Condoms, like food and medicine, are largely impervious to the deflation of economic bubbles. So Malaysia’s largest condom manufacturer, Karex, will blithely ignore depressing global financial trends and launch an initial public offering sometime in the near future. Beyond confirming the impending float, Karex this week shyly declined to reveal any further details, but chief …read more

Musaab Naji Al-Wakil is an ordinary, middle-class Iraqi who has been stuck in Malaysia with his wife and four children for five years, and he too has felt the pull of the boats.

Hemmed in by the towering piles of books dominating his Kuala Lumpur living room, Malaysia’s eminent poet-activist snorts with derision. “This government isn’t fair, it isn’t just,” said 77-year-old A. Samad Said. “They use racial tension.”

One small family of Burmese refugees living in a dingy tenement on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur has slipped right through the cracks of asylum officialdom, it seems mostly because they wouldn’t abandon their adopted sons in Burma.

The magic list of refugees who might make the cut to come to Australia has taken on mythical proportions in the ghettos of Kuala Lumpur. To make the list means an end to a life of uncertainty and insecurity, an end to dodging police and the paramilitary corps. It means being able to work legally, …read more

ALAM Shamsul Alam ran for his life. He ran barefoot across paddy fields for kilometres, then leaped into the sea and swam for two hours in a bid for freedom. He was eventually picked up by fishermen and handed to the police.