Harun ur Rashid

On the last week of May 2018, Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said that the signing of an agreement on sharing Teesta water would not be possible without taking West Bengal on board. She said this at a press conference in New Delhi, according to a video record published on the external affairs ministry website.

No sitting US president has ever met a North Korean leader before. The historic meeting on June 12 between US Donald Trump and North Korean Supreme leader Kim Jong Un ended with historic results. The meeting generated so much goodwill that the US President expressed his desire to visit North Korea and to invite the North Korean leader to Washington.

In his famous poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, the 18th-century English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge eloquently reflects on the scarcity of water in the sea: “Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink”.

Blue economy means extraction of the resources of sea for the growth of an economy. Bangladesh has settled maritime boundary disputes with Myanmar in 2012 and with India in 2014 through an arbitral method. It is estimated that Bangladesh has acquired 118,813 square kilometres of the Bay of Bengal. The areas of resources include 200 nautical miles of exclusive economic zone and over 354 nautical miles of resources on seabed (continental shelf). It is estimated that the resources from the sea of Bangladesh constitute 81 percent of the resources existing in its land territory.

The Election Commission in India needs to be congratulated for conducting a free and fair election in Assam and West Bengal, among others, as no party has alleged any rigging in the outcome of elections. Both Trinomool Congress and BJP did much better than expected in the two states.

No country is now immune to domestic or internationally-linked terrorism. Terrorism broadly falls into various categories, such as ideological or class-struggle or cross-border terrorism.

After the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war, the then Soviet Union brokered a peace agreement at Tashkent. Russia has again taken the initiative

Cabotage restriction means that Bangladeshi trucks may move to Bhutan, India and Nepal with Bangladeshi goods but cannot pick up Indian, Bhutanese or Nepalese goods on its way back to Bangladesh. That means Bangladeshi trucks have to return empty.