DHAKA, 24 October 2022, (TON): Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who is also the president of ruling Awami League, on Sunday congratulated Chinese President Xi Jinping on his reelection as the general secretary of the Communist Party of China.
The prime minister said "Your reelection is undoubtedly a fitting recognition of the trust and confidence reposed on you for your able leadership, achievements, and vision by the people of China and the CPC."
She said "I also convey my sincere congratulations on the successful conclusion of the 20th Congress of the CPC."
Sheikh Hasina said that Bangladesh observed with great admiration the realization of the First Centenary goal of the CPC- building a moderately prosperous society in all respects by 2020- as set when President Xi first took over the position of the CPC's General Secretary in 2012.

NEW DELHI, 24 October 2022, (TON): India's space agency says its rocket has successfully put 36 internet satellites into orbit for UK-based satellite company OneWeb after months of delay due to the war in Ukraine.
The mission part of a commercial arrangement between New Space India Limited, a government-run firm, and OneWeb was announced successful by the Indian Space Research Organisation.
ISRO Chairman Sreedhara Panicker Somanath said "this is the first-ever commercial launch of the new rocket LVM3."
This 14th launch of OneWeb satellites relied on India's heaviest rocket, normally reserved for government spacecraft.

DHAKA, 24 October 2022, (TON): Bangladesh will seek Japan's stronger engagement in its development efforts through investment and financing in major projects during Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's forthcoming visit to Japan slated for November 29-30.
Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen told "we are happy with Japan looking at the areas (mega projects) where they are working."
He said "Japan is a good investor for Bangladesh, and they are implementing major projects. Now Bangladesh seeks more financing for important projects from Japan."
Momen said "the basic idea is Japan is capable of financing and they always finance without any tough conditions. They have technology, too."

DHAKA, 24 October 2022, (TON): Sultan of Oman Haitham bin Tarik has praised the role of Bangladeshi expatriate workers played in Oman.
Sultan Tarik accepted the invitation to visit Bangladesh and wished to undertake the visit at a convenient time.
He also underscored on strengthening bilateral relations in other areas of mutual interest including trade and investments, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The issues were discussed when ambassador of Bangladesh to the Sultanate of Oman Md Nazmul Islam presented his credentials to Sultan Tarik at the Al Baraka Royal Palace in Muscat recently.

DHAKA, 24 October 2022, (TON): US special presidential envoy for climate John Kerry has said "the United States is willing to establish a new partnership with Bangladesh for improving operations and planning to ensure grid stability and reliability to support increased use of renewables here."
He said in a recent letter to Bangladesh foreign minister AK Abdul Momen "the US State Department’s Bureau of Energy Resources looks forward to establishing a new partnership between the Power Grid Company of Bangladesh and Pacific Northwest Laboratory to improve operations and planning to ensure grid stability and reliability to support the increased use of renewables."
The US special envoy in the letter also promised support for Bangladesh’s energy security, clean energy and energy access goals, including through the Clean EDGE Asia Initiative, said a foreign ministry release here in Dhaka.

