বাংলাদেশ-শ্রীলংকা সিরিজ নিয়ে যা বললেন ক্রিকেট গবেষকরা

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War on Isis: US-led forces carry out 22 airstrikes on Islamist targets in Iraq and Syria in 24 hours

The US and its allies have carried out 22 air strikes on Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in the past 24 hours, it has emerged.

There were three strikes near Hasaka in northeast Syria hitting a tactical unit and destroying Isis fighting positions, bunkers and excavators, according to a Coalition Joint Task Force spokesman.

Another strike near Aleppo hit an Isis tactical unit.

Kobani, near the Turkish border, also took a hit destroying three fighting positions and a tactical unit.

And in a co-ordinated attack with the Iraqi Government, there were fifteen strikes in Iraq targeting  Islamic State buildings and equipment near Baiji, Fallujah, Mosul and Sinjar.

This latest round of air strikes come as political turmoil continues within Iraq.\

An Iraqi parliamentary panel called on Suneqy for the former Prime Minister Nuri-al-Maliki and dozens of top officials to stand trial over the fall of the city of Mosul to Isis last year.

The panel's findings allege Maliki had an inaccurate picture of the threat to Mosul because he chose commanders who were corrupt and failed to hold them to account.

While Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi ordered military commanders accused of abandoning their posts in Ramadi, capital of the Anbar province which was overrun by Islamic State in May, to face court martial.

This comes a week after Abadi began sweeping reforms to the government to try and provide accountability for the loss of almost a third of the country’s territory to the radical jihadists.

Abadi slashed 11 ministerial posts, including cutting the three deputy prime minister posts and combining four ministries with similar ones.

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Morgan Freeman's step-granddaughter E'Dena Hines stabbed to death on street in New York

Morgan Freeman’s step-granddaughter was stabbed to death on a New York street in the early hours of Sunday, police have confirmed.

E’Dena Hines, 33, whose grandmother was Jeanette Adair Bradshaw, the actor’s first wife, was stabbed several times in front of her home in Harlem’s West 162nd St.

The New York Post said that a 30-year-old man man who was at the scene was taken into custody and moved to hospital for a psychiatric evaluation.

Freeman issued a statement saying: "The world will never know her artistry and talent, and how much she had to offer."

Writing on Facebook, he added: "I want to acknowledge the tremendous outpouring of love and support my family has received regarding the tragic and senseless passing of my granddaughter. Thank you from the bottom of my heart."

Hines had studied acting and was involved with teaching urban youth.

Three years ago, Morgan, who is aged 78, issued a statement denying that he was involved in a relationship with Ms Hines.

“The recent reports of any pending marriage or romantic relationship of me to anyone are defamatory fabrications from the tabloid media designed to sell papers,” he said.

“What is even more alarming is that these fabrications are now being picked up by the legitimate press as well.”

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Toddler has his Minions Fart Gun confiscated at Dublin Airport for posing security 'threat'

A family in Dublin has discovered the harsh reality of airport security restrictions after their toddler’s Minions toy was confiscated for posing a ‘threat’.

The toddler had a Minions Fart Gun taken off them at Dublin Airport on Saturday because toy guns – especially those with a trigger mechanism – are on the prohibited items list.

“Can’t believe that a minion fart gun was taken from friends toddler, security felt it posed a threat [SIC],” a friend of the child’s family wrote on Twitter yesterday.

A spokesperson for Dublin Airport explained why the toy had been taken away from the child: “Toy guns and replica guns are on the prohibited items list and we urge people to check this before they travel.

“We don’t make the rules but we apply the rules consistently; anything that is a replica gun with a trigger mechanism on it is listed as a prohibited item.”

The spokesperson added that the toy gun is being kept safe at the airport for the family to pick up on their return.

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Yvette Cooper interview: Leadership candidate makes emotional call for Labour to be the party that 'makes a difference'

It is easy to be cynical about politicians – to think that they are in it for themselves, that they will say anything to get into power, and don’t know anything about the “real” world.

But when you’re sharing the back seat of a three-door Fiat Punto with a politician who is choked up and on the verge of tears, it sort of makes you reassess.

When that politician is Yvette Cooper – the Labour leadership candidate and shadow Home Secretary – it is all the more surprising.

We’d met earlier in the day at one of her campaign events, and I was interviewing her en route to her next destination a Labour club in Deeside, North Wales. Then we pull up in a car park by the venue, and Cooper begins telling me about a woman she met on the campaign trail in Pontefract. It’s a typical story politicians like to tell when they want to illustrate a wider point.

“She came to the door in her pyjamas – it was about six o’clock on a Friday evening,” she says. “She told me she was sorry but she was about to go to bed, because she goes to bed early so she doesn’t have to turn the heating on. She was paying the bedroom tax and couldn’t afford it.”

Cooper says she asked the woman if she had thought about moving to a smaller house where her rent would be less, but the lady told her she needed the space for her grandson who stayed two nights a week when his mother worked nights.

“I had a whole conversation with her about how she was managing. She said it was fine – she didn’t have money for food for the next few days, although her daughter would come in and she would probably be all right.

“I left thinking I don’t know what to do to help. When we had a Labour government, there was always something you could do.

“If all else failed you could go to a government minister and say, ‘Oh my God, this is happening, what are we going to do about it?’ I went back and said here are the details of the local food bank.”

She pauses and adds: “I came into politics to use politics to make a difference. And in the end, all I could do was to take her the details of a local charity. You ought to be able to do something. Politics should be able to do something to help.”

At that point, I return to a theme we had been talking about earlier – asking Cooper what a Jeremy Corbyn win in the Labour leadership contest would mean for the lady.

“I think it’s letting her down,” she begins. Then she pauses. “I think we already let her down. We let her down at this election. So it’s, you know...”

She breaks off and visibly crumples – struggling to get the words out. There is a long pause as she tries to compose herself and the car seems even smaller. Then in a whisper that is barely audible on the tape when I listen back to it later, she adds: “I don’t want to let people down.”

A few moments later – after wiping her eyes with a tissue handed over by an aide (inappropriately with the pattern of a £50 note printed on it) she’s back to her old self.

She heads off to do a clip for the local TV news and then goes straight into an hour-long question and answer session with local party activists.

