Grameenphone may not be able to sell new SIMs after a week or two as it has come close to exhausting the new connections it was allowed to sell by the regulator, said its CEO yesterday.

It has been four years since a band of hackers broke into this Bangladesh Bank’s account with the New York Fed with the intent to pull off what would have been the biggest cyber heist in history.

There is a major concern over the disposal of tonnes of laminated campaign posters without causing further damage to the environment and public health.

At least 17 controversial ward councillor candidates, all backed by the Awami League, emerged victorious in Saturday’s Dhaka city polls.

China yesterday imposed a lockdown on a major city far away from the epicentre of a coronavirus epidemic, as its death toll from the disease soared to 304 and the first foreign fatality was reported in the Philippines.

Sadman Sakib, 19, one of the 304 who returned from China and now quarantined in the Ashkona Hajj camp, was not very comfortable inside his two-bed dormitory room in Wuhan University.

The BNP’s organisational weaknesses were exposed once again as the party leaders and activists failed to show up at the polling centres on Saturday, said party insiders.

The dawn-to-dusk hartal enforced yesterday by BNP in Dhaka city, protesting “widespread irregularities” in the city corporation elections, ended peacefully with little impact on public life.

In the absence of rival party activists, journalists covering the Dhaka city election at various polling centres yesterday were apparently a thorn on the side of ruling party candidates and their supporters.

The polling atmosphere was eerily festive. Almost too peaceful to be true. Election posters flooded every nook and cranny of the capital. Supporters of the candidates, mostly from the Awami League, were seen outside the polling centres. Law enforcers patrolled the streets while peace prevailed.

Unlike any polls in the past, eligible city dwellers yesterday were free to exercise their right to vote through machine, for the first time, at all centres across Dhaka.

Yesterday’s Dhaka city polls may appear to many a re-run of the national election held on December 30, 2018, because of some aspects.

For most it was the first EVM experience and for many the experience was not pleasant.

A total of 361 Bangladeshis, stranded in the coronavirus-hit Chinese city Wuhan, are set to return home early today.

The United States and other countries tightened travel curbs yesterday and businesses said they were facing supply problems because of the coronavirus in China, a day after the World Health Organization declared a global health emergency.

The Election Commission hopes that the voter turnout will increase in Dhaka city elections with participation of young voters.

Chief Election Commissioner KM Nurul Huda yesterday requested the polling agents of the mayor and ward councillor candidates not to leave the polling centres even if they were asked to do so.

A little over a year after the parliamentary election, the two arch-rival political parties once again lock horns in the much-anticipated Dhaka city polls today amid widespread fears of violence and concerns over the use of EVMs.

Bangladeshi nationals working at foreign missions in Dhaka and international organisations will be able to work as local observers, not as foreign observers, in the Dhaka city elections, Chief Election Commissioner KM Nurul Huda said yesterday.

Combating the mosquito menace was a key promise in the manifesto of Mohammad Hanif, who became the first elected mayor of the undivided Dhaka City Corporation in 1994.