The Cow
In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
[2:256]
Let there be no compulsion in religion: Truth stands out clear from Error: whoever rejects evil and believes in God hath grasped the most trustworthy hand- hold, that never breaks. And God heareth and knoweth all things.
* v.256 : Compulsion is incompatible with religion; because 1) religion depends upon faith and will, and these would be meaningless if induced by force; 2) Truth and Error have been so clearly shown up by the mercy of God that there should be no doubt in the minds of any persons of goodwill as to the fundamentals of faith; 3) God’s protection is continuous and His Plan is always to lead us from the depths of darkness into the clearest light.
* Hand-hold: something which the hands can grasp for safety in a moment of danger. It may be a loop or a handle, or anchor. If it is without flaw, so that there is no danger of breaking, our safety is absolutely assured so long as we hold fast to it. Our safety then depends on our own will and faith; God’s help and protection will always be unfailing if we hold firmly to God and trust in Him.
(Translation and interpretation by Abdullah Yusuf Ali)
For those who wish to be further enlightened, read this.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Walkin' the Talk...Not!
Today, newspapers reported that Johawaki Sdn Bhd, the contractor responsible for the shoddy work at the Jalan Duta Court Complex apologised and had ' taken responsibility for the problems plaguing the building'. Mind you, they did blame the burst pipe which flooded the cafeteria on a subcontractor. Guess the supervisor was sleeping, huh?
I thought I'd Google Johawaki just for fun and lo and behold, they have a website! Despite being 'one of the most prominent construction companies in the country', they can't seem to hire web writers who can write good English. Their introduction goes like this:
JOHAWAKI is one of the prominent construction company in the country. It has progressed aggressively since its incorporation in 1982. To date, the company has carved its reputation in areas ranging from building, civil and infrastructure works, restoration and refurbishment works as well as road and building maintenance. It has also established a trading house dealing with supplies of construction materials, machineries and equipments.
Johawaki Group has built a reputation based on long term relationships and satisfied customers. Our staff of highly trained professionals is ready to provide technical assistance and exceptional customer service to your company. let us show you the value we can bring to your project.
Like many corporations, they have a vision and mission. Their mission statement is a bit long but it includes this:
Work ethics at Johawaki Group of Companies rely on professionalism, teamwork and the adoption of new technologies to add value for clients. The philosophy of doing it right, the first time – a resolution to work in the best interest of the client and to recognize for being different, daring and innovative. It is these values that share the vision with the nation.
Guess the bosses forgot to read their own mission statement?
The website also claims that 'the Johawaki approach to detailed and methodical planning translates into "no surprises" for our clients'.How ironic!
But at least they are taking responsibility, which is more than what most people would do.
I thought I'd Google Johawaki just for fun and lo and behold, they have a website! Despite being 'one of the most prominent construction companies in the country', they can't seem to hire web writers who can write good English. Their introduction goes like this:
JOHAWAKI is one of the prominent construction company in the country. It has progressed aggressively since its incorporation in 1982. To date, the company has carved its reputation in areas ranging from building, civil and infrastructure works, restoration and refurbishment works as well as road and building maintenance. It has also established a trading house dealing with supplies of construction materials, machineries and equipments.
Johawaki Group has built a reputation based on long term relationships and satisfied customers. Our staff of highly trained professionals is ready to provide technical assistance and exceptional customer service to your company. let us show you the value we can bring to your project.
Like many corporations, they have a vision and mission. Their mission statement is a bit long but it includes this:
Work ethics at Johawaki Group of Companies rely on professionalism, teamwork and the adoption of new technologies to add value for clients. The philosophy of doing it right, the first time – a resolution to work in the best interest of the client and to recognize for being different, daring and innovative. It is these values that share the vision with the nation.
Guess the bosses forgot to read their own mission statement?
The website also claims that 'the Johawaki approach to detailed and methodical planning translates into "no surprises" for our clients'.How ironic!
But at least they are taking responsibility, which is more than what most people would do.
Saturday, May 26, 2007
While We Move Backwards, Others Advance...
A Quiet Revolution in Algeria: Gains by Women
Shawn Baldwin for The New York Times
Sixty percent of Algeria’s university students are women, researchers say. This group was waiting for a bus Thursday at a university in Algiers.
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
Published: May 26, 2007
ALGIERS, May 25 — In this tradition-bound nation scarred by a brutal Islamist-led civil war that killed more than 100,000, a quiet revolution is under way: women are emerging as an economic and political force unheard of in the rest of the Arab world.
Women make up 70 percent of Algeria’s lawyers and 60 percent of its judges. Women dominate medicine. Increasingly, women contribute more to household income than men. Sixty percent of university students are women, university researchers say.
In a region where women have a decidedly low public profile, Algerian women are visible everywhere. They are starting to drive buses and taxicabs. They pump gas and wait on tables.
Although men still hold all of the formal levers of power and women still make up only 20 percent of the work force, that is more than twice their share a generation ago, and they seem to be taking over the machinery of state as well.
“If such a trend continues,” said Daho Djerbal, editor and publisher of Naqd, a magazine of social criticism and analysis, “we will see a new phenomenon where our public administration will also be controlled by women.”
The change seems to have sneaked up on Algerians, who for years have focused more on the struggle between a governing party trying to stay in power and Islamists trying to take that power.
Those who study the region say they are taken aback by the data but suggest that an explanation may lie in the educational system and the labor market.
University studies are no longer viewed as a credible route toward a career or economic well-being, and so men may well opt out and try to find work or to simply leave the country, suggested Hugh Roberts, a historian and the North Africa project director of the International Crisis Group.
But for women, he added, university studies get them out of the house and allow them to position themselves better in society. “The dividend may be social rather than in terms of career,” he said.
This generation of Algerian women has navigated a path between the secular state and the pull of extremist Islam, the two poles of the national crisis of recent years.
The women are more religious than previous generations, and more modern, sociologists here said. Women cover their heads and drape their bodies with traditional Islamic coverings. They pray. They go to the mosque — and they work, often alongside men, once considered taboo.
Sociologists and many working women say that by adopting religion and wearing the Islamic head covering called the hijab, women here have in effect freed themselves from moral judgments and restrictions imposed by men. Uncovered women are rarely seen on the street late at night, but covered women can be seen strolling the city after attending the evening prayer at a mosque.
“They never criticize me, especially when they see I am wearing the hijab,” said Denni Fatiha, 44, the first woman to drive a large city bus through the narrow, winding roads of Algiers.
The impact has been far-reaching and profound.
In some neighborhoods, for example, birthrates appear to have fallen and class sizes in elementary schools have dropped by nearly half. It appears that women are delaying marriage to complete their studies, though delayed marriage is also a function of high unemployment. In the past, women typically married at 17 or 18 but now marry on average at 29, sociologists said.
And when they marry, it is often to men who are far less educated, creating an awkward social reality for many women.
Khalida Rahman is a lawyer. She is 33 and has been married to a night watchman for five months. Her husband was a friend of her brothers who showed up one day and proposed. She immediately said yes, she recalled.
She describes her life now this way: “Whenever I leave him it is just as if I am a man. But when I get home I become a woman.”
Fatima Oussedik, a sociologist, said, “We in the ’60s, we were progressive, but we did not achieve what is being achieved by this generation today.” Ms. Oussedik, who works for the Research Center for Applied Economics and Development in Algiers, does not wear the hijab and prefers to speak in French.
Researchers here say the change is not driven by demographics; women make up only a bit more than half of the population. They said it is driven by desire and opportunity.
Algeria’s young men reject school and try to earn money as traders in the informal sector, selling goods on the street, or they focus their efforts on leaving the country or just hanging out. There is a whole class of young men referred to as hittistes — the word is a combination of French and Arabic for people who hold up walls.
Increasingly, the people here have lost faith in their government, which draws its legitimacy from a revolution now more than five decades old, many political and social analysts said. In recent parliamentary elections, turnout was low and there were 970,000 protest votes — cast by people who intentionally destroyed their ballots — nearly as many as the 1.3 million votes cast in support of the governing party.
There are regular protests, and riots, all over the country, with people complaining about corruption, lack of services and economic disparities. There are violent attacks, too: bombings aimed at the police, officials and foreigners. A triple suicide bombing on April 11 against the prime minister’s office and the police left more than 30 people dead.
In that context, women may have emerged as Algeria’s most potent force for social change, with their presence in the bureaucracy and on the street having a potentially moderating and modernizing influence on society, sociologists said.
“Women, and the women’s movement, could be leading us to modernity,” said Abdel Nasser Djabi, a professor of sociology at the University of Algiers.
Not everyone is happy with those dynamics. Some political and social analysts say the recent resurgence in radical Islamist activity, including bombings, is driven partly by a desire to slow the social change the country is experiencing, especially regarding women’s role in society.
Others complain that the growing participation of women in society is a direct violation of the faith.
“I am against this,” said Esmail Ben Ibrahim, an imam at a neighborhood mosque near the center of the city. “It is all wrong from a religious point of view. Society has embarked on the wrong path.”
The quest for identity is a constant undercurrent in much of the Middle East. But it is arguably the most complicated question in Algeria, a nation whose borders were drawn by France and whose people speak Berber, Arabic and French.
After a bitter experience with French occupation and a seven-year revolutionary war that brought independence in 1962 at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, the leaders here chose to adopt Islam and Arab identity as the force to unify the country. Arabic replaced French as the language of education, and the French secular curriculum was replaced with a curriculum heavy on religion.
At the same time, girls were encouraged to go to school.
Now, more than four decades later, Algeria’s youth — 70 percent of the population is under 30, researchers said — have grown up with Arabic and an orientation toward Middle Eastern issues. Arabic-language television networks like Al Jazeera have become the popular reference point, more so than French television, observers here said.
In the 1990s radical Islamist ideas gained popular support, and terrorism was widely accepted as a means to win power. More than 100,000 people died in years of civil conflict. Today most people say the experience has forced them to reject the most radical ideas. So although Algerians are more religious now than they were during the bloody 1990s, they are more likely to embrace modernity — a partial explanation for the emergence of women as a societal force, some analysts said.
That is not the case in more rural mountainous areas, where women continue to live by the code of tradition. But for the time being, most people say that for now the community’s collective consciousness is simply too raw from the years of civil war for Islamist terrorists or radical Islamic ideas to gain popular support.
There is a sense that the new room given to women may at least partly be a reflection of that general feeling. The population has largely rejected the most radical interpretation of Islam and has begun to return to the more North African, almost mystical, interpretation of the faith, sociologists and religious leaders said.
Whatever the underlying reason, women in the streets of the city are brimming with enthusiasm.
“I don’t think any of this contradicts Islam,” said Wahiba Nabti, 36, as she walked through the center of the city one day recently. “On the contrary, Islam gives freedom to work. Anyway, it is between you and God.”
Ms. Nabti wore a black scarf covering her head and a long black gown that hid the shape of her body. “I hope one day I can drive a crane, so I can really be financially independent,” she said. “You cannot always rely on a man.”
***********************************************************************************
While we take for granted our development and our economic advancement, we also become complacent to the threats. We become cowed by insults by people in authority and remain silent. It goes on and on and one day we find ourselves back in the dark ages and we don't know why.
This story shows there is no contradiction between Islam and modernity, and that giving women rights, space and voice benefits the entire nation. We should reject the crudeness and uncouth behaviour of men in positions of authority as not only sexist but ultimately unIslamic. Therefore we should not keep silent when they insult us.
Shawn Baldwin for The New York Times
Sixty percent of Algeria’s university students are women, researchers say. This group was waiting for a bus Thursday at a university in Algiers.
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
Published: May 26, 2007
ALGIERS, May 25 — In this tradition-bound nation scarred by a brutal Islamist-led civil war that killed more than 100,000, a quiet revolution is under way: women are emerging as an economic and political force unheard of in the rest of the Arab world.
Women make up 70 percent of Algeria’s lawyers and 60 percent of its judges. Women dominate medicine. Increasingly, women contribute more to household income than men. Sixty percent of university students are women, university researchers say.
In a region where women have a decidedly low public profile, Algerian women are visible everywhere. They are starting to drive buses and taxicabs. They pump gas and wait on tables.
Although men still hold all of the formal levers of power and women still make up only 20 percent of the work force, that is more than twice their share a generation ago, and they seem to be taking over the machinery of state as well.
“If such a trend continues,” said Daho Djerbal, editor and publisher of Naqd, a magazine of social criticism and analysis, “we will see a new phenomenon where our public administration will also be controlled by women.”
The change seems to have sneaked up on Algerians, who for years have focused more on the struggle between a governing party trying to stay in power and Islamists trying to take that power.
Those who study the region say they are taken aback by the data but suggest that an explanation may lie in the educational system and the labor market.
University studies are no longer viewed as a credible route toward a career or economic well-being, and so men may well opt out and try to find work or to simply leave the country, suggested Hugh Roberts, a historian and the North Africa project director of the International Crisis Group.
But for women, he added, university studies get them out of the house and allow them to position themselves better in society. “The dividend may be social rather than in terms of career,” he said.
This generation of Algerian women has navigated a path between the secular state and the pull of extremist Islam, the two poles of the national crisis of recent years.
The women are more religious than previous generations, and more modern, sociologists here said. Women cover their heads and drape their bodies with traditional Islamic coverings. They pray. They go to the mosque — and they work, often alongside men, once considered taboo.
Sociologists and many working women say that by adopting religion and wearing the Islamic head covering called the hijab, women here have in effect freed themselves from moral judgments and restrictions imposed by men. Uncovered women are rarely seen on the street late at night, but covered women can be seen strolling the city after attending the evening prayer at a mosque.
“They never criticize me, especially when they see I am wearing the hijab,” said Denni Fatiha, 44, the first woman to drive a large city bus through the narrow, winding roads of Algiers.
The impact has been far-reaching and profound.
In some neighborhoods, for example, birthrates appear to have fallen and class sizes in elementary schools have dropped by nearly half. It appears that women are delaying marriage to complete their studies, though delayed marriage is also a function of high unemployment. In the past, women typically married at 17 or 18 but now marry on average at 29, sociologists said.
And when they marry, it is often to men who are far less educated, creating an awkward social reality for many women.
Khalida Rahman is a lawyer. She is 33 and has been married to a night watchman for five months. Her husband was a friend of her brothers who showed up one day and proposed. She immediately said yes, she recalled.
She describes her life now this way: “Whenever I leave him it is just as if I am a man. But when I get home I become a woman.”
Fatima Oussedik, a sociologist, said, “We in the ’60s, we were progressive, but we did not achieve what is being achieved by this generation today.” Ms. Oussedik, who works for the Research Center for Applied Economics and Development in Algiers, does not wear the hijab and prefers to speak in French.
