MH370 Uighur connection

https://www.ft.com/content/57f34736-ae76-11e3-aaa6-00144feab7de

Beijing dismisses Uighur link to missing Malaysian airliner

 Tom Mitchell in Beijing, and Jeremy Grant and Demetri Sevastopulo in Kuala Lumpur MARCH 19 2014 

Background checks on the 154 Chinese citizens aboard missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, including a Uighur passenger from the northwestern region of Xinjiang, had not turned up any evidence of their possible involvement in a hijack attempt, China has said. The announcement by Huang Huikang, Beijing’s ambassador to Kuala Lumpur, reported by China Central Television on Tuesday, came as Malaysia confirmed it had asked “every relevant country” in the search area that has access to satellite data to provide what information they could. A number of Chinese ships joined the expanding international search – an area which now covers 2.5m square nautical miles – for the missing aeroplane on Wednesday, according to Chinese state media. Xinhua said nine ships, including China’s largest rescue vessel, would set sail from Singapore for waters southeast of the Bay of Bengal and west of Indonesia. It said the Chinese ships would focus on maritime areas near the Indonesian island of Sumatra, away from regions being combed for wreckage by other countries. Chinese authorities had earlier initiated a search of their own territory. The “northern corridor” that Malaysian authorities say the aircraft may have flown along passes over the Chinese regions of Tibet and Xinjiang. At the same time China appeared to tone down earlier criticism of Malaysia’s handling of the crisis, now in its 11th day. “The Malaysian government has been doing its best in the search and investigation,” Mr Huang was quoted as saying by China’s official Xinhua news agency. “But it lacks experience and capability to handle this kind of incident.” Malaysia is leading a multinational search and rescue effort involving 26 nations in two flight path “corridors” identified as the likely areas to which the airliner may have flown hours after contact was lost with ground. Flight MH370 went missing with 239 people on board on March 8, less than an hour into a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Two-thirds of the passengers were Chinese. Some relatives of the 153 Chinese passengers aboard the flight on Tuesday threatened in Beijing to go on hunger strike in protest at what they see as insufficient information from Malaysia. Thailand belatedly provided some additional information on Tuesday when Thai military officials said their radar had showed an unidentified aircraft, possibly flight MH370, flying toward the Malacca strait, minutes after the Malaysian jet's transponder signal was lost. It took 10 days to report the data “because we did not pay attention to it”, said air force spokesman Air Vice Marshal Montol Suchookorn. When the jet was first reported missing, comments circulated on Chinese social media networks about possible foul play by Uighur activists fighting for an independent homeland. The aircraft’s disappearance occurred just a week after eight attackers, identified by the Chinese government as “separatists” from Xinjiang, killed 29 people in a terrorist attack at a train station in southwestern Yunnan province. Such suspicions were heightened when Chinese state media released a list of the missing aircraft’s passengers with the name of the Uighur passenger obscured. It also emerged that two other passengers were travelling on stolen passports. The Uighur passenger, however, was identified as a 35-year-old artist on his first trip outside of China. He was travelling with an official delegation, while the two mystery passengers were identified as Iranians and most likely asylum seekers. MH370 search widens Subtitles unavailable Xinhua also reported that China’s Premier Li Keqiang had asked Najib Razak, the Malaysian prime minister, to provide more information on flight MH370, and in a “timely, accurate and comprehensive” manner. China is Malaysia’s biggest trading partner. In October last year Malaysia and China pledged to boost bilateral trade to Rm511bn ($155bn), from Rm181bn in 2012, the latest year for which figures were available. While Malaysia has been improving the flow of information and has a firmer grip on the investigation than in its early stages, the country’s defence minister and acting transport minister, Hishamuddin Hussein, was forced on Tuesday to revise his government’s version of when the aircraft’s air communications were disabled after discrepancies emerged with an earlier statement. “The co-operation we saw in the first phase continues in this new phase. In fact, there is even more commitment to assist us in this much larger and more complex multinational operation,” he told a daily news conference in Kuala Lumpur. China had deployed more than 10 maritime vessels, a number of aircraft and 21 satellites to help with the expanding international search for the missing aircraft, Chinese media reported. Meanwhile, Australian aircraft have begun searching for the missing aircraft in the Indian Ocean after agreeing to take responsibility for the southern part of the search zone following talks with Kuala Lumpur. Canberra initially deployed two Orion aircraft to help the international search effort. On Monday Tony Abbott, Australia’s prime minister, pledged to provide two more Orion aircraft following a call with his Malaysian counterpart, Mr Najib. 

Additional reporting by Julie Zhu in Hong Kong, Jamie Smyth in Sydney and agencies

Storm in. Sydney

We had a bad storm in Willoughby in November.
No electricity for a week.
It wasn't hardship surviving this.

I was working, out of the house, Stephen worked at his mum's house.

Candles, solar torch over the kitchen bench, dinner at 6pm (in the dark),.
Stephen kindly charged all our devices during the day.
So after dinner we curled up and went to bed early.
We were one son down as he was away on school camp.
Easy peasy.
We were lucky the weather didn't require heating or cooling. We were sweet.

John Taylor Gatto: Why Schools Don't Educate

Why Schools Don't Educate


by John Taylor Gatto


I accept this award on behalf of all the fine teachers I've known over the years who've struggled to make their transactions with children honorable ones, men and women who are never complacent, always questioning, always wrestling to define and redefine endlessly what the word "education" should mean. A Teacher of the Year is not the best teacher around, those people are too quiet to be easily uncovered, but he is a standard-bearer, symbolic of these private people who spend their lives gladly in the service of children. This is their award as well as mine.


We live in a time of great school crisis. Our children rank at the bottom of nineteen industrial nations in reading, writing and arithmetic. At the very bottom. The world's narcotic economy is based upon our own consumption of the commodity, if we didn't buy so many powdered dreams the business would collapse - and schools are an important sales outlet. Our teenage suicide rate is the highest in the world and suicidal kids are rich kids for the most part, not the poor. In Manhattan fifty per cent of all new marriages last less than five years. So something is wrong for sure.


