Next Time, I'll Be There..

I have been back in Malaysia for couple of weeks now for a sojourn. One of the things (some) Malaysians or ex-Malaysians abroad have to do.

I was invited by Tok Mommy (Kak Maria) for a bloggers' bash. Actually, it was an invite through another invitation. I was thrilled, yet a little apprehensive.

Truth be told. It was not easy because I'd have to "blow my cover". No more anonymity.

Would people be expecting an "Eva"? Kak Maria told me that a joke was going around the Tuesday Mee Rebus sessions that some people are convinced that I'm a 6-footer Sikh male.

Kak Maria herself asked me about me.I told her I ain't telling. although I gave her BROAD hints.

I'll be honest -- I'm no 6-footer although I am tall. Nor am I male or a Sikh.

To cut a story short -- I missed the bloggers bash at the Curve on Saturday Nov 29 because I was at the other end of the Klang Valley, stuck in a horrendous traffic jam.

Was looking forward to meeting Kak Maria, Nuraina, Kerp, MadSalo, Rocky and the others.

I suppose Somebody else had good reason to not let me be there.

It would have to be "next time"....

So, until the next time in this lifetime....you guys rock!

State Of Emergency At Bangkok Airports As Rumours Of Coup Abound

People power in Thailand ain't gonna do the country any good. But something just has to be said and done for the long-term good of the country.

That people power is deceptive because the real power in Thailand lies in the military.

These protests are just being allowed because the military is allowing it to a point when it has the government on its knees.

Already there are rumours of a coup.

Just read The New York Times that a a state of emergency has been declared at Bangkok’s two commercial airports today.

Thai Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat against whom the protest is made, instructed police to deal with protesters occupying the facilities, Thai media reported.

Of course the people are protesting, Somchai is ousted leader Thaksin Shinawatra's brother-in-law.

Read the story here.

And on the coup, here

Judge Orders Guantanamo Releases

Well, I hope that this development spells better things to come as far as Guantanamo prisoners are concerned.

Many of them I am very sure are innocent.

Punish the guilty. Release the innocent!

Read this Al-Jazeera report:

A US judge has ruled that five Algerians held in the US prison facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba for almost seven years had been illegally detained and must be freed.

Richard Leon, a US district judge in Washington DC, said the US government had "failed to show by burden of proof" that the five men had allegedly planned to go to Afghanistan to fight US-led forces there.

However the judge did find that a sixth Algerian man, seized alongside the other men in Bosnia-Hercegovina in 2001, had been legally detained.

The ruling follows the first hearings under a landmark US supreme court ruling in June - based on a case brought by lawyers for Lakhdar Boumediene, one of the Algerian men - that gave Guantanamo prisoners the legal right to challenge their continued detention.

The June ruling said that inmates in Guantanamo Bay had the right to know under what charges they were being held and what the evidence was against them.

Thursday's decision marks a fresh embarrassment over the camp for the Bush administration and comes after Barack Obama, the US president-elect, pledged to close the prison camp after taking office in January.

The White House said later on Thursday it disagreed with the court's ruling and that the Justice Department was reviewing the decision on the five Algerians.

"This ruling does demonstrate the need for Congress to enact procedures that allow these petitions to be adjudicated in a way that is fair to the detainee but that allows the government to present its case without imperiling national security," said Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman.

Controversial cases

The US government had accused all six of the men of planning to travel to
Afghanistan to join the al-Qaeda network and fight against US-led forces in the country.

But their lawyers say there is no evidence the men ever would have ended up ona battlefield or posed any threat to the US.

Michael Ratner from the Centre for Constitutional Rights, who acted as a legal advisor to the men, told Al Jazeera he was overjoyed by the verdict.

"This is a huge huge decision. Not only for those five men but for how it showed that the US government was off the chart in what it was doing to people."

Ratner said he hoped that the decision would lead to similar rulings in other cases involving Guantanamo detainees.

Judge Leon said the allegation against the men was based on a single source and that he did not have enough information to judge the source's reliability or credibility.

However the judge ruled the government did provide enough evidence that one of the detainees, Belkacem Bensayah, had planned to take up arms against the US in Afghanistan.

Boumediene and the other five men were initially detained by US authorities on suspicion of plotting to bomb the US embassy in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, in October 2001, and transferred them to Guantanamo in January 2002.

However the Justice Department has reportedly since dropped the embassy bombing accusations.

Last month, US district judge Ricardo Urbina also ordered the release of 17 Chinese Muslims, members of the Uighur ethnic group, after the government acknowledged they were not enemy combatants.

About 250 prisoners are still being held at the US naval camp in Cuba on suspicion of "terrorism" or links to al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Most were detained during the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 after the September 11 attacks in the US.