I watch her perform. She is feisty, passionate and confident – not a hint of what’s just gone before. So, what to make of what I’ve just witnessed?

Part of it must be simple dog-tiredness from a long gruelling leadership campaign. Trying to become leader of the Opposition is not a glamorous business; it involves long days speaking to small groups of people in musty halls, grabbing a sandwich where you can, and fielding endless impertinent questions from journalists (“How embarrassed were you when Ed Balls said he was a long slow burner in bed?” and so on).

You are always on show, watching what you say and how you look, and having to be cheerful and optimistic, whatever you feel inside. It must be exhausting.

But in this case, I think there is something more.

The day before we met, Cooper made a speech that stood out compared to some of her previous, more anodyne and overly cautious contributions in the campaign.

She rounded on Jeremy Corbyn – the surprise front-runner – saying his policies would consign the party to an irrelevant pressure group that could never win an election.

“We cannot condemn today’s five year olds to spend all their childhood under a Tory government,” she said.

“We can’t just luxuriate in our own righteousness out on the sidelines. We have a responsibility to change the world or what’s the point of us at all?”

It was a good speech, with a coherent argument, and you felt she really believed in what she was saying – not always a given with politicians.

You get the sense the Corbyn ascendency has really made Cooper think about what it is for her to be “Labour”. And to think about it in a way she has probably never done as explicitly before since she worked for John Smith in the 1990s up to becoming a cabinet minister.

It has forced her to define herself ideologically – rather than assuming that all Labour needed to do for the next five years was achieve one more managerial push with a more plausible leader than Ed Miliband.

As she put it earlier in the interview: “This is not just about the next few months. This is about the next 10 years. It just reaches the point where it focuses your mind and you think we are in danger of writing off the next election now.

“I already feel the sense of frustration that we let people down in the last election and the idea that we would let people down again – not just for this five years but for the next five years as well.

“That just feels too much just to stand by and be polite about this and not speak out.”

But, I ask her, doesn’t she and other identikit “newish Labour” figures share some of the blame for the rise of Corbyn? Put bluntly, if they were more inspiring, there would be no need for him.

“You can get caught in a soundbite vortex,” she accepts. “You can get stuck in that sense of what are the simple slogans or phrases that you use, and then you don’t end up having an honest conversation about what are people really thinking or talking about.”

But she adds: “I think there is a bit of a myth that’s been created. A myth that one candidate in this race has principles and the other three don’t. That one candidate in this race answers straight questions and the other three don’t. I don’t think that’s right, actually.

So what are Cooper’s principles and policies?

Understandably, so far in an election that she wants to win, they are a little vague. But she has identified that Labour needs to reinvent itself as a party fighting for the interests of workers in high-tech industries, as it once did in old-style heavy industry.

As she puts it: “There are millions of people of working age who don’t even know how to Google. Everything is being digitalised. How are you even going to apply for jobs if you don’t have those skills for the future?”

She is more libertarian than Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were and would champion an equality agenda rather than just paying lip service to it.

On tax and spending, she sticks with the Blair-Brown consensus: support business to make money, tax those businesses, then redistribute the proceeds of growth. It’s what allowed Labour to help the lady in Pontefract.

But unless Corbyn can be stopped, all that is an irrelevance. And you suspect she knows that the chances of stopping him now are remote.

Thus the emotion. Not so much, I think, for her own sake – but because she sees it as undoing of everything she has tried to achieve.

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Labour leadership contest: Party aids fear 'purge' if Jeremy Corbyn is elected

Dozens of Labour staff members and Shadow Cabinet aides could be dismissed within hours of Jeremy Corbyn winning the party’s leadership, it has emerged.

The Independent understands that large numbers of Labour staff members are on contracts that expire the day after the new leader is elected. This means Mr Corbyn and his new shadow cabinet team will have a completely free hand at choosing who works for the party, with little or no legal obligation to existing staff.

Labour aides, who have worked for the party for the past five years, fear those around the new leader will use the opportunity to “purge” party HQ of those considered to be on the right, and replace them with people whose views are more in tune with the new leader. Other staff members intend to leave of their own volition and are understood to be already sending out their CVs in anticipation of a Corbyn victory.

One aide working for a Shadow Cabinet minister said: “I’m very, very vulnerable and I suspect that people like me will be quickly expunged.

“It is not a case of having a contract that gives you certain rights. It ends with the leadership election and that’s it. Then, unless we get re-employed, we’re out and there is nothing we can do about it.”

Another said: “It is certainly true that there is nothing to stop him getting rid of us. But it is also true that not many will want to stick around.”

Mr Corbyn has publicly insisted that if he wins next month he wants to unite the party and lead a broad church shadow cabinet, including people who fundamentally disagree with him.

But others in his campaign have been less forgiving. Dave Ward, the general secretary of the Communication Workers’ Union, which has 200,000 members, said his union was backing Mr Corbyn to rid the party of Blairites.

“There is a virus within the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn is the antidote,” he said.

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IVF: Do children have the right to know if they're the result of a stranger’s sperm or egg donation?

Although she has two half-sisters from her dad’s previous marriage, there was nothing in Jess Pearce’s childhood to make her doubt her biological origins. She tanned, her father tanned; he was tall, so was she. Yet when she was 28, her mother dropped a bombshell.

“She sat me down one Sunday afternoon and said she had something she wanted to tell me,” Jess recalls. “She looked quite upset, and I thought, ‘She’s going to die.’” Instead, her mother told her, “Your dad isn’t your real dad.”

Jess’s father had undergone a vasectomy after his first marriage. When he met her mother he tried to get it reversed, but the operation failed and they opted for sperm donation through the NHS. Jess was conceived on the third try at St George’s Hospital in Hyde Park Corner; all her parents knew about the donor was that he was from Middlesex. The clinic advised Jess’s parents to keep the insemination a secret. “No one knew,” says Jess. “It was literally just my mum and my dad and two of their best friends.” This was the norm back then, says Olivia Montuschi, co-founder of the Donor Conception Network. “The vast majority of [parents] were told not to tell their children... They just thought it was in everybody’s best interest that the secret was kept – go home, make love, and who knows?”

Olivia herself has had two children through donor insemination because her husband is infertile. They had resolved to be honest with their kids from the outset. “I remember telling this to a nurse when she was inseminating me, and getting a very odd look as if to say, ‘Why would you do that?’” she says.

