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Etta James - A First Lady Of Soul And Blues

2012-01-21T00:28:00.000-08:00

WE have just lost Etta James, one of the first ladies of soul. Read all about her from Wikipedia.
Etta James Hawkins (January 25, 1938 – January 20, 2012) was an American singer whose style spanned a variety of music genres including blues, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, soul, gospel and jazz. Starting her career in the mid 1950s, she gained fame with hits such as Dance With Me, Henry, At Last, Tell Mama and I'd Rather Go Blind. She faced a number of personal problems including drug addiction before making a musical resurgence in the late 1980s with the album The Seven Year Itch.
She is regarded as having bridged the gap between rhythm and blues and rock and roll, and is the winner of six Grammys and 17 Blues Music Awards. She was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in 1993, the Blues Hall Of Fame in 2001 and the Grammy Hall Of Fame in 1999 and 2008. Rolling Stone ranked James number 22 on its list of the 100 Greatest Singers Of All Time and number 62 on the list of the 100 Greatest Artistes.
Born in Los Angeles to an African-American mother and a British-American father, James never knew her absentee father's identity. She received professional vocal training at five from James Earle Hines, musical director of the Echoes Of Eden Choir at the St. Paul Baptist Church in Los Angeles. She soon formed a girl group The Creolettes and met musician Johnny Otis who became their mentor. As lead singer she recorded Dance With Me, Henry in 1950. James eventually left the group (which was renamed The Peaches after a name change suggested by Otis). As a solo artiste, James had an R&B hit Good Rockin' Daddy and began a relationship with singer Harvey Fuqua of The Moonglows. One of her childhood friends BB King dedicated the song Sweet Sixteen to her. From the 1960s to 1970s she had major hits as If I Can't Have You, Spoonful, All I Could Do Was Cry and My Dearest Darling. She also sang background vocals on Chuck Berry's Back In The USA. Her debut album At Last was released in 1960 and included the title track, I Just Want To Make Love To You and A Sunday Kind Of Love. In the same year she released the album A Second Time which contained The Fool That I Am and Don't Cry Baby. In 1961 she released the hit single Something's Got A Hold On Me and Stop The Wedding. In 1963 came the hit single Pushover and the album Etta James Rocks The House. In 1967 she released the hit single Tell Mama and I'd Rather Go Blind. In the 1970s came Losers Whispers, I Found Love and Out On The Street Again. In 1989, James released the albums Seven Year Itch and Stickin' To My Guns. She also had a duet with hip-hop singer Def Jef titled Droppin' Rhymes On Drums. In 1992, she released the album The Right Time and in 1993 came the Billie Holiday tribute album Mystery Lady: Songs Of Billie Holiday. The latter album won James her first Grammy for best jazz vocal performance in 1994. In 1995, she released her autobiography A Rage To Survive and recorded the album Time After Time. In 1998 came the album Etta James Christmas. In 2000, she launched the blues album Matriarch Of The Blues. In 2008, Beyonce Knowles played James in the film Cadillac Records. James' final television performance was in 2009 in Dancing With The Stars. She sang At Last. James is survived by her husband Artis Mills whom she married in 1969. They have two sons Donto and Sametto who performed with her in some concerts.

Izwan Pilus - A Rising Star Dead In His Prime

2012-01-20T04:18:00.001-08:00

It is shocking and saddening that Melakan actor, singer and TV personality Izwan Pilus has passed away today of a lung infection at only 34.

A winner of Bintang RTM (Stars Of RTM talent search) and its subsequent host, he was the elder brother of Astro TV personality and Akademi Fantasia 7 (Astro reality talent show) runner-up Aril Pilus.

RIP Izwan. U will be missed.

The King They Won't Celebrate

2012-01-16T21:56:00.000-08:00

The King They Won't Celebrate
(From Socialist Worker Org)
By Brian Jones

In 1967, Martin Luther King published a book called Where Do We Go From Here? that set out a proposal for Phase Two of the Civil Rights movement.

THIS YEAR, the holiday celebrating Dr Martin Luther King Jr's birthday has taken on a special significance. For millions, King's struggle to smash racial barriers finds its highest symbolic fulfillment in the inauguration of the first African American president.
One can hardly set foot on Harlem's main artery of 125th Street without seeing literally hundreds of posters (in windows, or for sale from sidewalk vendors) depicting Obama and King together. No doubt, King's name and King's words will be on the lips of many who cross the inaugural stage.
It's a good thing that King is the object of so much official praise. But we should never forget that this wasn't always the case. Although he was assassinated in 1968, the campaign to acknowledge King's special contribution to this country with a national holiday wasn't won until 1986.
In the last year of his life, King actually became the source of much official derision, particularly after his public denunciation - at the Riverside Church in Harlem in April 1967 - of the war in Vietnam. King, breaking with many of the more timid civil rights leaders, spoke out forcefully against what he called "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government."
Did the liberal Democratic Party establishment leap to King's defense? Did they praise his courage?
Not exactly. Consider the reaction to the speech by then-President Lyndon Johnson, who fumed in the Oval Office: "What is that goddamn Black preacher trying to do to me?"
In 1957, Time magazine had named King its Man Of The Year. After his 1967 speech, it ran an article called Confusing The Cause which chastised King for daring to speak about something other than civil rights. The article called King a drawling bumkin, so ignorant that he had not read a newspaper in years, who had wandered out of his native haunts and away from his natural calling.
Dr King was murdered exactly one year after the speech at Riverside Church. In that last year of his life, he campaigned for radical, social-democratic reforms that are still far beyond what the Democratic Party is prepared to accept.
One of the best biographies of King is Bearing The Cross: Martin Luther King Jr And The Southern Christian Leadership Conference by David Garrow.
Readers of the book will find that King presents a radical analysis of the origin and nature of racism and a perspective for future organising that would, if carried out, shake American capitalism to its core.
BY THE time King sat down to write this book, the civil rights movement had won the major legislation it sought. King recognised that those victories hardly changed the real structure of racism in America, but they did create a mass transformation in consciousness.
To sit at a lunch counter or occupy the front seat of a bus had no effect on our material standard of living, but in removing a caste stigma, it revolutionised our psychology and elevated the spiritual content of our being.
But Phase Two of the movement would have to challenge economic inequality.
Dignity is also corroded by poverty ... No worker can maintain his morale or sustain his spirit if in the market place his capacities are declared to be worthless to society.
Compared to the cost of creating real equality, the civil rights victories were "cheap".
The practical cost of change for the nation up to this point has been cheap. The limited reforms have been obtained at bargain rates. The real cost lies ahead. The stiffening of White resistance is a recognition of that fact.
The discount education given Blacks will in the future have to be purchased at full price if quality education is to be realised. Jobs are harder and costlier to create than voting rolls. The eradication of slums housing millions is complex far beyond integrating buses and lunch counters.
That "resistance" - the White backlash - against the gains of the civil rights movement began before the ink had dried on the chief pieces of civil rights legislation, signed into law by Johnson in 1964 and 1965. Further, Northern liberal politicians who funded King's campaigns to desegregate the South were the very ones presiding over the segregated slums in the North.
When, in the last session of Congress, the issue came home to the North through a call for open housing legislation, White Northern congressmen who had enthusiastically supported the 1964 and 1965 civil rights bills now joined a mighty chorus of anguish and dismay reminiscent of Alabama and Mississippi.
So while King thought that riots were counterproductive, and he disagreed with the popular slogan Black Power, he rejected the logic of blaming the victim and identified racism as the real root of the problem.
The persistence of racism in depth and the dawning awareness that Black demands will necessitate structural changes in society have generated a new phase of White resistance in North and South.
Based on the cruel judgment that Blacks have come far enough, there is a strong mood to bring the civil rights movement to a halt or reduce it to a crawl. Black demands that yesterday evoked admiration and support, today to many have become tiresome, unwarranted and a disturbance to the enjoyment of life. Cries of Black Power and riots are not the causes of White resistance, they are consequences of it.
KING MOVED his family to Chicago and led a campaign there against the manifestations and institutions of Northern racism, but his nonviolent tactics were unable to wrest major concessions from city officials.
A sense of frustration had set into the Black ghetto, evidenced by the urban riots that swept hundreds of American cities from 1965 to 1968. Once, King even spoke before a Black audience and was booed. That night, he tossed and turned, trying to understand what was happening to Black consciousness.
Why would they boo one so close to them? But as I lay awake thinking, I finally came to myself, and I could not for the life of me have less than patience and understanding for those young people.
For 12 years, I, and others like me, had held out radiant promises of progress. I had preached to them about my dream. I had lectured to them about the not-too-distant day when they would have freedom, all, here and now. I had urged them to have faith in America and in White society. Their hopes soared.
They were now booing because they felt that we were unable to deliver on our promises. They were booing because we had urged them to have faith in people who had too often proved to be unfaithful. They were now hostile because they were watching the dream that they had so readily accepted turn into a frustrating nightmare.
King warned that the legacy of racism in America would not be easily or quickly overcome. He recalled the tendency of the country to take "one step forward on the question of racial justice, and then take a step backward," and drew an historical parallel with the freeing of the slaves.
In 1863, the Black was given abstract freedom expressed in luminous rhetoric. But in an agrarian economy, he was given no land to make liberation concrete ... As Frederick Douglass came to say, "Emancipation granted the Black freedom to hunger, freedom to winter amid the rains of heaven. Emancipation was freedom and famine at the same time."
What did this history demonstrate to King?
All of this tells us that the White backlash is nothing new. White America has been backlashing on the fundamental God-given and human rights of Black Americans for more than 300 years.
Interestingly, King stopped short of asserting racism as a universal or permanent feature of American society. He argued, instead, that its origins lay in the economics of the African slave trade. Racism was the result, not the cause of slavery.
It is important to understand that the basis for the birth, growth and development of slavery in America was primarily economic. It seems to be a fact of life that human beings cannot continue to do wrong without eventually reaching out for some rationalisation to clothe their acts in the garments of righteousness. And so, with the growth of slavery, men had to convince themselves that a system which was so economically profitable, was morally justifiable. The attempt to give a moral sanction to a profitable system gave birth to the doctrine of White supremacy.
It follows from this understanding of the social roots of racism that, just as it was made, racism can be unmade. Furthermore, the logic of the struggle for economic equality, King argued, naturally leads to the question of multiracial struggle.
Racism is a tenacious evil, but it is not immutable. Millions of underprivileged Whites are in the process of considering the contradiction between segregation and economic progress. White supremacy can feed their egos but not their stomachs.
King worried that the slogan "Black Power" cut Blacks off from their potential allies.
In the final analysis, the weakness of Black Power is its failure to see that the Black man needs the White man, and the White man needs the Black man. However much we may try to romanticise the slogan, there is no separate Black path to power and fulfillment that does not intersect White paths, and there is no separate White path to power and fulfillment, short of social disaster, that does not share that power with Black aspirations for freedom and human dignity. We are bound together in a single garment of destiny.
Racism actually retarded the organisation of poor Whites to challenge their own poverty.
There are, in fact, more poor White Americans than there are Blacks. Their need for a war on poverty is no less desperate than the Black's. In the South, they have been deluded by race prejudice and largely remained aloof from common action. Ironically, with this posture, they were fighting not only the Black, but themselves.
Did this mean forgetting about racism and "moving on" to a purely economic movement? No, quite the opposite.
It is, however, important to understand that giving a man his due may often mean giving him special treatment. I am aware of the fact that this has been a troublesome concept for many liberals, since it conflicts with their traditional ideal of equal opportunity and equal treatment of people according to their individual merits.
A society that has done something special against the Blacks for hundreds of years must now do something special for him, in order to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis.
That "something special," King argued, would be a massive reparations program, an Economic Bill Of Rights.
However much we pool our resources and "buy Black," this cannot create the multiplicity of new jobs and provide the number of low-cost houses that will lift the Black out of the economic depression caused by centuries of deprivation. Neither can our resources supply quality integrated education. All of this requires billions of dollars which only an alliance of liberal-labour-civil-rights forces can stimulate.
In short, the Blacks' problem cannot be solved unless the whole of American society takes a new turn toward greater economic justice.
WE SHOULD never forget that King died trying to build a movement to get those billions. He was assassinated in Memphis, where he had come to support sanitation workers on strike for union recognition, the very kind of struggle he felt was central to Phase Two.
America has elected an African American president, something that would have been impossible only a generation ago. But King's words remind us of a further "turn" that America has yet to take. A new generation will have to take up this challenge.
In the final pages of Where Do We Go from Here? King calls on a bit of Biblical poetry to urge his readers to build the kind of determined movement that could make their dreams a reality.
Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism and militarism. With this powerful commitment, we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain. Amen.

Kim Jong-Il - Ruthless President Of North Korea

2011-12-18T21:36:00.001-08:00

Two generations of Field Marshall Kims have ruled North Korea, a brutal Stalinist dictatorship. The second generation President, Field Marshall Kim Jong-Il, passed away on December 17, 2011. Read all about him here.

The Kims made North Korea, their personal fiefdom, an isolated autocracy and to the US, an international pariah.

While South Korea is the toast of town and a beacon of democracy in US eyes, it is also a military dictatorship under the CIA, where socialists can be bumped off any time.

Read all about Kim the Monster here. From Wikipedia.

Kim Jong-Il (February 16, 1941 - December 17, 2011) was the President of North Korea from July 8, 1994 until his death on December 17, 2011.

He was the eldest son of Field Marshall Kim Il-Sung aka Kim Sung-Ju, the founder and first President of North Korea. He was born in Vyatskoye, Khabarovsk, Russia.

He received his early education in China.

He also studied English in Malta.

In 1991, after rising the ranks in the North Korean Communist Party and government over the decades, Kim became defence minister of North Korea and head of the North Korean Armed Forces.

Kim is survived by a wife and four children.

Vaclav Havel - Restorer Of Czechoslovakian Democracy

2011-12-18T21:22:00.001-08:00

The first post-Communist President of Czechoslovakia (and the Czech Republic after the break up of 1993) Vaclav Havel passed away on December 18, 2011.

He will always be remembered as a great humanitarian who fought a brave war against single-party dictatorship and restored democracy to his country.

However, he has also been criticised for being slavishly pro-US and Western Europe and for deeming the Cold War as one of Evil Communism versus Godly US And Western European Democracy.

Read all about him here, from Wikipedia.

Vaclav Havel (October 5, 1936 - December 18, 2011) was a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician.

He was the 10th and last President of Czechoslovakia (1989–92) and the first President of the Czech Republic (1993–2003).

He wrote over 20 plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally.

Havel received the US Presidential Medal Of Freedom, the Philadelphia Liberty Medal, the Order Of Canada, the Freedom Medal of the Four Freedoms Award and the Ambassador Of Conscience Award.

He was also voted 4th in Prospect magazine's 2005 global poll of the world's top 100 intellectuals.

He was a founding signatory of the Prague Declaration On European Conscience And Communism.

At the time of his death he was Chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation.

Beginning in the 1960s, his work turned to focus on the politics of Czechoslovakia.

After the Prague Spring, he became increasingly active.

In 1977, his involvement with the human rights manifesto Charter 77 brought him international fame as the leader of the opposition in Czechoslovakia.

It also led to his imprisonment.

The 1989 Velvet Revolution launched Havel into the presidency.

In this role, he led Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic to multi-party democracy.

His 13 years in office saw radical change in his nation, including its split with Slovakia, which Havel opposed, its accession into NATO and start of negotiations for membership in the European Union, which was attained in 2004.

Havel was born in Prague. He grew up in a well-known and wealthy entrepreneurial and intellectual family, which was closely linked to the cultural and political events in Czechoslovakia from the 1920s to the 1940s.

His father, Vaclav Maria Havel, was the owner of the suburb Barrandov which was located on the highest point of Prague and of Barrandov film studios.

Havel's mother, Bozena Vavreckova came from a well known family. Her father was an ambassador and well-known journalist.

Because of Havel's bourgeois history, the Communist regime did not allow Havel to study formally after he had completed his required schooling in 1951.

In the first part of the 1950s, the young Havel entered into a four-year apprenticeship as a chemical laboratory assistant and simultaneously took evening classes.

He completed his secondary education in 1954.

For political reasons, he was not accepted into any post-secondary school with a humanities programme.

Therefore, he opted to study at the Faculty Of Economics of Czech Technical University in Prague but dropped out after two years.

In 1964, Havel married proletarian Olga Splichalova, much to the displeasure of his mother.

The intellectual tradition of his family compelled Havel to pursue the humanitarian values of Czech culture.

After military service (1957–59), he worked as a stagehand in Prague and studied drama by correspondence at the Academy Of Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU).

His first publicly performed full-length play, besides various vaudeville collaborations, was The Garden Party (1963).

It won him international acclaim.

It was soon followed by The Memorandum, one of his best known plays and the The Increased Difficulty Of Concentration, all at the Balustrade.

In 1968, The Memorandum was also brought to The Public Theatre in New York, which helped establish his reputation in the United States.

The Public continued to produce his plays over the next few years, although after 1968 his plays were banned in his own country.

Havel was unable to leave Czechoslovakia to see any foreign performances.

During the first week of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, Havel provided a commentary on the events on Radio Free Czechoslovakia in Liberec.

Following the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 he was banned from the theatre and became more politically active.

He was forced to take a job in a brewery, an experience he wrote about in his play Audience.

This play, along with two other Vanek plays (so-called because of the recurring character Ferdinand Vanek, a stand in for Havel), became distributed in samizdat form across Czechoslovakia.

Christopher Hitchens - Rightward Turning British Author

2011-12-18T21:03:00.000-08:00

Respected British author Christopher Hitchens passed away on December 15, 2011 after a long battle with cancer. He will always be remembered as a columnist, literary critic and talk show participant, but alas, his final years were marked by a rightward political shift to slavish pro-US war mongering. He will be missed.

Read all about him here, from Wikipedia.

Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April, 1949 – 15 December, 2011) was a British author and journalist whose career spanned more than four decades.

He was a columnist and literary critic for The Atlantic, Free Inquiry, The Nation, Salon, Slate, Vanity Fair and World Affairs and became a media fellow at the Hoover Institution in 2008.

He was a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits and in 2005 was voted the world's fifth top public intellectual in a Prospect/Foreign Policy poll.

Hitchens was known for his admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson and for his excoriating critiques of Mother Teresa, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Henry Kissinger among others.

His confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure.

As a political observer, polemicist and self-defined radical, he rose to prominence as a fixture of the left-wing publications in his native Britain and the United States.

His departure from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left following Ayatollah Khomeini's issue of a fatwa calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie.

The 11 September, 2001 attacks strengthened his embrace of an interventionist foreign policy and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face" which extended to criticism of the religion itself.

His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a conservative.

Hitchens described himself as an atheist and a believer in the philosophical values of the Enlightenment.

According to Hitchens, the concept of a god or a supreme being is a totalitarian belief that destroys individual freedom and that free expression and scientific discovery should replace religion as a means of teaching ethics and defining human civilisation.

He wrote at length on atheism and the nature of religion in his 2007 book God Is Not Great.

Asteroid 57901 is named after him. His memoir, Hitch-22, was published in 2010.

His mother, Yvonne Jean Hickman and father, Eric Ernest Hitchens (1909–1987) met in Scotland while both were serving in the Royal Navy during World War II.

In the 1960s Hitchens (who was a self-confessed bisexual) joined the political left, drawn by his anger over the Vietnam War, nuclear weapons, racism and "oligarchy", including that of "the unaccountable corporation".

He joined the Labour Party in 1965, as a Trotskyist.

Hitchens began working as a correspondent for the magazine International Socialism, published by the International Socialists, the forerunners of today's British Socialist Workers Party.

In the 1970s, he went on to work for the New Statesman, where he became friends with, among others, the authors Martin Amis and Ian McEwan.

In November 1973, Hitchens' mother committed suicide in Athens.

After moving to the United States in 1981, Hitchens wrote for The Nation where he penned vociferous critiques of Ronald Reagan, George H W Bush and American foreign policy in South and Central America.

He became a Contributing Editor of Vanity Fair in 1992.

Hitchens spent part of his early career in journalism as a foreign correspondent in Cyprus. There he met his first wife Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot, with whom he had two children, Alexander and Sophia.

Despite going rightwards, Hitchens continued to regard both Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky as great men and the October Revolution as a necessary event in the modernisation of Russia.

In 2005, Hitchens praised Lenin's creation of "secular Russia" and his discrediting of the Russian Orthodox Church, describing it as "an absolute warren of backwardness and evil and superstition".

He also opposed the torture of suspected terrorists in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

And he described Sarah Palin as a useless bimbo.

Besides not recognising Israel.

He infamously described Judaism, Christianity and Islam as 'the real axis of evil' and received death threats.

Farewell Socrates And Dev Anand.

2011-12-11T02:40:00.000-08:00

Read all about the late, great Socrates and Dev Anand. From Wikipedia.

SOCRATES.
Socrates Brasileiro Sampaio De Souza Vieira De Oliveira (19 February, 1954 – 4 December, 2011) was a Brazilian footballer.
He was also a qualified doctor, and was the elder brother of Rai De Oliveira, who was a member of Brazil's World Cup winning squad in 1994.
He played for Botafogo-SP, before joining Corinthians in 1978.
He spent six years with the club, scoring 172 goals in 297 league games.
He then moved to Italy to play for Fiorentina, before returning to Brazil to end his career with Flamengo and Santos.
He is best remembered outside of his homeland for the 60 caps he won playing internationally for Brazil.
He captained his country at the 1982 FIFA World Cup and also appeared at the 1986 World Cup, the 1979 Copa America and the 1983 Copa America – appearing in the defeat to Uruguay in the 1983 finals.
He was named South American Footballer of the Year in 1983 and was named on Pele's FIFA 100 list in 2004.
Socrates was a technical playmaker, known for great through passes and his vision on the field, as well as his physical strength.
He was also a two-footed player and a prolific goal scorer.
His ability to read the game was highly valued and his signature move was the blind heel pass.
He is considered one of the greatest midfielders ever.
Easily recognisable for his beard and headband, he became the "symbol of cool for a whole generation of football supporters".
Socrates was born in Belem Do Para.
During his time at Corinthians he co-founded the Corinthians Democracy Movement, in opposition to the then military government.
Socrates and his team mates protested against the regime's treatment of footballers and showed support to the wider movement for democratisation by wearing shirts with "Democracia" written on them during games.
Socrates has stated that his childhood heroes were Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and John Lennon.
Married with six children, he was a columnist for a number of newspapers and magazines, writing not only about sports, but also politics and economics.
He frequently appeared on Brazilian TV programmes as a football pundit.
At the time of his death from heart failure, Socrates was writing a fiction book about the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.
He was noted for being an intellectual, a heavy drinker and smoker and for his height (193cm).

DEV ANAND.
Dharam Dev Pishorimal Anand (26 September, 1923 – 3 December, 2011), better known as Dev Anand, was an Indian film actor, writer, director and producer known for his work in Hindi cinema.
The Government of India honoured him with the Padma Bhushan in 2001 and the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 2002 for his contribution to Indian cinema.
His career spanned more than 65 years and he acted in 114 Hindi films of which 110 had him play the lead actor.
A Punjabi from Gurdaspur, he was the third of four sons of a lawyer.
After graduating in English Literature from the Government College, Lahore (then in British India, currently in Pakistan), Anand left his hometown for Bombay in the early 1940s.
He began his career in the military censor's office at Churchgate.
He joined his elder brother, Chetan, as a member of the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA).
Anand was soon offered the lead role in Prabhat Films' Hum Ek Hain (1946), a film about Hindu-Muslim unity.
While shooting the film in Pune, Anand befriended the actor Guru Dutt.
They agreed that if one of them was to become successful in the film industry, they would help the other to be successful.
They formed a mutual understanding that when Anand produced a film, Dutt would direct it and when Dutt directed a film, Anand would act in it.
In the late 1940s, Anand was offered a few roles as the male lead opposite singer-actress Suraiya in woman-oriented films.
While shooting these films, he became romantically involved with Suraiya.
The two of them were paired in seven films together: Vidya (1948), Jeet (1949), Shair (1949), Afsar (1950), Nili (1950), Do Sitare (1951) and Sanam (1951), all of which were successful at the box office.
On the set of the film Jeet, Anand proposed to Suraiya.
Her maternal grandmother opposed the relationship as they were Muslim and Anand was Hindu, and so, Suraiya remained unmarried.
Anand was offered his first big break by Ashok Kumar.
He spotted Anand hanging around in the studios and picked him as the hero for the Bombay Talkies production, Ziddi (1948), co-starring Kamini Kaushal, which became an instant success.
After Ziddi's success, Anand decided that he would start producing films.
It was in Ziddi that the first Kishore Lata duet - Ye Kaun Aaya Karke Yeh Sola Singhar was recorded.
This duet was instant hit and from here on the playback singer’s association with Dev Anand began and continued for four decades.
His association with Kishore Kumar started when the former sang the first solo of his playback singing career – Marne Ki Duayen – in Ziddi.
In 1949, he launched his own company Navketan (renewal), which, by 2011, had produced 35 films.
Dev chose Guru Dutt as director for the crime thriller, Baazi (1951).
The film starring Dev Anand, Geeta Bali and Kalpana Kartik was a trendsetter and saw the debut of Kalpana Kartik (aka Mona Singh) as the lead female actress.
After this, Dev Anand and Kalpana Kartik were offered many films to star in together.
They signed all of their film offers and subsequently the movies Aandhiyan, Taxi Driver, House No. 44 and Nau Do Gyarah became big hits.
During the making of Taxi Driver, the couple fell in love and Dev proposed marriage to Kalpana.
The couple had a son, Suneil Anand in 1956 and a daughter, Devina.
In the 1960s, Dev Anand acquired a romantic image with films like Manzil and Tere Ghar Ke Samne with Nutan, Kinaare Kinaare with Meena Kumari, Maya with Mala Sinha, Asli-Naqli with Sadhana Shivdasani, Jab Pyar Kisise Hota Hai and Mahal with Asha Parekh and Teen Deviyaan opposite Kalpana, Simi Garewal and Nanda.
In the film Teen Deviyaan, Dev Anand played a playboy.
His first colour film, Guide with Waheeda Rehman was based on the novel of the same name by R K Narayan.
Johny Mera Naam (1970), a thriller, saw Dev paired with Hema Malini.
His directorial debut, the espionage drama Prem Pujari, was a flop but has developed a cult following over the years.
He tasted success with his 1971 directorial effort, Hare Rama Hare Krishna which talked about the prevalent hippie culture.
His find Zeenat Aman, who played the mini-skirt sporting, pot-smoking Janice, became an overnight sensation.
Dev also became known as a filmmaker of trenchantly topical themes.
The same year, he starred with Mumtaz in Tere Mere Sapne, an adaptation of A J Cronin's novel, The Citadel.
The film was directed by Dev's brother, Vijay and was also successful.
Dev Anand was politically active in the 1970s.
He led a group of film personalities who stood up against the Emergency imposed by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
He actively campaigned against her with his supporters in the Indian parliamentary election in 1977.
He was compared to India's Gregory Peck, a comparison that he greatly resented.
Nevertheless, he became good friends with the real Peck.
Dev Anand is credited with giving actors like Jackie Shroff in Swami Dada, Tabu in Hum Naujawan and Richa Sharma (Sanjay Dutt’s first wife) a break into the film industry.
He discovered Zeenat Amaan, Tina Munim and encouraged music composer Rajesh Roshan.
Amit Khanna started his career with Navketan as executive producer in 1971 and was the secretary to Dev Anand in the 1970s.

Bye Ricky And Joe! You Will Be Missed!

2011-11-09T02:23:00.000-08:00

Boxing and Hong Kong entertainment lost two major icons this week - Joe Frazier and Ricky Hui.

Read all about them here. From Wikipedia.

JOE FRAZIER
Joseph William Frazier, (January 12, 1944 - November 7, 2011) was a former Olympic and Undisputed World Heavyweight boxing champion, whose professional career lasted from 1965 to 1976, with a brief comeback in 1981.

Frazier emerged as the top contender in the late 1960s, defeating the likes of Jerry Quarry, Oscar Bonavena, Buster Mathis, Eddie Machen, Doug Jones, George Chuvalo and Jimmy Ellis en route to becoming undisputed heavyweight champion in 1970, and followed up by defeating Muhammad Ali on points in the highly-anticipated Fight of the Century in 1971.

Two years later Frazier lost his title when he was knocked out by George Foreman. He fought on, beating Joe Bugner, losing a rematch to Ali, and beating Quarry and Ellis again.

Frazier's last world title challenge came in 1975, but he was beaten by Ali in their brutal rubbermatch. He retired in 1976 following a second loss to Foreman. He made a comeback in 1981, fighting just once, before retiring for good.

The International Boxing Research Organisation (IBRO) rates Frazier among the ten greatest heavyweights of all time. He is an inductee of both the International Boxing Hall of Fame and the World Boxing Hall of Fame.

After retiring Frazier made cameo appearances in several Hollywood movies, and two episodes of The Simpsons.

His son Marvis became a boxer - trained by Frazier himself - although was unable to emulate his father's success.

Frazier continued to train fighters in his gym in Philadelphia. His later years saw the continuation of his bitter rivalry with Ali, in which the two periodically exchange insults, interspersed with brief reconciliations.

Frazier died of cancer on November 7, 2011.

He hailed from Beaufort in South Carolina.

RICKY HUI
Ricky Hui Koon Ying (August 3, 1946 - November 8, 2011), who died of a heart ailment last Tuesday, will always be remembered as a gifted comedian from Hong Kong.

He was one third of the iconic Hui Brothers who also included comedian, producer and director Michael and singer, composer, lyricist and producer Samuel Hui.

Ricky was born in Guangdong and migrated to Hong Kong in 1950. His father was a violinist. In 1972, he joined Shaw Brothers productions as an actor and his early films included The Lizard, The Sugar Daddies and Hong Kong 73.

He later appeared with his brothers in The Private Eyes (1976). Other notable films he starred in were Games People Play (1979), The Contract (1978) [with his brothers], From Riches To Rags (1979) [directed by John Woo], Chicken And Duck Talk (1988) [with his brothers] and The Magic Touch (1992).

Ricky was also a talented singer who released 7 albums.

About Bosnia Herzegovina (Wikipedia)

2011-10-29T05:51:00.001-07:00

Bosnia Herzegovina is a country in Southern Europe, on the Balkan Peninsula. Bordered by Croatia to the north, west and south, Serbia to the east and Montenegro to the southeast, Bosnia Herzegovina is almost landlocked, except for the 26 kilometres of coastline on the Adriatic Sea surrounding the town of Neum. The central and southern part of the country is mountainous, in the northwest it is moderately hilly and the northeast is predominantly flat. The inland has a moderate continental climate, bookended by hot summers and cold, snowy winters. The southern tip of the country has a Mediterranean climate.
Bosniaks are the largest ethnic group, with Serbs second and Croats third. The Muslim Bosniaks are the indigenous people.
Formerly one of the six federal units constituting Yugoslavia, Bosnia Herzegovina gained independence in 1992.
Bosnia Herzegovina is a republic, with a three-member Presidency composed of a member of each major ethnic group.
The country comprises two autonomous entities - the Bosniak-Croat Republic and the Serb Republic.
The Bosniaks, also called Herzegovinians, were originally Eastern Orthodox Christians, but became Muslim during Ottoman Rule. Like their neighbours the Croats, Serbs, Montenegrins, Slovenians, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Albanians, Czechs, Slovaks and Hungarians, they are of Thracian (Lithuanian) descent.
Bosnia was alternately conquered by Croatia and Serbia during its early years, and became independent of its neighbours in the 12th century under King Boric.
During Turkish Ottoman (Azeri) rule in the 15th century, Bosniaks played an important role in running the Ottoman bureucracy throughout the Turkish empire.
In 1878, Austria conquered Bosnia Herzegovina.
On June 28, 1914, a Serb from Bosnia, Gavrilo Princip, killed the Austrian Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo. This was the event that led to World War 1.
After the war, Bosnia Herzegovina joined Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Slovenia and Croatia as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia under the rule of the Serb Kings.
Adolf Hitler's Germany occupied Bosnia Herzegovina during World War 2 and butchered many Bosniaks. Bosniaks fought in the Communist resistance led by Josip Tito Broz of Croatia.
After World War 2, Bosnia Herzegovina and the rest of Yugoslavia came under the control of the Communists, with Tito as the first Yugoslav President.
In the late 1980s, Serbian fascism began to permeate the Serbian chapter of the Yugoslav Communist Party. These fascists were led by Tito's arch enemy Slobodan Milosevic who was supported by the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States.
After the fall of the Warsaw Pact in 1989, Yugoslavia ditched Communist Party rule and the Communists became known as the Socialists.
Milosevic and his fascist followers had by now seized control of the Socialist Party of Yugoslavia. The country had become Greater Serbia in effect.
Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia Herzegovina and Macedonia all voted to secede from Yugoslavia. Only Serbia and Montenegro (which was ruled by Milosevic's allies) remained in Yugoslavia.
Milosevic, who had become President of Serbia And Montenegro (as the rump Yugoslavia was soon renamed) invaded the separatist former republics. Bosnia Herzegovina was hardest hit and saw a horrifying genocidal campaign against Bosniaks and Croats.
Malaysia became the first Muslim country to speak out strongly against Serbia's genocidal invasion of its former Yugoslav republics.
The first Malaysian statesmen who highlighted the horrors of Milosevic's barbaric rule was Kelantan Chief Minister Nik Aziz Nik Mat and Opposition Leader Lim Kit Siang.
The then Malaysian Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad and Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim followed, with a declaration of jihad against Serbia.
In 1995, the United States Air Force bombed Serbia, bringing its aggression to an end. Milosevic was forced to sign the Dayton Agreement which recognised the sovereignty of all ex-Yugoslav republics apart from Serbia And Montenegro.
Milosevic was subsequently ousted from power by moderate elements in his party. They had him arrested and brought to trial in The Hague for crimes against humanity, but he was poisoned to death by the CIA before he could stand trial.
Muslims comprise 47 percent of Bosnians, followed by Christians (36 percent Eastern Orthodox, mainly Serbs and 18 percent Roman Catholic, mainly Croats).
Tourism is the main revenue earner for Bosnia Herzegovina.
Bosnia Herzegovina hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics. The country's top sports are boxing, football, chess and winter sports.
Bosnian cuisine is mildly spicy. Typical ingredients include tomatoes, potatoes, onions, garlic, peppers, cucumbers, carrots, cabbage, mushrooms, spinach, zucchini, beans, plums, milk, paprika and cream. The country is also famous for its coffee.

Chop Em To Meat - Arab Despots, Israel And US Imperialism

2011-10-20T21:55:00.000-07:00

We must celebrate. Muammar the monster is dead.
We must wish that Saleh and Assad join him as mincemeat.
And that Mubarak and Ben Ali meet a similar fate.
At the hands of the laws they made.

But we should not hail America and Israel.
And join in the good old cowboy chorus.
That God bless America land of the free.
In its mission to uphold life, liberty.
And the pursuit of happiness the world over.

America and Israel ruling the world.
Is unavoidable but evil and undesirable.
The only way to end Pax Americana.
And Pax Israelica is.
To make both America and Israel socialist.
Soaked in Marx's red wine.
And the Occupy Wall Street.
Is making that happen slowly but surely.
Not taking power.
But tearing down capitalist power.
He who conquers America and Israel.
Conquers the world.

Muammar Is Mincemeat, Libya Is Liberated, America Will Screw Libya's Oil

2011-10-20T06:35:00.000-07:00

Muammar the Monster, aka Libya's long-serving despotic president Muammar Gaddafi, is finally mincemeat, literally. Killed by his former henchmen who organised a mass-based revolt early this year.

Libya is liberated from his tyranny, as Iraq was from another notorious monster, Saddam Hussein's tyranny almost a decade ago.

And America, the so-called champion of democracy, is getting ready to steal Libya's oil and ram pro-Israel policies down the throats of all Libyans.

Beware of America, Libyans.

Follow socialism of Karl Marx.

Sultan Abdul Halim Shah Becomes King A Second Time

2011-10-14T05:54:00.001-07:00

Congrats to Sultan Abdul Halim Shah of Kedah.

He becomes King of Malaysia for a second time on Dec 12, 2011.

He will serve for five years.

He is 84, the oldest person to be King.

He will complete his term at 89.

Congrats too to Sultan Muhammad Faris Petra 5 of Kelantan, the new Deputy King of Malaysia.

Daulat Tuanku.

Farewell Mr Jobs. You Will Go Down In History As A Modern Day Al-Ghazali.

