CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

Fugitive financier sought in Malaysian fund scandal seeks Trump’s pardon


ByAFP
May 13, 2026


A massive corruption scandal in Malaysia saw top officials loot billions from state fund 1MDB - Copyright AFP/File MANAN VATSYAYANA

A fugitive financier accused of involvement in a massive corruption scandal in Malaysia in which top officials looted billions from state fund 1MDB has filed for a pardon from US President Donald Trump.

Businessman Low Taek Jho, better known as Jho Low, is formally seeking a “pardon after completion of sentence,” according to the US Department of Justice website.

Whistleblowers allege that Jho Low, a well-connected Malaysian financier with no official role, helped set up the 1MDB state investment fund and made key financial decisions before disappearing about a decade ago.

Low, who has been indicted in the US, has denied wrongdoing but remains at large.

The fund was launched by former prime minister Najib Razak in 2009, shortly after he became prime minister. It is alleged that more than $4.5 billion was diverted from 1MDB between 2009 and 2015 by fund officials and associates, including Low.

Najib, who has been tried and convicted in multiple cases, has been jailed and fined $2.8 billion for his role in the plunder.

Najib’s defense lawyers blamed Low and dubbed him the mastermind of the scheme.

Malaysia unsuccessfully sought the return of Low through extradition, and it was widely speculated in media that he was hiding in China.

Trump was scheduled to arrive in China on Wednesday to meet with Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping.

The scandal shook Malaysian politics, contributing to the 2018 downfall of the ruling coalition that had governed since independence in 1957, and led to the convictions of two former Goldman Sachs bankers.

Investigators said top officials used their ill-gotten gains to splurge on luxury assets worldwide, including a luxury yacht, high-end real estate, Monet and Van Gogh paintings and even to fund the Hollywood blockbuster “The Wolf of Wall Street.”

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio testified in court about Low’s wild spending sprees and lavish parties.

The globe-spanning scandal also ensnared Pras Michel, a rapper in rap trio the Fugees, who was found guilty of helping Low funnel money from 1MDB into US politics.

Poland’s wanted ex-minister confirms he fled to US from Hungary


ByAFP
May 10, 2026


Ziobro, pictured here in 2022, faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted of the charges laid against him - Copyright AFP Wojtek RADWANSKI

Poland’s former justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro, wanted on several criminal charges in his home country, has fled Hungary to the United States, he confirmed on Sunday, following local media reports.

“I am in the United States,” Ziobro told right-wing broadcaster Republika. “I arrived yesterday, and this is my third time traveling around the country,” he added.

Ziobro, who received asylum from right-wing ally Viktor Orban’s government last year, faces up to 25 years in prison in Poland if convicted of the charges laid against him.

They include abuse of power, leading an organised criminal enterprise and using funds meant for crime victims to buy Israeli Pegasus spyware, allegedly to monitor political opponents.

After Orban’s party was ousted from power in an election in April, Hungary’s new Prime Minister Peter Magyar — who was sworn in on Saturday — said that Hungary would no longer protect people wanted elsewhere.

“Hungary will no longer be a dumping ground for internationally wanted criminals,” he told journalists the day after his victory, naming as examples Ziobro and his former deputy, Marcin Romanowski, suspected of embezzling nearly 40 million euros ($47 million).

The Republika broadcaster reported earlier on Sunday that Ziobro was in the US, while liberal broadcaster TVN24 published a photo of Ziobro at Newark Liberty International Airport, which it said had been taken by another traveller.

It is unclear how Ziobro managed to travel to the United States, as Poland had previously said his travel documents — including his Polish and diplomatic passports — had been revoked.



– Poland to contact US –



Current Polish Justice Minister Waldemar Zurek wrote on X that Poland “will reach out to the USA and Hungary with questions regarding the legal basic that enabled Zbigniew Ziobro to… enter the United States despite lacking valid documents”.

“We will not cease or efforts to ensure that he and Mr. Marcin Romanowski are held accountable before the Polish justice system,” he said.

