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A Mother’s Crowdfunding Attempt To Raise US$1.7 Million For Toddler

The sum of US$1.3 million (S$1.7 million) is an astounding amount to be asking strangers for.

But the kindness of strangers is exactly what Madam Jamie Chua is banking on to pave the way for her toddler to have the surgery she needs.

At just 21 months, Xie Yujia has suffered multiple operations, a collapsed lung, a seizure and a detached retina.

Her biggest problem is a congenital defect – her oesophagus, or food pipe, is not connected to her stomach.

Madam Chua, 30, has started a crowd-funding effort on Indiegogo to raise the necessary funds for Yujia to have reconstructive surgery at the Boston Children’s Hospital in the United States, which specialises in treating such defects.

“I was told before delivery that the baby might have a block in her food pipe, as she couldn’t swallow amniotic fluid,” recalled the housewife.

Tests revealed the far more serious problem of oesophageal atresia, which happens in about one out of 2,500 births.

A day after she was born, she was wheeled into the operating room for surgery, but her oesophagus was too far from the stomach to be joined to it.

For the next five months, Yujia was fed through a tube to her stomach and needed another down her throat to remove the saliva which might choke her.

She had corrective surgery in February last year and went home a month later for the first time, but complications, such as infections, continued to dog her.

That April, after a second procedure to widen her oesophagus, it ruptured and the gastric juice that leaked into her lungs caused her left lung to collapse.

Back into hospital she went. Finally, in February, she was well enough to go home with her mum and dad, Mr Xie Wen Long, 40, a self-employed event organiser.

Madam Chua said the dreaded process of sticking a tube down Yujia’s throat every few hours is the main reason she would like her daughter to have reconstructive surgery.

“Feeding her through a tube to her stomach is okay, but I can’t see her go through the suction process,” she said.

When she heard the amount needed for the surgery in Boston, her heart dropped as she had thought it would cost the same amount as the surgery in Singapore, which was about $300,000.

Her Indiegogo campaign had received US$35,200 as of last night.

Source: www.straitstimes.com

June 17, 2015
IMH Resident Charged For Abusing IMH Employees

When she was warded at the Institute of Mental Health (IMH), she abused two employees there. She was then put in a welfare home, where she damaged a room and tried to commit suicide.

Then, while being assessed at IMH to see if she was suitable for a mandatory treatment order, Joanne Lim Wan Ting punched a nurse.

Yesterday, the 23-year-old was sentenced to five months’ jail for a string of misdemeanours, including two counts of voluntarily causing hurt and one count of wilfully destroying the property of a welfare home.

Lim has borderline personality disorder, where one has difficulty regulating their emotions, but is understood to have been of sound mind during the offences.

Last November, Lim punched and pulled the hair of IMH nurse Thein Thein Moe, 44, when the latter was trying to stop her from banging her head on a glass counter because she was angry the nurse could not immediately attend to her.

In March, while living at the Angsana Home @ Pelangi Village in Buangkok Green, she was taken to a padded cell for safety reasons after shouting and throwing her food on the floor. Lim tore fabric off the wall lining and tried to strangle herself with it.

On April 13, Lim punched the head of IMH senior staff nurse Lim Theng Theng, 61, multiple times because she was unhappy staying at IMH and the nurse would sometimes scold her for not behaving herself.

At the time, Lim was being assessed for suitability for a mandatory treatment order.

In court yesterday, Lim told State Courts judge May Mesenas that she was sorry and was unsure where she would be living after her release from prison. She also agreed to cooperate if she were to be admitted to a welfare home again.

Asked about its standard procedures when staff members are assaulted at work, an IMH spokesperson said employees may lodge a police report.

“The management of IMH will not tolerate any form of abuse on our staff, be it verbal or physical,” she said. “However, sometimes, patients who hit our staff may be very unwell and have no insight into their actions. In such cases, our staff would usually choose not to make a police report.”

Source: www.todayonline.com

June 17, 2015
More Charges For Man Accused of SingPass Breach

Sixteen more charges were on Tuesday (Jun 16) slapped on James Sim Guan Liang, 39, who is accused of illegally using 293 SingPass accounts to access the Central Provident Fund (CPF) and Media Development Authority (MDA) websites.

Sim now faces an additional 13 charges of abetting to make false statements to attempt to obtain a Singapore visa for another person, plus three fresh charges of handing over possession of his identity card to another person. He now faces a total of 884 charges.

Sim is accused of handing over his SingPass login details to “Lemon aka Long”, who then created false statements for visa applications for 13 China nationals. Electronic records showed that Sim was cited as either friends or relatives of the China nationals.

Sim was also accused of handing over his identity card to “Lemon”, in three of the new charges.

He was previously accused in 868 counts under the Computer Misuse Act, where 575 of them were for illegal access to users’ CPF Member’s Homepage and/or MDA’s Online Services and Application Migration server. The remaining 293 charges were for emailing SingPass details to “Lemon”, who is believed to have used the information to make false statements to obtain a Singapore visa.

Sim remains on S$30,000 bail and will have his case heard in a pre-trial conference on Jun 26 at 3pm.

For parting with possession of an identity card to any person, Sim could be sentenced to a maximum of ten years’ jail as well as fined up to S$10,000. For abetting to make a false statement to obtain a Singapore visa, Sim could be sentenced to a maximum of 12 months’ jail and face a S$4,000 fine.

