The Philippine government yesterday urged the Supreme Court of the Philippines to cancel the franchises of the country’s top broadcaster, ABS-CBN Corp, a move that opposition lawmakers and rights advocates called intimidation of independent media.
The government said that the 66-year-old entertainment and media conglomerate had violated ownership laws and was involved in “highly abusive practices.”
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s opponents said that the complaint was timed to deny the Philippine Congress the chance to renew the franchise of ABS-CBN, which employs nearly 7,000 people and engages hundreds of celebrities in radio, television and online content.
Philippine Solicitor-General Jose Calida said that ABS-CBN had for too long shown greed and abuse of what was a privileged franchise.
“We want to put an end to what we discovered to be highly abusive practices of ABS-CBN benefiting a greedy few at the expense of millions of its loyal subscribers,” Calida said in a statement.
ABS-CBN denied that and said the complaint appeared to be “an effort to shut down ABS-CBN to the serious prejudice of millions of Filipinos.”
Duterte has accused ABS-CBN of refusing to air his campaign commercials.
ABS-CBN has not directly responded to Duterte’s claims, but its chairman, Eugenio Lopez, said at the company stockholders’ meeting in 2017 that it was “part and parcel of our work being a media institution.”
In 2018, the government revoked the license of Rappler, a news Web site that Duterte called a “fake news outlet” sponsored by US spies.
Rappler still operates pending appeal.
Calida said that ABS-CBN started a pay-per-view channel without approval and charges fees not supposed to be levied.
Like Rappler, ABS-CBN had breached foreign ownership restrictions behind an “elaborately crafted corporate veil,” he said.
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
RSS