Eresh Omar Jamal

Hossain Zillur Rahman, executive chairman of the Power and Participation Research Centre (PPRC), talks about inflation and the discrepancy between official and real data in a conversation with Eresh Omar Jamal of The Daily Star.

Dr Manzoor Ahmed, professor emeritus at Brac University and vice-chair of the Campaign for Popular Education (CAMPE) Council, talks to Eresh Omar Jamal of The Daily Star about a new book, of which he is a co-author, on the political economy of education in South Asia.

In a first-of-its-kind study, the Economic Relations Division (ERD) under the finance ministry found that around 1.6 million young people lost their jobs and about 20 million youths faced income loss due to the pandemic.

Over the years, experts have identified two major problems in Bangladesh’s banking sector.

Stefania Maurizi is an investigative journalist working for the Italian daily Il Fatto Quotidiano. She has worked on all WikiLeaks releases of secret documents and partnered with Glenn Greenwald to expose the Snowden Files about Italy.

Dr Iftekharuzzaman, executive director of Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB), speaks to Eresh Omar Jamal of The Daily Star about the discrimination faced by marginalised communities and the rise of fundamentalism in Bangladesh.

Dr Badiul Alam Majumdar is global vice-president and country director, The Hunger Project, and secretary of Sushashoner Jonno Nagorik (Shujan). In this interview with Eresh Omar Jamal of The Daily Star, he talks about the constitutional obligation of formulating a law to establish the Election Commission and why politicians so far have ignored it.

Dr Mehtab Khanam is Honorary Professor, Department of Psychology, Dhaka University, and a renowned psychotherapist. In an interview with Eresh Omar Jamal of The Daily Star, Dr Khanam talks about the state of mental health awareness in Bangladesh and how much it affects general well-being.

When we ask the question, “Who should development benefit?”, the answer should be quite straightforward: “the people.” But in reality, that is not often the case.

In a recent report, the World Bank stated that better targeted social protection programmes and reallocation of existing transfers to the poorest segment of society could reduce poverty from 36 percent to 12 percent in Bangladesh.

Today marks 20 years of the 9/11 attacks on the US masterminded by Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and a bunch of “ragheads” (as angry racist US soldiers called them) sitting in some cave in Afghanistan, as per the West’s dubious official narrative of what transpired on this day.

Twenty-years after 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan by US and NATO forces, the US is on the cusp of withdrawing its forces from the proverbial “graveyard of empires”, with the US military claiming its withdrawal is more than 90 percent complete.

As of now, the US and Iran are yet to conclude their talks in Vienna “on the terms of Washington return(ing) to the [Iran nuclear] agreement,” according to The Guardian.

On May 27, The Daily Star reported that detectives had claimed to have seized LSD, an extremely potent hallucinogenic drug, for the first time in the country during a raid in Dhaka.

On May 19, the finance minister said, “The scope [to whiten black money] will be there as long as undisclosed incomes will be there.” (The Daily Star) Before commenting on this statement, let’s take a step back and think how we got to this point.

In a report published on May 1, this newspaper revealed that according to a recent study, the Covid-19 treatment cost is abnormally higher in private hospitals compared to public hospitals.

The ongoing pandemic has caused huge economic losses for the world. In 2020, growth in South Asia contracted by 5.4 percent, which does not capture the whole story of how terribly its people have actually suffered—but it is an indicator of how the region has struggled over the last year.

For this year’s World Health Day, the World Health Organization wanted to highlight the importance of building a fairer and healthier world. In terms of fairness, how do you rate our healthcare system? And when it comes to ensuring a healthy population, how would you rate its performance?

One of the less talked-about downsides of the pandemic-induced lull has been the increasing financial stress on the Bangladesh Power Development Board (BPDB). According to a study last year by the Ohio-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis,

The reason behind the creation of the concept of Least Developed Countries (LDC) by the UN in the 1960s was to identify a set of nations whose development struggles were not solely based on their own shortcomings, but due to other structural constraints.