Bangladesh women garment workers face sex abuse

DHAKA, Oct 3: Sexual abuse, meagre wages and life-threatening safety lapses are some of the routine problems facing an estimated 1.5 million women toiling in Bangladesh’s garment factories.

"About 6,000 female workers have been sexually violated in two years (until now) by a section of garment owners, male colleagues, law enforcing agents and others," Amirul Huq Amin, general secretary of the National Garment Workers Federation, told Reuters yesterday.

"Some factory owners even use female workers as bait to hook up (with) buyers coming from abroad," he added.

Garment exports earned Bangladesh four billion dollars in 1998/99 (July-June), Commerce Ministry officials said.

The garment industry, which accounts for four-fifths of annual export earnings, had stopped using child workers a few years ago due to pressure from overseas buyers and the international labour organisation.

But Amin said other problems — including sexual abuse — remained.

He said about 70 per cent of sexual abuse incidents occurred inside factories where women worked night shifts, often with the doors locked from the outside.

Women workers also fell prey to sexual abuse when returning home at odd hours, he said, adding that offenders included policemen and criminals.

Amin said women were exposed to abuse partly because employers did not arrange transport for their workers.

About 1.5 million women — nearly 90 percent of the sector’s total employees — work in Bangladesh’s 2,600 garment factories, earning monthly salaries of between 700 taka (13 dollars) and 2,000 taka (37 dollars).

"They can hardly make ends meet with such meagre salary, which is even less than the average wage of a farm labourer," Amin said.

At least 152 garment workers were killed and scores injured in factory fires over the past five years, he said.

He said most of the factories had "no emergency exit, no adequate toilet facilities or maternity leave. Sometimes it appears that we are in a prison or forced-labour camp."

Amin said his federation recently made a strong appeal to the Government and factory owners to improve working conditions and provide better security for workers.

"We have recently concluded an agreement with the Bangladesh Garments Manufacturers and Exporters Association for granting weekly holiday and maternity leave," Amin said without giving further details.

The Garment Association’s Chief Executive Officer, Wazir Afzal, said abuse of women was a major problem in Bangladesh.

"It would not be fair to single out the garments sector for such crimes," he said. (REUTERS)

Dan Hicks and the hot licks ticking again

NEW YORK, Oct 3: Dan Hicks and the hot licks are back, with help from such celebrity guests as Tom Waits, Elvis Costello and Bette Midler. But the man who wrote "how can I miss you when you won’t go away?" never really did go away.

Hicks, whose Cowboy Hipster style and sophisticated harmonic stylings have made him one of San Francisco’s most influential musicians, has been writing and singing his witty, quirky, jazzy songs for more than three decades.

"I don’t think i’ve ever stopped," Hicks said reflectively in an interview after a show at New York city’s Bowery Ballroom. "Not much. I might have stopped in the ’70s there for a while. I had a gig where I had an open mike thing once a week at a local bar.

"That’s as slow as I got. I didn’t quite stop. I got slow, though," he said, laughing.

Despite continuing royalties from such favourites as "I scare myself" and "canned music," finances have from time to time over the years forced hicks to pare down his sound when he hit the road. But with the release of "beatin’ the heat" (surfdog), he is back fronting his favourite configuration.

Once again he has put together the classic hot licks lineup: two smooth and sexy female singers ("the lickettes"), Gypsy Jazz violin and guitar reminiscent of Le Hot Club De France, and stand-up bass, all blending with his cool, dry vocals and rhythmic guitar chording.

Despite appearances on the cover of "rolling stone," on national television shows, on international stages and just inside the top 40 of pop music charts, hicks has never quite been mainstream. But his frothy post-western swing music is a taste that, once acquired, cannot be satisfied anywhere else.

That is why musicians the likes of waits, costello and midler, as well as Rickie Lee Jones and Brian Setzer, were happy to contribute to the album.

Hicks and waits combine for a hilarious duet on "I’ll tell you why that is." the song is about "a man capable of explaining anything and everything and maybe in the sequel tune he will actually do that," Hicks explains in the liner notes.

Hicks had known waits 20 years earlier, but they had fallen out of touch until the recording session. "He stayed long enough to get it done, and zap, he was gone," Hicks said of his fellow california eccentric. "he had to go take care of his kids or something. He lived right near where we recorded.

"He had a little coat on he never took off, a little raincoat or something, you know? he had this hat," Hicks drawled amusedly. "He just stood there like he walked in off the street. He took his hat off when we had to put on the earphones. That was it."

