Several months ago, Bangladeshi radio personality R. J. Apu, who grew up reading the comics throughout the 1990s — and whose actual name is Zahidul Haque Apu — created cover art that shows Tintin in various cities across the country.
Dhaka police say they were attacked without reason. BNP leaders denounced the police actions as an "injustice" — part of a government plot to exclude BNP from upcoming elections.
There is another story about youthful anger in Bangladesh. No, not radicalization. It’s the story of hip-hop.
The company is a big buyer from factories in Bangladesh.
Rongmala Begum, like many of Bangladesh’s garment workers, doesn’t know how old she is. She doesn’t have a birth certificate, which is common for the rural poor here. She thinks she’s in her 40s. She has an identification card, but she can’t read it. Begum is illiterate.
The Rana Plaza collapse made companies and consumers more aware of working conditions in the clothing factories. In some places, reforms have made workers safer, but the changes are far from universal.
Bengali American Sultana Begum knew the two Emory University students, and one UC-Berkeley student, who were killed by militants in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She says the Bengali presence at Emory is small, but representative of a diaspora with strong cultural and family ties to Bangladesh. And she worries that the secular quality of their country is being threatened.
Men wielding machetes hacked to death the founder of the only LGBT magazine in Bangladesh on Monday.
A "Made in Bangladesh" tag on clothing typically also means "made by women," because they make up 80 percent of the country's garment-factory workforce. Many of them send the money they earn back to villages in the countryside.
In 2013, a traditional marriage ceremony took place at the Hindu temple in Pirojpur, Bangladesh, just as has been happening for hundreds of years. The only problem was that both people getting married were women and same-sex marriage is not accepted in Bangladesh. Now, instead of finding happiness, one of the brides is facing criminal charges — accused of abduction.
In recent years, horrible disasters in Bangladesh's garment industry have left hundreds of garment workers dead or injured. Since then, both international clothing labels and the Bangladeshi government have promised reforms. But some of the workers have also responded by joining unions. And female workers are taking more of a leadership role in that struggle.