Researchers here say the change is not driven by demographics; women make up only a bit more than half of the population. They said it is driven by desire and opportunity.
Algeria’s young men reject school and try to earn money as traders in the informal sector, selling goods on the street, or they focus their efforts on leaving the country or just hanging out. There is a whole class of young men referred to as hittistes — the word is a combination of French and Arabic for people who hold up walls.
Increasingly, the people here have lost faith in their government, which draws its legitimacy from a revolution now more than five decades old, many political and social analysts said. In recent parliamentary elections, turnout was low and there were 970,000 protest votes — cast by people who intentionally destroyed their ballots — nearly as many as the 1.3 million votes cast in support of the governing party.
There are regular protests, and riots, all over the country, with people complaining about corruption, lack of services and economic disparities. There are violent attacks, too: bombings aimed at the police, officials and foreigners. A triple suicide bombing on April 11 against the prime minister’s office and the police left more than 30 people dead.
In that context, women may have emerged as Algeria’s most potent force for social change, with their presence in the bureaucracy and on the street having a potentially moderating and modernizing influence on society, sociologists said.
“Women, and the women’s movement, could be leading us to modernity,” said Abdel Nasser Djabi, a professor of sociology at the University of Algiers.
Not everyone is happy with those dynamics. Some political and social analysts say the recent resurgence in radical Islamist activity, including bombings, is driven partly by a desire to slow the social change the country is experiencing, especially regarding women’s role in society.
Others complain that the growing participation of women in society is a direct violation of the faith.
“I am against this,” said Esmail Ben Ibrahim, an imam at a neighborhood mosque near the center of the city. “It is all wrong from a religious point of view. Society has embarked on the wrong path.”
The quest for identity is a constant undercurrent in much of the Middle East. But it is arguably the most complicated question in Algeria, a nation whose borders were drawn by France and whose people speak Berber, Arabic and French.
After a bitter experience with French occupation and a seven-year revolutionary war that brought independence in 1962 at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, the leaders here chose to adopt Islam and Arab identity as the force to unify the country. Arabic replaced French as the language of education, and the French secular curriculum was replaced with a curriculum heavy on religion.
At the same time, girls were encouraged to go to school.
Now, more than four decades later, Algeria’s youth — 70 percent of the population is under 30, researchers said — have grown up with Arabic and an orientation toward Middle Eastern issues. Arabic-language television networks like Al Jazeera have become the popular reference point, more so than French television, observers here said.
In the 1990s radical Islamist ideas gained popular support, and terrorism was widely accepted as a means to win power. More than 100,000 people died in years of civil conflict. Today most people say the experience has forced them to reject the most radical ideas. So although Algerians are more religious now than they were during the bloody 1990s, they are more likely to embrace modernity — a partial explanation for the emergence of women as a societal force, some analysts said.
That is not the case in more rural mountainous areas, where women continue to live by the code of tradition. But for the time being, most people say that for now the community’s collective consciousness is simply too raw from the years of civil war for Islamist terrorists or radical Islamic ideas to gain popular support.
There is a sense that the new room given to women may at least partly be a reflection of that general feeling. The population has largely rejected the most radical interpretation of Islam and has begun to return to the more North African, almost mystical, interpretation of the faith, sociologists and religious leaders said.
Whatever the underlying reason, women in the streets of the city are brimming with enthusiasm.
“I don’t think any of this contradicts Islam,” said Wahiba Nabti, 36, as she walked through the center of the city one day recently. “On the contrary, Islam gives freedom to work. Anyway, it is between you and God.”
Ms. Nabti wore a black scarf covering her head and a long black gown that hid the shape of her body. “I hope one day I can drive a crane, so I can really be financially independent,” she said. “You cannot always rely on a man.”
***********************************************************************************
While we take for granted our development and our economic advancement, we also become complacent to the threats. We become cowed by insults by people in authority and remain silent. It goes on and on and one day we find ourselves back in the dark ages and we don't know why.
This story shows there is no contradiction between Islam and modernity, and that giving women rights, space and voice benefits the entire nation. We should reject the crudeness and uncouth behaviour of men in positions of authority as not only sexist but ultimately unIslamic. Therefore we should not keep silent when they insult us.
Friday, May 25, 2007
Our Parallel Lives
This article is appeared in the New York Times in a blog called Our Lives as Atoms and I thought how uncanny it was that many of the points are so relevant to media and politics in our country as well.
We should especially think about the points being made about how the lack of criticism leads to the tyranny of minority views.
May 23, 2007, 6:11 pm
A New Silent Majority
By Mark Buchanan
Something seems a little out of whack between the mainstream media and the American people. Take the arguments of the past few days over former President Jimmy Carter’s remarks about the Bush administration and the consequences of its particular brand of foreign policy. Carter didn’t attack President Bush personally, but said that “as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history,” which can’t really be too far out of line with what many Americans think.
In coverage typical of much of the media, however, NBC Nightly News asked whether Carter had broken “an unwritten rule when commenting on the current president,” and portrayed Carter’s words — unfairly it seems — as a personal attack on President Bush. Fox News called it “unprecedented.” Yet as an article in this newspaper on Tuesday pointed out, “presidential scholars roll their eyes at the notion that former presidents do not speak ill of current ones.”
The pattern is familiar. Polls show that most Americans want our government to stop its unilateral swaggering, and to try to solve our differences with other nations through diplomacy. In early April, for example, when the speaker of the House, the Democrat Nancy Pelosi, visited Syria and met with President Bashar al-Assad, a poll had 64 percent of Americans in favor of negotiations with the Syrians. Yet this didn’t stop an outpouring of media alarm.
A number of CNN broadcasts — including one showing Pelosi with a head scarf beside the title “Talking with Terrorists?” — failed even to mention that several Republican congressmen had met with Assad two days before Pelosi did. The conventional wisdom on the principal television talk shows was that Pelosi had “messed up on this one” (in the words of NBC’s Matt Lauer), and that she and the Democrats would pay dearly for it.
So it must have been a great surprise when Pelosi’s approval ratings stayed basically the same after her visit, or actually went up a little.
Or take the matter of the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Most media figures seem to consider the very idea as issuing from the unhinged imaginations of a lunatic fringe. But according to a recent poll, 39 percent of Americans in fact support it, including 42 percent of independents.
A common explanation of this tendency toward distortion is that the beltway media has attended a few too many White House Correspondents’ Dinners and so cannot possibly cover the administration with anything approaching objectivity. No doubt the Republicans’ notoriously well-organized efforts in casting the media as having a “liberal bias” also have their intended effect in suppressing criticism.
But I wonder whether this media distortion also persists because it doesn’t meet with enough criticism, and if that’s partially because many Americans think that what they see in the major political media reflects what most other Americans really think – when actually it often doesn’t.
Psychologists coined the term “pluralistic ignorance” in the 1930s to refer to this type of misperception — more a social than an individual phenomenon — to which even smart people might fall victim. A study back then had surprisingly found that most kids in an all-white fraternity were privately in favor of admitting black members, though most assumed, wrongly, that their personal views were greatly in the minority. Natural temerity made each individual assume that he was the lone oddball.
A similar effect is common today on university campuses, where many students think that most other students are typically inclined to drink more than they themselves would wish to; researchers have found that many students indeed drink more to fit in with what they perceive to be the drinking norm, even though it really isn’t the norm. The result is an amplification of a minority view, which comes to seem like the majority view.
In pluralistic ignorance, as described by researchers Hubert O’Gorman and Stephen Garry in a 1976 paper published in Public Opinion Quarterly, “moral principles with relatively little popular support may exert considerable influence because they are mistakenly thought to represent the views of the majority, while normative imperatives actually favored by the majority may carry less weight because they are erroneously attributed to a minority.” (Now doesn't this sound familiar?)
What is especially disturbing about the process is that it lends itself to control by the noisiest and most visible. (Don't we know this!)Psychologists have noted that students who are the heaviest drinkers, for example, tend to speak out most strongly against proposed measures to curb drinking, and act as “subculture custodians” in support of their own minority views. Their strong vocalization can produce “false consensus” against such measures, as others, who think they’re part of the minority, keep quiet. As a consequence, the extremists gain influence out of all proportion to their numbers, while the views of the silent majority end up being suppressed. (The United States Department of Education has a brief page on the main ideas here.)
Think of the proposal to put a timetable on the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, supported, the latest poll says, by 60 percent of Americans, but dropped Tuesday from the latest war funding bill.
Over the past couple months, Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com has done a superb job of documenting what certainly seems like it might be a case of pluralistic ignorance among the major political media, many (though certainly not all) of whom often seem to act as “subculture custodians” of their own amplified minority views. Routinely, it seems, views that get expressed and presented as majority views aren’t really that at all.
In a typical example in March, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported that most Americans wanted to pardon Scooter Libby, saying that the polling “indicates that most people think, in fact, that he should be pardoned, Scooter Libby should be pardoned.” In fact, polls showed that only 18 percent then favored a pardon.
Mitchell committed a similar error in April, claiming that polling showed Nancy Pelosi to be unpopular with the American people, her approval rating being as low as the dismal numbers of former Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert just before the 2006 November elections. But in fact the polls showed Pelosi’s approval standing at about 50 percent, while Hastert’s had been 22 percent.
As most people get their news from the major outlets, these distortions – however they occur, whether intentionally or through some more innocuous process of filtering – almost certainly translate into a strongly distorted image in peoples’ minds of what most people across the country think. They contribute to making mainstream Americans feel as if they’re probably not mainstream, which in turn may make them less likely to voice their opinions.
One of the most common examples of pluralistic ignorance, of course, takes place in the classroom, where a teacher has just finished a dull and completely incomprehensible lecture, and asks if there are any questions. No hands go up, as everyone feels like the lone fool, even though no student actually understood a single word. It takes guts, of course, to admit total ignorance when you might just be the only one.
Last year, author Kristina Borjesson interviewed 21 prominent journalists for her book “Feet to the Fire,” about the run-up to the Iraq War. Her most notable impression was this:
“The thing that I found really profound was that there really was no consensus among this nation’s top messengers about why we went to war. [War is the] most extreme activity a nation can engage in, and if they weren’t clear about it, that means the public wasn’t necessarily clear about the real reasons. And I still don’t think the American people are clear about it.”
Yet in the classroom of our democracy, at least for many in the media, it still seems impolitic – or at least a little too risky – to raise one’s hand.
********************************************************************************
Mark Buchanan, a theoretical physicist, is an associate editor for ComPlexUs, a journal on biocomplexity, and the author of "Ubiquity: The Science of History," "Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks" and, most recently, "The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You." He lives in Normandy.
We should especially think about the points being made about how the lack of criticism leads to the tyranny of minority views.
May 23, 2007, 6:11 pm
A New Silent Majority
By Mark Buchanan
Something seems a little out of whack between the mainstream media and the American people. Take the arguments of the past few days over former President Jimmy Carter’s remarks about the Bush administration and the consequences of its particular brand of foreign policy. Carter didn’t attack President Bush personally, but said that “as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history,” which can’t really be too far out of line with what many Americans think.
In coverage typical of much of the media, however, NBC Nightly News asked whether Carter had broken “an unwritten rule when commenting on the current president,” and portrayed Carter’s words — unfairly it seems — as a personal attack on President Bush. Fox News called it “unprecedented.” Yet as an article in this newspaper on Tuesday pointed out, “presidential scholars roll their eyes at the notion that former presidents do not speak ill of current ones.”
The pattern is familiar. Polls show that most Americans want our government to stop its unilateral swaggering, and to try to solve our differences with other nations through diplomacy. In early April, for example, when the speaker of the House, the Democrat Nancy Pelosi, visited Syria and met with President Bashar al-Assad, a poll had 64 percent of Americans in favor of negotiations with the Syrians. Yet this didn’t stop an outpouring of media alarm.
A number of CNN broadcasts — including one showing Pelosi with a head scarf beside the title “Talking with Terrorists?” — failed even to mention that several Republican congressmen had met with Assad two days before Pelosi did. The conventional wisdom on the principal television talk shows was that Pelosi had “messed up on this one” (in the words of NBC’s Matt Lauer), and that she and the Democrats would pay dearly for it.
So it must have been a great surprise when Pelosi’s approval ratings stayed basically the same after her visit, or actually went up a little.
Or take the matter of the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Most media figures seem to consider the very idea as issuing from the unhinged imaginations of a lunatic fringe. But according to a recent poll, 39 percent of Americans in fact support it, including 42 percent of independents.
A common explanation of this tendency toward distortion is that the beltway media has attended a few too many White House Correspondents’ Dinners and so cannot possibly cover the administration with anything approaching objectivity. No doubt the Republicans’ notoriously well-organized efforts in casting the media as having a “liberal bias” also have their intended effect in suppressing criticism.
But I wonder whether this media distortion also persists because it doesn’t meet with enough criticism, and if that’s partially because many Americans think that what they see in the major political media reflects what most other Americans really think – when actually it often doesn’t.
Psychologists coined the term “pluralistic ignorance” in the 1930s to refer to this type of misperception — more a social than an individual phenomenon — to which even smart people might fall victim. A study back then had surprisingly found that most kids in an all-white fraternity were privately in favor of admitting black members, though most assumed, wrongly, that their personal views were greatly in the minority. Natural temerity made each individual assume that he was the lone oddball.
A similar effect is common today on university campuses, where many students think that most other students are typically inclined to drink more than they themselves would wish to; researchers have found that many students indeed drink more to fit in with what they perceive to be the drinking norm, even though it really isn’t the norm. The result is an amplification of a minority view, which comes to seem like the majority view.
In pluralistic ignorance, as described by researchers Hubert O’Gorman and Stephen Garry in a 1976 paper published in Public Opinion Quarterly, “moral principles with relatively little popular support may exert considerable influence because they are mistakenly thought to represent the views of the majority, while normative imperatives actually favored by the majority may carry less weight because they are erroneously attributed to a minority.” (Now doesn't this sound familiar?)
What is especially disturbing about the process is that it lends itself to control by the noisiest and most visible. (Don't we know this!)Psychologists have noted that students who are the heaviest drinkers, for example, tend to speak out most strongly against proposed measures to curb drinking, and act as “subculture custodians” in support of their own minority views. Their strong vocalization can produce “false consensus” against such measures, as others, who think they’re part of the minority, keep quiet. As a consequence, the extremists gain influence out of all proportion to their numbers, while the views of the silent majority end up being suppressed. (The United States Department of Education has a brief page on the main ideas here.)
Think of the proposal to put a timetable on the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, supported, the latest poll says, by 60 percent of Americans, but dropped Tuesday from the latest war funding bill.
