Ashfaque Swapan

Hello from Georgia, ground zero in a massive US political battle.

"Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years. Socialism is what they called public power.

Despite razor-thin majorities in the US Senate and the House—where corralling lawmakers can be as frustrating as herding cats—Biden has managed the near-impossible task of steering through Congress a massive USD 1.9 trillion bill about to profoundly change America.

Every Ekushey, we renew our pledge to the language martyrs of 1952 that we will ensure that our beloved Bangla continues to flourish. To redeem this pledge, we need to remember a critical fact: The continued survival of a language depends on how well it adapts to the changing technologies of the age.

The trial of former US President Donald Trump in the US Senate had all the hallmarks of a Shakespearean tragedy. The Democratic impeachment managers put together a chilling case proving Trump’s complicity in the January 6 assault on the US Congress.

During a recent round-trip from Atlanta, US to Dhaka, Bangladesh, I had wildly contrasting experiences in the two cities as I tried to get tested for Covid-19.

America’s quadrennial celebration of peaceful transition of power is one of its more hallowed traditions.

As the world continues to reel from images of the outrageous assault of the US Capitol by Trump’s goons, history was made in the southern US state of Georgia this month.

Here in America, are we finally beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel?

The toxic political fallout of the recent presidential elections has truly tarnished America’s reputation.

President Donald Trump will leave the White House in January, thank goodness. Unfortunately, his malign influence on American politics will remain.

Never before has a hard-won victory had such a bitter edge.

Today, Americans are terrified of a pandemic virus whose infection rate has spiked up again. With just four percent of the world’s population, the US already has a quarter of the world’s Covid-19 deaths.

Last year, when about 150 people—a substantial chunk from out-of-state—gathered in Atlanta for a convention, the event had an intriguing twist: The first ever World Bengali Literature Conference, as the event billed itself, focused exclusively on Bangla literature.

US President Donald Trump could give Caligula a run for his money. The deranged, violent Roman emperor had once made his donkey a consul, but Trump is no slouch when it comes to outrageous behaviour.

The sheer brazenness of the Republican volte face following the death of US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is breathtaking. In 2016, eight months before presidential elections, US Senate Republicans balked when US President Barack Obama wanted to fill a vacancy in the US Supreme Court. They invented a new “principle” that in an election year, this should wait until elections.

Americans elect their president through a crazy-quilt mosaic of elections conducted by a bewildering variety of local jurisdictions spread out over the entire country, and its wheels may come off come November.

“Owning the libs and pissing off the media. That’s what we believe in now. There’s really not much more to it,” said long-time senior congressional Republican aide Brendan Buck on what the Republican Party stood for today, while in conversation with Politico reporter Tim Alberta.

It’s hard to believe a full 45 years have passed since you became the victim of one of the most barbaric political murders in living memory.

Online juggernaut Amazon owns Kindle, the 600-pound gorilla in the US electronic book space. Its global presence is also formidable.