The Malaysian government says it will not allow Israeli Paralympic swimmers to enter the country for a swimming meet later this year. The meet is a qualifying event for the 2020 Paralympics, and the International Paralympic Committee said it is disappointed with the country's decision and is aiming to "find a solution" to the matter. Malaysia is one of the few Muslim countries to have no diplomatic ties with Israel and bans people with Israeli passports from entering the country.
The post Brickbat: All Wet appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Less than five months after passing legislation that made creating and disseminating fake news punishable by jail time, Malaysia's parliament has repealed the law.
The Anti-Fake News Bill 2018 was approved in early April by the government of then-Prime Minister Najib Razak. But as the Associated Press reports, human rights advocates worried the law would be used to stamp out opposition ahead of Malaysia's general election in May.
"This is a law that was clearly designed to silence criticism of the authorities and to quell public debate—it should never have been allowed to pass in the first place," Teddy Baguilat, a Philippine member of parliament, said in a statement. Baguilat serves on the board for the Southeast Asian nonprofit group ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights.
Those found guilty under the now-repealed fake news measure faced up to six years behind bars, as well as a fine of up to 500,000 ringgit (about $123,000).
But if the law's purpose was to keep Najib in power, then it failed. Najib's party was defeated in May, and Mahathir Mohamad became the new prime minister. On Thursday, the new government repealed the fake news bill by a voice vote. "We don't need new legislation. We already have existing laws, such as the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998 and others that can deal with" fake news, Deputy Minister Mohamed Hanipa Maidin told lawmakers prior to the vote.
Baguilat praised the government's decision to get rid of the law. "The Malaysian lower house's decision today to repeal the wildly repressive Anti-Fake News Law marks a huge step forward for human rights in Malaysia," he said in his statement. "It not only shows that the Pakatan Harapan government is serious about its promises to strip controversial laws from the legal books, it also sends a signal to the wider region that positive human rights change is within reach."
But while Malaysia may have gotten rid of this one law, it's still far from a bastion of free speech and press. The nation was ranked 145th out of 180 countries in the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders' 2018 World Press Freedom Index.
The group noted that Malaysian newspapers must renew their operating licenses with the government every year. And under the decades-old Sedition Act, criticism of the government is heavily restricted. "The Malaysian authorities should now follow up and repeal all other repressive laws, including the Sedition Act," Baguilat said.
Fake news is a real problem around the globe. But as Reason's Nick Gillespie has previously argued, that doesn't mean regulation is the answer.
The post Malaysia Ditches Terrible Fake News Law appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Salah Salem Saleh Sulaiman posted an angry YouTube video claiming that it took police in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, 50 minutes to respond to calls over the fatal April shooting of a Palestinian engineer. The police disagree. So now Sulaiman is going to jail.
It's the first conviction under Malaysia's new law criminalizing "fake news," and it's a big warning to anybody who thinks the government should get involved in determining what deserves the "fake news" label.
Whose accounting of the time is correct? I don't know. Police records say the first police car responded within eight minutes. That doesn't necessarily make it true.
Sulaiman, who is actually a Danish citizen of Yemeni descent, threw himself on the mercy of the court and pleaded guilty, insisting that he meant no harm. He did not have any legal representation. He was fined the equivalent of $2,500, which he says he couldn't pay. So he's going to prison for a month.
Malaysia's new law has been attacked by activists concerned that Prime Minister Najib Razak will abuse it to shield himself from criticism for his ongoing financial corruption scandal (he's accused of siphoning off hundreds of millions of dollars from a government investment fund) and to crack down on his opponents. Malaysia has a general election scheduled for May 9.
It is utterly unsurprising that the first fake news conviction is of somebody saying something critical of the government's behavior. When government authorities have control over what sort of criticism is allowed and what information is considered "real" or "fake," they will be tempted to use it to protect their power. Something to keep in mind whenever any official—elected or otherwise—starts popping off about how somebody needs to do "something" about fake news. It's all about shielding themselves from opposition.
The post Malaysia's First 'Fake News' Conviction Is All About Shielding Government from Criticism appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Malaysian officials have proposed a law that would ban fake news and impose prison sentences of up to 10 years and fines of up to $128,000 on those who violate the law. Critics say the law is aimed at stifling dissent.
