Khairy Jamaluddin Not Defending FAM Deputy President's Post

Khairy Jamaluddin Sunday announced that he will not be defending his post as deputy president of the Football Association of Malaysia (FAM) for the 2010-2015 term.

Khairy, who held the post from 2007, hoped the new candidate replacing him would be able to take a re-look at the FAM's progress as a whole, and claimed that the FAM, as the country's football parent body, had failed to build a strong football structure.

He said this was due to the internal problems within the FAM that led to the withdrawal of many of the sponsors.

Speaking to reporters here today, he said there were many sponsors for the local league previously but the private sector now preferred to sponsor advertisements for the World Cup and the English Premier League (EPL).

"We can't blame them because the returns (from the EPL) are higher. If they sponsor the local league, to get a few thousand supporters for one match will be difficult," he said.



Khairy claimed that the FAM had also failed to coordinate the football structure at the grassroots level which was also the reason why the national team failed to get quality players for the national team.

In fact, he claimed that the FAM did not have sufficient financial resources to develop a strong football structure at the grassroots level.

"More than 90 per cent of the FAM's financial allocation was spent to organise the local league to the extent that the FAM could not meet its promise to improve the country's football structure," he said.

Khairy claimed that less than 10 per cent of the FAM's financial allocation was spent for the district league.

Source: Bernama

Umno Open To Malay Unity Talks With PAS But Without Preconditions - Najib

Umno is open to having discussions with PAS on Malay unity but such talks must be held without any precondition, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak said Sunday.

"We (Umno) are always open but they (PAS leaders) must not impose preconditions and insult Umno in their speeches. If we want to talk, we must not condemn each other," the Umno president told reporters after attending a luncheon with Sabah Chinese community leaders, here.

Najib was asked to comment on a statement by Perak Mufti Tan Sri Harussani Zakaria yesterday that some Umno and PAS leaders had approached him recently to seek his opinion on how best to unite the Muslims.

Harussani had said that he explained to them that he was not a politician and could not make a decision in the matter.

Najib said Umno had maintained its stand on the proposed talks but it seemed that PAS had other considerations and wanted to include the issue of oil royalty claimed by Kelantan in the discussions.

"It is up to PAS to determine its stand. We do not want to keep repeating the matter," he said.

Source : Bernama

KP Selangor, Datuk Suhaimi Ghazali letak jawatan...

By: RBF

Sekalung Tahniah Kepada Suhaimi

Saya difahamkan oleh beberapa sumber bahawa Ketua Pergerakan Pemuda Umno Selangor, Suhaimi Ghazali telah menghantar surat perletakan jawatan beliau kepada Ketua Pemuda Umno Malaysia.

Difahamkan juga satu pengumuman rasmi untuk mengumumkan perkara tersebut akan dilakukan dalam masa terdekat.

RBF ingin mengucapkan tahniah kepada Suhaimi kerana bertindak secara gentlemen. Beliau berani mengambil tanggungjawab atas kegagalannya. Beliau tidak mahu menyusahkan orang lain dan beri peluang kepada orang yang boleh menjalankan tugas.

Semoga pemimpin-pemimpin lain yang gagal berani juga mengambil tanggungjawab sebagaimana yang dilakukan oleh Suhaimi.

Sekali lagi tahniah kepada Suhaimi.

Habis cerita bab Suhaimi, sekarang timbul pula persolan baru. Siapakah yang layak menggantikan Suhaimi sebagai Ketua Pemuda Selangor. Yang ini pun satu masalah juga, KJ perlu berhati-hati dalam hal ini.

KJ kena ingat, UMNO/BN adalah pembangkang di Selangor. Di saat begini, UMNO/BN Selangor memerlukan seorang KP yang gigih, berani, bijak berpolitik serta kreatif. P/raya makin hari makin dekat , Selangor perlu ditebus kembali. Sesiapa yang bakal memegang jawatan tersebut perlu bekerja keras 24 jam sehari, 7 hari seminggu,30 hari sebulan dan 365 hari setahun. Tiada masa untuk berbulan madu. - RBF

Umno tidak terdesak, perjuangan yang konsisten... Berbeza dengan Nik Aziz tidak konsisten!

