MALAYSIANS ADVICED TO SAVE 10% OF INCOME TO FACE HARD TIMES?
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - Domestic Trade, Cooperatives and Consumerism
Minister Datuk Hamzah Zainuddin(photo) said due to the uncertain economic outlook,
spending must be carefully managed.
Save at least 10% of your monthly income to cushion yourself
against unexpected hardship, the Government has advised.
“We need to change our lifestyle and must know how to live
within our means.
“If it is possible, you should allocate at least 10% of your
income and put it aside so that you can use it during emergencies,” he told
reporters at a ringgit management symposium organised by Umno Youth and the
Credit Counselling and Debt Management Agency (AKPK) here yesterday.
The event was aimed at educating youths on the importance of
financial management and giving comprehensive knowledge in personal finance.
- Hamzah said the Government had come up with initiatives including for those identified as the B40 group to cope with the high cost of living.
- “We are aware of the situation on the ground. So we have the BR1M cash handouts for the poor,” he added.
- At the event, AKPK revealed its latest figures that over 25,000 Malaysians under the age of 35 have been declared bankrupt over the past five years.
- Umno Youth Young Professionals Bureau chief Shahril Hamdan said the rate was alarming and urged the Government to find a solution to ease the burden faced by youths.
“For those who are not bankrupt, they are still burdened
with high debt.
“We find that most youths below the age of 35 are also
unable to service their debt as it exceeds the standard 30% of their monthly
income,” he added.
Shahril said Umno Youth will raise the issue with the
Government after identifying short- and long- term solutions.
The debt mostly involved housing loans, credit card bills
and personal loans.
Source: The Star
FACEBOOK DELETES SEX BLOGGER ALVIN TAN
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - Facebook has removed the page of infamous sex
blogger Alvin Tan, just days after he allegedly insulted Muslims by showing a
series of pictures of him using a page of the Quran as toilet paper.
Checks on his Facebook account reveal the message “Sorry,
this page isn't available. The link you followed may be broken, or the page may
have been removed.”
Tan switched to his Twitter account @AlvinTanYOLO to further
‘express his thoughts’, at the same time promoting his debut porn video and
retweeting posts by his supporters.
The 26-year old’s latest attempt at publicity saw him
posting pictures of himself defecating while apparently reading the Quran and
using a page of the book to ‘clean up’.
Malaysians, both Muslims and non-Muslims, were outraged at
the posting, with many slamming Tan for going overboard in his insults against
Islam.
Social groups have called on the public not to generate more
publicity for Tan as it may help his bid for political asylum in the US, in the
case that he is threatened.
Many Malaysian shared the post, asking others to report his
Facebook page to be removed, with some warning they would lodge police reports.
- Five police reports were lodged against Tan on Friday in Johor after his latest post, Bernama reported.
- Several other previous postings had also outraged Malaysians, including a video of him singing a cover of the Azan.
Tan became infamous after he and his former partner Vivian
Lee, 25, uploaded a photograph of them on Facebook deemed insulting to Islam in
2013.
The former couple are facing criminal charges under
Malaysia's Sedition Act as well as the Film Censorship Act for their
controversial uploads.
Source: New Straits Times
APOCALYPTIC SCENE AS PARIS HIT BY MULTIPLE ATTACKS
PARIS France - Sirens blaring, blood on the roads, weeping
relatives: nightmare scenes played out on the streets of Paris on Friday night
as at least 120 people were killed in simultaneous attacks.
Pierre Montfort lives close to a Cambodian restaurant on Rue Bichat, where one of seven attacks took place in a night of bloodshed not seen in decades.
Another witness described the scene: "For a moment, we
could only see the flames from the gun. We were scared, how did we know he wasn't
going to shoot the windows?"
Florence said she arrived by scooter a minute or so after.
- "It was surreal, everyone was on the ground. No one was moving inside the Petit Cambodge restaurant and everyone was on the ground in bar Carillon," she said.
- "It was very calm -- people didn't understand what was going on. A young girl was being carried in the arms of a young man. She seemed to be dead."
