It's been a while since the Hallmark Group has been mentioned in the news. Except for when it has been used as an example of severe corruption and criminality, to illustrate the grave consequences that arise when certain principles and rules are ignored.

In a reversal of its stance, the Bangladesh Bank (BB) on August 27 decided to allow Beximco Ltd to reschedule its loan of Tk 430.05 crore, thus in principle approving the rescheduling of restructured loans.

Having acceded to the United Nations Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (UNCAT) on October 1998, Bangladesh was obligated to submit its initial State Report under Article 19 of the UNCAT to the UN’s Committee against Torture (CAT) by November 4, 1999. But it took Bangladesh 20 years to comply—and only after the CAT sent a letter to the Bangladesh government on December 10, 2018, reminding it of its overdue initial report and about the possibility for the Committee to proceed with a review in its continued absence.

Bangladesh’s economy has made massive strides since 1971. After independence, the initial challenges that the economy faced were enormous. And while Bangladesh managed to overcome most of them, many new challenges emerged in the years that followed.

If you said pre-2013...that the most private moments of your lives were being watched and recorded...people would call you a conspiracy theorist.” – Edward Snowden

Moving against the current of expert opinion, the government, in the budget for FY2019-20, opened up a five-year scheme to convert black money into white.

The Tk 5,23,190 crore budget proposed by the government, which is the biggest in our country’s history, was somewhat of a letdown. Governments sometimes struggle to fully make use of their budgetary plans in electoral democracies because the party in power may

One of the best instruments the government can use to serve those it works for—presumably the citizens—is the national budget. Unfortunately, if one was to ask ordinary citizens, independent analysts and experts to rate how successfully the government implemented

No matter which approach is used, every method of measurement shows inequality has risen in Bangladesh (at least) over the last 10 years. If we take the latest Household Income and Expenditure Survey of the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, we see that the country’s Gini coefficient—a measure of inequality—went up (indicating disparity has grown) from 0.458 in 2010 to 0.482 in 2016. From a different angle, a report released by Oxfam towards the close of last year ranked Bangladesh 148th in the world—out of 157 countries—for reducing inequality.

In the last decade at least, we have seen two things happening side-by-side globally. One is the rise of the executive branch of government—the significance of its role in the workings of government and society at large. The other is the decline of civil liberties—some of which, such as the right to privacy and free speech, people are now “willingly” compromising on, or no longer view as inalienable even.

Aside from being nominated multiple times for the Nobel Peace Prize, including in 2019 by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mairead Maguir, Julian Assange has won countless awards for journalism

While inaugurating the first national industrial fair in the city, the prime minister, at the end of last month, said she wanted to discuss how to reduce the interest rate of bank loans which she thought had become the biggest barrier to the country’s industrialisation.

The devastating series of suicide attacks in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday that claimed at least 250 lives was noticeably well organised.

Three weeks into the invasion of Iraq, coalition forces led by the US army entered Baghdad and formally occupied it on April 9, 2003.

Narratives shape our world. The deeper meaning of Orwell's words becomes clear when we know the true nature of Syria's crisis.

According to the Fall 2018 issue of MIT's Sloan Review Magazine, “Blockchain technology is set to be a major player of the future digital economy.”

The recent Ducsu election, held after 28 years and for the first time since people's representation in government is said to have prevailed in the country, was another unfortunate nail in the coffin of our so-called democracy.

An article titled “Tax the rich” published in this daily on February 22, highlighted the astonishing rise in wealth and income inequality that we've witnessed globally in recent years, and rightly recognised it as a crisis that deserves the most urgent attention.

While most of the western mainstream media was shocked by Donald Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US Presidential Elections, the same can't be said about all media outlets or pundits.

Lately, I've had the chance to research a lot about the state of youth unemployment in our country. This included reading multiple reports released by a number of national