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Federal Constitution must remain supreme

June 1st, 2007
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Bar Council: Federal Constitution must remain supreme

PETALING JAYA: The Bar Council supports the minority judgment of Chief Judge of Sabah and Sarawak Richard Malanjum that no court or authority should be easily allowed to have implied powers to curtail rights that are constitutionally granted. 

Its president S. Ambiga said the Federal Constitution “is and must remain in law, supreme.” 

“In an event of any inconsistency or conflict between the provisions of State Enactments and of the Federal Constitution, the latter must prevail,” she said in a statement yesterday. 

On Wednesday, the Federal Court rejected Lina JoyÂ’s appeal to compel the National Registration Department (NRD) to remove the word “Islam” from her identity card. 

Chief Justice Ahmad Fairuz Sheikh Abdul Halim and Federal Court Justice Alauddin Mohd Sheriff voted against her appeal and said conversion issues should be dealt with by the Syariah Court. 

In his dissenting judgement, Justice Malanjum described the NRD’s insistence that Lina Joy obtain a certificate of apostasy from the Federal Territory Syariah Court or any Islamic authority as illegal and unreasonable. 

Ambiga said: “We are mindful that issues relating to religion will inevitably draw emotive responses in a multireligious society. 

“Malaysians must be prepared to confront these issues maturely and dispassionately within the framework of our Federal Constitution as the supreme law of the land.” 

Council of Churches of Malaysia general-secretary Rev Dr Herman Shastri said it viewed the Federal Court’s decision with regret and concern. 

“We believe that the constitutional provision in Article 11 of the Federal Constitution which guarantees freedom of religion in our country has been severely violated,” he said. 

He said the majority judgement had denied the individual the right to freedom of conscience and choice of religion.  

“It is, therefore, vital that the necessary legislation be enacted to ensure that no citizen would be penalised when he or she exercises the individual right to choose a faith and to practice it in freedom,” he said. 

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Google launches Google Gears – to allow OFFline use

May 31st, 2007
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Gears puts Google in the driver's seat

 

The Google Gears plugin download page.

The Google Gears plugin download page.

 
Stephen Hutcheon
May 31, 2007 – 9:00AM
 

Google is rolling out a technology designed to overcome the major drawback faced by all web-based applications: the fact that they don't work without an internet connection.

Google Gears is an open source technology for creating offline web applications that is being launched today at Google's annual Developer Day gatherings around the world.

"With Google Gears, we're tackling the key limitation of the browser in order to make it a stronger platform for deploying all types of applications and enabling a better user experience," Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in a statement.

The Google Gears technology is designed to be used for web applications such as email and word or image processing.

While it can be used with non-Google applications, it's clear that the web search and advertising giant will be the major beneficiary of what is expected to be an enthusiastic take up.

That enthusiasm is not expected to extend to Microsoft. Google has already invaded the software company's turf, offering Google Apps – its package of workplace programs – as an alternative to Microsoft's Office suite.

To date, the Google replacement proposition hasn't been appealing to large private and public sector organisations partly because of the lack of offline access.

Launched in February, Google's suite of web-based programs includes a word processor, email, a spreadsheet and a calendar.

Google said it would charge corporate customers $US50 ($61) a year for the suite, about a tenth of what Microsoft charges for its Office package.

But there haven't been many takers. In February, it was reported that the Commonwealth Bank suspended a trial of Google Apps, which it was looking at rolling out for its 50,000-strong workforce.

The Gears technology promises to give Google a better platform from which to go after Microsoft's very lucrative Office franchise.

"This is a core piece of technology that we're releasing to the community to really help move the industry forward on solving this problem," Google Australia's senior product manager Carl Sjogreen told smh.com.au.

"For your average web user, the end goal is that basically it's seamless whether you're connected to the internet or not."

He described Gears as a "critical missing piece in the evolution of making the web and the browser a platform for all applications".

The search for a way to give web-based programs the stability and portability of desktop applications has been going on for over a decade.

