It is indeed a seminal event in the history of Bangladesh that the UN last year declared Bangladesh eligible to step up to a developing economy from being a Least Developed Country (LDC). Of course the process is gradual and due to take effect in 2024 with a grace period of three years to wean off the special dispensations of the LDC status.

Remember those first words ever spoken from the moon? In the half-century since Neil Armstrong uttered them, the space race has invited many other countries—from the rich to the poor, from the developed to the developing—and even attracted private-sector

There are certainly many better persons than I who can assess former President HM Ershad more insightfully and, perhaps, more eloquently.

The other day I was going from Chattogram to my ancestral village in the Chandanish upazila, located about 40km southeast from the city centre. As soon as I crossed the Karnafuli River a common scene along the road began to haunt me. Felled trees were stacked up on both sides of the road, to be processed locally or transported to lumber mills on the outskirts of cities. The continuity of the spectacle revealed the enormity of scale in tree cutting. It felt as if a full-scale war on nature—a kind of “ecocide”—was going on.

Adventurous is not the first word that pops into one’s mind when thinking of us Bangladeshis. Hospitable? Yes. Warm? Yes. Resilient? Definitely yes. And laidback? Yes. But “adventurous”?

The first thing that probably comes to a parent’s mind when their child is brutally taken from them is, “why couldn’t I protect her/him?” That is most likely what the parents of seven-year-old Samia, a nursery school student from Wari, were thinking when they

This year marks a clear break with the past in terms of the climate change problem now becoming a “climate change crisis” with the adverse impacts of human-induced climate change getting visible across the world.

Right after he took office as the new Finance Minister of Bangladesh (FM), AHM Mustafa Kamal declared at a meeting in Dhaka on January 10, 2019, “From today no more money will be added to the defaulted loans and it will gradually decrease from now on.”

Last May, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was invited to the annual leaders’ high-level meeting in Munich, Germany, to speak on the growing concern about the global security threats due to climate change.

One was willing to credit Trump with some degree of sanity when he rescinded the order to retaliate with force against Iran, till he chose to go for new sanctions.

National Geographic (NatGeo), the international news magazine, dedicated its April 2019 issue to the challenges of urban living and the progression of big cities.

People migrating from one place to another—whether within the same country or across international borders—is a complex phenomenon, in which pull factors (such as job-seeking) and/or push factors (such as environmental degradation) can play important roles. Recently, the impacts of climate change have been included in this hypothesis, as a major environmental push factor, which has drawn a great deal of interest from political as well as scientific circles.

The clandestine demolition of Jahaj Bari in Old Dhaka on the night of Eid-ul-Fitr reveals the precarious state of historic preservation in Bangladesh.

You left a restaurant, content, so much so that you tipped the waiter heavier than your usual. Two days later, a news flash on the TV scroll: “Sona Dana Khana Pina Restora fined Tk 1 lakh for freezing rotten fish and expired chicken.” Nausea overtakes you. To an

The Tk 5,23,190 crore budget proposed by the government, which is the biggest in our country’s history, was somewhat of a letdown. Governments sometimes struggle to fully make use of their budgetary plans in electoral democracies because the party in power may

No two countries that share borders are more different from each other than Mexico and the United States. The contrast between the quality of life in these two countries could not be starker.

In recent times, offences and excesses committed by some police officials have become a matter of grave concern for the citizens as well as the controlling authorities.

The Rohingya population in Bangladesh continues to grow. There are now over one million Rohingyas living in Bangladesh, and with each passing year, their number is increasing by approximately 20,000.

In the proposed budget for fiscal year 2019-20, the government plans to spend Tk 74,367 crore, or 14.21 percent of the total expenditure, for social safety net programmes (SSNPs).

This is the first time we noticed a prominent leader of the opposition using an appropriate word, “ambitious”, to describe the budget, instead of branding it as “anti-people.” This is a good sign because the first budget for a new finance minister should be forward-looking.