Reactions range from shock and horror to “That’s interesting; I thought there was something odd going on,” says Montuschi. “More often than not, you will find that there have been odd discrepancies in things that parents have said,” she says. “Or [the child] will wonder about the complete lack of physical likeness or [shared] interests with the non-genetic parent.”

Though some parents feel under pressure to tell their kids about their genetic heritage, many decide to keep the details of their child’s conception under lock and key. A 2003 survey by the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge found that 47 per cent of parents of kids conceived after egg donation had no intention of telling. It’s not just the child’s feelings at stake. Even a genuine desire to tell can create tensions with grandparents or other family members who think it should remain a secret. Then there’s the wider taboo of where babies come from. “A lot of people find it really difficult to talk about, not necessarily because there is a genetic difference in the family, but because the discussion takes them into areas of parenthood where they wouldn’t normally have to go,” says Petra Nordqvist of the University of Manchester. “They’d have to say, ‘My sperm doesn’t work and we’ve had to undergo five years of IVF.’ Some people just hate having that kind of conversation with their families.”

Nordqvist runs the Relative Strangers project at the University of Manchester. She has interviewed many families of donor-conceived children. She says even though most parents find it easy to love and accept their child once it is born, the infertile partner may continue to harbour anger and insecurities.

“[We interviewed] one man who said he wanted to kill the donor,” Nordqvist says. “I think it was tied in with masculinity; with not having been able to get his partner pregnant. If someone has never been able to get over the fact that they couldn’t produce a child… the knowledge that they will have to tell this child that they are donor-conceived – that’s really opening up these wounds.”

Women, on the other hand, seem to find it easier to come to terms with having a genetically unrelated child. “They sort of replace the egg with the idea of providing blood and a home for nine months,” says Nordqvist, adding that the pregnancy seems to act as a kind of “normalising process” for them.

So if your child has been conceived through unconventional means, when is the best time to break the news? At the Centre for Family Research, Susan Golombok is conducting research on how the age of disclosure about sperm donation affects family relationships. They’ve found that the offspring of lesbian and single mothers tend to be told about their origins earlier than children of heterosexual couples, for perhaps obvious reasons. Among those children of heterosexual couples who were told later on, children were more likely to feel angry at their mothers than their fathers – the most common feeling towards fathers was sympathy. But, says Golombok, “Our work suggests that if children are told when they’re young – pre-school age – they seem to accept it, and they’re not particularly interested in it.”

It’s not dissimilar to the situation faced by many adoptive parents, something Golombok herself has experience of. After several failed attempts at IVF, she and her husband opted to adopt a child, Jamie, from Peru. Golombok remembers the moment they first broached the subject, when Jamie was around three years old. “We were looking at a map of the world, and we just said, ‘That’s where you come from.’ He wasn’t particularly interested.”

Jess says she’s glad that her origins were kept quiet, but also that her parents eventually told her the truth. She says the privacy helped her to deal with the revelation. “I didn’t feel angry...  I’m just grateful that I know now.”

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Human head transplants: are we close to making them a reality?

Thanks to Frankenstein’s monster, Robocop, and the cyborg commandos of Ghost in the Shell, extreme portrayals of transplant surgery have captured our imagination over the years. The story of a patient’s hand grafted on to a leg in China after an industrial accident to preserve it before being restored to his arm is just the latest success story to gain worldwide attention.

So when Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero first announced his intention to perform the first ever human “head transplant”by December 2017 – part of his “head anastomosis venture” orHEAVEN project – science fiction seemed to inch a little closer to science fact. Canavero’s idea involves a 36-hour surgery during which the head of a patient suffering from a debilitating disease would be fused at the spinal cord to a brain dead donor with an otherwise healthy body.

Despite scientists and surgeons voicing some serious doubts that such a massive undertaking would be successful, Canavero is adamant that the technology now exists – by employing his novelGEMINI protocol, he argues, the likelihood of success is around 90%.

But just how well do his claims stand to scientific scrutiny? Below are just three of the many important issues that haven’t been convincingly addressed.

Fundamental principles

First of all, let’s look at how the surgery would be performed. The head of the patient and spinal cord of the donor body would be cooled below 20°C. This would give the surgical teams less than an hour to simultaneously remove both heads at the neck, transfer the head of the patient to the donor body, and reconnect the spine and blood vessels before nervous system cells begin to decay. The spines would be held together and stabilised, and a specialised compound known as polyethylene glycol (PEG) would be used to connect the bundles running through the spinal cords. After all the blood vessels, neck muscles and connective tissue are sewn up, the patient would be placed in a chemically induced coma for three to four weeks to allow the connections to seal and recover.

One of the fundamental principles behind this procedure is that severed spinal cords possess the ability to reconnect, but that spinal injuries smash up the millions of connections beyond repair. Canavero argues that by slicing through the spine with an extremely sharp knife, the mostly intact fibres could reconnect with the help of the PEG glue and electrical stimulation. He illustrated this concept at a TEDx talk this year, where he compared a banana squashed at the centre with one finely sliced with a sharp knife.

Serious flaws in Canavero’s proposal include the failure of previous animal models or the implausibility of keeping the head alive during the procedure. Canavero, however, is not only convinced that the head could be connected, but that it could gain full control of the body. To understand whether his conviction is warranted, we should look at the neuroscience behind his arguments.

Glial scars: the Gandalf between bridges

Neurons in the brain sprout tails known as axons, which travel through the spinal cord to send and receive signals to and from the body. In a spinal cord injury, these axons are severed, preventing the signals from reaching their target. To some extent, Canavero is correct that the spine is equipped with thetools to repair axons, but these connections are actively blocked by the almost immediate formation of glial scars.

Glial scars are clusters of immune cells that flock to the site of injury when the spinal cord is damaged. These scars patch up holes in the axons and protect against further injury, but they also release chemicals that stop the two ends from fusing. Canavero’s GEMINI protocol makes no mention of glial scars, which would likely prove to be a fatal hindrance to his procedure.

