My own vicarious hat trick—third in a row and the last column on the World Cup. Not surprising, as, for the past one month, not much work has been done in Bangladesh except for posting Facebook statuses on the games.

Homo sapiens could not have faced the erosion of their cutting-edge claims at a worse time.

President Donald Trump of the USA and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin met in Helsinki, the capital of Finland on July 16.

These days, I assail myself with questions triggered by the everyday acts of thoughtlessness that I witness committed by the multitude around me everywhere, young and old, male and female.

In the run-up to the negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in its 21st Conference of Parties (COP21) in December 2015, one of the most politically contentious issues was whether the limit of the long-term global temperature rise should be kept at 2 degrees centigrade or changed to 1.5 degrees.

Let's just think about what Donald Trump recently did. He wooed Putin and tried to stitch the US and Russia together without knowing the difference between Great Britain, England and the United Kingdom.

Last week I went to Sadarghat with my team to work on a documentary on Dhaka's urban story. We arrived at the launch terminal in the wee hours, just when launches arrive from the country's riverine south. The terminal was quite a sight.

Pakistan goes to polls under a caretaker government amid judicial activism and militant attacks. Former Chief Justice Nasirul Mulk, heading a six-member cabinet, took over as caretaker prime minister on June 1, 2018 to oversee the general election scheduled for July 25, 2018.

The world observed World Population Day on July 11. The theme for this year—“Family Planning is a Human Right”—was selected in recognition of the perils that women, regardless of age, face if their right to choose when and how often to get pregnant is taken away from them. It also was an occasion to recognise that both men and women have the right to choose when and how often to embrace parenthood—if at all.

In this age of the internet and social media we are constantly deluged with free information coming from all directions. More than a billion people are frequently making status updates on Facebook, the most popular social media platform today, so much so that more eyeball time now is spent on social media advertising than the same on television, radio and newspaper combined.

The recent quota movement, which was somehow quelled defying the logic of merit-based competition and fundamentals of a market economy, portrays a pathetic lack of skills among the youth of our nation.

Well, the World Cup continues. The South Koreans are back home but are greeted with raw eggs. Thank Heavens, it's not North Korea; instead of eggs, it would've been ballistic missiles.

Puff was a mythological dragon, made famous by one of the original, 1960s, folk-rock bands, consisting of Peter, Paul, and Mary. He lived “by the sea”, and would “frolic in the autumn mist” in a land they called Honah Lee.

A 40-year-old Argentina supporter wanted to raise the blue and white stripes atop his building in Dhaka. His hand-held flag-mast came in contact with high voltage electricity.

The police handling of the entire anti-quota episode so far reminds me of the pictorial idiom that one finds displayed in many public places in China and Japan, in particular in the form of three primates popularly known as the thinking sages or the wise apes, each covering three of the five main sensory organs.

The Green Climate Fund (GCF) was created under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to channel up to USD 100 billion a year from 2020 onwards from the developed countries to the developing countries to help them tackle climate change through both mitigation and adaptation projects.

Once the Huang He river was known as the river of sorrow in China and the river's deadly floods were seen as acts of God. But the Chinese regime changed this narrative through its long-term planning and by transforming the threats into irrigation opportunities.

While I cannot claim to be an avid football fan, the World Cup bug does attack me every four years. I write this column on a sleepless night, disturbed and disenchanted after watching the rather physical and hostile match between England and Colombia, fighting for a place in the quarterfinals.

With the “world watching” Bangladesh in appreciation for its brave choice to defend the rights of the Rohingya refugees and stand up for the more honourable human values, a most disgraceful display of inhumanity had to bring our nation back down to earth.

Things do not look very pretty for General Min Aung Hlaing of Myanmar, the alleged war criminal responsible for the genocide against the Rohingya community in Rakhine.