The post Brickbat: Say What? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Malaysian authorities are saying thanks but no thanks to an international "Love and Sex with Robots" symposium that was scheduled to be held there. "It's not our culture," said Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar about the event, which was to take place in the metropolitan area of Iskandar Malaysia in November.
"It's already an offense in Malaysia to have anal sex," Bakar said at the press conference, according to the English-language Malaysian newspaper The Star. "Intercourse with robots. Don't try to be ridiculous."
The event's organizers had been warned and the police would "take action…if they choose to hold the event," Bakar said.
But as racy as the robot event might sound, this gathering was to be more academic than erotic. The love- and sex-robots symposium was one several sessions taking place as part of an "Advances in Computer Entertainment Conference" co-chaired by Adrian David Cheok, a professor of pervasive computing at City University London, and chess-master turned toy developer and author (his book is Love + Sex With Robots) David Levy.
Cheok said the event was not meant to promote sexual and romantic relationships between humans and robots.
At the moment, such relationships aren't really possible anyway, since artificially intelligent sexbots don't yet exist. (For more on the once- and -future pursuit of human-like machines for people to have sex with, see my feature from Reason's April 2015 issue.) But some people are already plenty worried about the possibility. For instance, the Campaign Against Sex Robots was recently launched by two academics to promulgate the idea that sex robots would be "harmful and contribute to inequalities in society." The Campaign called Malaysia's decision to ban the sex robots symposium "welcome news considering the significance of the sex trade in Malaysia."
The post Malaysia Bans International Sex Robot Symposium appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Education officials in Malaysia say that reports a teacher told non-Muslim students they should drink their urine during Ramadan are not true. Officials say that the teacher merely told those students to respect the fasting of their Muslim peers and go to the toilet if they needed to drink water.
The post Brickbat: Good to the Last Drop appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Malaysian officials are detaining two Canadian siblings blamed for causing a recent earthquake in the country. Lindsey and Danielle Petersen were part of a group of tourists accused of showing disrespect to a mountain held sacred by locals by stripping down and posing for a photo there. An earthquake struck the mountain six days later, which officials blame on the tourists.
The post Brickbat: Climb That Mountain appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Air traffic control has lost contact with a Singapore-bound AirAsia flight that originated in Indonesia and was carrying more than 160 passengers. The Malaysia-based airline announced the flight had lost contact over Twitter earlier tonight. BBC reports:
Search and rescue operations are under way for the missing aircraft.
The flight had been due to arrive in Singapore at 08:30 (00:30GMT).
There were six foreigners on board the flight, reports say, three from South Korea and one each from the UK Malaysia and Singapore. The rest of the passengers were Indonesian.
An official with the transport ministry, Hadi Mustofa, told local media the plane lost contact over the Java Sea, between the islands of Kalimantan and Java.
He said the plane had asked for an unusual route before it lost contact and that the weather had been cloudy.
AirAsia have given few other details.
Another Malaysia-based airline, Malaysia Air, lost two flights this year, one to a missile shot over Ukraine and another somewhere en route to Beijing. AirAsia got into some controversy for an article that ran in their in-flight travel magazine shortly after that Malaysia Air flight went missing because it included the claim that "your captain is well prepared to ensure your plane will never get lost." AirAsia claimed the article went to print before the missing Malaysia Air flight but pulled the magazine, apologized, and promised disciplinary action anyway.
The post Malaysia-Based AirAsia Flight to Singapore Goes Missing appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Almost two days after Flight 17 was downed by a missile over rebel-held territory in the east of Ukraine, representatives from the Kiev government had still not been allowed access to the mammoth crash site, and rebels were preventing local emergency services personnel from gathering evidence, Ukrainian officials said.
"They're playing a game with the state. They behave as an independent country. The reason is to make all the procedures illegitimate," said Konstantin Batozsky, an adviser to Serhiy Taruta, governor of the Donetsk region.
The post Ukraine Accuses Rebels of Tampering with Crash Site, Bodies appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>I was glad to hear Barack Obama suggest that he needed more information related to the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 before deciding on a cause of action. Perhaps this time, he'll involve Congress and the American people in whatever comes next.
Here's my latest Time.com column, which talks about the need for a serious national conversation about foreign policy.
Even with little in the way of concrete knowledge — much less clear, direct ties to American lives and interests — what might be called the Great U.S. Intervention Machine is already kicking into high gear. This is unfortunate, to say the least.