Over the past couple months, Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com has done a superb job of documenting what certainly seems like it might be a case of pluralistic ignorance among the major political media, many (though certainly not all) of whom often seem to act as “subculture custodians” of their own amplified minority views. Routinely, it seems, views that get expressed and presented as majority views aren’t really that at all.
In a typical example in March, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported that most Americans wanted to pardon Scooter Libby, saying that the polling “indicates that most people think, in fact, that he should be pardoned, Scooter Libby should be pardoned.” In fact, polls showed that only 18 percent then favored a pardon.
Mitchell committed a similar error in April, claiming that polling showed Nancy Pelosi to be unpopular with the American people, her approval rating being as low as the dismal numbers of former Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert just before the 2006 November elections. But in fact the polls showed Pelosi’s approval standing at about 50 percent, while Hastert’s had been 22 percent.
As most people get their news from the major outlets, these distortions – however they occur, whether intentionally or through some more innocuous process of filtering – almost certainly translate into a strongly distorted image in peoples’ minds of what most people across the country think. They contribute to making mainstream Americans feel as if they’re probably not mainstream, which in turn may make them less likely to voice their opinions.
One of the most common examples of pluralistic ignorance, of course, takes place in the classroom, where a teacher has just finished a dull and completely incomprehensible lecture, and asks if there are any questions. No hands go up, as everyone feels like the lone fool, even though no student actually understood a single word. It takes guts, of course, to admit total ignorance when you might just be the only one.
Last year, author Kristina Borjesson interviewed 21 prominent journalists for her book “Feet to the Fire,” about the run-up to the Iraq War. Her most notable impression was this:
“The thing that I found really profound was that there really was no consensus among this nation’s top messengers about why we went to war. [War is the] most extreme activity a nation can engage in, and if they weren’t clear about it, that means the public wasn’t necessarily clear about the real reasons. And I still don’t think the American people are clear about it.”
Yet in the classroom of our democracy, at least for many in the media, it still seems impolitic – or at least a little too risky – to raise one’s hand.
********************************************************************************
Mark Buchanan, a theoretical physicist, is an associate editor for ComPlexUs, a journal on biocomplexity, and the author of "Ubiquity: The Science of History," "Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks" and, most recently, "The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You." He lives in Normandy.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Still waiting...UPDATED
UPDATED: As if to prove that women's dressing has absolutely nothing to do with supposedly 'attracting' sexual violence, Harian Metro today frontpaged an article about 'Mat Rempits' outraging the modesty of a girl in tudung and videoing it on their mobile phones. And a friend sent me a link to a YouTube video which shows another incident of a man's indecent behaviour towards a young girl in a tudung.
What more evidence do we need that it's not women's dress but men's disrespect for women that leads to these incidences of harassment and worse? Let's not forget poor NoorShuzaily who was killed by a bus driver a few years ago.Another very decently dressed young woman who did absolutely nothing to provoke her murderer.
Unfortunately, as my fellow blogger Walski says, the culture of 'blame-storming' is alive and well even among those who should know better. According to the Harian Metro report,
"Sementara itu, penganalisis jenayah terkenal, Kamal Affendi Hashim, meluahkan rasa kesal dengan hobi jijik kumpulan remaja terbabit yang tidak hanya merosakkan maruah gadis terbabit, malah mengaibkan bangsa sendiri.
Menurutnya, masalah itu tidak akan terjadi jika gadis terbabit berhati-hati memilih rakan dan tidak bergaul dengan Mat Rempit atau remaja liar.
“Malangnya, ramai mangsa yang malu dan enggan tampil membuat laporan polis apabila diperlakukan sesuka hati golongan tidak bertanggungjawab itu menyebabkan gejala ini berterusan dan suspek semakin galak mencari mangsa untuk dirakamkan bagi tujuan suka-suka,” katanya.
So it's the fault of the girls for choosing the wrong friends and for not reporting to the police. Gee, we'll never win, will we?
Datuk Shahrizat, I'm still waiting for you to say something!!
(Thanks to Concerned Man for the lead)
The Star, Thurs May 24 2007
Women don’t need a dress code, says Ng
PETALING JAYA: A dress code for women will not help to change the mindset of men with dirty thoughts, Wanita MCA chief Datuk Dr Ng Yen Yen said.
“We don’t need a dress code. We have freedom to dress in our multiracial country,” she said, responding to the argument between Jawi assemblywoman Tan Cheng Liang and two fellow members of the Penang state assembly on the issue.
On Tuesday, assemblymen Shabudin Yahaya (BN – Permatang Berangan) and Datuk Jasmin Mohamed (BN – Sungai Dua) had blamed women’s provocative dressing for sexual crimes.
Tan had ticked them off for what she called narrow thinking.
Dr Ng, who is deputy Finance Minister, said Wanita MCA supports Tan’s stand on a dress code.
She added that even children and women who are “covered from head to toe” had become rape victims.
“This shows that the cause of crime has nothing to do with women’s dressing,” she said.
**********************************************************************************
I'm still waiting for Datuk Shahrizat Jalil, Minister for Women, Family and Community Development to say something about her fellow Penang BN MPs. Rather than doing this:
Cuban art show to mark Merdeka
(From left) Datuk Faizah Mohd Tahir, Datuk Seri Shahrizat Abdul Jalil, Cuban artist Ulises Bretana and Pedro Monzon Barata admiring one of the paintings.
KUALA LUMPUR: Cohesion was the order of the day when Cuban and Malaysian cultures came together in a blaze of colours to commemorate Malaysia’s 50th year of independence.
The Cuban Embassy and Maybank have put together an exhibition of paintings by more than 40 noted Cuban artists from the Pinar del Rio province.
The exhibition, called "Independence, Presumptions and Convergence: A Homage to Malaysia’s Independence through Cuban Art", was launched by Women, Family and Community Development Minister Datuk Seri Shahrizat Abdul Jalil on Tuesday night.
"Art is a language understood by everyone and I hope we can utilise it to unite our two countries," Shahrizat said in her speech.
Also present at the launch were the Cuban Ambassador to Malaysia Pedro Monzon Ba- rata and Datuk Amirsham A. Aziz, CEO of Maybank, and his wife Datuk Faizah Mohd Tahir (who also happens to be Secretary-General of the Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development)..
*********************************************************************************
I don't have anything against Cuban art, nor events for Merdeka. But one should not forget one's core job. In fact, as a member of the National Council of Women, which advises the Government on women's issues, I advise the Minister ( who chairs the NCW) to say something very very soon. Don't brush it off as just them joking when you know they weren't.
What more evidence do we need that it's not women's dress but men's disrespect for women that leads to these incidences of harassment and worse? Let's not forget poor NoorShuzaily who was killed by a bus driver a few years ago.Another very decently dressed young woman who did absolutely nothing to provoke her murderer.
Unfortunately, as my fellow blogger Walski says, the culture of 'blame-storming' is alive and well even among those who should know better. According to the Harian Metro report,
"Sementara itu, penganalisis jenayah terkenal, Kamal Affendi Hashim, meluahkan rasa kesal dengan hobi jijik kumpulan remaja terbabit yang tidak hanya merosakkan maruah gadis terbabit, malah mengaibkan bangsa sendiri.
Menurutnya, masalah itu tidak akan terjadi jika gadis terbabit berhati-hati memilih rakan dan tidak bergaul dengan Mat Rempit atau remaja liar.
“Malangnya, ramai mangsa yang malu dan enggan tampil membuat laporan polis apabila diperlakukan sesuka hati golongan tidak bertanggungjawab itu menyebabkan gejala ini berterusan dan suspek semakin galak mencari mangsa untuk dirakamkan bagi tujuan suka-suka,” katanya.
So it's the fault of the girls for choosing the wrong friends and for not reporting to the police. Gee, we'll never win, will we?
Datuk Shahrizat, I'm still waiting for you to say something!!
(Thanks to Concerned Man for the lead)
The Star, Thurs May 24 2007
Women don’t need a dress code, says Ng
PETALING JAYA: A dress code for women will not help to change the mindset of men with dirty thoughts, Wanita MCA chief Datuk Dr Ng Yen Yen said.
“We don’t need a dress code. We have freedom to dress in our multiracial country,” she said, responding to the argument between Jawi assemblywoman Tan Cheng Liang and two fellow members of the Penang state assembly on the issue.
On Tuesday, assemblymen Shabudin Yahaya (BN – Permatang Berangan) and Datuk Jasmin Mohamed (BN – Sungai Dua) had blamed women’s provocative dressing for sexual crimes.
Tan had ticked them off for what she called narrow thinking.
Dr Ng, who is deputy Finance Minister, said Wanita MCA supports Tan’s stand on a dress code.
She added that even children and women who are “covered from head to toe” had become rape victims.
“This shows that the cause of crime has nothing to do with women’s dressing,” she said.
**********************************************************************************
I'm still waiting for Datuk Shahrizat Jalil, Minister for Women, Family and Community Development to say something about her fellow Penang BN MPs. Rather than doing this:
Cuban art show to mark Merdeka
(From left) Datuk Faizah Mohd Tahir, Datuk Seri Shahrizat Abdul Jalil, Cuban artist Ulises Bretana and Pedro Monzon Barata admiring one of the paintings.
KUALA LUMPUR: Cohesion was the order of the day when Cuban and Malaysian cultures came together in a blaze of colours to commemorate Malaysia’s 50th year of independence.
The Cuban Embassy and Maybank have put together an exhibition of paintings by more than 40 noted Cuban artists from the Pinar del Rio province.
The exhibition, called "Independence, Presumptions and Convergence: A Homage to Malaysia’s Independence through Cuban Art", was launched by Women, Family and Community Development Minister Datuk Seri Shahrizat Abdul Jalil on Tuesday night.
"Art is a language understood by everyone and I hope we can utilise it to unite our two countries," Shahrizat said in her speech.
Also present at the launch were the Cuban Ambassador to Malaysia Pedro Monzon Ba- rata and Datuk Amirsham A. Aziz, CEO of Maybank, and his wife Datuk Faizah Mohd Tahir (who also happens to be Secretary-General of the Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development)..
*********************************************************************************
I don't have anything against Cuban art, nor events for Merdeka. But one should not forget one's core job. In fact, as a member of the National Council of Women, which advises the Government on women's issues, I advise the Minister ( who chairs the NCW) to say something very very soon. Don't brush it off as just them joking when you know they weren't.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Relay for Life ...Help Cancer Survivors
The National Cancer Society of Malaysia is holding a 16-hour Relay for Life on June 2 at the National Stadium at Bukit Jalil. From 6pm on that day til 10am the next morning, teams of people will walk or run around the stadium continuously and raise funds to set up a cancer screening and resource centre in the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, to upgrade the NCSM Cancer Treatment Centre in Tong Shin Hospital and to fund NCSM’s school education programme.
If you're intersted in setting up a team, do go to the NCSM website for information and application forms.
Maybe All-Blogs might like to send a team?
If you're intersted in setting up a team, do go to the NCSM website for information and application forms.
Maybe All-Blogs might like to send a team?
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
A Classic Line from the NST
The NST normally takes an admirably realistic stand about HIV/AIDS but today's carried an editorial which, after making a good case for being realistic about condoms, then said this:
Still, the government is loath to openly sanction condom use among youth, in view of the thin ice it would have to tread on religious sensibilities and cultural sensitivities. This is understandable.
But why should governments be expected to take charge of everything to do with life and death in any given nation? Here in Malaysia, such NGOs as the Malaysian AIDS Council (MAC) have done sterling work in expanding awareness and disseminating information and assistance to HIV/AIDS sufferers and their families, while actively pursuing preventive strategies especially among the young.
Let the MAC and other concerned organisations shoulder the task of promoting condom use, freeing the higher national authorities to uphold the ideals of clean and moral living, while social activism takes on the hard realities of modern life."
WHY SHOULD GOVERNMENTS BE EXPECTED TO TAKE CHARGE OF EVERYTHING TO DO WITH LIFE AND DEATH IN ANY GIVEN NATION?
What sort of question is that? If Governments don't have to care, what good are they? Why does a government like Brazil's defy the Americans so that they can give their own people cheaper lifesaving drugs? Because they care about their people! Because those people return the favour by voting for them!!!
Unless, of course, people at risk of getting infected don't count. That means men, women and young people don't count. What a message!
And what is this about the higher national authorities upholding the ideals of clean and moral living, while social activism takes on the hard realities of modern life? Yet another stab at NGOs as if we are somehow not upholding 'clean and moral living'! Give me a break! I'd rather sit down with any social worker helping to feed a drug user in the streets than any of the so-called clean and moral higher authorities any time. At least I know I'm not talking to a hypocrite.
Still, the government is loath to openly sanction condom use among youth, in view of the thin ice it would have to tread on religious sensibilities and cultural sensitivities. This is understandable.
But why should governments be expected to take charge of everything to do with life and death in any given nation? Here in Malaysia, such NGOs as the Malaysian AIDS Council (MAC) have done sterling work in expanding awareness and disseminating information and assistance to HIV/AIDS sufferers and their families, while actively pursuing preventive strategies especially among the young.
Let the MAC and other concerned organisations shoulder the task of promoting condom use, freeing the higher national authorities to uphold the ideals of clean and moral living, while social activism takes on the hard realities of modern life."
WHY SHOULD GOVERNMENTS BE EXPECTED TO TAKE CHARGE OF EVERYTHING TO DO WITH LIFE AND DEATH IN ANY GIVEN NATION?
What sort of question is that? If Governments don't have to care, what good are they? Why does a government like Brazil's defy the Americans so that they can give their own people cheaper lifesaving drugs? Because they care about their people! Because those people return the favour by voting for them!!!
Unless, of course, people at risk of getting infected don't count. That means men, women and young people don't count. What a message!
And what is this about the higher national authorities upholding the ideals of clean and moral living, while social activism takes on the hard realities of modern life? Yet another stab at NGOs as if we are somehow not upholding 'clean and moral living'! Give me a break! I'd rather sit down with any social worker helping to feed a drug user in the streets than any of the so-called clean and moral higher authorities any time. At least I know I'm not talking to a hypocrite.
Monday, May 21, 2007
But This is What We're Up Against
Yesterday, after the Malaysian AIDS Council's International AIDS Memorial Day event press conference, this was what came out in the NST:
CONDOM SNAG : Tough task of promoting condom use goes to NGOs
By : Shamini Darshni
Prof Dr Adeeba Kamarulzaman(left)Datuk Zaman Khan(Right)
KUALA LUMPUR: The debate on whether the government will lead the campaign to promote the use of condoms to fight HIV/AIDS may be over. (It is?)
Health Ministry deputy director Dr Jalal Halil Khalil said the job had been handed over to non-governmental organisations like the Malaysian AIDS Council (MAC) through its 37 affiliates. (Handed over, huh?)
