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It was "little more than empty fields" five years ago — but it's now "a vast, heavily guarded complex stretching for 210 hectares (520 acres)," reports the Guardian, "the frontline of a multibillion-dollar criminal fraud industry fuelled by human trafficking and brutal violence." Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos have in recent years become havens for transnational crime syndicates running scam centres such as KK Park, which use enslaved workers to run complex online fraud and scamming schemes that generate huge profits. There have been some attempts to crack down on the centres and rescue the workers, who can be subjected to torture and trapped inside. But drone images and new research shared exclusively with the Guardian reveal that the number of such centres operating along the Thai-Myanmar border has more than doubled since Myanmar's military seized power in 2021, with construction continuing to this day. Data from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (Aspi), a defence thinktank in Canberra, shows that the number of Myanmar scam centres on the Thai border has increased from 11 to 27, and they have expanded in size by an average of 5.5 hectares a month. Drone images and photographs of KK Park and other Myanmar scam centres, Tai Chang and Shwe Kokko, taken by the Guardian in August show new features and active building work... Myanmar's military junta has allowed the spread of scam centres inside the country as these criminal enterprises have become an essential part of the country's conflict economy since the coup, helping it rise to the top of the global list of countries harbouring organised crime. According to Aspi's analysis, Myanmar's military, which has lost huge swathes of territory since the coup and is struggling to retain its grip on power, cannot take meaningful measures against the scam compounds without endangering its precarious relations with the crucial armed militias who are profiting from them. While 7,000 people were freed from the compounds earlier this year, "Thai police estimated earlier this year that as many as 100,000 people were held inside Myanmar scam centres," the article notes. Elsewhere the Guardian reports that "The centres are run by Chinese criminal gangs," and describes people who unwittingly came to Thailand for customer service jobs, only to be trafficked to Myanmar's guarded "cyberslavery compounds" and "forced to send thousands of messages from fake social-media profiles, posing as a rich American investor to swindle US real estate agents into cryptocurrency scams." Since 2020, south-east Asia's cyber-slavery industry has entrapped hundreds of thousands of people and forced them to perform "pig butchering" — the brutal term for building trust with a fraud target before scamming them. At first, the industry mostly captured Chinese and Taiwanese people, then it moved on to south-east Asians and Indians — and now Africans. Criminal syndicates have been shifting towards scamming victims in the US and Europe after Chinese efforts to prevent its citizens being targeted, experts told the Guardian. That has led some trafficking networks to seek recruits with English-language and tech skills — including east Africans, thousands of whom are now estimated to be trapped inside south-east Asian compounds, says Benedikt Hofmann, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime's representative for south-east Asia and the Pacific. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.

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A viral post last week posited the existence of the 'London banana' - a belt sweeping through the west of the capital where 'you'll have a great time'.

One of the shopping centre's multi-storey car parks on Montfichet Road in Stratford, east London went up in flames after 15 vehicles caught fire on the second floor of car park C.

Lauren Sanchez and her billionaire husband Jeff Bezos were spotted enjoying the New York Fashion Week festivities on Friday night.

The Boy in the Stripped Pyjamas author John Boyne has been denied a second literary award after he backed JK Rowling over her gender critical views. 

The former glamour model, 47, took to Snapchat on Saturday to share the news with her followers.

There is one most important thing Harry needs to do following his meeting with his father King Charles at Clarence House, Richard Eden reveals.

"The United Arab Emirates wants to compete with the U.S. and China in AI," writes Gizmodo, "and a new open source model may be its strongest contender yet. "An Emirati AI lab called the Institute of Foundation Models (IFM) released K2 Think on Tuesday, a model that researchers say rivals OpenAI's ChatGPT and China's DeepSeek in standard benchmark tests." "With just 32 billion parameters, it outperforms flagship reasoning models that are 20x larger," the lab wrote in a press release on Tuesday. DeepSeek's R1 has 671 billion parameters, though only 37 billion are active. Meta's latest Llama 4 models range from 17 billion to 288 billion active parameters. OpenAI doesn't share parameter information. OpenAI doesn't share parameter information. Researchers also claim that K2 Think leads "all open-source models in math performance" across several benchmarks. The model is intended to be more focused on math, coding, and scientific research than most other AI chatbots. The Emirati lab's selling point for the model is similar to DeepSeek's strategy that disrupted the AI market earlier this year: optimized efficiency that will have better or the same computing power at a lower cost... The lab is also aiming to be transparent in everything, "open-sourcing not just models but entire development processes" that provide "researchers with complete materials including training code, datasets, and model checkpoints," IFM said in a press release from May. The UAE and other Arab countries are investing in AI to try reducing their economic dependence on fossil fuels, the article points out.

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There was a way of behaving in the locker rooms when I was playing tennis. Whenever another player was in there, you had to show your masculine side, put on a front, show no weakness.

Erika Kirk shared the deeply personal footage showing her gently stroking her husband's hand as she sits beside his body, which was dressed in a dark suit and red tie.

