Donald Trump came into office promising to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. Now, six months later, his high stakes meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska may have put the United States and Russia on a new path toward peace, or, if this initiative fails, could trigger an even more dangerous escalation, with warhawks in Congress already pushing for another $54.6 billion in weapons for Ukraine...
THE luminous white stones of Sadapathar, glistening in the currents of the River Dhalai, have long been celebrated as a wonder of Sylhet. Tourists travel miles to marvel at this natural treasure, yet behind its beauty lies a thriving, often lawless, industry of stone and sand extraction. Along the Companiganj鈥揃holaganj highway, stone-crushing machines run ceaselessly...
IN SIDNEY Lumet鈥檚 12 Angry Men, there鈥檚 a moment when Juror 8, played by Henry Fonda, stands alone against a mounting verdict. 鈥業t鈥檚 not easy to raise my hand and send a boy off to die without talking about it first,鈥� he says. He adds very little to the prevailing noise in the room, yet his voice carries a weight far beyond its volume, grounded in moral authenticity...
DHAKA, a teeming capital, is a living example of what happens when urbanisation can outstrip planning. A sprawling city with more than 20 million, it is about to explode. Its crowded, polluted streets, survival struggles and squalor tell the story of a desperate metropolis. Every morning, millions of Dhaka residents endure agonising commutes, stuck in traffic that snakes...
IT WAS astonishing to read about the death of Ahmad Saeed Tazazaa (20 years old) on August 3, 2025, inside Israel鈥檚 Magiddo prison. Just months earlier, reports emerged that Israeli forces had killed another Palestinian prisoner in Megiddo, Walid Khaled Abdullah Ahmad (16 years old), on March 24. Both young men, boys really, had been picked up from the...
PEOPLE in Bangladesh are not dying solely from poverty; they are dying under the crushing weight of cruelty, superstition and hypocrisy. Three recent incidents have laid bare the nakedness of our collective moral bankruptcy. They are not isolated tragedies; they are symptoms of a deeply unhealthy social structure and of our contempt for the very religious...
ONCE, in the villages of Bangladesh, the night air shimmered with tiny golden lights. Fireflies, the living lanterns of the countryside, would drift through paddy fields and hover over darkened rivers, their glow guiding the imagination of poets and the steps of night-time travellers. Bengali literature even gave us the image of 鈥榓 boat in a dark night finding its way...
WATER runs through the veins of Bangladesh 鈥� shaping our land, feeding our people and sustaining our economy. With more than 700 rivers and a maze of wetlands, ponds, canals and coastal ecosystems, the country is blessed with extraordinary freshwater and marine wealth. Yet this abundance is underappreciated, undervalued and increasingly under threat. As...
WHAT if the most sinister achievement of modern capitalism is its ability to convince people that their suffering is entirely self-inflicted? Netflix鈥檚 Squid Game, which burst into global consciousness in 2021, isn鈥檛 merely a dystopian thriller, it is a masterclass in economic allegory. On the surface, it tells the story of 456 people who voluntarily sign up to compete in...
AT THE Singapore Changi Airport, I was waiting for my connecting flight to Brisbane, Australia. I entered one of the restaurants for a meal. As I waited for my order to be served, I looked around. My attention was grabbed by a service robot which was given the name Wendy. Wendy was moving around and collecting used dishes from the tables. As she did her work, she...
IN THE evolving situation, the severity of vector-borne diseases, especially mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue and chikungunya, is increasing day by day. The worst dengue situation happened in 2023. According to government estimates, the number of infected people was 321,179 and the number of dengue death was 1,705 that year. This year until August...
IN TODAY鈥橲 interconnected trade system, the smallest tremor in distant economies can send out disruptive waves through developing nations such as Bangladesh. As the country navigates the turbulent aftermath of the Covid pandemic, the combined impact of geopolitical tension, fractured supply chains and persistent inflationary pressures continues to...
THE Israeli human rights organization B鈥橳selem released a comprehensive report on July 27 describing the Israeli war on Gaza as genocide...
THERE is something profoundly disquieting about a moral catastrophe unfolding under the glaring light of international attention鈥攐nly to be met with an American shrug and a diplomatic shrug-off. Israel鈥檚 unfolding plan to seize full military and administrative control of Gaza, paired with the dismaying acquiescence of the United States, ought to alarm every...
IN RECENT years, debates over electoral reform in Bangladesh have intensified, with many policymakers, academics and citizens arguing for a system that would represent the diversity of political opinions. One potential model comes from Japan鈥檚 house of representatives, which uses a combination of single-seat constituencies and proportional representation. Adopting...
