Compiled by BENJAMIN LEE, C.ARUNO and R.ARAVINTAN
A CHINESE educationist group is urging the government to delay allowing children aged six to enter Year One if adequate support for the policy is lacking, reported China Press.
United Chinese School Committees’ Association of Malaysia (Dong Zong) chairman Datuk Tan Yew Sing said that for the policy to succeed, there must be improvements in infrastructure, adjustments to the curriculum, additional teachers and administrative support for primary schools.
He said that with an additional 60,000 pupils joining Year One, and assuming an average class size of 30 students, schools nationwide would require a total of 2,000 additional classrooms.
“If each class requires two teachers, about 4,000 more teachers would be needed,” he said after chairing a Dong Zong central committee meeting.
> A woman sued her nephew for cutting his hair during Chinese New Year, claiming that it had led to her husband’s death, reported Oriental Daily.
The nephew, surnamed Liu, visited his uncle on the second day of the New Year but was chided for having messy hair.
Upset, he immediately left and got a haircut at a nearby barbershop.
That evening, his uncle met with an accident and died from his injuries at hospital.
Liu attended his uncle’s wake but was accosted by his aunt after seeing his fresh haircut.
She became emotional and claimed that Liu had broken the traditional Chinese New Year taboo and believed it had brought misfortune upon her husband.
After failing to get police to investigate the case, she sued Liu for one million yuan (RM575,633) but the court dismissed the case, stating no legal causal link between Liu’s haircut and the uncle’s death.
(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.)
