Bangladesh Prime Minister Tajuddin Ahmad said today that the refugees now in India were keen on coming back home.

The Bangladesh Climate Trust Fund (BCTF) has warned Padma Bank of legal action over its failure to pay back the fixed deposit receipt (FDR) worth Tk 29.1 crore upon maturity.

The Group of Seven richest democracies yesterday sought to counter China’s growing influence by offering developing nations an infrastructure plan that would rival President Xi Jinping’s multi-trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The latest TIB report on the government’s response to Covid-19 consisted of “wrong information from the first to the last”, Health Minister Zahid Maleque said yesterday.

Indian start-up Mylab Discovery Solutions hopes that its inexpensive Covid-19 home test kit -- the country’s first -- will help the massive South Asian nation better track the pandemic’s spread among its 1.3-billion people.

Bangladesh has requested the Saudi government to waive the seven-day mandatory quarantine for Bangladeshi workers in the Kingdom as Dhaka will ensure quarantine here before their departure.

At least 13 people were wounded in a shooting in downtown Austin, Texas early on Saturday, police said, adding the suspected shooter was still at large.

Japan’s House of Councilors has unanimously passed a resolution, condemning the coup d’état in Myanmar and calling for early recovery of the democratic political system.

Azerbaijan yesterday handed over to Armenia 15 prisoners of war captured during last year’s hostilities over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, the foreign ministry in Baku said.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Friday that emergency department visits for suspected suicide attempts by teenage girls rose significantly last year compared to 2019, highlighting the mental health impact of the pandemic.

About a quarter of Mexico’s 126 million people are estimated to have been infected with the coronavirus, the health ministry said on Friday, far more than the country’s confirmed infections.

A firebrand Pakistani scholar has been detained for making death threats against Nobel prize laureate Malala Yousafzai over her comments on marriage, officials said Friday.

A 35-year-old Chinese national held by India’s Border Security Force, near the border with Bangladesh in West Bengal’s Malda district, for illegal entry on June 10, has claimed he runs a hotel in a posh locality of Gurugram -- a satellite city in Delhi -- along with an Indian partner, police sources said.

The UN rights chief yesterday said that violence was escalating across Myanmar, warning that the country had plunged into a “human rights catastrophe” since the February 1 coup.

Police yesterday detained 12 Rohingyas in Noakhali’s Companiganj upazila for fleeing a refugee camp at Bhasan Char in the district’s Hatiya upazila.

Two years ago, when she was 18, Tania (not her real name) married Jahidul Islam Rony, 27, a conductor of a city bus. Their days were passing well until she discovered that her husband was a drug addict and irregular in his job.

BNP Chairperson Khaleda Zia currently does not have any post-Covid complications, but she is still at risk because of her old age, the party said yesterday.

Twenty general and science and technology universities have postponed holding of uniform admission tests due to Covid-19.

Rivers are likely to erode about 28 square kilometres of land this year, which is more than the land eroded last year, according to a research body of the water resources ministry.

The United States appealed today to India and Pakistan to exercise restraint and urged the Pakistanis to restore normalcy in East Pakistan through “peaceful political accommodation”.