BNP secretary general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir yesterday said the proposed budget completely failed to address how people’s lives and livelihood can be protected amid the pandemic.

In a significant development, Myanmar’s National Unity Government has announced drafting a new constitution and committed to ensuring citizenship and fundamental rights of all ethnic groups, including the Rohingyas.

A SpaceX rocket took off Thursday for the International Space Station carrying supplies for scientific experiments, including some surprising passengers -- squids and virtually indestructible microorganisms called tardigrades.

The proposed 15 percent income tax on private universities is unacceptable and contradictory to the Private University Act-2010, Association of Private Universities of Bangladesh (APUB) said yesterday.

In a telegram sent to the US State Department on June 5, 1971, US Ambassador in Pakistan Joseph Farland provided a detailed account of his conversation with Pakistan President Yahya Khan. The meeting was held on the same day.

A boat carrying dozens of Rohingya refugees that set sail in February but had been adrift in the Andaman Sea with engine failure has landed on an Indonesian island after a voyage of more than 100 days, a human rights official said yesterday.

Aviation and tourism have been hit perhaps the hardest by the pandemic. Airlines went bankrupt and airliners were sent into early retirements or long storages. Flights got cancelled due to measures meant to contain the spread of the virus and planes that flew, flew nowhere near the full capacity.

The government is going to bolster the country’s expanding ICT sector with tax exemptions in six more services and VAT waiver on hardware manufacturing as it looks to prepare the nation for the fourth industrial revolution.

A Nigerian state government said it was negotiating with gunmen who seized 136 children from an Islamic seminary at the weekend, the latest in a string of mass kidnappings in the country.

A shadow government in Myanmar yesterday called on the Rohingya minority to help it overthrow the junta, promising citizenship and repatriation for the persecuted Muslim community in a future democratic Myanmar.

Countries and private donors pledged nearly $2.4 billion to the Covax vaccine-sharing plan, expanding efforts to make Covid-19 shots more available to people in poorer nations.

Bangladesh has taken a huge responsibility by hosting almost one million Rohingya refugees in the largest refugee camp in the world, said the UN Refugee Agency, calling on the international community to support Bangladesh and share its burden.

At least 4,510 Bangladeshis illegally reached Italy, Malta, Spain and Greece by sea and land last year.

The new national budget proposes hiking the monthly allowance of valiant freedom fighters to Tk 20,000 from Tk 12,000.

Government research confirmed community transmission of the Delta variant, popularly known as Indian variant, in the country and it also found one unidentified variant of coronavirus.

In the wake of skyrocketing Covid-19 cases in bordering areas, partial lockdown and night-time travel restrictions were imposed in three more districts yesterday, while Satkhira will go into a seven-day lockdown from tomorrow.

As Bangladesh continues to fight against the pandemic with rising infections in frontier districts, it recorded 30 more deaths from Covid-19 in 24 hours till yesterday morning, raising the death toll to 12,724.

Pakistan and the United Nations agreed on relief operations for victims of the war in East Pakistan, a UN spokesman announced today.

Domestic manufacturing might enjoy a big boost as the government plans to encourage local investment in products labelled “Made in Bangladesh”.

Uncertainty over the return of around 25,000 Bangladeshi expatriates to work in Oman and Kuwait is over as Civil Aviation Authority of Bangladesh has lifted its restriction on travel to Oman, and Kuwait is allowing domestic workers to fly to that country.