2011-10-05T20:05:00.000-07:00

RIP Steve Jobs. You will go down in history as a modern day Al-Ghazali, Rumi, Ibnu Sina, Ibnu Rushd, Ibnu Khaldun, Ibnu Haytham and Al-Razi.

Dedicated To Al-Shahid Noramfaizul Mohamad Noor

2011-09-04T21:11:00.000-07:00

And to all fallen heroes of Malaysia.

Perajurit Tanah Air (National Heroes)

Inilah Barisan Kita
Yang Ikhlas Berjuang
Siap Sedia Berkorban
Untuk Ibu Pertiwi
Sebelum Kita Berjaya
Jangan Harap Kami Pulang
Inilah Sumpah Pendekar Kita
Menuju Medan Bakti
Andai Kata Kami Gugur Semua
Taburlah Bunga Di Atas Pusara
Kami Mohon Doa
Malaysia Berjaya
Semboyan Telah Berbunyi
Menuju Medan Bakti

(This Is Our Army
That Fights With Honesty
Ready To Fall
For The Motherland
Before We Win
Don't Hope We Be Home
It's Our Master's Oath
That We Give Our All
Lest We All Fall
Sprinkle Flowers On Our Graves
All Of Us Pray
That Malaysia Wins
The Siren Has Sounded
We Give Our All)

Noramfaizul Mohamad Noor - Martyr In The Cause Of God

2011-09-03T21:31:00.000-07:00

This is a sad, sad day for journalism, Malaysia and the world.

Our brave, handsome, dedicated journalist and exemplary husband, father and friend, Noramfaizul Mohamad Noor of Serdang, Subang Jaya, Selangor, has died at the hands of pirates and terrorists in lawless Somalia at the age of 40.

He leaves behind 2 kids and a beautiful, grieving wife Azrina Jaafar, my ex-colleague.

Faizul was a star journalist and lensman of the Malaysian National News Agency (Bernama).

The award-winning journalist was marking his second assignment in Somalia (his first being Black Hawk Down) when he died yesterday.

He was shot on the shoulder blade, dying a similar death as Mahsuri the maiden of Langkawi who was impaled by the shoulder blade.

He was the first Malaysian journalist to die in the line of duty in the last 20 years.

He was the media team leader covering a humanitarian relief mission of the Malaysian Government and the ruling National Front coalition.

The PM has described him as a national hero and a great son of Malaysia gone too soon.

I describe him as Al-Shahid, a man who died in the cause of Islam.

All men and women who give their lives in line of duty for the betterment of humanity are Al-Shahid.

RIP and Al-Fatihah.

To dearest Azrina, my ex-colleague, my prayers, love and hugs. Be strong, dear. We are all with you and family in your moment of grief.

And to Putrajaya, please make sure all security measures are taken to protect journalists such as working with international humanitarian relief agencies.

Azizi Abdullah - Prolific Novelist

2011-08-22T03:49:00.001-07:00

Thanks, New Straits Times.

Novelist Azizi Abdullah, who passed away of a long illness at 69 on August 11, 2011, will always be remembered as a prolific writer of the Malay language.

The author from Kulim, Kedah is best remembered for penning the Malay novel Seorang Tua Di Kaki Gunung (The Old Man By The Hill) which was a brutally honest critique of the rural-urban divide in the country. The novel was also made into a mini series starring veteran actor Tamam Idris in the 1980s. It was also made into a Form Five text 20 years ago.

Tengku Ismail Tengku Su - The Duke Of Songket

2011-08-22T03:48:00.000-07:00

Thanks, New Straits Times.

Tengku Ismail Tengku Su, who died at 60 recently after a long illness, will always be remembered as Malaysia's Duke of Songket.
The Terengganu prince, more than anyone else, spent his lifetime promoting the traditional Malay embroidery, Songket, around the world.
He famously designed Songket garments for VIPs including Kings, Sultans, Governors and Prime Ministers.

About Klang.

2011-08-21T04:32:00.001-07:00

From Wikipedia.

Klang is the royal town and former capital of Selangor.
It is the namesake of the Klang Valley (the metropolitan area of Kuala Lumpur) and the Klang River which separates Klang town into north and south sections.
Klang is also the main port of Malaysia.
Klang borders Shah Alam to the east, Kuala Selangor to the north, the Straits of Melaka to the west and Banting (Kuala Langat) to the south.
Klang was one of Malaysia's earliest tin mining regions.
In 1880 it was replaced as capital of Selangor by Kuala Lumpur.
Klang is believed to be named for a Senoi (Mon-Melanesian Aboriginal Malaysian) pronunciation of Gangga.
The town was named Gangga by the early kings of Selangor, in reference to Ganges River in India.
Selangor was once known as the kingdom of Gangga Negara. Gangga Negara later shifted to Perak.
Klang is home to several museums and the famous fishing island Pulau Ketam.
Its famous cusine includes Bak Kut Teh (pork ribs soup) and Chee Cheong Fun (fettucini-like noodles coated in mushroom sauce and sprinkled with fried shallots) and Cendol (green rice noodles soaked in a coconut milk and brown sugar soup).
Famous personalities from Klang include former Cabinet Ministers Datuk Seri Harun Idris and Tengku Adnan Mansor, singers Ahmad Jais, Azri Abdullah, Ellyana Emrizal and Guy Sebastian, actors Norlia Ghani, Hamid Gurkha, Rusdi Ramli and Eja, entertainment journalist Joe Lee and businessman Datuk Jason Goh.

Shammi Kapoor - Bollywood Idol.

2011-08-17T02:53:00.000-07:00

From Wikipedia.

Shammi Kapoor, who passed away on Aug 14, 2011 will always be remembered as one of the screen gods of Bollywood.

The Punjabi actor and director was an icon of Hindi language cinema from the 1950s to the 1970s.

Born in Mumbai on Oct 21, 1931, he debuted in Bollywood in 1953 with the film Jeevan Jyoti, and went on to deliver hits like Tumsa Nahin Dekha, Dil Deke Dekho, Junglee, Dil Tera Diwana, Professor, China Town, Rajkumar, Kashmir Ki Kali, Janwar, Teesri Manzil, An Evening In Paris, Bramhachari, Andaz and Vidhaata.

He received the Filmfare Best Actor Award in 1968 for his performance in Brahmachari and Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actor for Vidhaata in 1982.

Shammi was the second of the three sons born to Prithviraj Kapoor (the other two being Raj Kapoor and Shashi Kapoor), both successful Bollywood actors.

Though born in Mumbai, he spent a major portion of his childhood in Kolkata, where his father was involved with New Theatres Studios, acting in films.

Shammi was married twice.

His first wife was Geeta Bali (a Punjabi actress) whom he wed in 1955. They had two children. She died in 1965 of smallpox.

In 1969, he wed Neela Devi of Gujarat.

Shammi was also a businessman and the founder of the Internet Users Community Of India.

Bubba Smith - Footballer Turned Actor

2011-08-03T20:40:00.001-07:00

Charles Aaron "Bubba" Smith (February 28, 1945 – August 3, 2011) was an American actor and athlete. He was a professional football player in the 1960s and 1970s who became an actor in the late 1970s. He was well known for his height of 2 metres.

Smith was born in Beaumont, Texas. He played football at Michigan State University. After leaving professional football, Smith began his acting career in small movie and television roles in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His notable TV shows included Tales Of The Golden Monkey, Good Times and Blue Thunder. His best known film series was Police Academy where he played Moses Hightower. His brother Todd Smith was with the Dallas Cowboys, Houston Oilers and Buffalo Bills. From Wikipedia.

Datuk Syed Ahmad Jamal - Artist And Humanist

2011-07-31T03:14:00.001-07:00

DATUK Syed Ahmad Jamal, who passed away at 82 on July 30, 2011 will always be remembered as a great Malaysian artist who inculcated the concept of universal humanism in his works.
A devout Muslim, he internalised his faith and always described his works as driven by humankind's longing for God.
He was also a social activist who campaigned for better human rights in Malaysia.
He was the country's National Art Laureate 1995 and was cultural director of University Malaya (1979-82) and National Art Gallery director (1983-91).
Syed Ahmad received his early education in Sultan Abu Bakar College, Johor Baru. He later studied art at the University of London and the University of Hawaii.

Amy Winehouse - A Beautiful Voice Cut Short

2011-07-23T23:16:00.000-07:00

It is sad to hear that the brilliant British singer Amy Winehouse passed away on July 23, 2011.

A beautiful voice she was, but she failed to face up to her inner demons and the perils of drug addiction.

Read all about her here.

Thanks, Wikipedia.

Amy Jade Winehouse (September 14, 1983 – July 23, 2011) was a British singer-songwriter known for her powerful contralto vocals and her eclectic mix of musical genres including R&B, soul and jazz.

Winehouse's 2003 debut album, Frank, was critically successful in the UK and was nominated for the Mercury Prize.

Her 2006 follow-up album, Back To Black, led to six Grammy Award nominations and five wins, tying the record for the most wins by a female artist in a single night, and made Winehouse the first British singer to win five Grammys, including three of the "Big Four": Best New Artist, Record Of The Year and Song Of The Year.

On February 14, 2007, she won a BRIT Award for Best British Female Artist.

She won the Ivor Novello Award three times, one in 2004 for Best Contemporary Song (Musically And Lyrically) for Stronger Than Me, one in 2007 for Best Contemporary Song for Rehab and one in 2008 for Best Song Musically And Lyrically for Love Is A Losing Game.

The album was the third biggest seller of the 2000s in the United Kingdom.

Winehouse was credited as an influence in the rise in popularity of female musicians and soul music, and also for revitalising British music.

Winehouse's distinctive style made her a muse for fashion designers such as Karl Lagerfeld.

The singer's problems with drug and alcohol abuse, as well as self-destructive behaviour, were regular tabloid news from 2007 until her death.

She and her former husband, Blake Fielder-Civil, were plagued by legal troubles that left him serving prison time.

Winehouse died at the age of 27 on July 23, 2011 at her home in London.

Winehouse was born in the Southgate area of north London to a Jewish family who were the source of her interest in jazz.

Winehouse was the younger of two children (elder brother Alex) of Mitchell Winehouse, a taxi driver and Janis Winehouse Seaton, a pharmacist.

Mitchell often sang Frank Sinatra songs to young Amy.

When Winehouse was 10, she founded a short-lived rap group called Sweet N Sour with childhood friend Juliette Ashby.

Winehouse received her first guitar when she was 13 and began writing music a year later.

She began working soon after, including as a showbiz journalist for the World Entertainment News Network, in addition to singing with local group the Bolsha Band.

Winehouse signed to Simon Fuller's 19 Management in 2002.

Winehouse's greatest love was 1960s girl groups.

She borrowed her "instantly recognisable" Beehive hairdo and Cleopatra makeup from The Ronettes.

Winehouse's debut album, Frank, was released on October 20, 2003.

Produced mainly by Salaam Remi, many songs were influenced by jazz and, apart from two covers, every song was co-written by Winehouse.

The album entered the upper levels of the UK album chart in 2004 when it was nominated for BRIT Awards in the categories of British Female Solo Artist and British Urban Act.

It went on to achieve platinum sales.

Later in 2004, she won the Ivor Novello Songwriting Award for Best Contemporary Song, alongside Salaam Remi, with her contribution to the first single, Stronger Than Me.

The singer won the 2008 Grammy Awards in the categories of Record Of The Year, Song Of The Year and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for the single Rehab, while her album Back To Black was nominated for Album Of The Year and won the Best Pop Vocal Album award.

Producer Mark Ronson's work with her won the Grammy Award for Producer Of The Year, Non-Classical category.

The singer also earned a Grammy in the Best New Artist category.

This earned Winehouse an entry in the 2009 edition of the Guinness Book Of World Records for Most Grammy Awards won by a British Female Act.

British singer Adele credited Winehouse's success in the United States for making her and fellow British singer Duffy's journey to the United States "a bit smoother".

American singer Lady Gaga credited Winehouse with paving the way for her rise to the top of the charts.

Winehouse's last public appearance took place at Camden's Roundhouse, London on July 20, 2011, when she made a surprise guest appearance on stage to support her god daughter Dionne Bromfield.

Winehouse married on-off boyfriend Blake Fielder-Civil (born August 1978), a former video production assistant, on May 18, 2007, in Miami, Florida.

They divorced in 2009.

Tan Sri James Wong - Sarawak Independence Leader

2011-07-18T23:24:00.001-07:00

Tan Sri James Wong Kim Min will always be remembered as an independence leader of Sarawak.
The former Sarawak Deputy Chief Minister who passed away at 89 on July 18, 2011, was also instrumental in the formation of Malaysia.
Wong, the father of businessman and rock singer Alex Wong aka SingleTrackMind, was Deputy Chief Minister from 1963-1966.
He was with the late Tan Sri Stephen Kalong Ningkan a founder member of the Sarawak National Party (Snap), the second multi-ethnic party in Sarawak after the Sarawak United People's Party (Supp).
They founded Snap in 1961.
Wong replaced Ningkan as President of Snap in 1966 but was ousted by Datuk Dunstan Endawie in 1976.
Endawie was backed by prominent Iban leaders Tan Sri Leo Moggie and Datuk Seri Daniel Tajem.
In 1982, Endawie broke off with Tajem and Moggie and supported Wong's campaign to recapture Snap's Presidency.
Wong stepped down as Snap President in 2002.
He was replaced by his long time protege and friend Datuk Edwin Dundang.
Wong was born on August 6, 1922 in Limbang.
He was a self-made businessman and one of the richest men in Sarawak.
He had his early education in St Mary's School and St Thomas' School, Kuching.
He became a State Legislative Assemblyman in 1956.
He holds the longest serving State Legislative Assemblyman record in Malaysia.
Wong is survived by his wife Puan Sri Valerie Bong, three sons and five daughters.
NST and Wikipedia.

Raja Aziz Addruse - Champion Of Human Rights

2011-07-12T20:54:00.001-07:00

Thanks Wikipedia.

The late Raja Aziz Addruse, who passed away after a long illness at 75 on July 12, 2011, will always be remembered as a champion of human rights.

A one-time Bar Council president (1976-78, 1988-89 and 1992-94), he was a tireless campaigner for judicial independence and the rule of law.

A Lincoln's Inn graduate and a Perak royal, he was a member of the International Commission of Jurists together with former Bar Council president and United Nations special rapporteur Datuk Param Cumaraswamy and former Chief Justice Tun Suffian Hashim.

He was also the founder president of the Malaysian Association of Human Rights (Hakam) in 1989.

Facundo Cabral - Voice Of The Oppressed.

2011-07-10T20:24:00.001-07:00

Thanks, Wikipedia.

Facundo Cabral (May 22, 1937 – July 9, 2011) was an Argentine singer and songwriter.

He was best known as the composer of "I'm Not From Here Nor There", which he improvised during one of his concerts.

His songs have been covered by Spanish language interpreters such as Alberto Cortez, who was also a friend of his, Juan Luis Guerra and Joan Manuel Serrat.

After touring the world, Cabral enjoyed popularity in his home country during the early 1980s, when Argentine radio demanded local content after the Falklands War.

He was enormously popular in all Latin American countries. When he performed in Peru or Mexico, which he called his second home, tickets were sold-out long before the performance date(s).

Facundo Cabral was named a United Nations Messenger Of Peace in 1996.

Cabral was born in La Plata.

He first sang in Tandil, 350 km from Buenos Aires.

From the most humble of beginnings he came to inspire millions around the world through his songs, poems and 66 books.

He walked 3,000 km at the age of nine to look for work to support his mother and six siblings after his father abandoned them.

When he left his mother told him "This is the second, and last gift I can give you. The first was to give you life, and the second one, the liberty to live it".

He wrote music that inspired millions. He met Mother Teresa and Jorge Luis Borges. He performed in over 165 countries in eight different languages.

His wife and one-year-old daughter were killed in a plane crash in 1978.

He was nearly blind and crippled, and was a cancer survivor.

He once said: I always ask God, why did you give me so much? You gave me misery, hunger, happiness, struggle, lights. I saw everything. I know there is cancer, syphilis and spring and apple fritters.

Cabral was shot and killed during a tour in Guatemala City while en route to La Aurora International Airport on July 9, 2011.

He was mourned throughout Latin America.

Guatemala's 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu described his death as a great loss for humanity. She likened Cabral as a man who walked the path of Jesus.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez described Cabral as the greatest troubadour of Latin America and the Che Guevara of music.

Dreamgirls - The Mowtown Musical

2011-07-10T08:59:00.000-07:00

Thanks, Wikipedia.

Dreamgirls is a 2006 musical drama film, directed by Bill Condon and jointly produced and released by DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures.

Adapted from the 1981 Broadway musical of the same name by composer Henry Krieger and lyricist Tom Eyen, Dreamgirls is a roman a clef of the histories of the Motown record label and one of its acts, The Supremes.

The story follows the history and evolution of American R&B music during the 1960s and 1970s through the eyes of a Detroit, Michigan girl group known as "The Dreams" and their manipulative record executive.

The film adaptation of Dreamgirls stars Jamie Foxx, Beyonce Knowles, Eddie Murphy and Jennifer Hudson, who won the 2006 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Effie White.

The film also features Danny Glover, Anika Noni Rose, Keith Robinson, Sharon Leal, and Hinton Battle.

Produced by Laurence Mark, the film's screenplay was adapted by director Bill Condon from the original Broadway book by Tom Eyen.

In addition to the original Kreiger/Eyen compositions, four new songs, composed by Krieger with various lyricists, were added for this film.

Dreamgirls is the most expensive film to feature an all African American starring cast in American cinema history.

Dreamgirls received three awards at the 64th Golden Globe Awards, including Best Picture — Musical Or Comedy, and two Oscars at the 79th Academy Awards.

The plot of Dreamgirls is broken up into two sections or acts: The first taking place from 1962 to 1966, and the second taking place from 1973 to 1975.

Backstage at an amateur talent show at the Detroit Theatre in 1962, Cadillac salesman Curtis Taylor Jr (Jamie Foxx) meets a girl group known as "The Dreamettes": lead singer Effie White (Jennifer Hudson), and back-up singers Deena Jones (Beyonce Knowles) and Lorrell Robinson (Anika Noni Rose).

Curtis presents himself as the Dreamettes' new manager and arranges for the Dreamettes to become backup singers for local R&B star Jimmy "Thunder" Early (Eddie Murphy).

With ambitions of making Black singers mainstream successes among White audiences, Curtis starts his own record label, Rainbow Records, out of his Detroit car dealership, and appoints Effie's brother, CC (Keith Robinson), as his head songwriter.

However, when their first single fails after a White pop group releases a cover version, Curtis, CC and their producer Wayne (Hinton Battle) turn to payola to make Jimmy and the Dreamettes pop stars.

Offstage, Effie becomes infatuated with the slick-talking Curtis, while the married Jimmy begins an affair with Lorrell.

Jimmy's manager Marty (Danny Glover) grows weary of Curtis' plans to make his client more pop-friendly and walks out.

However, when Jimmy bombs in front of a mostly white Miami Beach audience, Curtis sends Jimmy out on the road alone, keeping the Dreamettes behind to headline in his place.

Feeling that Effie's large figure and voice will not attract White audiences, Curtis appoints the slimmer Deena lead singer and renames the group "The Dreams".

With the aid of new songs and a more glamorous image, Curtis and CC transform The Dreams into a top selling mainstream pop act by 1965.

However, Effie begins acting out, particularly when Curtis' affections also turn towards Deena.

Curtis drops Effie from the group, hiring his secretary, Michelle (Sharon Leal), to take her place.

Nine years later, in 1973, Effie has become an impoverished welfare mother, living in inner-city Detroit with her daughter Magic.

Meanwhile, Rainbow Records has moved to Los Angeles, where the Dreams - now "Deena Jones & The Dreams" - have become superstars.

Jimmy Early, on the other hand, has descended into drug addiction, his career neglected due to Curtis' preoccupation with Deena, now also his wife.

When Jimmy has a breakdown onstage at Rainbow's tenth anniversary TV special the following year, Curtis drops him from the label, and Lorrell ends their long affair.

Some time later, Jimmy is found dead in a hotel room from a heroin overdose.

Angered over Curtis' increasing control over his music, and his lack of sympathy upon learning of Jimmy's death, CC quits and returns to Detroit to find Effie, who has been rebuilding her career in music with Marty as her manager.

The two siblings reconcile, and CC writes and produces Effie's comeback single, "One Night Only".

Just as the record begins gaining radio play in Detroit, Curtis uses payola to force radio stations to play a disco cover of "One Night Only" by Deena Jones & The Dreams instead.

His plan falls apart when Deena, angry over Curtis' control of her career, finds evidence of his payola schemes and contacts Effie and CC.

Deena and Effie reconcile, while Curtis, wanting to avoid being reported to the FBI for his payola operation, agrees to give Effie's record national distribution.

Inspired by Effie's victory, Deena leaves Curtis to make it on her own.

As a result, Deena Jones & The Dreams give a farewell performance at the Detroit Theatre.

At the conclusion of the concert, Deena invites Effie to join the group onstage and sing lead for the final performance of the group's signature song, "Dreamgirls".

As the concert ends, Curtis notices Magic in the front row and realises that he is the girl's father.

Cast:

Jamie Foxx as Curtis Taylor Jr - Based upon Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr.
Curtis is a slick Cadillac dealer-turned-record executive who founds the Rainbow Records label and shows ruthless ambition in his quest to make his Black artists household names with White audiences.
At first romantically involved with Effie, Curtis takes a professional and personal interest in Deena after appointing her lead singer of the Dreams in Effie's place.

Beyonce Knowles as Deena Jones - Based upon Motown star Diana Ross.
Deena is a shy young woman who becomes a star after Curtis makes her lead singer of The Dreams.
This, as well as her romantic involvement and later marriage to Curtis, draws Effie's ire, though Deena realises over time she is a puppet for her controlling husband.
Knowles was nominated for a Golden Globe for her role.

Eddie Murphy as James "Thunder" Early - Inspired by R&B/soul singers such as James Brown, Jackie Wilson and Marvin Gaye, Early is a raucous performer on the Rainbow label whom Curtis attempts to repackage as a pop-friendly balladeer.
Jimmy's star fades as The Dreams' star rises and he falls into drugs and an adulterous affair with Dreams member Lorrell.
Murphy won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Academy Award for his role in the film.

Jennifer Hudson as Effie White - Inspired by Supremes member Florence Ballard and soul singers Etta James and Aretha Franklin.
The plus-sized Effie is a talented yet temperamental singer who suffers when Curtis, the man she loves, replaces her as lead singer of The Dreams and his love interest, and later drops her altogether.
With the help of Jimmy's old manager Marty, Effie attempts to resurrect her career a decade later, while raising her daughter Magic, the offspring of her union with Curtis.
Hudson won a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Effie.

Anika Noni Rose as Lorrell Robinso - Inspired by Supremes member Mary Wilson.
Lorell is a good-natured background singer with The Dreams who falls deeply in love with the married Jimmy Early and becomes his mistress.

Danny Glover as Marty Madison, Jimmy's original manager before Curtis steps into the picture.
Marty serves as both counsel and confidant to Jimmy, and later to Effie as well.

Keith Robinson as CC White - Inspired by Motown vice president, artist and songwriter Smokey Robinson.
CC is Effie's soft-spoken younger brother and his real name is Clarence Conrad.
He serves as the main songwriter for The Dreamettes and later the entire Rainbow roster.

Sharon Leal as Michelle Morris - Based on The Supremes member Cindy Birdsong.
Michelle replaces Effie in The Dreams and becomes CC's love interest.
She is at first Curtis' secretary until she becomes one of The Dreams' background singers.

Hinton Battle as Wayne, a salesman at Curtis' Cadillac dealership who becomes Rainbow's first record producer and Curtis' henchman.

Dreamgirls also features supporting performances from Mariah I. Wilson as Magic, Effie's daughter, Yvette Cason as May Jones, Deena's mother, Ken Page as club owner Max Washington and Alexander Folk as Ronald White, Effie and CC's father.

Cameo appearances in the film are made by John Lithgow and John Krasinski as a film producer and writer/director, Jaleel White as a talent booker at the Detroit Theatre, Dawnn Lewis as Melba Early, Jimmy's wife and Loretta Devine, who originated the role of Lorrell on Broadway, as a jazz singer in Max Washington's club.

Throughout the film, a number of musical acts depicted as allusions to or analogues of real-life R&B performers appear, among them Little Albert & The Tru-Tones (Little Anthony & The Imperials), Tiny Joe Dixon (BB King), The Family Funk (Sly & The Family Stone or the Motown house band The Funk Brothers) and The Campbell Connection (The Jackson 5).

The musical Dreamgirls was staged in the National Theatre, Malaysia from July 14-24, 2011.

It was produced by Broadway Academy and starred among others, TV personalities Cheryl Samad and Azura Zainal and reality show graduates Dina Nadzir and Dafi Ismail Sabri.

Congrats South Sudan, RIP Betty Ford

2011-07-09T06:01:00.000-07:00

Congrats to the people of South Sudan, the newest country on earth which arrives today.

And RIP Betty Ford, ex-first lady of the USA.

Information about Betty Ford from Wikipedia.

Elizabeth Ann Bloomer Warren Ford (April 8, 1918 – July 8, 2011), better known as Betty Ford, was the wife of former United States President Gerald Ford and served as the First Lady of the United States from 1974 to 1977. As First Lady, Ford was active in social policy and shattered precedents as a politically active presidential wife.

Throughout her husband's term in office, she maintained high approval ratings despite opposition from some conservative Republicans who objected to her more moderate and liberal positions on social issues. Ford was noted for raising breast cancer awareness following her 1974 mastectomy and was a passionate supporter of, and activist for, the Equal Rights Amendment. Pro-choice on abortion and a leader in the Women's Movement, she gained fame as one of the most candid first ladies in history, commenting on every hot-button issue of the time, including feminism, equal pay, sex, drugs, abortion and gun control. She also raised awareness of addiction when she announced her long-running battle with alcoholism in the 1970s.

Following her White House years, she continued to remain active in the feminist movement. She is the founder, and served as the first chairwoman of the board of directors, of the Betty Ford Centre For Substance Abuse And Addiction and was a recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Elizabeth Ann Bloomer was born in Chicago, the third child and only daughter of William Stephenson Bloomer Sr. (July 19, 1874 – July 18, 1934), a traveling salesman for Royal Rubber Co, and his wife, Hortense Neahr (July 11, 1884 – November 20, 1948).

When Ford was 14, she began modeling clothes and teaching children to dance.

When Ford was 16, her father died of carbon monoxide poisoning in the Bloomers' garage while working under their car, despite the garage doors being open. In 1936, after she graduated from high school, Ford attended the Bennington School Of Dance in Bennington, Vermont, where she studied under Martha Graham and Hanya Holm.

After being accepted by Graham as a student, Ford moved to Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood and worked as a fashion model for the John Robert Powers firm in order to finance her dance studies. She joined Graham’s auxiliary troupe and eventually performed with the company at Carnegie Hall.

She also organised her own dance group and taught dance at various sites in Grand Rapids.

In 1942, she married William C. Warren, whom she had known since she was 12. They divorced on September 22, 1947.

On October 15, 1948, she married Gerald R. Ford Jr, a lawyer and World War II veteran.

Married for 58 years until Gerald's death, the couple had three sons and a daughter.

The Fords moved to the suburbs of Washington DC and lived there for 25 years. Gerald rose to become Vice President to Richard Nixon in 1973. He became president in 1974, upon Nixon's resignation in the wake of the Watergate scandal.

Betty and Gerald Ford were among the more openly loving and intimate First Couples in American history. Neither was shy about their mutual love and equal respect, and they were known to have a strong personal and political partnership.

Information about North and South Sudan from Wikipedia.

Sudan (North Sudan).

Sudan is a country in North Africa and the third largest country in Africa by area.

It is bordered by Egypt to the north, the Red Sea to the northeast, Eritrea and Ethiopia to the east, South Sudan to the south, the Central African Republic to the southwest, Chad to the west and Libya to the northwest.

The world's longest river, the Nile, divides the country between east and west sides.

The people of Sudan have a long history extending from antiquity which is intertwined with the history of Egypt.

Sudan was united politically with Egypt over several periods.

After gaining independence from Egypt and the United Kingdom in 1956, Sudan suffered 17 years of civil war during the First Sudanese Civil War (1955–1972).

This was followed by ethnic and economic conflicts between the Northern Sudanese (Black Africans of the Nubian Sudanic ethnic group, speaking Arabic and Muslim by faith) and the Southern Sudanese (Black Africans of various ethnic groups from the Sudanic group, speaking English and Christian and Sabian by faith).

After the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983-2010), the government in Khartoum signed a comprehensive peace agreement with the rebels of the south, and this granted autonomy to Southern Sudan.

Following a referendum held in January 2011, Southern Sudan became an independent country on July 9, 2011.

Sudan was inhabited at least 60,000 years ago. The area was known to the Egyptians as Kush and had strong cultural and religious ties to Egypt.

In the 8th century BC, the kings of Kush extended their influence into Egypt.

The dynasty's intervention in Syria caused a confrontation between Egypt and Syria. When the Syrians in retaliation invaded Egypt, Taharqa (688-663 BC), the last Kush king, withdrew and returned to Kush.

In 590 BC, Egypt sacked Sudan.

In the 6th century, Rome Christianised Sudan.

Sudan became Muslim gradually beginning 632.

In 1820 Egypt invaded Sudan. Sudan was ‘unified’ with Egypt.

In 1881, Muhammad Ahmad (ancestor of Sudan’s former prime minister Sadiq Al-Mahdi) set up his own dynasty after deposing the Egyptians.

In 1898, British-controlled Egypt conquered Sudan.

Britain gave independence to Sudan on January 1, 1956.

In 1955, the year before independence, a civil war began between northern and southern Sudan. The southerners, anticipating independence, feared the new nation would be dominated by the north.

Southern Sudan was once in British East Africa with Uganda and Kenya.

The British had attached Southern Sudan to Northern Sudan.

The First Sudanese Civil War, lasted from 1955 to 1972.

The 1955 war began when southern army officers mutinied and then formed the Anya-Nya guerilla movement.

In 1972, a cessation of the north-south conflict was agreed upon under the terms of the Addis Ababa Agreement, following talks which were sponsored by the World Council of Churches. This led to a 10-year hiatus in the national conflict.

In 1983, the civil war was re-ignited following President Gaafar Nimeiry's decision to circumvent the Addis Ababa Agreement.

Nimeiry attempted to create a federated Sudan including states in southern Sudan, which violated the Addis Ababa Agreement that had granted the south considerable autonomy.

The Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), based in southern Sudan, was formed in 1983 as the successor of the Anya-Nya movement.

The leader of the SPLA was John Garang.

In 1989, General Omar Al-Bashir became president of Sudan and imposed Wahhabi policies that further destabilised the country and intensified the civil war.

The war went on for more than 20 years and killed an estimated two million people.

Peace talks between the southern rebels and the government made substantial progress in 2004. The peace was consolidated with the official signing by both sides of the Nairobi Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005.

The agreement granted Southern Sudan autonomy for six years, to be followed by a referendum about independence.

It created a co-vice president position and allowed the north and south to split oil deposits equally, but also left both the north's and south's armies in place.

John Garang, the south's peace agreement appointed co-vice president died in a helicopter crash on August 1, 2005, three weeks after being sworn in.

Just as the long north-south civil war was reaching a resolution, some clashes occurred in the western region of Darfur between the pastoral tribes.

The rebels accused the central government of neglecting the Darfur region economically.

The government used Arab-speaking northern militias known as the Janjawid to suppress the Muslim but English-speaking Darfur rebels.

The fighting has displaced hundreds of thousands of people, many of them seeking refuge in neighbouring Chad.

Thus far, over 2.5 million civilians have been displaced and the death toll is estimated from 200,000 to 400,000.

In 2006, the Sudanese government and Darfur's largest rebel group, the SLM (Sudanese Liberation Movement), signed the Darfur Peace Agreement, aimed at ending the three-year conflict.

The agreement specified the disarmament of the Janjawid and the disbanding of the rebel forces, and autonomy for Darfur.

The terrain of Sudan is generally flat, broken by several mountain ranges; in the west the Jebel Marra is the highest range; in the east are the Red Sea Hills.

The Blue and White Niles meet in Khartoum to form the River Nile, which flows northwards through Egypt to the Mediterranean Sea.

Blue Nile's course through Sudan is nearly 800 km long and is joined by the rivers Dinder and Rahad between Sennar and Khartoum. The White Nile within Sudan has no significant tributaries.

The amount of rainfall increases towards the south. In the north there is the very dry Nubian Desert.

Sudan’s rainy season lasts for about three months (July to September) in the north, and up to six months (June to November) in the south.

The dry regions are plagued by sandstorms, known as haboob, which can completely block out the sun.

In the northern and western semi-desert areas, people rely on the scant rainfall for basic agriculture and many are nomadic.

Nearer the River Nile, there are well-irrigated farms growing cash crops.

Rich mineral resources are available in Sudan including gold, silver, chrome, asbestos, manganese, gypsum, mica, zinc, iron, lead, uranium, copper, kaolin, cobalt, granite, nickel and tin.

Agriculture production remains Sudan's most important sector, employing 80 percent of the workforce.

The Merowe Dam, also known as Merowe Multi-Purpose Hydro Project or Hamdab Dam, is a large construction project in northern Sudan, about 350 km north of the capital Khartoum.

It is situated on the River Nile, close to the Fourth Cataract where the river divides into multiple smaller branches with large islands in between.

The main purpose of the dam is the generation of electricity. Its dimensions make it the largest contemporary hydro power project in Africa.

Sudan has more than 550 tribes that speak over 400 different languages and dialects, but there are two distinct major cultures — Arabised Black African people and non-Arabised Black African people.

Muslims form 97 percent of Sudanese, followed by Sabians (2 percent) and Christians (1 percent).

North Sudan is 1,886,068 square km with 30,894,000 people.

It has 15 provinces.

Khartoum is the capital of North Sudan.

South Sudan.

South Sudan is a country in East Africa. Its capital and largest city is Juba, located in the southern state of Central Equatoria.

The landlocked country is bordered by Ethiopia to the east, Kenya, Uganda, and Congo-Kinshasa to the south, the Central African Republic to the west and Sudan to the north.

South Sudan includes the vast swamp region of the Sudd formed by the White Nile, the Bahr Al Jabal.

South Sudan is rich in oil.

The country is rich in fauna. Boma National Park, west of the Ethiopian border, as well as the Sudd wetland and Southern National Park near the border with Congo, provide habitat for large populations of hartebeest, kob, topi, buffalo, elephants, giraffes and lions.

South Sudan's forest reserves also provided habitat for bongo, giant forest hogs, Red River Hogs, forest elephants, chimpanzees and forest monkeys.

Most South Sudanese are Sabians, followed by Christians and Muslims.

South Sudan is 619,745 square km with 8,260,490 people. South Sudan has 10 provinces.

Juba is the capital of South Sudan.

About The Tiananmen Massacre 1989

2011-07-07T04:44:00.001-07:00

From Wikipedia.
The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, also known as the Tiananmen Square massacre and the June Fourth Incident were a series of demonstrations in and near Tiananmen Square in Beijing in the People's Republic of China (PRC) beginning on April 15, 1989.
The movement used mainly non-violent methods and can be considered a case of civil resistance.
Led mainly by students and intellectuals, the protests occurred in the year that was to see the collapse of a number of communist governments in eastern Europe.
The protests were sparked by mass mourning over the death of former CPC General Secretary Hu Yaobang, a Party official who had been purged for his support of political liberalisation.
By the eve of Hu's funeral, 100,000 people gathered at Tiananmen Square.
Beijing students began the demonstrations to encourage continued economic reform and liberalisation, and evolved into a mass movement for political reform.
From Tiananmen Square they later expanded to the surrounding streets.
Non-violent protests also occurred in cities throughout China, including Shanghai and Wuhan.
Looting and rioting occurred in various locations throughout China, including Xian and Changsha.
The movement lasted seven weeks after Hu's death on April 15. Prime Minister Li Peng declared martial law on May 20, but no military action took place until June 4, when the tanks and troops of the People's Liberation Army moved into the streets of Beijing, using live fire while proceeding to Tiananmen Square to clear the area of protestors.
The exact number of civilian deaths is not known, and the majority of estimates range from several hundred to thousands.
There was widespread international condemnation of the government's use of force against the protesters.
Following June 4, the government conducted widespread arrests of protesters and their supporters, cracked down on other protests around China, banned the foreign press from the country and strictly controlled coverage of the events in the domestic press.
The Communist Party initiated a large-scale campaign to purge officials deemed sympathetic to the protests.
Several senior officials, most notably Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, were placed under house arrest.
Deng Xiaoping was Chinese Senior Leader from 1978 to 1992.
At the Eleventh National Congress of the Communist Party in 1978, the Communist Party of China (CPC) initiated a series of economic and political reforms, which led to the gradual implementation of a market economy and some political liberalisation that relaxed the system set up by Mao Zedong.
The Chinese economic reforms were led by Zhao Ziyang, the Party's General Secretary, and they were generally successful in the early years, particularly in the rural regions.
However, since political reforms were neglected, corruption and nepotism pervaded the shift toward a free-market economy.
Students and intellectuals demanded economic liberalisation, political democracy, media freedom, freedom of speech and association and rule of law.
Hu was removed by Deng on January 16, 1987 for being 'too liberal'. Zhao replaced him.
Jiang Zemin succeeded Zhao Ziyang to become CPC General Secretary in 1989.
To purge sympathisers of Tiananmen demonstrators, the Communist Party initiated a two-year programme aimed to deal "strictly with those inside the party with serious tendencies toward bourgeois liberalisation".
Four million people were reportedly investigated for their role in the protests.
The Party leadership expelled Zhao Ziyang and placed him under house arrest until his death in 2005.

