At a time when central banks around the world are taking a whole host of precautionary measures and the world economy as well as all individual economies are under significant duress due to the coronavirus pandemic, it’s astounding that our central bank is yet to even consider what actions it could take should the situation worsen.

While the government has been grappling with the coronavirus testing kit crisis with more and more COVID-19 cases being detected every day, the news of a testing kit developed by the Gonoshasthaya Kendra has made us very hopeful.

With the first COVID-19 related death confirmed by the Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research (IEDCR), the level of panic amongst the citizens now seems to have intensified severely.

We are shocked at the way two police stations have treated the case of Shafiqul Islam Kajol, a journalist who has been missing for a week after a case was filed against him by a lawmaker.

In a report published in this daily yesterday, the WHO spokesperson in Bangladesh warned that refugees are more at risk of infection from communicable diseases because they live in overcrowded camps and settlements.

Hardly have we started effectively addressing the COVID-19 virus that has taken the form of a pandemic, when we have the distressing news of the onset of dengue in the country.

In a manner befitting the urgency of the situation, the World Health Organization (WHO) director has urged all countries to ramp up their testing programmes as the best way to arrest the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.

Words are not enough to express our shock at the tragedy that took place at the Dhaka Medical College Hospital (DMCH) on March 14, where a 24-year-old female patient died because of the negligence of doctors and staff, all of whom fled the ward she was admitted to, suspecting her as a COVID-19 patient.

It is a frightening thought that had Ariful Islam, the Kurigram correspondent of Bangla Tribune, not been granted bail, we may not have known the terrifying ordeal of a citizen being picked up, mercilessly tortured and even threatened with “crossfire”.

Having written multiple editorials over the past month pleading with the government to prepare accordingly to handle the massive

There are enough grounds to suggest that the arrest of the Kurigram correspondent of Bangla Tribune Ariful Islam by a mobile court under a taskforce of Kurigram district administration and sentencing him to one-year imprisonment on the early hours of March 14 after he was picked up from his home on charges of possessing narcotics was done out of spite at the orders of the district commissioner rather than for the purpose of serving the rule of law.

We are shocked by the report of two teachers of Chattogram’s Forestry Science and Technology Institute (FSTI) allegedly extorting money from their students for years by threatening them with poor scores in exams.

While we commend the government for its efforts to make healthcare accessible to all by establishing healthcare facilities even in remote places of the country, what we often notice is that many healthcare facilities remain unutilised mostly due to a shortage of manpower including doctors.

We are pleasantly surprised to learn from a Prothom Alo report that rather than sentencing nine youths, aged between 19 and 24, to

When schools, colleges and universities are being shut down across the globe to contain the spread of coronavirus, Bangladesh, it appears, is struggling to institute basic precautionary measures in its educational institutions.

While we are relieved that two of the three people diagnosed with the coronavirus thus far have already recovered, we are at a loss to

According to the High Court, an estimated 20 million people in the country suffer from some form of kidney disease every year and about 35,000-45,000 of them die of kidney failure. Although the annual demand for kidney transplant is somewhere between 5,000-9,000, only about 120-130 end-stage renal failure patients can find healthy donors and undergo kidney transplant per year.

According to a report published in this daily, the outer anchorage of Chattogram port has not been properly monitored by the Customs House Chattogram (CHC) for the last nine years.

We are shocked that a fire that broke out in Rupnagar slum in the city’s Mirpur area on Wednesday morning has destroyed at least 200 shanties, leaving hundreds of its residents homeless.

According to a report published on March 10, the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) has issued letters to listed handset importers, producers and vendors asking them to discourage the use and trade of second generation (2G) mobile phones.