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  • Singapore Presidents Have Been Honoured For Contributions to Country

    Singapore Presidents Have Been Honoured For Contributions to Country

    AL-yusofishak1-1708e

    SINGAPORE – A new mosque, a leading think-tank and a professorship will be named after Singapore’s first president Yusof Ishak to honour his contributions to the country, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said at his National Day Rally on Sunday.

    The new mosque in Woodlands will be named Masjid Yusof Ishak, the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (Iseas) at the National University of Singapore (NUS) will now be known as Iseas-The Yusof Ishak Institute and a Yusof Ishak Professorship in Social Sciences will be started at NUS to enhance research in multi-ethnicity and multiculturalism.

    Mr Yusof served as Yang di-Pertuan Negara after Singapore gained self-government in 1959, and as president from independence in 1965 until he died in office in 1970, aged 60, from a heart attack. His portrait has featured on Singapore currency notes since 1999.

    We take a look at some of the ways Singapore’s other presidents have been honoured:

    Benjamin Sheares (Term of office: 1971-1981)

    Benjamin Sheares

    Singapore’s second president lends his name to one of the Republic’s most notable bridges – the Benjamin Sheares Bridge. Completed in September 1981, months after Dr Sheares’ death at age 73, the 1.8km bridge is the longest in Singapore.

    Since the opening of the Marina Coastal Expressway in December 2013, an arterial road bearing his name – Sheares Avenue – has connected the East Coast Parkway to the Central Business District.

    Apart from his contributions to the nation, Dr Sheares was also an outstanding surgeon who was the first Singaporean to be appointed Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of Malaya in Singapore in 1950.

    In tribute, the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School launched the $2.5 million Benjamin Sheares Professorship in Academic Medicine in 2011, which recognises leadership in medical teaching and research. One of the four advisory colleges at the school is also named after Dr Sheares.

    Devan Nair (Term of office: 1981-1985)

    Devan Nair

    Mr Devan Nair helped found the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) in 1961, and was elected its first secretary-general.

    To honour his contribution to the labour movement, the NTUC named an adult education centre after him in 2014. The Devan Nair Institute for Employment and Employability opened in May and is situated in Jurong East.

    Said Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong at this year’s May Day Rally: “(Devan Nair) was pivotal in forging a united and forward-looking labour movement. This institute is a good way to honour his life as a teacher. He became a unionist, and as a unionist, his passion as a teacher continued.”

    Mr Nair died in 2005 at age 82.

    Wee Kim Wee (Term of office: 1985-1993)

    Wee Kim Wee

     

    The former editorial manager of The Straits Times lends his name to the Nanyang Technological University’s Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information. The school’s communication studies course was rated sixth-best in the world in rankings released earlier this year by education consultancy Quacquarelli Symonds.

    The school was renamed in 2006, a year after Mr Wee’s death. The same year, the university set up the Wee Kim Wee Legacy Fund, which benefits communications students by supporting programmes like Going Overseas for Advanced Reporting (Go-Far), an annual journalism course which exposes students to the challenges of reporting in a foreign country. The Singapore Management University also has a Wee Kim Wee Centre, for better understanding of cultural diversity in the business environment.

    A research laboratory at the National Cancer Centre also bears Mr Wee’s name. The Wee Kim Wee Laboratory of Surgical Oncology was set up in 2005 after the Goh Foundation pledged $3 million to the centre. Mr Wee died at age 89 from complications arising from a relapse of his prostate cancer, and also suffered from colon cancer.

    Ong Teng Cheong (Term of office: 1993-1999)

    Ong Teng Cheong

    Singapore’s first elected president Ong Teng Cheong played a major role in the setting up of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and the National Arts Council, and his 1989 recommendation for the construction of a new performing arts centre eventually took shape as the iconic Esplanade.

    To honour those contributions to the arts, the NUS set up the Ong Teng Cheong Professorship In Music after Mr Ong’s death in 2002 from cancer at the age of 66. It continues to fund well-known musicians who want to teach at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music.

    In 2002, the Singapore Institute of Labour Studies was renamed in honour of Mr Ong, who was a former labour chief. In 2009, the institute, which trains future union leaders, merged with NTUC’ leadership development department and got its present name, Ong Teng Cheong Labour Leadership Institute.

    S R Nathan (Term of office: 1999-2011)

    SR Nathan

    The Institute of Policy Studies in July 2014 named Banyan Tree Holdings executive chairman Ho Kwon Ping its first S R Nathan Fellow for the Study of Singapore. The fellowship was set up to recognise Mr Nathan’s contributions to public service and the advancement of Singapore.

