Friday, July 9, 2010

Paul the octopus tips Spain......

Paul the octopus tips Spain to win World Cup

Paul the psychic octopus; world cup football final results

But Paul the celebrity Cephalopod disagrees with Mani the fortune-telling parakeet

LAST UPDATED 12:13 PM, JULY 9, 2010

Spanish football fans have reason to be confident ahead of the World Cup final on Sunday, as their team been picked to win by perhaps the most reliable tipster on the planet - Paul, the psychic octopus.

Paul has become a worldwide phenomenon during the World Cup and, after correctly predicting the result of all Germany's games, he has now plumped for Spain to beat Holland in the final on Sunday.

The Weymouth-born cephalopod, who now lives at the Sea Life Aquarium in the German city of Oberhausen, made his latest prediction on Friday, when he chose a mussel from a box containing a Spanish flag rather than the one with a Dutch flag on it.

Although he usually only predicts the outcome of games featuring his adopted country he was persuaded to have a punt on the winner of the final after first predicting who would win the third place play-off between Germany and Uruguay. His keepers were concerned that he could be "too tired" to choose between the finalists after the mental exertion required to decide that Germany would win the game, but in the end proved up to the task.

Paul faced the ire of German fans after he opted, correctly, for Spain to win their semi-final. But such is his international fame that senior politicians have stepped in to protect him. Spanish prime minister Jose Luiz Rodriguez Zapatero said: "I am concerned for the octopus. I am thinking of sending him a protective team."

While Spanish environment and fisheries minister Elena Espinosa announced: "On Monday, I shall be at the European Council of Ministers and I shall be asking for a [fishing] ban on Paul the octopus so the Germans do not eat him."

There are two slivers of hope for Dutch fans. One is that Paul has only previously predicted the outcome of matches featuring Germany, so his psychic abilities may not stretch beyond that.

The second is that a psychic parakeet in Malaysia thinks that the Dutch will emerge victorious. The 13-year-old bird, called Mani, correctly predicted the winners of the quarter finals and tipped Spain to beat Germany in the semis.

Mani is no stranger to future-gazing as she belongs to an 80-year-old fortune teller known as Mr Muniyappan, and has been helping him impart advice for five years.

Najib and the Crony Culture

Malaysia's Najib and the Crony Culture

Written by Barry Wain
Wednesday, 07 July 2010

The government backs down on a tycoon's sports betting plan

The Malaysian government has portrayed its recent decision not to legalize sports gambling as the action of a responsible administration responding to public opinion and keeping its promise to be more open and accountable.

In fact, the episode is a sharp reminder of how deeply entrenched the crony culture is in the country and how little has changed under the leadership of Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak.

While Najib has pleased many Malaysians by refusing to allow businessman Vincent Tan to expand his gambling empire, the prime minister's image has suffered because of his secretive attempt to revive sports betting.

In the public outcry over the proposal, Najib was also outmaneuvered by the political opposition through its control of key states in peninsular Malaysia. By reversing course, he underlined his growing reputation to backtrack on policy in the face of protest, as he has done over his ambition to dismantle certain parts of the New Economic Policy, the affirmative action plan that has benefited ethnic Malays for four decades.

Malaysians were kept in the dark this year as Vincent Tan, invoking an unpublicized agreement negotiated with the government decades ago, geared up to begin accepting bets on the World Cup in South Africa. With little warning, his company, Ascot Sports Sdn Bhd, announced that it had obtained exclusive rights to a business that could top RM20 billion annually – without competitive bidding or public discussion.

Dramatic as the news was, it wasn't the first time that Tan had been on the brink of starting Malaysia's first legal sports betting operation.

In 2004, months after becoming prime minister, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi discovered that a license had been issued to Tan in 2003 by Premier Mahathir Mohamad in his capacity as finance minister.

Abdullah's aides said Mahathir had awarded the license not long before retiring, but the former premier denied being "personally responsible" for it.

Worried that his administration would be open to criticism by conservative Muslims, especially the opposition Parti Islam Se-Malaysia, which had long campaigned to close existing gaming outlets, Abdullah vetoed the gambling concession.

Tan's revived plans burst into the open in early May in a filing with the stock exchange. Tan's publicly listed Berjaya Corporation Bhd. said it was buying his 70 percent stake in dormant Ascot Sports for RM525 million. (His son holds the remaining 30 percent.)

Berjaya said, "The Ministry of Finance has given its approval for the re-issuance of the license…upon certain terms and conditions." Berjaya subsequently made it known that the "re-issuance" took the form of a "letter of approval" it had received from the finance ministry in January. Najib acts as finance minister as well as premier.

In the uproar that followed, some of the mysterious history of the sports betting proposal emerged.

It transpires that Dr. Mahathir's government first issued a license to Tan in 1987, without informing the public. After suffering losses, Tan surrendered the license in 1990, but apparently negotiated for Ascot Sports to be given the right of first refusal if a new license was issued.

At first, the Najib government did not dispute Berjaya's claim to have obtained the license. But as opposition mounted to more legalized gambling – betting is permitted by non-Muslims on horse racing and lotteries and in a casino -- Najib, wearing his finance minister's hat, stunned the country by declaring that the license had not yet been issued after all.

In a written reply to members of Parliament, he said the government was "still getting feedback from various quarters" and had not finalized the terms and conditions. Najib's hesitation in following through on the letter of approval his ministry sent to Berjaya four months earlier reflected his political dilemma.

A strong element in the backlash was the memory of the Mahathir era, when well-connected businessmen, widely termed cronies, were given privatization and other government contracts without any tendering process. Vincent Tan was the chief non-Malay crony.

