Tasneem Tayeb

With fears of the spiralling Coronavirus pandemic occupying our minds, dengue seems to have taken a backseat, especially in terms of our preparedness to fight off the disease.

The coronavirus, now declared a pandemic by WHO, has created panic around the world, and Bangladesh is no exception. As soon as the Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research (IEDCR) confirmed the first cases of coronavirus in the country on March 8,

At 92, Mahathir Mohamad, the world’s oldest serving president, came into the limelight recently, but for all the wrong reasons. On February 22, without any prior notice, Mahathir suddenly tendered his resignation as the prime minister of the country, less than two years into his tenure.

What was supposed to be the celebration of friendship between two of the largest democracies in the world—India and America—turned out to be a sideshow to a bloodbath of communal hatred, exposing the undemocratic underbelly of BJP’s India.

Turkey and the Russia-backed Syrian government led by Bashar al-Assad are in a tight jostle for full control of the north-western Syrian province of Idlib. The province—the last of the four de-escalation zones agreed by Turkey, Iran and Russia in 2017, which is yet to be taken over by the Assad government—is important to all the warring actors for diverse and awkward reasons.

The five year long bloody civil war that spiralled out of control soon after it broke out in 2015, has claimed the lives of “tens and thousands” of civilians.

Activist-turned-politician Arjun Kejriwal has had smooth sailing at the recently held Delhi legislative polls, with his Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) being handed a strong mandate by the Delhiwalas, winning a sweeping 62 out of 70 seats. This is his third straight term in office.

Two days after the Interna-tional Court of Justice (ICJ) approved emergency “provisional measures” asking Myanmar to stop persecution of the Rohingya in all forms— including killing, raping, and destroying homes and villages—two Rohingya women died in Rakhine State when the Myanmar army shelled a village. One of them was pregnant.

Tensions that saw a renewed escalation in the Middle East after the US unilaterally withdrew from the Iran Nuclear Deal in 2018, on grounds that can be at best termed flimsy and unconvincing, are only intensifying by the day.

The US assassination of General Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC’s) Quds Force

The last remaining major European colonial powers, Britain and France, were whiffing quite an opportunity at the dawn of World War I, as they found themselves on the right side of history.

On January 3, the Middle East was shaken by the news of the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, head of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) Quds Force, by the United States near Baghdad’s international airport.

2019 has seen a significant drop in the number of journalists being killed—49 as against the annual average of 80 journalists killed for the past two decades. The annual report by Reporters Without Borders, known better by their French initials RSF (Reporters Sans Frontières), termed this figure “historically low”.

Lord Campden is what his friends would call him, in the heady days that lie between youth and adulthood. He was a sharp dressing, cigar smoking, culture-loving European aesthete—a finance executive leading a privileged life in London, one of the great world cities.

While witness-ing chaos unfolding in India over the newly passed Citizenship Amendment Act (ACC), I could not help but think about Amartya Sen’s bestseller The Argumentative Indian, a book that invokes the rich Indian tradition of scepticism and heterodoxy, and discusses how this has facilitated the flourishing of the world’s largest democracy.

The upper house of the Indian parliament, the Rajya Sabha, passed the contentious Citizenship (Amendment) Bill (CAB) on

In Myanmar, the Rohingya have faced persecution, witnessed murder, endured sexual violence. While fleeing the genocide perpetrated by the Myanmar military, they had only one aim: survival. And survive they did once they crossed the border and made it to the world’s largest refugee camp in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar.

While it is a well-docu-mented fact that more than 700,000 Rohingya had to flee Myanmar’s Rakhine state since the latest onslaught of violence unleashed on them by the Myanmar military and nearly 9,000 Rohingya had been killed in Rakhine between August 25 and September 24 in 2017

Between January and October 2019, 173 women have been killed by their husbands in Bangladesh, 37 have been murdered by the husband’s family, while 36 have been killed by their own family members.

Child marriage is an aberration that has permeated the boundaries of nationality, religion and race. Be it in Africa, Middle East, Latin America or Asia, child marriage nips the dreams of young girls in the bud.