FINALLY, Mamata Banerjee, who is popularly known as Didi in India, paid us a visit. We only wonder why she didn't come much earlier! She won a landslide victory in the West Bengal legislative assembly election in 2011.

FOUR years after the abdication of long-time Egyptian autocrat, President Husni Mubarak, in what seemed a watershed moment in recent history, the“Arab Spring -- a succession of popular uprisings in Arab countries -- seems depleted, defeated, and reset to zero.

WEEK after week has passed by since we have been living in a state of terror. Blockades and strikes appear to reign supreme in the lives of millions of helpless people in the country.

A passenger bus is set afire in front of the Petrobangla Bhaban at Karwan Bazar in Dhaka

HAVE any of our politicians been listening to Arvind Kejriwal's speeches, especially the one after he took oath as the chief minister of the Indian capital? I suppose not. To be fair, neither did the Indian politicians before his magnificent victory in the latest Delhi Assembly polls. If they had, they may not have met the debacle that they did.

IT'S a telling comment on India's Congress party that a four-member committee it appointed in October to devise a strategy to rejuvenate it has turned out a non-starter because its members couldn't decide who should head it.

WEST Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has just concluded her 3-day visit to Dhaka. She came at the invitation of Bangladesh Foreign Minister A.H. Mahmood Ali to pay respect to the martyrs of Ekushey February. During her brief stay in the capital she called on President Abdul Hamid, met Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and paid tribute to the martyrs at the Central Shaheed Minar.

WHILE solutions to the present political stalemate do not appear to be in sight and the public continue to suffer due to obstinacy of the political actors, is it worth pondering over measures that could be undertaken without recourse to political dialogue, with a view to tiding over the present situation?

PRESIDENT Thein Sein, who is a former military leader himself, declared a three-month state of emergency in the Kokang self-administered zone in the northern part of Shan state, which shares border with China's Yunnan province.

With the BNP-Jamaat allies continuing to enforce blockade and hartal for the 44th day on February 18, the country has descended into deep chaos, uncertainty and unimaginable distress. We have got to be worried and perturbed after witnessing the scale of tragedies, lives lost by burning, destruction and losses inflicted on the economy in a free Bangladesh that we liberated at the cost 3 million lives. Since January 6, the country, from Teknaf to Tetulia, has turned into a theatre of unabated violence and destruction.

THE number one priority for any human being is safety of life and property. People live in a society and even form a state basically from that desire. Formation of government and financing of the same are borne by the people with the expectation that they would receive protection.

One more innocent life succumbs to the brutal and mindless arson today at the critical care of the Dhaka Medical College Hospital’s burn unit

ON the darkened highways of Bangladesh; in the gloomy forests of Nigeria; in the merciless deserts of Iraq, Libya and Syria; in the windy ravines of Afghanistan; inside quiet mosques and vibrant schools in Pakistan, precious human lives are being ripped asunder by guns and bombs of demons of hell who call themselves humans. Why? To crush, conquer, control, exploit, extort and rule over the unarmed common people.

LIKE the universe, Bangladesh's politics is continually expanding! It is in a constant revolution on a bipolar axis, so to speak. And, the unresolved debate over genesis also curiously plays out: Which came first -- the egg or the hen? This shapes understanding of politics depending on which side of the political spectrum one is. The neutral silent majority knows full well where and how our political history coursed up on a wrong tangent from the core set of Liberation War ethos.

Ruling Awami League the visiting European Union parliamentary delegation that the party will not sit in a dialogue with BNP until the ongoing violence stops

Ruling Awami League tells the visiting European Union parliamentary delegation that the party will not sit in a dialogue with BNP until the ongoing violence stops

IT does not need an expert to say that we have landed ourselves in the most difficult situation as a result of the current political deadlock.

SUPPOSE India had lost the World Cup cricket match against Pakistan at Adelaide, the reaction among its people would have been that of disappointment and remorse. But I do not think that they would have initiated scuffles with the Pakistani spectators. The Indians would not have destroyed television sets as some did in Karachi and elsewhere in Pakistan. Of course, there would have been a sense of humiliation, but it would not have poured on to the streets in the shape of fracas or demonstrations.

A few days ago, in a news interview in Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) radio here in the US, a journalist covering events in Afghanistan provided a grim view of the prospects of democracy in that country.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina warns the country's leading English daily, The Daily Star, for “patronising banned militant organisation Hizb-ut Tahrir by publishing its poster”.