Overview
Manchester United
Good: No matter how bad they do in early stage of the season, never discount them from winning the title. They are using their worldwide brand to attract good players to their club. Macheda is their new star along with Gibson and two Rafael brothers. Fergie does not afraid to field Man Utd kids if necessary and they rose to the challenge. Winning EPL & Carling Cup
Bad: Fielding kids against Everton for Semi Final FA Cup does not bode well with the FA and the biggest of all, Fergie got it wrong in Rome
Next step: Sort out Tevez and Ronaldo. A friend of mine (MU supporter) resigned to the fact that both are leaving OT. If that the case, MU need to find replacement fast. Next season we may able to see more MU kids playing the first eleven. uh, there is a small matter of Berbatov finding his feet on the front line.
Prediction 09/10 Season: Second
Liverpool
Good: Learn to win ugly. At last players are getting well with each other after few seasons.
Bad: Gaff Rafa bite Fergie psycho game. Too depending on Gerard as Chelsea won big at Anfield after 30 years.
Next step: Buy few big players with loads money. Tevez could fill the forward role between Gerard and Torres. Maybe a winger to replace Babel, who rumoured to be on the way out.
Prediction 09/10 Season: Third
Chelsea
Good: Get back to feet after Guus was assigned as interim manager. Winning FA Cup
Bad: Signing Scolari. I think he is a good manager but lack of experience in club level may caused for his downfall. Last but not least, players reaction during Barca game. I know Chelsea was REAL hard done by but they should control their behavior.
Next step: Coach. someone who can speaks English. Unable to speak English could one of the reason Scolari could not get his idea across players. Back four looks good, Malouda looked what Chelsea paid for & maybe a creative midfield to replace aging Deco and Ballack. There is a growing matter of Drogba, is he staying or going?
Prediction 09/10 Season: First
Arsenal
Good: Young players given chances by Wenger to play the big league
Bad: Young = lightweight. Need recruitment soon. Requirement: Experienced.
Next step: Wenger staying or going? They always claim they have money to buy big players and yet they are not. Need new keeper or back up keeper & someone alongside Fabregas. and a forward to shut Adebayor mouth.
Prediction 09/10 Season: A distance fourth
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Saturday, May 30, 2009
FINAL RESULT FANTASY POINTS
Congrats to Chikungnya CF (Champion for Yahoo Fantasy League) & Intertina (Champion for Premierleague Fantasy League). Hadiah? Berupa wang tunai sebanyak gaji anda yang dibayar oleh majikan anda, hehehhehehe...
YAHOO FANTASY LEAGUE
Rank Team Points
1 Chikungunya CF 2,930.50
2 YouMustBeatLiverpool1st 2,828.50
3 Kera Jadian (KJ) FC 2,746.50
4 PakLahKuatTido 2,706.00
5 Raub FC 2,637.50
6 naz united 2,592.00
7 {KBM} Geng Cakcibor Eleven FC 2,544.00
8 FC J'en ai marre 2,519.50
9 Korok FC 2,386.50
10 Rempit F.C 2,252.00
11 intertina 2,144.00
12 Lupikirlasendili 1,924.00
13 P11 FC 1,860.50
14 FC Geroda 1,800.50
15 Neu 1,541.00
PREMIERLEAGUE FANTASY LEAGUE
= 1 intertina talib sabri 54 1914
= 2 Geng Cakcibor Eleven Cakcibor Eleven 48 1891
= 3 Cap Ayam Noor Hisham Muhamat 30 1819
= 4 OneTeamToRuleThemAll Ahmad Harris Khaidzir 44 1816
= 5 2ndBestAintThatBad Ahmad Harris Khaidzir 51 1810
= 6 Paklah Bapa Mertuaku Bambang Pamungkas 25 1718
= 7 rejected by turtle Hadly Muhd 63 1666
= 8 redridinghood Muhammad Redha Md Hatta 23 1352
= 9 neu Ihsan Hasbullah 41 1345
YAHOO FANTASY LEAGUE
Rank Team Points
1 Chikungunya CF 2,930.50
2 YouMustBeatLiverpool1st 2,828.50
3 Kera Jadian (KJ) FC 2,746.50
4 PakLahKuatTido 2,706.00
5 Raub FC 2,637.50
6 naz united 2,592.00
7 {KBM} Geng Cakcibor Eleven FC 2,544.00
8 FC J'en ai marre 2,519.50
9 Korok FC 2,386.50
10 Rempit F.C 2,252.00
11 intertina 2,144.00
12 Lupikirlasendili 1,924.00
13 P11 FC 1,860.50
14 FC Geroda 1,800.50
15 Neu 1,541.00
PREMIERLEAGUE FANTASY LEAGUE
= 1 intertina talib sabri 54 1914
= 2 Geng Cakcibor Eleven Cakcibor Eleven 48 1891
= 3 Cap Ayam Noor Hisham Muhamat 30 1819
= 4 OneTeamToRuleThemAll Ahmad Harris Khaidzir 44 1816
= 5 2ndBestAintThatBad Ahmad Harris Khaidzir 51 1810
= 6 Paklah Bapa Mertuaku Bambang Pamungkas 25 1718
= 7 rejected by turtle Hadly Muhd 63 1666
= 8 redridinghood Muhammad Redha Md Hatta 23 1352
= 9 neu Ihsan Hasbullah 41 1345
nazir @ LENSAZUM
Nazir dah go full time photography. you can find him at lensazum.blogspot.com or you can click on the picture (link to Nazir's website)
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Eureka moment that led to the discovery of DNA fingerprinting
TQ Kak Yani for sharing.
