198 more Myanmar boat people found off Indonesia

By NINIEK KARMINI The Associated Press

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Indonesia's navy picked up 198 starving, dehydrated boat people from Myanmar who said they drifted for three weeks after authorities in Thailand forced them to sea in a boat without an engine, an official said Tuesday.

Twenty-two others died on the small wooden vessel during the crossing, the survivors told Indonesian officials.

It was the latest in a string of accusations that Thai authorities have been habitually abusing boat people fleeing the military dictatorship in Myanmar by abandoning them to die at sea. Thailand has repeatedly denied the accusations.

Indonesian fishermen discovered the 40-foot (12-meter) boat off Aceh's coast in northern Sumatra and towed it to shore Monday, navy officer Tedi Sutardi told The Associated Press. The passengers had run out of food and water.

"They were standing on the boat for 21 days because there was no space to sit," Sutardi said. "It is a miracle they survived."

At least 91 were admitted to the Idirayeuk General Hospital in weak condition due to "lack of fluid and malnutrition," hospital director Edie Gunawan said. A 13-year-old boy was among those with severe dehydration, said emergency nurse Muji, who goes by one name like many Indonesians.

The drifting boat was the second load of Rohingyas, a stateless Muslim group facing decades of persecution in Myanmar, to arrive in Indonesia in a month. Other boatloads have been found near India's Andaman Islands.

The boat people in Indonesia recounted being beaten and set adrift by Thai authorities, Sutardi said.

One survivor told investigators the group was among 1,000 Rohingyas working in Thailand as migrant laborers, Sutardi said. They spoke of being forced to leave Thailand on nine motorless boats in December after being detained as illegal workers.

Some of them were beaten and "we could see they had black and blue marks on their backs," Sutardi said.

Neither a Thai military spokesman nor Foreign Ministry spokesman Tharit Charungvat were aware of the latest allegations. But Tharit said Thailand has no policy of forcing illegal migrants back to sea.

The Rohingyas, an ethnic minority not recognized by Myanmar's military regime, number about 800,000 in that country. Hundreds of thousands have fled to Bangladesh, Malaysia and the Middle East.

Source : www.syracuse.com

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Susilo Happy With Indonesia-Malaysia EPG

By Mohd Nasir Yusoff

JAKARTA, Feb 2 (Bernama) -- Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is happy with the progress done by the Indonesia-Malaysia Eminent Persons Group (EPG) which met to find ways to resolve problems and strengthen bilateral ties.

Presidential spokesman Dino Patti Djalal said Indonesian EPG chief Jen (B) Try Sutrisno who called on Susilo today reported on the intensive meetings with the Malaysian EPG.

He said the outcome of the Indonesia-Malaysia EPG meetings would be presented to the leaders of both countries.

"We are planning a bilateral meeting between Susilo and the Malaysian Prime Minister (Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi) sometime in mid March," he was quoted as saying on the president's website.

The Indonesian EPG also presented a preliminary report on several recommendations discussed including culture, history, education and economic cooperation.

Dino said one of the proposals made was for a discussion on Indonesia-Malaysia history as young people were not aware of the long history of both countries.

Problems deriving from the Indonesian workforce would also be discussed by the two EPGs as Malaysia is the largest recipient of Indonesian labour.

"Both countries will have to implement a mechanism that will effectively address the problems brought about by the Indonesian workforce," he added.

The Indonesian EPG comprised Jen (B) Try Sutrisno, Quraish Shihab, Musni Umar and Des Alwi Abubakar.

Also present at the meeting with Susilo were Indonesian Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda, Cabinet Secretary Sudi Silalahi and Minister cum State Secretary Hatta Rajasa.

Source : www.bernama.com

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iPhone : Gloves with fancy fingers for iPhone use

Michael Felberbaum , The Associated Press | Thu, 01/29/2009 8:18 AM | Sci-Tech

Winter tests the patience of many iPhone users.

After all, Apple Inc.'s device, like other gadgets with touch-screen technology, will work only with the touch of an uncovered finger. So if you're wearing gloves, you have a dilemma: Bare your hands to use your beloved devices, or let calls, texts and e-mails go unanswered while you're braving the elements?

A person wearing Tavo gloves holds an iPhone 3G in Montreal, Canada. (AP/Michael Felberbaum)

A company called 4sight Products Inc. has a solution: $40 gloves that have electrically conductive gold-colored material on the tip of the index finger and thumb. Apple must think it's a good idea as well — it has filed an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for gloves that would essentially do the same thing. (Apple didn't return a call seeking comment.)

The gloves, sold under the Tavo brand, aren't perfect. But they could be a welcome addition for people who need to answer a call in the cold, or can't wait to get to a warmer location before firing off a text message or e-mail.

