Within a week of the ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that provisionally recognised the group identity of the Rohingya and the unremitting persecution that the community has endured over decades,

Since the 2015 mayor elections, we have seen a steady decline in voter turnout in elections in Bangladesh.

That voter turnout in Saturday’s election would not be satisfactory was a foregone conclusion, given that people in general have lost confidence in the electoral system.

By all credible indications, voting in the two city corporations of the capital has taken place in an uneven playing field—an electoral space that has been intimidatingly patrolled to ensure its monopolisation.

As citizens of Dhaka vote for Dhaka’s twin city corporation elections today, this is a good time to take stock of their significance. We underestimate the importance of these elections at our peril.

On January 23, when the President of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Abdulqawi Ahmed Yusuf, at the onset of his deliberations pronounced that “the Court’s references in this Order to the Rohingya should be understood as references to the group that self-identifies as the Rohingya group,” some of us in the press room were elated.

There is a story to be told of Dhaka—the once-provincial backwater-turned-megalopolis—but it was nowhere in the electioneering that wrapped up last night.

What do I expect, what do you expect, being a citizen of a megacity in 2020? The answer is simple. A liveable life.

Implementing any one or all of these promises would be like a dream come true for every Dhaka resident. However, the moot question is whether these mayoral candidates know the powers of a mayor and how poorly equipped a mayor’s office is in implementing them?

Today, we live in a world more dependent on digital platforms than ever before. Everything an average person requires, from ordering food to finding an emergency doctor, can be done with a few taps on some smart device.

What do you want Dhaka to be? How do you envision this city?

On May 29, 2014, soon after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published the second volume of its massive Fifth Assessment Report, an interesting article was written in The Daily Star.

It was his last semester before graduation. Yet Ernesto Guevara decided to postpone the completion of his medical degree, and instead embarked on an audacious adventure.

As the world observes the International Day of Education today, nearly five million children are growing up in Bangladesh without access to education. These include not just the 4.3 million Bangladeshi children who have not seen the inside of a classroom, but also the half a million Rohingya children who have been languishing in refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar.

Transparency International (TI) released its Corruption Perception Index 2019 on January 23, 2020. Bangladesh has scored 26 out of 100, the same as in 2018.

The political standoff between Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government and those in opposition of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) is set to intensify further in the coming weeks.

Days ago, the editor of the leading Bangla daily Prothom Alo and a few of his colleagues were forced to secure higher judiciary intervention that ordered law enforcers not to harass or arrest them until the hearing on a bail petition in a lower court.

In what was perhaps the most public endorsement of extra judicial killings by lawmakers in Bangladesh, multiple Members of the Parliament on January 14 came out in support of killing the rapists in “crossfire”.

To offer better city services to the inhabitants of Dhaka, past governments have stressed on the “coordination” of activities of all the city service providers—as many as 50—through forming committees.

From Sudan to Syria to Bangladesh, climate change is often presented as a powerful and simple root cause of violent conflict and mass migration.