//webmod
LONDON, May 24 - On 10 September 1984, geneticist Alec Jeffreys wrote three words - "33 autorad off" - in his red desk diary.
The phrase marked the completion of an experiment, set up that summer, to study how inherited illnesses pass through families.
It failed completely.
Yet the project remains one of the most profoundly influential pieces of research ever carried out in a British laboratory, for it produced the world's first DNA fingerprint, a technology that has revolutionised crime scene investigations, led to the convictions of murderers and rapists, and transformed immigration disputes and paternity cases.
Twenty-five years ago the idea that scientists would one day be able to pinpoint an individual from the tiniest trace of their sweat or blood would have seemed laughable. Today we take it for granted.
Along with the CCTV camera and the tapping of emails and phone calls, the DNA fingerprint has become part of a civic apparatus that can follow the movements of individuals with unprecedented accuracy.
Thanks to the research by Jeffreys, thousands of dangerous criminals have been caught and imprisoned and thousands of individuals unfairly denied UK citizenship have been allowed to settle in this country.
At the same time, millions of individuals have had their profiles stored in databases in Britain, a serious threat to civil liberties according to some organisations and individuals, a point that is - partially - accepted by Jeffreys himself.
More than any other modern scientific discovery, DNA fingerprinting raises crucial issues about balancing the use of technology to help society against an individual's right to privacy.
Such concerns were far from the mind of Alec Jeffreys, then a 34-year-old Leicester University genetics researcher, in the summer of 1984.
At the time he was seeking ways to trace genes through family lineages and had hit on a fragment of DNA that was repeated on different chromosomes in the cells of men and women.
This genetic stutter could be unique to an individual, Jeffreys realised, and so he devised an experiment to see if he could count those repeats in different individuals and their relatives, as well as in animals such as seals, mice and monkeys.
First, cells were broken open and their DNA extracted.
Then this DNA was attached to photographic films. Radioactive probes - which could identify the repeated sections of DNA - were added.
Everything was then placed in a photographic developing tank and left over the weekend of 8-9 September.
The results, Jeffreys hoped, would reveal ways that might help him study inherited diseases such as cystic fibrosis.
But when he entered his laboratory that Monday morning and removed the film from its tank, he found an odd array of blobs and lines.
"My first reaction was 'God, what a mess.' Then I stared a bit longer - and the penny dropped." That piece of film showed a sequence of bars, each representing different numbers of DNA repeats in the various individuals and animals in the experiment.
Crucially, every individual in the sample had a different bar code and could be identified with precision. Jeffreys could even establish kinships: the bands of the DNA supplied by one of his technicians were a composite of her mother's and father's, for example.
Even the animal samples showed that individuals could be identified this way.
As Jeffreys put it: "It was an absolute Eureka moment. It was a blinding flash. In five golden minutes, my research career went whizzing off in a completely new direction.
The last thing that had been on my mind was anything to do with identification or paternity suits.
However, I would have been a complete idiot not to spot the applications."
He called his staff together and they began a brain-storming session to find uses for the technology they had stumbled on.
Paternity cases were an obvious example, as was the identification of criminals. "But then we thought, how about crime scene samples. Could we get DNA from blood left behind after murders or robberies?"
Today this seems a silly question, attuned as we are to the marvels displayed in CSI Miami and the rest. But in 1984 no one knew how stable DNA was.
For all Jeffreys knew, it could break apart rapidly after a cell had died, making crime scene sampling impossible.
"So I spent the next two days cutting myself and leaving blood marks round the laboratory. Then we tested those bloodstains and found that their DNA was intact." Thus the genetics laboratory of Jeffreys was not only the birthplace of DNA fingerprinting; it became the first setting for a DNA crime scene analysis.
Yet the criminal case uses of DNA fingerprinting were not the first to occupy Jeffreys and his team. Its usefulness in immigration cases grabbed immediate attention. A paper about DNA fingerprinting was written by Jeffreys and his team and was published in Nature in March 1985, triggering several newspaper reports.
These were instantly followed up by a group of lawyers who were fighting the deportation of a young boy who, said the Home Office, was not the son of a British woman, as she claimed, and had no right to UK nationality.
"In fact, I had never seen the implications for immigration cases," admits Jeffreys. "It was my wife, Sue, who said DNA fingerprinting would make an incredible difference in disputes over nationality. And she was absolutely right."
After talks with the woman's lawyers, Jeffreys agreed to help. However, the case was complicated by the fact that the boy's father was no longer living in Britain and could not be contacted.
"It was like a jigsaw with most of the bits missing," says Jeffreys.
Nevertheless he took samples from the mother, her three daughters and the disputed son. The results "blew me away", he recalls. "It was so incredibly simple. When I looked at the film we made of the DNA samples, I could see that every genetic character in the boy was either present in the woman or in his sisters. He was definitely her son."
The Home Office called in Jeffreys and, after a detailed explanation by him, agreed to drop the case.
"Afterwards I went over to tell the mother what had happened, that DNA had done its job," says Jeffreys.
"She had a bad time for the past two years and it was clearly affecting her health. But the look on her face when I told her, the relief - it was a magical moment. I realised then that we were on to something of real use. We had reached out and touched someone's life."
Over the next decade, DNA fingerprinting was used to test more than 18,000 immigrants who had been refused entry into the UK.
