His Royal Highness the Sultan of Selangor was absolutely right when he said, “Democracy means that it is the people who determine their destiny”.  (The Sun, 11^th March)  This is particularly so in a Parlimentary Democracy with Constitutional Monarchy wherein the head of government is appointed by the constitutional monarch to reflect the wishes of the people.  It is always the people who determine the government of their choice.

MANY children associate Easter with a surfeit of chocolate eggs rather than a commemoration of the most important event in the Christian calendar. 

But like other Easter customs, the origin of the Easter egg goes back a long way. The historical intermingling of pagan, Christian and Jewish beliefs and practices has left its legacy in many of the things we take for granted about Easter today.

(From Teachernet.gov.uk. To read the rest of the article CLICK HERE)

Is the Church Political? 

CONTRARY to the notion among certain segments of society that the Church should "go back to the sacristy", Christian believers are becoming increasingly aware that they are very much the Church in the world.

In an address in July 2008, the Holy Father Benedict XVI spoke of the need for "evangelising the world of work, the economy, politics, which requires a new generation of committed Christian laypeople capable of seeking with competency and moral rigour solutions of sustainable development".

This was no new teaching, for it was a mere resonant echo of Vatican II's Apostolicam Actuositatem (Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity, 1965, point 5):

IN many ways, the emergence of a two-coalition system in Malaysia - I prefer the term two-coalition system rather than a two-party system since both the government and the opposition are made up of different parties in their respective coalitions rather than single parties - is somewhat fortuitous.

This is actually the second attempt at forming a united opposition coalition to challenge the dominance of the Barisan Nasional (BN). The first attempt was in the formation of the Barisan Alternatif  (BA) prior to the 1999 general elections. (Or one can go back even further to 1990 to the formation of the Angkatan Perpaduan Ummah and Gagasan Rakyat as the first attempt to form a united opposition coalition)

The BA fell apart partly because the distribution of power within the coalition made it untenable. An overly dominant PAS took the 1999 general election results as an endorsement for its Islamic state agenda rather than Malay dissatisfaction of the treatment of Anwar Ibrahim. This resulted in increasing pressure on the DAP which finally left the BA soon after the September 11^th attacks in New York and Washington, DC. Keadilan, as PKR was known back then, could not provide an effective ‘balance' between PAS and DAP because it had the smallest number of seats in the BA.