After a decade-plus of disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people (including almost 7,000 American soldiers) and constitutionally dubious and strategically vague interventions in places such as Libya, it is well past time for American politicians, policymakers, and voters to stage a national conversation about U.S. foreign policy. Instead, elected officials and their advisers are always looking for the next crisis over which to puff up their chests and beat war drums.
And there's this:
When the United States uses its unrivaled military power everywhere and all the time, we end up accomplishing far less than hawks desire. Being everywhere and threatening action all the time dissipates American power rather than concentrates it. Contra John McCain and Hillary Clinton, whatever happened in Ukrainian airspace doesn't immediately or obviously involve the United States, even with the loss of an American citizen. The reflexive call for action is symptomatic of exactly what we need to stop doing, at least if we want to learn from the past dozen-plus years of our own failures.
President Obama is right to move cautiously regarding a U.S. response. He would be wiser still to use the last years of his presidency to begin the hard work of forging a foreign-policy consensus that all Americans can actually get behind, not just in this situation but in all the others we will surely encounter.
The post Malaysian Airlines, Ukraine, and The Great American Intervention Machine appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A Malaysian Airlines passenger plane en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur appears to have crashed in Eastern Ukraine. Though the airline has only confirmed it has lost contact with flight MH17, Reuters has tweeted that a correspondent has seen the wreckage on the ground and bodies.
Here's the Associated Press story on it right now. It will obviously be updated as reports roll in, and we'll keep an eye out for news at Reason 24/7. A Ukraine adviser claimed on Facebook that the plane was shot down. Ukraine has stated that they are not responsible.
The post Malaysian Plane Crashed in Ukraine—Who's to Blame? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>What, you expected the speculation to stop? Yes, we seem to have a better sense of what happened to the plane this week than we did before. But we have lots of remaining questions too—and anyway, since when has the existence of an official explanation stopped people from imagining alternatives? We may have moved past the stage when a CNN host can straight-facedly ask if it's "preposterous" to think the plane was swallowed by a black hole (and when one of his guests, former Transportation Department official Mary Schiavo, can outdo even that level of scientific illiteracy by claiming "a small black hole would suck in our entire universe"). But alternative theories are still bound to flourish. Indeed, if you look at the reasons why such stories emerge, you'll see that this is the kind of mystery that's most likely to invite a lot of suspicious speculation.
First: Human beings are pattern-seeking, storytelling creatures. If there's a gap in the data, we'll try to fill it in a way that makes a coherent picture. That's just the way our minds work, and for good reason: It would be hard to survive if we couldn't draw such inferences. The problem is that we're also prone to drawing inferences that are false. (As David Friedman has put it, we "are equipped with superb pattern recognition software—so good that it can even find patterns that are not there.") Ideally, we're always open to new information and constantly revising our map of the world to take those data into account. In practice, we can get stuck on a story our psyches find compelling, even if new evidence points in a different direction.
The Malaysian mystery was particularly likely to inspire this sort of connect-the-dots game. On one hand, we know there's some pattern to be found amid the noise: The plane must have disappeared for a reason. On the other hand, the gaps in the data are so large that even the most careful and responsible speculation will require some guesswork. And if you aren't a specialist in aviation, you're not always going to be well-equipped to know which of those guesses are plausible. Especially after weeks when even news presented as hard evidence turned out to be false leads.
Second: Frightened people see frightening patterns. If you've got a reason to be scared or suspicious, that anxiety will inform the speculations you use to fill in the gaps. That's one reason why conspiracy theories are an inevitable part of social life. Combine an unsolved mystery with a feeling of fear, and you're bound to hear people positing that a villain's at work.
Here again, the Malaysian mystery is a particularly potent illustration of the principle. It's a story, after all, about an innately scary thing. Worse, a scary thing associated with common anxieties: fear of crashes, fear of terrorism, and so on. So people are especially likely to fill in those blank spaces with forces that scare them, from Islamists to North Korea.
Third: Less transparency means less trust. Some spaces are intentionally kept blank. There are times when that represents a deliberate cover-up, and there are times when it merely reflects the familiar bureaucratic impetus toward inefficiency, mistrust, and miscommunication. Either way, withholding information only inflames outsiders' suspicions. In this case, we haven't just seen transparency problems among the Malaysian authorities; the Malaysians have had trouble extracting information from neighboring nations. The governments of the region don't trust each other, that makes them less transparent, and that in turn encourages more distrust.