Fixing a spine needs more than glue

If we ignore the glial scar problem, the next question is whether using polyethylene glycol to fuse the spinal cords would actually work. PEG has indeed been shown to promote axon repair to some extent, but most of these experiments were performed on cells isolated in a lab as opposed to in the body. Some promising results have, however, been shown in recent animal models. One group used PEG to treat rats with fully severed spinal cords and found that some axons did reconnect. They also restored some movement, with some rats gaining minor control of their hind legs.

No doubt, these findings offer some important implications for treating spinal cord injuries, but when considering how this could be applied to a head transplant, the devil is in the detail. Only the physical control of the body of the rats was tested, which means that we’re still unsure as to whether they regained sensation in their lower bodies. The PEG treatment also offered only modest improvement in function and repair of cells in the spine. Most importantly, though, the rats’ spines were disconnected at the thoracic level TH8/9. This is a region about half way down the spine, which is low enough to preserve the most important bodily functions.

In Canavero’s procedure, the spine would be cut at the cervical region where axons carry signals involved in functions that keep the body alive. Unsuccessful fusion of these axons would leave a patient paralysed and breathing with a machine. Canavero claims in his proposal that a research group in China has already successfully carried out a similar operation in mice. This is partially true, in that 18 out of 80 mice operated on survived for three hours after being taken off a ventilator. Importantly, there was also no spinal fusion with these mice and the brain stem of the donor bodies were kept intact. As the brainstem controls vital functions including breathing, the mouse heads were essentially stitched onto a paralysed incubator.

Although Canavero’s proposal is an exciting idea, the research simply doesn’t support his claim that we now have the technology to pull it off. However, significant advances are being made in the way treating spinal cord injuries through stem cell therapy or forming bridges over glial scars. A more robust and stable development of this technology would be an important step in the spinal cord injury treatment and a possible first step towards realising Canavero’s vision.

We still have a long way to go, however, before we can start swapping our bodies. Even after we figure out how to fuse spines and restore connectivity, we still don’t know whether the brain can rewire itself to control a new body. We know from studies into hand transplants, which are several magnitudes less complex, that function can be restored to some degree, but even this varies in success with our current technology. More worryingly, though, episodes of the immune system attacking the transplanted hand are extremely common. This could be a catastrophic event following a head transplant, as the donor body’s immune system could attack the head.

To convince neuroscientists that this procedure could work, more compelling evidence is needed. In Canavero’s own paper he argues that a preliminary experiment would need to be performed on a primate model. Whether or not this would even be ethical given our current understanding would be another major question. For Canavero’s ideal to be realised, science has some massive hurdles to jump. Before we move onto humans, we should start with fixing the banana.

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What happens to your body when it doesn’t get enough iron?

Any fan of Popeye will know that a good supply of iron can do wonders for your body, but in reality the effect of not getting enough of this powerful mineral can be more profound.

Iron is essential for keeping a healthy stock of red blood cells, which are the transport vehicles that allow oxygen to travel around the body. Without sufficient iron levels you run the risk of becoming anaemic, making it harder for your body to function properly.

When we breathe in and inhale oxygen into our lungs it binds with the haemoglobin in the blood, this is then delivered to all our organs via a network of blood vessels. A lack of iron means your blood might not be as oxygenated as it could be. This can have wide reaching effects in terms of symptoms but the biggest indicator is often the feeling of tiredness.

Iron deficiency is the most widespread nutritional disorder in the world and the most commonly seen cause of anaemia. It can easily be treated, but it is important to determine the cause, as it could be a ‘red flag’ for something more serious and is certainly not something to ignore.

How much iron do I need?

Most of us have about four grams of iron stored in our body. Half of this is in the blood and the rest kept in stores around the body, such as in the liver and spleen. When we are low in iron our stores are depleted first and it then starts to affect our blood quality.

You should be able to consume enough iron from a balanced diet. The recommended daily intake depends on a number of factors, such as age and gender, but as a guide, the NHS suggests 8.7 milligrams for men and 14.8 milligrams for women.

Women can often need more iron during their monthly menstrual cycle and pregnancy can demand a bigger supply too. Those who are pregnant should be extra cautious, as if untreated and severe, low iron increases the risk of complications with the pregnancy and can also make the expectant mother more prone to infections.

What causes iron deficiency?

In general, you might be low on iron if you are not taking enough in via your diet, if your body is having trouble absorbing or storing it, or if you need more iron than usual - perhaps during a growth spurt in adolescence or during pregnancy.  You may also be losing iron, for example through blood loss with the menstrual cycle. For men, and in women who have reached the menopause, the most common cause of iron deficiency is bleeding in their gastrointestinal tract. They might not be aware this is happening, as it is not always evident in the stools. Many things can cause such bleeding, including damage caused by stomach ulcers or certain medications.

Basic over-the-counter anti-inflammatories, for example, could increase acid levels and can be linked with erosions or ulceration of the stomach lining. This not only affects iron absorption, but also increases the risk of bleeding from the stomach lining.

In certain cases, but relatively very few, bleeding in the gastrointestinal tract could be a sign of gastrointestinal malignancies, such as cancer of the bowel or stomach. If this were suspected, your GP would refer you to a specialist to get checked out.

Signs your iron is running low

While exhaustion is the most common indication of an iron deficiency, your body often gives other warning signs too. The reduced oxygen in your blood can cause your complexion to become paler than normal and you might notice you become breathlessness, experience palpitations and dizzy spells, feel weak or more irritable. You are also more likely to have low blood pressure.

Some of the more unusual symptoms patients have been known to experience include hair loss, difficulty swallowing and food tasting differently.

Interestingly, research published in the British Medical Journal this year found that people with iron deficiency could also have high levels of glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c), which could potentially lead to a misdiagnosis of diabetes.

Boosting iron levels

Iron deficiency itself can be diagnosed by two blood tests, a full blood count and a ferritin level – which looks at the amount of iron stored in your body. You can usually easily treat the problem by upping your levels – through oral supplements, changes to your diet or IV infusion.

There are a number of side effects that patients should be aware of when taking iron tablets; they commonly cause constipation, can turn stools black and can cause other gastrointestinal side effects. These side effects are to be expected but if significant, should be discussed with your GP.

What you eat of course plays a huge role in keeping iron levels healthy. The Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition’s last report on iron emphasised the importance of eating a variety of foods containing iron.

