Myanmar’s Kachin State: The new geopolitical flashpoint in China’s backyard
The timing could hardly be worse for China. Beijing has spent billions building oil and gas pipelines from Myanmar’s ports to mitigate the risk of shipping through the Malacca Strait.
21 September 2025, 05:00 AM
The 'six tigers' that drive China's AI geopolitics
China's four dragons—Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, and ByteDance—play a vital role in nurturing the AI startup ecosystem.
19 August 2025, 07:40 AM
How the Liangzhu model is challenging Silicon Valley’s AI dominance
The Liangzhu model benefits from coordinated support from both large corporations and the government.
29 July 2025, 05:00 AM
How Iran's authoritarian rule became its greatest vulnerability
The regime's brutality towards its people has created a reservoir of resentment that foreign powers can exploit.
18 July 2025, 07:00 AM
Operation Rising Lion and its wider fallout in Israel-Iran conflict
The operation revealed Israel’s strategic shift from traditional methods to a new era of advanced, tech-based intelligence warfare.
2 July 2025, 05:00 AM
Not your average BMW: Decoding Dhaka's rickshaw kings
The true kings of Dhaka's roads aren't the buses, cars, or traditional rickshaws—they're the battery-powered rickshaws.
19 May 2025, 10:30 AM
China’s bold move to bypass Western tech dominance
Washington’s continued restrictions on exporting chip technology to Beijing may soon prove futile.
13 April 2025, 06:00 AM
Dhaka's traffic through a visitor's eyes
Slowness aside, what baffled her most was the complete unpredictability of Dhaka's vehicular movement.
6 April 2025, 07:00 AM
Race with the machine
The other day, a technician came over to fix my internet connection. He was a computer science graduate. But this is a job that any vocationally-trained person could do well—it doesn’t require a four-year university degree.
28 February 2022, 18:00 PM
How to secure jobs amid looming automation
On December 19, The Daily Star published a refreshing story that offered a window into the changing landscape of our job market. Electronics manufacturers, according to the report, are scrambling for graduates from the polytechnic institutes, often recruiting them straight from the campus.
15 January 2022, 18:00 PM
Can Bangladesh leapfrog into the future with 4IR?
American geographer Jared Diamond makes an interesting point in his bestseller “Guns, Germs, and Steel.”
27 December 2021, 18:00 PM
Why Bangladesh should invest in artificial intelligence
In the 1970s, American sociologist and economic historian Immanuel Wallerstein (1930-2019) proposed an approach to view the global economic system as an interplay between three groups of countries: core, semi-periphery, and periphery countries.
11 October 2021, 18:00 PM
How the US’ War on Terror played out on its social divide
On June 23, 2010, a rocket-propelled grenade shattered the skull of US Army Private First Class Russell Madden in Afghanistan, where he was fighting his country’s war against terror.
14 September 2021, 18:00 PM
How can today’s graduates prepare for future jobs?
The world has seen more changes in the last two years than in the previous two decades. The ongoing pandemic has taught us the hard way that everything we hold dear or take for granted is actually fragile and transient.
9 September 2021, 18:00 PM
Can AI improve our budget implementation scenario?
On July 25 this year, the Prothom Alo English edition published a news item about a bridge being built somewhere on the outskirts of Dhaka that led to nowhere.
31 August 2021, 18:00 PM
Online education and artificial intelligence
As we all know, Covid-19 struck Wuhan on New Year's Eve in 2019, and the city embraced total lockdown. Soon, the rest of China and the world followed. But what many don't know is Chinese education never went into lockdown.
31 July 2021, 18:00 PM
After two decades of war, the US leaves an uncertain future for Afghans
June 2002. I was on my first visit to Kabul. People were trying to put together their lives with new hope. Kids seemed happy and curious. Some were walking to whatever remained of the schools. Some were playing on the streets, while others were curiously watching the foreigners.
18 June 2021, 18:00 PM
Can our engineering education prepare graduates for the industry?
How universities can better prepare graduates for the industry is a constant topic of debate. It will perhaps never end because the industry needs are changing rapidly, and the universities are constantly trying to adapt to such changes.
31 May 2021, 18:00 PM
Ethnic minorities’ baffling show of support for Suu Kyi: What does it indicate?
After Aung San Suu Kyi’s arrest following the military coup, there was an outpouring of support shown to her by various ethnic groups in Myanmar,
1 April 2021, 18:00 PM
Suu Kyi is likely to win again, but will that bring about any real change?
It was a landslide victory in 2015 for Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD).
26 August 2020, 18:00 PM
Has Trump found a solution to America’s Afghan problem?
America’s recent peace agreement with the Talibans in Doha makes many ponder whether it has lost the war. However, before coming to such a conclusion, we should revisit the aims of this decades-old bloody conflict.
6 July 2020, 18:00 PM
William Dalrymple's 'The Anarchy': Risky business and the company that never left
The book starts with the origin of the word loot, a slang word for plunder. It was imported into the English language while the East India Company and its officers pillaged—for more than 100 years—Bengal, Mysore,
10 June 2020, 18:00 PM
Iran and the USA don’t have to be enemies
The contradict-ion couldn’t be more striking.
2 March 2020, 18:00 PM
‘The only constant in life is change’
On November 29, 2019, The Daily Star announced the demise of its Star Weekend magazine and the birth of Toggle, quoting Heraclitus as a justification, but without giving him due credit.
11 January 2020, 18:00 PM
Myanmar’s state of perpetual conflict
Report after report have confirmed the wave of appalling violence in Myanmar on its ethnic minorities, perpetrated by a well-trained, well-armed and state-sponsored organisation. Yet the world seems to be incapable of ending this horrifying situation, perhaps unprecedented since the Second World War. Why?
20 October 2019, 18:00 PM
Trump’s wish to buy Greenland
Donald Trump. Boris Johnson. Marine Le Pen. Norbert Hofer. Are they ignorant? Short-sighted? Populist?
29 August 2019, 18:00 PM
A priceless gem in Copenhagen
On a short trip to Copenhagen, my wife and I, having just visited the Little Mermaid and the Hans Christian Andersen museum, are wandering where to go next. Just then, by a sheer stroke of luck, someone at the tourist information centre casually mentions The
22 August 2019, 18:00 PM
Why Suu Kyi is silent on the Rohingya issue
Aung San Suu Kyi's inability to speak up for the Rohingya in Myanmar has been a riddle. The Western world had elevated her almost to the status of sainthood, only to find that she is actually a politician, happy to switch sides as convenient.
17 April 2019, 18:00 PM