No wonder we've heard so many conspiratorial conjectures. Though here we have to be careful with our language. In all the mockery of CNN's black-hole discussion, one bizarre bit of the broadcast didn't get as much attention as it should have: The host referred to the idea as one of "these conspiracy theories," even though a black hole isn't a conspiracy. I suppose you could make the tale a conspiracy theory if you wanted to: If you're already imagining a event horizon floating over the ocean, you might as well take one more step into fantasy and propose that a secret society of wizards put it there. But it's hardly a conspiracy story per se.
In the last few decades, our language has evolved in a strange direction. People started using the phrase "conspiracy theory" to mean "implausible conspiracy theory," then "implausible theory, whether or not it involves a conspiracy." CNN isn't the only offender here: A Daily Beast video, theoretically devoted to listing the "kookiest conspiracy theories" about the plane, included not just the black hole but such nonconspiratorial notions as the ideas that the craft was hit by a meteor or landed on an isolated island. (Meanwhile, some bona fide conspiracy theories weren't so far out. It wasn't absurd to wonder whether the passengers had been the victims of a terrorist plot.)
Treating "conspiracy" as a synonym for "fringe"—or just for "weird"—conceals the fact that we're all capable of conspiracy thinking, and not just when a real plot is afoot. If there's a hint of a hidden pattern and a reason to be afraid, suspicions can cross anyone's mind; and if someone seems to be withholding important information, those suspicions will become more intense. The question to ask at a time like this is not What do we do about all these weird theories? It's How do we keep our heads when the evidence is sparse and not always easy to judge?
The post The Flight 370 Conspiracy Stories Aren't About to Stop appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Tonight, The Independents is back live on Fox Business Network (9 p.m. ET, 6 p.m. PT, with repeats three hours later) with a show that features liberaltarian jackalope Rep. Beto O'Rourke (D-El Paso), that rare Democrat who has used a Tea Party-style primarying strategy to knock off an incumbent over an issue that the party's base has been serially disrespected by the establishment: in this case, marijuana prohibition. (Read Mike Riggs's interview with O'Rourke from January 2013.) O'Rourke will be on talking up a new bipartisan bill he's co-sponsoring to create more oversight and accountability for the Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection, particularly involving use-of-force incidents and invasive drug searches.
The Party Panel tonight consists of Winston Group pollster and Daily Beast contributor Kristin Soltis Anderson, with Washington Free Beacon staff writer Lachlan Markay. They are slated to discuss the latest developments and conspiracy theories about the downed Malaysian passenger jet and Russia's aggressions on its western flank, plus Hawaiian cops and their hooker habit.
Last week the New York Observer had an article about a goofy new proposal in Albany to create a tax credit for TV shows that staff their writing rooms with non-whites and non-males. Over the weekend I called the idea "idiotic," and as a result Lowell Peterson, executive director of the Writers Guild of America, East, has volunteered to set me straight. Speaking of dumb laws, Kennedy's back with her latest segment demonstrating on the mean streets of midtown Manhattan behavior that is illegal in places like Meriden, Connecticut.
The episode will end with a discussion of Jimmy Carter's misguided faith that his snail-mail communications will be any less surveilled than his phone calls and sexts. Then comes the aftershow, which will be live-streamed on the program's website. Please send your tweets out to @IndependentsFBN; some may be used on air.
The post Tonight on <em>The Independents</em>: Prohibition-Hating Democrat Beto O'Rourke, Russia Conspiracy Theories, Dumb Laws, Jimmy Carter's Surveillance Naivete, Tax Breaks for Diverse TV Writing Rooms (Like Ours!), and Sexy Aftershow! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak has said that according to analysis from the British company Inmarsat and the U.K. Air Accidents Investigation Branch missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went down in the southern Indian Ocean. In the announcement Razak did not expand on the nature of the analysis. According to Razak, MH370's last position was west of the Australian city of Perth.
According to the BBC a text sent to the relatives of the 239 people on the missing flight said that it had to be assumed that there were no survivors.
