I have posted on social media regularly about the issue of brands delaying payments to suppliers in the wake of growing concerns about Covid-19.

The need for increased fiscal space in the budget for fiscal year (FY) 2021, which is the Covid budget, had been pronounced loudly way before the budget was announced on June 11, 2020. Domestic resource mobilisation by the National Board of Revenue (NBR) is the major source of financing the budget. The other sources are borrowing from the banking system, sale of national savings certificates, foreign loans and assistance.

Hundreds and thousands of refugees and migrants are preyed upon every year by human traffickers with false promises of a better future, a home.

The national budget announced by the Bangladesh government is another example of the curious disconnect between reality and the world of politics.

Uncertainties loom large over the holding of Higher Secondary Certificates (HSC) and its equivalent exams.

Today, after a period of hiatus, I have once again taken up my pen (metaphorically) to remember and celebrate a hero—a woman of courage and integrity who changed the world, not with fire and fury but with her soft touch.

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” This comment by Vladimir Lenin, describing the Bolshevik revolution over 100 years ago, serves as an apt metaphor for the journey Bangladesh has had since March 8, when the country confirmed its first Covid-19 case.

On May 27, 2020, a devastating fire broke out in the corona isolation unit of United Hospital in Gulshan, which claimed the lives of five patients who were receiving treatment there.

There are very few positives to be taken from the past few weeks as Covid-19 has wreaked havoc around the world, killing otherwise healthy people—and placing otherwise healthy businesses on life-support. In fact, as I write this, a great many garment suppliers globally are in urgent need of their own “intensive care”. Cash is the lifeblood of our industry, and right now, many thousands if not tens of thousands of garment factories around the world are running out of it.

The finance minister of Bangladesh deserves thanks for presenting the national budget for fiscal year (FY) 2021 at a time when the implications of Covid-19 (C19) pandemic is dire.

Police brutality is no strange phenomenon to the American criminal law enforcement scenario. However, the happenings since George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis last month have demonstrated unusually deep anger and anguish, and protests continue.

I had a senior colleague at Jahangirnagar University who was known to his students at the Pharmacy Department as an eccentric genius.

“When written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters: one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.”

As Bangladesh assumes the leadership of the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) for the next two years, including at the next Conference of Parties (COP26) to be held in Glasgow, Scotland in November 2021, there is an opportunity for Bangladesh to push for the issue of loss and damage from climate change to be made a central topic for discussion at COP26. This is quite a politically sensitive issue that goes well beyond mitigation and adaptation, which have been the main focus of climate change conferences until now.

With Covid-19 bringing economic activities across nations to a halt, more and more people are being pushed into poverty. Job losses, business losses and farming losses, leading to economic stress, are pushing many to the fringes of poverty. And as families are being rendered helpless, the worst sufferers are invariably the children.

With the Bangladesh economy in the first phase of its Covid Reopening, the country will be eagerly looking forward to attracting foreign investors to provide a much-needed stimulus.

The Covid-19 pandemic is wreaking havoc throughout the global fashion industry. A recently updated report by McKinsey and Company and the Business of Fashion—“The State of Fashion 2020”—states that the global fashion industry will face a 27 percent to 30 percent contraction in business due to the outbreak of the virus.

On June 7, 1966, in the then East Pakistan, a special protest day was observed in support of the Six Point Movement. The government of General Ayub Khan moved to suppress it with force. Huge demonstrations were fired upon by police claiming a number of lives. Large scale arrests followed. It is time once again to gratefully recall those intrepid Bangali nationalists whose sacrifices expedited our defiant march to full independence a few years later.

The Amazon rainforest, spread over 2.1 million square miles, is dubbed as the “lungs of the planet” as it produces 20 percent of the oxygen in our planet’s atmosphere.

Today, June 5, marks the 53rd anniversary of the 1967 war between Israel and its Arab neighbours Egypt, Jordan and Syria. In the six days of conflict, Israel captured the Sinai and Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Syrian Golan Heights—all of which, except for the Sinai, it still illegally occupies.