Of these, more than 95 per centproduced results that showed they were blood relatives of UK citizens and were therefore entitled to British citizenship - thanks to DNA fingerprinting.
The next two years were "simply insane", adds Jeffreys.
He was inundated with calls from families, mostly of Bangladeshi or Pakistani origins, who had been caught up in immigration disputes.
"The university switchboard jammed on several occasions with the calls coming into us."
A company, Cellmark, was set up in 1987 to take up these cases and took over much of the Jeffreys caseload.
"Then, out of the blue, I got a call from Leicestershire police, who were investigating the rape and murder of two schoolgirls, Linda Mann and Dawn Ashworth, who lived in the village of Narborough outside Leicester."
A local man, Richard Buckland, had just confessed to the murder of Dawn but refused to confess to the killing of Linda. Use your DNA fingerprinting technology to prove he killed both girls, they asked him.
So Jeffreys set up his tests, using - in this case - a version of DNA fingerprinting called DNA profiling.
Only a limited number of repeated regions are counted, a technique that is quicker to use and requires smaller samples. It was a perfect opportunity to show off the forensic value of genetic fingerprinting, Jeffreys realised, and, as the tests were being completed, he worked through the night to finish them off as quickly as he could. "I just couldn't wait any longer," he says.
He pulled the film from its developing tank. "I had expected to draw a blank and to find there was not enough DNA in the samples of semen that had been taken from the girls' bodies to produce results." He was wrong.
The film was covered in black bands, which showed that the semen from both girls came from the same man, but that Buckland's DNA was completely different.
He was not the murderer, the tests indicated. "It was a blood-chilling result," adds Jeffreys.
The police's response was terse and Anglo-Saxon. For his part, the geneticist began to worry that the whole concept of DNA profiling was "up the spout" and that there were things going on biologically that science still did not understand. Then the Home Office repeated the tests and produced the same results as Jeffreys. "I was fretting all the time, but they gave me strength," he adds.
In the end, the police accepted Buckland's innocence and on 21 November 1986, at Leicester Crown Court, he was cleared of the girls' murders.
Thus the first use of DNA fingerprinting in a criminal case was to help free an innocent man. "I am pretty sure that, given his confession, Buckland would still be in jail today," adds Jeffreys.
"Worse, the real perpetrator would have gone on to kill again."
In the end, that perpetrator was caught by a combination of DNA science and "good old-fashioned coppering", as Jeffreys puts it.
In January 1987 police asked all local men between 17 and 34 to submit blood for DNA testing in order to eliminate them from their inquiries.
By September, 4,000 had provided samples without success - until a chance remark transformed the investigation.
In a pub one day a local man admitted to his mates he had provided blood on behalf of a friend, Colin Pitchfork.
One friend told the police, the man and Pitchfork were arrested and the latter's DNA was shown by Jeffreys to match that of the semen from the two girls' bodies.
On 23 January 1988 Pitchfork was sentenced to life for the murders of Linda Mann and Dawn Ashworth. "It was the first time on the planet that a criminal investigation had been tackled and solved at a DNA level," says Jeffreys.
Since then, Jeffreys has used DNA profiling to determine a range of intriguing cases. In 1990 he showed that DNA from bones dug up from a Brazilian graveyard by Nazi-hunters was almost certainly that of Josef Mengele, a doctor who had tortured inmates at Auschwitz.
A year later, he helped Home Office scientists prove that bones found in a burial pit in Ekaterinburg, 850 miles east of Moscow, were those of the Russian imperial family who had been killed in 1918 during the Russian civil war.
It is a striking body of work, which earned Jeffreys a knighthood in 1994 and which has taken him far from his academic roots and involved him in a startling range of work. He has no regrets, however: "I love it. DNA fingerprinting came out of the blue and turned me round in five minutes flat. There are certain things in science that are historically inevitable, however. I was just lucky that I got to discover DNA fingerprinting. If I hadn't, someone else would have done it by now. I have no illusions about that."
Forensic History
1984 DNA fingerprints are discovered by Alec Jeffreys. At first, these are used extensively to resolve disputed immigration cases.
1987 The first DNA profile is developed, also by Jeffreys.
These use pieces of DNA from only a few selected sites on a person's chromosomes. Repetitions of DNA at these sites are counted, producing a set of numbers that acts as a person's DNA identifier. DNA profiles require smaller forensic samples and are quicker to develop.
Crucially, they can also be turned into a sequence of numbers, making it possible for a DNA database to be created.
1995 The UK National Criminal Intelligence DNA Database is established and is used to store the profiles of men and women convicted of crimes in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. A separate database is established in Scotland.
2009 The UK national database is now the largest, per head of population, of any country in the world: almost 10 per cent of the population of England, Wales and Northern Ireland is on the database. - Guardian
//webmod
LONDON, May 24 - On 10 September 1984, geneticist Alec Jeffreys wrote three words - "33 autorad off" - in his red desk diary.
The phrase marked the completion of an experiment, set up that summer, to study how inherited illnesses pass through families.
It failed completely.
Yet the project remains one of the most profoundly influential pieces of research ever carried out in a British laboratory, for it produced the world's first DNA fingerprint, a technology that has revolutionised crime scene investigations, led to the convictions of murderers and rapists, and transformed immigration disputes and paternity cases.
Twenty-five years ago the idea that scientists would one day be able to pinpoint an individual from the tiniest trace of their sweat or blood would have seemed laughable. Today we take it for granted.
