DHAKA: Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina imposed a nationwide curfew last week and used the army to quell protests against job quotas that killed nearly 150 people, but anger against her government does not seem to have abated.
The protests, which started in universities and colleges earlier this month, quickly turned into a more widespread agitation against Hasina and her government.
Police fired rubber bullets, tear gas and lobbed sound grenades to disperse tens of thousands of protesters who came out on the streets. The government denied any live rounds were fired, but hospital sources said dead and injured people had wounds from bullets and shot gun pellets.
Rights groups and critics say Hasina has become increasingly autocratic during her last 15 years in power and her rule has been marked by mass arrests of political opponents and activists, forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings, charges she denies.
Badiul Alam Majumdar, the secretary of Shushahoner Jonno Nagorik, a Dhaka-based civil society platform for good governance, said the protests were “just the tip of the iceberg” and the use of force against students will breed further discontent against Hasina’s government.
“People are being deprived of their basic rights, with a significant lack of human rights and justice. They can’t cast their votes freely,” he said. “This widespread frustration and anger among the people is evident in the protests.”
Government official were not immediately available for comment. But officials have said previously no students were involved in arson or violence, and instead blamed opposition parties.
Hasina, 76, first led her Awami League party to victory in elections in 1996, serving one five-year term before regaining power in 2009, never to lose again.
She won a fourth straight term in office in January elections that were boycotted by the main opposition party and also marred by deadly protests.
While Hasina managed to overcome discontent and return the country toward some normalcy this week, it will not be “business as usual” going forward, said Zafar Sobhan, the editor of English daily Dhaka Tribune.
“This crisis shows that the government needs to listen to the young people of the country and take their concerns seriously,” said Sobhan, adding that the quota issue served as a proxy for several other key issues.
“The government has been put on notice that enough is enough and it needs to address the legitimate concerns of the public,” he said.
‘MURDERS SHOULD BE INVESTIGATED’
Asif Mahmud, a student leader, told Reuters that he was abducted and abused by authorities for four days and then dumped on the road this week. His allegations could not be independently verified and government officials could not be immediately reached for comment on a holiday.
“There have been killings, nobody is addressing that,” Mahmud said. “These murders should be investigated. Those who ran this massacre, we will demand their prompt punishment.”
The United Nations, international rights groups, the US and Britain have criticized the use of force and asked Dhaka to uphold the right to peaceful protests.
Hasina said she was forced to impose the curfew to protect citizens and state property, blaming the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and the Jamaat-e-Islami party for the violence, charges they denied.
Tarique Rahman, the exiled acting chairman of BNP, said that Hasina was involved in “mass murder” during the protests.
The daughter of the country’s founding father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who led Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan, Hasina has been credited with turning around the economy and the massive garments industry.
But the economy has also slowed sharply since the Russia-Ukraine war pushed up prices of fuel and food imports, forcing Bangladesh to turn last year to the International Monetary Fund for a $4.7 billion bailout.
Experts have blamed the latest unrest on stagnant job growth in the private sector and high rates of youth unemployment that have made government jobs, with their regular wage hikes and other privileges, more attractive.
Failing to tame inflation, which currently hovers around 10 percent, and unemployment was not due to a dearth of options but rather due to a lack of political will, the experts said.
“One critical policy approach could have been to increase investment into the services sectors like health and education where it would be possible to create more decent jobs, especially for the educated and relatively young people,” said Mohammad Abdur Razzaque, chairman of Dhaka think tank Research and Policy Integration for Development.
Bangladesh protests quelled but anger, discontent remain
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Bangladesh protests quelled but anger, discontent remain
- The protests, which started in universities and colleges this month, quickly turned into a more widespread agitation against government
- Police fired rubber bullets, tear gas and lobbed sound grenades to disperse tens of thousands of protesters who came out on the streets
Trump administration rescinds Biden-era guidance on emergency abortions
- The Biden-era memo was issued in July 2022, weeks after the US Supreme Court struck down the constitutionally enshrined right to abortion
The Biden-era memo was issued in July 2022, weeks after the US Supreme Court struck down the constitutionally enshrined right to abortion.
