Mohammad Al-Masum Molla

The general students of Buet, the premier engineering university, warmly welcomed admission-seekers for the academic session 2019-2020 yesterday. Pens, pencils, water bottles and biscuits were handed out to the candidates and their parents.

The name describes the role it is assigned. But in reality, the Directorate of Students’ Welfare at Buet seems to have nothing to do with the welfare of students.

Top-listed Bangladeshi fugitive Zeesan Ahmed, who was arrested in the UAE recently, had reportedly been freed on bail by a Dubai court on Thursday.

In a remote village of Joypurhat, Atiqul Islam drives a rickshaw van to make ends meet. A father of three, it was always difficult for him and his wife Nazma Begum to get by on the meagre income. But the family was close to a dream come true.

Buet authorities knew that Chhatra League activists were bullying, verbally abusing and physically torturing students but they rarely took action against the perpetrators.

Just before the start of their two-day weekend from Thursday, Buet students are supposed to get a breather from classes and exams on Wednesday evenings.

He passed his SSC exams from Railway High School in the capital in 1988 and went to his village home at Sonapur in Feni for a few days. But he came back to Dhaka soon afterwards, because his elder brother beat him up for playing cards with his friends.

Room 2011. It is the second last room located on the first floor of the five-storey Sher-e-Bangla Hall at Buet. Although innocuous-looking from the outside, the room is known among the students to be a torture cell and a party hub.

Jahara Mohamman, who lives in a small village near the city of Gao in the West African country of Mali, has been suffering from irregular menstruation for many years.

Top-listed fugitive criminal Zeesan Ahmed of Bangladesh was arrested Wednesday night in the UAE.

For an average Bangladeshi, it’s hard to imagine a life without connectivity. Even people living in some of the remotest villages in Bangladesh now have access to the internet via mobile phone network.

Gao International Airport is one of the key installations in the landlocked West African country Mali. It is the second largest airport of the country -- mostly used by UN officials, peacekeepers and military personnel.

Sharmin Afroz, a housewife, does not know what to do. Her two school-going children, aged seven and eleven, would only take porridge with milk for their breakfast. But Sharmin, 39, is not sure if she should allow her children to take pasteurised milk anymore.

Indiscriminate use of antibiotics by farmers in treating cattle diseases is posing a public health risk as the medicines enter the food chain through various avenues.

The sun beating down mercilessly on the sand, the temperature is 50 degree Celsius, and humidity only five percent -- that’s the unforgiving Saharan climate for you in the West African country Mali.

With much of it set across the barren Sahara, Mali does not grow a lot of vegetables. The people are more used to meat and dairy, since traditionally they are not accustomed to vegetable cultivation.

If you leave the tap running as you brush your teeth in the morning, you probably waste more than half of the water a peacekeeper in Mali’s Kidal gets to use in a day.

A series of small, bullet-riddled structures, enclosed by bulky sandbags, are the only thing that act as a break from the desolation deep in the middle of the Sahara in the northwest of Mali.

A recent UN report published on Monday gives a dreadful account of the situation in Myanmar stating that the Rohingya remaining in Myanmar’s Rakhine state face a “serious risk of genocide” and that the repatriation of the Rohingya living in Bangladesh is “impossible.”

A loud, screeching alarm pierced through the otherwise peaceful evening in a stretch of the Malian desert in West Africa around 7:30pm. The resting Bangladeshi soldiers -- stationed in the Saharan country as part of a UN peacekeeping mission -- sprung into action at the siren.