Governing, no matter who does it, is part philosophy, part exigency, part panic, part payoff. And it's never easy to ascribe precise percentages to each part.

When the tenure of one leader goes on interminably, there's is often another factor that figures in the conjecture about the reasons for its longevity: willingness to traffic with the occult that supposedly confers immunity against adversity.

Independent candidate for Balingian, Salleh Jafaruddin, has alluded to the "foreign witchcraft apparatus" around Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud, shedding hints of plots hatched to divert the country's most durable state chief executive from the writing on the wall, which is that it is time he went quietly into retirement...