Koran Indonesia looks deceptively like a normal newspaper, but is clearly slanted to make Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri's government look good. "The economy has recovered," reads one headline, while another announces: "Farmers are getting wealthier."
The paper appeared on newsstands on the first day of campaigning for Indonesia's first direct presidential elections, and it comes as no surprise that it's funded by Megawati's campaign team.
It is one of the more innovative -- and some might say sneaky -- ways the five candidates contesting the July 5 polls are trying to win over Indonesia's 150 million voters.
For the first time in the country's history, candidates are fighting to get their message directly to the populace, spending millions on TV and radio commercials and full-page newspaper advertisements.
Previously, voters were bypassed in a system where lawmakers acting as an electoral college picked the president. The system, devised by former dictator Suharto, returned him to power six times until he was ousted in 1998.
Spreading the word about the candidates is not limited to the mass media. Campaign workers also hand out bars of soap, cooking oil, kites and wrist watches emblazoned with candidates' faces at rallies.
Banners bearing simple slogans hang from trees and lampposts and even from cemetery gates across the country.
The top three presidential hopefuls are said to have accumulated huge war chests, mostly in unregulated donations from by wealthy business people seeking favors from future administrations.
So far, Megawati's campaign has spent around US$480,000 on advertisements alone, according to a survey by anti-corruption watchdogs.
She is leading the spending rush -- both on conventional ads and on efforts like Koran Indonesia, which appear to circumvent Indonesia's weak campaign finance laws.
Readers of Koran Indonesian have to get to the fine print at the bottom of page two before they learn that Megawati's campaign team produces the paper.
The 300,000-circulation broadsheet is supposedly on sale for a small sum, but is actually distributed for free.
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
Hundreds of Filipinos and tourists flocked to a sun-bleached field north of Manila yesterday, on Good Friday, to witness one of the country’s most blood-soaked displays of religious fervor, undeterred by rising fuel prices. Scores of bare-chested flagellants with covered faces walked barefoot through the dusty streets of Pampanga Province’s San Fernando as they flogged their backs with bamboo whips in the scorching heat. Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists said they saw devotees deliberately puncturing their skin with glass shards attached to a small wooden paddle to ensure their bleeding during the ritual, a way to atone for sins and seek miracles from
RSS