My first encounter with using my iPhone 3G in very cold temperatures happened while I was visiting Chicago in late December. That presented challenges I usually don't encounter in my warmer home base, Virginia.

It hadn't crossed my mind that I wouldn't be able to answer my phone with gloves on, but alas, as the iPhone rang, I tried sliding the button on the touch screen to answer. Unable to get a reaction from the phone, I frantically pulled off one of my gloves, just in time for the call to go to voice mail.

For the rest of the trip, taking off my gloves to use the phone became an unwelcome ritual.

So I took the Tavo gloves when I made my next trip: to the subzero temperatures of Montreal.

Walking along the snow-piled streets in my bomber hat, the last thing I wanted to do was take off my gloves. And for the most part, the gloves allowed me to use my phone with few problems. The gloves have a tactile grip, which makes it easier to hold on to the iPhone.

Handling calls worked best, since the touch-sensitive area of the iPhone screen is larger when you're making phone calls.

But typing proved to be a bigger challenge. While trying to send a text message to a friend with the gloves on, I couldn't manipulate the small on-screen keyboard buttons as quickly and as accurately as usual. That meant standing in the cold longer in order to send the message. I even decided to take the gloves off a few times when I got too frustrated.

Nevertheless, I was certainly glad to have the Tavo gloves when I needed them most. When it's minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit, I'd rather not have to choose between missing a call and missing a finger.

Source : www.thejakartapost.com

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Personal Technology: How to be sure an indiscreet email does not land you in jail

Jeremy Wagstaff | Mon, 01/12/2009 3:58 PM | Sci-Tech

An indiscreet email that falls into the wrong hands can land you in jail.

Take the case of David and Fiona Fulton, a British missionary couple in Gambia. According to The Times, an email critical of the country's president fell into the hands of a Gambian who promptly forwarded it to the Gambian police.

The couple, hoping for leniency, pleaded guilty to sedition. Without luck: In December, the court sentenced them to a year in jail with hard labor.

If you're working in a foreign country, how can you avoid a fate like this? Well, there are technical solutions but they aren't much use without a good dose of common sense.

The first one is to comply with a country's laws. Gambia has been ruled by one man since 1994, and, in the words of Amnesty International, is a country where "fear rules, and arbitrary arrests, detentions and human rights violations translate into a culture of silence.

"All public protests have ceased. Self-censorship of the media is the rule rather than the exception, and individuals remain silent when their human rights are violated."

In other words, not a place you should be openly questioning the sanity of the president.

This is also a story about email. Email is an illusion. It feels private, but it's not. It feels like a letter - one to one - but it's not. It feels secure, but it's not.

Emails can be copied to other people easily by the sender.

Emails can be forwarded. To anyone. Without the sender's permission or knowledge.

Emails can be intercepted by more or less anyone.

Let's take these issues one by one. Although emails feel like letters of old, they're not really. It's easy to add another email address in the To or Cc fields.

You can even create mailing lists to send the email to large numbers of people via what feels like one email address.

And once they're in the hands of a recipient, that person can do what they like with them. They can forward them to other people, post them on a website or blog, or copy and paste the contents into a document. Your words are very much no longer your own.

In fact, you have no control over your email even before it has reached its intended recipient. Most emails are sent in what is called plain text, meaning that it*s not encrypted. Think postcard rather than sealed envelope.

This means that anyone who wants to - and with a modicum of knowledge - can grab your email between your computer and the computer of your correspondent.

That could be at any point on the Internet: It could be over the wireless connection in a cafe you're using to access the Internet. It could be at the Internet company providing that connection. Or it could be at any of the computers the email passes through on the way to your correspondent.

Now there's not much you can do once your email has reached its recipient. They can do with it what they will, and you'll be none the wiser.

(And this need not necessarily be about politics. If you're dissing your boss on company email, or being rude about the head of the village fete committee in an email to other committee members, be ready for that email to find its way into the wrong hands.)

So it pays to select your recipients as carefully as you select your words. Don't write something sensitive and then send it to people who might not be aware of its sensitivity.

If you live in a country where you think the president really is mad, and dangerous, then maybe think twice before you commit those thoughts to an email.

If you still feel the urge to write those words, or if your profession requires your writing sensitive emails, there are tools to help.

First off, if you want to be sure that the person you're sending the email to is following your request not to distribute the email more broadly, there are services such as ReadNotify.com.

Among other things, ReadNotify.com will tell you when and whether an email you sent someone has been forwarded to someone else. The service also boasts a feature that will force the email to self-destruct within a certain period, or when the recipient tries to copy, print or forward it.

A service like this is for the paranoid, but in the case of the Fultons, it might have saved them.

Still, I don't use this service and I think it's a little over the top. A better solution is the commonsense one: Don't send sensitive stuff to people you don't trust to be discreet about it.

