“These attacks are a dangerous escalation in violence and could put ordinary people in Rakhine State at risk, in particular as tensions have been reaching a boiling point in the region recently, said Josef Benedict, the human-rights organisation’s deputy campaigns director for Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

“We urge all sides to show the utmost restraint and ensure that ordinary people are protected from human rights violations and abuses.”

A commission led by former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan on Thursday urged the Myanmar government to implement 88 recommendations to address human-rights violations, statelessness, and profound discrimination against Muslim Rohingyas, though it did not mention them by name. Northern Rakhine State could become fertile ground for radicalisation unless the government changes its approach to Muslims living there, the report warned.

“The investigation into these criminal acts must be prompt, thorough and effective, and comply with international human rights standards,” said Benedict in response to the militant’s killings. Any prosecutions must respect fair trial rights and not result in the death penalty, he said.

“This cannot lead to repeat of last year’s vicious military reprisals responding to a similar attack, when security forces tortured, killed and raped Rohingya people and burned down whole villages. Although the government has an obligation to protect people, this cannot be seen as giving the army a blank cheque to commit atrocities against parts of the population.

Benedict referred to the August 24 findings of the Annan commission.

“It is crucial that the government makes every effort to address the long-standing and systematic discrimination in Rakhine State, which has left people trapped in a cycle of violence and destitution. As a first step, authorities must push forward with implementing recommendations outlined in the recent report by the Advisory Commission on Rakhine State.”

 “The chances of survival are not high,” local police spokesman Roman Ruegg told reporters.

The landslide, which struck early Wednesday, sent a huge river of rocks and mud flooding down the Piz Cengalo mountain into the outskirts of Bondo, a village near the Italian border.

The eight missing, who come from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, were hiking in the Val Bondasca region at the time.

Police said they had set off in separate groups.

A massive search and rescue operation is under way, involving some 120 emergency workers equipped with infrared cameras and mobile phone detectors, helicopters and rescue dogs.

According to Anna Giagometti, mayor of Bregaglia — a municipality that encompasses Bondo — paths in the area had been flagged as “dangerous” earlier this month because of falling rocks.

Speaking to the Blick daily, she said warning signs in several languages had been posted in the village.

This aerial video grab made on August 24, 2017 partially shows the Switzerland village of Bondo after a landslide struck the day before, sending mud, rocks and dirt flooding down the Piz Cengalo mountain into the outskirts of the village, near the Italian border.// AFP PHOTO

 – Thick mud and sludge –

Police and residents said mobile phone coverage in the area was spotty, voicing hope it could explain why those still missing had not been in touch.

But authorities acknowledged that the chances of a happy ending were dwindling fast.

Swiss President Doris Leuthard, who examined the site from the air on Thursday, said the probability that the hikers were dead “is increasing by the hour,” Blick reported.

A picture taken on August 25, 2017, shows a general view of the village of Bondo in the Swiss Alps following a landslide two nights ago. // AFP PHOTO

Dramatic footage showed an entire mountainside disintegrating, unleashing an unstoppable mass of thick mud and sludge that tore up trees and demolished at least one building in its path.

Police said 12 farm buildings, including barns and stables, had been destroyed, while the Graubunden canton’s main southern highway was closed to traffic.

– Deafening bang –

“It was terrible,” Elisa Nunzi told Blick after witnessing the landslide from her home in a higher-altitude village.

The 27-year-old said she heard a deafening bang that sent rocks pouring down the mountain. “There were so many. It did not stop.”

Christian Speck, manager of a hotel in Soglio, several kilometres (miles) from Bondo, also witnessed the mountainside collapsing.

“At breakfast time, my customers and I saw rocks come lose from the mountainside and slide towards Bondo, in a huge cloud of smoke,” he told AFP.

The landslide set four million cubic metres (141 million cubic feet) of mud and debris in motion, its relentless mass stretching 500 metres (1,600 feet) across, according to the regional natural hazards office (AWN).

The event was so severe that the vibrations set off seismometres across Switzerland, measuring the equivalent of a 3.0 magnitude earthquake, according to the Swiss Seismological Service.

– Melting permafrost? –

Experts hinted that climate change could be partially to blame for the disaster, with melting permafrost and an adjacent glacier likely destabilising the landmass.

An alert system put in place after a previous large landslide in the area in late 2011 allowed the authorities to quickly sound the alarm and evacuate around 100 people from Bondo and two Alpine cabins, amid fears of fresh landslides.

