The Singapore silat team won eight medals, including a gold, at the recent SEA Games. But the team has not been faring well in the past few editions compared to their glory years in 1999 and 2003.
One by one, their athletes faltered at the semi-final stages of the Games, except for Muhammad Nur Alfian Juma’en. He defended his gold in the individual Class F finals after beating world champion Tran Dinh Nam from Vietnam, and famously shed tears on the podium, overwhelmed by the moment.
Nur Alfian said: “The thing that was running through my mind was that everything was worth it. Like the sacrifices that I’ve done in terms of diet, school, time with family and the training was very tough. To be able to achieve the win, I can’t describe the emotions.”
The 18-year-old first took up silat when he was five. Initially it was just for fun, but now, he is part of the elite team which has over 22 athletes.
“The main thing is discipline because you have to take care of your diet. And you must also give 100 per cent in training every single time,” Nur Alfian said.
He was one of 13 silat athletes fielded at the recent Games and the team ended with a haul of one gold, one silver and six bronze.
Mr Sheik Alau’ddin, head of the Singapore Silat Federation, said: “I asked them, ‘What is the problem with you guys? Why are you so scared?’ And they said ‘I’m scared of losing. I’m scared because I might fall.’ So, all these things messed up their minds. The main priority now is to have the mental strength, how we need to develop individual athletes.”
The team seems to fare better at other international and regional competitions. Singapore was crowned overall champions in the 5th Southeast Asian Pencak Silat Championships in April, defeating powerhouses like Malaysia and Indonesia along the way. The team received seven gold, two silver and 10 bronze in the competition. And Singapore’s silat exponents won one gold, three silver, and three bronze at the world championships in Phuket earlier in January.
At the SEA Games though, they have only bagged four gold in the past five editions.
Sheik Alau’ddin said the sport’s glory years at the Games were in 1999 and 2003. They had won three gold medals each in those years. But he said the sport is not losing its shine.
“I’m not worried about all that. It’s just the individual athletes, whether they’re hungry enough, whether they want to be on the highest podium,” he said. “You see, like Alfian, he fought in the finals and his toe was split open and there’s blood everywhere. If it’s someone who is not strong enough and they look at the blood, they might not continue.”
This hunger to win will be put to the test when they compete at the International Malaysia Open Silat Championship in September.
CHARLESTON, S.C. — The mass murder of nine people who gathered Wednesday night for Bible study at a historic black church has shaken a city whose history from slavery to the Civil War to the present is inseparable from the nation’s anguished struggle with race.
Fourteen hours after the massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in which the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, the church pastor and a prominent state senator was among the dead, the police on Thursday arrested Dylann Storm Roof, a 21-year-old white man with an unsettled personal life and a recent history of anti-black views.
The killings, with victims ranging in age from 26 to 87, left people stunned and grieving. Mr. Roof sat with church members for an hour and then started venting against African-Americans and opened fire on the group.
At Morris Brown African Methodist Episcopal Church here, blacks, whites, Christians and Jews gathered to proclaim that a racist gunman would not divide a community already tested by the fatal police shooting in April of an unarmed African-American, Walter Scott.
“We cannot make sense of what has happened, but we can come together,” declared the Rev. George Felder Jr., pastor of the New Hope A.M.E. Church.
Gov. Nikki R. Haley fought back tears, her voice trembling and cracking, at a news conference here. “We woke up today, and the heart and soul of South Carolina was broken,” she said. “Parents are having to explain to their kids how they can go to church and feel safe, and that is not something we ever thought we’d deal with.”
President Obama, once again having to confront the nation’s divisions, saw systemic issues of guns, violence and race in the tragedy in Charleston.
“We don’t have all the facts, but we do know that, once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun,” he said at the White House.
Credit Charleston Police Department
And quoting the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. after four black girls were killed in the bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Ala., 52 years ago, he said the lessons of this tragedy must extend beyond one city and one church. He cited Dr. King’s words that their deaths were a demand to “substitute courage for caution,” and urging people to ask not just who did the killing but “about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers.”
Even amid calls here for calm and compassion, at least three bomb threats were made Thursday that forced the evacuation of buildings around Charleston, including churches where prayer vigils were being held for the shooting victims. And while the racially mixed crowds inside those churches linked arms and appealed for harmony, the tone among black people gathered on the city’s streets was not so conciliatory.
Jareem Brady, 42, said the shooting was only an extension of what black people face daily. “We’re not worth the air they don’t want us to breathe,” he said of Charleston’s white citizens.
