Eresh Omar Jamal

One important but oft-ignored thing is that design and implementation mistakes delay the revenue-generation phase of megaprojects.

The number of risks that our economy currently faces because of all the global instabilities is perhaps unmatched since the early days of Bangladesh’s independence. Amid this reality, the government is set to present the new budget early next month.

The war in Ukraine is, in reality, a proxy war being fought between the West and Russia. Unlike its portrayal in the Western media, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was neither unprovoked nor unpredictable.

If we are to have an inclusive society, we can’t simply “cancel” those who we don’t agree with.

Sri Lanka is known as the country of smiling people because of their friendliness. But recently, the island nation has been experiencing an explosion of pain and anger.

While Covid-19 captured the attention of the world for the last two years or more, another pandemic has been silently killing countless numbers of people around the world.

According to a recent report, due to the insistence of lawmakers, the government is going to repair religious establishments and build new bridges across the country at a cost of Tk 5,132 crore.

Hossain Zillur Rahman, executive chairman of the Power and Participation Research Centre (PPRC), talks about inflation and the discrepancy between official and real data in a conversation with Eresh Omar Jamal of The Daily Star.

Dr Manzoor Ahmed, professor emeritus at Brac University and vice-chair of the Campaign for Popular Education (CAMPE) Council, talks to Eresh Omar Jamal of The Daily Star about a new book, of which he is a co-author, on the political economy of education in South Asia.

In a first-of-its-kind study, the Economic Relations Division (ERD) under the finance ministry found that around 1.6 million young people lost their jobs and about 20 million youths faced income loss due to the pandemic.

Over the years, experts have identified two major problems in Bangladesh’s banking sector.

Stefania Maurizi is an investigative journalist working for the Italian daily Il Fatto Quotidiano. She has worked on all WikiLeaks releases of secret documents and partnered with Glenn Greenwald to expose the Snowden Files about Italy.

Dr Iftekharuzzaman, executive director of Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB), speaks to Eresh Omar Jamal of The Daily Star about the discrimination faced by marginalised communities and the rise of fundamentalism in Bangladesh.

Dr Badiul Alam Majumdar is global vice-president and country director, The Hunger Project, and secretary of Sushashoner Jonno Nagorik (Shujan). In this interview with Eresh Omar Jamal of The Daily Star, he talks about the constitutional obligation of formulating a law to establish the Election Commission and why politicians so far have ignored it.

Dr Mehtab Khanam is Honorary Professor, Department of Psychology, Dhaka University, and a renowned psychotherapist. In an interview with Eresh Omar Jamal of The Daily Star, Dr Khanam talks about the state of mental health awareness in Bangladesh and how much it affects general well-being.

When we ask the question, “Who should development benefit?”, the answer should be quite straightforward: “the people.” But in reality, that is not often the case.

In a recent report, the World Bank stated that better targeted social protection programmes and reallocation of existing transfers to the poorest segment of society could reduce poverty from 36 percent to 12 percent in Bangladesh.

Today marks 20 years of the 9/11 attacks on the US masterminded by Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and a bunch of “ragheads” (as angry racist US soldiers called them) sitting in some cave in Afghanistan, as per the West’s dubious official narrative of what transpired on this day.

Twenty-years after 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan by US and NATO forces, the US is on the cusp of withdrawing its forces from the proverbial “graveyard of empires”, with the US military claiming its withdrawal is more than 90 percent complete.

As of now, the US and Iran are yet to conclude their talks in Vienna “on the terms of Washington return(ing) to the [Iran nuclear] agreement,” according to The Guardian.