The current Covid-19 pandemic emergency is combining with the climate change emergency as we speak, and as we tackle the first, we also need to tackle the second at the same time.

Economic recovery following the coronavirus lockdown will require massive government intervention and tons of money.

Increasing allocation for the health sector is a common and justified demand in Bangladesh. With an allocation of 0.9 percent of gross domestic product and less than five percent of total budget expenditure the country has very little healthcare investment for its citizens.

I was a young lecturer when private universities appeared for the first time in the higher education scene of Bangladesh. I remember when one of my colleagues left us to join a pioneer private university as a full time faculty, we at the department felt that he had sold his soul to money, deciding to work under a corporate system. The same thing happened when one of my teachers left for a financially lucrative BCS job.

In America, one of the politically charged reactions to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has been the denigration of urban population density.

Dr Saadat Husain, former chairman of Bangladesh Public Service Commission, passed away on April 22, 2020.

I had written in a previous column about the fact that the next Conference of Parties (COP26) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which was to have been held in November 2020 in Glasgow, Scotland with the United Kingdom as COP26 President, had to be postponed to 2021 due to the global Covid-19 pandemic.

The world watched in paralysed horror as oil prices plummeted to below zero: the price of West Texas Intermediate oil grade went negative to –USD 37.63 per barrel (pb), for the first time in history. The shock of the collapse was intense, leading to traders naming the day “Black Monday”.

The passing of National Professor Jamilur Reza Choudhury marks the sudden end of the extraordinary journey of a man who was venerated by thousands of his direct students at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (Buet), Brac University and University of Asia Pacific as well as thousands more, who came in touch with him through his professional and pro-bono engagements in diverse fields, to whom he was a quintessential teacher, mentor and philosopher-guide.

Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic we have begun to analyse, forecast and speculate the impact on economies, societies, political systems, governance mechanisms, and on many more areas.

My Face-book newsfeed has been experiencing a little tremor ever since the Dhaka-based action movie Extraction started streaming on Netflix on April 24.

Press freedom in Bangladesh has been in decline long before the coronavirus came to our shores.

The recent back-and-forth debate over the use of face masks to prevent the spread of covid-19 has settled. In the beginning, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said that there was no need for people who are well to wear face masks.

One of the key revelations of the Covid-19 pandemic is that things that we held to be true in the past are now seen to have been myths, and as we transition from the old order into a new (and hopefully better) order going forward, we can build a better world by fixing much of what was wrong with the old world.

What does a “contract” actually mean? I am sure many garment factory owners have been pondering over this issue these past few weeks. Here’s a simple definition of a contract: “A written or spoken agreement, especially one concerning employment, sales, or tenancy, that is intended to be enforceable by law.”

To support the COVID-19 affected economy, some experts are suggesting that the government of Bangladesh should go for printing money. However, I feel that there is no need to take such a radical measure since Bangladesh has a number of policy tools at its hand at the moment to heat up the economy.

The horrific images of white plastic body bags in which the final journeys are set during this great pandemic add to the myth of coronavirus as the great leveller.

One of the biggest lessons coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic is that we are living in an interlinked world where no country can cut itself off for very long and no country can tackle the problem by itself. This lesson is even more true as we battle the double whammy of Covid-19 and the climate change.

The pandemic and its economic impact will be felt very strongly by the poor.

Alan Greenspan, who led the US Federal Reserve for two decades, was summoned in congress and testified that the financial crisis of 2008-2009 was an economic tsunami which could happen once in a century.