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
Bangladesh: From a take-off stage to actual take-off
Budget implementation capacity of Bangladesh has been falling consistently for the last seven fiscal years, exposing poor capacity of government agencies, The Daily Star reported on June 4, 2018. Despite a sustained increase in GDP growth rate for over a decade, the implementing capacity has dropped from 97 percent in 2010-11 to a mere 78 percent in 2016-17, it further adds.
20 June 2018, 18:00 PM
Why liberal arts education matters
In the Vatican, there is a fresco by Raphael called “The School of Athens.” It depicts an imaginary congregation of many of the great Greek polymaths, philosophers, painters, sculptors, poets, and scientists—the very shapers of modern western civilisation.
28 January 2018, 18:00 PM
Rethinking our way forward
Recently, The Daily Star held a roundtable conference on how infrastructure development projects in Bangladesh can be better managed and the summary was published in the daily on December 12 which I read with interest.
29 December 2017, 18:00 PM