Our school crisis is a reflection of this greater social crisis. We seem to have lost our identity. Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent - nobody talks to them anymore and without children and old people mixing in daily life a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact, the name "community" hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that. In some strange way school is a major actor in this tragedy just as it is a major actor in the widening guilt among social classes. Using school as a sorting mechanism we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander through subway trains begging and sleep on the streets.


I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching - that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very hard, the institution is psychopathic - it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to different cell where he must memorize that man and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.


Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the state of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted - sometimes with guns - by an estimated eighty per cent of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880's when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard.


Now here is a curious idea to ponder. Senator Ted Kennedy's office released a paper not too long ago claiming that prior to compulsory education the state literacy rate was 98% and after it the figure never again reached above 91% where it stands in 1990. I hope that interests you.


Here is another curiosity to think about. The homeschooling movement has quietly grown to a size where one and a half million young people are being educated entirely by their own parents. Last month the education press reported the amazing news that children schooled at home seem to be five or even ten years ahead of their formally trained peers in their ability to think.


I don't think we'll get rid of schools anytime soon, certainly not in my lifetime, but if we're going to change what is rapidly becoming a disaster of ignorance, we need to realize that the school institution "schools" very well, but it does not "educate" - that's inherent in the design of the thing. It's not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent, it's just impossible for education and schooling ever to be the same thing.


Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnard Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and some other men to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce through the application of formulae, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.


To a very great extent, schools succeed in doing this. But our society is disintegrating, and in such a society, the only successful people are self-reliant, confident, and individualistic - because the community life which protects the dependent and the weak is dead. The products of schooling are, as I've said, irrelevant. Well-schooled people are irrelevant. They can sell film and razor blades, push paper and talk on the telephones, or sit mindlessly before a flickering computer terminal but as human beings they are useless. Useless to others and useless to themselves.


The daily misery around us is, I think, in large measure caused by the fact that - as Paul Goodman put it thirty years ago - we force children to grow up absurd. Any reform in schooling has to deal with its absurdities.


It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety, indeed it cuts you off from your own part and future, scaling you to a continuous present much the same way television does.


It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.


It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home demanding that you do its "homework".


"How will they learn to read?" you say and my answer is "Remember the lessons of Massachusetts." When children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cellblocks they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease if those things make sense in the kind of life that unfolds around them.


But keep in mind that in the United States almost nobody who reads, writes or does arithmetic gets much respect. We are a land of talkers, we pay talkers the most and admire talkers the most, and so our children talk constantly, following the public models of television and schoolteachers. It is very difficult to teach the "basics" anymore because they really aren't basic to the society we've made.


Two institutions at present control our children's lives - television and schooling, in that order. Both of these reduce the real world of wisdom, fortitude, temperance, and justice to a never-ending, non-stopping abstraction. In centuries past the time of a child and adolescent would be occupied in real work, real charity, real adventures, and the realistic search for mentors who might teach what you really wanted to learn. A great deal of time was spent in community pursuits, practicing affection, meeting and studying every level of the community, learning how to make a home, and dozens of other tasks necessary to become a whole man or woman.


But here is the calculus of time the children I teach must deal with:


Out of the 168 hours in each week, my children sleep 56. That leaves them 112 hours a week out of which to fashion a self.


My children watch 55 hours of television a week according to recent reports. That leaves them 57 hours a week in which to grow up.


My children attend school 30 hours a week, use about 6 hours getting ready, going and coming home, and spend an average of 7 hours a week in homework - a total of 45 hours. During that time, they are under constant surveillance, have no private time or private space, and are disciplined if they try to assert individuality in the use of time or space. That leaves 12 hours a week out of which to create a unique consciousness. Of course, my kids eat, and that takes some time - not much, because they've lost the tradition of family dining, but if we allot 3 hours a week to evening meals, we arrive at a net amount of private time for each child of 9 hours.


It's not enough. It's not enough, is it? The richer the kid, or course, the less television he watches but the rich kid's time is just as narrowly proscribed by a somewhat broader catalog of commercial entertainments and his inevitable assignment to a series of private lessons in areas seldom of his actual choice.


And these things are oddly enough just a more cosmetic way to create dependent human beings, unable to fill their own hours, unable to initiate lines of meaning to give substance and pleasure to their existence. It's a national disease, this dependency and aimlessness, and I think schooling and television and lessons - the entire Chautauqua idea - has a lot to do with it.


Think of the things that are killing us as a nation - narcotic drugs, brainless competition, recreational sex, the pornography of violence, gambling, alcohol, and the worst pornography of all - lives devoted to buying things, accumulation as a philosophy - all of them are addictions of dependent personalities, and that is what our brand of schooling must inevitably produce.


I want to tell you what the effect is on children of taking all their time from them - time they need to grow up - and forcing them to spend it on abstractions. You need to hear this, because no reform that doesn't attack these specific pathologies will be anything more than a facade.
The children I teach are indifferent to the adult world. This defies the experience of thousands of years. A close study of what big people were up to was always the most exciting occupation of youth, but nobody wants to grow up these days and who can blame them? Toys are us.
The children I teach have almost no curiosity and what they do have is transitory; they cannot concentrate for very long, even on things they choose to do. Can you see a connection between the bells ringing again and again to change classes and this phenomenon of evanescent attention?
The children I teach have a poor sense of the future, of how tomorrow is inextricably linked to today. As I said before, they have a continuous present, the exact moment they are at is the boundary of their consciousness.
The children I teach are ahistorical, they have no sense of how past has predestined their own present, limiting their choices, shaping their values and lives.
The children I teach are cruel to each other, they lack compassion for misfortune, they laugh at weakness, and they have contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly.
The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candor. My guess is that they are like many adopted people I've known in this respect - they cannot deal with genuine intimacy because of a lifelong habit of preserving a secret inner self inside a larger outer personality made up of artificial bits and pieces of behavior borrowed from television or acquired to manipulate teachers. Because they are not who they represent themselves to be the disguise wears thin in the presence of intimacy so intimate relationships have to be avoided.
The children I teach are materialistic, following the lead of schoolteachers who materialistically "grade" everything - and television mentors who offer everything in the world for free.
The children I teach are dependent, passive, and timid in the presence of new challenges. This is frequently masked by surface bravado, or by anger or aggressiveness but underneath is a vacuum without fortitude.