- On Rue Charonne, a little further east, fire engines drive past, their sirens wailing.
- A man said he heard shots ring out, in sharp bursts, for two or three minutes.
- "I saw several bloody bodies on the ground. I don't know if they were dead," he said.
- "There was blood everywhere," said another witness.
Outside the Saint-Louis Hospital in the north of the capital
a police cordon had been set up.
Standing nearby, a tearful man said his sister had been
killed. At his side, his mother burst into tears and collapsed into his arms.
"They won't let us pass," he said, pointing at the
intersection 50 metres (yards) away.
Further east, near the Bataclan concert hall and not far
from the scene of another deadly attack in January on the offices of satirical
French magazine Charlie Hebdo, the area was on lock down.
Police say around 100 people were killed at the music venue,
with reports saying armed attackers shot dead people attending a rock concert
one by one before police stormed the building.
"My wife was in Bataclan, it's a catastrophe,"
said one man as he tried to run into the site but was blocked by the police
cordon.
In the north of Paris, near the Stade de France stadium,
three explosions left at least five dead as France were playing a friendly football
match against Germany.
"We heard explosions 25 minutes after the start of the
match. It continued as normal. I thought it was a joke," said Ludovic
Klein, 37, who came from Limoges to watch
the match with his 10 year old son.
Source: AFP
TIGERS, PIRANHAS MAY JOIN CROCODULE GUARDS AT INDONESIA JAIL?
JAKARTA, Indonesia – When Indonesia’s anti-drugs czar
announced plans to guard a death-row prison island with crocodiles, the
government rushed to explain that it was just a joke, but on Friday Budi Waseso
said he was now thinking of using tigers and piranha fish too.
Media quoted the National Narcotics Agency (BNN) chief as
saying that he had already obtained two crocodiles from a farm to study their
power and aggression and may ultimately put as many as 1,000 in place to keep
convicts from escaping.
“The number will depend on how big the area is, or whether
perhaps to combine them with piranhas,” he told reporters, according to the
rimanews.com portal. “Because the (prison) personnel numbers are short we can
use wild animals. We could use tigers too – for conservation at the same time.”
Piranha fish, meat-eaters with sharp teeth and powerful
jaws, are indigenous to South America and are not found in Indonesia.
Waseso and officials at his office were not immediately
available to comment on the reports.
Indonesian President Joko Widodo declared a war on what he
has dubbed a “narcotics emergency” after taking office a year ago, basing his
campaign on a study that showed at least 40 people a day were dying from drug
use.
- He has repeatedly refused clemency to traffickers and more than two dozen, mostly foreign, drug convicts have been executed this year after a five-year moratorium on the death penalty.
- In separate comments on the TVOne channel, Waseso rejected critics who said his plans to use animals as jailors were trampling on the human rights of convicts.
“We have to look at the whole problem,” he said. “These
people are murderers – mass murderers. Shouldn’t we also look at the human
rights of their victims?”The plan has echoes of the Bond movie “Live and Let Die”, when the secret agent escapes from an island surrounded by crocodiles by using the reptiles as stepping stones.
Source: -Reuters
DOCUMENTARIES ON MALAYSIA OR PARTICULARLY SABAH, MALAYSIAN BORNEO
This video clip which was uploaded many years ago on YouTube by Michael Rogge, who has around 1,000 video clips from around the world.
One of them is this short but interesting documentary about Malaysia.
It tells a short story about the history, economy and people of this country. Now watch it here:
Source: North Borneo history.
A JAPANESE CAUGHT HIDING IN DRAIN TO TAKE UPSKIRT PHOTOS OF WOMEN
TOKYO, Japan – A man in Japan who hid in a drain for five
hours, allegedly to snap photos up women’s skirts, was given away when
passers-by spotted his hair sticking out of a grate, police and reports said.
Yasuomi Hirai, 28,
allegedly squeezed himself in a section of a gutter 28cm wide, with his head
under a piece of iron grating, a police spokesman said on Wednesday (Nov 11).
- “His hair got caught at the edge of the grate, which drew the attention of some pedestrians,” the spokesman with the Hyogo prefectural police in Kobe told AFP.