Moreover, Tan made his initial fortune when granted the privatized lottery Sports Toto, until then controlled by the Ministry of Finance, in 1985. The deal was kept secret initially, erupting into what became the "Sports Toto Scandal" when word of it eventually leaked.

By seeming to allow the license to go to Ascot Sports in a non-transparent fashion, Najib drew attention to what looked like his broken promises to be more open. He also appeared to be condoning gambling, which is forbidden in Islam and opposed by many Malays.

The government attempted to frame the widening debate as an effort to curb underground sports betting, which is known to be rampant in Malaysia.

But in reality Najib needed increased gambling tax to help reduce Malaysia's officially projected budget deficit from 7 percent to 3 percent of gross domestic product by 2015. One industry group estimated illegal sports betting turnover at RM20 billion to RM30 billion, and calculated potential government revenue at RM1 billion to RM3 billion.

Najib was also outflanked by the opposition. The Penang state government, led by the Democratic Action Party, declared a ban on sports betting, followed by Kedah and Selangor. Kelantan, controlled by Parti Islam and the only other state in opposition hands, forbids all forms of gambling.

Narrowing Najib's options further, sections of his United Malays National Organization, including UMNO Youth, opposed the move. Terengganu state, in UMNO hands, also said it would not allow sports gambling, according to local press reports.

After a meeting of UMNO's Supreme Council, Najib capitulated, saying the decision was taken "after much deliberation on the impact it will have from the perspective of religion and politics." Left unsaid was why Najib felt bound by a tainted agreement entered by a past administration, and whether more such deals might surface.

Barry Wain, writer-in-residence at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, is author of Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times.

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Obama: Our first female President...

President Obama's first year in office
President Barack Obama marks his first year in the White House this week. The good feelings that surrounded him in the months after Inauguration Day a year ago have faded. Since January 2009, Obama has signed an economic stimulus bill, pushed Congress to pass health-care reform, traveled overseas and upheld traditions like the White House Easter Egg roll and a State Dinner.

By Kathleen Parker
Wednesday, June 30, 2010

If Bill Clinton was our first black president, as Toni Morrison once proclaimed, then Barack Obama may be our first woman president.......

Obama shows he's the one in command!

Phew! That was fun. Now, if you'll just keep those hatchets holstered and hear me out.

No, I'm not calling Obama a girlie president. But . . . he may be suffering a rhetorical-testosterone deficit when it comes to dealing with crises, with which he has been richly endowed.
It isn't that he isn't "cowboy" enough, as others have suggested. Aren't we done with that? It is that his approach is feminine in a normative sense. That is, we perceive and appraise him according to cultural expectations, and he's not exactly causing anxiety in Alpha-maledom.

We've come a long way gender-wise. Not so long ago, women would be censured for speaking or writing in public. But cultural expectations are stickier and sludgier than oil. Our enlightened human selves may want to eliminate gender norms, but our lizard brains have a different agenda.

Women, inarguably, still are punished for failing to adhere to gender norms by acting "too masculine" or "not feminine enough." In her fascinating study about "Hating Hillary," Karlyn Kohrs Campbell details the ways our former first lady was chastised for the sin of talking like a lawyer and, by extension, "like a man."

Could it be that Obama is suffering from the inverse?

When Morrison wrote in the New Yorker about Bill Clinton's "blackness," she cited the characteristics he shared with the African American community:

"Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas."

If we accept that premise, even if unseriously proffered, then we could say that Obama displays many tropes of femaleness. I say this in the nicest possible way. I don't think that doing things a woman's way is evidence of deficiency but, rather, suggests an evolutionary achievement.

Nevertheless, we still do have certain cultural expectations, especially related to leadership. When we ask questions about a politician's beliefs, family or hobbies, we're looking for familiarity, what we can cite as "normal" and therefore reassuring.

Generally speaking, men and women communicate differently. Women tend to be coalition builders rather than mavericks (with the occasional rogue exception). While men seek ways to measure themselves against others, for reasons requiring no elaboration, women form circles and talk it out.

Obama is a chatterbox who makes Alan Alda look like Genghis Khan.

The BP oil crisis has offered a textbook case of how Obama's rhetorical style has impeded his effectiveness. The president may not have had the ability to "plug the damn hole," as he put it in one of his manlier outbursts. No one expected him to don his wetsuit and dive into the gulf, but he did have the authority to intervene immediately and he didn't. Instead, he deferred to BP, weighing, considering, even delivering jokes to the White House Correspondents' Association dinner when he should have been on Air Force One to the Louisiana coast.

His lack of immediate, commanding action was perceived as a lack of leadership because, well, it was. When he finally addressed the nation on day 56 (!) of the crisis, Obama's speech featured 13 percent passive-voice constructions, the highest level measured in any major presidential address this century, according to the Global Language Monitor, which tracks and analyzes language.

Granted, the century is young -- and it shouldn't surprise anyone that Obama's rhetoric would simmer next to George W. Bush's boil. But passivity in a leader is not a reassuring posture.
Campbell's research, in which she affirms that men can assume feminine communication styles successfully (Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton), suggests holes in my own theory. She insists that men are safe assuming female styles as long as they meet rhetorical norms for effective advocacy -- clarity and cogency of argument, appropriate and compelling evidence, and preempting opposing positions.

I'm not so sure. The masculine-coded context of the Oval Office poses special challenges, further exacerbated by a crisis that demands decisive action. It would appear that Obama tests Campbell's argument that "nothing prevents" men from appropriating women's style without negative consequences.

Indeed, negative reaction to Obama's speech suggests the opposite. Obama may prove to be our first male president who pays a political price for acting too much like a woman.
And, perhaps, next time will be a real woman's turn.