Press Trust of India . Kolkata

After getting extension of her visa to stay in India, Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen on Friday said she was living a 'caged' life and asked the government to remove the curbs on her movement.

'My freedom of movement is severely curtailed. I cannot meet friends and fellow writers causing stress to my mind and health.

Staff Correspondent

British television presenters Jackie and Laurence Llewelyn-Brown have visited Bangladesh's Sidr-hit remote localities to tell Britons back home about the woes of the survivors and their struggle to build life afresh in the ruins.

'Getting back home, they will tell the stories of how November 15 cyclone survivors are fighting to rebuild their homes and what assistance they might need to survive,' Chloe Bayram, the event coordinator of CARE United Kingdom, said on Wednesday after the team concluded its trips to Sarankhola and Morelganj, two badly affected upazilas in Bagrhat district.

UNB, Dhaka

Close coordination between the information department and the media was underscored at a meeting of the information officers at the secretariat on Wednesday for implementation of government policies and development programmes.

People should be properly informed of the government policies and programmes.

Staff Correspondent

The Bangladesh Film Archives has taken up a project to carry out researches on a number of aspects of the country’s film industry, including the lives and works of eminent actors, directors and other artistes.

Staff Correspondent

Politicians and civic leaders have stressed that the government should initiate dialogues with political parties immediately and without imposing any condition to lead the country towards elections as planned.

Ban on politics needs to be lifted to pave the way for fruitful talks, some of them suggested as they were speaking at the BBC Bangla-desh Sanglap in Dhaka Saturday. ‘We are in deep crises.

Staff Correspondent

The Bhasha Andolon Museum has initiated the process of making a list of the heroes of historic language movement in 1952.

Names of the people who had contributions to the language movement but opposed the war of independence will not be included in the list, the museum authorities told a news briefing in Dhaka on Saturday.

They said they would try to complete the job by this year and keep in mind about the controversies over the list of freedom fighters.

Staff Correspondent

Odhikar, a non-governmental human rights body, has expressed deep concern over the government's fresh attempts to curb media freedom and curtail rights of the citizens with imposing Emergency Powers Rules.

Agency

A group of people Friday vandalised three makeshift outlets of Grameenphone on Dhaka University campus, protesting what they said was an ‘imperialistic force’.

Students said up to eight people, believed to be students of Dhaka University, attacked the outlets near the university’s Central Library around 3.30pm.

Agency The BBC has teamed up with Bangladesh's leading news web site bdnews24.com to enable its users to listen to BBC World Service radio.

Visitors to the 24/7 site across the world can now access BBC radio programmes in English and Bangla. The news service is the first news site in Bangladesh to carry the BBC radio content.

Staff Correspondent

Shamsun Nahar Rahman Rose, a social and cultural activist and mother of renowned fashion designer Bibi Russel, died at a city hospital on Sunday.

She was 79. Shamsun Nahar, wife of late freedom fighter and cultural activist Mokhlesur Rahman Sidhu Bhai, is survived by two sons and three daughters.

Agency

Bangladesh's army-backed emergency government has banned two popular live political talk shows, the private satellite television channel ETV said Saturday.

'The information ministry handed us a written order saying that we cannot telecast out our live talk shows any more,' a senior ETV official said.

Agency

Controversial Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, under virtual house arrest after being shifted out of here in controversial circumstances, had her Indian visa extended for six months from February 17.

'I have come to know that my visa has been extended,' Taslima told the Press Trust of India on Wednesday when contacted in Delhi where she is staying at an undisclosed destination on security grounds after violent protests by a little-known Muslim group against her alleged anti-Islam writings.

LOS ANGELES (AFP)

Nominees for the 80th Academy Awards were to be unveiled early Tuesday, with Hollywood on tenterhooks as experts predicted a wide open battle for the Oscars' best picture prize.

The nominations for this year's awards were to be revealed at 5:38 am (1338 GMT) at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, whose Beverly Hills headquarters went into lockdown on Monday in anticipation of the event.

Staff Correspondent

A video compact disc of the Spartacus 71, video-film directed by Mostofa Sarwar Farooki, was released in the Star Cineplex of Basundhara City Shopping Complex in Dhaka on Monday.

Members of the Dhaka guerrilla group 'crack platoon' in 1971, Nasir Uddin Yousuff and Habibul Alam (Bir Pratik) unveiled the cover of the VCD, produced by the Impress Telefilm Limited and released by the Laser Vision.

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Staff Correspondent

Small and medium businesses in Bangladesh spent nearly $380 million on IT and telecom solutions in 2007, said a study conducted by the New York-based Access Markets International Partners. 'SMBs in Bangladesh may have started off a bit slower than their counterparts in the Indian subcontinent in terms of overall IT adoption,' says Dev Chakravarty, senior analyst at AMI Partners, a consulting firm that specializes in IT, internet, telecommunications and business services strategy, venture capital and actionable market intelligence, with a strong focus on global small and medium business enterprises. 'However, their IT adoption is set to take off more rapidly in the near future.

Agence France-Presse . Paris

Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, under Indian government protection from Islamist death threats, described her life in hiding as a 'slow and lingering death' in a text released in France on Friday.

'I am merely a disembodied voice. Those who once stood by me have disappeared into the darkness,' the 45-year-old Taslima wrote in an article published in Saturday's edition of Le Monde newspaper.