Meanwhile another Japanese accused of accessing a woman’s
Facebook account and allegedly downloading pictures of her in her underwear has
been arrested, police and reports said Tuesday.
In what is being reported as the first such arrest in Japan,
Ryosuke Koga, 25, allegedly logged into the victim’s Facebook account 17 times
between January and March, a Tokyo Metropolitan Police spokesman said.
Source: AFP
MEGACITIES HIT HARD BY SURGING SEA LEVELS
France: Large swathes of Shanghai, Mumbai, New York
and other cities will slip under the waves even if an upcoming climate
summit limits global warming to two degrees Celsius, scientists reported
Sunday.
A 2 C spike in Earth's temperature would submerge land currently
occupied by 280 million people, while an increase of 4 C -- humanity's
current trajectory -- would cover areas lived on by more than 600
million, the study said.
“Two degrees Celsius warming will pose a
long-term, existential danger to many great coastal cities and regions,”
said lead author Ben Strauss, vice president for sea level and climate
impacts at Climate Central, a US-based research group.
- Sea level rises corresponding to these 2 C or 4 C scenarios could unfold in two hundred years, but would more likely happen over many centuries, perhaps as long as 2,000 years, according to the research, published by Climate Central.
- Capping the rise in Earth's temperatures to 2 C above pre-industrial levels is the core goal of the 195-nation UN climate summit in Paris from November 30 to December 11. The most effective way to slow global warming is to slash the output of the greenhouse gases which drive it. But even if emissions reduction pledges -- many of them conditioned on financial aid -- submitted by 150 nations ahead of the Paris summit are fulfilled, it would still put us on a pathway for a 3 C world, the United Nations has warned.
- Achieving the two-degree goal remains a serious challenge. Strauss and colleagues apply on a global scale the same methodology they used for a recent study that focused on temperature-linked sea level rise in the United States, published in the US Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
That study concluded that both Miami and New Orleans are doomed to crippling impacts.
In the new report, the country hit hardest by sea level rise under a 4 C scenario is China.
Today, some 145 million people live in Chinese cities and coastal
areas that would eventually become ocean were temperatures to climb that
high.
Source: - AFP
INDONESIA PLANS CROCODILE-GUARDED PRISON ISLAND FOR DRUG CONVICTS
JAKARTA: Indonesia's anti-drugs agency has proposed building
a prison on an island guarded by crocodiles to hold death row drug convicts, an
official said Monday (Nov 9), an idea that wouldn't be out of place in a James
Bond film.
The proposal is the pet project of anti-drugs chief Budi
Waseso(photo), who plans to visit various parts of the archipelago in his search for
fierce reptiles to guard the jail.
"We will place as many crocodiles as we can there. I
will search for the most ferocious type of crocodile," he was quoted as
saying by local news website Tempo.
- Waseso said that crocodiles would be better at preventing drug traffickers from escaping prison as they could not be bribed - unlike human guards.
- But he is banking on the convicts lacking Roger Moore's crocodile-running skills showcased in Bond movie "Live and Let Die" when he escapes from an island using the reptiles as stepping stones.
- "You can't bribe crocodiles. You can't convince them to let inmates escape." The plan is still in the early stages, and neither the location or potential opening date of the jail have been decided.
- Indonesia already has some of the toughest anti-narcotics laws in the world, including death by firing squad for traffickers, and sparked international uproar in April when it put to death seven foreign drug convicts.
- But President Joko Widodo has insisted that drug dealers must face death as the country is fighting a "national emergency" due to rising narcotics use. Despite the harsh laws, Indonesia's corrupt prison system is awash with drugs, and inmates and jail officials are regularly arrested for narcotics offenses.
Anti-drugs agency spokesman Slamet Pribadi confirmed
authorities were mulling the plan to build "a special prison for death row
convicts". He said only traffickers would be kept in the jail, to stop
them from mixing with other prisoners and potentially recruiting them to drug
gangs.
The agency is currently in discussions with the justice
ministry about the plan, he added.
Source:- AFP
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