Anak Jengayan

MCA leaders back their president, and say it makes no sense to appoint candidates who don't command the people's support in the Cabinet.

 KUALA LUMPUR: There is no meaning to the appointment of defeated candidates into the Cabinet since they do not command the support of the people, said senior MCA leaders today. 

“If the candidate has lost the popular support and trust of the people he or she represents, then his or her acceptance into the Cabinet will have lost its original meaning.

“After all, he or she is considered a representative and trustee of the rakyat,” said central committee member and Deputy Home Minister Lee Chee Leong in a statement.

In view of this, Lee said he backed his president Dr Chua Soi Lek’s stand to deliberate on accepting government positions if the party fared poorly in the next general election.

“As a member of the Barisan Nasional representing the Chinese community, the rights of the Chinese community will be maintained, regardless of whether MCA has its representatives in the state and federal levels,” he added.

With talk of the general election looming, Lee said, MCA must be well-prepared to go all out to achieve brilliant results.

“Once the general election begins, the people can then review and reflect on the past performances of their representatives at both the state and federal levels and make their own judgement,” he added.

Lee said that the priority now was to consolidate and unite MCA in order to regain the trust of the Chinese community.

Following Sunday’s Sarawak state election, Chua had urged SUPP not to accept any state government posts in view of the party’s dismal performance.

This led opposition DAP to question why MCA did not do the same in the wake of its 2008 general election debacle.

Chua responded by blaming his predecessor for the decision and stated that if MCA performed badly in the next polls, the party would deliberate on whether to accept similar appointments.

 

In another statement, party vice-president and Deputy Finance Minister Donald Lim Siang Chai similarly backed Chua’s assessment that the party will reconsider its position in the Cabinet if it suffers the same results as 2008 general election.

He said the party had done the same after suffering a setback in the 1969 polls.

“If MCA fails to obtain recognition from the majority of Malaysian Chinese, this will affect MCA’s position as the front-runner within BN in negotiating to secure and defend Chinese interests.

“When our party’s position is weakened, we will not be in a conducive position to maintain the interests of the ethnic Chinese community,” he said.

Yesterday, another vice-president and Deputy Youth and Sport Minister, Senator Gan Ping Sieu, said MCA’s stand on the matter was plain and clear.

“If PM’s BN leadership and transformation plans that MCA is supporting are rejected by Chinese community in the coming general election, we will consider our position in the line-up of federal and state governments, as the case may be,” he said.

-- FMT

 

By Joseph Tawie

A joint Dayak representation in the BN will ensure a Dayak deputy chief minister, a post eyed by Masing.

KUCHING: The merger between Sarawak Barisan Nasional (BN) parties – Parti Rakyat Sarawak (PRS) and Sarawak Progressive Democratic Party (SPDP) – looks set to take shape in a move which could give the joint entity a deputy chief minister’s slot.

“We are serious about it. Once the election dust has settled, the PRS merger committee will be reactivated so that talks between PRS and SPDP can proceed,” PRS president James Masing said.

He was commenting on a news report quoting him as saying that the merger plan of the two parties has to be implemented if the two Dayak-dominant parties want a bigger representation in the state cabinet, including getting the post of deputy chief minister (DCM).

The two parties when merged would have 14 Dayak elected representatives, making the new entity the second biggest party after Parti Pesaka Bumiputra Bersatu (PBB) which has 35 seats.

The merger talks began six years ago upon the suggestion of Chief Minister Taib Mahmud following the deregistration of Sarawak National Party (SNAP) and Parti Bansa Dayak Sarawak (PBDS) after the leadership crises.

SPDP and PRS are breakaway parties from the deregistration of SNAP and PBDS on Nov 5, 2002 and on Oct 21, 2004 respectively.

However, SNAP’s registration was restored by the Court of Appeal last year.

After being accused of having a hand in the deregistration of SNAP and PBDS, Taib wanted to be seen as trying to unite the Dayaks under the PRS-SPDP entity.

But the merger plan met a number of obstacles previously before taking a fresh step now.

Contacted by FMT, Masing said: “Whatever obstacles we have we need to negotiate and discuss them.

“We need to be a political realist at some point of time. The political landscape can change. We need to change to remain relevant,” he said.

The merger plan becomes vital now following the dismal performance of another Sarawak party, Sarawak United Peoples’ Party (SUPP), in the state polls.

The Chinese-based SUPP won only six out of 19 seats it contested, with losses including in Piasau where SUPP president and DCM Dr George Chan was defeated by a DAP greenhorn.

SUPP’s heavy defeat left a vacant DCM position which is now being eyed by the Dayak-based parties.

Masing also called on SNAP to join the merger talks or return to the Barisan Nasional (BN) fold.

Dayak-based SNAP was another party which performed poorly in the state polls, losing in all 26 constituencies it contested.

Yesterday, DAP supremo Lim Kit Siang also mooted the idea of a merger between his party and SNAP so that they can jointly embrace the support of the Iban-Dayak community in Sarawak to get rid of BN.

