Mati Ketawa Ala Indonesia: SBY Berboedi

Tim sukses SBY sedang pusing melakukan pembenahan di Palembang. Alasannya, ketika mereka memunculkan jargon "SBY berbudi," mereka tidak memikirkan kalau di Palembang arti kata Budi = menipu/berbohong.

Jadi artinya SBY berbudi = SBY berbohong, sehingga slogan-slogan di Palembang yang naik cetak harus dibatalkan semua.

Oleh karena itulah orang Palembang lebih suka SBY berpasangan dengan Hatta Rajasa agar jargonnya jadi "SBY berjasa."

Tetapi masih untung SBY tidak berpasangan dengan Salahudin karena jargonnya jadi "SBY bersalah."

Dan juga PAN tidak jadi mengajukan ketumnya Sutrisno Bachir karena jadi "SBY berachir."

Namun siapapun "ber sama nya, tetap SBY depannya"....termasuk Rani kalo jadi cawapres menjadi "SBY berani."

Source - http://www.kabarinews.com/article/Berita_Indonesia/Lelucon/Mati_Ketawa_Ala_Indonesia/33165

Published 05/27/2009 - 5:39 a.m. GMT

Banned: First Altantuya, Now Perak

Athi Veeranggan | May 30, 09 4:38pm | Malaysiakini

It is clear that any mention of a possible link between Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak and murdered Mongolian woman Altantuya Shaariibuu can land a person into trouble.

PKR supreme council member and fiery orator Badrul Hisham Shaharin had to spend nearly five hours at the Central Seberang Perai police headquarters yesterday to answer questions over his by-election campaign speech in Penanti on Monday where he mentioned ‘Altantuya’.

Now, however, one cannot also link Najib to the four-month political impasse in Perak or you can be investigated for sedition and criminal defamation.

Senior DAP leader Lim Kit Siang found out about this after a report was made by the police and a statement was taken on the matter.

At a 3,000-strong by-election campaign rally in Guar Perahu, Penanti last Sunday, Lim accused Najib of engineering the Perak power grab.

The Ipoh Timur parliamentarian was quizzed by investigating officer ASP Norazizi Saad for nearly an hour from 11.30am today at his house in Island Park, Georgetown.

Lim said he was being investigated for sedition and criminal defamation in blaming Najib for the Perak political stalemate.

He added that he was being probed following a report lodged by an on-duty police officer at the Sunday rally.

“If I am charged and found guilty, I will be imprisoned … simple as that,” the DAP supremo told a press conference, flanked by his son and Penang Chief Minister Guan Eng, DAP national chairperson Karpal Singh and several DAP local leaders and assemblypersons.

Even Najib’s father did not do this.

The senior Lim cautioned that the two-month-old Najib’s premiership was fast descending into a “police state” and into an “era of darkness”.

He cited police crackdowns on candlelight vigils, hunger strikes, wearing black, the raid on DAP headquarters, and the harassment of Pakatan Rakyat leaders and social activists to back his claim. Over 160 people have been arrested in the past three weeks.

“This is a serious violation of human rights and civil liberties,” said the veteran opposition leader, the only opposition parliamentarian who has faced off the country’s six prime ministers.

“I don’t blame the police. They are acting on the directives from a higher-up power,” he said, suggesting that the Barisan Nasional government was increasingly spooked by the rapid loss of public confidence.

Kit Siang recalled that even Najib’s late father, former premier Abdul Razak Abdul Rahman, had never investigated him for sedition or criminal defamation despite engaging in many political duels with him back in the 70s.

“We are facing a major political crisis at the same time when the country is facing its biggest economic crisis,” lamented the senior politician.

Guan Eng, meanwhile, criticised the police for wasting their resources on petty political issues, and ticked them off for increasingly acting like “bodyguards to BN rather than to the people.”

Like Chegu Bard, as Badrul Hisham is fondly known, Kit Siang was slapped with a police order yesterday under Section 111 of Criminal Procedure Code (CPC) requesting him to be present at the Central Seberang Perai police headquarters this morning.