I could name a few other conditions that school reform would have to tackle if our national decline is to be arrested, but by now you will have grasped my thesis, whether you agree with it or not. Either schools have caused these pathologies, or television, or both. It's a simple matter [of] arithmetic, between schooling and television all the time the children have is eaten away. That's what has destroyed the American family, it is no longer a factor in the education of its own children. Television and schooling, in those things the fault must lie.


What can be done? First we need a ferocious national debate that doesn't quit, day after day, year after year. We need to scream and argue about this school thing until it is fixed or broken beyond repair, one or the other. If we can fix it, fine; if we cannot, then the success of homeschooling shows a different road to take that has great promise. Pouring the money we now pour into family education might kill two birds with one stone, repairing families as it repairs children.


Genuine reform is possible but it shouldn't cost anything. We need to rethink the fundamental premises of schooling and decide what it is we want all children to learn and why. For 140 years this nation has tried to impose objectives downward from the lofty command center made up of "experts", a central elite of social engineers. It hasn't worked. It won't work. And it is a gross betrayal of the democratic promise that once made this nation a noble experiment. The Russian attempt to create Plato's republic in Eastern Europe has exploded before [our] eyes, our own attempt to impose the same sort of central orthodoxy using the schools as an instrument is also coming apart at the seams, albeit more slowly and painfully. It doesn't work because its fundamental premises are mechanical, anti-human, and hostile to family life. Lives can be controlled by machine education but they will always fight back with weapons of social pathology - drugs, violence, self-destruction, indifference, and the symptoms I see in the children I teach.


It's high time we looked backwards to regain an educational philosophy that works. One I like particularly well has been a favorite of the ruling classes of Europe for thousands of years. I use as much of it as I can manage in my own teaching, as much, that is, as I can get away with given the present institution of compulsory schooling. I think it works just as well for poor children as for rich ones.


At the core of this elite system of education is the belief that self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge. Everywhere in this system, at every age, you will find arrangements to place the child alone in an unguided setting with a problem to solve. Sometimes the problem is fraught with great risks, such as the problem of galloping a horse or making it jump, but that, of course, is a problem successfully solved by thousands of elite children before the age of ten. Can you imagine anyone who had mastered such a challenge ever lacking confidence in his ability to do anything? Sometimes the problem is the problem of mastering solitude, as Thoreau did at Walden Pond, or Einstein did in the Swiss customs house.


One of my former students, Roland Legiardi-Lura, though both his parents were dead and he had no inheritance, took a bicycle across the United States alone when he was hardly out of boyhood. Is it any wonder then that in manhood when he decided to make a film about Nicaragua, although he had no money and no prior experience with film-making, that it was an international award-winner - even though his regular work was as a carpenter.


Right now we are taking all the time from our children that they need to develop self-knowledge. That has to stop. We have to invent school experiences that give a lot of that time back, we need to trust children from a very early age with independent study, perhaps arranged in school but which takes place away from the institutional setting. We need to invent curriculum where each kid has a chance to develop private uniqueness and self-reliance.


A short time ago I took seventy dollars and sent a twelve-year-old girl from my class with her non-English speaking mother on a bus down the New Jersey coast to take the police chief of Sea Bright to lunch and apologize for polluting [his] beach with a discarded Gatorade bottle. In exchange for this public apology I had arranged with the police chief for the girl to have a one-day apprenticeship in a small town police procedures. A few days later, two more of my twelve-year-old kids traveled alone to West First Street from Harlem where they began an apprenticeship with a newspaper editor, next week three of my kids will find themselves in the middle of the Jersey swamps at 6 A.M., studying the mind of a trucking company president as he dispatches 18-wheelers to Dallas, Chicago, and Los Angeles.


Are these "special" children in a "special" program? Well, in one sense, yes, but nobody knows about this program but the kids and myself. They're just nice kids from Central Harlem, bright and alert, but so badly schooled when they came to me that most of them can't add or subtract with any fluency. And not a single one knew the population of New York City or how far it is from New York to California.


Does that worry me? Of course, but I am confident that as they gain self-knowledge they'll also become self-teachers - and only self-teaching has any lasting value.


We've got to give kids independent time right away because that is the key to self-knowledge, and we must re-involve them with the real world as fast as possible so that the independent time can be spent on something other than more abstraction. This is an emergency, it requires drastic action to correct - our children are dying like flies in schooling, good schooling or bad schooling, it's all the same. Irrelevant.


What else does a restructured school system need? It needs to stop being a parasite on the working community. Of all the pages in the human ledger, only our tortured entry has warehoused children and asked nothing of them in service to the general good. For a while I think we need to make community service a required part of schooling. Besides the experience in acting unselfishly that will teach, it is the quickest way to give young children real responsibility in the mainstream of life.


For five years I ran a guerilla program where I had every kid, rich and poor, smart and dipsy, give 320 hours a year of hard community service. Dozens of those kids came back to me years later, grown up, and told me that one experience of helping someone else changed their lives. It taught them to see in new ways, to rethink goals and values. It happened when they were thirteen, in my Lab School program - only made possible because my rich school district was in chaos. When "stability" returned the Lab was closed. It was too successful with a wildly mixed group of kids, at too small of a cost, to be allowed to continue. We made the expensive elite programs look bad.


There is no shortage of real problems in the city. Kids can be asked to help solve them in exchange for the respect and attention of the total adult world. Good for kids, good for all the rest of us. That's curriculum that teaches Justice, one of the four cardinal virtues in every system of elite education. What's sauce for the rich and powerful is surely sauce for the rest of us - what is more, the idea is absolutely free as are all other genuine reform ideas in education. Extra money and extra people put into this sick institution will only make it sicker.


Independent study, community service, adventures in experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships, the one day variety or longer - these are all powerful, cheap and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But no large-scale reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force the idea of "school" open - to include family as the main engine of education. The Swedes realized that in 1976 when they effectively abandoned the system of adopting unwanted children and instead spent national time and treasure on reinforcing the original family so that children born to Swedes were wanted. They didn't succeed completely but they did succeed in reducing the number of unwanted Swedish children from 6000 in l976 to 15 in 1986. So it can be done. The Swedes just got tired of paying for the social wreckage caused by children not raised by their natural parents so they did something about it. We can, too.