Along with the CCTV camera and the tapping of emails and phone calls, the DNA fingerprint has become part of a civic apparatus that can follow the movements of individuals with unprecedented accuracy.
Thanks to the research by Jeffreys, thousands of dangerous criminals have been caught and imprisoned and thousands of individuals unfairly denied UK citizenship have been allowed to settle in this country.
At the same time, millions of individuals have had their profiles stored in databases in Britain, a serious threat to civil liberties according to some organisations and individuals, a point that is - partially - accepted by Jeffreys himself.
More than any other modern scientific discovery, DNA fingerprinting raises crucial issues about balancing the use of technology to help society against an individual's right to privacy.
Such concerns were far from the mind of Alec Jeffreys, then a 34-year-old Leicester University genetics researcher, in the summer of 1984.
At the time he was seeking ways to trace genes through family lineages and had hit on a fragment of DNA that was repeated on different chromosomes in the cells of men and women.
This genetic stutter could be unique to an individual, Jeffreys realised, and so he devised an experiment to see if he could count those repeats in different individuals and their relatives, as well as in animals such as seals, mice and monkeys.
First, cells were broken open and their DNA extracted.
Then this DNA was attached to photographic films. Radioactive probes - which could identify the repeated sections of DNA - were added.
Everything was then placed in a photographic developing tank and left over the weekend of 8-9 September.
The results, Jeffreys hoped, would reveal ways that might help him study inherited diseases such as cystic fibrosis.
But when he entered his laboratory that Monday morning and removed the film from its tank, he found an odd array of blobs and lines.
"My first reaction was 'God, what a mess.' Then I stared a bit longer - and the penny dropped." That piece of film showed a sequence of bars, each representing different numbers of DNA repeats in the various individuals and animals in the experiment.
Crucially, every individual in the sample had a different bar code and could be identified with precision. Jeffreys could even establish kinships: the bands of the DNA supplied by one of his technicians were a composite of her mother's and father's, for example.
Even the animal samples showed that individuals could be identified this way.
As Jeffreys put it: "It was an absolute Eureka moment. It was a blinding flash. In five golden minutes, my research career went whizzing off in a completely new direction.
The last thing that had been on my mind was anything to do with identification or paternity suits.
However, I would have been a complete idiot not to spot the applications."
He called his staff together and they began a brain-storming session to find uses for the technology they had stumbled on.
Paternity cases were an obvious example, as was the identification of criminals. "But then we thought, how about crime scene samples. Could we get DNA from blood left behind after murders or robberies?"
Today this seems a silly question, attuned as we are to the marvels displayed in CSI Miami and the rest. But in 1984 no one knew how stable DNA was.
For all Jeffreys knew, it could break apart rapidly after a cell had died, making crime scene sampling impossible.
"So I spent the next two days cutting myself and leaving blood marks round the laboratory. Then we tested those bloodstains and found that their DNA was intact." Thus the genetics laboratory of Jeffreys was not only the birthplace of DNA fingerprinting; it became the first setting for a DNA crime scene analysis.
Yet the criminal case uses of DNA fingerprinting were not the first to occupy Jeffreys and his team. Its usefulness in immigration cases grabbed immediate attention. A paper about DNA fingerprinting was written by Jeffreys and his team and was published in Nature in March 1985, triggering several newspaper reports.
These were instantly followed up by a group of lawyers who were fighting the deportation of a young boy who, said the Home Office, was not the son of a British woman, as she claimed, and had no right to UK nationality.
"In fact, I had never seen the implications for immigration cases," admits Jeffreys. "It was my wife, Sue, who said DNA fingerprinting would make an incredible difference in disputes over nationality. And she was absolutely right."
After talks with the woman's lawyers, Jeffreys agreed to help. However, the case was complicated by the fact that the boy's father was no longer living in Britain and could not be contacted.
"It was like a jigsaw with most of the bits missing," says Jeffreys.
Nevertheless he took samples from the mother, her three daughters and the disputed son. The results "blew me away", he recalls. "It was so incredibly simple. When I looked at the film we made of the DNA samples, I could see that every genetic character in the boy was either present in the woman or in his sisters. He was definitely her son."
The Home Office called in Jeffreys and, after a detailed explanation by him, agreed to drop the case.
"Afterwards I went over to tell the mother what had happened, that DNA had done its job," says Jeffreys.
"She had a bad time for the past two years and it was clearly affecting her health. But the look on her face when I told her, the relief - it was a magical moment. I realised then that we were on to something of real use. We had reached out and touched someone's life."
Over the next decade, DNA fingerprinting was used to test more than 18,000 immigrants who had been refused entry into the UK.
Of these, more than 95 per centproduced results that showed they were blood relatives of UK citizens and were therefore entitled to British citizenship - thanks to DNA fingerprinting.
The next two years were "simply insane", adds Jeffreys.
He was inundated with calls from families, mostly of Bangladeshi or Pakistani origins, who had been caught up in immigration disputes.
"The university switchboard jammed on several occasions with the calls coming into us."
A company, Cellmark, was set up in 1987 to take up these cases and took over much of the Jeffreys caseload.
"Then, out of the blue, I got a call from Leicestershire police, who were investigating the rape and murder of two schoolgirls, Linda Mann and Dawn Ashworth, who lived in the village of Narborough outside Leicester."
A local man, Richard Buckland, had just confessed to the murder of Dawn but refused to confess to the killing of Linda. Use your DNA fingerprinting technology to prove he killed both girls, they asked him.
