Zyma Islam

Four months into the pandemic, a major coronavirus testing facility is still functioning with volunteer technologists who have begun to go on strike demanding payment.

Something strange is happening in the capital’s slums -- Covid-19 cases are hard to come by.

It was a small piece of news published on June 6, hardly noticeable in the slew of coronavirus coverage -- 219 migrant workers deported from Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain have been sent to jail on charges of “tarnishing the image of Bangladesh”.

Over the last 48 hours, young women have been taking to social media to talk about a rare topic -- how women seeking gynaecological help often receive insensitive, traumatising and humiliating “advice” from doctors.

During a time period that has seen an unprecedented rise in cases filed under the infamous Digital Security Act, the digital sphere is more unsafe than ever before.

You may have already seen the social media campaign ‘#payup’, asking Kardashian sisters Kendall and Kylie Jenner to pay up their suppliers in Bangladesh. You may have also read about British brand, Debenhams, which is asking for a whopping 90 percent discount on products from 40 suppliers in the country. What you may not know is that these are only two of at least 1,931 brands which have either delayed, put on hold, or straight-up cancelled their orders since the onset of Covid-19, as per data received from the BGMEA.

While Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman University Vice-Chancellor Prof Kanak Kanti Barua verbally spurned the Rapid Dot-Blot test developed by Gonoshasthaya Kendra last Wednesday, calling it “ineffective in detecting Covid-19”, the full report justifies and recommends its use as an antibody test.

Has asking questions about, commenting on, or critiquing the health sector, and the agents responsible for it, become tantamount to an activity for which one can be punished and even arrested?

A 22-year-old nurse of the capital’s Ibn Sina Hospital died in front of its emergency unit allegedly after being refused admission yesterday.

A nurse from Ibn Sina Hospital died without admission at the same hospital’s emergency yesterday, after allegedly being refused on grounds of her not having a Covid-19 clearance certificate.

Save for a slash in income tax, there is no respite in this year’s budget for the penny-pinching middle class. Their expenditures will continue going up even as the global pandemic and resulting recession hits their incomes and slashes their jobs.

With the opportunity offered to money launderers by the government to whiten black money failing to draw a significant response, the new budget has made a new, lucrative proposition -- invest the money and no one, not even the income tax authority, will be able to question its source.

Save for a slash in the income tax, there is no respite in this year’s budget for penny-pinching middle class families.

For two months, the concept publicised over and over again was that staying home was the key to combating the spread of coronavirus.

On the same day the Cabinet Division issued a circular on relaxing the shutdown, the government’s very own National Technical Advisory Committee on May 28 warned of an explosion of cases if health and safety measures were not implemented strictly.

Vernon Anthony Paul was one of the five patients who died in the fire at United Hospital. Choked in anguish, his son narrates his harrowing experience.

Three former students of the principal and founder of Sunbeams school remembers the pioneering educationist,

The League of Nations -- the body which pretends to have a mighty, big say in global affairs -- yesterday removed Chapasthan from the world map following a really funny cartoon drawn about it.

As the lockdown to curb the spread of coronavirus continues to have an impact on people from all walks of life, a generation of working women is learning that their “work-from-home” is not quite the same as that of men.

A team from Child Health Research Foundation (CHRF) yesterday successfully completed the genome sequencing of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in Bangladesh.