Family is the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents - and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850 - we're going to continue to have the horror show we have right now. The curriculum of family is at the heart of any good life, we've gotten away from that curriculum, time to return to it. The way to sanity in education is for our schools to take the lead in releasing the stranglehold of institutions on family life, to promote during school time confluences of parent and child that will strengthen family bonds. That was my real purpose in sending the girl and her mother down the Jersey coast to meet the police chief. I have many ideas to make a family curriculum and my guess is that a lot of you will have many ideas, too, once you begin to think about it. Our greatest problem in getting the kind of grass-roots thinking going that could reform schooling is that we have large vested interests pre-emptying all the air time and profiting from schooling just exactly as it is despite rhetoric to the contrary. We have to demand that new voices and new ideas get a hearing, my ideas and yours. We've all had a bellyful of authorized voices mediated by television and the press - a decade long free-for-all debate is what is called for now, not any more "expert" opinions. Experts in education have never been right, their "solutions" are expensive, self-serving, and always involve further centralization. Enough. Time for a return to democracy, individuality, and family. I've said my piece. Thank you.




© John Taylor Gatto. All rights reserved.


This article is the text of a speech by John Taylor Gatto accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990. It is reprinted with permission of the author.

• 

A man who stood tall upholding the name of Malaysian palm oil industry

SC Chin, Research writer
May 3rd, 2019 (Updated May 4th, 2019)

The Malaysian oil palm industry has ceainly gone through its fair share of ups and downs over the last century. From the moment Frenchman Henri Fauconnier first planted oil palm at Tennamaram Estate in Batang Berjuntai (now known as Bestari Jaya) in 1917, it set off an adventurous yet fruitful journey for the industry.

From pioneers who laid the foundations in the early days, to dynamos who took it to greater heights in the decades that followed, everyone had an important role in shaping the industry to its present dominant state.

Today, Malaysia is at the forefront of championing the sustainability of this fiercely contested crop amid many disputable smear campaigns. Yes, the Malaysian oil palm industry has come a long way since the primitive days at the turn of the 20th century.

We owe our success to the leadership and stewardship of many people across different generations. Even though some have passed on, their legacy just lives on. And there is one man in particular, whose name is truthfully upheld by the industry fraternity as - “The Palm Oil King” of Malaysia.

Danish born Tan Sri Borge Bek-Nielsen may not be a household name that lingers on our lips, but he certainly left a trail of commanding footprints in our history book, as far as the Malaysian oil palm industry is concerned.

Knowing so little about a name that is so iconic to the industry is such a shame. Call it a tribute to a special man, the late Bek-Nielsen deserved many rounds of applause for his selfless contributions to the industry, spanning nearly six decades from 1951 to 2005.

The story of this very down-to-earth former chairman of United Plantations (UP) can be both fascinating and inspiring. The way he dedicated his life to the industry made him a man of determination and tenacity with a sharp vision driven by his courage and farsightedness.

Bek-Nielsen carried with him the embodiment of an engineer (how he started his career at UP), innovator, entrepreneur, industrialist, leader, mentor, motivator, philanthropist, discipline and integrity – all of which made him such a respected figure in the industry.

He was a game-changer who would stay ahead of his peers, putting his ingenuity to good use.

Bek-Nielsen was affectionately known as the de facto guardian who stood the ground for the Malaysian oil palm industry when the American soybean lobby launched the infamous smear campaign against palm oil in the 1980s.

Armed with detailed research findings and a dedicated organizational support structure from the Malaysian government, he took on the propaganda power of the rich, protectionist West. Together with Tun Dr. Lim Keng Yaik, the then minister for primary industries, and Tan Sri Dr. Augustine Ong, then director-general of Palm Oil Research Institute of Malaysia (PORIM), they toured America to restore the reputation of Malaysian palm oil, crushing the make-believe myths with hard scientific facts.

Not discrediting the other team members who fought hard for the livelihoods of all the stakeholders, Bek-Nielsen was instrumental in turning the tide on their opponents in the counter-attack, fueled by his fervent and energetic temperament.

Bek-Nielsen arrived in Malaysia (known as Malaya then) in 1951 as a young mechanical engineer for UP and worked his way up to be the senior executive director in 1971 and was finally appointed as the chairman of the plantation group from 1978 to 1982.

The Dane is known for his resourcefulness that revolutionized UP to a very efficient state with industry-wide standards, thus becoming a role model for the Malaysian oil palm industry ever since.

The Unitata refinery in Jendarata, Teluk Intan, which came into operation in 1974, is one of the export-led industrialization efforts by Bek-Nielsen to open up more markets.

“Few have managed what Bek-Nielsen has done and nobody in the industry has ever doubted it, that UP is considered the best oil palm plantation in the world,” said John Madsen, the former CEO of Carlsberg Malaysia, who first met Bek-Nielsen in 1981.

Recalling his visit to UP’s refinery, Madsen said: “The refinery from the outside looks like an office building….. Not a single drop of oil or a spot on the floor. Everything is stainless steel and as clean as your living room! Bek-Nielsen was an extremely tidy, orderly and fastidious person. Everything just had to be right, to be perfect.“

Some of Bek-Nielsen’s colleagues told Madsen: ”We could never have had a better leader. He was tough but always fair”.

Bek-Nielsen won enormous respect from his workers by being thorough, never compromising on quality but by showing his passion for work. He also showed them how much he cared by providing all workers with the best housing, schools, nurseries, sports facilities, old folks homes and houses of worship for all religions.

Even the lowest paid worker had his own house for his family. Bek-Nielsen did everything he could to ensure that all workers were treated well and respected as human beings. He understood and lived by the philosophy that you get much more in return, business-wise, by giving.

“Mr. Bek-Nielsen lived and worked by the principles of honesty, integrity and hands-on leadership…. or management by walking around! He was often spotted around the estate checking up on work, progress and so forth,” said one of his workers in remembrance of the great Dane.

