"Nusrat Jahan Rafi was doused with kerosene and set on fire at her school in Bangladesh. Less than two weeks earlier, she had filed a sexual harassment complaint..."

"...against her headmaster.... Nusrat, who was 19, was from Feni, a small town 100 miles (160km) south of Dhaka. She was studying at a madrassa, or Islamic school. On 27 March, she said the headmaster called her into his office and repeatedly touched her in an inappropriate manner. Before things could go any further she ran out...  At the local police station she gave a statement. She should have been provided with a safe environment to recall her traumatic experiences. Instead she was filmed by the officer in charge on his phone as she described the ordeal. In the video Nusrat is visibly distressed and tries to hide her face with her hands. The policeman is heard calling the complaint 'no big deal' and telling her to move her hands from her face. The video was later leaked to local media. According to a statement given by Nusrat, a fellow female student took her to the roof of the school, saying one of her friends was being beaten up. When Nusrat reached the rooftop four or five people, wearing burqas, surrounded her and allegedly pressured her to withdraw the case against the headmaster. When she refused, they set her on fire. Police Bureau of Investigation chief Banaj Kumar Majumder said the killers wanted 'to make it look like a suicide'. Their plan failed when Nusrat was rescued after they fled the scene.... 'One of the killers was holding her head down with his hands, so kerosene wasn't poured there and that's why her head wasn't burned'... In the ambulance, fearing she might not survive, she recorded a statement on her brother's mobile phone. 'The teacher touched me, I will fight this crime till my last breath,' you can hear her say."

BBC reports.

"A car powered by compressed natural gas was traveling through a bazaar in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, when the cylinder stored in the back exploded..."

"The blast flipped the car. It then ignited several other cylinders that were being used at a street-side restaurant.... A wall of fire surged across the street, engulfing bicycles, rickshaws, cars, people, everything in its path. The inferno claimed at least 110 lives in one of the most historic neighborhoods in Bangladesh.... 'This isn’t about poverty, it’s about greed,' said Nizamuddin Ahmed, an architect in Dhaka. 'The people storing these chemicals in residential buildings are rich — they have cars, nice homes, children studying abroad.'"

The NYT reports.

"Bangladesh is one of the few Muslim countries in the world where prostitution is legal."

"The Kandapara brothel in the district of Tangail is the oldest and second-largest in the country — it has existed for some 200 years. It was demolished in 2014, but has been established again with the help of local NGOs. Many of the women were born there, grew up there and didn’t know where else to go when it disappeared. Supporters of the brothel believe that sex work is also work — and that these women don’t want to do something else. The women themselves demonstrated for their rights as workers, and so at the end of 2014, the Bangladesh National Women Lawyers Association convinced the High Court that the eviction of the sex workers was an illegal act. The sex workers quickly returned to their homes. Today, the area’s 'brothel district' is surrounded by a wall...."

From a photo-essay in The Washington Post titled "Heartbreaking photos show what it’s like living in a walled city of a brothel."

These women don’t want to do something else....

"Attackers armed with machetes killed a blogger in Bangladesh on Friday, the 4th killing of an online critic of religious extremism in the Muslim-majority country in less than 6 months."

"Niloy Chatterjee, 40, a blogger who advocated secularism, was killed in his flat in the capital, Dhaka, said police official Mustafizur Rahman."

"We are speechless. He was demanding justice for killing of other bloggers," said Imran Sarker, head of a network of activists and bloggers. "Who will be next for demanding justice for Niloy?"

"When Avijit Roy was murdered, the police were standing nearby and watching the spectacle. The murderers left unscathed after their act..."

"When the murderers were escaping after killing Oyasiqur Rahman Babu, the police had been standing by then too... The police were paper tigers when women were being molested one by one before an audience of thousands at the new year celebrations. They were engaged primarily in not neglecting their duty. They were busy clearing the way for the sexual offenders to escape...."

From the last blog posts of Ananta Bijoy Das, who was hacked to death by masked men with machetes in Sylhet, Bangladesh.

Another Bangladesh blogger is hacked to death.

"Ananta Bijoy Das was attacked by a masked gang wielding machetes in the city of Sylhet," BBC reports.

Mr Das wrote blogs for Mukto-Mona, a website once moderated by Avijit Roy, himself hacked to death in February...