"It was like — it wasn’t a mirage but, you know, I didn’t really know him, it had been a long time — it was kind of a kick. I couldn’t believe my eyes, actually."

Hicks outlined his exacting criteria for choosing the celebrities he invited: "Who did I think would sound good? who did I think knew of me? who would call me back?"

Midler, a longtime fan who has herself recorded Hicks songs, does a perfect lickette impression on "strike it while it’s hot" — a credit to her range of talent, and also an indication of the particularity of Hicks’s sound.

Although Hicks was a member of San Francisco’s first psychedelic band, the charlatans, he has stuck to his breezy, Jazz-based acoustic style since the hot licks took off in 1969.

"I don’t know if it’s boon or bane," Hicks said of his remarkable consistency. "I never really felt like changing it. My wife puts it in terms like ‘you’re an artist and that’s what you chose to do.’ Maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s it, you know?" he mused.

Emphatically, he continued: "That’s ity I’ve thought now and then like why don’t i get in another band, get into some real pop band, be in something that’s real big? why don’t i just do that? but I don’t think I could do that."

Hicks has long been known for his quick, Tart Wit onstage. At the bowery ballroom show, he directed an appreciative audience’s attention to the instrument onstage that "simulates the sound of a violin synthesizer."

Recent reviewers and veteran fans say that while his sense of humour remains intact, he appears a kinder, Gentler Curmudgeon these days. Hicks, 58, agrees.

"I think my attitude’s toned down. Yeah. I used to do a lot more, I don’t know, the word jive comes to mind," he said. (REUTERS)

Rumours swirl around first nobels of millennium

STOCKHOLM, Oct 3: The first nobel literature award of the 21st century is due to be announced in the next week or two with a non-European likely to clinch the prestigious and valuable prize, according to talk in Stockholm literary circles.

As ever the Swedish academy, which traditionally unveils literature’s top accolade on a Thursday in October, was keeping the announcement date a closely guarded secret until the last minute and letting nothing slip about its candidate list.

But with dates for the science, economics and peace prizes confirmed for the week beginning October nine, and more than one million dollars at stake for each prize, the perennial rumour-mill is already grinding out plenty of speculation.

"It’s a shot in the dark of course, but personally I expect a non-European author," said Erik Wallrup, chief critic at Sweden’s Svenska Dagbladet daily.

He tipped Trinidad-born V.S. Naipaul but said Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer and Belgian author Hugo Claus were possibles.

The Academy always announces its decision at 1630 hours ist on the chosen day outside its headquarters on Stockholm’s Mediaeval old town island.

"There’s definitely an element of ‘which continent is it going to be this year?’," said Adrian Tahourdin of the London Times literary supplement.

"The chances are it won’t be a European and if it’s an African, (Nigerian novelist) Chinua Achebe is a good bet."

Other worthies included South Africa’s JM Coetzee, Canadians Margaret Atwood and Alice Munroe, U.S. writer Philip Roth and exiled chinese poet Bei Dao.

Among European hopefuls were Cees Nooteboom of the Netherlands, Albania’s Ismail Kadare, Sweden’s Astrid Lindgren and Zimbabwe-raised British Octogenarian Doris Lessing.

British author Salman Rushdie was a long shot.

"He’s in mid-career," Tahourdin said. "If they’re going to give it to him they’ll wait a while. Plus they tend to steer clear of controversy."

Two of the academy’s 18 members stopped attending its weekly meetings in 1989 after the then secretary refused to condemn Iran’s death edict on Rushdie, and a third member is also boycotting the meetings, so the prize is in the hands of 15 people.

The science awards were seen as wide open, with dozens of Stellar candidates for medicine/physiology on Monday 9th and physics and chemistry on Tuesday 10th.

One poignant decision will be whether to reward Craig Venter, whose company Celera Genomics raced the publicly funded human genome project to map the fundamental human genetic code.

"What Craig Venter did is of enormous interest to the academic world. It will have to be considered. But there’s still a certain amount of resentment," said new scientist magazine editor Jeremy Webb.

"In many ways he broke the academic model for how these things should be done. He introduced the commercial side."

As ever, most science awards will probably go to researchers working in the United States, especially for physics.

"They have got the infrastructure, the universities and the culture," American Institute of Physics chief science writer Phil Schewe told Reuters.

"More and more we are getting an equitable distribution of talent, but the U.S. still has a disproportionate number of physicists and good results, and will continue to because the economy is strong at the moment. But these things go in cycles."

