When BN MPs turn to Muhyiddin for extra funding, it bodes ill for Najib

When it came out in the press that 100 Barisan Nasional MPs had gone to see Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin for funding for their constituencies, there were many who wondered why didn't they approach Prime Minister Najib Razak, who is also BN chairman. Najib is also the Finance minister and the all-powerful UMNO president. So why not him, why Muhyiddin?

Some of Najib's supporters say if the request was made to him, it might be 'controversial' especially if he dishes out money to the Barisan Nasional MPs, he might be accused of using national money to fund BN campaigns. But surely, everyone knows this has been happening all the while, so why the sudden coyness?

Then there were those who claimed the Prime Minister was too busy finding ways to shore up the country's battered economy while keeping his political minders in UMNO happy. The nation’s coffers are drying up fast and income generation is slow and lagging behind other countries such as Vietnam and Indonesia. And as the US wrangles with its own debt problems, analyst expect the ripples from this fiasco to hit world economies hard. So Najib has no time for BN MPs. Does that make sense?

Indians pay surgeons to turn girls into boys

Madhya Pradesh state government is investigating claims that up to 300 girls were surgically turned into boys in one city after their parents paid about £2,000 each for the operations.

Women's and children's rights campaigners denounced the practice as a "social madness" that made a "mockery of women in India".

India's gender balance has already been tilted in favour of boys by female foeticide – sex selection abortions - by families who fear the high marriage costs and dowries they may have to pay. There are now seven million more boys than girls aged under six in the country.

Campaigners said the use of surgery meant that girls were no longer safe even after birth.

The row emerged after newspapers disclosed children from throughout India were being operated on by doctors in Indore, Madhya Pradesh.

Doctors confronted in the investigation claimed that girls with genital abnormalities were being sent to the city's clinics to be "surgically corrected" and that only children born with both male and female sexual characteristics were eligible for the procedure. But campaigners said the parents and doctors were misindentifying the children's conditions to turn girls into boys.

The surgery, known as genitoplasty, fashions a penis from female organs, with the child being injected with male hormones to create a boy.

Dr V P Goswami, the president of the Indian Academy of Paediatrics in Indore, described the disclosures as shocking and warned parents that the procedure would leave their child impotent and infertile in adulthood.

"Genitoplasty is possible on a normal baby of both the sexes but later on these organs will not grow with the hormonal influence and this will lead to their infertility as well as their impotency. It is shocking news and we will be looking into it and taking corrective measures," he said. "Parents have to consider the social as well as the psychological impact of such procedures on the child."

India's National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights ordered the Madhya Pradesh government to investigate the claims and produce its findings within 15 days.

Ranjana Kumari, of the Centre for Social Research and one of India's leading campaigners against female foeticide, said the surgical transformation of girls into boys without their informed consent was a sign of India's growing "social madness".

She said she despaired that education had failed to stop the growing rejection of baby girls in India.

"The figures are getting worse. In 2001 there were 886 girls born to every 1,000 boys in Delhi. Today there are only 866. The more educated and rich you are, the more there is killing of girls," she said.

"People don't want to share their property or invest in girls' education or pay dowries. It's the greedy middle classes running after money. It is just so shocking and an outright violation of children's rights."

The government needed to address the problem by stressing the spiritual value a girl or woman brought a household in Hindu culture. "In India we say God resides in that house where there's a woman but that has evaporated because of all this greed. We need to emphasise the spiritual wealth a girl brings to a family, but we also need to support them with financial subsidies and jobs," she added.

IF YOU LIKE THIS POST AND WEBSITE PLEASE VISIT OUR

FACEBOOK PAGE HERE AND CLICK “LIKE”

For more information, please click here

Mexican teens turn to kidnapping in drug war city

CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO - School dropout Toby was just 15 when he and his friends started kidnapping businessmen, truck drivers and lawyers for ransom in Mexico's most violent city, Ciudad Juarez.