However, the DAP leader had asked Norazizi to record his statement at his Penang home.

Karpal, who was also at the press conference after Kit Siang’s sesssion with the police, slammed the police for applying Section 111 on his DAP colleague.

The MP-cum-lawyer said that such an order could only be issued after a witness had failed to turn up at the designated police station to give a statement.

Karpal: Charge Khir Toyo instead

Karpal instead called on the attorney-general to press charges against former Selangor menteri besar Dr Mohd Khir Toyo for taking part in an illegal Umno Youth rally in Waterfall, Penang on Feb 13.

The demonstration was to include a march from Waterfall to Karpal’s house nearby in Jalan Utama. However, it was called off after police warned Umno Youth members that severe action would be taken against them.

Mohd Khir and Permatang Pauh Umno Youth chief Mohd Zaidi was later escorted to the Georgeown police headquarters for their statements to be recorded. They were later released.

“It was an illegal assembly. Why none of them were charged?” asked Karpal, the Bukit Gelugor MP.

According to Kit Siang, he was approached by police officers at a Pakatan Rakyat rally in Berapit last night where he was informed about the investigation. At the same time, a police order was delivered to his house in Persiaran Besi, Island Park.

Police also served a separate notice to Chegu Bard at his homes in Seremban and Bangi on Thursday when he was in Perak.

During the Guar Perahu ceramah, Kit Siang had condemned the police raid on DAP headquarters in Petaling Jaya as “a shameful incident”, and called on Penanti voters to teach Najib a political lesson.

Pakatan candidate Mansor Othman from PKR is up against three independent candidates – Aminah Abdullah, Kamarul Ramizu Idris and Nai Khan Ari, in Penanti by-election.

Campaigning will end at midnight and polling is tomorrow.

Excerpt -http://blog.limkitsiang.com/2009/05/30/are-there-enough-courts-and-prisons/#

Indonesian Presidential and Vice Presidential Candidates

The three campaigns now have their own websites. Timothy Simamora kindly provided the URLs to me via Facebook. Here they are. I've appended the Alexa traffic ranking for today in each case. The rankings add another set of numbers to public opinion polls in Indonesia. Lower numbers mean more traffic. Like most of those polls, it looks like a walkover for SBY-Boediono. Their site gets a surprising high level of traffic for an Indonesian political site.


Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono-Boediono
http://sbypresidenku.com/
Alexa ranking - 59,778

Megawati Soekarnoputri-Prabowo Subianto
http://megaprabowo.com/
Alexa ranking - 1,563,135

Jusuf Kalla-Wiranto
http://jk-wiranto-2009.com/
Alexa ranking - 3,364,705

Looks like money, and even long-established branch networks, don't conquer all. But iit remains a politics of personality system.

Bottom of the Blog Wonders

Today I began rounding out our choice of news and other gadgets which appear at the bottom of Starting Points, always after the regular postings (my originals, re-posts from others). You have to scroll down to see all these goodies. They're not just cute. They're an integral part of this blog.

So is the right sidebar, to which I also added a few more gadgets today, all designed to make your online life easier and a little more fun. (Yeah, I know some of the diverse postings here can get a little heavy.) There will many new link headers in the sidebar in coming days.

Here's a rundown of today's new sidebar gadgets:

• Translate This Blog or Any Other Webpage (new)
  
• Dictionary Help Tools (new)
  
• Sidebar Search Menus (new)
  
• Google Phrase Translator (new)
  

And here's a complete list of all that's now at the bottom, since the original posting explaining what I was doing down there has now gone into the blog's March 2009 archive:

• Breaking News Customized for This Blog (unique, covers all areas mentioned in the blog logo)
  
• BBC News (new)
• Al Jazeera Video News (new)
• TwitterSearch (a very easy way to get the best of Twitter fast)
  
• Many Other Social Networks (new, may not yet cover your favorite)
• Easy Wikipedia Search
• Google Mini Search
• Google Tools (new)
• Search YouTube
  

I re-named some of these gadgets to better reflect what they do. Collectively, they're a unique set of tools which to a significant degree replace typical blog postings and facilitate net search- and-explore processes. Try out as many as you can. The learning curve is pretty flat. Play around -- you can't break anything.

