BANGLADESH

Bangladesh hope Sharmin Akhtar Ratna finished a disappointing 27th out of 56 participants on Saturday's opening medal event of the London Olympics at the Royal Artillery Barracks.
Her combined score of 393 included impressive scores of 99, 100 and 99 in the last three shots, but her first effort of 95 had left her too far behind to get anywhere in the running.
It was bitter disappointment for a cautiously hopeful Bangladeshi contingent who had hoped that Ratna's two-month training course in England prior to the Olympics would have helped her achieve something substantial. She had been excelling at practice scoring an average of 398, but it seemed like the pressure of the Olympics got the better of her and she crumbled at the big stage.
Gold went to China's ace rifle shooter Yi Siling, making her the first gold medallist of London 2012. Sylwia Bogacka took silver and Yi's compatriot Yu Dan won bronze.
The top two qualifiers Bogacka and Yi started a fierce battle for the gold, both scoring 10.8 out of possible 10.9 in the first shot.
Yi, the world No.1 in this event, cemented her top position and grabbed the title with her last two shots (10.3 and 10.5) finishing on a total of 502.9 points. This is the second gold for China in this event at the Games after Du Li won at Athens 2004.
Bogackla dropped her rank to third after the ninth shot, however her last shot (in which she scored 10.8) lifted her to the silver medal position. She finished on 502.2 points.
Yu clinched bronze with a total score of 501.5 points. She was second after the ninth shot but dropped her rank with her last shot (9.6).
Five shooters finished at 397 points after the 40-shot qualification rounds.
A five-way shoot-off (five shots) decided the last four qualifiers.

Dhaka city remains exposed to serious sound pollution due to lax enforcement of the law.
The pollution is caused by construction work using brick crushers and mixing machines, use of heavy equipment in factories and loudspeakers in and around the capital. Needless honking by motorists also largely contributes to the pollution.
The sound level in Dhaka city in April-May was beyond the permissible limit, more than double the limit in some cases, according to a survey by the Department of Environment (DoE).
The Noise Pollution (Control) Rules, 2006, prohibit honking in a 100-metre radius of hospitals, educational institutes and offices. The rules do not allow use of brick crushers within a 500-metre radius of a residential area. Taking prior permission is mandatory for using loudspeakers.
The law has provisions for punishing the first-time offender by a maximum of one month's jail or Tk 5,000 in fine or both. The punishment for a second-time rule breaker is six months in jail at most or Tk 10,000 in fine or both.
But thanks to a slack enforcement of the law, offenders are rarely brought to book.
According to the noise control guidelines, the permissible level in the silent zones (100 metres around hospitals, educational institutions, courts and offices) is 40 decibels at night and 50 decibels during daytime. It is 45 decibels at night and 55 decibels during the day in residential areas and 50 and 60 decibels respectively in mixed areas.
In commercial areas, the limit is 60 decibels at night and 70 decibels during the day and 70 and 75 for industrial areas.
The DoE survey -- done at 12 major points between 11:00am and 1:00pm -- found the maximum sound level at 90 decibels while the minimum was at 77 decibels.
The areas covered in the survey are Mirpur-10, Farmgate, Bijoy Sarani, the road in front of the Prime Minister's Office, Mohakhali, Kuril Biswa Road, Biman Bandar Rail Station, Banani, Kanchpur Bridge, Gulistan, Sayedabad and Jatrabari.
Medical experts say noise pollution causes headache and irritation that in turn make people suffer from depression and anxiety. Excessive sound also interferes with attention. Continuous exposure to sound pollution increases the pace of heartbeats and the risk of cardiac arrest.
Lelin Chowdhury, chairman of Health and Hope Hospital, says sound pollution in the long term reduces hearing ability and increases secretion of stress hormone, which leads to a rise in blood pressure.
In addition, it makes people intolerant, making them vulnerable to psychological disorders.
Children suffer the most from hearing losses due to noise pollution and their mental development gets hampered. Noise pollution can also cause miscarriages and premature births.
"There is no count of the affected people, but the number is rising day by day," said Lelin, a specialist in preventive medicine.
Work for Better Bangladesh (WBB) Trust, an environmental organisation, in a survey between March and April last year found the maximum sound level in the capital's silent zones to be 104 decibels.
According to the trust, the maximum sound level in front of Square Hospital at Panthapath was 104 decibels between 9:50am and 9:55am on April 21. It was 103 near New Model University College between 12:00noon and 12:05pm on the same day.
So far this year, the DoE has conducted about 60 drives against sound polluters and realised more than Tk 1 crore in fine, but could hardly bring about any change.
Improving the situation requires more drives but the department cannot do so owing to lack of manpower, says DoE (enforcement) Director Munir Chowdhury.
It is also the duty of the Bangladesh Road Transport Authority and the traffic police to check noise pollution by drivers, he adds.
In 2005, the WBB Trust conducted a survey among 1,000 Dhaka city students, only to find 60 to 70 percent of them had difficulties concentrating and suffered from headaches because of noise pollution.
Ninety percent of them said their studies were disrupted by a blaring of horns.
Seven years have passed since. The magnitude of the pollution must have increased manifold by now as both construction work and number of vehicles have increased, medical experts say.

