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Former US diplomat and author Martin Indyk dies at 73
NORWICH, Conn. — Veteran diplomat Martin S. Indyk, an author and leader at prominent U.S. think tanks who devoted years to finding a path toward peace in the Middle East, died Thursday. He was 73.
His wife, Gahl Hodges Burt, confirmed in a phone call that he died from complications of esophageal cancer at the couple’s home in New Fairfield, Connecticut.
The Council on Foreign Relations, where Indyk had been a distinguished fellow in U.S. and Middle East diplomacy since 2018, called him a “rare, trusted voice within an otherwise polarized debate on U.S. policy toward the Middle East.”
A native of Australia, Indyk served as U.S. ambassador to Israel from 1995 to 1997 and from 2000 to 2001. He was special envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations during former President Barack Obama’s administration, from 2013 to 2014.
When he resigned in 2014 to join The Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, it had symbolized the latest failed effort by the U.S. to forge an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. He continued as Obama’s special adviser on Mideast peace issues.
“Ambassador Indyk has invested decades of his extraordinary career to the mission of helping Israelis and Palestinians achieve a lasting peace. It’s the cause of Martin’s career, and I’m grateful for the wisdom and insight he’s brought to our collective efforts,” then-Secretary of State John Kerry said at the time, in a statement.
In a May 22 social media post on X, amid the continuing war in Gaza, Indyk urged Israelis to “wake up,” warning them their government “is leading you into greater isolation and ruin” after a proposed peace deal was rejected. Indyk also called out Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in June on X, accusing him of playing “the martyr in a crisis he manufactured,” after Netanyahu accused the U.S. of withholding weapons that Israel needed.
“Israel is at war on four fronts: with Hamas in Gaza; with Houthis in Yemen; with Hezbollah in Lebanon; and with Iran overseeing the operations,” Indyk wrote on June 19. “What does Netanyahu do? Attack the United States based on a lie that he made up! The Speaker and Leader should withdraw his invitation to address Congress until he recants and apologizes.”
Indyk also served as special assistant to former President Bill Clinton and senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs at the National Security Council from 1993 to 1995. He served as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs in the U.S. Department of State from 1997 to 2000.
Besides serving at Brookings and the Council on Foreign Relations, Indyk worked at the Center for Middle East Policy and was the founding executive director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Indyk’s successor at the Washington Institute called him “a true American success story.”
“A native of Australia, he came to Washington to have an impact on the making of American Middle East Policy and that he surely did — as pioneering scholar, insightful analyst and remarkably effective policy entrepreneur,” Robert Satloff said. “He was a visionary who not only founded an organization based on the idea that wise public policy is rooted in sound research, he embodied it.”
Indyk wrote or co-wrote multiple books, including Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East and Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy, which was published in 2021.
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US, Taiwan, China race to improve military drone technology
washington — This week, as Taiwan was preparing for the start of its Han Kuang military exercises, its air defense system detected a Chinese drone circling the island. This was the sixth time that China had sent a drone to operate around Taiwan since 2023.
Drones like the one that flew around Taiwan, which are tasked with dual-pronged missions of reconnaissance and intimidation, are just a small part of a broader trend that is making headlines from Ukraine to the Middle East to the Taiwan Strait and is changing the face of warfare.
The increasing role that unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, play and rising concern about a Chinese invasion of democratically ruled Taiwan is pushing Washington, Beijing and Taipei to improve the sophistication, adaptability and cost of drone technology.
‘Hellscape’ strategy
Last August, the Pentagon launched a $1 billion Replicator Initiative to create air, sea and land drones in the “multiple thousands,” according to the Defense Department’s Innovation Unit. The Pentagon aims to build that force of drones by August 2025.
The initiative is part of what U.S. Admiral Samuel Paparo recently described to The Washington Post as a “hellscape” strategy, which aims to counter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan through the deployment of thousands of unmanned drones in the air and sea between the island and China.
“The benefits of unmanned systems are that you get cheap, disposable mass that’s low cost. If a drone gets shot down, the only people that are crying about it are the accountants,” said Zachary Kallenborn, a policy fellow at George Mason University. “You can use them at large amounts of scale and overwhelm your opponents as well as degrade their defensive capabilities.”
The hellscape strategy, he added, aims to use lots of cheap drones to try to hold back China from attacking Taiwan.
