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Noted Criminal Lawyer Subhas Anandan Passed Away Aged 67

Criminal lawyer Subhas Anandan, 67, died in the Singapore General Hospital on Wednesday morning.

Mr Sunil Sudheesan, who is Mr Subhas’ nephew, told The Straits Times he was informed about his uncle’s death before an appeal case on Wednesday.

But he stayed in court till the case was over before going to the hospital. Tearing up, Mr Sunil said: “(Subhas) would have wanted me to finish the appeal.”

Mr Subhas had been in ill health, and he was diagnosed with heart and kidney failure last year. He had three heart attacks since 1978, lost one kidney to cancer in 2001, suffered diabetes and blocked intestines.

The prominent lawyer, a senior partner at RHTLaw Taylor Wessing and president of the Association of Criminal Lawyers in Singapore, had earned a reputation for defending notorious criminals, many a time pro bono.

He defended Anthony Ler, who hired a teenager to kill his wife in 2001; Took Leng How, a vegetable packer who befriended eight-year-old girl Huang Na, then killed her in 2004; and Leong Siew Chor, who chopped up a woman he killed in the Kallang body parts case.

Another client was ex-stewardess Constance Chee, who abducted her ex-lover’s four-year-old daughter and caused her death after a fall from a flat in 2004.

In his career, he had taken on more than 2,500 cases since he was called to the Bar in 1971 after graduating from the then University of Singapore.

Said senior lawyer Amolat Singh, a long-time friend of Mr Subhas: “Everybody is in utter disbelief. It’s a very shocking piece of news, like a bolt out of the blue. He was out and about, always giving people encouragement. There was never a moment that we thought he was going so soon. He was always a fighter.”

Mr Subhas had a second book, titled It’s Easy To Cry, that is due on the shelves later this year.

He leaves behind his wife, Vimala, 56, and son Sujesh, 24.

Source: www.straitstimes.com

January 7, 2015
Women Taking On Lead Roles In Male-Dominated Professions

Women make up about 45 per cent of the Republic’s workforce, and are increasingly taking on leading roles in traditionally male dominated professions.

Channel NewsAsia spoke to two women public officers who are leaders in their field.

GENDER NOT AN ISSUE WHEN FIGHTING FIRES: MAJOR ELLENA QUEK

Ms Ellena Quek used to head Jurong Fire Station which is home to about 140 officers. The 32-year-old was the third female officer to command a fire station in Singapore. She is now posted to the Ministry of Home Affairs.

The Major who joined the Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) in 2005 said her gender was never an issue when it came to fighting fires.

“I think at the fire site or the incident site, a lot of the stereotypes that we have don’t matter anymore, because the fire doesn’t care whether you are male or female or whatever qualifications you have,” Major Quek said.

Major Quek and her fellow woman officers make up 14 per cent of the SCDF’s uniformed and civilian personnel.

The SCDF said it started recruiting female officers as early as the 1980s. In the early years, female officers were only trained in administrative work. But the SCDF said more female officers have taken on higher appointments such as Fire Station Commander, Division Commander or Director of a Staff Department.

Major Quek said female officers bring with them a different dynamic.

“Female officers have an advantage, in relationship-building and also in our sensitivity to situations, especially when there’s trauma involved. A lot of the things that we see on a daily basis – they are not what you would see outside in your everyday life,” she said.

“I HAVE TO BRACE MYSELF TO LOOK CONFIDENT”: SUPERINTENDENT JEAN CHIANG

Superintendent Jean Chiang – who works for the Singapore Prison Service (SPS) – shares her sentiments. She is the second-in-command of a pre-release centre for offenders.

Superintendent Chiang has steadily climbed up the ranks, behind the iron bars and cold concrete walls.

“I must share that it is a challenge to be in front of male inmates, who are tall, big, burly. Many of them have tattoos, and I have to stand in front of hundreds of them, to address them in big groups at times. So definitely, that was something new to me and something that I have to brace myself for to stand up in front of them and to look confident and authoritative,” she revealed.

The SPS said it is seeing more women applying to join the service through the years. Just like Superintendent Chiang, many of them have become leaders in their fields.

“The basic principle of why SPS deploys women officers in the first place is that the organisation recognises us as competent, capable and thus, we do not want to portray ourselves as the weaker sex but rather fully competent and capable in managing male inmates as well,” she said.

To ensure the safety of its women officers, there are strict guidelines on the roles of female staff, particularly in male institutions. For example, women officers do not enter the toilet or bathing facilities of inmates, when they are in use.

They also do not manage high-risk inmates like sexual offenders and those who are violent. They must also be accompanied by male officers in areas where inmates congregate.