Malaysia Ban on 'Allah' Upheld

The Catholic church in Malaysia has failed in a bid to suspend a government ban on the use of the word "Allah" in its weekly newsletter after the court rejected its application.

The high court ruling on Thursday effectively upheld the federal government's 2007 ban, which has become a symbol of religious tensions in the country.

The court will hear the newspaper's original bid to review the administrative order on July 7.

The government directive bars non-Muslims from translating God as "Allah" in their literature, saying it would confuse Muslims in this plural, Muslim-majority country.

The Herald, which reports on Catholic community news in English, Malay, Tamil and Mandarin, tried to get the order suspended while waiting for a court decision on the ban's legality.

'Status quo'

Lawrence Andrew, a Catholic priest and the editor of The Herald, told Al Jazeera they had asked to suspend the ministerial directive until the court rules on whether the ban is legal.

"Since the status quo remains we will not use the word "Allah" in our publication. In fact we have not been using it since our January edition."

The government had previously warned The Herald, which has a circulation of 12,000 limited to Catholics, that its permit could be revoked if it continued to use the word "Allah" for God in its Malay-language section.

The section is read mostly by indigenous tribes across the country who converted to Christianity decades ago.

In 2007, the government issued a warning over The Herald's use of the word "Allah", which officials had said could only be used to refer to the Muslim God.

Christian groups say the ban is unconstitutional, arguing that the word "Allah" predates Islam.

Print publications in Malaysia require a permit which is renewed every year, and is subject to conditions set by the government.

State laws

In multi-racial Malaysia, the government considers religion a sensitive matter and often classify related matters as a security issue.

S Selvarajah, a lawyer for The Herald, told Al Jazeera the court said about 10 Malaysian states had similar prohibitions on non-Muslims' use of the word "Allah".

He said the judge explained that suspending the ban "would tantamount to the court aiding the infringement of those provisions".

"But it [the ruling] has no real prejudice as such because The Herald, in compliance with the ban, had stopped using the word since January," he said.

"We'll wait for July when the court will hear the parties and decide on the matter once and for all."

About 60 per cent of the country's 27 million people are Muslim Malays, with one-third of them ethnic Chinese and Indians, and many who are Christians.

The minorities have often said their constitutional right to practice their religion freely has come under threat from the Malay Muslim-dominated government.

The government has repeatedly denied any discrimination against the country's ethnic minorities.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia-pacific/2009/05/200952894123668106.html

East Timor Resisting Legalized Abortion, UN Committee Calls Current Policies "Discriminatory"

NEW YORK, MAY 25, 2009 Zenit.org - The predominantly Catholic nation of East Timor is under pressure from the United Nations for its laws that penalize abortion, even in the case of rape and incest.

The Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute reported last week that East Timor's policies are being scrutinized by the U.N. committee responsible for overseeing compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which will meet for its 44th session in July.

The country's new penal code, which will take effect at the beginning of June, continues to penalize the practice of abortion, though it adds an exception for cases where the mother's health is in jeopardy.


A report from East Timor to the committee states that abortion is a "sensitive issue" in the country, "especially given the traumatic events of recent years" when a 24-year Indonesian occupation enforced family planning programs that were "widely resented" by the people.

The report notes that in the Timorese culture, contraception is generally unpopular, as both men and women see it as "fueling promiscuity and sexually-transmitted diseases while decreasing the number of children."

The Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute stated that despite general support in East Timor for the continued criminalization of abortion, several non-governmental organizations such as the Alola Foundation and Rede Feto, with the support of the United Nations Population Fund and the United Nations Children's Fund, have been lobbying for more liberalized abortion laws.