Earlier, Zurek told the Polsat broadcaster: “If it is confirmed that Ziobro is in the USA, then (Poland) will request his extradition.”

Ziobro was the leader of the ultra-conservative Sovereign Poland party, a junior coalition partner of the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party, and served as justice minister and attorney general between 2015 and 2023.

He is also known as the architect of contentious judicial reforms which sparked a standoff between Poland and the European Commission.

Asked by Republika about his potential extradition, Ziobro replied: “I am ready to appear before any court, and an American independent court is certainly an independent court.

“If they want to initiate extradition proceedings, by all means,” he added, calling extradition cases in US courts “a demanding procedure”.

He has rejected the charges against him, accusing the centrist Polish government of conducting a witch hunt against conservatives.

Ted Turner: The Devil Behind Cable News

Binoy Kampmark

May 12, 2026

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Ted Turner smoking a cigar – Public Domain

Being very much the all-American figure that he was, the passing of Ted Turner was bound to enliven the cliché machine with the usual, clotty descriptions: the philanthropist, the conservationist, the yachtsman, sporting proprietor and twenty-four hour news pioneer.  “He thought big and lived large,” observed Guardian US columnist Margaret Sullivan with irritating triteness.  “He was the original,” added former CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour, barely an improvement.  “He made us all strive for his vision of a better world.”  No doubt the hagiographers will be kept busy with words of statuary on various aspects of his life in due course.

One contribution of his should not be spared a good beating.  As the man behind the first 24-hour news network, he has much explaining to do.  The time when news could be rationed to times of the day did, at least, concentrate the mind on those behind producing it.  Care would be taken assembling the items that would be delivered by an almost affected hauteur on air.  This all changed when the news about events became news about news. Turning news into a twenty-four-hour affair had the effect of treating virtually everything before the camera into something worth mentioning and reporting about.  Nothing in this world of “Chicken Noodle News” could be too trivial anymore; every item, however tedious, deserved its place in Andy Warhol’s span of 15-minute fame, from inane car chases to watching paint dry.

After Turner’s launching of the Cable News Network (CNN) in 1980, events of varied relevance and proportion could receive the around the clock exposure live coverage offered.  Relentless, even ghoulish footage beamed across the network of the Space Shuttle Challenger as it exploded 73 seconds after taking off in 1986.  In 1987, an 18-month-old Jessica McClure gave voyeuristic delight to viewers over 58 hours of coverage after falling into a well in Midland, Texas.  Eyes were glued to screens wondering if “Baby Jessica” might be rescued.  The efforts of rescuers were also the subject of interest.

The argument about cable television news ever being factual is a moot point.  CNN’s coverage of the 1991 Gulf War only served to illustrate how subservient a news outlet could be to official narratives.  The fact that news had become a continuous and unceasing affair merely concentrated the messages of the administration of President George H. W. Bush, turning CNN into an uncritical annex of the war.  Douglas Kellner’s The Persian Gulf TV War is a bracing account of this fact, a polemic against media complicity with establishment drip feed.

The US military establishment had certainly learnt chastening lessons from the Vietnam War, keeping the wandering media hacks on a short lead.  The unsuspecting Wolf Blitzer, who continues to labour at the network with perennial sunniness, uncritically recalls in an interview with Poynter the cultivating roles played by the panjandrums of war.  “The top Pentagon leadership – Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Colin Powell and other senior leaders were quickly reaching out to me – a newcomer and relatively junior reporter at the Pentagon – to brief me on the state of the war.”

This was no time for critical analysis from news reporters.  A conduit, a medium, was what was needed, and a twenty-four-hour organ was there to oblige.  The likes of Cheney and Powell, accordingly, “knew that everyone around the world was watching CNN and they wanted their analysis reported.”  The icing of propaganda was complete with another realisation, not that Blitzer ever clicked.  “It also became very evident to me the top Pentagon brass knew that Saddam Hussein’s military leaders in Baghdad were watching CNN.”