By: Bro Jinggo

Hasrat UMNO untuk membincangkan kedudukan orang Melayu dan Islam bukanlah dibuat berdasarkan pertimbangan politik tetapi satu perjuangan konsisten parti itu sejak dari dulu. Perjuangan UMNO tidak pernah berubah kerana sentiasa bersedia dengan sesiapa sahaja bagi membincangkan agenda yang lebih luas khususnya demi agama, bangsa dan negara.

Umno tidak terdesak. Hasrat umno untuk membincangkan kedudukan orang Melayu, kedudukan Islam tidak bersandarkan pertimbangan politik. Malahan isu yang sebenar adalah sampai bila kedudukan agama Islam dan masa depan orang Melayu menjadi pertaruhan hanya kerana persengketaan politik yang berpanjangan.

Janganlah sampai disebabkan politik agama kita tergadai, masa depan orang Melayu terjejas. UMNO tidak pernah menolak perpaduan orang Melayu malah sudah terbukti sejak zaman Datuk Onn lagi.

Perjuangan Umno terbukti konsisten sejak dari dulu. Umno tak tergamak untuk menggadai maruah bangsa, agama dan negara semata-mata untuk raih sokongan politik dan kejar jawatan.

Kenyataan Nik Aziz Tidak Konsisten, Sudah Diduga – Shafie



Keengganan Mursyidul Am Pas, Datuk Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat untuk berbincang dengan UMNO ke arah permuafakatan orang Melayu sememangnya sudah diduga, kata Naib Presiden UMNO, Datuk Seri Mohd. Shafie Apdal.

Bagi beliau, perkara tersebut menjelaskan tentang sikap pemimpin itu yang tidak pernah konsisten dalam kata-katanya termasuk dalam perjuangan partinya.

“Kita sudah kenal Pas khususnya Nik Aziz, bila pihak lain kata nak runding, beliau kata tak boleh bincang, sekejap boleh bincang, sekejap tidak. Jadi kalau lihat tidak ada konsistensi dari segi perjuangan dan hala tuju parti ini,”katanya yang juga Menteri Kemajuan Luar Bandar dan Wilayah.

Beliau berkata demikian kepada pemberita selepas merasmikan Mesyuarat Perwakilan UMNO Bahagian Jelebu di Dewan Budaya Simpang Pertang di sini hari ini.

Mohd. Shafie mengulas kenyataan Nik Aziz hari ini yang bersetuju berjumpa dengan Timbalan Perdana Menteri, Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin selagi perbincangan itu tidak menjurus kepada perpaduan di antara Pas dan UMNO.

Sebaliknya Nik Aziz mahu pertemuan tersebut memberi fokus terhadap rundingan pemberian royalti minyak kepada negeri itu.

Mohd. Shafie pada masa sama menafikan bahawa UMNO terdesak untuk bersatu dengan Pas, sebaliknya menekankan bahawa perbincangan tersebut ke arah penyatuan bangsa.

”Tidak bererti apabila kita berkata ada cadangan untuk penyatuan UMNO-Pas bermakna ada kelemahan dalam UMNO, cuma memikirkan betapa perlunya penyatuan agama itu yang ingin kita daulatkan,” jelasnya.

Anwar Ibrahim and the Bush Neocons

A Washington, DC NGO bares some awkward questions for Malaysia's opposition leader

A 42-page report by a Washington, DC-based whistle-blower organization is proving a major embarrassment for Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim by alleging that the Foundation for the Future, which Anwar headed for a time in the middle of the last decade, was actually established and funded by the US Department of State at the behest of Elizabeth Cheney, the daughter of then-Vice President Dick Cheney, and the Bush administration's neoconservatives.

The Government Accountability Project report, titled The Foundation for the Future: What FOIA Documents Reveal, and released July 8, is based on hundreds of documents delivered to the organization under the US Freedom of Information Act. It says the Foundation for the Future was established and operated in a "highly irregular manner" by Bush administration officials and employees including Shaha Riza, the girlfriend of Paul Wolfowitz, who was forced to leave the World Bank after it became known that he had promoted Riza to triple the World Bank's salary guidelines. The full report can be found here.

Ostensibly, matching money to fund the Foundation for the Future was supposed to come from 11 countries led by Qatar at US$10 million, and Bahrain, with another US$2 million. Jordan was to put up another US$1 million, Turkey US$500,000 and the rest was to be scattered among several European Union countries including Denmark, Greece, Spain, the Netherlands and the European Union itself. But neither Qatar nor Bahrain ever came through. Of the US$22.26 million pledged, only about US$6.4 million ever materialized. The rest apparently was made up from US State Department funds.

