I am delighted to be returning to Bangladesh in its Golden Jubilee year, and I look forward to celebrating the tremendous achievements of the past half century with friends old and new.
As is known, the current provisions of the EU’s Generalised System of preferences (EU-GSP) scheme are being revised at present in anticipation of the new scheme to be put in place as of January 1, 2024.
Upon reading the news headline for the incident I am about to discuss, I only felt a momentary, dull pain in my gut or thereabouts. Because while it is a shocking incident that would rob you of hope, the elements of the story are all too familiar to us all.
As tensions over the Taiwan Strait mount, everyone needs to think about whether war is inevitable. Ukrainian revolutionary Leon Trotsky once said: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” And if we slip into war by what World War I historian Barbara Tuchman called the March of Folly, can the Great Powers step back from mutual nuclear annihilation?
The year 2020 marked a watershed in global efforts to end tuberculosis (TB) by 2030. First, it was because, by 2020, the TB-affected countries aimed to achieve the first set of “End TB” milestones: a 35 percent reduction in TB deaths, a 20 percent
I have been feeling unwell since October 13. After the mayhem in Cumilla, I knew it wouldn’t be the last. With a broken heart, my father-in-law and I, along with my son, decided to continue with our tradition of puja visits and mandap-hopping, yet we were all deeply disturbed, witnessing the carnage unravelling with a helpless rage.
Today, on October 22, we celebrate National Road Safety Day. But why? Not why we care about safety—the devastating toll of accidents makes it clear why it is important—but why call it Road Safety Day? If we are using roads to travel from place to place, and we want to be able to do so safely, why not call it Safe Travels Day?
I was around 10 when I first heard about the idea of, as it was then known, global warming and how Bangladesh will one day go underwater as sea levels rise.
The pandemic has pointed out the need for placing the youth issues at the centre stage of policy discourse.
Seldom does an assembly or Lok Sabha election in any Indian state arouse as much interest among the people across the country’s border as in Bangladesh. The results of the recent assembly polls in West Bengal and Assam were keenly watched in India’s eastern neighbour. The interest in West Bengal was, understandably, much greater given the powerful linguistic and cultural connections between the state and Bangladesh.
Last week, I wrote in this daily about the need for Bangladesh to take a “whole of society” approach to international diplomacy on tackling climate change globally, rather than depending on the annual Conference of Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which meets only once a year for two weeks.
The Bangladesh Right to Information (RTI) Act 2009 is a unique piece of legislation. Most laws are largely founded on the concept of government responsibility to regulate citizen behaviour, but the RTI law establishes government accountability to its citizens.
Dr Firdausi Qadri of Icddr,b, Dr Salma Sultana of Model Livestock Advance-ment Foundation and Prof Samia Subrina of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET)—three Bangladeshi women scientists have recently made us proud.
As much of the world continues to reel under the coronavirus crisis, there is an increasingly frantic scramble for more and more vaccines in countries seeking to protect their people against the disease.
As the sun was about to set over the Gaza horizon on May 10, 2021, the community would not have known what was to happen that night. But they are citizens of Gaza, and what did happen would not have taken them by surprise. Israeli bombardment overnight of the besieged strip has claimed the lives of 21 Palestinians, including nine children. As dawn broke, there was devastation and a fresh round of Israeli attacks killing another three people. By the time of writing this, at least 26 lives have been lost to Israeli attacks.
As the government rolls out a financial assistance scheme in the country to support the poor in the face of the economic fallout of the pandemic, the urban poor are finding themselves in a tight spot.
Conscious citizens were appalled after seeing the photos of chopped branches and logs in Suhrawardy Udyan after several mature trees of the park were cut down as part of an ongoing government undertaking—the Independence Monument Construction (Phase III) Project.
In June 2019, the members of a citizen group in Jessore’s Keshabpur upazila called their upazila engineer to inform him that the contractor who was building their village road brought low-quality bricks for the purpose, instead of the higher quality ones he was supposed to.
