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High-rise hotels in world heritage zone to proceed

Anil Netto
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15

Sigh…. good luck to George Town and its heritage conservation. Looks as if the state government has already made up its mind to give the green light to the four projects. Why am I not surprised.

The state government says these hotels are needed to stave off the recession. But it forgets that tourism is a major revenue earner for Penang, and visitors don’t come to George Town to check out its boutique hotels. Rather, they are drawn to the historical character of the place. Once that is gone, George Town becomes just like any other city in this region.

This excerpt from a Business Times report:

Penang hotel projects on, Unesco guidelines awaited
By Marina Emmanuel
marinae@nstp.com.my

Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng yesterday said the state authorities and affected developers are awaiting guidelines from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) on whether any changes should be made to the project plans.

“The developers fully understand that legally, the projects can still proceed, although Unesco needs to state if any modifications are needed. Penang needs these projects (investments) to offset the oncoming economic recession,” he told a press conference at his office in George Town.

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Rocket fire into Israel: Lull until 4 Nov 2008

Anil Netto
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24

rocket-hitsMuch has been said about the home-made Qassam rockets fired into Israel in the same way that the United States cited WMD before its illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq.

This is a chart that was drawn up by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Israel Intelligence Heritage & Commemoration Center. It was removed from the website of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the eve of the ground invasion and replaced with an almost illegible graph in which the labels obscure the data, according to Jim Holstun and Joanna Tinker in the Electronic Intifada.

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Massacre! Israeli forces shell UN school in refugee camp

Anil Netto
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31

gaza
Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse. Now they are shelling UN schools.

Israeli forces have shelled another UN school in the Jabaliya Refugee Camp. Three artillery shells landed in the perimeter of the school, killing some 30 displaced people who were sheltering there and injuring 55.

The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees, has been using UN schools to shelter some of the 15,000 Gazans who had fled their home following the Israeli invasion of Gaza.

The massacre is reminiscent of the Israeli shelling in 1996 of a UN compound in Qana, southern Lebanon, which killed 106 civilians.

John Ging, the UNRWA Director of Operations in Gaza, stressed that all UN schools in Gaza are clearly marked, flying the UN flag, and that the organisation has provided the GPS coordinates of all of its installations in the area to Israel. “Those who were in the school were all families seeking refuge,” the UN News Centre quoted him as saying.

Over 640 people have been killed so far in Gaza.

This report from the Ma’an News Agency website, one of the most browsed in Palestine:

Date: 06 / 01 / 2009  Time:  17:04

Updated 18:07

Gaza – Ma’an – Israeli forces killed at least 42 Palestinians at a UN school that was sheltering displaced people in Jabaliya Refugee Camp in the northern Gaza Strip late on Tuesday afternoon, medical officials confirmed to Ma’an.

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K Terengganu by-election: The old numbers game

Anil Netto
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20

Yesterday I heard on the radio news (one of the Astro channels, I think) that the BN had 30,000 supporters accompanying their candidate on nomination day. The Pas candidate could just muster 15,000 supporters, the newscaster said.

But Raja Petra, who is predicting a Pas win by a majority of 5,000 votes, warns us:

Whatever the mainstream newspapers reported today, don’t you believe it! PAS saw a crowd of 30,000 to 40,000 supporters. And the crowd was wall-to-wall — from the Stadium Negeri, where the nomination papers were filed, right up to the old penyu round-a-bout, where the penyu no longer lives. Most importantly, the crowd was mostly local folks and their dressing, sarong just below the knee, and Terengganu slang was so distinct there was no doubt about them being locals. I mean, only locals would shout “Hancur, hancur…….hancur bee eng” and “Menang, menang……menang Pakatang.”

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Funeral tents attacked; emergency calls refused in Gaza

Anil Netto
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3

Funeral tents have been attacked in Gaza, hospital premises shelled, a high-rise building housing international media fired at by an Apache helicopter, medical teams prevented from responding to 80 per cent of emergency calls… and of course, the rising death toll of civilians, including women and children.

And all the while, the Palestinians are being steadily dispossessed from their rapidly shrinking homeland.

Will this madness never stop?

Sharon, a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement, reports from Gaza:

There have been two separate reports about Israeli attacks on funeral tents. We are trying to confirm deaths and injuries for one. The second of the funerals attacked was medic Arafa’s yesterday afternoon; 5 people were injured.

We have also had reports that in the Zaytoun area two days ago, Israeli soliders rounded up a group of people into two houses; women and children into one, men into the other, where they were kept for two days. Then this morning at 11am Israeli forces shelled the houses. We have heard the number of deaths as between 7 and 20. One was a seven year old boy whose father was interviewed on TV while holding his body. We are trying to find out further details. It is getting very hard to keep up with this insanity.

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Heroic former judge Azmi Kamaruddin passes away…

Anil Netto
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5

Former Supreme Court Judge Azmi Kamaruddin passed away last night at the age of 75.