Physics likelies include Eric Cornell, Carl Wyman and Wolfgang Ketterley for refrigerating atoms into a new state, and Geoffrey Marcy and Paul Butler for discovering distant planets.

Melvin Schocket, Paul Grannis and Leon Lederman, already a nobel winner, may get a taste of glory for their breakthroughs in finding new subatomic particles.

George Smoot and John Mather are in the running for research on disturbances in cosmic microwave radiation that let researchers peer into the first seconds after the big bang.

Academics also point to work on black holes by Stephen Hawking and John Wheeler, the discovery of a key computer hard drive technology by Stuart Parkin, and work on atom wave interference by David Pritchard and Theodore Hanch.

In chemistry, Peter armbruster deserves recognition for helping discover new chemical elements.

Economics is due on Wednesday 11th. Norway’s Cobel Committee will announce the peace prize in Oslo on Friday 13th.

The prizes, first awarded in 1901, were created in the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, who died in 1896. They are presented in glittering ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo on December 10, the anniversary of his death. (REUTERS)

Shrine untouched for 2,000 yrs found

ZAGREB, Oct 3: An international team of archaeologists has uncovered what may be a pre-Roman Pagan shrine that has lain undisturbed beneath the hills of Southern Croatia for more than two thousand years.

The Croatian-Canadian team says the site, dating from the third century BC, is the only shrine of the ancient Illyrian people ever found.

They believe they are the first people to have set foot in it since it was sealed up as Rome’s legions marched across Europe.

The dramatic discovery was made deep inside a cave at Spila, near the village of Nakovana on the Peljesac Peninsula in Southern Dalmatia, about 100 km North-West of the Adriatic city of Dubrovnik.

Pottery and a huge phallic stalagmite in the cave indicate that it was used as a shrine.

"We believe that the Centre of the cave served as an Altar for some Pagan ritual, probably linked to fertility or potency," Dr Staso Forenbaher of the Croatian Institute for Anthropological Research told Reuters.

"To our knowledge, this is the only Illyrian sanctuary ever found," he added.

The Illyrians inhabited the Western Balkans before the Romans conquered the region and were assimilated by migrating Slavic tribes in the early middle ages. Albanians are their only modern descendants.

Forenbaher and Dr Timothy Kaiser of the Royal Ontario Museum discovered deeper channels in the Spila cave almost by accident, during excavations at the entrance in August 1999. They returned a year later to lead the project.

The cave contains several layers of archaeological material dating from the early neolithic era, 6,000 years BC. The most valuable findings were hidden behind a mass of stones and earth deep inside.

Forenbaher said he believed the entrance might have been sealed on purpose, at some point during the first century BC at the time of the Roman conquest, possibly to prevent the sanctity of the site from being broken.

"It looked completely intact. The surface was crusty, and there was no evidence whatsoever that any human or animal had walked there for centuries," said Forenbaher.

The fact that the shrine has been completely untouched for two millennia makes its significance even greater.

"Hopefully, this will give us a chance to try to reconstruct what had been going on there," Forenbaher said.

As the team went into the cave, a corridor 50 metres in length and tall enough for a person to stand up in, opened up roughly in the middle of a circular area about 10 metres in diameter.

In the middle of this stood a 60-cm tall red and white stalagmite in the form of a phallus. The team believe it played a central role in whatever rituals went on in the cave when it was used as a shrine.

"We dug around and under the stalagmite and found that it had not grown there naturally. It had to be brought in from someplace else - perhaps even from the cave itself - to be installed there by humans," Forenbaher said.

Scattered around were hundreds of pieces of hellenistic pottery, mostly plates and chalices, some of them bearing inscriptions in ancient Greek and Latin.

Their function and position around the Phallus indicate they were used in some sort of a ritual that included feasting, drinking and probably making offerings to pagan gods.

Most pieces seem to have originated from Magna Graecia -Greek colonies in Southern Italy - and from Greek settlements in the Southern Dalmatian islands of Korcula (Korcyra Nigra), Hvar (Pharos) and Vis (Issa).

The team dug out about three tonnes of material from the cave, taking everything they could find to the Dubrovnik Archaeology Museum for further research, Forenbaher said.

They also found containers with what looked like remains of food that will be sent to Britain to be analysed, while radioactive carbon dating will be done in Croatia.

More than 100 kg of collected pottery will be sorted out and put together by local experts.

"We expect first reports to come out within a year, and the whole project to take three years," Forenbaher said. (REUTERS)

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