Several organisations, including Mozilla Corporation, Adobe and Opera Software, have been working on a similar project and are backing the Google push.

Mozilla has already flagged that its upcoming Firefox 3 browser will support offline applications.

To start the ball rolling, Google has "Gears-enabled" its RSS feed reader, Google Reader.

After downloading the Gears plug-in, the browser will automatically determine whether a user is online or offline. If it's the latter, the next time the user is online, the application will synchronise with the server.

Google says it will work with others in the web community to help develop an industry standard that will further facilitate the rollout of hybrid programs which work both online and offline.

"It's something that we're making this available in its early stages and in an open source environment so that everyone can help test its capabilities and help improve upon it," said Mr Sjogreen.

"As more and more people are depending on web applications to manage their lives and get information about what's going on, it becomes and increasing problem when you can't access those applications when you're offline."

 
Google Gears – the game has changed
Posted by Marc Orchant @ 10:30 pm

source

I’m not often left feeling completely astonished these days. I like to think I’m pretty on top of where things are going. But I just got completely blindsided by Google Gears. There’s already plenty of first-glance analysis to help you grasp the magnitude of what they’ve done. I recommend you start by listening to David Berlind’s podcast interview with Linus Upson, a director of engineering at Google about the back story on Gears and what Google is aiming to accomplish with this broadside.

Then you can pop over to Techmeme and read until you can’t take any more guessing, prognosticating, and crystal ball gazing. There’s a huge thread of posts and counter-posts already piling up and at this hour (10:25 p.m. Mountain time) the pace with which this is pushing everything else off the page is pretty impressive.

Rather than trying to tell you “what it all means”, I thought a quick display of Gears in action would be infinitely more interesting. Here’s what I did in about five minutes to turn Google Reader, the tool I’m using to manage my RSS habit these days, into an offline reader. Follow along because I think you’ll be every bit as blown away as I am at how easy this is.

Step 1 – Install Google Gears (as a Firefox add-in in my case). Windows, Mac and Linux Firefox are supported as is Internet Explorer. Safari support is promised soon according to the podcast interview mentioned above.

Step 2 – Click the offline button in Google Reader (next to the account name in the upper right corner of the window). Google Reader asks if you want to download content before going offline. Downloading 2000 items took only a couple of minutes over a WiFi connection.

Step 3 – Disconnect from the intertubes and read your RSS feeds as if you were still connected. When you reconnect to the network, Google Reader synchronizes your local changes (items read, shared and/or starred) with the server and updates new content from your subscription list. Seamless..

Step 4 – There is no Step 4.

This is big folks. In my admittedly limited testing the offline reading experience is completely consistent with what I’ve come to expect when working with Reader online (with the exception of images which are not downloaded for offline viewing). Google is open-sourcing Gears and, as David points out in the post accompanying his podcast interview, they’ve taken a huge step towards defining a de facto standard for taking web apps offline. The reason I think this isn’t just crazy Web 2.0 hype is that Adobe has announced they are aligning their Apollo efforts with the approach Google’s taken with Gears as there are significant similarities in how the two companies have have approached their online/offline application solutions.

There are probably a few freaked out people in the web and hybrid application worlds right about now. Because the game has changed.
 

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Lina Joy Case – Articles from Today’s Newspapers Part 2

May 31st, 2007
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Federal Court dismiss Lina Joy's appeal
 

By : A. Hafiz Yatim and Rita Jong

LINA Joy has lost her long battle to have her religious status adjudicated by the country’s civil laws.

A three-judge Federal Court panel ruled by a 2-1 majority that only the syariah court
has the power to determine whether a person is still a Muslim based on Islamic law.
It said Lina, born Azlina Jailani, should obtain a syariah court order confirming her
apostasy before the NRD could remove the word “Islam” from her identity card…

» Read more: Lina Joy Case – Articles from Today’s Newspapers Part 2

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Lina Joy Case – Articles from Today’s Newspapers Part 1

May 31st, 2007
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Federal Court rejects Lina's appeal in a majority decision

By CHELSEA L.Y. NG and RAPHAEL WONG

 
PUTRAJAYA: The Federal Court, in a majority decision, has rejected Lina Joy's appeal to compel the National Registration Department (NRD) to remove the word Islam from her identity card. 
 
