We should have seen this coming a mile away. After all, it seems to be the trend with popular instant messengers these days anyway. Facebook is said to be now eying adding the power of games to its Messenger service, leveraging the nascent platform announced barely two months ago. But while the move may sound like a no-brainer in retrospect, … Continue reading
SITTWE, Myanmar (AP) — The boy was shoved onto the wooden vessel with hundreds of other Rohingya Muslims. For days, the 14-year-old sat with his knees bent into his chest, pressed up against sweaty bodies in the cabin’s rancid heat.
Women cradled coughing babies. The crew paced back and forth with belts and iron rods, striking anyone who dared to speak, stand up or even those who vomited from the nauseating stench and rolling waves. Rohingya have been fleeing persecution in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar for years, but that was not the central reason Mohammad Tayub ended up on the ship anchored off the coast of western Rakhine state two weeks ago.
He said he was simply tricked by brokers, now capitalizing on poverty and a growing sense of desperation.
Two men approached him while he was tending cattle, he said, offering him a job in Malaysia and saying that if he wanted to help earn money for his family, this was his best chance.
They took him to the shore on the back of their motorbike, offering assurances he wouldn’t have to pay for the boat ride. He hoped at least to go home, pack a bag and say goodbye, but by that time, it was already too late.
“I’m never going to see my mother again,” he thought when inside the ship, his body pressed up tightly against strangers on all sides. “I wanted to cry, but I knew I’d be beaten again if I did.”
Tayub had no way of knowing there is little chance of an exit for thousands of Rohingya and Bangladeshis stranded in the sea since a crackdown on human trafficking networks in Thailand earlier this month left the region grappling with a monumental humanitarian crisis. They are growing weaker each day as the navies of three Southeast Asian nations have pushed crowded rickety boats out of their respective waters, each nation fearing that any sign of acceptance could trigger a mass exodus that would swamp its shores.
Survivors say dozens have died and an increasingly alarmed United Nations has warned that the boats could turn into “floating coffins.”
But that has not stopped brokers like the ones who approached Tayub in Myanmar. All are still eager to earn the $100 they receive from the ship’s captain for each body delivered regardless of what happens after they leave, according to Maung Maung, a community leader who has researched trafficking in camps in and around Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine state.
The captains know they can earn more money — thousands of dollars per person from family members — once they leave the country’s terrestrial waters.
For those trapped inside the vessels until the crew is given the go-ahead to leave, the shore is tantalizingly close, a few hours away by boat.
“I wanted to jump in the water and swim back home,” Tayub said, “but the crew were all armed. I knew they’d shoot me.”
The government claims Myanmar’s 1.3 million Rohingya are illegal migrants from neighboring Bangladesh, though many of their families arrived generations ago. Denied citizenship, they are effectively stateless and have faced violence and state-sponsored discrimination for decades.
After the country of 50 million started moving from dictatorship to democracy in 2011, newfound freedoms of expression lifted the lid off deep-seated hatred of the dark-skinned religious minority, making them even more vulnerable. Up to 280 Rohingya have been killed since mid-2012, and some 140,000 were chased from their homes by machete-wielding extremist Buddhist mobs. They now live under apartheid-like conditions in camps where they can’t work, get an adequate education or receive medical care.
They have been told there’s little chance they will be allowed to vote in upcoming general elections and that those who cannot prove their families have been in the country since it gained independence from Britain in 1948 could face deportation or indefinite detention in camps.
As result, more than 100,000 Rohingya and neighboring Bangladeshis have fled by boat in the last three years, the biggest exodus of boat people in the region since the Vietnam War, says Chris Lewa of the non-profit advocacy group Arakan Project.
Now it is not just religious and ethnic persecution but abject poverty, desperation and greed within their own communities that have torn the social fabric and driven Rohingya to leave.
Though police, navy and other government officials profit, the brokers themselves are almost all Rohingya.
The Associated Press interviewed nine families whose children have been taken by traffickers. It also interviewed six young victims, several community leaders and a smuggler in Sittwe.
Maung Maung, one of the community leaders, rattled off names of more than a dozen men and women working full time to fill ships with human cargo. Residents were quick to confirm them, saying it’s no longer a secret. The giant wooden vessel that carried Tayub was among five migrant ships bobbing last week in the Bay of Bengal that separates Myanmar and Bangladesh.
The brokers promise men jobs and offer pretty young girls the prospect of marriage if they agree to board the ships. It may cost them nothing to board, but the migrants are unaware that they will be held hostage in jungle camps or at sea until their poor families somehow come up with enough money to pay their ransom. Activists also say some women end up being sold into prostitution.
Until recently, the first stop for boats leaving the Bay of Bengal was Thailand, long considered a regional trafficking hub. Men, women and children were often held until brokers could collect up to $2,000 from relatives.
