PETALING JAYA: Two Malaysians shared top honours in the internationally recognised Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) Financial Accounting paper in 2010.
Their wins brought the number of prizes awarded to Malaysians last year to three. In June, An Li Fong had scored the highest marks in the Audit and Assurance examination. Kwong Sze Hui and Teh Qian Yuen, both 20, scored the highest marks in the Financial Accounting paper, ahead of almost 900 students across the world and 64 in Malaysia.
Sponsored by the world’s fifth largest accountancy and advisory services network BDO, Kwong and Teh were two of the top accounting students studying for the leading Accredited Chartered Accountant (ACA) qualification in Malaysia with Sunway-TES.
A total of eight prizes have been won by Malaysians since 2004, ICAEW said in a statement yesterday.
Number crunchers: Gan (centre) posing with the ICAEW examination joint first place winners Teh (left) and Kwong.
Kwong and Teh garnered joint first place and the Spicer and Pegler prize with their BDO colleague Sam Moore of Huddersfield, Britain.
BDO Malaysia managing partner Datuk Gan Ah Tee lauded the duo’s achievements as a reflection of their drive to become global accounting professionals.
“They have demonstrated their commitment to excellence and this augurs well with BDO’s continued strategy to support human resources development.
“Our intention to provide opportunities for young, deserving Malaysian students to become global professionals through the BDO sponsorship programme continues to be well on its way,” Gan said.
ICAEW is an international accountancy body which provides training and support to over 134,000 members in 160 countries.
It is also a founding member of the Global Accounting Alliance with over 775,000 members worldwide.
DAP adviser Lim Kit Siang has been a defender and promoter of democracy, human rights, justice and equality. He remains the government’s leading critic.
DAP members and leaders have annually been marking the birthday of party adviser and undisputed leader Lim Kit Siang, who turned 70 on Sunday.
Where before his birthdays were low key and celebrated only among the inner circle, now big dinners and speeches are in order. Not only are the circumstances different, but the DAP has also grown rapidly in size after the tsunami of 2008 which changed the political landscape of the country and propelled it from a tight-knit opposition party into the ruling government in five states.
For hardcore DAP members, Lim is the man who made it all possible. The man who kept the party together during the long years of hardship; the man who went into ISA detention; the man who sacrificed for the party; and also the man who finally crowned it all with the 2008 successes.
Lim, who gave up an early career as a journalist, is as active in politics now as he was in 1966 when, as a 25-year-old youth, his career first took off after he became the national organising secretary of the DAP.
In the 45 years since, Lim has been a permanent fixture in national politics as the “Mr Opposition” in parliament, taking over the title from Tan Sri Tan Chee Koon, the opposition stalwart of an earlier era. Lim, the MP for Ipoh Timur, remains the government’s leading critic, as he had been when first elected to parliament as MP for Bandar Melaka in 1969.
In the intervening years, he also grew into the job becoming the country’s leading defender and promoter of democracy, human rights, justice and equality. All his ideals are best encapsulated in the DAP’s long struggle under his leadership for a Malaysian Malaysia.
In that time too, Lim, born in Batu Pahat, Johor, in 1941, ruled the DAP with an iron fist, tolerating little dissent and keeping his flock in a tight circle around him to fend off the party’s many political enemies and survive numerous threats and challenges.
Lim managed to steer the DAP through endless upheavals like ISA arrests, election defeats, defections and show trials to survive and eventually prosper with the 2008 tsunami that brought the DAP from the cold into the government.
It was also under Lim’s watch that the DAP won 29 seats in parliament, its best ever showing and took Penang, defeating arch rivals Gerakan and MCA in a spectacular manner.
Lim’s crowning glory in five decades of relentless politics is to see his son, Guan Eng, capture Penang and become its chief minister, something Lim himself had tried to do for two decades and failed.
Lim took over an incipient DAP, a wing of the Singapore’s PAP after separation in 1965, and nurtured it into the country’s leading multi-racial and secular opposition party.
The DAP successfully filled the big political vacuum left behind by state action against left wing political parties like the Socialist Front and the Labour Party.