Jim Morrison - Troubled Rocker, Troubled Genius

2011-07-05T10:55:00.000-07:00

From Wikipedia.
James Douglas Morrison (December 8, 1943 – July 3, 1971) was an American lead singer and lyricist of the rock band The Doors, as well as a poet.
Born in Melbourne, Florida, he was of British and Native American ancestry.
In 1947, Morrison, then four, witnessed a car accident in the desert, where a family of Native Americans perished.
He referred to this incident in the song Dawn's Highway from the album An American Prayer, and again in the songs Peace Frog and Ghost Song.
Morrison believed the incident to be the most formative event of his life and made repeated references to it in his songs, poems and interviews.
With his father in the United States Navy, Morrison's family moved often. He spent his childhood in San Diego, California.
In 1958, Morrison attended Alameda High School in Alameda, California. He graduated from George Washington High School (now George Washington Middle School) in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1961.
Jim was inspired by the writings of philosophers and poets. He was influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Rimbaud, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Patchen, Michael McClure and Gregory Corso.
In 1964, Morrison moved to Los Angeles, California, to attend the University Of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Morrison completed his undergraduate degree at UCLA's College Of Fine Arts in 1965.
Morrison subsequently led a bohemian lifestyle in Venice Beach. Living on the rooftop of a building inhabited by his old UCLA cinematography friend Dennis Jakobs, he wrote the lyrics of many of his band's songs there.
The Doors, formed in 1965 by Morrison, took their name from the title of Aldous Huxley's The Doors Of Perception (a reference to the "unlocking" of "doors of perception" through psychedelic drug use).
Morrison was its lead singer and songwriter. The group's best known songs included Light My Fire, Love Me Two Times, Love Her Madly and Touch Me.
Light My Fire eventually reached number one on the Billboard Pop Singles chart.
In 1967, Morrison and The Doors produced a promotional film for Break On Through (To The Other Side), their hit single.
The Doors also made music videos for The Unknown Soldier, Moonlight Drive and People Are Strange.
Morrison became addicted to drugs over the course of his singing career and in 1969, he was seriously overweight.
His close friends nicknamed him Jumbo Jim. During his early days, Morrison was nicknamed the Lizard King.
Morrison self-published two volumes of poetry in 1969.
In 1971, Morrison visited Paris and lost some weight. He was found dead by his girlfriend, Pamela Courson, on July 3, 1971 in his bathroom.
He was believed to have overdosed on drugs. Courson died of an overdose three years later. Like Morrison, she was also 27.
Morrison was buried in Paris' Pere Lachaise Cemetery.
In 1991, Val Kilmer played Morrison in Oliver Stone's film The Doors.

Madonna Louise Ciccone - Queen Of Pop

2011-07-05T10:53:00.000-07:00

From Wikipedia.
Madonna Louise Ciccone (born August 16, 1958) is an American recording artiste, actress and entrepreneur also known as the Queen Of Pop.
Born in Bay City, Michigan, she moved to New York City in 1977 to pursue a career in modern dance.
After performing in the music groups Breakfast Club and Emmy, she released her debut album in 1983.
She... followed it with a series of albums in which she found immense popularity by pushing the boundaries of lyrical content in mainstream popular music and imagery in her music videos, which became a fixture on MTV.
Throughout her career, many of her songs have hit number one on the record charts, including Like A Virgin, Papa Don't Preach, Like A Prayer, Vogue, Frozen, Music, Hung Up, and 4 Minutes.
She is widely admired by liberal people for speaking her mind and challenging cultural orthodoxy.
Her career was further enhanced by film appearances that began in 1979.
She won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress In A Motion Picture Musical Or Comedy for her role in Evita (1996).
Madonna's other ventures include being a fashion designer, children's book author, film director and producer.
Madonna has sold more than 300 million records worldwide and is recognised as the world's top-selling female recording artiste by the Guinness World Records.
In 2008, Billboard magazine ranked Madonna at number two, behind only The Beatles, on the Billboard Hot 100 All-Time Top Artistes, making her the most successful solo artiste in the history of the Billboard chart.
She was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in the same year.
Considered one of the "25 Most Powerful Women Of The Past Century" by Time for being an influential figure in contemporary music, Madonna is known for continuously reinventing both her music and image.
Madonna's mother Louise Fortin was of French descent from Canada and a relative of Canadian singer Celine Dion.
Her father Anthony Ciccone, is a first-generation Italian American.
The Ciccone family originated from Pacentro, Italy.
She is the third of six siblings.
Her mother died of breast cancer at the age of 30 in 1963.
Madonna attended Rochester Adams High School, and was a straight-A student.
She went to New York in 1977 to learn dance.
She formed a rock band called The Breakfast Club, and served as its vocalist and guitarist.
Her debut single, Everybody, was released on October 6, 1982.
IN the same year she started developing her debut album Madonna, which was primarily produced by Reggie Lucas of Warner Bros.
It contained the chart-topping hit Like A Virgin and was released in 1983.
In 1985, Madonna acted in the film Desperately Seeking Susan which featured her hit song Into The Groove.
In the same year she married Lithuanian-American actor and producer Sean Penn.
They were divorced in 1987.
True Blue, Madonna's third studio album, was released in 1986. It spawned three number one singles on the Billboard Hot 100: Live To Tell, Papa Don't Preach and Open Your Heart.
It also had two top five singles, True Blue and La Isla Bonita.
In 1990, Madonna starred as Breathless Mahoney in the film Dick Tracy, with Warren Beatty playing the title role. To accompany the film, she released the soundtrack album I'm Breathless, which included songs inspired by the film's 1930s setting.
In 2000, Madonna starred in the film The Next Best Thing, and contributed two songs to the film's soundtrack: Time Stood Still and American Pie, a cover version of Don McLean's 1971 song.
She released her eighth studio album, Music, in September 2000.

Goodbye Lt. Columbo

2011-06-26T04:52:00.001-07:00

Hungarian-Russian American actor Peter Michael Falk, who was best known as meticulous detective Lt. Columbo in the 1960s TV series Columbo passed away on June 23, 2011 at the age of 84.
Read all about him from Wikipedia.
Peter Michael Falk (September 16, 1927 – June 23, 2011) was an American actor, best known for his role as Lieutenant Columbo in the television series Columbo.
He appeared in numerous films and television guest roles and was nominated for an Academy Award twice (for 1960's Murder Inc. and 1961's Pocketful Of Miracles), and won the Emmy Award on five occasions (four for Columbo) and the Golden Globe Award once.
Falk's right eye was surgically removed when he was three because of a serious ailment. He wore a glass eye for most of his life.
Despite this, Falk participated in team sports, mainly baseball and basketball, as a boy.
Falk's first stage appearance was at the age of 12 in The Pirates Of Penzance at Camp High Point in New York.
There he met fellow actor Ross Martin of Wild Wild West fame.
They would later act in The Great Race and Columbo.
Falk attended Ossining High School in Westchester County, New York, where he was a star athlete.
Falk obtained a Masters of Public Administration degree at Syracuse University in 1953.
In 1956, he left his job with the Budget Bureau and moved to Greenwich Village to pursue an acting career.
His first New York stage role was in Dom Juan at the Fourth Street Theatre in 1956.
His first film performances were in small roles in Wind Across The Everglades (1958), The Bloody Brood (1959) and Pretty Boy Floyd (1960).
Falk's performance in Murder Inc. (1960) was a turning point in his career.
He was cast in the supporting role of killer Abe Reles, in a film based on the real-life murder gang of that name, that had terrorised New York in the 1930s.
Falk also starred in holiday television movies as A Town Without Christmas (2001), Finding John Christmas (2003) and When Angels Come To Town (2004).
In 2005, he starred in The Thing About My Folks.
Falk married Alyce Mayo, whom he had met when they were both students at Syracuse University, on April 17, 1960.
On December 7, 1977, Falk married actress Shera Danese.
Falk was an accomplished artist. In October 2006 he had an exhibition of his artwork at the Butler Institute Of American Art.
Falk was also a chess aficionado and was a spectator at the American Open in Santa Monica, California, 1972.

About Bali.

2011-06-26T04:41:00.001-07:00

Thanks Wikipedia.
Bali is an Indonesian island located in the westernmost end of the Lesser Sunda Islands, lying between Java to the west and Lombok to the east.
It is one of the country's 33 provinces with the provincial capital at Denpasar towards the south of the island.
With a population of 3,891,000 in 2010, the island is home to most of Indonesia's small Hindu minority.
93pc of Balinese are Hindus. The rest are Muslims.
Bali is the largest tourist destination in the country and is renowned for its highly developed arts, including traditional and modern dance, sculpture, painting, leather, metalworking and music.
Bali was inhabited by about 2000 BC by Austronesian peoples who migrated from Borneo.
The people of Bali and neighbouring Java and Madura are from the Melanau group of Dayaks from Borneo.
The first European contact with Bali was made in 1585 when a Portuguese ship visited the Bukit Peninsula.
In 1597 the Dutch explorer Cornelis De Houtman arrived at Bali and, with the establishment of the Dutch East India Company in 1602, the stage was set for colonial control two and a half centuries later.
Imperial Japan occupied Bali during World War II.
During the Japanese occupation a Balinese military officer, Gusti Ngurah Rai, formed a Balinese 'freedom army'.
Following Japan's surrender in August 1945, the Dutch promptly returned to reinstate their pre-war colonial administration.
This was resisted by the Balinese rebels now using Japanese weapons.
The 1963 eruption of Mount Agung killed thousands, created economic havoc and forced many displaced Balinese to be transmigrated to other parts of Indonesia.
When General Suharto seized power in 1965, he killed 5pc of the island's population.
Bali's central mountains include several peaks over 3,000 metres in elevation.
The highest is Mount Agung (3,142 m), known as the "mother mountain" which is an active volcano.
The island is surrounded by coral reefs. Beaches in the south tend to have white sand while those in the north and west have black sand.
The largest city is the provincial capital, Denpasar, near the southern coast.
Three small islands lie to the immediate south east and all are administratively part of the Klungkung regency of Bali: Nusa Penida, Nusa Lembongan and Nusa Ceningan.
Bali lies just to the west of the Wallace Line, and thus has a fauna which is Asian in character, with very little Australasian influence, and has more in common with Java than with Lombok.
Squirrels are quite commonly encountered, less often the Asian Palm Civet, which is also kept in coffee farms to produce Kopi Luwak.
Bats are well represented, perhaps the most famous place to encounter them is the Goa Lawah (Temple Of Bats).
The Crab-Eating Macaque, known locally as “kera”, is quite common around human settlements and temples.
About 80pc of Bali's economy depends on tourism.
The tourism industry is primarily focused in the south.
The main tourist locations are the town of Kuta (with its beach), and its outer suburbs of Legian and Seminyak, the east coast town of Sanur, Ubud, Jimbaran and the newer developments of Nusa Dua and Pecatu.
The Hindu New Year, Nyepi, is celebrated in the spring by a day of silence.
On this day everyone stays at home and tourists are encouraged to remain in their hotels.
But on the day before large, colourful sculptures of ogoh-ogoh monsters are paraded and finally burned in the evening to drive away evil spirits.
Balinese society revolves around each family's ancestral village, to which the cycle of life and religion is closely tied.

Farewell Clarence Clemons, Noor Azian Ahmad Said And Zami Ismail

2011-06-20T02:37:00.000-07:00

The weekend of June 18 and 19, 2011 saw the loss of three great people who helped develop art and music in Malaysia and the United States.

They were Clarence Clemons, Bruce Springsteen's band member, saxophonist and mentor, Noor Azian Ahmad Said, the mother of Malaysia's King of Cartoonists Datuk Mohamad Noor Khalid or Lat and film maker Mamat Khalid, and veteran Malaysian actor and comedian Zami Ismail.

Clemons, 69, also released solo albums and in 1985 he had a hit with You're A Friend Of Mine. He also starred in films as Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure with Keanu Reeves, and TV series as The Simpsons and Different Strokes. Clemons was married five times and has four sons.

Zami, 68, of Tapah, Perak, was best known for starring in long-running sitcom Pi Mai Pi Mai Tang Tu. He also advertised Mamee noodles in television commercials in the 1970s where he voiced the Mamee monster and the Mamee singing chef. He is survived by his wife Hanizan Ibrahim and nine children including actor Opie Zami and director Latiff 'Hitler' Zami.

Noor Azian, 90, of Gopeng, Perak is survived by five children including eldest son Lat and youngest son Mamat.

Largest Malaysian Towns And Cities 2011

2011-06-08T10:46:00.001-07:00

1 Subang Jaya 1 553 589
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5 Ampang Jaya 804 901
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8 KUCHING 674 281
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21 KOTA BARU 356 615
22 Sungai Petani 347 761
23 Bukit Mertajam 321 172
24 KUALA TERENGGANU 286 317
25 Miri 280 518
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28 ALOR SETAR 231 045
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35 Penampang 169 769
36 Nibong Tebal 143 151
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86 Gua Musang 19 173
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88 Simpang Renggam 18 711
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90 Beaufort 17 954
91 Kapit 16 689
92 Kuala Lipis 16 285
93 Jasin 15 113
94 Kota Belud 14 522
95 Besut 13 654

Happy 85th Birthday Marilyn Monroe

2011-06-02T06:20:00.001-07:00

From Wikipedia.

The late great Marilyn Monroe was one of the great sex goddesses of the modern era. Her 85th birthday is June 1, 2011.

Marilyn Monroe, born Norma Jean Mortenson (June 1, 1926 – August 5, 1962) was an American actress, singer and model.

After spending much of her childhood in foster homes, Monroe began a career as a model, which led to a film contract in 1946.

Her early film appearances were minor, but her performances in The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve (both 1950) were well received.

By 1953, Monroe had progressed to leading roles.

Her "dumb blonde" persona was used to comedic effect in such films as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), How To Marry A Millionaire (1953) and The Seven Year Itch (1955).

Limited by typecasting, Monroe studied at the Actors Studio to broaden her range, and her dramatic performance in Bus Stop (1956) was hailed by critics, and she received a Golden Globe nomination.

Her production company, Marilyn Monroe Productions, released The Prince And The Showgirl (1957), for which she received a BAFTA Award nomination and won a David Di Donatello Award.

She received a Golden Globe Award for her performance in Some Like It Hot (1959).

The final years of Monroe's life were marked by illness, personal problems and a reputation for being unreliable and difficult to work with.

The circumstances of her death, from an overdose of barbiturates, have been the subject of conjecture.

Though officially classified as a "probable suicide", the possibility of an accidental overdose, as well as the possibility of homicide, have not been ruled out.

In 1999, Monroe was ranked as the sixth greatest female star of all time by the American Film Institute.

In the years and decades following her death, Monroe has often been cited as a pop and cultural icon as well as an eminent American sex symbol.

Monroe was born in the Los Angeles County Hospital, the third child of Gladys Pearl Baker (May 27, 1902 – March 11, 1984).

Monroe's birth certificate names her father as Martin Edward Mortensen.

Baker had married Mortensen in 1924, but they had separated before Gladys' pregnancy.

Throughout her life, Monroe denied that Mortensen was her father.

She said that she had been shown a photograph of a man that Gladys identified as her father, Charles Stanley Gifford.

Gladys was mentally unstable and financially unable to care for the young Norma Jean, so she placed her with foster parents Albert and Ida Bolender of Hawthorne, California, where she lived until she was seven.

While living with the Bolenders, an unusual incident occurred.

One day, Gladys came to the Bolenders and demanded that Norma Jean be released back into her care.

Ida knew that Gladys was unstable at that time and insisted that this situation would not benefit Norma Jean.

Unwilling to cooperate, Gladys managed to pull Ida into the yard while she ran inside the house, locking the door behind her.

After several minutes, Gladys walked out of the front door with one of Albert Bolender's military duffel bags.

To Ida's horror, Gladys had stuffed the now screaming Norma Jean inside the bag, zipped it up, and proceeded to leave the house. Ida charged towards Gladys and the quarrel resulted in the bag splitting open.

Norma Jean fell out and began weeping loudly as Ida grabbed her and pulled her back inside the house, away from Gladys.

In 1933, Gladys bought a house and brought Norma Jean to live with her.

A few months after moving in, Gladys suffered a mental breakdown.

Norma Jean was declared a ward of the state, and Gladys' best friend, Grace McKee, became her guardian.

It was Grace who had told Monroe that someday she would become a movie star.

Grace was captivated by Jean Harlow.

Grace married Ervin Goddard in 1935, and nine-year-old Norma Jean was sent to the Los Angeles Orphans Home (later renamed Hollygrove).

In 1937, Grace took Norma Jean back to live with her, Goddard, and one of Goddard's daughters from a previous marriage.

This arrangement did not last for long, as Goddard attempted on several occasions to sexually assault her.

Disturbed by this, Grace sent her to live with her great-aunt, Olive Brunings in Compton, California.

This arrangement also did not last long, as 12-year-old Norma Jean was assaulted (sexually) by one of Olive's sons.

In early 1938, Grace sent her to live with yet another one of her aunts, Ana Lower, who lived in the Van Nuys section of Los Angeles.

The time with Lower provided the young Norma Jean with one of the few stable periods in her life.

By 1942, the elderly Lower developed serious health problems, and thus Norma Jean went back to live with the Goddards.

While attending Van Nuys High School, she met a neighbour's son, James Dougherty and began a relationship with him.

They got married that year.

In 1943, with World War II raging, he enlisted in the Merchant Marine and was shipped out to the Pacific.

Norma Jean found employment in the Radioplane Munitions Factory. She sprayed airplane parts with fire retardant and inspected parachutes.

During this time, Army photographer David Conover snapped a photograph of her for a Yank magazine article.

He encouraged her to apply to The Blue Book Modeling Agency.

She signed with the agency and began researching the work of Jean Harlow and Lana Turner.

She was told that they were looking for models with lighter hair, so Norma Jean bleached her brunette hair to a golden blonde.

Norma Jean became one of Blue Book's most successful models, appearing on dozens of magazine covers.

Jim Dougherty was oblivious of his wife's new job until he discovered one of his shipmates admiring a revealing photo of Norma Jean in a magazine.

Dougherty corresponded with her via several letters stating that once he returned from service, she would have to give up her modeling.

A dissatisfied Norma Jean, who now saw the possibilities of a modeling and acting career, decided then to divorce Dougherty.

The marriage ended when he returned from overseas in 1946.

Her successful modeling career brought her to the attention of Ben Lyon, a 20th Century Fox executive, who arranged a screen test.

Lyon was impressed and commented, "It's Jean Harlow all over again."

Lyon did not like the name Norma Jean and chose Marilyn Monroe (Monroe is her mother's maiden name) for Norma Jean.

Marilyn Monroe's first movie role was an uncredited role as a telephone operator in The Shocking Miss Pilgrim in 1947.

She won a brief role that year in Dangerous Years and extra appearances in Green Grass Of Wyoming and You Were Meant For Me.

In 1948, Monroe signed a contract with Columbia Pictures and was introduced to the studio's head drama coach Natasha Lytess, who became her acting coach for several years.

She starred in the low-budget musical Ladies Of The Chorus.

She had a small role in the Marx Brothers film Love Happy (1949).

Love Happy brought Monroe to the attention of the talent agent, Johnny Hyde, who arranged for her to audition for John Huston's drama The Asphalt Jungle, playing the young mistress of an aging criminal.

Her performance brought strong reviews and was seen by the writer and director, Joseph Mankiewicz.

He accepted Hyde's suggestion of Monroe for a small comedic role in All About Eve as Miss Caswell, an aspiring actress.

Monroe enrolled at UCLA in 1951 where she studied literature and art appreciation, and appeared in several minor films playing opposite long-established performers as Mickey Rooney, Constance Bennett, June Allyson, Dick Powell and Claudette Colbert.

In 1951, she appeared as a presenter at the 23rd Academy Awards.

In 1952, Monroe appeared on the cover of Look magazine.

In March 1952, Monroe faced a possible scandal when one of her nude photos from a 1949 session with photographer Tom Kelley was featured in a calendar.

The press speculated about the identity of the anonymous model and commented that she closely resembled Monroe.

As the studio discussed how to deal with the problem, Monroe suggested that she should simply admit that she had posed for the photograph but emphasised that she had done so only because she had no money to pay her rent.

She gave an interview in which she discussed the circumstances that led to her posing for the photographs, and the resulting publicity elicited a degree of sympathy for her plight as a struggling actress.

She made her first appearance on the cover of Life magazine in April 1952, where she was described as "The Talk Of Hollywood".

Stories of her childhood and upbringing portrayed her in a sympathetic light.

It was during this time that she began dating baseball player Joe DiMaggio. They were married in 1954.

Four films in which Monroe featured were released in 1952.

First, Clash By Night, a Barbara Stanwyck drama, directed by Fritz Lang. It was favourably received by critics.

Next came We're Not Married!, Don't Bother To Knock and Monkey Business.

Darryl F. Zanuck cast her in Niagara, as a femme fatale scheming to murder her husband, played by Joseph Cotten.

Her next film in 1953 was Gentlemen Prefer Blondes co-starring Jane Russell and directed by Howard Hawks.

This was followed by How To Marry A Millionaire, River Of No Return and There's No Business Like Show Business.

In 1954, shortly after There's No Business Like Show Business, she starred in The Seven Year Itch.

Not long after the film, she and DiMaggio were divorced.

In 1955, Monroe dated playwright Arthur Miller. She studied at the Actors Studio, and befriended actors Kevin McCarthy and Eli Wallach.

In Bus Stop, Monroe played Cherie, a saloon singer with little talent who falls in love with a cowboy, Beauregard "Bo" Decker, played by Don Murray.

She received a Golden Globe nomination.

She married Miller in 1956. A year later she co-starred with Lord Laurence Olivier in The Prince And The Showgirl. In 1959 came Some Like It Hot which earned her a Golden Globe for Best Actress.

From 1959 onwards, Monroe became addicted to drugs. She became an ardent fan of the new United States President John F. Kennedy and had an affair with him.

Marilyn Monroe was found dead of a drug overdose at her home on August 5, 1962. The last person she spoke to was Kennedy. Many fans believe the CIA killed her in order to implicate Kennedy. She and Miller had been divorced in earlier that year.

She was buried on August 8, 1962 at the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Westwood, Los Angeles.

Farewell Jeff Conaway And Joseph Brooks.

2011-05-28T22:11:00.001-07:00

We've lost two great, underrated American celebrities this weekend. Actor Jeff Conaway of Taxi and Grease fame and Joseph Brooks who wrote and composed Debbie Boone's hit song You Light Up My Life.

Read all about them here. From Wikipedia.

Jeff Conaway.

Jeffrey Charles William Michael Conaway (October 5, 1950 – May 27, 2011) was an American actor, best known for his roles in the movie Grease and the television series Taxi and Babylon 5.

Conaway began acting on Broadway at two. He appeared in the play All The Way Home in 1960 and the 1977 Disney film, Pete's Dragon.

He was best known for playing Kenickie in the 1978 motion picture musical Grease and for his role in the television series Taxi, where he played cocky, vain, struggling actor Bobby Wheeler from 1978 to 1981.

He was nominated for a Golden Globe Award in 1978 for his role as Wheeler.

From 1994-1999, he played Sergeant Zack Allan, on Babylon 5. From 1989-1990, he was cast on The Bold And The Beautiful, in the role of Mick Savage.

In the mid-1960s, he was the lead singer and guitarist for a rock band, The 3 1/2.

He was married thrice and his second marriage from 1980 to 1985 was to Olivia Newton-John's sister Rona.

A drug addict for most of the 1980s, he died of a drug overdose.

Joseph Brooks.

Joseph Brooks (March 11, 1938 – May 22, 2011) was an American screenwriter, director, producer and composer.
He composed the song You Light Up My Life for the film of the same name that he also wrote, directed and produced.

In his later years he became the centre of a scandal after being accused of a series of casting-couch rapes.

He was indicted in 2009, but committed suicide on May 22, 2011, before he could be brought to trial.

In the 1960s, Brooks composed advertising jingles for clients including Pepsi (You've Got A Lot To Live) and Maxwell House (Good To The Last Drop Feeling).

He received numerous Clio Awards for his work, as well as a People's Choice Award.

In October 1977 You Light Up My Life reached Number 1 on the US Billboard Hot 100 charts and held the top position for 10 consecutive weeks, then the longest run in the chart's history.

With sales of over four million copies in the US, the song became the biggest hit of the 1970s.

The passionate ballad earned Brooks a Grammy Award for Song Of The Year, as well as an Academy Award for Best Original Song, a Golden Globe Award and an American Society Of Composers, Authors And Publishers Award.

The song was Debby Boone's first solo hit record and only top 40 pop hit.

Brooks was married with two children. His brother is Institutional Investor Magazine founder Gilbert Kaplan.

In June 2009, Brooks was arrested on charges of raping or sexually assaulting 11 women lured to his East Side apartment from 2005 to 2008.

Bonnie And Clyde - Notorious Criminal Couple

2011-05-23T00:18:00.000-07:00

From Wikipedia.

Bonnie Parker (October 1, 1910 – May 23, 1934) and Clyde Barrow (March 24, 1909 – May 23, 1934) were well-known robbers and criminals who travelled the Central United States with their gang during the Great Depression. Their exploits captured the attention of the American public during the "public enemy era" between 1931 and 1934. Barrow preferred to rob small stores or rural gas stations. The gang is believed to have killed at least nine police officers and committed several civilian murders. The couple themselves were eventually ambushed and killed in Louisiana by law officers. Their reputation was cemented in American pop folklore by Arthur Penn's 1967 film Bonnie And Clyde with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway portraying the criminal couple.
Bonnie Elizabeth Parker was born in Rowena, Texas, the second of three children. Her father, Charles Parker, a bricklayer, died when Bonnie was four. Her mother, Emma Krause, moved with the children to her parents' home in Cement City, an industrial suburb of Dallas. Parker was one of the best students in her high school, winning top prizes in spelling, writing and public speaking.
Parker did not date until she was in her second year of high school, but in that year she fell in love with a classmate, Roy Thornton.
The two quit school and were married on September 25, 1926, six days before Parker's sixteenth birthday. Their marriage, marked by his frequent absences and brushes with the law, was short-lived, and after January 1929 their paths never crossed again. But they were never divorced, and Parker was wearing Thornton's wedding ring when she died. Thornton was in prison in 1934 when he learned of his wife's ambush. His reaction was, "I'm glad they went out like they did. It's much better than being caught."
In 1929, between the breakdown of her marriage and her first meeting with Clyde Barrow in January 1930, Parker lived with her mother and worked as a waitress in Dallas. One of her regular customers in the cafe was postal worker Ted Hinton, who would join the Dallas Sheriff's Department in 1932, and as a posse member would participate in her ambush in 1934.
Clyde Chestnut Barrow was born in Ellis County, Texas, near Telico, a town just south of Dallas. He was the fifth of seven children, from a desperately poor farming family that emigrated, piecemeal, to Dallas in the early 1920s.
Clyde was first arrested in late 1926, after running when police confronted him over a rental car he had failed to return on time. His second arrest, with brother Marvin "Buck" Barrow, came soon after, this time for possession of stolen goods (turkeys). Despite having legitimate jobs during the period 1927 to 1929, he also cracked safes, robbed stores and stole cars. After sequential arrests in 1928 and 1929, his luck ran out and he was sent to Eastham Prison in April 1930. While in prison, he was sexually assaulted repeatedly for over a year by a dominant inmate, whose skull he eventually fractured with a length of pipe. It was Clyde Barrow's first killing.
Paroled in February 1932, Barrow emerged from Eastham a hardened and bitter criminal.
In his post-Eastham career, he focused on smaller jobs, robbing grocery stores and gas stations. Barrow's favoured weapon was the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle (called BAR). Barrow's goal in life was not to gain fame or fortune from robbing banks, but to seek revenge against the Texas prison system for the abuses he suffered while serving time.
Bonnie Parker met Clyde Barrow in January 1930 at a friend's house. Parker was out of work and was staying in West Dallas to assist a girlfriend with a broken arm. Barrow dropped by the girl's house while Parker was supposedly in the kitchen making hot chocolate.
When they met, both were smitten immediately.
After Barrow was released from prison in February 1932, he and Ralph Fults assembled a rotating core group of associates and began a series of small robberies, primarily of stores and gas stations.
Their goal was to collect enough money and firepower to launch a raid of liberation against Eastham prison.
On April 19, Bonnie Parker and Fults were captured in a failed hardware store burglary in Kaufman, Texas, and subsequently jailed.
On April 30, Barrow was the wheelman in a robbery in Hillsboro, Texas, during which the store's owner, JN Bucher, was shot and killed.
When shown mugshots, the victim's wife identified Barrow as one of the shooters, even though he had stayed outside in the car.
Meanwhile, Parker remained in jail until June 17. When the Kaufman County grand jury convened, it declined to indict her, and she was released. Within a few weeks, she reunited with Barrow.
On August 5, while Parker was visiting her mother in Dallas, Barrow, Hamilton and Ross Dyer were drinking alcohol at a country dance in Stringtown, Oklahoma, when Sheriff CG Maxwell and his deputy, Eugene C Moore, approached them in the parking lot.
Barrow and Hamilton opened fire, killing the deputy and gravely wounding the sheriff. It was the first killing of a lawman by Barrow and his gang, a total eventually amounting to nine officers. Another civilian was added to the list on October 11, when storekeeper Howard Hall was killed during a robbery of his store in Sherman, Texas. The take, twenty-eight dollars and some groceries.
WD Jones had been a friend of the Barrow family since childhood, and though he was only 16 years old on Christmas Eve 1932, he persuaded Barrow to let him join up with the pair and ride out of Dallas with them that night. The very next day, Jones was initiated into homicide when he and Barrow killed Doyle Johnson, a young family man, in the process of stealing his car in Temple, Texas.
Less than two weeks later, on January 6, 1933, Barrow killed Tarrant County Deputy Sheriff Malcolm Davis when he, Parker and Jones wandered into a police trap set for another criminal. The total murdered by the gang since April was now five.
On March 22, 1933, Buck Barrow was granted a full pardon and released from prison. Within days, he and his wife, Blanche, had set up housekeeping with Clyde Barrow, Parker and Jones in a temporary hideout in Joplin, Missouri.
Lawmen assembled a two-car, five-man force on April 13 to confront the suspected bootleggers living in their rented apartment over a garage. Though taken by surprise, Clyde, noted for remaining cool under fire, was gaining far more experience in gun battles than most lawmen. He, Jones and Buck quickly killed Detective McGinnis and fatally wounded Constable Harryman. During the escape from the apartment, Parker laid down covering fire with her own BAR, forcing Highway Patrol sergeant GB Kahler to duck behind a large oak tree while .30-06 slugs slammed into the other side, forcing wood splinters into the sergeant's face. Parker then got into the car with the others. The car slowed long enough to pull in Blanche Barrow from the street, where she was pursuing her fleeing dog, Snow Ball. The surviving officers later testified that their side had fired only fourteen rounds in the conflict, although one of these hit Jones in the side, one struck Clyde and was deflected by his suitcoat button, and one grazed Buck after ricocheting off a wall.
The group escaped the police at Joplin, but left most of their possessions at the rented apartment: Buck and Blanche's marriage license, Buck's parole papers (only three weeks old), a large arsenal.
For the next three months, they ranged from Texas as far north as Minnesota. In May, they robbed banks in Lucerne, Indiana and Okabena, Minnesota. Previously they had kidnapped Dillard Darby and Sophia Stone at Ruston, Louisiana, in the course of stealing Darby's car. This was one of several incidents between 1932 and 1934 in which they kidnapped lawmen or robbery victims, usually releasing them far from home, sometimes with money to help them return. Stories of these encounters made headlines, but so too did the darker encounters. The Barrow Gang would not hesitate to shoot anyone, lawman or civilian, who got in their way. Other members of the Barrow Gang known or thought to have committed murders included Raymond Hamilton, WD Jones, Buck Barrow and Henry Methvin. Eventually, the cold-bloodedness of the killings would not only sour the public perception of the outlaws, but lead directly to their undoing.
On June 10, while driving with Jones and Parker near Wellington, Texas, Barrow missed warning signs at a bridge under construction and flipped their car into a ravine. Parker sustained horrific third degree burns to her right leg. The burn was so severe, the muscles contracted and caused the leg to "draw up". Near the end of her life, Parker could hardly walk and would either hop on her good leg or be carried by Clyde. After getting help from a nearby farm family and kidnapping two local lawmen, the three outlaws rendezvoused with Blanche and Buck Barrow again and they hid out in a tourist court near Fort. Smith, Arkansas.
Then Buck and Jones bungled a local robbery and killed Town Marshall Henry D Humphrey in Alma, Arkansas.With the renewed pursuit from the law, they had to flee again, despite the grave condition of Bonnie Parker.
On July 18, 1933, the gang checked into the Red Crown Tourist Court south of Platte City, Missouri (now within the city limits of Kansas City). The Red Crown Court was just two brick cabins joined by garages and the gang rented both. To the south stood the Red Crown Tavern, a popular restaurant and a favourite watering hole for Missouri Highway Patrolmen.
When Clyde and Jones went to town to purchase bandages and atropine sulfate to treat Bonnie's leg, the druggist contacted Sheriff Holt Coffey, who put the cabins under watch. Coffey had been alerted by Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas to be on the lookout for strangers seeking such supplies. The sheriff contacted Captain Baxter, who called for reinforcements from Kansas City including an armoured car. At 11pm that night, Sheriff Coffey led a group of officers armed with Thompson submachine guns toward the cabins. But in a pitched gunfight at considerable distances, the submachine guns proved no match for Clyde Barrow's preferred Browning Automatic Rifles, stolen July 7 from the National Guard armoury at Enid, Oklahoma. The Barrows laid down withering fire and made their escape when a bullet short-circuited the horn on the armoured car and the lawmen mistook it for a cease-fire signal. They did not pursue the retreating Barrow automobile.
Although the gang evaded law enforcement once again, Buck Barrow had sustained a horrific wound in the side of the head and Blanche Barrow was nearly blinded from glass fragments in both her eyes. Their prospects for holding out against the ensuing manhunt dwindled.
Five days later, on July 24, the Barrow Gang was camped at Dexfield Park, an abandoned amusement park near Dexter, Iowa. So plainly mortal was Buck's head wound that Clyde and Jones dug a grave for him. After their bloody bandages were noticed by local citizens, it was determined that the campers were the Barrow gang. Surrounded by local lawmen and approximately one hundred spectators, the Barrows once again found themselves under fire. Clyde Barrow, Parker and WD Jones escaped on foot.
Buck was shot again, in the back, and he and his wife were captured by the officers. Buck died five days later, at Kings Daughters Hospital in Perry, Iowa, of pneumonia after surgery.
For the next six weeks, the remaining trio ranged far afield of their usual area of operations — west to Colorado, north to Minnesota, southeast to Mississippi — keeping a low profile and pulling only small robberies for daily-bread money. They restocked their arsenal when Barrow and Jones burglarised an armoury at Plattville, Illinois on August 20 and scored three BARs, handguns and lots of ammunition.
By early September, they risked a run back in to Dallas to see their families for the first time in four months, and Jones parted company with them, continuing on to Houston, where his mother had moved. He was arrested there without incident on November 16 and returned to Dallas. Through the autumn, Barrow executed a series of small-time robberies with a series of small-time local accomplices while his family, and Parker's, attended to her considerable medical needs.
On November 22, 1933, they narrowly evaded arrest — but not bullets — while attempting to hook up with family members near Sowers, Texas. This time, it was their hometown Sheriff, Dallas' Smoot Schmid and his squad, lying in wait nearby. As Barrow drove up, he sensed a trap and drove right past his family's car, at which point Schmid and his deputies stood up and opened fire with machine guns and a BAR. The family members in the crossfire were not hit, but not so the outlaws. A single BAR slug penetrated the car — and the legs of both Parker and Barrow. The couple made their getaway that night, but the attempted ambush would prove to be a dry run for deputies Ted Hinton and Bob Alcorn, who would get another shot at the pair six months hence in Louisiana.
Bonnie Parker crossed an ominous personal threshold the following week when on November 28, a Dallas grand jury delivered a murder indictment on her and Barrow for the January 1933 killing of Tarrant County Deputy Malcolm Davis. It was the first murder warrant issued for Parker.
On January 16, 1934, Barrow finally made his long-contemplated move against the Texas Department of Corrections as he orchestrated the escape of Raymond Hamilton, Henry Methvin and several others in the infamous "Eastham Breakout" of 1934.
The Texas prison system received national negative publicity from the brazen raid, and Barrow appeared to have achieved what Phillips describes as the burning passion in his life, exacting revenge on the Texas Department of Corrections.
During the jailbreak, escapee Joe Palmer shot prison officer Major Joe Crowson and this act would eventually bring the full power of the Texas and federal governments to bear on the manhunt for Barrow and Parker. As Crowson struggled for life, prison chief Lee Simmons reportedly promised him that all persons involved in the breakout would be hunted down and killed, and all were, except for Henry Methvin, whose life would eventually be exchanged for turning Barrow and Parker over to authorities. The Texas Department of Corrections then contacted former Texas Ranger Captain Frank A. Hamer, and persuaded him to accept an assignment to hunt down the Barrow Gang. Though retired, Hamer had retained his commission, which had not yet expired. He accepted the assignment as a Texas Highway Patrol officer, secondarily assigned to the prison system as a special investigator, and given the specific task of hunting down Bonnie, Clyde and the Barrow Gang.
Frank Hamer was tall, burly, cryptic and taciturn, unimpressed by authority, driven by an "inflexible adherence to right, or what he thinks is right." For twenty years Hamer had been feared and admired throughout the Lone Star State as "the walking embodiment of the 'One Riot, One Ranger' ethos. In accomplishing the aims of Texas law enforcement he "had acquired a formidable reputation as a result of several spectacular captures and the shooting of a number of Texas criminals. He was officially credited with fifty-three kills (and seventeen wounds to himself). Although prison boss Simmons always said publicly that Hamer had been his first choice for the Barrow hunt, there's evidence he approached two other Rangers first, both of whom had been queasy about shooting a woman and declined. Hamer apparently had no such qualms. Starting February 10, he became the constant shadow of Barrow and Parker, living out of his car, just a town or two behind the bandits. Three of Hamer's brothers were also Texas Rangers, and while brother Harrison was the best shot of the four, Frank was considered the most tenacious.
On April 1, 1934, Easter Sunday, Barrow and Henry Methvin killed two young highway patrolmen, HD Murphy and Edward Bryant Wheeler, in an area of Grapevine, Texas now called Southlake. A contemporary eyewitness account stated that Barrow and Parker fired the fatal shots and this story got widespread coverage in the press[95] before it was discredited. Henry Methvin later admitted he fired the first shot, after assuming Barrow wanted the officers killed; he also admitted that Parker approached the dying officers intending to help them, not to administer the cold-blooded point-blank coup de grace the discredited eyewitness had described.
Having little choice once Methvin had shot Wheeler, Barrow then joined in, firing at Patrolman Murphy. Most likely, Parker was asleep in the back seat when Methvin started shooting and took no part in the assault.
Five days later, Barrow and Methvin killed 60-year-old Constable William "Cal" Campbell, a widower single father, near Commerce, Oklahoma. They kidnapped Commerce police chief Percy Boyd, drove around with him, crossing the state line into Kansas, and then let him out with a clean shirt, a few dollars and a request from Parker to tell the world she didn't smoke cigars. The outlaws didn't realise at their upbeat parting that Boyd would identify both Barrow and Parker to authorities — he never learned the name of the sullen youth who was with them — and when the resultant arrest warrant was issued for the Campbell murder, it specified Clyde Barrow, Bonnie Parker and John Doe.
Barrow and Parker were ambushed and killed on May 23, 1934 on a rural road in Bienville Parish, Louisiana. The couple appeared in daylight in an automobile and were shot by a posse of four Texas officers (Frank Hamer, BM "Manny" Gault, Bob Alcorn and Ted Hinton) and two Louisiana officers (Henderson Jordan and Prentiss Morel Oakley).
The posse was led by Hamer, who had begun tracking the pair on February 10, 1934. They were mutilated.
Word of the ambush quickly got around when Hamer, Jordan, Oakley and Hinton drove to town to telephone their respective bosses. A crowd soon gathered at the spot, and Gault and Alcorn, who were left to guard the bodies, lost control of the jostling curious. One woman cut off bloody locks of Parker's hair and pieces from her dress, which were sold as souvenirs. Hinton returned to find a man trying to cut off Barrow's trigger finger, and was sickened by what was occurring. One eager man had opened his pocket knife, and was reaching into the car to cut off Clyde's left ear. The coroner enlisted Hamer for help in controlling the "circus-like atmosphere," and only then did people move away from the car.
Bonnie and Clyde wished to be buried side by side, but the Parker family would not allow it. Mrs. Parker had wanted to grant her daughter's final wish, which was to be brought home, but the mobs surrounding the Parker house made that impossible. Over 20,000 people turned out for Bonnie Parker's funeral, making it difficult for her family to reach the grave site.
Parker's family used the now defunct McKamy-Campbell Funeral Home, then located on Forest Avenue in Dallas, to conduct her funeral. Hubert “Buster” Parker accompanied his sister’s body back to Dallas in the McKamy-Campbell ambulance. Her services were held Saturday, May 26, at 2pm in the funeral home, directed by Allen D Campbell. His son, Dr Allen Campbell, later remembered that flowers came from everywhere.
Thousands of people gathered outside both Dallas funeral homes hoping for a chance to view the bodies. Barrow’s private funeral was held at sunset on Friday, May 25, in the funeral home chapel. He was buried in Western Heights Cemetery in Dallas, next to his brother, Marvin. They share a single granite marker with their names on it and a four-word epitaph previously selected by Clyde: “Gone but not forgotten.”
The life insurance policies for both Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were paid in full by American National of Galveston.
Blanche Barrow's injuries left her permanently blinded in her left eye. After the 1933 shootout at Dexfield Park, she was taken into custody on the charge of "Assault With Intent To Kill." She was sentenced to ten years in prison but was paroled in 1939 for good behaviour. She returned to Dallas, leaving her life of crime in the past, and lived with her invalid father as his caregiver. She married Eddie Frasure in 1940, worked as a taxi cab dispatcher and a beautician, and completed the terms of her parole one year later. She lived in peace with her husband until he died of cancer in 1969. Warren Beatty approached her to purchase the rights to her name for use in the 1967 film. While she agreed to the original script, she objected to her characterisation.
She died from cancer at the age of 77 on December 24, 1988, and was buried in Dallas's Grove Hill Memorial Park under the name "Blanche B. Frasure".
Henry Methvin's ambush-earned Texas pardon didn't help him in Oklahoma, where he was convicted of the 1934 murder of Constable Campbell at Commerce.
He was paroled in 1942 and killed by a train in 1948.
Bonnie Parker's husband Roy Thornton was sentenced to five years in prison for burglary in March 1933. He was killed by guards on October 3, 1937, during an escape attempt from Eastham.
Prentiss Oakley, who all six possemen agree fired the first shots, was reported to have been troubled by his actions. He often admitted to his friends that he had fired prematurely and he was the only posse member to express regret publicly. He would go on to succeed Henderson Jordan as Bienville Parish sheriff in 1940.
Frank Hamer returned to a quieter life as a freelance security consultant — a strikebreaker — to oil companies, although, according to Guinn, "his reputation suffered somewhat after Gibsland" because many people felt he had not given Barrow and Parker a fair chance to surrender. He made headlines again in 1948 when he and Governor Coke Stevenson unsuccessfully challenged Lyndon Johnson's vote totals during the election for the US Senate. He died in 1955 at 71. His possemate Bob Alcorn died on May 23, 1964 — exactly thirty years to the day after the Gibsland ambush.
The criminal couple's enduring appeal to the public was due to their revolt against an uncaring system.