So to the last bit. How do you ensure that snooping eyes don't read your emails before they reach their intended recipient?

Not enough people do this, and more should. This bit is not quite as easy as it should be, but the good news is that it's a lot easier than it could be. Basically, you need to encrypt your email - convert it from a postcard to a sealed envelope with a big lock on it that only the recipient can open.

Next column I'll explain how to do that. In the meantime, if you're in a country - or a company * where these things matter, think twice before you hit send.

@ Copyright

Jeremy Wagstaff is a commentator on technology and appears regularly on the BBC World Service. He can be found online at jeremywagstaff.com or via email at jeremy@loose-wire.com.

Source : www.thejakartapost.com

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Multicultural education in Indonesia: Opportunities and challenges

Setiono Sugiharto , Contributor , Jakarta | Thu, 01/22/2009 4:35 PM | Supplement

As a nation-state with a pluralistic society, Indonesia is prone to social unrest and intra-group tension in terms of race, ethnicity and religion. Recent media headlines reported that discrimination and intolerance toward other religions were on the rise, the latest case being the closure of a Jewish synagogue in Surabaya, East Java. This was done in a show of solidarity with Palestinians being attacked in the Gaza Strip.

This, however, is just one indication of the fragility of our democracy, which upholds freedom of choosing different faiths. Another case of religious intolerance was the barring of Ahmadiyah followers from disseminating their religious dogma, which is considered heretical and blasphemous by hard-line Muslims.

Still another case was the Islamic Defenders Front's (FPI) ambush of a peaceful rally for religious tolerance at the National Monument, Central Jakarta.

Instances of opposition against religious pluralism prevailed long ago and are likely to continue to prevail in the future.

As part of its concerns about the real threat against pluralism, education practitioners once proposed that multicultural education be part of the school curriculum and be made a compulsory school subject.

The discourse on multicultural education was voiced in an effort to counteract growing radicalism in the country and to instill a sense of inclusiveness in the young generation.

When effectively implemented in a multiethnic society like ours, multicultural education provides the opportunity for young and adult learners to learn fundamental principles that help them critically evaluate and respond to what they see and experience as they live in a culturally heterogeneous society.

These principles include learning for the acquisition of social skills important for interacting with students from other racial, ethnic, religious and cultural groups; learning to understand universal values shared by all cultural groups such as compassion, justice, equality, tolerance, peace, freedom and care; learning about possible stereotypes and other related bias that could produce deleterious effects on racial, ethnic and religious relations.

In practice, teachers can, for example, assign students with meaningful tasks such as a case study, problem-solving approach and discovery learning, which will help students demonstrate universal values shared by other religious and ethnic groups, and critically analyze, weigh and evaluate prejudices.

As schools here are now experimenting with multicultural education, it is perhaps too premature to arrive at a definitive conclusion that they are doomed to failure in implementing multicultural education.

However, the increasing rate of violence against minority religious groups and the rise of radicalism among both youth and adults is a test case that poses a challenge to schools in effectively implementing multicultural education.

What is more, regional autonomy granted by the central government has made it possible for all regions to impose local ordinances that tend to favor the dogmas of the dominant religion. This is just antithetical to multilingual education, which respects and values freedom and differences in all walks of life.

In fact, the country has been embroiled in a seemingly never-ending spat regarding the imposition of sharia bylaws, with opponents arguing that it can destroy the spirit of pluralism in the country.

Another potential challenge is that teachers might not be ready, if not unsure, how to teach multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is a highly intricate and elusive concept, demanding teachers to learn about the multiple perspectives from multidisciplinary studies such as education, sociology, psychology, politics and history.

Mary Stone Hanley, a proponent of multicultural education, warns that knowledge construction drawn from this multidiscipline is imperative because before teachers can effectively teach multiculturally they must reconstruct their world views.

Diminishing cultural pride is also important for teachers to be able to teach effectively. In a primordially-rooted culture, doing so is difficult, if not impossible.

It is also important to note that as multiculturalism embraces an assimilationist ideology, it contradicts both teachers' and students' community cultures where homogeneity and commonality are highly valued, and where ethnocentricity is deeply rooted.

Not all teachers and students are willing to take the risk of losing their ethnic identity and being socially and politically alienated within their cultural community simply because they are invited to adhere to assimilationist ideology.

As a final remark, multicultural education has the potential to equip students with skills needed to interact with others from different faiths, ethnicities, races, cultures. But without a deeper and sound understanding of it, and political commitment to support its implementation, we are just trivializing its goal -- the transformation of society via education.

The writer is chief editor of the Indonesian Journal of English Language Teaching and teaches English composition at Atma Jaya University, Jakarta. He can be reached at setiono.sugiharto@atmajaya.ac.id.

Source : www.thejakartapost.com

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