COCK fighting is an addictive past time which has been an obsession in many regions of the world since ancient times.

In response to my last Sunday’s article “The tough gets going when the going gets tough”, a very prominent Sabah businessman, who is very concerned about Sabah’s future said to me that Sabah can choose to stay poor or be poorer, going further down the slippery rope of economic quagmire.

News of the unending stream of brutality, violence and carnage in America; the daily killings, the mindless shooting of children and adults, the pushing of folks into the path of oncoming trains and other traffic, police brutality and the vicious partisan struggle for political power, brings to the mind of the outsider the subtitle of Hans Habe’s book about his travel across the American continent in 1963; ‘Anatomy of Hatred, The Wounded Land, Hans Habe, (George C Harrap & Co. Ltd., 1964) “The Wounded Land” speaks of this sensitive European-American writer’s tender feelings for his adopted country as he traversed it with his wife and experienced America as an outsider. Habe, a Hungarian, had fought for France at the start of the Second World War and became an American citizen in 1941. A successful novelist and social commentator, Habe’s “Our Love Affair with Germany”, has been selected by scholars as being “culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.”(quote from The Book Depository).

OFFICIALLY, I have not been a student for more than 20 years. Many of my teachers who taught me in school, college and university have left and the rest have grown older with age.

Yes, Sabah has been going through some extremely tough times for the last 30 years. The worst nightmares are being manifested in Sabah’s crumbling infrastructures. Today are dried taps, tomorrow is power failures, day after tomorrow can be landslides.

A POSSIBLE leap from 13pc to 20pc in employer contributions to the Employees Provident Fund (EPF) is a significant increase of almost 54pc.  The increase in the employer's contribution rate will help to address the issue of low retirement savings among Malaysian workers. According to a survey conducted by the EPF in 2019, almost two-thirds of active EPF members aged 54 and below had less than RM50,000 in their retirement savings. This is far below the minimum amount required for a comfortable retirement, which is estimated to be around RM240,000.

Recently, Scientex Bhd, a listed company that failed to acquire land to build more affordable homes in Johor, announced its maiden venture into Indonesia through a joint venture (JV).

IT is not the first time that the subject of former finance minister Tun Daim Zainuddin’s wealth has been thrust into the limelight.

SABAH reminds me of “water, water everywhere, not a drop to drink” in the poem of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Water is one of Sabah’s most serious ironies – Sabah has one of the highest rainfalls but our taps are dry almost every day. Many homes are without piped water. Of course, we know what has gone wrong.

The big news in technology this week was the resignation a few days ago of Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, the man widely known as the godfather of Artificial Intelligence (AI), from Google in which he had served off and on since 2003.