So Jeffreys set up his tests, using - in this case - a version of DNA fingerprinting called DNA profiling.
Only a limited number of repeated regions are counted, a technique that is quicker to use and requires smaller samples. It was a perfect opportunity to show off the forensic value of genetic fingerprinting, Jeffreys realised, and, as the tests were being completed, he worked through the night to finish them off as quickly as he could. "I just couldn't wait any longer," he says.
He pulled the film from its developing tank. "I had expected to draw a blank and to find there was not enough DNA in the samples of semen that had been taken from the girls' bodies to produce results." He was wrong.
The film was covered in black bands, which showed that the semen from both girls came from the same man, but that Buckland's DNA was completely different.
He was not the murderer, the tests indicated. "It was a blood-chilling result," adds Jeffreys.
The police's response was terse and Anglo-Saxon. For his part, the geneticist began to worry that the whole concept of DNA profiling was "up the spout" and that there were things going on biologically that science still did not understand. Then the Home Office repeated the tests and produced the same results as Jeffreys. "I was fretting all the time, but they gave me strength," he adds.
In the end, the police accepted Buckland's innocence and on 21 November 1986, at Leicester Crown Court, he was cleared of the girls' murders.
Thus the first use of DNA fingerprinting in a criminal case was to help free an innocent man. "I am pretty sure that, given his confession, Buckland would still be in jail today," adds Jeffreys.
"Worse, the real perpetrator would have gone on to kill again."
In the end, that perpetrator was caught by a combination of DNA science and "good old-fashioned coppering", as Jeffreys puts it.
In January 1987 police asked all local men between 17 and 34 to submit blood for DNA testing in order to eliminate them from their inquiries.
By September, 4,000 had provided samples without success - until a chance remark transformed the investigation.
In a pub one day a local man admitted to his mates he had provided blood on behalf of a friend, Colin Pitchfork.
One friend told the police, the man and Pitchfork were arrested and the latter's DNA was shown by Jeffreys to match that of the semen from the two girls' bodies.
On 23 January 1988 Pitchfork was sentenced to life for the murders of Linda Mann and Dawn Ashworth. "It was the first time on the planet that a criminal investigation had been tackled and solved at a DNA level," says Jeffreys.
Since then, Jeffreys has used DNA profiling to determine a range of intriguing cases. In 1990 he showed that DNA from bones dug up from a Brazilian graveyard by Nazi-hunters was almost certainly that of Josef Mengele, a doctor who had tortured inmates at Auschwitz.
A year later, he helped Home Office scientists prove that bones found in a burial pit in Ekaterinburg, 850 miles east of Moscow, were those of the Russian imperial family who had been killed in 1918 during the Russian civil war.
It is a striking body of work, which earned Jeffreys a knighthood in 1994 and which has taken him far from his academic roots and involved him in a startling range of work. He has no regrets, however: "I love it. DNA fingerprinting came out of the blue and turned me round in five minutes flat. There are certain things in science that are historically inevitable, however. I was just lucky that I got to discover DNA fingerprinting. If I hadn't, someone else would have done it by now. I have no illusions about that."
Forensic History
1984 DNA fingerprints are discovered by Alec Jeffreys. At first, these are used extensively to resolve disputed immigration cases.
1987 The first DNA profile is developed, also by Jeffreys.
These use pieces of DNA from only a few selected sites on a person's chromosomes. Repetitions of DNA at these sites are counted, producing a set of numbers that acts as a person's DNA identifier. DNA profiles require smaller forensic samples and are quicker to develop.
Crucially, they can also be turned into a sequence of numbers, making it possible for a DNA database to be created.
1995 The UK National Criminal Intelligence DNA Database is established and is used to store the profiles of men and women convicted of crimes in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. A separate database is established in Scotland.
2009 The UK national database is now the largest, per head of population, of any country in the world: almost 10 per cent of the population of England, Wales and Northern Ireland is on the database. - Guardian
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Monday, May 25, 2009
Sunday, May 24, 2009
ANSARA CAW. TAIPING (ACT) AGM
AGM tahun ni adalah AGM ke 7 & 8. Tahun lepas diorang missed sebab sibuk dengan aktiviti 25 Tahun Jubli Perak & SPKG. Sebab tu AGM tahun ni adalah AGM ke 7 & 8.
Sebenarnya aku pun first time 'sampai' ke AGM ACT ni. Baru nak start kerja2 voluntary work yang aku tengok sangat kureng especially di kalangan orang melayu kita. Tempatnya di Saujana Impian Golf Resort dekat area Kajang. Kalau ikot kilometer, 40 km dari rumah aku. Jauh bebenor tuh...
Masa sampai tu, aku terserempak ngan Talib. Tu pun wife aku yg perasan Mis dok dukung anak dia. Masa pendaftaran nampak lah muka 'regular' a.k.a Amy. Time tu Talib tengah isi borang ANSARA. Nazir Azhari pun ada. So antara ahli ACT yang ada, kitorang lah dikira paling junior kecuali Azwan (SPM 97). Dia datang pun nak main golf, ACT Invitational, acara ACT lepas AGM.
Nak promo sket, Nazir sekarang dah jadi full time photographer. So kalau korang nak survey untuk photographer bley la korang kontek dia or website dia http://lensazum.blogspot.com/ atau facebook dia. Dia sekarang joint venture ngan kawan dia yang ada studio. Best of luck, bro! Yang lain-lain tu masih berstatus 'employee'.
