Rojak and Cocktail: Malaysia Boleh?

M'sia To Send Peacekeepers Despite Israeli Objection

Malaysia will send a peacekeeping force to Southern Lebanon under the United Nations' (UN) auspices despite opposition from the Israeli regime, said Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak Thursday.

The Deputy Prime Minister said the presence of Malaysian peacekeepers was most welcome by Lebanon.

Speaking to reporters after chairing the Cabinet Committee on Tourism here, he said he could not understand why the presence of Malaysian peacekeepers there was being objected to merely for the technical reason that Malaysia had no diplomatic ties with the Israeli regime.

Najib, who is also the Defence Minister, said this when asked to comment on the objection as reported in the press today.

Malaysia, he said, had an excellent record in terms of providing service by its peacekeeping force.

In fact in Bosnia, the Malaysian peacekeeping force had served outstandingly.

Asked whether Malaysia's stand on the Israeli regime could influence the quality of service rendered by the Malaysian peacekeepers in Lebanon later, Najib said the country's peacekeeping force had always served in a professional manner.

He said the UN had not informed Malaysia when it could send its peacekeeping force to Lebanon.

The UN had also not informed Malaysia about the objection by the Israeli regime against the presence of Malaysian peacekeepers there.

The Israeli regime was reported to have objected against the participation of Malaysian troops in the UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon on grounds that Kuala Lumpur had no diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv.

The Israeli objection could pose difficulty to UN efforts to send peacekeeping forces to Southern Lebanon to oversee the implementation of the ceasefire between the Israeli regime and Hezbollah beginning Monday.

Besides Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei are among the Muslim countries that have offered to send up to 1,000 troops for the peacekeeping force. France too had made a similar offer.

In BEIRUT, Malaysian Foreign Minister Datuk Seri Syed Hamid Albar said it was the UN and not the Israeli regime that had the final say in selecting the peacekeepers to monitor the situation in Lebanon.

He was commenting on a Reuters report Wednesday stating that Israel wanted only countries that had diplomatic relations with her to participate in UNIFIL while those without diplomatic ties like Malaysia would not be acceptable.

The UN Security Council had unanimously accepted a resolution calling for the ceasefire on Friday.

The resolution enables the UN to send up to 13,000 troops to beef up the present strength of 2,000 troops in the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).

-- BERNAMA

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Newsweek International :Global universities new ranking

Aug. 13, 2006 - In response to the same forces that have propelled the world economy toward global integration, universities have also become more self-consciously global: seeking students from around the world who represent the entire spec trum of cultures and values, sending their own students abroad to prepare them for global careers, offering courses of study that address the challenges of an inter connected world and collaborative research programs to advance science for the benefit of all humanity. To capture these developments, NEWSWEEK devised a ranking of global universities that takes into account openness and diversity, as well as distinction in research.

We evaluated schools on some of the measures used in well-known rankings published by Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Times of London Higher Education Survey. Fifty percent of the score came from equal parts of three measures used by Shanghai Jiatong: the number of highly-cited researchers in various academic fields, the number of articles published in Nature and Science, and the number of articles listed in the ISI Social Sciences and Arts & Humanities indices. Another 40 percent of the score came from equal parts of four measures used by the Times: the percentage of international faculty, the percentage of international students, citations per faculty member (using ISI data), and the ratio of faculty to students. The final 10 percent came from library holdings (number of volumes).

(Source:Newsweek)

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Here is the ranking:

1. Harvard University
2. Stanford University
3. Yale University
4. California Institute of Technology
5. University of California at Berkeley
6. University of Cambridge
7. Massachusetts Institute Technology
8. Oxford University
9. University of California at San Francisco
10. Columbia University
11. University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
12. University of California at Los Angeles
13. University of Pennsylvania
14. Duke University
15. Princeton Universitty
16. Tokyo University
17. Imperial College London
18. University of Toronto
19. Cornell University
20. University of Chicago
21. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich
22. University of Washington at Seattle
23. University of California at San Diego
24. Johns Hopkins University
25. University College London
26. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne
27. University Texas at Austin
28. University of Wisconsin at Madison
29. Kyoto University
30. University of Minnesota Twin Cities
31. University of British Columbia
32. University of Geneva
33. Washington University in St. Louis
34. London School of Economics
35. Northwestern University
36. National University of Singapore
37. University of Pittsburgh
38. Australian National University
39. New York University
40. Pennsylvania State University
41. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
42. McGill University
43. Ecole Polytechnique
44. University of Basel
45. University of Maryland
46. University of Zurich
47. University of Edinburgh
48. University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
49. University of Bristol
50. University of Sydney
51. University of Colorado at Boulder
52. Utrecht University
53. University of Melbourne
54. University of Southern California
55. University of Alberta
56. Brown University
57. Osaka University
58. University of Manchester
59. University of California at Santa Barbara
60. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
61. Wageningen University
62. Michigan State University
63. University of Munich
64. University of New South Wales
65. Boston University
66. Vanderbilt University
67. University of Rochester
68. Tohoku University
69. University of Hong Kong
70. University of Sheffield
71. Nanyang Technological University
72. University of Vienna
73. Monash University
74. University of Nottingham
75. Carnegie Mellon University
76. Lund University
77. Texas A&M University
78. University of Western Australia
79. Ecole Normale Super Paris
80. University of Virginia
81. Technical University of Munich
82. Hebrew University of Jerusalem
83. Leiden University
84. University of Waterloo
85. King's College London
86. Purdue University
87. University of Birmingham
88. Uppsala University
89. University of Amsterdam
90. University of Heidelberg
91. University of Queensland
92. University of Leuven
93. Emory University
94. Nagoya University
95. Case Western Reserve University
96. Chinese University of Hong Kong
97. University of Newcastle
98. Innsbruck University
99. University of Massachusetts at Amherst
100. Sussex University

The highest-ranked Asian university is found on the 16th spot. Malaysia is at ....
sorry, where is Malaysia ? Someone please pass me a magnifying glass. Come on, let's face it,we were not even in the range of "Top 100 Asia Pacific Universities" according to "Academic Ranking of World Universities - 2005" published by well known Institute of Higher Education, Shanghai Jiao Tong University last year.

(ref:Shanghai Jiao Tong University & plant-biology.com)

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Blogging Mr. President

Why would Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad decide to post an online diary? And why is it such a hit?

Aug. 16, 2006 - Government leaders are seldom fixtures in the freewheeling blogosphere. But Mahmoud Ahmadinejad clearly hopes to change all that. The Iranian president last week launched a blog (www.ahmadinejad.ir) that comes with folksy pictures of himself in an open-necked shirt and a casually studied writing pose complete with old-fashioned pen rather than modern keyboard at hand. And not surprisingly, it’s generated the kind of buzz that most bloggers can only dream about.

Within days of the controversial leader’s first posting, Technorati (www.technorati.com), the San Francisco-based blog search engine, had ranked it as the 3,722nd most-popular blog among the estimated 50 million in cyberspace. It is also, according to Technorati marketing director Derek Gordon, the first ever by a sitting head of state....(more)