Malaysian opposition party defies government and publishes newspaper

Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim’s party has defied a government order to stop publishing its newspaper. The Home Ministry recently suspended the publication license of Suara Keadilan, or Voice of Justice, the weekly newspaper of Anwar’s People’s Justice Party, after it ran an article that claimed the state-run land development agency was in grave financial peril. However, the party distributed 100,000 copies of the paper to newsstands over the weekend by exploiting an apparent loophole in the law, said editor Dzulkarnain Taib. The party gave the newspaper’s latest issue an abbreviated name — Keadilan — to make it technically a different publication from Suara Keadilan.