China yesterday said Australia’s sudden scrapping of a Belt and Road Initiative deal risked “serious harm” to relations and warned of retaliatory actions, but Canberra insisted it would not be bullied.

More than 1,700 people were detained by police at rallies in support of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny in dozens of cities across Russia, an independent monitor reported yesterday.

The BNP has sought an explanation from the party’s standing committee member Mirza Abbas over his statement on the disappearance of the party leader M Ilias Ali.

India yesterday posted a global record for the number of coronavirus cases in a day, as US President Joe Biden hailed his government’s “stunning” vaccination drive.

The ongoing Covid-19 crisis has been taking a heavy toll on low-income groups as they have been facing income losses and taking out loans to cope with the pandemic fallout.

Intelligence and regulatory bodies fear a possible labour unrest ahead of Eid caused by the uncertainty over payment of salaries and festival bonuses of workers of some factories affected by the pandemic.

The six-wheeled robot has converted some carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere into oxygen, the first time this has happened on another planet, the space agency said Wednesday.

The Pakistan radio said tonight that Pakistan had decided to close down the Deputy High Commission office in Calcutta and had asked India to close her Deputy High Commission office in Dacca.

A Khulna court yesterday rejected the bail petition of a local journalist in a case filed under the Digital Security Act over circulating misinformation on Facebook against the city mayor.

People living by the Kirtonkhola river in Barishal noticed in March this year that the river’s water had become unusually salty.

Although the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh is set to expire on May 31, no brand has yet agreed to re-sign the agreement.

Germany’s defence ministry yesterday said it planned to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan in early July, after the United States announced plans to pull out by September 11.

Russian President Vladimir Putin called communist Cuba’s new leader Miguel Diaz-Canel Tuesday to discuss strengthening the two countries’ “strategic partnership,” the Russian foreign ministry said in a message retweeted by its embassy in Havana.

The Bangladesh High Commissioner to the UK Saida Muna Tasneem has briefed UK’s all-party parliamentary group (APPG) about the inconvenience caused by UK’s travel ban that has put Bangladesh among those nations on its “red list”.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina yesterday allocated Tk 10.50 crore for district deputy commissioners to provide assistance to the poor, distressed and insolvent people who were affected due to the ongoing lockdown.

Indonesia’s navy is searching for a missing submarine with 53 people on board that went missing yesterday and is seeking help from neighbouring Australia and Singapore in the hunt, the Indonesian military chief told Reuters.

A South Korean court yesterday dismissed a case brought by a handful of World War II sex slaves and their families against the Japanese government, saying Tokyo enjoyed “sovereign immunity” over the issue.

Scientists in Chile’s parched Atacama desert, the world’s driest, have discovered the remains of a previously unknown species of dinosaur that millions of years ago lived among lush greenery in what is now a moonscape of rock and sand.

A Khulna court yesterday sent a journalist arrested under the Digital Security Act to jail.

The business as usual approach of the international community has encouraged Myanmar to flout the decisions of international mechanisms and continue mass atrocities on ethnic minorities with a greater sense of impunity, said State Minister for Foreign Affairs Shahriar Alam.