DAP performed very well in the state polls by winning 12 out of the 15 urban and Chinese-majority seats it contested.

Meanwhile, SPDP president William Mawan Ikom could not be reached for comment.

However, he had reportedly said “if that is what Masing has said, I will say the same thing”.

SPDP deputy secretary-general Paul Igai said that any merger would be between parties and not elected representatives.

He said any decision would have to be taken back to the members.

Several members of the Dayak community have expressed the hope that the two parties would seriously consider the merger.

KUCHING: PRS president Dato Sri Dr James Masing is against the idea of amending the state constitution to provide for the nomination of non-elected representatives to sit in the State Legislative Assembly (DUN).

“I do not think there is any requirement to amend the law. We are appointed as members of the Cabinet because the rakyat elect us to be there.

“Everybody must go through the due process of the law and if you don’t get it… hard luck lah. We cannot amend it just to accommodate a few who cannot make it,” he reasoned.

He added that the law practised here had been in existence for years and there was “nothing wrong with it”.

Masing, who was sworn in as a full minister yesterday after retaining his Baleh seat in the 10th state election, said the wish of the rakyat was paramount in a democratic country.

“If the rakyat elect us, so be it. The process cannot change just to accommodate a few,” he said when asked to comment on the suggestion made by Senator Datuk Idris Buang on Sunday.

Idris had suggested that the state BN government nominate non-elected representatives from the Chinese community to sit in the State Legislative Assembly after the Chinese-based SUPP suffered heavy casualties in April 16 polls.

Idris pointed out that this could be done by making amendments to the state constitution to include a provision for such nominations.

Meanwhile, DUN Speaker Dato Sri Mohamad Asfia Awang Nassar, when asked to comment on the same matter, said it was up to the state government to decide.

-- Borneo Post

KUCHING: President of Parti Rakyat Sarawak (PRS) James Masing is not only bitter, but felt very hurt by the loss of the Pelagus seat to independent candidate George Lagong.

Lagong defeated PRS candidate Stanley Nyitar by a very comfortable margin of 2,837 votes when he secured 5,740 votes as against 2,903 by Stanley.

The PKR candidate, Edward Sumbang Asun, managed to secure 1,171 votes.

The constituency has 15,323 voters comprising 11,979 Ibans, 2,359 Chinese and 901 Malay/Melanau and the rest others.

PRS contested in nine seats and won eight, making it the second biggest party after PBB which has 35 seats in the new state assembly.

Asked to comment on the defeat of Pelagus seat, Masing said: “Now it dawns on me this cruel fact of life.

“The pride of poor communities is as deep as their pockets. This is most evident in politics,” he said, referring to a large sum of money that had helped influence the voting pattern in the rural areas.

However, he refused to say whether his party was sabotaged or not.

“I am not aware of it yet. In Ngemah, I had the full support of all BN parties.

“In Pelagus we lacked the necessary resources during the fight. Otherwise we would have a clean sweep,” he said, pointing out that Larry Sng and his influential father Sng Chee Hua were of no help to BN in Pelagus.

The role of the Sngs

Larry Sng, the former incumbent, was sacked from the party and had remained partyless and was dropped from contesting in this state polls.

He had insisted of contesting as a BN man, but was strongly objected by PRS.

Masing must also remember that George Lagong has blood relations with the Sngs.

Meanwhile speculation is rife that Masing may be appointed as a deputy chief minister in the Taib cabinet following the defeat of SUPP president George Chan at Piasau.

SUPP which had 12 seats before going to the polls, now only has six seats – two Chinese and four Dayaks.

“It appears that the Chinese party is being represented by the Dayaks and they should ask more from SUPP in terms of position, and so on,” said a former leader.

Semalam Anak Jengayan menerima panggilan daripada Orang Panggau bahawa Papa Gomo telah diminta untuk memberi keterangan berhubung dengan isu video seks lucah Anawar Ibrahm.

"Saya sedang menghantar Gomo ke Balai Polis ni. Gomo diminta Polis Bukit Aman untuk memberi keterangan." kata Orang Pangau.

Saya telah meminta Papa Gomo, GAP (Gerakan Anti PKR) dan Pisau.Net untuk membuat liputan kawasan yang ditandingi calon Parti Rakyat Sarawak (PRS) iaitu Dun N.56 Baleh dan Dun N.56 Pelagus. Ketiga-tiga rakan blogger saya ini telah membuat artikle yang cukup menarik untuk bacaan semua. 

Kalau nak tahu lebih lanjut berkenaan artikel tulisan mereka. Sila layari blog; Papa Gomo, Gerakan Anti PKR dan Pisau.Net.

Researchers said Sunday they had solved a conundrum about human perception that has stumped philosophers and scientists alike since it was first articulated 323 years ago by an Irish politician in a letter to John Locke.