Karl Marx - King Of Social Revolution

2011-05-22T03:15:00.000-07:00

From Wikipedia.

Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 – March 14, 1883) was a German philosopher, sociologist, historian, economist and journalist who developed the socio-political theory of Marxism. His ideas have since played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement. He published various books during his lifetime, the most notable being The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Capital (1867–1894), co-written with his friend and fellow German socialist Friedrich Engels.

Born into a wealthy middle class family in Trier, Prussia, Marx went on to study at the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin, where he became interested in the philosophical ideas of Hegel. In 1836, he became engaged to Jenny Von Westphalen, marrying her in 1843.

Following the completion of his studies, he became a journalist in Cologne, writing for radical newspapers. Moving to Paris in 1843, he began writing for other radical newspapers as well as a series of books with Engels.

Exiled to Brussels in Belgium in 1845, he became a leading figure of the Communist League, before moving back to Cologne. There he founded his own newspaper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

Exiled once more, in 1849 he moved to London together with his wife and their children. In London, where the family was reduced to poverty, Marx continued writing and formulating his theories about the nature of society and how he believed it could be improved. He became a significant figure in the International Workingmen's Association.

Marx's theories about society, economics and politics, collectively known as Marxism, hold that all society progresses through the dialectic of class struggle. He was heavily critical of the current socio-economic form of society, capitalism, which he called the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie", believing it to be run by the wealthy middle and upper classes purely for their own benefit, and predicted that, like previous socioeconomic systems, it would inevitably produce internal tensions which would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system, socialism.

Under socialism, he argued that society would be governed by the working class in what he called the "dictatorship of the proletariat", the "workers state" or "workers' democracy".

He believed that socialism would, in its turn, eventually be replaced by a stateless, classless society called pure communism.

Along with believing in the inevitability of socialism and communism, Marx actively fought for the former's implementation, arguing that both social theorists and underprivileged people should carry out organised revolutionary action to topple capitalism and bring about socio-economic change.

While Marx remained a relatively unknown figure in his own lifetime, his ideas and the ideology of Marxism began to exert a major influence on socialist movements shortly after his death. Revolutionary socialist governments following Marxist concepts took power in a variety of countries in the 20th century, leading to the formation of socialist states as the Soviet Union in 1922 and the People's Republic of China in 1949.

Marx is typically cited, with Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, as one of the three principal architects of modern social science. Marx has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history, and in a 1999 BBC poll was voted the "thinker of the millennium".

Leonardo Da Vinci - The Fruity Genius

2011-05-14T04:09:00.001-07:00

From Wikipedia.

Leonardo Piero Da Vinci (April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519) was an Italian polymath - painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer.

Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance Man, a man of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination".

He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever.

Born in Florence, Leonardo was educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter, Verrocchio.

Much of his earlier working life was spent in the service of Ludovico Moro in Milan.

He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice and spent his last years in France, at the home awarded to him by Francis I.

Leonardo was and is renowned primarily as a painter.

Among his works, the Mona Lisa, which is the artist in drag, is the most famous and most parodied portrait.

The Last Supper the most reproduced religious painting of all time.

Leonardo's drawing of the Vitruvian Man (the nude artist) is also regarded as a cultural icon, reproduced on everything from the Euro to T-shirts.

He conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics.

Some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded.

He made important discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, optics and hydrodynamics, but he did not publish his findings and they had little influence on later science.

Leonardo was the model for two works by his mentor Verrocchio, the bronze statue of David in the Bargello and the Archangel Raphael in Tobias And The Angel.

In 1472, at the age of 20, Leonardo qualified as a master in the Guild Of St Luke, the guild of artists and doctors of medicine.

While in Milan from 1482 to 1499 he was commissioned to paint the Virgin Of The Rocks for the Confraternity Of The Immaculate Conception and The Last Supper for the Monastery Of Santa Maria Delle Grazie.

From 1513 to 1516, Leonardo spent much of his time living in the Belvedere in the Vatican in Rome, where Raphael and Michelangelo were both active at that time.

In 1515, Leonardo was ordered by Francis I to make a mechanical lion.

When Leonardo died, he was buried in the Chapel Of Saint-Hubert in Chateau D'Amboise, France.

Leonardo was gay and never married.

Seve Ballesteros - Spanish Golf Legend

2011-05-07T23:59:00.001-07:00

From Wikipedia.

Severiano Ballesteros Sota, who died after a long battle with cancer on May 7, 2011, will always be remembered as Spain's greatest golf icon.

A World No. 1 who was one of the sport's leading figures from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, he gained attention in the golfing world in 1976, when at 19 he finished second at The Open Championship.

A member of a gifted golfing family, Ballesteros won five major championships between 1979 and 1988, The Open Championship three times, and The Masters twice.

He was also successful in the Ryder Cup, helping the European team to five wins both as a player and captain, and won the World Match Play Championship a record-tying five times.

He is best known for his great short game, and his erratic driving of the golf ball.

Ballesteros was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award for the second time at the BBC Sports Personality Awards 2009.

Ballesteros was born in Pedrena, Cantabria, Spain.

He learned the game while playing on the beaches near his home, mainly using a 3-iron given to him by one of his elder brothers.

His uncle Ramon Sota was Spanish professional champion four times and finished sixth in The Masters in 1965.

Seve's elder brother Manuel finished in the top 100 on the European Tour order of merit every year from 1972 to 1983, and later became Seve's manager.

Brothers Vicente and Baldomero, and nephew Raul are also professional golfers.

Ballesteros turned professional in March 1974 at the age of 16.

In 1999, Ballesteros was inducted into the World Golf Hall Of Fame.

He was instrumental in introducing the Seve Trophy in 2000, a team competition similar to the Ryder Cup pitting a team from Great Britain and Ireland against one from continental Europe.

In 2000, Ballesteros was ranked as the 16th greatest golfer of all time by Golf Digest magazine. He was the top golfer from the continent of Europe.

Ballesteros was married to Carmen Botin O'Shea, daughter of Emilio Botin, from 1988 until their divorce in 2004.

They have three children.

Congrats Wills And Kate.

2011-05-02T03:14:00.001-07:00

Long live Diana.

Finally, The Monster Is Dead

2011-05-02T03:11:00.000-07:00

Finally, the Monster of Monsters, Osama Bin Laden, is dead.

We have every reason to celebrate.

But the battle is not over yet.

We must destroy Wahabism.

Osama is but a speck in the dark empire of Wahabism.

To destroy Wahabism, we must destroy Saudi Arabia.

America the champion of democracy should get out of Libya and stop killing the irrelevant Muammar Gaddafi, and instead focus on killing Saudi Arabia.

If there is no more Saudi Arabia, there will be no more Wahabism.

And the real Islam, the Unitarian Universalist Church where I stand, will prevail.

Tan Sri Zainal Aznam Yusof - A Towering Malay And Malaysian

2011-05-02T03:07:00.000-07:00

Tan Sri Dr Zainal Aznam Yusof, who passed away after an illness at 67 recently, was a towering Malaysian and Malay.

Zainal was the former deputy director-general of the Institute of Strategic and International Studies.

He had long been involved in various economic research and policy development departments and panels in the country.

He had worked with three Prime Ministers - Tun Dr Mahathir Muhammad, Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and Datuk Seri Najib Razak - as a key economic adviser to the government.

He was a firm believer in meritocracy and the need to make Malaysia's economy competitive. Zainal was an Oxford graduate in economics.

Alan Tang - HK's Alain Delon

2011-03-31T22:16:00.001-07:00

Alan Tang Kwong Wing's death from a stroke on March 29, 2011 has robbed Hong Kong and Taiwan of a brilliant leading man, producer and director.

Read all about him here. Thanks Wikipedia.

Alan Tang Kwong Wing (September 20, 1946 – March 29, 2011) was a Hong Kong film actor, producer and director.

Tang was born in Shunde, Guangdong, China, the youngest of four children.

His first starring role was actually at 16 in the 1963 film The Student Prince.

Upon graduation from secondary school, Tang acted in Hong Kong youth films starring Josephine Hsiao, Chen Chen, and Connie Chan throughout the 1960s.

Tang was often voted Best Actor by film magazines.

Tang found greater fame when he moved to Taiwan during the 1970s, and made over 60 feature films, often dramas and romances.

He often co-starred with Brigette Lin.

In 1974, Tang produced and starred in Splendid Love In Winter with Chen Chen, and Dynamite Brothers with American footballer Timothy Brown.

In 1977, he formed The Wing-Scope Company.

A decade later, Tang established In-Gear Film Productions, with his brother Rover Tang.

Well-known films of Tang during this time included Flaming Brothers, Gangland Odyssey, Return Engagement, Gun N Rose and The Black Panther Warriors.

He also produced two films directed by Wong Kar Wai, As Tears Go By and Days Of Being Wild.

In the 1990s, Tang became a restaurant businessman. He also became the godfather of Adam Cheng's daughter, actress Joyce Cheng.

Tang was a generous celebrity who devoted much of his time to philanthropy.

Elizabeth Taylor - Grand Dame Of British Cinema

2011-03-23T06:57:00.000-07:00

Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor, (February 27, 1932 – March 23, 2011) will always be remembered as the grand dame of British cinema.

The former child star who passed away after a long illness recently, was known for both her acting talent and beauty.

She was also frequently in the spotlight because of her Hollywood lifestyle, and many marriages.

Taylor is considered one of the greatest actresses of Hollywood's golden age.

She was born in Hampstead, a wealthy district of North West London, the second child of Francis Lenn Taylor (1897–1968) and Sara Viola Warmbrodt (1895–1994), who were Americans residing in the United Kingdom.

She was of British, Jewish (Israeli), Spanish, Portuguese, Iranian and Native American heritage.

Taylor's family came from Arkansas City, Kansas.

Her father was an art dealer and her mother a former actress.

She was a dual citizen of the UK and the US for life.

At three, Taylor took ballet lessons. Shortly before World War II, her parents returned to the United States.

The Taylors were family friends of Andrea Berens, a wealthy British socialite and the fiancee of Cheever Cowden, chairman of Universal Pictures in Hollywood.

Berens introduced Sara and Elizabeth to Cowden, and he had her signed to Universal as an actress.

Taylor appeared in her first film at nine, There's One Born Every Minute.

Not long after, she joined Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) and starred in Lassie Come Home.
This 1943 film featured her lifelong pal Roddy McDowall.

In 1944, she starred in Jane Eyre.

At 12, she played Velvet Brown in National Velvet. Velvet was a young girl who trains her horse to win the Grand National.

The film also rocketed Mickey Rooney and Angela Lansbury to fame.

In 1946, she starred in The Courage Of Lassie.

Other notable films in the 1940s were Life With Father (1947), Cynthia (1947), A Date With Judy (1948) and Julia Misbehaves (1948).

In 1949, she starred in Conspirator which bombed at the box office.

But her portrayal of 21-year-old debutante Melinda Grayton was praised by critics.

Her first major box office success in an adult role was Kay Banks in the romantic comedy Father Of The Bride (1950).

In late 1949, Taylor starred in A Place In The Sun as a spoiled socialite.

The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954) saw her reunited with her Big Hangover co-star Van Johnson.

Following a substantial role opposite Rock Hudson and James Dean in Giant (1956), Taylor was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress. She was also nominated for her roles in Raintree County (1957), Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Suddenly Last Summer (1959).

In 1960, she starred in Cleopatra as the title character. Her future husband, British actor Richard Burton played Mark Antony.

Taylor won her first Academy Award for Best Actress for Butterfield 8 (1960), which co-starred then husband Eddie Fisher.

Her second Best Actress award was in Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? (1966), which co-starred Burton.

Burton and Taylor starred in six films during the decade – The VIPs (1963), The Sandpiper (1965), The Taming Of The Shrew (1967), Doctor Faustus (1967), The Comedians {1967} and Boom! (1968).

Taylor appeared in Reflections In A Golden Eye (1967) opposite Marlon Brando and Secret Ceremony (1968) opposite Mia Farrow.

Taylor continued to star in numerous theatrical films throughout the 1970s, such as Zee And Co (1972) with Michael Caine, Ash Wednesday (1973), The Blue Bird (1976) with Jane Fonda and Ava Gardner and A Little Night Music (1977).

With then-husband Burton, she co-starred in the 1972 films Under Milk Wood and Hammersmith Is Out and the 1973 made-for-TV movie Divorce His, Divorce Hers.
Taylor starred in the 1980 mystery film The Mirror Cracked, based on an Agatha Christie novel.

In 1985, she played movie gossip columnist Louella Parsons in the TV film Malice In Wonderland.

Her last theatrical film was 1994's The Flintstones.

In the 2000s she starred in television series such as General Hospital, All My Children and The Simpsons.

Taylor made her Broadway and West End debuts in 1982 in The Little Foxes.

She also starred in Noel Coward's Private Lives (1983) with Burton.

On December 5, 2007, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger inducted Taylor into the California Hall Of Fame, located at The California Museum For History, Women And The Arts.

Taylor devoted much time and energy to AIDS-related charities and fundraising. She helped start the American Foundation for AIDS Research after the death of her former co-star and friend, Rock Hudson.

She also created her own AIDS foundation, the Elizabeth Taylor Aids Foundation (ETAF).

By 1999, she had helped to raise an estimated US$50 million to fight the disease.

She also became a close pal of Michael Jackson, and attended his funeral in 2009.

Taylor was married seven times to Conrad Hilton (1950-51), Michael Wilding (1952-57), Michael Todd (1957-58, he died), Eddie Fisher (1959-64), Richard Burton (1964-74, 1975-76), John Warner (1976-82) and Larry Fortensky (1991-1996).

She is survived by two sons (from Wilding) and two daughters (one each from Todd and Burton).

She has nine grandchildren.

About Japan

2011-03-14T21:24:00.001-07:00

Thanks Wikipedia.

Japan is an island nation in East Asia.

Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south.

The characters that make up Japan's name mean "sun-origin", which is why Japan is sometimes referred to as the "Land Of The Rising Sun".

Japan is an archipelago of 6,852 islands.

The four largest islands are Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu and Shikoku, together accounting for ninety seven percent of Japan's land area.

Japan has the world's tenth largest population, with over 127 million people.

Since adopting its revised constitution in 1947, Japan has maintained a unitary constitutional monarchy with an emperor and an elected parliament called the Diet.

A major economic power, Japan is the world's fourth largest exporter and fifth largest importer.

Although Japan has officially renounced its right to declare war, it maintains an extensive modern military force in self-defense and peacekeeping roles.

Japan has the highest life expectancy of any country in the world.

The English word Japan is an exonym.

The Japanese names for Japan are Nippon and Nihon.

Japanese people refer to themselves as Nihonjin and to their language as Nihongo.

Both Nippon and Nihon mean "sun-origin".

The British coined the name Japan from the Malay word Jepang which is derived from the Shanghai Chinese word for the country, Zepen.

The Japanese are of Chinese and Mon origin.

The Ryukyu Islanders in the south of Japan are the same people as the aboriginals of Taiwan and the people of the Philippines.

They are Austronesians of the Bajau subgroup (Kenyah in Sarawak and Kayan in Indonesian Borneo aka Banjarmasin).

Japan received Buddhism from the Koreans.

During the 16th century, traders and missionaries from Portugal reached Japan, initiating direct commercial and cultural exchange between Japan and the West (Nanban trade).

On March 31, 1854, the United States' representative Matthew Perry inked a business treaty with the Japanese monarch.

Emperor Meiji subsequently introduced a constitution for Japan and modernised the country extensively.

After victories in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), Japan gained control of Taiwan and Korea.

World War I enabled Japan, which joined the side of the victorious Allies, to widen its influence and territorial holdings.

It occupied Manchuria in 1931, and in 1940, joined Adolf Hitler's Germany fighting the Allies in World War II.

Japan invaded China in 1937, precipitating the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945).

In 1940, it took South East Asia and on December 7, 1941, attacked the United States' naval base at Pearl Harbour.

After the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and the American atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Japan surrendered to the Allies.

The Allies (led by the United States ) repatriated millions of ethnic Japanese from colonies and military camps throughout Asia.

The Allies also convened the International Military Tribunal For The Far East on May 3, 1946 to prosecute some Japanese leaders for war crimes.

However, the bacteriological research units and members of the imperial family involved in the war were exonerated from criminal prosecutions by the Supreme Allied Commander despite calls for trials for both groups.

In 1947, Japan adopted a new constitution emphasising liberal democratic practices.

The Allied occupation ended with the Treaty Of San Francisco in 1952 and Japan was granted membership in the United Nations in 1956.

Japan later achieved rapid growth to become the second largest economy in the world.

On March 11, 2011, Japan suffered the strongest earthquake in its recorded history.

It had a magnitude of 9.0 and was aggravated by a tsunami, affecting the northeast area of Honshu, including the capital city Tokyo.

About 73 percent of Japan is forested, mountainous and unsuitable for agricultural, industrial, or residential use.

As a result, the habitable zones, mainly located in coastal areas, have extremely high population densities.

The islands of Japan are located in a volcanic zone on the Pacific Ring Of Fire.

The climate of Japan is predominantly temperate, but varies greatly from north to south.

Japan's geographical features divide it into six principal climatic zones: Hokkaido, Sea Of Japan, Central Highlands, Seto Inland Sea, Pacific Ocean, and Ryukyu Islands.

The northernmost zone, Hokkaido, has a temperate climate with long, cold winters and cool summers.

In the Sea Of Japan zone on Honshu's west coast, northwest winter winds bring heavy snowfall.

In the summer, the region is cooler than the Pacific area, though it sometimes experiences extremely hot temperatures.

The Central Highlands has a typical inland climate, with large temperature differences between summer and winter, and between day and night.

The mountains of the Chugoku and Shikoku regions shelter the Seto Inland Sea from seasonal winds, bringing mild weather year-round.

The Pacific coast experiences cold winters with little snowfall and hot, humid summers.

The Ryukyu Islands have a subtropical climate, with warm winters and hot summers.
Japan has nine forest ecoregions which reflect the climate and geography of the islands.

They range from subtropical forests in the Ryukyu Islands, to temperate forests in the mild climate regions of the main islands and the cold northern islands.

Japan has over 90,000 species of wildlife, including the brown bear, the Japanese macaque, the raccoon dog, and the Japanese giant salamander.

Japan is one of the world's leaders in the development of new environment-friendly technologies, and is ranked 20th best in the world in the 2010 Environmental Performance Index.

Japan is a constitutional monarchy where the power of the Emperor is very limited.

As a ceremonial figurehead, he is defined by the constitution as "the symbol of the state and of the unity of the people".

Power is held chiefly by the Prime Minister of Japan and other elected members of the Diet, while sovereignty is vested in the Japanese people.

Japan's legislative organ is the National Diet, a bicameral parliament.

The Diet consists of a House of Representatives with 480 seats, elected by popular vote every four years or when dissolved, and a House of Councillors of 242 seats, whose popularly-elected members serve six-year terms.

There is universal suffrage for adults over 20 years of age.

Japan consists of forty seven prefectures, each overseen by an elected governor, legislature and administrative bureaucracy.

Each prefecture is further divided into cities, towns and villages.

Japan has a large industrial capacity, and is home to some of the largest and most technologically advanced producers of motor vehicles, electronics, machine tools, steel and nonferrous metals, ships, chemical substances, textiles and processed foods.

Agricultural businesses in Japan often utilise a system of terrace farming, and crop yields are high.

Japan is the second largest producer of automobiles in the world.

Its main exports are transportation equipment, motor vehicles, electronics, electrical machinery and chemicals.

Japan is a leading nation in scientific research, particularly technology, machinery and biomedical research.

Some of Japan's more prominent technological contributions are in the fields of electronics, automobiles, machinery, earthquake engineering, industrial robotics, optics, chemicals, semiconductors and metals.

Primary schools, secondary schools and universities were introduced in 1872.

Since 1947, compulsory education in Japan comprises elementary and middle school, which together last for nine years (from ages 6 to 15).

Japanese music is eclectic and diverse.

Many instruments, such as the koto, were introduced in the 9th and 10th centuries.

The accompanied recitative of the Noh drama dates from the 14th century and the popular folk music, with the guitar-like shamisen, from the sixteenth.

Historically, the primary ingredient of Japanese cuisine has been Japanese rice.

In the early modern era ingredients such as red meats that had previously not been widely used in Japan were introduced.

Japanese cuisine offers a vast array of regional specialties.

Traditionally, sumo is considered Japan's national sport.

Japanese martial arts such as judo, karate and kendo are also widely practiced and enjoyed by spectators in the country.

Japan hosted the Summer Olympics in Tokyo in 1964.

The Japanese professional baseball league was established in 1936.

Today baseball is the most popular spectator sport in the country.

One of the most famous Japanese baseball players is Ichiro Suzuki, who plays for the Seattle Mariners.

Since the establishment of the Japan Professional Football League in 1992, association football has also gained a wide following.

Japan was a venue of the Intercontinental Cup from 1981 to 2004 and co-hosted the 2002 FIFA World Cup with South Korea.

Japan has one of the most successful football teams in Asia, winning the Asian Cup four times.

Muammar Qaddafi's Farewell Speech By Tariq Ali

2011-03-05T04:30:00.001-08:00

Veteran social activist and leftist Tariq Ali of the United Kingdom parodies a resignation speech by Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi.

From Socialist Worker.

It's raining outside which is why I cannot address you. Sorry. It seems to be raining inside my tent as well. Can this be rain? No. It's dogs polluting the uniforms of my bodyguards. No respect for women. Benghazi. I hate that city. Once I accidentally addressed my friend Berlusconi as Benghazi. Drunkards, pimps and religious extremists. I will bomb them again before I leave. I wish we had bought some drones so I could press button myself.

My relations with the people are informal, based on friendship and fear. Why have they become so noisy and combative? I have many children. The British Foreign Office adopted one of them, my dear Saif, and wanted to put him on the throne, but that would have no effect on the intellectual landscape of the Jamahiriya.

I just received a tweet from Venezuela: "Have you read The Autumn of the Patriarch by G G Marquez?" Why should I read this shit? Has G G Marquez read my science-fiction short stories Escape From Hell that are even better than my little Green Book, which is very nutty? They are set in an imaginary country with an imaginary ruler who kills his people, and they rise and get rid of him. It's very funny story. It is popular in Arab lands.

I met them, these jokers and stray dogs of Europe. Blair, Berlusconi, they are my friends, but now they ask me to go. Why? Did they not go? It's always raining in London. And that Roman pimp is always raining on his people. I will go when my time comes. When Allah summons me to discuss the political conjuncture. I like pizzas. Once there was a good pizza place in Tripoli. Much better pizzas than in Benghazi, but now all these shops are burning.

Is it still raining? No? OK. Then I will go. Bury me in a colored shroud, not white. Bill Clinton. His penis should have been chopped off and fed to swine for letting Monica play with him when he was talking to heads of state. Men will be men, but that still upsets me. I never did that. Nor did Blair or Berlusconi.

I ruled this place for 42 years. And now it's raining. I'm sorry not to rule for 50 years. Mubarak was a stray dog, Ben Ali a pimp. Why they compare those rascals to me. I struggled against my own military dictatorship. I am not a rootless pot of excrement. What do you think? I will ask the people, but I need an umbrella. Who is raining? Am I raining on my own people?

Just one last point, I need to address to my people. Remember this: States are counter-Being. Similarly, being is counter-state. Being is the activity of being alive, free, agile and uncontained. Being, when pursued rigorously, states would wither away like Clinton's penis.

States exist by "neutralising" being. "State of being" is a moronic condition. However, "normally," we exist in the moronic conditions. I am proud to be the Chief Moron in a moronic state. I will neutralise you all.

Yours,
Muammar Qaddafi.

No US Intervention In Libya

2011-03-05T04:16:00.000-08:00

Eric Ruder For Socialist Worker

WITH forces loyal to Libya's brutal and murderous President Colonel Muammar Qaddafi and anti-government protesters locked in an increasingly bloody conflict, US and other Western powers are threatening to make the situation worse.

Two US warships crossed through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean Sea on March 2 en route to Libya in what Pentagon officials intended as a show of force, while US President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton talked with NATO and European allies about other military options.

On March 3, Obama authorised the use of US military airlifts to transport refugees seeking to return to their home countries from Libya, a move that may be designed to provoke Qaddafi by bringing US military aircraft in close range to the action.

The question of intervention with the authorisation of the United Nations or NATO has been raised, though Russia, as a member of the UN Security Council, has said it would veto a resolution sanctioning the use of military force, and the German government has opposed military action.

The uprising that began in eastern Libya in mid-February has won broad popular support, but thus far has been unable to force Qaddafi out, nor dislodge the regime's grip on the Libyan capital of Tripoli. Qaddafi is clinging to power with a combination of foreign African mercenaries and units from his own well-trained security forces, armed with Western-supplied weapons that have been used against those who support democracy.

The split in Qaddafi's regime and its armed forces, combined with the territorial division between his stronghold in western Libya and the rebellion's base in the east, has set the stage for a possibly protracted conflict, with casualties that could rise significantly.

Nevertheless, despite the carnage, significant sections of the Libyan uprising have told the US and other Western powers to stay out of Libya. As General Ahmad Gatroni, a rebel military leader in Benghazi, put it, the US should "take care of its own people, we can look after ourselves." In Benghazi's main square, demonstrators have hung a banner that reads in English, "No foreign intervention. Libyan people can manage it alone."

In Benghazi, journalist Jihan Hafiz reported widespread opposition to US intervention. "The entire Libyan population is insisting against US intervention or any involvement of foreign powers within Libya," one Libyan pro-democracy protester told Hafiz.

According to Hafiz: Rebels in Benghazi are also rejecting calls from US Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman to send the liberated territory weapons to fight Qaddafi's forces. They insist they defeated the security forces of Muammar Qaddafi in Benghazi without the use of weapons and without the support of a foreign government. Their victory in the bloody battle for Benghazi has engendered a strong sense of unity and nationhood in a country known for tribal divisions.

Other sections of the opposition are calling for the US to act. The options range from US strikes on the regime's mercenary forces to a "no-fly zone" that would constrain Qaddafi's ability to use air power against a popular uprising. For some, these calls are a cynical calculation to build a relationship with imperialism. For others, they merely seem the best way to stop Qaddafi's savage violence.

Thus, one Libyan blogger whose friend was shot and killed in the demonstrations in Tripoli wrote an article for the Guardian that rejects intervention by Western ground forces:

Any military intervention on the ground by any foreign force would be met as Mustafa Abud Al Jeleil, the former justice minister and head of the opposition-formed interim government, said with fighting much harsher than what the mercenaries themselves have unleashed.

Nor do I favour the possibility of a limited air strike for specific targets. This is a wholly popular revolution, the fuel to which has been the blood of the Libyan people. Libyans fought alone when Western countries were busy ignoring their revolution at the beginning, fearful of their interests in Libya. This is why I'd like the revolution to be ended by those who first started it: the people of Libya.

But this same writer supports a Western-imposed no-fly zone:

I, like most Libyans, believe that imposing a no-fly zone would be a good way to deal the regime a hard blow on many levels. It would cut the route of the mercenary convoys summoned from Africa, it would prevent Gaddafi from smuggling money and other assets, and most importantly, it would stop the regime from bombing weapons arsenals that many eyewitnesses have maintained contain chemical weapons, something that would unleash an unimaginable catastrophe, not to mention that his planes might actually carry such weapons.

But there can be no doubt that a no-fly zone is a form of "military intervention." Even Pentagon officials warn that a no-fly zone would require the use of force, with a substantial risk of casualties. According to the Washington Post:

US military officials have tried to emphasise that such an operation would not be bloodless. On Capitol Hill, General James N Mattis, the head of the US Central Command, told a Senate panel that it would be necessary to preemptively attack Libyan air-defense batteries and installations to ensure that they could not shoot down US or NATO planes. "It would be a military operation," he said. "It wouldn't be just telling people not to fly airplanes."

No wonder the US backed a resolution referring the investigation of war crimes committed by the Qaddafi regime to the International Criminal Court only after Washington secured a provision to exempt Americans from investigation or prosecution for any actions stemming from operations in Libya authorised by the UN Security Council. In other words, the US doesn't want its own pilots to face prosecution for any war crimes that result from intervention.