By Ali Hassan

For the rest of South Asia to improve the participation of women in its economy, it can apply some of the lessons learned from Bangladesh’s inclusive policies. A comparative look at Bangladesh’s economic progress shows its commitment to raising the standards of living for women and girls in the last three decades. Increasing state capacity and political commitment to economic development has resulted in increased gender equality.
In a country without substantial natural resources, the prominence on the development of human resources has become a part of Bangladesh’s national agenda for development in recent years. From 1970 till present, Bangladesh directed international aid towards Gender in Development (GID) and Gender and Development (GAD) projects. Three key areas where such programs focused include female education, family planning, and micro-financing for women-run MSMEs to help conventional women into the workforce.
As a consequence, Bangladesh has seen extensive successes both for the individual welfare of women and for its economy largely. The maternal mortality rate was reduced from 472 per 100,000 live births in 1991 to 181 in 2015. There are currently more girls than boys attending Bangladeshi secondary schools, and more than 30 million women in Bangladesh are customers of microcredit organizations showcasing their direct interactions with the economy.
In 2015, 23 million out of 26 million Micro-Finance Institute clients were women. In the meantime, 15 percent of all Bangladesh Bank refinance abilities for the MSME sector have been distributed to women entrepreneurs. As a result of Bangladesh’s liberal policies, the World Bank guesses that female labor force contribution rose by 10 percentage points between 2003 and 2016 refining the country’s overall economic growth via augmented female workforce contribution.
Likewise, other Asian countries including Pakistan can replicate Bangladesh’s synergized developmental policy where all stakeholders including state, civil society, and global donors can make a political pledge to such a developmental plan where women’s education and healthcare is a main focus. An improved educated facility provided for female labor force is key to economic development.
One auspicious area for growth and innovation is the agricultural sector, which employs a large of percentage of women working in Asian countries and contributed Asian countries. Transformation in the agriculture could support in acquainting women with innovative high-tech practices as well as authorizing women in the agriculture sector to capitalize in the green tech revolution and advance the productivity. The dire economic inactivity and lack of gender parity policy in the rest of South Asia can be addressed by the introduction of women-centric developmental strategies by state institutions, international aid organizations, and ratification of women’s economic empowerment at local level leadership.
Communal level programs can invest in building the sense of earnestness to invest in Asian women education, health, inspire entrepreneurship, with the purpose of building a women workforce; that is skilled and enabled at state and community level to corresponding industry and production requirements. This investment will be effective in twofold manner: first, internally, it will help drive the young female population’s appetite to achieve milestones in education, health, and contribute to innovation and in turn to the growth of economy.
On the exterior, the South Asia female skilled labor can help position better in the competition with the global economies. Calling for the female youth towards action and mutual responsibility, while also preparing and training this potential workforce can enable South Asian women to help their states and its communities in overcoming the economic and development challenges in the future.
Empowering and including women in the economy could be the untapped potential necessary to drive growth and development that is essential for reviving a staggering economy. However, to improve the access of women to the workforce in South Asia a deep knowledge of cultural and institutional constraints is important.
Offering an important comparative context, Bangladesh’s recent progress is a compelling case in particular as it is a relatively younger country, has a Muslim majority, and faced alarming levels of poverty in the past but has been able to revive its economy, literacy rate, life expectancy and increase women participation in the workforce to 35 percent in recent years. Bangladesh’s is offering a prevailing lesson to pursue successful policies that bring women into economic development of South Asia.

