President Yahya Khan arrived in Dhaka today. No local political leader went to the airport to meet him. All the entries of the airport were heavily guarded. Siddiq Salik, then public relations officer in the Pakistan army in Dhaka, recounts,

We warmly welcome the government’s plan to build 30,000 homes for those of our valiant freedom fighters who are insolvent, and for the families of deceased and martyred war heroes.

The UN’s decision to send a delegation to visit Bhasan Char, where the government has built a housing facility for around one lakh Rohingya refugees, is a welcome one.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, chairman of the Pakistan People’s Party, said today at a public meeting in Karachi that if power was to be transferred to the people before any constitutional settlement, as demanded by Bangabandu, it should be transferred to the Awami League in the East and the PPP in the West.

We are alarmed at the findings of a study conducted by the Manusher Jonno Foundation (MJF) on the situation of child marriages across the country. It has found that at least 13,886 child marriages took place in 21 districts of the country during the lockdown last year.

We heartily welcome the initiatives of two city corporations to draw immediate and long term plans to solve Dhaka’s waterlogging problem.

Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s demands received wide approval in both wings of Pakistan.

The recent video of the violent beating of an eight-year-old by a madrasa teacher shows the impunity that authority figures in our educational institutions still enjoy.

The fact that the number of new coronavirus cases has been rising for a week is extremely disconcerting, particularly given that schools and colleges are scheduled to reopen on March 30, and universities soon after.

BBC today reported that Pakistan President Yahya Khan would visit Dhaka soon with a “package deal” to resolve the ongoing crisis in East Pakistan. The report also indicated a handover of power to elected representatives before the commencement of the National Assembly session.

As the bridge over Feni river (namely “Maitri Setu”) has been inaugurated by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her Indian counterpart Narendra Modi on March 9, we are very hopeful that it will create new trade opportunities for the two countries and increase inter-regional trade.

There has been a new and concerning development with regard to the Covid-19 pandemic situation in Bangladesh.

It is not often that the outgoing head of a very important state institution admits his failure in fulfilling his mandate.

For a political party to be truly a people’s party, it’s imperative that there is fair representation of various sections of the population, including women, within the party hierarchy.

Despite repeated use of courier services by transnational syndicates to smuggle drugs through Bangladesh to a third country, the government has turned down a proposal to use the National Identity Card server to verify the identity of the product sender.

In a press statement issued on March 10, 1971, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman urged the UN Secretary General to take action to avert the threat of genocide in East Pakistan.

The recent addition of a woman to the list of casualties resulting from road accidents is testament to the fact that our authorities have failed to bring under control the high rate of deaths from road accidents in the country.

It is a shocking reality that domestic violence, a malaise that we have been plagued with for decades, intensified in 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic broke out.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the unfair treatment of Bangladeshi migrant workers in host countries was frequently in the spotlight—whether it was the detention of unregistered workers in unsafe facilities,

One hears very often from a few inveterate optimists that Bangladesh has seen the end of religious extremism. We have been continually cautioning against entertaining any euphoria that absence of demonstrative activity on their part is not an indication of the demise of the religious extremists altogether.