Bangladesh is prone to retaining Islam as state religion in the midst of increasing pressure on religious minorities and groups of civil society to restore the secular character of the 1972-Constitution.

However, the Awami League-led coalition, which plans to make major changes to the Constitution should provide equal status with other religions. “You know the ‘(parliamentary), the Special Committee has proposed to declare the provision of equal status with other religions and equal rights of the followers of all religions, Islam the state religion,” Law Minister Shafique Ahmed said on Monday

“Parliament will ultimately make the final decision on the proposed amendment,” he added, without giving details. According to media reports, the Cabinet yesterday agreed to the proposal of the Special Committee to maintain Islam as State religion “because of the sensitivity of the issue.”

A project research on Bangladesh Ecology, Bangladesh Behavior and Conservation of Some Bangladesh Wildlife is towards an end now. This research in the area of wildlife, ecology, behavior and conservation was done under the bilateral collaboration between the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and the University Of Chittagong (UCHIT) (Chittagong, Bangladesh). It was funded by the Norwegian Cooperation Program for Development Research and Education (NUFU).

As prefixed the duration mentioned for the project was 2007-2011. They were primarily interested to look at the relationship that is there between the biodiversity & the ecology of wildlife and the effects of habitat adaptation and disintegration on conservation of species in Bangladesh. There were 4 PhD Researchers, 4 Mphil and 3 MSc students.

The most important intentions of the project were:

- To build human resource and institutional capacity in the areas of natural science, and

- To increase the ability to demonstrate a critical awareness and reflection on research-based information as a basis for problem solving and practice in professional contexts; to interpret and report research findings in areas of natural science; to formulate research questions and problems, design and carry out small scale research projects and present findings in academic conferences.

The chief doings of the project were as follows:

- To develop realistic international standard course curricula, research laboratory, organizing training and supervising for PhD and Masters study in the areas of natural science;

- To produce research based dissertation and publications and arrange seminars, symposiums and workshops or conferences to disseminate research-based information;

- To establish the linkage or networking with relevant disciplines or departments or research institutions at home and abroad.

Funding of the whole Ecology, Behavior and Conservation of Some Bangladesh Wildlife project was done by:

- Norwegian Cooperation Programme for Development Research and Education (NUFU)

- Norwegian State Educational Loan Fund (Lånekassen).

Such researches & studies create awareness not only towards some endangered Bangladesh Wildlife species which need to be conversed but also the care nature life & ecology need from human life.

Just nineteen months back, Bangladesh Awami League formed government in Bangladesh with its electoral manifesto titled ‘Vision 2021′, which was destined for ensuring ‘Digital Bangladesh’. It was greatly understood by many that, Sheikh Hasina and her party copied this theme of Vision 2021 from that of Barack Hussain Obama, who too was set in Presidency in United States almost during the same time.

It is important to mention here that, in Bangladeshi democracy, political parties are set in power through election for a period of 60 months, while in United States; Presidents are elected for a period of 48 months. In such case, while Barack Obama has roughly 29 months to go, Bangladesh Awami League will be in power for another 41 months to be in power.

Obama’s policies have greatly flopped in United States and his Democratic party is expected to witness a severe setback during the coming elections of Senate and Congress in November 2010. It is easy to predict now that, Obama’s befooling policies have already started to be disliked if not hated by Americans.

On the other hand, ruling party in Bangladesh is visibly intensifying its grip over country’s administration and the very democracy gradually with the aim of continuing in power at least up to 2021, if not more. Supporters of Bangladesh Awami League are openly declaring that their party will remain in power for next couple of decades, while it is adopt every possible ‘strategies’ in dumping the political opponents either inside prisons or in exile.

Now let us have a glimpse over the electoral manifesto of Bangladesh Awami League:

It says “Good governance through establishing Rule of Law and avoiding Political Partisanship, Human rights will be established on a strong footing with a view to ensuring rule of law. Independence of the judiciary will be ensured and the Institutions of the State and Administration will be freed from partisan influence. The basis of appointment and promotion will be merit, efficiency, seniority, honesty and loyalty to the Republic; political connection will have no relevance.”

What we see in reality? There is every sign that the ruling party is trying to everything in suffocating voice of political opponents including the media. Scores of cases are already lodged against opposition leaders as well as members of media for criticizing the government. And interestingly, most of such cases are lodged by the activists of the ruling party. There is a clear signal to everyone of not uttering a single word against the ruling party. “Be with us or be treated as our enemy” is the policy of the ruling party in Bangladesh.