Those who could pay continued onward, usually to Malaysia, because the Muslim country faces a shortage of unskilled workers. Those who couldn’t come up with the money were sometimes beaten, killed or left to die. At suspected migrant camps in the mountains of southern Thailand, authorities have unearthed dozens of bodies from shallow graves since May 1. They have also arrested dozens of people, including police, politicians and a suspected trafficking kingpin.
The crackdown, however, had the unintended consequence of spooking agents and brokers, who started holding the migrants offshore in overloaded boats. Fearing arrest, captains abandoned vessels, leaving thousands of men, women and children to fend for themselves on the open ocean.
Off the Myanmar coast, Tayub and everyone else on the wooden boat seemed destined to meet the even more uncertain fate once the vessel left, though it was unclear to those on board what they were waiting for.
As the number of passengers climbed to about 300, they were convinced the ship would soon set sail and their families would never know what had happened.
Some were able to leave, but only if they could somehow pay the brokers anywhere from $100 to $300 to disembark.
On Tayub’s 12th night on board, he heard a boat pull up and loud voices. He was shocked to hear someone call, “Come out people from the Sittwe area!” He rushed to the deck with 13 other boys and girls, tripping between the bodies and legs of the other tightly packed passengers.
The kids didn’t know it then, but their parents had learned what had happened and paid a local community leader to rescue them. They argued, negotiated, and eventually, after handing over hundreds of dollars, the ship’s broker let them disembark. When they arrived at shore hours later, eyes red from crying and their stomachs concave after days of eating nothing but a few handfuls of rice and slices of potato, they rushed to their parents’ arms.
Some said they knew when their children disappeared that there was only one place they could be: the ships. Every village and camp in the area had stories about missing children or relatives and friends.
“When we left from the ship, the rest of the people were crying and shouting,” Tayub said. “They wanted to go home, too.” Instead, he said, the crew beat them, and shot their guns in the air to shut them up.
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Associated Press writer Robin McDowell in Yangon, Myanmar, contributed to this report.
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What could lead a 27-year-old married teacher with a young son to have a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old student? Jennifer Caswell, known as Jennifer Sexton before her recent divorce, speaks out for the first time since the former middle school teacher from Hollis, Oklahoma, was charged with three counts of second-degree rape.
Caswell, who taught sixth, seventh and eighth grade, recalls when the student/teacher relationship became inappropriate. “He was flirty. I should have put a stop to it then, and I didn’t,” she says. “I wasn’t used to getting attention. It felt nice to have someone to compliment me and things like that, because I felt very unwanted.”
She tells Dr. Phil that she felt vulnerable during her seven-year marriage. “I never got complimented. Never even got a birthday present, Christmas present, for Valentine’s Day, nothing. I felt really bad about myself,” she says, fighting tears. “I never thought I’d be in this situation. I’m not a monster and I’m not a predator. I made a stupid decision.”
Dr. Phil asks, “Would you say the marriage was not a good marriage?”
Caswell explains, “We didn’t fight, but that’s only because we didn’t talk. It was like living with a roommate … He would come home. He would talk on the phone to his friends for an hour or two, and then he would go to the playroom and play his Xbox until 1 or 2 in the morning.”
Dr. Phil probes, “Was he affectionate with you physically?”
“No, we never held hands or cuddled on the couch or anything like that,” Caswell says. “I wanted that. I mean, I need that and I wasn’t getting it there.”
She claims her former student reacted to her quite differently. “He would always tell me how beautiful I was and how I was a good person on the inside,” says Caswell about the teen, whom she describes as “funny” and “mature.”
Watch as Caswell describes how they became intimate in her classroom, and see more from Dr. Phil’s exclusive interview on Tuesday’s episode — check local listings here.
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Like before, LG is going to squeeze out every bit that it can from a winning name. Just as the LG G3 last year had almost half a dozen devices bearing its name, none of which even comes close to the flagship’s specs, so to the LG G4. Although it already has an LG G Stylo, LG is announcing a … Continue reading
Microsoft Solitaire first appeared on Windows 25 years ago. In that time, new time-wasting games took over. Solitaire used to be the ultimate way of killing time at work, with Minesweeper coming in at a close second place finish. Nowadays, games like Candy Crush are ubiquitous. Solitaire never had a the kind of social components that makes games so catchy … Continue reading
Surprise! Netflix built into hotel-room TVs doesn’t seem awful. When Mariott announced that it’d add streaming apps including the House of Cards outfit, Crackle, Hulu Plus, and YouTube into its in-room entertainment options, there was reason for conc…
Pressure does different things to different people, – for some, it helps them to focus and perform, while others simply fall apart. What execution under pressure can teach one is how to cope with a wide range of emotions from fear, despair, and confusion, to surprise and accomplishment. This is the saga of how a weeklong, intensive design-a-thon on Design Driven Startups challenged a group of international business students to their very foundations.
