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.

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.

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.

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.

We are left surprised and confused by the expatriates’ welfare minister’s suggestion that the police not record cases under the Anti-trafficking Act against recruiting agents should workers, sent abroad with proper documents, fall victim to trafficking. The rationale behind this suggestion stems from the fact that the Anti-trafficking Act carries harsher punishment (up to death penalty).

A news report that was published in the front page of a leading Bangla newspaper on August 6 gives us pause to think about the flagrant way in which money is spent by the Election Commission (EC). EC records show that each commissioner has given 520 speeches in 18 days, which translates into 14 public speeches every day—a feat that is not possible for any human being!

In an unprecedented but not quite unexpected move, the BJP government has scrapped the 70-year-old Article 370 of the Indian Constitution that had accorded a special status to the state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). In fact, this was one of the points in the BJP election manifesto in the last general election which it has followed through on. But not only that, the BJP government has also bifurcated the state into two with J&K and Ladakh becoming Union Territories, the latter coming under the direct rule of New Delhi.

Following the signing of the CHT Peace Accord in 1997 between the then government and Parbatya Chattogram Jana Sanghati Samiti, the CHT Land Dispute Resolution Commission was formed in 1999 in line with the accord. However, it is extremely unfortunate that two decades after its formation, the commission has not been able to solve a single land dispute, even as the complaints keep piling up. Around 22,000 complaints have been filed with the commission since 1999, but the commission remains ineffective due to a variety of reasons—primary among them being the lack of a set of rules and regulations needed for the commission to do its job.