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.