Bangladesh will stay beside India if attacked: Kamal

Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal while addressing a views exchange programme at Secretariat Reporters Forum in the Secretariat says that Bangladesh will stay by India if the neighbouring country is attacked in the ongoing tension with Pakistan. Photo: Partha Pratim Bhattacharjee

Star Online Report

Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal today said Bangladesh will stay beside India if the neighbouring country is attacked following the ongoing tension with Pakistan.

The home minister made the comment while replying to a query about Bangladesh’s stance on the current unrest situation between India and Pakistan following the recent Uri attack and India's retaliatory surgical strikes on terror launch pads across the LoC.

Meanwhile, Pakistan and India have agreed to reduce tensions after their National Security Advisors spoke over phone, top Pakistani diplomat Sartaj Aziz said yesterday.

On Tahmid

The home minister said law enforcers did not pray for fresh remand for Tahmid Hasib Khan, one of the Gulshan café attack survivors, as they did not get enough information in previous remands.

“We will be able to question him further if we need it,” Kamal added.

On Sunday, the court granted bail to Tahmid, who was released at the same night.

It was widely reported earlier that Tahmid, a Canadian university student, and Hasnat Karim, a former private university teacher in Bangladesh, were taken in by detectives for interrogation immediately after the 11-hour bloody siege ended on July 2.

Hacking of Sylhet college student

The home minister firmly stated that the attacker, who stabbed Sylhet Government Mohila College student Khadija Akter Nargis yesterday, will be brought to justice, no matter what his political association is.

On Monday evening, Khadija, 23, a student of the college and daughter of Masuk Miah, a resident of Hausa village in Sadar upazila, was stopped on her way to home from college allegedly by Badrul Alam, 30, assistant secretary of BCL unit at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology (SUST).

Hearing screams of the victim, locals rescued Khadija and caught Badrul from the spot and handed him over to police after giving him a good thrashing.
On border killings by BSF
The government logged protests with Indian authorities every time a Bangladeshi citizen is killed by their Border Security Force (BSF), Kamal said adding both the countries are working to reduce such incidents.

Nobel physics prize awarded to 3 British scientists for topology work

Members of the Nobel Committee for Physics sit in front of a screen displaying the winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics (L-R) David J Thouless, F Duncan M Haldane and J Michael Kosterlitz during a press conference to announce the winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on October 4, 2016. Photo: AFP

AP, Stockholm

British-born scientists David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz were awarded this year's Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for work that "revealed the secrets of exotic matter," the prize committee said.
The three "opened the door" to an unknown world where matter takes unusual states or phases, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
They were for their "theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter."
Thouless, 82, is a professor emeritus at the University of Washington. Haldane, 65, is a physics professor at Princeton University in New Jersey. Kosterlitz, 73, is a physics professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
Their research was conducted in the 1970s and '80s. Nobel judges often award discoveries made decades ago, to make sure they withstand the test of time.
This year's Nobel Prize announcements started Monday with the medicine award going to Japanese biologist Yoshinori Ohsumi for discoveries on autophagy, the process by which a cell breaks down and recycles content.
The chemistry prize will be announced on Wednesday and the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. The economics and literature awards will be announced next week.

Each prize has a purse of 8 million kronor ($930,000). The winners also collect a medal and a diploma at the award ceremonies on December 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel's death in 1896.

Over 6,000 migrants plucked from sea in a single day, 22 dead

Migrants wait to be rescued as they drift in the Mediterranean Sea some 20 nautical miles north off the coast of Libya on October 3, 2016. Photo: AFP

Reuters

About 6,055 migrants were rescued and 22 found dead on the perilous sea route to Europe on Monday, one of the highest numbers in a single day, Italian and Libyan officials said.
Italy's coastguard said at least nine migrants had died and a pregnant woman and a child had been taken by helicopter to a hospital on the Italian island of Lampedusa, halfway between Sicily and the Libyan coast.
Libyan officials said 11 migrant bodies had washed up on a beach east of the capital, Tripoli, and another two migrants had died when a boat sank off the western city of Sabratha.

One Italian coast guard ship rescued about 725 migrants on a single rubber boat, one of some 20 rescue operations during the day.
About 10 ships from the coast guard, the navy and humanitarian organisations were involved in the rescues, most of which took place some 30 miles off the coast of Libya.
Libyan naval and coastguard patrols intercepted three separate boats carrying more than 450 migrants, officials said.

Monday was the third anniversary of the sinking of a migrant boat off the Italian island of Lampedusa in which 386 people died.

According to the International Organisation for Migration, around 132,000 migrants have arrived in Italy since the start of the year and 3,054 have died.
Most depart from Libya, where political chaos and a security vacuum have allowed people smugglers to act with impunity.