Life

Dhaka, Sept 20 (UNB) – More than 29 million children were born into conflict-affected areas last year, Unicef said on Friday. Read More »

Sirajganj, Sept 14 – Six schoolgirls including a fifth-grader have been saved from child marriage in Sirajganj on Friday. Assistant Commissioner (Land) and Executive Magistrate Anisur Rahman led the drives to rescue the teenaged girls from being married off. Read More »

Kurigram – A sub-inspector of police reportedly committed suicide by shooting himself at his rented house in the district town on Wednesday afternoon. Read More »

By Zofeen Ebrahim Reprint Karachi, Aug 21 2019 (IPS) – Gulab Shah, 45, is having sleepless nights. He and his family are worried about their imminent migration from their village in Jhaloo to a major city in Pakistan, thanks to the continued ingress of sea water inland. Read More »

Chattogram, Aug 21 (UNB) – A police officer is being praised for protecting a newborn from dogs in the port city on early Tuesday. Sub-Inspector Mostafizur Rahman and tales of his selfless act went viral on the social media within hours. He said he was standing in front of Akteruzzaman Centre near the end of his night shift when he ... Read More »

The bridegroom whose wedding was targeted by a suicide bomber in the Afghan capital Kabul says he has “lost hope” after the deadly attack. Read More »

Thailand, July 13 (AP/UNB) — Farmers in eastern Thailand have celebrated the start of the sowing season by racing their buffaloes, whose usual duty is to plow the fields. Read More »

Sylhet, July 13 (UNB) – “But I have promises to keep,” is probably what echoed in the mind of young bridegroom Rubel Ahmed when he set out for the house of his would-be bride in a nearby village. Read More »

Keraniganj, July 12 (UNB)- It is not about a single tube- well that would go out of order and could be fixed soon. Imagine a village dependent on groundwater, where one day residents wake up to find not 1, 10, or 20 but rather 2,000 tube-wells together have been rendered useless to the task of lifting water. The situation can ... Read More »

Dhaka, Jul 8 (UNB) – A strain of the common cold virus can infect and kill bladder cancer cells, a small study suggests, reports the BBC. All signs of the disease disappeared in one patient, and in 14 others there was evidence that cancer cells had died. University of Surrey researchers said the virus could “help revolutionise treatment” for the ... Read More »

Dhaka, July 1 (UNB) – The High Court has observed that Bangladesh’s existence depends on the protection of rivers. “The country will survive, beloved Bangladesh will survive if the rivers are protected,” it said. The HC bench of Justice Moyeenul Islam Chowdhury and Justice M Ashraful Kamal came up with the observations in the full verdict declaring the Turag River ... Read More »

By Dr Jaspal Kaur Sadhu Singh The correction of this injustice has been achieved through a long drawn fight, somewhat of a David and Goliath contest. The outcome, culminating in a spectacular opinion and vote, has a number of consequences that can impact a rules-based international order, a commitment promoted by the UN Charter which specifically seeks to ‘establish conditions ... Read More »

By Mohammed On World Refugee Day, personal reflections of a young Palestinian from the Gaza Strip CHAPEL HILL, North Carolina, USA, Jun 20 2019 (IPS) – I am a refugee, born to a refugee family. I was granted that status on the day I came into this world. I was not aware of what had happened before then. I did ... Read More »

By Charlotte Munns UN, Jun 12 2019 (IPS) – The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has been forced to justify its existence at the United Nations ahead of a pledging conference later this month. UNRWA came under fire by Jason Greenblatt, US Special Envoy for International Negotiations, at a Security Council ... Read More »

Washington, June 11 (AP/UNB) — The world’s oceans will likely lose about one-sixth of their fish and other marine life by the end of the century if climate change continues on its current path, a new study says. Every degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) that the world’s oceans warm, the total mass of sea animals is projected to drop by ... Read More »

by Geetha Iyer The evolution of insects About 500 million years ago (MYA), the Earth experienced a remarkable evolutionary event. Called the Cambrian explosion, it resulted in the emergence of a plethora of life forms – some gigantic, others small; some that lived on land and others that occupied water. Around 412 MYA (in a time period called the Devonian), ... Read More »

By Cara Anna | AP Johennesburg — Botswana became the latest country to decriminalize gay sex on Tuesday, a landmark case for Africa, as the High Court rejected laws punishing it with up to seven years in prison. Jubilant activists in the packed courtroom cheered the unanimous decision in the southern African nation that is seen as one of the continent’s most ... Read More »