Bek-Nielsen had shown us what a good corporate citizenship should be. He cared for everything. He ploughed the fruit of success back into the community. He put things into action and turned dreams into reality.

He fully understood the importance of knowledge sharing to steer the industry further and that was how the Bek-Nielsen Foundation Lecture Series came into fruition.

I wish I could tell you everything about the remarkable life of Bek-Nielsen and the UP legacy he left behind in fewest words possible. But I think Susan M. Martin did a really great job. This is a must-read: The UP Saga.

And on the sustainability issue that flared up in the West in the early 2000s, UP took this new trend very seriously under the auspices of Dato’ Carl Bek-Nielsen, current chief executive director of UP and his younger brother Martin Bek-nielsen, UP’s executive director, after the official retirement of their late father in 2003.

Concerted efforts were taken by the two brothers to ensure that the spirit of sustainability was “built into” the UP fabric and not just "bolted on", hence leading to United Plantations becoming the world’s first certified producer of sustainable palm oil under the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in 2008. Since then, UP has taken a step further, obtaining Asia's only producer with the RSPO Next certification then, surpassing even the strictest sustainability criteria in the West.

“The fight to uphold palm oil's name continues, this time it’s under the topic of sustainability. This will be a long drawn battle but a war which we can win by doing what is necessary and by adapting to change.”

“I believe very much in the notion of conservation, which means striking a vital balance between development and environmental protection, and living up to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, so no one is left behind and where opportunities are provided for all, especially the developing nations and not just the developed nations.”

“The palm industry has a vital role to play here and I believe that if we make the right but tough decisions, we can come out on top far ahead of all other agricultural crops,” remarked Dato’ Carl Bek-Nielsen, affirming UP’s commitment towards nurturing a healthy oil palm ecosystem through environmentally and operationally sustainable practices.

To sum it all up, the big-picture thinking of this story - the Malaysian oil palm industry certainly needs more movers and shakers like Tan Sri Borge Bek-Nielsen, whose lifelong enthusiasm and optimism, together with his botanical and mechanical innovation, brought forth good practices that

Two Familes Sri Lanka bombings

*Two Super-Rich Families Ended Up on Opposite Sides of Easter Attacks... A story of unbearable grief... Islamic extremism, madness and hatred*😣




(10 min read) 😃👇




By New York Times, Jeffrey Gettleman, Kai Schultz, Mujib Mashal and Russell Goldman

April 27, 2019




COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — A little before 9 a.m. on Easter Sunday, Anders Holch Povlsen, the richest man in Denmark, was having breakfast with his family at the Table One restaurant in the Shangri-La Hotel in Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo.




The restaurant was decorated with crates of oranges, apples and large, uncut pineapples, and the Povlsens looked out on the ocean rollers crashing into a sea wall not far away.




At the same time, Ilham Ibrahim, the son of one of Sri Lanka’s wealthiest spice traders, was heading down to Table One in an elevator. Wearing a baseball cap and a large backpack, he stepped into the elevator with a friend wearing the same thing. Right before the doors opened, CCTV shows, Mr. Ibrahim’s friend flashed him a long, white smile.




The two families, the Povlsens and the Ibrahims, were about to intersect.




One was a billionaire in dollars. The other, a billionaire in rupees. One built a fortune through jeans, turtlenecks and all kinds of hip clothing. The other, through white pepper, black pepper and all kinds of spices.




They both were well-known and admired, part of wildly successful, close-knit business families from opposite ends of the world and perhaps opposite ends of the ideological spectrum.




In an instant, five of their children — Ilham, Inshaf, Alma, Agnes and Alfred — were blown to pieces, one side slaughtered by the other.




Two of the Ibrahim sons — Ilham and his older brother, Inshaf — were among the suicide bombers behind the series of devastating attacks around the country. Sri Lanka’s Muslims have been painfully perplexed by the question of why two of their most privileged sons would do this.




“Everybody keeps asking me that question,” said Hilmy Ahmed, the vice president of the Muslim Council of Sri Lanka. “I don’t know if there ever will be an answer.”




A week after 250 people were killed in the attacks by Islamist extremists, Sri Lanka remains in shock. Fear is printed on so many faces. An unnatural quiet fills areas that should be busy, like Old Moor Street in Colombo where the Ibrahims ran their spice empire from behind an unassuming storefront with a gray gate.




Investigators from half a dozen countries, including the United States, are still combing through the three hotels and three churches that were hit, searching for clues of how an obscure Islamist group with no history of serious violence could execute one of the deadliest attacks in the world in recent years.




Behind each of the little white funeral flags fluttering across Colombo is a story of almost unbearable grief — of young couples who died together, of shrapnel piercing toddlers’ flesh, of people who will love no more.




Perhaps the most striking is how the paths of the Ibrahims and Povlsens, two powerful families with so much to live for, crossed that day.




A Visionary Businessman

The Shangri-La Hotel rises up as a sleek tower along Colombo’s scenic Galle Face drive, a 32-story rectangle of steel and bluish glass with unobstructed views of the Indian Ocean. The Povlsens stayed here, part of a beach vacation to Sri Lanka during their children’s Easter school break.




It was Anders, the intensely private chief executive of a huge family-run fashion company called Bestseller; his wife, Anne; and their four children, ages around 5 to 15.




Alma was the oldest. She had shared a few pictures of her trip on Instagram, but it was almost as if she were keeping her posts intentionally vague: glassy waves viewed from an empty beach, a tree canopy against a bright tropical sky, a portrait of her siblings, taken only from behind.




There may be a reason behind this. In the late 1990s, a blackmailer trespassed on Anders’ parents’ estate and threatened to kill them if he wasn’t paid. A few years later, kidnappers abducted a man for ransom in India, mistaking him for Mr. Povlsen.




Soren Jakobsen, a biographer who wrote about the Povlsens, said the family “has had security as their top priority for 20 years.” Anders, 46, didn’t like anyone taking his picture and avoided social media.




The Povlsens live in a secluded, 600-year-old manor house. They also own several castles and 220,000 acres in Scotland, which Anders has committed to “re-wilding,” as he calls it. He is worth about $8 billion, Forbes says.




