WHEN Nuwan Kulasekara sent down the first ball of the 2015 World Cup in Christchurch on Saturday, it marked the World Cup's return to Trans-Tasmania after nearly a quarter of a century.

I think it is good news that after a long break Saudi Arabia has reopened its manpower market for Bangladesh. But the agreement was signed only for recruiting female workers who will work in households. In fact, the KSA had never closed its market for our female workers. Our government could have sent them during this period.

AWAY from the glare of global headlines, Nepal is grappling with a constitutional crisis that could once again propel the tourist Mecca, sensitively situated between India and China, into full-fledged conflict.

THERE is a perplexing problem in Bangladesh's “universities,” especially in the private universities. A significant number of departments of these universities are staffed by faculty members who are of very senior rank (professors).

RECENTLY, the Office of the United States Trade Representatives (USTR) called on the government of Bangladesh to improve on its labour rights, and in particular to allow for increased unionisation before it would consider restoring trade benefits. In Bangladesh, it now seems to be increasingly accepted that unionisation or some worker constituted collective will help to improve workplace standards. Of course, labour advocates have been arguing this for years, but Rana Plaza provides a tragic reminder that unions play a critical role in improving workplace safety and labour rights. Therefore, freedom of association has been a key criteria in Bangladesh's review on trade benefits. This is a welcome development.

EUROPE has a strong tradition as a leader in the fight against climate change. Lately, however, the continent has reached an ideological impasse over how to address the problem, with environmental sustainability and growth often portrayed as being mutually exclusive. If Europe is to remain an environmental leader, as well as a center of innovation and competitiveness, it will have to abandon its ideological rigidness and embrace realistic, pragmatic solutions that can deliver environmental benefits without sacrificing economic development.

Treaties signed between two or more states create rights and obligations for sovereign states and in the process also have impact on citizens who pay their allegiance to those states.

One of the worst decisions of the BNP-led government in 2004 was the rejection of the Indian proposal to lay a gas pipeline from Myanmar to India through Bangladesh.

It has been described as the halting of the “saffron juggernaut,” the Bharatiya Janata Party's worst recent political drubbing, and Narendra Modi's Stalingrad, the battle that became a turning point in World War-II.

Where are we heading to? It is so sad! Why will infants and common people have to be burnt in the name of political movement?” wrote my FaceBook friend and brother in response to a post that I posted which said: “While so far my thought was, more or less, on how to delay death and live a meaningful life

Since President Xi Jinping took office in China in 2012, the country has undergone changes in its foreign policy. This is apparent to Chinese scholars as well as to foreign policy experts who had not noticed such changes since 1989. The strategy now used is not only sophisticated but also progressive.

IT is, indeed, instructive to analyse why the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) was decimated at the polls in Delhi.

THE global economy's slowdown has not spared India. Sustaining the growth that it needs to continue to lift millions of people out of poverty will require

IF you work on adivasi rights in the Chittagong Hill Tracts in some capacity, you may be familiar with an uncanny feeling that you are being followed. That

AFTER six 'long' years, manpower market in Saudi Arabia is going to reopen for Bangladesh. It is the biggest ray of hope in the diplomatic front in recent

WHENEVER a minimum democratic environment prevailed and people got a chance to participate in political activities, including electoral politics, people have celebrated the event. In the post 1947 period, voting for Jukto Front in 1954 and for autonomy in 1970, participation in the Liberation War, and overthrowing of the dictatorial regime in 1991 -- all these denote people's power and also rejection of extremism.

POLITICAL violence is as old as the memory of our nationhood stretches back. Between the rise and fall of regimes, what appears again and again is the cycle of political violence.

THE pressure was getting to me. Tomorrow was the last day of my exams, and if I did well I'd have a good feeling during the entire vacation.

Chief Justice Mustafa Kamal is one of those rare academic-minded lawyers who never lost his zeal for judicial activism despite the elevation of age or status.

THE recent public hearings organised by the Bangladesh Energy Regulatory Commission (BERC) and the sorry state of preparedness of the Bangladesh Power Development Board (BPDB) and its subsidiaries, gas distribution and transmission companies including TITAS and Gas Transmission Company Ltd. (GTCL) leave a lot to be desired.