Singabloodypore

Singapore - A Singapore court Tuesday sentenced a man to hang for killing his Chinese lover after their relationship went sour in June 2006, media reports said.

Eu Lim Hoklai, 55, a seafood stall boss and father of three, was found guilty of strangling Yu Hong Jin, 29, the owner of a massage parlour.

Eu claimed that he paid for her trips to China and moving her business that she tried to press even more money out of him, threatening to tell his family about their affair, the online edition of Straits Times newspaper reported.

He told the court he decided to end the relationship after he saw a man leaving her flat just days before the crime.

Eu said Yu slapped him and stabbed him with a knife after he refused to compensate her with 30,000 Singapore dollars (20,800 US dollars) for breaking up with her. Eu then stabbed and strangled Yu, the report said.

The court dismissed his argument that he acted in self-defence.

From Yawning Bread

Since we are so fond of world rankings, this might interest Singaporeans: On a per capita basis, Singapore is among the ten worst infected countries in the world for the H1N1 influenza that began spreading from Mexico in May.

Up-to-date numbers of laboratory-confirmed cases can be seen from the World Health Organisation's website. As at 26 June 2009, 07:00 GMT, Singapore reported 315 cases, which I have calculated to be 67 per million population. Compared to other countries, we were eighth in per capita ranking.

The evening of the same day, our Health Ministry announced a new total of  [1]. For our small population, that is very many. That said, numbers in other countries change equally quickly, and rankings will necessarily change too.

Our early "lead" in ranking reflects the number of people travelling through Singapore especially to and from Australia and the United States, two other countries in the top ten league. Tourists and Singaporeans have brought the virus in.

Continue reading at Yawning Bread.

Low pay is all part and parcel of the economic culture in Singapore and is used to justify undermining  employee rights in the name of ‘economic development’ .

It rests upon the premise that products and services can be produced cheaply when wages are kept low. Somehow, we believe that by granting rights to workers, the economic prosperity that we have enjoyed all these years will be threatened.

Central to making Singapore attractive to overseas investors is the absence of a minimum wage. Like a scratched record this is repeated again and again. A minimum wage would drive potential foreign investors away and make the cost of doing business here too high. This argument rests upon the assumption that Singaporean workers compete with workers of other countries on the basis of how ‘cheap’ our workers are.

Yet 90% of other countries including; Australia , France the UK and, that bastion of an unregulated labor market  the USA , have minimum wage legislation

This low cost/wage model may have worked for Singapore in the past but it is not economically sustainable and may lead to social problems in the future. Keeping wages low is a reactive strategy, appropriate to the needs of a developing country. As well as creating economic hardship a minimum wage deflates and  hollows out domestic purchasing power thus reducing the level of economic activity and reducing overall employment opportunities. At a social level, the impact of low pay is already being seen in other countries. In the US , for example, deregulation and outsourcing has caused low–income service sector employees to depend on federal food stamps and hospital emergency rooms for their basic medical care.

According to a Citibank report, the Singapore economy is in danger of becoming two economies; one that is in its growth phase an orientated towards technology and emerging markets and another which is contracting as a result of outsourcing and competition from overseas and wages that are kept low by virtue of the absence of a minimum wage.

Contrary to what the government says, a minimum wage may not increase  business costs significantly. It just reduces the huge profits earned by the business owners, salaries of the top management and the rental costs. The share of business cost of the minimum wage earners is probably not significant, except for highly labor intensive industries. If we consider large MNCs such as McDonalds,  it’s simply used as a pretext to keep wages low and to get employees to work longer hours. When workers are poor and lack legal protection, they are often willing to work longer hours for lower wages.

2000 years ago the Greek historian Plutarch was one of the first to highlight  the dangers of creating an imbalance between rich and poor and of nurturing an underclass whereby a sizable number of our citizens are unable to tap into the opportunities at hand. 

The attraction of switching jobs for an additional $50 a week has significantly greater appeal to a low paid employee who has little to lose either in terms of  career prospects or remuneration. From an HR  perspective, low wages encourage  job hopping, makes it difficult for companies to cultivate a culture of loyalty and provides a disincentive for employers to invest in training. A minimum wage deflates earnings at the middle and lower levels undermining the incentive and motivation to perform beyond the accepted minimum.

Ultimately both sides lose out as poor pay nurtures poor human capital.

For some time the Government spin machine has been advocating ‘skills upgrading’ and the redesign of low-level jobs – all of which add up to that magic word ‘empowerment’. In other words the employee is more skilled and more versatile and has the capacity to create greater value for his employer. This requires  more training and more investment on the part of the employer making it more essential to retain these staff.  Yet the reality is that pay levels remain the same – the employee simply has to work harder.

Meanwhile  the government continues to  exhort the ideal of  ‘life long learning’ and acquiring qualifications and skills yet still hangs on to the ideal of keeping labor costs low. Yet is this compatible with  the increasing numbers of better educated Singaporeans?

As any economist will tell you,  in an increasingly globalized, knowledge-based and technologically oriented economy, it's the quality rather than the cheapness of their  human capital  that give developed countries  such as Singapore their  competitive edge.

Changing mindsets, a piece of gobbled gook  that heralds the emergence of the service sector as the real driver of job creation - leisure and people industries - in other words if you are unemployed, your best chance of a job is as a waiter, croupier  or hooker.

Eurekalert

Contact: Mithu Mukherjee
mithu.mukherjee@sagepub.co.uk

Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC (June 25, 2009) – Whatever their reason for posting their thoughts online, bloggers have a shared ethical code, according to a recent study published in the journal New Media Society, published by SAGE. Key issues in the blogosphere are telling the truth, accountability, minimizing harm and attribution, although the extent to which bloggers follow their own ethical ideals can depend on the context and intended audience.

Creating weblogs (blogs) is often viewed as a form of citizen journalism, open to anyone with Internet access. As it grows in prevalence and influence, communication scholars, news media, governments and bloggers themselves have raised questions about blogging's ethical implications. Some academics propose that bloggers should follow an ethics code, based on standards journalists follow. But few researchers have examined ethical standards bloggers themselves aspire to, and whether they adhere to their own ethical standards.

Blog tracking site Technorati (www.technorati.com) tracked some 113 million blogs in early 2008, although not all blogs are active or updated frequently. A blog can be a personal journal for family and friends. But many bloggers aspire to reach a wider audience and create non-personal blogs, which cover everything else from commerce or politics to entertainment and technology.

Andy Koh, Alvin Lim and Ng Ee Soon of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore used a web survey of 1224 international bloggers with active, text-based blogs to find out more about bloggers, their ethical ideals and how they put these into practice. Of those surveyed, more than half were male (51%), most were under 30 (65%). Most were well educated, and the majority were from the USA (65%), with no other country accounting for more than eight percent of the participants.

The police has commenced formal investigations against artist Seelan Palay for the screening of the film One Nation Under Lee. He is allegedly being investigated under section 21 of the Films Act which states that —(1) Any person who —(a) has in his possession;(b) exhibits or distributes; or(c) reproduces,any film without a valid certificate, approving the exhibition of the film, shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable on conviction.

Needless to say, the above law makes criminals out of just everyone who has ever screen an unlicensed video in Singapore, even if held in the comfort of his or her own home.

During the private premiere of the film held at the Peninsula-Excelsior Hotel last year, censorship officers entered the screening room and seized a DVD of the film (see videos here and here). The censors has yet to rate the film, although a submission has recently been made (see here).

Below is a transcript of the police interview, held on Monday 21st June at the Cantonment Police Complex, which I received via email from Seelan.