The church holds a special place in the history of Charleston and particularly of its African-American population. It has the oldest black congregation south of Baltimore, according to the National Park Service, and its website calls it the oldest A.M.E. church in the South. The church’s current Gothic Revival building was completed in 1891, but the congregation dates to before 1820.
Of those killed, the most prominent was the church’s leader, Mr. Pinckney, 41.
“He was very gentle,” Mayor Joseph P. Riley said. “He spoke thoughtfully and deliberately. He had a big job, because that’s a big important church.”
Mr. Pinckney was holding a Bible study session with a small group Wednesday when, surveillance video shows, the suspect arrived after 8 p.m. — a slight, blond man with a bowl haircut and a gray sweatshirt. He sat down with the others for a while and listened, then began to disagree with others as they spoke about Scripture, said Kristen Washington, who heard the harrowing story from her family members who were in the meeting and survived.
Witnesses to the tragedy said the gunman actually asked for the pastor when he entered the church, and sat next to Mr. Pinckney during the Bible study.
They said that almost an hour after he arrived, the gunman suddenly stood and pulled a gun, and Ms. Washington’s cousin, Tywanza Sanders, 26, known as the peacemaker of the family, tried to calmly talk the man out of violence..
“You don’t have to do this,” he told the gunman, Ms. Washington recounted.
The gunman replied, “Yes. You are raping our women and taking over the country.”
In an interview with NBC News, Sylvia Johnson, a cousin of Mr. Pinckney’s who also spoke with a survivor, gave nearly the same account of what the gunman said: “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”
Violent History: Attacks on Black Churches
The gunman took aim at the oldest person present, Susie Jackson, 87, Mr. Sanders’ aunt, Ms. Washington said. Mr. Sanders told the man to point the gun at him, instead, she said, but the man said, “It doesn’t matter. I’m going to shoot all of you.”
Mr. Sanders dived in front of his aunt and the first shot struck him, Ms. Washington said, and then the gunman began shooting others. She said Mr. Sanders’ mother, Felicia, and his niece, lay motionless on the floor, playing dead, and were not shot.
The gunman looked at one woman and told her “that she was going to live so that she can tell the story of what happened,” said Councilman William Dudley Gregorie, a friend of both the female survivor and a trustee in the Emanuel church.
“She is still in shock, the carnage was just unbelievable is my understanding,” he said. “One of the younger kids in the church literally had to play dead, and it’s my understanding that my friend might have also laid down on top of him to protect him as well.”
REV. JOHN RICHARD BRYANT
The church had been unusually full that day, for its quarterly meeting, Mr. Gregorie said, and “if the perpetrator were to have come in earlier, there would have been many, many more people at the church.”
The gunman left six women and three men dead or dying, including a library manager, a former county administrator, a speech therapist who also worked for the church, and two ministers.
Greg Mullen, the Charleston police chief, called it a hate crime, and Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the Justice Department was investigating that possibility.
In a photo on his Facebook page, a glowering Mr. Roof (pronounced “Rawf”) wears symbols of two former white supremacist regimes — the flags of apartheid-era South Africa, and of Rhodesia, the nation that became Zimbabwe. Other photos, posted by a Facebook friend of his and widely circulated online, show Mr. Roof leaning against a car with a license plate that reads, “Confederate States of America.”
The Shootings in a Charleston Church
Where the attack happened, some statistics behind hate crimes, and maps of Charleston’s shifting population.
The tragedy had a particular resonance in a city that offers perhaps the sharpest contrast in the South between its cosmopolitan, tolerant present, and its antebellum past, when Charleston was the capital of the slave trade. It was in Charleston that a state convention adopted the “ordinance of secession” in December 1860, putting South Carolina on a path to become the first state to leave the Union, and the first shots of the Civil War were fired four months later, on Fort Sumter.
But if the church shooting prompted comparisons to the 1963 bombing of a black church in Birmingham by white supremacists that killed four girls, it also illustrated how much has changed. The earlier bombing took place as black people struggled to secure basic civil rights, at a time when they were barred from voting, much less holding office. Alabama’s governor at the time, George Wallace, was the public face of white resistance, and no one was charged with the crime until 12 years later.
The shooting Thursday took the life a black state legislator, an arrest was made in hours, and some of the most emotional expressions of mourning came from Ms. Haley, whose parents are from India, and who is not only the state’s first female governor, but also the first who is not of European descent.
Local, state and federal law enforcement started a manhunt for the suspect, distributing pictures of him entering the church, and asking people to be on the lookout for him or his 2000 Hyundai sedan. By midmorning Thursday, he had been identified as Mr. Roof, described as 5-foot-9 and weighing 120 pounds.