The Washington Post notes that past research "indicates that exercise helps some cancer survivors avoid recurrence of their disease." But a new study "offers an explanation of how, showing that exercise changes the inner workings of our muscles and cells, although more study is still needed..." The study, published last month, involved 32 women who'd survived breast cancer. After a single session of interval training or weightlifting, their blood contained higher levels of certain molecules, and those factors helped put the brakes on laboratory-grown breast cancer cells. "Our work shows that exercise can directly influence cancer biology, suppressing tumor growth through powerful molecular signals," said Robert Newton, the deputy director of the Exercise Medicine Research Institute at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia, and senior author of the new study. His group's experiment adds to mounting evidence that exercise upends the risks of not only developing but also surviving cancer... Scientists know contracting muscles release a slew of hormones and biochemicals, known as myokines, into our bloodstreams and have long suspected these myokines fight cancer. In some past studies with mice and healthy people, blood drawn after exercise and added to live cancer cells killed or suppressed the cancer's growth... [The new study tested cancer cells in high-tech petri dishes with blood drawn from cancer survivors.] Drenched in plasma from either the interval trainers or the lifters, many cancer cells quit growing. Quite a few died. (The blood drawn before exercise had no effects.) The cancer-fighting impacts were greatest with the blood drawn after interval training. Why? Additional testing showed this blood contained the highest concentrations of certain, beneficial myokines, especially IL-6, a protein that affects immune responses and inflammation... What these results mean, Newton said, is that "exercise doesn't just improve fitness and well-being" in people who've had cancer. "It also orchestrates a complex biological response that includes direct anticancer signals from muscles..." Questions remain, of course. Can any type of exercise fight cancer? Newton and other researchers have doubts. The exercise in this study was strenuous, by design. "Earlier studies suggested that the stronger the exercise stimulus, the greater the release of anticancer myokines," Newton said... Even the weight training in this study was less potent than the intense intervals. But Newton believes weight training remains key to cancer fighting. "People with cancer who increase their muscle mass through resistance training also experience greater rises in circulating myokines," he said. More muscle means more myokines.

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In their 40s and 50s, people are attracted to those at least a decade younger. This is particularly the case for men. Of course it is, the unhelpful, unrealistic b*****ds.

River Cottage Limited, in Musbury, Devon, has been told it needs major improvements over its management of food safety in a damning report by East Devon district council.

Look around Keir Starmer's administration and you will notice a common thread running through it. One that leads all the way back to Tony Blair and the New Labour administration of 1997.

Laurence Fox attended the ""Unite the Kingdom rally today standing with Tommy Robinson as he called for a "sword" to be put to people impinging free speech.

Laurence Fox attended the ""Unite the Kingdom rally today standing with Tommy Robinson as he called for a "sword" to be put to people impinging free speech.

It's known for being a 'one street village' but it has so much more than that

The superstar was in town for the Robins' first home game back in the second tier in 43 years last month, only to see them lost 3-2 to West Bromwich Albion.

When a study last month linked drinking lots of fizzy drinks to hair loss, it underlined the crucial role of diet in a condition affecting millions.

"Freelance developers and entire companies are making a business out of fixing shoddy vibe coded software," writes 404 Media, interviewing one of the "dozens of people on Fiverr... now offering services specifically catering to people with shoddy vibe coded projects." Hamid Siddiqi, who offers to "review, fix your vibe code" on Fiverr, told the 404 Media that "Currently, I work with around 15-20 clients regularly, with additional one-off projects throughout the year. ("Siddiqi said common issues he fixes in vibe coded projects include inconsistent UI/UX design in AI-generated frontends, poorly optimized code that impacts performance, misaligned branding elements, and features that function but feel clunky or unintuitive," as well as work o color schemes, animations, and layouts.) And others coders are also pursuing the "vibe coded mess" market: Swatantra Sohni, who started VibeCodeFixers.com, a site for people with vibe coded projects who need help from experienced developers to fix or finish their projects, says that almost 300 experienced developers have posted their profiles to the site. He said so far VibeCodeFixers.com has only connected between 30-40 vibe code projects with fixers, but that he hasn't done anything to promote the service and at the moment is focused on adding as many software developers to the platform as possible... "Most of these vibe coders, either they are product managers or they are sales guys, or they are small business owners, and they think that they can build something," Sohni told me. "So for them it's more for prototyping..." Another big issue Sohni identified is "credit burn," meaning the money vibe coders waste on AI usage fees in the final 10-20 percent stage of developing the app, when adding new features breaks existing features. Sohni told me he thinks vibe coding is not going anywhere, but neither are human developers. "I feel like the role [of human developers] would be slightly limited, but we will still need humans to keep this AI on the leash," he said. The article also notes that established software development companies like Ulam Labs, now say "we clean up after vibe coding. Literally." "Built something fast? Now it's time to make it solid," Ulam Labs pitches on its site," suggesting that for their potential customers "the tech debt is holding you back: no tests, shaky architecture, CI/CD is a dream, and every change feels like defusing a bomb. That's where we come in."

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