That unceasing nature of the broadcasts also turned the journalists in the war news cycle into minor celebrities offering minor contributions.  CNN’s Bernard Shaw was hardly doing much in the way of investigative journalism bunkered in the Al Rasheed Hotel in Baghdad as the bombs of Operation Desert Storm started falling.  Limited as he was, he offered that line media watchers remember: “The skies over Baghdad have been illuminated.”  The cable news coverage also served to exsanguinate the conflict, turning it into a simulation, a crude video game notoriously theorised by the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard as La guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (The Gulf War War Did Not Take Place).

With CNN as pioneer, snapping upstarts were bound to follow.  By January 2002, Fox News had surpassed the network in the cable news ratings despite being available in 10 million fewer homes.  The news in terms of substance had ceased to exist, its undertaker being Fox CEO and chairman Roger Ailes.  In its place rose the ranting hysteric and jabbering pontificator, full of what might politely be called “views”.

With constant news coverage firmly in place, the time was ripe for a figure capable of seducing and even shaping it.  Donald J. Trump did so with a sinister gusto, the first politician to become the news cycle.  With tacit collusion, CNN and other cognate news networks fed and oxygenated the property tycoon’s fickleness, the capriciousness, the rants. Every comment, however asinine or vapid or vulgar, warrants mention, analysis, a comb through by perfumed pundits eager to pursue a “fact check”.  A Stockholm Syndrome of sorts developed between the network and the reality television star turned President.

With news as surfeit and saturation, the Turner legacy is one we could have done without.  With its tendency to feed us stories thin, uneven and occasionally interesting in continuous fashion, the twenty-four-hour news beast is limping towards the Museum of Media Relics.  The studied, rationed podcast and the conspiratorial slime of social media continue to usher it along its doomed way.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

Ted Turner: 24 Hours That Changed The News World

Thomas Knapp

 May 11, 2026

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Photograph Source: Gotfryd, Bernard, photographer – Public Domain

“We won’t be signing off until the world ends,” Ted Turner said in 1980, just before the launch of his latest media venture. “We’ll be on, and we will cover the end of the world, live, and that will be our last event.”

Turner died on May 6 at 87. The world hasn’t ended yet, nor has his project, Cable News Network, but the latter changed the former in a big way.

If you’re too young to remember the pre-CNN era, trying to describe it feels like pulling a fish out of water and showing it a non-aquatic landscape:

On television, “the news” was generally broadcast twice a day, morning and evening, in half-hour local and half-hour national/world shows. Morning network shows included short news segments between entertainment content. Truly earth-shaking events might call for “SPECIAL BULLETIN” interruptions.

Radio stations often carried very short “top of the hour” news updates between their other programming, but prior to CNN Radio (launched at the same time as CNN’s cable television news channel) there were no “24-hour news” stations.

About half of the American population cared enough about “the news” to subscribe to a daily newspaper, delivered to their front porches each morning or evening. Such newspapers — apart from a few big-city publications — tended to be very local in focus, with perhaps a smattering of national stories from wire services like Associated Press and United Press International. USA Today, the first really intentionally “national” newspaper, launched two years after CNN.

At the time of CNN’s launch, about one in five US households subscribed to cable television. Three years later, that number had doubled and eventually approached 90% (streaming options have dragged it down, but the percentage remains higher than in pre-CNN days).

Since CNN’s launch, “the news” has gone from short daily feeds covering pre-deadline events to 24/7/365 real-time coverage of far more things, in far more detail, by numerous and varied outlets.

In theory, that should make the public much better informed than we used to be. We can know more OF what’s happened, and know more ABOUT what’s happened.

In reality, I’m not sure our attention to important facts about important events has really increased.

The 24-hour news environment seems far richer in sensationalism, pearl-clutching, and outrage bait than in useful information about the important stuff.

Former football star leads police on low-speed chase in a Bronco.

One movie star’s divorcing another movie star and it’s getting ugly.

Someone said a bad word on a hot mic.

That’s not Ted Turner’s fault. It’s our fault. CNN and its media children and grandchildren give us what we want to watch, because that’s how businesses make money.

That they’ll keep showing us whatever keeps us watching isn’t news.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.