The government of Bangladesh is considering an effective framework to hold those spreading disinformation and rumours accountable. "A framework on how to hold those who spread disinformation and rumors accountable is under consideration," State Minister for Information and Broadcasting, Mohammad A Arafat, said on Saturday (January 20, 2024). Read: Referring to victims’ pleas, Sajeeb Wazed says BNP’s ‘disinformation campaign’ aimed at passing the blame on Awami League In preventing propaganda, he said, the government is ensuring that freedom of expression and media is not hindered. The information state minister made the announcement on X (formerly known as Twitter). Read more: US expresses concern over ‘deep fakes’ in Bangladesh election-related disinformation

Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s (BNP) media cell affiliated magazine’s official twitter handle, tweets from which are retweeted by BNP supporters and activists, is running a “smear campaign” claiming the party boycotting Somoy TV talk shows has resulted in a decline in its viewership, says the TV authorities. Such claims are meant to “intimidate and prevent” the media from carrying out reportage ahead of the national election, analysts and senior journalists say. Read : BNP, like-minded parties set to hold mass processions in Dhaka Saturday With a graph purportedly showing a steep decline in the YouTube viewership of two TV channels — Somoy and Ekattor — in August, the tweet shared by BNP Media Cell’s magazine “The Road to Democracy” contains a “veiled threat” to mainstream media outlets, they say. “We call upon Bangladeshi media to take a strong, pro-democratic stance. In the end, a dictatorship takes down everyone. Your complicity will not save you,” reads the tweet. The tweet came after BNP leadership slapped an embargo on party leaders and activists from appearing in talk shows on the two leading television channels. For context, Somoy TV produced and aired a series of documentaries on convictions of the Zia family, including BNP Chairperson Khaleda Zia and her son Tarique Rahman. “The party has decided to temporarily boycott the talk shows of Ekattor TV and Somoy TV due to their biased approach. The decision has been made after consultations with senior BNP leaders who recently participated in these talk shows,” Shahid Uddin Chowdhury Annie, BNP's publicity secretary and member secretary of BNP Media Cell, had said. Read : BNP wants to indulge in evil game of 1/11 with Dr Yunus at the helm: Quader The graph shared with the post showed Somoy and Ekattor lost significant viewership on YouTube right after BNP’s decision to boycott their talk shows. The graph claims the YouTube viewership for Somoy TV did not cross the 40,000 mark since the boycott till August 13. But Somoy TV authorities say this claim is untrue.  Between July 28 and August 22, the impression gained by Somoy TV marked a 15 percent spike despite BNP’s boycott, as the total number soared to 2.6 billion, said Salauddin Salim, Head of Broadcast & IT at Somoy TV. Moreover, the total number of viewership on a daily basis till the said period remained almost the same with no sign of decline since the boycott, suggesting that the claim of “dip” in viewership is not true, he added. On the other hand, the total number of subscribers on Somoy’s YouTube channel reached 20.4 million from 20.2 million in the said time frame. Read : BNP leaders to avoid Somoy TV and Ekattor TV talk shows Months earlier, BNP's Secretary General Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir lashed out at Somoy TV.  The Somoy TV report that had seemingly drawn the ire of the BNP leader highlights that both Tarique Rahman and Khaleda Zia were sentenced by courts.  "That report on our leaders – Tarique Rahman and Begum Zia – is like back-stabbing our democratic movement against the government. As we continue our movement to restore democracy, they should abstain from airing such reports," Fakhrul said about Somoy TV at a press conference. Media analysts say BNP’s call for “press freedom” rings hollow as such “intimidation tactics” clearly expose a “double standard”. Read more: Apathy of ‘unelected and irresponsible mayors, commissioners’ behind current dengue situation: BNP