As the Guardian's Seumas Milne points out, it's crucial to remember that the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were also justified as "humanitarian interventions," meant to save oppressed populations from the wrath of tyrannical regimes. As Milne put it:

It's as if the bloodbaths of Iraq and Afghanistan had been a bad dream. The liberal interventionists are back. As insurrection and repression has split Libya in two and the death toll has mounted, the old Bush-and-Blair battle cries have returned to haunt us.

The same Western leaders who happily armed and did business with the Qaddafi regime until a fortnight ago have now slapped sanctions on the discarded autocrat and blithely referred him to the international criminal court the United States won't recognise.

In truth, the real purpose of a US military intervention would not be humanitarian, but the pursuit of US interests in the continued flow of Libyan oil to Western markets. Hillary Clinton said as much at a March 1 meeting of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. According to the Washington Post:

Libya could face a "protracted civil war" without a strong US and international response to the turmoil there, Clinton told the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "The stakes are high," and a "strong and strategic American response will be essential" not only in Libya but also throughout the Middle East if the United States is to protect its own national security, she said.

The US government can't be trusted as a genuine opponent of Qaddafi's tyranny. After all, Libya has moved closer and closer to Washington, especially since the September 11 attacks in 2001. Libya under Qaddafi was once a pariah state for the US, but for the last decade and more, it had become an example of a pariah that returned to the fold.

US intervention would not save the Libyan people from Qaddafi, a dictator that Washington had learned to live with. Instead, it would become the means through which US imperial control and influence would be strengthened in a country with vast oil wealth and, considering its location next to two countries, Egypt and Tunisia, that have experienced revolutions since the start of the year, great geopolitical importance.

Opposing US intervention in Libya does not for one moment mean support for Qaddafi or his regime.

Now, Qaddafi is once again denounced as a tyrant by the US political establishment. But US intervention would not be an expression of support for the popular uprising against the dictator it once made an accommodation with.

If it were to take place, US intervention would revive Qaddafi's authority, allowing him the opportunity to appeal for support as a defender of Libyan sovereignty against US imperialism. And the point of intervention, as Clinton made clear, is not to safeguard Libya's self-determination, but to protect US interests, and that means stabilising Libya under the control of a new dictatorial regime friendly to US interests.

No doubt some sections of the old elite that sanctioned Qaddafi's brutality in the past are looking for an arrangement with the US and other Western powers. These figures, even if they claim to speak for the "opposition," should not be confused with the mass uprising against Qaddafi.

US officials would cherish a stable, pro-American Libya that could serve as a new strategic beachhead for US military operations in the region, especially as decades of US diplomacy to construct a network of pro-US regimes in the Middle East unravels.

While the Pentagon may not relish the idea of invading another Muslim country while it struggles to hang on to its occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, a strong US presence could serve to dampen the wave of revolt sweeping North Africa and the Middle East. If other resistance leaders in the region think that mounting a challenge to their own dictator might result in a massive US military presence, they might think twice.

These are the calculations that are taking place in the minds of US officials. No one should take their newfound concern for the Libyan people seriously. As the Guardian's Milne points out:

Military action is needed, US and British politicians claim, because Qaddafi is "killing his own people."

Hundreds have certainly died, but that's hard to take seriously as the principal motivation. When more than 300 people were killed by Hosni Mubarak's security forces in a couple of weeks, Washington initially called for "restraint on both sides." In Iraq, 50,000 US occupation troops protect a government which last Friday killed 29 peaceful demonstrators demanding reform. In Bahrain, home of the US Fifth Fleet, the regime has been shooting and gassing protesters with British-supplied equipment for weeks.

The "responsibility to protect" invoked by those demanding intervention in Libya is applied so selectively that the word hypocrisy doesn't do it justice. And the idea that states which are themselves responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands in illegal wars, occupations and interventions in the last decade, along with mass imprisonment without trial, torture and kidnapping, should be authorised by international institutions to prevent killings in other countries is simply preposterous.

The reality is that the Western powers which have backed authoritarian kleptocrats across the Middle East for decades now face a loss of power in the most strategically sensitive region of the world as a result of the Arab uprisings and the prospect of representative governments. They are evidently determined to appropriate the revolutionary process wherever possible, limiting it to cosmetic change that allows continued control of the region.

Those calling for Western military action in Libya seem brazenly untroubled by the fact that throughout the Arab world, foreign intervention, occupation and support for dictatorship is regarded as central to the problems of the region. Inextricably tied up with the demand for democratic freedoms is a profound desire for independence and self-determination.

The Arab revolution will be made by Arabs, or it won't be a revolution at all.

How Libyan President Became Pro-Western Thug Traitor

2011-02-25T03:56:00.000-08:00

Excellent Article From Green Left Weekly (Democratic Socialist Party of Australia).
By Peter Boyle.

On February 22, President Muammar Gaddafi was boasting on state TV that the Libyan people were with him and that he was the Libyan revolution, even while his dwindling army of special guards and hired mercenaries attempted to drown a popular revolution in blood.
Civilians were strafed and bombed from helicopters and planes. Snipers with high-powered rifles fired into unarmed crowds. Two pilots flew their fighter jets to Malta rather than bomb their own people and another two are reported to have crashed their jets rather than attack civilians. Sections of the armed forces, several diplomats and a couple of ministers have abandoned the regime and, at the time of the writing, the east of Libya was in the hands of popular revolutionary committees.
And as more sections of his armed forces stared to go over to the people, Gaddafi ordered troops who refused to shoot their own people to be executed.
Gruesome footage of the carnage was revealed to the world despite the Gaddafi regime’s desperate attempts to seal the country by blocking the internet and locking out journalists.
First Gaddafi’s son Saif Al Islam (a darling of greedy US and European corporations in recent years) and then Gaddafi himself tried to deny these massacres while simultaneously threatening the Libyan people with ruthless retribution against those who dared to rise up against the regime.
While the regime’s genocide against the Libyan people unfolded, it took days before the US and other Western governments were prepared to condemn the regime for this monstrosity. Even as late as February 23, US President Barak Obama had not condemned Gaddafi by name.
Yet in the 1980s and most of the 1990s the Gaddafi regime was attacked by the same Western governments as a “terrorist rogue state” because of its political and material support to numerous national liberation movements around the world. The administration of US President Ronald Reagan imposed economic sanctions on Libya and carried out bombing raids to try and assassinate Gaddafi.
In 1988, I visited Libya as a journalist for the left-wing newspaper Direct Action and visited Gaddafi’s bombed out home. I wrote several articles describing and defending the 1969 Libyan revolution.
However, in the late 1990s secret negotiations for a rapprochement with the US and other Western governments began. First, UN sanctions were lifted in 1999 and by 2006 the US lifted its own sanctions and normalised relations.
European leaders flocked to Libya with greedy businesspeople hanging on to their coat tails and before long several European oil companies were back in business, with banks, airlines and hotel chains following. Former British Labour PM Tony Blair and scandal-plagued, right-wing Italian President Silvio Berlusconi played leading roles in the process.
Gaddafi’s son Saif was the the neoliberal frontman for Libya. He offered greater access to capital, tax concessions and privatisation. According to an April 2010 report from the Libyan government, over the previous 10 years the the regime privatised 110 state-owned companies. The same report promised to privatise 100 percent of the Libyan economy over time. The prospect of the privatisation of the oil refineries and other downstream sectors of the oil industry promises lucrative profits.
Worried that they were missing out to European competition, a group of powerful US companies (including BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Dow Chemical, ExxonMobil, Fluor, Halliburton, Hess Corporation, Marathon Oil, Midrex Technologies, Motorola, Northrop Grumman, Occidental Petroleum, Raytheon, Shell and United Gulf Construction Company) set up a US-Libya Business Association to catch up.
Among the Gaddafi regime’s new lobbyists in Washington was arch neocon Richard Perle, a former Reagan-era US Defense Department official and George W. Bush-era chair of the US Defense Policy Board.
According to US political reporter Lauren Rozen, Perle traveled to Libya as a paid adviser to the Monitor Group, a prestigious Boston-based consulting firm with close ties to leading professors at the Harvard Business School.
A 2007 Monitor memo named among the prominent figures it had recruited to travel to Libya and meet with Gaddafi "as part of the Project To Enhance The Profile Of Libya And President Muammar Gaddafi" Perle, historian Francis Fukuyama, Princeton Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis, famous Nixon interviewer David Frost, and MIT media lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, the brother of former deputy secretary of state and director of national intelligence John Negroponte.
Several major US oil companies, including ConocoPhillips, Marathon Oil and Hess Corp, now have significant stakes in Libya's oil industry, according to a fact sheet prepared by Reuters on February 23. However, 80-85 percent of Libya’s oil exports go to Europe and companies such as British Petroleum, Italy’s Eni, Spain’s Repsol and Royal Dutch Shell have some of the biggest stakes.
In the February 23 issue of the British Guardian, Tom Bawden and John Hooper described the role of Berlusconi in Europe’s courting of the Gaddafi regime.
Gaddafi and Berlusconi have a famously warm personal relationship. Less well-known, however, is the fact that Berlusconi is in business with one of the Libyan state’s investment vehicles.
In June 2009, a Dutch-registered firm controlled by the Libyan Arab Foreign Investment Company, took a 10 percent stake in Quinta Communications, a Paris-based film production and distribution company. Quinta Communications was founded back in 1990 by Berlusconi in partnership with Tarak Ben Ammar, the nephew of the late Tunisian dictator, Habib Bourguiba.
The Italian prime minister has a 22 percent interest in the company through a Luxembourg-registered subsidiary of Fininvest, the firm at the heart of his sprawling business empire. Last September, the Libyans put a director on the board of Quinta Communications to sit alongside Berlusconi's representatives.
Libyan investors already hold significant interests in several strategic Italian enterprises. They reportedly own around one per cent of Italy’s biggest oil company, Eni; the LIA has an acknowledged 2 percent interest in the aerospace and defence group, Finmeccanica; Lafico is thought to retain more than 2 percent of Fiat and almost 15 percent of a quoted telecommunications company, Retelit.
The Libyans also own 22 percent of the capital of a textile firm, Olcese. Perhaps their best-known investment is a 7.5 percent stake in the Serie A side Juventus. But undoubtedly the most controversial is another 7.5 per cent interest in Italyís largest bank, Unicredit.
The European Union’s latest annual report on arms exports revealed Libya’s biggest military suppliers in Europe, reported Deutsche Presse-Agentur.
Italy granted export licences totalling 112 million euros, with a single 108-million-euro licence for military aircraft making up most of the amount.
Malta emerged as the second-largest exporter, having authorized the sale of an 80-million-euro consignment of small arms.
Germany was third in the list, with 53 million euros of licences, mostly for electronic jamming equipment used to disrupt mobile phone, internet and GPS communication.
France was next with 30.5 million euros, followed by Britain with 25.5 million euros, and Belgium with 22 million euros.
About 150 British companies have established a presence in Libya since the US and Europe lifted economic sanctions in 2004, after the country renounced terrorism, ceased its nuclear weapons programme and handed over two suspects in the Lockerbie bombing case.
The most high profile have been the oil companies, keen to tap Libya’s vast reserves of fossil fuels. In a deal brokered in 2007 by Tony Blair, BP signed a £560m exploration agreement allowing it to search for oil and gas, offshore and onshore, in a joint venture with the Libya Investment Corporation. Shell is also exploring for oil in Libya as western companies seek to capitalise on a country with the largest oil reserves in Africa and substantial supplies of gas.
High street retailers such as Marks & Spencer, Next, Monsoon and Accessorize have also set up in the country to serve the growing middle-class population, as oil revenues have 'trickled down' into the broader Libyan population.
Companies such as AMEC, an engineering firm, and Biwater, a waste treatment company, have supplied services to Libya, which is using its oil revenues to reshape the country through an infrastructure spending spree that will cost about £310bn over the next decade.
British exports to Libya have soared to about £930m in recent years, while the business momentum in post-sanctions Libya is so great that the economy managed to grow by about 5 percent last year, while much of the rest of the world struggled.
Gaddafi’s son Saif, speaking in his private suite in Mayfair’s five-star Connaught Hotel, told the British Daily Mirror in June 2010.
Tony Blair has an excellent relationship with my father.
For us, he is a personal family friend. I first met him around four years ago at Number 10. Since then I’ve met him several times in Libya where he stays with my father. He has come to Libya many, many times.
Libya considered Blair to be a trusted adviser to the Libyan Investment Authority, a role that Blair now denies.
But Blair’s done his dirty job well. As a February 19, 2011 ,report in the British Independent revealed.
Since the warming of relations between Libya and Britain, officers travelled frequently to Tripoli between 2008 and 2009 to train police, and Britain has authorised the export of tear gas, crowd-control ammunition, small-arms ammunition and door-breaching projectile launchers.
Three years ago, ministers agreed to send Libya vehicles armed with water cannons. There are also unconfirmed reports that riot vans made by British companies have been present during crackdowns in the Libyan city of Benghazi, where scores have been killed.
One of the murderous special battalions headed by another Gaddafi son, Khamis, is a British-trained unit, according to a February 21 Associated Press report.
While Libya’s oil exports have enabled it to build up foreign reserves of US$150 billion, almost half of its youth are unemployed, according to African Online News, an independent African news agency.
Libya is the richest North African country. But that does not reflect the real economy of the average Libyan, with around half the population falling outside the oil-driven economy. The unemployment rate is at a surprising 30 percent, with youth unemployment estimated at between 40 percent and 50 percent. This is the highest in North Africa.
Also other development indicators reveal that little of the petrodollars have been invested in the welfare of Libya’s 6.5 million inhabitants. Education levels are lower than in neighbouring Tunisia, which has little oil, and a surprising 20 percent of Libyans remain illiterate.
Decent housing is unavailable to most of the disadvantaged half of the population. A generally high price level in Libya puts even more strains on these households.
But the key of popular discontent is the lack of work opportunities, which strongly contrasts the Libyan image of a rich nation constantly propagated by the regime and its Soviet-style media.
The few options for ordinary Libyans include the police or armed forces, construction works and petty trade. But even here, contacts and corruption are needed to have a chance.
The oil sector employs only 4900 Libyans with a further 1000 training overseas, according to an October 2010 report by Libyan National Oil Company (NOC).
In the 1980s, the Gaddafi regime came under attack from the Reagan administration because it took a strong anti-imperialist line and gave financial and material aid to many national liberation movements at the time. There were also some weird right-wing sects seeking and sometimes obtaining Libyan largesse. The Gaddafi regime meddled disastrously and sometimes bloodily in factional disputes within the Palestinian liberation movement.
The Gaddafi regime also claims to have provided its citizens with free education and health, though quality and access was not even. Tellingly, Libyans, who could afford it, have preferred to go to neighbouring Tunisia (which is not an oil-rich state) or to Europe for serious medical treatment.
It provided its workers with some welfare but did not allow trade unions and it certainly it did not treat its significant number of “guest” workers equally or fairly. There were closed labour camps for some of these workers from other countries and trade unions were not allowed. A bizarre personality cult around Gaddafi was obvious and while there was a pretence at popular democracy of sorts through a system of “people’s congresses” these only had a nominal existence.
Left commentator Tariq Ali dismissed the Gaddafi-led 1969 revolution as “all for show, like his ghosted science-fiction short stories”. But there was a political revolution in 1969 that did result in the nationalisation of the Libyan oil industry and some broader redistribution of oil wealth, which contrasted sharply with that in countries like Saudi Arabia. This was a nationalist revolution, similar to that led by Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt in 1952, which also called itself “socialist”.
The US and other imperialist governments at the time saw the 1969 revolution as an attack on their presumed right to exploit Libya’s oil resources. David Mack, a former US diplomat and State Department official, explained how the US reacted in the January 2011 Foreign Service Journal.
By 1969, the US and British air bases in Libya were of declining strategic importance, but Tripoli had become a producer of energy vital to the economies of our West European allies and profitable for American companies. While the US still enjoyed a cozy relationship with an aging monarch and his sclerotic political system, Libyan popular attitudes were not isolated from the rest of the Arab world. The war of June 1967 had left Arabs everywhere with a feeling of humiliation and a conviction that Washington had aided Israel’s victory, achieved in large part by its devastating surprise attack on the Egyptian Air Force. This set the stage for the Libyan Revolution of September 1, 1969.
Eventually, US policy adapted to these new realities. Henry Kissinger, who was President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, claims in his memoirs that he favored a covert action program to overthrow the new Libyan leaders and keep the airbase, but yielded to the State Department view of the primacy of the oil interests and declining value of our military base. Much later, during the Reagan administration, the U.S. supported and provided some military training to Libyan emigre opponents of the Gaddafi regime. They proved unreliable.
According to Henry Kissinger’s memoirs, the government of US President Richard Nixon had prepared a covert program to assassinate Gaddafi and other Libyans who had led the 1969 revolution against a corrupt monarchy, but this was abandoned because big oil companies like Exxon and Mobil prefered to cut a deal with the regime, albeit on tougher terms.
The Gaddafi regime has come a long way since then. It was increasingly betrayed promises and gains of 1969, earning an IMF tick of approval for progress in neoliberal reform.
An ambitious program to privatise banks and develop the nascent financial sector is underway. Banks have been partially privatized, interest rates decontrolled, and competition encouraged. Ongoing efforts to restructure and modernize the Central Bank of Libya are underway with assistance from the Fund.
Structural reforms in other areas have progressed. The passing in early 2010 of a number of far- reaching laws bodes well for fostering private sector development and attracting foreign direct investment. A comprehensive civil service reform is needed to facilitate more effective [read lower and stricter] wage and employment policies that would address the needs of a young and growing labor force.
Recent developments in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia have had limited economic impact on Libya so far. To counter the impact of higher global food prices, the government abolished, on January 16, taxes and custom duties on locally-produced and imported food products. Later in January, the government also announced the creation of a large multi-billion dollar fund for investment and local development that will focus on providing housing for the growing population.
The IMF will have to eat that prediction. The stifling political repression (which has been fiercest in the eastern part of the country, which is also the poorest), the corruption, nepotism and flamboyant lifestyles enjoyed overseas by Gaddafi’s children have proved too much. And the stirring example of the youth of Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Algeria, Yemen, Syria, Jordan and Djibouti added the spark.
What has led to this new Libyan revolution is the degeneration of the regime born of the 1969 revolution into a crony capitalism. The popular character of the new revolution is undeniable, it is far from clear what sort of regime will emerge out of it. The same greedy and powerful Western interests that first attacked and then propped up the Gaddafi regime are preparing for a change of tack, including considering direct military intervention.
As the 19th century British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston famously observed.
We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual.
Hopefully the makers of the new Libyan revolution will heed the lessons of its own history.

Mutual Acceptance Key To Success - Tuanku Mizan

2011-02-15T19:34:00.000-08:00

Thanks, Malaysian National News Agency.

The King of Malaysia Tuanku Mizan Zainal Abidin says Malaysians should accept each other's cultural and religious differences and not harbour prejudiced thoughts.

Failure to do so, he says, results in a deadly social cancer.

“We must not destroy the unity and harmony that we have built all this while for short-term gains," he said in his recent Maulud message.

Gary Moore - Gifted Guitar Man

2011-02-09T01:58:00.000-08:00

Thanks, Wikipedia.

The sudden death of British guitarist Gary Moore has robbed the music world of a brilliant genius.

Moore, who died of a heart attack on February 6 at the age of 59, was a versatile guitarist who excelled in rock, pop, jazz, country, blues and folk music.

Born on April 4, 1952 in Belfast, he played with various musicians since his teens, and they included Phil Lynott and Brian Downey, who later inducted him into their group Thin Lizzy, BB King, Albert King, Colosseum II, Greg Lake, Skid Row (not to be confused with the glam metal band of the same name), Jimmy Nail, Jack Bruce, The Beach Boys, Ozzy Osbourne, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber and the Traveling Wilburys.

Moore learnt the guitar at eight and when he was 14, he learnt the play the instrument with his right hand despite being left-handed.

At 16, he moved to Dublin, Ireland, and watched Jimi Hendrix and John Mayall perform. He also joined the group Skid Row, which was formed by Lynott.

Moore's early influences included Elvis, The Beatles and Fleetwood Mac whose guitarist Peter Green became his mentor.

Moore released his first solo album in 1973, Grinding Stone.

In 1978 his collaboration with Lynott, Parisienne Walkways, reached the Top Ten in the UK Singles Chart.

In 1987, he collaborated on the UK charity record Let It Be, a cover of The Beatles' track.

After a series of rock records, Moore returned to blues music with Still Got The Blues in 1990.

He stayed with the blues format until 1997, when he decided to experiment with modern dance beats on Dark Days In Paradise.

With Back To The Blues, Moore return to his tried and tested blues format in 2001.

He continued with this style on Power Of The Blues (2004), Old New Ballads Blues (2006), Close As You Get (2007) and Bad For You Baby (2008).

Moore was twice married and is survived by three children.

About Muse, Britain's Super Band Of Today

2011-01-06T23:35:00.001-08:00

Thanks, Wikipedia.

Muse is a British rock band from Teignmouth, Devon, formed in 1994.

The band consists of Matthew Bellamy (lead vocals, guitar, keyboards) [born June 9, 1978], Christopher Wolstenholme (bass, backing vocals, keyboards, guitar, harmonica) [born December 2, 1978] and Dominic Howard (drums, percussion, synthesisers, backing vocals, sampling) [born December 7, 1977].

Muse is known for its energetic and extravagant live performances, and its fusion of progressive rock, alternative rock, pop, heavy metal and electronica.

Muse has released five studio albums: Showbiz (1999), Origin Of Symmetry (2001), Absolution (2003), Black Holes And Revelations (2006) and The Resistance (2009).

The band has also issued three live albums, Hullabaloo Soundtrack (2002), Absolution Tour (2005) and HAARP (2008).

Muse has also won numerous music awards, including five MTV Europe Music Awards, five Q Awards, eight NME Awards, two BRIT awards an MTV Video Music Award, four Kerrang! Awards and an American Music Award.

Muse had sold over 10 million albums worldwide.

The members of Muse played in separate school bands during their stay at Teignmouth Community College in the early 1990s, but the formation of Muse began when Bellamy successfully auditioned for the part of guitarist in Howard's band.

They asked Wolstenholme – who played the drums – to learn to play bass guitar for the band.

Matt and Dom's first band name was Gothic Plague.

After Gothic Plague came Fixed Penalty and Rocket Baby Dolls.

In 1994, the band adopted Muse as its name.

The name was inspired by Bellamy's art teacher Samuel Theoun who mentioned the word Muse to him.

Muse played its first gigs in London and Manchester.

The band had a significant meeting with Dennis Smith, the owner of Sawmills Studio, situated in a converted water mill in Cornwall.

He had seen the boys grow up as he knew their parents.

This meeting led to their first proper recordings and the release of the Muse EP.

Its second EP, the Muscle Museum, reached number 3 in the indie singles chart.

Smith introduced the band to Safta Jaffery with whom he had recently started the record label Taste Media.

Muse signed with Smith and Jaffery and recorded three albums, Showbiz, Origin Of Symmetry and Absolution with Taste Media.

In 1998, Muse signed a deal with Maverick Records.

Upon their return from America, Taste Media arranged deals for Muse with various record labels in Europe and Australia, allowing them to maintain control over their career in individual countries.

During production of Origin Of Symmetry, the band experimented with instrumentation such as a church organ.

Bellamy cites guitar influences such as Jimi Hendrix and Tom Morello (of Rage Against The Machine and Audioslave) in the band's works.

Absolution (produced by Rich Costey) was released in 2003 and debuted at number one in the UK.

The album yielded its first top ten hit with Time Is Running Out.

The band played at the Glastonbury Festival in June 2004. After the festival, the band described the concert as "the best gig of our lives".

However, Howard's father, William Howard, who was at the festival to watch the band, died from a heart attack shortly after the performance.

The single Butterflies & Hurricanes was dedicated to Dom's father.

Muse won two MTV Europe awards, including Best Alternative Act and a Q Award for Best Live Act that year.

Muse also received an award for Best Live Act at the 2005 BRIT Awards.

In 2006, Muse released Black Holes And Revelations, co-produced by Muse and Rich Costey.

The album's title and themes are the result of the band's fascination with science fiction and political outrage.

The album charted at No. 1 in the UK, much of Europe and Australia.

It was also a success in the United States, reaching number nine on the Billboard 200 album chart.

In 2008, the band members received honorary doctorates of arts from the University of Plymouth for their contributions to music.

In 2010, Muse came up with the song Love Is Forever for the soundtrack of The Twilight Saga: Eclipse.

Muse has cited Queen as an influence.

Queen guitarist Brian May has praised Muse's work, calling the band "extraordinary musicians" who "let their madness show through, always a good thing in an artiste."

Pete Postlethwaite - A Fine British Actor

2011-01-03T02:22:00.001-08:00

Thanks, Wikipedia.

Pete Postlethwaite, who passed away after a long illness on January 2, 2011, will always be remembered as a fine British actor.

Born on February 7, 1945 in Warrington, Cheshire, the United Kingdom, he taught drama at Loreto College, Manchester before training as an actor at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.

Postlethwaite started his acting career at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre where his colleagues included Bill Nighy (Pirates Of The Caribbean), Jonathan Pryce (Tomorrow Never Dies) and Julie Walters (Mamma Mia).

Postlethwaite, who subsequently joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Walters had an intimate relationship during the latter half of the 1970s.

After routine appearances for television programmes such as The Professionals, Postlethwaite starred in the film Distant Voices, Still Lives in 1988.

He received an Academy Award nomination for his role in In The Name Of The Father in 1993.

Other major films he starred in were The Usual Suspects, Alien 3, Amistad, The Constant Gardener, Inception and Baz Luhrmann's Romeo And Juliet (with Leonardo Di Caprio and Claire Danes).

Steven Spielberg called Postlethwaite "the best actor in the world" after working with him in The Lost World.

To this Postlethwaite modestly replied: "I'm sure what Spielberg actually said was, Pete's the best actor in The Lost World."

Postlethwaite co-starred with Sean Bean of The Lord Of The Rings, Don't Say A Word and Goldeneye fame in the British television series Sharpe.

It was his most famous television series.

In 2004, he received the Order Of The British Empire (OBE) from Queen Elizabeth 2 of the United Kingdom.

His most recent film was Clash Of The Titans.

Faizal Yusof - Brilliant Actor Gone Too Soon

2011-01-02T02:05:00.000-08:00

Faizal Yusof, the promising, Kuala Lumpur-born TV and film actor who passed away of a heart attack on New Year's Day 2011, was a man at the peak of his popularity.

The 32-year-old had been a regular on Malay TV series over the last seven years.

He most recently appeared with singer-actor Syed Hussein Syed Mustaffa, the ex-son-in-law of former Selangor Chief Minister Tan Sri Muhammad Muhammad Taib in the popular TV series Adamaya.

Faizal's mentor, top actor Rosyam Nor described him as a shining star gone too soon.

"Malaysia has lost a gem of an actor. Faizal was humble and disciplined, and took great pride in his work," he said.

Faizal is survived by his 27-year-old wife Munira Rashid. She is five months pregnant.

He has a 2-year-old son Rayyan with singer and actress Siti Nordiana Alias. They were married for three years beginning 2006.

Conspiracy Against Minister Accused Of Molesting Servant

2011-01-02T02:04:00.001-08:00

There is a conspiracy against a Cabinet Minister accused of molesting his ex-maidservant.

Tun Ibrahim Ismail - Malay And Malaysian Warrior

2010-12-27T04:08:00.000-08:00

General Tun Ibrahim Ismail, who passed away at 88 on December 23, 2010, will always be remembered as a no-nonsense military man who served his country with distinction.

Born in Johor Baru on October 19, 1922, he was the Malaysian Armed Forces Chief Of Staff from 1970 to 1977.

Ibrahim received his early education at the Air Molek Malay School, the Ngee Heng English School and the Bukit Zaharah English School in Johor Baru.

He also attended Sultan Abu Bakar College in Johor Baru.

He joined the Johor Military Force in 1941 and received military training in Dehra Dun, India.

During the Japanese Occupation of Malaya, he joined Force 136, the British-sponsored resistance army.

During the Communist insurgency, Ibrahim trained the police in counter-insurgency measures.

During the Emergency of May 13, 1969, Ibrahim was a member of the National Operations Council (NOC).

Ibrahim was descended from the Sultans of Johor and the Bintan Batins of Riau, who are the descendants of legendary warriors Hang Tuah and Hang Jebat.

He was also descended from Tun Perak, the grandson of Sultan Iskandar Shah of Johor, the founder Sultan of Melaka.

A descendant of Tun Perak, Tok Jabbar, had sons named Tahir and Ibrahim.

Tahir had a son named Muhammad. Muhammad's grandson was Datuk Onn Jaafar, the founder of the United Malay National Organisation (Umno), the father of third Prime Minister Tun Hussein Onn, and the grandfather of Home Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein.

Ibrahim was descended from the older Ibrahim, the brother of Tahir.

Cute news reader and emcee Datuk Mahadzir Lokman, nicknamed Mr Blue Hyppo, a nephew of Hussein, is descended from Tahir's and Ibrahim's sister Kamariah.

Ibrahim Ismail was also descended from the Father of Modern Malay Literature Abdullah Abdul Kadir or Munshi Abdullah.

Munshi Abdullah's son Datuk Muhammad Ibrahim Munshi Abdullah was the paternal great-great grandfather of ex-Deputy Minister Datuk Siti Zainab Sheikh Abu Bakar.

Munshi Abdullah was of Johor royal and Arab ancestry. He was born in Melaka City.

Stephen J Cannell - Iconic Creator Of American TV Series

2010-12-23T04:17:00.000-08:00

Screenwriter, actor, novelist and producer Stephen Joseph Cannell, who died after a long illness aged 69 on September 30, 2010, will always be remembered as an American television icon.

Born on February 5, 1941 in Los Angeles, he struggled with dyslexia in school, but graduated from the University of Oregon in 1964 with a degree in journalism.

He was quickly hired by the television production branch of Universal Studios and was soon freelance writing for crime shows as Ironside and Columbo.

Not long after, he received his first full-time gig as the story editor of Jack Webb's police series Adam 12.

Cannell created or co-created nearly 40 television series, mostly crime dramas, including The Rockford Files, The Greatest American Hero, The A-Team, Wiseguy, 21 Jump Street, Silk Stalkings and The Commish.

In the process he had, by his own count, scripted more than 450 episodes, and produced or executive produced over 1,500 episodes.

Cannell also acted occasionally in his series Renegade.

He also served as the host of the 1995–1996 documentary series US Customs Classified.

In the 2000s, Cannell turned his attention to novels. He wrote 14 novels.

He discussed his experiences as a dyslexic in Dislecksia: The Movie. Wikipedia.

Datuk Seri Juhar Mahiruddin Is Sabah's New Governor

2010-12-23T02:42:00.000-08:00

Sabah State Legislative Assembly Speaker Datuk Seri Juhar Mahiruddin, 59, is the new Governor of Sabah as of today.

A community leader of mixed Kadazan and Bajau heritage from Sandakan (born November 5, 1953), he was formerly with the United Sabah National Organisation (Usno), and later joined the United Malaysian National Organisation Sabah (Berjaya) and the Sabah United Party (PBS).

When Usno and Berjaya merged to become Umno Sabah, he became a member of Umno Sabah in 1990.

A British-trained lawyer and magistrate, he was a Member of Parliament from 1990-1999 and subsequently served as Sabah State Legislative Assembly Speaker (2002-2010).

He was the Deputy Speaker of the Parliament's lower house (House Of Representatives) from 1994-1999.

Juhar's sister is the Parliament's upper house's (Senate) Deputy President Datuk Armani Mahiruddin.

He is an avid photographer and is musically talented.

Juhar will serve for a maximum of two four-year terms.

Sabah's Governors since independence have been the following:

Tun Datu Mustapha Datu Harun of Kudat (1963-65) [Bajau].
Tun Pengiran Ahmad Raffae Pengiran Osman of Sipitang (1965-73) [Berunai].
Tun Muhammad Fuad Donald Stephens of Papar (1973-75) [Kadazan].
Tun Muhammad Hamdan Indan Keri of Tuaran (1975-78) [Kadazan].
Tun Ahmad Thomas Koroh of Tenom (1978) [Kadazan & Murut].
Tun Muhammad Adnan Mickey Robert of Keningau (1978-86) [Kadazan].
Tun Muhammad Said Keruak of Kota Belud (1986-94) [Bajau].
Tun Sakaran Dandai of Semporna (1994-2002) [Murut & Bajau].
Tun Ahmadshah Abdullah of Kota Kinabalu (2002-2010) [Kadazan & Bajau].
Datuk Seri Juhar Mahiruddin of Sandakan (2010-) [Kadazan & Bajau].

Irvin Kershner - Director Extraordinary

2010-12-08T20:42:00.000-08:00

Irvin Kershner, who passed away at 87 on November 27, 2010, will always be remembered as a great American filmmaker.

His most notable films included Star Wars 5: The Empire Strikes Back and Sir Sean Connery's last James Bond movie Never Say Never Again.

Kershner's background was a mixture of music and art.

The study of music (violin, viola and composition) was the most important activity of his early years.

He attended the Temple University – Tyler School Of Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

Later, he went to New York to study painting.

He then moved to Los Angeles where he studied photography at the Art Centre.

He began his film career at the University of Southern California, teaching photography and taking cinema courses.

Kershner then became a photographer on US State Department film projects in Iran, Greece and Turkey.

He and Paul Coates (1921–68) developed Confidential File, a documentary television series.

Kershner worked as writer, director, cinematographer and editor.

He later developed and directed the television series The Rebel (1959–61), as well as the pilots for Peyton Place, Cain's One Hundred and Philip Marlowe.

He moved on to feature films, such as Hoodlum Priest which starred Don Murray, The Luck Of Ginger Coffey with Robert Shaw, A Fine Madness with Connery, Joanne Woodward and Jean Seberg, The Flim-Flam Man starring George C Scott, Up The Sandbox with Barbra Streisand, The Return Of A Man Called Horse starring Sir Richard Harris, the critically acclaimed TV movie Raid On Entebbe which was nominated for nine Emmys, including Best Director, and Eyes Of Laura Mars starring Faye Dunaway and Tommy Lee Jones.

Kershner considered himself a universalist in religion.

He said: "I've been a student of Christianity. I've been interested in Islam. I studied Buddhism. And I'm a Jew by birth."

He detested nationalism and upheld internationalism.

Kershner also directed the TV series Seaquest DSV and acted in The Last Temptation Of Christ.

Fan Yew Teng - The True Dragon Of Bosnia

2010-12-08T20:35:00.000-08:00

Fan Yew Teng, the Kampar-born veteran Opposition politician who passed away after a long battle with cancer at 69 yesterday, will always be remembered as the true Dragon Of Bosnia.

He was the first Malaysian, as a non-governmental individual, and a member of the Democratic Action Party (DAP), to speak up against the rape of Yugoslavia and Bosnia-Herzegovina by the monstrous Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic in the early 1990s.

He was with Malaysian Islamic Party (Pas) senior leader Datuk Nik Aziz Nik Mat the first political giant in the Muslim world to call for international humanitarian intervention to save Bosnia and the rest of Yugoslavia from Serbian fascist terror.

DAP adviser Lim Kit Siang and his son DAP secretary-general and Penang Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng have described Fan as one of Malaysia's most unsung heroes and a consistent champion of human rights and the environment.

The Lims also described Fan as a man of integrity and principles who was always his own man.

Fan was not always in the DAP, and from the late 1970s to early 1990s went over to the People's Justice Party (PKR) which was then the Malaysian People's Party (PRM).

He was also a poet and political writer. DAP Member of Parliament for West Ipoh M Kulasegaran described Fan as his sifu par excellence.

He described Fan as a man who walked the talk at all times and even adopted a spartan and eco-friendly lifestyle like Gandhi.

Fan's twin daughters Pauline and Lillian Fan are human rights activists, too.

They are close friends of writer and activist Eddin Khoo, the son of historian Tan Sri Khoo Kay Kim.

Eddin has described Fan as a giant amongst Malaysians whose loss is irreplaceable.

Farewell Mr Naked Gun Leslie Nielsen

2010-11-29T04:36:00.000-08:00

Leslie Nielsen, the veteran Canadian actor who passed away at 84 on November 28, 2010 was best remembered for his character Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun film series.

Read all about him here. Thanks Wikipedia.

Leslie William Nielsen (February 11, 1926 – November 28, 2010) was a Canadian-American actor and comedian.

Nielsen appeared in over 100 films and 1,500 television programmes over the span of his career, portraying over 220 characters.

