Showing 1 - 10 of 17
As Trump returns, Sino-Indian ties are changing
Oped, Debasish Roy Chowdhury, Published on 24/01/2025
» Weeks before his return to the White House, US President-elect Donald Trump issued a pointed warning to the Brics countries. "Go find another sucker," he wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social, threatening the group's nine members with 100% tariffs should they attempt to challenge the dollar's global dominance.
'Bulldozer justice' reigns in an unchanging India
Oped, Debasish Roy Chowdhury, Published on 11/09/2024
» Politically motivated bulldozing has returned with a vengeance in India. Earlier this month in the state of Madhya Pradesh, a local Muslim leader and member of the opposition Congress party watched his home, supposedly "illegally built", reduced to rubble. A district official then gloated on social media that justice had been served for recent attacks on the police. Meanwhile, in the neighbouring state of Uttar Pradesh, bulldozers flattened an "illegal" shopping complex owned by a Muslim functionary of an opposition party who had recently been arrested on charges of gang-raping a minor girl.
The debate about AI safety gets everything wrong
News, Daron Acemoglu, Published on 07/08/2024
» A huge industry has emerged in recent years as China, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union have made the safety of artificial intelligence a top priority. Obviously, any technology -- from cars and pharmaceuticals to machine tools and lawnmowers -- should be designed as safely as possible (one wishes that more scrutiny had been brought to bear on social media during its early days).
The popular decimation of India's democracy
Oped, Pranab Bardhan, Published on 18/05/2024
» India's ongoing parliamentary election, in which nearly a billion people casting their votes over a six-week period, should represent an extraordinary exercise of democracy. The bleak reality, however, is that the election appears poised to consolidate a decade-long process of democratic decay, which has included the decimation of liberal institutions and practices and weakening of political competition. After all, the leader who has presided over this process -- Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) -- remains wildly popular.
Let's open Facebook's black box
News, Parmy Olson, Published on 03/08/2022
» There's a perfectly good reason to break open the secrets of social-media giants. Over the past decade, governments have watched helplessly as their democratic processes were disrupted by misinformation and hate speech on sites like Meta Platforms Inc's Facebook, Alphabet Inc's YouTube and Twitter Inc. Now some governments are gearing up for a comeuppance.
A monopoly, for sure
Oped, Postbag, Published on 21/11/2020
» Re: "A more unequal society than ever before", (Opinion, Nov 14).
Donald Trump's last stand for 'apartheid America'
News, Jeffrey D Sachs, Published on 29/10/2020
» The ferocity of the 2020 presidential election in the United States is not about Donald Trump per se, but about what he represents: the racist structures of power that have persisted in America for centuries, though sometimes in mutated form. The long history of America's state-sponsored racism will draw to an end in the coming generation, which is why Mr Trump is so strikingly reactionary in his attempts to prolong it. Yet the damage that Mr Trump's brand of white nationalism could still cause to the US and the world if he wins a second term makes the election easily the most important in modern American history.
Don't politicise the Hagia Sophia
News, Editorial, Published on 19/07/2020
» After it was designated as a museum in 1936 by the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the Hagia Sophia took on a different meaning. It wasn't just a place of worship as it had been under the Byzantines and the Ottomans. It became a meeting place for people of different faiths but held by no religion in particular. It was a place where laymen, leaders, popes and presidents met to marvel at the grandeur of its domed roof, which has seen empires come and go over its long history.
Of plagues, genocides and the coronavirus
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 10/07/2020
» Last Sunday in the city of Baltimore, they tore down a statue of Christopher Columbus and threw it into the harbour.
Standing up to hate speech
Asia focus, Nareerat Wiriyapong, Published on 06/07/2020
» As a regular social media user, I find it annoying whenever I scroll through my Facebook account to find many ads that aren't relevant to my interests. My main purpose for using social media is just that: social. I like to hear from people I don't see regularly or long-lost friends from my school days.