Md Shahnawaz Khan Chandan

Thousands of critical cancer, heart, kidney and liver patients have their treatments on hold as medical tests they require have been off for lack of radioactive isotope for the last two months.

Due to a lack of coordination and support from the health ministry, a good number of laboratories and experts based in universities and government research institutions remain unutilised in the country’s Covid-19 response.

The US-Bangla Airlines will operate eight special flights on Chennai-Dhaka and Kolkata-Dhaka routes from April 20 to bring back over 1,000 stranded Bangladeshis who went there for treatment.

As the coronavirus gains a foothold in the country, the increasing vulnerability of millions of orphaned and destitute children remains largely unaddressed.

A large number of Bangladeshi patients and their attendants are stuck in India as the neighbouring country has been under a lockdown since March 25.

Around a million Rohingya in the refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, along with aid workers, are likely to be among the worst sufferers if coronavirus spreads in the region, feared experts.

Although the diagnosis of novel coronavirus is so far only Dhaka-based, the authorities prefer not to expand the testing facilities to hospitals outside the capital right now due to a lack of trained manpower and unavailability of the necessary technology.

For hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi state-run jute mill workers, this year began with an assurance that is all-too-familiar to them.

“Take our dead bodies, give us our money back”, “We want to eat, we want to live”, “Give us food or we shall eat the constitution” -- these are the slogans imprinted on banners hanging all over Khalishpur. This part of Khulna city is host to nine state-run jute mills.

Under your editorship, we got two leading newspapers in Bangladesh—Bhorer Kagoj and Prothom Alo. How did you plan the content of these newspapers, and their editorial structure and policy? How did you make them stand out in a market already occupied by several age-old, reputed newspapers?

Shahbagh, the intellectual heart of Dhaka, becomes a meeting place for renowned and promising authors, scholars, poets, journalists, readers, and intellectuals from far and wide, at least twice a year.

Ashraful Islam, a retired government official, built a two-story house in Dhaka’s east Jurain neighbourhood in 1996. He spent his forty years of savings and even exhausted his wife’s fixed deposit to build this dwelling.

Sahera Khatun Shimul, a young working woman, has to travel from Dhanmondi to Khilgaon regularly to attend her office.

The latest, but probably not the last, victim of this culture of impunity is Abrar Fahad, a second-year student of the electrical and electronic engineering department of Bangladesh University of Science and Technology (BUET).

Most of the time, however, one of her parents takes her to school and they carry her schoolbag for her. On the way to school,

On August 24, 2017, the High Court directed the Bangladesh government not to approve any industry activity within 10 kilometres of the Sundarbans area.

When recent reports revealed that some 3,450 Rohingya refugees will be repatriated to Myanmar, panic struck the camps again. Unlike the repatriation programme of November 2018, this time the families earmarked for repatriation have not been informed yet (as of

Manira Akhter Mitu was a second-year student at the department of economics at Begum Badrunnesa Women’s College, one of the seven graduate and post-graduate level colleges affiliated with Dhaka University (DU).

Md Shajib Mian, an 18-year-old youngster, is one of the many destitute youths of Kamlapur railway station who can be seen peddling water bottles, cigarettes, newspapers and sometimes carrying heavy luggage of the passengers on his short, lean body and dirt-covered hair.

On June 25, Professor ABM Faroque, the chief investigator of a nine-member research team unveiled that a study found detergent and antibiotics for human-use in several samples of widely sold pasteurised and non-pasteurised milk.