Born in Saskatchewan, Canada, Nielsen enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and worked as a disc jockey before receiving a scholarship to Neighbourhood Playhouse.

Beginning with a television role in 1948, he quickly expanded to over 50 television appearances two years later.

Nielsen appeared in his first films in 1956 and began collecting roles in dramas, westerns and romance films.

Nielsen's lead roles in the science fiction film Forbidden Planet (1956) [based on Shakespeare's The Tempest] and disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure (1972) received positive reviews.

Although his acting career crossed a variety of genres in both television and films, Nielsen's deadpan delivery as a doctor in 1980's Airplane! marked a turning point in his career, one that would make him, in the words of film critic Roger Ebert, "the Olivier of spoofs."

Nielsen enjoyed further success with The Naked Gun and its sequels, based on a brief television series he starred in.

His portrayal of serious characters seemingly oblivious to (and complicit in) their absurd surroundings gave him a reputation as a comedian.

In the last decades of his career, Nielsen appeared in multiple spoof and parody films, many of which were met poorly by critics but performed well in box office and home media releases.

Nielsen was recognised with a variety of awards throughout his career and was inducted into both the Canada and Hollywood Walks Of Fame.

He married four times and had two daughters from his second marriage.

Nielsen's uncle Jean Hersholt inspired him to become an actor.

Nielsen was born in Regina, Saskatchewan.

His mother, Mabel Elizabeth Davies, was a Welsh immigrant from Fulham, London, and his father, Ingvard Eversen Nielsen, was a Danish-born Constable in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Nielsen had two brothers. His elder brother, Erik Nielsen (1924–2008), was Deputy Prime Minister of Canada during the 1980s.

Their uncle, Hersholt, was an actor best known for his portrayal of Dr Christian in the long-running radio series of the same name and the subsequent television series and films.

Following his graduation from Victoria Composite High School in Edmonton, at 17, Nielsen enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and was trained as an aerial gunner during the latter part of World War II (but was too young to be fully trained and sent overseas).

He briefly worked as a disc jockey at a radio station in Calgary, Alberta, before enrolling at the Lorne Greene Academy of Radio Arts in Toronto.

When he was studying in Toronto, Nielsen received a scholarship for the Neighbourhood Playhouse in the United States.

He later attended the Actors Studio, before making his first television appearance in 1948 on an episode of Studio One, alongside Charlton Heston.

It was not until 1956 when he made his feature film debut in the Michael Curtiz-directed musical film The Vagabond King.

Forbidden Planet in 1956 became an instant success, and roles in Ransom! (1956), The Opposite Sex (1956) and Hot Summer Night (1957) followed.

In 1957 he got the lead role opposite Debbie Reynolds in the romantic comedy Tammy And The Bachelor.

Nielsen also landed the lead role in the Disney mini-series The Swamp Fox, as American Revolutionary War hero Francis Marion.

His early television appearances included parts in Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Virginian, and The Wild Wild West.

In 1968, he had a major role in the pilot film for the popular police series Hawaii Five-O, and appeared in one of the episodes in the seventh season.

In 1969, he had the leading role as a police officer in The Bold Ones: The Protectors.

Nielsen also starred in the William Girdler-directed 1977 action film Project: Kill.

His last role before portraying mainly comedy roles was the Canadian disaster film City On Fire in which he played a corrupt mayor.

In 1980, he guest starred on the CBS mini-series The Chisholms.

Nielsen's comedic breakthrough came with a supporting role in 1980's Airplane!, a parody of Zero Hour!, Airport, and other movies that dealt with air travel.

In Airplane! his deadpan delivery contrasted with the continual absurdity surrounding him.

The film's directors Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker, chose Nielsen for the role based on his ability to play "a fish in water".

The film The Naked Gun spawned two sequels, The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell Of Fear (1991) and Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult (1994).

Nielsen briefly appeared in the World Wrestling Federation in the summer of 1994 on Monday Night RAW, capitalising on his Frank Drebin character.

In 1997, he played Mr Magoo in the live action version of the popular cartoon.

He also appeared in Scary Movie 3 (2003) and 4 (2006).

Nielsen hosted a series of golf instructional videos beginning with 1993's Bad Golf Made Easier.

In his eighties, Nielsen continued to have an active career.

He performed serious roles on screen and stage as well as providing voice-overs and on-camera appearances for commercials.

The sibling relationship with his elder brother Erik Nielsen, a former Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, served as the premise of an HBO mockumentary titled The Canadian Conspiracy.

Nielsen starred in it along with prominent Canadian-born media personalities.

Among his numerous awards, in 1995 Leslie Nielsen received UCLA's Jack Benny Award for his comedic roles.

In 1988, he became the 1,884th personality to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame.

In 2001 he was inducted into Canada's Walk Of Fame.

The following year he was made an Officer Of The Order Of Canada.

On February 20, 2002, Nielsen was named an honorary citizen of West Virginia.

Tun Dr Lim Chong Eu, Father Of Modern Penang, Industrialisation And The Penang Bridge

2010-11-24T20:16:00.000-08:00

Tun Dr Lim Chong Eu, Penang’s second Chief Minister (1969-90) who passed away at 91 yesterday, will always be remembered as the Father of Modern Penang, Malaysian Industrialisation and the Penang Bridge.

The charismatic politician was widely regarded as a father figure who transcended ethnic boundaries and religious or cultural differences.

As Chief Minister for 21 years, he transformed Penang from an economy that depended solely on its free-port status to an urbanised and industrialised state good enough to be known as the Silicon Valley of Malaysia.

Dr Lim gave Penang factories, brought in multinationals and set up the state government’s investment arm, Penang Development Corporation.

It was the result of his hard work and the sound foundation he laid that the big names — such as Intel, Motorola, Advanced Micro Devices, Robert Bosch, Seagate and Renesas Semiconductor — are in the Bayan Lepas Industrial Zone.

Dr Lim also gave the state a structure most Penangites see every day, namely the state’s first skyscraper, the 65-storey Kompleks Tun Abdul Razak (Komtar).

In its heyday, Komtar was the tallest building in Asia, standing at 232m when it was completed in 1986.

It was also during his tenure as Chief Minister that the multi-million ringgit Komtar project began to take shape as an integrated development, comprising business and government departments, as well as a civic centre for Penangites.

Once completed, all local, state and Federal Government departments in Penang were placed under the same roof in Komtar.

Born on May 28, 1919 in Georgetown, Penang, Dr Lim was educated at Penang Free School, where he was King's Scholar in 1937.

He later studied at Edinburgh University in Scotland, the United Kingdom, where he obtained his degree in medicine in 1944.

He was appointed to the Penang Local Council in 1951 and the Federal Legislature in 1955.

During that time, he was also a medical doctor, serving in the Malayan Auxiliary Air Force from 1951 until 1954 before going into private practice.

At 39, Dr Lim, who was with the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) [he was in the Labour Party before Independence in 1957] challenged incumbent Tun Tan Cheng Lock for the party presidency and won with a 22-vote majority in 1958.

During his one-year tenure as MCA president, he and the first Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra had political differences as he wanted the scrapping of special assistance for Malays and Aborigines and Mandarin (Beijing Chinese) as a third national language alongside Malay and English.

Tunku supported Tan’s son and political heir Tun Tan Siew Sin for the MCA presidency as the latter was willing to compromise with the dominant United Malay National Organisation (Umno), MCA’s partner in the Alliance (National Front or Barisan Nasional after 1974).

Dr Lim threatened to withdraw MCA from the Alliance if the Tunku did not meet his demands, but Siew Sin stood by the Tunku and the Alliance.

MCA encountered its first major split, and Dr Lim’s faction left the party, paving way for Siew Sin to assume the party presidency in 1960.

Dr Lim and his supporters formed the multi-racial United Democratic Party (UDP) with his old friends from the Labour Party.

Seven years later, Dr Lim dissolved the UDP and formed Gerakan, the Malaysian People’s Movement Party, with another group from Labour led by the late Opposition Leader Tan Sri Dr Tan Chee Khoon.

In 1969, Gerakan beat the Alliance in the general election and captured the State Legislative Assembly of Penang.

Dr Lim became Penang’s Chief Minister succeeding Penang MCA leader the late Tan Sri Wong Pow Nee who had been Chief Minister since Independence.

Not long after becoming Chief Minister, Dr Lim and Dr Tan had a rift because Dr Lim wanted Gerakan to join the Alliance.

Dr Tan and his faction left Gerakan and became the People’s Justice Movement (Pekemas).

Pekemas was dissolved after the 1978 election and Dr Tan’s supporters joined either the Democratic Action Party (DAP) or the Malaysian People’s Party (PRM) [DAP was also from Labour and PRM is today People’s Justice Party or PKR].

Dr Tan was the father of former Deputy Minister Dr Tan Kee Kwong, who joined Gerakan in 1995, and left for PKR in 2008.

Dr Lim retired in 1990 and was succeeded by his longtime protege Tan Sri Koh Tsu Koon.

He was also Gerakan’s second President from 1969 to 1980.

Gerakan’s first President was former University Malaya vice-chancellor the late Datuk Dr Syed Hussein Alatas (cousin of third Prime Minister Tun Hussein Onn and uncle of Hussein’s son and current Cabinet Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein) who was formerly in Umno and PRM and was allied to Dr Tan.

Dr Syed Hussein later supported the Islamic Party of Malaysia (Pas), before returning to Umno, PRM and finally PKR.

Dr Lim’s successor as Gerakan President was former Cabinet Minister from Ipoh Tun Dr Lim Keng Yaik who served until his retirement in 2007.

Journalists, government servants and officials who knew Dr Lim remembered him as serious, straight talking and mentally alert at all times.

He was well-read and well-versed in governmental matters and could put many a degree holder to shame.

He was fondly known as the "old man" by members of his party, for what he had accomplished for Penang, polishing the "pearl" so it would continue to shine after him.

Dr Lim had always known that the future was going to be a challenging one for Malaysians.

In a speech on national integration at Georgetown’s Science University of Malaysia (USM) in 1995, he described himself as an "old bee that lingered in an environment best to build his hive", but in the next 25 years as the nation moved towards 2020, the people would become very "busy bees".

With just that, Malaysians would be successful in the future, he said.

After his retirement, Dr Lim concentrated on business and was chairman and adviser to several large corporations.

He was pro-chancellor of USM from 1994 to 1999, and was conferred an Honorary Doctorate of Law.

He was also conferred the Doctorate In Honoris Causa by his alma mater, Edinburgh University, and even received a medal from Emperor Akihito of Japan.

In 2007, when Gerakan opened its Wawasan Open University, Dr Lim was named founding chancellor.

He is survived by his wife Toh Puan Goh Sing Yeng and four children.

Former Chief Minister Koh described Dr Lim as the Father of Modern Penang, Father of Malaysian Industrialisation and Father of the Penang Bridge which he conceived in the 1970s.

His description of Dr Lim was endorsed by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak, former Prime Ministers Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad and Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, themselves Penangites (in part) and Penang Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng.

Opposition Leader and former Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim (also from Penang) and Guan Eng described Dr Lim as one of the country's pioneers in multi-racial politics.

Despite his earlier differences with the Tunku, they remained friends for life and the Tunku even chose Penang as his post-retirement home.

Dr Lim almost always attended the Tunku’s birthday celebrations and the Tunku described Dr Lim as the real ‘founder’ of Penang instead of the state’s first British colonial governor Sir Francis Light.

Dr Lim, who was often modest, also hailed the Tunku as Penang’s real ‘founder’ because it was he who decided as Prime Minister not to reattach the former British colony to its mother state Kedah (the Tunku’s home state) when Malaya (later Malaysia) became independent.

Dr Lim was also responsible for designing Penang’s state flag and coat of arms.

Dino De Laurentiis - Iconic Film Maker

2010-11-11T06:58:00.001-08:00

Italy’s Dino De Laurentiis who passed away today at 91 will always be remembered as an iconic science fiction film maker.

Read all about him from Wikipedia.

Agostino (Dino) De Laurentiis (August 8, 1919 – November 11, 2010) was an Italian Academy Award-winning film producer.

He was born at Torre Annunziata in the province of Naples.

He produced close to 150 films starting with Lultimo Combattimento (1940).

De Laurentiis initially produced neo-realist films such as Bitter Rice (1946) and the Fellini classics La Strada (1954) and Nights Of Cabiria (1956), often in collaboration with producer Carlo Ponti.

In the 1960s, De Laurentiis produced films as Kiss The Girls And Make Them Die, Navajo Joe (1966), Anzio (1968), a World War II film, Barbarella (1968) and Danger: Diabolik (1968), both successful comic book adaptations, and The Valachi Papers.

In the 1970s, De Laurentiis relocated to Wilmington, North Carolina, the United States.

He made acclaimed films, including The Scientific Cardplayer (1972), Serpico (1973), Death Wish (1974), Mandingo (1975), Three Days Of The Condor (1975), The Shootist (1976), Ingmar Bergman's The Serpent's Egg (1977), Ragtime (1981), Conan The Barbarian (1982) and Blue Velvet (1986).

King Kong (1976) was also a commercial hit, as were Lipstick, the killer whale film Orca (1977), The White Buffalo (1977), the disaster movie Hurricane (1979), the remake of Flash Gordon (1980), Halloween II (the 1981 sequel to John Carpenter's 1978 classic horror film), David Lynch's Dune (1984), and King Kong Lives (1986).

De Laurentiis also made several adaptations of Stephen King's works, including The Dead Zone (1983), Cat's Eye (1985), Silver Bullet (1985) and Maximum Overdrive (1986).

Army Of Darkness (1992) was produced jointly by De Laurentiis, Robert Tapert and the movie's star Bruce Campbell.

They distributed the animated Transformers movie.

De Laurentiis also produced the first Hannibal Lecter film Manhunter (1986).

He passed on adapting Thomas Harris' sequel, The Silence Of The Lambs, but produced the two follow-ups, Hannibal (2001) and Red Dragon (2002), a remake of Manhunter.

He also produced Hannibal Rising (2007), which tells the story of how Hannibal becomes a serial killer.

He had a strong preference for adaptations of books, especially The Bible: In The Beginning (1966), Barabbas (1961) and Dune (1984).

In 2001 he received the Irving G Thalberg Memorial Award from the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences.

He had four children with his first wife, actress Silvana Mangano, who died in 1989.

He later married movie producer Martha Schumacher and they had two daughters.

One of the children from his first marriage, Raffaella De Laurentiis, is also a producer.

Another, Federico De Laurentiis (February 28, 1955 – July 15, 1981), died at 26 in an airplane crash.

His grand daughter is Giada De Laurentiis, host of Everyday Italian, Behind The Bash, Giada At Home and Giada's Weekend Getaways on Food Network.

His nephew is Aurelio De Laurentiis, a film producer in his own right and the chairman of SSC Napoli Football Club.

So Long Shamrin

2010-11-11T05:07:00.000-08:00

Veteran rock singer Shamrin Abdul Samad of Fotograf who passed away of a heart ailment at 43 today will always be remembered as an alpha male icon.

Shamrin was a popular singer throughout the last two decades, and was known for his manly voice.

Fotograf’s best known songs included Di Alam Fana Cintamu, Jangan Di Ucap Selamat Tinggal and Luka Seribu Rindu.

Fotograf was formed in 1987 and its other members are guitarist Abol, bassist Amran and drummer Ringgo.

It released five albums between 1989 and 1997, and had plans for a new album and reunion concert.

In 2004, Shamrin launched a mini album which he co-produced with rocker Opie of Bloodshed and Rosli Selasih.

Nestor Kirchner - Argentina’s Accidental Hero

2010-10-29T06:58:00.000-07:00

It is with great sadness that I announce the loss of Argentina’s former President Nestor Kirchner who passed away of a heart ailment recently.

He will be sadly missed.

While he was not a charismatic strongman of the Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez mould, he was living proof that common sense politics on the side of the poor and underprivileged is always good for the world.

RIP Mr Kirchner and thanks for the memories.

And to current Argentine President Cristina Fernandez, his wife, my prayers are with you and stay strong, ma’am.

Read all about Mr Kirchner from Wikipedia.

Nestor Carlos Kirchner (February 25, 1950 – October 27, 2010) was the 54th President of Argentina from May 25, 2003 to December 10, 2007.

Previously, he was Governor of Santa Cruz Province.

He briefly served as Secretary General of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR).

A Peronist, Kirchner was little known internationally and even domestically before his election as President. This happened when ex-President Carlos Menem withdrew from the Presidential election of 2003.

Soon after taking office, Kirchner surprised the world by standing down powerful military and police officials. Stressing the need to increase accountability and transparency in government, Kirchner overturned amnesty laws for military officers accused of torture and assassinations during the 1976–1983 "dirty war" under military rule.

On October 28, 2007, his wife Cristina Fernandez was elected to succeed him as President of Argentina. Thus, Kirchner then became the First Gentleman of Argentina. He was designated Secretary General of the Union of South American Nations on May 4, 2010.

Kirchner, who had been operated on twice in 2010 for cardiovascular problems, died at his home in El Calafate, Santa Cruz Province, on October 27, 2010, after suffering a heart attack.

Kirchner was born in Rio Gallegos, in the Patagonian province of Santa Cruz. His mother María Juana Ostoic Dragnic was a Chilean of Croatian descent from Punta Arenas and his father, a post office official, was of German descent. He received his primary and secondary education at local public schools, and his high-school diploma from the Argentine school Colegio Nacional Republica De Guatemala.

Kirchner studied law at the National University of La Plata, graduating in 1976. He and his wife set up a private legal practice in their home province.

In 1983, Kirchner became an official in the provincial government. In 1986, he was nominated to stand for election as the mayor of his city and won the post in 1987 by a slim margin.

He was elected governor of his province in 1991.

As governor, he cut down on wasteful expenditure by the government and presided over a balanced budget.

Kirchner was a critic of IMF structural adjustment programmes. His criticisms were supported in part by former World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz.

While a critic of neo-liberalism, Kirchner did not describe himself as an opponent of markets and the private sector.

Kirchner emphasised holding businesses accountable to Argentina's democratic institutions, environmental standards and contractual obligations. He pledged to not open his administration to the influence of big and corrupt businesses.

In 2004 he nationalised the energy sector after years of privatisation by past leaders.

Kirchner became President following Eduardo Duhalde’s resignation in 2003.

Kirchner came into office on the tail of a deep economic crisis.

He appointed new judges to the judiciary and promoted new military and police personnel.

Argentinian soccer legend Diego Maradona was a close friend of Kirchner and his wife. In an eulogy to the late President, he said Kirchner was the People’s President and an unassuming champion of the downtrodden.

Chavez described Kirchner as a giant amongst Latin American leaders almost on par with Simon Bolivar, Castro and Che Guevara.

US President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton paid tribute to Kirchner as a champion of South American unity and a true statesman.

Khairy Jamaluddin Urges Malays To Be Malaysians First

2010-10-20T05:02:00.000-07:00

Thanks, The Star, The New Straits Times and the Malaysian National News Agency (Bernama).

Malaysia also belongs to the Chinese, Indians, Europeans, Indochinese, Indonesians, and other non-indigenous peoples who are legitimate, tax-paying and law-abiding citizens, says Umno Youth Chief Khairy Jamaluddin.

It would thus be very rude to call them immigrants or squatters of the land.

He says: “We must empathise with their feelings – when they are referred to as migrants or told to return to China, India, Europe, Indochina or Indonesia, what of their feelings? This is their country of birth and that of their parents and grandparents.”

“How would they feel if their child is denied government scholarships despite achieving outstanding results in government examinations? We often hear of grouses about the government service being overwhelmingly Malay Malaysian. Are we to believe that there are but a few non-Malay Malaysians qualified to hold senior positions?”

Khairy says the barriers that separate Malaysians only become “higher and thicker” when each person fails to understand and appreciate the feelings of other Malaysians.

“The 1Malaysia concept needs to be held as a shared aspiration. Community life in a multi-ethnic country demands patience and courtesy from everyone. We should not point fingers at each other in the face of any issue, big or small,” he says.

“We need to understand the feelings of other people if we want them to understand ours. We all need to imagine ourselves in each other’s shoes, assume we swap places, switch fortunes, only then can we appreciate the universal truth that our shared humanity unites us more than it divides.”

He says Malaysians need to “give and take”, which does not translate into one side giving and the other receiving.

Khairy says while the perspectives of each ethnic group is still influenced by communal and religious identity, the collective interest of being Malaysian citizens should remain “foremost”.

“Whatever differences there may be must not become obstacles to a life of mutual respect and understanding. Irrespective of our differences, we pledge allegiance to the same King, Constitution, laws and values,” he says.

“The Malaysian spirit must be our priority.”

Farewell Yalal Chin & Tom Bosley

2010-10-19T20:30:00.000-07:00

Last Oct 15, veteran Melaka-born stage, TV and film actor, producer and screenwriter Yalal Chin passed away after a long illness at 67.

He was last seen in Putra The Musical alongside Datuk Jalaluddin Hassan, the host of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? and the younger brother of ex-police chief Tan Sri Musa Hassan.

On Oct 19, we lost veteran American actor Tom Bosley who passed away after a long illness at 83.

Read all about Bosley here.

Yalal and Bosley will be missed.

Thanks, Wikipedia.

Thomas Edward Bosley (October 1, 1927 – October 19, 2010) was an American actor, best known for his starring and supporting roles on the television shows Happy Days, Murder, She Wrote and Father Dowling Mysteries, as well as the title role in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fiorello!

Bosley was born in Chicago and was of Israeli ancestry.

During World War II, Bosley served in the United States Navy.

While attending DePaul University in Chicago in 1947, he made his stage debut in Our Town with the Canterbury Players at the Fine Arts Theatre.

Bosley performed at the Woodstock Opera House in Woodstock, Illinois in 1949 and 1950 alongside Paul Newman.

His breakthrough stage role was New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia in the long-running Broadway musical Fiorello! (1959), for which he won a Tony Award.

In 1994, he originated the role of Maurice in the Broadway version of Disney's Beauty And The Beast.

His first motion picture role was in 1963, as the would-be suitor of Natalie Wood in Love With The Proper Stranger.

Other films included Divorce American Style, Yours, Mine And Ours and the made-for-television The Triangle Factory Fire Scandal.

Bosley shared a heartfelt story about his experience with the Holocaust in the documentary film Paper Clips.

Bosley's best known TV role was Howard Cunningham, Richie Cunningham's (Ron Howard) father in the long-running sitcom Happy Days.

Bosley was also known for portraying Sheriff Amos Tupper on Murder, She Wrote.

He also portrayed the eponymous Father Frank Dowling on the TV mystery series, Father Dowling Mysteries.

Also a voice actor, Bosley voiced many cartoon characters, including Harry Boyle in the animated series Wait Till Your Father Gets Home.

He also narrated the movie documentary series That's Hollywood.

Additionally, he played the narrator BAH Humbug in the Rankin/Bass animated Christmas special The Stingiest Man In Town which was an adaptation of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

Bosley also starred in the 2008 Hallmark Channel television movie Charlie & Me.

In 2010 he appeared in The Backup Plan starring Jennifer Lopez.

Edmund Chong, A Dedicated Member Of Parliament

2010-10-09T01:37:00.001-07:00

Thanks, The Star.

Batu Sapi Member of Parliament Edmund Chong Ket Wah, who died in a road accident on October 8, 2010, will always be remembered as a dedicated elected representative of Sabah.

Batu Sapi is a Parliamentary seat in Sandakan, Sabah's second biggest city.

Chong, 54, died in Kota Kinabalu. Born on April 9, 1956, he is survived by his wife Linda Tsen and four children. He was an engineer and a member of National Front (BN) component party the Sabah United Party (PBS) headed by former Chief Minister and current Deputy Chief Minister Tan Sri Joseph Pairin Kitingan.

Both Kitingan and Sabah Chief Minister Datuk Seri Musa Aman have described Chong's death as a great loss for the people of Sabah.

Musa said: “He was a dedicated and committed leader in discharging his responsibilities as a Member of Parliament.”

Kitingan said: “His loss is irreplaceable. He was my close friend too.”

Tony Curtis - All-American Entertainer

2010-09-30T20:52:00.001-07:00

Thanks Wikipedia.

Tony Curtis, who passed away after a long illness on Sept 29, 2010, will always be remembered as an all-American entertainer.

Read all about him here.

Tony Curtis (June 3, 1925 – September 29, 2010) was an American film actor.

He played a variety of roles, from light comedy, such as the musician on the run from gangsters in Some Like It Hot, to serious dramatic roles, such as an escaped convict in The Defiant Ones, which earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. From 1949, he appeared in more than 100 films and made frequent television appearances.

Curtis was born Bernard Schwartz in the Bronx, New York, the son of Emanuel Schwartz and his wife, Helen Klein.

His parents were Hungarian Jewish immigrants from Mateszalka, Hungary.

Hungarian was Curtis' only language until he was five or six.

His mother had once made an appearance as a participant on the television show You Bet Your Life, hosted by Groucho Marx.

His mother was later diagnosed with schizophrenia, a mental illness which also affected his brother Robert and led to Robert's institutionalisation.

When Curtis was eight, he and his younger brother Julius were placed in an orphanage for a month because their parents could not afford to feed them.

Four years later, Julius was struck and killed by a truck.

During World War 2, Curtis joined the United States Navy, inspired by watching Cary Grant in Destination Tokyo and Tyrone Power in Crash Dive (1943).

He served aboard USS Proteus, a submarine tender, and on September 2, 1945, he witnessed the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay from about a mile away.

Following his discharge, Curtis attended City College of New York and studied acting at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School in New York, along with Walter Matthau and Rod Steiger.

Arriving in Hollywood in 1948 at 23, he was placed under contract at Universal Pictures and changed his name to Tony Curtis, taking his first name from the novel Anthony Adverse and his last name from "Kurtz", a surname from his mother's family.

Curtis' uncredited screen debut came in Criss Cross (1949) playing a rumba dancer. In his second film, City Across The River (also in 1949), he was credited as Anthony Cross.

Later, as Tony Curtis, he cemented his reputation with breakthrough performances such as in the role of the scheming press agent Sidney Falco in Sweet Smell Of Success (1957) with Burt Lancaster (who also starred in Criss Cross) and an Oscar-nominated performance as a bigoted escaped convict chained to Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones.

He did both screen comedy and drama and became the most sought after star in Hollywood.

Curtis' comedies include Some Like It Hot (1959), Sex And The Single Girl (1964) and The Great Race (1965), and his dramas included playing the slave Antoninus in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (1960) co-starring Kirk Douglas and Lord Laurence Olivier, The Outsider (1961), the true story of WW2 veteran Ira Hayes, and The Boston Strangler (1968), in which he played the self-confessed murderer of the film's title, Albert De Salvo.

Curtis also appeared frequently on television.

He co-starred with Roger Moore in the TV series The Persuaders. Later, he co-starred in McCoy and Vega$.

In the early 1960s, he was immortalised as Stony Curtis, a voice-over guest star on The Flintstones.

In 1978, Curtis introduced the Electric Light Orchestra at Wembley Arena for their opening Big Night Concert (a Gala charity event) on Out Of The Blue Tour: Live At Wembley.

Throughout his life, Curtis enjoyed painting, and since the early 1980s, painted as a second career.

His work commands more than US$25,000 a canvas now.

In the last years of his life, he concentrated on painting rather than movies.

A surrealist, Curtis claimed Van Gogh and Picasso as his influences.

In March 2006, Curtis received the Sony Ericsson Empire Lifetime Achievement Award.

He also has a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame and received the Order Of Arts And Letters from France in 1995.

Curtis was married six times. His first wife was actress Janet Leigh, to whom he was married from 1951 to 1962, and with whom he fathered actresses Kelly and Jamie Lee Curtis.

He subsequently wed Christine Kaufmann, the German co-star of his film Taras Bulba in 1963. The marriage lasted until 1968 and they had 2 daughters.

Curtis was also married to Leslie Allen (1968 – 1982, two sons), Andria Savio (1983 – 1992), Lisa Deutsch (1993 – 1994) and Jill Vandenberg (1998 until his death).

In 1998, he founded the Emanuel Foundation For Hungarian Culture, and served as honorary chairperson.

He dedicated this to the 600,000 Hungarian victims of the Holocaust.

His son Nicholas died of a heroin overdose at the age of 23.

Of this Curtis said: "As a father you don't recover from that. There isn't a moment at night that I don't remember him."

In October 2008, Curtis released his autobiography American Prince: A Memoir, written with Peter Golenbock.

In September 2009, Curtis released his second book The Making Of Some Like It Hot: My Memories Of Marilyn Monroe And The Classic American Movie, written with Mark A Vieira.

Sultan Muhammad Petra 5 Of Kelantan

2010-09-29T10:12:00.000-07:00

Congrats to Sultan Muhammad Petra 5 also known as Sultan Faris Petra.

He became the new Sultan of Kelantan and heir to one of the world's most ancient royal houses on September 13, 2010.

He is the eldest of four siblings.

His parents are former Kelantan ruler Sultan Ismail Petra and Tengku Anis Tengku Abdul Hamid.

Sultan Ismail was removed from the throne by the Kelantan privy council for reason of infirmity on September 13, 2010.

He had been ill from a stroke for a year.

His eldest son Sultan Faris succeeded him under the law.

Sultan Faris is a business and diplomacy graduate from the United Kingdom.

He counts as his family friend one of Malaysia's top fashion designers, Zang Toi, who is also from Kelantan.

About The Czech Republic

2010-09-19T04:00:00.000-07:00

Thanks Wikipedia.

The Czech Republic is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe. It borders Poland to the northeast, Germany to the West and northwest, Austria to the south and Slovakia to the east.

Known as Bohemia until 1918, it was a major power in Eastern Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries.

In 1526 it became part of Austria (then the dominant province of Germany).

In 1918 it became independent with neighbouring Slovakia as Czechoslovakia.

Invaded by Germany during World War 2, it was liberated by the Soviet Union and became a Communist-ruled state until 1989.

On New Year’s Day in 1993, the Czech Republic and Slovakia went separate ways.

The Czech Republic comprises three historical lands namely Bohemia (Czechia) in the west, Moravia in the southeast and Czech Silesia in the northeast. The latter two emerged from the former.

The Czechs and the Slovaks emerged from the Hungarians. They who intermarried with the Celts (Welsh or Gauls) of France and the Anglo-Saxons (Germans) of Germany.

The first known King of the Czechs was a German merchant prince named Samo of part-Czech heritage.

The Czechs were ‘protected’ by the German Empire (Holy Roman Empire). In 1235 they were invaded by the Mongols.

At one time the Czech Kings ruled Poland and Hungary.

In the 15th century, the Czech Roman Catholic priest and intellectual Jan Hus opposed corruption in the Roman Catholic Church and was executed. His followers became known as the Moravian Baptists (as opposed to the Calvinist Baptists).

In 1663, the Ottoman Dynasty from Azerbaijan invaded the Czech lands and Slovakia and placed them under the Muslim Caliphate briefly.

An estimated 150,000 Czech soldiers died in World War 1.

After the War, the Austrian Empire (and German Empire) was dissolved and Czechoslovakia became an independent republic through the merger of the Czech lands and Slovakia.

In 1938, Germany invaded Czechoslovakia and ruled it until 1945.

The Soviet Army which occupied Czechoslovakia following liberation from the German fascists made the country a single-party Communist dictatorship which lasted until 1989.

In 1989, multi-party democracy was restored to Czechoslovakia, and the country adopted a pro-British, pro-European Union, pro-North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) and pro-United States foreign policy like the rest of the former Communist states of Eastern Europe.

The Czech landscape is exceedingly varied.

Bohemia has a basin drained by the Elbe and Vltava rivers, and is surrounded by low mountains as the Krkonose range of the Sudetes.

The country’s highest peak, Snezka (1,602m) is in the Krkonose.

Moravia is quite hilly, too, and is drained by the Morava River. It is also the source of the Oder River.

Water from the landlocked Czech Republic flows to three different seas namely the North Sea, Baltic Sea and Black Sea.

The Czech Republic has four national parks.

The Czech Republic has a temperate climate with relatively hot summers and cold, snowy winters.

Most rain falls during the summer.

The wettest area in the Czech Republic is Bily Potok in the Jizera Mountains.

The driest area is Louny District northwest of Prague.

Czechs form 94 percent of the population followed by Slovaks (2 percent), Polish (1 percent) and Germans, Hungarians, Ukrainians, Russians, Bulgarians, Roma, Greeks and Vietnamese (3 percent).

Ruzyne International Airport is the main airport in the country. Ceske Drahy is the main railway operator.

Tourism is one of the main income earners of the Czech economy.

Czech cuisine is generally meaty and fish is rare. Czechs also drink beer and wine.

Fernet Stock and Becherovka are the most famous Czech liquors.

Ice hockey and football are the most popular sports in the country.

The Czech lands have produced many famous scientists such as Vaclav Divis who invented the lightning rod, Gregor Mendel the father of genetics and the Nobel laureate polarographist Jaroslav Heyrovsky.

Notable Czech composers include Antonin Dvorak and Bohuslav Martinu.

M Rajoli - Malaysia's Mickey Rooney

2010-09-19T00:02:00.000-07:00

The late M Rajoli who passed away after a long illness at 65 on September 17, 2010, will always be remembered as a versatile supporting actor.

One of Malaysia's groovy grandpas of film, he starred in countless comedies, TV series and serious movies for the last four decades.

The actor was born Mohamad Razali Mohamad Zin in Pasir Mas, Kelantan, is survived by his wives Hashimah Mohamad Din and former Radio Television Malaysia (RTM) news caster and actress Wan Chik Daud, four children and seven grand children.

About Kota Marudu

2010-09-18T03:04:00.000-07:00

Kota Marudu is a district and municipality in Sabah previously known as Bandau.

Bandau is a Rungus Kadazan word meaning "King Of The Beasts".

This King was not a lion or tiger (both cats are not found in Borneo) but a civet (musang).

The district/town to its east is Pitas.

Pitas means "Shattered" in Bajau.

The story goes that the Sultan of Sulu broke a glass there.

Kota Marudu gets its name from the Bajau word Mairudu meaning "The Spot".

To its west is the town/district Kudat which is named for the Rungus Kadazan word for wild grass.

Kudat has some Bajau suburbs such as Matunggong ("Island's End"), Bak-Bak ("Meeting Place"), Malubang ("Graveyard"), Tombarungus ("Rungus Cape") and Simpang Tanjung Mengayau ("Fighting Cape Junction" because two Bajau warriors fought at the cape once upon a long time).

Kota Marudu's well-known Bajau suburb is Bulih Ajung ("Ship's Behind").

Bandau was renamed Kota Marudu by Sabah's third Chief Minister and first Bajau Chief Minister Tun Datu Mustapha Datu Harun in 1974.

He was the grand-uncle of my dear friends, singers and actresses Pija and Naufara Yasin, their choreographer brothers Farid and Wan Yasin, and their late cousin, singer and actress Yanie Julkarim.

Kudat was a satrapy of the Sultan of Sulu, Mustapha's ancestor, and the most famous Duke of Kudat was Sharif Osman.

Sharif Osman fought the attempts of Sarawak's private British colonialist or White Rajah Sir James Brooke and his nephew and heir Sir Charles Johnson Brooke to acquire Sabah in the 1840s.

At that time, the Sultan of Sulu opposed Sultan Omar of Brunei's 'softness' towards the United Kingdom and the ease in which the latter 'ceded' Sarawak to Brooke.

The Sultan of Brunei's Chief Minister Pengiran Muda Hashim was a good friend of the Brookes and they attempted to install him as the new Sultan of Brunei.

Two other relatives of the Sultan of Brunei, Mat Saman the Duke of Klias (aka Beaufort) and Pengiran Yusof, plotted to oust the weak Sultan of Brunei and install Pengiran Yusof as the new Sultan.

Pengiran Hashim was killed by Pengiran Yusof, and in retaliation, Brooke killed Pengiran Yusof, Mat Saman and Sharif Osman with help from the Royal British Navy based in Singapore.

Brooke forced the Sultan of Brunei to accept British protection.

And the Sultan of Sulu being a vassal of the Sultan of Brunei was commanded to accept British protection, too.

Brooke ended his plan to take Sabah from Brunei and Sulu as his master, the British monarch, had become overlord of Brunei.

Among the places of interest in Kota Marudu is the Sorinsim Waterfall, located 40km from the town centre and Taman Sagabon, an agriculture research station beside the Buyut Lake.

South East Asia's biggest solar power station is located in Kota Marudu.

About Jimi Hendrix

2010-09-17T04:20:00.000-07:00

From Wikipedia.

James Marshall "Jimi" Hendrix (born Johnny Allen Hendricks, November 27, 1942 – September 18, 1970) was an American guitarist and singer-songwriter.

