According to a recent report, due to the insistence of lawmakers, the government is going to repair religious establishments and build new bridges across the country at a cost of Tk 5,132 crore.

In a first-of-its-kind study, the Economic Relations Division (ERD) under the finance ministry found that around 1.6 million young people lost their jobs and about 20 million youths faced income loss due to the pandemic.

Over the years, experts have identified two major problems in Bangladesh’s banking sector.

When we ask the question, “Who should development benefit?”, the answer should be quite straightforward: “the people.” But in reality, that is not often the case.

In a recent report, the World Bank stated that better targeted social protection programmes and reallocation of existing transfers to the poorest segment of society could reduce poverty from 36 percent to 12 percent in Bangladesh.

Today marks 20 years of the 9/11 attacks on the US masterminded by Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and a bunch of “ragheads” (as angry racist US soldiers called them) sitting in some cave in Afghanistan, as per the West’s dubious official narrative of what transpired on this day.

Twenty-years after 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan by US and NATO forces, the US is on the cusp of withdrawing its forces from the proverbial “graveyard of empires”, with the US military claiming its withdrawal is more than 90 percent complete.

As of now, the US and Iran are yet to conclude their talks in Vienna “on the terms of Washington return(ing) to the [Iran nuclear] agreement,” according to The Guardian.

On May 27, The Daily Star reported that detectives had claimed to have seized LSD, an extremely potent hallucinogenic drug, for the first time in the country during a raid in Dhaka.

On May 19, the finance minister said, “The scope [to whiten black money] will be there as long as undisclosed incomes will be there.” (The Daily Star) Before commenting on this statement, let’s take a step back and think how we got to this point.

In a report published on May 1, this newspaper revealed that according to a recent study, the Covid-19 treatment cost is abnormally higher in private hospitals compared to public hospitals.

The ongoing pandemic has caused huge economic losses for the world. In 2020, growth in South Asia contracted by 5.4 percent, which does not capture the whole story of how terribly its people have actually suffered—but it is an indicator of how the region has struggled over the last year.

One of the less talked-about downsides of the pandemic-induced lull has been the increasing financial stress on the Bangladesh Power Development Board (BPDB). According to a study last year by the Ohio-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis,

The reason behind the creation of the concept of Least Developed Countries (LDC) by the UN in the 1960s was to identify a set of nations whose development struggles were not solely based on their own shortcomings, but due to other structural constraints.

It was good to hear the High Court blasting a section of Bangladesh Bank officials for their alleged connection with financial scams involving People’s Leasing and Financial Services Ltd (PLFSL), a non-bank financial institution (or NBFI) that is now in the process of liquidation due largely to the infamous PK Halder and his associates.

Bangladesh is no stranger to disaster management. Since independence it has dealt with numerous natural disasters as well as political unrest and overhauls.

The year 2020 has been like no other in recent history. Even the biggest doomsdayers could not have predicted what was to occur, and how the Covid-19 pandemic was to derail millions, if not billions, of dreams and aspirations.

As the nation holds its breath in anticipation of a potential second wave of Covid-19, five countries including Bangladesh have decided to strengthen sharing of information and coordination of policies and actions to cope with its probable impacts.

The year 2020 has been a disappointment due to the Covid-19 pandemic. And just one of its many downsides can be seen on the global economy which, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is set to contract by 4.9 percent in 2020—with the IMF saying in its June report that this “baseline projection rests on key assumptions about the fallout from the pandemic.”

In an interview published by The Daily Star on October 27, Dr Ahsan Mansur, while discussing the recent IMF revelation that Bangladesh is set to surpass India in terms of per capita GDP, said something very interesting.