A senior Malaysian minister has vowed to end economic discrimination against the country’s ethnic Chinese and Indian minorities in a bid to revive government support, an official said yesterday.
Malaysia, which has a substantial population of minorities, has a system of affirmative action that gives preference to its Muslim-Malay majority in awarding contracts, government jobs and scholarships.
Ethnic Chinese and Indians, who together make up one-third of the country’s 27 million people, want to see an end to the policy. Many are also non-Muslims and complain that their religious rights have also been threatened.
International Trade Minister Muhyiddin Yassin pledged the government would ensure that the “economic cake” was shared equally in Malaysia, where Malays comprise 60 percent of the population, said an aide to Muhyiddin who declined to be named, citing protocol.
Muhyiddin, who last week was elected deputy president of the ruling party, is expected to take over as deputy prime minister this week.
“We want to implement more effective social programs. We begin by having a new leadership,” the New Straits Times quoted Muhyiddin as saying. “We admit that we have weaknesses and have made mistakes in the past.”
His aide confirmed that he made the comments.
His comments, while speaking to reporters on Monday, come at a crucial time for the ruling National Front coalition. The alliance, which has ruled Malaysia since independence in 1957, has lost significant support recently to Anwar Ibrahim’s three-party opposition alliance amid rising complaints by the minorities.
Muhyiddin is leading the National Front’s campaign for special elections in northern Malaysia. The contests for one vacant parliamentary seat and two state legislature seats are to be held on Tuesday.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
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