Charleston Chief on Church Killings
Greg Mullen, the police chief of Charleston, S.C., says that a shooting on Wednesday at a historic African-American church that left nine dead was “unfathomable.”
By Reuters on Publish DateJune 18, 2015. Photo by David Goldman/Associated Press.
A short time later, someone reported possibly sighting him some 200 miles to the northwest, in Shelby, North Carolina. Jeffrey Ledford, the Shelby police chief, said officers there pulled Mr. Roof over, arrested him at 10:49 a.m., and found a gun in the car.
Mr. Roof waived extradition and was flown to South Carolina on Thursday evening and, amid extraordinary security, walked into the jail in Charleston County at 7:25 p.m.
As Mr. Roof, who was wearing a striped jail jumpsuit, entered the jail through a secured entrance, a police dog barked, cameras clicked and one woman muttered, “The bastard’s here.”
Nearby, a 15-year-old boy from North Charleston held a handwritten sign: “Your evil doing did not break our community! You made us stronger!”
The boy, Hikaym Rivers, said that he doubted Mr. Roof saw his message — and he questioned whether the accused killer would have cared if he noticed the sign — but he said it was important to make a public statement one night after the shooting in Charleston.
“We’re supporting our community, and we’re taking a stand that no one can just take this away from us,” he said. “It’s our peace of mind.”
Jail officials said that Mr. Roof would make a court appearance on Friday afternoon.
In Charleston, nicknamed “Holy City” for its large number of churches, many houses of worship held prayer vigils, for the dead and for survivors, that drew people from different communities, races and denominations together.
At the Morris Brown A.M.E. Church, just a few blocks from Emanuel, the mood of a packed house alternated between grief, hope and resilience. Calls of “enough is enough” echoed as the Rev. John Richard Bryant called for an end to gun violence.
“You look like a quilt, you look like patches,” Mr. Bryant said. “You all fit somewhere.”
Hundreds of people packed the pews of the white columned Second Presbyterian Church on Thursday evening in a vigil to remember the victims of the shooting. Pastors read Scriptures, the congregation sang and the Rev. Sidney Davis delivered a rousing sermon, his voice screeching at times. After reading a passage from the Bible, he said, “Last night, Satan came again. Satan came to say white and black cannot raise God.”
Later, he told the racially mixed congregation that the bullets were not simply penetrating the people who died in the church. “It was all of us dying last night,” he said.
Correction: June 18, 2015
An earlier version of this article misstated the location of Shelby, N.C. It is west, not east of Charlotte.
If you have non-Muslim colleagues who are missing their lunch buddies this month, perhaps this will give them a better idea of what’s really going on with Muslims this Ramadan.
Your Muslim classmates and colleagues may look pale, have chapped lips and look adoringly at the clock counting down to 713pm to break their fast, but despite the hunger and thirst, they’re kind of …. peaceful. Happy even! What sorcery is this, you wonder? Here are some reasons why:
1) Rewards are multiplied.
Ramadan is like the Great Singapore Sale of worship. In other months, we are told that our good deeds are rewarded in the ratio 1:10 (yeah, Allah is pretty great) up to 1:700 but for Ramadan, a narration by Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) informs us that God says “Fasting is for Me, and I reward it accordingly.” And that means infinitely (and more!) probably because one of the attributes of God is that He is the Most Generous. There is no logic or system in His Accounting WHICH IS GREAT because we are so in need of extra points.
So that’s why we’re still smiling despite looking at you and your Big Mac during lunch time. Coz we’re hopeful of the rewards of remaining patient for that few hours.
2) We see our potential.
In Ramadan, we believe Satan gets locked up. No more bothersome whispers to do evil things! Although Muslims do believe that we all have innate bad characteristics (with or without Satan) that we have to remove, it does help that we get a free pass for a month from him and focus on cleaning our hearts!
This, coupled with the fact that its the GSS of worship, is why you may notice your Muslim friends who drink, stop drinking. Those who can rival a pirate with his swearing and cursing, bite his tongue in this month. And others turn down invitations for movies, parties and other general entertainment.
It’s because we realise what we’re capable of. We spend 11 months of the year trying so hard to be better people and it’s usually a great struggle. Yet in Ramadan, things get easier and we focus more on our spirituality and realise what we’re capable of. And that makes us mighty pleased and hopeful.
3) Great sense of community
Living in a fast-paced city like Singapore and with an increasingly individualistic system of living, it gets difficult to feel a sense of community sometimes. Ramadan reverses that. Makciks all over insist that their children come home to break their fast together, if not everyday, at least once a week.
