Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Singapore under pressure to abolish security law



By Agence France-Presse, Updated: 9/18/2011

Human rights and opposition groups say Singapore needs to keep up with the times and abolish the Internal Security Act (ISA), which allows for detention without trial and is seen by critics as an instrument to stifle dissent.

In a surprise move, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said last week his government would scrap the ISA and ease other laws perceived as curbs on civil liberties, including protest rules and annual newspaper licensing.

But Singapore insists the ISA, which was used against leftists in the past and suspected Islamic extremists in recent years, remains relevant and maintains that media regulations are needed to preserve social cohesion.

The city-state's longest-held ISA detainee was Chia Thye Poh, a former Socialist Party MP who was held for 23 years from 1966 to 1989, followed by nine more years of effective house arrest.

Even now all protests outside a designated free-speech zone -- where speakers must register with authorities in advance -- still require a police permit in Singapore.

The ISA was originally designed to fight communist insurgents in the 1960s in British-ruled Malaya, which included modern-day Malaysia and Singapore.

Singapore became independent in 1965 after being ejected from the Malaysian federation, but both countries retained the ISA.

Najib said that after repealing the ISA, Malaysia will introduce new legislation retaining some preventive detention powers but for shorter periods and subject to more court oversight.

"In a way Najib is taking the cue from civil society groups in his country," said Sinapan Samydorai, director for Southeast Asian affairs at Think Centre, a Singapore-based political and civil rights campaign group.

"If Malaysia is opening up, then I think they are moving ahead. It's also time for Singapore to move ahead," he told AFP.

Singapore defends the ISA. Last week, authorities disclosed three suspected Islamist militants were being held under it after they were repatriated to the city-state.

Two belonged to the Southeast Asia-based Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) terror network and the third is a member of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), an armed group waging an insurgency in the southern Philippines.

In a statement on Friday, Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs said the ISA had been used "sparingly" and was aimed at fighting "threats of subversion, racial and religious extremism... espionage and terrorism," not political dissent.

"No person has ever been detained only for their political beliefs," the ministry said, referring to criticism that the ISA was used in the past to detain government opponents and intimidate the population.

Samydorai said the results of parliamentary elections in May and the presidential poll in August, when the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) recorded its worst-ever showings, showed that Singaporeans, especially the young, want greater political freedom.

"Governments in Asia are realising that young people cannot tolerate non-democratic practices anymore," he said.

In May, the PAP lost an unprecedented six seats in the 87-member parliament and its share of the popular vote fell to 60 percent, its lowest in 52 years in power.

Three months later, the party's de-facto candidate in the four-man contest for the presidency -- the head of state -- won by a razor-thin margin after garnering just 35.2 percent of votes cast.

Government critics have been emboldened by the poll results and independent political websites are starting to buzz with calls for the ISA's abolition.

"Singapore will be making a quantum leap towards improving its human rights record if (the government) decides to imitate Malaysia in abolishing the ISA," wrote Ann Xavier in The Online Citizen.

"A first world country like Singapore should not be keeping third world laws to repress its political opponents."

According to critics, the ISA is not Singapore's only repressive legislation.

The mainstream media is tightly controlled, and opposition figures have on occasion been bankrupted in libel actions brought by senior government officials -- which bars them from being MPs or parliamentary candidates.

Chee Soon Juan, who is secretary general of the opposition Singapore Democratic Party and has been made insolvent for exactly that reason, said "times demand" that the ISA be abolished.

"Repressive laws that instil fear and stifle independent thinking have no place in the modern world," he told AFP.

Reform Party chief Kenneth Jeyaretnam -- whose father and predecessor J.B. Jeyaretnam was also bankrupted in a defamation suit -- said the ISA should be replaced with laws to fight terrorism while safeguarding basic human rights.

Abolishing the ISA and related legislation was "long overdue", he said, calling for "the restoration of our fundamental constitutional rights to freedom of association and expression".

Thursday, September 15, 2011

On The Eve Of Malaysia Day 16 September 2011



Najib disappoints again: Glamour ISA announcements but little real change

Prime Minister Najib Razak's promise to repeal the Internal Security Act 1960 and several other oppressive laws were cautiously greeted by PKR leaders as a victory for the people, including the thousands of activists both local and foreign who fought through the decades for their removal.

However, they slammed Najib for trying to give a false impression to Malaysians that they could look forward to greater democracy, when effectively, there was little real change and a possibility that new laws made to replace the ISA could contain similarly oppressive clauses.