Now serving an eight-year sentence at a juvenile detention center, Toby looks anything but a gangster, with his slim build and neat hair. He has no tattoos or scars.

But as a worsening drug war hits the economy of this forlorn desert city, even teenagers from law-abiding families are being drawn into crime by the lure of cash and cool clothes.

"I started with armed robberies and the money was good. As my parents didn't have any work I thought, 'this is cool,' and I started kidnapping," said Toby, a Mexican-American born across the border in El Paso, Texas.

He says he made up to $45,000 a time with the abductions, and shared the loot with his friends.

His mother refused to take any of the money, so Toby, who moved to Ciudad Juarez with his parents when he was nine, frittered it away on clothes and cars. "I got through the money so fast so I just kept on doing it," he said.

Toby's father made a decent living for years in bars in Ciudad Juarez when Americans used to come over the border in droves for cheap tequila and a night on the town.

But a turf war between Mexico's most-wanted trafficker, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman and the powerful Juarez cartel has frightened off tourists, sparking a mindless spiral of killings that has laid waste to the manufacturing city and destroyed job prospects for the city's youth.

Some 230,000 people have fled Ciudad Juarez over the past two years.

Rubble lines the streets of the old center, just over the Rio Grande with the glass towers of El Paso in the distance. Day in, day out, authorities demolish the bars, hotels and brothels they say breed the drug crime terrorizing the city. But the violence continues.

"There's no way out and nothing to do, there aren't even parks to go to," said one teenager who declined to give his name in one of Ciudad Juarez's desolate 'barrios', crisscrossed with unpaved streets and sagging electricity cables.

No official data is available on minors staging kidnappings in Ciudad Juarez, but Eustacio Gutierrez, a judge dealing with local juvenile delinquents, said he hears cases daily.

Youngsters typically get hold of guns on the city's black market, start tracking wealthy residents and kidnap them.

"I've handed down sentences as long as 12 years," he said.

According to the girlfriend of a kidnapper who reported Toby and his friends to the police, the teens kept the victims locked up in a room in the house where one of them lived.

"They would choose victims themselves and pull people out of cars at gunpoint," the girl said, declining to be named.

While the 9,300 drug war dead in Ciudad Juarez since early 2008 has scared away U.S. teens from getting involved in smuggling drugs across the border, a lust for money and status is trumping fear for Mexican youngsters.

"All the businesses are shutting down, so what opportunities do young people have?" said Marc Marquez, deputy chief of juvenile services for El Paso County. "It is a vicious cycle. By the time they are 15, they are so desensitized."

EPHEMERAL WEALTH

Ciudad Juarez was once a kind of Las Vegas that boomed in the U.S. Prohibition era of the 1920s and early 1930s, luring American film stars and singers to its bars.

Named after Benito Juarez, a 19th-century reformist president, the city is scattered with monuments that recall the fighting during the Mexican Revolution between 1910 and 1920.

After the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, it was supposed to spearhead Mexico's march toward prosperity, attracting hundreds of thousands of workers from across the country and billions of dollars in foreign investment.

Foreign-owned plants remain busy and the Ciudad Juarez-El Paso region handled $71 billion in trade in 2010, but little of that wealth stays in Juarez. Factory jobs pay poorly, forcing parents to neglect their children as they toil just to get by.

President Felipe Calderon, who launched a crackdown on the drug cartels in late 2006, has pledged to build schools and parks to revive the city and end the violence. But locals say he is moving too slowly to deal with decades of neglect.

Poverty alone does not explain the teenage slide into crime, social workers say, noting that wealthier youngsters have also been caught kidnapping, tempted by easy money.

Juvenile detention centers once full of street gang members who barely got through primary school now deal with teenagers who went to private secondary schools, some of them girls.

"Something is very wrong," said Elizabeth Ochoa, a psychologist at one local detention center. "They want clothes and expensive cell phones, and all the police and all the prisons in the world are not going to stop them."

For more information, please click here