Some Bondo residents were permitted to return home as early as Friday afternoon, but Giacometti told reporters that several families living in the area most at risk of new landslides should expect to wait days and even weeks before it was deemed safe to go back.

They would however be permitted to go back to pick up some personal affects left behind in the rush to evacuate, she said.

Simona Rauch, a Protestant minister at a church in Val Bregaglia, told AFP residents had not expected to be gone so long.

“People left immediately, leaving everything behind. They didn’t bring anything because they thought they would be returning quickly,” she said.

“No one expected this kind of catastrophe.”

Around 48 hours after Severe Typhoon Hato smashed into southern China, worst-hit Macau was still picking up the pieces, with the enclave’s government facing recriminations over its lack of preparation.

The government sent a request to Chinese authorities asking for the assistance of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Macau garrison to assist in relief efforts, the first such request since the city was handed over to China in 1999.

“The PLA Macau Garrison have joined hands with the Macau Government and the Macau public for post-typhoon relief and construction work,” a government statement said Friday.

Local residents browse piles of drenched clothes discarded by local clothing stores after typhoon Hato hit in Macau, China, 25 August 2017. // EPA PHOTO

Authorities said around 1,000 troops were mobilised in the morning.

Residents volunteered to pick debris off the streets alongside troops who were seen clearing away items ranging from computer equipment to gas cylinders.

The official death toll in Macau hit nine on Friday after a man’s body was pulled from a car park.

A further eight people are known to have died in mainland southwestern China.

“It’s been absolutely devastating for Macau,” Andrew Scott, chief executive officer of O MEDIA, a media company in the city, told AFP.

“There is a real air of despondency. Each addition to the death toll is absolutely demoralising to the citizens of Macau,” he said.

A taxi driver who identified himself as Ben said he expected the PLA to handle the clean-up effectively.

“There are so many disasters in China, they can handle it in a couple of days, a situation like this could be quite easy for them,” he said.

– ‘Extremely difficult’ –

On Thursday evening, as residents of the former Portuguese colony queued for drinking water, Macau’s leader Fernando Chui and other government ministers bowed their heads for a minute’s silence and made a public apology.

“These two days, we have faced an extremely difficult test together. Hato is the strongest typhoon in 53 years and has brought tremendous damage to Macau,” Chui told reporters.

“In facing this disaster, we admit we have not done enough, there is space for improvement,” he said, adding that the city’s meteorological bureau chief had resigned.

Casinos, which brought in more than $28 billion in 2016 — over half of Macau’s GDP — were among the casualties of the storm, and reporters who got inside the Wynn Macau found switched off slot machines and no air conditioning.

Chinese People’s Liberation Army soldiers based at a barracks in Macau help clear debris from a street in Macau on August 25, 2017, two days after Typhoon Hato hit the territory. // AFP PHOTO

Other casinos and resort facilities in the city were either shut or running at limited capacity.

“It will probably take at least a week to normalise again and for visitors to feel comfortable about coming again,” gaming analyst Ben Lee of IGamiX consultancy told AFP, adding that some casinos were unprepared for the severity of the storm.

In Hong Kong, Hato — whose name is Japanese for “pigeon” — sparked the most severe Typhoon 10 warning, only the third time a storm of this power has pounded the financial hub in the past 20 years.

Although 120 people were hurt, there were no fatalities in the city, where careful planning and long experience with extreme weather is credited with limiting the devastation.

Meanwhile, the Hong Kong Observatory was warning of another tropical cyclone heading towards the area and due to make landfall some time on Sunday.

With the ubiquitous influence of artificial intelligence, our everyday life has entered the enchanted realm of hyper-connectivity. We live in a time of massive opportunity in the digital space, to lead better, easier and more connected lives.

The application of the internet of things (IoT) has become a mainstay of contemporary life. With the constant obsession over “smart”  everything, we seem to be on the precipice of a utopia of digitally — assisted living. The world has never revolved around our needs more than it has right here, right now.

In the developed world, the future is always released a season ahead. Anything that can be connected, will be connected. However, in the emerging world, focusing on the IoT appears to be putting the cart before the horse. Digitalisation shouldn’t be about things — it is about people. We need to focus on the Internet of People.

The over-reliance on smart devices and capital-intensive technology has given the emerging world limited access to new world connectivity. To extend wider access to connectivity, private smart devices are not the only gateway for individuals to step into a collective digital consciousness. We need to ensure our public infrastructure is as connected as the technologies we use in our daily lives.

The recent national emphasis on digitalisation and collection of data as an asset has brought another essential building block of the future into the spotlight.