Read more: http://www.malaysia-chronicle.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=19453:najib-disappoints-again-glamour-announcements-but-little-real-change&Itemid=2

Najib announces repeal of ISA, three emergency declarations

Datuk Seri Najib Razak announced tonight the repeal of the Internal Security Act 1960 (ISA) and the three Emergency Declarations when both the Dewan Negara and Dewan Rakyat have their next sitting.

The prime minister said that new laws will be enacted to protect the peace, harmony and security of the country.

He also announced that the government will do away with annual printing and publishing permits with permits that can be cancelled if regulations are flouted.

Najib acknowledged in his address to the nation on the eve of Malaysia Day that the move to increase civil liberties was “risky, but we are doing this for our survival.”

“No individual will ever be detained simply due to political ideology,” he said in his speech that was broadcast live on all local television stations.

The move to scrap the law has been hailed by ex-ISA detainee and DAP secretary-general Lim Guan Eng as “an epochal move.”

Read more: http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/najib-announces-repeal-of-isa-three-emergency-declarations/

K'jaan mansuhkan ISA dan Akta Buang Negeri

"Sehubungan dengan itu lagi, kita tidak akan teragak-agak untuk meminda atau memansuhkan undang-undang yang tidak lagi relevan," tambahnya.

Kajian semula komprehensif itu akan melibatkan Akta Kediaman Terhad 1933 dan Akta Mesin Cetak dan Penerbitan 1984 di mana prinsip pembaharuan tahunan akan dihapuskan dan digantikan dengan pengeluaran lesen sehingga dibatalkan.

Kerajaan juga akan mengkaji semula seksyen 27 Akta Polis 1967 dengan mengambil kira peruntukan Perkara 10 Perlembagaan Persekutuan tentang kebebasan berhimpun dengan prinsip menentang sekeras-kerasnya demonstrasi jalanan.

Baca selanjutnya: http://www.malaysiakini.com/news/175950

ISA abolished, host of changes promised

Najib said the parliamentary motion to lift the Emergency proclamations will be made under Clause 3, Article 150 of the Federal Constitution, and was in line with the people’s aspiration for Malaysia to be more open and its democracy, more dynamic.

“As many are aware, only the emergency proclamation made following the confrontation in 1964 had been implicitly revoked, while the other emergency proclamations are regarded to be in force until today,” he said.

He said, realising that Malaysia had changed over the years and in line with the people’s aspirations based on the universal philosophy on democracy, the government would table in the lower and upper houses of parliament for the three emergency proclamations to be revoked.

Clause 3, Article 150 of the Federal Constitution gives the power to the Yang di-Pertuan Agong to revoke the emergency proclamations and ordinance, or these to be ineffective if decided by parliament.

Read more: http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/2011/09/15/internal-security-act-to-be-abolished/

Najib's Speech Could Open Door to Malaysia Reforms

Still, depending on how far Mr. Najib is prepared to go, Thursday's speech could go some way toward repairing the poisonous atmosphere in the country, and also help Mr. Najib ensure that he can make his own mark on determining the country's future direction.

"This really could be a turning point for Malaysia," Singapore Management University's Ms. Welsh said.

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903927204576571934144265052.html

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Sexual anarchy: The Kinsey legacy

August 24, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Our children are under attack by an insidious and virulent enemy.

On August 17, 2011, more than 50 activists attended a conference for “minor-attracted adults,” i.e., pedophiles, which sought to eliminate the “stigma” attached to pedophilia and to redefine pedophilia as a normal “sexual orientation.” The United States Department of Justice has determined that 64 percent of forcible sodomy victims are boys under the age of 12 and that 58,200 children were kidnapped by non-family members in 1999.

So-called “experts” in the field of human sexuality claim that children are sexual not only from birth, but even in the womb and are willing participants in sexual acts with adults.

Children are encouraged to experiment with sex early and often and to engage in sex with members of the same-sex as well as the opposite sex. Sexually transmitted diseases among teenagers are at epidemic proportions, and new and sometimes fatal strands of diseases are being reported. More than 50,000 teens have contracted HIV which has advanced to full blown AIDS and by 1992 more than 7,000 boys and 1,500 girls have died from HIV/AIDS.

How did we get here? How do we stop the madness before we lose an entire generation?