This sense of community is most beautifully manifested during the special night prayer that’s only done in Ramadan. It is called the Tarawih prayer (tarawih literally comes from the word rest, or refers to the period of rest in between 4 cycles of the prayer). Mosques all over Singapore which are usually only packed for Friday prayers, are generally packed every single night in Ramadan for these prayers and not just men too. Women, children and the elderly all make their way to the mosques to perform this voluntary prayer together. And it’s an amazingly happy sight.
Fasting also teaches and reminds us of those less fortunate. When we’re hungry, we are able to empathise with those who are hungry not out of choice. Since Ramadan is basically our happy hour for extra good deeds, you will see many charity initiatives in this month too. SimplyIslam’s Ramadan Charity Basket has been ongoing for 8 years now and we help to provide financial aid and also food provisions to over 150 needy families. You can click on the link above to find out more, donate and also volunteer during the drive!
4) Salvation from Hell
Do I really need to explain? Ok. So Muslims believe in a Heaven and a Hell. If your good deeds outweigh your bad deeds, to Heaven you go! (With God’s Mercy of course!) If it’s the opposite, …. you know where this is going.
BUT! Ramadan is great because Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) says: “Fasting serves as a shield from Hellfire.”
And in another narration, “Whoever observes fasts during the month of Ramadan out of sincere faith, and hoping to attain Allah’s rewards, then all his past sins will be forgiven.”
ALL his past sins guys, ALL. So of course we’re happy in this month!
5) Ramadan Food
I know I was going for the spirituality angle in this piece but I’ll be a hypocrite if I say we don’t get excited about the special Ramadan food. These are things that even the non-Muslims enjoy too I’m sure!
There’s this milky, nutty, cold and yummy drink that magically appears in Ramadan and it’s called Katira. Katira is to Singaporean Muslims what the Butterbeer is to Harry Potter. (If you don’t get that reference, seriously why have you not read Harry Potter?!)
Katira Goodness
There’s also Dendeng which is basically our awesome, halal version of your Bee Cheng Hiang’s Bakkwa. ‘Nuff said.
Then there’s the simple, understated Bubur Masjid (literally Mosque Porridge) that we actually send our kids to collect at the mosque once they’re done with school because if we go after our office hours, it might run out. Seriously, we take our Bubur Masjid very seriously. Seriously.
So now you know what’s up with your Muslim friends this month. We’ll catch up with you on Hari Raya when we’ll all celebrate over pineapple tarts and fizzy drinks! But till then, please don’t post your lunch on Instagram, thanks.
BANGKOK – Thailand confirmed its first case of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) on Thursday, becoming the fourth Asian country to register the deadly virus this year.
Public Health Minister Rajata Rajatanavin told a news conference that a 75-year-old businessman from Oman had tested positive for MERS.
“From two lab tests we can confirm that the MERS virus was found,” Rajata said, adding the man had traveled to Bangkok for medical treatment for a heart condition.
“The first day he came he was checked for the virus. The patient … contracted the MERS virus.”
The health minister said 59 others were being monitored for the virus, including three of the man’s relatives who traveled with him to Bangkok.
MERS is caused by a coronavirus from the same family as the one that triggered China’s deadly 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).
The vast majority of MERS infections and deaths have been in Saudi Arabia, where more than 1,000 people have been infected since 2012, and about 454 have died.
Last month, a MERS outbreak erupted in South Korea resulting in 23 deaths so far. A total of 165 people have been infected and 6,700 people are in quarantine.
But there have been signs that the outbreak, the largest outside of Saudi Arabia, may be slowing in South Korea. The daily number of new cases has dropped to single digits this week compared to as many as 23 last week. Three were reported on Thursday – the lowest number since June 1.
All of the infections known to have occurred in South Korea have taken place in healthcare facilities. Three hospitals have been at least partially shut and two have been locked down with patients and medical staff inside.
China and the Philippines have also reported one MERS case this year.
Earlier, Thailand’s Disease Control Department said it was screening travelers at 67 points of entry.
“We are checking 67 ports including land, sea and air,” said Sophon Mekthon, secretary-general of Thailand’s Disease Control Department.
“We’ve told all hospitals in Thailand to be on alert. Those who come back from the Middle East and South Korea must be checked thoroughly.”
As scenes of overcrowding outside the Sports Hub yesterday evening for the closing ceremony of the SEA Games went viral, questions need to be asked on whether the Singapore SEA Games Organising Committee (SINGSOC) have done all it could to make it better, or did it instead compound the problem.
Agitated ticket holders queuing to enter the stadium to watch the closing ceremony might not have realised that the problem went beyond missing a show. The capacity crowd could have turned into a disaster if there was a fire or stampede on site.
