this is g.w. news asia coming up on the program a massive fire in the bangladeshi capital has left scores dead as a tour through a dense shopping district in dhaka is this yet another tragic failure for the country's fire safety laws plus. czars choice to feature this freckled supermodel in a beauty ad kicks off controversy in china and. also in china the country's new generation of single women who don't want to dish on marriages but instead want access to sperm banks we'll look at the national feminist awakening.

i'm melissa chana thank you for joining the program great to have you with us bangladesh is once again mourning the victims of a deadly fire the latest blaze in the capital dhaka has killed scores of people with many more suffering severe burns the inferno broke out in a busy shopping district in dhaka crammed with buildings and narrow alleys here in the chalk these are many people live above shops and warehouses packed with highly flammable goods bangladesh's lacks fire safety laws are once again in focus despite official promises to tighten them up building fires have become a regular occurrence with hundreds of people killed in recent years. explosions blazing fire lit up die. it's old city as the fire raced through five buildings in

the district. some of the buildings caught in the blaze door to chemicals one housed a plastics warehouse filled with flammable material those caught in the inferno described how the fire started. if that's what i saw a sudden massive explosion with fire and shock waves that totally destroyed the road side wall i was in a rickshaw when the explosion took place i don't think my rickshaw driver is alive anymore it's going to doing firefighters had difficulty finding enough water to battle the blaze and had to rely on a nearby mosque for help. but chief outlined the scale of the catastrophe. the dead bodies are being sent to dhaka medical college hospital. and we have rescued forty one injured people and sent them to the hospital and our fire

extinguishing operation is almost at the last stage we are now searching the rubble in preparation for dampening the area is under way. right as it. initially struggled to get close to the scene because of heavy traffic and narrow alleyways around the area the death toll is expected to rise and some of the injured suffering critical burns. to china where a czar of beauty ad has kicked off a heated debate on social media it's the latest western fashion label to ruffle feathers recently in china michelle stockman from our social media desk has been following the story for us so michelle tell us a little bit more about this controversy over the weekend the spanish fashion label zahra posted a cosmetics that on china's top social media platform now if you choose the chinese supermodel legion one very prominently featured as you can see are her frankel's

now in china freckles aren't considered classically beautiful in fact many people see them as blemishes well this that has kicked off quite a story debate in the comments there were some users that suggested that zahra was imposing western beauty standards or even by choosing this particular model to represent chinese beauty of trying to uglify china will bring up one of these comments here this way the user said sorry we asian women don't have freckles even if some do it's just a small minority like this young woman it's just her really the model you found is one in a large city. so you know zorra has responded to this controversy they have said we meant no offense basically we can boil this backlash down to differences in ascetics between spain and china so it's stopped in the minefield has come out relatively unscathed unlike melissa as you may recall dolce and gabbana a few months ago that tell you in fashion designer house had put out an ad

featuring a chinese model glamorously dressed fumbling with chopsticks as she tried to eat pizza and pasta so across the world that ad was considered racist well you talk about the differences in aesthetics between spain and china but it sounds like just looking at the online comments within china there are differences of opinion in terms of what is beautiful as well yes if we go back to that ad many many users said basically get over it ok beauty comes in many forms will bring up one of these comments here that actually was a video and this we have a user made her point by photoshopping leading one to conform to the so called chinese beauty ideal here you can see she's a race in the freckles lighting the skin and making the models face thinner she says that's the kind of popular face you want is that really what you think is beautiful. well i would say frieda freckles but i don't speak for the whole world beauty is in the eye of beholder well i have freckles too so maybe in china some

people don't think that i look too good in fact i remember when i started working in hong kong i was considered too fat as a chinese american and then when i moved to beijing some people thought i was too dark because i had the california tan coming from los angeles so it's it's a complicated you know i hear you i totally hear you in france where i live there is considered a gore mind right here on t.v. right now i am breaking so-called beauty barriers by being a gray haired woman on t.v. but you know i did the day year ago i feel great about it i'm not going back excellent very good i love your hair thank you very much for your time michel you're welcome melissa. and now on to a nother expectation chinese society imposes on its women many people feel some pressure from their parents to get married in china there really is double the stress when there's often only one child and therefore only one person to deliver

