The biggest phenomenon in publishing history

The fourth book in the series, the Goblet of Fire, which came out in July 2000, became the fastest selling book of all time in its first weekend of publication, with 372,000 copies sold. Compared to that, the advance reservations for the Order of the Phoenix made with only one supplier -- the online bookseller Amazon -- is reportedly 400,000 in the UK alone, six times more than the pre-orders received for the previous book. The total advance orders taken by Amazon since the publishing date was announced on 15th January is more than 1.1 million. Britain's largest bookseller, WH Smith, has announced 280,000 pre-orders which is also a sixfold increase on their advance sale of the fourth volume. Waterstone's of Piccadilly, London, the largest bookstore in Europe (some say the largest in the world) started selling the book from its 100 retail outlets all over Britain from Friday (20th June) midnight, as did 350 stores of the supermarket giant Tesco (their online site Tesco.com received more than 50,000 pre-orders), 140 outlets of WH Smith and 67 branches of the specialist chain Ottaker's. Many of these stores arranged Harry Potter-themed midnight feasts and fancy dress parties for the thousands of customers, ranging from 10-year olds to middle-aged men and women, queuing up at their doors from six to eight hours before opening time. Another big supermarket chain Asda has placed an order for 500,000 copies of the book and they are donating 10 books from each of their 260 stores to local schools.

So far, 13 million copies of the Order of the Phoenix have been printed and several more millions will surely follow. The 37 year old creator of the series, J. K. Rowling, is expected to earn about £30 million from the book. Only a few years ago, before the first Harry Potter book saw the light of the day in 1997, she had to scrape by on a meagre £60 a week received from Social Security. Now worth an estimated £280 million she is not only one of the richest authors in the world writing in English, she is richer than the Queen of England. That is not surprising if you look at the sales figures of her previous books: the four previous volumes have sold nearly 200 million copies in 55 languages and 200 countries. And don't forget the films -- the two Harry Potter films made to date have grossed more than £1 billion worldwide and Ms Rowling's share of the proceeds in royalties has been considerable, to say the least. And there are more films on the way, and perhaps a sixth or even a seventh book waiting to be written. So the world's most famous boy wizard and his equally famous progenitor are likely to dominate the book and film markets well into the foreseeable future. As the editor of the British publishing industry magazine, The Bookseller, remarked after the launch: "We have never seen anything approaching the scale of this in recent history of general publishing...... It will certainly be the fastest-selling work of fiction since they started keeping records on this kind of thing."

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No more asylum for Bangladeshis

Well, Bangladesh is not alone, citizens of six other countries henceforward are to be denied the right to seek political asylum in Britain. In a recently published White List, the British Home Office has named Bangladesh together with Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, South Africa and Ukraine as "safe" countries, which means that the British Government no longer considers the political situations in these countries as unsafe or dangerous for the life and liberty of their citizens. Therefore, anyone from any of these countries arriving in Britain and applying for asylum in future, will be remanded in custody at the Immigration Department's Fast Track Reception Centre at Oakington in Cambridgeshire for 10 days while their status is checked. A decision regarding their applications will be taken during these 10 days and if found wanting in merit the applications will be rejected and the applicants deported back to where they came from. Announcing the names of these seven countries, a Home Office minister said that the object of this measure was to take effective steps against continuous violation of asylum regulations. The Home Office feels that the named countries are now generally considered safe and their citizens are no longer fleeing them in order to save their lives, so Britain no longer considers it necessary to offer them protection against persecution according to the Geneva Convention. On the other hand, a spokesperson of the Joint Council for Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) feels that Britain is gradually distancing itself from the underlying principles of the Geneva Convention and the latest Home Office White List is a part of the plans to turn the whole of Europe into an unbreachable fortress.

The first White List of "safe" countries, published in October 2002, included the names of Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. These ten countries, however, will become components of the European Union from next year. A second "safe" list was published in February this year comprising of seven countries such as Albania, Bulgaria, Jamaica, Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, Serbia of former Yugoslavia and Montenegro. Meanwhile, the inclusion of Bangladesh in the third list of "safe" countries is bound to have a profound impact on Bangladeshi asylum seekers. In the last three years or so, there were more than three thousand applications from people of Bangladeshi origin, out of which only a handful have been granted asylum. Now that Bangladesh has been declared a "safe" country, the fates of not only the new applicants but of those waiting for decision on applications already submitted as well, are likely to become uncertain.