Many of us will have heard the story of the boiled frog. Legend has it that if you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will instantly leap out. But if you put it in a pot filled with pleasantly tepid water and gradually heat it, the frog will remain in the water until it boils to death.

Individuality builds self-confidence as opposed to dependency, creativity against suppression, cooperatives instead of idle loners, an active workforce vs laissez-faire, contributors not dumb receivers, and choosers not beggars. Allow me to elaborate.

Debates on any global index and ranking where a country does not perform well are common almost everywhere.

The happy ending of this story came about due to a mixture of pure chance and the laudable inquisitiveness of a Detective Branch (DB) police constable, Mahfizur Rahman.

In order to reach the globally agreed atmospheric temperature target of staying below 1.5 Degrees Centigrade, all the countries in the world have embarked on a race to reach net zero emissions of greenhouse gases as early as possible.

Following the inauguration of his Presidency, Joe Biden has already given several executive orders which are of great significance, not only for the US but for the entire world.

In our Viber group, a departmental colleague shared an excerpt from a student’s exam script. The student wrote down the title of Jhumpa Lahiri’s book “The Interpreter of Maladies” as “The Translator of Disease”.

Americans exercised their democratic right and elected Donald Trump as president in 2016. Four years later, they exercised the same right again and corrected what had turned out to be a disastrous mistake.

As the lights were about to go out on Trump presidency, the outgoing US administration made two major announcements about the Middle East—terming Iran a home for Al Qaeda, and designating the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen as “terrorists”.

It has been well-known for a long time that Bangladeshi migrant workers in the Middle East and South Asian countries are at the receiving end of all sorts of uncertainties one can think of.

Two years ago, the Global Commission on Adaptation (GCA) was set up under the chairmanship of Ban Ki-moon, former Secretary General of the United Nations, and with a number of eminent individuals as Commissioners, including Dr Muhammad Musa from BRAC.

Finally President Trump has accepted the inevitable, but not before wreaking havoc, as we had predicted he would four years ago, both at home and abroad.

Issues around sustainability come and go, but some topics will remain as important now as they were before the current global pandemic began.

The first six months of the fiscal year 2020-21 saw very slow implementation of the Annual Development Programme (ADP) of Bangladesh.

No centuries-old city merits a revamping makeup, so as to render it unrecognisable by distortion, not the least Dhaka.

A desperate Mike Pompeo unconvincingly claiming, “Al-Qaeda has a new home base.

Bangladesh is no stranger to disaster management. Since independence it has dealt with numerous natural disasters as well as political unrest and overhauls.

A national newspaper ran a story on January 10 featuring the research expenditure of public and private universities of Bangladesh.

He wanted to be an excep-tional journalist, and he was. It was as if he willed himself to be what he wanted to be.

How well do you follow the headlines of your newspapers? If one were to run a quiz to see how well the readers of The Daily Star stack up against each other, the question that is most likely to be at the top of the list would be about the name that appeared most in the headlines of our central pages over the last week.