To Najib and his Gang you can have the Best Fabrication but Please ask Allah to help to Rectify your State and Purify your Soul..Before it is Too Late

The difference between fortune and misfortune is not money, but the value of a family at peace with itself.

An Exposition of the Way in which a Man may Discover the Faults in his Soul.

Firstly, he should sit before a Shaykh who has insight into these faults and hidden weaknesses, and put him in authority over his soul, and follow the instructions he gives in connection with his struggle therewith.

Secondly, he may seek out a true, perceptive and religious friend, and appoint him to be the overseer of his soul, so that he notes his circumstances and deeds, and brings to his attention the inner and external faults, acts and traits which he finds dislikeable in him. This was the practice of the wise men and the great leaders of the Faith.

'Umar (may God be pleased with him) used to say, 'May God grant His mercy to a man who shows me my faults'. And he used to ask Salman about his faults when they met, saying, ''What things have you heard about me that you find dislikeable?' Salman pleaded to be excused answering this but when he insisted, replied, 'I have heard that you once ate two kinds of food at one meal, and that you have two sets of clothing, one to wear at night and the other for the day.' 'Have you heard anything else?' he enquired, and he said that he had not. 'These two things,'he said, 'I now renounce'.

It was ever the desire of religious people to discover their faults through being told of them by others; however, things have come to such a pass with us that the most hateful of all people are those who counsel us and draw our attention to our defects.

The third way is to learn of the faults of one's soul by listening to the statements of one's enemies, for a hostile eye brings out defects: it may happen that a man gains more from an enemy and a foe who reminds him of his faults than from a dissimulating friend who praises and speaks highly of him, and hides from him his faults. Although human nature is inclined to disbelieve an enemy and to interpret his statements as the fruit of envy, still, the man of insight, whose faults must necessarily be noised abroad in the statements of his foes will not fail to derive some benefit.

The fourth way is to mingle with people, and to attribute to oneself every blameworthy thing which one sees in them. For 'the believers are mirrors one to another', andrecognize their own faults in the faults of others, knowing that temperaments are similar in the following of desire, and that every attribute in a man must be shared by his associate to some degree; thus one will come to scrutinise one's own soul and cleanse it of everything one finds blameworthy in others. This constitutes the highest degree of self-discipline. 'Were all people only to renounce the things they dislike in others they would not need anyone to discipline them. Jesus (upon whom be peace) was once asked, 'Who taught you?' 'I was taught by no-one,' he replied. 'I perceived the ignorance ofthe ignorant man, and avoided it'.