The 42-year-old will now have to either subject herself to the jurisdiction of the Syariah Court on whether she is an apostate or seek a review of the Federal Court decision. 
 
Chief Justice Ahmad Fairuz Sheikh Abdul Halim ruled that the NRD had reasonably imposed a condition requiring Lina to obtain a certificate of apostasy from the Syariah Court before it proceeds to make the deletion. 
 

» Read more: Lina Joy Case – Articles from Today’s Newspapers Part 1

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Malaysia’s Crisis of Faith

May 31st, 2007
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Malaysia's Crisis of Faith
Wednesday, May. 30, 2007 By HANNAH BEECH

Muslims gathered for a vigil outside Malaysia's Palace of Justice awaited the verdict on Lina Joy's case, May 30, 2007
Tengku Bahar / AFP/Getty Images
 
In what has been dubbed a blow to Malaysia's religious freedom, the country's highest court on Wednesday denied an appeal by Christian convert Lina Joy to make her switch from Islam recognized by law. A multi-ethnic state composed largely of Muslim Malays, Christian and Buddhist Chinese, and Hindu and Sikh Indians, Malaysia has long prided itself on its diversity of faiths. To safeguard this religious heterogeneity, the country's constitution sets out a dual-track legal system in which Muslims are bound by Shari'a law for issues such as marriage, property and death, while members of other faiths follow civil law.
 

Malaysians expected Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi to be cautious, but he has quickly emerged as a bold reformer

But the parallel system has occasionally faced snags. Joy is a Malay originally known as Azlina Jailani, and by Malaysian law her ethnicity automatically makes her a Muslim subject to Shari'a law. In order to make her 1990 conversion to Christianity legal, she needed permission from the Shari'a courts, which consider a renunciation of Islam a major offense. But, since she is still classified as a Muslim by the state, Joy was not allowed to have her case heard by the civil courts. Her six-year-long campaign to convince the civil system to legalize her conversion failed, prompting her appeal to the Federal Court, after the Court of Appeal rejected her claim in September 2005.

On Wednesday, the Court announced that it had no jurisdiction over the case since it was under the purview of Shari'a law, effectively punting on any attempt to clear up the gray space that exists between Malaysia's two legal systems. The ruling was greeted by shouts of "God is great!" from many in the assembled crowd outside the Palace of Justice in Kuala Lumpur. More secular observers were far less jubilant. "I see this case not just as a question of religious preference but one of a potential dismantling of Malaysia's … multi-ethnic, multi-religious [character]," warned Malik Imtiaz Sarwar, a member of Joy's legal team, before the decision was announced.

The Joy verdict, which will likely become a precedent for several other pending conversion cases, is seen by many in Malaysia as evidence of how religious politics are cleaving the nation, with a creeping Islamization undermining the rights of both non-Muslims and more moderate adherents to Islam.. Last November, at a party conference for the Muslim-dominated United Malays National Organization ruling party, one delegate vowed he would be willing to "bathe in blood" to defend his ethnicity ? and, by extension, his religion. In several Malaysian states, forsaking Islam is a crime punishable by prison time.

Earlier this week, Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, who in December acknowledged that race relations in his homeland were "fragile," hosted the World Islamic Economic Forum in Kuala Lumpur. In an era where Islam is so often partnered with extremism and autocratic governance, Malaysia was held up at the annual conference as a model of a moderate Muslim nation committed to safeguarding the rights of its diverse population. But the Federal Court's verdict on Joy's case, which represented her last legal recourse, may undercut that reputation. After all, is it complete religious freedom if a 42-year-old woman isn't allowed to follow the faith of her choosing?

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