either economics or populism. It has to do with technology’s still-growing role in what nation-states do. In 1975, Michel Foucault famously identified what he called the “oldest dream of the oldest sovereign,” the panopticon: that circular prison whose sight lines were such that a warden at its center could keep tabs—or pretend to—on every subject in his realm. Now even the world’s most liberal governments have tools for gathering information that would have made the Stasi blush. Governments controlled by data, rather than vice versa, begin to process people as “readable texts” rather than as citizens. Borders, in turn, become the places in which those bureaucracies can most easily produce the “data double” that we’ve all become. Longo underscores what this means. “A central aim of this book,” he writes, “has been to identify the grand strategic shift away from nation-states and toward individuals. But what if this foretells the end of the individual too, now at the expense of the sub-individual, a subject composed of data points?” It’s a troubling suggestion, not least because of the stark divide that’s already emerged between countries willing to share those data points and those that aren’t. This digital “firewall,” invoked by several of Longo’s sources, excludes anyone whose government doesn’t have the capacity or will to issue passports whose chips and barcodes possess their holders’ vital information. It threatens to turn humans without data, in a word, into humans without rights. With rich countries now admitting foreign nationals based on how much they “trust” the data attached to their passport, such divides will only further inflame the perceived split between nations that have joined modernity and those outside it. To explain what this all portends, Longo turns to another hazy episode from history that Foucault used to illuminate his theories of modern society. It involves the moment when
many medieval towns were spurred by rapid growth, in the eighteenth century, to do away with their walls—losing their ability to down their gates at night and to monitor, during the day, entries and exits. This change, in Foucault’s account, introduced to those towns a new anxiety about vagrants and outsiders. The shift gave birth to modern policing; armed guards turned their gaze from the horizon to the streets below them. The question for the sovereign state, then as now, wasn’t whether or not to have walls—it was where to put them. The answer, in the centuries since, has evolved with shifts in ideology and geopolitics and technology alike. But the conclusion reached by our republic and most nation-states today, whether spurred by populist strongmen or their own bureaucracies’ needs, about whether to wall their territories’ edges or more aggressively surveil what they contain, is plain: do both. In our new age of “bordering,” the border is drawing nearer, all the time, to the edge of the body itself.
03 Sudden foreign accent, 'werewolf' hair growth: Yes, these odd medical conditions are real Medical advances are making it increasingly common for Americans to be diagnosed with a rare disease — but some of these conditions are so unusual that they can generate national headlines when a person is diagnosed. In many cases, these conditions are temporary and treatable — as was the case this week when a condition that causes out-of-control hair growth made international news when more than a dozen children were reported to have been diagnosed with the condition.
© Provided by USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Satellite Information Network, Inc. These odd medical conditions are so bizarre, they almost sound fake
But some conditions have been found to be permanent, leading some who have been diagnosed to long-term effects including social anxiety, as Ashley Bosma — a woman who suffers from "foreign accent syndrome" — said in an interview. 'Werewolf syndrome' "Werewolf syndrome," also known as hypertrichosis, is the excess production of hair, either in one specific area or throughout the body. Seventeen babies in Spain were afflicted with the ailment after a medicinal mix-up that resulted in them taking minoxidil, the active ingredient in Rogaine, instead of omeprazole, the active ingredient in Prilosec. Farma-Química Sur, the company involved in the mix-up, has since been prohibited from manufacturing any medication until this incident has been resolved, reported Spanish publication El País. The babies afflicted will recover in the span of a few months after taking the medicine, added El País. Prior to this outbreak, "werewolf syndrome" gained notoriety after the website Barcroft TV circulated videos and images of two children — a girl in Bangladesh and a boy in India — who were born with the ailment. 'Black hairy tongue' Black hairy tongue is a condition where small bumps on your tongue grow larger and change into a brownish-black color. The condition can look as though small hairs sit on top of the person's tongue. Last September, the condition gained national attention after the New England Journal of Medicine published details of a case involving "black discoloration of her tongue" in a 55year-old woman. The study, which included graphic photos, found the condition was a side effect of her treatment following a motor vehicle crash. After developing an infection, the woman was given two antibiotics: an oral dose of minocycline and meropenem given intravenously. One week later, she developed nausea, a bad taste in her mouth and the tongue discoloration.