It also reports that under the guise of promoting "gender equality," the U.N. committee is pushing for the "modification of customs and practices" regarded by them as "discriminatory."

Additionally, the U.N. body responds with opposition or indifference to Timor's reference to their long-standing customs, distrust of foreign influence, and the "reproductive rights" abuses suffered by Timorese women under Indonesia's rule.

The Timorese report states that the nation values gender distinctions as they help to protect the integrity of the family, as well as the well-being of women.

http://easttimorlegal.blogspot.com/2009/05/east-timor-resisting-legalized-abortion.html

Fumbled Flag Has Timorese Worried

May 26th, 2009 by The Lost Boy

The people of Timor-Leste celebrated seven years of independence last Wednesday with a day of parades, music and festivities in Dili, the capital city

Only a few bloggers marked the occasion. Sandra Martz wrote on her blog, “On May 20, 2002, following 25 years of violent domination by the Indonesian military which was aided and abetted by the US under Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger, Timor-Leste became an independent nation.”

It was, however, a minute of awkwardness during the flag-lowering ceremony last week that has been the talk of town ever since.

It happened at about 5 pm – the national anthem played while the flag of Timor-Leste was lowered in front of President Jose Ramos-Horta, Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao, police commander Longuinhos Monteiro and about 1,000 onlookers.

As two honour guards ceremoniously folded the flag, one of them suddenly fumbled and dropped his end.

Pausing for a moment, the guard recovered to pick up his end of the flag and kiss it, but continued to bugle his folding duties.

Radio Nomad of Notes from Abroad was the first blogger to notice the significance of the accident:

Many Timorese are superstitious and that includes issues concerning the flag. Some believe what happened yesterday is a bad omen — signalling trouble ahead.

I was quickly reminded this morning by colleagues that on May 20, 2002, when the flag was raised for the first time at Government Palace over an independent [Timor-Leste] – the flag did not flutter. Within months, they said, new violence broke out.

Timorese Josh Trindade, 34, independent consultant and researcher, says the Timorese are a traditional people who read a lot into symbols such as this.

“We read small signs from nature – from the birds, the trees, the moon, the sun. Everyone is saying that the flag being dropped is a bad sign. Most people interpret it as a sign of conflict,” he said.

The colours of Timor-Leste’s flag – yellow, black, red and white – symbolize colonialism, overcoming obscurantism, the struggle for liberation and peace.

The national flag was based on that of the Revolutionary Front for an Independent Timor-Leste (FRETILIN) party, who were heavily involved in Timor-Leste’s fight for independence and now sit in opposition to Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao’s coalition government.

“The flag was chosen by a political party. The flag doesn’t represent the country – it represents politics. This is a sign to get a new flag,” added Trindade.

An anonymous commenter on the Timor Lorosae Nacao blog raised the question, “When is Timor-Leste going to have their own flag and push aside the FRETILIN flag? Because this flag remembers every prisoner who FRETILIN assassinated during the civil war, some of them were buried alive.”

Maria Neto, 42, who has six children and works as a maid in Dili, saw the flag being dropped.

“Many of the people there held their breath and wondered what would happen. At the moment I saw it I thought this was a bad sign – there’s going to be something bad again,” she said.

Timorese people voted almost 80% in favour of independence in 1999 after a bloody 24-year occupation by the Indonesian military.

A country with a recent history of conflict, Timor-Leste’s flag has become a sacred item and a symbol of the thousands of people who died during the struggle for independence.

Blogger Young Activist wrote, “Seven years ago today, in one of the greatest victories for the human rights movement, Timor-Leste’s independence from Indonesia was finally formally recognized. Although the nation declared its independence after Portugal’s renunciation of its claims to the territory in 1975 the colony was promptly invaded by American-backed Indonesia.

“For the next two and a half decades Timor-Leste would be subjected to occupation, starvation, torture, military rule, repression and the largest proportional genocide since the Holocaust, a genocide that left over 100,000 people decade.”