Why are women taking on these jobs despite the obvious challenges?

Superintendent Chiang said: “When we see that that we are able to help them achieve some things, we see that we are able to motivate them to change. I think that is very, very satisfying.”

Major Quek noted: “Really, gender doesn’t matter. It is how you prove yourself and what you do that matters.”

As these women prove – that is what matters most when it comes to serving Singapore.

Source: www.channelnewsasia.com

January 7, 2015
Anti-Foreigner And Anti-Islam Sentiments Dividing Germany

DRESDEN (Germany) — The fear of foreigners, especially Muslims, threatening or drowning out national and regional identities forged over centuries seems to have a growing pull in Europe, where populists and nationalists scored record gains in elections in May for the European Parliament and where recent protests against immigrants flared up in Germany and Sweden.

The simmering resentment and suspicion have driven debates across Europe about tighter controls on immigration. Worries about immigration have helped buoy right-wing parties in Britain, Denmark, France and Hungary. German officials recorded more than 70 attacks on mosques from 2012 to 2014, including a case of arson, and the police in Britain have recorded an increase in hate crimes against Muslims.

Protesters marched in several German cities on Monday against higher levels of immigration and what they see as the growing influence of Islam, in defiance of an appeal from Chancellor Angela Merkel to spurn rallies she views as racist.

The German rallies, organised by a new grassroots movement known as PEGIDA, or Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West, have become an almost weekly event in the east German city of Dresden in recent months. About 18,000 people, the biggest number so far, turned out in Dresden on Monday, but similar rallies in Berlin and the western city of Cologne were heavily outnumbered by counter-protesters who accuse PEGIDA of fanning racism and intolerance.

In her New Year address last week, Ms Merkel urged Germans to shun the anti-Muslim protesters, saying their hearts were full of hatred. “We need to … say that right-wing extremism, hostility towards foreigners and anti-Semitism should not be allowed any place in our society,” she said on Monday in the eastern town of Neustrelitz.

Ms Merkel was joined in her sentiment yesterday when top-selling German tabloid Bild and 50 prominent Germans called for an end to what they see as rising xenophobia. Bild published a “No to PEGIDA” appeal yesterday, covering the front page and a double page spread on pages 2 and 3 with quotes from the 50 politicians and celebrities.

“(They) are saying ‘no’ to xenophobia and ‘yes’ to diversity and tolerance,” Bild deputy editor Bela Anda wrote in a commentary. “We should not hand over our streets to hollow rallying cries.”

Elsewhere, hundreds of Swedes gathered last Friday outside the royal palace in Stockholm and in other cities to show solidarity with the Muslim population a day after an unknown assailant threw a bottle filled with flammable liquid at a mosque in the northern city of Uppsala and sprayed racist slogans on the building. The firebomb caused no injuries and did not damage the building.

But as each day brings more reports of immigrants who have boarded ships and sneaked across European borders, the famous tolerance of the Swedes is being tested as never before.

Despite a lacklustre economy, Sweden was third behind only Germany and France in the number of people registering for asylum in 2012, said the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. Relative to its population, Sweden received the second-highest share of asylum applications in the European Union after Malta, the institute said.

Even so, there are few places where the turn against immigrants is more surprising than Sweden, where a solid core of citizens still supports the 65-year-old open-door policy towards immigrants facing hardship that has long earned international respect for the country.

The Syrian conflict has boosted the number of asylum seekers. Of 81,000 people seeking asylum in Sweden in 2014, roughly half were from Syria, the Swedish Migration Board said.

Opposition to the rising numbers is growing. The far-right, anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats had their best showing ever, nearly 13 per cent of votes, in elections in September.

Mr Omar Mustafa, president of the Islamic Association of Sweden, which represents about 40 communities across the country, said the recent fires at mosques were the culmination of a year of rising anti-Islamic attacks, from women having their hijabs, or head coverings, pulled off in the streets to the vandalism of 14 mosques, as well as racist or anti-Muslim vitriol spread through social media.

“It is a scary development in Swedish society,” Mr Mustafa said in a telephone interview. “It is a big movement that is moving from the Internet to the real world.”

Germany, too, has some of the world’s most liberal asylum rules, partly due to its Nazi past. The number of asylum seekers arriving in Germany, many from the Middle East, jumped to around 200,000 last year, four times as many as in 2012. In Cologne, home to a large Muslim population, there were 10 times as many counter-demonstrators as PEGIDA protesters. In similarly multi-ethnic Berlin, about 5,000 counter-demonstrators swamped around 400 anti-Muslim protesters, local police said.

