The five-year ride on the tiger by Aung San Suu Kyi is over. She is back to where she had been used to living during the greater part of her political career (except for a brief interregnum of pseudo-democracy): behind bars.

The Al Jazeera report on Bangladesh titled “All the Prime Minister’s Men”, aired early Tuesday morning, revealed some vulnerabilities of our power structure that pivots around connections, cronyism and corruption. It has also, inadvertently, exposed the weaknesses of our media and the state of its freedom.

The United Nations has rightly expressed fears that the recent military coup in Myanmar would exacerbate the plight of the Rohingya still remaining in the country.

For those who had expected a quick rapprochement initiative from the Biden administration with regard to Iran, especially a return to the 2015 landmark Iran nuclear deal, the recent comments by the new US top diplomat, Antony Blinken, may have perhaps been a little disappointing.

Many of us will have heard the story of the boiled frog. Legend has it that if you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will instantly leap out. But if you put it in a pot filled with pleasantly tepid water and gradually heat it, the frog will remain in the water until it boils to death.

Individuality builds self-confidence as opposed to dependency, creativity against suppression, cooperatives instead of idle loners, an active workforce vs laissez-faire, contributors not dumb receivers, and choosers not beggars. Allow me to elaborate.

Debates on any global index and ranking where a country does not perform well are common almost everywhere.

The happy ending of this story came about due to a mixture of pure chance and the laudable inquisitiveness of a Detective Branch (DB) police constable, Mahfizur Rahman.

In order to reach the globally agreed atmospheric temperature target of staying below 1.5 Degrees Centigrade, all the countries in the world have embarked on a race to reach net zero emissions of greenhouse gases as early as possible.

Following the inauguration of his Presidency, Joe Biden has already given several executive orders which are of great significance, not only for the US but for the entire world.

In our Viber group, a departmental colleague shared an excerpt from a student’s exam script. The student wrote down the title of Jhumpa Lahiri’s book “The Interpreter of Maladies” as “The Translator of Disease”.

Americans exercised their democratic right and elected Donald Trump as president in 2016. Four years later, they exercised the same right again and corrected what had turned out to be a disastrous mistake.

As the lights were about to go out on Trump presidency, the outgoing US administration made two major announcements about the Middle East—terming Iran a home for Al Qaeda, and designating the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen as “terrorists”.

It has been well-known for a long time that Bangladeshi migrant workers in the Middle East and South Asian countries are at the receiving end of all sorts of uncertainties one can think of.

Two years ago, the Global Commission on Adaptation (GCA) was set up under the chairmanship of Ban Ki-moon, former Secretary General of the United Nations, and with a number of eminent individuals as Commissioners, including Dr Muhammad Musa from BRAC.

Finally President Trump has accepted the inevitable, but not before wreaking havoc, as we had predicted he would four years ago, both at home and abroad.

Issues around sustainability come and go, but some topics will remain as important now as they were before the current global pandemic began.

The first six months of the fiscal year 2020-21 saw very slow implementation of the Annual Development Programme (ADP) of Bangladesh.

No centuries-old city merits a revamping makeup, so as to render it unrecognisable by distortion, not the least Dhaka.

A desperate Mike Pompeo unconvincingly claiming, “Al-Qaeda has a new home base.