Cases of persecution of religious minorities, especially Hindus and Ahmadiyas are continuing in full swing in Bangladesh. There had been cases of destruction of Hindu temples as well as Ahmadiya mosques in the country, with numerous instances of abduction, forceful conversion etc.

Extortion and massive lawlessness by the cadres of the ruling party is a regular phenomenon. Especially the youth and students fronts of Bangladesh Awami League are active in extortion, terrorism, vandalism and various forms of crimes. No action has ever been taken for any such crimes.

Promotions are mostly considered on the basis of loyalty towards Bangladesh Awami League.

It says “Transformation of political culture, Terrorism, corruption and use of religion for politics will be stopped. Steps appropriate to the time will be taken to establish democratic principles in the political parties, transparency of political funding, civility and tolerance.”

Political culture is unchanged if not worsened. Terrorism by the ruling party cadres is continuing. The ruling party is continuing massive offensives on Jamaat-e-Islami, while it is reluctant in taking any action against other Islamist parties in Bangladesh.

I have just taken two of the several points from the electoral manifesto of the ruling party in Bangladesh. If anyone will look through it carefully, they will easily understand that the entire manifesto was created with a huge dream of continuing in power till 2021. In this case, instead of calling it ‘Vision 2021′, we can rather name it ‘Mission 2021′. It is not a mere ‘vision’ of Bangladesh Awami League to be in power till 2021, but this is their ‘mission’.

In the same electoral manifesto, Bangladeshi Awami League pledged to take a 3-year ‘crash program’ in meeting the ‘existing crisis’ in power sector. They have promised to install sufficient number of power stations to ensure smooth supply of electricity to the country. But, in past nineteen months, instead of seeing any improvement in power crisis, there is visible sign of severe deterioration in the entire situation. When Awami League came in power, there was daily blackout [load shedding] for 1-2 hours a day, while now it has become normal to witness blackout of 5-6 hours a day. The situation will further worsen during coming days. Industrial sectors are already facing virtual collapse due to such situation in the power sector and foreign investors are not showing any interest in investing in Bangladesh due to power shortage as well as crimes like extortion, vandalism etc.

So the very concept of ‘Digital Bangladesh’ by Bangladesh Awami League is by now questioned by many. People are whispering terming ‘Digital Bangladesh’ as ‘Digital BAKSAL’. I am sure; the present government will take lesson from the past and will not repeat the same blunder. The entire nation had highest aspiration on them and the ruling party cannot afford to dampen the people.

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — The violent threats are not what bother Michael Mann the most. He's used to them.

Instead, it's the fact that his life's work — the effort to stop global warming — has been under siege since last fall. That's when Mann suddenly found himself in the middle of the so-called "climategate" scandal, in which more than 1,000 e-mails among top climate scientists — including Mann — were obtained illegally by hackers and published on the Internet.

The e-mails showed some of the scientists sharing doubts about just how fast the Earth's temperature is rising, questioning the work of other researchers and refusing to share data with the public. Critics, including Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., have seized on the e-mails as proof that Mann and his colleagues deliberately exaggerated the scientific case behind global warming.

In a rare extended interview, Mann acknowledges "minor" errors but says he has been bewildered by the criticism — including a deluge of correspondence sent to his Pennsylvania State University office that, he says, occasionally has turned ugly.

"I've developed a thick skin," Mann says. "Frankly, I'm more worried that these people are succeeding in creating doubt in the minds of the public, when there really shouldn't be any."

MORE: Climate research e-mail controversy simmers CLIMATE DEBATE: Religious groups get involved CHICKEN MANURE: Could it help curb climate change?

Indeed, the controversy has contributed to a fundamental shift in efforts to stop global warming, forcing environmentalists to scale down long-held ambitions and try to win back an increasingly skeptical American public. Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank, says recent events may be causing "the death of the global warming movement as we know it."

Others don't go quite that far, but there have been setbacks:

• Citing doubts raised by the "climategate" e-mails, state governments in Texas, Virginia and Alabama filed legal challenges last month to stop the federal government from regulating carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. The challenges could force the Obama administration to modify or abandon its plans to regulate carbon emissions from factories and vehicles.

• Senate Democrats including John Kerry of Massachusetts have set aside House legislation that would limit greenhouse gas emissions from factories and other businesses nationwide. They are pursuing a new bill that may instead focus on utility companies, Kerry says.