“Germany is a country where refugees are welcome and the silent majority must not remain silent but rather go out onto the streets and show itself,” Justice Minister Heiko Maas said at the Berlin counter-demonstration.

Cologne Cathedral, one of Germany’s most famous landmarks, switched its lights off to protest against the anti-Muslim rallies. Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate turned off its floodlights in a similar gesture of solidarity.

Source: www.todayonline.com

January 7, 2015
Sofware Phone Scam Alert!
There have been several reports of victims receiving calls from unknown people claiming to be the technical support from major software companies, soliciting user information and passwords, police said in a news release on Tuesday (Jan 6). Victims would see their computers being remotely controlled or files deleted after being duped.

Police said callers would inform victims that their computers required security or software updates, and victims would be asked to download and install one or more software programmes from the Internet. The victims would also be asked to provide software user account identification codes and passwords to the caller and, in some instances, were instructed to enter some commands into their computers, police added.

“Some victims observed that their computers were remotely controlled or files were deleted after following the instructions of the callers. The callers would then convince the victims to buy additional software by making online payments or by providing their credit card details,” police stated.

Police have the following advice for you to protect yourself from being scammed:
- Ignore such calls. Do not follow the instructions of the callers to install any software for your computer or enter any commands
- Do not make any payment or divulge your credit card and/or bank account details to the callers
- If you had followed any of the caller’s instructions, immediately change your computer’s log-in password and all other passwords associated with your online accounts (e.g. social media accounts and email accounts), especially your online banking and credit card passwords. Where possible, try changing the passwords from another computer other than the affected one
- Scan your computer with a commercial anti-virus software to find out if malware has been installed on your computer
- If you have any information related to this crime, call the police hotline at 1800-255 0000, or 999 for urgent assistance
Source: www.channelnewsasia.com
January 7, 2015
Cherian George Hits Out At NTU President And Claimed Tenure Denied For Political Reasons

Journalism don Cherian George has hit out at recent comments made by Nanyang Technological University (NTU) president Bertil Andersson on Dr George’s departure from the university after being denied tenure.

Dr George, now a professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, also alleged that he was denied tenure by NTU for political reasons, blowing open an episode both parties had been tight-lipped on, despite an outcry by students and some academics in 2013 when news of the decision broke.

In an interview with Times Higher Education — which discussed academic freedom in Singapore among other topics — Professor Andersson had said the denial of tenure to Dr George — formerly an associate professor at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information who left NTU last February — was an academic decision.

In the article published on Dec 4 titled “Singapore is ‘Asia lite’ for Western universities”, Prof Andersson was quoted as saying that Dr George was “subjected to the same scrutiny as everyone else” in the university’s tenure process, and that the decision was “not political”. A clarification by Prof Andersson to the article was made 12 days later, stating there was no intention to lower the reputation or standing of Dr George in his field of work.

According to Dr George — who was twice denied tenure by NTU and had his appeal rejected — the clarification came after he had asked Prof Andersson to retract remarks made about his case. The clarification fails to reduce the sting of Prof Andersson’s published remarks, wrote Dr George in a recent post on his blog. “They amount to a statement by the NTU president that the reason I was forced to leave his university was that I was unable to meet its academic standards required for tenure,” he wrote.

Calling Prof Andersson’s comments “incorrect, insensitive and injurious”, Dr George said only political and not academic reasons had been given for denying him tenure. He asserted that annual performance reviews after the first denial of tenure in 2009 did not highlight any deficiency in research or teaching which he was required to address in order to secure tenure.

“Instead, the only remedial actions discussed with me by any level of the university during that period were that I could perhaps try reaching out to the government, or moving to a role within the university that might be less politically sensitive than journalism education,” he added.

He called on the university president to disclose all documents relevant to the tenure case if he wished to stand by his comments. The documents include the minutes of the 2009 tenure committee, chaired by Prof Andersson, who judged Dr George, as well as his annual appraisals between the first and second tenure applications, wrote Dr George.

“NTU has told third parties that it is not appropriate to discuss personnel matters, ostensibly to protect my confidentiality. I am prepared to waive any confidentiality rights that I may have, if it agrees to reveal all the (documents mentioned). If NTU declines, that is its prerogative — but any embarrassment it avoids would not be mine,” he wrote in the post that had been shared over 2,000 times on Facebook by 11pm last night.

Contacted last night, NTU said the university has already stated its position on several previous occasions and would not be making any further comments. Previously, NTU had not commented specifically on Dr George’s case, but had said its tenure process was rigorous and “purely a peer-driven academic exercise” by internal and external reviewers.

Source: www.todayonline.com

January 7, 2015