This ITE CC student deserve a recognition for his kindness.
On a very heavy rainy day opposite ITE central he stood at the entrance of bus 72 and held an umbrella up for everyone else to get on to the bus.
Like an overhead bridge if you will. On behalf of everyone Thank you.
Source: Anaid Quinn
When a Choa Chu Kang Housing Board flat burst into flames and terrified residents fled en masse, one man ran in the opposite direction.
On discovering the February 2014 fire, football coach Faizaltulamri Noorali immediately ran from door to door to warn his neighbours. Racing up and down several flights of stairs, the 34-year-old saved two elderly women, two maids and a little girl. He even rescued a cat.
When The Straits Times caught up with him more than a year later, he downplayed his deeds. “I was just doing something a normal human being would do,” he said.
That morning, he had spotted smoke coming out of an eighth-storey unit. The heat made him hesitate, but the thought of somebody being trapped inside spurred him to break a window pane. Recalling the thick black smoke that billowed out over him, he said: “I had to squat down to avoid the smoke. I almost lost consciousness then.”
Despite inhaling some of the smoke, Mr Faizaltulamri went on to rescue others, including a 63-year-old housewife on the 14th storey. As she refused to leave without her cat, he had to search her flat and catch the feline.
On the 11th storey, he found a 76-year-old woman lying in the corridor, with her maid crying helplessly next to her . He carried the elderly woman down and, despite his fatigue, went back upstairs, returning with a five-year- old asthmatic girl in his arms.
His acts have got him recognised by strangers, not just in Choa Chu Kang but also in the new restaurant he is helping his friend manage, and even on one occasion by Singaporean tourists in Batam.
Mr Faizaltulamri said, however, that he did not always cut such a gallant figure. A rebellious youngster, he was even involved in a secret society at one point.
He said: “In the past, I didn’t think about other people. If this had happened 10 years ago, I would have been one of those bystanders taking a selfie with the fire in the background.”
His outlook changed after he met his girlfriend of 11 years, Ms Faizureen Ashiqkeen. “She’s my real inspiration,” he said.
The 32-year-old educator was not amused by her fiance’s heroics, though. Mr Faizaltulamri said she broke down on learning how he had risked his life.
The couple are getting married next month, and plan to move into a new flat five minutes away from Mr Faizaltulamri’s family.
Their first step on setting up house? “Get fire insurance,” quipped Mr Faizaltulamri.
Source: www.straitstimes.com
When Staff Sergeant (SSgt) Tan Kok Beng received complaints about an elderly woman cluttering a common corridor with junk in March last year, he doggedly visited her Housing and Development Board (HDB) unit in Yishun every week for a month to persuade her to clear out the items.
Even when he went out of his way and offered to help her clear out the junk, he was met with aggression and hostility.
“She kept shouting ‘Don’t throw, don’t throw!’,” said SSgt Tan. “She even threatened to burn everything and kill herself, so she was referred to the IMH (Institute of Mental Health).”
But SSgt Tan persisted in getting the lady to consent to the junk being cleared. “She eventually agreed, because she could not do anything (from the IMH),” he said.
On Thursday (Jan 8), SSgt Tan and another 65 Home Team officers were presented with the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) Star Service Award, which recognises officers for delivering outstanding service to the public. Another Star award recipient at the ministry’s biennial Excel Fest was Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) officer SSgt Muhammad Hafidz, who had rescued a man from a burning HDB unit even though he was off duty.
CONTRIBUTIONS TO INNOVATION
The MHA’s 3i Awards were also presented on Thursday to 32 Home Team officers for their contributions towards innovation in the ministry.
One of the recipients was SCDF chief medical officer Ng Yih Yng, who devised a live, over-the-phone coaching solution for SCDF dispatchers to walk bystanders through the steps of performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on heart attack victims.
“Previously, the dispatchers would ask bystanders if they wanted to do CPR. Most would decline. Either (they were) fearful or (they) lacked experience,” said Dr Ng. “So we changed our approach by telling bystanders that they have to perform CPR.”
Every year, about 1,800 Singaporeans suffer from sudden cardiac arrest and only 3 per cent of them survive the attack. Dr Ng said the coaching solution has almost doubled the number of bystanders performing CPR on heart attack victims annually from 391 to 782. “Cardiac arrest victims could die within 10 minutes. There are so many things a bystander can do to help a heart attack victim survive. That’s what we want people to understand,” he said.