The question of how we got here can be answered by two words: Alfred Kinsey. Even 55 years after his death, Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey continues to profoundly affect American culture. Two of his most ardent supporters, Dr. Carol Vance, Columbia University anthropologist and lesbian activist, and Dr. John Money, an “out” pedophile advocate and pioneer of transgender surgery at Johns Hopkins, have cogently summed up Dr. Kinsey’s legacy – a legacy they consider sexual “progress” but is in reality sexual anarchy.

Speaking at a 1998 Kinsey symposium of fellow sexologists at San Francisco State University, Dr. Vance said, “Biography is the battleground.”[1] Should Kinsey be discredited, she warned, “200 years of sexual progress can be undone.”

Dr. Vance’s statements echo comments made in 1981 by Dr. Money at the 5th World Congress of Sexology in Israel. They also agreed that the information contained in Table 34, below, and the other data chronicling Kinsey’s and his team’s widespread child abuse, described in detail in Kinsey’s 1948 study on male sexuality, would be the undoing of the “Pre and Post Kinsey eras” globally and in the USA.

In fact, Dr. John Bancroft, director of the Kinsey Institute said at the 1998 conference, which commemorated the 50th anniversary of Kinsey’s studies, that he “prayed” that a British television program, “Secret History: Kinsey Paedophiles,” would never be shown in the United States because the public would not understand the “science” involved in Kinsey’s publication of tables 30-34. He understood that should those tables be widely publicized in the United States, then the whole field of human sexuality and human sex education would be destroyed.

This field of human sexuality and human sex education and 200 years of “sexual progress” that these elite “scientists” were so worried would be destroyed is better described as sexual anarchy. This sexual anarchy that has given these scientists and their followers prestige, money, credibility and control over the deconstruction of the Judeo-Christian civil society was crafted by Dr. Kinsey.

A gall-wasp zoologist at Indiana University from 1920 to his death in 1956, Dr. Kinsey is most famous for his earth-shaking books, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948)[2] and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953),[3] funded by Indiana University and the Rockefeller Foundation. Dr. Kinsey said that his mission was to eliminate the sexually “repressive” legal and behavioral legacy of Judeo Christianity. He claimed that this “repressive” sexual legacy was responsible for socio-sexual ills like divorce, rape, illegitimacy, venereal disease, juvenile delinquency, promiscuity, homosexuality, adultery, and child sexual abuse.

Furthermore, he argued that if we Americans would admit that we really were engaged in widespread licentious conduct, instead of hypocritically denying it, then these socio-sexual ills would be dramatically reduced.

In large measure, Dr. Kinsey’s mission has been accomplished, mostly posthumously, by his legion of true believers–elitists who have systematically brainwashed their fellow intellectual elites to adopt Kinsey’s pan-sexual secular worldview and jettison the Judeo Christian worldview upon which this country was founded and flourished.

The result of Dr. Kinsey’s mission has been totally antithetical to the utopia he predicted. Instead of reducing the socio-sexual ills that he claimed were rampant in pre-Kinsey America, the implementation of the Kinsey worldview has increased extant global sexual trauma while ushering in a host of new ills that are objectively defined as sexual anarchy. Like a cancer spreading throughout the body, sexual anarchy has spread throughout the fabric of society, affecting every aspect of American life and every man, woman and child.

According to the Rockefeller-funded Kinsey “study,” his “science” proved that humans had all along been copulating like insects or monkeys but systematically and hypocritically lying about their conduct. Adults claimed they were virgins, or maritally faithful, but, according to Kinsey, the truth was that most people were promiscuous and the widespread promiscuity had done no harm to the civil society.

Therefore, Kinsey said, all of the laws restraining sexual behavior–the laws that had favored and protected women, children and the family for generations –were simply old-fashioned leftovers from an uninformed and hypocritical era. Such sex laws were no longer valid in a “sexually enlightened and honest era.”

Enter “Kinsey’s pamphleteer,” Hugh Hefner and his Playboy magazine. At Kinsey’s urging, the country’s laws were gutted to resemble the free love, free life style Kinsey alleged Americans were living all along, and could finally live out with a free and open spirit–no more lies or pretense. Thus the 1955 American Law Institute Model Penal Code jettisoned the “common law” sexual standards that were based upon Biblical authority/precedent for “scientific law” based on Kinsey’s allegedly “objective data.”

The ALI recommended laws trivializing rape and allowing fornication, cohabitation, sodomy and adultery. Shortly thereafter, fornication, cohabitation and adultery were decriminalized so that they would become common, normal, and harmless, as Kinsey said they had been all along. In 1957, the United States Department of Defense used Kinsey and his team to conclude that homosexuals do not pose a security risk.