    A professorship at the National University of Singapore, the S R Nathan Professorship in Social Work, is also named after Singapore’s sixth president, who was an early graduate of the university’s department of social work. The professorship will allow distinguished teachers to be brought in, including one full-time faculty member to work with the department’s Centre for Social Development.

    There is also the S R Nathan Education Upliftment Fund which supports education assistance programmes and needy students.

    Source: http://www.straitstimes.com/news/singapore/more-singapore-stories/story/how-singapores-presidents-have-been-honoured-20140820

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  • Islamic State Millitants and the Unmistakable London Accent

    Islamic State Millitants and the Unmistakable London Accent

    james-wright-foley-beheading-video-execution-isis-395349

    It is the now familiar nightmare image. A kneeling prisoner, and behind him a black-hooded man speaking to camera. The standing man denounces the West and claims that his form of Islam is under attack. He then saws off the head of the hostage. Why did Wednesday morning’s video stand out? Because this time the captive was an American journalist — James Foley — and his murderer is speaking in an unmistakable London accent.

    The revulsion with which this latest Islamist atrocity has been greeted is of course understandable. But it is also surprising. This is no one-off, certainly no anomaly. Rather it is the continuation of an entirely foreseeable trend. Britain has long been a global hub of terror export, so much so that senior US government officials have suggested the next attack on US soil is likely to come from UK citizens. All countries — from Australia to Scandinavia — now have a problem with Islamic extremists. But the world could be forgiven for suspecting that Britain has become the weak link in the international fight against jihadism. And they would be right. This is not even the first beheading of an American journalist to have been arranged by a British man from London.

    In 2002, 27-year-old Omar Sheikh was in Pakistan. A north London-born graduate of a private school and the London School of Economics, he had gone to fight in the Balkans and Kashmir in the 1990s. In 1994 he was arrested and jailed for his involvement in the kidnapping of three Britons and an American in India. Released in 1999 in exchange for the passengers and crew of the hijacked Air India flight IC-814, he was subsequently connected to the bombing of an American cultural centre in Calcutta in January 2002 and that same month organised the kidnapping and beheading of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

    Back then it was possible to dismiss Omar Sheikh as a one-off — a macabre fluke. His alma mater shrugged off concerns about the number of London-based students who had got involved in Islamic extremism or the radical preachers touring the country. The shrug became a little harder to maintain — though maintained it was — the next year when two British men — Asif Hanif, 21, from -Hounslow in west London and Omar Khan Sharif, 27 — carried out a suicide bombing in a bar on the waterfront in Tel Aviv. Omar Sharif had been a student of King’s College London, just across the road from LSE. That time the glory of killing three Israelis and wounding over 50 was claimed by the terrorist group Hamas.

    As the list of British-born jihadists grew, their activities also got closer to home. On 7 July 2005, British-born Muslims carried out the first suicide bombings on British soil, with four more attempted a fortnight later. On Christmas Day 2009, the former head of the Islamic Society at University College London attempted to explode a bomb on a plane as it landed in Detroit. Last year, two converts decapitated Drummer Lee Rigby in broad daylight in south London. It is important to keep in mind that these are just the most high-profile cases. But the list of cases which were thwarted by good security work or sheer luck is astonishing. As well as the constant stream of convictions, at least one large-scale mass atrocity attempt on the lives of the British public was thwarted each year. As were smaller attempts. Everybody still remembers the killing of Lee Rigby, but how many people recall the case of Parviz Khan’s Birmingham terrorist cell? Khan was convicted in 2008 for a plot the previous year to kidnap and behead a British Muslim soldier on video.

    All the while, as the list of jihadists grew, so did the number of places where they could train. Perhaps as many as 4,000 people from Britain are thought to have gone to train or fight in Afghanistan. Estimates of the number of British citizens who have gone to fight in Syria and Iraq range from just over 500 to 1,500 (a figure from Khalid Mahmood, a Birmingham Labour MP). If the larger figure is correct, it would be significantly higher than the number of Muslims currently serving in Britain’s armed forces. Some of these jihadists have returned; some have been killed fighting. But it is now obvious that whether we like it or not, this is Britain’s problem.

