The writing is on the wall and just a matter of time before Zaid becomes one of the many victims of Anwar's insatiable greed to keep control of PKR by his family and cronies.He has refused to be de jure leader of PKR, instead, allowing his wife to hold the post but he literally control her and the party as de facto leader.
It was a clear signal to Zaid Ibrahim that Anwar Ibrahim finds him a threat to the leadership.By hook or by crook Zaid must be stopped or his next stop would be the presidency.
Zaid quits the No.2 race and all his posts in PKR quoting blatant cheating in the voting process for the No.2 post condoned by the leadership.
Becoming deputy president is one step nearer to becoming the president which Zaid would definitely succeed if he had won the post of deputy.His meteoric rise in the PKR hierarchy gave Anwar bone chilling shivers.The voting trend showed that Zaid is likely to win the contest that would displace Anwar's blue-eyed boy Azmin Ali.
My advice to Zaid Ibrahim is not to waste his time in PKR but to form his own party.He would be able to pull many PKR members who are disillusioned with Anwar's leadership.The voting trend is strong indication that PKR members are fed up with Anwar and Azmin Ali's political charade.
Democracy is not in his dictionary.A demagogue that many young Malaysians would want to make the prime minister of this country.Can you imagine what he would do once he sat in Putrajaya?
U.N. Human Rights Council Takes Aim at New Target: United States
By George Russell
Published November 05, 2010 | FoxNews.com
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The United Nations Human Rights Council, a conclave of 47 nations that includes such notorious human rights violators as China, Cuba, Libya and Saudi Arabia, met in Geneva on Friday, to question the United States about its human rights failings.
It heard, among other things, that the U.S. discriminates against Muslims, that its police are barbaric and that it has been holding political prisoners behind bars for years.
Russia urged the U.S. to abolish the death penalty. Cuba and Iran called on Washington to close Guantanamo prison and investigate alleged torture by its troops abroad. Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, told the U.S. it must better promote religious tolerance. Mexico complained that racial profiling had become a common practice in some U.S. states.
Some of these allegations, and many more, come from Americans themselves — especially from a stridently critical network of U.S. organizations whose input dominates the U.N. digest of submissions from “civil society” that are part of the council’s background reading.
For the first time ever, the U.S. came under the Human Rights Council’s microscope as part of the its centerpiece activity, the “Universal Periodic Review,” a rotating examination of the human rights failings and strong points of every country in the world, from North Korea to Norway, by the council's members.
For two hours, council members got to say whatever they wish, good and ill, about the country that has done the most in the past 40 years to establish human rights as a global theme.
The anticipation was that that ill-wishers were planning to pack the line to the speaker’s podium, with complaints from some Western human rights organizations that Cuba, Venezuela and Iran were seeking to “hijack” the microphone and stack the speaker’s list with U.S. critics. And it appears to some extent they did.
But what really is under review is the gamble by the Obama administration to join the council in the first place, rather than shun it in disdain, as the Bush administration did, along with its predecessor, the U.N. Human Rights Commission, because of its roster of despotic members and unbridled antagonism toward Israel.
The Universal Periodic Review, in which all countries great and small submit to human rights commentary by their peers, is supposed to help install the principle of observing human rights in the farthest reaches of the international community.
But it is also showing signs of becoming, in the U.S. case, a one-sided fiasco, along the lines of such previous toxic human rights extravaganzas as the U.N.’s 2001 “World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance,” and its 2006 follow-up, which turned into orgies of anti-Israeli posturing and helped to lead to the previous U.N. Human Rights Commission crackup.
So who is supposed to benefit from the U.S. submission to the UPR process?
According to Jim Kelly, director of international affairs for the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies and founder of a blog called Global Governance Watch, the main beneficiaries are likely to be the interest groups that take part in the exercise. “The fact is, they are demanding that the U.S. comply with rights that are already addressed by our own democratic system and laws,” he argues. “They are simply trying to get us to adopt U.N. standards instead of our own. It’s not as if by our participating in the human rights process Cuba is going to clean up its act.”
But according to the U.S. State Department, which led a delegation of high-level American diplomats and government officials to Geneva, the Periodic Review is a major opportunity for Washington to lead the rest of the world by example.
“Our taking the process seriously contributes to the universality” of the human rights process, one State Department official told Fox News. “It’s an important opportunity for us to showcase our willingness to expose ourselves in a transparent way” to human rights criticism.
“For us, upholding the process is very important.”
The same official, however, declared that the “most important” part of the process is “the dialogue with our own citizens.”
That was a reference to the important—and often harshly critical—role being played in the U.S. Universal Periodical Review by American human rights interest groups, or Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), also known in U.N. parlance as “stakeholders.”
The Obama administration has gone to elaborate lengths to consult with such groups in advance of the Geneva meeting. The State Department, has led delegations from a variety of government departments (including Labor, Homeland Security, Education and Justice) to consult with such groups in Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, Harlem, and Albuquerque, according to an official at State.
Those NGOs will also get a chance to “engage” with the U.S. delegation in Geneva at what the State Department calls a “first ever town hall meeting,” after the Human Rights Council, composed of national governments, makes its views known. “Many countries stack the room with NGOs that are government controlled,” the State Department official told Fox News, adding that the U.S. obviously doesn’t.