Source: www.channelnewsasia.com
A North Korean central news anchorman said during a live broadcast: “We are very delighted to announce a successful mission to put a man on the sun. North Korea has beaten every other country in the world to the sun. Hung Il Gong is a hero and deserves a hero’s welcome when he returns home later this evening”.
Hung is expected back on Earth in just a few hours time, where he will be greeted by his uncle, and supreme leader: Kim Jong-un. Hung traveled in the cover of darkness, as it would protect him from the harsh, and extreme temperatures of the Sun. Hung will also be bringing back some sun spot samples for his uncle, which I’m sure he will show off to the world in a short amount of time.
The North Korean central news agency is calling the 18-hour mission the “greatest human achievement of our time” – and so they should, landing a man on the Sun, a trip that took 18 hours return, is quite the achievement, all things considered. I wonder if Dennis Rodman considered this a slam dunk for the country.
Tensions are running high between Indonesia and Singapore over the former’s decision to name a naval vessel after two convicted members of the Indonesian Marine Corps, who carried out the bombing of the MacDonald House office building in Singapore on March 10, 1965.
The bone of contention lies in how Harun Said and Usman Ali, the two Indonesian commandos, are seen by both countries.
In Singapore, they are the perpetrators of the bombing of a civilian target, while the Indonesian government sees them as national heroes who carried out their duty during Konfrontasi (1963-66) with Malaysia.
The disparate labels for the two men are understandable considering Singapore, still part of Malaysia at the time, and Indonesia were locked in a dispute that stemmed from the latter’s objection towards the formation of the federal state of Malaysia, encompassing large swathes of territory on the island of Borneo that Indonesia had laid claim to.
However, objectively speaking, were Usman and Harun terrorists or were they war heroes?
Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines terrorism as the use of violent acts to frighten the people in an area as a way of trying to achieve a political goal. By this definition alone, what the two men did qualifies as an act of terrorism.
Singaporean police records state that when they were arrested floating at sea, the two men said they were a fisherman and a farmer, before later confessing to the bombing.
However, it was not until later, during their trial for murder, that the two revealed they were members of the Indonesian Marine Corps with express orders to cause trouble in Singapore as part of confrontation with Malaysia. Apparently, the two men chose to reveal their status in the hope of being treated as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.
When the presiding judge denied them POW status – on the grounds that members of enemy armed forces who are combatants and who come here with the assumption of the semblance of peaceful pursuits and divest themselves of the character or appearance of soldiers, but are captured, are not entitled to the privileges of prisoners of war – Usman and Harun retracted their statements that they were members of the Indonesian military.
Despite lobbying by the Jakarta government for their release, Usman and Harun were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. However, when their bodies were brought back to Jakarta after their execution in 1968, the two were interred in the National Heroes Cemetery with full military honours.
It could well be argued that the granting of national hero status to the two men was Indonesia’s way of saving face after a failed diplomatic attempt to have the two released.
It was also a delicate time for Indonesia as the new government under then President Sukarno was trying to extricate itself from the confrontation.
The hero status for both men was also anomalous even by Indonesian standards, as people given this recognition are usually those who perished in combat against enemy forces. Usman and Harun never actually met these criteria – as never during Konfrontasi did the Indonesian government nor its Malaysian counterpart officially declare war on each other.
So, essentially, both were perpetrators of a state-sponsored act of terrorism. Hence, the adamant position by the Singaporean government that Usman and Harun were terrorists.
By the same token, Indonesians should look at the incident as a lesson in how not to conduct bilateral relations. Sukarno’s accusation that Malaysia was a puppet state of the United Kingdom has never been proven.
To date, it remains obscure why Sukarno instigated the unofficial war against Malaysia in 1963. Some historians have argued that his earlier success in wresting Papua from the Dutch emboldened him to try a similar tactic with the former British Malaya, though Sukarno always publicly denied any territorial ambitions. Nevertheless, Sukarno’s coveting Malaysia as part of a Greater Indonesia may not have been just a flight of fancy.
In many ways, his model for the state of Indonesia was the ancient Majapahit Empire, which encompassed Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and parts of Thailand and Indochina.
Whatever his motives, the border skirmishes and acts of sabotage against Malaysia during Konfrontasi appeared to be designed to provoke the British, who had granted independence to Malaysia in 1957, into declaring war against Indonesia. Had they done so, Sukarno would certainly have obtained his evidence that Malaysia was simply an extension of British imperial powers.
Johannes Nugroho*
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*Johannes Nugroho is a writer and businessman from Surabaya. This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insider.
Source: The Jakarta Globe