“When written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters: one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.”

As Bangladesh assumes the leadership of the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) for the next two years, including at the next Conference of Parties (COP26) to be held in Glasgow, Scotland in November 2021, there is an opportunity for Bangladesh to push for the issue of loss and damage from climate change to be made a central topic for discussion at COP26. This is quite a politically sensitive issue that goes well beyond mitigation and adaptation, which have been the main focus of climate change conferences until now.

With Covid-19 bringing economic activities across nations to a halt, more and more people are being pushed into poverty. Job losses, business losses and farming losses, leading to economic stress, are pushing many to the fringes of poverty. And as families are being rendered helpless, the worst sufferers are invariably the children.

With the Bangladesh economy in the first phase of its Covid Reopening, the country will be eagerly looking forward to attracting foreign investors to provide a much-needed stimulus.

The Covid-19 pandemic is wreaking havoc throughout the global fashion industry. A recently updated report by McKinsey and Company and the Business of Fashion—“The State of Fashion 2020”—states that the global fashion industry will face a 27 percent to 30 percent contraction in business due to the outbreak of the virus.

On June 7, 1966, in the then East Pakistan, a special protest day was observed in support of the Six Point Movement. The government of General Ayub Khan moved to suppress it with force. Huge demonstrations were fired upon by police claiming a number of lives. Large scale arrests followed. It is time once again to gratefully recall those intrepid Bangali nationalists whose sacrifices expedited our defiant march to full independence a few years later.

The Amazon rainforest, spread over 2.1 million square miles, is dubbed as the “lungs of the planet” as it produces 20 percent of the oxygen in our planet’s atmosphere.

Today, June 5, marks the 53rd anniversary of the 1967 war between Israel and its Arab neighbours Egypt, Jordan and Syria. In the six days of conflict, Israel captured the Sinai and Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Syrian Golan Heights—all of which, except for the Sinai, it still illegally occupies.

In the last few weeks, the world has been having to deal with the double emergency of the pandemic as well as climate change, while Bangladesh and West Bengal had to deal with a triple emergency, with super cyclone Amphan hitting us quite badly.

The building of trust, meaningful relationships between manufacturers and customers in the global apparel industry has played a vital role in the continuing success of the sector.

While the world grapples to contain the spread of the coronavirus, a different breed of pesky pestilence is threatening the food security of many regions, including some parts of Asia—locusts!

The budget for fiscal year (FY) 2021 is going to be presented in the backdrop of a situation which was previously not experienced in the history of Bangladesh.

His visiting card had two office addresses: one in Scotland and the other in Estonia. There was nothing wrong with it, but the architect who just shared his card explained the oddity.

Every country, small or large, rich or poor, have embraced the concept of a balanced and phased reopening where the concerns of the workers, businesses, and health sector professionals are meshed into a workable action plan.

Online teaching, at its best, can create a learning environment to ensure transference of knowledge. However, I am not sure if technology and innovations have reached that point to replace the tribal needs of human interactions that define the complex teacher-student relationship in a physical classroom.

It is hard not to notice the frozen posture of BUET engineer MD Delwoar Hossain’s murdered body on the bank of the Turag river.

China and South Korea were the early frontlines in our pitched battle against Covid-19. Both countries had taken the hardest hit during the initial phase of the outbreak, but both were quick to rebound from the initial shock of it and soon cornered the mortal enemy with the swift stroke of their digital weapons.

Once the Covid-19 pandemic is under control, and the world economy is back on its tracks, the status and fate of the 2030 Agenda, also known as Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), needs to be reassessed.

During a Joe Rogan podcast a year ago, Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and co-founder of Tesla Inc., audaciously said that many human beings alive today have already become “cyborgs”.

Remember getting caught by your parents for trying out roadside pickles or tawdry coloured crunchy ice outside your school?