    Involvement in Syria spreads across Britain. As with other conflicts, a large proportion of the Brits going to fight in Syria appear to be — like the murderer of James Foley — from London. This is in line with other work, including a list of all terrorism convictions in the UK to date, which shows that almost half of Islamism-inspired terrorism offences and attacks on UK soil over the last decade were perpetrated by individuals living in London at the time of their arrest.

    But involvement in the Syrian conflict has also spread to Birmingham and other places with large Muslim populations, as well as some places that will have surprised the wider public. In February of this year it transpired that the 41-year-old Abdul Waheed Majid from Crawley, West Sussex, had become a suicide bomber. On 6 February the non-Arabic-speaking Brit carried out a truck-bombing against a jail in Aleppo, Syria.

    In May, the Instagram account of a British man believed to be from London shows other jihadist war crimes from Syria, including the killing of a prisoner believed to be a loyalist of President Bashar al-Assad. One of the people shooting bullets into their captive is identified as a British man who in another video berates British Muslims for not providing enough support to the jihad. ‘You know who you are,’ he says, ‘from the capital, the Midlands, up north, wherever you may be… it’s a disgrace, that brothers know where these wives are, where these families are, and yet you are buying your nephew or your child a PlayStation 4 or taking them out to Nando’s.’

    The list goes on. A cell of young men from Cardiff. Others from Portsmouth. Earlier this month, Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary from west London appeared in a photo he himself posted on Twitter. He is pictured holding a severed head with the caption ‘chillin’ with my homie, or what’s left of him’. This is all part of the strange juncture that Syria has become for British jihadis — a meld of street cool, Islamic extremism and ultra-violence. Even the register in which these men communicate on social media is familiar. For instance Madhi Hassan, 19, from Portsmouth, sent out a media image of himself holding a jar of Nutella, to reassure Brits coming over that they would not lack all comforts.

    Of course, one line of argument claims that if we just left all these places alone then none of this would come to us. But we left the Balkans alone and created one generation of jihadists. Then we didn’t leave Afghanistan and Iraq alone — and created another generation of jihadists. Now we have very much left Syria alone — and lo and behold, we seem to have created another jihadist generation. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, apparently. Yet remarkably few people seem to realise that this isn’t really about us.

    Nevertheless, it comes ever closer to home. In recent weeks the black flag of jihad as used by Isis has been flown openly in London — supporters of Isis have appeared on Oxford Street — and elsewhere. Just this week, the imam of a leading Welsh mosque resigned after a pro-Isis guest preacher was invited to speak at his mosque.

    This battle is going on in households and mosques up and down this country. We fear joining up these dots. And we fear giving offence more than we fear the international opprobrium that is coming our way.

    The country that brought liberty to much of the world is now exporting terrorism to large parts of it. Britain needs to look to itself, and address this problem, if there are not to be many more videos like this week’s.

    Source: http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9293762/the-british-beheaders/

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  • IS Millitants Asked For Ransom Before Executing American Journalist

    IS Millitants Asked For Ransom Before Executing American Journalist

    Kneeling in the dirt in a desert somewhere in the Middle East, James Foley lost his life this week at the hands of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Before pulling out the knife used to decapitate him, his masked executioner explained that he was killing the 40-year-old American journalist in retaliation for the recent United States’ airstrikes against the terror group in Iraq.

    In fact, until recently, ISIS had a very different list of demands for Mr. Foley: The group pressed the United States to provide a multimillion-dollar ransom for his release, according to a representative of his family and a former hostage held alongside him. The United States — unlike several European countries that have funneled millions to the terror group to spare the lives of their citizens — refused to pay.

    Sensitive to growing criticism that it had not done enough, the White House on Wednesday revealed that a United States Special Operations team tried and failed to rescue Mr. Foley — a New Hampshire native who disappeared in Syria on Nov. 22, 2012 — as well as the other American hostages during a secret mission this summer. Mr. Obama said the United States would not retreat until it had eliminated the “cancer” of ISIS from the Middle East.

    ISIS also appears determined to increase the pressure on Washington. It has now threatened to kill a second of its hostages, Steven J. Sotloff, a freelance journalist for Time magazine who was being held alongside Mr. Foley.

    james foley_2

    In the video uploaded to YouTube on Tuesday, the screen goes dark after Mr. Foley is decapitated. Then the ISIS fighter is seen holding Mr. Sotloff in the same landscape of barren dunes, wearing an orange jumpsuit and his hands cuffed behind his back. “The life of this American citizen, Obama, depends on your next decision.”