As health providers suddenly found themselves embroiled in legal uncertainty over abortion, the memo provided an interpretation of the 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), arguing it supersedes state abortion laws when needed to stabilize a pregnant patient.
The directive was fiercely contested by anti-abortion advocates.
In a letter Tuesday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said the EMTALA guidance did not reflect the current administration’s policy.
“CMS is rescinding this memo ... effective May 29, 2025, consistent with Administration policy,” it said.
Offering its own interpretation, CMS said EMTALA provides the right for any hospital patient to receive “either stabilizing treatment or an appropriate transfer to another hospital.”
It said the US Health and Human Services would no longer enforce the Biden-era guidance.
The pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute said the Trump administration’s revocation of the EMTALA guidelines showed “callous disregard for the law and people’s lives.”
Lawrence O. Gostin, a health law expert at Georgetown University, wrote in the New York Times that the CMS letter “basically gives a bright green light to hospitals in red states to turn away pregnant women who are in peril.”
According to Guttmacher, 13 US states, mostly in the south and east of the country, have “a total abortion ban” as of May 28.
While these states generally provide narrow exceptions in the event of a threat to the mother’s life, it is unclear what constitutes a life-threatening condition in the eyes of the law.
Since returning to office, US President Donald Trump has taken a series of moves to restrict abortion access.
In his first week back in the White House, Trump revoked two executive orders protecting access to a pill widely used to terminate pregnancies and the ability to travel to states where the procedure is not banned.
Cologne starts its biggest evacuation since 1945 to defuse WWII bombs
- Even 80 years after the end of the war, unexploded bombs dropped during wartime air raids are frequently found in Germany
COLOGNE: More than 20,000 residents were being evacuated from part of Cologne’s city center on Wednesday as specialists prepared to defuse three unexploded US bombs from World War II that were unearthed earlier this week.
Even 80 years after the end of the war, unexploded bombs dropped during wartime air raids are frequently found in Germany.
Disposing of them sometimes entails large-scale precautionary evacuations such as the one on Wednesday, though the location this time was unusually prominent and this is Cologne’s biggest evacuation since 1945. There have been bigger evacuations in other cities.
Authorities on Wednesday morning started evacuating about 20,500 residents from an area within a 1,000-meter (3,280-foot) radius of the bombs, which were discovered on Monday during preparatory work for road construction.
They were found in the Deutz district, just across the Rhine River from Cologne’s historic center.
As well as homes, the area includes 58 hotels, nine schools, several museums and office buildings and the Messe/Deutz train station. It also includes three bridges across the Rhine — among them the heavily used Hohenzollern railway bridge, which leads into Cologne’s central station and is being shut during the defusal work itself. Shipping on the Rhine will also be suspended.
The plan is for the bombs to be defused during the course of the day. When exactly that happens depends on how long it takes for authorities to be sure that everyone is out of the evacuation zone.
Trump envoy says risk levels ‘going way up’ after Ukraine struck Russian bombers
MOSCOW: US President Donald Trump’s Ukraine envoy said the risk of escalation from the war in Ukraine was “going way up” after Ukrainian forces used drones to strike nuclear-capable bombers at several air bases deep inside Russia.
Ukraine said it attacked airfields in Siberia and Russia’s far north over the weekend, striking targets up to 4,300 km (2,670 miles) from the front lines of the conflict.
“I’m telling you, the risk levels are going way up — I mean, what happened this weekend,” Trump’s envoy, Keith Kellogg, told Fox News.
“People have to understand in the national security space: when you attack an opponent’s part of their national survival system, which is their triad, the nuclear triad, that means your risk level goes up because you don’t know what the other side is going to do. You’re not sure.”
Russia and the United States together hold about 88 percent of all nuclear weapons.
Each power has three main ways of attacking with nuclear warheads, known as the nuclear triad: strategic bombers, land-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-launched ballistic missiles.
