DURING the first weekend of November 2011, the PPSMI (the Teaching and Learning of Science and Mathematics in English) policy trended on Twitter. This evidence of PPSMI’s importance to large numbers of tech-savvy Malaysians came shortly after Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin’s back-to-back statements on the policy. Muhyiddin first reiterated that PPSMI would [...]

IN the days before and after the Bersih 2.0 rally for electoral reform, Malaysian social networks were buzzing like never before. Internet chatter was centred around the biggest campaign in town: the street march in the heart of Kuala Lumpur on 9 July 2011. Thanks to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, users had a platform to [...]

GIVEN the public opposition against Lynas Corporation‘s proposed rare earth processing plant in Pahang, it is timely to revisit the due process that is supposed to govern the inception of such projects. How did the public come to know about the project so late after federal approval had already been given for it? Can public [...]

THE world was taken by surprise on 2 May 2011 with the announcement that Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had been killed. Some mourned, whilst others cheered. And to a few, the death brought closure to the 11 Sept 2001 attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre. But what was the thinking behind US President [...]

IT’S not every day that one gets a personal greeting from the prime minister via e-mail or SMS. But when Datuk Seri Najib Razak did just that to over five million Malaysians for Chinese New Year in February 2011, he got flak from the DAP in Parliament for imprudent use of taxpayers’ dollars. Another DAP [...]

The endless distractions on Facebook are the bane of my working life. As a freelance consultant, I need discipline and a strict schedule to meet tight deadlines. But then a friend from university announces his baby is having problems feeding, and so I stop my work to suggest strategies for feeding babies. Or to respond [...]