Sara Hossain, a lawyer and human rights activist in Dhaka, has told the BBC Mr Das and Mr Roy were on a list of targets. "They've always believed and written very vocally in support of free expression and they've very explicitly written about not following any religion themselves," she told the BBC World Service's Newsday programme. "These last two have been part of a blog called Mukto-Mona (Free Mind), which is about free thinking and is about explicitly taking on religious fundamentalism and particularly Islamic religious fundamentalism. Their names have been on lists of identified targets."

"The problem with free speech is that it’s hard, and self-censorship is the path of least resistance."

"But, once you learn to keep yourself from voicing unwelcome thoughts, you forget how to think them — how to think freely at all — and ideas perish at conception. Washiqur Rahman and Avijit Roy had more to fear than most of us, but they lived and died as free men."

The last paragraph of George Packer's New Yorker essay titled "Mute Button."

ADDED: I looked at the blog after publishing this post and saw that it sat atop a post about an American law professor who insisted that it was necessary for him to hide his Christianity in the United States.

Here's a Bible verse for timid Christians: "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery."

"Today is September 30th, also known as Blasphemy Rights day."

"This day is dedicated to those who are systematically being persecuted, harassed, or killed for their simple expression of Freethought (more precisely, for their ‘blasphemous’ views towards religion)."

Today, we state clearly that considering apostasy to be a criminal offense in state level in fact is an inexcusable offense. If being religious is someone’s right, then being critical to religion is also one’s right. There is nothing wrong to be critical to any idea or ideology, as CFI aptly put on its Blasphemy day banner – ‘Ideas do not need rights, People do’!

So wrote Avijit Roy on his blog Mukto Mona, on September 30, 2013.

Avijit Roy left his home in Atlanta for a speaking engagement in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Last Thursday:

As he walked back from the book fair, assailants plunged machetes and knives into Roy and his wife, killing him and leaving her bloodied and missing a finger.

Afterward, an Islamist group "Ansar Bangla-7" reportedly tweeted, "Target Down here in Bangladesh."

Woman found alive after 17 days in the wreckage...

... of the building that collapsed in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

On Friday afternoon, as soldiers cleared a floor, they heard sounds below, correspondents say. Officers immediately ordered workers to stop clearing the site.

Detection equipment was sent in and they saw a woman waving her hand. She shouted "I'm still here" and said her name was Reshma....

Rescuers said it was possible that the woman survived because of the large quantities of oxygen and water that were pumped into the ruins in the early stages of the rescue effort.

She had no serious injuries, but how did she keep from dying of thirst? Are we to understand that they hosed the immense pile of rubble and bodies — 1,000+ people died — and she drank the water dripped through to the place where she was enclosed? Astounding!

"The news of survival and new life came as the 72-hour deadline to change the operation from rescue to recovery approached..."

"... even as hundreds more people were feared still trapped amid the rubble."

Rescuers tunneling Friday into the rubble of the eight-story building that collapsed Wednesday discovered another 50 people trapped on what remained of its third floor.... Also Friday, two women who gave birth under the debris were rescued -- along with their infants....

Officials coordinating the operation have said the rescue efforts would end Saturday morning, when heavy equipment will be used to retrieve the remaining bodies and cart away the rubble.... The planned use of heavy equipment ignited protests from the people who crowded near the rescue site, many of them relatives who were showing pictures of the missing to whomever would pay attention and saying they did not believe 72 hours was long enough to wait.

"The Language Movement catalysed the assertion of Bengali national identity in Pakistan..."

"... and became a forerunner to Bengali nationalist movements, including the 6-point movement and subsequently the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971. In Bangladesh, 21 February is observed as Language Movement Day, a national holiday."

Bangladesh is today's "History of" country.

Here is the monument to the Language Movement martyrs:

 

What was so important about language?

When the state of Pakistan was formed in 1947, its two regions, East Pakistan (also called East Bengal) and West Pakistan, were split along cultural, geographical, and linguistic lines. In 1948, the Government of Pakistan ordained Urdu as the sole national language, sparking extensive protests among the Bengali-speaking majority of East Pakistan. 

Would East and West Pakistan be one country today if the government hadn't been so hardcore about Urdu?