The ALI also recommended changing the definition of obscenity, which the Supreme Court did in 1960. That same year Kinsey’s claim that 10% to 37% of the male population is at least sometimes homosexual was used to promote “gay rights” in elite professions, e.g., medicine, psychiatry, social work, education, etc.

In 1961, Illinois became the first state to legalize heterosexual sodomy. In 1962 Ralph Slovenko wrote in the Vanderbilt Law Review that four or five year olds are provocateurs: “Even at the age of four or five, this seductiveness may be so powerful as to overwhelm the adult into committing the offense.”

That same year, the United States Supreme Court declared prayer in public schools unconstitutional[4] and the following year declared that Bible reading in public schools was unconstitutional.[5] The Judeo-Christian worldview was expunged from the classroom. Schools could no longer teach that fornication, adultery or cohabitation were illegal, nor could the health teachers imply that sex should be confined to marriage because that would reflect a “religious,” thus allegedly a non-scientific, worldview.

The only avenue remaining for the teaching of human reproduction was the “scientific,” i.e., Kinseyan, secular worldview.

By 1968 over 51,000 sex professionals had been trained by the unaccredited IASHS (Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality) to teach Kinseyan sexuality in schools and medical schools and to design school sex education curricula. In 1975, the IASHS began to accredit sex educators in “safe sex” through the Ph.D. level.

Contraception became a necessity in the face of the radical changes in the sexual landscape, and so it was legalized in 1965.[6]

TABLE 34, one of five tables documenting the Kinsey team’s child sexual abuse protocol in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948).

As evidence of lack of “consent” became the only criteria for sex crimes, alleged rape victims were commonly challenged as “liking” the rough sex and as consenting to the sexual activity. Prostitution and rape were increasingly referred to as “victimless crimes” in the courts and in the media.

Thus, the right to have sex for ‘fun’ and profit became the justification for a sex industry, inaugurated by Kinsey’s publicist, Hugh Hefner, that includes child and adult pornography, exhibitionism, prostitution and strip clubs, to name a few. That industry has grown to a multi-billion dollar market, giving its purveyors the resources and clout to negotiate grants to sexology research groups and organizations that create the sex education curricula for the nation’s schools, as well as access to lobbyists and, arguably, to state and federal legislators to continue to change the law to favor the sex industry’s interests.

Playboy, et. al also have funded Planned Parenthood, Sex Information & Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), the Kinsey Institute, and other “sexology” institutions. In 1967, Playboy provided the first of many grants to the ACLU to support drug use, pornography, abortion, homosexuality, school sex [mis]education and the elimination or reduction of sex offender penalties. Beginning in 1970, Playboy officially granted funds to NORML, the National Organization for the Repeal of Marijuana Laws.

The year 1969 brought about significant events related to the systematic effort to normalize homosexuality as championed by Kinsey 21 years earlier. The Gay Liberation Front was formed at the New York Alternative University. The American Sociological Association officially stated that homosexuality is normal, citing Kinsey’s “research.” The National Institutes of Mental Health Task Force on Homosexuality recommended legalizing private consensual homosexual acts (sodomy) citing to Kinsey’s “data.”[7] In 1972, the NIMH Task Force, led by Kinseyan disciples, urged that homosexuality be taught as a normal sexual variation in the nation’s schools.

“No fault” divorce was ushered in by California in 1970. By 1985, no fault divorce was the law in 49 states. This triggered a massive increase in the divorce rate and the impovertization of women and children, increasing the need for welfare and abortion, with the latter legalized in 1973.[8]

The absence of fathers in the home decreased the economic, social, emotional and spiritual home life, which triggered epidemic child sexual abuse, increased promiscuity, increased criminality–including rape and prostitution–increased venereal diseases and sterility in young women. With no father in the home, children were significantly more vulnerable to molestation by older children, which was redefined as “harmless” peer sex play by Kinsey. This “harmless” sex play led to increased rates of venereal disease, promiscuity, homosexual acting out and suicide.

These disorders then opened the door to additional, more virulent forms of mandated sex [mis]education couched as “pride” in one’s sexual “orientation,” anti-bullying, AIDS prevention and more instruction in “safe sex,” including mutual masturbation, oral and anal sodomy and viewing pornography.

By 1981 Dr. Mary Calderone, SIECUS president and past medical director of Planned Parenthood, took Kinsey one step further, asserting that children are sexual in the womb (Kinsey said children were sexual from birth).

