Zyma Islam

The two-finger test, so called for its use of the doctor’s index and middle fingers to check for the presence and status of the survivor’s hymen, was banned in 2018 for being pseudo-science, as well as traumatic and humiliating for survivors.

The turnout was less than 20 percent in 709 centres in the February 1 Dhaka city polls, shows Election Commission data on all the 2,468 centres released yesterday.

A mess only five years ago, the sidewalks in Gulshan-2 residential area now make for a streamlined jogging track, with dips in front of the gates of people’s homes.

At the Court Street yesterday, a heavily pregnant 17-year-old waddled about from one lawyers’ chamber to another, looking for someone who can help her. She is about to deliver a baby in 20 days, and in this state, she had taken a public bus from Uttara all the way to the old part of the town.

A photo taken at the recent protests against rape has been making the rounds on social media. In the image, a tea-seller named Abdul Jalil Shwapan—or “Shwapan Mama” as he is fondly known to the students of the campus—holds up a placard demanding death for the rapists of both the DU student whose rape has shaken up the system, as well as that of his own child.

River polluters should be not only fined but also punished with jail terms, recommends the National River Conservation Commission.

In order to justify the discriminatory stance of the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019, something odd is happening—Bangladesh is being painted by elements within India as a violent state from which Hindus are fleeing away, into India.

Suu Kyi: Please allow me to clarify the term clearance operation. Its meaning has been distorted. As early as the 1950s has been used against communists. It simply means to clear an area of insurgents or terrorists.

Every four years, the United Nation’s Human Rights Council reviews Bangladesh’s human rights situation as part of its Universal Periodic Review (UPR).

2019 has not been a comfortable year for the media globally. While nobody has yet tallied up the numbers internationally, 7,200 jobs were lost just in the U.S., according to the business and finance news organisation Business Insider’s own calculation.

Impunity under the radar

There was a king named Prithu Raja in northern Bangladesh in the 13th century. He had a fort city in Panchagarh called Bhitargarh, and he may or may not have died by committing suicide in a lake.

Burimari union, a border village nestling in a nook of the Indian district of Cooch Behar, is a village of stones and stone-crushing yards.

For months, our public universities have been erupting in protests, with students demanding some very basic things: vice-chancellors who are not corrupt, teachers who cannot bribe their way into the university, student political wings who do not extort or oppress (or murder), effective sexual harassment policies, and freedom of expression.

The story of Teesta begins 23,386 ft above the sea-level at the Pahunri glacier nestled between the Tibet and India border.

Around halfway through the Jahangirnagar University campus one would notice age-old rusting signboards with caution warnings like

“We can read it ourselves inside our homes but we can’t organise a reading circle to share the contents of the manual, without

When the concrete casting of the ceiling at Gausia market broke off and fell on my head last week, I was determined to hold someone

Just as the city corporations were about to lay down the shovels and pat themselves on the back for a job well done cleaning up all the qurbani waste, more appeared on the streets. Traders threw away reeking piles of hides, dumping them in public garbage spots (also known as sidewalks).

The Modhupur sal forest exists on the map of northern Bangladesh as a small blob of green in what is otherwise a sea of grey. Being designated the colour green on a map is special—it means that patch of land is an unruly,