[An excerpt from "Disciplining the Soul" by al-Imam al-Ghazzali]

~~~

We conclude from the above that seeing the faults of others could bring about either one of two consequences: positive or negative.

Positive is when we reflect what we see from the faults of others on our state, and then from there, begin rectifying our state. Positive is also when we ask Allah to bless us with the exceptional wisdom in offering sincere advice (make da'wah) to those with faults hoping that in return a friend would do the same when they see our faults.

Negative, as we would generally have already experienced, is when arrogance creeps in on oneself, refusing to reflect and 'attribute to oneself every blameworthy thing which one sees in others'.

اللهم استر عوراتنا وآمن روعاتنا

We ask Allah to help us rectify our state and purify our soul...

The Supreme Court has the task of Solomon, without the luxury of sentiment: it cannot suggest that the last word be left to the mother, since the Supreme Court is the final court of appeal, the supreme mother of Indian justice. It will be guided by merit, precedence, and the principles its judgment will establish for private and public sector. If India's destiny lies in its economy, if India is to soar above the neighbourhood towards a unique horizon, then the moral code of our faith in business will lie in the voice of the Supreme Court.

In view of the Japanese nuclear disaster, will Prime minister Najib Abdul Razak or his Energy Minister Peter Chin issue a statement on whether they are going to review the government’s stand on nuclear power stations?

Malaysia plans to build two nuclear power plants that will generate 1,000 megawatts each with the first plant ready for operation in 2021 and the second plant, a year later, as part of the overall long-term plan to balance energy supply.

Perhaps it is time for Najib’s administration to re-evaluate the advantages and the disadvantages as well as to re-assess the benefits and the risks of using nuclear power as a source of potential energy.

As Japan struggled to cope with the renewed nuclear threat even as it had to deal with the effects of the earthquake and the tsunami, nations around the world, from Australia to the USA, have prompted their governments to review the use of nuclear energy.

Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard said that her ruling Labor Party was traditionally opposed to the idea of using nuclear power to satisfy the vast country's electricity needs.

Citing her nation’s alternative energy supplies, she said, “We are a country with abundant solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, you name it, we have got renewable sources of energy, so we don't think nuclear energy is right for this country.”

Switzerland has also decided to suspend plans to replace its ageing nuclear power plants amid fears of a nuclear disaster in Japan. It stressed that safety was an absolute priority.

In Washington, lawmakers have called for a slowdown in nuclear development even as President Barack Obama aimed to increase nuclear power as part of the US effort to decrease the nation's dependence on coal and imported oil.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was put under pressure to postpone the switch-off of all nuclear reactors by a decade.

Germany decided in 2000 to switch off the last of its 17 nuclear power stations by 2020, but Merkel's government in 2010 postponed the exit until the mid-2030s, despite strong protests.

Britain's energy minister Chris Huhne said that lessons had to be learned from the Japanese nuclear accident.

Meanwhile in Malaysia, there has been an eerie silence from Najib, although his deputy Muhyiddin Yassin insists that their BN government would forge ahead with plans to build two nuclear plants.

Gerakan’s head of environment, safety and quality of life bureau, Dr Cheah Soon Hai has told the government to set up a parliamentary select committee to get views and experts' advice on the matter.

He said, “The government cannot ignore the public's concern and apprehension over health and safety aspects. The people's welfare must come first.”

Recently, Energy, Green Technology and Water Minister Peter Chin Fah Kui said the government would be transparent in its planning, policies and implementation stages with regard to building nuclear plants in the country.

Chin said there was still time to study everything as the first nuclear plant in the country would not be built for at least 10 years.

Nevertheless, members of the public find it alarming that Japan who is technologically advanced and rigorous in its safety procedures, is saddled with a nuclear disaster on their hands.

Meanwhile, Selangor exco in charge of tourism, consumer affairs and environment Elizabeth Wong has warned that the Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster has shown that the safety back-up plans in place were inadequate.

She said, “Despite being warned by experts and citizen groups that stronger earthquakes and tsunamis could happen, they failed to plan for them.”

“The nuclear industry and nuclear agencies have a long history of accidents, cover-ups and poor follow-up on safety standards. Japan is not unique in this regard, as it is a pattern found around the world.”

By M J Akbar

The 20th century ended in 2002, on the day the Godhra riots began. It was a turbulent age that ravaged society and broke the land as faith became the emotional spur of identity and the principal dialectic of politics. If Jinnah used the rhetoric of Islam to divide, then Gandhi used the metaphor of Ram rajya to unite. Both left an immediate legacy of incomplete dreams; it was up to history to decide which one had a better chance of success. Jinnah's Pakistan has crept towards theocracy, inciting blood-warm civil wars and cold-eyed terrorism. Gandhi's India, despite the able custody of Nehru, has had to struggle with the scourge of communalism, the one great impediment to its tryst with destiny.


