Bankrupt broadcaster ABN owes contractors RM130mil

Nine contractors of the defunct Asian Broadcasting Network have lodged a police report over payments not received for their services.

Jarjeet Gill, one of the contractors, said liquidator appointed by the courts following ABN’s bankruptcy case last year had revealed that ABN owed RM200 million to Bank Pembangunan Berhad. However about 100 contractors were owed RM130 million and had not been paid after four years.

“We want the authorities to investigate and find out where the money went to.”

He also called for investigations into how ABN received its licence in the first place despite having no prior experience.

ABN operated ABNxcess, the sole digital cable television service in Malaysia, launched on 8 June 2013.

The main people behind it were Sreedhar Subramaniam, the chief executive, and politically well connected businessman Tan Sri Kenneth Eswaran.

Sreedhar and P’ng Hong Kwan, a former editor with the New Straits Times, started the Malaysian Insider Web site in 2008.

ABN LIQUIDATED BUT CONTRACTORS NOT PAID

Everything simple is false. Or turning everything into Us versus Them.

We are back to Paul Valéry’s maxim: “Everything simple is false. Everything complex is unusable.” In the world of computer modeling, this is known as Bonini’s paradox: The more realistic a model is, the more it becomes as complex and difficult to understand as the real world; the simpler and more user-friendly a model becomes, the less accurately it represents the underlying system. Mass democracy and mass media on the American model work to impose on the complex reality of American public life the simplest possible model of politics, aggregating all of political reality into two variables: Us and Them.

Another way of putting this is that the unstated task of cable-news journalism on the Fox/MSNBC model — along with practically all political talk radio, 99.44 percent of social media, and a great deal of inferior writing about politics — is transmuting intellectual complexity into moral simplicity. Even that isn’t quite right: The moral simplicity offered by the “Everybody Who Disagrees with Me Is Hitler” school of analysis is a false simplicity — simplicity for the truly simple, as opposed to what Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. described as “the simplicity on the far side of complexity.”

Reality is complex. But it isn’t only the cable-news mouth-holes that are engaged in the reverse alchemy of turning the gold of genuine inquiry into the dross of political rhetoric. We — we the media, and We the People — commit the same sin.

from the National Review Can We Talk?

Link

https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2018/06/09/syahredzan-johan-appointed-kit-siangs-political-secretary/

Link

Donald Trump’s Surveillance of New York Times Reporter Is a True Declaration of War Against the Press

Link

https://nypost.com/2018/06/08/columnist-charles-krauthammer-says-he-has-just-weeks-to-live/

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The theory of a free press

Myanmar Times co-founder held in drug raid

Ross Dunkley, the Australian co-founder of the Myanmar Times newspaper, was arrested during a late-night drug raid at his Yangon home on Wednesday. .

Another foreigner, six men, all Myanmar nationals, and a maid were also arrested. Police said they seized methamphetamine, marijuana and 0.1gm of heroin, other drugs, a range of currencies, 10 handsets and a Range Rover car.

Dunkley, 60, co-founded the Myanmar Times in 2000 with U Sonny Swe, whose father was senior member of the Military Intelligence, and associate of the then printed minister.

In 2014 father and son were arrested in a purge and jailed. They were freed after three years.

After the arrest control of the Myanmar Times was transferred to a close associate of the hardline Information Minister.

In early 2015, Dunkley sold his shares in the paper.

> FRONTIER MYANMAR

Dr Mahathir baits the press…

Prime Minister, what do you like best about coming back?

I like my press conferences best… You have asked me a lot of nasty questions which I try to answer and because I can’t answer any more, this press conference is over. Thank you.

Without further ado, he then left the podium, followed by his entourage sporting huge grins; some even giggled, as they walked away. | » WHAT DOES DR MAHATHIR LIKE BEST…

Dress code snags BFM reporter at prime minister’s office

Our @NewsBFM reporter, who was professionally dressed, was turned away from a PMO press conference for having a knee-length skirt. Some things, it seems, never change. #MalaysiaSama

— Umapagan Ampikaipakan (@umapagan) June 8, 2018