Although Lim tried to change its image in his two decades as party secretary-general until 1999 and later as chairman and adviser, the DAP remains mostly a Chinese party with very little Malay grassroots participation. The failure to attract Malays is hampering the party’s growth as a national, multi-racial party with the potential to rule the country like the PKR.
Thus, the DAP, although a major partner in Pakatan Rakyat and a player in parliament and national politics, has to defer to a politically weaker and splintered PKR. Lim has developed a special relationship with PAS, each hoping to ride on the other’s coat-tails to Federal power.
Lim’s career is one upheaval after another but he faced his greatest defeat in the 1999 general election when Chinese voters, out of fear of an Islamic theocracy, punished the DAP. Lim himself lost in Penang but he bounced back in 2004 winning the Ipoh Timur seat.
His greatest achievement is taking the DAP back into an alliance with PAS but this time with the PKR led by Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim taking the lead role and assuring Chinese voters and others that the grouping that later became Pakatan Rakyat, is a safe bet.
After 45 years in opposition politics and after publishing over 30 books, Lim is an enigma.
While his political career is well-documented, only the bare outlines of his early life and his family is known even to his closest political allies except that he traces his ancestry to Zhang Zhou village in Fujian province which he visited in 2008.
Very little is known about his parents, his siblings, his early life and schooling and what really pushed him into politics. Lim has written about politics but not himself.
Lim is getting old and in apparent retirement after handing over effective power to others including in stages to his son, Guan Eng. Nevertheless, he wields tremendous moral authority and is the one person everybody defers to in the DAP.
“Lim’s role now in the DAP is to make sure the party stays united and behind Guan Eng as the acknowledged heir,” said a DAP MP who declined to be identified.
“He keeps an eye on everything and everybody and intervenes when necessary,” the MP said, citing recent squabbles between party leaders and factions in last year’s party elections as occasions when Lim had stepped in to keep unity and discipline.
As Lim ages, a new DAP is also taking shape. Success has attracted new members with the DAP growing to about three times its original size.
It has also brought new challenges to the party like power struggles over sharing portfolios and government largesse, allegations of corruption and a growing and restive grassroots.
While the DAP changes significantly, power in the party remains in the hands of an inner circle that is beholden to Lim.
With such deference, and given the tremendous moral authority he wields, Lim continues to be the effective ruler and final arbitrator in the DAP.
KUALA LUMPUR: Zairil Khir Johari (pic), the son of the late former Education Minister Tan Sri Mohd Khir Johari, has been appointed the political secretary to the DAP secretary-general.
Lim Guan Eng said that Zairil, 28, who joined the party six months ago, would be based at the DAP secretariat here and assist him with political matters at the party and national level.
“He is also learned, especially in international relations and diplomacy.
“He just happens to be a Malay,” Lim said when asked if Zairil was appointed to encourage more Malays to join DAP.
Lim added that DAP had always reached out to people of various races and was not anti-Malay as some had propagated.
“Competency is race-blind and not race-specific,” he said. He added that his children’s doctor was a Malay but he was the best.
Zairil, a father of one, has a Masters in Arts in International Studies and Diplomacy from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.
He also has a degree in information systems engineering and was a chocolate making entrepreneur. He introduced full-coloured chocolate printing technology in Malaysia.
Zairil, from Penang, said he had been observing DAP for some time before joining the party. He hoped to help DAP achieve its goal for an equitable Malaysia for all races.
“Politics has always been my passion. “I share the views of many young people that Malaysia is going in the wrong way.
Feb. 23 (Bloomberg) — It comes with a nice office and a grand title. You would probably have a pretty generous expense account. And there may well be a lucrative consulting gig with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. when it is all over.
Even so, you would have to be bordering on insanity to accept the role of European Central Bank president when Jean- Claude Trichet steps down in October this year.
It’s the job from hell. The euro crisis is getting worse. You will be asked to achieve the impossible. You will have zero independence. And the chances are that you will wind up being remembered as the person who presided over one of the biggest monetary failures in history. That’s hardly an appealing prospect.