The condition went away within weeks after doctors had the patient stop minocycline in favor of an alternative treatment. Black hairy tongue can occur in patients for a number of reasons, according to Yasir Hamad and David K. Warren, doctors at Washington University in St. Louis. Among them: poor oral hygeine, using tobacco or irritating mouthwashes, or antibiotic treatments. 'Foreign accent syndrome' Last year, a Florida native drew national attention to a rare speech disorder when she was diagnosed. Following a traumatic brain injury, Ashley Bosma began speaking in what sounds like a posh British accent. The rare condition has been documented at least 100 times. "It's real. It happens. It's a beautiful and cursing phenomenon," Bosma said. The University of Texas at Dallas says the syndrome has been observed in a number of languages. Japanese speakers have begun to speak with a Korean accent and Spanish speakers have begun speaking with a Hungarian accent, for example, the university says.
1 India vs Bangladesh: ‘Would be amazing’ - Shane Warne’s special request for Sourav Ganguly, Virat Kohli With India’s first ever Day/Night Test underway, Australian spin legend Shane Warne is hoping Virat Kohli and his men will agree to play with the pink ball when they tour Australia next year. The second Test between India and Bangladesh, which started in Kolkata on Friday, saw the two teams playing with the pink ball for the first time. Warne congratulated the new BCCI President Sourav Ganguly and skipper Kohli for taking the initiative. Also Read: Tendulkar reveals interesting story about historic 2001 Test vs Australia “Congrats to you and @imVkohli on agreeing to play a day/night test. I hope there’s another one next summer in Adelaide when India tour Australia on @FoxCricket - Would be amazing buddy!,” Warne wrote replying to Ganguly’s tweet.
Also Read: Virat Kohli annihilates Ponting’s record en route huge Test milestone Former England captain Michael Vaughan was also quick to congratulate Ganguly. “Well done Sourav .. look forward to a couple in Aussie next winter,” Vaughan tweeted. Also Read: Rishabh Pant released by Team India to play Mushtaq Ali Earlier this week Kohli had said he is open to the idea of Day/Night Test in Australia next year provided his team is allocated a practice match, something which wasn’t on the table during the 2017-18 tour Down Under. India are scheduled to play a four-match Test series in Australia starting in November next year.
02 “I hope to return to Bangladesh soon”--Rituparna Sengupta When did you arrive in Bangladesh? It has been a few days since I came to Bangladesh to shoot for my upcoming film, Gangchil. We are currently shooting in a village in Noakhali. I hope to return home by tomorrow. How has your experience been from the shoots? Shooting in this village has been an amazing experience. Its green environment and the river banks are beautiful. Having Ferdous and Purnima as my co-actors made this experience even better. Tell us a bit about your role in the film. I am playing the role of Bijli in the film. I do not want to give any spoilers, so I will just say that Bijli is a special character and plays an important role in the film. You are to work in a couple of more films in Bangladesh. How are those projects coming along?
I will be working in the film Jam, produced by actor Manna’s production house, Kritanjali Kothachitra. His wife Shelly approached me to work in the film. So, I hope to return to Bangladesh soon. What else are you currently busy with, besides ‘Gangchil’? My film 3 Kanya, was recently released. I have to start shooting for my other projects in Kolkata as soon as I return home. Besides, I also have to plan my next trip to Bangladesh. I will dearly miss the hospitality and kindness of Bangladesh while I will be away, especially the taste of Comilla’s Roshmalai and Padma’s Ilish.
03 Pink Ball Test: India crush Bangladesh by an innings and 46 runs, record 12th successive series win at home KOLKATA: Paceman Umesh Yadav claimed five wickets as India thrashed Bangladesh in just over two days of their first day-night Test to sweep the series 2-0 on Sunday. Bangladesh were bowled out for 195 in less than an hour of the first session on day three in Kolkata, as India won by an innings and 46 runs to record their 12th-straight Test series triumph on home soil. '; var randomNumber = Math.random(); var isIndia = (window.geoinfo && window.geoinfo.CountryCode === 'IN') && (window.location.href.indexOf('outsideindia') === -1 ); console.log(isIndia && randomNumber BLOG| SCORECARD It was a memorable pink-ball international debut for India, who become the only team to win four consecutive Tests by an innings margin. Virat Kohli's side -- which has now won seven Tests in a row -- consolidated their top position in the world Test championship with three successive series sweeps. Mushfiqur Rahim made a valiant 74 before falling to Yadav, and the innings soon folded as Mahmudullah did not return to bat after he had retired hurt on 39 on day two. India took 8.4 overs to wrap up the game at Eden Gardens with Yadav taking all the three wickets to fall Sunday afternoon.
