NorthEast

An Overview The petroleum industry is involved in the global processes of exploration , extraction , refining , transporting (often with oil tankers and pipelines ), and marketing petroleum products. The largest volume products of the industry are fuel oil and gasoline (petrol). Petroleum is also the raw material for many chemical products , including pharmaceuticals, solvents, fertilizers, pesticides, and plastics. The industry is usually divided into three major components: upstream , midstream and downstream . Midstream operations are usually included in the downstream category. Petroleum is vital to many industries , and is of importance to the maintenance of industrialized civilization itself, and thus is critical concern to many nations. Oil accounts for a large percentage of the world’s energy consumption, ranging from a low of 32% for Europe and Asia, up to a high of 53% for the Middle East . Other geographic regions’ consumption patterns are as follows: South and Central...

The political scene in Malaysia since March 8, 2008 has been interesting and significant. To start with, the Barisan Nasional (BN) with UMNO being the backbone to the present government has been battered by the Pakatan Rakyat (PR) lead by Parti Keadilan Rakyat and its de facto leader Mr Anwar Ibrahim. The loss of 2/3 majority has been a major blow to BN and Prime Minister (PM) Abdullah Badawi. This is indeed a sharp turn of event from his first election as PM when the opposition was almost vanished from what many described as the strongest mandate given to any PM in Malaysia’s history. Till now, debates are ongoing on what has happened that contributed to such a change of fortune to PM? Whatever the answers, I do notice the present trends bring about some positive development to the country which I like to highlight: 1) Malaysia is now much more open as a society than before. Freedom of speech has been greatly enhanced and embracing diversity is visible. For example, TV stations have b...

Last Saturday (14 June 2008), I came across an article written by columnist, Seah Chiang Nee, on his weekly ‘Insight Down South’, on The Star. The writer sighted waning interest among many in Singapore in areas that were the cornerstone of Singapore’s development, i.e., engineering and even legal profession which experiences shrinking supply amid rising demand for lawyers. Retired civil servant, Ngiam Tong Dow was quoted to express concern with the present development. According to him, “Britain’s economic decline set in because the best and brightest from Oxbridge, instead of going into engineering and running factories, went into the (financial) City of London... they are not creators of wealth, they just shuffling asserts around the place. In US, the best went to Wall St, their best still go into engineering. This trend is not unique to Singapore. Many countries, in pursuit of greater socio-economic growth, are facing such reality. But this is never an easy issue to tackle and any p...