Red meats and leafy green vegetables are a good source, but there are plenty of others – including fortified cereals and even dark chocolate. Although the benefits of eating spinach was somewhat exaggerated by the infamous cartoon sailorman, he was certainly on to something in terms of making sure your body gets enough iron-rich food.

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Amazon: Devastating expose accuses internet retailer of oppressive and callous attitude to staff

Working four days in a row without sleep; a woman with breast cancer being put on “performance-improvement plans” together with another who had just had a stillborn child; staff routinely bursting into tears; continual monitoring; workers encouraged to turn on each other to keep their jobs.

Life at Amazon sounds bleak, according to a devastating, 5,900-word expose by The New York Times.

The global internet retailer founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, which paid just £11.9m in tax in Britain last year despite UK sales of £5.3bn, has previously been accused of treating warehouse staff in the UK “like cattle” as they are driven to work harder.

However, it’s claimed that their counterparts in the US have faced even tougher conditions. Staff in a Pennsylvania warehouse allegedly worked in temperatures in the high 30s Celsius – as ambulances waited outside to take them away when they collapsed – and air conditioning was only fitted after newspaper reports.

Former office staff at the company’s headquarters in Seattle also spoke of working 80-hour weeks, getting emails from the office while on holiday or late at night, oppressive scrutiny of performance, and callous disregard for personal crises.

An ex-Amazon employee who had a stillborn child recalled how she had “just experienced the most devastating event in my life” but was then told by the company that she was being put on a performance-improvement plan. This, she told The New York Times, was “to make sure my focus stayed on my job”.

The US newspaper described the plan as effectively a warning that the employee was in danger of being fired.

Even the former human resources executive who was required to put the woman on the plan said she had questioned whether it was the right thing to do.

“What kind of company do we want to be?” she asked her bosses at the time.

This was just one of a litany of similar accounts.

A woman suffering from breast cancer was also put on the plan, as she was told “difficulties” in her “personal life” were interfering with her work.

Molly Jay, who worked in the Kindle team, said she was given high performance ratings for years until she started caring for her father when he was dying of cancer.

Ms Jay said she was told she was a “problem” by her boss, took unpaid leave and did  not return.

“When you’re not able to give your absolute all,  80 hours a week, they see it as a major weakness,” she said.

A worker who miscarried twins went on a business trip the day after having surgery when her boss allegedly told her: “I’m sorry, the work is still going to need to get done. From where you are in life, trying to start a family, I don’t know if this is the right place for you.”

Former Amazon engineer Jason Merkoski, 42, said: “The sheer number of innovations means things go wrong, you need to rectify, and then explain, and heaven help if you got an email from Jeff. It’s as if you’ve got the CEO of the company in bed with you at 3am breathing down your neck.”

One former worker’s fiancé used to drive to her office at 10pm and call her mobile phone repeatedly to make her leave. They went on holiday to Florida but she continued to work – only to develop an ulcer from overwork.

Other former staff, including Bo Olson, who worked at Amazon in a book-marketing role for less than two years, said they regularly witnessed people in tears in the office.

“You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,” Mr Olson said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”

However, some seem to relish working for Amazon – even if it took a toll on their lives.

Dina Vaccari, who joined Amazon in 2008 to sell gift cards, said: “One time I didn’t sleep for four days straight.

“These businesses were my babies, and I did whatever I could to make them successful,” she said.

Stephenie Landry, an operations executive, sounded “exhilarated”, The New York Times said, as she described how she helped set up a new delivery system.

“A customer was able to get an Elsa doll [from the Frozen film] that they could not find in all of New York City, and they had it delivered to their house in 23 minutes,” she said. “We’re trying to create those moments for customers where we’re solving a really practical need… in this way that feels really futuristic and magical.”

People who thrive at Amazon are nicknamed “Amabots”, but staff at other companies sometimes refer to ex-Amazon employees who move to their firm as “Amholes” because of their generally aggressive, competitive nature. Such attitudes are forged by practices such as the organisation level review, which was described as a “semi-open tournament” akin to a court case in which managers debate their staff’s performance, with the worst losing their jobs in a process known as “rank and yank”.

A marketer who worked in the retail division for  six years said: “You learn how to diplomatically throw people under the bus… It’s a horrible feeling.”

Robin Andrulevich, a former Amazon human resources executive, described the turnover of staff at the company as “purposeful Darwinism”.

“They never could have done what they’ve accomplished without that,” she said.

Amazon itself says that staff are held to “unreasonably high” standards.

However, a company spokesman said it was “not our policy or practice” to treat employees with cancer or other serious problems in the way described above.

“If we were to become aware of anything like that, we would take swift action to correct it,” he said.

And Susan Harker, Amazon’s top recruiter, who was given permission to speak to The New York Times, said the support she had received when her husband got cancer “took my breath away”.

Nicola Smith, head of economic and social affairs at the TUC, the British union body, said such working conditions were “extremely detrimental to employee health and productivity”.

“I think there are some really concerning practices described inThe New York Times report, including employment practices that are not legally acceptable in the UK. Yet we know bad employers still exploit workers in this way,” she said.

Amazon has also been criticised in the past for working conditions in its UK warehouses, and Ms Smith said the concerns raised in the US highlight the need for continued vigilance against the dilution of union powers and workers’ rights in Britain – citing fees for employment tribunal cases and a reduction in protections from unfair dismissal introduced under the Coalition Government.

Forest of contradiction

Amazon has faced complaints in the UK for using zero-hour contracts and tagging staff to monitor their performance.

Warehouse workers walk up to 27 miles during a shift, and their toilet breaks are timed. There have also been claims that staff are given a job for 12 weeks then sacked, only to be re-employed, to avoid getting the same rights as full-time workers.

In 2013 Channel 4 News found GPS tags were fitted to staff and talking to colleagues could lead to dismissal. In 2014 Tim McKinney, an American street pastor who worked for two months at Amazon’s warehouse in Dunfermline to assess claims of poor conditions told The Sun that the company used “fear and intimidation” on staff.

Amazon said at the time that employees were treated with “dignity and respect”, adding: “We are proud of providing a safe and positive workplace.”