Lighting is a much overlooked physical public infrastructure already in place that could put us on the high speed road to a well-lit, sustainable future.

Digitalisation does not always have to require significant capital outlay or an overhaul of existing infrastructure. There are existing turnkey solutions in the market where current infrastructure can be retrofitted with newer technologies. Case in point: Connected lighting is a future-proof ‘plug-and-play’ platform for data collection and urban sensing, managed through smart controls in the IoT.

With an estimated number of 59.2 billion lighting points available by 2030, the opportunity of an intelligent lighting system as a pathway to connect cities and individuals to the digital ecosystem is phenomenal.

Connected lighting has the potential to transform each of the estimated 300 million street lights worldwide from being an output point for light to becoming an input point for information. Each lighting point can collect data about its surroundings and inhabitants.

These light poles can then start to provide input on human and vehicle traffic flow, air quality, crowds and security risks, energy consumption, waste, transport and other critical functions.

In the United States, 4G LTE wireless telecommunications technology is already being merged with energy-saving LED street lighting in Los Angeles to provide an architecture that can help residents improve cell service — with the scalability for further integration with new technology in future. For example, the city of Los Angeles is testing out streetlights outfitted with integrated sensors that can wirelessly detect gunshots and other noises to enhance public safety, and may expand the capabilities of these censors to recognise air pollution and earthquakes.

In Southeast Asia, connected street lighting has been a core component of the ongoing transformation of cities like Jakarta and Melaka in Malaysia into the region’s smart cities.

As part of a city-wide upgrade by the Jakarta government office, nearly 90,000 of the Indonesian capital’s street luminaires has been replaced with energy-efficient LED lights connected to a cloud-based smart lighting management system.

Similarly, as part of Melaka’s Green City Action Plan to make the city a Green Technology State by 2020, connected street lighting management has been implemented in the central parts of Bandaraya Melaka and major arteries into the city. Each light point is connected and performance data will be sent through existing cellular networks to the city’s lighting office.

The data will enable the city officials to efficiently monitor the city’s infrastructure by district.

The true added value in bringing light points into the IoT is that connected lighting is an ideal platform for urban sensing. A smart city’s systems need to be open. Smart city systems need to be connected. The ability to integrate with existing infrastructures using standardised interfaces presents the opportunity for a city to deploy new applications quickly as technologies evolve, allowing cities and their citizens to pursue new possibilities in the future.

In a world where technology continually modifies our everyday experiences and the physical environment around us, an overarching infrastructure convening people, assets and data will serve to gradually narrow the divide between the built environment and the virtual environment we reside in.

A connected lighting infrastructure, as a platform for data collection, can create an auto-learning environment for the spaces we live, work and play in. The pairing of visible light communications with indoor positioning technology is already reimagining the physical retail experience.

Lighting fixtures in stores can be embedded with sensors that can collect data about consumers for analysis — where they are, what time of the day they are most likely to visit the store and which aisles they are spending time at.

The sensors can also detect the shoppers’ smartphones across the shopping floor to deliver services, such as wayfinding, digital store mapping, notifications of prevailing sales promotions of interest to the client, personalised shopping assistance and recommendations, and location-based information and recommendations.

In the near future, we can also expect our offices to run on connected lighting systems adapted to each user’s personalised preferences for lighting and temperature settings. In-built room luminaires can track activity patterns and daylight levels, collect human occupancy and foot traffic data throughout the day.

About 90 per cent of the operational costs of a business are now staff related. To have personal control over the environment settings of their work station will go into enhancing human performance, comfort, health, concentration levels and alertness, cooperative behavior and creativity.

For the connected consumer, the true meaning of “virtual reality” hinges on a hybrid experience that pushes physical and virtual environments to adapt to their inhabitants’ changing experiential consumption patterns.

As technology continues to transform the way we relate to and engage with the spaces we inhabit, artificial intelligence and smart applications will continue to push the demand for infrastructural updates that can support our evolution into a smart nation.

This is my theory: The catalyst of the next big bang will not be unlike the first one. Let there be light, and there was light.

“We are of the view that Indonesia will not be able to meet its electricity demand in the conventional way. Therefore, we offer nuclear plants,” Galuzin told journalists in Jakarta on Wednesday as reported by Antara.

He said his country had deep experience in developing nuclear energy and had helped many countries construct nuclear power plants. Last year, Russia helped Iran construct nuclear plants worth some US$10 billion.

Other countries that have used Russia’s nuclear technology include Nigeria, Jordan and India.