Nazmul Ahasan

A week or so ago, a colleague and I needed to fact-check a claim about gun deaths across the United States. We simply googled and found a number of sources. The most cited of these was the US government's own data. The National Center for Health Statistics, like many other federal agencies, preserves an enormous amount of important data on its website.

It's a bit strange to see Chinese president Xi Jinping, of all people, defending globalisation and economic liberalisation in the face of resistance from Donald Trump, the leader of the capitalistic world. But here we are, getting accustomed to a scenario that would have seemed impossible only a few years ago.

Last week, at a conference about urban development hosted by World Bank, almost all the municipality mayors of Bangladesh were present to share their experiences with experts and mayors from different other countries.

Dhaka, Bangladesh: The police in Dhaka have arrested an artist who they say is the creator of the much-talked-about graffiti series “Subodh,” along with his two alleged collaborators.

If there were anything that our growing number of IT freelancers would die for, it would be PayPal, one of the fastest, easiest and most popular online payment systems in the world.

Some say it depicts the minorities who are finding it increasingly harder to live in their ancestral land. Some believe Subodh is the face of the dissenting voice or free speech under siege. To me, Subodh represents our collective conscience.

It's been 27 years since the last election of the Dhaka University Central Students' Union (DUCSU) was held. First held in 1924, DUCSU elections have taken place even under the most arduous circumstances, during the Pakistani rule and even with the military regimes in power in independent Bangladesh.

When Gauri Lankesh was killed, all quarters of Indian society condemned the killing except for the prime minister himself. Lankesh was editor of the Kannada weekly Gauri Lankesh Patrike, a secular activist and, most importantly, a staunch critic of Hindutva, the predominant form of Hindu nationalism in India.

One of the primary reasons put forward to make a case for outlawing private tutoring and coaching is that it is discriminatory. In a country where one in four students drop out of school before completing their primary education due to poverty, tutoring being a necessity, certainly adds extra pressure on the economically less fortunate parents.

It is a well-documented fact that women and children fare worst in wars and conflicts irrespective of where they take place. The conflict zone in the northern Rakhine state of Myanmar is no exception.

While we must explore how best to utilise our current demographic dividend, we cannot afford to overlook the possibility of a demographic chaos looming large on the horizon should we continue on with our failures.

Since the fall of the military dictator HM Ershad in the early nineties, Bangladesh has largely been a democracy. Two democratically elected political parties have mostly governed the country ever since.

A story by Reuters citing an Indian government spokesperson says that India is in talks with Bangladesh and Myanmar to deport 40,000 Rohingya Muslims, arguably one of the world's most persecuted ethnic groups.

Some East and Southeast Asian countries benefitted from investing heavily in human resource sectors such as education and health during this period. While there's no universal model for a country to develop, experts suggest the strategy taken by those countries may also help Bangladesh reap its demographic dividend.

First, the daughter – a student – was kidnapped, and then raped. As if that was not enough, she and her mother were then tortured, mentally and physically, for hours, and their heads shaven in an attempt to humiliate and hush them up. In the end, they were asked to leave the town and never come back.

Siddiqur Rahman, while protesting, was injured in his eyes by a tear gas canister in yet another case of police brutality. One eye will never see again, another one is damaged.

Translating Donald Trump is, well, an awkward process. After all, the president of the free world has about as much respect for basic grammar, word choice and sentence structure as he does for immigrants, women and the environment.

When Vichy France's puppet government headed by Philippe Pétain rounded up thousands of Jews for deportation to Nazi camps, it was to protect his imaginary sovereignty. France was under Nazi occupation, but Pétain cared so much about his country's pseudo-sovereignty that he would carry out the deportation instead of letting his Nazi masters take the trouble to do so.

As the government reportedly speeds up the construction of an ICT Park in Korail slums, the locals are worried that they may no longer have a roof over their heads.

On August 21, 1835, an intriguing teaser appeared on the front page of the New York Sun announcing a series of articles revealing the supposed discovery of life and even civilisation on the moon.