A Malaysian Catholic newspaper will be allowed to continue publication after the government withdrew a controversial decision to cancel its publishing license, the editor said yesterday.
The Herald said earlier last week that the government had told it that its license for next year had not been approved. Under Malaysian law, all publications must renew their license every year.
The move came amid a long-running dispute over the weekly’s use of “Allah” as a translation for “God” in its Malay-language section. The government argued “Allah” should be used only by Muslims, who dominate the country’s population.
The Herald’s editor, Father Lawrence Andrew, said government officials in a meeting on Friday said the paper’s license would be approved, but rejected its request to publish a supplement in a language used by an Aboriginal group on Borneo island.
“They have asked us to ignore the September letter which says the license is not approved and stick to an earlier letter in August stating a new license will be given, there is no more confusion,” Andrew said. “On our application to publish an additional page in the Kadazandusun language, we are sad it has been rejected. We will put the plan on hold and won’t be using the language for the time being.”
A home ministry official confirmed the Herald was allowed to continue publishing and attributed the controversy to “miscommunication.”
“We are processing their license renewal. We never disapproved their application, [the September letter] was because of miscommunication, but it has all been solved now,” said the official, who requested anonymity. “We only rejected their application to publish in the Kadazandusun language.”
The Herald, circulated among the country’s 850,000 Catholics, nearly lost its publishing license last year for using the word “Allah.” The paper is printed in four languages, with a circulation of 14,000 copies a week.
Meanwhile, the government has warned another newspaper that its coverage of a fatal police shooting of five ethnic Indian criminal suspects could stir racial tensions and cause the publication to be suspended, the daily’s chief executive said.
The warning underscores efforts by authorities to quell perceptions among the ethnic Indian minority that the police force, dominated by majority Malay Muslims, often uses excessive force against Indian suspects while trying to arrest them or during interrogation.
Authorities have defended the killing of the five Indians, saying they shot first at police who were chasing them. The suspects were accused of a spate of armed robberies.
The Home Ministry sent a letter to the Tamil Nesan saying its coverage of a Nov. 8 fatal shooting of five young Indian men would “provoke the Indians in the country and could affect the country’s harmony,” the newspaper’s chief executive, S. Vell Paari, said in a statement late on Saturday.
The ministry warned the Tamil-language newspaper’s license would be revoked if it continued such coverage, Vell Paari said.
Vell Paari denied the newspaper’s coverage had been provocative, saying it had a right to report what had happened.
Ministry officials familiar with the matter could not immediately be contacted yesterday.
The Tamil Nesan is one of the main newspapers catering to ethnic Indians, who comprise less than 10 percent of Malaysia’s 28 million people. Indians, many of whom are among the country’s poorest citizens, have increasingly complained of government discrimination.
A colossal explosion in the sky, unleashing energy hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash nearly as bright as the sun. Shockwaves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles. It might sound apocalyptic, but a newly detected asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has a greater than 1 percent chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years. Such an impact has the potential for city-level devastation, depending on where it strikes. Scientists are not panicking yet, but they are watching closely. “At this point, it’s: ‘Let’s pay a lot of attention, let’s
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
CHEER ON: Students were greeted by citizens who honked their car horns or offered them food and drinks, while taxi drivers said they would give marchers a lift home Hundreds of students protesting graft they blame for 15 deaths in a building collapse on Friday marched through Serbia to the northern city of Novi Sad, where they plan to block three Danube River bridges this weekend. They received a hero’s welcome from fellow students and thousands of local residents in Novi Said after arriving on foot in their two-day, 80km journey from Belgrade. A small red carpet was placed on one of the bridges across the Danube that the students crossed as they entered the city. The bridge blockade planned for yesterday is to mark three months since a huge concrete construction
DIVERSIFY: While Japan already has plentiful access to LNG, a pipeline from Alaska would help it move away from riskier sources such as Russia and the Middle East Japan is considering offering support for a US$44 billion gas pipeline in Alaska as it seeks to court US President Donald Trump and forestall potential trade friction, three officials familiar with the matter said. Officials in Tokyo said Trump might raise the project, which he has said is key for US prosperity and security, when he meets Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba for the first time in Washington as soon as next week, the sources said. Japan has doubts about the viability of the proposed 1,287km pipeline — intended to link fields in Alaska’s north to a port in the south, where
RSS