“We hope that the Periodic Review process will be one that sheds new light on issues,” the official added, including “what we learn from our own NGOs, which we take seriously.”
How seriously the NGOs should be taken is indeed, an important part of the question surrounding the human rights tableau in Geneva. For one thing, 103 submissions by those NGOS about U.S. human rights practices—very broadly defined—are already included in the official documentation of the Universal Periodic Review itself.
In that sense, their contents provide a kind of rough road map to the rhetoric that the U.S. may face in the days—and even years—ahead, because the Universal Periodic Review process will be repeated indefinitely into the future, and is supposed to analyze progress from session to session.
According to a dense summary of the submissions circulated by the U.N. in advance of Friday's meeting, the NGOs offering briefs for this Review run a familiar gamut from the American Bar Association and British-based Amnesty International to such specialized groups as the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission.
They also include an array of submissions from college legal faculties and their advocacy offshoots; environmental coalitions; and a smattering of other non-American organizations such as the Federation of Cuban Women, based in the Castro dictatorship. (The women’s group objects on human rights grounds to the U.S. embargo against Cuba.)
Even relatively conservative and centrist organizations are represented in submissions by the Heritage Foundation, the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, and the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty.Read more.
The murder he wrote in a "Statutory Declaration" based on hearsay could not be the basis for a court proceeding.
Anyone with ill intent could have signed a farcical statutory declaration.
Statutory declaration is not 'gospel truth' as the opposition and pro-opposition media made it out to be.
I don't see the point of writing about the issue anymore other than sensationalising what was already a dead horse.
Anyway, enjoy "The Murder He Wrote"
Written by Our Correspondent
FRIDAY, 05 NOVEMBER 2010
The episode of a sensational killing of a Mongolian translator appears to be about finished
The closing of a case earlier this week by Malaysia's attorney general over allegedly false statements by a private investigator that tied Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak to the 2006 murder of Mongolian translator Altantuya Shaariibuu literally lets unknown persons close to the prime minister get away with murder.
The closure of the case appears to write the final chapter in one of Malaysia's most sensational murder cases, one involving a gruesome death, intrigue in high places, more than 100 million euros in alleged bribes and a trial that appeared to be rigged to keep prosecutors as far as possible away from Najib, then the deputy prime minister, and his wife, Rosmah Mansor.
The private investigator, P Balasubramaniam, was hired in 2006 by Abdul Razak Baginda, one of Najib's best friends and a defense analyst from the Malaysian Strategic Research Centre think-tank, to attempt to keep Altantuya away from Baginda because he had jilted her. She was demanding revenge and US$500,000 for her role as a translator in the sale of French submarines to Malaysia. A French prosecutorial team continues to probe the sale of the subs to Malaysia and whether kickbacks were paid to top French and Malaysian politicians.
In July of 2008, as the trial droned on, Balasubramaniam issued a statutory declaration alleging that Najib, then the deputy prime minister, was involved in the murder, only to retract the entire contents of the declaration a day later and issue a second saying he had made the first under duress (Note: Both declarations can be found here).
Balasubramaniam's lawyer, Americk Sidhu, denounced the closing of the case, saying that if the supposedly false statements were investigated thoroughly by police, they would have led to the conclusion that people close to Najib were involved in the murder.
De facto Law Minister Nazri Aziz, in a written statement to parliament, said the case was closed because Balasubramaniam had given conflicting statutory declarations, and that anyway, they didn't affect the trial of two of Najib's personal bodyguards and Abdul Razak Baginda, which ended in April of 2009 after a 159-day trial in which the bodyguards were sentenced to death. They are appealing the verdict, with suspicions running high that they will somehow be given their freedom in exchange for their silence on whoever ordered them to kill the woman.
"Although there are contradictions between the two statutory declarations, the contradictions do not affect the outcome of the trial of Altantuya," Nazri said. "Moreover, the individual (Balasubramaniam) is still believed to be abroad." Nazri added that the decision to close the case was made after "careful consideration" of the results of the police probe and witness statements.
Although the two bodyguards were convicted of the crime, Baginda was acquitted under controversial circumstances without having to put on a defense. He then hurriedly left the country for England, where he has remained ever since. One of the two bodyguards said in a cautioned statement that they had been hired to commit the killing and were to be paid RM100,000 to do it. But the statement was never introduced into the marathon trial and never was anybody asked who had done the hiring or made the payment offer.
The 27-year-old Altantuya, the translator in some phases of the billion-dollar purchase of French Scorpene submarines that netted Baginda's company €114 million in consulting fees, was shot in the head and her body was blown up with explosives in a patch of jungle near the suburban city of Shah Alam. Before she died, she told Balasubramaniam she had been promised US$500,000 for assisting in the submarine transaction.
In the bodyguard's cautioned statement, it emerged that Altantuya, almost with her last words, told her two assailants that she was pregnant and begged them not to kill her. That has led to speculation that her body was blown up with C4 explosives to hide any DNA evidence of who the father might be.
Balasubramaniam, who remains somewhere in Chennai, has continued to insist loudly that Razak Baginda, who is married, had told him that the translator had been Najib's sexual companion before the then-deputy prime minister passed her on to Baginda because it wouldn't look good for a prospective prime minister to have a girlfriend. Read more..