The pivotal moments of faith-based passions were the narrative of the 1980s: the Shah Bano episode, and the Ram temple movement. Babri linked up to Ahmedabad through Godhra. But 2002 turned into a swivel point; the last of the lava spewed out, leaving those who had stoked the volcano a spent force. Hindsight confirms that after 2002, enough Indians turned away from fire to the forge of social and economic change. Congress understood this, instinctively rather than ideologically. The absence of ideology permitted tactical mobility between virtual laissez faire, a tilted partnership with America and state-financed handout programmes. Enough constituencies were onside, therefore, on polling day. The BJP flourished only where its regional leaders recognized the primacy of rice over anger. Narendra Modi, uniquely, has mined both seams, but he will find out in the next elections that one seam has run dry. Even the violence of the last eight years, spawned by Naxalites, has been motivated by hunger rather than faith.


The true business of the first decade of the 21st century has been business. It was both appropriate and unfortunate, therefore, that the last date on the legal calendar of this decade was occupied, in the Supreme Court, by the bitter gas case between the iconic businessmen of our time, the brothers Mukesh and Anil Ambani. Their dispute has generated more headlines in six years than any political conflict.


Blood, we have been reliably informed, is thicker than water. Why does money become, all so often, thicker than blood?


There are two medieval models for inheritance. The Mughals opted for a life-and-death decision on the battlefield. The English graduated, possibly to preserve their nobility from self-inflicted wounds, to primogeniture, in which the eldest son got the estate and the younger son a book written by P G Wodehouse. Both models are unacceptable in more egalitarian times, but in our country the elder brother still has the edge. This is why Mukesh Ambani received nearly three-fourths of the Dhirubhai empire, and Anil accepted such an unequal settlement.


But it also becomes a duty on the part of the heirs to preserve this amity, for every empire, political or business, is a public responsibility. Businessmen are often called barons or the new 'Moghuls', but this is not a license to behave like a Mughal, consolidating power by eliminating kin.


There is a remarkable parallel between what might be justifiably called the two most powerful brother-heirs in the Indian private sector. Decorum prevents me from naming one pair of brothers. Both lost their patriarch in harness. The comparative bank balance is not the issue, since billions are beyond mathematics. But if the Ambanis possess the power of wealth; the others have the wealth of power. All four are brilliant, with the rare ability to nurture a seed into a plant and then transform it into a plantation. The Ambanis are an international phenomenon; no less remarkably, the other brothers lifted the dominant newspaper of a single city into a range of media products that made their brand an unparalleled sensation. Brothers inherit genes, not temperament; there were differences in both families. The contrast is that the unnamed heirs, prone as everyone else to human weakness, turned a kingdom into an empire in exemplary harmony, offering a template. Imagine the economic stratosphere in which both Ambanis would flourish without their epic war.


The difference between fortune and misfortune is not money, but the value of a family at peace with itself.


The Supreme Court has the task of Solomon, without the luxury of sentiment: it cannot suggest that the last word be left to the mother, since the Supreme Court is the final court of appeal, the supreme mother of Indian justice. It will be guided by merit, precedence, and the principles its judgment will establish for private and public sector. If India's destiny lies in its economy, if India is to soar above the neighbourhood towards a unique horizon, then the moral code of our faith in business will lie in the voice of the Supreme Court.

Unless you live in California, most Americans can't imagine what it's like to be in a minor earthquake, never mind a major one. As a kid in Japan, I lived through lots of little quakes. They were no big deal. If the quake seemed serious or went on too long, we'd simply go outside and wait. But there was never a major quake when I lived in Japan.

In the 1990s, on a trip to Japan with my mother, an earthquake hit just after I checked into a hotel in Sapporo. I was hanging up shirts and jackets in the closet when they started swaying. We were on the 10th floor so I could feel the building swaying at least two or three feet. I had a flash of fear, and opened the door to the room and wedged myself in the doorway as a safety precaution (I think it's something I remembered from my childhood), but I knew if the building collapsed standing in the doorway wouldn't help. I looked out the door, and no one else seemed as concerned as me, except my mom poked her head out of her room.

As it turned out, the temblor didn't cause much damage in Sapporo, the largest city in the northern-most Japanese island of Hokkaido. But two days later when we arrived in Nemuro, my mom's hometown at the easternmost tip of Hokkaido, we saw the power of the "jishin," or earthquake. Roads were humped up in the middle and the pavement split like the top of a loaf of bread, and in the town's cemetery, my grandfather's memorial had crumbled into a pile of rubble. But life went on as normal. Luckily there were no casualties from that quake, and there was no tsunami that followed in its wake.

The Great Tohoku Kanto Earthquake, which is now what the Japanese call the March 11 disaster, is the strongest earthquake in the country's recorded history. That's saying something for a country where quakes are so common there are established rules for what you're supposed to do when they strike, like people in Kansas are taught from childhood what to do if a tornado touches down.