Background:
MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing went missing on March 8. The pilots never indicated that anything was wrong, although radar data suggests that the flight was deliberately flown off course. Its disappearance prompted a massive search that included over two dozen countries. The fuel range of the plane stretched from Afghanistan to parts of Australia (map below):
It was revealed that two young Iranian men had boarded the flight with stolen passports. However, authorities said that the men were likely asylum seekers and not connected to any terrorist organizations. The Chinese ambassador in Kuala Lumpur said that background checks on the Chinese nationals on board MH370 had not uncovered any links to terror groups.
Theories about what happened to the plane:
The mysterious disappearance of MH370 led to a range of theories about what happened to the plane being put forward, including that a black hole was somehow involved.
A theory about the plane's disappearance that was written up by pilot Chris Goodfellow was republished in Wired and discussed at Business Insider. According to Goodfellow, what most likely happened was that the pilots tried to land MH370 after a fire broke out on the plane, thereby explaining the unexpected change in course. Goodfellow explains that if the pilots passed out or died because of smoke in the cabin the plane would simply have continued on its revised course until it ran out of fuel and crashed. However, 777 pilots who spoke to Business Insider claim that the first thing pilots would do if smoke was in the cockpit would be to put on oxygen masks.
Recently, possible debris from the flight was spotted in the southern Indian Ocean.
The post Malaysian PM: 'MH370 Ended in the Southern Indian Ocean' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The missing Malaysian airplane has inspired a lot of conspiracy theories. Since I recently wrote a book about conspiracy theories, a Malaysian radio show called me last week for an interview. Our conversation was broadcast today, and you can listen to a podcast of it here. Besides the mystery of flight MH370, the topics discussed range from the TV show Fringe to the fabled seaside battles between the rockers and the mods.
The post Talkin' Malaysian Airplane Conspiracy Theories on Malaysian Radio appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Over at Mediaite, Andrew Kirell has pulled together what Donald Rumsfeld might call the "known knowns" about Zaharie Shah, the pilot of the missing Malaysian Airlines plane.
Plenty of questions have arisen over whether the pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 54, had any terrorist sympathies, but the truth is that evidence has, thus far, proved inconclusive.
In fact, many of Shah's internet actions paint a portrait of a man who barely fits the stereotypes of a religious fundamentalist or separatist.
Among those actions?
He's a supporter of Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, a reformer who was once charged with sodomy laws by the current authoritarian government. Shah's YouTube statistics reveal he has watched a lot of Ibrahim videos. Shah is also believed to have attended the court hearing that overturned Ibrahim's those sodomy charges. Ibrahim was once again jailed on those charges, just several hours before MH370 departed from Kuala Lumpur.
As expected, sources within the Malaysian government have called Shah a "fanatical supporter" of Ibrahim, attempting to portray his politics as radical and possibly violent. But Ibrahim's People's Justice Party is on the forefront of a coalition using elections to fight for "transparent and genuine democracy," including a constitution, separation of powers, as well as decentralized economic controls. As Slate described it: If anything, Shah is guilty of supporting "a nonviolent man who supports a pluralistic and democratic Malaysia."
Read Reason's 24/7 latest roundup of everything related to Shah and the disappearance of Flt 370, which Malaysian officials are now investigating as deliberate.
The post All About the Missing Malaysian Pilot, Zaharie Shah appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Today Malaysia's Prime Minister said that whoever or whatever caused Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 to head off course was likely due to "deliberate action" by somebody on board.
Whether that means the flight was actually hijacked he is still not willing to say. From CNN:
"Evidence is consistent with someone acting deliberately from inside the plane," Prime Minister Najib Razak said, officially confirming the plane's disappearance was not caused by an accident.
"Despite media reports that the plane was hijacked, we are investigating all major possibilities on what caused MH370 to deviate," he said.
Military radar showed the jetliner flew in a westerly direction back over the peninsula before turning northwest toward the Bay of Bengal or southwest into the Indian Ocean, Najib said.
"Up until the point at which it left military primary radar coverage, these movements are consistent with deliberate action by someone on the plane," he said.
Malaysian officials have released the map below showing the last known possible locations of the jet based on its final satellite transmissions, hours after final radar contact:
CNN notes that the home of the pilot, outside Kuala Lumpur, was searched by Malaysian authorities.
Analyzing the mystery:
The New York Times takes note of where the northern arc would take the plane:
The northern arc described by Mr. Najib passes through or close to some of the world's most volatile countries, home to insurgent groups, but also over highly militarized areas with robust air-defense networks, some run by the American military. The arc passes close to northern Iran, through Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, and through northern India and the Himalayan mountains and Myanmar.
