Labels: disturbing, free your mind, home is where the heart is

2. It is beautiful. Unfortunately it is too small. The authorities were afraid that coral would be destroyed if a larger marina is built.

3. I am as much an environmentalist as anyone else. But if we are going to develop we have to accept prudent sacrifices.

6. Unfortunately their standard of living although higher now than before development is not as high as in Langkawi. Certain people are determined to keep these Tiomanese poor by preventing the proper development of these beautiful islands.

7. I feel sad seeing the ramshackle huts which the villages used to rent to tourists for RM 5 a night. There is no proper toilet and no bathroom.

8. They are not doing well now and many have collapsed. Yet Tioman water is very clear and tourists like to swim and snorkel there.

Labels: disturbing, home is where the heart is

Malaysian drowned while fleeing, inquest told

MELBOURNE: A Malaysian who overstayed his visa drowned in the Murray River in South Australia after police tried to subdue him with capsicum spray, an inquest in Adelaide was told.

Chan Wah Aun, 27, who was staying illegally near Adelaide, had been told by a friend to “just run away” when approached by the officers, The Australian newspaper reported.

Chan died on or about Sept 11, 2006 after he was pulled over for a random breath test outside Waikerie, 175km northeast of Adelaide.

Police questioned Chan, who had arrived in Australia from Malaysia in May of that year, and an immigration check showed he had overstayed his visa.

Chan had been working at a Waikerie meatworks, breaching his visa’s condition not to take up employment.

South Australian Coroner Mark Johns heard that Chan had been speaking on his mobile phone to a friend while at the random breath test unit, asking the friend if police would shoot him if he tried to run.

“If you get the chance to run, just run away,” the friend reportedly told Chan, saying that he would not be shot unless he was violent.

The court heard that Chan then struggled when police arrested him as an unlawful non-citizen.

Chan “became violent”, leading the police officers to use capsicum spray.

He broke away and escaped, running towards a cliff top by the river.

Nine days later, two men fishing found his body floating face down near the cliffs.

The coroner will deliver his findings at a later date. – Bernama

Labels: Australia, disturbing, home is where the heart is

Labels: disturbing, home is where the heart is

25. The US Dollar is not backed by anything. It sustains its value because it is used as a trading currency. When countries start using other currencies for trading and quickly dispose off the US Dollar in favour of Euro or Yen; when the US Dollar is no longer used for the reserves of the rich countries, then the US Dollar will not be worth the paper on which it is printed.

26. The United States already suffers from twin deficits. When the dollar becomes useless the United States will go into deep recession. Printing more money by the Federal Reserve Bank (which incidentally is not owned by the Government but by other banks) will only result in its devaluation and inflation in the United States.

27. The United States must surely go into severe recession (I am sure the United States will do something illegal in order to prevent this from happening). But whatever, United States recession will affect the whole world.

Labels: home is where the heart is, musings

Soon after the KLCI opened, down 0.37 point to 1,153.33 on some selling, the system went kaput...

...Right now, the DPM and his wife are still plagued by the Mongolian affair, the IGP and the AG are implicated for punishable crime, Anwar Ibrahim is implicated in a politically crippling act, two senior Umno ministers have been identified for political crucifixion, the Sabahan leaders are waiting to bite the right piece of bait -- while the PM is said to be immobilised in anticipation of life thereafter.

Is Malaysia about to plunge into a state of Emergency? Eyebrows were raised when people heard IGP Musa Hassan said yesterday that the police and the armed forces will be holding a joint public order exercise until Monday and the military will be called in to maintain public order if the security situation in Malaysia deteriorates.

Labels: disturbing, home is where the heart is

Elite Malays and their mixed marriages

Darah Kacukan | Aug 1, 07 2:01pm

MALAYSIA's Malay leaders say 'do as I say, not do as I do' when it comes to marriage

In early June, the Malaysian media blossomed with pictures of Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi in the traditional Malay suap-menyuap ceremony, exchanging bites of coloured glutinous rice with his new bride.