He is often considered the greatest electric guitarist in the history of rock music, and one of the most influential musicians of his era.

After initial success in Europe, he achieved fame in the United States following his 1967 performance at the Monterey Pop Festival.

Later, Hendrix headlined the iconic 1969 Woodstock Festival and the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival.

Hendrix often favoured raw, overdriven amplifiers with high gain and treble and helped develop the previously undesirable technique of guitar amplifier feedback.

Hendrix was one of the musicians who popularised the wah-wah pedal in mainstream rock which he often used to deliver an exaggerated pitch in his solos, particularly with high bends and use of legato.

He was influenced by blues artistes such as B B King, rhythm and blues and soul guitarists as Curtis Mayfield and Steve Cropper, and jazz.

In 1966, Hendrix, who played and recorded with Little Richard's band from 1964 to 1965, said, "I want to do with my guitar what Little Richard does with his voice."

As a record producer, Hendrix also broke new ground in using the recording studio as an extension of his musical ideas.

He was one of the first to experiment with stereophonic and phasing effects for rock recording.

Hendrix won many of the most prestigious rock music awards in his lifetime, and has been posthumously awarded many more, including being inducted into the US Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 1992 and the UK Music Hall Of Fame in 2005.

An English Heritage blue plaque was erected in his name on his former residence at Brook Street, London, in September 1997.

A star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame was dedicated in 1994.

In 2006, his debut US album, Are You Experienced, was inducted into the United States National Recording Registry, and Rolling Stone named Hendrix the top guitarist on its list of 100 Greatest Guitarists in 2003.

He was also the first person inducted into the Native American Music Hall Of Fame.

Born Johnny Allen Hendricks in Seattle, Washington, he was the first of two sons of James Allen "Al" Hendricks (1919–2002) and Lucille Jeter (1925-1958).

His father was stationed at Fort Sill in Oklahoma at the time of his birth.

He was known as "Buster" to friends and family, from birth.

Al found it hard to gain steady employment after the Second World War, and the family experienced financial hardship.

Hendrix had two brothers, Leon and Joseph, and two sisters, Kathy and Pamela.

Joseph was born with physical difficulties and at three was given up to state care.

His sisters were given up at a relatively early age, for care and later adoption.

Kathy was born blind.

Hendrix's parents divorced when he was nine.

His mother, a heavy drinker, died in 1958.

Hendrix grew up shy and sensitive, deeply affected by the poverty and family disruption he experienced.

Unusually for his era, Hendrix's high school had a relatively equitable ethnic mix of African Americans, European Americans and Asian Americans.

At 15, he acquired his first acoustic guitar from an acquaintance of his father.

Hendrix was a self-taught guitarist and played with bands around Washington and British Columbia in Canada.

Hendrix was particularly fond of Elvis Presley, whom he saw perform in Seattle, in 1957.

The first formal band he played in was The Velvetones. He later joined the Rocking Kings.

Hendrix completed junior high at Washington Junior High School.

Hendrix got into trouble with the law twice for riding in stolen cars.

He was given a choice between spending two years in prison or joining the army.

Hendrix chose the latter and enlisted on May 31, 1961.

After completing boot camp, he was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division and stationed in Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

He spent a year in the army.

While in the army, Hendrix met fellow soldier and bass player Billy Cox, and they forged a loyal friendship from 1969 until Billy's breakdown shortly before Hendrix's death.

After his army discharge, Hendrix and Cox moved to Clarksville, Tennessee.

They played in Nashville's Jefferson Street, the traditional heart of its African American community and home to a lively rhythm and blues scene.

Their band was known as The Casuals, later King Kasuals.

Hendrix went to New York City in 1964 and befriended Lithofayne Pridgeon (known as Faye) and the Allen twins, Arthur and Albert (now known as Taharqa and Tunde-Ra Aleem).

The twins also performed as backup singers (under the name Ghetto Fighters) on some of his recordings, most notably Freedom.

Pridgeon, a Harlem native with connections throughout the area's music scene, provided Hendrix with shelter, support and encouragement.

Hendrix won first prize in the Apollo Theatre amateur contest.

He was offered the guitarist position with The Isley Brothers' back-up band and readily accepted it.

Hendrix' first studio recording occurred in March 1964, when the Isley Brothers recorded Testify.

Hendrix subsequently went to Nashville and recorded and performed with Little Richard.

He rejoined the Isley Brothers in 1965 and recorded Move Over and Let Me Dance with them.

In the same year, Hendrix joined New York–based R&B band Curtis Knight And The Squires.

He recorded a single with Knight, How Would You Feel backed with Welcome Home.

He also signed a three-year recording contract with entrepreneur Ed Chalpin.

While the relationship with Chalpin was shortlived, his contract remained in force, which caused considerable problems for Hendrix later on.

The legal dispute has continued to the present day.

Hendrix had his first composer credits for Hornets Nest and Knock Yourself Out released as a Curtis Knight And The Squires single in 1966.

He also formed his own band The Blue Flame and later the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

Hendrix then met Chas Chandler, who was ending his tenure as bassist in The Animals and looking for talent to manage and produce.

Chandler brought him to London and signed him to a management and production contract with himself and ex-Animals manager Michael Jeffery.

At Chandler's request, Cream let Hendrix join it on stage for a jam on the song Killing Floor.

Hendrix and Cream lead singer Eric Clapton remained friends until Hendrix's death.

His showmanship and virtuosity made instant fans of reigning guitar heroes Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, as well as Brian Jones and The Beatles.

Further success came in early 1967 with Purple Haze which featured The Wind Cries Mary.

The first Jimi Hendrix Experience album, Are You Experienced, was released in the United Kingdom on May 12, 1967.

On March 31, 1967, he set his guitar on fire at the end of his first performance, as a publicity stunt.

The Beatles' Sir Paul McCartney recommended his group to the organisers of the Monterey International Pop Festival.

This proved a great opportunity for Hendrix.

He opened the festival with Killing Floor, a song he played frequently from 1965 to 1968, as the opener to his shows.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience's second album Axis: Bold As Love in 1967 was his first recording made for stereo release.

Hendrix's third recording was the double album Electric Ladyland (1968).

Electric Ladyland included Voodoo Chile (Slight Return) as well as Hendrix's rendering of Bob Dylan's All Along The Watchtower.

Hendrix often appeared at impromptu jams with B B King and Jim Morrison of The Doors.

After a year in the US, Hendrix moved back to London, where he performed at the Royal Albert Hall in 1969.

Later that year, the Experience disbanded.

At Woodstock 1969, Hendrix recorded Jam Back At The House, Shokan Sunrise, Machine Gun and Message To Love among others.

In 1970, Hendrix worked on his new LP First Rays Of The New Rising Sun.

He then decided to leave his manager Jeffery.

Hendrix's last public performance was an informal jam at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in Soho.

Hendrix died in his apartment, apparently of a drug overdose.

In 2006, Seattle honoured Hendrix with the re-naming of a park near the Colman School.

Hendrix synthesised many styles in creating his musical voice and his guitar style was abundantly imitated by others.

Despite his hectic touring schedule and notorious perfectionism, he was a prolific recording artiste and left behind more than 300 unreleased recordings.

His career and death grouped him with Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Ron "Pigpen" McKernan (of the Grateful Dead) and Kurt Cobain as one of the 27 Club, a group including iconic 1960s rock stars who suffered drug-related deaths at age 27 within months of each other, leaving legacies in death that have eclipsed the popularity and influence they experienced during their lifetimes.

Despite his popularity and the lavish praise heaped upon his guitar skills, he was surprisingly humble.

Musically, Hendrix did much to further the development of the electric guitar's repertoire, establishing it as a unique sonic source, rather than merely an amplified version of the acoustic guitar.

His music also had a great influence on funk especially through Ernie Isley of The Isley Brothers, Prince, and John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

His influence even extends to hip hop artistes, as Chuck D of Public Enemy, Ice-T (who covered Hey Joe), and Wyclef Jean.

Miles Davis was also deeply impressed by Hendrix.

In 1992, Hendrix was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

In 1987, Leon Hendrix commissioned the James Marshall Hendrix Foundation.

This foundation is based in Renton, Washington.

The Machine That Killed Hendrix

2010-09-17T03:33:00.000-07:00

This article by David Rowlands is from Green Left Weekly, Australia's leading progressive cyber weekly.

It coincides with the 40th anniversary of Jimi Hendrix's death on September 18, 2010.

Jimi Hendrix was traumatised by an impoverished upringing and stung by the systemic racism that dogged him as the child of African-American and Cherokee parents.

Hendrix’s identification with progressive politics embodied the ferment of the late 1960s, with songs like If Six Was Nine (I’m gonna wave my freak flag high), I Don’t Live Today (about the plight of Native Americans) and the anti-war poem Machine Gun.

Hendrix spoke out in favour of the radical anti-racist Black Panthers and criticised the US war on Vietnam.

He played free at benefit concerts and famously performed a radical deconstruction of the US national anthem, Star Spangled Banner at the 1969 Woodstock festival.

The FBI considered him a dangerous subversive and targeted him for surveillance and harassment.

40 years on from his death, a web of intrigue continues to surround the legacy of this visionary guitarist and composer.

Hendrix may have been a musical genius, but he was a babe in the woods when it came to the hard commercial realities of the music business.

This is often attributed to factors such as Hendrix’s easygoing nature and drug use, but it flows a little deeper than that.

Psychologists would call it “learned helplessness”.

Traumatised by an impoverished upbringing in Seattle and stung by the systemic racism that dogged him as a “half-caste” child of African-American and Cherokee parents, Hendrix was exceptionally vulnerable to the rankest forms of exploitation.

In 1965, Ed Chalpin (who specialised in producing cheesy cover versions of Top 40 hits) coaxed the up-and-coming guitarist on the Chitlin’ Circuit (as US venues open to Black performers were known) into signing an exclusive recording contract — for an advance of US$1.

The next year, Hendrix picked up a contract with British management outfit Yameta.

Chas Chandler, ex-Animals bassist, knew Hendrix’s transcendental amalgam of blues, rock, jazz, funk and soul had the potential to revolutionise the music scene.

Hendrix re-located to London, where his band, the Jimi Hendrix Experience was formed in late 1966 under Chandler’s direction.

Hendrix harnessed the sonic potential of modern amplification to saturate the ears and minds of stunned audiences with head-trips of three-dimensional tone and colour.

There was an element of avant garde exploration in Hendrix’s emerging psychedelic sound — the creative process, not the end product, was what mattered to him.

Following Hendrix’s spectacular rise to international fame after his performance at the Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967, Chandler’s shady Yameta partner, Mike Jeffery, stepped in as the controlling force.

The Experience was the hottest act around, regularly earning $50,000 per show.

But the band members (Hendrix with bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell), received a minimal share.

Most of the takings disappeared into offshore Yameta bank accounts, never to be seen again.

To make matters worse, Chalpin initiated a law suit claiming prior rights to the proceeds from Hendix’s releases.

Years of stressful litigation ensued, and Hendrix found it impossible to terminate an increasingly abusive professional relationship with Jeffery.

As an ex-military intelligence agent with reputed links to MI6, the FBI and organised crime, Jeffery was sly and manipulative.

Jeffery was widely rumoured to have planted the vial of heroin that appeared in Hendix’s luggage at Canadian customs.

The resulting legal hassles made Hendrix even more dependent on his manager.

Desperate for some creative down time, Hendrix was coerced into non-stop touring by Jeffery.

Allegedly, Jeffery was behind a bizarre 1969 kidnapping in which the guitarist was abducted, held for days and threatened with death.

The episode of extraordinary rendition was supposedly a charade designed to intimidate Hendrix, who told friends on many occasions he feared for his life.

Towards the end of his life, Hendrix was making moves toward a new start — but too late.

He died in London on September 18, 1970 — a few months after breaking off all contact with his manager.

Inhalation of vomit due to drug intoxication was the official cause of death.

The toxic Yameta agreement had almost expired, and Hendrix — eager to step back from power-rock to pursue jazz-inspired fusion projects — was counting the days.

Former Hendrix roadie, James “Tappy” Wright, claimed in his 2009 autobiography Rock Roadie that Jeffery drunkenly confessed in 1971 to murdering Hendrix.

Wright said Jeffery told him he stuffed pills into Hendrix’s mouth and poured “a few bottles of red wine deep into his windpipe”.

Jeffery allegedly said: “I had to do it. Jimi was worth much more to me dead than alive. That son of a bitch was going to leave me.

“If I lost him, I’d lose everything.”

Circumstantial evidence adds to the mystery.

Hendrix’s clothing was saturated in red wine, but the post mortem examination revealed little alcohol in his bloodstream.

Such evidence is intriguing, but the absence of conclusive proof makes it impossible to verify the murder conspiracy theory.

At the very least, however, it is clear the insane pressures inflicted on him by the profit-driven music business machine contributed to Hendrix’s untimely death.

In a sense, Hendrix’s death amounted to a slow execution by the corporate capitalist music machine.

Hendrix died intestate and the question of who owns his work has been in and out of court for decades amid claim and counter-claim by competing factions bidding for exclusive rights.

In the mid-1990s, multi-billionaire Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, underwrote a successful campaign by Hendrix’s father Al (who died in 2002) and stepsister Janie to wrest control from controversial producer Alan Douglas.

Hyped as a progressive development at the time, the Experience Hendrix company (operating in silent partnership with Allen) has since acquired a reputation for aggressively bullying any other potential claimants — including Hendrix’s children and his brother Leon.

What would Hendrix have made of it all?

Perhaps he would ruefully conclude that the confining “plastic cage” he sang about in Stone Free was not so easy to break, after all.

Malaysia’s Formation Helped Development Of Sabah, Sarawak & Labuan - PM

2010-09-16T21:18:00.000-07:00

From Malaysian National News Agency (Bernama).

Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak said the decision of people of Sabah, Labuan and Sarawak to form Malaysia with their Peninsula counterparts was a wise move which has brought them significant development and progress.

However, the path leading to the formation of Malaysia was not easy because of challenges as the claim by the Philippines on Sabah and the ensuing confrontation with Indonesia.

Najib said: “When the claim made by the Philippines on Sabah did not materialise because of our joint defence of Sabah and when Indonesia launched the confrontation against us, we all fought to protect each other,” he said.

Najib also said the independence leaders of Sabah, Labuan and Sarawak had to work hard to convince the people of the benefits of joining with Malaya (Peninsular Malaysia) to form Malaysia.

“The journey leading to the auspicious date of September 16, 1963 was not easy because the late Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra and my father, the late Tun Abdul Razak Hussein, worked with the independence leaders of Sabah, Labuan and Sarawak to convince the peoples of British Borneo that their future would be more secure, and their prosperity would become a reality if they formed Malaysia.

“Eventually, more than 80 per cent agreed that Sabah, Labuan and Sarawak become part of the Federation of Malaysia,” he said.

Congrats To Malaysia Day Award Recipients

2010-09-16T20:44:00.000-07:00

Congrats to Malaysia Day Award recipients Tun Abdul Rahman Yaakub (Bapa Kemerdekaan Sarawak, former Sarawak Chief Minister and Governor), Tan Sri Ghani Gilong (ex-Sabah Cabinet Minister), Tan Sri Zainal Abidin Sulong (ex-Foreign Ministry Secretary-General from Kelantan) and Datuk Seri Yuen Yuet Ling (ex-Perak police chief).

Nash Shocked, Saddened By Ex-Wife's Gruesome Murder

2010-09-12T22:31:00.000-07:00

Rock star Nash aka Jamaluddin Alias is shocked and saddened by the gruesome murder of his ex-wife, Malaysian cosmetics queen and one-time Businesswoman Of The Year Datuk Paduka Sosilawati Lawiya. He conveys his condolences to her loved ones and prays for the safety and well-being of her six kids from her previous marriage. They were married from 2006-2009.

Rocker Nash's Ex-Wife Feared Murdered

2010-09-11T23:17:00.000-07:00

Police in Banting have found what is believed to be the body of rocker Jamaluddin "Nash" Alias' ex-wife, Malaysia's cosmetics queen Datuk Paduka Sosilawati Lawiya. She has been missing from home in Kuala Lumpur for two weeks since August 30, 2010. Robbers might have mutilated her and burnt the body together with that of her driver and 2 clients, a lawyer and a banker.

Update:
Yes, police have confirmed that the four of them were murdered. The late Sosilawati from Batu Pahat will be dearly missed by all Malaysians. She was to Malaysia what Mary Quant and Estee Lauder were to Europe and America. RIP and prayers to her family, and the families of the other three victims. May the monsters who slaughtered them be slaughtered too.

Terengganu Before Terengganu Sulatanate

2010-09-09T05:36:00.000-07:00

Terengganu was ruled by the Laksamana of Johor, Wan Abdul Rahman, before it became a Sultanate under Sultan Zainal Abidin Shah 1.
He was the younger brother of Sultan Abdul Jalil Shah 4 of Pahang.
Wan Abdul Rahman was descended from Hang Tuah the Batin of Bintan and Laksamana of Melaka (and Johor).
And from Tun Perak the Bendahara of Melaka (and Johor), also the ancestor of Sultan Abdul Jalil and Sultan Zainal Abidin.
The Megats of Pahang were also the ancestors of Wan Abdul Rahman, Sultan Abdul Jalil and Sultan Zainal Abidin.
The Megats of Pahang were the original rulers of Terengganu.
The Megats were the Johor royals who governed the land of the Temuans aka Selangor.
This Selangor covered modern Selangor, Perak (Gangga Negara was the old name), Pahang, Terengganu, Deli, Kampar, Jambi and Tanah Datar (aka Minangkabau Kingdom).
Tun Hassan was one of them.
He was also from the Bendaharas of Johor (and Melaka, who later ruled Pahang and Johor courtesy of Sultan Abdul Jalil).
His son Tun Zain succeeded him.
Tun Zain was succeeded by his son Tun Sulaiman.

Muslims Of China

2010-09-08T22:57:00.001-07:00

Muslims of China, known as Hui, are a mixture of Huaren (like me) with Arabs, Indians (Parsees and Malayalees) and Malays/Indochinese (Burmese, Kedahans and Kelantanese). The Burmese include the Mongolian Uzbeks.

Islam came to China via India and Malaysia (the Pepper Route) and via Iran and Uzbekistan (the Silk Route).

There is a very small Kelantanese Malay community in Hainan, China.

About Kampung Baru, Kuala Lumpur

2010-09-08T22:41:00.000-07:00

Kampung Baru (New Village) took shape in the late 19th century on 114 hectares next to the Klang River in Kuala Lumpur. It was one of the projects by the British administration.

The main objective, says historian Tan Sri Khoo Kay Kim, was to provide a place near the town centre where the Malays could live quite cheaply.

In January 12, 1900, the Selangor Resident gazetted the area as a Malay Agricultural Settlement.

The British thought that by building a village, they would be able to induce them to cultivate rice. But the ones who came did not want to cultivate the land. They were mainly traders.

The land was “partly high flat land and partly swamp”. Each occupant held about a quarter of a hectare. The first residents were the peons and messengers employed in government offices. The bullock cart drivers, mainly from Melaka, were followed by Johoreans and Javanese.

The Malays were rowing sampans up and down the Klang River to transport goods for the miners in the interior, who were predominantly Chinese.

That mode of transport died when the railway arrived in 1886. By 1912, buses and lorries came. The first car came in about 1900.

From the initial 196 holdings in 1904, there are today 1,792 lots comprising both Malay Agricultural Settlement and Non-Malay Agricultural Settlement land like the Jalan Dang Wangi and Jalan Chow Kit lots.

(Many thanks, The Star)

Note that Kampung Baru is not the oldest village in Kuala Lumpur. That honour goes to Pantai (which comprises Pantai Dalam, Kampung Kerinci where RTM is, and Kampung Abdullah Hukum where Mid Valley Megamall is).

About Belize

2010-08-24T06:06:00.001-07:00

From Wikipedia.

Belize (formerly British Honduras) is a multi-racial in Central America.

Although Kriol (Creole) and Spanish are spoken amongst the population, Belize is the only country in Central America where English is the official language.

Belize is bordered by Mexico to its north, by Guatemala to its south and west, and by the Caribbean Sea to the east.

The 22,960 square km country with 333,200 people is rich in terrestrial and marine species, and is a major part of thes Mesoamerican Biological Corridor.

The origin of the name Belize is unclear, but it is most likely from the Mayan word belix meaning muddy water, applied to the Belize River.

Belize was originally part of the Maya civilisation.

In 1638, the British colonised Belize.

They harvested logwood which produced a fixing agent for clothing dyes that was vital to the European woollen industry.

The British brought African slaves from Congo to Belize. They came via Jamaica.

As early as 1800, Africans outnumbered Europeans by about four to one.

By then, the settlement's primary export had shifted from logwood to mahogany.

The Europeans intermarried heavily with the Mayans and Africans.

The Spanish in Mexico (then ruling the rest of Central America) repeatedly tried to gain control by force over Belize, but were unsuccessful.

In 1964 Belize gained self-rule under Chief Minister George Price who is of Mayan-British descent.

He is one of four Prime Ministers Belize has had to date, the others being his successors (in chronological order) Manuel Esquivel (Mayan-Spanish), Said Musa (Lebanese Arab) and Dean Barrow (African).

Belize was officially named Belize replacing its former name British Honduras in 1973.

Belize gained independence from Britain on September 21, 1981.

At that time Guatemala staked a claim on Belize. The claim has yet to be dropped.

Belize has since independence been ruled by two political parties, the People’s United Party and the United Democratic Party which broke off from the former.

The east of Belize, the Caribbean Sea, has the second longest barrier reef in the world.

The Caribbean coast is lined with a coral reef and some 450 islets and islands known locally as cayes (pronounced keys).

They total about 690 square kilometres and form the approximately 320-kilometre Belize Barrier Reef, the longest in the Western Hemisphere and the second longest in the world after the Great Barrier Reef.

Belize has a tropical climate with pronounced wet and dry seasons, although there are significant variations in weather patterns by region.

Temperatures vary according to elevation, proximity to the coast, and the moderating effects of the northeast trade winds off the Caribbean.

Average temperatures in the coastal regions range from 24 C to 27 C.

Average rainfall varies from 1,350 mm in the north and west to over 4,500 mm in the south.

Hurricanes have played key — and devastating — roles in Belizean history.

In 1931 an unnamed hurricane destroyed over two-thirds of the buildings in Belize City and killed more than 1,000 people.

In 1955 Hurricane Janet leveled the northern town of Corozal.

Only six years later, Hurricane Hattie struck the central coastal area of the country, with winds in excess of 300 km/h (186 mph) and 4 m storm tides.

While over 60 percent of Belize's land surface is covered by forest, recent studies indicate that some 20 percent is cultivated.

Savannah, scrubland and wetland constitute the remainder of Belize's land cover.

The Belize Barrier Reef System constitutes a UNESCO-recognised World Heritage Site.

Belize has a small, essentially private enterprise economy that is based primarily on agriculture and merchandising, with tourism and construction recently assuming greater importance.

A combination of natural factors — climate, the Belize Barrier Reef, over 1,000 offshore cayes (islands), safe waters, jungle and wildlife reserves and many Maya ruins — support the thriving tourism industry.

Belize also has the largest cave system in Central America.

Belize is a parliamentary democracy and a member of the Commonwealth of Nations.

Like Canada, Jamaica, the Bahamas, St Kitts And Nevis, Antigua And Barbuda, St Lucia, St Vincent And The Grenadines, Barbados, Grenada, Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Tuvalu, it is a Commonwealth Realm.

This means it is a sovereign state within the Commonwealth of Nations that has the Queen or King of the United Kingdom as its honorary monarch and head of state.

The Queen or King of the United Kingdom is represented by a locally elected President titled Governor-General.

The cabinet is led by the Prime Minister of Belize, who is chief executive officer of the country.

Mestizos, of British and Mayan or Spanish and Mayan (from Guatemala) descent, form 44 percent of the population.

Kriols, of British and African descent form 25 percent.

Spanish form 5 percent of the population and Mayans form 17 percent.

The remaining 9 percent comprises Asian Indians, Chinese, Indochinese and British.

In the 1860s, many Mestizos and British from the United States’ Louisiana region went to live in Belize.

English is the only official language of Belize.

Kriol is the second most spoken language and it is heavily influenced by African languages from the Congo region.

Spanish is also widely spoken.

Nearly 80 percent of Belizeans are Christians. Half of them are Roman Catholics and the rest are Protestants.

The Asian Indians make up most of the Hindus and Muslims.

Belizean cuisine is heavily inspired by British, Mexican and Caribbean cuisine.

Basic ingredients are rice, beans, chicken, pork, beef, fish, coconut milk and plantains.

The traditional exotic recipes include armadillo, paca (guinea pig relative) and conch soup with okra, potatoes, yam, cassava (tapioca) flour and capsicum.

The major sports in Belize are football, basketball, volleyball and cycling, with smaller followings of boat racing, track and field, softball and cricket.

The black orchid is the national flower while the mahogany is the national tree.

The national bird is the keel billed toucan while the Baird's Tapir (tapirus bairdii), the largest land mammal of the American tropics, is the national animal.

About Dharmasraya

2010-08-23T05:53:00.000-07:00

Dharmasraya was one of the capitals of ancient Johor aka Sri Vijaya.

It was in the Kingdom of Minangkabau which is today the Indonesian province of West Sumatra.

The Johor Kings initially ruled their empire from Muar, Skudai and Kota Tinggi in mainland Johor, followed by Singapore (Temasik), Tanjungpinang (Bintan Island) in the Riau Islands, Palembang and Jambi in Sumatra.

One of the Kings of Johor who ruled in Dharmasraya was Adityavarman.

He set Johor free from Javanese overlordship.

Like his forefathers from the Mauli branch of the Johor royal house, he continued to make the Minangkabau land as the centre of Johor, with Dharmasraya as the capital.

The King of Johor became the King of Minangkabau as well, and he made Minangkabau as opposed to Tanjungpinang the centre of Johor.

In the 15th century, one of the Johor princes governing Bintan, Parameswara aka Sultan Iskandar Shah, formed the Kingdom of Melaka and it became the new centre of the Johor Empire.

The King of Minangkabau ceased to be the lord of Johor, and ceded the whole of Sumatra sans Aceh (Kedah's) and Minangkabau (Adityavarman's) to Parameswara’s rule.

In Minangkabau today, you find both aboriginal Minangkabaus of the Bodi Caniago and Koto Piliang sukus (subgroups) and the Melayu (Malay aka Johor) suku which is divided into Rawa, Air Bangis and Talu.

The Rawa, Air Bangis and Talu are from the Johor royals.

The Johor royals and Johor peoples are from the Temuans of Selangor.

The Minangkabau peoples are from the Beras (Semelais) of Bera in Pahang.

About The Tabular Islamic Calendar

2010-08-10T21:17:00.001-07:00

The tabular Islamic calendar, invented in Egypt when it was ruled by the Syeds or Fatimids, has months determined by arithmetic rules rather than by observation or astronomical calculations as was the case in the early years of the Caliphate.

It was developed by early Muslim astronomers to provide a predictable time base for calculating the positions of the moon, sun, and planets.

It is used by historians to convert an Islamic date into a Western calendar when no other information (like the day of the week) is available.

It is used by Muslims in the West and many secular Muslim countries.

Each year has 12 months. The odd numbered months have 30 days and the even numbered months have 29 days, except in a leap year when the final month has 30 days.

In Malaysia, Ramadan and Syawal are always determined by observation.

All About Oman

2010-08-10T20:53:00.000-07:00

Thanks, Wikipedia.

Oman is an Arab country in southwest Asia on the southeast coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It borders the United Arab Emirates on the northwest, Saudi Arabia on the west and Yemen on the southwest.

The coast is formed by the Arabian Sea on the south and east and the Gulf of Oman on the northeast. The country also contains Madha, an exclave enclosed by the United Arab Emirates and Musandam, an exclave also separated by Emirati territory.

Oman was founded by Arabs from Yemen. It was later conquered by Persia (Iran). The Omanis embraced Islam during the time of Muhammad. Oman later fell under the influence of the Shiah Muslims and became a major trading nation. Omanis settled in parts of East Africa most notably Zanzibar.

The legend of Sinbad The Sailor is from Oman.

From 1508-1648, the Portuguese conquered Oman. The Omanis drove out the Portuguese in 1741.

Oman subsequently became a British protectorate and gained independence when Sultan Qaboos Said ascended the throne on July 23, 1970.

A vast gravel desert plain covers most of central Oman, with mountain ranges along the north (Al Hajar Mountains) and southeast coast, where the country's main cities are located - the capital city Muscat, Sohar and Sur in the north and Salalah in the south.

Oman's climate is hot and dry in the interior and humid along the coast.

More than half of the population lives in Muscat and the Batinah coastal plain northwest of the capital, about 200,000 live in the Dhofar (southern) region, and about 30,000 live in the remote Musandam Peninsula on the Straits of Hormuz.

Shiah Muslims are 83 percent of Omanis. Sunnis are 17 percent.

Omani citizens enjoy good living standards, but the future is uncertain with Oman's limited oil reserves. Agriculture produces fruits, grains and vegetables. Less than 1percent of the country is under cultivation. Industry is 4 percent of Gross National Product.

Oman is famous for its khanjar knives, which are curved daggers worn during holidays as part of ceremonial dress.

Benjamin McKay - Always A Dear Friend Of Malaysia

2010-07-31T05:06:00.000-07:00

Australian expatriate arts lecturer, arts journalist and arts critic Benjamin McKay, who passed away of an illness at 46 recently, will always be a dear friend of Malaysia and the closest Malaysia has had to a new Johan Abdullah aka John Begley, the acclaimed British-born writer, actor, journalist and cartoonist of The New Straits Times.

His dear friend, Central Market Annexe Gallery chief, former arts portal Kakiseni editor and arts activist Pang Kee Teik has described the late Australian as 'truly Malaysian in heart and soul'.

"Benjamin moved to Kuala Lumpur in 2005 and was proud to call it home. He embraced Malaysian ways easily and made friends with similar ease. He loved the arts, and was passionate about taking it higher. He saw beauty in everything and preferred to build on strengths instead of harp on weaknesses. He believed that the Malaysian arts scene had a future if only it was better promoted."

McKay was also a good friend of the late, great Yasmin Ahmad and shared her vision of a truly Malaysian Malaysia.

He was a firm believer in Tunku Abdul Rahman's dream of a truly democratic, secular and multi-racial Malaysia.

He once said: “Young people, with all their talents and intelligence, will be impeded if they are deemed to be unworthy of the truth. Their capacity to engage globally and to strengthen Malaysia’s place within an increasingly competitive and intelligent global environment will be stymied if they are not allowed to critically engage with their culture, their politics and their society.”

Pang said McKay was completely egalitarian. He believed a thinker’s role was not to be confined to subjects sanctioned by ivory towers. He believed he could make thinkers out of everyone.

I've never known him personally, but he was a great man and will be dearly missed. So long, Benjamin. See you on the other side.

Iran’s First President Speaks Out For Truly Islamic Republicanism

2010-07-30T07:39:00.000-07:00

An article by Abol Hassan Bani Sadr, Iran’s first President who was ousted by Imam Ruhollah Khomeini after less than a year in office.

Bani Sadr has always represented an Islamic interpretation rooted in Western Renaissance values because he always believes the true Islamic interpretation lies in the one that upholds the greatest human rights and emphasises moderation.

He believes that the interpretation of Islam must match that of Western Renaissance values because the great Islamic ulama of long ago such as Al-Ghazali, Ibnu Haytham and Ibnu Sina shaped such values which sprung up from Caliphate-occupied Spain.

Bani Sadr believes in Secularism = Islamism just like the founding fathers of Malaysia.

Thanks, Christian Science Monitor.

The Muslim world must have an interpretation of Islam that embraces freedom and human rights instead of violence and oppression.

The despotic and misogynist narratives of Islam that predominate now must be replaced by alternative interpretations of Islam.

Shariah has to be interpreted in tandem with freedom and human rights as must the Holy Koran its source.

The religion must be read and taught in a way that shows religion at the service of human beings, not human beings at the service of religion.

Religion has for too long become about power. Violence and terror is the direct result of a religious interpretation that sanctifies violence.

This poisons and kills the beauty of Islam.

The Muslim world has to be made to relearn Islam, the Koran, the Traditions and the Shariah from scratch.

It has to reorient itself with the Koranic concept of Oneness or Tawhid.

This is a worldview that regards the whole of existence as a single form.

There is no separation between everything.

The whole of existence is a single living organism, possessing will, intelligence, feeling and purpose.

The expansion of freedom and development is the pathway to the divine.

Human beings are created with the talents, rights and responsibilities of self-determination.

Women and men are equal in the Quran and this should be the norm in Musilm society. Enslaving women is against Islam, in fact an Islam that believes so is a false Islam and Muslims who believe so are false Muslims.

The West cannot destroy extremist, fascist Muslim governments by brute force, lest they become stronger.

They can only be destroyed by education of Muslims and non-Muslims on what the real Islamic interpretation is.

The real Islamic interpretation should be disseminated around the West and used to re-teach the Muslim world.

Only then will the Muslim world rediscover Islam’s true interpretation and rise up against oppressive religious establishments and tyrannical governments.

Human rights, democracy, non-violence, modernity and progress are rooted in Islamic tradition, in the lives and works of Al-Ghazali, Rumi, Ibnu Sina and Ibnu Khaldun.

Show The World That Islam Is Love & Peace - Tuanku Mizan

2010-07-28T04:37:00.000-07:00

From New Straits Times and Malaysiana1.

The King of Malaysia Tuanku Mizan Zainal Abidin calls on Muslims around the world to show others than Islam is love and peace.

Failing to do so gives others a bad impression of the faith and worse, generates 'Islamophobia', a 'poison' to the world community.

He says Islam is facing its worst 'physical and spiritual' threats today because of Muslims' failure to uphold the true teachings of Islam for too long.

He also says Muslims should stay united and not be involved in petty conflicts, be clean, disciplined, hard-working, humble, generous, caring, open-minded, honest and trustworthy so that they will be respected by others and be deemed a peace-loving people.

He also calls on non-Muslims to realise that Islam is love and peace, progress and knowledge, consistent with universal human values.

He says: "Muslims must regain the glory of civilisation which was once theirs.

It is not impossible to rise up from the decline which we brought on ourselves.

We can overcome the stumbling blocks which have hampered us for too long if we return to the true teachings of the faith that is in tandem with common values of humanity."

Very Good Article On The Mini - From UK

2010-07-27T04:29:00.001-07:00

From www.icons.org.uk.

The miniskirt was an emblem of rebellion for the young generation against the old. They were rejecting the beliefs and standards of their parents, as well as their fashions. This was not just a generational conflict, this was a particularly female revolution. And make no mistake, this IS a revolution - it is all about politics.

The arguments are much the same as the debate surrounding the more contemporary Wonderbra: as a woman you deserve to have control over your own body, to celebrate your sexuality, but by using this freedom are you simply making yourself the object of male fantasy? Miniskirts, like Wonderbras, give more excuses for exploitative pictures to appear across the Media, promoted as being about “girl power” while actually just objectifying women even further.

The battle of the miniskirt is about a woman’s control over her body image and therefore it’s also about (you’ve guessed it) sex.

The first time that hemlines rose significantly was in the 1920s when the so-called “flapper” girls scandalised first America and then Europe with their energetic dances, androgynous look and skirts raised to almost the knee. Flapper fashion rode on the back of the first wave of feminism: the suffragette movement. Due to their continued agitation from the turn of the century and the prominence of women in the working arena which occurred during the first world war, in 1918 women over 30 got the vote and the voting age was finally brought in line with men in 1928. The suffragettes were also actively working to improve women’s lot in other areas such as marriage, child birth and economic status.

Is it a coincidence that the second major rise in hemlines occurs with the rise of second wave feminism? In 1949 Simone De Beauvoir published her enormously influential book The Second Sex. She argued that women’s submissive role was a social construct and not a result of natural law. Although it took a decade for the significance of her idea to become clear, this book provided the cornerstone for second wave feminist thinking. In 1963, American Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique which exploded the myth of the happy housewife and articulated the desire of so many women to explore other roles. We were on the way.

The 1960s was the first decade in which all young women received full time secondary education up to age 15 and this produced a huge boost to the numbers of women attending the now rapidly expanding universities. Women were entering the work place as teachers, nurses and secretaries. The introduction of the “temp agency” meant women could get work wherever and whenever they wanted it, facilitating travel and wider opportunities.