He said the government could not be seen to be the agent advocating the use of condoms as this could be misinterpreted. (Misinterpreted in what way?)
"We realise that we are an Islamic country and we have to do things carefully," he told a press conference yesterday in conjunction with the International AIDS Memorial Day (IAMD).
"That is why we have given this duty to non-governmental organisations like the Malaysian AIDS Council."
Dr Jalal, of the AIDS/STD unit, said the ministry and the government were concerned about the rising number of people being infected every year.
"Of course, we are worried. If not, we would not be working hard. We will not give up. We will continue to educate."
Seventy per cent of the nearly 75,000 people with HIV/AIDS are Injecting Drug Users (IDUs).
Existing efforts to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS has so far been targeted at IDUs, sex workers and homosexuals. (But coverage is poor.)
However, the steady rise of HIV/AIDS among sexually-active heterosexuals, not only among marginalised communities but also among the public, is worrying the government and NGOs. (But IDUs and sex workers are mostly heterosexual. The numbers of HIV among them have been increasing all this time. Which means that the rise of infections among the clients of sex workers, their partners and wives as well as the wives and partners of IDUs have been rising all this time as well. We should have worried about this ages ago! Unless marginalised communities are unimportant.)
Dr Jalal said the government understood that condoms were the answer to preventing HIV transmission among marginalised groups like sex workers, IDUs and the public.
(In other words, condoms are the answer for everybody!)
Citing the needle and syringe exchange programme (NSEP) introduced last year, Dr Jalal said needles and syringes were also handed out through NGOs. (Because that would be the only way they would work at the moment. In some countries, you can exchange dirty needles for clean ones at pharmacies.)
The NSEP falls under the National Strategic Plan on the Control and Prevention of HIV/AIDS, on which the ministry has spent RM27 million.
"The important thing is to prevent HIV/AIDS from spreading. We have to give enough information to all levels of society. But changing knowledge to behaviour is not easy." (Especially if you don't try hard enough...)
Malaysian AIDS Foundation trustee Datuk Zaman Khan, while agreeing the use of condoms was the best method of controlling HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, said abstinence was still the best option.
"There are so many taboos in this country. Not a single religion on earth encourages people to have intercourse before marriage but in reality, it happens.
"I am not trying to encourage heterosexual (sic) practices but the truth is one way to stop HIV from spreading is by the use of condoms. The problem we have is about how to promote their use."
MAC president Prof Dr Adeeba Kamarulzaman said promoting the use of condoms had been a challenge over the past 20 years.
"Delaying sexual practices and having monogamous relationships are ideals but these do not necessarily happen in real life. We have to match that with pragmatism."
Surveys, she said, had shown that Malaysians were having sex at a young age but many were not protecting themselves.
Asked how the taboo associated with condoms could be broken, she said: "I wish I knew a simple way, but there isn’t one. (I would suggest someone like the PM or the Mufti of Perlis saying condoms are OK would do it.)
"We know what works and we have to get people to realise that they have to protect themselves. For those who are against condom promotion, it’s about protecting public health and educating the young.
"It does not mean that with condom promotion we are going to stand at every street corner and shout ‘condoms’ or have a condom parade.
"Those things are not in keeping with our culture, but it does mean that we have to educate people about risks."
IAMD is observed worldwide on the third Sunday in May to remember those who lost their lives to AIDS.
Earlier, HIV-positive persons and representatives from marginalised communities, NGOs and the government, released 21 doves to represent the 21 years HIV/AIDS has been in the country.
*********************************************************************************
This is the sort of news report that makes me mad. I don't know whether it's because the reporter is ignorant or editors don't ask for clearer writing or what. But so much here is misrepresented. Why did the reporter not call the Ministry official out on his inconsistencies. And since when does someone like him get to make a call on a policy issue like saying that the debate on condoms is 'over'?
It is an old saw that the Government cannot 'promote' condoms for religio-political reasons despite knowing that there are sound public health reasons for this. For God's sake, if you want to look for justification within Islam, you can and there are any number of Muslim scholars (Prof Hashim Kamali of IIU being one) who can provide them, based on the concept of 'darar' (a state of emergency) and that of the using the lesser evil to combat a greater one. What we are lacking is simply the political will to do the right thing.
So they wash their hands off it and pass it on to NGOs. As if we are not Muslims ourselves. By putting it this way ("We realise that we are an Islamic country and we have to do things carefully."), Dr Jalal is saying that NGOs aren't doing things 'the Islamic way' and that's exactly what sets us up for all sorts of problems. Yet Islam has never had any problem with the use of contraceptives within marriage, and most of our women at risk are married! Just ask the 300 HIV+ women of Prihatin in Kota Baru! By not even publicly qualifying that married HIV-positive men should use condoms, we are only allowing more and more married women and their babies to become infected. How Islamic is that? (And by the way, as I have mentioned before, The Islamic Republic of Iran promotes condoms in prisons where the inmates are certainly NOT married to one another!!!)
I just wish that instead of quoting the same old tired inanities, government servants would just say that what is most important is saving lives. To ensure that everybody has a fighting chance to avoid HIV infection, whether through education, condoms or needle exchange programmes, IS the most moral thing to do.
There is nothing more frustrating than people whose knowledge simply never increases, whose mind stagnates and new and evolving problems are 'solved' by passing the buck to others. If they at least provide the sort of environment that enables the buck receivers to do the job properly, that would be something. But to 'give' with one hand and then undermine that with the other is really unfair.
I know some of what Datuk Zaman Khan is saying is also odd, for a Malaysian AIDS Foundation Trustee. But not having been at the press conference, I can't say for sure how accurate his quotes are. I do know however that if ever there was a complete turnaround in attitude towards AIDS and condoms, it has to be Datuk Zaman's. Years ago when he was head of Prisons, we would have public fights about these issues. But after two of his relatives died of AIDS, he changed completely and now 'has AIDS for breakfast' in his own words and encourages us every day. He was in fact the chair of the IAMD organising committee this year.
CONDOM SNAG : Tough task of promoting condom use goes to NGOs
By : Shamini Darshni
Prof Dr Adeeba Kamarulzaman(left)Datuk Zaman Khan(Right)
KUALA LUMPUR: The debate on whether the government will lead the campaign to promote the use of condoms to fight HIV/AIDS may be over. (It is?)
Health Ministry deputy director Dr Jalal Halil Khalil said the job had been handed over to non-governmental organisations like the Malaysian AIDS Council (MAC) through its 37 affiliates. (Handed over, huh?)
He said the government could not be seen to be the agent advocating the use of condoms as this could be misinterpreted. (Misinterpreted in what way?)
"We realise that we are an Islamic country and we have to do things carefully," he told a press conference yesterday in conjunction with the International AIDS Memorial Day (IAMD).
"That is why we have given this duty to non-governmental organisations like the Malaysian AIDS Council."
Dr Jalal, of the AIDS/STD unit, said the ministry and the government were concerned about the rising number of people being infected every year.
"Of course, we are worried. If not, we would not be working hard. We will not give up. We will continue to educate."
Seventy per cent of the nearly 75,000 people with HIV/AIDS are Injecting Drug Users (IDUs).
Existing efforts to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS has so far been targeted at IDUs, sex workers and homosexuals. (But coverage is poor.)
However, the steady rise of HIV/AIDS among sexually-active heterosexuals, not only among marginalised communities but also among the public, is worrying the government and NGOs. (But IDUs and sex workers are mostly heterosexual. The numbers of HIV among them have been increasing all this time. Which means that the rise of infections among the clients of sex workers, their partners and wives as well as the wives and partners of IDUs have been rising all this time as well. We should have worried about this ages ago! Unless marginalised communities are unimportant.)
Dr Jalal said the government understood that condoms were the answer to preventing HIV transmission among marginalised groups like sex workers, IDUs and the public.
(In other words, condoms are the answer for everybody!)
Citing the needle and syringe exchange programme (NSEP) introduced last year, Dr Jalal said needles and syringes were also handed out through NGOs. (Because that would be the only way they would work at the moment. In some countries, you can exchange dirty needles for clean ones at pharmacies.)
The NSEP falls under the National Strategic Plan on the Control and Prevention of HIV/AIDS, on which the ministry has spent RM27 million.
"The important thing is to prevent HIV/AIDS from spreading. We have to give enough information to all levels of society. But changing knowledge to behaviour is not easy." (Especially if you don't try hard enough...)
Malaysian AIDS Foundation trustee Datuk Zaman Khan, while agreeing the use of condoms was the best method of controlling HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, said abstinence was still the best option.
"There are so many taboos in this country. Not a single religion on earth encourages people to have intercourse before marriage but in reality, it happens.
"I am not trying to encourage heterosexual (sic) practices but the truth is one way to stop HIV from spreading is by the use of condoms. The problem we have is about how to promote their use."
MAC president Prof Dr Adeeba Kamarulzaman said promoting the use of condoms had been a challenge over the past 20 years.
"Delaying sexual practices and having monogamous relationships are ideals but these do not necessarily happen in real life. We have to match that with pragmatism."
Surveys, she said, had shown that Malaysians were having sex at a young age but many were not protecting themselves.
Asked how the taboo associated with condoms could be broken, she said: "I wish I knew a simple way, but there isn’t one. (I would suggest someone like the PM or the Mufti of Perlis saying condoms are OK would do it.)
"We know what works and we have to get people to realise that they have to protect themselves. For those who are against condom promotion, it’s about protecting public health and educating the young.
"It does not mean that with condom promotion we are going to stand at every street corner and shout ‘condoms’ or have a condom parade.
"Those things are not in keeping with our culture, but it does mean that we have to educate people about risks."
IAMD is observed worldwide on the third Sunday in May to remember those who lost their lives to AIDS.
Earlier, HIV-positive persons and representatives from marginalised communities, NGOs and the government, released 21 doves to represent the 21 years HIV/AIDS has been in the country.
*********************************************************************************
This is the sort of news report that makes me mad. I don't know whether it's because the reporter is ignorant or editors don't ask for clearer writing or what. But so much here is misrepresented. Why did the reporter not call the Ministry official out on his inconsistencies. And since when does someone like him get to make a call on a policy issue like saying that the debate on condoms is 'over'?
It is an old saw that the Government cannot 'promote' condoms for religio-political reasons despite knowing that there are sound public health reasons for this. For God's sake, if you want to look for justification within Islam, you can and there are any number of Muslim scholars (Prof Hashim Kamali of IIU being one) who can provide them, based on the concept of 'darar' (a state of emergency) and that of the using the lesser evil to combat a greater one. What we are lacking is simply the political will to do the right thing.
So they wash their hands off it and pass it on to NGOs. As if we are not Muslims ourselves. By putting it this way ("We realise that we are an Islamic country and we have to do things carefully."), Dr Jalal is saying that NGOs aren't doing things 'the Islamic way' and that's exactly what sets us up for all sorts of problems. Yet Islam has never had any problem with the use of contraceptives within marriage, and most of our women at risk are married! Just ask the 300 HIV+ women of Prihatin in Kota Baru! By not even publicly qualifying that married HIV-positive men should use condoms, we are only allowing more and more married women and their babies to become infected. How Islamic is that? (And by the way, as I have mentioned before, The Islamic Republic of Iran promotes condoms in prisons where the inmates are certainly NOT married to one another!!!)
I just wish that instead of quoting the same old tired inanities, government servants would just say that what is most important is saving lives. To ensure that everybody has a fighting chance to avoid HIV infection, whether through education, condoms or needle exchange programmes, IS the most moral thing to do.
There is nothing more frustrating than people whose knowledge simply never increases, whose mind stagnates and new and evolving problems are 'solved' by passing the buck to others. If they at least provide the sort of environment that enables the buck receivers to do the job properly, that would be something. But to 'give' with one hand and then undermine that with the other is really unfair.
I know some of what Datuk Zaman Khan is saying is also odd, for a Malaysian AIDS Foundation Trustee. But not having been at the press conference, I can't say for sure how accurate his quotes are. I do know however that if ever there was a complete turnaround in attitude towards AIDS and condoms, it has to be Datuk Zaman's. Years ago when he was head of Prisons, we would have public fights about these issues. But after two of his relatives died of AIDS, he changed completely and now 'has AIDS for breakfast' in his own words and encourages us every day. He was in fact the chair of the IAMD organising committee this year.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Remembering Those Who Have Gone...UPDATED
Today is International AIDS Memorial Day, a day when we remember all those we have lost to AIDS. Too many by far whether around the world (more than 12 million) or in our own country. I am going to a gathering this afternoon organised by the Malaysian AIDS Council to remember, to share, to console and to pray together. I'll report on it later.
But do take out a minute to remember those who have gone because of a totally preventable disease, and those still living whose lives, were it not for politics and greed, can be extended with some very effective medicines.
For info on what this day is all about and events around the world, go to the website of the International AIDS Candlelight Memorial.
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For those who have never attended an HIV/AIDS event, it can be a very different experience. Today's International AIDS Memorial Day event, organised by the Malaysian AIDS Council and supported by the Ministry of Health, was no exception.
About 200 people crowded into a ballroom at a small hotel in Jalan Raja Laut. They came from all over the country, from Kelantan, Kedah, Perak, wherever there were people who cared about AIDS.There were young men still struggling to understand what it means to be HIV-positive, women who had been left with children to support when their husbands died of AIDS-related illnesses, transexuals who are starting their own little support groups, doctors, religious leaders, community workers and just people who care.
The event started with a few speeches and then followed with perhaps a very unusual item on the programme. As HIV does not discriminate when it comes to who it infects, and all sorts of Malaysians become infected, the 'doa selamat' was a multi-religious one. One by one, a representative from the Taoists, Buddhists, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and Hindus came onstage to say a little blessing for the event and to ask God to guide us all in our work so that people with HIV/AIDS could lead a life as productive as anyone else. I was very touched when the Muslim representative, Ustaz Mohd Faisal, asked God to help us all 'regardless of colour, race, creed or religion' as we carry out our work (in the HIV/AIDS field).How unusual to hear such inclusive language! And he clearly meant for his doa to include non-Muslims as well,even though there were already prayers for all of them by their own religious leaders.(It has to be said though that this Ustaz, who has been giving religious lessons at Pengasih, an NGO that works with drug users, was invited because he is much more community-friendly than the ones that come from the usual religious institutions.)
Then there was a releasing of 21 doves meant to symbolise the 21 years that had passed since the very first AIDS case was reported in Malaysia in 1986.Before that several HIV-positive women read out a message which in part said:
"Kita memperingati mereka yang telah meninggalkan kita - mereka yang telah menaburkan kasih sayang sebagai ibu, bapa, isteri,suami, pasangan, adik, kakak, abang, saudara mara, rakan taulan."
