Is the Coronavirus racist? Of course not. The Covid-19 and its variants do not discriminate between race, creed or borders. They simply infect everyone indiscriminately, so the only defence is vaccines and social distancing.

The need for higher allocation for the social safety net programmes (SSNPs) has never been felt so badly than during the ongoing pandemic.

CITIZENS’ understanding about the causes of climate change and its consequences is vital for its mitigation. For that, communicating the relevant issues to the masses is a prerequisite.

No child, Palestinian or Israeli, whoever they are, should ever have to worry that death will rain from the sky. How many of my colleagues are willing to say the same, to stand for Palestinian human rights as they do for Israeli? How many Palestinians have to die for their lives to matter?”

On May 1 the world celebrated the contributions of workers to societies especially to the economic growth of nations. Yet news reports on May 5 (The Daily Star) described the dire state of workers in Bangladesh’s informal sector as a result of the economic fallout of the pandemic. Sadly they were not in such a great state before the pandemic either.

The Covid-19 pandemic continues to reveal shocking underlying infrastructural inequalities around the world. While the United States rapidly rolls out vaccines even to children, countries like India suffer devastating numbers of fatalities each day. India recently reported more than 340,000 daily coronavirus cases—nearly half the global total—and the country seemingly has no end to its crisis in sight.

While the pandemic was a first in recent times, there has been an international aid system in place for decades now to deal with the fallout of war, hunger, poverty, refugees, and forced displacement.

The concepts of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), blue economy or global biodiversity targets have gained traction in Bangladesh, so much so that it would not be unfair to say that the terms and phrases are often overly used.

Because of their continuous renewability and inexhaustibility, ocean energies are known as marine renewable energy (MRE). However, all ocean-based renewable energy resources are not considered MRE.

The holiday lethargy has caused me self-loathing. Let me count some of the factors as to why I am beginning to hate myself.

You have perhaps been witness to a cycle of violence that begins with one-sided bullying and coercion (action) and continues until the victim is forced to respond (reaction). And then the “fighting” begins. But then the victim is blamed for countering the continuing onslaught.

Deadly Covid-19 surges are painful reminders that we cannot let our guard down. If the virus travels into rural South Asia with the same vengeance with which it hit Indian cities,

In the second half of 2017, the government did something unprecedented in response to an unprecedented situation—it sheltered about 750,000 Rohingyas fleeing from a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing” by the Myanmar army.

Bangladesh had its first gas field discovery in Sylhet in 1955. Since then, a total of 27 commercial gas fields have been found in the country with a cumulative original recoverable gas reserve of 28 trillion cubic feet (Tcf), according to Petrobangla official estimates.

Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel Klara and the Sun, his first since receiving the award in literature in 2017, has some relevance for policymakers and ordinary citizens across the globe.

Governments in the Western world were galvanised by the “Je suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”) slogan after the shooting at the office of the ill-famous sleazy French magazine in Paris in 2015 by Muslim extremists, which ended in twelve of its staff members being killed.

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.

It was quite a sight. Viewers of television channels and readers of the dailies that carried the images of incarcerated journalist Rozina Islam were baffled at the scale of security measures taken by the state.

The year 2020 will be remembered as not just the year of the pandemic, but also for the experienced human-induced climate change impacts,

South Asian countries share common traditions, heritage, culture and history. Thus it is not surprising that Bangladesh, India and Pakistan also share the colonial legacy of repressive and authoritarian laws, often called the “colonial hangover”.