Ishant Sharma led the pace charge with impressive match figures of 9-78 to flatten the Bangladesh batting that fell for 106 in their first innings of the opening day. "With the way these guys are bowling now, they can pick up wickets on any surface -whether we play at home or we play away," a victorious Kohli said. "I think it is all about the mindset... these guys are very hungry, they are at the top of their game. "I feel that we are in the right kind of space right now to capitalise on opportunities and everyone is enjoying playing in this team and I think that's the standout feature about us." Kohli played a key part with his 136 in India's 347 for nine declared on Saturday as they managed a lead of 241 runs. The tourists were in early trouble at 13 for four in the final session on day two when Mushfiqur resisted India's persistent pace attack. Ishant trapped Shadman Islam lbw for nought and then claimed skipper Mominul Haque, who got a pair of ducks. The spearhead quickie, who claimed five wickets in the first innings, bowled at a lively pace as one of his rising deliveries hit Mohammad Mithun on the helmet. Bangladesh were forced to take two concussion substitutes in Mehidy Hasan and Taijul Islam for Liton Das and Nayeem Hasan who were hit on the helmet by Shami on day one. Mushfiqur was also at the receiving end of a nasty hit from Yadav, but went on to play a fighting knock. Kohli completed his 27th century before falling to a stunning catch by Taijul off Ebadat Hossain. India won the opening Test also inside three days, as well as the preceding Twenty20 series 2-1.
1 Bangladesh Sentences 7 to Death Over 2016 Bakery Attack DHAKA, Bangladesh — Seven militants linked to the Islamic State were sentenced to death by a Bangladeshi court on Wednesday for their role in planning a gruesome 2016 attack at an upscale bakery in Dhaka, one of the worst such attacks the country has suffered.
The attack, which left 24 people dead and was initially claimed by the Islamic State, at the time represented one of the clearest indications that the group had made inroads in South Asia. And after their sentence was handed down on Wednesday, the convicted men vowed to carry out an even bloodier attack. The violence took place in July 2016 in a diplomatic enclave of Bangladesh, a Muslimmajority country. Militants armed with machetes, grenades and rifles stormed the Holey Artisan Bakery, sorted foreigners from Bangladeshis, and then slaughtered hostages during an 11-hour standoff with the military. The gunmen complained to the restaurant’s staff that foreigners, with their revealing clothing and ease consuming alcohol, were a threat to Islam. Eventually, they ordered patrons to cite verses from the Quran and killed those who could not. At one point, according to survivors, the attackers asked the restaurant’s staff to turn on the Wi-Fi network and then posted images of the carnage online. The seven convicted men belonged to the banned militant group Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh. Abdullah Abu, a public prosecutor on the case, said that 21 people were implicated in plotting the attack, including five militants who were killed when soldiers rushed the bakery. Eight other people were killed in subsequent security raids. Mr. Abu said the remaining men were involved in supplying arms, money and training to the attackers, who came mostly from educated, cosmopolitan backgrounds. One person was acquitted for lack of evidence. On Wednesday, the convicted men did not appear to show remorse for their actions, the prosecutor said. “The attackers’ ultimate goal was to implement their plan of jihad,” he said. “The judge said this terror attack was horrifying and had spread shock waves inside and outside the country.”