• After more than a decade of fruitless efforts to negotiate a binding global treaty to cut greenhouse gas emissions, culminating in last December's summit in Copenhagen, the USA may now pursue a more narrow strategy, State Department climate change envoy Todd Stern said last month. He said future talks might be limited to a smaller group of major polluters such as the USA and China — and leave out small countries that blocked a deal at Copenhagen, such as Sudan.

• The United Nations announced Wednesday that it would bring in an outside panel of scientists to help review an occasional study put together by a U.N. body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The study was regarded as the gold standard of climate science until several errors came to light this year.

On February 13th, Greenpeace International announced that was hiring ForestEthics founder Tzeporah Berman as director of its global climate and energy campaign. The move has provoked intense outrage among many Greenpeace supporters, staff and activists. The conflict raging within Greenpeace has the potential to be an important first step in addressing two heretofore taboo subjects in the environmental movement: the corrupting influence of corporate cash and the absence of democratic structures.

The announcement marked an acceleration of a long-term drift away from Greenpeace's origins in direct action environmental and anti-war work. Back in 2007, Greenpeace lauded Coca-Cola for its "commitment to use climate-friendly coolers and vending machines." (The same year, campaigns against Coke's complicity in paramilitary assassination of union leaders in Colombia were in full swing, while a year earlier, the government of Kerala had banned Coca-Cola after a revolt over overuse and pollution of groundwater.)

If the Coke deal was Greenpeace testing the waters of corporate collaboration, hiring Berman is Greenpeace jumping in.

The hire marks a full-circle return for Berman, who rose to prominence within Greenpeace but left in 2000 to found ForestEthics, where she broke new ground in the "collaborative approach" to conservation. According to Berman's ethos, "the notion of activists vs. corporations, of good vs. evil, no longer applies... It's about creating dialogue, and finding the solutions that will be mutually beneficial to all."

While heading up ForestEthics, Berman undertook a series of collaborations with companies like Home Depot, Dell, Staples and most recently General Electric. Immediately before being hired by Greenpeace, Berman headed PowerUp Canada, an initiative funded mostly by the Tides and Ivey Foundations that pushed the privatization of British Columbia's rivers in the name of green energy. She has since backed away from the fruits of her efforts, claiming she does not support the privatization of "all" rivers in BC.

Grassroots environmentalists in Canada were furious at Berman long before she took the Greenpeace job, starting with the elimination of public oversight during her stint as lead negotiator of the Great Bear Rainforest deal. (In the deal that was finally signed, only 32 per cent of the rainforest was protected.)

Berman's return to Greenpeace as it approaches its 40th year of existence has stoked the ire of the organization's supporters to white-hot levels.

A founding member of Greenpeace International who preferred to remain anonymous, commented: "A mark of integrity is the blunt refusal to be compromised. The movement we started, based on principles of non-violent direct action, all those years ago, has now been sold out..."

70 people have signed a statement calling on Greenpeace to rescind Berman's hire and "renounce collaboration and partnership with destructive corporations".

Greenpeace staffers and activists in Canada -- where Berman is well-known, and where Greenpeace has a high-profile anti-tar sands campaign underway -- have privately expressed a mix of bafflement and rage at the decision.

One anonymous "Greenpeace activist or staff" remarked in testimony posted to "Greenpeace actually started the Kyoto Plus campaign to battle Power Up, the organization that Tzeporah started. And now they're hiring her. The hypocrisy blows my mind. It's astonishing. It's like they just hired the devil. No one will take us seriously... with decisions like this."

Greenpeace's decision comes at a point when questions about Environmental organizations lack of democracy or accountability, and their corresponding closeness with corporations involved in environmental destruction, are looming larger than ever.

A recent report in The Nation ends with a 30-year veteran of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) stating outright: "We're close to a civil war in the environmental movement. For too long, all the oxygen in the room has been sucked out by this beast of these insider groups, who achieve almost nothing.... We need to create new organizations that represent the fundamentals of environmentalism and have real goals."

The report, whose author was subsequently interviewed on Democracy Now!, raises issues that are echoed in the anonymous testimonies of disgruntled Greenpeacers. Phrases like "disenfranchised," "no consultation," "no transparency," "more concerned with getting a 'seat at the table,'" point repeatedly to the same pair of problems: addiction to corporate and foundation cash and a total lack of democracy.

While the debate rages inside Greenpeace, early reports seem to indicate that many on the inside are channeling their frustration at the lack of consultation and their own disempowerment into rage against the small number of people willing to publicly oppose the Berman hire and discuss her record.