In 1964 Dorothy Hodgkin won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry and Gwen Moffat became the first female mountain guide, 1965 saw the first female High Court judge appointed. From 1957 Mary Stott was the editor of the Guardian’s women’s page, a campaigning platform for women’s issues.

There were legal changes afoot, too. In 1964 married women were allowed to keep half of any money saved out of housekeeping allowances, in 1967 they were granted similar rights to their husband in the marital home. The 1967 Abortion Act legalised abortion and in 1969 the divorce law was reformed so that either party could sue for divorce, innocent or otherwise. These legal changes are the manifestation of a social revolution that was taking place in Britain and across the world throughout this time. The predominant image of women shifted from being a wife and mother to the young, free, single girl. And the miniskirt seemed to express it all.

As women took a more assertive role in society, they also wanted to regain control over their own bodies. This is one of the most urgent concerns of second wave feminism. In 1974, Angela Carter wrote about her anorexia and how the ideas of the Women’s Liberation Movement had helped her to fight it. Anorexia is bound up with dissatisfaction with your physical being and the Women’s Liberation Movement was about releasing women from these kinds of bonds.

The miniskirt can be seen as a celebration of the female form, asserting your right to be proud of your figure and your right to display it. The famous Lewis Morley photograph of Christine Keeler (1963) sitting, nude, staring directly over her seat back into the camera lens is a striking image of a woman at the height of her celebrity (she is famous for being the downfall of politician John Profumo in a sex scandal that rocked Westminster), proud of her sexuality, confident that this is where her power lies.

Women were no longer submitting to the whims of (mostly male) designers. Long trousers came in for women at about this time and there was a move away from haute couture. Mary Quant had her finger on the pulse. She was a self-made businesswoman who provided ready-to-wear, affordable clothes that expressed this newly adventurous spirit in women. Interestingly, her famous “Chelsea Look” owes a great deal to those androgynous 1920s flappers, except now their bobs were by Vidal Sassoon, they applied thick kohl eyeliner and their skirts were above the knee - well above.

And this leads us on to the controversial issue of sexual liberation. The rise of the miniskirt coincided with the wider availability of the contraceptive pill (1961), a far more reliable method of family planning than those previously available and, crucially, one which was in the control of the woman. This allowed women to be more relaxed about sex and paved the way for women’s sexual liberation. Well, that was the theory, anyway.

In practice only one in ten doctors would prescribe it for a single woman and it was “more talked about than taken” (Out Of The Doll’s House by Angela Holdsworth). The impact of the Pill on women’s sexual choices was not really felt until the 1970s, whatever the skirt length may have had you believe about women’s attitude to sex.

Undoubtedly, the miniskirt came to prominence at a time when women’s rights were a hot topic. The miniskirt was both a symbol of women’s liberation and a tool of it.

A “Dolly bird” is an attractive, fashionable young girl, the term originating with the idea of a woman as a pretty ornament. Miniskirts celebrate women’s femininity, playing with ideas of sexual possibility, but who are they doing it for?

The freedom women were supposed to have in the Sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion: things to make life easier for men, in fact (Julie Burchill).

Feminists quickly realised that the freedom of the miniskirt came at a price, that it had greater potential to be exploitative than liberating. When a person is wearing a miniskirt you see the legs, not the person. A woman in a miniskirt is dehumanised in some ways. Increased visibility for the idea of the sexually empowered woman, striding around Swinging London in her miniskirt resulted in the media simplification of these sexy, sassy women into simpering sex objects, toys for men. Mrs Peel from The Avengers, Pussy Galore in Goldfinger, both tread the difficult line of kick-ass/nice-ass portrayal.

When Talbot Rothwell took over scripting the popular Carry On film series in 1963 an increase in female leading roles went hand in hand with an increase in sexually explicit situations, innuendo and curvaceous clothing. The huge popularity of the Benny Hill Show on the BBC throughout the 1960s also propagated the idea of women’s only possible role being a sexualised one.

Miniskirts are undoubtedly regarded as “sexy” items of clothing. But why? And whose point of view are we talking about here? The fashion gives the impression that the wearers are sexually available – “up for it”, in other words, or “asking for it”, in more sinister ones. Prostitutes often wear miniskirts as an enticement for trade and a symbol of their willingness. What effect do these associations have on the way we view a girl who chooses to wear a miniskirt for a fun night out? Is she being oppressed by a male view of her fashion choice?

The current rise of “raunch culture” promotes a woman’s right to express her sexuality overtly, publicly and, some would say, by reclaiming images and behaviour associated with pornography. Has third wave feminism given us the right to choose to behave like a sex object if we wish?

Looking at it in the opposite way, you could say that miniskirts are enticing because they are disempowering. They give men the idea of superiority or control over women. A woman in a miniskirt is vulnerable and exposed, and, in her disempowered state, more attractive. The miniskirt, rather than being a complete revelation, is trying to cover a woman’s body, but failing. This partial revelation is much more alluring than straight down the line nudity would be. The onlooker is tantalised - what might you catch a glimpse of?

Thus, a miniskirt is the opposite of women’s liberation, a blatant symbol of our self-imposed oppression and subscription to the male sex game. Maybe we should have been burning miniskirts instead of bras in the late 1960s.

So, as you can see, the miniskirt is controversial in more ways than one when it comes to women’s liberation. It is important to realise that these arguments are not just those of the 1960s, when the miniskirt was born. US TV series Ally McBeal kicked off the debate once again in the late 1990s. Starring a high-flying female lawyer who dressed in power suits, the programme shows Ally and her co-workers taking on and feminising the traditionally male world of the law. Her miniskirt was her trademark. But how could she expect to be taken seriously and wear a skirt that short? Distracting the jury, using her physical allure instead of her mind, she was ditsy, an emotional wreck who needed a man and a baby – what kind of role model for modern women was she projecting?

Ally’s miniskirts encapsulate the contradictions: powerful yet vulnerable, sexy but wanting to please, playful but professional - all this in a few iconic inches of cloth.

About Leonardo DiCaprio - The New Robert De Niro

2010-07-27T00:14:00.000-07:00

Just watched Inception, the brilliant sci-fi film produced and directed by Batman Begins’ Christopher Nolan, and starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

Read all about Leonardo here. Thanks, Wikipedia.

Leonardo Wilhelm DiCaprio (born November 11, 1974) is an American actor and film producer.

His first role was in the sitcom Growing Pains, but his breakthrough film performance came in This Boy's Life.

This was quickly followed by What's Eating Gilbert Grape.

His performance as the mentally handicapped brother of Gilbert (Johnny Depp) brought him nominations for the Golden Globe and Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

DiCaprio has been nominated for two BAFTAs and seven Golden Globes. He is a Golden Globe winner.

He gained international fame for his role as Jack Dawson in Titanic, and has starred in many other successful films including Romeo + Juliet, Catch Me If You Can, Inception and Blood Diamond, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Another Academy Award nomination came for his role as Howard Hughes in The Aviator, directed by Martin Scorsese.

He has also worked with Scorsese in Gangs Of New York, The Departed and Shutter Island.

This working partnership brought comparison to the earlier working relationship between Scorsese and actor Robert De Niro, who also benefited from roles in Scorsese films early in his career.

DiCaprio was born in Los Angeles, California, the only child of Irmelin Indenbirken and George DiCaprio, a comic artist.

His mother moved from Oer-Erkenschwick in the Ruhr, Germany, to the US during the 1950s, while his father is a fourth-generation American of Italian-German descent.

His maternal grandmother, Helene Indenbirken, was born Yelena Smirnova, a Russian immigrant to Germany.

His paternal grandmother, Olga Anne Jacobs, was also German-born.

DiCaprio was named Leonardo because his pregnant mother was looking at a Leonardo Da Vinci painting in a museum in Italy when he first kicked.

His parents divorced when he was a year old and he lived mostly with his mother.

During his childhood, DiCaprio was interested in baseball and comic books, and frequently visited museums with his father.

DiCaprio's career began with his appearing in several commercials and educational films.

He got his break on television in 1990 when he was cast in the short-lived series based on the movie Parenthood.

On set, he met another child actor, Tobey Maguire.

The two quickly became friends and made a pact to help each other find roles in TV and movies.

DiCaprio had bit parts on several shows, including The New Lassie and Roseanne, as well as a brief stint in the soap opera Santa Barbara.

His debut film role was Critters 3. Soon after, in 1991, he became a recurring cast member on the hit ABC sitcom Growing Pains.

His breakthrough came in 1992, when he beat out hundreds of other boys for the role of Toby Wolff in This Boy's Life, co-starring Robert De Niro and Ellen Barkin.

His performance as the troubled, abused teenager was critically acclaimed.

Later in 1993, he co-starred as the mentally handicapped brother of Johnny Depp in What's Eating Gilbert Grape.

His performance earned him both Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for Best Supporting Actor.

1995 was an eventful year for DiCaprio. He starred in four movies. In The Quick And The Dead, he played Gene Hackman's alleged son, Fee, starring alongside Sharon Stone and Russell Crowe.

He then starred in Total Eclipse, a fictionalised account of the homosexual relationship between Paul Verlaine (David Thewlis) and Arthur Rimbaud.

River Phoenix was originally cast as Rimbaud, but died before production.

He also starred as Jim Carroll in The Basketball Diaries, a life story of drugs and prostitution.

Baz Luhrmann's 1996 film Romeo + Juliet featured DiCaprio as the male lead alongside Claire Danes.

Later that year he starred in Marvin's Room, reuniting with Robert De Niro and appearing alongside Meryl Streep and Diane Keaton.

The move from "star" to "superstar" came when DiCaprio played Jack Dawson in the 1997 blockbuster Titanic, alongside Kate Winslet as Rose DeWitt Bukater.

In 1998, he made a cameo appearance in Woody Allen's satire Celebrity.

That year, he also starred in the dual roles of the villainous King Louis XIV and his secret, sympathetic twin brother Philippe in The Man In The Iron Mask, which was a box office success.

In 2002, DiCaprio starred as an Irish immigrant working for a deadly butcher in Gangs Of New York (directed by Martin Scorsese) and as a charismatic young con man and forger in Catch Me If You Can (directed by Steven Spielberg).

Both films were well received by critics. He received Golden Globe nominations for both.

Forging a collaboration with Scorsese, the two paired again for a biopic of the eccentric and obsessive American film director and aviation pioneer Howard Hughes in The Aviator, a film that scored DiCaprio a second Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.

DiCaprio continued his run with Scorsese in the 2006 film The Departed as Billy Costigan, a smart undercover cop in Boston.

His next film was Blood Diamond, released in December 2006.

The film received favourable reviews and DiCaprio was praised for the authenticity of his South African Afrikaner accent.

In 2006, the Golden Globes nominated DiCaprio twice in the same category: Best Actor for Blood Diamond and The Departed.

He earned an Oscar nomination for lead actor in Blood Diamond and BAFTA for lead actor for The Departed.

DiCaprio starred in 2008's Body Of Lies, directed by Ridley Scott and co-starring Russell Crowe.

The same year, he appeared in Revolutionary Road, an adaptation of Richard Yates' 1961 novel.

It reunited DiCaprio with his Titanic co-stars Kate Winslet and Kathy Bates.

DiCaprio was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama for his performance.

In 2010, DiCaprio starred in Shutter Island directed by Martin Scorsese, which is based on the novel of the same name by Dennis Lehane.

He also starred in Christopher Nolan’s Inception.

A committed environmentalist, DiCaprio has received praise from environmental groups for opting to fly on commercial flights instead of chartering private jets.

His house has solar panels.

In 2007 he produced the documentary film on conservation, 11th Hour.

He is a philanthropist who has aided computer literacy and victims of the recent earthquake in Haiti among others.

From 2001-2005, DiCaprio was in a relationship with Brazilian model Gisele Bundchen.

On August 5, 2008, DiCaprio's maternal grandmother, Helene Indenbirken died in Oer-Erkenschwick, Germany, at 93.

Sir Francis Light & Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles - Fathers Of British Colonialism In Malaysia

2010-07-24T05:04:00.000-07:00

Sir Francis Light and Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles will always be remembered as the Fathers of British Colonialism in Malaysia.

Read all about them here.

Thanks Wikipedia.

Sir Francis Light – Penang’s First Colonial Governor.

Captain Sir Francis Light (1740 – October 21, 1794) was the first colonial governor of British-ruled Penang in Malaysia.

Light hailed from Dallinghoo in Suffolk, England.

He never knew who his father was. His mother’s name was Mary Light.

From 1759-1763, Light worked in the British Navy.

He subsequently became a merchant and an agent of the British East India Company, the British government’s investment company and colonial administrator in the Far East.

Light lived for 10 years in Phuket, Thailand and picked up Malay and Thai.

In 1786, on behalf of the Company, Light acquired Penang from Sultan Abdullah Mukarram Shah of Kedah, in return for British protection to fend off Thai aggression.

Light served as Penang’s governor from 1786 until his death from malaria on October 21, 1794.

He is buried at the Protestant Cemetery in Jalan Sultan Ahmad Shah, Georgetown.

He had 4 daughters and 2 sons from his marriage to Martina Rozells of Phuket, of Thai-Portuguese ancestry.

Light lived in Alor Setar before moving to Georgetown.

One of his sons Colonel William Light established the city of Adelaide in Southern Australia, as the then British-ruled Australian province’s surveyor-general.

Adelaide was formerly the centre of the Kaurna Aboriginal Nation.

Thomas Stamford Raffles – Singapore’s First Colonial Administrator.

Sir Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles (July 6, 1781 – July 5, 1826) was the British colonial administrator who acquired Singapore for the United Kingdom in 1824.

Raffles was born on the ship Ann off the coast of Port Morant in Jamaica.

His father was Captain Benjamin Raffles of Yorkshire.

When he was 14, Raffles worked as a clerk for the British East India Company.

He was posted to Penang in 1805 as the assistant secretary to the colonial governor.

During this time he mastered the Malay language.

He also became Governor of Java, which was acquired by the Dutch from the Johor Empire in 1612, but ceded to Britain from 1795 to 1815 due to the Napoleonic conquest of Holland.

While serving as Governor of Java, Raffles restored the ancient temple of Borobudur.

Raffles also established the Bogor Botanical Gardens in Bogor, Java.

In 1817, Raffles wrote and published the History Of Java, describing the history of the island from ancient times.

He was knighted the same year and subsequently appointed British Governor of Bengkulu in Sumatra, a British colony acquired in 1685 from the infamous Sultan Mahmud Shah 2 of Johor.

In 1819, Raffles persuaded the United Kingdom to set up a trading post in the Johorean island of Singapore.

He dabbled in Johor’s politics and gave his support to Sultan Hussain Muhammad Shah (the man who lent his name to Malaysia’s popular rock group Meet Uncle Hussain), whose right to the throne was usurped by his Dutch-backed younger brother Sultan Abdul Rahman Shah.

Johor had been a Dutch protectorate since 1784 when Hussain’s and Abdul Rahman’s father Sultan Mahmud Shah 3 was forced to accept Dutch ‘protection’.

Mahmud Shah 3 had launched an unsuccessful invasion of Dutch-ruled Melaka that year, triggered by a ‘breach of contract’ by the Dutch East India Company (the Dutch equivalent of the British East India Company) in a business venture with the Sultanate of Johor.

Sultan Hussain gave Britain the right to set up a trading post in Singapore in return for British recognition of himself as the legitimate Sultan of Johor.

Britain appointed Raffles as the British High Commissioner of the East Indies (Malay Peninsula and Archipelago) and he was tasked with overseeing the trading post in Singapore.

Sir William Farquhar was appointed as Raffles’ deputy.

In 1824, following the London Treaty between Holland and Britain, Britain recognised Dutch rule over Riau, Sumatra, Java, Bali, Banjarmasin, the Tenggara Islands (sans East Timor which was Portuguese-ruled), West Papua New Guinea, Sulawesi and Maluku.

Holland recognised British rule in Penang and ceded Melaka to Britain.

Singapore became a British colony, but the Sultan of Johor was allowed to rule his kingdom from Singaporean land leased to him, covering the small villages of Teluk Belanga and Kampung Gelam.

In 1855, Hussain's son Sultan Ali Iskandar Shah moved his capital to Johor Baru in the mainland.

He was subsequently ousted from power by his cousin Tengku Ibrahim Shah who became Temenggung (Home Minister) of Johor.

Nevertheless, the British allowed the family of Sultan Ali to live in Kampung Gelam and the family of Tengku Ibrahim to live in Teluk Belanga uninterrupted.

Raffles returned to Britain on August 22, 1824.

He wrote extensively on the flora, fauna, culture and history of the Malay Archipelago and Peninsula, during his time in the region and after.

He founded London Zoo in 1825. A year later, he died of cancer.

Raffles has numerous roads, buildings and monuments to his name in Singapore.

The world’s largest flower, the Rafflesia, is named in his honour.

Alternate Origin Of Malaysia's Name

2010-07-24T02:35:00.000-07:00

I always thought Malaysia derives from Mountainous Land, Malay meaning Mountain in Sanskrit.

But Dewi Malam, a Temuan Batin from Kampung Olak Lempit in Banting, Selangor, told us that Malaysia also means Land Of Working People, Malay or Malayu meaning Working People in Temuan.

Zsa Zsa Gabor – Hungarian Hottie Of Hollywood

2010-07-24T02:32:00.000-07:00

Zsa Zsa Gabor is seriously ill.

She will always be remembered as Hollywood’s Hungarian hottie.

Read all about her here. Thanks, Wikipedia.

Zsa Zsa Gabor was born Sari Gabor in Budapest, Hungary on February 6, 1917.

She was the second of three sisters.

Her late elder sister Magda and late younger sister Eva also became famous actresses in Hollywood, and Eva was best known for voicing Bianca, the flirty, sexy and brave Hungarian mouse in the Disney cartoon movies The Rescuers (1977) and The Rescuers Down Under (1990).

In 1936, she competed in the Miss Hungary beauty contest but was disqualified for being underaged.

She then visited Vienna in Austria and was discovered by tenor Richard Tauber who roped her in for his operetta The Singing Dream.

Gabor married nine times and eight of her marriages ended in divorce.

Zsa Zsa was the only Gabor sister to bear a child, Constance (Francesca) Hilton who was born on March 10, 1947 after an affair with Conrad Hilton (great-grandfather of Paris Hilton).

She was involved in an automobile accident in 2002 and was hospitalised for two months.

In 2005, she suffered a stroke and took two years to recover.

Gabor’s well-known films include Moulin Rouge (1952), Lili (1953), The Story Of Three Loves (1953), Pepe (1960), Every Girl Should Have One (1978), A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), The Naked Gun 2 ½: The Smell Of Fear (1991), The Beverly Hillbillies (1993) and A Very Brady Sequel (1996).

Her television series include Gilligan’s Island (1965), F Troop (1966), Bonanza (1967), My Three Sons (1968), Love Boat (1980), The Facts Of Life (1981), Matt Houston (1983), It’s Garry Shandling’s Show (1989) and The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air (1991).

She was also active in musical theatre.

Adolf Hitler - The Anti-Christ & Abu Dajjal

2010-07-19T07:37:00.000-07:00

Thanks, Wikipedia.

The most evil of men was Adolf Hitler.

He was an Austrian German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party or Nazi Party, an ultra-conservative political party in Austria and Germany in the 1930s.

Hitler was born on April 20, 1889 in Braunau Am Inn, Austria and committed suicide on April 30, 1945 in Berlin, Germany.

Hitler was Prime Minister of Germany (which included Austria which he reabsorbed) from 1933 to 1945. He was also President of Germany from 1934 until his death (Austria was kicked out of Germany after the fall of the Hitler regime).

A decorated veteran of World War I, Hitler joined Nazis in 1919 and became their leader in 1921.

In 1923, he was jailed for attempting to overthrow the government of Germany.

In the same year he wrote his infamous book Mein Kampf (My Struggle) which preached Aryan, especially Anglo-Saxon supremacy and contempt for homosexuals, Arabs, Muslims, Jews, Turks, Roma (Parsee people living in Europe) and Africans.

Hitler attempted to unify the whole of Europe under his rule, in the footsteps of Germanys’ great Emperor Charles I (Charlemagne).

He started World War II on September 1, 1939 by invading Poland.

Within three years he conquered most of Europe.

His troops committed various crimes against humanity during the War, including the mass murder of more than 17 million civilians, six million of whom were Jews.

Hitler committed ethnic cleansing against Europeans of Asian descent such as Jews, Arabs, Turks and Parsees, as well as Muslims, Africans and homosexuals.

In 1945, Germany was overrun by the Soviet Union’s armed forces and Hitler’s capital Berlin was occupied.

Hitler married his longtime mistress Eva Braun in a bunker on April 28, 1945. They committed suicide two days later.

Hitler's father, Alois Hitler, was an illegitimate child of Maria Anna Schicklgruber.

In 1842, Johann Georg Hiedler married Maria and adopted Alois.

Hiedler, also spelt Hitler, means ‘one who lives in a hut’.

Schiklgruber had an affair with a Jewish man in Austria and became pregnant with Alois.

When Hitler, the fourth of Alois’ six children was three, his family moved from Austria to Passau in Bavaria, Germany.

His younger brother Edmund died of measles on February 2, 1900.

From a confident, outgoing boy who found school easy, he became a morose, detached, sullen boy who constantly battled his father and his teachers.

Hitler was close to his mother, but had a troubled relationship with his authoritarian father, who frequently beat him.

Despite his son’s dream of going to high school and becoming an artist, Hitler’s father sent him to the Realschule in Linz, a technical school.

For young Hitler, German Nationalism quickly became an obsession, and a way to rebel against his father, who was unsure of his roots.

After Alois' death on January 3, 1903, Hitler's behaviour at the technical school became more disruptive, and he was asked to leave.

He enrolled at the Realschule in Steyr in 1904, but upon completing his second year, he and his friends went out for a night of celebration and drinking, and an intoxicated Hitler tore his school certificate into four pieces and used it as toilet paper.

Hitler was expelled, never to return to school again.

Hitler took part in his first Holy Communion on May 22, 1904, at the Linz Cathedral.

From 1905, Hitler lived a bohemian life in Vienna on an orphan's pension and support from his mother.

He was rejected twice by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (1907–1908), citing "unfitness for painting", and was told his abilities lay in the field of architecture.

On December 21, 1907, Hitler's mother died of breast cancer at 47.

Ordered by a court in Linz, Hitler gave his share of the orphans' benefits to his sister Paula.

When he was 21, he inherited money from an aunt.

He struggled as a painter in Vienna, copying scenes from postcards and selling his paintings to merchants and tourists.

After being rejected a second time by the Academy of Arts, Hitler ran out of money.

In 1909, he lived in a shelter for the homeless.

Hitler became anti-Asian and anti-Semite (Arab and Jewish) during his days in Linz.

He was influenced by rightist politicians as Lanz Von Liebenfels, Karl Lueger (Mayor of Vienna), Georg Ritter Von Schonerer, the theologian Martin Luther and the composer Richard Wagner.

Some of the above personalities were obsessed with the notion of a ‘superior’ Aryan (Indo-European) people that emerged from the Hindu Kush Mountains in India, and that the Anglo-Saxons were the most superior of the Aryans.

Ironically, Hitler was often invited for dinner by Jewish customers and interacted well with Jewish merchants.

In 1913, Hitler moved to Munich where he wrote Mein Kampf.

When Germany entered World War I in 1914, he petitioned King Ludwig III of Bavaria for permission to serve in a Bavarian regiment.

The request was granted and Hitler served in France and Belgium in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment and left service as a Lance Corporal.

He participated in a number of major battles on the Western Front, including the First Battle of Ypres, the Battle of the Somme, the Battle of Arras and the Battle of Passchendaele.

Hitler was twice decorated for bravery. He received the Iron Cross, Second Class, in 1914 and Iron Cross, First Class, in 1918.

On October 15, 1918, Hitler was admitted to a field hospital, temporarily blinded by a mustard gas attack.

Hitler became a German citizen in 1932.

In 1919, Hitler joined the conservative German Workers’ Party. There he met Dietrich Eckart who became his political mentor.

In 1920, after his discharge from the Army, Hitler successfully proposed the renaming of the party to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

The party was anti-Asian, anti-immigration and for the revival of the German Empire.

In 1921, Hitler seized control of the party. He received a lot of help from rightist ex-servicemen who followed him into the party.

Most of Hitler’s supporters were Austrians.

In 1923, Hitler and his supporters attempted to oust the State Government of Bavaria. He was sentenced to five years’ jail, but with help from his rightist supporters and admirers in the government, he spent only one year behind bars.

During the Great Depression in 1930, many Germans and Austrians turned to extreme rightist ideology and they became Hitler’s admirers. Many of the German and Austrian police and armed forces personnel were attracted to his extremism.

In 1932, Hitler contested the German Presidency but lost.

He then organised a bloodless coup against the winning President Paul Von Hindenburg and was appointed Prime Minister in 1933.

A year later, Hitler became President of Germany.

He made the multi-party democracy a brutal, single-party dictatorship. Communists were made illegal and ruthlessly persecuted, as were Liberals and Socialists.

He also absorbed Austria into Germany.

Hitler forced Germans to adhere to an austere, puritanical culture as espoused by the Spartans of Ancient Greece.

He pursued strong ties with Britain, Italy and Japan, but cut ties with Britain in 1937 for ‘not doing enough to fight Communism’.

In 1938, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia. A year later, on September 1, he invaded Poland, prompting Britain to declare war on Germany two days later.

On June 22, 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, whose then President, the Georgian despot Josef Stalin, had all along thought of Germany as a friend and ally.

In the same year, he bombed Britain and captured France.

In July 1944, Claus Von Stauffenberg planted a bomb in Hitler's headquarters, the Wolf's Lair at Rastenburg. Hitler escaped unhurt and killed Von Stauffenberg and more than 4,900 people.

By late 1944, the Soviet Army had driven the Germans out of Eastern Europe and were advancing into Germany.

Hitler realised that Germany had lost the war, but allowed no retreats.

He hoped to negotiate a separate peace with the United States and Britain, a hope buoyed by the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt on April 12, 1945.

He ordered the complete destruction of all German industrial infrastructure before it could fall into Allied hands, saying that Germany's failure to win the war forfeited its right to survive.

Hitler decided that the entire nation should go down with him.

In April 1945, Soviet forces attacked Berlin. Hitler celebrated his last birthday in a bunker in Berlin.

He committed suicide at the month’s end in the bunker. The Soviet Army dumped his remains in the Elbe River.

Outside the building in Braunau Am Inn, Austria where Hitler was born is a memorial stone warning of the horrors of World War II.

It reads: What manner of man is this grim figure who has performed these superb toils and loosed these frightful evils? – Winston Churchill.

There is also a memorial which reads: For peace, freedom and democracy, never again fascism, millions of dead remind us.

Hitler was a Roman Catholic and later Protestant Christian. He also admired Hinduism and saw Jesus as an Aryan God.

He was bigoted against Judaism and Islam.

He was a closet homosexual and a vegetarian, with one testicle.

About Spain

2010-07-09T02:45:00.000-07:00

Thanks, Wikipedia.

Spain is a kingdom in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula.

Its mainland is bordered to the south and east by the Mediterranean Sea except for a small land boundary with the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar.

To the north by France, Andorra and the Bay of Biscay.

And to the northwest and west by the Atlantic Ocean and Portugal.

Spanish territory also includes the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean, the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean off the African coast, and two autonomous cities in North Africa, Ceuta and Melilla, that border Morocco.

Furthermore, the town of Llivia is a Spanish exclave situated inside French territory.

Spain was once a global empire that ruled most of the American continent.

Spain gets its name from the Greek word for Western Land.

Spain has a Mediterranean climate. The highest rainfall is in the northern mountains bordering France (the Pyrenees Mountains).

The Spanish and their neighbours the Portuguese are from the Iberian or Basque people who live in Basque Country at the western Pyrenees region.

Spain was with Portugal under Italian rule before being conquered by the Franks of Germany and later the Arab Umayyad Dynasty from Syria.

The Spanish (or Asturians) and Portuguese (or Galicians) are a mixture of French (aka Gaul or Welsh) and Iberian people.

In 1492, the Asturian kings of Castille (of Frankish German origin) toppled Umayyad rule in Spain and drove many Arabs and Israelis out of the country.

Spain conquered the American continent during this period. It also conquered the Philippines and Equatorial Guinea in Africa.

Arab Muslim rule in Spain bequeathed a lot of knowledge to the Spanish people. They kick-started the Renaissance.

Spain and Portugal were both conquered by the French Emperor Napoleon in the early 1800s. During the same period, Spain’s colonies in the American continent gained independence.

Britain helped liberate Spain and Portugal from the French.

Spanish are mostly Christians of the Catholic Church. 2 percent are Muslims.

Miguel De Cervantes of Don Quixote fame is Spain's most famous author. Pablo Picasso is one of the fathers of modern art.

Spanish cinema has achieved major international success including Oscars for recent films such as Pan's Labyrinth.

In the long history of Spanish cinema, the great filmmaker Luis Bunuel was the first to achieve world recognition, followed by Pedro Almodovar in the 1980s.

In the field of classical music, Spain has produced a number of noted composers such as Manuel De Falla and Enrique Granados and singers and performers such as Jose Carreras, Montserrat Caballe and Placido Domingo.

Sport in Spain has been dominated by football since the early 20th century. Real Madrid and FC Barcelona are two of the most successful football clubs in the world.

About The Netherlands (Holland).

2010-07-09T01:13:00.000-07:00

Thanks, Wikipedia.

The Kingdom of the Netherlands, informally Holland, is a country in northwest Europe.

Its capital and largest city is Amsterdam in Holland Province while The Hague, in the same province, is the seat of government and Rotterdam (in the same province) is the main port (Europe’s largest).

The Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south and Germany to the east.

The Netherlands is a low-lying country, with about 20 percent of its area and 21 percent of its population located below sea level.

Significant land area has been gained through land reclamation and preserved through an elaborate system of dikes.

The Netherlands was originally part of Germany (the present-day Protestant-dominated Netherlands) and France (the present-day Catholic-dominated Belgium).

Charles V of Germany also became King of Spain and he put the Netherlands under the Spanish Crown.

In 1648, Spain granted independence to the Netherlands.

The southern Netherlands aka Belgium remained under Spanish rule until the Napoleonic Wars.

From 1581-1795, the Netherlands was known as the Dutch Republic.

Holland Province, Friesland and Protestant Northern Flanders became nominally equal partners with their Counts ruling as joint heads of state in a presidential council.

But in practice, the Count of Holland, William of Orange (who was from Germany), controlled the Dutch Republic and was as good as an uncrowned King.

On January 19, 1795, the Netherlands became the Batavian Republic following an invasion by France.

Count William of Orange, ruler of Holland Province and leader of the Dutch people (namely Holland Province Dutch, Frisians and Protestant Flemish as opposed to Catholic Flemish of Belgium) fled to the United Kingdom.

From 1806 to 1815, Emperor Napoleon of France (who was Italian) proclaimed the Kingdom of Holland with himself as King.

On March 16, 1815, William of Orange became King of the Netherlands.

In 1815, the Congress of Vienna formed the United Kingdom of the Netherlands by merging the Netherlands with Belgium (which Napoleon earlier took from Spain).

King William of Orange also became Grand Duke of Luxembourg (formerly part of Germany and later colonised by Napoleon).

In 1830, Belgium left the Netherlands and became an independent kingdom under the rule of Leopold I from Saxony in Germany.

In 1890, the crowns of Luxembourg and the Netherlands were separated when Queen Wilhelmina was barred by Luxembourg law from becoming Grand Duchess of Luxembourg.

The crown of Luxembourg went to her cousins from the House of Nassau from Rhineland Palatinate, Germany (which is also the home of the Netherlands’ House of Orange Nassau and the Spanish, ex-Portuguese and ex-French royal families).

New York was formerly a Dutch colony called New Amsterdam. It was given to the British and renamed New York.

The Netherlands also colonised South Africa, Suriname, the Netherlands Antilles, Namibia and the Dutch East Indies (which was acquired from the Sultan of Johor and later became independent Indonesia).

The Netherlands was heavily involved in the slave trade during colonial times.

From 1940 to 1945, the Netherlands was invaded and conquered by Nazi Germany.

Queen Wilhelmina fled to Canada with her government and organised a resistance army that worked closely with the United States, United Kingdom and France.

The country is divided into two main parts by three large rivers, the Rhine (Rijn) and its main distributaries, the Waal and the Meuse (Maas).

The southwest of the Netherlands is a river delta and two tributaries of the Scheldt.

Only one significant branch of the Rhine flows northeastward, the Ijssel River, discharging into the Ijssel Lake, the former Zuiderzee (Southern Sea).

This river also forms a linguistic divide.

People to the east speak Low Saxon German dialects (the Frisian language dialects, as well as Hollandish Dutch dialects of Friesland heavily influenced by the Frisian language dialects).

People to the west speak Low Franconian German dialects (the Dutch language dialects, ie Hollandish and Flemish dialects).

Over the centuries, the Dutch coastline has changed considerably as a result of human intervention and natural disasters.

In 1287, St Lucia's Flood affected the Netherlands and Germany killing more than 50,000 people.

The last major flood took place in 1953, when a huge storm caused the collapse of several dikes in the southwest.

More than 1,800 people drowned.

The Dutch government subsequently decided on a large-scale program of public works to protect the country against future flooding.

The project took more than 30 years to complete.

To guard against floods, villages and farmhouses were built on man-made hills called terps.

These terps were connected by dikes.

In 1932, the Closure Dike was completed, blocking the former Zuiderzee (Southern Sea) from the North Sea and thus creating the Ijssel Lake.

The Netherlands has 20 national parks and hundreds of nature reserves.

The Netherlands has a highly mechanised agricultural sector that employs 4 percent of the workforce.

It is the third largest exporter of agricultural produce after the United States and France and is one of the world’s top exporters of dairy products.

It is also a major oil producer.

The Netherlands has Europe’s largest port Rotterdam.

The Netherlands has a long tradition of social tolerance. It was the first country in Europe to legalise marijuana and prostitution.

Ethnic Dutch form 81 percent of the population and they include the Frisians of Friesland.

There are also Dutch Malays / Dutch Indonesians (3 percent), Germans from Saxony (3 percent), Turkish (3 percent), Surinamese of Indian and African American descent (2 percent), Arabs from Morocco (2 percent), Netherlands Antilles African Americans (1 percent), Indians from India (3 percent), Chinese (1 percent) and Israelis (1 percent).

The Dutch language is based on the Hollandish dialect of Haarlem. It is the national language of the Netherlands.

Frisian is also spoken in the province of Friesland.

The Dutch are mostly Christians - 61 percent Protestant and 39 percent Catholic.

Muslims form 5 percent of the population and they are mostly from the Dutch East Indies (today Indonesia). There is a small number of Hindus, Buddhists, Jews and Sikhs from Suriname.

The Netherlands has had many well-known painters.

The 17th century was the age of the Dutch Masters such as Rembrandt Van Rijn and Johannes Vermeer.

Famous Dutch painters of the 19th and 20th centuries were Vincent Van Gogh and Willem De Kooning.

The Netherlands is the country of philosophers Erasmus of Rotterdam and Spinoza.

All of Rene Descartes' major work was done in the Netherlands.

The Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) discovered Saturn's moon Titan and invented the pendulum clock.

Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek was the first to observe with a microscope.

Toh Puan Norashikin ‘Neno’ Seth – Dignified Mother Of Malaysians

2010-07-03T03:17:00.000-07:00

Thanks, Malaysian National News Agency (Bernama).

Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak has paid tribute to the late Toh Puan Norashikin ‘Neno’ Mohamad Seth as a mother of Malaysians.

Norashikin passed away of a long illness at 80 yesterday. Her late husband was the revered Tun Dr Ismail Abdul Rahman who served with distinction as Deputy Prime Minister from 1970 until his death in 1973.

Dr Ismail was one of the founders of Umno and one of the independence leaders of Malaysia.

The eldest of their six children, Tawfik Ismail, was TV3’s first CEO.

Najib, whose mother Tun Rahah Mohamad Noah hails from Muar, Johor like Norashikin and Ismail, said there were many leadership qualities of Norashikin which could be emulated.

He said Norashikin was admired for promoting education amongst Malaysian women and her belief that they could be achievers in all disciplines.

She also supported Ismail’s belief in 1Malaysia and taught her children and grandchildren to be Malaysians first.

He also said she was a strong, resilient mother and grandmother to her children and grandchildren, who raised them to become successful Malaysians in their chosen professions.

Former Prime Minister Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said Norashikin was a true Malaysian first and foremost, who was very much loved by friends from all walks of life.

Norashikin was buried at the Heroes’ Mausoleum in the National Mosque today. She is survived by six children and 13 grandchildren.