This low-key but high-profile wedding followed another elite ceremony in May when one of Malaysia's most eligible bachelors, the Raja Muda (crown prince) of Perak, Dr Raja Nazrin Shah, finally got hitched at the age of 50 in an unostentatious ceremony in Kuala Kangsar.

But these two weddings had something else in common, a characteristic not much commented on in the media but clear to most Malaysians: in both cases the brides were locally-born Eurasians.

The prime minister's new wife is Jeanne Abdullah, a friend and relative of Abdullah Badawi's late wife, Endon, who died of complications from breast cancer in October 2005. Jeanne had originally been Jean Danker, a Catholic from a Eurasian family which spans Malaysia and Singapore and who converted to Islam when she married her first husband, Endon's brother Othman, from whom she was later divorced.

The bride of Oxford and Harvard-educated Raja Nazrin, son of the current Perak Sultan, who himself was formerly Malaysia's top law official, is Zara Salim Davidson, a chemical engineer and the daughter of William Davidson, a British-born Ipoh lawyer and his Malay wife. She herself is a member of the Kedah royal house and thus related to Malaysia's first prime minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman. Raja Nazrin has repeatedly spoken out against racism in Malaysia. Zara considers herself to be very much a Malay despite her Eurasian blood.

These weddings thus represent what should be one of the triumphs of Malaysia - its ability to break down racial and religious barriers and subsume them into a broader Malaysian identity. Unfortunately the elite all too often fails to preach what it actually practices. It is a one-way street. Marry a Malay and you will become a Malay. You will also become a Muslim and, the courts say, you will stay that way.

The good-natured Abdullah Badawi clearly has no problem with the mixed racial ancestry of his bride, or with the fact that she was baptised a Christian. Yet he heads a ruling party which is not merely race-based but at times makes a fetish of Malay racial purity. And he heads a government that supports the recent court decision refusing to allow a Muslim to become a Christian, an act of supposed apostasy. But in the eyes of some Christian fundamentalists, the gentle Jeanne is also an apostate for having forsaken Christianity.

Others have identity problems too

Malays are not the only ones with identity problems. Scratch many a Malaysian Chinese and one may also find a strain of Chinese chauvinism, as is often the case in Singapore. But in Malaysia it is the Malay elite which sets the tone. This is why many believe that a more open recognition of the sheer diversity of Malaysians' origins would help offset the divisions caused by race-based politics that identifies religion with race.

Just a brief look at the origins of many members of the elite gives the lie to ethnic purity and religious dogmatism. There is Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia's longest-serving prime minister. His father was a Muslim Malayali from Kerala in south India who migrated to Malaysia and took a Malay bride. Mahathir himself was classified as an Indian when at university in Singapore.

But instead of celebrating the upward mobility that Malaysia offered to this migrant from India, the politics of the United Malays National Organisation (Umno) required Mahathir to bury his ethnic past and wear his acquired Malay identity on his sleeve. In reality Mahathir welcomes racial mingling. His son Mirzan married into the family of Indonesian Chinese tycoon Liem Sioe Liong, and daughter Marina's first husband was European.

The current head of Umno Youth, Hishamuddin Hussein, who waved a kris (Malay dagger) at last year's national Umno convention and offered to bathe it in Chinese blood to the ominous cheers of the audience, is another whose Malay roots are not as deep as often assumed. His grandfather, the founder of Umno, Onn Jaafar, appeared to be a Caucasian, which was not surprising given that his Johor-based family was of Turkish origin. Onn was ejected from the party he founded because he wanted to make it multi-racial and though his son went on to become the head of Umno and a prime minister, he carried with him his father's inclusive and moderate instincts.

Onn lost out politically to Malaysia' s first Prime Minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman. Although the Tunku placed more emphasis on Malay identity, he was certainly no exclusivist. Indeed, he had been born a subject of the King of Siam and as a scion of the royal house of Kedah spent some of his early years in Bangkok at the court of his then sovereign. His mother was Siamese, though her family originally was from Pegu (Burma). Of his four wives, one was Thai Chinese, one English, one Malay and one Malaysian-Chinese. He never hid his fondness for whisky, even while heading the Organization of Islamic Conference, or his student days in England pre-occupied, as he once put it, with "fast women, fast cars and not-so-fast horses."

