Lowyat.NET: Latest topics by cloude nine

Constitution gives no licence to expand syariah

cloude nine — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 15:08:40 +0800

KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 14 — An amendment to Article 121 of the Federal Constitution does not empower syariah courts to take over the jurisdiction of civil courts, former Chief Justice Tun Abdul Hamid Mohamad said today, giving heft to the protracted conflict arising from Malaysia’s dual-track judicial system.

He said the amendment was “not a licence to expand the jurisdiction of Shari’ah Courts and to oust the jurisdiction of the civil courts.”

The Muslim-dominant country, which provides for syariah courts to run alongside civil courts, has created several grey areas due to an overlap of powers.

The retired top judge noted that many people, especially syarie law experts, have been mistaken in the belief that clause (1A) in Article 121, which lays out the extent of judicial power, absolutely excludes civil courts from trying disputes that touch on Muslim rights.

Abdul Hamid (picture) said that many arguments have been put forward in legal conflicts that if an offence is within the jurisdiction of the syariah court, it is no longer to be tried in a civil court any more by virtue of Article 121(1A).

“What about cases in which one party is a Muslim and the other is not?” he asked in his speech at a law conference in the city.

“Secondly, the amendment is not a licence to expand the jurisdiction of Shari’ah Courts and to oust the jurisdiction of the civil courts,” he said.

Abdul Hamid, who was chief justice between 2007 and 2008, recounted that the question had cropped up before the Court of Appeal nearly a decade ago in a sodomy conviction, saying that the courts had failed to address the issue of constitutionality of section 25 of the Syariah Criminal Offences (Federal Territories) Act 1997.

“To me, that section is unconstitutional and void,” he said today.

Disputes of jurisdiction between the Islamic courts and the civil courts have been increasing of late especially in matters dealing with religious conversion and child custody as well as the latest ongoing storm over the right of non-Muslims to call their gods “Allah”, a word conservative Islamic scholars insist be reserved for their god.

Civil liberty activists and lawyers have noticed a trend that the judiciary has been putting Islamic law above all other laws in Malaysia, signalling an erosion of the Federal Constitution.

In his speech at the Conference on the Transformation of Security and Fundamental Rights Legislation, Rights and Responsibilities: Between Hope and Challenges, Abdul Hamid also said he disagreed with the Indian Supreme Court that some provisions of the Constitution cannot be amended because they were a fundamental structure of the law.

The former judge said that Malaysia’s highest law “is a living document” but warned that it was not for judges to rewrite the Constitution under the pretext of interpreting it.

Only elected lawmakers had the power to change it through an Act of Parliament, he said, highlighting that such is the practice of a democracy.

“I had said before: ‘No judge is a Parliament’. I still hold the same view,” he said.

Police open probe into violations by KL 112

cloude nine — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 11:44:30 +0800

KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 13 — The police today opened an investigation into allegations that the organisers of yesterday’s gathering at the Merdeka Stadium had violated three of the 27 conditions agreed to between them and the police.

Dang Wangi police chief ACP Zainuddin Ahmad said the alleged violations are bringing children under 15 to the rally; carrying placards, posters and banners with words of a seditious nature; and allowing the number of participants to exceed the agreed 30,000.

The police would call up several witnesses and study the footage of closed circuit television cameras (CCTV), he said when contacted by Bernama.

Zainuddin said the police would conduct an investigation into the alleged violations because the 27 conditions had been agreed to in accordance with Section 15 (1) of the Peaceful Assembly Act 2012.

Meanwhile, the Merdeka Heritage Trust, owner of the stadium, said it would soon issue a statement on the condition of the arena following the gathering yesterday.

The Merdeka Heritage Trust is a subsidiary company of Permodalan Nasional Berhad. About 45,000 people attended the gathering yesterday, and 200 policemen were deployed for crowd control. — Bernama

Android Now 'Outshines iOS In Almost Every Aspect'

cloude nine — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 16:48:09 +0800

Ralf Rottmann is CTO and co-founder of Grandcentrix, the largest mobile app developer in Germany. He's also a hardcore Apple fanboy who has a house full of Apple products and more than 8,000 songs purchased on the iTunes store. He's tried out every big Android phone and found each one wanting.

But suddenly things have changed. He just got a Nexus 4, the flagship Android phone made by LG and running Jelly Bean, the latest version (4.1) of Android. And since switching it on two weeks ago, he hasn't touched his iPhone 5.

"When iOS 6 came out, for the first time I complained about the lack of innovation in this major new release. I asked myself whether we might see Apple beginning to lose its lead position in mobile platforms," Rottmann writes in an essay on Gizmodo.

Rottmann goes on at great length and great detail about all the ways, big and small, that Jelly Bean outguns Apple's iOS 6. The only thing he misses, he says, is iMessage.

Sure, he's just one guy. But he's a significant guy. And more and more people like him, from all around the world, are coming to the same conclusion.

Meanwhile, Back In Northern California

Nevertheless, in Silicon Valley the conventional wisdom still seems to be that the only people who use Android phones are people who are too cheap or too poor to buy an iPhone. There's a myth in the Valley that Android phones are bargain basement devices, and that people who use them aren't very tech savvy and don't really do anything with them. It's all pure FUD.

There's also this persistent myth the iPhone has some kind of lead. It doesn't. Not in terms of market share, not in terms of engineering, not in terms of design, not in terms of software, not in terms of maps, not in terms of voice recognition, not in terms of performance. In almost every way, the iPhone has been smoked.

(The one exception is profit. Apple is exceedingly profitable and rakes in obscene margins on the iPhone. But that's because Apple has been milking the same platform for years, selling last-generation hardware and investing too little in software. Apple spends a mere 2% of its revenues on R&D, far less than its rivals. Now those chickens are coming home to roost.)

