bangla-news-radar

Monitor Bangladeshi newspapers from your AI assistant. Ask what the press is saying about a brand, a person, or a topic — and get back real headlines from real papers, in Bengali or English.

An MCP server built with FastMCP.

Unofficial. Not affiliated with any of the newspapers listed. It reads the public RSS feeds they already publish for syndication.

Why

There is no easy way to ask "which Bangladeshi papers are covering this right now?" — you open five tabs and scroll. This turns that into one question.

Useful for PR and brand monitoring, competitor tracking, or seeing how differently outlets frame the same story.

Related MCP server: @cyanheads/gdelt-mcp-server

Tools

Keyword matching is case-insensitive and works in Bengali.

Sources

Around 250+ current articles per scan, fetched in parallel.

Deliberately excluded: Jugantor, Kaler Kantho and bdnews24 return HTTP 403 to automated requests. That is their choice and this tool respects it — no spoofed headers, no scraping around the block.

No working feed found: Samakal (/feed serves HTML), Ittefaq, Bangla Tribune.

Install

Requires uv and Python 3.12+.

git clone https://github.com/Claudefarid/bangla-news-radar.git
cd bangla-news-radar
uv sync
uv run fastmcp install claude-code server.py:mcp

Restart your client, then ask it things like "Which Bangladeshi papers wrote about bKash this week?" No API key or login required.

Verify with uv run python test_server.py.

Notes for anyone building something similar

• The Daily Star's site-wide /rss.xml is stale — its newest item was over three months old when this was written. The per-section feeds (/business/rss.xml, etc.) are current. Check freshness before trusting any feed.

• Only Prothom Alo exposes a search API (it runs on Quintype, at /api/v1/search). The other papers offer feeds only, which is why scan_news searches within recent articles while deep_search reaches one paper's archive. The tool descriptions say so, so the model doesn't imply archive-wide coverage it does not have.

• The Daily Star puts HTML inside its <title> tags — headlines arrive wrapped in an unescaped <a href="...">. ElementTree parses that anchor as a child element, so findtext("title") returns an empty string rather than raising. Every Daily Star headline was blank, and since an empty headline matches no keyword, compare_coverage reported the paper as not covering topics it was covering all along. Read descendant text with "".join(element.itertext()). A silent parse failure that looks like a real editorial finding is the worst kind of bug in a monitoring tool.

• Feeds are fetched concurrently and one dead feed cannot sink a scan — failures come back in an unreachable field instead of raising.

Please be considerate

Headlines and summaries are the copyrighted work of the publishers. This is for monitoring, research and summarization — not republication. Requests identify themselves by User-Agent. Keep your volume sane.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Covers this code only, not any content retrieved through it.