For the past three years, we have been conducting a one-week workshop for fourth year students at the Copenhagen Business School, in Denmark on Bridging Business & Design. This year, sixty-three students, in groups of three, were tasked with creating a new business and pitching a Minimal Viable Product within five days time that entailed creating a business strategy, business model, design brief, design concept and ad campaign.
The projects offered ranged from bicycle locks, transformer shoes, music mixing, parcel delivery service and solar panel tracking. Two of the teams soon pulled ahead of the rest and were running neck-to-neck to the finish line.
One of them was “Quetape,” a flexible fabric-sensor for monitoring of top athletes’ muscle performance and the other was “Sky(r) Bites,” a delicious and healthy ice cream snack, which the team had prototyped and shared with everyone in the group. They had also developed a provocative ad campaign that focused on the pleasurable and healthy aspect of their product since it was sugar-free, high in protein and low in carbs. However, upon tallying up the hard won student votes, “Quetape,” won, mainly due to its better understanding and implementation of strategy.
In the real world, creating new entrepreneurial ventures is an elite sport, where only five to ten percent of those throwing their hat into the ring, will have the relevant skills to succeed. These very necessary skills include passion, risk-attitude, adaptability, grit and social capital. Even then, the sport of startups is still a gamble and as with any other sport, a game plan is essential.
This workshop highlighted the fact that being an entrepreneur is not an easy road. Of the twenty-one randomly grouped teams that began the project, sixteen made it thought the business model stage, twelve formulated an inspirational design brief, and yet, by the end of the week only six of them had successfully pitched their new business opportunity.
Granted, it was a tough crowd and when students were asked to provide an overall rating of each other’s business opportunities and concepts, they used the full range of grades from A+ to E. Compared with Asian students who were going through a similar exercise, the European students had no trouble failing their classmates, while the Asian students never rated another classmate below a C.
In differentiating the performance by rating it on the nine Design Quality Criteria, and using a scale from one to five, one European student even extended the grade range down to a zero for added emphasis. Toughness aside, student ratings of the overall performance correlated strongly with design quality, underlining design’s importance for startups.
Hindsight is twenty-twenty, so a good question might be, “How predictable was the outcome?” By inviting students to place bets throughout the workshop using Monopoly money, it was revealed that early odds acted as perfect predictors of who would win, adding credence to the idea of using gaming as an early predictor of outcomes.
With the assistance of some of the best business students in Europe, we discovered that using the Design Driven Startups method offered a starting point for professionals with the right stuff to quickly build their startup capabilities, better enabling them to impact the world with breakthrough, innovative offerings.
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Have you spent more hours than you could possibly count playing Solitaire on your PC?
Your day in the sun may have finally arrived.
On Monday, Microsoft announced that the Windows card game, beloved by procrastinators everywhere, is turning 25. The company is marking the occasion with two Solitaire tournaments, pitting the best players in the world against each other.
The first tournament, which kicked off Monday, is an internal competition among Microsoft employees.
“In early June, the same challenges used in the tournament will be released in the game for the world to play,” the company writes in a blog post, adding: “You’ll be challenged to bring your best to defeat our best.”
Players will be given the choice of competing in five different game modes, including FreeCell (where you use four extra cells to move cards around), Spider (where you clear eight columns with the fewest moves) and the classic version known as “Klondike.”
The company has yet to reveal other details about the competition.
For now, you can practice your Solitaire skills by downloading the game for free on Windows or Windows Phone. According to Microsoft, Solitaire is currently the top free Windows Store game.
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When your eyes’ photoreceptors (the so-called “rods and cones”) fail either due to illness or injury, so to does your vision. And until very recently, few options to correct the condition existed — typically in the form of a bulky and intrusive wear…
Here’s a look at another upcoming Windows 8.1 tablet from Fujitsu, the ARROWS Tab Q665/L. Measuring 11.9mm thick and weighing 795 grams, this waterproof and dustproof tablet features an 11.6-inch 1920 x 1080 Full HD LED-backlit display, a 2.0GHz Intel Core M-5Y10c processor, an Intel HD Graphics 5300, a 4GB DDR3 RAM and a 128GB SSD.
Apart from that, the tablet is packed with a 2MP front-facing camera, a 5MP rear-facing camera, a microSD card slot, a fingerprint sensor, 1x USB 2.0 port, 1x USB 3.0 port, a micro-HDMI port and built-in stereo speakers. Running on Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit OS, the ARROWS Tab Q665/L provides WiFi 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.0 for connectivity.
The Fujitsu ARROWS Tab Q665/L will hit the market from late June for 154,600 Yen (about $1,288). [Product Page]
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