Last week, British director Daniel Gordon’s new documentary Billion Dollar Heist was released. The film highlights the seriousness of cybersecurity issues the world faces today. Unfortunately, the subject of Gordon’s documentary is our central bank, the Bangladesh Bank, which was almost robbed of around a billion dollars by hackers in one of the worst instances of cybercrime in the world. Reviews published in some of the leading international newspapers, including The Guardian and The Financial Times, remind us that the 2016 heist remains quite a mystery.  Nearly three years after the heist, our government enacted the Digital Security Act, 2018, promising it to be “an Act to make provisions for ensuring digital security and identification, prevention, suppression and trial of offences committed through digital device and for matters ancillary thereto.” But instead, from its beginning, it has been another tool for suppressing free speech and political dissent in the country. Accordi...

Plenty of jokes are making rounds in all kinds of social media platforms since British Prime Minister Liz Truss announced her resignation on October 20. Some of those are just simple facts, yet so hilarious that controlling laughter would be difficult. One Twitterati, Alan McGuiness had  a viral tweet that reads, “My son has lived through four chancellors, three home secretaries, two prime ministers and two monarchs. He’s four months old.” A meme lists Liz Truss’ legacies as “she buried the Queen, the Pound, the Country, the Chancellor, the Conservative Party. All in a month.” And, in the world of Tiktoking, a cheeky video runs a recruitment ad for the UK Prime Minister, which says that the applicant doesn’t need any experience, not even any IQ, who will be working along with a team that changes almost every day.    Last week I wrote about a British tabloid's funny betting of a head of lettuce against the premiership of Liz Truss to see what outlasts the other. As th...

Years of campaigning and legal challenges have finally given some hope to thousands of international students, including Bangladeshis, subjected to historical injustices since 2014 over a wrongful allegation of cheating in English tests. The language test was conducted by a non-profit organisation Educational Testing Services (ETS). A first tier Appeal Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) in its verdict issued on June 18 concluded that ‘the generic evidence is not reliable because a number of students have been identified by ETS as having cheated but who did not in fact cheat.’ A UK-based rights group, Migrant Voice which has been supporting the victims of this injustice, has now signed a partnership with the law firm Bindmans LLP to launch a group compensation scheme against the Home Office. Due to the huge number of the victims, it has been likened by many something similar to Windrush scandal. In 2014, acting on a BBC investigation that unmasked some colleges in England faci...

The ongoing Tokyo Olympics is the latest sporting event where taking the knee by players has made its way in. Athletes at these Games are allowed to protest after the International Olympic Committee relaxed Rule 50, which previously forbade athletes to make any kind of “demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.” It follows the Euro 2020 where knee taking by English footballers stirred a political debate, but eventually won over the argument against racial injustices. These are powerful imprints of the social movement Black Lives Matter. No wonder the editors of Oxford Dictionary, in 2017, added the changed meaning of the word ‘woke’ to be awake to sensitive social issues, such as racism from its traditional usage as past participle of ‘’wake’’. It became popular as the anti-racism movement Black Lives Matter (BLM) started using hashtag #StayWoke on social media. But many others, particularly the conservatives, deride the te...

The United Kingdom has finally adopted the long-awaited Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime aimed at tackling human rights abusers around the world. With the announcement of targeted measures known as Magnitsky sanctions against individuals and entities accused of serious human rights violations in Russia, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar and North Korea on Monday the UK has now joined the United States and Canada in bringing in legislations to penalise rights’ abusers. The term “Magnitsky sanctions” is derived from the name of a Russian auditor, Sergei Magnitsky, who died from custodial torture in a Moscow jail in 2009 after his revelation of a $230 million dollar fraud by Russian tax officials in the UK.   The Magnitsky Act, first enacted by the US Congress in 2012, was hailed by human rights defenders as a much needed “smart tool” to counter autocratic regimes across the world. It   allows Western governments to target perpetrators without punishing the wider people of a coun...