Uproar over social media. All the reading for today:
Sarawak Report: SENSATIONAL FINDINGS! – Prime Minister Najib Razak’s personal accounts linked to 1MDB money trail
Wall Street Journal: Investigators believe money flowed to Malaysian leader Najib’s accounts amid 1MBD probe
Asia Sentinel: Could this be the Smoking Gun for Malaysia’s PM?
The wonders of our float system as our pump prices go up even as the global oil price in an oversupplied market hits a three-week low. How is this possible?
From our last poll, it appears that almost 60 per cent of you felt that affordable housing would be any home priced up to RM240000 rather than RM400000. (Mind you, this would be what is affordable to the middle class rather than the low-income group, who would struggle to buy even a RM72000 home.)
This figure of RM240000 also tallies with a Penang Institute researcher’s opinion that the price of an affordable home should be between RM180,000 and RM240,000, three to four times the average household yearly income (based on about RM5000 per month in 2012), in line with the international yardstick for what constitutes an affordable price for a home.
Is that why there is a glut in ‘affordable housing’? (Because many would be unable to afford housing from RM240000 to RM400000.)
Let’s do another poll of monthly household income (husband and wife’s combined income only) and see if that supports the finding in the earlier poll and compare the outcome to the eligibility criteria of income thresholds for ‘affordable housing’ as laid out by the state government. But bear in mind that based on the demographic profile of readers of this blog, the poll result would probably be skewed towards the incomes of the middle- to upper-middle class strata of the population.
The publicity surrounding the arrest of a PetroSaudi IT executive smacks of a public relations exercise intended to divert attention from the major questions surrounding 1MDB.
We shouldn’t have been too surprised by the recent earthquake and tremors in Sabah. There had been ample warning of the prevalence of earthquake faults in the state, and our rescue services have no reason to be unprepared.
The former director of the Minerals and Geosciences Department Sabah, Alexander Yan, had warned, apparently in 2010, that several previously identified active or potentially active faults were confirmed as earthquake-generating faults. He pointed out that “these faults are to be found in the Ranau area within the Central-North Seismic Zone of Sabah, as well as in the Dent-Semporna Peninsula Zone.”
What does Greece have in common with Malaysia? The 2004 European football champions just got beaten 2-1 by the “fishermen, road constructors and carpenters” from the Faroe Islands, minnows in world football.
The financial institutions that arranged the massive loans for 1MDB have to answer some tough questions.