He hobnobs with Danish princes, raising chickens and brewing beer with them, leading a charmed life that in Denmark has spawned near hagiography. Bestseller employees and people in his town, Stavtrup, said that he was down to earth and that they didn’t fear him.




“Anders Holch Povlsen is not a smart ass,” Mr. Jakobsen said, “but a solid, honest and visionary businessman. That’s why they are supporting him.”




That was nearly the same thing many people said about the Ibrahims.




He Never Showed His Face

Mohamed Ibrahim loved to tell the story of his ring.




It was the late 1960s, and he was an uneducated teenage boy from Delthota, a small town in Sri Lanka’s lush center. He sold his favorite ring for bus fare to get to Colombo, by himself. He never looked back.




In the bowels of Colombo’s Muslim quarter, he slaved away as a cook, then as a vendor of onions. Then he got into sesame and pepper. Sack by sack, he inched up the spice trade.




Sri Lanka’s tropical climate and rich soil produce some of the world’s most desired spices. Until last week, Mr. Ibrahim ran one of the island’s biggest spice exporters, sending 20 million pounds of pepper to India each year.




He bought and sold so much, merchants said, that he could set the price. He also served as the president of the Colombo Traders Association, lived in a million-dollar mansion on Colombo’s outskirts and kept a fleet of six cars, including a BMW.




Family members said Mr. Ibrahim, even at around 70, was a tireless worker, up at 4 a.m., off to the mosque, then a simple breakfast at home. He spent the rest of the day in his spice factory, rubbing the peppercorns between his fingers, inspecting the quality of his products.




The Ibrahims’ office on Old Moor Street is tucked between bare shops where the smells of cumin, chili and cinnamon mix in the air.




“He calls everyone brother,” said A.B. Kaldeen, a date importer who remembered Mr. Ibrahim’s generosity during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting. “Even the investigators told us they know he is a good person.”




Neighbors often spotted him walking down Old Moor Street with his head down, eyes on the ground, in a slight stoop.




His eldest son, Inshaf, around 35, was flashier. He drove a new white Toyota Landcruiser and stood taller than most Sri Lankan men, around 5 feet 11 inches, with a muscular build. Friends said he walked fast, no matter where he was going.




Years ago, at D.S. Senanayake, considered one of Colombo’s most prestigious schools, his nickname was Kudda, or Powder, an affectionate reference to the family’s spice business.




Inshaf was being groomed to take over, and his father set him up with a copper pipe factory. A picture from 2016 shows Inshaf beaming as he and his father accept an award from a minister — one of several awards bestowed on the Ibrahims from the Sri Lankan government.




He was a handsome man, healthy looking, and sported a snug-fitting gray suit and a long wispy beard.




Ilham, the second son, around 31, was more withdrawn. Merchants on Old Moor Street barely saw him. It seems his job was to oversee a family pepper farm near Matale, a city a few hours away.




“Ilham never showed his face to people,” said a relative who did not want to be named, saying it would bring him problems to be publicly connected to the Ibrahim brothers. “He was not so comfortable.”




‘Be Strong’

It’s not clear how long the Povlsens spent in Colombo: Alma’s Instagram posts indicate that she was in Sri Lanka at least four days. One image, taken on the Thursday before Easter and tagged Sri Lanka, shows three younger children, presumably her siblings, sitting at the edge of a swimming pool framed by tall palm trees. The caption reads: “Three little darlings.”




The night before the Easter attacks, according to a family member who spoke with journalists, Inshaf told his wife that he was traveling to Zambia. As he said goodbye, he lingered an extra moment outside the car and said, “Be strong.”




He then checked into the Cinnamon Grand hotel in Colombo. His brother Ilham checked into the Shangri-La. Inshaf used a fake identity card, but Ilham used his real identification, a decision that, after the attacks, would have additional deadly consequences.




CCTV footage from the Shangri-La shows Ilham stepping into the elevator and later into the Table One restaurant with another man who has now been identified as Zaharan Hashim, the bombings’ suspected mastermind. When the authorities figure out how they met, it will unlock a lot about what was about to unfold.




The authorities say that Mr. Zaharan was an extremist Muslim preacher and recruiter for the Islamic State from eastern Sri Lanka who attracted a small following by posting fiery videos on YouTube.




Last year, Mr. Zaharan was preaching hateful messages against non-Muslims in a town about 30 miles from where Ilham managed the family pepper farm. At the time, in this same area, feelings were raw between Buddhists, who are the majority in Sri Lanka, and Muslims, who make up about 10 percent of the population.




Buddhist monks had just led riots that killed several Muslims. Police officials said Mr. Zaharan had tapped into this and encouraged young men in the area to deface Buddhist statues.




It is not clear how Mr. Zaharan and Ilham met, but members of the Ibrahim extended family say Ilham was more devout than others in his family and that his young wife, Fatima, covered her entire face with a veil, unusual in Sri Lanka.




The mutual attraction makes sense: If Ilham was looking for spiritual guidance, Mr. Zaharan may have offered that. And if Mr. Zaharan had murderous plans, then the Ibrahim family fortune could help finance them.




Mother Blows Up Her Children

On Easter Sunday, the skies above Colombo were clear. The sun beat down. All of the major hotels — and churches — were crowded.




Table One was filling with guests. They sat in long rows in green cushioned chairs, the room lit by bright windows. The food on offer included the likes of English breakfast sausages, fish curry and string hoppers (spongy rice noodles popular in Sri Lanka).




Ilham and Mr. Zaharan entered the restaurant from different sides. Around 8:50 a.m., they blew themselves up.




Asanga Abeyagoonasekera, a foreign policy expert for Sri Lanka’s Defense Ministry, was staying with his family on the ninth floor. He says the whole building shook.




Mr. Abeyagoonasekera rushed down the fire escape with his wife and two young sons. Gravely wounded people were stumbling outside. The ground was covered in blood. He saw a Western woman being carried away.




“She was right in front of me,’’ he said. “She was hit. She was lifeless.”




Mr. Abeyagoonasekera does not remember seeing Mr. Povlsen or his family. At that moment, he said, all he and his wife were trying to do was cover their sons’ eyes.




