Habibullah N Karim

The Myanmar junta, under the façade of a democratically installed government headed by a titular political icon Aung San Suu Kyi, has been carrying out a campaign of brutal ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslim minority in its Rakhine province with complete impunity even though the world community is keenly aware of the atrocities and flagrant human rights

A quarter bigger than the last revised budget, this budget coming in at a whopping Tk 4 lakh 64 thousand crore certainly fits the pattern of double-digit augmentation from year to year with special purse strings reserved for popular mandates like agricultural subsidies, rural infrastructure and social welfare that anyone would expect in an election year.

Bangladesh Sugar and Food Industries Corporation (BSFIC) is a state-owned enterprise (SOE) that is among the remnants of a bygone era when, in a post-liberation war-ravaged economy, the sugar and food manufacturing enterprises left behind by non-resident business owners from pre-independence times had to be taken under the stewardship of the state.

News about security forces mowing down several dozen “drug dealers” in the last two weeks has got many of us writhing in moral agony over “shootouts” happening on an increasing tempo. True, drug abuse is highly detrimental to our youth and surely drug dealers need to be checked vigorously, but committing the state-sanctioned “ultimate sin” to rid ourselves of some low-level operatives is quite disturbing, to say the least.

On May 11 at 4:14pm US east coast standard time, Bangladesh entered the space technology history books as the latest iteration of the Falcon 9 rocket by SpaceX took off from the Kennedy Space Center Launchpad 39A in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Huge drum rolls and pageantry surrounded the recent celebrations of International Women's Day. We can obviously feel enlightened on this front, having women as the chief executive of the government and that of the parliament.

A budding computer scientist pursuing a PhD at the McMaster University, Canada recently wrote a blog post on the increasing human capacity for self-destruction enabled by science. First, it was the atomic bomb created by physicists, then it was the nerve gas created by chemists, and now the neural networks created by cyber nerds that pump enormous power into artificial intelligence bots—bots that can take over our lives, manipulate our behaviour, and pretty much get us to do anything they please.

Bangladesh has been riding the growth waves in the last two-and-a-half decades with spectacular results: our exports grew six folds, our GDP quadrupled and our extreme poverty levels got slashed by more than half, not to mention our 30 percent increase in longevity and other human development achievements.

All that brouhaha and petty religiosity surrounding the release of the Bollywood film Padmaavat built up a huge anticipation among moviegoers around the world.

We have some of the strangest banking and payment system strictures in the world.

While we are mesmerised by several hundred-billion-dollar valuations of Apple, Google, and Facebook, cyber pundits are already talking about the next killer app or the next search engine darling.