Most have been held for years without being charged and many have complained of abuse, and the camp remains one of the most controversial aspects of the Bush administration's so-called war on terror.

HALLELUJAH! HISTORY AND OBAMA.

Let me apologize for not blogging for a mighty long time. I was in Europe. Spain to be exact. As usual -- work and play.

Not a moment passed by that I did NOT think about the US presidential elections.

My fingers were so itchy. I wanted to surf the net and blog about my days and nights.

I thought this could never happen -- I did not have time. NO TIME.

I never thought this could ever be possible. But that's the truth...so help me God!

HOWEVER -- came home. Caught up with stuff.
And YES! Barrack Hussein Obama is PRESIDENT!

That's H I S T O R Y and H I S T O R I C, people.

I rejoice. I know that he may not be as good a President as his hype want us to believe. But, I'm putting my money on him.

Never thought this day would come. Ever!

HALLELUJAH!

My Money!

I don't know about you guys....but here, we're a nation of bewildered people. We don't know what hit us. So we're still coming around....

So what do we do? I mean, what if tomorrow (God forbids!) we lose our investments? Do we switch to cash? Any risks in doing that?

Well, the New York Times has a report in answer to my fear:

It’s a question we’ve all asked in our darker moments of late: Why not just put all of our investments in cash, 100 percent, just for a little while, until things calm down?

Some people already seem to be acting on that instinct. In the first six days of October (through Monday), investors pulled $19 billion out of mutual funds that invest in United States stocks, matching the outflows for the entire month of September, according to TrimTabs Investment Research.

“What clients are looking for is safety,” said John Bunch, president of retail distribution at TD Ameritrade. “They are seeking solutions that are backed by the federal government. Specifically, F.D.I.C-insured money funds and certificates of deposit. All of it is under the umbrella of, ‘Am I safe and insured?’ ”

By fleeing for the comfort of safe and insured, however, investors with a time horizon beyond a few years may be doing real damage to their long-term finances. If you’re tempted to make a big move to cash right now, you’re doing something called market timing. It’s an implied statement that you’ve figured out the right moment to get out of stocks — and will also know the right time to get back in.

So let’s dispense with the first part straightaway. The right time to move out of stocks was a year or so ago, before various stock indexes the world over fell by one-third or more.

If you missed that opportunity, you’re hardly alone.

But if you sell now, you’ll be locking in your losses. And once you’re in cash, there isn’t much upside. In fact, with interest rates low, you’re likely to lose money in cash, because inflation will probably eat up the after-tax returns you earn from a savings or money-market account.

A guarantee of a small loss may sound good right now. But if you’re not bailing out of stocks once and for all, how will you know when it’s time to get back in? The fact is, any peace of mind you gain by being on the sidelines now will turn into a migraine once you see how much you can harm your portfolio over time by missing just a bit of any rebound.

H. Nejat Seyhun, a professor of finance at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, put together a study in 2005 for Towneley Capital Management, where he tested the long-term damage that investors could do to their portfolios if they missed out on the small percentage of days when the stock market experienced big gains.

From 1963 to 2004, the index of American stocks he tested gained 10.84 percent annually in a geometric average, which avoided overstating the true performance. For people who missed the 90 biggest-gaining days in that period, however, the annual return fell to just 3.2 percent. Less than 1 percent of the trading days accounted for 96 percent of the market gains.

This fall, Javier Estrada, a professor of finance at IESE Business School in Barcelona, published a similar study in The Journal of Investing that looked at equity markets in 15 nations, including the United States. A portfolio belonging to an investor who missed the 10 best days over several decades across all of those markets would end up, on average, with about half the balance of someone who sat tight throughout.

So moving to cash right now is just fine as long as you know precisely when to get back into stocks (even though you didn’t know when to get out of them).

At some point, stocks will indeed fall enough that investors will remove the money from their mattresses and put it to work, causing prices to rise significantly. But, as Bonnie A. Hughes, a certified financial planner with the Enrichment Group in Miami, put it to me, there won’t be an e-mail message or news release that goes out when this is about to happen. It will be evident only afterward, on the few days when the market surges.

And it gets worse for those who think they won’t have any trouble investing in stocks again later. Medium- or long-term investors who are considering a big move into cash right now are probably making an emotional decision, at least in part. For those who follow through, the same instincts will probably hurt when trying to figure out when to reinvest in stocks.

“The emotional forces that drove them out of the market aren’t likely to let them back in ‘until things are better,’ ” Dan Danford of the Family Investment Center in St. Joseph, Mo., said in an e-mail message. “And for most people, things won’t feel better again until the market has already moved back up.” In fact, he added, plenty of people may not allow themselves to get back in until the market has already risen significantly.