As soon as they got home, his 6-year-old threw up.




Thirty-three people were killed at the Shangri-La, including three of Mr. Povlsen’s four children. It is not clear how the blast killed half of the family and spared the rest.




In a photo taken at the National Hospital of Sri Lanka in Colombo a few hours later, a man who appears to be Mr. Povlsen clutches a mobile phone to his ear, his shirt stained with blood, his left eye nearly swollen shut. When a Sri Lankan journalist asked to speak to him, he shook his head.




At the Cinnamon Grand, CCTV footage shows Inshaf, wearing a backpack and ball cap, stepping into the buffet room. But then he stops. He walks forward and then back, forward and then back, several times, his body tight.




“He was clearly reluctant,” said the family member. “He was always more connected to people than Ilham.”




But whatever hesitation he might have been feeling, Inshaf overcame it. He killed himself and 20 others.




Within minutes of one another, seven suicide bombers across Sri Lanka detonated backpacks stuffed with powerful explosives, blowing apart people at three hotels and three churches.




Because Ilham used his real identification card when he checked into Shangri-La, the police quickly figured out who he was. Within hours, constables swarmed the Ibrahim mansion.




They were greeted at the door by a woman who then turned around and dashed up the stairs. It was Fatima, Ilham’s wife.




At the top of the stairs in front of her three children, Fatima blew herself up, killing three police officers and all of the children, ages 5, 4 and nine months. Police officials said she might have been pregnant, too.




Mr. Ibrahim, the family patriarch, was handcuffed to a police officer and taken away.




The next day, Mr. Povlsen, his wife and their only surviving child, Astrid, left Colombo on a private jet.




On Thursday, more than 1,000 people in the Povlsens’ town, Stavtrup, marched in a torchlight vigil up to the family’s home. Some could not hold back their tears. People were crying even in the supermarket.




Mr. Ibrahim remains in custody: Most of his associates say they believe he knew nothing about the suicide plot.




Mr. Ahmed, the vice president of Sri Lanka’s Muslim Council, said that even though Mr. Ibrahim is 70, he is likely to be tortured.




“If they need to, they will,” he said. “I’m sure of it.”

New International Economic Order

The promise of the 'New International Economic Order'
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16 April 2019 AfricaBurkina Faso
In 1984, President of Burkina Faso Thomas Sankara addressed the United Nations General Assembly. Sankara was perhaps the last ‘Third World’ politician, a revolutionary Marxist who felt a ‘special solidarity uniting the three continents of Asia, Latin America and Africa’. In his speech, he argued for a New International Economic Order to improve the poor countries’ lot and spoke on behalf of all the oppressed across the world. What has become of Sankara’s vision 35 years later? We reproduce an abridged version of the speech, followed by a reflection on Sankara’s words by Vijay Prashad, historian of Third World internationalism.


Eternal victory!
I bring the fraternal greetings of a country covering 274,000 square kilometres, where seven million men, women and children refuse henceforth to die of ignorance, hunger and thirst even though they are not yet able to have a real life, after a quarter of a century as a sovereign state represented here at the United Nations.

I do not intend to enunciate dogmas here. I am neither a messiah nor a prophet. My only ambition is a twofold aspiration: first, to be able to speak in a simple language, the language of facts and clarity, on behalf of my people; and, second, to be able to express the feelings of that mass of people who are disinherited – those who belong to what the world maliciously dubbed ‘the third world’ – and to state the reasons that have led us to rise up…

Nobody will be surprised to hear us associate the former Upper Volta, now Burkina Faso, with that despised rag-bag, the third world… We do so to affirm our awareness of belonging to a three-continent whole and to state, as one of the Non-Aligned Countries, our deeply felt conviction that a special solidarity unites the three continents of Asia, Latin America and Africa in the same battle against the same political traffickers and economic exploiters.

Thus to recognize our presence in the third world is, to paraphrase José Márti, to affirm that we feel on our cheek every blow struck against every other man in the world…

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Now our eyes have been opened to the class struggle and there will be no more blows dealt against us. It must be proclaimed that there will be no salvation for our peoples unless we turn our backs completely on all the [economic] models that all the charlatans of that type have tried to sell us for 20 years.

This is something that we, we the people of Burkina Faso, understood on that night of 4 August 1983, when the stars first began to shine in the heavens of our homeland… Instead of a minor, short-lived revolt, we had to have revolution, the eternal struggle against all domination…

We want to democratize our society, to open up our minds to a universe of collective responsibility, so that we may be bold enough to invent the future… We believe that the United Nations should enable those countries affected by drought to establish a medium- and long-term plan to achieve self-sufficiency in food… We have established a vast house-building programme… and we are also building roads, small water collectors, and so forth. We swear that in future in Burkina Faso nothing will be done without the participation of the people themselves.

I speak not only on behalf of Burkina Faso… but also on behalf of all those who suffer… those millions of human beings who are in ghettos because their skin is black… those [indigenous Americans] who have been massacred, trampled on and… confined to reservations… women throughout the entire world who suffer from a system of exploitation imposed on them by men… I wish to stand side by side with the peoples of Afghanistan and Ireland, the peoples of Grenada and East Timor… We wish to enjoy the inheritance of all the revolutions of the world, all the liberation struggles of third-world peoples.

There must be no more deceit. The New International Economic Order, for which we are struggling and will continue to struggle, can be achieved only if we manage to do away with the old order, which completely ignores us; only if we insist on… the right to decision-making with respect to the machinery governing trade, economic and monetary affairs at the world level.

Down with international reaction! Down with imperialism! Down with neo-colonialism! Eternal victory to the peoples of Africa, Latin America and Asia in their struggle!

New York, 4 October 1984

Thomas Sankara (1949-87) was born in French Upper Volta. Aged 33, he became President, changing the country’s name to Burkina Faso, which means ‘land of the honest and upright’. His four-year revolution altered the structure of society by setting up directly elected local councils that gave ordinary people more control over their lives. He was known for living a humble life, refusing to use air conditioning in the presidential office. He was assassinated in a military coup by Blaise Compaoré, a childhood friend, who took the country down a road of neoliberalism and subservience to France, its former colonial master.