An aircraft flying on that arc would have to pass through air-defense networks in India and Pakistan, whose mutual border is heavily militarized, as well as through Afghanistan, where the United States and other NATO countries have operated air bases for more than a decade.
Air bases near that arc include Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, where the United States Air Force's 455th Air Expeditionary Wing is based, and a large Indian air base, Hindon Air Force Station.
The Times is not unsubtly suggesting that there's a high likelihood of the jet being spotted if it had taken the northern arc, making the southen arc the more likely possibility.
Over at Wired, Brendan I Koerner considers the possibility that if the plane were hijacked, it may not have been part of a well-orchestrated plan to engage in acts of terrorism:
With the hijacking theory growing more plausible by the hour, it's time to wonder how such an epic crime might have occurred–and how it might have ended far more tragically than its perpetrator envisioned.
If MH370 was seized by passengers or a crew member, the hijacking would the third so far this year—in addition to the Ethiopian Airlines episode, there also was the bizarre Pegasus Airlines incident of early February, in which an apparently intoxicated Ukrainian man demanded passage to Sochi but was instead taken to Istanbul. This clustering of hijackings shouldn't be surprising. The crime always has been highly viral in nature; each hijacking tends to be influenced by the last, in terms of modus operandi or other key details. A perfect example of this phenomenon is how "parajacking"–hijackings in which the criminal flees by jumping out of the plane–evolved in the early 1970s. Though most folks only remember the infamous D.B. Cooper hijacking of November 1971, there were numerous other incidents in the ensuing months in which the hijackers became increasingly more adept at getting away from the authorities–at least for a few days. (Cooper himself may have been a copycat, inspired by a farcical Air Canada hijacking.) Perhaps one of MH370's pilots had been inspired by the Ethiopian Airlines hijacking, and thought he could fly his way to a better life on distant shores.
It also is important to remember that, unlike the highly organized 9/11 terrorists, most hijackers through history have been scatterbrained, sometimes to a comic degree. In the midst of manic episodes or afflicted by paranoia, they often can be quite good at planning minor details of their crimes, yet quite deluded about how the endgames will play out. This certainly was the case with Roger Holder, the principal hijacker of Western Airlines Flight 701 in June 1972. An Army veteran who had served four tours in Vietnam, Holder cooked up a clever ruse by which he convinced the crew that he was accompanied by four members of the Weathermen, at least one of whom was armed with a bomb. But he also hijacked a short-range Boeing 727 by accident, thereby making it impossible for him to reach his intended destination of Hanoi.
If MH370's hijacker was in a mental state similar to Holder's, he or she might have had the psychological wherewithal to figure out how to disable the plane's communications systems, but not to realize that reaching, say, Western Europe was not a feasible goal. The hijacking could even have been an impulsive act, as many such crimes were during America's "golden age" or air piracy. Ricardo Chavez Ortiz, for example, who commandeered a Frontier Airlines jet in order to get a radio crew to broadcast his rambling 34-minute speech, claimed to have decided to hijack the plane only after it reached cruising altitude.
The plane would have been running low on fuel by the time it sent its last satellite transmission, so even if it was hijacked, officials may still be looking for a crash scene.
The post Officials Say Malaysian Jet's Disappearance Likely Deliberate appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing went missing early last Saturday morning local time. So far, there has been no sign of the aircraft and a massive search is underway for the missing plane. The last known position of the aircraft was over the Gulf of Thailand.
The area being searched is vast, and a Colorado-based satellite imaging company is crowdsourcing the search.
From ABC News:
Longmont, Colo.-based DigitalGlobe trained cameras from its five orbiting satellites Saturday on the Gulf of Thailand region where Malaysia flight 370 was last heard from, said Luke Barrington, senior manager of Geospatial Big Data for DigitalGlobe.
The images being gathered will be made available for free to the public on a website called Tomnod. Anyone can click on the link and begin searching the images, tagging anything that looks suspicious. Each pixel on a computer screen represents half a meter on the ocean's surface, Barrington told ABC News.
"For people who aren't able to drive a boat through the Pacific Ocean to get to the Malaysian peninsula, or who can't fly airplanes to look there, this is a way that they can contribute and try to help out," Barrington said.