The Malay aristocracy has anyway been quite catholic in its choice of brides. Those in mixed marriages include Ahmad Shah, the Sultan of Pahang, whose consort is of Pakistani lineage. The Sultan of Selangor's divorced second consort and mother of his heir apparent was an American citizen.

Catholic brides

Sultan Iskandar of Johor's first wife, the mother of his heir apparent, was a British woman, Josephine Trevorrow. In this respect Sultan Iskandar took after his own grandfather, Sultan Ibrahim, who had two European wives, one British, one Romanian.

Maybe it is Johor's geography, its proximity to Singapore and the diversity of Indonesia, but its politicians seem to thrive on marrying outsiders. Former Deputy Prime Minister Musa Hitam's first wife was from (Catholic) Latin America and his second was of mixed ancestry. Another Johor politician, Tun Dr Ismail, deputy prime minister in the early 1970s, was of part Chinese ancestry.

Conversions of convenience to Islam often mean that Malay mixtures leave little trace compared with other cross-ethnic marriages. But the non-Malay, but Muslim, origins of many of the elite are found everywhere, from South Asia, Yemen, Egypt, Turkey and other countries. They include the likes of Zeti Aziz, the governor of Bank Negara. She is the daughter of Ungku Aziz, the European-looking former University of Malaya vice-chancellor, whose Johor-based family came from Turkey.

Chinese roots are also more real than apparent, often hidden by conversions. But relatively recent high-profile marriages to Chinese include Tengku Razaleigh, former finance minister and a member of the Kelantan royal house who married a long-time Chinese friend who converted and changed her name to Noor Abdullah.

Rashid Hussein, the prominent Singapore-born, Anglophile financier whose father was Indian and mother Malay married Sue Kuok, a daughter of tycoon Robert Kuok Hock Nian, the Malaysian-born but now Hong Kong-based tycoon. Kuok's first wife and mother of some of his children was Eurasian but he later married a Chinese and emphasized his Chinese ethnic identity. In a recent book, "Asian Godfathers" Kuok was described by an in-law as "the biggest racial bigot I have ever met."

Among the non-Malay groups, inter-ethnic marriages are generally much more common than among Malays. However it also seems the case that migration is the preferred option for the numbers of Malaysians who either marry across ethnic lines or acquire foreign spouses while studying or working abroad. This particularly applies to Malay women who are either not particularly religious or who see no reason why their spouses should convert.

By one estimate, there are some 150,000 mixed marriages in Malaysia, a number that seems impossibly small in a population of 24 million. The leafy, winding streets of Damansara Heights and Kenny Hills abound with matrons who entered into marriage and lives of leisure with well-to-do Malays straight out of the universities of England, where the government had sent their mates. It is forbidden for a Muslim to marry a non-Muslim, so these women, with their servants and their huge homes, stop being Jean and become Jehan in public, although seldom in private.

But while the list of Malay elites is long and rich with instances of intermarriage, at the lower economic levels the list is short, and increasingly circumscribed by the growing power of Malaysia's shariah, or Islamic religious courts. The issue was brought to the fore in the case of Lina Joy, who changed her name from Azlina Jailani and became a Catholic in an effort to marry a non-Muslim.

Not a catalyst but symbolic

With scores, perhaps hundreds, of outraged Muslims outside the courtroom, demanding that she be denied the chance to change her religion on her identity card, a high court ruled in May that she was subject to the jurisdiction of the shariah court. The shariah courts have allowed one conversion in history – for a woman who had been dead for decades.

The result is that either people do not marry, or they emigrate. Bright women who have preferred to marry foreigners found their husbands denied work permits. There are believed to be thousands living in Australia, Canada or the United Kingdom.