When Axel Weber unexpectedly resigned as Bundesbank president this month, the favorite to take over from the usually calm and confident Trichet was suddenly out of the running.
The field is now wide open. Mario Draghi, the Bank of Italy governor, has been installed by the bookmakers as most likely to get the job. He is followed by Erkki Liikanen, the Finnish central banker, who is now at odds of 2-1, followed by Luxembourg’s Yves Mersch, and Dutchman Nout Wellink. An outsider at 20-1 is another German, Klaus Regling, the head of Europe’s bailout fund. It could even be another Frenchman — Xavier Musca, the economics adviser to French President Nicolas Sarkozy, has been mentioned as a possibility.
Euro Mess
Yet surely any job would be preferable to running the ECB. Greek finance minister, for example. Or running the public relations unit for BP Plc on the Gulf coast. Either would be better than trying to sort out the mess the euro has become.
Here’s why.
First, the crisis ebbs and flows. But the only real fix is for the economies of the 17 members to converge, and there is no sign of that. Germany is booming, and the peripheral countries are slumped in recession. The German economy will expand 2.3 percent this year, according to the government. By contrast, the Greek economy shrank 1.4 percent in the fourth quarter alone. From a year earlier, its economy contracted 6.6 percent.
The difference in growth rates between Germany and the worst performing countries is now close to nine percentage points. In effect, the imbalances are widening — and that means the crisis is becoming more severe.
Inflation Lurks
Second, the new ECB president will be asked to achieve the impossible. The central bank is mandated to keep consumer-price increases at just below 2 percent. In January, the euro area’s inflation rate was already 2.4 percent. Thomas Straubhaar, director of the Hamburg Institute of International Economics, says German inflation will reach 4 percent by the end of 2012. Price pressures are growing everywhere, and at some point the ECB will have to act.
That will plunge the struggling nations into a depression. What happens to an economy that has already contracted more than 6 percent in the past year when you boost interest rates? You create a full-blown depression — 1931 will seem mild by comparison. They will burn your effigy in Athens and Dublin. You can’t maintain price stability and rescue the peripheral nations, but that’s what you will be asked to do.
Three, the bank’s independence is about to be compromised. The euro area’s leaders will struggle to keep the single currency together. They have invested too much capital in this project to let it fail. They will come up with a dozen plans and trillions of euros in rescue packages. The chances of the ECB maintaining its independence during that process are zero.
Let Inflation Rip
If you need to print money to keep the euro intact, you will have to turn on the presses. If you have to prop up bankrupt banks, the euros will have to be made available. If you need to cut interest rates and let inflation rip, you will have to ignore your mandate for price stability. The ECB president will end up having to do what French and German politicians tell him, regardless of whether it makes any economic sense.
Four, you will probably end up presiding over the dismemberment of the euro. This is an eight-year term. Whoever gets the job will still be there in 2019. It is hard to see the single currency surviving that long without one or more countries leaving. The pressures within the system are too great to be contained. Who wants to be remembered as the person who presided over one of the great monetary failures in history?
They will probably find someone to take the job. There’s always someone who wants a promotion. But Axel Weber was a candidate of stature, just what the ECB needs. He walked away from the gig. The other candidates are now taking a good hard look at the job description.
(Matthew Lynn is a Bloomberg News columnist and the author of “Bust,” a book on the Greek debt crisis. The opinions expressed are his own.)
Radiation from a mobile phone call can make brain regions near the device burn more energy, according to a new study.
Cellphones emit ultra-high-frequency radio waves during calls and data transfers, and some researchers have suspected this radiation — albeit inconclusively — of being linked to long-term health risks like brain cancer. The new brain-scan-based work, to be published Feb. 23 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, shows radiation emitted from a cellphone’s antenna during a call makes nearby brain tissue use 7 percent more energy.
“We have no idea what this means yet or how it works,” said neuroscientist Nora Volkow of the National Institutes of Health. “But this is the first reliable study showing the brain is activated by exposure to cellphone radio frequencies.”