Drone manufacturing supremacy
China has its own plans under way and is the world’s largest manufacturer of commercial drones. In a news briefing after Paparo’s remarks to the Post, it warned Washington that it was playing with fire.
“Those who clamor for turning others’ homeland into hell should get ready for burning in hell themselves,” said Senior Colonel Wu Qian, spokesperson for the Chinese defense ministry.
“The People’s Liberation Army is able to fight and win in thwarting external interference and safeguarding our national sovereignty and territorial integrity. Threats and intimidation never work on us,” Wu said.
China’s effort to expand its use of drones has been bolstered, analysts say, by leader Xi Jinping’s emphasis on technology and modernization in the military, something he highlighted at a top-level party meeting last week.
“China’s military is developing more than 50 types of drones with varying capabilities, amassing a fleet of tens of thousands of drones, potentially 10 times larger than Taiwan and the U.S. combined,” Michael Raska, assistant professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, told VOA in an email. “This quantitative edge currently fuels China’s accelerating military modernization, with drones envisioned for everything from pre-conflict intel gathering to swarming attacks.”
Analysts add that China’s commercial drone manufacturing supremacy aids its military in the push for drone development. China’s DJI dominates in production and sale of household drones, accounting for 76% of the worldwide consumer market in 2021.
The scale of production and low price of DJI drones could put China in an advantageous position in a potential drone war, analysts say.
“In Russia and Ukraine, if you have a lot of drones – even if they’re like the commercial off-the-shelf things, DJI drones you can buy at Costco – and you throw hundreds of them at an air defense system, that’s going to create a large problem,” said Major Emilie Stewart, a research analyst at the China Aerospace Studies Institute.
China denies it is seeking to use commercial UAV technology for future conflicts.
“China has always been committed to maintaining global security and regional stability and has always opposed the use of civilian drones for military purposes,” Liu Pengyu, spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, told VOA. “We are firmly opposed to the U.S.’s military ties with Taiwan and its effort of arming Taiwan.”
Drone force
With assistance from its American partners, pressure from China and lessons from Ukraine, Taiwan has been pushing to develop its own domestic drone warfare capabilities.
The United States has played a pivotal role in Taiwan’s drone development, and just last week it pledged to sell $360 million of attack drones to the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, or TECRO, Taiwan’s de facto embassy in Washington.
“Taiwan will continue to build a credible deterrence and work closely with like-minded partners, including the United States, to preserve peace and stability in the region,” TECRO told VOA when asked about the collaboration between Taipei and Washington. “We have no further information to share at this moment.”
The effort to incorporate drones into its defense is crucial for Taiwan, said Eric Chan, a senior nonresident fellow at the Global Taiwan Institute.
“The biggest immediate effects of the U.S. coming into this mass UAV game is to give Taiwan a bigger advantage to be able to, first, detect their enemy and, second, help them build a backstop to their own capabilities as well,” Chan said.
With the potential for China to consider using drones in an urban conflict environment, Taiwan is recognizing the importance of stepping up its counter-drone defense systems.
“After multiple intrusions of Chinese drones in outlying islands, the Taiwan Ministry of Defense now places great emphasis on anti-drone capabilities,” said Yu-Jiu Wang, chief executive of Tron Future, an anti-drone company working with the Taiwanese military.
The demand is one that Wang said his company is willing and ready to fill.
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Video game performers to strike over artificial intelligence concerns
LOS ANGELES — Hollywood’s video game performers voted Thursday to go on strike, throwing part of the entertainment industry into another work stoppage after talks for a new contract with major game studios broke down over artificial intelligence protections.
The strike — the second for video game voice actors and motion capture performers under the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists — will begin at 12:01 a.m. Friday. The move comes after nearly two years of negotiations with gaming giants, including divisions of Activision, Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Co., over a new interactive media agreement.
SAG-AFTRA negotiators say gains have been made over wages and job safety in the video game contract, but that the studios will not make a deal over the regulation of generative AI. Without guardrails, game companies could train AI to replicate an actor’s voice, or create a digital replica of their likeness without consent or fair compensation, the union said.
Fran Drescher, the union’s president, said in a prepared statement that members would not approve a contract that would allow companies to “abuse AI.”
“Enough is enough. When these companies get serious about offering an agreement our members can live — and work — with, we will be here, ready to negotiate,” Drescher said.
A representative for the studios did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
The global video game industry generates well over $100 billion in profit annually, according to game market forecaster Newzoo. The people who design and bring those games to life are the driving force behind that success, SAG-AFTRA said.