the country only recently relaxed its family planning policy they had created a generation of single children but times have also changed and young chinese want more individual choice and freedom over their lives for some women that means a different kind of motherhood a different kind of happiness as our correspondent mathias bolinger reports. for allah on hanging up the chinese character for double happiness is an ironic gesture it is usually reserved for newlyweds but alan is single and she doesn't want to be a wife what she does want to be is a mother. so high as it is interesting to show what kind of yeah you hope. some of wanted to have a baby my whole adult life i don't have that. team oh i want to be a mother and as a woman i want to experience getting pregnant and giving birth by studying it

doesn't tell the court. arlen has petitioned delegates of the national people's congress china's parliament asking that single women give access to sperm banks but who in china where family planning authority is can still find unmarried mothers for unsanctioned babies she's realistic about her chances of immediate success they were only seen you know in a moment from getting access to artificial reproduction technology as an unmarried woman is certainly going to be very difficult but i think sometime in the very very distant future it will be possible alan alter your name has talked about her union for motherhood on social media her posts have sparked a lively debate in a society where traditional family values do rule in a park in beijing parents gather on sundays to lay out their children's resumes for prospective partners and unmarried child can stigmatize the whole family women in particular are under huge pressure to marry by their late twenty's and. then you

put my dictionary engine shiner is an arrangement between families everything that happens in that marriage becomes the business of the couple's parents and extended family but i want a relationship where two people decide for themselves how to live and whether they want children there in the city. i don't know if those aspirations would make it easy to find a partner so she's now looking for a sperm donor online currently she holds down three different jobs in the creative industry she belongs to china's me generation those born after one thousand nine hundred and often considered more individualistic and demanding. that. our generation's ideas about marriage and childbirth a very far away from the last generations. most people don't want to discuss these issues but if you look at their behavior there's

a clear message and that message is that our generation is less ready to compromise and wants to have more personal choices. alan says she would love to find a father who would take care of the child without the expectations of a traditional family but if that doesn't work out she's willing to go it or alone for more background on what's happening in china i spoke to author later home fincher her latest book is betraying big brother the seminars the awakening in china released not too long ago and it has received a lot of attention i began by asking her just how bad the stigma is against single mothers. yeah well it's it's not so much stigma although the stigma obviously exists the biggest problem is government policy and it's extremely difficult for single women to give birth in china without being penalized in some ways so for

example a lot of single women who have babies will then have trouble getting the baby and official registration our. household registration which means that that her child will have trouble getting medical care or will have trouble getting to school the mother may herself be fined in some cases so it's much more regulatory policy controls on single mothers and it's also really difficult for single women in fact they're they're not allowed to get artificial reproductive assisted reproductive technology so they're a single woman who leave china to freeze their eggs for example and are we seeing a change though will people feel differently in a generation. well we are seeing a change because that i mean on the ground already there if you talk to ordinary people they don't necessarily have that much of

a problem it's single mothers they're the critical question is what is the chinese government policy going to be and and if you're looking towards a generation from now i mean it really is an open question will the communist party still exist in a generation in the same way that it does today. but that attitudes on the ground are constantly evolving especially young people in china actually often have very very progressive attitudes on gender and sexuality. there's more on line on our website www dot com forward slash asia and don't forget to check out the news on facebook as well as this week sri lanka held its annual no one procession one of the most colorful buddhist pageants in the country will leave you with those pictures see you next time.

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a passion to protect the environment yes that is the basis of this man's business. this is business africa. as well. to stem zimbabwe's worst economic crisis in a decade the country's central bank on wednesday renounced the picking of its cause i can see to the so-called bond notes the so-called to the us dollar zimbabwe began using bomb notes during shortages of hard cash a few years ago amid spiraling inflation some economists welcomed the move but critics say it's just a reintroduction of the good old zimbabwean dollar just without the name. zimbabwe began printing a. nose to help fund its spending in two thousand and sixteen the zimbabwe bond note was pegged at par with the us dollar despite being traded at a discount electronically at the end of twenty eighteen the value of the ball notes plummeted on the black market. no notes were being traded or.