The frustration is understandable, but if the goal is a strong, democratic environmental movement, there are much better targets for their rage.

The overreach of Greenpeace's turn towards corporate collaboration and the ensuing grassroots backlash affords the rarest of moments: an opportunity to articulate and push for demands that normally bounce harmlessly off of the bureaucratic carapace of big organizations like Greenpeace.

It's an opportunity to demand an end to corporate collaboration, but it's also an opportunity to demand democratic accountability to a supporting membership that is there because of the organization's forty years of direct action. Small-scale financial supporters, volunteer activists and staff alike have no formal say in Greenpeace's strategic direction. Nearly all of their complaints emanate from the frustration created by that contradiction.

At a moment where tensions are at their highest, the irony of an NRDC functionary describing "civil war" and calling for "new organizations that represent the fundamentals of environmentalism and have real goals" while Greenpeacers seethe, lash out at those pointing to Berman's record, or quit, should not be lost on anyone.

Greenpeace International's head office has raised the stakes. If the resistance to Berman's hire is broken, the descent of the organization will be far swifter than the Coked-up years leading to its fortieth birthday. If the resistance continues to grow and spreads to supporters of other unaccountable, corporate-partnered big greens, then we'll win with Greenpeace or without it.

If Greenpeace's transformation into another public relations contractor for corporations and foundations is allowed to continue, everyone loses.

Corporate collaboration will never do more than slightly curtail environmental destruction. In many cases, the results of collaboration have been disastrous. The only things that can stop it are organizations rooted in communities and grassroots movements that are immune to "leaders" selling them out for money and ego.

If that's what folks working with and supporting Greenpeace want, they won't get a better shot at it than this one.

For example, they’ll say the growing number of people skeptical about claims of imminent, catastrophic, man-made global warming — including many scientists — are insanely claiming all climate science is a hoax.

That might be a valid point if that’s what most critics were saying. But it’s not.

Rather, they’re arguing that since it’s only human to “follow the money” and the big money, to say nothing of scientific prestige in the climate change field, at least pre-Climategate, was in predicting imminent, worst-case, catastrophic, man-made global warming, that might have skewed the science somewhat over time.

How do we know it’s human nature to follow the money? From the warmists.

Take Greenpeace’s widely quoted 2007 report that ExxonMobil spent almost

$23 million between 1998 and 2006 funding skeptics who questioned man-made global warming, part of, they say, the oil giant’s campaign to sow confusion with the public.

So, Greenpeace’s argument goes, these skeptics’ views were influenced by money.

Okay. Let’s say that’s true. And, since ExxonMobil is only one company, albeit the biggest and baddest on this issue according to the warmists, let’s say Greenpeace’s research into ExxonMobil uncovered only 1/100th of the total funding the fossil fuel industry and others paid to skeptics. Let’s say it was

$2.3 billion. That would certainly be a lot of money.

But as Joanne Nova, an Australian climate blogger and author of The Skeptics Handbook recently noted, it pales beside the $79 billion the U.S. government alone has spent on climate research and technology since 1989. (Nova rejects the science of anthropogenic global warming, which doesn’t change her point.)

Given that kind of public mega-money invested in climate science and technology in just one country, it makes you wonder about some things.

For example, about why the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) still apparently doesn’t have the resources to double-check facts, so that it doesn’t end up doing stupid stuff such as predicting Himalayan glaciers will disappear by 2035, or getting the amount of land below sea level in the Netherlands wrong by a factor of over 100%. (The list of IPCC errors grows almost daily.)

Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist magazine, explained the heady effect all this public cash, starting decades ago, had on scientists in the U.K., a hot-bed of climate hysteria, in the British documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle.

“If I wanted to do research on, shall we say, the squirrels of Sussex ... I would write my grant application saying ‘I want to investigate the nut-gathering behaviour of squirrels, with special reference to the effects of global warming,’ and that way, I get my money,” Calder noted. “If I forgot to mention global warming, I might not get the money.”

Exactly. No hoax, just a telling observation of the human tendency of climate scientists, like everyone else, to follow the money. Perhaps to the conclusion that when the political flavour of the month (or decade) is to find evidence of imminent, catastrophic, man-made, global warming, scientific studies over time may tend to overstate conclusions, understate uncertainties and focus excessively on worst-case scenarios.

Which, as we’re now learning, appears, in many cases, to have happened.