A Bangladeshi non-government organisation has misappropriated an international grant of nearly $1.9 million, meant to fight AIDS and tuberculosis, through fabricated bank statements, cheques and accounting journals.
According to a probe report of The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, Padakhep Manabik Unnayan Kendra diverted the money in 2004-09 and tried to justify the withdrawals with fake and forged documents.
The report, released on July 11, said the withdrawals -- about 52 percent of the total $3.62 million fund disbursed to the NGO -- never took place. The organisation maintained false bank account numbers to conceal the fund diversion.
The Global Fund, which so far has provided $82 million to ministries and NGOs in Bangladesh to tackle the deadly diseases, said the misappropriated amount might be even more. The report recommended recovering the loss from Padakhep.
The Global Fund, an international financing institution, has so far committed $22.6 billion in 150 countries to support large-scale prevention, treatment and care programmes.
The report reads Padakhep made significant efforts to conceal the fund diversion by fraudulently maintaining manufactured records to justify the withdrawals that never actually happened.
The fabricated papers include false bank statements and cheques, accounting journals in fictitious programmes and activities and invoices for made-up purchases.
“Vendors who allegedly provided goods and services under the programme also confirmed in several instances that the bids, invoices, and cheques bearing their companies' names were not authentic and that the vendors never provided the goods or services and they never received the funds,” explains the report, prepared after a year-long investigation by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of The Global Fund.
Exposure of some financial irregularities of Padakhep in two AIDS prevention projects financed by The Global Fund in mid-2009 led the donor into conducting the investigation.
Save the Children, a globally active NGO and also the principal recipient of The Global Fund money, had appointed Padakhep as the sub-recipient. It found irregularities while monitoring the project implementations.
Save the Children ended its contracts with Padakhep on November 24 last year.
Padakhep challenged the contract termination and is now in a legal battle with Save the Children. It even claimed $14.23m in damages.
According to the report, Padakhep held its funds with NCC Bank between November 2004 and December 2009. Later, it moved its accounts to Dutch Bangla Bank.
The OIG investigation team found that Padakhep had concealed the genuine bank statements maintained at the NCC bank and instead created and produced its own versions of statements, which were in fact fictitious.
The NGO often reported different account numbers on its forged bank statements than the NCC Bank actually used. Padakhep produced falsified bank statements and provided those to Save the Children in order to back the expenditures, the report says.
The report used scanned copies of the genuine and fake banks account numbers. It drew a comparison that proved bank statements provided by Padakhep and those of NCC Bank were not the same. The amounts and dates of fund withdrawals were also different in the genuine and fake bank statements.
The OIG team showed the versions of bank documents provided by Padakhep to senior NCC Bank officials who confirmed that the statements were not issued by the bank. However, the probe body did not find evidence of the practice in DBB Bank accounts.
To maintain consistency between the false bank statements and supporting documentation, Padakhep created, produced and utilised extensive and elaborate false documentation to support fabricated bank statements, and conceal the actual nature of its expenditures.
The accounting journals reflected the transactions in the forged statements.
The OIG in its report placed an accounting journal page and the corresponding genuine and fraudulence bank statements. A transaction of Tk 61,700 for a workshop described in the accounting journal appeared in both genuine and false statements, but a withdrawal of Tk 35,000 was only in the false bank statement.
The OIG team said the amount of Tk 35,000 had never actually been withdrawn.
Padakhep has been working in the fields of micro-credit, education, health, agriculture and environment for 25 years with funds from various international donors. At present, it is running 32 projects all over Bangladesh.
VERSIONS OF PADAKHEP
Terming the report one-sided, Padakhep Executive Director Iqbal Ahammed said Save the Children, being the principal recipient of the fund, was equally responsible if anything happened since it supervised, monitored and audited the project activities.
“Padakhep can't do anything through bypassing Save the Children and its staff. If anything happened then that should have been come out at the time of the happening, but Save the Children had no objection to our activities then,” he said, accusing the OIG of not taking and including its comments in the report.
Asked how he could deny the proof of forgery and fraudulence to conceal a misappropriation of funds, Iqbal Ahammed said that while many points of the report were not correct, they needed to verify the images and the proof used in the report.
“Padakhep is going to challenge the report. We have serious comments on the report, but will not give that since the matter is now before a tribunal,” he told The Daily Star.
REACTION OF SAVE THE CHILDREN
The OIG report clearly establishes that Padakhep has misappropriated not less than $1.89 million of donor funds intended to fight the scourge of HIV and AIDS in Bangladesh, said its Country Director Michael McGrath through an email.
He said the report was the result of more than a year of intensive investigation, involving discussions not only with Padakhep and its bank, but also with health ministry officials and principal and sub-recipients of The Global Fund grants.
“The evidence is overwhelming. Padakhep has been provided with an opportunity to comment on the draft report. If the OIG did not incorporate the changes requested by Padakhep, I can only assume that it was because they were not convinced as to the accuracy or truthfulness of the information provided by Padakhep,” said McGrath.
He termed Padakhep's claim that the principal recipient shared equal culpability for the fraud as absolutely “outrageous”.
“If a criminal is caught by the police and charged with serious crimes, would we say that the police were equally responsible for the crimes committed, because it took them some time to identify the culprit and assemble the evidence?”
The only reason why Padakhep is seeking to prevent public discussion of the OIG report is that they do not want the people, the government and the donors to know the details of the donor fund misappropriation which they have been responsible for over an extended period of time.
Instead of taking action against the NGO, the health ministry has recommended that Padakhep undertake a Tk 24 crore project fighting HIV/AIDS.