He will forever be remembered for standing up, along with his colleagues, in defence of the Judiciary when its independence was under severe assault in 1988 during the Mahathir administration.

Azmi was one of five Supreme Court Judges – the others were George Seah, Wan Hamzah Mohd Salleh, the late Eusoffe Abdolcadeer and the late Wan Suleiman Pawanteh – who tried to stop the removal of Tun Salleh Abas, who had been suspended as Lord President.

These five shone like a beacon of justice at a time when the judiciary was shrouded in darkness.

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Just change it?: Before and after GE12

Anil Netto
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26

Blog reader LTH shares with us his thoughts about the Pakatan’s apparent lack of enthusiasm regarding local democracy. As recent events have shown, it isn’t impossible to restore local democracy – with or without the Election Commission’s or federal assistance or legal reforms. All that is needed to get the ball rolling is the political will and sincerety to fulfil campaign promises:

During GE12,

  • “We will return to the people local council elections!” was part of the PR manifesto;
  • And this is how they promised: “Just change it!”

After GE12,

  • “There are legal problems to untangle, you know; we can’t just change it!”
  • “We’ll need to move the whole SPR machinery over, will cost many millions, I tell you!”
  • “We tried in Parliament, you saw us, didn’t you?” (note: knowing full well it was an exercise in futility)

Haha, after 1 January 2009, the Gunung Rapat people have become such an embarrassment to PR:

Three USM students detained for distributing leaflets

Anil Netto
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15

2330: Freed! The students have now been released. “The campus authorities probably realised that they would have as much difficulty in trying to justify the action against students for distributing leaflets as the cops did when they tried to detain under-age cyclists,” says one political observer.

2300: Three USM students were detained at 9.15pm while they were distributing leaflets in the campus. The three were bundled into a van apparently without any explanation and taken to the campus’ security department.

The leaflets provided an introduction to the “Pro-Mahasiswa” group and a bit of publicity about the group’s appointment to meet the USM Deputy Vice-Chancellor tomorrow.  The students are believed to be preparing for campus elections expected to be held soon and are seeking free and fair campus elections.

Bundling students into a van? Is this the way an “apex university” handles students’ affairs? Do they think they can rise up the THES global rankings this way?

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Perak village head election a step in the right direction

Anil Netto
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14

Democracy is here to stay, whether our politicians are ready for it or not.

It was interesting to see the reaction of the Pakatan government in Perak to the election of a village head.  They did not seem to be too happy with it.

Congrats to PKR’s Gopeng MP Lee Boon Chye for pushing this through.

And now Selangor might reportedly follow suit with a pilot election for a village head later this year.

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Gaza’s hospitals stretched beyond breaking point

Anil Netto
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5

Hospitals in Gaza, already facing a crippling shortage of medical supplies and equipment, are struggling to cope with the rising number of casualities, many of them civilians. Television footage shows every inch of space – even the floors – in certain hospitals being used for the treatment emergency cases. In one scene, medics are seen pumping the chest of a man lying on the floor in between two beds.

It doesn’t help that the earlier siege had blocked essential medical supplies into Gaza.  National Public Radio asked United Nations Relief  and Works Agency rep Chris Gunness how Gaza’s hospitals were coping:

Very, very badly. Because, don’t forget, in the months that preceded this military operation, the hospitals in Gaza and actually at many aid organizations were starved of essential life-saving drugs. So, even without this offensive, they were stretched to breaking point. Now, with the number of people coming into these hospitals, they are stretched frankly to breaking point. And reports in the hospitals say that basically, if you are in a life threatening condition you may be seen, but if your foot has been blown off, or you’ve lost a limb and you’re not going to die, then it’s most unlikely that you will actually be seen…

Well, the onslaught continues. I don’t know if you will have heard or seen the pictures overnight from Gaza, but we’ve got very large scale bombardments of areas, you know, the most densely populated – one of the most densely populated parts of this planet. And you know, it’s fine for politicians in Israel and elsewhere to say well, we’re doing what we can to limit civilian casualties, but imagine if someone decided there would be an aerial bombardment of say, Manhattan, or any inner city in America. And someone said, oh and by the way we’re trying very hard to limit civilian casualties. Most Americans I know would simply laugh and say that’s absurd. Well, that’s the situation we’re facing in Gaza. There is this bombardment and we get this rhetorical promise to try and keep civilians safe, but frankly it’s very difficult to make any sense of that, given the scale of the bombardment in this very densely populated part of the world.

Canadian human rights activist Eva Bartlett reports live from Gaza:

In the haze of dust and smoke from the latest F-16 strike, a family self-evacuates. The dispatcher at the Jabaliya Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) receives call after call from terrified residents fleeing their homes. It’s a new year, a new Nakba, and an old scene; Israel is bombarding Gaza once again and the world is standing idly by, sitting on a fence very different from the electrified border fence encaging Gaza, or the separation wall dividing and ghettoizing the West Bank. The world sits on the fence, justifying Israel’s massacre of a civilian population already dying from the siege.

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