Among the dead were nine Italians, seven Bangladeshis, seven Japanese, one American and one Indian. For months after the attack, Dhaka’s diplomatic area was eerily quiet. Restaurants were empty for days, and foreigners did not leave their compounds. When the Holey Artisan Bakery reopened in 2017, visitors burst into tears and hugged staff members. The attack encouraged Islamist militants in Bangladesh, where Western intelligence officers had worried that the Islamic State and other extremist groups could find fertile ground to spread their message. Until 2016, local militants had carried out only isolated killings, mostly of religious minorities and bloggers critical of hard-line Islam. Mohammad Delwar Hossain, a lawyer representing four of the convicted men, said they planned to appeal the sentence. He also expressed surprise that some of the convicted men had worn caps bearing an Islamic State-like emblem to the hearing. “They were produced before the court through special security,” he said. “So this is also my question: How and from where did they get this cap?” As the men were taken back to prison in a caged police van, they screamed at journalists huddled on the roadside. Among their cries: “We are soldiers of God! We are not scared of death sentences! We are the winners! We will carry out an even bigger incident than this one.” Julfikar Ali Manik reported from Dhaka, and Kai Schultz from New Delhi.
02 Slow and steady hope for near-extinct Bangladesh tortoises
Š MUNIR UZ ZAMAN The population of Asian Forest Tortoises has fallen sharply after widespread habitat destruction and rampant poaching Newly-hatched tortoises take their first steps at a Bangladesh conservation park, their feet barely visible under hard shells that carry the weight of the species on their backs.
Š MUNIR UZ ZAMAN The local population of Asian Forest Tortoises was estimated at less than 50 before the recent births These tiny newborns -- 41 in all -- belong to a species thought to have gone extinct in the country until seven years ago, when they were rediscovered by conservationists with the help of locals in the southeastern Chittagong hills.
Š MUNIR UZ ZAMAN Environmentalists say the success of the breeding programme is no guarantee the species will survive once the newborns are released back into the wild Once abundant across dense tropical forests in Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Thailand, the population of Asian Forest Tortoises has fallen sharply after widespread habitat destruction and rampant poaching. With their local population estimated at less than 50 before the recent births, wildlife experts and forestry officials have worked hard to boost their numbers. Two years ago they brought two male and five female adults to a forest reserve north of the capital Dhaka in an effort to breed them in captivity. To their delight, the appropriately-named Casanova, around 15 years old, and Big Boy, aged between 50 and 100, mated with four females giving birth to 46 babies. The 41 to have survived are growing at a "healthy pace", conservationist Shahriar Caesar Rahman told AFP. "It is a huge achievement because without this intervention they would have gone extinct from the country," Rahman said. "We are giving them a realistic chance now for them to get back from the brink. And we hope that in future they will survive and thrive in Bangladesh."
Š MUNIR UZ ZAMAN Logging and slash-andburn agriculture is eating into the tortoises natural habitat, environmentalists say - Critically endangered Across the region, the population of Asian Forest Tortoises has plummeted by at least 80 percent in the past 135 years and the species is critically endangered, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Š Sam JAHAN Newly-hatched tortoises take their first steps at a Bangladesh conservation park, their feet barely visible under hard shells that carry the weight of the species on their backs. These tiny newborns -- 41 in all -- belong to a species thought to have gone extinct in the country until seven years ago, when they were rediscovered by conservationists with the help of locals in the southeastern Chittagong hills. Environmentalists say the success of the breeding programme is no guarantee the species will survive once the newborns are released back into the wild. Logging and slash-and-burn agriculture are eating into their natural habitat, Rahman says. The human population in the lush Chittagong hills has soared, with the area's tribal minority groups pushed further into the jungle by the encroachment of settlers from elsewhere in Bangladesh.
Hills have been stripped bare of vegetation for new roads and development, and the tortoises are also popular in tribal cuisine. World Bank conservationist Ishtiak Sobhan said environmental activists are working to encourage the indigenous population to cut tortoise meat from their diets. Some tribespeople are also being trained to rescue the animals from poachers, with around two to three saved each year. Meanwhile, a decades-long local insurgency has hampered efforts by authorities to protect the wild creatures and other endangered animals in the forest. Senior forest department official Imran Ahmed told AFP the government will roll out new projects to conserve the fauna in the hilly area. "Our plan is now to involve the local tribal people to conserve these rare animals. We want to co-manage the project with them. I think that'll bring sustainable success," Ahmed told AFP. sa/sam/grk/rma/gle/ind/rbu
03 Holey Artisan cafe: Bangladesh Islamists sentenced to death for 2016 attack
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Eight people were put on trial accused of supplying weapons to the attackers Seven Islamists have been sentenced to death for a 2016 attack on a cafe in the Bangladeshi capital in which 22 people, mostly foreigners, were killed. The attack on the Holey Artisan cafe in Dhaka was carried out by a group of five men, who took diners hostage. Eight people were on trial, accused of planning the attack and supplying weapons. One man was acquitted. The 12-hour siege was Bangladesh's deadliest Islamist attack. Most of the victims were Italian or Japanese.
