Another NS death

National Service - A death trap?* Mohd Rafee Amir from Kuala Selangor is the latest casualty of the National Service [Bernama report here]. His sister said he had called home last Saturday to say he had fever and his legs were swollen after a fall during training. Rafee was 18.
How many deaths since the NS was introduced in 2004 - 19, 20, 21?
Way too many. Those parents did not send their healthy children to NS to die.

* Borrowed from a posting in the Malaysian Medical Resources. To read the article, which predicts that another death would spell the end of the NS program, click here.

Top Malaysian lawyer stopped by Oz terror cops

"Lucky" Malik Imtiaz. My lead counsel* was at the Brisbane airport the other day when he was "pounced" by security officers and put through a "more thorough check". They screened him and his luggage for traces of explosives and whatever else that a terrorist is supposed to carry with him/her.
After the ordeal, one of the airport security officers told him he was "really lucky". But lucky for what?
Read Malik's Flying the safe and friendly skies and pray you don't get lucky when you are at an airport Down Under.

* Malik leads the legal team defending Jeff Ooi and I against the suits filed separately against us by NSTP and its officers and a former editor. My case is up for mention again on 5 Sept while Jeff has a date at the High Court on 911.
p.s. Malik can actually pass off as a Pakistani, Indian, Palestinian, Jew, Afghan, Malaysian, Singaporean, and even an Arab sheikh (if he puts on a headgear).

Why should Msian govt apologise, huh, huh?

No two ways about it. It's a clear-cut matter, as I see it: our cops brutally beat up an Indonesian karate referee when he was here, he countrymen are angry, so the Malaysian government should apologize because that's basic decency and it would help calm things down.

But Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar, speaking on behalf of the Abdullah Administration, sees things differently.


If that is so, why then did we apologize to China when our cops asked a woman believed to be a Chinese national (turned out that she was Malaysian!) to strip naked two years ago? Why did the Malaysian government apologize on behalf of the cops then and won't apologize on behalf of its cops now, Syed Hamid?

While Syed Hamid was giving the Indonesian media a diplomatic lecture, Haris Ibrahim has apologized on behalf all of us Anak Bangsa Malaysia. Yesterday, Anwar Ibrahim blogged to agree with Malaysian students in Indonesia that the Malaysian government should apologize.

I was lamenting Syed Hamid's idea of decency when this article suddenly found my screen:

What the fish!?
Now, wait a sec. We'll need to verify this because there was nothing in Bernama about Pak Lah apologizing to the Indonesian President. The national news agency did carry a report on the IGP apologizing to the Indonesian ref here but nothing on the ABC Radio story Malaysia apologizes to Indonesia for karate assault here.