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Bloated PM’s Department?

Is this incredible or what? The White House employs 1,888 staff, but Malaysia’s Prime Minister’s Department has 43,554 employees.

There is also a similar disparity in their respective budgets. The White House’s budget is US$394 million for 2011.

Have a look at the White House website here.

Compare that with the PM’s Dept budget of RM4 billion or is that RM12 billion?

The vast difference is partly down to the whole array of departments, agencies, and what-have-you under the Prime Minister’s Department. Read more

Gender paradox

Girls and women are excelling in secondary and tertiary education; yet formal women’s participation in public life and major decision-making remains lower. Why is that?

This is a piece I wrote for IPS:

It is a paradox, all right. Women make up more than half of those who take part in protests and other activities organised by her political party on issues affecting low-income workers, says Rani Rasiah of the Socialist Party of Malaysia.

But when it comes to holding official positions at the party’s local branches, more than half of the officials happen to be men, she observes. Read more

Try Firefox’s Tab Candy: it’s great

I’ve just been trying out Firefox’s Tab Candy, and I must say it could change the way you work on your browser.

I think it’s great. But a warning: it’s an alpha version (not even a beta); so it’s only for those of you who really want to see what’s in store and how it could radically change the way you use your browser tabs.

What Tab Candy does is to give you the flexibility to create groups of tabs on an empty workspace of your browser, so that you only need to open one group at a time in your browser, instead of opening an ever-increasing number of tabs. Each group of tabs can be given a name. You can also drag a tab to move it from one group to another. And then you can save the groups of tabs. Read more

Taib Mahmud in a room in House of Lords

Technically speaking, the Sarawak Chief Minister did speak at the House of Lords – but it appears to have been in a room down a corridor.

Not quite the image many had in their minds. Blog reader Sean took the initiative to write to the House of Lords about the visit.

According to him, the House of Lords replied:

Thank you for your email. Read more

More on the 20 Pykett Avenue land deal

Some details about the deal involving the 20 Pykett Avenue building, whose demolition over the weekend caught the MPPP by surprise.

In December 2009, the Mah Sing board announced to Bursa Malaysia that its subsidiary Klassik Tropika had entered into a sale and purchase agreement to acquire the 3.4-acre freehold property from Khaw Bian Cheng Sdn Bhd for RM38 million. There were two private caveats on the land.

Khaw Bian Cheng Sdn Bhd was supposed to transfer the land free from all encumbrances and with vacant possession. (I guess you could say it is now ‘vacant possession’.) Read more