Group insists weedkiller used to kill grass in cemetery

Compiled by BENJAMIN LEE, C. ARUNO and R. ARAVINTHAN

A MAN took to the Internet to complain about an unkempt cemetery in Perak that asks visitors to pay a “grass-cutting” fee, Sin Chew Daily reported.

He said he was asked to pay RM20 for the service.

“I would have paid RM40 (if they had been doing their job),” said the unidentified man, who went to the cemetery to mark the Qing Ming festival (Tomb Sweeping Day).

Instead, he said he was furious to see that the place was overgrown with tall grass.

“If they had been cutting the grass throughout the year, it would not have been this bad,” he said.

Many Internet users agreed with the man after seeing the photos he posted online.

The cemetery committee later said the pictures showed yellowing grass, which meant that workers had applied weedkiller.

“The problem we face is that we do not have extra funds to hire people to cut grass. We are not allowed to burn it either as we are located near a housing area, so the only solution is to apply weedkiller. The grass will therefore grow back quickly,” a committee member said.

The committee, he said, spends about RM20,000 applying weedkiller in the cemetery twice a year.

He added that the RM20 fee collected (which came to about RM3,000 to RM4,000 each year) was not enough to cover even the cost of the weedkiller.

As such, he hoped the public could understand its predicament.

> Malaysian singer Nicholas Teo performed an impromptu rendition of Little Tortoise together with his former TV co-star, Taiwanese singer Cyndi Wang, during her recent concert, Sin Chew Daily reported.

Teo, 42, made a surprise appearance at Wang’s Sugar High World Tour concert in Genting Highlands.

Wang was thrilled when she saw Teo and immediately passed him a microphone.

The two enjoyed some friendly banter before Wang convinced him to perform together.

Teo sang Little Tortoise, a song from the Taiwanese drama Smiling Pasta, in which both of them had starred together in 2006.

Their fans were ecstatic with the impromptu performance.

The above articles are compiled from the vernacular newspapers (Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese and Tamil dailies). As such, stories are grouped according to the respective language/medium. Where a paragraph begins with a >, it denotes a separate news item.