An American Jewish organization celebrated the “first shipment” of food supplies from Pakistan that arrived in Israel. The trade last week included Pakistani-Jewish businessman Fishel BenKhald and three Israeli businesses, according to a statement issued by the American Jewish Congress from its New York offices, reports Voice of America. BenKhald resides in Karachi, where he manages a Jewish kosher certification business for food makers selling to international markets. Last Tuesday, he announced the unusual trade on Twitter, the VOA report said. The trader shared a video of his products, which included dates, dried fruit, and spices, on display in a Jerusalem market. The video has subsequently received over 640,000 views. Read More: India-Bangladesh trade using rupee instead of US dollar could start soon "I was not expecting it to be taken that big of a deal," BenKhald said in written comments to VOA, adding that this was not the first export of Pakistani products to Israel. "The Israeli government and buyers have no problem accepting the direct shipment from Pakistan,” he said, adding that Israel does not have a problem sending payments to Pakistani banks, said the report. BenKhald's attempt was largely lauded by Pakistani Twitter users, who included journalists, politicians, and businesses, some of whom sought his assistance on how to market their products to Israel. He tried to respond to every communication, it added. Pakistani officials did not immediately comment on the unusual exchange. Read More: Trade and investment opportunities opening up between Bangladesh, Brazil Islamabad has no diplomatic relations with Israel and refuses to recognize it as a sovereign state until the state of Palestine is created, a position shared by many Muslim-majority nations. Nevertheless, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain established ties with Israel in 2020 as part of the Abraham Accords, which were brokered by the United States. Sudan and Morocco followed suit. "Trade exhibits hosted by the UAE helped Pakistani and Israeli businessmen conclude a deal that enabled this week's Pakistani shipment to Israel," the American Jewish Congress noted. "We welcome this small step that can have wider implications for Israeli and Pakistani economies and for the region at large." Pakistan is a recognized nuclear power, while Israel is commonly believed to possess nuclear weapons. Since their foreign ministers met publicly in 2005, the two nations have had secret discussions on security matters. Pakistani Islamist organizations and right-wing parties are adamantly opposed to establishing formal relations with Israel over the Palestinian issue, the report also said. Read More: Traders fined in Faridpur for selling meat in violation of price list Pakistani people are barred from visiting Israel since their passport plainly states that they are valid for all nations except Israel.

Twitter CEO Elon Musk has reportedly indicated that the social media platform is now valued at less than $20 billion. According to technology news websites Platformer and the Information, who broke the story first, the estimate of Twitter’s valuation was based on Musk’s offer of equity grants to employees, reports BBC. A poo emoji was automatically sent in response to a BBC request for comment via Twitter’s press office email account, after Musk’s announcement of the strategy in a tweet earlier this month. Read More: Elon Musk apologizes after mocking disabled Twitter employee Meanwhile, Twitter reports that parts of the source code that powers multi-billionaire Elon Musk’s social media platform have been leaked online. It claimed that the code was uploaded to the Microsoft-owned website GitHub, where developers share code, the report said. After Twitter made a request for its removal, it was taken down. Read More: Elon Musk hopes to have Twitter CEO toward the end of year After cutting more than a third of Twitter’s staff and dealing with a loss of advertising since acquiring the company in October of last year, the leak presented Musk with a new challenge, said the report.

