On April 28, the people of Bangladesh had the chance to have their voices heard in municipal elections in the country’s two major cities. Unfortunately, the opposition has boycotted the elections on accusations of widespread vote rigging. Fair elections are needed to give the Bangladeshi people the opportunity to hold the governing
AL to account for using the nation’s founding tragedy for political gain, and push for reform of the ICT to open the door to a judicial mechanism that lives up to domestic and international standards and bolsters rule of ...
In Bangladesh, a draft of the Child Marriage Restraint Act has been sent to the Cabinet stating the minimum age of marriage will remain at 18 — but it will come with a clause.
This new “clause” means that while the legal age of marriage will remain at 18 for girls, marriage will be legal at 16 under special circumstances — if it is their parents’ wish, for example, or if a girl becomes pregnant.
Essentially, the new clause will allow the continuation of child marriage and prove perilous for young people in Bangladesh.
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The recent discursive assault on Islam and Muslims by the so-called “new atheists” is another moment in the sequence of never ending vilifications of Islam that Western culture seems to have an insatiable appetite for. There is a perverse quality to this culture and discourse of contempt. It is to some extent “performed” for consumption by social media and cable networks to satiate the daily appetite for controversy, outrage, moral judgment and value-based affirmations of the self. The new public intellectuals, who engage in this theatre of outrage, are professionals whose bottom line depends on the frequency and intensity with which the media covers such performed cultural conflicts. The most famous and popular of all new atheists, such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, are full servi...
The quickest way to grasp the nastiness of Bangladesh’s season of political turmoil is to visit the high dependency unit at Dhaka Medical College Hospital.
This is the ward for burn victims from roadside firebomb attacks, collateral damage from the long battle between Bangladesh’s “two ladies,” as the country’s two most important political leaders are known. On a recent morning, Mohammad Nazmul Mollah looked down the row of beds at three men who had been riding beside him in a truck, after unloading a shipment of sand, when a firebomb thrown by a protester smashed through the windshield.
Mr. Mollah, 25, was the lucky one, having jumped out the passenger-side window so quickly that his worst injuries were fractures to bones and kneecaps. The eight men to his right were unlucky: fiv...
The Nobel Peace Prize is about to bow out to critics. As of Jan. 1, the Oslo-based Norwegian Nobel Committee that selects the winners has a new secretary, Olav Njølstad, who announced that “changes loom” in a recent interview.
However, Njølstad added, the changes “will not be dramatic”, making it unlikely that they will satisfy the full makeover demanded by The Nobel Peace Prize Watch, a newly-formed advocacy group
wishing to reverse and undo international militarism.
In a letter sent in February to the Nobel Prize awarder...
A jittery silence has fallen over the street where Salahuddin Ahmed, a top official of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, is believed to have been abducted a month ago.
The caretaker who opened the compound gate to a group of men, and told several journalists they identified themselves as police detectives, can no longer be found, friends on the street say. Neither can the maid who opened the door to the apartment. The owner of
the apartment, the deputy managing director of a bank, is also unreachable.
“Of course...
AL to account for using the nation’s founding tragedy for political gain, and push for reform of the ICT to open the door to a judicial mechanism that lives up to domestic and international standards and bolsters rule of ...