Kellogg said the damage to the Russian bombers at the weekend was less important than the psychological impact on Russia and that he was particularly concerned by unconfirmed reports of a Ukrainian attack on a naval base in northern Russia.
White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said on Tuesday that Trump had not been informed in advance of Ukraine’s drone attacks on Russia’s bombers.
Russia and Ukraine held talks in Istanbul on Monday but made little headway toward ending the war that has raged since Moscow sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine more than three years ago.
Kellogg said Ukraine had come up with a “very reasonable position” but Russia had come with a “very maximalist position,” and that the aim now was to “try to bridge that.”
Australian accused in mushroom murders recounts fatal lunch
- Erin Patterson is accused of using poisonous mushrooms to murder three elderly relatives of her estranged husband
- Prosecution accuses her of knowingly serving the guests lethal death cap mushrooms in a Beef Wellington pastry dish
SYDNEY: An Australian woman accused of using poisonous mushrooms to murder three elderly relatives of her estranged husband gave on Wednesday her account of the fatal lunch, in a case that has gripped the public.
Erin Patterson, 50, is charged with the July 2023 murders of her mother-in-law Gail Patterson, father-in-law Donald Patterson and Gail’s sister, Heather Wilkinson, along with the attempted murder of Ian Wilkinson, Heather’s husband.
The prosecution accuses her of knowingly serving the guests lethal death cap mushrooms in a Beef Wellington pastry dish at her home in Leongatha, a town of about 6,000 some 135 km (84 miles) from Melbourne.
She denies the charges, with her defense calling the deaths a “terrible accident,” but faces a life sentence if found guilty.
She wept repeatedly on Wednesday as she told the court she might have accidentally included foraged mushrooms in the meal she served.
“Now I think there was a possibility there were foraged ones in there,” she said in questioning by her lawyer, Colin Mandy.
The court also heard that Patterson, who began giving evidence on Monday as the first witness for her own defense, had invented medical issues partly to elicit sympathy from her estranged husband’s relatives, as she felt they were growing apart.
“I didn’t want their care of me to stop, so I kept it going. I shouldn’t have done it,” she told the court.
“Did you lie to them?” Mandy asked.
“I did lie to them,” she replied, through tears.
The prosecution accuses Patterson of having invented the medical issues to lure the victims to her home for the meal, a claim she denies.
Investigation panic
Previously the court heard that shortly after the lunch, Patterson disposed of a food dehydrator found to contain traces of death cap mushrooms, while mobile phones she owned were reset to factory status three times.
On Wednesday, Patterson said she had disposed of the dehydrator before a visit from child protection workers investigating her living arrangements.
“I was scared of the conversation that might flow about the meal and the dehydrator,” she said. “I was scared they would blame me for it, for making everyone sick. I was scared that they would remove the children.”
The phones were reset either due to damage or because she panicked during the police investigation, she told the court.
The prosecution rested its case on Monday, after a month of evidence from witnesses, including relatives and medical, forensic and mushroom experts.
The trial, which began on April 29, has drawn intense media interest, with podcasters, journalists and documentary-makers descending on the town of Morwell, about two hours east of Melbourne, where it is being held.
State broadcaster ABC’s daily podcast about the proceedings is currently Australia’s most popular, while many domestic newspapers have run live blogs.
The trial, set to conclude this month, continues.
Madrid’s ghost towns revived as Spain’s housing crisis escalates
- Sesena, a development near Madrid, gained notoriety as one of the so-called ‘ghost towns’ created when Spain’s property bubble burst in 2008
- Sesena has been adopted as a commuter town as Madrid overflows, even though it is located in the neighboring Castile-La Mancha region
SESENA, Spain: The first call came two minutes after estate agent Segis Gomez posted a listing in Sesena, a development near Madrid that gained notoriety as one of the so-called “ghost towns” created when Spain’s property bubble burst in 2008.
Half-built and half-empty for more than a decade, these days the squatters have gone from this development 40 kilometers south of the capital and middle-class families, driven out of the city center by an acute housing crisis, are moving in. Construction, meanwhile, has restarted.