For Malaysia's young to take their cues from Malaysia's top politicians and the cream of society outside of official policy might not be a bad idea. Shamsul Amri Baharuddin, the Director of the Institute of the Malay World Civilisation (ATMA) and Professor at University Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) in Bangi – and himself married to an Australian, says Abdullah Badawi's marriage to Jean Danker Abdullah is "not a catalyst but certainly symbolic."

Marina Mahathir told Asia Sentinel that "If people think that marrying into another culture is enriching, then it will be a good thing. But some people make one person give up their own culture because they think of it as inferior."

But so long as the elite indulges in kris-waving while marrying as it pleases, multiracial nation-building may have scant grassroots impact.

Labels: disturbing, home is where the heart is, interesting stuff

"The idea of a Being who interferes with the sequence of events in the world is absolutely impossible."
(Source: here)

Labels: disturbing, home is where the heart is, musings

Five Asian nations branded 'worst' violators of refugee rights

WASHINGTON (AFP) - China, India, Malaysia, Thailand and Bangladesh have been identified as among the worst violators of refugees' rights in a global survey released ahead of Friday's World Refugees Day.

They joined Iraq, Kenya, Russia, Sudan and Europe as the 10 worst places for refugees last year, according to the World Refugee Survey 2008 released in Washington on Thursday.

The annual study, conducted by the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI), a non-governmental group, also showed the total number of refugees growing to 14 million at the end of 2007, the largest it has been since 2001.

Driving the growth again were Iraqi refugees, with more than 550,000 fleeing their country. In all, more than two million refugees from the insurgency-wracked nation are awaiting an end to violence in their homeland.

The worst places for refugees list was based on violators turning refugees away to face further persecution, violence, and possibly death, or letting them enter a country and subjecting them to deprivation and stultifying limbo, USCRI said.

"We've tried to call attention to these countries because they have been particularly egregious in their treatment of refugees," USCRI president Lavinia Limon said.

Labels: disturbing, home is where the heart is

Today, in Malaysia, there is no longer just the Chinese. Along the way, the chinese people divided beyond dialects and religious faith. We now have denomination within the Chinese. The major three groups are Regular, Cina, and Ah Beng.

The Regular group is the minority, making up less than 20% of the Chinese people. This group has the following characteristics:

1. Speaks English as the first language.
2. Thinks the world owes them a living.
3. Uses the internet more than the other two groups combined.
4. Loves the iPod and/or IKEA.
5. Watches one or more of the following TV series: "Sex and the City", "Friends", or "CSI".
6. Thinks that the Regular group is way larger than it is and makes fun of the other groups, particularly the Ah Beng groups. Why? Because it's fun.
7. Is arty-farty and places lots of emphasis on pronunciation - knows how to correctly enunciate 'croissant'.
8. Uses 'Hey', 'Yo' or 'Wassup' as the standard greeting with the occasional 'dude', 'cool', 'crap' and 'hell' thrown in.
9. Eats pig trotters, not 'chu kiok' and takes watercress soup, not 'sai yong choi thong'.

Recent studies have also shown that there is a growing splinter group within the Regular group known as the CPWTTANC groups. (CPWTTANC is short for Chinese People Who Think They Are Not Chinese.) This growing subgroup are considered elitist by some and are found making statements like "I wish I were in the U.S." or "This never happened when I was studying in Australia." They also tend to speak with an unidentifiable accent.

The women may also prefer to date white men from foreign countries with the excuse that local men just "don't understand me" and have the secret desire to be taken away to the U.S. to live in a sitcom.

The second Chinese group, Cina makes up approximately 55% of the Chinese community. (Cina is derived from the Malay word Cina which means Chinese and is pronounced "chee-na". And you will have to say it in a condescending tone for effect.)

This group is considered mainstream and contributes to the numbers that reflect development in the country. They are the masses in context of the Chinese community. In other words, if you want to sell something to the masses of Chinese people, the Cina is it.

