The Climate Change Emergency has been declared first by the youth, led by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg and her Fridays for Future movement of school children striking every Friday to urge leaders to treat climate change as a truly global emergency.

As the novel coronavirus known as Covid-19 spreads rapidly across the world, we now face another dimension of the “globalisation and its discontents” argument.

Trending now are a winter holding at around twenty degrees Celsius, finishing office work in a traffic jam, private fogging to rid societies of mosquitoes (members of the Executive Committee not included), and a side job or business not only to make ends meet but for a wee bit of luxury, such as eating out.

With the number of coronavirus cases crossing 100,000 mark, the official death toll standing at—and forever climbing over—3,652 (live update, worldometers, March 8), and the US flashing 8.3 billion green bucks to shoo away the spread, the outbreak of COVID-19 is no longer a “told-you-not-to-have-that-bat-soup-or-fox-meat” gossip.

The campaign for International Women’s Day 2020 is #EachForEqual. This signifies how important it is for everyone to play a role in establishing women’s equality. An equal society is an empowered society.

It is now an admitted fact that in the treasury of the world’s great speeches, the historic March 7 speech of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman occupies a special place of honour and prominence.

At 92, Mahathir Mohamad, the world’s oldest serving president, came into the limelight recently, but for all the wrong reasons. On February 22, without any prior notice, Mahathir suddenly tendered his resignation as the prime minister of the country, less than two years into his tenure.

Abhijit Banerjee, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019, made his mark with some early work on corruption in government.

Every day, long before dawn, before insanity grips Dhaka and all manners of chaos start swirling around us, certain parts of the capital fall into a familiar routine: alarms go off and shoes go on. A group of students are on their way to the university library.

When we read about a woman being “gang-raped”, then raped again by her “rescuer” (The Daily Star, October 28, 2019), how long do we spend thinking about the unbelievable trauma this woman has gone through?

Never under-estimate the power of marketing and PR. At present, there is a huge disparity in the global apparel industry in terms of who is doing what with regard to sustainability. Some brands are doing a lot. Some brands are doing a little. Some brands are doing nothing at all.

When political events in the domestic sphere of a state transcend the internal space of that state, through a process of empathetic osmosis, and impacts negatively upon the domestic political and governance harmony of one or more neighbouring states around or adjacent to it,

With Imax plan-ning to supersize the Netflix streaming service, the merger of our viewing habits is in sight. Last September, there was this David and Goliath agreement between these two opposing movie services that would allow blockbuster cinemas to be made available on small screens, while fringe films under the rubric of Netflix Originals in large cineplexes.

What was supposed to be the celebration of friendship between two of the largest democracies in the world—India and America—turned out to be a sideshow to a bloodbath of communal hatred, exposing the undemocratic underbelly of BJP’s India.

It couldn’t have been less propitious a time for US President Donald Trump to arrive in Delhi on the final leg of his 36-hour visit to India. Some parts of Delhi were burning as riots broke out in northeast Delhi.

The announce-ment on January 23 that a uniform admission test will be held for all public universities starting next year had stirred a big debate. Even university teachers seemed divided over the issue—some supported it, while others opposed.

The Bangladesh parliament, led by the parliamentary standing committee on environment, recently declared a planetary emergency in Bangladesh. This is ground breaking in that most other parliaments around the world have declared a climate change emergency, but none have also added a biodiversity emergency as the Bangladesh parliament has. So ours is a twin track emergency, not just a single track.

Turkey and the Russia-backed Syrian government led by Bashar al-Assad are in a tight jostle for full control of the north-western Syrian province of Idlib. The province—the last of the four de-escalation zones agreed by Turkey, Iran and Russia in 2017, which is yet to be taken over by the Assad government—is important to all the warring actors for diverse and awkward reasons.

If Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) KM Nurul Huda is not your favourite go-to guy when you look for truths, he has only himself to blame.

Over 8,000 km away, everything looks different. The skies, the sunrise, the people and of course, trade. In Paris, the three-day Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Forum on Due Diligence in the Garment and Footwear Sector,