The fortunate (if that's the word) thing about this quake is that it struck off the northern coast of Japan, not east of Tokyo. It's unimaginable what kind of devastation it could have caused if the quake had been closer to Tokyo. As it is, there was some damage in the capital but not to the extent of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which demolished much of Tokyo, or even the Great Hanshin Earthquake, which was a lessor temblor but killed over 6,000 people in Kobe.

Although the tsunami hit in a more rural part of Japan, the damage and the human cost is enormous. I'm sure when the final tally is in, the death toll will be over 10,000. It breaks my heart to think of the entire towns close to the northern shore that were simply washed away by the tsunami.

I watched in horror when I first saw the email breaking news alerts about the earthquake and tuned in to CNN. The footage was terrible, and yet difficult to turn off. The power of nature to overwhelm human endeavors is incredible and truly awful.

Overall, I have to say that the U.S. broadcast news media have been stuck looping video clips over and over and not adding much of value to the news that I've been looking for, about damage to Nemuro, where my uncle still lives. I can tell when the anchors are just stretching their limits of knowledge and filling time. I've also been irritated by themispronunciations of words such as "tsunami" and "Tokyo."

So my main sources for coverage have been news media from Japan, thanks to the Internet.

My favorite is Yokoso News, a project of Katz Ueno, a Japanese man who was educated in LA and normally uses Yokoso News as an outlet for cultural news and education about Japan for Westerners.

His dogged determination to translate every news development from Japanese to English in real-time on his site's video livestream has been absolutely heroic. He originally was on the air for 18 hours straight, then took a couple of hours off to sleep, and has been on mostly nonstop since. At times he's been joined by a woman calling herself "Ema" who lives in Tokyo (Katz is based in Western Japan, far from the quake's epicenter) using the Internet video phone service Skype.

Ueno has been reading the latest news as he sees it for 14-hour stretches, and has been answering questions people post to him via Twitter. He's been the best source for information, hands-down.

Here's his livestream. If he's not broadcasting it's because he's getting some shuteye, and because, as he says, "I need to make some money." As I write this he's about to take a break and promises he'll be back with the latest news in 11 hours. I'm sure he'll eventually return to his regular programming, but I swear, he deserves an international award for his efforts the past few days:

Video streaming by Ustream

I have relatives on Hokkaido, Japan's northern-most island. One uncle and his family are in Sapporo, which is inland and away from the tsunami. Another uncle still lives with his family in Nemuro, which is on the coast and probably vulnerable. My mom wasn't able to get through to their phones for a day, but finally was able to connect with her brother. He reported that the tsunami did hit Nemuro, but not with the force that it hit cities such as Sendai. He's fine, luckily.

My mom also has an old friend who lives in Tokyo who has kids about my age, and they're all fine too. So are a couple of online friends through Facebook and Tumblr, and some friends from the U.S. who had the unfortunate timing of traveling to Japan last week.

But that leaves thousands of victims who lost their lives, and many more who lost their homes and livelihoods. It's hard to imagine what life must be like for those people. It's hard to think how this disaster will affect Japan's economy, and subsequently the world's economy.

My biggest fear is that a man-made, nuclear disaster will overtake the natural one.

Here are some other resources to follow developments in Japan:

First, you can donate to the Red Cross by texting REDCROSS" to 90999. This will automatically donate $10, and the charge will appear on your next mobile phone bill (see note below about Red Cross vs Salvation Army, and also DirectRelief.org if you're uncomfortable with either organization's policies).

The Japan America Society of Colorado (and many other organizations across the country) are accepting donations for earthquake and tsunami relief efforts.

NHK World has been the go-to source for all the US media; this is the English version of NHK (Japan's public television network).

USTWrap.info is aggregating multiple video livestreams and Twitter feeds in Japanese.

Guardian UK Japan Earthquake Coverage has a different perspective than the US mainstream media. The BBC is also worth checking for their coverage.

The Nikkei Youth Foundation based in Tokyo has posted an online formlooking for volunteers around the world to translate Japanese into multiple languages for relief efforts.

Since the beginning, Al Jazeera English has had different, and often more in-depth coverage than the US cable networks.

From Facebook, amazing street-level view of tsunami raging through town.

Google Crisis Response Page includes Google's "Person Finder" service and many links. A note from Emily Nakano Co of Absolutely Fobulous (via the comment below) about donating to the Red Cross vs alternatives such as Salvation Army, and other links:

Quick note about the Red Cross (See here: http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2011/03/did-your-donation-really-reach-japan-probably-not/).

Red Cross is a good option but there is also the Salvation Army. The org has been in Japan since 1895 so it's an NGO that understands Japan's infrastructure, which is really important. You can also text "Japan" or "Quake" to 80888 to make a $10 donation to the Salvation Army.

NGO JEN specializes in post-disaster recovery and redevelopment.

AMDA International (emergency medical aid).

Shelter Box (on the ground in Japan in less than 24 hrs after the earthquake struck)

A reader pointed out on Facebook that if you're uncomfortable about the policies of either the Red Cross or Salvation Army, this organization seems to be a good alternative: Direct Relief International.