So far they pursued their vocations with enthusiasm and passion, and enjoyed doing so. Now forced by the circumstances most can no longer be engaged in their professional activities and have to pass their days in intense uncertainty.

Seldom does an assembly or Lok Sabha election in any Indian state arouse as much interest among the people across the country’s border as in Bangladesh. The results of the recent assembly polls in West Bengal and Assam were keenly watched in India’s eastern neighbour. The interest in West Bengal was, understandably, much greater given the powerful linguistic and cultural connections between the state and Bangladesh.

Dr Firdausi Qadri of Icddr,b, Dr Salma Sultana of Model Livestock Advance-ment Foundation and Prof Samia Subrina of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET)—three Bangladeshi women scientists have recently made us proud.

As much of the world continues to reel under the coronavirus crisis, there is an increasingly frantic scramble for more and more vaccines in countries seeking to protect their people against the disease.

The Bangladesh Right to Information (RTI) Act 2009 is a unique piece of legislation. Most laws are largely founded on the concept of government responsibility to regulate citizen behaviour, but the RTI law establishes government accountability to its citizens.

As the sun was about to set over the Gaza horizon on May 10, 2021, the community would not have known what was to happen that night. But they are citizens of Gaza, and what did happen would not have taken them by surprise. Israeli bombardment overnight of the besieged strip has claimed the lives of 21 Palestinians, including nine children. As dawn broke, there was devastation and a fresh round of Israeli attacks killing another three people. By the time of writing this, at least 26 lives have been lost to Israeli attacks.

Conscious citizens were appalled after seeing the photos of chopped branches and logs in Suhrawardy Udyan after several mature trees of the park were cut down as part of an ongoing government undertaking—the Independence Monument Construction (Phase III) Project.

In June 2019, the members of a citizen group in Jessore’s Keshabpur upazila called their upazila engineer to inform him that the contractor who was building their village road brought low-quality bricks for the purpose, instead of the higher quality ones he was supposed to.

Uncountable numbers of people in India are suffering the painful and deadly consequences of a second wave of Covid-19 infections.

At a time when most people are struggling to choose between life and livelihood, there are members of our society who have been going out of their way to help make life easier for those who have been afflicted by the virus.

Is democracy in decline, retreat or under siege? This is a soul-searching question by many who agonise over a lost golden age of democracy, freedom and rule-based world order.

Ruling Bharatiya Janata Party created history in the north eastern Indian state of Assam by becoming the first non-Congress party to win two successive terms in the state assembly elections there.

The month of April 1971 was when the die for the future of Bangladesh’s Liberation War was cast.

Vaccination programmes and travel bubbles are still in their infancy. They could help revive tourism in Asia and the Pacific but governments need to pave the way with the right policies.

Land is the closest thing that we know. We cultivate it, build on it, transform it to meet our needs, commercialise it to maximise economic gain, and derive our identities from its widely varying geographic characters.

It is widely acknowled-ged that Bangladesh has been successful in making impressive gains in poverty reduction in the past years. Nevertheless, at the end of 2019, there were still about 16.5 million people categorised as extreme poor.

Dear Satyajit Ray: Happy 100th birthday, maestro.

There is hardly anyone left in India, including yours truly, who has not lost a loved one to the devastation wrought by the second wave of the coronavirus.

Every year, the Earth Day comes and goes while we continue to dig ourselves deeper and deeper toward climate and ecological disaster.

titan, a legend, an iconoclast, a pioneer—these are some of the words that come to one’s mind when recalling the memory of Kamal Ziaul Islam, popularly known as KZ Islam, who passed away on May 3, 2021.