By Usman Khan

Nepal is in dire need of scarcity of food and Nutrition and needs immediate measures of intervention are needed to avoid further deterioration of the situation. Many children are suffering from a severe form of malnutrition. As they are not getting a sufficient diet or have other serious health issues. The Issues of malnutrition are not new in the Chepang community of Dhading and Chitwan, and some districts of the Karnali Province of Nepal.
A recent report on hunger also shows a miserable picture of Nepal’s hunger level. The country ranks 81st out of 121 countries in the 2022 Global Hunger Index, with a score of 19.1, which shows that the country is on the verge of serious levels of hunger. A GHI score of less than 10 is considered a low hunger level, a score between 10 and 19.9 is moderate, 20 to 34.9 is serious, 35 to 49.9 is alarming, and over 50 is extremely alarming.
Many people in the country have not been receiving adequate nutritious food. According to the hunger report by the Concern Worldwide of Ireland Welthungerhilfe’s inadequate food supply, is leading to undernourishment problems, and child under-nutrition which is also affecting the child mortality rate.
According to the Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS 2019). The report showed that 12 percent of children under five suffer from wasting, which is the major gauge for mapping GHI scores. According to the Nepal Demographic Health Survey 201, only 10 percent of children under five were suffering from waste. Low weight for a particular height is an under-nutrition condition, which is a strong forecaster of mortality among children under five. According to the UN health agency, wasting in children is related to a higher risk of death if not cured appropriately.
There are manifold factors including the Covid-19 pandemic, which rendered thousands of people unemployed, growing inflation triggered by the protracted Ukraine-Russia war, and climate change are to blame for the deterioration of the problems. As politicians both in the government and the opposition are busy in election campaigns, they have no time to address these issues, growing the situation more badly.
Many people in the Tarai region, who used to sell spare grains, have been forced to buy foodstuff due to extreme weather events dry spells in monsoon and flooding at the time of reap. Of late, unseasonal extreme rainfall becomes the reason thousands of people face the risk of hunger.
Around 18 percent of children under five years of age were found to be affected by waste against the 12 percent national average. Nutrition has a direct link with the general development of the country. Malnutrition affects the physical as well as mental growth of children, which eventually affects the country’s financial health, according to them. Immediate intervention measures are needed to address the existing problems of nutrition.
Problems will escalate if Nepal fails to address the problems at the earliest. Nepal’s government should not forget that problems now are not limited to any particular area but are happening many places in the country. It should be conceded that a high prevalence of wasting means children of the said age group are not getting enough nutritious foods and poor water and sanitation conditions and other factors are also responsible for the problems.
Malnutrition is not only a problem of not getting enough to eat but also of the lack of nutritious food, of lack of knowledge to use locally available food and growing junk food consumption among children. Nepal also has an international obligation to improve the condition of malnourished children. The country needs to reduce stunting in order to meet the United Nations-backed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) targets, wasting to 4 percent from the current 12 percent, underweight to 10 percent from the existing 27 percent and anemia to 10 percent from over 52 percent in 2016.
Nepal should be committed to meeting the goals of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), aimed at ending poverty and hunger and all forms of inequality in the world, and UNICEF already warned in January that Nepal’s significant progress in the nutrition of mothers and children are at risk due to current inequalities and the pandemic.
That’s why the UNICEF suggested a multisystem approach involving food, health, water and sanitation, education, and social protection systems to improve the health of Nepali children. Nepal’s government needs to improve the children’s health by access to safe nutritious, affordable, and sustainable diets throughout childhood, puberty, and years of childbearing to Progress toward the SDG targets on stunting.

WASHINGTON, 23 October 2022, (TON): A US appeals court temporarily blocked President Joe Biden’s plan to cancel billions of dollars in college student loans, one day after a judge dismissed a Republican-led lawsuit by six states challenging the debt-forgiveness program.
The 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals granted the states’ emergency petition to freeze the loan forgiveness plan until the court rules on their request for a longer-term injunction while decision against the states is being appealed.
The St. Louis-based appeals court also ordered an expedited briefing schedule on the matter.
US District Judge Henry Autrey in St. Louis ruled on Thursday that while the six Republican-led states had raised “important and significant challenges to the debt relief plan,” he threw out their lawsuit on grounds they lacked the necessary legal standing to pursue the case.

ROME, 23 October 2022, (TON): Giorgia Meloni, whose political party has neo-fascist roots, was sworn in on Saturday as Italy’s first far-right premier.
Meloni, 45, took the oath of office before the Italian president at the presidential palace, becoming also the first woman to be the nation’s premier.
Her Brothers of Italy party was the top vote-getter in last month’s national election. Meloni announced her Cabinet. Her coalition allies include the right-wing League of Matteo Salvini and the conservative Forza Italia party headed by former Premier Silvio Berlusconi.

LONDON, 23 October 2022, (TON): The UN condemned an armed drone attack launched By Yemen’s Houthi militia on a southern oil terminal in Hadramout province a day earlier, saying "it was a deeply worrying military escalation."
The UN’s envoy to Yemen said “I condemn the aerial attack claimed by Ansar Allah yesterday, Oct. 21, against the vessel at Al-Dhabba oil terminal in Hadramout governorate."
Hans Grundberg said “at this critical juncture, I call on the parties to show utmost restraint and double their efforts to renew and expand the truce, lay the groundwork for a permanent cease-fire, and activate a political process to end the conflict."
He added in a statement “I reiterate that all parties must abide by their obligations under international humanitarian law to protect civilians and civilian infrastructure."