Pinaki Roy

Nearly 70,000 Rohingya refugees have gathered at two newly built camps in Teknaf and Ukhia of Cox's Bazar as the old shelters in the district are already overcrowded. So far, an estimated 90,000 Rohingyas have arrived in Bangladesh in the wake of violence triggered by a Rohingya insurgent attack in Myanmar's Rakhine State on August 25.

Law enforcers rescued 19 bodies of Rohingya people, who had been fleeing violence in Myanmar, from the Bay of Bengal after the ill-equipped boats carrying them capsized yesterday.

It was around noon on Wednesday.

A few thousand Rohingya refugees entered Bangladesh yesterday slipping through the Rezu Aamtali border in Naikkhangchhari of Bandarban.

Several thousand Rohingyas from Myanmar, mostly women, children and elderly people, are waiting in no man's land along the Naikhyangchhari border to enter Bangladesh territory.

They are now on this side of the border. On the other side, they have homes, may be burnt down already. It's just several hundred metres away but they are too scared to go back. They left their villages on Saturday, a day after violence erupted in Rakhine State of Myanmar, according to Dil Mohammed, one of the refugees, who is from Dekibunia of Maungdaw.

Experts have expressed concern over the depleting Bengal tiger population in the Sundarbans as the number of tiger attacks in and around the mangrove forest has gone down significantly in recent years.

The quality of the Buriganga water in Dhaka improved to some extent after the tanneries of Hazaribagh were shut down recently. Tests by Department of Environment (DoE) say so and so do the people of the area.

At least nine rivers, including the Jamuna, Teesta, Dharla, Surma and the Kushiyara, are flowing above the danger level, but experts say that will neither worsen nor prolong the current flooding. However, there is a possibility of a fresh flood if it rains heavily in the northeastern states of neighbouring India, they add.

It was just a matter of time before a tragedy of this scale befell the country's hill region. The way people felled trees, cleared forest for commercial plantation and cultivation, and built houses on hill slopes in the Chittagong region, something disastrous was bound to happen, say experts.

Prof Dwijen Sharma, an eminent naturalist, said it would not be possible to stop the conflict between nature and development as long as capitalism controls everything.

A government dispatched experts' team reached Sunamganj yesterday to collect water samples from the haors there for lab test at the Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission to ascertain whether there is any radioactive materials in the waters.

Bangladesh experiences flash floods ever so often and farmers are no stranger to crop loss as a result. But the deaths of fish, frogs and fowls in their hundreds as an aftermath of such floods are a new phenomenon altogether.

Farmers in the northeastern backswamp are all too familiar with flash floods. Rice paddies grown just once a year in this vast haor remain at the mercy of nature. But thousands of growers in this wetland ecosystem had never experienced flash floods striking this early as in this season, completely destroying paddies in over one lakh hectares of land.

A huge quantity of dissolved salt will be discharged into the Dhaleshwari river from the Savar Tannery Industrial Estate as the central effluent treatment plant (CETP) there doesn't have the component needed for desalinising wastewater. Even if all the other toxic materials are treated, the salt will kill the biodiversity of the river, say, environmentalists. The country's tannery industry uses around 40,000 tonnes of salt annually.

The government has given Hazaribagh tanners three more months to relocate their factories to Savar Tannery Industrial Estate, as the tanners again missed the deadline -- December 31-- for doing so.

The house being set afire by a policeman and a person in a pink shirt as seen in an Al Jazeera video belonged to Chumki Mardi, a 55-year-old Santal woman.

The situation there was all very happy. As the troops were advancing towards the newly liberated capital, people standing along the road cheered them, chanting "joy bangla". They thanked the troops and other freedom fighters.

The hill people had to struggle and make sacrifices for achieving the Chittagong Hill Tracts Peace Accord. Every single family there was affected in one way or the other. Since its signing, 19 years have gone by but the hill people are yet to see its full implementation.

The Santals had owned most of the land, now at the centre of a row in Gobindaganj of Gaibandha, before the government acquired it in the 50s, according to old land records.