Anwar has previously disavowed any US funding of the organization, established in 2005 as "an essential front on the global war on terror" and part of President George Bush's "freedom agenda" to promote democracy and reform in the Middle East and Africa. Anwar served as chairman and acting president of the organization's board in the period when he was out of politics following his incarceration on corruption and sexual perversion charges.

The Government Accountability Project report lends considerable ammunition to Anwar's opponents in the United Malays National Organization, who have long charged that Anwar was connected to the US Central Intelligence Agency, although neither the CIA nor the US government as a whole has ever exhibited any particular desire to bring down the Malaysian government, and in fact considers Malaysia, as a moderate Muslim democracy, to be one of its staunchest allies in the region.

In particular, UMNO Youth Chief Kairy Jamaluddin called attention to Anwar's statements disavowing US funding of the foundation and demanded that Anwar explain himself. He accused Anwar of misleading the US government in a memorandum of understanding saying the foundation had agreed to get other countries to commit funds to match those the US government was providing.

"For me, it is a serious matter that the opposition leader has tried to mislead the US government to get grants for a foundation that he was chairman of," Khairy told the Malaysian newspaper The Star.

An Anwar associate said the opposition leader would decline to comment, adding that there was little to be gained by saying anything about the matter. Nonetheless, he characterized Anwar's role as blameless.

"There is nothing wrong going on," he said. "This is part of the campaign to get Wolfowitz out of the World Bank and to do so they threw Anwar under the bus."

The report characterizes the Foundation for the Future as part of a vast and tragic misconception among the Bush administration neoconservatives, particularly Wolfowitz, that a slight push – the elimination of Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein from power – would result in a dramatic change in the Middle East. That of course has resulted in the deaths of more than 4,000 US soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and a realignment in the Middle East that nobody in the west wanted – the growing power of Iran in the region and particularly in Iran's influence over the Iraqi government itself.

But the Foundation from the start appears to have been a mess, according to the report. It apparently was the brainchild of Shaha Riza, who was seconded from the World Bank by Wolfowitz to run it. As has been widely reported, Riza's salary increases during external service far exceeded those allowed under World Bank regulations, Wolfowitz allegedly instructed the Department of Human Resources to pay her three times the allowable increase for her grade and circumstances, so that she ended up making more money that Condoleezza Rice, her nominal superior, by about US$7,000, according to the report.

The foundation's first president, an Iraqi named Bakhtiar Amin, who had served in the new interim government set up following the invasion, quit after a short time on the job because "he was not up to the task." It appeared that the entire foundation pretty much consisted of Shaha Riza. There was no chief financial officer or chief operations officer.

The Washington Post reported at the time that "Though Shaha Riza, who has been romantically linked to Wolfowitz, is not listed as part of the staff on the organization's Web site, she is the only person working in the group's offices. ‘It is basically just her running this thing,' said Tamara Cofman Wittes, research fellow at the Brookings Institution Saban Center for Middle East Policy, who closely tracks democracy programs in the region. She said the board members had no experience in grant-making and thus had ‘started from zero,' with no bylaws or grant-making guidelines."

When Anwar was ultimately selected as board chairman, according to the report, it appeared that it was more because Anwar was a friend of Wolfowitz's rather than for any other reason. "Anwar Ibrahim…was not from the region, and the tactics used to position him as the chair were not transparent," the report continued.

Ultimately, the report says, less than half of the $60 million in initial funding for the Foundation (as envisioned by Elizabeth Cheney) ever materialized, and the major proportion of funding came from the United States, in violation of the spirit of the legislation creating the institution. The "great multilateral effort…devolved into a unilateral US initiative supported only by Jordan and a smattering of European nations. And the organization that was promoted as a "model" and "beacon of inspiration for the democratic development of the societies in which it operates" represented little more than a nest of sinecures for those people closest to the Vice President: his daughter Liz, Wolfowitz's girlfriend Shaha Riza and Wolfowitz's favored friend from Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim."

The report ends up by questioning whether the US State Department's representation that Qatar would stump up US$10 million was deliberately perpetrated to circumvent requirements in US law regarding contributions to a Middle East Foundation, whether US law was violated by Shaha Riza's secondment to the State Department, whether future support for the Foundation is even appropriate, and whether the state Department abused freedom of information law by inappropriately classifying documents in an effort to hide them from whistle-blowers.

Source: Asia Sentinel