“Eighteen months of negotiations have shown us that our employers are not interested in fair, reasonable AI protections, but rather flagrant exploitation,” said Interactive Media Agreement Negotiating Committee Chair Sarah Elmaleh.
Last month, union negotiators told The Associated Press that the game studios refused to “provide an equal level of protection from the dangers of AI for all our members” — specifically, movement performers.
Members voted overwhelmingly last year to give leadership the authority to strike. Concerns about how movie studios will use AI helped fuel last year’s film and television strikes by the union, which lasted four months.
The last interactive contract, which expired November 2022, did not provide protections around AI but secured a bonus compensation structure for voice actors and performance capture artists after an 11-month strike that began October 2016. That work stoppage marked the first major labor action from SAG-AFTRA following the merger of Hollywood’s two largest actors unions in 2012.
The video game agreement covers more than 2,500 “off-camera (voiceover) performers, on-camera (motion capture, stunt) performers, stunt coordinators, singers, dancers, puppeteers, and background performers,” according to the union.
Amid the tense interactive negotiations, SAG-AFTRA created a separate contract in February that covered indie and lower-budget video game projects. The tiered-budget independent interactive media agreement contains some of the protections on AI that video game industry titans have rejected.
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YouTube star sets Domino installation world record
YouTube star Lily Hevesh has been mesmerizing viewers with domino creations for 15 years. Last weekend, at the National Building Museum in Washington, she completed her most ambitious project yet: she brought down an installation of 100,000 dominoes and set a world record. Maxim Adams reports. Camera: Dmitry Shakhov, Artem Kohan.
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Drill team cultivates sense of identity for Chinese American girls
In the Pacific Northwest, there is a marching group that has thrilled parade audiences for more than 70 years. The Seattle Chinese Community Girls Drill Team has brought a sense of community and identity for generations of Chinese American girls. VOA’s Natasha Mozgovaya reports.
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CrowdStrike: More machines fixed as customers, regulators await details on what caused meltdown
AUSTIN, Tex. — Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike says a “significant number” of the millions of computers that crashed on Friday, causing global disruptions, are back in operation as its customers and regulators await a more detailed explanation of what went wrong.
A defective software update sent by CrowdStrike to its customers disrupted airlines, banks, hospitals and other critical services Friday, affecting about 8.5 million machines running Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The painstaking work of fixing it has often required a company’s IT crew to manually delete files on affected machines.
CrowdStrike said late Sunday in a blog post that it was starting to implement a new technique to accelerate remediation of the problem.
Shares of the Texas-based cybersecurity company have dropped nearly 30% since the meltdown, knocking off billions of dollars in market value.
The scope of the disruptions has also caught the attention of government regulators, including antitrust enforcers, though it remains to be seen if they take action against the company.
“All too often these days, a single glitch results in a system-wide outage, affecting industries from healthcare and airlines to banks and auto-dealers,” said Lina Khan, chair of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, in a Sunday post on the social media platform X. “Millions of people and businesses pay the price. These incidents reveal how concentration can create fragile systems.”
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Ukraine’s largest music festival returns with break from inescapable reality of war
Kyiv, Ukraine — This year, Ukraine’s largest music festival struck a different chord. Gone were the international headliners, the massive performance halls and the hundreds of thousands of visitors.
Instead, beloved local artists graced the stage this past weekend at the Atlas Festival — the first since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 — for a smaller but still ebullient crowd. The stage was erected in a shopping mall parking lot, the only option with a shelter large enough to contain the 25,000 people expected in the event of an air raid.
Carefree youth danced, romanced and sang along, rubbing shoulders with hardened military commanders as famous singers who crooned lyrics imbued with national pride. Music was the main goal, but so was shattering the illusion that the capital is invulnerable to the bloody battles hundreds of miles away.
“Such kind of festivals can’t be separated from the life of the country. The country is at war. The core issues here should relate to the war,” said Vsevolod Kozhemyako, a businessman and one of the founders of the 13th “Khartia” Brigade, now a part of Ukraine’s National Guard and defending the front line in Kharkiv.
“People who are still young and who don’t join (the fight) should understand that they cannot live in a bubble,” he said.
And yet, a bubble is precisely how it feels to be in Kyiv, as the war approaches its third year. While Ukrainian soldiers are killed and wounded every day along the 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line in the east, the capital is a contrast with its busy bars and clubs.