Click here to see if you can find any sign of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
Officials have said that the two Iranian men who boarded the missing flight with stolen passports do not have ties to terrorist groups. The Malaysian air force says that the flight changed course before disappearing.
The post Satellite Imaging Company Crowdsourcing Search For Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The private HELP University said a simple ceremony to mark the award was held in early October at North Korea's embassy in Kuala Lumpur.
(H/T Charles WT)
The post Malaysian University Awards Kim Jong-un Economics Doctorate appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The appeals court said the term Allah must be exclusive to Islam or it could cause public disorder.
People of all faiths use the word Allah in Malay to refer to their Gods.
Christians argue they have used the word, which entered Malay from Arabic, to refer to their God for centuries and that the ruling violates their rights.
(H/T Charles WT)
The post Malaysian Court Rules Non-Muslims Cannot Use the Word "Allah" appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Riduan Masmud was charged with raping a 13-year-old girl last February. On Monday, his counsel Loretto Padua revealed to the court that Masmud is now married to the young girl he was accused of assaulting. As The Daily Express notes, Padua had previously told the court that Masmud was in the process of seeking a lawful marriage to the teen in Syariah Court—a separate court system that has jurisdiction over matters pertaining to Islamic law.
The post Shariah Court in Malaysia Allows Man To Marry 13-Year-Old He is Accused of Raping appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Parliament was dissolved last week and on the weekend, Prime Minister Najib Razak released the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition's election manifesto.
The post Malaysian Elections Set for May 5 appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Najib, whose National Front (BN) coalition has been in power for 56 years, made the announcement in a televised address on Wednesday.
"The king has accepted my request to dissolve parliament effective April 3," he said from the administrative capital Putrajaya, adding he hoped his coalition would win a "solid majority".
The post Malaysian Prime Minister Dissolves Parliament appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Haji Musa, a general from the Royal Army of the Sulu Sultanate, was killed yesterday, Hamza Taib, Sabah's police chief, said in a televised media briefing. Abraham Idjirani, a spokesman for Sulu Sultan Jamalul Kiram, said by phone that the general was "very much alive."
The post Malaysia Claims It Killed Rebel Muslim General appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Police chief Ismail Omar said 32 followers of a self-proclaimed Philippine sultan had been killed in two confrontations since Wednesday near the scene of a three-week standoff in Sabah state, after a military assault to dislodge them.
That brought the total dead to 60, including 52 militants. Eight Malaysian policemen were killed in skirmishes last weekend.
The post Sixty Killed in Raid on Rebels in Malaysia appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Three F-18 fighter jets and five Hawk ground-attack aircraft bombed and strafed the estimated 200 Filipino gunmen holed up near the small northeastern Malaysian village of Kampung Taduo, Defense Minister Ahmad Zahid of Malaysia said on Tuesday.
The post Malaysia Uses Airstrikes, Mortars Against Rebels appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The payments to conservative American opinion writers — whose work appeared in outlets from the Huffington Post and San Francisco Examiner to the Washington Times to National Review and RedState — emerged in a filing this week to the Department of Justice. The filing under the Foreign Agent Registration Act outlines a campaign spanning May 2008 to April 2011 and led by Joshua Trevino, a conservative pundit, who received $389,724.70 under the contract and paid smaller sums to a series of conservative writers.
The post Malaysian Anti-Democracy Propaganda Reached From the Huffington Post to RedState appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Alvin Tan, 24, a law student at the National University of Singapore (NUS), and his Malaysian girlfriend Vivian Lee, 23, have been denounced by critics over their X-rated blog called "Sumptuous Erotica".
In it the couple posted erotic photographs and videos of their lovemaking as well as close-ups of their genitals — and despite an outcry remained unrepentant, claiming they had done no wrong.
The post Malaysian Student Sex Blog Causes a Stir appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>After more than a week of improbable claims, the Obama Administration now characterizes the deadly September 11 attack on the U.S. embassy in Libya as a terrorist act. But President Obama himself cautioned that protests against the unseen film Innocence of Muslims are "natural."
"It is, I think, self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack," White House spokesman Jay Carney told Reuters. "Our embassy was attacked violently and the result was four deaths of American officials. So, again, that's self-evident."
The new evaluation came as congressional committees met in closed session to press Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, along with top intelligence and law enforcement officials, on whether the diplomatic outpost was adequately protected by a force of mostly Libyan guards.
