MALAYSIA is open to proposals to resume the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, as families of passengers marked the fifth anniversary of the jet’s disappearance.
The US firm Ocean Infinity mounted a “no cure, no fee” search for the plane in the southern Indian Ocean in January 2018 that ended in May without any clues.
But Ocean Infinity’s CEO, Oliver Plunkett, said in a video shown at the public remembrance event on Sunday in Kuala Lumpur that the company hopes to resume the search with better technology obtained in the past year.
Transport Minister Anthony Loke said the government “is waiting for specific proposals, in particular from Ocean Infinity”, to resume the search for the plane, which vanished March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board.
The Ocean Infinity mission came a year after an official search by Malaysia, Australia and China ended in futility.
Plunkett said his company has better technology now after successfully locating an Argentinian submarine in November, a year after it went missing. He said the firm is still reviewing all possible data on Flight 370 and thinking about how it can revive its failed mission.
ESTONIANS have started voting in a parliamentary election in the small Baltic nation in a ballot where Prime Minister Juri Ratas and his Centre Party are pitted against the centre-right opposition.
The vote in the Nato and the European Union member of 1.3 million people comes as the far-right, nationalist Estonian Conservative People’s Party, EKRE, has substantially increased its popularity since the 2015 election.
Both main contenders wish to keep it at bay.
Nearly a million voters are eligible to elect representatives for the next four years to the 101-seat Riigikogu legislature. About 26% have previously cast their votes online. Estonia was the first country in the world to use online balloting for a national election in 2005.
THE top Muslim cleric in Egypt has stirred up controversy after saying that polygamy is an “injustice” for women, but stopped short of calling for a ban on the practice.
“Those who say that marriage must be polygamous are all wrong. We have to read the (Koran) verse in full, said Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, Al-Azhar’s Grand Imam.
He said that monogamy was the rule and polygamy a restricted exception. It is restricted in Islam and requires fairness and “if there is not fairness it is forbidden to have more than one wife”, he said.
Al-Tayeb said the practice came from “a lack of understanding of the Koran and the tradition of the Prophet” and it is “often an injustice to women and children”.
The Grand Imam also called for a broader revamp of how women’s issues are addressed.
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