Every so often, Kyiv comes face to face with the war. Two weeks ago, a barrage of Russian missiles destroyed a children’s hospital and a private clinic, in one of the deadliest attacks since the full-scale invasion. Residents have grappled with power cuts caused by Moscow’s targeted destruction of Ukrainian energy generation at the height of a summer heat wave.
In every corner of the music festival, visitors were confronted with the inescapable reality that theirs is a country trapped in a bloody war of attrition. Festival organizers hoped to raise $2.2 million (2 million euros) to help soldiers purchase supplies for the front line.
In the mall’s basement parking lot, various military units, from Khartia to the 3rd Assault, offered interactive games to lure donations and possible recruits. A first-person shooter game offered visitors a chance to improve target practice by gunning down shadowy virtual infantrymen. In another corner, medics brandished severed plastic limbs and offered emergency medical training.
The festival concluded Sunday with a much-anticipated performance from Serhii Zhadan and his band Zhadan and the Dogs. Zhadan, a celebrated artist dubbed the poet of the Donbas, recently joined Khartia.
“It’s just a small break, an opportunity to take a breath,” said Zhadan, minutes before he took to the stage for a roaring crowd. “The most important things, they are happening over there, at the front line.”
On stage, Zhadan started with one of his most beloved songs “Malvi” or “Mallow.” The crowd sang along, word for word. “But what can you do with my hot blood,” they chanted. “Who will come at us.”
18-year old Viktoriia Khalis was excited to see his performance. She had been to the Atlas festival once before in 2021. The difference is stark, she said.
“The main thing that has changed, unfortunately, now the festival is connected with donations,” she said. But she also felt more connected to her homeland. “I feel this entire crowd is related to me. I feel unity.”
She was scared there would be another Russian air attack — a music festival with thousands of attendees would be a prime target — but said she couldn’t miss a chance to see her favorite artists.
For Nadiia Dorofeeva, one of Ukraine’s most famous singers, every concert feels different. “Before, when I entered a stage I was thinking only about if I looked good, sang well and if the people got what they came for. But now, I dream of having no air alarms, I am seeing how people cry at my concerts.”
One of Dorofeeva’s songs, “WhatsApp,” is about a girl waiting for her beloved to return from war. “She washed the phone with tears/Like rainy glass,” often moves listeners to tears.
Among the attendees was Lt. Gen. Serhii Naiev, an assistant deputy chief in Ukraine’s General Staff.
“There are well-known artists on stage, they are performing their concerts and there are a lot of Ukrainians around who are donating their money, much-needed money for the armed forces of Ukraine,” he said.
“We understand that our partners are supporting us, but we also understand that we could do a lot by ourselves, to be stronger,” he said.
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India ed-tech firm Byju’s founder faces reckoning as startup implodes
NEW DELHI — Byju Raveendran, an Indian mathematics whiz who soared from teacher to startup billionaire before his education-technology company imploded this year, now faces his biggest test.
The future of Raveendran’s eponymous Byju’s online coaching firm rests with India’s courts after the country’s biggest startup, once loved by global investors who valued it at $22 billion, crashed below $2 billion in valuation.
The 44-year-old founder last week lost control of the company as a tribunal kick-started an insolvency process.
Accused of “financial mismanagement and compliance issues,” the son of a family of teachers from a small village in south India faces a reckoning that will test the ingenuity that made him a poster child for India’s startups.
His formerly high-flying company was eventually brought low when it could not pay $19 million in sponsorship dues to India’s cricket federation, prompting a tribunal to suspend Byju’s board and make Raveendran report to a court-appointed restructuring expert.
An appeals tribunal is expected to hold a hearing on Monday on whether Byju’s insolvency process should be quashed after the former billionaire argued in court his company is solvent and that insolvency could shut it down and cost the jobs of 27,000 staff, including teachers. Insolvency also would not bode well for Byju’s backers, such as Dutch technology investor Prosus.
Raveendran denies the allegations of mismanagement and wrongdoing at his firm, which has in recent months faced lawsuits over unpaid loans and boardroom battles with foreign investors that went public.
Potential insolvency is a dramatic turn of events for an entrepreneur described by one person who has worked with him as an extremely passionate and goal-oriented person who might adopt “an abrasive approach” in a crisis.
Raveendran presented a “suave, nice and polished” image, appearing to heed advice, but “eventually there was a trust deficit,” said another executive who quit last year as a Byju’s senior vice president.
