Cops claim identifying 3 killers of blogger Avijit Roy

Police claim to have identified three persons who directly took part in the killing of secular writer and blogger Avijit Roy. File photo.

Star Online Report

Police today claimed to have identified three persons “who directly took part” in the killing of secular writer and blogger Avijit Roy last year.
“They all are the members of banned militant outfit Ansarullah Bangla Team,” Monirul Islam, deputy inspector general (DIG) of police, told reporters at the media centre of Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP).
However, the police official did not provide details about the three for the sake of investigation.
Unidentified assailants killed writer and blogger Roy and badly wounded his wife Rafida Ahmed Banna on the Dhaka University campus on February 26 last year when the couple came out of the Ekushey Boi Mela.
“Eight people have been arrested in connection with the killing. Some of them might be directly involved in the killing,” the DIG said.
Police will be certain about it after getting the DNA tests of the suspects soon, he added.
Monirul further said two of the arrestees – Shafiur  Rahman Farabi and Mannan Rahi – had provoked the killing.

UAE win toss, opt to bowl

Asia Cup, 2nd Match

UAE players celebrate the fall of wicket during a T20 match. File Photo: STAR

Star Online Report

United Arab Emirates, led by Amjad Javed opted to bowl first and make use of the conditions with the hard, new ball against Sri Lanka led by the ‘Slinga’ Malinga at Mirpur stadium.
The match will be a major test for UAE as they look to continue their good form from the qualifiers, where they won all three matches against Afghanistan, Oman and Hong Kong.
Some new match-winners have emerged, which could help them not be just another Associate participant among the big boys.
After the 2-1 loss in India, Sri Lanka have a chance to ease their way into the Asia Cup by taking on the UAE in their first match.

Sri Lanka v United Arab Emirates

Sri Lanka: 19/0 (3/20 over)

United Arab Emirates won the toss and elected to field

The return of the captain Lasith Malinga, Angelo Mathews, Rangana Herath and Nuwan Kulasekara will give the team a major boost as they look to start gathering themselves ahead of the World T20, where they have a title to defend.
Mirpur had a green top for the Bangladesh-India encounter but it is unlikely that a similar pitch will be greeting Sri Lanka and UAE.
A surface devoid of grass and with slower speed can be expected. There is rain in the forecast but nothing that should threaten the game.
This is the first encounter between Sri Lanka and UAE in T20Is, although the teams have met in ODIs in 2004 and 2008.
Sri Lanka
DSNFG Jayasuriya, TM Dilshan, LD Chandimal (Wicketkeeper), AD Mathews, TAM Siriwardana, CK Kapugedera, MD Shanaka, KMDN Kulasekara, HMRKB Herath, SL Malinga (Captain), PVD Chameera
United Arab Emirates
Rohan Mustafa, Muhammad Kaleem, Mohammad Shahzad, Muhammad Usman, Shaiman Anwar, Amjad Javed (Captain), Saqlain Haider, SP Patil (Wicketkeeper), Qadeer Ahmed, Ahmed Raza, Mohammad Naveed

Acidic oceans stifling coral growth: study

Coral reefs, like these in the lagoon of the Toau atoll, about 400 km from Tahiti in the Tuamotu Archipelago on October 18, 2015, are home to a quarter of the ocean's species and a lifeline for a billion people (AFP Photo/Gregory Boissy)

AFP, Paris

Scientists unveiled the first smoking-gun evidence Wednesday that growing ocean acidity caused by global warming is already stifling growth of vital coral reefs.
The decline of shallow water corals, home to a quarter of the ocean's species and a lifeline for a billion people, has long been in evidence.
Earlier studies had shown that the rate at which living coral reefs calcify, or accumulate mass, had dropped by about 40 percent in just over 30 years.
Up to now, however, it was not possible to tease out the impact of acidification from other threats such as pollution, over-fishing and warming water.
The world's oceans are 26 percent more acidic today than at the start of the Industrial Revolution, when mankind started massively burning fossil fuels which give off harmful carbon dioxide (CO2).
About a quarter is absorbed by the oceans, changing their chemical composition, and making the water more acidic and corrosive to corals and shellfish.
"Our work provides the first strong evidence from experiments on a natural ecosystem that ocean acidification is already slowing coral reef growth," said Rebecca Albright, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California.
"This is no longer a fear for the future. It is the reality of today."
The findings were published in the science journal Nature.
Albright and colleague Ken Caldeira led experiments on natural reefs off the coast of Australia's One Tree Island, in the southern Great Barrier Reef.
Deep cuts
Manipulating the chemistry of the seawater flowing over the flat reef, the researchers restored it's pH -- the balance between alkalinity and acidity -- to what it would have been without climate change.
As suspected, the corals became better able to build themselves up.
"By turning back time in this way, they demonstrate that -- all things being equal -- net coral-reef calcification would have been around seven percent higher than at present," Janice Lough, a scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, noted in a comment, also published in Nature.
The novelty of the experiment, she said, is that it "restored the ocean chemistry of a natural reef to that of pre-industrial times, thus factoring out other potentially confounding factors, such as temperature."
Some researchers have proposed artificially reducing the acidity of ocean water around coral reefs -- a form of geo-engineering -- as a means of preserving shallow marine ecosystems.
But even if the experiments underlying the study did exactly that, implementing such a scheme on the required scale would be nigh impossible, the authors caution.
"The only real, lasting way to protect coral reefs is to make deep cuts in our carbon dioxide emissions," Caldeira said.
"If we don't take action on this issue very rapidly, coral reefs -- and everything that depends on them, including both wildlife and local communities -- will not survive into the next century."