Dhaka  - Bangladesh's Awami League-led alliance government is proposing to restrict privatisation of state-owned enterprises, after bitter experience with past divestments, a news report said Sunday.

"We have no plan to privatise any more state-owned enterprises for the time being," the Daily Star newspapers quoted Industries Minister Dilip Barua as saying at a conference on industrial policy.

The minister criticised the handling of 76 state-run entrepreneurs privatised since 1994.

Dhaka - Saudi Arabia promised to recruit more Bangladeshi workers, while reassuring Dhaka that complications over work permits faced by over 2 million Bangladeshi workers already in the kingdom would be resolved, Bangladeshi Foreign Minister Dipu Moni said Saturday. Moni made the comments while briefing reporters on the recent five-day visit by Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed to the kingdom.

Dhaka - Bangladesh launched Saturday an improved livelihood programme worth about 80 million dollars for the coastal farmers devastated by the Super-cyclone Sidr in late 2007, officials said. Initially, the Improved Livelihood for Sidr-Affected Rice Farmers Project, funded by the United States, will benefit some 280,000 farm families through restoring high-yielding rice production in eight cyclone-battered southern districts.

Dhaka - Human Rights Watch asked Bangladesh Saturday to stop the deaths in custody of suspected mutineers, as reports that 16 soldiers died in detention since a bloody uprising at the Dhaka headquarters of Bangladesh's border guards. "The Bangladesh government should protect detainees suspected of involvement in a February massacre of army officers from being killed or mistreated," the New-York-based rights watchdog said in a statement.

Dhaka  - Authorities in Bangladesh have asked intelligence agencies to closely monitor activities of 12 suspected militant outfits running so-called Islamic activities in the predominately Muslim South Asian country, media reports said Saturday.

"The government has kept watchful eyes on the activities of the 12 organizations listed as terrorist outfits by the immediate-past interim administration," State Minister for Home Affairs Tanjim Ahmed Sohel Taj told a private television channel.

Dhaka - Activities at Bangladesh's prime Chittagong port resumed Friday after the authorities dredged up the Karnaphuli channel blocked by a vessel that sank on Tuesday, officials said.

"Movements of ships between the port and the outer anchorage resumed in the morning after the channel was deepened and widened through dredging," an official at the Chittagong Port Authority said.