That situation is worth considering if you think your mood, or returns, can’t get any worse. “People feel worse missing out on the bounce-back that will inevitably come than they do hanging in there through the down period,” said Elaine D. Scoggins, a certified financial planner with Merriman Berkman Next in Seattle.

The truly downbeat do not see the bounce as inevitable. This outlook is essentially a bet that our current predicament is so different that the equity markets won’t bounce back at all, even though they survived 1929, the Great Depression, 1987 and a major terrorist attack. I do not believe that the markets are in some kind of permanent decline, and I haven’t found an expert who does.

That said, some retirees, or those close to leaving the work force, may be well-off enough to leave stocks behind for now. If the tumult in the economy and the decline in the markets have altered your risk tolerance, then it may make sense to move to a portfolio of Treasury bills, certificates of deposit and money market funds.

Michael G. Coli, 56, of Crystal Lake, Ill., decided to take his 401(k) money out of the market in February. As an investor in his sons’ pizza restaurants, he noticed that an increasing number of customers were relying on credit cards. And as the owner of a winter home in Naples, Fla., he witnessed the housing market dive. Taken together, he decided to pull his retirement money, which he would need in five years, from the Vanguard Balanced Index Fund and move it all into certificates of deposit.

“I had the feeling the economy was not on real firm ground,” Mr. Coli said. “I decided to get out and put it all in C.D.’s, and that is where I’ve been ever since.”

If you can’t afford to live off the proceeds of cash investments (or dividends from your investment in your kids’ pizza joints), you may have no choice but to hold on to whatever stocks you have left. Then, you can hope for a rebound that will allow you to live out your later years more comfortably. Selling now and moving to cash could mean guaranteeing a lower standard of living for the rest of your life, because you’d be locking in your losses.

But if you’re a bit younger, try to think of your investment portfolio in the same way you consider the value of your home, if you own one. After all, if you’re not moving anytime soon, your home is a long-term investment, too.

“Today’s price is not your price. Your price is 10 or 20 years from now,” said Thomas A. Orecchio, of Greenbaum & Orecchio, a wealth management firm in Old Tappan, N.J. “Unfortunately, stock market investors don’t always see things that way.”

A Really New Dawn!

Read the good news about Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi's decision to step down next March!

Oh...forget Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim's promise of a new dawn. We'll stick to this one because this will be happening for sure. Yeah, for sure.

Are you guys celebratin' back home?

Now, I'm just absorbing this whole thing and feelin' a kind of high. No, it's not the vodka. It's the thought that at least, one clown is out! And with him, the other clowns, who may be smaller, but, I can tell ya, they're the ones who've been effectively putting stupid ideas in his head!

Now, let's see -- is Datuk Seri Najib Razak Pak Lah's successor. By all counts under the current system of succssion, he is the bona fide successor.

Oh, yeah...I've been readin' stuff on home.

The way Umno works, I think, they'll want him to be. They' ll live him alone. And Tengku Razaleigh may join Pakatan.

And ooooh...I can see Anwar's people sharpening their knives, lembing and everythin' to make sure Najib drowns, and drowns.....

Man, politics kill...

I'd give this new dawn a chance..

A Damn Quick Way To Decline..

You'd think that we've gone through the worst, or that the Government's done the worst or the most unthinkable thing...

Then, yesterday, the Government ISA-ed three people -- controversial blogger Raja Petra Kamaruddin, Sin Chew Jit Poh senior reporter Tan Hoon Cheng and Seputeh MP Teresa Kok.

This afternoon, Hoon Cheng was released.

She was arrested because the police wanted to bet a clarification from her about the report she had written, quoting Bukit Bendera Umno division chief Ahmad Ismail calling the Chinese community ‘squatters’.

Also, Syed Hamid claims that she was actually in protective custody because she had received threats to her safety.

His remarks had sparked an outcry among the predominantly Chinese political parties in the ruling Barisan Nasional, particularly MCA and Gerakan.

Ahmad who has been punished by Umno with a 3-year membership suspension, insisted that he was quoted out of context.

RPK and Teresa are still being detained, their whereabouts unknown.

Home Minister Syed Hamid Albar told a Press conference today that RPK was arrested ebcasue he was unrepentant, after being warned to stop publishing inflammatory articles in his news portal Malaysia Today.

Teresa because she had criticized the "azan" (call for prayer) at a mosque. Her remarks were published by Malay daily, Utusan Malaysia.

Were all the arrests justified?

Syed Hamid believes that the police acted professionally.

Hell.... ISA arrests are never justified, man!

Looks to me that this is intimidation. Big time!

And you don't know where and when it ends.

ISA is not a tool to be fooled around with, man....you;re really signing your own death sentence!