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Bangladesh in final; to meet India

Bangladesh booked their maiden final berth in the SAFF U-16 Championship overcoming Afghanistan by a solitary goal in a tense semifinal battle at the Sylhet District Stadium yesterday. Midfielder Saad Uddin, one of Sylhet's own, scored the all important goal in the 56th minute to send the boys in red to their first final, having exited the competition from this stage in the previous two editions.

The Bangladesh boys will meet India in Tuesday's final as the defending champions later handed a single-goal defeat to Nepal in the second semifinal.

Having outclassed Sri Lanka in their opening match, and overcome India in another difficult group stage encounter, Bangladesh were expected to put on a dominant display against a side they had beaten two years ago. But the young brigade of the Lions of Khorasan proved to be more than just a physical side, causing a few problems to the Bangladesh defence with their incisive attacks, especially through the wings. The hosts did dominate possession, and tried to build up the game with short passes, but the heavy ground and a lack of synch among the players in the attacking third meant most of the forays failed to be penetrative.

However, somewhat against the run of play, the hosts gifted the opposition a spot kick in the 38th minute, with defender Jahangir Alam Sajib needlessly pushing Afghanistan striker Abdul Naser Amini inside the forbidden zone, despite already having cleared the ball. But to the relief of the Bangladesh team and that of the full-house crowd, Amini blasted the ball woefully over the crossbar.

The big break for Bangladesh came in the 56th minute when Sarwar Zaman Nipu's shot, at the end of a bursting run, was parried for a corner by the Afghan gopalkeeper. Saad was at hand to rifle the ball home when Khalil Bhuiyan's curler was headed to his path by skipper Shawon Hossain.

Chances came at both ends towards the end, with Bangladesh substitute Mohammad Rony rattling the crossbar with a glancing header in the 88th minute before Bangladesh goalkeeper Faisal Ahmed needed to produce a brilliant one-handed save in the stoppage time to deny the visitors a chance to crawl back.

Goalscorer Saad was delighted with being able to contribute to the victory. “This was my first goal in the tournament which makes me very proud. My family members and relatives were here, so it was pretty special to score in front of them,” said Saad in his post-match reaction. “My players were not physically as strong as the opposition. They were weary in the second half, which is why they could not create the pressure that was needed towards the end. Still they successfully held their own,” opined Bangladesh coach Syed Golam Jilani.

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Bangladesh detectives press charges against 13 for Rajon killing

Forty days into the gruesome murder of teenage boy Samiul Islam Rajon, police yesterday pressed charges against 13 people, including prime accused Kamrul Islam, for their involvement in the killing.

In the charge sheet submitted to a Sylhet court, police showed three accused, including main accused Kamrul, as abscondees and 10 others as arrestees.

Kamrul fled to Saudi Arabia soon after the incident. He was later detained by Saudi police. Despite Bangladesh government's diplomatic efforts to bring him back, the Saudi authorities are yet to make it clear when they will repatriate him.

Talking to The Daily Star yesterday, a foreign ministry official said, "Saudi government has promised us that it will send back Kamrul.”

“Our embassy there is working hard to that end," said the official on condition of anonymity.

The official, however, said the Saudi authorities didn't mention any date for Kamrul's repatriation.

Around 5:00pm yesterday, Investigation Officer Suranjit Talukder, also inspector of Detective Branch of Sylhet Metropolitan Police, submitted the charge sheet to the court of Metropolitan Magistrate Shahedul Karim.

The accused are Kamrul Islam, Muhit Alam, Ali Haider, Nurul Amin, Dulal Ahmed, Nur Mia, Ayaz Ali, Badal, Firoz Ali, Shamim, Ruhul Amin, Pavel and Asmat Ali.

The investigation officer prayed to the court for relieving two other detainees -- Lipi Begum and Ismail Hossain Ablush -- of the charges as their involvement in the incident was not found, said police.

Public Prosecutor Misbahuddin Siraj said a total of 38 people testified in the case, and eight of the arrestees confessed to their involvement in the killing.

Rajon's father Sheikh Azizur Rahman expressed satisfaction at the charge sheet.

"I will feel relieved when the culprits walk the gallows. I want speedy trial of this case," he told The Daily Star.

On July 8, thirteen-year-old Rajon was beaten to death by Kamrul and several other brutes in Kumargaon bus stand area of Sylhet Sadar upazila.

His “crime”, they claimed, was stealing a rickshaw van. One of culprits filmed the incident on a mobile phone and shared it on the social media.

The sickening torture video shook the nation to its core and stirred outcries in the social network and the mainstream media.

Tied to a pole, the boy screamed for help, cried for water and begged for his life. But the group showed no mercy. They laughed, joked and filmed their madness to share it on the social media.

In the video footage that went viral, Kamrul, in a black T-shirt and lungi, was seen hitting the boy with a stick in the feet, joints of legs, shoulders and in the head.

They kept beating him, at times knocking him down to the ground, and asking how he would like to take the beating. When Rajon cried for water, they told him to drink his own sweat.

The boy died of brain haemorrhage. His body bore 64 injury marks.

After the killing, the culprits were taking his body on a microbus to dump it in a secluded place, but the locals spotted them and managed to catch one of them. The police recovered the body from the microbus.

A murder case was filed with Jalalabad Police Station on July 8 night.

On July 13, some expatriate Bangladeshis spotted Kamrul in Jeddah, caught him and handed him over to the Bangladesh mission there. Later, Jeddah police took him into custody.

Sylhet Metropolitan Police closed officer-in-charge of Jalalabad Police Station Alamgir Hossain and suspended sub-inspectors Aminul Islam and Zakir Hossain on July 24 after a probe found their negligence in arresting the killers.

Our Moulvibazar correspondent contributed to this report.

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Questions of Cash: 'A connecting Vueling flight was cancelled and all my travel costs were left hanging in the air'

Q. I flew from London to Ibiza in May to take part in a charity bike ride for Great Ormond Street hospital. It was a bank holiday weekend, so direct flights were too expensive. I halved the cost by breaking up the journey with a flight from London to Madrid with Norwegian Air Shuttle, and from Madrid to Ibiza with Vueling. The Norwegian flight would get me into Madrid for 13:35 and the Vueling flight was scheduled to leave at 17:25. This was booked and confirmed on 3 March.

