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.
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.
At a time when most people are struggling to choose between life and livelihood, there are members of our society who have been going out of their way to help make life easier for those who have been afflicted by the virus.
Is democracy in decline, retreat or under siege? This is a soul-searching question by many who agonise over a lost golden age of democracy, freedom and rule-based world order.
We are seeing a growing number of brands, retailers and manufacturers setting climate targets at present. In many cases they are establishing science-based targets aimed at limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
Over the past one and a half years or so, the pandemic has changed many things in our lives. It may continue to bring in more changes as the consequences of the pandemic unfold.
Ruling Bharatiya Janata Party created history in the north eastern Indian state of Assam by becoming the first non-Congress party to win two successive terms in the state assembly elections there.
The month of April 1971 was when the die for the future of Bangladesh’s Liberation War was cast.
Vaccination programmes and travel bubbles are still in their infancy. They could help revive tourism in Asia and the Pacific but governments need to pave the way with the right policies.
Land is the closest thing that we know. We cultivate it, build on it, transform it to meet our needs, commercialise it to maximise economic gain, and derive our identities from its widely varying geographic characters.
It is widely acknowled-ged that Bangladesh has been successful in making impressive gains in poverty reduction in the past years. Nevertheless, at the end of 2019, there were still about 16.5 million people categorised as extreme poor.