Meeting berjalan macam meeting society time kita sekolah dulu-dulu. Ikot protocol (ACT ni berdaftar dengan ROC = Registrar of Company). Macam SPKG tahun lepas, geng kita dok buat meeting sendirik tapi kali ni takde la se-riuh masa SPKG dulu. Lots of things to catch up.. yelah dah brapa juta saat dah tak jumpa, sekarang baru nak tangkap naik (catch up)... Ada 2 orang yang aku expect datang, tak dapat hadir. Suraya Ali & Fadzliana. Tak sure kenapa Yana tak datang tapi Suraya Ali kena masuk opis hari ni sebab itu boss besar mau buat review... Bonus tengah tahun kah?
Ini dia committe baru untuk ANSARA Cawangan Taiping Sessi 2009/2010.Sebenarnya aku pun first time 'sampai' ke AGM ACT ni. Baru nak start kerja2 voluntary work yang aku tengok sangat kureng especially di kalangan orang melayu kita. Tempatnya di Saujana Impian Golf Resort dekat area Kajang. Kalau ikot kilometer, 40 km dari rumah aku. Jauh bebenor tuh...
Masa sampai tu, aku terserempak ngan Talib. Tu pun wife aku yg perasan Mis dok dukung anak dia. Masa pendaftaran nampak lah muka 'regular' a.k.a Amy. Time tu Talib tengah isi borang ANSARA. Nazir Azhari pun ada. So antara ahli ACT yang ada, kitorang lah dikira paling junior kecuali Azwan (SPM 97). Dia datang pun nak main golf, ACT Invitational, acara ACT lepas AGM.
Nak promo sket, Nazir sekarang dah jadi full time photographer. So kalau korang nak survey untuk photographer bley la korang kontek dia or website dia http://lensazum.blogspot.com/ atau facebook dia. Dia sekarang joint venture ngan kawan dia yang ada studio. Best of luck, bro! Yang lain-lain tu masih berstatus 'employee'.
Meeting berjalan macam meeting society time kita sekolah dulu-dulu. Ikot protocol (ACT ni berdaftar dengan ROC = Registrar of Company). Macam SPKG tahun lepas, geng kita dok buat meeting sendirik tapi kali ni takde la se-riuh masa SPKG dulu. Lots of things to catch up.. yelah dah brapa juta saat dah tak jumpa, sekarang baru nak tangkap naik (catch up)... Ada 2 orang yang aku expect datang, tak dapat hadir. Suraya Ali & Fadzliana. Tak sure kenapa Yana tak datang tapi Suraya Ali kena masuk opis hari ni sebab itu boss besar mau buat review... Bonus tengah tahun kah?
Presiden: Fuad Kenali (First Batch MRSM Taiping - Class of 1985)
Timbalan Presiden: Ihsan Husainy Hasbullah (Class of 1995)
Setiausaha: Zaini a.k.a Jenab (First Batch MRSM Taiping - Class of 1985)
Bendahari: Roslan A'Alaf (First Batch MRSM Taiping - Class of 1985)
Ahli:
1. Roslan Seman (Tatau batch mana)
2. Mohd Amyzaddin Raya (Class of 1995)
3. Azwan (Class of 1997)
4. Talib Sabri Sulaiman (Class of 1995)
5. -sorry lupa-
6. Abg Damit (bahagian website maintenance)
Meeting conclude, makan & aku dapat call dari Hasnor, dia pun ada bisness sendiri. Company dia sole distributor untuk industrial dryer, mainly untuk produk dlm bentuk serbuk e.g. ajinomoto, nescafe, susu tepung dsb. Dia join tournament golf tu. Mengamuk dia bila dia tau dia sorang je batch kita yang join tournament tu. Takpe bro, next year aku promo kaw-kaw punya >_<. Aku blah dalam kol 1 lebey, time tu dah berduyun2 golfers tengah register. Maybe next year kita bley ramaikan kawan2 kita kat AGM & Invitational Golf tournament anjuran ACT.
Kalau korang ada apa2 idea menarik, tertarik ko memang de boom, bley la korang suggest kat website ni atau ACT @ http://www.actorg.net
Saturday, May 23, 2009
CODE OF CONDUCT
Aku dah agak mende ni akan berlaku tapi tak sangka mende ni jadi selepas dua tahun lebih blogging ni.
Apa yang aku maksudkan? Ada orang buat statement yg belum ditentukan betul atau salah. Bak kata Ahmad Kamal @ Yeop jika yang dikatakan tu salah sudah menjadi fitnah dan kalau betul sudah membuka pekung seseorang.
Pendapat aku, baik diselesaikan di belakang tabir. Ini cerita peribadi, bukan perkara yg patut diwar-warkan. Hadis yang diriwayatkan oleh Abu Hurairah bahawa Rasulullah pernah bersabda (Sumber: Hadith 40)
Tapi kalau yang salah tetap salah & perlu di betulkan, gunalah cara yang terbaik. Namun begitu saya kurang pasti dengan tindakan untuk melaung-laungkan kepada orang lain tentang keburukan seseorang. Cuba bayangkan jika orang membuat apa yang anda lakukan sekarang?
Sekian,
Yang jahil,
//[i]
Apa yang aku maksudkan? Ada orang buat statement yg belum ditentukan betul atau salah. Bak kata Ahmad Kamal @ Yeop jika yang dikatakan tu salah sudah menjadi fitnah dan kalau betul sudah membuka pekung seseorang.