The references seem endless, and they can come from anywhere. In recent days, Pope Francis compared Nicaragua's repression of Catholics to Hitler's rule in Germany. In Britain, a BBC sportscaster likened the nation's asylum policy to 1930s Germany, resulting in his brief suspension and a national uproar. For Holocaust and anti-Nazi scholars and organizations, the two sentiments were understandable — but concerning. Invoking Hitler and Nazi Germany, they warn, often serves to revive a familiar and unwelcome line of argument. “We have to be aware of, and confront, contemporary instances of discrimination, hate speech and human rights abuses across the world,” says Rafal Pankowski, a Polish sociologist who heads the anti-Nazi NEVER AGAIN Association. But he added: “Of course, the historical analogies must not be overused and devalued. The label `Nazi' should not be trivialized and reduced to a term of abuse against anybody we don’t like.” Also Read: BBC crisis escalates as players, stars rally behind Lineker Last week, Pope Francis was quoted as criticizing the government in Nicaragua, where religious leaders have been arrested or fled, for acting as “if it were a communist dictatorship in 1917 or a Hitlerian one in 1935.” Nicaragua responded by proposing to suspend Vatican ties. Around the same time, the BBC's Gary Lineker tweeted that a plan announced by Britain's Conservative government was “immeasurably cruel” and included language "not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s.” The bill, intended to stop tens of thousands of migrants a year from reaching the country in small boats across the English Channel, would bar asylum claims by anyone who reaches the United Kingdom by unauthorized means and compel the government to detain and deport them “to their home country or a safe third country.” Also Read: Lineker off flagship BBC soccer show after Twitter posts At first, the broadcaster suspended Lineker, its highest paid TV commentator. But it reversed itself on Monday and praised Lineker as a “valued part of the BBC.” ALTERNATIVE WORDING Peter Fritzsche, author of “An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler,” among other books, calls Lineker's comments poorly expressed and misguided, given that "Nazi Germany had no immigration policy"." Rather than comparisons to the Nazis, Fritzsche believes Lineker would have been better off describing the policy with the words "racist” or “inhumane.” “Great Britain, in its rhetoric about immigrants and its policies regarding asylum-seekers ... generates quite rightly enormous outrage, because we believe Great Britain is in the family of democratic humane nations,” says Fritzsche, a history professor at the University of Illinois. “The sportscaster’s sentence is inaccurate. The spirit is laudable.” Sometimes, scholars and activists say, events do call for Nazi comparisons, whether it's the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 or the annual Independence Day march in Warsaw, Poland organized by extreme-right groups. But Nazi references have also been used to criticize fiscal policy (anti-tax activist Grover Nordquist once invoked the Holocaust when criticizing estate taxes) or insult rival heads of state (Saudi Arabia and Iran recently re-established diplomatic ties, six years after Prince Mohammed bin Salman referred to Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as the “new Hitler”). On the Internet, Nazis have been mentioned so often, and for so long, that in 1990 author-attorney Mike Godwin formulated “Godwin's Law” for them: “As an online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison to Hitler or Nazis approaches 1.” They come up so often that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. has crafted a standard response, which it cited when contacted this week by The Associated Press. "Nazism represented a singular evil that resulted in the murder of 6 million Jews and the persecution and deaths of millions of others for racial and political reasons," the statement reads. “Comparing contemporary situations to Nazism is not only offensive to its victims, but it is also inaccurate and misrepresents both Holocaust history and the present," the statement says. "The Holocaust should be remembered, studied, and understood so that we can learn its lessons; it should not be exploited for opportunistic purposes.” A RANGE OF REFERENCES Nazi references can be outlandish (actress Megan Fox once compared “Transformers” director Michael Bay to Hitler); self-evident (Kanye West, who years ago complained of being looked at like “he was Hitler,” declared in 2022 that there were “good things about Hitler"); and strategic (Russian President Vladimir Putin listed “denazification” of Ukraine as one of the main goals of his “special military operation,” falsely alleging that there are Nazis in Ukraine’s leadership). The Putin accusation isn’t new. It has been part of the Kremlin’s propaganda effort for years, used to justify a Moscow-backed insurgency in Ukraine’s east and bash Kyiv’s pro-Western government, which took over after a popular uprising ousted a pro-Russian president in 2014. Analysts say the narrative appears to play well in Russia, where the Soviet army’s defense against Nazi Germany forces in World War II is still a fundamental part of the national identity. Officials and state media routinely use the term “Nazi” to describe the Ukrainian government and its army. Moscow’s rhetoric has prompted some international backlash. Asked in an interview with an Italian news channel about Russian claims that it invaded Ukraine to “denazify” the country, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that Ukraine could still have Nazi elements even if some figures, including the country’s president, were Jewish. “So when they say, ‘How can Nazification exist if we’re Jewish?’ In my opinion, Hitler also had Jewish origins, so it doesn’t mean absolutely anything. For some time we have heard from the Jewish people that the biggest antisemites were Jewish,” Lavrov said, speaking to the station in Russian, dubbed over by an Italian translation. Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid called Lavrov’s statement “unforgivable and scandalous and a horrible historical error,” adding that “the government of Russia needs to apologize.” In Israel, the Holocaust is seen as unique, and comparisons to the Nazis or Nazi Germany in the modern context are typically dismissed as cheapening the victims' memory. But comparisons do happen. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has likened Iran to Nazi Germany, and ultra-Orthodox protesters call the police in Israel “Nazis” when they arrest people. Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, says Lineker’s comparison is flawed. The Conservatives’ proposal, he says, is more like the British policy toward Holocaust survivors who tried to enter British Mandate-era Palestine after 1945 on boats such as the Exodus — and were turned back. The larger issue, Zuroff says, is that people like Lineker cite the Holocaust to draw attention to their own issues. Perhaps, Zuroff says, the BBC figure “should be punished by being put in a library and forced to read 10 accurate history books.”