Our broken world
So easy to describe the problem – the hunger, the famine, the wars, the destruction of nature. So easy to feel bad about the conditions of our present, to worry for humans and for nature, to worry about extinction.

So hard to think of solutions, to devise an exit from the path to annihilation. So hard to imagine that anything other than the ugly present is the future.

Ours is a broken world. But it does not have to be so.

For hundreds of years, sensitive human beings fought to build a world in the image of freedom. Workers and peasants, ordinary people with dirt under their fingernails, threw off the cloak of humiliation put on them by the owners of land and wealth to demand something better. They formed anti-colonial movements and socialist movements, movements against the terrorism of hunger and indignity. These were movements, people in motion. They did not accept their position as static. They were on the move, not only towards the landlord’s house or the factory’s gates, but towards the future.

These movements produced a truly revolutionary century. It began with the revolutions of 1911 (China, Iran, Mexico), the revolution of 1917 (against the Tsarist empire), the revolution of 1949 (China), the revolution of 1959 (Cuba) and many, many others, including your revolution, Thomas, the revolution of Burkina Faso (1983), the land of the honest and upright.

Each of these revolutions offered a promise: the world need not be organized in the image of the bourgeoisie, when it can as easily be developed around the needs of humanity. Why should the majority of the world’s people spend their lives working to build up the wealth of the few, when the purpose of life is so much richer and bolder than that? If the people from China to Cuba were able to overthrow the institutions of humiliation, then anyone could do so. That was the promise of revolutionary change.

Programmes for the benefit of humanity followed these revolutions – projects to enhance the lives of people through universal education and universal healthcare, projects to make work co-operative and enriching rather than debilitating. Each of these revolutions experimented in different ways with the palette of human emotions – refusing to allow state institutions and social life to be governed by a narrow interpretation of human instinct (greed, for example, which is the emotion around which capitalism is developed). Could ‘care’ and ‘solidarity’ be part of the emotional landscape? Could ‘greed’ and ‘hate’ be overcome?

Out of these struggles came a broad programme for the organization of planetary affairs – the New International Economic Order (NIEO), which was proposed by the Third World in the 1970s under the auspices of the UN. Trade and development policy could be subordinated to the values of solidarity and care, to the values of human development and not profit maximization. Social wealth could be harnessed to build up the best of human potential rather than be sequestered into the hands of the few to fester in bank accounts. The NIEO shone a light of promise.

None of this was allowed. The NIEO was destroyed by the imperialist core, the triad of Europe, Japan and the United States. It was not permitted to flourish. They used the debt crisis as a way to demand ‘structural adjustment’ of the economies of the formerly colonized states, to demand that they accept the rules set by the triad rather than form their own. Any threat to the order established by property and privilege could not be allowed.

And so, that’s where we are, 35 years since your speech to the United Nations. Any threat to the order is to be destroyed, even if it means the emergence of strongmen to do the destruction. There is blood on the tracks. Death to those who dream is more acceptable than death to the order that favours property and privilege.

Yet the present is intolerable. And so, we turn again to our hopes and to the necessity of our struggles. We want the guns to be silent, as silent as the cries of hungry children. We want to reach out to the stars and pull them down closer to us, to give us confidence as we destroy the old order that destroys the world, to give us confidence to build institutions of humanity and for nature. We want.



Vijay Prashad is the Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and Chief Editor of LeftWord Books. His book Red Star over the Third World (Pluto Books) is released in the UK later this year.

Suicide bombings before 2003

Volume 97, Issue 3
August 2003 , pp. 343-361

The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism
ROBERT A. PAPE (a1)


https://doi.org/10.1017/S000305540300073X
Published online: 27 August 2003

Abstract


Suicide terrorism is rising around the world, but the most common explanations do not help us understand why. Religious fanaticism does not explain why the world leader in suicide terrorism is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a group that adheres to a Marxist/Leninist ideology, while existing psychological explanations have been contradicted by the widening range of socio-economic backgrounds of suicide terrorists. To advance our understanding of this growing phenomenon, this study collects the universe of suicide terrorist attacks worldwide from 1980 to 2001, 188 in all. In contrast to the existing explanations, this study shows that suicide terrorism follows a strategic logic, one specifically designed to coerce modern liberal democracies to make significant territorial concessions. Moreover, over the past two decades, suicide terrorism has been rising largely because terrorists have learned that it pays. Suicide terrorists sought to compel American and French military forces to abandon Lebanon in 1983, Israeli forces to leave Lebanon in 1985, Israeli forces to quit the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 1994 and 1995, the Sri Lankan government to create an independent Tamil state from 1990 on, and the Turkish government to grant autonomy to the Kurds in the late 1990s. In all but the case of Turkey, the terrorist political cause made more gains after the resort to suicide operations than it had before. Thus, Western democracies should pursue policies that teach terrorists that the lesson of the 1980s and 1990s no longer holds, policies which in practice may have more to do with improving homeland security than with offensive military action.

Flight 102 crash

A military vehicle aboard an overloaded plane in Afghanistan broke free and struck critical operating systems, probably leading to the 2013 crash that killed all seven crew members, US safety officials said on Tuesday.


The National Transportation Safety Board said an improperly secured mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicle, known as an MRAP, went through the bulkhead and disabled two hydraulic systems, making the aircraft uncontrollable.


The Dubai-bound Boeing 747-400 plane crashed just after takeoff from Bagram airbase on 29 April 2013, killing six crew members. It was operated by National Air Cargo Group Inc and carried 207 tonnes of cargo, including five MRAPs, weighing between 12 and 18 tonnes each.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Airlines_Flight_102




https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/15/crash-of-boeing-747-in-afghanistan-caused-by-shifting-cargo

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Teardrop - Massive Attack

A conversation with Mahathir Mohammed

I admire this man. Mostly I realise because he mirrors my views. Whether he has influenced me so thoroughly or it is through our similar backgrouds I dont know. I like to think that through our similar background: of being exposed to the same Malaysian doctors values, I have independently come to the same conclusions on many issues. Listening to him is listening to my thoughts with wit and humour. I enjoy.