Dhaka, June 8 (UNB)— An estimated 115 million boys and men around the world were married as children, according to the first-ever analysis on child grooms, launched on Friday by the UN Children’s Fund (Unicef). Twenty-three million among them married before the age of 15. Using data from 82 countries, the in-depth study brings the overall number estimated child marriages ... Read More »

New York, June 7 (AP/UNB) — When dog owners go through a stressful period, they’re not alone in feeling the pressure — their dogs feel it too, a new study suggests. Dog owners experiencing long bouts of stress can transfer it to their dogs, scientists report in a study published Thursday in Scientific Reports. The Swedish researchers focused on 58 ... Read More »

The thyroid gland is a butterfly shaped endocrine gland located at the front of the neck below Adam’s apple. It is basically responsible for the secretion of thyroid hormones which regulates body processes such as respiration, body temperature, pulsation, digestion and almost all the metabolic processes in your body. Thyroid Gland produces mainly two hormones T3 (triiodothyronine) and T4 (thyroxine) ... Read More »

By Caroline Gluck Negombo, Sri Lanka, May 31 2019 (IPS) – Thirteen-year-old Bariea, a Pakistani asylum seeker in Sri Lanka, is taking shelter at a mosque in the city of Negombo, where an uneasy mix of high anxiety and extreme boredom hover over the room. “We just have a few small bags, mostly clothes,” said Bariea. “We thought we would ... Read More »

by Katherine Barnett The security and privacy of personal data are being jeopardised as Deep Packet Inspection is deployed by internet service providers. Europe has not escaped the global move towards ‘surveillance capitalism’. Numerous pieces of legislation are under consideration which put online freedoms and privacy at risk—the UK’s Online Harms white paper is just one example. Now European telecommunication ... Read More »

by Susanne Wixforth Amazon symbolises the four platform giants, also known as GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon). The company is Europe’s largest platform retailer and its turnover is twice as high as that of its 20 largest competitors. While Amazon´s chief executive earned 2.16 million dollars per hour in 2017, its workers must be grateful if they receive the ... Read More »

Keraniganj, May 31 (UNB) – Workers of some 30 dockyards in and around Keraniganj are passing a busy period in their respective dockyards in refurbishing the old and unfit launches to earn extra money ahead of the Eid-ul-Fitr. One of the most abiding features of the Eid-ul-Fitr festival among Bangladeshis is the almost ritual practice of going home for the ... Read More »

By Baher Kamal Madrid, May 29 2019 (IPS) – No, no, no. Nothing to do with what the US and Europe’s far-right fanatics now use to vociferate, saying once and again that “migrants come here to destroy our democracy, our civilisation, and our lifestyle”. Rather the complete opposite—this is about major damage that precisely “our civilisation” and “our lifestyle” have ... Read More »

Strong primary health care is the frontline in defending the right to health, including sexual and reproductive rights. It’s through strong primary health care that countries can prevent, detect and treat non-communicable diseases, he said. It’s through strong primary health care that outbreaks can be detected and stopped before they become epidemics. “And it’s through strong primary health care that ... Read More »

By Chris Wellisz Washington DC, May 24 2019 (IPS) – As a child growing up in Communist Yugoslavia, Branko Milanovic witnessed the protests of 1968, when students occupied the campus of the University of Belgrade and hoisted banners reading “Down with the Red bourgeoisie!” Milanovic, who now teaches economics at the City University of New York, recalls wondering whether his ... Read More »

Naogaon, May 26 – The phrase ‘drought-prone region’ to describe a cluster of districts in Bangladesh’s north sounds almost benign, and hardly captures the perpetual hardships of people engaged in a daily battle for water, the other name of life. The paucity of water also makes it extremely difficult for farming or any form of agriculture to thrive in the ... Read More »

By Peter Maurer Stockholm, May 22, 2019 (IPS) – The connection of humanitarian action to broader objectives like peace, development and human rights is understandably complex, but it is also an area in which some fresh thinking is important. The dilemma we are facing today is how to expand and uphold neutral, impartial and independent humanitarian action while designing and ... Read More »

May 16, 2019 SANDRP Just as all festivities of a fisherfolk life are connected to the river, their dreams and nightmares are riverine too. “For several days I’ve been noticing something different in the river’s flow pattern-familiar calculation just don’t seem to hold. The current where we knew it to be slanted is now straight, where we knew it to ... Read More »