Import ban, so what? There are ways to sneak those in, through the country’s main airport even.

Roads and Highways Department (RHD) has failed to start the physical work of a project taken up two years ago for installing 28 axle load control centres despite a call by one of its wings for implementing axle load control on highways ungently to reduce road damages.

“If you come close to me you will smell the pus.”

“I decided not to shave the beard. I’ve just trimmed it a bit, I think I quite like the beard,” laughed Shafiqul Islam Kajol, his eyes twinkling with amusement at the irony of keeping the large, shaggy, grey beard that grew out over his 53 days of enforced disappearance and seven months in prison.

In 2018, aged just 43, Mazidul Haque developed severe breathing problems, consulted a doctor and was diagnosed with asbestosis, a potentially fatal respiratory disease which scars the lungs. After more than a decade working in the shipbreaking yards of Chattogram, he lost his job, and the means to support his family.

The burgeoning forex reserve, now hovering around $40 billion, is turning a lot of heads, alarmingly though, as big borrowers shift their eyes from exhausted public banks to the secured coffers.

Transnational trafficking gangs allegedly backed by some ruling party men have long been using different border points of Jashore to traffic women and children to India.

It is a piece of paper full of lies and yet it is the legal government document that allows a person to drink alcohol in Bangladesh.

Almost every time any government agency tried to ensure accountability and transparency of the duty-free liquor trade, it found itself in a legal limbo. Over the last two decades, diplomatic bonded warehouses, who import duty-free liquor for diplomats and foreigners, filed writ after writ with the High Court challenging the legality of the government action.

Officially, most bars and social clubs neither import nor purchase alcohol yet they log huge sales; restrictive law, high import tariff, bureaucratic nightmare encouraging smuggling; govt loses big, earning almost nothing out of this trade.

“Oh my God! Incredulous!” was the expression of a banking expert as he leafed through the Bangladesh Bank probe report. Page after page of it explains in painstaking details how a Bangladeshi business entity allegedly skimmed at least Tk 765 crore in the name of exports from the state-owned Janata Bank and the BB from January 2017 to February this year.

It's now a national crisis. The influx of deadly yaba appears to have gone beyond control despite efforts by law enforcement agencies to contain it.

Millions are now addicted to the pink pills. They take it as stimulant and end up with organ damage and mental derangement. The Daily Star has prepared a three-part series on the invasion of yaba and is running the third part today.

It was like wooing customers to have kebab and biriyani at popular Bihari restaurants. Only a few steps into the Camper Bazar, youths in small groups were looking for potential customers, holding packets full of pink tablets.

It's called crazy medicine. Produced in Myanmar, the dangerous drug very easily crosses the border and reaches cities, towns and villages of Bangladesh through various channels -- sometimes in full knowledge of law enforcers. It now seems unstoppable and is poised to cripple the country's biggest hope -- the youth.

Every time he extends his hands to seek alms, Sohrab Hossain, 63, looks embarrassed. Begging has never been his livelihood; it is now.

Mukuly Begum literally struggled to take her thirteen-month-old daughter on her lap.

“My arms and legs were tied in such a way that it was impossible for me even to change sides without help,” said Jewel, who was abducted and held captive by human traffickers in November last year.

As legal channels for labour migration from Bangladesh have shrunk due to malpractices in the arrangements by both private agencies and the government, desperate jobseekers take dangerous sea route to Malaysia.

Sona Mia has no more tears left to shed. He is now afraid of something ominous coming his son's way.