It was by a fluke that the victim of extortion for a routine public service happened to be a Deputy Attorney General (DAG), for which reason the crime was made public.

The country saw a staggering 5,727 daily Covid-19 positive cases on Wednesday, with a positivity rate of 20.27 percent. The day also recorded 85 Covid-related deaths. Though these are alarming figures, we are not wholly shocked at the severity of the current situation.

We are glad to see that ten Supreme Court lawyers have taken steps to hold the authorities to account with regard to leaked telephone conversations and the violation of the right to privacy that this entails.

The taskforce formed in October 2019 in order to reduce road accidents in the country, sat for its third meeting (since its inception) on Sunday, after a six-month hiatus—but not much progress seems to have taken place since its last meeting at all.

It is encouraging that after a gap of several weeks, the Covid-19 vaccination campaign has restarted across the country from Monday with Sinopharm vaccines. However, it is on a very limited scale, understandably, and in the four major centres in Dhaka, only the students of public and private medical colleges are being inoculated.

The government’s recent announcements on abandoning coal-based power generation and shifting towards cleaner energy was welcomed

The appalling record of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) is no secret to anyone. While people continue to suffer from rights abuses and injustices in greater numbers each year,

According to a DS report published yesterday, in October 2019, a taskforce headed by the Home Minister himself was created to implement the 111-point directive that was, in turn, prepared by a 16-member team headed by a former shipping minister.

The spike in infection rates in the border districts, and the mortality rate as a consequence, are not entirely unexpected. In spite of the need to have a strict lockdown immediately from the end of May,

A discussion held by The Daily Star with health policy experts has brought to light the utter neglect and apathy of our society towards one of the most essential groups of people: the sanitation and waste workers.

As more details of the case of a 12-year-old boy from Bogura who was forced to confess to killing his younger brother in 2015 are being revealed, we are horrified to hear of the ordeal that this child and his parents have been put through for almost six years.

A report published by The Daily Star on June 17 has once again brought to light the allegations of illegal gas connections being provided in exchange for extra charges to customers by syndicates linked with former and current employees of the state-owned Titas Gas Transmission and Distribution Company Limited.

The icddr,b study that has found 68 percent of coronavirus cases in Dhaka city to be of the highly transmissible Delta variant is no great surprise.

The alarmingly high countrywide positivity rate of 16.62 percent on Wednesday is, sadly, a reflection of how more districts (besides just the bordering ones) are experiencing higher positivity rates with each passing day.

We would like to echo the appeal of recruiting agencies to the government to immediately facilitate the inoculation of migrant workers with the Covid-19 vaccine, as many of them are ready to resume their old jobs or start new ones.

The Sal forest in Tangail has been shrinking at a speedy rate over the years, and there seems to be no way to prevent this tragedy under the present circumstances.

The finance minister’s recent comments on the state of the “new poor”—the proportion of the population that has been pushed into poverty due to the economic fallout of the pandemic—has left us stunned, not least because of his suggestion that the poverty data published by numerous organisations is “imaginary”.

We are shocked by the strange recommendation of the parliamentary standing committee on the Liberation War Affairs Ministry to replace female Upazila Nirbahi Officers (UNO) with a lower ranking male officer when a deceased freedom fighter is given the guard of honour.

Looking at how the Covid-19 pandemic has been handled so far gives one the impression that we have been constantly outrun by it. We have failed to be proactive.

The shocking murder of three people, including a child, by an Assistant Sub-Inspector (ASI) in Kushtia town highlights the need for