There were reportedly thousands of such ticket holders who were sweating in the crowded confines. SINGSOC had since issued an apology and clarification, indicating that the crowd was due to an entry issue.
“As a significant proportion of the spectators were at the gates just before the start of the ceremony, there was a need to adjust entry gates and seating arrangements to enable them to be seated as quickly as possible. Consequently, some gates had to be closed for safety reasons.”
However, the problem might be due to there being too many tickets issued compared to the capacity for the Sports Hub, as some disappointed ticket holders have alleged.
TOC understands that SINGSOC was unhappy with the number of no-shows at the opening ceremony, as many seats were clearly visible on national television. In order to avoid a repeat of the incident, SINGSOC supposedly decided to over-sell the tickets for the closing ceremony.
Over-selling tickets is not something alien to event companies. It is a pretty common practice to over-issue tickets by about 5% in the form of complimentary tickets, in order to pack venues.
But the question becomes one of exactly how much SINGSOC over-issued, if it did indeed do so.
From pictures and eyewitness accounts, a conservative estimate of the number of people waiting outside the stadium would hover between 10,000 and 15,000.
Image from an attendee stuck outside the stadium during the SEA Games closing ceremony.
The Sports Hub has a maximum capacity of 55,000, and factoring in seats that need to be allocated for display and participants, it would likely be configured to hold about 40,000 seated ticket holders for the closing ceremony.
In other words, if SINGSOC did indeed over-issue tickets, they did it at 25% to 35% more seats than the stadium can hold in full capacity, a far cry from the 5% standard.
Would the Sports Hub had been able to absorb such excess capacity? As a video by Channel NewsAsiashows, there does not seem to be extra room for the thousands who were stuck outside the gate, but who would technically have an empty seat in the stadium.
Images from various online sources also indicate that there was very little spare capacity inside the stadium to match the crowds waiting outside, although there were a few empty block visible.
Capacity crowd for the SEA Games closing ceremony.
Who has the legit ticket?
The overissuing of tickets were mainly in two forms – complimentary tickets for Sponsors and free entry for SEA Games Volunteers. The former might include entities like GP Battery and NTUC, while that the latter could access the Sports Hub by flashing their accreditation passes (a pass given to all volunteers), TOC was told.
Paying patrons mostly bought their tickets before the start of the SEA Games itself, as the seats were sold out quickly.
The problem arising from yesterday evening also give reason the question how paying patrons are guaranteed their seats. It is understood that those who bought tickets had designated seats by blocks. However, comments online suggests that such designated seats were not reserved fro them as they rightly expected it to be.
Who were occupying the seats of paying fans? Was it complimentary ticket holders from sponsors and partners, volunteers, or was there excess capacity sold?
Disregard for safety, poor decisions on capacity
The crowd waiting outside the stadium was clearly agitated from the humidity and the crowd, from social media postings. There were also accounts of a lot of pushing and shoving going on in the crowd and many like the elderly, the disabled and the young were helplessly caught in the scrum.
It was also reported that those who managed to get in ended up sitting on the stairway to watch the show. In the event of an emergency, a stampede could have led to serious injuries and death, not only within the stadium, but among the crowds stuck outside.
Pertinent questions to ask might include whether SINGSOC has consulted Sports Hub management about the ability of the new stadium to accommodate such an expanded capacity. TOC understands that such consultations did not take place.
An expert in event management TOC spoke to shared that any decision to over-cater for event seats need to take into account the realities of the ground, and an inability to do so reflects lack of competency.
“When managing such long haul multi sports events, it is important to feel the pulse on the ground so that organisers are aware of public sentiment towards the games. This will help in understanding whether the public are interested/or will attend events. SINGSOC should have realized that public participation for the games was high, and hence the likelihood of attendance at the closing ceremony was likely to be high.”
About SINGSOC
SINGSOC is the steering committee for the 28th SEA Games. It’s a team of 20 headed by Minister Lawrence Wong.
In addition to Minister Lawrence Wong, SINGSOC also features 2 other Ministers – Mr Masagos Zulfiki and Mr Teo Ser Luck and 2 Senior Ministers of State – Ms Indranee Rajah and Ms Josephine Teo.
In its post-event statement, SINGSOC offered a full refund but as evident from the comments, many are still unsatisfied. Questions also remain about how SIGSOC would be able to identify legitimate tickets in order to effect such a refund.
There was also no clarity so far about how it was possible for thousands to be stuck outside the stadium, beyond the explanation of a congestion at the gate.
TOC has sent a number of queries to SINGSOC to seek clarifications on whether tickets were over-issued and how the capacity for the closing ceremony was managed. At time of publishing, SINGSOC has not responded.