Renowned British journalist and CNN’s international business correspondent Richard Quest tweeted a photo with Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina yesterday (March 13, 2023). The tweet read: “I am enjoying her own recipe for tea: ginger, cardamon, honey and host of spices.” Read More: Pressures on Sheikh Hasina won’t work: PM The photo was taken in Dhaka during Quest’s visit here. In another tweet with a photo, the anchor of ‘Quest Means Business’ on CNN wrote: “Thank you #bangladesh for warmth and hospitality. This was my first visit to your country: it won’t be my last. You can see my interview with the prime minister on @questCNN next week.”    Read More: EC is totally independent to conduct election: PM Hasina

Saudi Arabia is mulling a three-day weekend after the UAE enacted it last year. According to Saudi local media, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development responded to a tweet by saying that it is evaluating the present work arrangement to extend the weekend to three days, reports Khaleej Times. The message, according to sources, emerged on the ministry’s Twitter account, which is meant to respond to inquiries from its recipients, it said. Read More: China’s Xi wants bigger global role after facilitating Saudi-Iran deal According to the tweet, the ministry is conducting a periodic evaluation of the present work system in Saudi Arabia to enhance job creation and make the market more appealing to local and foreign investors. It further stated that a draft of the work system had been posted on a survey platform for public comment. In a landmark reform, the UAE implemented a shortened workweek on January 1, 2022 UAE – adopting a Saturday-Sunday weekend, with half workday on Fridays. The new approach was implemented throughout all government bodies, and most private-sector businesses followed suit. On Fridays, the office is only open until noon. Read More: Beximco to produce medicines in Saudi Arabia from next year

Elon Musk took the witness stand Friday to defend a 2018 tweet claiming he had lined up the financing to take Tesla private in a deal that never came close to happening. The tweet resulted in a $40 million settlement with securities regulators. It also led to a class-action lawsuit alleging he misled investors, pulling him into court for about a half hour Friday to deliver sworn testimony in front of a nine-person jury and a full room of media and other spectators. The trial was then adjourned for the weekend and Musk was told to return Monday to answer more questions. In his initial appearance on the stand, Musk defended his prolific tweeting as “the most democratic way” to distribute information even while acknowledging constraints of Twitter's 280-character limit can make it difficult to make everything as clear as possible. “I think you can absolutely be truthful (on Twitter),” Musk asserted on the stand. “But can you be comprehensive? Of course not,” Musk's latest headache stems from the inherent brevity on Twitter, a service that he has been running since completing his $44 billion purchase of it in October. The trial hinges on the question of whether a pair of tweets that Musk posted on Aug. 7, 2018, damaged Tesla shareholders during a 10-day period leading up to a Musk admission that the buyout he had envisioned wasn’t going to happen. In the first of those those two 2018 tweets, Musk stated “funding secured” for a what would have been a $72 billion buyout of Tesla at a time when the electric automaker was still grapping with production problems and was worth far less than it is now. Musk followed up a few hours later with another tweet suggesting a deal was imminent. After it became apparent that the money wasn't in place to take Tesla private, Musk stepped down as Tesla’s chairman while remaining CEO as part of the Securities and Exchange Commission settlement, without acknowledging any wrongdoing. The impulsive billionaire came into court wearing a dark suit and tie on the third day of the civil trial in San Francisco that his lawyer unsuccessfully tried to move to Texas, where Tesla is now headquartered, on the premise that media coverage of his tumultuous takeover of Twitter had tainted the jury pool. Read more: Elon Musk depicted as liar, visionary in Tesla tweet trial The jury that was assembled earlier this week focused intently on Musk while he answered questions posed by Nicholas Porritt, a lawyer representing Tesla shareholders. At one point, Musk asked Porritt if he would speak closer to the microphone so he could hear him better. At other times, Musk craned his neck as he gazed around the courtroom. Musk, 51, said he cares “a great deal” about investors and also railed against short sellers who make investments that reward them when a company's stock price falls. He called short selling an “evil” practice that should be outlawed, denigrating those who profit from it as “a bunch of sharks." When shown communications from Tesla investors urging him to curtail or completely stop his Twitter habit before the 2018 buyout tweet, Musk said he couldn't remember all those interactions from years ago, especially since he gets a “Niagara Falls" of emails. Even before Musk took the stand, U.S. District Judge Edward Chen had declared that the jurors can consider those two tweets to be false, leaving them to decide whether Musk deliberately deceived investors and whether his statements saddled them with losses. Musk has previously contended he entered into the SEC settlement under duress and maintained he believed he had locked up financial backing for a Tesla buyout during meetings with representatives from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. An expert on corporate buyouts hired by shareholder lawyers to study the events surrounding Musk's proposal to take Tesla private spent the bulk of his three hours on the stand Friday deriding the plan as an ill-conceived concept. “This proposal was an extreme outlier,” said Guhan Subramanian, a Harvard University business and law professor for more than 20 years. “It was incoherent. It was illusory.” In a lengthy cross examination that delayed Musk's appearance, a lawyer for Tesla's board of directors tried to undermine Subramanian's testimony by pointing out that it relied on graduate student assistance to review some of the material related to the August 2018 tweets. The lawyer, William Price, also noted Subramanian's $1,900-per-hour fee for compiling his report for the case. The trial over his Tesla tweets come at a time when Musk has been focusing on Twitter while also serving as the automaker's CEO and also remaining deeply involved in SpaceX, the rocket ship company he founded. Read more: Elon Musk takes over Twitter: what to expect? Musk’s leadership of Twitter — where he has gutted the staff and alienated users and advertisers — has proven unpopular among Tesla’s current stockholders, who are worried he has been devoting less time steering the automaker at a time of intensifying competition. Those concerns contributed to a 65% decline in Tesla’s stock last year that wiped out more than $700 billion in shareholder wealth — far more than the $14 billion swing in fortune that occurred between the company’s high and low stock prices during the Aug. 7-17, 2018 period covered in the class-action lawsuit. Tesla’s stock has split twice since then, making the $420 buyout price cited in his 2018 tweet worth $28 on adjusted basis now. The company's shares were trading around $133.42 Friday, down from the company’s November 2021 split-adjusted peak of $414.50. After Musk dropped the idea of a Tesla buyout, the company overcame its production problems, resulting in a rapid upturn in car sales that caused its stock to soar and minted Musk as the world’s richest person until he bought Twitter. Musk dropped from the top spot on the wealth list after the stock market’s backlash to his handling of Twitter. When asked Friday about the challenges that Tesla faced in 2018, he recalled spending many nights sleeping at the automaker's California factory as he tried to keep the company afloat. “The sheer level of pain to make Tesla successful during that 2017, 2018 period was excruciating," he recalled.