The Cina are identified by the following traits:

1. Speaks Mandarin or Cantonese as the first language.
2. Generally quiet, selft-effacing, and obliging but are actually shrewd and calculative.
3. Sees Taiwan as the place to be.
4. More likely to forward chain email to people in their address book.
5. Goes to Halo Café or Wow Wow Café BY CHOICE at least three times a year.
6. Has Astro hardwired to Wah Lai Toi.
7. Calls a music video an MTV instead of music video.
8. Knows all the dim sum dishes by name.
9. Seventy percent of lighting at home generated by flourescent lights.
10. Sucks fish bones.

The Last group is known as the Ah Bengs. This term was probably made up by the Regulars in the early 80s during the cultural invasion that saw the mass import of music and movies from countries like Hong Kong, Taiwan, and to some extent, Japan. This phenomenon saw the more open-minded and runaway members of the Cina group defect into Ah Bengs and its feminine equivalent, Ah Lian. They just took their Alan Tam and Anita Mui a little too seriously.

Perhaps the most made-fun-of group not only by its own Chinese people but by people of other races, the Ah Bengs is often seen as people living on the edge and has more flamboyant tastes. One may identify the Ah Beng by these tell-tale signs:

1. Built-in visual self-defense mechanism that keeps people away from them.
2. Have enough amplifiers in their one car to power speakers for six cars.
3. Hair not in their original colour.
4. Volume of voice is automatically five decibels higher than everyone else.
5. Excessive use of the phrase "Kan Ni Na Bu Ciao Chee Bai". (Although, to be fair, some members of the Regular group have been reported to use the phrase on a daily basis as well.)
6. Once a fan of one of the following groups: Vengaboys, Dr Bombay, Aqua, or the Cheeky Girls.
7. Their Proton car does not look like a Proton car due to modifications.
8. For the Ah Lians, have at least one bag fashioned after a furry animal complete with the head.
9. Accessories must be in 6 different colours, at least - from bracelets, necklaces, earrings, belt, socks, quasi-gloves, platform shoes - yup, Ah Bengs and Ah Lians alike.
10. Think they are NOT Ah Bengs and Ah Lians.

Labels: hilarious, home is where the heart is

His target is 40 children

By R.S.N. MURALI

KUALA TERENGGANU: The man who was allowed by the Syariah High Court to take a fourth wife, has fathered 25 children. He hopes to make it 40.

Property negotiator Abu Bakar Embong has been hoping to expand his family with another 15 children but did not want to “burden” his three wives.

When the 54-year-old recently expressed his wish to marry his newfound sweetheart, a woman 30 years his junior, his wives Asnah Jusoh, 46, Mazumi Ismail, 45 and 25-year-old Norazlina Ariffin not only agreed to the marriage scheduled for the end of this month, they also agreed to let their husband spend more time with his new bride.

On Monday, the Syariah High Court here approved Abu Bakar's application to take Suhaili Alias, 25, from Batu Enam here, as his fourth wife.

Abu Bakar has 11 sons and 14 daughters from his three marriages, the eldest child being 25 years and youngest just four months old.

Asked whether he was still confident of fathering more offspring at his age, the 54-year-old grandfather replied: “I am still strong and foresee no problems”.

He also shared some tips with the media on how to be sexually active even at an advanced age.

Among the techniques he employed was to bathe in the morning by pouring a pail of water on the right leg first before washing other parts of the body.

“This technique is deemed a must for those with several wives,” he said.


One happy family: Abu Bakar with his three wives and some of their 25 children at their home in Teluk Menara.

Labels: disturbing, home is where the heart is, musings

Labels: Australia, home is where the heart is, PhD, updates

Aged woman jumps off bridge

MUAR: An elderly woman jumped to her death from a bridge at Sungai Muar yesterday.

A group of anglers saw the 59-year-old woman walking barefoot and crying on the bridge at 3am.

One of them, Noorazam Abu Naim, said the woman was wiping tears from her face while walking on the bridge.

He said that before anyone could stop her she had climbed over the railing and jumped into the river.

The body of the woman, identified as Tay Ah Hong (pic) from Jalan Bakri, was spotted about 15 minutes later behind the Muar Customs Department building. Tay left a plastic bag with some personal belongings on the bridge.