On 15 April, however, Vueling sent me a message saying it had moved the flight time to 09:50 – before I was due to land in Madrid. I phoned but was told the 17:25 flight had been cancelled. I was offered another flight at 11:00, which also did not work for me, or the following day, which would have been too late for the cycle event. I was offered a refund, though I have not received it yet.

I then had to cancel the Norwegian flight and book a replacement from Stansted to Ibiza with Ryanair. My travel insurer, Columbus, promised to pay out for the money I lost on the Norwegian flight and the costs for rebooking a direct flight with Ryanair. But it needs proof from Vueling that it changed the flight times and an explanation why. Vueling's representatives will only say they don't know. In the meantime, Columbus can't do anything to help me. CT, London

A. A spokeswoman for Vueling – part of IAG, which also owns BA – apologised for the flight cancellation but said it was unable to provide a reason and that it "cannot provide a letter" to assist with your insurance claim. She added that it has now refunded the cost of your flight. You have confirmed receipt of this payment – but, like us, you again asked for an explanation for the cancellation, to no avail.

And unfortunately, your problems haven't ended there. A spokeswoman for Columbus said: "We understand that [the reader] is making two claims on her travel insurance – one for the cost of a Norwegian flight from London to Madrid that she cancelled due to her connecting flight from Madrid to Ibiza with Vueling changing its original time. The second claim is the cost of a flight she booked with Ryanair.

"Columbus has thoroughly investigated the claims. Unfortunately, the investigations have shown that this particular circumstance is not covered under her travel insurance.

"It understands that the situation was not within [the reader's] control and ... as a gesture of goodwill, would like to offer to reimburse [the reader] the cost of the Ryanair flight, less the policy excess."

This is not consistent with the information you say was given to you by Columbus, but the insurer is adamant it will not meet the costs of the Norwegian flight as well.

We requested that Columbus review its decision. It did this and reiterated its position, its spokeswoman stating: "Columbus believes that a decision not to pay any claim would accurately represent the cover ... Section 11 of the travel insurance policy [delay/missed connection] states that cover is provided where travel was affected by a strike, adverse weather and mechanical breakdown only. The reasons stated for making a claim are not covered under this section and so Columbus would not be required to consider payment in this case."

As a result, you have been reimbursed for both the Ryanair and Vueling flight costs, but not the Norwegian flight.

Buy-to-let and the capital gains maze

Q.  I have a question about capital gains tax. If we sell our buy-to-let property and reinvest the money in another buy-to-let, is CGT still payable? We haven't, after all, taken the money out of the "business". If so, would we have to buy the second property in the same tax year?

The plan is to sell for about £100,000 a property we bought jointly for £40,000, reinvesting the proceeds in another property nearer to where we live to make management easier. If CGT is payable, would we both be able to claim the £11,000 tax-free allowance on the profit? RH, by email

A. Gill Smith, head of private client services at the accountancy firm Moore Stephens, answers: "A buy-to-let property is viewed as an investment, not as a business asset (unless used for furnished holiday lettings). Therefore, assuming this has always been a rental property and you have never lived there, any gain will be subject to CGT and cannot be rolled over into another property.

"On the basis that the property is held jointly, the gain is divided between the two of you. The good news is that you each have an annual allowance of £11,100 to set against the gain – assuming there are no other capital gains to use up these allowances.

"Additionally, if either of you have any unutilised 20 per cent income tax band in the year, then that amount of the gain will only suffer CGT at 18 per cent, rather than the higher 28 per cent rate.

"Also, do not forget that the cost of the property for CGT purposes will include costs of acquisition, such as legal expenses and stamp duty land tax, and also the cost of any capital improvements to the property. The selling price can be reduced by expenses of sale, which again include legal costs and estate agent's fees."

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Manchester City vs Chelsea match report: Sergio Aguero inspires City to emphatic win as John Terry is hauled off at half-time

Manchester City 3 Chelsea 0

We are only eight days into the new season and already Jose Mourinho is one doctor down, 16th in the Premier League table and has a captain wearing the expression of a man watching his home being repossessed. Chelsea have certainly started with a bang but the smoke is coming from under their own bonnet.

Diagnosis? Not yet critical, but with the potential to get much worse if things cannot be changed. With the caveat that these are early days, this was a wonderful performance from Manuel Pellegrini’s Manchester City team who took the initiative within the first 20 seconds of the game and simply got stronger from there. It was City who looked invigorated, positive and full of confidence – if anything they looked like the defending champions.

There was a new three-tier South Stand open for the first time at the Etihad Stadium, and a team that looked radically different from the side that ceded the title so weakly at the turn of the year. Sergio Aguero, starting his first game of the season, was exceptional, and so too the likes of David Silva and Fernandinho but all the time you waited for Chelsea’s response and it never arrived.

The drama was heightened by Mourinho’s decision to substitute John Terry for the first time in 177 league games over the two spells that this manager-player partnership has been in existence. The explanation from Mourinho was that he wanted to play a higher line and in order to do so needed the pace of Kurt Zouma to defend further up the pitch, but Terry returned to watch the second half with a cloud over his head as grey as anything the Manchester climate serves up.

When asked about the decision, Mourinho immediately adopted his own defensive line – reminding all concerned that it was he who had resurrected Terry’s Chelsea career. “I don’t know if you ask [Rafa] Benitez, Roberto Di Matteo who never played him,” he said. “I am the one who plays him every game, and recovered him in difficult moments with others managers. [I am] the one who has the right to look at the game and say ‘I want Zouma on the pitch’.

The prospect of a fissure opening between Mourinho and his 34-year-old captain is really the least of his worries, and both of them seem a bit long in the tooth for that now. Of more immediate concern was how brittle Chelsea look defensively – Mourinho admitted to a “fragility” – and what implications that might have for the rest of their season.

Mourinho tried to put a brave face on it all, claiming that Chelsea had enjoyed the better of a second half in which they eventually conceded two goals but the malaise goes a lot deeper than that. Gary Cahill was out of form and struggling with a bleeding nose. Diego Costa’s provocation schtick got little change of Vincent Kompany and Eliaquim Mangala. Eden Hazard and Cesc Fabregas were not the game-changers of 12 months ago.

Aguero gave City a well-deserved half-time lead and Kompany and Fernandinho scored in the last ten minutes. It was patently obvious that this Chelsea team need the kind of lift that only a player capable of breaking into their first XI can provide, and that is unlikely to be supplied by signing Baba Rahman, a second-choice left-back, or even John Stones from Everton.