Divers have located the oil tanker MT Meherjan that sank in Meghna on Wednesday.

The tanker's position was determined to be a place near Char Sultani, a place near Kaliganj, a Barisal River Port official said on Saturday.

Rescue vessel MV Hamza reached the spot in the morning and MV Rustam arrived in the afternoon. The vessels will work together for the rescue work.

Divers said the spot was about 100 feet deep and that the tanker was unreachable because of strong currents.

Hamza commander Rafiqul Islam told bdnews24.com the tanker even without its cargo would weigh 250-300 tonnes. "MV Hamza has a capacity of handling only up to 60 tonnes," he said.

BIWTA Chairman Samsuddoha Khandaker led a seven-member team to the spot and a three-member Environment Department team reached there to collect water samples.

Environment Department Director Sukumar Biswas told bdnews24.com their team was collecting dissolved oxygen and other samples.

The Jamuna Oil Company (JOCL) tanker, MT Meherjan, carrying 700,000 litres of petrol and diesel sank in mid-river after a collision with a cargo vessel, Fazlul Haq-3, on Wednesday night at Mehendiganj upazila in Barisal.

The cargo vessel's hands escaped soon after the accident. One of the tanker's staff, Nizam Uddin, has been missing.

The oil tanker was on its way to JOCL's Barisal depot.

Clashes between followers of two 'Pirs' (saints) left one person dead and 20 others injured on Saturday at the district's Raypura upazila.

Raypura OC Abdul Baten had told bdnews24.com in the afternoon that there had been three casualties, but in the afternoon he recanted to say police had found only one dead body.

The clashes begun around 11am and continued in sporadic outbursts at Kacharikandi village. Both parties, followers of Kashimpur and Char Monai Pirs, used firearms and sharp weapons, the police officer said.