(We remember those who have left us - those who loved us as mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, partners, younger siblings, older siblings, relatives and friends.)
" Kita juga mengimbas kembali perasaan takut, sedih dan keseorangan yang dialami teman-teman kita dan keluarga mereka akibat dari kejahilan dan sikap masyarakat yang mencemuh dan menghina. Kita memperingati kegelapan yang menyelubungi dunia HIV/AIDS."
(We are also reminded of the fear, sadness and loneliness that was experienced by our friends and their families because of the ignorance and society's attitude which belittles and humiliates.We remember the darkness that engulfed the world of HIV/AIDS)
But there was also a message of hope:
"Kita memperingati bagaimana kita telah menyusun tenaga agar lebih ramai dari teman-teman kita mampu mendapatkan rawatan yang amat diperlukan supaya mereka dapat mengecapi kehidupan yang penuh dan bermakna."
(We remember how we combined efforts so that more of our friends can afford to obtain the necessary treatment so that they can lead full and meaningful lives.)
" Kita telah berusaha supaya anak-anak kita turut serta dalam alam persekolahan dan mampu membina harapan dan masa depan yang lebih cerah. Kita mendoakan agar sentiasa dikurniakan kekuatan dalam menghadapi cabaran dan dugaan - demi keamanan, kasih sayang, kemanusiaan. Kita tidak akan menyerah kalah sehingga setiap insan diberikan maklumat tepat agar mereka dapat melindungi diri mereka and orang tersayang. Merpati disini melambangkan satu pembaharuan, kebebasan dan kedamaian."
(We have worked so that our children may participate in schooling and build hopes and futures that are brighter. We pray that we will always be blessed with strength in facing challenges and hardships, for the sake of peace, love and humanity. We will not surrender until every human being is provided with accurate information so that they may protect themselves and those whom they love. These doves represent renewal, freedom and peace.)
Then representatives from all sectors of society including professionals, youth, religious leaders, women, children, transexuals, sex workers, migrant workers, "tak kira umur, bangsa, seksualiti dan agama" (regardless of age, race, sexuality and religion) released the doves into the sunny skies outside.
Unlike most years, this year's event was short on tears and despair. Perhaps there is a sense of hope in the air. Certainly each event brings more and more people into the circle. I met several first-timers who felt so happy to be there because it was the first time that they had met so many other people living with HIV/AIDS and felt the warmth of such a community.
I met up again with so many people that I have known a long time. We didn't seem to have lost many in the past year or so. But still some looked a little skinnier and there was news of some who are in hospital. I noticed so many more HIV+ women now which is both a bad and good sign. Bad, because it means that the reality that more and more women are getting infected is being felt. But good also because it means they are active in doing things for themselves, including setting up support groups and small businesses to get income for themselves.The finest example is perhaps Persatuan Prihatin Malaysia, a support group for HIV+ women in Kota Baru with 300 members (300! All in one city!) which in three short years has established themselves, set up a shelter and started some income-generating projects such as tailoring and making kuih. They also do a lot of education for young people in schools and one of their volunteers, Zul Ikhsan Yusof, just won a Youth Award in Social Work by the Ministry of Youth and Sports and Berita Harian.
One new person I met is also a blogger, Pi Bani, who came with two of her clients, two young women. So nice to meet her in real life at last, instead of just online.
My successor as President of the MAC, Prof Dr Adeeba Kamarulzaman showed up at the event late, having come directly from KLIA after arriving from Warsaw where she had attended the 18th International Conference on the Reduction of Drug-Related Harm.Before that she had led a delegation of officials from our Prisons Department to Iran to see the impressive HIV prevention programmes they are conducting in their prisons, including needle exchange programmes and condom distribution. I'll tell you more about that when I've had a chance to talk to her more.
Another year, another International AIDS Memorial Day. More people at these events which means we are reaching more people. But then the numbers keep rising, especially among those we don't want to see. One of my former colleagues now works among refugees, that group of people that our government refuses to recognise exists. She is seeing more and more refugees testing HIV-positive. To get tested at government hospitals, they get charged RM100 which is a major deterrent. If you don't get tested, you won't get treated nor will you know what to do to prevent others from getting infected. Luckily people like my former colleague can take them to NGOs to be tested for free. But after that, what? Our Government provides free AIDS treatment but only to Malaysians. But not treating people who have HIV/AIDS just because they are unrecognised refugees does not make public health sense at all. We cannot pretend all the human beings within our borders live in complete isolation from one another.
I read in the Jakarta Post recently that local health authorities in Madiun, a small town in central Java, were raising the alarm because there was a sudden rise in the numbers of cases of HIV there in the past year. I found this interesting that the statistics could be so localised. In this country, we have no such localised stats, only state and national figures. Therefore we don't know how much devastation AIDS is causing to small towns because they are masked by statewide figures that seem low. It's just another example of how backward we are, compared to neighbouring seemingly less-advanced countries.
AIDS is still here and will be for a long time yet. That's a message that bears repeating.
Friday, May 18, 2007
Trust a Woman to Turn Things Upside Down
Feminist, Socialist, Devout Muslim: Woman Who Has Thrown Denmark into
Turmoil
by Ian Traynor, The Guardian
ODENSE, DENMARK - In the land that launched the cartoons war between
Islam and the west, Asmaa Abdol-Hamid finds herself on the frontline,
gearing up for a new battle.
The 25-year-old social worker, student and town councillor describes
herself as a feminist, a democrat, and a socialist. She has gay friends,
opposes the death penalty, supports abortion rights, and could not care
less what goes on in other people's bedrooms. In short, a tolerant
Scandinavian and European.
She is also a Palestinian and a devout Muslim who insists on wearing a
headscarf, who refuses, on religious grounds, to shake hands with males,
and who is bidding fair to be the first Muslim woman ever to enter the
Folketing, the Danish parliament in Copenhagen.
For the extreme right, the young activist is a political provocateur, an
agent of Islamic fundamentalism bent on infiltrating the seat of Danish
democracy. To many on the left, Ms Abdol-Hamid is also problematic,
personifying through her dress the reactionary repression of women and
an illiberal religious agenda that should have no place in her leftwing
"red-green" alliance of socialists and environmentalists.
As a result of announcing her parliamentary candidacy earlier this
month, the young Muslim and Danish citizen has been thrust to the centre
of a debate tormenting Denmark and the rest of western Europe - on the
place and values of Islam in modern Europe and the treatment of large
Muslim minorities.
Ms Abdol-Hamid is unfazed. "I see more Islam here in Denmark than in
Iran or in other places in the Middle East," she says. "It's easier to
be a Muslim in Denmark than in Saudi Arabia. I don't feel a stranger
here. I'm interested in politics. I want to talk about this society,
about political issues. But I'm not in politics because I'm a Muslim."
Her ambition, combined with her insistence on flaunting her religious
affiliation, have outraged the Danish political establishment and
triggered a new bout of soul-searching almost two years after the
publication of cartoons of the Prophet ignited violence and protest
across the Islamic world.
"This goes far beyond the extreme right," says Toger Seidenfaden, editor
of the Politiken daily newspaper. "Asmaa is insisting on the right to be
a religious Muslim and that's provoking broad debate among the public."
The key issue is the headscarf and whether it can be accommodated in
parliament. This month Ms Abdol-Hamid gained the candidacy for a safe
Copenhagen seat for the leftwing Unity List.
The Danish People's Party or DFP, the far-right movement that
unofficially props up the weak centre-right government of the prime
minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, is on the warpath. A couple of DFP
politicians compared the headscarf to the Nazi swastika. One described
the prospective MP as "brainwashed".
"We don't like the idea of her performing as an Islamist in the
parliament," says DFP spokesman Kim Eskildsen. "We find it wrong that
she'll use the parliament as a tool for Islamism ... We don't consider
this woman a Nazi. But the way the headscarf is used is comparable to
other totalitarian symbols."
The happiest country in the world, according to one detailed survey of
international living standards and public attitudes, Denmark is
economically highly successful, with the lowest unemployment in the EU.
For the country's 200,000 Muslims and immigrants, however, that
happiness is increasingly somewhere else. By virtue of the DFP's
influence on the centre-right government, Denmark has enacted the
tightest anti-immigration legislation in Europe in recent years.
Many Danes married to foreigners now commute into Copenhagen every day
from the southern Swedish town of Malmo across the bridge linking the
two cities because they cannot obtain residence for their spouses at
home.
Ms Abdol-Hamid, who shares a one-room council flat with one of her six
sisters in the "ghetto" of Vollsmose, in the town of Odense, says her
political mission is to fight for this underclass.
"This is such a rich country. But we have people in Denmark in deep
poverty and nobody helps them. For me the welfare system is very close
to Islam. But we need to change the government."
But conservative Muslim leaders are also disapproving of her activism.
"Some Muslims don't think it's right for a female to act like this. They
go to my father and tell him, get her married, get her married," she
laughs. "Others think you can't be Muslim and Danish at the same time.
Some of the Muslims and the extreme right are just the same.
"And there are women in my party who say that anyone who wears the
headscarf is oppressed. It's like they think I'm dumb. They're taking
away my individuality. We need the right to choose. It's up to us
whether or not we wear headscarves.
"They think I'm a woman from the Middle East. No. I'm a Danish Muslim."
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Sounds like a woman after my own heart! This is the type of feisty woman we need in Parliament. Do you think she would keep quiet at the Bung Mokhtars and Said Yusofs of the world?
Monday, May 14, 2007
Let's Overreact, Shall We?
Monday May 14, 2007
Don't base belief solely on blogs, says Umno info chief
BY ZULKIFLI ABD RAHMAN
KUALA LUMPUR: Umno Information chief Tan Sri Muhammad Muhammad Taib said people shouldn't base their beliefs solely on articles written in weblogs or blogs.
He claimed there were some bloggers who wrote with a slant that tended to side with Opposition views.
Muhammad said Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi appeared fine despite what had been reported in the Internet on Sunday.
"He joked and met the press. However, what was reported in blogs was different.
"The Internet reports are mischievious with the intention to cause panic in Umno and Barisan Nasional, and it can create a negative situation in the country.
"The people should check their facts first and not believe everything they read on the Internet," he told reporters at the Parliament lobby on Monday.
He was commenting on Internet reports which claimed that the Prime Minister had fainted while attending a function in Lumut on Sunday.
Muhammad said action should be taken against bloggers who knowingly spread false rumours.
Energy,Water & Communications Ministry Deputy Minister Datuk Shaziman Abu Mansor said the ministry would cooperate with the Internal Security Ministry if it received a request to investigate the source of the online rumour.
He added that Section 211 and 233 of the Communications and Multimedia Act stated that action could be taken on offensive Internet content or improper use of network facilities, which provided a fine of RM50,000, a year's jail or both.
The Act's Bill of Guarantee ensured that Internet content should not be censored, he said when asked whether the Government would regulate Internet content.
"I've not read the blog itself, but action can be taken under the Penal Code by the Internal Security Ministry," he told reporters at the Parliament lobby.
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Oh my my, what a to-do over a little spot of heat stroke! I thought PM already gave a perfectly credible explanation and his doctor said all his tests came out OK. Now if it was just a rumour he fainted, why would his doctor do tests? What exactly is the problem here?
Don't base belief solely on blogs, says Umno info chief
BY ZULKIFLI ABD RAHMAN
KUALA LUMPUR: Umno Information chief Tan Sri Muhammad Muhammad Taib said people shouldn't base their beliefs solely on articles written in weblogs or blogs.
He claimed there were some bloggers who wrote with a slant that tended to side with Opposition views.
Muhammad said Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi appeared fine despite what had been reported in the Internet on Sunday.
"He joked and met the press. However, what was reported in blogs was different.
"The Internet reports are mischievious with the intention to cause panic in Umno and Barisan Nasional, and it can create a negative situation in the country.
"The people should check their facts first and not believe everything they read on the Internet," he told reporters at the Parliament lobby on Monday.
He was commenting on Internet reports which claimed that the Prime Minister had fainted while attending a function in Lumut on Sunday.
Muhammad said action should be taken against bloggers who knowingly spread false rumours.
Energy,Water & Communications Ministry Deputy Minister Datuk Shaziman Abu Mansor said the ministry would cooperate with the Internal Security Ministry if it received a request to investigate the source of the online rumour.
He added that Section 211 and 233 of the Communications and Multimedia Act stated that action could be taken on offensive Internet content or improper use of network facilities, which provided a fine of RM50,000, a year's jail or both.
The Act's Bill of Guarantee ensured that Internet content should not be censored, he said when asked whether the Government would regulate Internet content.
"I've not read the blog itself, but action can be taken under the Penal Code by the Internal Security Ministry," he told reporters at the Parliament lobby.
********************************************************************************
Oh my my, what a to-do over a little spot of heat stroke! I thought PM already gave a perfectly credible explanation and his doctor said all his tests came out OK. Now if it was just a rumour he fainted, why would his doctor do tests? What exactly is the problem here?
Sunday, May 13, 2007
You think He Read my Column?
Sunday May 13, 2007
Spread info via SMS and blogs, Zam tells officers
KANGAR: Use the short message service (SMS), blogs and websites to keep abreast of new information technology.
That's the directive Information Minister Datuk Seri Zainuddin Maidin has for RTM officers.
“Many officers are still using outdated methods in disseminating information and are not maximising advertising space to the fullest.
“Sometimes, their thinking may have prevented them from taking a more radical stand in effecting changes,” he told a press conference after chairing the National Information Council (NIC) meeting at Putra Palace Hotel here yesterday. (Maybe they got their 'thinking' cues from their boss?)
He said that before blogs or websites were up, RTM and newspapers were among the popular sources of information for society.
Of late, he added, more would resort to getting news from blogs and websites. However, only the intellectual society was able to gauge the reliability of information derived from such sites, he said. (That sounds like a compliment to blog readers!)
Zainuddin said he met the president of the French Printed Media Association in France who voiced out the growing threat faced by the printed media from blogs.
“I’m not disputing blogs as the latest means of disseminating information through the Web but there is this fear that information posted on these sites are baseless and not obtained through reliable sources.
( Thanks for not disputing this but who's the one who's fearful?)
“Not everybody who reads them can differentiate the truth from the rumours,” he added.
He also said there was a proposal for RTM to put up information in the form of “wall newspapers” at bus stands like in China for easy accessibility to information from the Government. (China is such a good example to follow when it comes to propagan...sorry, information, isn't it?)
Spread info via SMS and blogs, Zam tells officers
KANGAR: Use the short message service (SMS), blogs and websites to keep abreast of new information technology.
That's the directive Information Minister Datuk Seri Zainuddin Maidin has for RTM officers.
“Many officers are still using outdated methods in disseminating information and are not maximising advertising space to the fullest.
