We condemn the attack on Ducsu Vice President Nurul Haque Nur by the ruling party men during Eid vacation.

It is very unfortunate that the flood victims of Sirajganj have yet to receive any assistance from the government to rebuild their houses washed away by the devastating flood.

The Dhaka University’s decision to re-affiliate seven Dhaka-based government colleges from the National University in 2017 has had the unfortunate effect of aggravating the very problems that they had hoped to address.

The fire that burned through an entire slum at Mirpur’s Chalantika area on Friday was reportedly exacerbated by plastic pipes facilitating illegal gas connections. The plastic pipes melted in the heat, releasing gas from within and making the blaze spread much faster than it would have otherwise. Locals have alleged that syndicates run by some ruling party men in cahoots with employees of Titas Gas stole gas from the main transmission and distribution lines and diverted it to the slum in exchange for money from slum dwellers. Thanks to these illegal gas pipes, it was an accident waiting to happen.

We are appalled to learn that Barisal city does not have any specialised disposal system for its medical waste. Waste from the government hospitals, clinics, diagnostic centres, blood banks and upazila health complexes—around five tonnes of it—is collected and dumped with regular garbage into a six-acre landfill. Such waste poses grave risks to both humans and the environment.

The return home for hundreds of thousands of people from the holidays may not be a joyous one, as transport terminals have been identified as areas that are ripe for Aedes-mosquito-breeding. Despite repeated assurances about cleanups by city authorities,

The Mirpur slum fire, which razed thousands of homes to the ground on Friday night and rendered their occupants homeless, is a monstrous exemplar of rapid, unplanned housing of the sort being seen in Dhaka and the disaster that it can cause, often with fatal consequences.

A major report, “Below the Canopy”, jointly written by the conservation group World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Zoological Society of London (ZSL), has brought to the fore some startling findings.

We laud the government’s plan to provide daily meals for all 1.73 crore primary students in order to increase attendance and reduce the number of dropouts. While enrolment of students has increased significantly over the years, keeping students in school has been a great challenge for the government.

We are deeply saddened to learn that at least 26 people died in road accidents across the country during the three-day Eid vacation.

We know from previous years that about 1 crore animals would be sacrificed during Eid-ul-Azha. So, the collapse of prices came as a big surprise, as the market had anticipated, or should have anticipated, this huge supply of rawhides.

Rajshahi prison authorities have partly destroyed a pre-colonial-era building inside the jail complex in the city’s Sreerampur area without consulting any archaeologist. The building was previously being used as the bungalow of deputy inspector general (prisons) since the

News has emerged of a trafficking network in Oman that is enticing Bangladeshi women with promises of regular jobs but ultimately pushing them into sexual slavery. What we have learnt from talking to those few who have managed to gain their freedom and return

As we get ready to celebrate Eid-ul-Azha, the second most important festival in the Islamic calendar, we hope that it will go beyond simply observing ritualistic practices and that we put more emphasis on the spiritual side of the day.

The recommendations that the United Nations Convention against Torture (UNCAT) committee has come up with recently in regard to Bangladesh are well overdue. The committee has expressed concerns about allegations of torture against law enforcers, and secret detention and enforced disappearance of citizens. Despite the fact that Bangladesh is a signatory to the UNCAT Charter, it took the country 20 long years to submit its first-ever report, which the committee noted with regret.

In a report on the annual development programme (ADP), prepared by the planning ministry and shared in a review meeting by the minister, we find that most ministries prepare projects without proper feasibility and technical design.

What we are hearing from entomologists in the city is that hay, when wet, provides suitable conditions for the Aedes mosquito to lay its eggs. If there is consistent rain, then hay, a staple food for cattle, which have begun to arrive in their thousands for Eid-ul-Adha, could potentially pose a new level of threat for the expansion of the dengue outbreak. So what is to be done? Experts believe that if the cattle grounds can be kept clean by actively seeking out breeding grounds of the Aedes mosquito, the city can be made safe.

While it is good to know that the police have finally submitted the charge-sheet in a case filed against four road safety campaigners in Chattogram last year during the nationwide road safety movement, there remains some confusion regarding the reasons why they were implicated under Section 57 of the ICT Act in the first place.

It is quite confounding that the drives carried out by the Directorate of National Consumer Rights Protection (DNCRP) recently, with the aim to identify the hospitals, dispensaries and diagnostic centres charging people more than the government-declared fees for dengue tests and selling medicines for mosquito control at very high prices, have been brought to a pause for reasons we fail to understand.

We are outraged at the alleged gang-rape of a woman by an OC and other policemen at the Khulna Railway Station on August 2. From what we learned from reports that have emerged since, the accused allegedly have committed the crime in a very organised manner: detaining the woman inside a train, forcing her to disembark from there and taking her to the police station only to rape her. What is more, the alleged rapists even filed a case against the victim for possessing five bottles of Phensedyl reportedly to cover up their crime.