Demand is so strong in Sesena that Gomez has a waiting list of 70 people for each property. Property prices have recovered their original value after plunging to less than half during the crisis, he said.
As anger grows over the cost of housing in Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has made providing affordable homes one of his main goals – even as he encourages population growth through immigration. The size of the challenge is clear in Madrid, which grew by 140,000 people in 2024, but only registered permits to build 20,000 new homes.
Short supply is being exacerbated by a boom in holiday lets, record migration and onerous planning laws.
“The problem is that we can’t match supply and demand quickly enough. So prices go up, or people have to trade price for distance,” said Carles Vergara, a real estate professor at IESE Business School in Madrid.
Sesena has been adopted as a commuter town as Madrid overflows, even though it is located in the neighboring Castile-La Mancha region and still lacks good transport links to the capital and public services, which caused homebuyers to reject it in the past.
Its founder and original developer, Francisco Hernando, had a vision of 13,000 affordable apartments with gardens and swimming pools on the Spanish plain where author Cervantes set his best-known work Don Quixote, but the project became a byword for speculative greed and corruption. Only 5,000 homes ended up being built. Hernando, who began his project in 2004, failed to tell homebuyers he hadn’t secured access to water or that the town had no public transport or schools. Hernando died in 2020.
When the market collapsed, initial investors saw the value of their property plummet, while many homes ended up in the hands of banks.
Madrid’s expansion
Today, Sesena teems with life as parents drop children at its three schools, drink coffee in its bars and visit recently-opened gyms and pharmacies. Impact Homes, a developer, is constructing 156 one-to-four bedroom apartments it expects to complete this year. Next door, another building has already pre-sold 49 percent of its units, it said in an email. “Sesena is at 100 percent,” said Jaime de Hita, the town’s mayor.
Nestor Delgado moved to Sesena in 2021 with his family from Carabanchel in south Madrid because an apartment cost 20 percent less to rent. In May, he bought a house with his wife for €240,000 ($272,808).
“We chose (Sesena) because we can afford it,” Delgado, 34, said.
The trade-off is rising before 5 a.m. (0300 GMT) to be among the first in the queue for the 6.30 a.m. bus to Madrid to arrive at his construction job by 8 a.m. or face an hour’s wait for the next bus.
Back to life
Other ghost towns are also coming back to life. Valdeluz, a development 75 km east of Madrid originally envisioned to house 30,000 people, was abandoned a quarter of the way through when the property bubble burst.
Mayor Enrique Quintana told Reuters the town’s 6,000-strong population is swelling with people from Madrid and could expand by 50 percent in the next four years.
A development on the edge of the village of Bernuy de Porreros, 100km north of Madrid, which as recently as six years ago was mostly abandoned, is now bustling with activity as handymen put the finishing touches on homes.
Lucia, a 37-year-old state employee, bought her house in April. Her daily commute to Madrid involves a 15-minute drive to the train station in Segovia and 28 minutes on the high-speed train, which costs her 48 euros for 30 trips thanks to a frequent traveler discount.
The development began to revive when Spain’s so-called bad bank Sareb, which was set up to take bad loans from the financial crisis, in 2021 began selling the homes for as little as €97,000. Four years later, one property was resold for double that, said resident Nuria Alvarez.
Until recently a relatively compact city, Madrid is on the way to becoming a metropolis like Paris or London, with commuter zones stretching beyond its administrative boundaries, said Jose Maria Garcia, the regional government’s deputy housing minister.
The metropolitan area’s population of 7 million will grow by a million in the next 15 years, the government estimates. Madrid has a deficit of 80,000-100,000 homes that’s growing by 15,000 homes a year and plans to build 110,000 homes by 2028, Garcia said.
Sesena, meanwhile, is once again dreaming big.
Its mayor, de Hita, said the town is securing permits for a new project dubbed Parquijote, with a proposed investment of €2.3 billion to build a logistics park that will create local jobs, along with 2,200 homes.
It’s no quixotic fantasy, de Hita said.
“This time we have learned from what happened,” he said. “It is fundamental that we look for growth by learning from the past.”