Timorese blogger Isaias Abilio Caldas remembered the devastation of that time in a blog post on Renova Timor:

“The whole country had just been laid to waste. Schools, hospitals, government buildings and private homes were razed to the ground by fire set by the Indonesian military and Pro-Indonesian militias. Corpses were found everywhere, half-buried or unburied at all leaving them as the nourishment of dogs, cows, flies and wild birds.”

Jeremias da Costa, a student at the National University of Timor-Leste, says that the dropping of the flag is a sign that all is not well with the nation’s leaders.

“The incident that happened [at the ceremony] was a big one. It showed people and the community that some leaders who reign in this country are ruling the country with their dishonesty,” he said.

FRETILIN leader Mari Alkatiri told reporters on Thursday that the fallen flag could be a sign that the end is near for Prime Minister Gusmao and his coalition government.

Later that day, Gusmao apologised for the flag incident.

“On behalf of the government I would like to apologize for that. It was not the fault of the young man or the government,” he said.

“We can only promise that next time they won’t wear gloves so the flag won’t slip out of their hands again when they fold it,” added the prime minister.

Despite this, Radio Nomad says people are still worried:

“The reaction to yesterday’s incident shows just how on edge people are — it was just over a year ago that an assassination attempt was made on the president.”

Maid Neto added, “Of course people are worried – even me. We don’t see that happen often. It’s the flag of the nation and when it falls it tells you that our leaders are not united. It tells us that there will be something bad in the future.”

http://whatismatt.com/fumbled-flag-has-timorese-worried/

Is Posterous the New TwitPic?

Image sharing via Twitter just got more complicated, or easier, depending on how you look at it. Sure we already showed you 5 ways to share images on Twitter, and suggested that Tweetphoto could rival TwitPic, but it looks as if Twitter’s most popular image sharing service is getting some healthy competition courtesy of an unexpected battler — Posterous.

Posterous? You say. Well yes. The simple site that’s great for posting anything by email has managed to sneak its way into the Twitter for photos space. The service is now announcing that no less than 11 of the most popular Twitter clients — including some of our favorites like Seesmic Desktop, Tweetie for Mac, and Twitterific — now support image uploads courtesy of Posterous.

With today’s news, Posterous has done what very few Twitter image sharing services have managed to do: get mass adoption by user-favorite Twitter clients. Even though we know that TweetDeck is missing from the list, we can’t help but be impressed by the array of mobile, web, and desktop Twitter clients that are now on the Posterous band wagon.

Interestingly enough, Posterous had the gumption to assert, in a previous blog post on the capabilities of their API, that they are indeed in direct competition with TwitPic.

Now we understand why Posterous so boldly claimed that, “We allow you to upload multiple photos and you get an image gallery. We offer the full size download of the image, or a zip file of multiple images. It posts to *your* Posterous site, which may have a custom domain and Google Analytics. And we autopost not just to Twitter, but also Facebook, Flickr, and many blogs. Oh, and TwitPic is down all the time. That’s no fun.”

Essentially by using Posterous in lieu of TwitPic, you’ll be creating a photo blog of your shared Twitter images, without sacrificing comments that can be posted as @replies or image analytics. To see what a Twitter photo blog of images posted to Posterous can look like, have a look at Rainn Wilson’s Posterous.

The full list of Twitter clients now supporting Posterous image posting is below. See any that catch your fancy, or have a Posterous wish list of your own? Leave us a comment with the details.

- Tweetie for Mac
- Seesmic Desktop for Adobe Air
- Destroy Twitter for Adobe Air
- PowerTwitter for Firefox (Firefox reviews)
- PeopleBrowsr
- Twinbox for Microsoft Outlook
- Twitterific for iPhone
- Pichirp Pro for iPhone
- Twitterville for iPhone
- Simply Tweet for iPhone
- Gravity for Nokia N60

http://mashable.com/2009/05/26/posterous-twitter/