Calderone announced that awareness of childhood sexuality was a primary goal of her organization. This set the “scientific” standard for distributing condoms to children nationwide. Therapeutic interventions were instituted to aid the now increasingly traumatized youth. Pharmocological intervention also increased, including mandated Hepatitis B vaccines for infants and HPV vaccines for elementary age children as STD “protections,” both of which were advocated in a 1977 “Child Rights” pedophile manifesto.

Hundreds of pages could be written on these issues and the additional fallout from Kinsey’s successful promiscuity propaganda that plummeted Reagan’s shining City on a Hill into a state of sexual anarchy.

We must focus now on how we stop the madness – not by ignoring the problem or by giving up in despair. God is on our side, just as He was on the side of those who founded this country. God used 56 God-fearing men to stand up to the largest imperial force in the free world and birth this great nation. He can use us to stand up against the current state of sexual anarchy, return this nation to our Judeo-Christian roots and rescue our children from the enemy who seeks to steal, kill and dstroy. As beneficiaries of God’s miraculous creation of these United States we cannot do anything less. Kinsey and his disciples at the Kinsey Institute have had more than 60 years to re-shape American culture. With Dr. Reisman’s decades of research we have the weapons to gain the upper hand, and we must band together to create the Judeo-Christian answer to the Kinsey Institute. We have the backing of the God of the universe. We can and must win this battle.

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Somali mother's desperate fight to save her family


Published by Mail Online on 1 August 2011. By Brian Carroll.


The Kenyan national newspaper, Daily Nation, summed it up in a lead editorial this week calling for ministerial resignations: ‘This tendency to attribute every misfortune to nature will be our downfall. We are not condemned by acts of God, but by gross mismanagement.’


The fleeing citizens of Somalia don’t even have a government to blame. Since 1991, when the first Somali refugees fled civil war and came to Dadaab, those who remained have been doomed to a dystopian nightmare, trapped between murderous militia on one side, and the onslaught of nature on the other.


A Transitional Federal Government (TFG) has been in place since 2006, but it scarcely controls a few neighbourhoods in the capital Mogadishu, a city now classified by the United Nations as the most dangerous on earth.



Somalia is the international community’s greatest failure. Experts report that a UN force of 22,500 soldiers would be required to suppress Al-Shabaab, and keep peace. Because of the United States’ €9 trillion debt and commitments in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, there is no international will to invade Somalia.

Instead the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) needs €700million before December to stop deaths like Osman’s, after seven months of dry, harsh and unforgiving days.




How to donate: The Disasters Emergency Committee is an umbrella organisation for a number of leading British charities.

They include: ActionAid, Age UK, British Red Cross, Cafod, Care International UK, Christian Aid, Concern Worldwide, Islamic Relief, Merlin, Oxfam, Plan UK, Save the Children, Tearfund and World Vision.

To make a donation call 0370 60 60 900 or text ‘CRISIS’ to 70000 to give £5. Alternatively, send a donation to PO Box 999, London, EC3A 3AA , visit www.dec.org.uk. or go to www.rescue-uk.org

Sunday, July 31, 2011

Scorpenes graft: Official Secrets Act must make way for Freedom of Information



Published by Malaysia Chronicle on 31 July 2011. By Maclean Patrick.

The Freedom of Information (FOI) Act is indeed a step in the right way for a government to be transparent and accountable to the people it serves. It allows the people of a nation to have knowledge on the dealings of the government it has installed to look into its welfare.

Yet in Malaysia, the Official Secrets Act (OSA) may go head to head with the proposed FOI Act. The Official Secrets Act (OSA) passed in 1972 states, “any document specified in the schedule and any information and material relating thereto and includes any other official document, information, and material as may be classified as ‘Top Secret’, ‘Confidential’, ‘Secret’, or ‘Restricted’, as the case may be, by a minister, the Menteri Besar or Chief Minister of a state or such public officer appointed under section 2B”.

In 1983, a provision was added to the OSA that makes it an offense to not report anyone seeking official Information. If charged for not reporting foul play, the accused will face an $8600 fine and/or a 5-year prison sentence.

Under the OSA, the government can classify any document as “Secret” and this is a point of contention for the FOI Act. By implementing the FOI Act, the provision that allows this has to be removed and replaced with instead by a list of documents that can be classified secret.

The Schedule to the Act covers "Cabinet documents, records of decisions and deliberations including those of Cabinet committees", as well as similar documents for state executive councils. It also includes "documents concerning national security, defence and international relations"

Over the years the OSA has been used against bloggers, public documents such as toll concessionaires, water rates by a private water utility and a 433-page report of recommendations on how to fix the police force.