“He said things are improving, don’t worry, we have the money,” the former executive said.
Raveendran and a Byju’s spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.
Byju’s downfall: ‘Our fair share of mistakes’
An engineer by training, he started Byju’s in 2011 with physical classes after friends urged him to go into teaching.
Raveendran, who aced a premier Indian management exam “with a score of 100 percentile, not once but twice,” according to the company website, started what would become his empire with his wife Divya Gokulnath, 38, a former student of his.
In education-obsessed India, Raveendran hit gold by offering online teaching programs priced from $100 to $300. He got a mammoth boost when the COVID-19 pandemic sent students indoors. At the height of his fame in 2021, he and his wife had a net worth of $4 billion, Forbes reckoned.
Now all that is in tatters.
Behind the reversal of Byju’s meteoric success, say executives and advisers who worked with Raveendran, is that he overruled associates and expanded the business through expensive acquisitions, splurging on marketing and being slow to address problems such as sales agents adopting aggressive tactics to mis-sell courses that damaged the company’s reputation.
With the backing of investors like General Atlantic, Prosus and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropy venture, Raveendran spent millions on acquisitions, and the company says it has 150 million students in over 100 countries.
“While growing fast, as I’ve accepted multiple times, we’ve made our fair share of mistakes,” Raveendran told an interviewer last year at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
As he battled crises, the CEO also said decisions to lay off some of its then-50,000 employees and slash branding expenses would help strengthen loss-making Byju’s and turn its cashflow positive.
“Every country needs a Byju’s,” he said.
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India’s battery storage industry grows
BENGALURU, India — At a Coca-Cola factory on the outskirts of Chennai in southern India, a giant battery powers machinery day and night, replacing a diesel-spewing generator. It’s one of just a handful of sites in India powered by electricity stored in batteries, a key component to fast-tracking India’s energy transition away from dirty fuels.
The country’s lithium ion battery storage industry — which can store electricity generated by wind turbines or solar panels for when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing — makes up just 0.1% of global battery storage systems. But battery storage is growing fast, with around a third of India’s total battery infrastructure coming online just this year.
“Our orders are growing exponentially,” said Ayush Misra, CEO of Amperehour Energy, the company that installed the batteries at the Chennai factory. “It’s a really exciting time to be a battery storage provider.”
Businesses invest in industry
India currently has around 100 megawatts of storage capacity from batteries, with another 3.3 gigawatts of clean energy storage coming from hydropower. The Indian government estimates that the country will need about 74 gigawatts of energy storage from batteries, hydropower and nuclear energy by 2032, but experts think the country actually needs closer to double that amount to meet the country’s energy needs.
Some customers are still wary of using battery technology for storage, and the storage systems can be seen as more expensive than the more commonly used coal. The supply chain of batteries is also concentrated in China, meaning the sector is vulnerable to geopolitical volatility.
But markets don’t think customers will be hesitant about batteries for long, with major Indian businesses announcing significant investments in the industry.
In January this year, energy giant Reliance Industries said it will build a 5,000-acre factory in Jamnagar, Gujarat. And in March, Goodenough Energy said it will spend $53 million by 2027 to set up a 20 million kilowatt-hour battery factory in the northern region of Jammu and Kashmir.
Alexander Hogeveen Rutter, an independent energy analyst based in Bengaluru, said upping storage capacity should be done alongside ramping up renewables.
“Clean energy combined with adequate storage can be an alternative to coal. Not in the future but right now,” he said. He added that it’s a “myth” that clean energy is more expensive than coal, as current prices of renewable energy combined with storage is cheaper than new coal.
Global battery costs are declining faster than expected, and experts say that if costs continue to plummet, energy storage systems can better compete with both coal and clean energy sources like hydropower and nuclear energy that can also control their supply to meet demand.
“Battery storage is now the largest resource to meet California’s evening peak electricity requirements. It’s more than gas, nuclear or coal,” he said. This is being replicated in the U.K., China and even smaller nations like Tonga. “There’s no reason why this can’t happen in India too,” he said.
India’s energy needs grow
One of India’s unique challenges is that energy needs are growing more rapidly than most nations: the population is increasing and extreme heat fueled by climate change means more and more people are using energy-guzzling air conditioning. India’s electricity demand grew by 7% last year and is expected to grow by at least 6% every year for the next three years, according to the International Energy Agency.