“Sometimes, their thinking may have prevented them from taking a more radical stand in effecting changes,” he told a press conference after chairing the National Information Council (NIC) meeting at Putra Palace Hotel here yesterday. (Maybe they got their 'thinking' cues from their boss?)
He said that before blogs or websites were up, RTM and newspapers were among the popular sources of information for society.
Of late, he added, more would resort to getting news from blogs and websites. However, only the intellectual society was able to gauge the reliability of information derived from such sites, he said. (That sounds like a compliment to blog readers!)
Zainuddin said he met the president of the French Printed Media Association in France who voiced out the growing threat faced by the printed media from blogs.
“I’m not disputing blogs as the latest means of disseminating information through the Web but there is this fear that information posted on these sites are baseless and not obtained through reliable sources.
( Thanks for not disputing this but who's the one who's fearful?)
“Not everybody who reads them can differentiate the truth from the rumours,” he added.
He also said there was a proposal for RTM to put up information in the form of “wall newspapers” at bus stands like in China for easy accessibility to information from the Government. (China is such a good example to follow when it comes to propagan...sorry, information, isn't it?)
Happy Mother's Day...from Terengganu
This is what Terengganu men decided to give the mothers of their children this Mother's Day.
Friday May 11, 2007
Terengganu to ease polygamy rules
BY R.S.N. MURALI
KUALA TERENGGANU: The Terengganu state government intends to relax its rules on polygamy to make it easier for men to have more than one wife, citing the high number of single mothers and unwed lasses.
Those who now intend to take a new wife are no longer required to seek the green light from their current spouses.
State Islam Hadhari and Welfare committee chairman Abdullah Che Muda told The Star that this would give opportunities for single ladies in the state to have their own families. (How very thoughtful of them!)
"However, those who want to take up new wives should adhere to certain rules and conform to criteria set by the Religious Department," he said when contacted here.
Abdullah said that a man keen to marry again should be mentally and financially stable, have indepth knowledge of Islam and must be able to treat all his wives fairly, including his first one.
"Only after a rigid evaluation would a man be allowed to take another wife," he said. (Guess a wife's feelings isn't considered a rigid criteria.)
Abdullah said the state now has large number of single mothers who are either widowed or divorced. The number of women who have lost their husbands has also soared. (Where did they lose them?)
There are currently close to 18,000 single mothers in the state and clubs have been set up at the district level to oversee their welfare.
*********************************************************************************
But let me wish all us long-suffering mothers a very Happy Mother's Day anyway!
Friday May 11, 2007
Terengganu to ease polygamy rules
BY R.S.N. MURALI
KUALA TERENGGANU: The Terengganu state government intends to relax its rules on polygamy to make it easier for men to have more than one wife, citing the high number of single mothers and unwed lasses.
Those who now intend to take a new wife are no longer required to seek the green light from their current spouses.
State Islam Hadhari and Welfare committee chairman Abdullah Che Muda told The Star that this would give opportunities for single ladies in the state to have their own families. (How very thoughtful of them!)
"However, those who want to take up new wives should adhere to certain rules and conform to criteria set by the Religious Department," he said when contacted here.
Abdullah said that a man keen to marry again should be mentally and financially stable, have indepth knowledge of Islam and must be able to treat all his wives fairly, including his first one.
"Only after a rigid evaluation would a man be allowed to take another wife," he said. (Guess a wife's feelings isn't considered a rigid criteria.)
Abdullah said the state now has large number of single mothers who are either widowed or divorced. The number of women who have lost their husbands has also soared. (Where did they lose them?)
There are currently close to 18,000 single mothers in the state and clubs have been set up at the district level to oversee their welfare.
*********************************************************************************
But let me wish all us long-suffering mothers a very Happy Mother's Day anyway!
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Some Bridges Can be Built, while Others are Torn Down
Maybe it's just me but the word 'bridges' seemed to crop up a lot today. I guess it is OK to build bridges with people outside for political and economic purposes but not among ourselves for purposes of respect, understanding and peace?
PM believes there will be better links with Singapore in future
KUALA LUMPUR: Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi believes that in the future there will be many bridges linking Johor and Singapore.
“One day, there will be many bridges like there are in New York, Manhattan and even in Korea.
(There are 2,027 bridges in New York City and 27 in Seoul over the River Han.)
“So while there may be differences in our approach, the Straits (of Johor) will not be an obstacle,” Abdullah, who is Umno president, told reporters yesterday after the party’s 61st anniversary celebrations.
On Wednesday, Foreign Minister Datuk Seri Syed Hamid Albar had said that as a Johorean he personally would like to see the bridge built because the Causeway was “out of date” and “not in tune with the times.”
Last year, Malaysia scrapped plans to build a crooked “scenic” bridge to replace the 80-year-old Causeway that links the two countries, citing potential legal problems as it believed Singapore might not go along with the project.
Abdullah is due to meet Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong for bilateral talks in Langkawi on Monday.
Asked whether he would raise the bridge issue with Lee, Abdullah said: “I am keeping an open mind.”
(Just to be finicky, does someone think that Manhattan is a different place from New York City? In any case, none of those bridges cross to another country.)
***********************************************************************************
Nation
Saturday May 12, 2007
Review decision on conference
By SHAILA KOSHY
KUALA LUMPUR: The Council of Churches Malaysia (CCM) has appealed to the Government to review the withdrawal of its support for the Building Bridges seminar that had been scheduled for this week.
Its general secretary Rev Dr Hermen Shastri said the organisers at the London office of the Archbishop of Canterbury had not been given any reason.
“They received formal word from the authorities here that support had been withdrawn, barely three weeks before the scheduled dates (May 7-11).
“In respect to the Government, the organisers felt it wise to cancel the seminar,” he said in urging the Government to offer an alternative date for holding the conference here.
The seminar was to coincide with the first visit of the Archbishop, Dr Rowan Williams, to the Anglican Church here recently.
Responding to a May 10 report on the cancellation of the seminar in the Times of London, Rev Shastri said the Archbishop’s office for Interfaith Relations had received a warm reception from the Prime Minister’s office and other Islamic institutions during preparations a year ago.
“The London office received a formal letter welcoming such a seminar which would have brought together over 30 world renowned Islamic and Christian scholars and theologians to deliberate under the theme Humanity in Context: Christian and Muslim Perspectives on Being Human.”
In his statement yesterday, Rev Shastri said the CCM and other Islamic institutions had been approached to host mini-seminars in which Muslim and Christian participants could interact with locals on the deliberations of the seminar.
Building Bridges seminars have been held in London, New York, Qatar and Sarajevo, and the organisers were excited at meeting in Malaysia, as the context would provide the international scholars exposure to the achievements of Malaysia in encouraging inter-faith dialogue at the national and international levels, he said.
He said the CCM had hoped that such a seminar would go a long way in pursuing the path of respectful dialogue and strengthening Malaysia’s claim of being a viable venue to host such global inter-faith dialogues.
*********************************************************************************
Malaysia's 'achievements' at encouraging inter-faith dialogue at the national and international levels?? Sorry, when was that?
If the Government withdraws support from this, I really wonder what is going to happen to another seminar about to take place next month...?
PM believes there will be better links with Singapore in future
KUALA LUMPUR: Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi believes that in the future there will be many bridges linking Johor and Singapore.
“One day, there will be many bridges like there are in New York, Manhattan and even in Korea.
(There are 2,027 bridges in New York City and 27 in Seoul over the River Han.)
“So while there may be differences in our approach, the Straits (of Johor) will not be an obstacle,” Abdullah, who is Umno president, told reporters yesterday after the party’s 61st anniversary celebrations.
On Wednesday, Foreign Minister Datuk Seri Syed Hamid Albar had said that as a Johorean he personally would like to see the bridge built because the Causeway was “out of date” and “not in tune with the times.”
Last year, Malaysia scrapped plans to build a crooked “scenic” bridge to replace the 80-year-old Causeway that links the two countries, citing potential legal problems as it believed Singapore might not go along with the project.
Abdullah is due to meet Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong for bilateral talks in Langkawi on Monday.
Asked whether he would raise the bridge issue with Lee, Abdullah said: “I am keeping an open mind.”
(Just to be finicky, does someone think that Manhattan is a different place from New York City? In any case, none of those bridges cross to another country.)
***********************************************************************************
Nation
Saturday May 12, 2007
Review decision on conference
By SHAILA KOSHY
KUALA LUMPUR: The Council of Churches Malaysia (CCM) has appealed to the Government to review the withdrawal of its support for the Building Bridges seminar that had been scheduled for this week.
Its general secretary Rev Dr Hermen Shastri said the organisers at the London office of the Archbishop of Canterbury had not been given any reason.
“They received formal word from the authorities here that support had been withdrawn, barely three weeks before the scheduled dates (May 7-11).
“In respect to the Government, the organisers felt it wise to cancel the seminar,” he said in urging the Government to offer an alternative date for holding the conference here.
The seminar was to coincide with the first visit of the Archbishop, Dr Rowan Williams, to the Anglican Church here recently.
Responding to a May 10 report on the cancellation of the seminar in the Times of London, Rev Shastri said the Archbishop’s office for Interfaith Relations had received a warm reception from the Prime Minister’s office and other Islamic institutions during preparations a year ago.
“The London office received a formal letter welcoming such a seminar which would have brought together over 30 world renowned Islamic and Christian scholars and theologians to deliberate under the theme Humanity in Context: Christian and Muslim Perspectives on Being Human.”
In his statement yesterday, Rev Shastri said the CCM and other Islamic institutions had been approached to host mini-seminars in which Muslim and Christian participants could interact with locals on the deliberations of the seminar.
Building Bridges seminars have been held in London, New York, Qatar and Sarajevo, and the organisers were excited at meeting in Malaysia, as the context would provide the international scholars exposure to the achievements of Malaysia in encouraging inter-faith dialogue at the national and international levels, he said.
He said the CCM had hoped that such a seminar would go a long way in pursuing the path of respectful dialogue and strengthening Malaysia’s claim of being a viable venue to host such global inter-faith dialogues.
*********************************************************************************
Malaysia's 'achievements' at encouraging inter-faith dialogue at the national and international levels?? Sorry, when was that?
If the Government withdraws support from this, I really wonder what is going to happen to another seminar about to take place next month...?
The Shame of Simpang Renggam
Simpang Renggam, the largest drug 'rehabilitation' centre in the country and prison is in the news again. It is so notorious that SUHAKAM has been compelled to visit it to investigate the death of S.Hendry under detention there. The so-called rehabilitation centre has even attracted the attention of Human Rights Watch which issued this report in 2004. Recently, it even warranted a visit by several Ministers. Doesn't look like this high-level visit had any effect.
Simpang Renggam detainees caught with drugs
By NELSON BENJAMIN
KLUANG: A total of 11 detainees held at the Simpang Renggam detention centre are in deeper trouble after drugs were found in their cells in two separate raids.
The first case was several days ago when the prison’s Unit Tindakan Cepat (Rapid Response Team) conducted a spot check in one of the cells and found six packets of what they believe to be syabu at about 3.30am. They detained six Indonesians and two Vietnamese.
In another raid early on Thursday, three locals were caught red-handed with several packets of syabu.
All the detainees, aged between 20 and 35, have been handed over to the police. They were at the detention centre either for offences under preventive laws or as remand prisoners.
Kluang OCPD Asst Comm Fauzi Arshad said investigations were being carried out under Section 12 (2) of the Dangerous Drug Act for possession.
A prison official said that internal investigations were under way to find out how the drugs were smuggled into the prison.
Earlier this year, several warders at the detention centre were investigated for supplying drugs to detainees.
*********************************************************************************
I'd like to know what happened to those warders under investigation. Maybe they're still at it?
Simpang Renggam is a very overcrowded prison, housing nearly 4000 prisoners when it was built for only 2000. Small wonder then that it makes a big contribution to the numbers of reported cases of HIV/AIDS in Johor.
Simpang Renggam detainees caught with drugs
By NELSON BENJAMIN
KLUANG: A total of 11 detainees held at the Simpang Renggam detention centre are in deeper trouble after drugs were found in their cells in two separate raids.
The first case was several days ago when the prison’s Unit Tindakan Cepat (Rapid Response Team) conducted a spot check in one of the cells and found six packets of what they believe to be syabu at about 3.30am. They detained six Indonesians and two Vietnamese.
In another raid early on Thursday, three locals were caught red-handed with several packets of syabu.
All the detainees, aged between 20 and 35, have been handed over to the police. They were at the detention centre either for offences under preventive laws or as remand prisoners.
Kluang OCPD Asst Comm Fauzi Arshad said investigations were being carried out under Section 12 (2) of the Dangerous Drug Act for possession.
A prison official said that internal investigations were under way to find out how the drugs were smuggled into the prison.
Earlier this year, several warders at the detention centre were investigated for supplying drugs to detainees.
*********************************************************************************
I'd like to know what happened to those warders under investigation. Maybe they're still at it?
Simpang Renggam is a very overcrowded prison, housing nearly 4000 prisoners when it was built for only 2000. Small wonder then that it makes a big contribution to the numbers of reported cases of HIV/AIDS in Johor.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Land of the Uncouth
Dato Mohd Said 'Close One Eye' Yusof, MP for Jasin
Bung Mokhtar, MP for Kinabatangan
What on earth is happening? Has crudeness and uncouthness now become the norm? Has Mat Rempitism infected everyone, especially politicians? What possessed the MPs for Jasin and Kinabatangan to stoop this low?
You think their mothers are proud of them?
(Hat tip to Mob's Crib.)
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
Tis a Puzzlement...!
I found lots of puzzling news in the papers today. Starting with this...
Guidelines on integrity
PUTRAJAYA: The Government’s seriousness in tackling issues involving integrity and good governance was reflected in two documents launched by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi yesterday.
The first document was entitled “National Integrity System – A Guiding Framework,” which was co-published by the Malaysian Institute of Integrity (MII)and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
The other was “Corporate Social Responsibility: Our First Outlook,” also published by MII.
The former includes topics such as “The Role Of The Public Service,” “Roles of the Executive,” “Watchdog Enforcement Agencies,” “Mass Media,” “Civil Society,” “Handling Competition Policy,” “Restoring Trust in the Public Service,” “Monitoring Public Officials,” “Affording Protection to Whistleblowers” and “Promoting Transparent Public Procurement.”
The latter provides companies with a single reference point when it comes to the issue of corporate social responsibility where the Government has emphasised on the need to establish a caring, economically just and equitable Malaysian society, infused with strong moral and ethical values.
Ministerial pow-wow: Abdullah, flanked by Samy Vellu (on his right) and Dr Fong chairing a special Cabinet committee meeting on Tuesday.
