Grieving dad: Chung Fang crying as he looks at the body of his son Hua Ting which was recovered in Kapit yesterday. By JACK WONG KUCHING: Year Six pupil Soon Hua Ting had been spending his long school holidays with his grandmother in Kapit when he was killed in a landslide on Wednesday. His grandmother Dayang A Dayak, 53, and her other grandson, Frederick Bradley A Peter, 13, were also buried alive in the landslide, which destroyed nine houses in Lorong 1, Kampung Baru Cina. Kapit acting OCPD Asst Supt Bradeep Sritharan said Soon's body was the third recovered by rescue workers at 2.30pm yesterday. His remains have been sent to the Kapit Hospital mortuary for a post-mortem. The boy, who lived with his family in Sibu, a nearly four-hour express boat ride away, came to stay with his grandmother when the yearend school holidays started. He was due to return home for the new school term later this week. Some 100 rescue workers, including firemen, policemen and Rela members, were still searching for a missing woman, believed to be Dayang's daughter, who was in her 30s. Hua Ting's father Soon Chung Fang, 40, wept as his son's body was retrieved from the rubble. "The last time I talked to him was during the start of the school holidays," said the crane operator, who arrived in Kapit from here yesterday. Hua Ting is the second youngest among five siblings - four boys and a girl. The search and rescue operation was sped up yesterday after an excavator was brought in to remove the rubble. Nearly 80 people from 17 families were made homeless in the landslide, the third to have happened in Kampung Baru Cina. Search and rescue operations were called off at 6pm and will resume today. One person is still missing.
newsdesk@thestar.com.my
Monday, October 27, 2008
Body of pupil recovered from rubble - Search continues for missing woman
PNB declares 6.25 sen dividend for ASN fund
KUALA LUMPUR: Permodalan Nasional Bhd (PNB) subsidiary Amanah Saham Nasional Bhd (ASNB) has announced a higher income distribution for investors of its Amanah Saham Nasional (ASN) growth fund. PNB chairman Tan Sri Ahmad Sarji Abdul Hamid said the better payout was due to the healthy performance of the local bourse and promising economic conditions. "The ASN fund's (good) performance was as a result of the (KQ Composite Index, which touched an all-time high of 1,440.39 points on Dec 6," Ahmad Sarji told a press conference yesterday. "The initiatives undertaken by the Government in developing the country's economic growth also contributed positively to the fund," he added. For its financial year ending Dec 31 (FY07), ASNB will be making an income distribution of 6.25 sen per unit for its ASN fund, an increase of 0.75 sen from 5.5 sen per unit in FY06. Ahmad Sarji said the income distribution would involve a total payment of RM86.81mil to 1.21 million unit holders subscribing for 1.39 billion units of ASN. "It (the income distribution) will be reinvested into additional ASN units calculated on the net asset value of ASN as at Dec 31 and be automatically credited into the unit holders' accounts," he said, adding that up to Dec 24, ASN had grossed 12.33% higher income to RM129.02mil from RIV11 14.86mil in FY06. Of the total income achieved, profit from sale of shares accounted for RM75.99mil, or 58.9%, followed by dividend income of RM41.67mil, or 32.3%, with the remaining RM11.36mil, or 8.8%, derived from short-term investment instruments. Ahmad Sarji added that transactions of ASN at the ASNB offices had been suspended from Wednesday to facilitate calculation of the income distribution. Transactions would resume on Jan 2, he said. On another note, PNB president and chief executive Tan Sri Hamad Kama Piah Che Othman also commented on the group's foreign investment strategies. "PNB currently uses its own funds for overseas investment, but we are looking to invest the money from the funds if we feel the returns would be promising," he said. PNB planned to launch new products in the first quarter next year to cater to more non-bumiputra investors, he added.
Tan Sri, Ahmad Sarji Abdul Hamid (left) and Tan Sri Hamad Kama Piah Che Othman at the press conference
A challenging 2008 for Asia - Calories, capital and climate spur anxiety
SINGAPORE: The new year maybe a challenging one for Asian policymakers. Year-end US closing stocks for wheat are the lowest in six decades. Soybeans in Chicago touched a 34-year peak this week. And palm oil in Malaysia climbed to a record on Wednesday. The steeply rising cost of calories may be more than just cyclical, notes Rob Subbaraman, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc economist in Hong Kong. Growing use of food crops in-biofuels and increasing demand for a protein-rich diet in developing countries may have pushed up prices more permanently. The wholesale price of pork in China has surged 53% in the past year. "Consumer inflationary expectations may soon rise, feeding into wage growth and core inflation, but we expect Asian central banks to be slow to react, initially due to slowing growth and later because of strong capital inflows," Subbaraman says. If the US Federal Reserve continues easing interest rates to combat a housing-led economic slowdown, a surge in capital inflows into Asia may indeed become a stumbling block in managing the inflationary impact of higher commodity prices. As Asian central banks raise interest rates - when the Fed is cutting them - they will invite even more foreign capital into the region. That will cause Asian currencies to appreciate, leading to a loss of competitiveness for the region's exports. On the other hand, paring the domestic cost of money prematurely may worsen the inflation challenge. That isn't all. Higher oil prices will also boost the attractiveness of coal as an energy source, delaying any meaningful reduction in carbon emissions in fast growing Asian countries such as China and India. As Daniel Gros, director of the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels, noted in recent research, the price of coal - relative to crude oil -has been halved since the end of 1999. And per unit of energy produced, coal is a much bigger pollutant than oil or gas. This does not augur well for the environment. "Given that China is likely to install over the next decade more new power generation capacity than already exists in all of Europe, this implies that the current level of high oil prices provides incentive to make the Chinese economy even more intensive in carbon than it would otherwise be," Gros said. Climate-related issues will be in the spotlight in Asia next year. China's eagerness to use the Beijing Olympic Games to showcase solutions to its huge environmental challenges would be one of the "big things to watch for" in Asia in 2008, Spire Research and Consulting" a Singapore-based advisory firm, said last week. In fact, lower oil prices may also make food costs more stable by lessening the craze for biofuels. That will leave capital flows as Asia's No. 1 challenge in 2008. And it won't be an easy one for policymakers to tackle. Take India example. The US$900bil economy has attracted US$100bil in capital in the 12 months through October, with a third of the money entering the country as overseas borrowings, according to Morgan Stanley economist Chetan Ahya in Singapore. This has caused the rupee to appreciate more than 12% against the US dollar this year, knocking off more than three percentage points from India's inflation index, says Lombard Street Research economist Maya Bhandari in London. China has it worse. Monetary conditions there remain dangerously loose. And China may be reluctant to do much about the undervalued yuan - the root cause of its record trade surpluses and the attendant liquidity glut - until the Olympics are out of the way. Asian economies may, to a large extent, be insulated from the sub-prime mess. Still, 2008 won't be all fun and games. — Bloomberg "Consumer inflationary expectations may soon rise, feeding into wage growth and core inflation" LEHMAN ECONOMIST