Imagine, William Molyneux wrote to the great British thinker, that a man blind from birth who has learned to identify objects -- a sphere and a cube, for example -- only through his sense of touch is suddenly able to see.

The puzzle, he continued, is "Whether he Could, by his Sight, and before he touch them, know which is the Globe and which the Cube?"

For philosophers of the time, answering "Molyneux's question," as it was known ever after, would resolve a fundamental uncertainty about the human mind.

Empiricists believed that we are born blank slates, and become the sum total of our accumulated experience.

So-called "nativists" countered that our minds are, from the outset, pre-stocked with ideas waiting to be activated by sight, sound and touch.

If a blind man who miraculously recovered his sight could instantly distinguish the cube from the globe it would mean the knowledge was somehow innate, they argued.

More recently, this "nurture vs. nature" debate has found its counterpart in modern neuroscience.

"The beauty of Molyneux's question is that it also relates to how representations are formed in the brain," said Pawan Sinha, a professor at MIT in Boston and the main architect of the study.

"Do the different modalities, or senses, build up a common representation, or are these independent representations that one cannot access even though the other modality has built it?" he asked in a phone interview.

Recent studies have suggested that the mental images we accumulate through sight and touch do, in fact, form a common pool of impressions that can be triggered and retrieved by one sense or the other.

But until now, no one has been able to design a definitive experiment.

The problem was finding subjects. They would have to have been blind at birth and then have had their sight restored, but not until they were old enough to reliably participate in tests.

Most forms of curable congenital blindness, however, are detected and cured in infancy, so such individuals are extremely rare.

More precisely, they are rare in rich countries. So in 2003, Sinha set up a program in India in cooperation with the Shroff Charity Eye Hospital in New Delhi.

Among the many patients he treated, he found five -- four boys and one girl, aged eight to 17 -- who met the criteria for surgery that would almost instantly take them from total blindness to fully seeing.

Once bandages were removed, researchers had to first be sure that the volunteers could see well.

Using objects that looked like Lego building blocks, they tested the ability to discriminate visually between similar shapes. The subjects scored nearly 100 percent.

They scored nearly as well when it came to telling the difference by touch alone, according to the study, published in Nature Neuroscience.

For the critical test, however, in which the children first felt an object and then tried to distinguish visually between that same object and a similar one, the results were barely better than if they had guessed.

"They couldn't form the connection," said Yuri Ostrovsky, also a researcher at MIT and a co-author of the study.

"The conclusion is that there does not seem to be any cross-modal" -- that is, from one sense to the other -- "representation available to perform the task," he said by phone.

The answer to Molyneux's question, then, appears to be "no": the data blind people gather tactically that allows them to identify a cup and a vase, and to tell them apart, is not accessible through vision.

At least not at first.

"From a neuro-scientific point of view, the most interesting finding is the rapidity with which this inability was compensated," said Richard Held, an emeritus professor at MIT and lead author of the study.

"Within about a week, it's done -- and that is very fast. We were surprised," he said by phone.

The overall results suggest that the human brain is more "plastic," or malleable, longer into childhood that previously thought, the researchers said.

"This challenges the dogma of 'critical periods,' the idea that if a child has been deprived of vision for the first three or four years of life, he or she will be unable to acquire any visual proficiency," Sinha said.

mh/gd

AFP

Menteri Kemajuan Luar Bandar dan Wilayah merangkap naib presiden UMNO Dato Seri Mohd Shafie Aqdal telah membuat lawatan ke Rh Nudong, Nanga Ibau, Kapit untuk membantu calon Barisan Nasional (BN) N.54 Pelagus Stanley Nyitar @ Unja ak Malang untuk berkempen.

Dalam lawatan tersebut, Dato Seri Mohd Shafie telah mengumumkan peruntukkan sebanyak RM15.8 juta untuk projek bekalan elektrik Luar bandar di kawasan N.54 Pelagus dan jalan raya untuk menghubungkan Kapit ke Nanga Ibau.

Dato Seri Mohd Shafie turut menyelar calon bebas iaitu George ak Lagong yang bertanding sekadar untuk menunjukkan ketidakpuasan hati. Beliau turut memberitahu Dato Sng Chee Hua ialah kawan Anwar Ibrahim. Tambah beliau, adalah sia-sia memilih caloh bebas yang ditaja oleh orang yang mempunyai kepentingan peribadi semata-mata. Beliau menyeru kepada pengundi supaya bijak memilih wakil rakyat mereka. Wakil rakyat yang dipilih haruslah mempunyai pandangan masa depan dan berjiwa rakyat seperti Stanley Nyitar.

Turut hadir dalam lawatan tersebut ialah Ahli Parlimen Hulu Rajang, Datuk Billy Abit Joo, Ahli Parlimen Kapit, Datuk Alexander Nanta Linggi, YB Senator Doris Sophia Brodie dan Walikota Kapit, En Philimon Nuing.

Anak Jengayan berkata: Nampak gayanya, menang besarlah bekas bos aku ini nanti. Hehe....