Labels: disturbing, home is where the heart is

Labels: disturbing, home is where the heart is

Labels: comics, disturbing, hilarious, home is where the heart is

Labels: disturbing, extravaganza, home is where the heart is

MCA Youth chief and two others in spy squad, says Wong
By LOH FOON FONG and NG CHENG YEE

KUALA LUMPUR: The main accuser at the centre of a probe into a spy squad, said to have been set up to oust the political enemies of the MCA president, has named three people as members of the secret group.

Petaling Jaya Utara division adviser Wong Leong, in a tell-all style, said the three members involved in the job were MCA Youth chief Datuk Liow Tiong Lai, Tanjung Piai MP Wee Jeck Seng and former Gerakan Belia Bersatu chairman Tee An Chuan.

He said Tee, the contact person of the team, had told him that the squad, which reported to Datuk Seri Ong Ka Ting, was set up in February 2005, to get rid of Ong’s political enemies.

“Tee told me that there are certain people that the team needed to eliminate when he approached me to work for them.

“They are Datuk Seri Dr Chua Soi Lek, Datuk Chua Jui Meng, Datuk Donald Lim Siang Chai, Tun Dr Ling Liong Sik and his son Datuk Ling Hee Leong, and all their supporters,” he told a press conference yesterday after testifying before a three-man panel set up to investigate the existence of the spy squad.

On April 11, the MCA presidential council appointed the three-man panel, led by Tan Sri Dr Sak Cheng Lum, to investigate the allegations.

The other two members are party veteran Tan Sri Michael Chen Wing Sum and lawyer and senior Bar Council member Roger Tan.

Labels: disturbing, home is where the heart is

Labels: extravaganza, home is where the heart is

MB gives advice on apple polishing

KUANTAN: Mentri Besar Datuk Seri Adnan Yaakob has given a tip on how one can climb up the political and corporate ladders - by apple polishing (bodek).

``If I did not `bodek' (apple polish), I would not be where I am now - a Mentri Besar.

``However, the bodek culture that one should practise is something that is of good use, which is to win the hearts of your superiors, resulting in creating an amicable working environment that can help improve productivity,'' he said Friday when addressing staff of Pahang SEDC and its subsidiaries in conjunction with the Workers' Day celebration at Indera Mahkota here.

Labels: disturbing, home is where the heart is

Malaysia woman scores rare legal win to quit Islam
KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - A Malaysian religious court granted a woman's wish to formally renounce Islam on Thursday, a decision described by her lawyer as a landmark case that could enable many others to leave the faith.

Islamic courts in the mainly Muslim nation rarely allow Muslims to convert to other religions. Often, they prescribe counselling or sometimes even fine them for apostacy.

"It's a landmark case," said lawyer Ahmad Jailani Abdul Ghani, who represented Siti Fatimah Tan Abdullah, 38, in her two-year court battle to convert back to Buddhism from Islam.

Siti Fatimah, an ethnic Chinese woman formerly known as Tan Ean Huang, had converted to Islam in 1998 in order to marry her Muslim lover at the time. In Malaysia, non-Muslims must convert to Islam before they can legally marry a Muslim.

But Siti Fatimah later broke up with her husband and in 2006 sought to have her conversion to Islam annulled, Ahmad Jailani said, adding that she had never practised as a Muslim and had only adopted Islam in name to ensure her marriage was recognised.

The lawyer said the ruling was important because it accepted that Muslims could renounce Islam on the grounds that they had never really practised the faith.

"We brought in two witnesses from her family to say that (because of) the way she prays and way she lives in her house, she is not a Muslim," Ahmad Jailani said.

Islam is Malaysia's official religion, but a big minority of around 40 percent of Malaysians profess other faiths such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity.

Islamic affairs are governed at state level, so Thursday's ruling by the Penang Sharia High Court does not necessarily form a precedent for sharia courts in Malaysia's 12 other states.

Ahmad Jailani said the Penang state religious council, which had opposed Siti's renunciation of Islam, had signalled it was likely to appeal the ruling.

Labels: home is where the heart is, music