Pendapat aku, baik diselesaikan di belakang tabir. Ini cerita peribadi, bukan perkara yg patut diwar-warkan. Hadis yang diriwayatkan oleh Abu Hurairah bahawa Rasulullah pernah bersabda (Sumber: Hadith 40)
"Let whosoever believes in Allah and in the Last Day either speak good or be silent. Let whosoever believes in Allah and in the Last Day honour his neighbour. Let whosoever believes in Allah and in the Last Day honour his guest."
Tapi kalau yang salah tetap salah & perlu di betulkan, gunalah cara yang terbaik. Namun begitu saya kurang pasti dengan tindakan untuk melaung-laungkan kepada orang lain tentang keburukan seseorang. Cuba bayangkan jika orang membuat apa yang anda lakukan sekarang?
Sekian,
Yang jahil,
//[i]
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Fare formulae
KWT-JKT-KWT : KD218 (RM2,500)
KWT-KUL-KWT : KD912.2 (RM10,950)
What is the logic to set a 1000km shorter distance could cost you 400% more? I failed to think...
KWT-KUL-KWT : KD912.2 (RM10,950)
What is the logic to set a 1000km shorter distance could cost you 400% more? I failed to think...
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
King style
A received mail from a fren titled:
ملك المغرب يذبح خروف بدون مساعدة احد (Raja Morocco menyembelih kambing tanpa bantuan sesiapa)
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Welcome to ‘sex orgy’ island
By R.S.N. MURALI and SHAHRIL CHE WAN
KUALA TERENGGANU: Revellers at a recent wild party on Pulau Perhentian are believed to have had a sex orgy before Besut District Council (MDB) enforcement officers moved in on them.
It is learnt that this was the second time a wild party was held on the island. The first, themed “Buffalo Bars Pink Lady”, was organised on May 3 where it is learnt that there was sexual intercourse between revellers. On the “Come bare under the moonlight’’ party on May 10, council officer Razman Ahmad, who led the team, said he was startled to find condoms strewn on the secluded beachfront where the party was held. “I can’t disclose more facts as the council has lodged a police report on the matter, but I can tell you that there were activities associated with sexual intercourse on that night and this was substantiated by the discovery of sex paraphernalia,” Razman said yesterday.
He declined to elaborate whether he witnessed the revellers having sex when council officials arrived at the scene. Investigations showed the organiser was a 31-year-old man from Kedah who arranged the party with his girlfriend from Ireland. It is learnt that police were investigating her for organising similar parties, including in Langkawi and Port Dickson, and that she was responsible for posting the invitation on her Facebook. Razman added that the scantily-clad teenagers, some of them foreigners, were intoxicated when his team arrived at 1am in two speedboats. He said he decided to call his superior to brief him on the situation, following which, the police were informed and 15 officers arrived at the scene. The officers seized alcoholic drinks worth about RM90,000, loudspeakers, audio equipment, psychotropic pills, drug and sex paraphernalia during the raid. The party was attended by 200 teenagers, who were invited via Facebook. Of the first party, council president Wan Mustafa Wan Hassan said the officers were unable to reach the site on time as they received the tip-off late. Wan Mustafa said the council has slapped the couple involved in the second party with a RM25,000 fine under the Entertainment Act 2002 for organising a party without permit. A police report has also been lodged.
Monday, May 18, 2009
YouTube pig cull clip sparks outrage
Source: Kuwait Times, Published Date: May 18, 2009
CAIRO: A YouTube video clip showing pigs being culled in Egypt as part of swine flu measures has caused outrage at the apparent barbarity of the method of slaughtering the animals. The clip posted by independent newspaper Al-Masri Al-Yom includes gory images of pigs being beaten with iron bars, piglets being stabbed and animals being kicked alive into bulldozer buckets. Since going on line on YouTube this weekend, the clip has sparked horrified reactions from Muslims and from the Christian Copt community, who are the main rearers of pigs in Egypt as Muslims do not eat pork. Although no case of A(H1N1) swine flu has yet been detected on its territory, Egypt is the only country in the world to have decided to kill all its pigs, estimated to have numbered around 250,000 before the cull began. The World Health Organization has said the drastic measure is not scientifically justified. In the video, Mohamed El-Mugharbil, deputy mayor of Kashkus near Cairo, describes how chemicals are also poured on animals caged in lorries, leading to a slow death. Ali Shaaban, head of the site where the corpses are buried, confirms the method. "The pigs are covered with chemical products and left for 30 or 40 minutes until they are dead, then we throw them in the ditch.The agriculture ministry denied the animals are killed with chemicals. "These are disinfectants. The throats of the animals are slit before they are buried," Saber Abdel Aziz Galal, head of the department of infectious diseases, told AFP. Other pictures obtained by AFP show pigs which have been disembowelled but whose throats have not been slit. Sheikh Salim Mohammed Salim, head of the fatwas committee at the University of Al-Azhar, told AFP that killing an animal that way is "strictly forbidden by Islam... whatever it is, including a pig.The government-controlled Al-Ahram weekly alleged there was chaos at Bassatin, the large abattoir in Cairo where the pigs are supposed to be slaughtered humanely at a rate of 1,200 per day. "Only the males are killed in accordance with the rules," said journalist Heba Nasreddin, while "the piglets and sows are hit with an iron bar and left to bleed to death." An online petition calling on the Egyptian government to end the "senseless slaughter" has been launched on www.care2.com.The slaughter caused controversy from its start on May 3, when riot police clashed with