During the launching ceremony Abdullah said, ”We must prove that we have integrity. We must walk the talk, our action reflects what we preach or what we have been advocating.
“Integrity is a national agenda. I want all, the Federal and state governments alike, to fully understand and make use of the guidelines, so there will be some form of uniformity in our actions and conduct.”
Abdullah said the Government had reasons to draft such guidelines and once all parties abide by it, both the Government and the private sector “could move together to achieve greater integrity.”
Earlier, Abdullah chaired the Cabinet Committee on Government Management Integrity, which was also attended by Works Minister Datuk Seri S. Samy Vellu, Education Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Tun Hussein, Human Resources Minister Datuk Seri Dr Fong Chan Onn, Home Affairs Minister Datuk Seri Mohd Radzi Sheikh Ahmad and Higher Education Minister Datuk Mustapa Mohamed.
The committee discussed how to improve the level of integrity, particularly in regards to discipline, corruption and management.
*********************************************************************************
Since I was so puzzled by this news, I decided to look up the meaning of 'integrity' and found the following in Wiktionary:
Integrity is a noun which means:
1.Steadfast adherence to a strict moral or ethical code
2.The state of being wholesome;unimpaired.
3.The quality or condition of being complete;pure.
Synonyms for 'integrity' are 'honesty', 'uprightness', 'rectitude', 'unity', 'wholeness', 'purity', 'goodness', 'probity', 'sincerity', 'virtue', 'decency'.
Sorrylah, I'm still puzzled...
Then there was this other piece of news:
Wednesday May 9, 2007
Tax perks for companies that celebrate Merdeka
By JUNE WONG
KUALA LUMPUR: Companies can apply for tax deductions for money spent on this year’s Merdeka celebrations, said Culture, Arts and Heritage Minister Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim.
“They can claim for articles bought like flags or even projects they carry out as long as they have the receipts and proper documentation for my ministry’s verification. We have the support and agreement of the Finance Ministry on this,” he said.
Dr Rais announced this during a briefing to the media here yesterday on the Government’s programmes and activities to mark the country’s 50th anniversary of Independence.
He said that so far, 700 companies that had pledged their support for and participation in the celebrations would enjoy the tax deductions and urged others to join in. There was no cap to the deductible amount but the companies must spend the money before Aug 31 this year, he later told The Star.
Dr Rais, who chairs the national Merdeka celebrations steering committee, made a plea to all citizens to take part in the celebrations and urged them to fly the national flag.
He added that this year’s celebrations would pay tribute to the nation’s war veterans, the five prime ministers and the 13 kings.
“I also appeal to heads of all media companies to give publicity and instil the spirit of Merdeka in our people,” he said.
The minister said the official celebrations would kick off with the launch of the “Fly the Jalur Gemilang” campaign on Aug 17 in Malacca. On Aug 24, a nationwide programme would be held in which Malaysians of different faiths would pray for the nation.
The Ambang Merdeka on Aug 30 will see the re-enactment of the ceremony in which the Union Jack was lowered for the last time and the Malayan flag raised for the first time exactly 50 years ago at Dataran Merdeka here.
And as always, the traditional National Day parade will be held on the morning of Aug 31, also at Dataran Merdeka.
Dr Rais revealed that on the night of Aug 31, Tunku Abdul Rahman’s moving declaration of Independence would also be re-enacted at Merdeka Stadium.
The final event to close the celebrations will be held on Sept 10 in Kuching.
********************************************************************************
These are the questions in my head:
1. If we don't give them tax breaks, does this mean that companies that make their money in this country will not celebrate Merdeka?
2. How much do flags cost that they need tax breaks to buy them?
3. No-cap tax breaks for projects huh?
4. Do we need media companies to instil the Merdeka spirit in us? Doesn't it come naturally?
5.Why can't this year's Golden Anniversary celebrations pay tribute to the people of Malaysia (which of course includes veterans, Prime Ministers and Kings) in all their wonderful diversity?
6. If I hold a Merdeka party, can I get a tax break for my expenses?
Guidelines on integrity
PUTRAJAYA: The Government’s seriousness in tackling issues involving integrity and good governance was reflected in two documents launched by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi yesterday.
The first document was entitled “National Integrity System – A Guiding Framework,” which was co-published by the Malaysian Institute of Integrity (MII)and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
The other was “Corporate Social Responsibility: Our First Outlook,” also published by MII.
The former includes topics such as “The Role Of The Public Service,” “Roles of the Executive,” “Watchdog Enforcement Agencies,” “Mass Media,” “Civil Society,” “Handling Competition Policy,” “Restoring Trust in the Public Service,” “Monitoring Public Officials,” “Affording Protection to Whistleblowers” and “Promoting Transparent Public Procurement.”
The latter provides companies with a single reference point when it comes to the issue of corporate social responsibility where the Government has emphasised on the need to establish a caring, economically just and equitable Malaysian society, infused with strong moral and ethical values.
Ministerial pow-wow: Abdullah, flanked by Samy Vellu (on his right) and Dr Fong chairing a special Cabinet committee meeting on Tuesday.
During the launching ceremony Abdullah said, ”We must prove that we have integrity. We must walk the talk, our action reflects what we preach or what we have been advocating.
“Integrity is a national agenda. I want all, the Federal and state governments alike, to fully understand and make use of the guidelines, so there will be some form of uniformity in our actions and conduct.”
Abdullah said the Government had reasons to draft such guidelines and once all parties abide by it, both the Government and the private sector “could move together to achieve greater integrity.”
Earlier, Abdullah chaired the Cabinet Committee on Government Management Integrity, which was also attended by Works Minister Datuk Seri S. Samy Vellu, Education Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Tun Hussein, Human Resources Minister Datuk Seri Dr Fong Chan Onn, Home Affairs Minister Datuk Seri Mohd Radzi Sheikh Ahmad and Higher Education Minister Datuk Mustapa Mohamed.
The committee discussed how to improve the level of integrity, particularly in regards to discipline, corruption and management.
*********************************************************************************
Since I was so puzzled by this news, I decided to look up the meaning of 'integrity' and found the following in Wiktionary:
Integrity is a noun which means:
1.Steadfast adherence to a strict moral or ethical code
2.The state of being wholesome;unimpaired.
3.The quality or condition of being complete;pure.
Synonyms for 'integrity' are 'honesty', 'uprightness', 'rectitude', 'unity', 'wholeness', 'purity', 'goodness', 'probity', 'sincerity', 'virtue', 'decency'.
Sorrylah, I'm still puzzled...
Then there was this other piece of news:
Wednesday May 9, 2007
Tax perks for companies that celebrate Merdeka
By JUNE WONG
KUALA LUMPUR: Companies can apply for tax deductions for money spent on this year’s Merdeka celebrations, said Culture, Arts and Heritage Minister Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim.
“They can claim for articles bought like flags or even projects they carry out as long as they have the receipts and proper documentation for my ministry’s verification. We have the support and agreement of the Finance Ministry on this,” he said.
Dr Rais announced this during a briefing to the media here yesterday on the Government’s programmes and activities to mark the country’s 50th anniversary of Independence.
He said that so far, 700 companies that had pledged their support for and participation in the celebrations would enjoy the tax deductions and urged others to join in. There was no cap to the deductible amount but the companies must spend the money before Aug 31 this year, he later told The Star.
Dr Rais, who chairs the national Merdeka celebrations steering committee, made a plea to all citizens to take part in the celebrations and urged them to fly the national flag.
He added that this year’s celebrations would pay tribute to the nation’s war veterans, the five prime ministers and the 13 kings.
“I also appeal to heads of all media companies to give publicity and instil the spirit of Merdeka in our people,” he said.
The minister said the official celebrations would kick off with the launch of the “Fly the Jalur Gemilang” campaign on Aug 17 in Malacca. On Aug 24, a nationwide programme would be held in which Malaysians of different faiths would pray for the nation.
The Ambang Merdeka on Aug 30 will see the re-enactment of the ceremony in which the Union Jack was lowered for the last time and the Malayan flag raised for the first time exactly 50 years ago at Dataran Merdeka here.
And as always, the traditional National Day parade will be held on the morning of Aug 31, also at Dataran Merdeka.
Dr Rais revealed that on the night of Aug 31, Tunku Abdul Rahman’s moving declaration of Independence would also be re-enacted at Merdeka Stadium.
The final event to close the celebrations will be held on Sept 10 in Kuching.
********************************************************************************
These are the questions in my head:
1. If we don't give them tax breaks, does this mean that companies that make their money in this country will not celebrate Merdeka?
2. How much do flags cost that they need tax breaks to buy them?
3. No-cap tax breaks for projects huh?
4. Do we need media companies to instil the Merdeka spirit in us? Doesn't it come naturally?
5.Why can't this year's Golden Anniversary celebrations pay tribute to the people of Malaysia (which of course includes veterans, Prime Ministers and Kings) in all their wonderful diversity?
6. If I hold a Merdeka party, can I get a tax break for my expenses?
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Way to Go, Brazil!
No, this isn't about football. It just shows that when you have a leader who cares about his people, everything can be done.Brazil has steadfastly insisted that it has the right to obtain antiretroviral drugs at the cheapest prices possible in order to provide it free to Brazilians living with HIV, most of whom are poor.
Thailand has done the same and is now facing criticism from the American pharmaceutical companies and other lobbying groups for that decision.
But every country has the right to do the best for its own people.I believe this is one of the sticking points in our FTA negotiations also.
And by the way, I don't see any threats against Canada and Italy for 'flouting drug patents' by the US.
For more information on compulsory licensing, please go to this article on the Third World Network website.
Brazil breaks patent on Merck AIDS drug
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has authorised the country to break the patent on an AIDS drug made by Merck & Company Incorporated, and import a generic version from India instead.
It is the first time Brazil has bypassed a patent to acquire cheaper drugs for its AIDS prevention program, a step recently taken by Thailand.
Other countries, including Canada and Italy, have also used a clause in World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules to flout drug patents in the name of public health.
Talks over the price of Merck's drug, Efavirenz, broke off on Thursday (local time) when the health ministry rejected the New Jersey-based company's offer to cut its $US1.59 per pill price by 30 per cent.
Brazil wanted to pay what Merck charges Thailand, or $US0.65 per pill.
"The compulsory licensing of Efavirenz is a legitimate and necessary measure to guarantee that all patients have access to the drug," Mr Lula's office said in a statement.
Representatives of some 200,000 AIDS patients who receive state-sponsored antiretroviral drugs applauded at a ceremony in Brazil's presidential palace, but drugmakers have reacted angrily.
Merck says it is "profoundly disappointed," calling the decision a misappropriation of intellectual property that will stifle research.
AIDS advocates have hailed the decision.
"This is certainly an important advance in terms of widening access. We are very happy that Brazil is moving in the right direction," said Michel Lotrowska, who heads AIDS treatment efforts in Brazil for Medicines Sans Frontieres, a humanitarian group.
Free treatment
Brazil's health ministry has said it plans to import a generic version of Efavirenz from India, paying about 45 US cents per pill, and may also start making its own copy of the drug.
Under WTO rules, countries can issue a "compulsory licence" to manufacture or buy generic versions of patented drugs deemed critical to public health.
Brazil's Government provides free universal access to AIDS drugs and distributes condoms and syringes free as part of a prevention program the United Nations has lauded.
Brazil has defied forecasts that AIDS would reach epidemic proportions.
Infection rates among adults have stabilised at about 0.6 per cent which is similar to the United States.
But government spending on antiretroviral drugs doubled in four years to nearly 1 billion reais ($US495 million) in 2005, according to a recent Brazilian report for the United Nations.
Supplying a patient Efavirenz for one year costs Brazil $US580 compared with $US166 for a similar generic drug.
Importing the generic drug from India will save $US30 million this year and $US236.8 million by 2012, the health ministry said.
Merck says most middle-income countries like Brazil pay $US1.80 per pill for Efavirenz.
Drug makers often scale down prices to keep countries as clients and avoid compulsory licensing.
Brazil's decision has also been criticised by the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations.
"Improved access can only be assured by adequate financing and collaboration with the innovative companies that develop new therapies," the group said.
Mr Lula's decree could also strain relations with the US Government, which has threatened to revoke Brazil's trading partner status unless it does more to protect patents.
- Reuters
Monday, May 7, 2007
Here We Go Again, Zam!
You all must have seen Zam's latest proposal to classify bloggers into 'pros' and 'non-pros'.The mind boggles as to how to do that. I wish he would just go online and go and read different blogs and just educate himself on what blogging is all about.
Meantime, since he only reads mainstream papers, I decided I'll give him something to think about in my column in The Star this Wednesday. So do watch out for it.
Meantime, see Mob's hilarious take on this.
And every time Zam opens his mouth, new bloggers spring up! Shar101 has now got one called Ol' Blue Eyes, for some reason.Maybe he's a Frank-fan, maybe he's a blue-eyed Malaysian...whatever, welcome Shar!
Meantime, since he only reads mainstream papers, I decided I'll give him something to think about in my column in The Star this Wednesday. So do watch out for it.
Meantime, see Mob's hilarious take on this.
And every time Zam opens his mouth, new bloggers spring up! Shar101 has now got one called Ol' Blue Eyes, for some reason.Maybe he's a Frank-fan, maybe he's a blue-eyed Malaysian...whatever, welcome Shar!
Thursday, May 3, 2007
May 3 - World Press Freedom Day
Today is the UN's World Press Freedom Day.The theme is Media as a Force for Change. In case anyone is wondering what the fuss is all about, do read the report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of expression and opinion.In particular, do read the report of the country visit of the Special Rapporteur to Malaysia.
Do see also the website of the World Association of Newspapers. It's mostly about journalists who have been jailed or killed but still interesting.The two cartoons here are from the website and are drawn by Michel Cambon.
Movies and Real Life ...Do They Synch?
The link between violence on the big screen and in real life has been long debated with no convincing conclusion. But this film-maker, an often defensive group of people, reflects on the issue and concludes that even if we cannot prove a direct connection, we should at least pause and think about it.
Making a Killing
By MIKE WHITE
Published: May 2, 2007, New York Times
Los Angeles
THE first movie I ever made was called “Death Creek Camp.” It told the age-old story of a group of teenage guys who set out on a fun-filled wilderness excursion only to be stalked and murdered by a psychopath disguised in a hockey mask and a blue kimono. It was no masterpiece of cinema.
Most of the scenes played out the same way — one of the fresh-faced hikers would get separated from the group. He would hear a noise in the bushes. “Bob? Jerry, is that you? Charlie?” Suddenly, from behind a tree, the stalker would pounce and blood would fly.
Why the killer wore a blue kimono was never explained nor why he wanted these nice campers dead. He was a deranged monster and that’s what monsters do. As the filmmaker, I was more interested in how the ketchup would drip off the victim’s cheek and where to plunge the retractable knife. I was 12.