The attack was claimed by the Islamic State (IS) group, but Bangladesh disputed this, instead holding a local militant group responsible. All of the gunmen were killed by police. Since the attack, Bangladesh authorities have led a brutal crackdown on militants it sees as a destabilising force in the predominantly Muslim country. Public prosecutor Golam Sarwar Khan, speaking after the verdict was delivered, said the charges against the accused "were proved beyond any doubt". "The court gave them the highest punishment," the prosecutor told reporters. A defence lawyer said the seven men would appeal. Death sentences in Bangladesh are carried out by hanging. The wife of Robiul Islam, a policeman killed in the attack, said she hoped the death sentence would be carried out as soon as possible. "In our society, it is really difficult for a widow to live with two kids. But I'll consider myself lucky because I've been showered with respect and support. My husband died for his country and is considered a martyr," Umme Salma told BBC Bengali.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media captionInside Bangladesh terror attack cafe The seven convicted men were accused of belonging to Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), a home-grown Islamist group outlawed in the country. Sentencing the men in Dhaka, the judge said they wanted to undermine public safety and create anarchy. Some of the men shouted "Allahu Akbar" (an Arabic phrase meaning "God is greatest") as they were led away from the packed courtroom, AFP news agency reported. A security cordon was put in place outside the court, with hundreds of armed police officers surrounding the building. One of the suspected masterminds of the attack, Nurul Islam Marzan, was killed in a shootout with anti-terrorism police in January 2017, authorities said. How did the attack happen?
On the evening of 1 July 2016, five gunmen burst into the Holey Artisan cafe in the upmarket Gulshan district of Dhaka. Armed with assault rifles and machetes, the young attackers opened fire and took diners hostage at gun-point. The attack saw victims inside the cafe, most of whom were foreigners, shot or hacked to death by the militants. Media playback is unsupported on your device Media captionA Dhaka resident captured the sound of gunshots during the raid in 2016 Army commandos were called in after two police officers died trying to fight the militants. After a 12-hour stand-off, the commandos stormed the building and rescued 13 hostages, killing all five militants behind the attack. The casualties included nine Italians, seven Japanese, an American and an Indian. Family members and friends of the victims had gathered in the vicinity, anxiously waiting for news. Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The former location of Holey Artisan cafe, pictured here on the one year anniversary of the cafe attack Bangladesh Army Brig Gen Naim Asraf Chowdhury said the victims had been "brutally" attacked with sharp weapons. "It was an extremely heinous act," Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said in a televised address at the time. "What kind of Muslims are these people? They don't have any religion." A police investigation found 21 militants in total were involved in carrying out and planning the attack, the Daily Star newspaper reported. Five were killed during the attack, eight in later anti-militant operations, the paper said. How did the authorities respond? At least 80 suspected militants were killed and more than 300 people arrested during a wave of operations that followed the attack.
Before that there had been a string of deadly attacks on secular writers, bloggers and members of religious minorities. The Bangladeshi government repeatedly denied international jihadist groups, such as IS and al-Qaeda, were behind these attacks, usually blaming the JMB instead. Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Bangladeshi authorities have led a brutal crackdown on militants since the attack But security forces were subjected to intense criticism for failing to prevent the violence. The Holey Artisan cafe attack - claimed by IS - galvanised the country's security agencies into action. However there have been persistent worries over the authorities' tactics. The UN and others have accused the security forces of enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings and use of torture. Islamist militant groups not yet uprooted Analysis by Akbar Hossain, BBC Bengali, Dhaka The Holey Artisan cafe attack prompted massive anti-terror operations across the country. And there were huge human rights concerns over how the operations were conducted. The government claims it dismantled Islamist militant groups. The security forces and spy agencies in Bangladesh purchased sophisticated equipment to track militant activities over the internet. Security analysts recognise the government has successfully contained militancy - but it's not thought to have been completely uprooted. A recent picture released by the Islamic State group showed several young Bangladeshis expressing their support for the extremists' new leadership after US forces killed its former leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.