Nevertheless, Valley folk continue to cling to their iPhones, even as their phones get eclipsed by Android.

Consider this article by Liz Gannes of AllThingsD who says 2012 was "the year I stopped using Apple's iOS apps." She's mostly embraced Google's apps, which she admits are better than Apple's.

The question then becomes, If you like Google's software, and why are you still using the iPhone? "I think iOS is a very nice operating system," Gannes writes.

The real answer, I think, is that old habits die hard. Out in Silicon Valley, Apple is the hometown team, and the iPhone, when it came out, was a very big deal. It was truly unique. But it's not anymore.

The rest of the world has figured that out. For once, Silicon Valley is playing catch-up.

SC commutes death penalty for man who brutally

cloude nine — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 15:22:38 +0800

MUMBAI: Three days before the brutal gang-rape of Nirbhaya, the Supreme Court commuted a death sentence to life for a 23-year-old man who killed a 65-year-old woman and raped her pregnant 25-year-old granddaughter-in-law in an upscale Pune neighbourhood in September 2007.

The convict, Sandesh Abhang, had stabbed the old woman 21 times, severed four fingers of one hand and chopped off the other wrist. He then raped her granddaughter-in-law, stabbed her 19 times, including in her neck, and left believing her to be dead. He later boasted to his friends that he had killed two women and was not afraid of anyone. The woman was five-month pregnant and gave birth to her child later.

The SC bench of Justices Swatantar Kumar and Madan Lokur observed that though the accused had committed a very "heinous and brutal crime", a "vital factor" that he "may not have been aware of what he was doing as he smelled of alcohol'' could not be ruled out and hence his "abnormal behaviour" was relevant in holding against death penalty. The SC said to kill, "it was not expected of him to inflict 21and 19 injures on their bodies respectively. He could have simply given an injury on the vital parts of their bodies and put them to death... amputating the fingers clearly reflects the conduct of an abnormal person".

The convict had sought leniency on the grounds that he was drunk and unaware of his own actions. But the state argued that the law allows intoxication as a defence only when the accused can prove that it was against his will and knowledge and when the effects are such that the person is rendered incapable of proper judgement of his own intent to commit a crime.

The SC said that in cases of capital punishment, reformation was a relevant criterion. In this case, it reasoned that the convict was young, had "no criminal involvement in similar crimes'' and "no evidence (had been) produced by the Maharashtra government'' to show that he was a hardened criminal incapable of being reformed. This, it said, outweighed other factors against him.

The Bombay high court bench of Justices B H Marlapalle and Abhay Thipsay had in March 2011 upheld the death sentence awarded by a sessions court. The HC said Abhang should be shown no mercy as he was incapable of remorse or reform. The accused, a mechanic, had entered the house in the afternoon saying "sahib ne bheja hain" for some work. His intention was to rob, but angered that the older woman's bangles were not of gold, he chopped her fingers and wrist.

The pregnant woman had helplessly pleaded with the accused to spare their lives and take away the valuables but even after taking the gold jewellery, he had in a cold-blooded manner killed the older woman by slashing her neck with his kukri, then at knife-point made the younger woman remove her clothes before raping her. The court observed that the younger woman "displayed wisdom and bravery. She received injuries on her back to protect the child in her womb and pretended to be dead by lying down quietly.''

At 3 pm, the convict left the flat in Bibwewadi after washing himself and his weapon clean. The young woman later called out to her aunt residing in the flat below and was finally rushed to the hospital where she remained in the ICU for almost three weeks.

The HC observed that the accused showed unusual calm and perversity in raping a bleeding pregnant woman after killing one and then washing himself clean. It held his conduct and crime to be rarest of rare and beyond redemption. He would be a menace and threat to society, it said but the SC disagreed and said ''his conduct in jail was not shown to be unworthy of concession.''

The HC and SC held that the evidence had proved the man's guilt beyond doubt. In the SC, Abhang did not challenge his conviction but only pleaded against the death sentence. The SC said life imprisonment shall be for life.

Kena backstab by fren

cloude nine — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 16:38:17 +0800

So the story goes like this.

I got a fren, he likes this girl a lot. She's quite popular wan, pretty, smart and funny. So he knew this girl since uni days, which was like 2 months ago. But the thing is he is damn secretive wan, he never like to admit that he likes any particular gals and always has this principled stand on relationships. The reason why he didn't go after the girl, is because he's already in a relationship. So he refuses to admit that he likes this girl to us. And I think that the reason why he didn't break up with the GF and go after this girl, is coz he quite kiasi, and sked after break up liao, this pretty gal dun like him and he left with nothing.

So hor, fast forward 2 months, i got to know dis pretty gal. Long story cut short, we piap piaped. But the thing is before i piap her, I actually asked him "bro you have any issues with me going after dis gal or not?" he keep saying no no i got no feelings for her. Then mah okay lor.

One day, during a yam cha session, we were talking about some random stuff and I trolled him and made him feel very embarassed about himself - something to do about how noob he is in studies (pure trolling la amongst frens, i mean kamon). I mean I only said it in jest, but he took it very seriously. So he emo liao.

Now, i found out that he's been backstabbing me by telling the pretty gal all sort of shit about me. Dug up all sort of old scandals and trying to psycho the gal to break up with me. Nia ma, I feel like he crossed the line liao. But the problem is that i found out about the backstabbing from the pretty gal's best friend, whom the pretty gal told all this stories to la. If i pecah the watermelon and go confront him, then confirm all hell will break lose wan. But at the same time i aso dunno what to do to patch things up with my fren - takkan just duduk diam diam while he keeps on stabbing meh?

So how? Dis is no romance isu, so cupid corner is pointless. Need some advice /k/