It is because the OSA is open to abuse by those in power, that it either has to be abolished or redesigned to allow for greater transparency and with a better classification to what can and cannot be considered state secret. With this the FOI Act can work, allowing the general public access to what and how the government is using public funds and to how the decisions came about.


Read more:

http://www.malaysia-chronicle.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=16811:scorpenes-graft-official-secrets-act-must-make-way-for-freedom-of-information&Itemid=2

Saturday, July 30, 2011

John Stott Has Died




John Stott died 27 July 2011 at 3:15 London time (about 9:15 a.m. CST), according to John Stott Ministries President Benjamin Homan. Homan said that Stott's death came after complications related to old age and that he has been in discomfort for the last several weeks.

"An evangelical is a plain, ordinary Christian," John Stott told Christianity Today in an October 2006 interview. From his conversion at Rugby secondary school in 1938 to his death in 2011 at 90 years old, Stott exemplified how extraordinary plain, ordinary Christianity can be. He was not known as an original thinker, nor did he seek to be. He always turned to the Bible for understanding, and his unforgettable gift was to penetrate and explain the Scriptures. As editor Kenneth Kantzer wrote in CT's pages in 1981, "When I hear him expound a text, invariably I exclaim to myself, 'That's exactly what it means! Why didn't I see it before?'"...

Stott was every inch an evangelical, but a reforming evangelical. He recognized that evangelicalism could and sometimes did sink down into mere piety, whereas the Bible spoke of a robust transformation of the world brought about by God's people engaged in mission. As a London pastor, Stott increasingly recognized the need for evangelicalism to reclaim its heritage of engagement with the social issues of the day.

As he told an interviewer years later, "In the early 1960s, I began to travel in the Third World, and I saw poverty in Latin America, Africa, and Asia as I had not seen it before. It became clear to me that it was utterly impossible to take that old view." The "old view" was that preaching was always a Christian's preeminent task, and that deeds of compassion were strictly secondary. As Stott probed the Scriptures, he came to believe that Jesus' Great Commission commanded Jesus' servants to carry on his entire mission, which included practical concern for life and health.

One of Stott's most significant works—and one that carried him far out of his own expertise—was the book Issues Facing Christians Today (1984), in which he attempted to address crucial concerns of contemporary society such as abortion, industrial relations, and human rights. Earlier he had written Your Mind Matters: The Place of the Mind in the Christian Life (1972). In 1982, he helped to launch the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, which offered classes and lectures on a wide variety of topics relevant to life in modern society.

His greatest impact in the area of social concern came somewhat inadvertently. In 1974, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association convened an International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland. About 2,500 members attended (in addition to 1,300 other participants). About half of the delegates and speakers came from Majority World countries. The gathering's wide representation resembled meetings of the World Council of Churches, but the excited atmosphere of unified mission was unprecedented. Many participants grasped for the first time the global dimensions of the evangelical church. Almost 30 years later, Philip Jenkins would write The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. But as David Jones, president of John Stott Ministries, says, at Lausanne, "Jenkins' book was there in the faces and minds of people. Lausanne showed the global church that we can work together."

Read more here: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/julyweb-only/john-stott-obit.html

Monday, July 25, 2011

CALLING FOR PUBLIC SUBMISSION OF EVIDENCE AND INFORMATION ON ALLEGATIONS OF VIOLATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS PRIOR TO AND DURING BERSIH RALLY




The Human Rights Commission of Malaysia (SUHAKAM) has decided to conduct a Public Inquiry into allegations of violations of human rights, including, the use of excessive force by the authorities prior to and during the public assembly on 9 July 2011. The Panel of Inquiry will be chaired by the Commission’s Vice-Chairman Professor Datuk Dr Khaw Lake Tee and assisted by Commissioners Professor Datuk Dr Mahmood Zuhdi b. Abdul Majid and Mr Detta Samen.

The Commission calls for public submissions of evidence and information following the allegations of amongst others, use of excessive force by the authorities prior to and during the public assembly on 9 July 2011. Members of the public who had witnessed any acts or incidents relating to such allegations, or who believe that they may be able to give relevant information and/or documents and other evidence including video/photo recordings pertaining to these or other such allegations are invited to contact the Commission as soon as possible.

More info may be found here:

http://www.suhakam.org.my/c/document_library/get_file?p_l_id=35723&folderId=441003&name=DLFE-12503.pdf