Of course, it had to be this day that Chelsea found themselves reaching the break with too few medical staff to go around, and blood and bandages proliferating. After 45 minutes of being run all over the pitch by City, it was Chelsea’s recently down-sized medical department that found itself over-stretched.

The stand-in doctor Chris Hughes was still treating a blow to Cahill’s face that required cotton wool to staunch the bleeding, when Diego Costa was felled by Fernandinho’s elbow. In the meantime, the auxiliary medical team had to treat Costa who needed a bandage around the head and ended the half chasing his fellow Brazilian down the tunnel.

While this went on, Mourinho had to listen to the name of Eva Carneiro, his recently demoted doctor, being chanted around the stadium by the home support. “You’re getting sacked in the morning,” sang the City fans to the newly installed Chelsea medical team. And on top of that there were too few medics to go around. Truly, football has that miraculous habit of foiling the best-laid plans.

The opening stages had been grim for Mourinho as his team staggered from repelling one City attack after another. Three times in the first 17 minutes the goalkeeper Asmir Begovic saved instinctively from Aguero, including one fine stop in the first 20 seconds.

Cahill was struggling badly against the Argentine and found himself turned after 16 minutes and reliant on a second save from Begovic. The goal on 31 minutes was brilliantly worked with a ball in from the right from Jesus Navas, and an exchange with Yaya Toure before Aguero took the return on his chest and turned away from Cahill into space to score.

The elbow by Fernandino on Costa should have been a red card, Mourino said later, and having been kicked earlier by Kompany, the Chelsea striker was in no mood to shake and make-up. It took a few of his team-mates and most of the backroom staff to stop him charging down the tunnel after Fernandinho.

Zouma replaced Terry at half-time and after the hour Mourinho brought on Juan Cuadrado for Ramires. He brought Fabregas back alongside Nemanja Matic but it made precious little difference.

In midfield for City, Fernandino was outstanding and Toure’s work rate appeared to have climbed steeply. The best chance for Chelsea came when Fernandinho slipped in midfield and allowed Hazard a run at goal. But Chelsea lingered over the shot itself and Joe Hart saved. In the seconds after Mourinho’s third substitution – Radamel Falcao for Willian – the second, decisive goal came.

That was the second header in two games from Kompany and, like the one against West Bromwich Albion six days earlier, was from a Silva corner. The final goal, with Chelsea stretched, was buried by Fernandinho. It is a rare sight to see Mourinho’s team so completely beaten with five minutes left. Everywhere he looked he saw players who had come off second best, and the question will now be whether he can afford to trust them to change.

Manchester City (4-2-3-1): Hart; Sagna, Mangala, Kompany, Kolarov; Toure, Fernandinho; Navas (Nasri, 65), Silva, Sterling (Demichelis, 79); Aguero (Bony, 83).

Substitutes not used: Caballero (gk), Zabaleta, Clichy, Iheanacho.

Chelsea (4-2-3-1): Begovic; Ivanovic, Cahill, Terry (Zouma, ht), Azpilicueta; Ramires (Cuadrado, 64), Matic; Willian (Falcao, 79), Fabregas, Hazard; Costa.

Substitutes not used: Blackman (gk), Falcao, Mikel, Remy, Loftus-Cheek.

Referee: M Atkinson

Man of the match: Fernandinho

Rating: 8

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Gordon Brown warns Labour is in danger of becoming 'party of protest' (but doesn't mention Jeremy Corbyn once)

Gordon Brown has waded into the Labour leadership race, urging the party to become “credible” and “electable” once more.

The former Prime Minister gave a speech this afternoon in which he said that Labour was “grieving” following their election defeat and that they needed to avoid the trap of becoming “a pale imitation of what the Tories offer” or “a party of permanent protest, rather than a party of government.”

However, although he spoke for nearly 50 minutes, Mr Brown did not mention Jeremy Corbyn by name a single time though it seemed his message - that of putting ideological purity above power - was aimed directly at those thinking about voting for the left-wing frontrunner.

Yet, despite the politician’s passionate pleas for his party’s future, not everyone’s focus was on Mr Brown’s message. Throughout his speech, he stormed up and down the stage, leaving some viewers dizzy with his erratic pacing.

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China warehouse explosion: Tianjin workers race to clear site of deadly chemicals before it rains

Chinese officials face a race against time to clear toxic chemicals from the site of the Tianjin warehouse explosion, amid fears the blast may have released hundreds of tons of toxic gas into the air.

Soldiers have joined rescue workers in gas masks and hazard suits in the port city where the death toll from Wednesday’s massive explosion has risen to 112. Another 95, the majority of whom were firefighters, remained missing.

Officials confirmed the warehouse where the blast occurred was used to house more than 100 tons of sodium cyanide, a potentially deadly substance.

The presence of the chemicals was confirmed by Shi Luze, the chief of staff of the People's Liberation Army's Beijing Military Region.

He said workers were trying to clear the area before possible rain showers, which could create toxic gas. The government has faced calls to extend its 3km exclusion zone around the site, though Shi said the toxins represented no danger to people outside the evacuated area.

Fire crews were criticised for using water to douse flames in the initial fire which may have contributed to the blasts, given the volatile nature of the chemicals involved.

Greenpeace said tests around the blast site showed that water supplies were not severely contaminated with cyanide, but that they did not "disprove the presence of other hazardous chemicals in the water". 

"Greenpeace reiterates its call for authorities to implement a comprehensive survey of hazardous chemicals currently present in air and water supplies and make public all information," it said.

Shockwaves from the blast itself were felt by people in apartment blocks several kilometres from the warehouse, and the larger explosions registered as seismic events with the US Geological Survey.

More than 6,000 people have been displaced since, and a group sheltering in a school near the site was moved on Saturday for fear that a change in wind direction could bring toxic gases their way.

"I'm very worried that these dangerous chemicals will harm my health," said Zhang Yinbao, who works in the chemical industry and whose apartment building is only 800 metres from the blast site.

The Chinese premier Li Keqiang travelled to Tianjin on Sunday and met with those who had been injured and evacuated. His visit coincided with an order from Tianjin officials for a city-wide check of potential fire safety violations.

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