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BNP’s mayoral aspirants
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member, wishing not to be named.
BNP leaders said Ishraque mulls taking up 60-day priority programmes to resolve the important public issues.
He is also considering launching a 24-hour hotline service at the regional offices of the Dhaka South City Corporation so that people can lodge their complaints and get remedies promptly.
Ishraque, a post graduate from University of Hertfordshire, wants to introduce “One Stop Service” centres for smooth and prompt issuance of birth and death certificates and trade licence.
He mulls discussing the holding tax issue with the city dwellers before reaching a decision in this regard. He also plans to provide safe water and improved sewerage and drainage services to the city residents in close coordination with the Dhaka Wasa and other utility service providers.
Son of former Dhaka mayor Sadeque Hossain Khoka, Ishraque plans to establish community centres, modern gymnasiums, and day-care centres for children in each wards of the south city.
Regarding smooth movement of people, he wants to install elevators or escalators at all footbridges in phases, and introduce bus services on some routes for the freedom fighters, elderly, physically challenged and underprivileged people.
He expects to launch community police in each ward to ensure safety and security of the south city residents.
About dengue and chikungunya diseases, Ishraque would create a city health database and give special attention to protect the people from such vector-borne diseases.
He wants to set up primary health check-up centres at the parks and gymnasiums of the city corporation.
In the Dhaka north city, Tabith plans to take an initiative to organise night markets or farmers’ markets at the entry points to the city and some other major areas to facilitate the farmers and the consumers.
He has plans to introduce “food courts” at public places and make arrangements for relocating the street food shops.
Son of BNP leader Abdul Awal Mintoo, Tabith wants to provide free treatment to the members of the underprivileged families and set up mobile health care service centres in association with development agencies.
He has a plan to introduce modern school bus service on specific routes for safe transportation of students to and from schools.
Tabith, a post graduate from George Washington University, also wants to award bright students with “city scholarship” each year for their success in primary-, junior- and SSC-level examinations.
To reduce illegal parking, a major cause for traffic congestion in the capital, the BNP mayoral hopeful wants to build multi-storied parking facilities or parking lots in busy areas on a commercial basis.
He also aims to take an initiative to build a circular road around the capital, as planned by Rajuk, to ease traffic congestion.
Like Ishraque, Tabith also plans to introduce “One Stop Service” for providing prompt services, including issuance of birth and death certificates, and trade licence.
For the recreation activities of the city residents, he wants to introduce boating, fishing and cable car ride in Hatirjheel area on a limited scale.
To ensure safety of the people, the mayoral hopeful plans to install CCTV cameras on the streets, lanes and by lanes in phases.

Scientists start
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could one day be transported there.
“Having our own facility allows us to focus on oxygen production, measuring it with a mass spectrometer as it is extracted from the regolith simulant,” said Beth Lomax of the University of Glasgow.
“Being able to acquire oxygen from resources found on the Moon would obviously be hugely useful for future lunar settlers, both for breathing and in the local production of rocket fuel.”
Before the technology could be taken to the surface, it will need tweaking to get it ready for use in the harsh environment of the Moon.
“And now we have the facility in operation we can look into fine-tuning it, for instance by reducing the operating temperature, eventually designing a version of this system that could one day fly to the Moon to be operated there,” said ESA research fellow Alexandre Meurisse in a statement.
Oxygen is the most abundant element in moondust, with experiments on samples delivered back down to earth showing it represents as much as 45 percent of its weight.
But it is largely trapped as minerals or glass, and so can’t be easily accessed by astronauts.
The process used in the plant is called “molten salt electrolysis”. It sees the regolith placed into a metal basket alongside a salt, and then heated up to 950 degrees Celsius, and then having a current passed through it.
That leads the oxygen to come out of the dust and be ready to be collected. The rest of the regolith is also converted into metal alloys.
Scientists hope this process can be made into a form that could be used on the Moon, with the hope of getting it there in the mid-2020s.