    Along with the three Americans, ISIS is holding citizens of Britain, which like the United States has declined to pay ransoms, former hostages confirmed. The terror group has sent a laundry list of demands for the release of the foreigners, starting with money but also prisoner swaps, including the liberation of Aafia Siddiqui, an M.I.T.-trained Pakistani neuroscientist with ties to Al Qaeda currently incarcerated in a prison in Texas. The policy of not making concessions to terrorists and not paying ransoms has put the United States and Britain at odds with other European allies, who have routinely paid significant sums to win the release of their nationals — including four French and three Spanish hostages who were released this year after money was delivered through an intermediary, according to two of the victims and their colleagues.

    Kidnapping Europeans has become the main source of revenue for Al Qaeda and its affiliates, which have earned at least $125 million in ransom payments in the past five years alone, according to an investigation by The Times. Although ISIS was recently expelled from Al Qaeda and abides by different rules, recently freed prisoners said that their captors were well aware of what ransoms had been paid on behalf of European nationals held by Qaeda affiliates as far afield as Africa, indicating that they were hoping to abide by the same business plan.

    While government and counterterrorism officials insist that paying ransoms only perpetuates the problem, the policy has meant that captured Americans have little chance of being released. A handful succeeded in running away, and even fewer were rescued in special operations. The rest are either held indefinitely — or else killed.

    In an opinion article for Reuters, David Rohde, a columnist for the news service and a former foreign correspondent for The Times who was kidnapped by the Taliban, said that the uneven approach to ransoms may have cost Mr. Foley his life.

    james-foley-fbi-570x341

    “The payment of ransoms and abduction of foreigners must emerge from the shadows. It must be publicly debated,” wrote Mr. Rohde, who escaped his yearlong custody of the Taliban only when he climbed out a window and freed himself. “American and European policy makers should be forced to answer for their actions.”

    Mr. Foley, a freelance videographer and reporter for GlobalPost and Agence France-Presse, went missing 21 months ago in a town 25 miles south of the Turkish border. According to Nicole Tung, a close friend and fellow photojournalist, who gave an account of Mr. Foley’s activities before his capture, he had spent weeks in Syria documenting the country’s spiral into civil war, narrowly avoiding a falling tank shell. The normally calm reporter — who had come under fire in Afghanistan and had been kidnapped a year earlier in Libya — was rattled.

    As the Thanksgiving holiday approached in 2012, he contacted Ms. Tung, and they made plans to meet for a few days across the border in Turkey. When Mr. Foley did not show up at the hotel at 5 p.m. as planned, Ms. Tung began calling his cellphone, finally reaching his translator.

    The man explained that Mr. Foley had stopped at an Internet cafe to file his last images in Binesh, Syria. Soon after, armed men sped up behind his car and forced Mr. Foley out at gunpoint.

    “I was sitting on the bed, in this depressing, dark hotel; the fact that the fixer answered the phone — when Jim was not answering his — was the cue that something had gone terribly wrong,” said Ms. Tung, who immediately contacted Mr. Foley’s family and editors.

    Across the ocean at his home in Cambridge, Mass., the chief executive and co-founder of GlobalPost, Philip Balboni, reached for his Blackberry and had a terrible sense of foreboding: The email informing him of Mr. Foley’s abduction was almost an exact replay of the horror his staff had endured a year earlier, when Mr. Foley was kidnapped with three others by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces in Libya.

  • Pre-schoolers Speak Mixing of English and Mandarin Have Better Grasps of Languages

    Pre-schoolers Speak Mixing of English and Mandarin Have Better Grasps of Languages

    SINGAPORE: Parents and teachers tend to frown upon children speaking a mix of English and Mandarin, but a study done on pre-schoolers here has found that such a habit does not necessarily reflect a weaker command of either language.

    On the contrary, the study — which saw the participation of 51 pre-schoolers aged between five-and-a-half and six-and-a-half years old — found that children switch between these languages because they have the linguistic capacity to do so. In fact, those who switch between English and Mandarin more frequently were found to have a better command of the latter language.

    Assistant Professor Yow Wei Quin from the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), who conducted the study, said many parents and teachers discouraged children from switching between these languages, which she called “code-switching”.

    “Code-switching is a pretty common thing that Singaporeans do and there are people, parents and those whom I have worked with — teachers and pre-school principals — who say that code-switching, code-mixing seems pretty bad,” said Asst Prof Yow, who will present her findings at the Ministry of Education’s Mother Tongue Languages Symposium this Saturday.

