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- Mekah bagaikan medan perang bagi Najib dan Rosmah..
- Ayatollah Pun Tak Tahu Quran
- Final Warning: Malaysia may be bankrupt sooner than 2019
Mekah bagaikan medan perang bagi Najib dan Rosmah.. Posted: 02 Nov 2011 06:00 PM PDT Sepatutnya dalam mengerjakan ibadat haji tidak dibezakan darjat dan taraf seseorang dimuka bumi ini, semuanya sama disisi Allah, yang membezakannya ialah Iman dan Taqwa.. Cuba korang tengok bagaimana jemaah dari Malaysia yang lain bergerak dibawah ni.. Ini close-up Najib dan Rosmah.
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Posted: 02 Nov 2011 05:57 PM PDT Robert Fisk's journalism career took off around the time of the Iranian Revolution in 1979. I was 19 years old then and had just finished my Sixth Form. His fantastic book elicits a personal recollection for me because the book covers events and over a period of time that many of us still know personally - through the newspapers, media and personal involvement. (Well in a very small way, I joined campus protests with my Palestinian friends in the US in the 80s and also visited Iraq on a humanitarian mission circa 1998 - when the Americans were still strafing and bombing their highways). This massive book is an epic perhaps in the same category as William L. Shirer's 1,245 page 'The Rise And Fall of the Third Reich' (1960) or Thomas Carlyle's three volume "door stop" -"The French Revolution - A History" (1837). The major difference is that Fisk's book is not an academic work per se. It is the recollections of a journalist who writes first hand about the things he saw, the people he spoke with and the events he witnessed by himself. It is an eyewitness record of many events in the Middle East beginning with the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the 10 year Iran - Iraq War, the two Gulf Wars and more. Of course there are many, many facets to a book. We gather so much information and knowledge by reading. I was most interested (but not surprised at all) to read about Robert Fisk's meeting with the Iranian Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkali. For those of you who are at least as old as me, Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkali was known in the media at that time as the "hanging judge". After the Shah of Iran was overthrown in 1979 and the Ayatollahs took over Iran, they conducted a purge where thousands of people (up to 10,000 or more) from the Shah's repressive regime were executed (hung, shot, skulls cracked etc). The man in charge of sending quite a few of these people to death was Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkali. Here is a picture of the guy (he died in 2003). On page 161 of his book Fisk writes about a new precedent that was set in Iran by Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkali's religious courts. In July 1980, in a place called Kerman, they sentenced four people to death by stoning for sexual offenses. On page 162 Fisk describes his meeting with the Ayatollah over this 'death by stoning' sentence: 'I dont know if I approve of stoning,' Sadegh Khalkali said, flashing a grin at us journalists and at a group of startled diplomats who had also been invited to the Qasr prison. 'But in the Koran, it is mentioned that those who commit adultery should be killed by stoning.' Folks, the Quran says no such thing.
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Final Warning: Malaysia may be bankrupt sooner than 2019 Posted: 02 Nov 2011 06:32 AM PDT It must be noted that when Malaysia was formed in 1963, the British left her with a solid administrative template. Yet, after more than 50 years of rule by Barisan Nasional, the template has not been improved on. In fact, it has gone to the dogs; replaced instead by a form of government that encourages leakages and corruption of all forms. Malaysia has a population of 28 million and a civil service of around 1.3 million. Out of the 28 million, only one percent are paying income tax. This clearly shows that 99% are either below that income tax bracket or merely earning too little to need to pay taxes. With inflation and the prices of goods continuing to rise, expect even fewer people to pay income tax in the near future. Incredulous optimism Yet, the Najib administration's goal for 2012 is to grant perks to the civil service and give hand-outs to non-serving members of the society in the incredulous optimism that this will improve productivity and raise efficiency and so forth. There is a lot of hope, but as always, no real mechanism to bring about results. The AG's report clearly shows that though there were improvements from last year, the large number of detected faults still means the government has a long way to go in order to be a world-class administration. For comparison, Taiwan has a population of 24 million and a civil service of just 400,000. Yet, Taiwan has continued to emerge as a major player on the global economic scene. Not bad for a small island that has so few natural resources and at one time was chided for producing rip-offs of Japanese electronic goods. Obviously, a clean and efficient government allows for a growing nation and a growing nation shows up, regardless of its size. In announcing the latest investment updates for the government's economic transformation programme (ETP), Idris had this to say, "If our economy grows less than four per cent… and we don't cut our operating expenditure, if we borrow at 12.5 per cent, if our annual debt rises to 12.5 per cent and our revenue does not grow, then it will happen." Bankruptcy happens when one overspends or makes a poor investment Let us examine Idris' statement. Exactly, what will happen and how will it happen? The answers are, Malaysia will go bankrupt and it may come sooner than 2019 unless the leaders get their act together. The awful signs of such a situation are when the country starts to be late in its repayment of debt or servicing of interest. This happens because there is insufficient cash-flow. Revenue from income and corporate tax plus returns from investment in all productive sectors are insufficient to cover the outflows. How come? Because the past BN government frittered away the borrowings on overpriced, unproductive or loss-making projects and ventures! According to the AG's Report, Malaysia's national debt rose by 12.3 per cent to over RM407 billion last year, and although the economy grew by 7.2 per cent in 2010, last year's fiscal deficit maintained public debt at over 50 per cent of GDP for the second year running. The government owed 53.1 per cent of GDP, slightly down from 53.7 per cent last year. This does not augur well for Malaysians who may now have to contend with additional taxes like the GST, just to raise government revenue in order to cover its operating expenditures such as subsidies. Yet even as the government grapples with the idea of reducing subsidies and implementing the GST, it must also clean up its own act.
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