“The country needs to quadruple its renewable energy deployment just to meet demand growth,” said Hogeveen Rutter.
Ankit Mittal, co-founder of Sheru, a software company that offers energy storage and management solutions, said that making battery storage sites more flexible can help the industry ramp up quickly.
Mittal said battery storage sites should be more accessible to the national energy grid, so they can provide electricity to whichever regions need the extra boost of energy most. Currently, battery storage sites in India only power up more local sites.
To encourage further growth of the battery sector, the Indian government announced last year a $452 million effort to support an additional four gigawatts of battery storage by 2031. But the government also provides subsidies for coal plants, making the electricity generated there a cheaper bet for some utility companies.
Future government policy could level the playing field. The country is set to announce a new national budget later in July that industry leaders hope will contain incentives for clean energy storage.
Akshat Singhal, co-founder of the Bengaluru-based battery tech startup Log 9 Materials, thinks that better government support can help the country meet growing energy demands “the right way,” with clean energy.
“One significant policy change can kickstart the entire ecosystem,” he said.
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Australia warns of ‘malicious websites’ after cyber outage
sydney — Australia’s cyber intelligence agency said on Saturday that “malicious websites and unofficial code” were being released online claiming to aid recovery from Friday’s global digital outage, which hit media, retailers, banks and airlines.
Australia was one of many countries affected by the outage that caused havoc worldwide after a botched software update from CrowdStrike.
On Saturday, the Australian Signals Directorate — the country’s cyber intelligence agency — said “a number of malicious websites and unofficial code are being released claiming to help entities recover from the widespread outages caused by the CrowdStrike technical incident.”
On its website, the agency said its cyber security center “strongly encourages all consumers to source their technical information and updates from official CrowdStrike sources only.”
Cyber Security Minister Clare O’Neil said on social media platform X on Saturday that Australians should “be on the lookout for possible scams and phishing attempts.”
CrowdStrike — which previously reached a market cap of about $83 billion — is a major cybersecurity provider, with close to 30,000 subscribers globally.
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Malaysia honors new king in coronation marked by pomp
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Traditional pomp and cannon fire Saturday marked the coronation of Malaysia’s billionaire King Sultan Ibrahim Iskandar, who pledged to govern fairly during the five-year term he will serve under a unique rotating monarchy system.
Ibrahim, 65, was sworn in on January 31. Saturday’s coronation at the national palace formalized his role as Malaysia’s 17th king in a ceremony steeped in Malay culture and pageantry.
Nine ethnic Malay state rulers take turns as Malaysia’s king for five-year terms under the country’s rotating monarchy, which began when Malaysia gained independence from Britain in 1957. Malaysia has 13 states but only nine have royal families, some which trace their roots to centuries-old Malay kingdoms that were independent states until they were brought together by the British.
Donned in black and gold traditional ceremonial outfit and headgear, Ibrahim and Queen Raja Zarith Sofiah were greeted by military salute before they proceeded to the throne. The heads of the other royal families, Brunei Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah and Bahrain King Hamad Isa al Khalifa were seated on a stage beside the throne.
At the start of the proceedings, a copy of the Quran was presented to Ibrahim, who kissed it. The monarch received a gold dagger, a symbol of power. Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim then pledged his government’s loyalty and said the royal institution was a pillar of strength for the nation. He then proclaimed Ibrahim as Malaysia’s new king.
“God willing, I will discharge my duties faithfully and honestly, and to rule fairly,” Ibrahim said in his coronation speech. He also urged Anwar’s government to step up efforts to improve the livelihood of the people and bolster the nation’s development. After the sultan took his oath, guests in the hall chanted “Long live the king” three times.
Ibrahim, from southern Johor state bordering Singapore, is one of the country’s richest men, with a business empire spanning from telecoms to real estate. He is known for his collection of luxury cars and motorbikes and is the only state ruler with a small private army — a concession granted to his state when it joined modern-day Malaysia.
He is vocal about Malaysian politics and has spoken out about corruption and racial discrimination.
Known as the Yang Di-Pertuan Agong, or He Who Is Made Lord, the king plays a largely ceremonial role, with administrative power vested in the prime minister and Parliament. The monarch is the nominal head of the government and armed forces and is regarded as the protector of Islam and Malay tradition.
All laws, Cabinet appointments and the dissolution of Parliament for general elections require his formal assent. The king has the power to proclaim an emergency and pardon criminals.
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