stone-throwing pig farmers trying to prevent their animals from being taken away. Between 300 and 400 residents of the hilly Moqattam slum district of Cairo, where mostly Coptic scrap merchants raise pigs, hurled stones and bottles at police, saying the cull would deny them a key source of income. The authorities have said it will take six months to complete the slaughter and announced plans to import three machines toboost culling capacity to 3,000 animals a day.Arab intellectuals, both Christian and Muslim, have accused President Hosni Mubarak's government of having conspired with the Islamist opposition the Muslim Brotherhood, which opposes rearing pigs "on Islamic land." "The Copts are victims of the flu without ever having been contaminated," according to Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun, who believes the government "clearly acted under pressure from Islamists" when it ordered the mass cull. Salama Ahmad Salama, an Egyptian commentator, said "human stupidity rather than an illness of pigs" was behind the government's decision. While the (A)H1N1 flu strain has yet to surface in Egypt, the country has battled an outbreak of bird flu for the past three years. Twenty-six people have died in Egypt from the H5N1 strain of bird flu since it was first identified in early 2006, and the country has seen an increase in cases over the past two months. - AFP Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwMIlw7rCSc
Nakheel to pay a fraction of debts
Cash-strapped Dubai developer Nakheel is to offer consultants and contractors just 65% of the money it owes them, NCE has learnt. Nakheel is one of the most high-profile developer in Dubai, with the government-backed firm responsible for the famous palm-shaped islands and ‘World’ and ‘Universe’ island developments. But last month NCE revealed that the developer was close to bankruptcy, with analysts estimating that it owed consultants up to £200M. Last week the Dubai government bailed it out with cash from a successful bond issue worth £13.3bn (US$20bn), with neighbouring Abu Dhabi buying half the offering. Despite this, NCE understands that consultants will struggle to get paid in full for work done. “One of the offers on the table is for firms to get 65% of their consultancy fees, with the understanding that in doing so, they waive their legal rights [to further payment], ” Association for Consultancy and Engineering chief executive Nelson Ogunshakin told NCE. “We also believe UK firms may be further down the pecking order, and indigenous suppliers are given a preference,” he said, adding that the money owed to global consultants will top £400M.
The ACE has approached business secretary lord Mandelson to step in on behalf of British consultants. “We want to take action where appropriate, but the UK is one of the biggest players in Dubai, and this relationship must not be damaged,” he said. He added that Nakheel may not be the only Dubai firm to be in trouble. “Nakheel’s troubles are visible, but there are other investment vehicles trying to play the same game,” he said. Nakheel refused to comment on the details of payments to consultants. “We have benefited from an injection of capital from the bond issue. The value and other details relating to this funding remain confidential.” Nakheel’s problems stem from difficulties in securing pre-construction sales on property space. Its cashflow dried-up when its housing market collapsed in September 2008, leaving no money to pay consultants or contractors. Consultants had previously warned that allowing Nakheel to collapse would have damaged the reputation of the Emirate. Numerous consultants had reported cash collection issues in the Emirate, although it is unclear how much is owed to them by Nakheel. Mouchel reported it was chasing £23M in Dubai, “the vast majority being due from the local state backed development companies”. Atkins is owed £25M in the whole Middle East market, Scott Wilson between £4M and £6M and WSP an undisclosed sum.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Petua panjang umur
A doctor on his morning walk, noticed an old lady sitting on her front step smoking a cigar, so he walked up to her and said, "I couldn't help but notice how happy you look! What is your secret?" "I smoke ten cigars a day," she said. "Before I go to bed, I smoke a nice big joint. Apart from that, I drink a whole bottle of Jack Daniels every week, and eat only junk food. On weekends, I pop pills, get laid, and don't exercise at all.." "That is absolutely amazing! How old are you?" "Thirty-four," she replied 
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
ZIARAH KE RUMAH PELAJAR CEMERLANG SPM 2008
Tulisan Sdr Zahir Zainuddin, AJK Biro Latihan HALUAN.
Kesempatan berada di Kota Bharu, Kelantan, telah memberi peluang kepada saya untuk mencari Kampung Parang Puting, Pengkalan Chepa bagi membuat kunjungan ziarah ke atas keluarga pelajar cemerlang Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) 2008, Nik Nur Madihah Nik Mohd Kamal. Beliau mendapat 19A1 dan satu A2, ayahnya seorang nelayan dan ibunya, Mariani Omar bekerja sebagai pencuci di Universiti Malaysia Kelantan (UMK).
Untuk ke rumah beliau, saya berhenti di tiga tempat bagi mendapat petunjuk kedudukan rumahnya di kampung tersebut. Tempat pertama ialah sebuah gerai jualan bergerak di hadapan sebuah sekolah berhampiran Lapangan Terbang Pengkalan Chepa, manakala tempat kedua dan ketiga ialah kedai runcit di tepi jalan. Akhirnya, kedudukan rumah Nik Nur Madihah dapat juga ditemui iaitu di sebelah sebuah sekolah rendah dan lorong masuk ke rumah itu mempunyai pondok telefon dan sebuah bengkel kecil-kecilan.
Ketika keluar dari kereta, saya melihat sebuah rumah yang daif seperti yang dipaparkan dalam surat khabar. Keadaan bumbung rumah beratap zink karat dan berjuntaian betul-betul di hadapan beranda rumah. Di kiri dan kanan ada tiga buah rumah yang agak besar dan jauh beza keadaannya dengan rumah pelajar itu. [klik sini utk baca seterusnya...]
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