Bangladesh

At least six people were killed and several injured on Saturday when a fire broke out after an explosion at an oxygen plant in southeastern Bangladesh, officials said.

The death toll could rise as a rescue operation was ongoing at the plant at Sitakunda, 40km (25 miles) from the south-eastern port city of Chittagong, they added.

It was not...

A searing heatwave in parts of southern Asia in April was made at least 30 times more likely by climate breakdown, according to a study by international scientists.

Unusually high temperatures of up to 45C (113F) were recorded last month in monitoring stations in parts of India, Bangladesh, Thailand and Laos.

The heat caused deaths and widespread...

The only newspaper of Bangladesh’s main opposition party has stopped publishing after a government suspension order was upheld, stoking fears about media freedom in the south Asian nation.

Campaigners and foreign governments including the US have long expressed worries about efforts by the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, to silence criticism and...

Cyclone Mocha brought strong winds and torrential rain to parts of Bangladesh and Myanmar on Sunday, with refugee camps bearing the brunt of the category-5 storm, leaving at least five dead and causing half a million people to be evacuated.

The region was rocked by sustained winds of more than 160mph as Mocha made landfall, whipping up gusts closer...

Aloka Gonju didn’t take much notice of the discoloured patch of skin on her left hand until her fingers began to stiffen and hurt. It became a struggle to pick leaves at the tea plantation where she works in Bangladesh.

“I had no idea what was happening to me,” says the 47-year-old, whose wages support her husband, four children and three gra...

The UN has been forced to cut food rations for Rohingya refugees by 17% and has warned of “unconscionable” further cuts in April as a result of dwindling international donations.

The World Food Programme (WFP) said it needs $125m (£104m) urgently to avoid the further cuts.

“The repercussions of these cuts will be immediate and long lasting, as r...

Tropical cyclone Mocha intensified to become “very dangerous”, the World Meteorological Organisation has said, warning of violent winds, floods and possible landslides in Bangladesh which could hit the world’s biggest refugee camp in Cox’s bazar.

Cyclone Mocha is predicted to make landfall on Sunday near the Bangladesh-Myanmar border, according to...

On his first day at high school, Khalid Hussain was accused of being the son of a war criminal. “A group of Bengali kids surrounded us and made it clear that we were not welcome. The incident still shocks me to this day,” says Hussain, who was 12 at the time. “But we just wanted to learn.”

It was not the last time Hussain, now a lawyer at the...

Hundreds of Bangladeshi firefighters have battled an inferno that raged through a popular clothing market in the capital, Dhaka, and covered the city’s oldest neighbourhoods in black smoke.

No deaths have been reported, but shop owners and fire officials told reporters that the famous Bongo Bazar and three adjacent markets had been gutted in the...

It was a warm afternoon in May 2020 when Ahmed Kabir Kishore, dozing lazily, awoke to 20 men breaking down the door of his apartment in Dhaka, Bangladesh. With guns waved in his face, he was dragged to a van outside. “Move away, we have arrested a terrorist,” he heard them shout at the crowds.

Kishore was not a terrorist. He was a cartoonist whose...

Hamida Khatun is sick of moving. The 60-year-old has been displaced about 20 times during her life, always as a result of climate disasters.“They seem to follow me wherever I go,” she says. But in 2019, the floods were the worst. “I thought at some point it would stop but it just kept rising and rising,” says Khatun. She saved herself from drownin...

India

Some days, Abha Kujur, 39, feels like the family “servant”. The housework is unending at the tiny rented flat in New Delhi she shares with her husband and three children. Her son, Nitesh, 18, goes to college, and her daughters, Neha, 23, and Nisha, 20, work as apprentices, but Kujur’s daily grind is as busy as it ever was.

“When they were y...

Four weeks ago, a reporter in Bangladesh was hauled from his office, badly beaten – and then thrown from the roof of his building, leaving him with fractures in his back, three broken ribs and a machete wound on his head.

The journalist, Ayub Meahzi, believes he was targeted for reporting on alleged local government ties to a criminal group.

The...

Bangladesh police on Wednesday charged a reporter from a leading newspaper with producing “false news”, stoking fears about media freedom, after an article about high food prices went viral.

Shamsuzzaman Shams was picked up from his home in the industrial town of Savar just outside Dhaka at about 4am by plainclothes police, according to his...

The cracks on the walls started to appear two days earlier. But despite the warning signs, Moushumi Begum still came to work on 24 April 2013. Moments later, she was buried under heavy rubble. “It all happened so quickly. I vividly remember every detail about that day, even though it was 10 years ago,” says Begum, who spent three hours trapped und...

An estimated 12,000 Rohingya have been left without shelter after a fire tore through part of a cramped refugee camp in southern Bangladesh on Sunday, destroying health centres, learning facilities and mosques.

The fire broke out at Camp 11 of Cox’s Bazar refugee camp, which is home to more than 1 million Rohingya refugees, including 700,000 who...

Dozens of hungry and weak Rohingya Muslims were found on a beach in Indonesia’s northernmost province on Sunday after weeks at sea, officials said.

The group of 58 men arrived on Indrapatra beach at Ladong, a fishing village in Aceh Besar district, said local police chief Rolly Yuiza Away. Villagers who saw the group of Rohingya on a rickety wooden...