Libyan officials allowed FBI investigators to visit the burned-out compound only early this week, officials said, a delay that could hamper the team in gathering evidence and interviewing witnesses.
Carney…said some of the heavily armed men who stormed the consulate in Benghazi and killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans "may have had connections" to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, an offshoot of the terrorist network that is active in eastern Libya.
Elsewhere around the world, a pan-Islamic "Day of Love" was marked by violence, arson, and flag burnings:
* In Pakistan rioters burned down movie theaters and at least three people have been killed.
* In Sri Lanka, protesters burned Obama in effigy.
* In Indonesia, the U.S. embassy has been closed and an imprisoned terrorist told Indonesians they should imitate the Libya attack. "We should hold our anger if we're being insulted," Abu Bakar Bashir said. "We should forgive. But if the one that was defamed is Allah, the Prophet or his Shariah, death is the punishment. The Prophet is much more precious than our souls."
* In Malaysia, protesters burned American flags outside the U.S. embassy.
The president, meanwhile, seems to be stepping back from Carney's characterization. From the L.A. Times again:
Asked later about the Libya attack during a town hall meeting in Coral Gables, Fla., President Obama appeared to fall back on the administration's earlier description of the assault — that it was sparked by anger over an amateur film, made in California and posted on the Internet, that ridiculed the Muslim prophet Muhammad.
"I don't want to speak to something until we have all the information," Obama said. "The natural protests that arose because of the outrage over the video were used as an excuse by extremists to see if they can also directly harm U.S. interests."
In his comments to Reuters, Carney maintained the administration's claim that there is no evidence the Libya attack was premeditated, a claim that seems to contradict eyewitness accounts, intelligence estimates, and warnings from Chris Stevens, the American ambassador who was killed in the Libya attack.
The post Obama Spokesman Concedes Libya Attack Was Terrorism, Obama Not So Much appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Although there was no violence, angry demonstrators declared their willingness to sacrifice their lives to defend the honour of Prophet Mohammed and warned "there will be consequences" over the film.
"We will not allow the prophet to be insulted. We are willing to sacrifice our lives and property," said Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man, an official with the opposition Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS), which spearheaded the march.
About 60 percent of Malaysia's 28 million people are Malay-Muslims.
The post Around 3,000 March on U.S. Embassy in Kuala Lumpur appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>August 31 marks Malaysia's independence from British rule and commemorates the founding of Bersatu—the umbrella organisation for militants in Thailand's southernmost provinces believed to want greater autonomy.
Three military rangers and two marines were wounded in bomb blasts, an army spokesman said, adding that more than one hundred "symbolic attacks" took place across the southern provinces of Songkhla, Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat.
The post Militants Launch Attacks in Southern Thailand appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As noted by the BBC, Aug. 14 was dubbed "Internet Blackout Day" in Malaysia, but since the country runs 12 hours ahead of the U.S. east coast, most Americans were asleep as the protest raged.
Participants blackened their home screens to protest the amendment to Section 114A of the Evidence Act, which was revised in April. The changes place all responsibility on website owners for any defamatory comments posted on the site. The amendment says that anyone can bring legal or criminal action against social networkers, mobile device owners, and even Wi-Fi network service providers who post defamatory comments on any website.
The post Malaysians Stage Blackout Over Internet Regs appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>They have replaced their home pages with black screens critical of the Evidence Act, revised in April, for Internet Black-out Day.
Critics say the law makes people unfairly liable for content published from networks and personal devices.
The post Malaysian Bloggers Protest appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The three officers from the Federal Territories Islamic Affairs Department, better known by its Malay language acronym JAWI, were courteous but brought with them 20 other men. They milled around the shop, browsing the shelves and taking pictures on their mobile phones. The officers asked the employees whether the shop was selling Allah, Liberty and Love, the newly released book by New York-based Canadian academic Irshad Manji.
Understandably, the staff, dealing with a raid by the religious authorities for the first time, was nervous. They lead the men to the shelf where the offending book was on display. After confiscating a couple of copies, the officials asked for the manager.
The post Malaysian Trial Opens over "Un-Islamic" Book appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Surendran Nagarajan, founder of Kuala Lumpur-based legal rights group Lawyers for Liberty, says Malaysia's Dangerous Drugs Act undermines common law principles of "presumption of innocence" in the trial process.
The post Malaysian Drug Laws are Unfair to Australians appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>