    However, upon noting that there was a dearth of research to prove that code-switching is bad, she set out to discover more, within the context of Singapore. Over the course of nine months, Asst Prof Yow and her research team studied the way the children spoke during free play, language lessons, meals and group project time at two pre-schools. These children shared similar family profiles, with parents whose average highest education was a university degree and who spoke more English than Mandarin at home.

    To test their English receptive vocabulary, Asst Prof Yow and her team used the internationally-recognised Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, where children were required to identify the picture that depicts the word being read to them. To measure their competencies in both spontaneous English and Mandarin speech, they considered the number of unique word types used, the mean length and complexity, some aspects of grammar and complexity of their sentences.

    The team found that the children “code-switched” 14 per cent of the time, but this did not affect their English language skills. Those who switched between English and Mandarin more frequently displayed better Mandarin vocabulary and expressed themselves better in the language.

    The findings suggest that code-switching gives children the opportunity to speak Mandarin. “The children are not pressured to think that they must speak in a full Mandarin sentence. Whatever they know, they will just use (it),” she said.

    Asst Prof Yow hopes that with the findings, parents would not discourage their children from code-switching. However, she said it is important that parents continue to use full sentences in one language. Acknowledging the limitations of her study, she said she was considering an expansion of her research to include a study into the impact of switching between other mother tongue languages and measuring language competencies through the analysis of syntax, for example.

    Source: http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/using-two-languages-in/1322760.html

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  • Singapore Female Bodybuilder Champion And Hubby Often Mistaken as Gay Couple

    Singapore Female Bodybuilder Champion And Hubby Often Mistaken as Gay Couple

    Doreen_6

    “Are you a man in a bikini?”

    “What’s your ‘ladyboy’ name?”

    Bodybuilder Doreen Yeo doesn’t feel angry when she receives such questions.

    The 27-year-old does, however, get embarrassed, and can only bravely smile and walk away.

    When she’s with her husband Mohamad Haris, they’ve been mistaken for a gay couple, and are often subjected to looks of disgust. They are so used to it that they aren’t bothered anymore, but Haris, 29, won’t hesitate to defend his wife if he has to.

    “It’s ok if people are curious about her physique, and want to take photos with her, but some give offensive looks like she’s committing a crime. Sometimes I don’t tell her if I see people giving us weird looks,” said Haris, who works as a personal trainer just like Yeo.

    Yeo added, “He’s with me most of the time and when people criticise me, he won’t be able to take it. He has seen the hardship I went through as a bodybuilder and thus knows what I have gone through.”

    Doreen_4

    Poor self-image

    Yeo’s buff physique may have earned her the gold medal in the open bodybuilding category at the 12th Southeast Asian Bodybuilding Championships in June, but she was not the most athletic person when growing up.

    In fact, at 14, she was exempted from all fitness tests and classes due to a car accident which left her with a torn knee ligament and slipped discs in the neck and back.

    By the time Yeo entered university, she was mocked for being too skinny: at her height of 1.64m, she weighed just a petite 45kg.

    Then there was the pressure from her mechanical engineering course – but thankfully, she found her place of solace.

    “I was studying all the time and I needed another channel to release stress. That was how I found the gym. I went to the one in school and started going every day, each time I had a break,” she shared.

    She started reading up and bought protein powder to aid her workouts, putting on 8kg of muscle within a year, while her waistline remained unchanged.

    “In university, students dress well but I was skinny, weak and didn’t have much friends, so I wanted to be different,” Yeo explained. “I wanted to become strong and toned. The desire to improve my poor self-image was what kick-started my passion for working out in the gym.”

    Doreen_1

    Dealing with negativity

    It was a poster for Muscle & Fitness War, a bodybuilding competition organised by NUS Health & Fitness Club, that gave her the idea to go into bodybuilding.

    Fired up with the determination to compete and stand on stage one day, Yeo kept training even though she received nothing but negativity all around.

    Her friends thought she was crazy, her colleagues at work said she wasn’t good enough and other gym-goers would ridicule her training methods.

    Undeterred, Yeo continued to train while balancing her work schedule.

    She became a trainer at True Fitness – where she met her husband – then a master trainer at Celebrity Fitness, before stepping out on her own as a freelancer this February.

    Source: https://sg.sports.yahoo.com/blogs/fit-to-post-sports/singapore-bodybuilder-triumphs-over-public-scorn–image-issues-091034283.html

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