The inspirations for this home movie (and the centerpieces of many Saturday night sleepovers) were slasher films like “Friday the 13th,” “Halloween” and “Terror Train.” My friends and I would eat junk food, drink soda and watch these cinematic bloodbaths until we dozed off, visions of gore and mayhem dancing in our heads.
Even though we all came from religious families — my father was a minister — it was rarely questioned whether our adolescent minds should be exposed to this kind of gruesome material. And clearly, we were the intended audience. My parents never sat and watched, nor did my sister, for that matter. The movies were titillating, shocking and dumb — and we teenage boys thought they were so cool. We devoured them and they, in turn, juiced us up.
After the horrific events at Virginia Tech, the relationship between violence in our movies and violence in our realities is being examined once again. Was Seung-Hui Cho inspired by a movie (the South Korean revenge flick “Oldboy”) when he murdered 32 of his classmates and teachers? Was Mr. Cho a deranged predator in a horror film, or was he a lost kid who could have been reached?
Hollywood and defenders of violent films dismiss Virginia Tech as a “unique” event, arguing that Mr. Cho was profoundly alienated from our culture, not at all a product of it. They assert that there are law-abiding, sane American moviegoers who love the thrill of a visual bloodletting, and then there are mentally disturbed people like Mr. Cho, constitutionally wired to do damage — and never the twain shall meet.
These commentators insist there’s no point debating which came first, the violent chicken or her violent representational egg, since no causal link has ever been proven between egg and chicken anyway. Besides, violent images can be found everywhere — on the news, in great art and literature, even Shakespeare!
For those who believe that violence in cinema consists of either harmless action spectacles or Martin Scorsese masterpieces, I might suggest heading down to the local multiplex and taking a look at some of the grotesque, morbid creations being projected on the walls. To defend mindless exercises in sadism like “The Hills Have Eyes II” by citing “Macbeth” is almost like using “Romeo and Juliet” to justify child pornography.
The notion that “movies don’t kill people, lunatics kill people” is liberating to us screenwriters because it permits us to give life to our most demented fantasies and put them up on the big screen without any anxious hand-wringing. We all know there’s a lot of money to be made trafficking in blood and guts. Young males — the golden demographic movie-makers ceaselessly pursue — eat that gore up. What a relief to be told that how we earn that money may be in poor taste, but it’s not irresponsible. The average American teenage boy knows the difference between right and wrong and no twisted, sadistic movie is going to influence him.
My own experience as a teenager tells me otherwise. For my friends and me, movies were a big influence on our clothes and our slang, and on how we thought about and spoke to authority figures, our girlfriends and one another. Movies permeated our fantasy lives and our real lives in subtle and profound ways.
It’s true nobody ever got shot in the face in my backyard, but there were acts of male bravado performed in emulation of our movie anti-heroes that ranged from stupid to cruel. And there were plenty of places where guys my age were shooting one another all the time. There still are. Can we really in good conscience conclude that the violence saturating our popular culture has no impact on our neighborhoods and schools?
The calamity at Virginia Tech is unfortunately not as unique an event as we’d like to think, but the sheer number of victims has grabbed our attention and inspired some collective soul-searching. As responsible Americans put their heads down on their desks and reflect, should the scribes of popular entertainment be excused to the playground? We screenwriters may be overgrown teenagers who still want to be cool, but we aren’t 12 years old anymore. Maybe we’re not responsible for Mr. Cho’s awful actions, but does that abrogate our responsibility to the world around us?
Most of us who chose careers in this field were seduced by cinema’s spell at an early age. We know better than anyone the power films have to capture our imaginations, shape our thinking and inform our choices, for better and for worse. At the risk of being labeled a scold — the ultimate in uncool — I have to ask: before cashing those big checks, shouldn’t we at least pause to consider what we are saying with our movies about the value of life and the pleasures of mayhem?
Mike White is the screenwriter of “School of Rock” and, most recently, “Year of the Dog.”
Making a Killing
By MIKE WHITE
Published: May 2, 2007, New York Times
Los Angeles
THE first movie I ever made was called “Death Creek Camp.” It told the age-old story of a group of teenage guys who set out on a fun-filled wilderness excursion only to be stalked and murdered by a psychopath disguised in a hockey mask and a blue kimono. It was no masterpiece of cinema.
Most of the scenes played out the same way — one of the fresh-faced hikers would get separated from the group. He would hear a noise in the bushes. “Bob? Jerry, is that you? Charlie?” Suddenly, from behind a tree, the stalker would pounce and blood would fly.
Why the killer wore a blue kimono was never explained nor why he wanted these nice campers dead. He was a deranged monster and that’s what monsters do. As the filmmaker, I was more interested in how the ketchup would drip off the victim’s cheek and where to plunge the retractable knife. I was 12.
The inspirations for this home movie (and the centerpieces of many Saturday night sleepovers) were slasher films like “Friday the 13th,” “Halloween” and “Terror Train.” My friends and I would eat junk food, drink soda and watch these cinematic bloodbaths until we dozed off, visions of gore and mayhem dancing in our heads.
Even though we all came from religious families — my father was a minister — it was rarely questioned whether our adolescent minds should be exposed to this kind of gruesome material. And clearly, we were the intended audience. My parents never sat and watched, nor did my sister, for that matter. The movies were titillating, shocking and dumb — and we teenage boys thought they were so cool. We devoured them and they, in turn, juiced us up.
After the horrific events at Virginia Tech, the relationship between violence in our movies and violence in our realities is being examined once again. Was Seung-Hui Cho inspired by a movie (the South Korean revenge flick “Oldboy”) when he murdered 32 of his classmates and teachers? Was Mr. Cho a deranged predator in a horror film, or was he a lost kid who could have been reached?
Hollywood and defenders of violent films dismiss Virginia Tech as a “unique” event, arguing that Mr. Cho was profoundly alienated from our culture, not at all a product of it. They assert that there are law-abiding, sane American moviegoers who love the thrill of a visual bloodletting, and then there are mentally disturbed people like Mr. Cho, constitutionally wired to do damage — and never the twain shall meet.
These commentators insist there’s no point debating which came first, the violent chicken or her violent representational egg, since no causal link has ever been proven between egg and chicken anyway. Besides, violent images can be found everywhere — on the news, in great art and literature, even Shakespeare!
For those who believe that violence in cinema consists of either harmless action spectacles or Martin Scorsese masterpieces, I might suggest heading down to the local multiplex and taking a look at some of the grotesque, morbid creations being projected on the walls. To defend mindless exercises in sadism like “The Hills Have Eyes II” by citing “Macbeth” is almost like using “Romeo and Juliet” to justify child pornography.
The notion that “movies don’t kill people, lunatics kill people” is liberating to us screenwriters because it permits us to give life to our most demented fantasies and put them up on the big screen without any anxious hand-wringing. We all know there’s a lot of money to be made trafficking in blood and guts. Young males — the golden demographic movie-makers ceaselessly pursue — eat that gore up. What a relief to be told that how we earn that money may be in poor taste, but it’s not irresponsible. The average American teenage boy knows the difference between right and wrong and no twisted, sadistic movie is going to influence him.
My own experience as a teenager tells me otherwise. For my friends and me, movies were a big influence on our clothes and our slang, and on how we thought about and spoke to authority figures, our girlfriends and one another. Movies permeated our fantasy lives and our real lives in subtle and profound ways.
It’s true nobody ever got shot in the face in my backyard, but there were acts of male bravado performed in emulation of our movie anti-heroes that ranged from stupid to cruel. And there were plenty of places where guys my age were shooting one another all the time. There still are. Can we really in good conscience conclude that the violence saturating our popular culture has no impact on our neighborhoods and schools?
The calamity at Virginia Tech is unfortunately not as unique an event as we’d like to think, but the sheer number of victims has grabbed our attention and inspired some collective soul-searching. As responsible Americans put their heads down on their desks and reflect, should the scribes of popular entertainment be excused to the playground? We screenwriters may be overgrown teenagers who still want to be cool, but we aren’t 12 years old anymore. Maybe we’re not responsible for Mr. Cho’s awful actions, but does that abrogate our responsibility to the world around us?
Most of us who chose careers in this field were seduced by cinema’s spell at an early age. We know better than anyone the power films have to capture our imaginations, shape our thinking and inform our choices, for better and for worse. At the risk of being labeled a scold — the ultimate in uncool — I have to ask: before cashing those big checks, shouldn’t we at least pause to consider what we are saying with our movies about the value of life and the pleasures of mayhem?
Mike White is the screenwriter of “School of Rock” and, most recently, “Year of the Dog.”
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
There are students and there are students...
I found these two stories in The Star today. I don't know why the first one warms the cockles of my heart and the second one doesn't.Perhaps the former because it recognises and rewards hard work regardless of race and religion, while the latter seems to reward something the student almost cannot help. At least the first ensures their future studies too.
Tuesday May 1, 2007
Carpenter’s son makes good – and he’s off to London
KUALA LUMPUR: K. Sathyvelu studied just one-and-a-half hours a day. Yet, he became one of the six SPM top achievers chosen for the Special Scholarship Award by Bank Negara yesterday.
This award enables the carpenter's son to study any course of his choice in one of the top universities in the world chosen by the bank.
Sathyvelu, who scored 15 1As, plans to become one of Malaysia's richest men and cites billionaire philanthropist T. Ananda Krishnan as his role model.
For now though, his love of mathematics and science is prompting him to do Actuarial Science at the London School of Economics.
The chosen ones: (From left) are Chong Qing, Afiqah, Nadiah, Sathyvelu, Azwan Arif and Siti Fatimah looking at their scholarship award.
“One of my dreams is to study overseas, and I know my parents cannot afford to send me abroad. That was the reason I took 15 subjects,” said Sathyvelu.
The others who received the award from Bank Negara Governor Tan Sri Dr Zeti Akhtar Aziz yesterday were Nadiah Amirah Jamil from Johor, Afiqah Abdul Aziz from Sarawak, Azwan Arif Abdul Aziz from Perak, Chong Qing Joel from Johor and Siti Fatimah Mukhtar from Kelantan.
Nadiah had 14 1As, four 2As and one 3B and wants to study Pharmacy, Siti Fatimah from Kelantan had 17 1As and one 2A and wants to study medicine and Azwan Arif from Perak had 10 1As and wants to study chartered accounting. All want to study at Cambridge University.
Chong Qing from Johor had 11 1As and wants to study engineering at Imperial College of London while Afiqah from Sarawak with 13 1As wishes to study dentistry but has yet to choose a university.
The scholarship covers full tuition fees, subsistence allowance, airfare and book and computer allowance. Scholars are not bonded but have to return to Malaysia to work.
Zeti said the scholarship was part of Bank Negara efforts towards nation-building.
The selection was stringent and they were looking for candidates who were resilient and adapted to changes easily, she said.
Bank Negara has given out more than 1,000 scholarships to Malaysians and the Special Scholarship Award was introduced three years ago, she said.
*********************************************************************************
Awards for top Muslim students
PUTRAJAYA: Muslim students who excelled in major examinations will be honoured in the first-ever Muslim Students Excellence Awards to be held on June 23.
Nine awards will be presented to students who did well in the STPM, SPM and PMR examinations.
Tan Sri Abdul Hamid Othman, the religious adviser to the Prime Minister, said this was the first time that Muslim students who did well in their studies would be awarded. The top award will be thePrime Minister’s trophy.
Two awards, he said, would be presented to the special Muslim students in recognition of their hard work and good examination results. Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak will present the awards in a ceremony to be held at Istana Hotel, organised by the Malaysian Muslim Students Foundation (YPIM).
“At the event, the foundation will be launching a welfare and education fund, so more activities can be held to help Muslim students nationwide,” he said at a press conference yesterday.
Tuesday May 1, 2007
Carpenter’s son makes good – and he’s off to London
KUALA LUMPUR: K. Sathyvelu studied just one-and-a-half hours a day. Yet, he became one of the six SPM top achievers chosen for the Special Scholarship Award by Bank Negara yesterday.
This award enables the carpenter's son to study any course of his choice in one of the top universities in the world chosen by the bank.
Sathyvelu, who scored 15 1As, plans to become one of Malaysia's richest men and cites billionaire philanthropist T. Ananda Krishnan as his role model.
For now though, his love of mathematics and science is prompting him to do Actuarial Science at the London School of Economics.
The chosen ones: (From left) are Chong Qing, Afiqah, Nadiah, Sathyvelu, Azwan Arif and Siti Fatimah looking at their scholarship award.
“One of my dreams is to study overseas, and I know my parents cannot afford to send me abroad. That was the reason I took 15 subjects,” said Sathyvelu.
The others who received the award from Bank Negara Governor Tan Sri Dr Zeti Akhtar Aziz yesterday were Nadiah Amirah Jamil from Johor, Afiqah Abdul Aziz from Sarawak, Azwan Arif Abdul Aziz from Perak, Chong Qing Joel from Johor and Siti Fatimah Mukhtar from Kelantan.
Nadiah had 14 1As, four 2As and one 3B and wants to study Pharmacy, Siti Fatimah from Kelantan had 17 1As and one 2A and wants to study medicine and Azwan Arif from Perak had 10 1As and wants to study chartered accounting. All want to study at Cambridge University.
Chong Qing from Johor had 11 1As and wants to study engineering at Imperial College of London while Afiqah from Sarawak with 13 1As wishes to study dentistry but has yet to choose a university.
The scholarship covers full tuition fees, subsistence allowance, airfare and book and computer allowance. Scholars are not bonded but have to return to Malaysia to work.
Zeti said the scholarship was part of Bank Negara efforts towards nation-building.
The selection was stringent and they were looking for candidates who were resilient and adapted to changes easily, she said.
Bank Negara has given out more than 1,000 scholarships to Malaysians and the Special Scholarship Award was introduced three years ago, she said.
*********************************************************************************
Awards for top Muslim students
PUTRAJAYA: Muslim students who excelled in major examinations will be honoured in the first-ever Muslim Students Excellence Awards to be held on June 23.
Nine awards will be presented to students who did well in the STPM, SPM and PMR examinations.
Tan Sri Abdul Hamid Othman, the religious adviser to the Prime Minister, said this was the first time that Muslim students who did well in their studies would be awarded. The top award will be thePrime Minister’s trophy.
Two awards, he said, would be presented to the special Muslim students in recognition of their hard work and good examination results. Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak will present the awards in a ceremony to be held at Istana Hotel, organised by the Malaysian Muslim Students Foundation (YPIM).
“At the event, the foundation will be launching a welfare and education fund, so more activities can be held to help Muslim students nationwide,” he said at a press conference yesterday.
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