Abdullah Shibli

Jeanine Cummins, the author of the latest American best-seller novel “American Dirt”, is taking a lot of flak for her story based on the experience of a Mexican woman named Lydia and her eight-year-old son who flee their home and cross over to the USA.

As the UK prepares to leave the European Union on January 31, there are two important issues still unresolved: the monetary cost of Brexit, and the future of UK’s trade relations with the EU.

It was the winter of 1995, or maybe 1996. Let me only say that it was a memorable moment for me, a quarter of a century ago in the city of Dhaka.

Two recent trade pacts—one between the US and China, and the other among US, Mexico and Canada—have given the economists plenty of reasons to worry.

The outcome of Britain’s recent parliamentary elections should not come as a surprise to anyone. The British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party had sought a clear mandate from the people to “get Brexit done”.

Americans celebrate Thanks-giving Day (on the last Thursday of November) for many reasons but personally, I look forward to this holiday for the opportunity to reflect on the happenings of the past year, and to plan for the next one.

Last week, for the first time I heard an eminent Burmese citizen and a former advisor to the military government admit that massacre and atrocities were committed against the Rohingyas. He also acknowledged that Rohingya villages were burned in Rakhine.

Bangladesh has made phenomenal progress in the last two decades in terms of improving the standard of living of the masses.

Thirty-nine migrants seeking a better life perished in a refrigerated van, and their bodies were found in an industrial site about 25 miles east of central London.

Bangla-desh has expressed its interest to participate in next year’s SDG voluntary national review (VNR) which will be placed before the UN in July 2020.

The 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to a trio who came from three different continents to teach and work together in Cambridge, USA. Abhijit Banerjee hails from India, Esther Duflo grew up in France, and Michael Kremer was born and brought up in the USA and finished his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Harvard. Their research focuses on poverty alleviation, and more specifically on the design of policy to guide development practitioners and government.

In Ian McEwan’s “Sweet Tooth”, a novel based on the social life of London in the early 1970s, we see a vivid description of conditions that prevailed in the UK which was then facing several crises on different fronts, and was completely torn apart by industrial and social unrest with slowing economic growth and rising unemployment.

In most countries in the world, barring a few, poverty appears to be a dirty word. Even in rich countries such as the USA and UK, it is difficult to find any reliable statistics on the existence of poverty, the level of poverty, or a headcount of poor people. It has recently

At some of the conferences on Bangladesh held in the USA, particularly at Harvard University, I have noticed that introductory speeches often mention Henry Kissinger and his infamous remark about Bangladesh being a “basket case” or “bottomless basket”.

I am sometimes asked by my family members and confused friends to explain Brexit and the drama that is unfolding every day in the United Kingdom.

Leaders of the Group of Seven (G7), comprising the world’s largest economies, met for three days in Biarritz, France on August 24-26 but failed to address any of the important global issues including climate change, trade war(s), the looming economic slowdown, etc.

The Rohingya repatriation is now rumoured to start in a few days, on August 22 to be specific. “Repatriation [of Rohingyas] is always on the table.

It is well-known that once you become rich, you can stay rich with little effort. Some of the super-rich in today’s world, for example, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Jack Ma of Alibaba have accumulated an enormous amount of wealth already and are likely to get richer in future. In the parlance of business, the super-rich or billionaires are on a path to exponentially increase their “net worth”.

Right after he took office as the new Finance Minister of Bangladesh (FM), AHM Mustafa Kamal declared at a meeting in Dhaka on January 10, 2019, “From today no more money will be added to the defaulted loans and it will gradually decrease from now on.”

The Rohingya population in Bangladesh continues to grow. There are now over one million Rohingyas living in Bangladesh, and with each passing year, their number is increasing by approximately 20,000.