SoulFullMent

Whenever people talk about the greater Bengal, divided in two halves—West Bengal, consisting of 18 districts of India, and East Bengal, which is now Bangladesh—the linguistic commonality along with what many term as 'Bengaliness' creates a myth of cultural affinity and a networked relationship maintained across the national divide.

10 years ago, the Bangladesh women's cricket team embarked upon their first ever Asia Cup journey. The Women in Green were all set to play the opening match of the four-team tournament, taking place in Sri Lanka, against India.

The whole world on one hand is trying its level best to curb plastic pollution while on the other hand, using and dumping it mindlessly. While solid plastics only(!) pollutes the environment, microbeads are the latest threat to nature, especially for humans. Products which have microbeads include soaps, toothpaste, facewash,

What started off as a fun way to spend time with her son at a fair in Kuala Lampur, for Masheed Ahmad, took a surprise turn when everyone started applauding her for the earrings she had made from polymer clay.

Stress is part and parcel of modern life and it isn't necessarily a bad thing. Positive stress motivates us and helps us to get things done. I suspect most of us would be living a vegetative life if there were no internal or external stressors at all to deal with! However, stress becomes negative when it demands too much personal and

A 9-year-old English bulldog is named the winner of the 2018 World’s Ugliest Dog contest in the San Francisco Bay Area.

When bank technicians in India are finally summoned to investigate why an ATM (automated teller machine) had not been working for days, they begin to smell a rat.

Thanks to the June 8 Star Weekend issue on highlighting various environmental concerns across the country. My attention was caught by “Dark flows the river Turag” and “The gradual dying of our rivers” because of my own bitter experience on the Buriganga recently.

Newly-wed Munia spent this Eid cooking for, and serving, her in-laws, while pining for her parental home and a glimpse of her parents. When the 28-year-old had approached her husband about visiting her parents, he had simply dismissed the idea. Her first Eid after marriage was thus marked by a huge fight with her husband who chose to prioritise his family and some ill-formed notions of custom over the happiness of his wife and his in-laws.

We have an education system in which student after student—countless of them—write the same definitions as answers. They probably get the same marks too— four out of five, nine out of ten.

In the five years following the collapse of Rana Plaza, Bangladesh has made real and unprecedented progress in improving workers’ health and safety in its garment industry. Now, the “sweatshop business model” of global capitalism is undermining those gains as international clothing brands cut prices paid to supplier factories in Bangladesh, and continue to roam the world looking for the lowest production costs, the most vulnerable workforce, and the weakest, most compliant governments.

No parent is ever prepared to hear that his or her child is anything other than happy and healthy and learning that one's child might have autism can be particularly frightening. But there are many ways in which special education can help improve the quality of life for children who suffer from Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

As communication technology develops, people have access to more information than ever before, literally at their fingertips. But how many of us can say that we are truly well informed?

She is just 15 years old, but has already designed a smart device that generates electric power from raindrops. Reyhan Jamalova, a ninth grade student at the Istek Lyceum in Baku, Azerbaijan, and a friend, Zahra Gasimzade, assisted by their physics tutors, worked for four months running calculations and developing a device to harvest energy from rainwater.

A bottle of sauce to achieve freedom. This is the goal of SfruttaZero, a project born in Puglia, Italy, to give dignified work to the day labourers who flock to Italy's “heel” during the tomato harvest. The idea was born in the ghetto of the city of Nardò, where hundreds of migrants live packed together in shameful conditions and work in the fields on starvation wages while being subject to all kinds of abuse.

Aging populations are a problem for all EU countries. But Poland lags behind the rest regarding employment of senior citizens and their involvement in citizen initiatives. Countrywide, barely 10 percent of golden-agers devote some time to voluntary work.

Rabia Balkhi was one of the first female Persian poets. She was killed by her brother, a king, hundreds of years ago for falling in love with a slave and daring to write poetry in a male-dominated culture. Much like her, women of modern-day Afghanistan still face violence because of their writing (namely journalists), or are murdered because of love affairs.

There are few things worse than being neglected into oblivion. The olive trees of Oliete, a village in Teruel, Spain, were disappearing for this very reason until four years ago. Located in one of the most deserted areas of Europe and, due to rural exodus, Oliete's 100,000 olive trees seemed doomed to dry out and die until hundreds of “godparents” came to their rescue.

“My Swiss family is incredible. They have helped me so much,” says Morad Essa, a young Eritrean and the first migrant to be welcomed into a Swiss family. He arrived in 2015 in Lully, a small Vaudois municipality and the first in Switzerland to host migrants, a practice that has now taken off in several Swiss cantons.