Bangladeshi writer in exile, Taslima Nasrin, has once again made news – saying she “became a big victim of medical crime” in India.   The internationally renowned writer, who is often embroiled in controversies, tweeted on her verified account on January 19, 2023: “I fell on the floor at my home and went to a private hospital for the internal fixation of my simple femoral neck fracture. Doctors did not want to do fixation, they have done my total hip replacement without any indication. Handicapped forever.” Taslima then tweeted, “I have seen my Xray report today (January 21, 2023). My Xray shows no fracture on my femur or anywhere. I came to a city private hospital to treat my knee pain after I fell on my knee. I never had any joint pain or any joint disease. But my total hip replacement was done.” Read more: Charges pressed against author Taslima Nasrin, 2 others in ICT case She tweeted by saying, “I became a big victim of medical crime. I was a healthy and fit person. In the name of treating my knee strain, they cut the parts of my healthy body off; my healthy hip joint, my femur were thrown away and a metal was put inside me. They have made me permanently handicapped”. She followed that with another tweet: “I became a big victim of medical crime. I was a healthy and fit person. In the name of treating my knee strain, they cut the parts of my healthy body off; my healthy hip joint, my femur were thrown away and a metal was put inside me. They have made me permanently handicapped.” Earlier in a Facebook post from her verified profile, Taslima said that the doctor imposed several restrictions, which included avoiding sitting in a normal chair, carrying heavy things, and sitting cross-legged. Read More: Freedom fighters receiving free medical treatment: Liberation War Minister On Friday (January 20, 2023), in another Facebook post she wrote, “Returned home from the hospital after being made paralyzed in exchange of lakhs of taka”.

A female passenger has reportedly been advised to get married and settle down in Dhaka by an immigration officer at Dhaka airport. The passenger, Priyanka Basu, shared her experience on Twitter on January 5, 2023 – that received a lot of reactions, reports the Hindustan Times. After enquiring her details at Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport, the immigration officer apparently advised Priyanka to “find a Bangladeshi man, get married and settle in Dhaka.” Read More: E-gates at Sylhet airport will improve passengers’ experience: Foreign Minister He also noted down her contact number to be in touch if a “suitable match” comes up, Priyanka tweeted. There were many responses to the tweet, with Twitterati making jokes and mocking the immigration officer’s advice. “Never knew this was part of their job description,” said one Twitter user. Read More: Dense fog: 8 int'l flights diverted, 7 delayed at Dhaka airport Another wrote, “Sounds like this officer has stakes in a ‘marriage bureau’, start-up (dating service) as you call them in the West. I hope he will soon make you an offer you cannot refuse.”