Tasneem Tayeb

The last remaining major European colonial powers, Britain and France, were whiffing quite an opportunity at the dawn of World War I, as they found themselves on the right side of history.

On January 3, the Middle East was shaken by the news of the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, head of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) Quds Force, by the United States near Baghdad’s international airport.

2019 has seen a significant drop in the number of journalists being killed—49 as against the annual average of 80 journalists killed for the past two decades. The annual report by Reporters Without Borders, known better by their French initials RSF (Reporters Sans Frontières), termed this figure “historically low”.

Lord Campden is what his friends would call him, in the heady days that lie between youth and adulthood. He was a sharp dressing, cigar smoking, culture-loving European aesthete—a finance executive leading a privileged life in London, one of the great world cities.

While witness-ing chaos unfolding in India over the newly passed Citizenship Amendment Act (ACC), I could not help but think about Amartya Sen’s bestseller The Argumentative Indian, a book that invokes the rich Indian tradition of scepticism and heterodoxy, and discusses how this has facilitated the flourishing of the world’s largest democracy.

The upper house of the Indian parliament, the Rajya Sabha, passed the contentious Citizenship (Amendment) Bill (CAB) on

In Myanmar, the Rohingya have faced persecution, witnessed murder, endured sexual violence. While fleeing the genocide perpetrated by the Myanmar military, they had only one aim: survival. And survive they did once they crossed the border and made it to the world’s largest refugee camp in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar.

While it is a well-docu-mented fact that more than 700,000 Rohingya had to flee Myanmar’s Rakhine state since the latest onslaught of violence unleashed on them by the Myanmar military and nearly 9,000 Rohingya had been killed in Rakhine between August 25 and September 24 in 2017

Between January and October 2019, 173 women have been killed by their husbands in Bangladesh, 37 have been murdered by the husband’s family, while 36 have been killed by their own family members.

Child marriage is an aberration that has permeated the boundaries of nationality, religion and race. Be it in Africa, Middle East, Latin America or Asia, child marriage nips the dreams of young girls in the bud.

Illicit Financial Flows (IFF)—which means “money illegally earned, transferred, or used that crosses borders”—have become a real global problem.

Mosqui-tos have become our closest companions, staying by us every hour of the day, waking us up with their love bites and lulling us to sleep with the ever-familiar hum of their buzzing wings.

The concerns and uncertainties over the relocation of some Rohingya refugees to Bashan Char are showing no signs of easing.

Sir Mark Moody-Stuart has served on the boards of major corporations like Shell, Anglo American plc and currently the Saudi Aramco. He is also the chairman of the Foundation for the United Nations Global Compact. After a doctorate in geology in 1966 at Cambridge, he worked for Shell in various capacities. He is also one of the major patrons of Asian University for Women. In an interview with Tasneem Tayeb of The Daily Star, Sir Mark Moody-Stuart talks about how businesses and governments together can embrace sustainability.

Arms trade is big business, governed by its own set of conventions. These transactions are triggered by conflicts and peacekeeping; for violence and security—depending on who the buyer is. And global arms sale has reached alarming levels in recent years—highest since the end of the Cold War.

With mass protests breaking out across a number of world capitals, it would seem the last few months have been unkind to the world. People in Sudan, Algeria, Hong Kong, Egypt and more recently in Iraq, Chile and Lebanon, have been forced to take to the streets seeking justice and equality, and respite from corrupt governing systems.

The threat of climate change is growing more real and more urgent by the day. According to Climate Nexus, a rise in temperature by 1.5 percent can lead to sea-level rise of 48cm...

The recent “deal” reached between Turkish President Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin, to end Turkish operation in northeast Syria, on October 22, has been causing quite a stir.

In awarding the Nobel Prize in literature to Peter Handke, the award committee said, “it’s not the academy’s mandate to balance literary quality against political considerations.” We need to talk about this.

The world today is observing World Food Day with the theme, “Healthy diet for a Zero Hunger world”, This is a worthy fight to pick, particularly for Bangladesh, a country where we are constantly assailed with news of food adulteration and contamination. The mobile court drives that fine fruit sellers and milk producers for selling contaminated products, and restaurant owners for serving unhygienic and inedible food to the customers, are a testament to the low-quality food that we are consuming day in and day out.