More than 5 billion mobile devices may be in use worldwide today. From behavioral quirks to brain cancer, researchers have looked for any health risks associated with cellphone radiation for years. Volkow said, however, that most research has produced conflicting results.
“These studies used only 14 people, at most, and looked at brain activity over brief time spans of about 60 seconds. A cellphone’s effect on the brain is very weak, so you lose statistical power with small sample sizes and durations,” said Volkow. “Our study had 47 usable subjects monitored over a long time to get us significant data.”
Cancer epidemiologist Geoffrey Kabat of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine said the work can’t and doesn’t offer any clinical predictions, but regarded it as the best to date on cellphone radiation’s effects on the brain.
“It’s a really even-handed look at this problem, and it shows a small effect that scales with exposure,” said Kabat, author of the book Hyping Health Risks. “I’m really curious to see where future research leads.”
Cellphones use ultra-high-frequency radio waves to connect with telecommunications networks. Antennas within phones emit the waves and, while the strength tails off quickly as distance from the antenna increases, a sizable chunk of it is beamed through the brain.
As a result, federal agencies require phone manufacturers to post information about how much radiation the body might absorb for each model, called its Specific Absorption Rate or SAR. Measured in watts per kilogram of tissue, it reveals how much radiation parts of the body are exposed to during use of a mobile device.
The simple cellphone used in Volkow’s study, a Samsung Knack phone popular in New York, has a peak SAR in the head of just under 1 watt per kilogram of tissue. The Phone 4 has a peak SAR in the head twice as high, while sun’s average SAR across the body is 4 or 5 times higher.
Some studies have suggested a small yet significant link between long-term cellphone SARs and certain brain cancers, including glioma and meningioma, but most investigations have found no such links. To abolish any uncertainty, the World Health Organization tasked a group of scientists to review all known related research. Their 2010 Interphone report showed no substantial link with mobile phone use and incidence of brain cancers, and in fact found reduced rates for some types.
‘The effect is very small, but it’s still unnatural. Nature didn’t prepare our brains for this.’
Still, Volkow said, understanding close-up and long-term exposure to cellphone radiation is important.
“The state of knowledge is really speculative. No studies have determined mechanisms for what we have seen, or other effects such as increased blood flow in the brain,” Volkow said. “I have spent hours on the phone with my sister every week, and have done it for years, so I would like to know if that’s harmful or not.”
Volkow and a team of researchers scanned the brains of 47 people with a cellphone attached to each side of their head. One phone was turned off, while the other had an active call going for 50 minutes. It was muted to prevent the audio from having effects on brain activity.
Twenty minutes into the call, clinicians injected a radioactive form of sugar into each person, then began imaging their brains with a Positron Emission Topography machine. Over the course of 30 minutes, the sugar pooled in the brain’s most active regions and revealed the energy use to the brain scanner.
Accounting for normal activity, the subjects showed about a 7 percent boost in sugar use on the side of the head where the active cellphone was.
Brain imaging physicist Dardo Tomasi of Brookhaven National Laboratory, who co-authored the study, said that’s several times less activity than visual brain regions show during an engaging movie.
“The effect is very small, but it’s still unnatural. Nature didn’t prepare our brains for this,” Tomasi said. Although the mechanism for the effect and its long-term consequences aren’t known, Volkow said it’s cheap and worthwhile to take matters into your own hands.
“You don’t have to wait around on us for the answers. Just use a wired headset or the speakerphone function,” she said. “That keeps the phone far enough away to make it an insignificant risk.”
Image: A bottom-of-the-brain view showing average use of radioactive glucose in the brains of 47 subjects exposed to a 50-minute phone call on the right side of their head. (Nora Volkow/JAMA) See Also:
Dave is an infinitely curious Wired Science contributor who's obsessed with space, physics, biology and technology. He lives in New York City. Follow @davemosher and @wiredscience on Twitter.
Number crunchers: Gan (centre) posing with the ICAEW examination joint first place winners Teh (left) and Kwong.