The dead body of Khoka Mia, 35, who died in the clash, has been kept at the Narsingdi Sadar Hospital.

Police earlier said one Ejaj Mia, 25, had died. Later, Brahmanbaria Sadar Hospital's Dr Safin Ahmed told bdnews24.com he had been sent to Dhaka for treatment.

The injured have been admitted to the Raypura Hospital, various local clinics and sent to Brahmanbaria for treatment, police said.

OC Baten said the clash erupted as a result of a long-standing dispute between the followers of the two Pirs.

He added that 25 people were detained from the scene during the clashes.

Shooting took centre stage at the Olympics on Saturday when IOC President Jacques Rogge handed over the first gold medal of the London Games, but it was the pioneering and pregnant athletes who stole the show.

China's Yi Siling took the honour of being the first London gold medallist when she won the women's 10 metre air rifle at a packed Royal Artillery Barracks in southeast London as supporters clamoured to see the opening action.

"I felt like a movie star," the 23-year-old Yi told reporters after winning her first Olympic gold.

"Now I've got the gold medal I feel very happy and very excited. I almost cried."

The event was graced by International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge who watched the 40 minute final and then presented the first medal at his last Games before he steps down from the role next year.

However, Yi and Rogge shared the spotlight with eight-months pregnant shooter Nur Suryani Mohamed Taibi of Malaysia who had the world's media hanging on her every word and movement.

Struggling to fit into her shooter's jacket, the 29-year-old could only finish 34th in the 56 woman qualifying heat but her performance was not the pressing issue.

"Baby is quite fine. She hasn't made an appearance during training or competition. I told her to behave herself," Suryani said after she felt "only three or four kicks" during the competition.

"When she kicked I tried to breathe in, breathe out and make myself calm."

Another markswoman was also causing quite a stir.

Bahia Al Hamad became Qatar's debut female Olympian when she was the first of the Gulf nation's three women athletes to see action in London.

"DREAM COME TRUE"

The 20-year-old carried the flag for her country the previous evening at the opening ceremony and finished a credible 17th in the rifle qualifying heat after receiving a wild card to take part.

"The competition was very hard, but I'm so happy and I enjoyed it," Al Hamad said.

"It is fun to be in the Olympics. It's a dream come true for me to be here," she added before fleeing the media scrum around her mid-question as the attention seemed all too much.

After the qualifying had finished, Yi took control of the eight-woman final when she fired a pinpoint 10.7 at the target, just shy of the maximum 10.9, to overtake rival Poland's Sylwia Bogacka who had led for most of the way but could only manage a 9.7.

Bogacka had to settle for silver and China also collected a bronze thanks to Yu Dan but there was no clean sweep on day one for the 2008 Games hosts.

Expected to claim the majority of the 15 shooting golds on offer in London, China suffered a disappointing start to the men's disciplines when defending champion Pang Wei finished fourth in the 10m air pistol.

The event was won by South Korean Jin Jong-oh, who held his nerve to hold on for victory after a slight mid-final meltdown.

Groans echoed around the indoor range from the 2,000 spectators who packed both shooting finals as Jin fired a disappointing nine with his seventh shot to give his opponents hope.

But the 32-year-old, firing his pistol with his right hand while his left was planted firmly in his pocket, roared back with a near perfect 10.8 to seal gold ahead of Italy's Luca Tesconi. Andrija Zlatic of Serbia took bronze.

"The Chinese guy won the gold last time. I promised myself that I would not let it happen this time," Jin said.

Jin's memorable finished wrapped up a successful day for shooting, which attracts big headlines in Asia but lacks the same popularity elsewhere.

The women are the sole focus on Sunday with two gold medals up for grabs in the 10m air pistol and the skeet.

Earthquake originated in Myanmar jolted south-eastern part of Bangladesh Sunday morning.

Dhaka met office said the tremor, measuring 5.6 on the Richter Scale, was felt at 8:21am and lasted for 15 seconds.

The source of the quake was 397 km east from Dhaka's Earthquake Observation Centre.

People in Bandarban, Khagrachhari, Rangamati and Chittaogong felt the tremor, but there was no report of casualties or damage.