Up to 75% of industrial court cases have been solved by the Human Resource Ministry this year through the newly implemented arbitration system.

According to the HR Minister, Datuk Dr. S Subramaniam, statistics show that only 512 cases were referred to the Industrial Court this year, compared to last year’s figure which reached 3,200 cases.

The new arbitration process and system has also helped to reduce time and cost, and ensured speedier delivery of justice settlement. In the recent years, backlog cases have been haunting many different courts in Malaysia and this resulted in hardship and inconvenience to the parties disputing their cases.

Arbitration refers to the process of appointing an independent middleman agreed by two parties in dispute to settle the differences and come out with a solution. Through arbitration, a case would not have to be referred to the Industrial Court, and save time for all parties. Formulated by the Industrial Relations Department, the arbitration process was implemented since early of 2008, and was expected to cut the number of backlog cases by half before the year ends.

The co-founder of Yahoo, Jerry Yang, finds himself at the receiving end of a job firing after being asked by the company shareholders to step down as the CEO.

Yang has reluctantly agreed to step down from his position, but insisted to remain as one of the board members. He will officially be replaced once a suitable replacement is found.

Jerry Yang replaced Terry Semel as the CEO in June 2007, and shortly after his appointment, Yahoo was approached by Microsoft for a takeover bid involving a staggering amount of US47.5 billion, more than tripled Yahoo’s market value.

Yang’s refusal to sell the company to Microsoft upset many of the company’s shareholders, with a number of them starting a revolt to remove him as the CEO. Microsoft’s CEO Steve Balmer has since withdrew their offer but some of the Yahoo shareholders still want to pursue with the deal, either by selling Yahoo entirely, or just the search engine, which has been overtaken by its bitter rival Google as the world’s largest search engine.

Yahoo has began an aggressive move to find a new CEO by engaging a number of major recruiters and headhunters. Jerry Yang is facing the same situation that hit Steve Job, the founder of Apple not long ago. Ten years after starting a small company and turning it into an award winning, multi-billion dollar company, Steve was fired as Apple CEO amid a disagreement with one of the top executives. Many years later, a management restructuring saw Steve rehired, and has been at the helm as CEO until today.

Yang co-founded Yahoo with partner David Filo in 1994 while the two were studying in Stanford University. The two were considered as one of the earliest internet billionaires in the world.

Malaysia is in a dire need of more oncologists as the number of cancer cases in the country is on the rise.

According to the Health Minister, Datuk Dr. Liow Tiong Lai, there are only 39 oncologists in the country at the moment, a number far cry from an ideal figure of 200.

Ideally, for every 1 million people, there should be 8 oncologists serving the population. For a country with 26 million population, the situation looks alarming.

The government has taken initiative to hire foreign oncologists but the new recruits are still insufficient to handle between 30,000 to 40,000 new cases every year. The National Cancer Registry Report published way back in 2002 also indicated that Malaysia ranks among the countries with most cases of nasopharyngeal, laryngeal and cervical cancers.

Oncology is a medical specialization that deals with the study of tumor and cancer related cases. An oncologist may be involved in physiotheraphy, clinical genetics, diagnosis counseling and so on, just to name a few.

Barely 3 days after announcing a layoff exercise involving over 9,000 staff, Citigroup employees are now facing a fresh nightmare as the company revealed a plan to make redundant about 52,000 of its workforce worldwide.

The figure represents about one-fifth of the company’s overall employee size.

Through electronic briefings done earlier on Monday, the US’ number two bank announced its biggest single employment cut in the history of the company’s incorporation, as it continues its struggle to slash cost and return back to profitability.

The job cut is expected to complete within the first 3 months of the year 2009. Those working in the company’s two operation bases – New York and London, were said to be mostly hit by the new layoff move.

Apart from termination, job losses will also occur through asset disposal and a freeze in the recruitment and hiring, where resigned staff would not be replaced. At the moment, around 25,000 Citigroup staff are in the process of transferring to new owners as the bank is disposing off some risky assets. The fate of these 25,000 people are still unknown once the staff transfer process completes and may still subject for more job cuts.

The future of Citi’s CEO, Vikram Pandit, is also in doubt with much criticism being targeted to him for his failed turnaround plans for the bank. Eventually, he may find himself at the other end of the firing line.