Source: www.channelnewsasia.com

June 17, 2015
IS Uses Malay-Language In Push For New Recruits In Southeast Asia

KUALA LUMPUR — The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) terrorist group is in an “aggressive mode” in reaching out to Malay-speaking communities by making reading materials in the Malay language more accessible online, a move that could have wide-ranging ramifications for countries in South-east Asia.

The Malaysian authorities say ISIS is spreading its propaganda through more “localised news reports” and “articles” that glorify its fighters, especially those from Malaysia and Indonesia who have travelled to Syria to take up arms with the militant group.

These “articles” are uploaded on ISIS websites in Malay, which also share information on ISIS activities in the provinces they conquered.

One of the websites is a portal containing articles taken from the ISIS magazine Dabiq, which are then translated into Bahasa Indonesia and Malay.

Online recruiters in Malaysia and Indonesia also use forums and blogs to reach out to potential recruits.

Malaysia’s top counter-terrorism official, Mr Ayob Khan Mydin Pitchay, said the ISIS recruiters would include articles on martyrdom and life in the organisation.

“They feed their sympathisers with fairy tales,” said Mr Ayob.

It is understood that there are currently about six to seven ISIS websites, forums and blogs in Malay.

Mr Ayob said these websites use servers abroad to avoid detection from the authorities in both countries.

The ISIS social-media unit has also taken the initiative to include Malay subtitles in its radio programmes broadcast in English and Arabic through ISIS’ official radio station, Bayan, which was made available on YouTube three months ago.

A check on YouTube, which provides access to recorded ISIS radio programmes, showed that Bayan attracts between 700 and 2,000 visitors.

International Islamic University Malaysia’s Political Science and Islamic Studies lecturer Ahmad Muhammady said the emergence of ISIS websites in Malay indicates an “offensive approach” taken by the terror group.

“Before this, they took a ‘defensive approach’, that is to respond to the accusations made against them, and it was done either in Arabic, English or Indonesian. Now, they changed tact,” Mr Ahmad said.

“To me, it is not surprising. Currently, the term ‘jihad media’ (ilami jihadi) is getting popular among the pro-ISIS chatters. This term is coined … to encourage young people to join the ISIS media team to take an offensive approach against their ‘enemies’.”

Last month, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong told a regional security forum in Singapore that South-east Asia is a key recruitment centre for ISIS.

“ISIS has so many Indonesian and Malaysian fighters that they form them into a unit by themselves — the Katibah Nusantara (Malay Archipelago Combat Unit),” said Mr Lee, who also warned that ISIS could establish a base somewhere in the region and pose a “serious threat to the whole of South-east Asia”.

His remarks followed the recent arrests of two self-radicalised Singaporean youths, including M Arifil Azim Putra Norja’i, 19, who had planned intensively to attack key facilities and assassinate government leaders if he was unable to leave Singapore for Syria.

Mr Ahmad said ISIS’ use of Malay-language materials as a recruitment tool was a worrying development for Malaysia. “Currently, there is an increase in interest among youths in rural areas in the east coast, especially among secondary and college students,” he said.

He said the use of Malay as the medium was all about penetrating deeper into Malaysian society.

“Those who are not educated in English still rely on the Malay website as a source of reference.”

The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) said so far, no ISIS websites in Malay have been shut down.

Its monitoring and enforcement division head Zulkarnain Mohd Yasin said MCMC was aware of the emergence of the ISIS sites.

“So far, we have not blocked any such website, but we did take down a few videos on YouTube,” he told The Malaysian Insider.

Source: www.todayonline.com

June 17, 2015
Suspected Loanshark Runner Arrested For Starting Fire Damaging Two Flats In Toh Guan

Police have arrested a man, believed to be a loan shark runner, who was involved in at least five cases of harassment involving fire islandwide.

The 31-year-old man was arrested on Monday at Lorong 5 Toa Payoh after setting his last fire on Saturday at Block 272, Toh Guan Road.

The fire destroyed the front doors of two units on the 12th storey of the block.

Residents believe the loan sharks were deterred by closed-circuit television cameras installed outside the debtor’s 11th storey unit and decided to target his neighbours’ flats instead.

Following the fire, the police arrested the suspect and seized cans of paint, bicycle chain locks and marker pens.

Preliminary investigations revealed that the suspect is believed to be involved in more than 10 cases of loan shark harassment islandwide, including at least five cases involving fire.

The suspect is expected to be charged today for loan shark harassment.

The two residents whose doors were burnt said they were relieved the man had been caught, and hoped such an incident would not happen again.

One of them, a man in his 20s who wanted to be known as Mr Lim, told The New Paper: “I didn’t expect something like that to happen to me, and I hope the police step up enforcement.”

His neighbour, who wanted to be known as Madam Liu, 76, blamed her luck and said she would have to pay for her own repairs.

Lianhe Wanbao reported that the suspect was taken to the scene of the crime yesterday in restraints, escorted by six police officers.

He was seen answering questions from the officers before being led away.

‘ZERO TOLERANCE’

Mr Loh Kah Wai, who heads the Unlicensed Money Lending Strikeforce of the Specialised Crime Division, said in a statement yesterday: “Police have zero tolerance against such lawless acts of loan shark harassment involving fire which threaten the community’s sense of safety.

“We will continue with our tough enforcement action and spare no effort to nab these offenders to ensure that they face the full consequences of their actions.” Under the Moneylenders Act, first-time offenders found guilty of acting on behalf of an unlicensed moneylender, committing or attempting to commit any acts of harassment, can be jailed up to five years, fined up to $50,000, and caned up to six strokes.

Source:www.tnp.sg

June 17, 2015