A former security guard was placed on probation for 15 months on Thursday after he admitted having sex with a 13-year-old girl who had run away from home.
Muhammad Rohaizad Muhammad Razali, 20, is the third of four men to be dealt with for having sex with the minor, who fell pregnant and had to have an abortion.
He befriended her on Facebook and asked her to be his girlfriend. She agreed and they had sex six times over the next month at a HDB staircase landing.
He pleaded guilty to two of six offences committed between Feb 8 and March 8 and said he did not use protection on either occasion.
Muhammad Rohaiza was also ordered to perform 120 hours of community service and remain indoors between 10pm and 6am. His parents have to sign a $5,000 bond to ensure his good behaviour.
The court heard that during his month-long relationship with the girl, who is now 14, Muhammad Rohaizad would meet her almost every day near his home in Yishun. All of their sexual encounters took place in the staircase landing of a HDB block there.
Musa Ahmad, 23, and Muhammad Nur Hakim Abdullah, 21 – who were dealt with previously – each received a year in jail.
A fourth man, Muhammad Sharul Shah Saruwan, 20, will be sentenced on Dec 24.
The maximum penalty for having sex with a person under 16 is 10 years in jail and a fine.
A mother defied official warnings to travel to the Syrian city of Raqqa to rescue her daughter from the clutches of Islamic State terrorists.
The woman, from Maastricht, named only as Monique was told that it was too dangerous to attempt the journey to free her daughter Aicha, 19.
“Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. This is what I think is right,” she told family and friends
After an appeal for help from her daughter, a Dutch convert to Islam, for help last month, the mother was told by police not to try and rescue her because it was too dangerous.
She was also warned that the “provision of assistance” to jihadists, such as her daughter, could be a criminal offence. She travelled from Turkey to Raqqa, the self styled capital of Islamic State, wearing a burka after arranging via Facebook a rescue rendezvous with he daughter.
The pair then escaped across the Syrian border back to Turkey where Aicha was arrested because she does not have a passport.
After converting to Islam aged 18, Aicha married Omar Yilmaz, a notorious Dutch jihadi, who is a former soldier, after seeing him interviewed on television.
“She wanted to go home, but could not leave Raqqa without help,” said the mother.
Dutch foreign ministry officials have intervened to bring the mother and daughter back from Turkey before the end of the week.
“It is quite remarkable that the mother managed to find and get her daughter,” Françoise Landerloo, the family’s lawyer told the Algemeen Dagblad newspaper.
Update: According to the folks behind the Basic Income campaign, Switzerland’s government will start discussing the proposal in spring 2015, with the public vote likely to take place by fall 2016.
Switzerland could soon be the world’s first national case study in basic income. Instead of providing a traditional social net—unemployment payments, food stamps, or housing credits—the government would pay every citizen a fixed stipend.
The idea of a living wage has been brewing in the country for over a year and last month, supporters of the movement dumped a truckload of eight million coins outside the Parliament building in Bern. The publicity stunt, which included a five-cent coin for every citizen, came attached with 125,000 signatures. Only 100,000 are necessary for any constitutional amendment to be put to a national vote, since Switzerland is a direct democracy.
The proposed plan would guarantee a monthly income of CHF 2,500, or about $2,600 as of November 2014. That means that every family (consisting of two adults) can expect an unconditional yearly income of $62,400 without having to work, with no strings attached. While Switzerland’s cost of living is significantly higher than the US—a Big Mac there costs $6.72—it’s certainly not chump change. It’s reasonable income that could provide, at the minimum, a comfortable bare bones existence.
The benefits are obvious. Such policy would, in one fell swoop, wipe out poverty. By replacing existing government programs, it would reduce government bureaucracy. Lower skilled workers would also have more bargaining power against employers, eliminating the need for a minimum wage. Creative types would then have a platform to focus on the arts, without worrying about the bare necessities. And those fallen on hard times have a constant safety net to find their feet again.
Detractors of the divisive plan also have a point. The effects on potential productivity are nebulous at best. Will people still choose to work if they don’t have to? What if they spend their government checks on sneakers and drugs instead of food and education? Scrappy abusers of the system could take their spoils to spend in foreign countries where their money has more purchasing power, thus providing little to no benefit to Switzerland’s own economy. There’s also worries about the program’s cost and long term sustainability. It helps that Switzerland happens to be one of the richest countries in the world by per capita income.
The problem, as with many issues economic, is that there is no historical precedent for such a plan, especially at this scale, although there have been isolated incidents. In the 1970s, the Canadian town of Dauphin provided 1,000 families in need with a guaranteed income for a short period of time. Not only did the social experiment end poverty, high school completion went up and hospitalizations went down.
“If you have a social program like this, community values themselves start to change,” Evelyn Forget, a health economist at the University of Manitoba, told The New York Times.
Similar plans have been proposed in the past. In 1968, American economist Milton Friedman discussed the idea of a negative income tax, where those earning below a certain predetermined threshold would receive supplementary income instead of paying taxes. Friedman suggested his plan could eliminate the 72 percent of the welfare budget spent on administration. But nothing ever came to fruition.
It’s what makes the potential experiment in Switzerland so compelling. Developed countries around the world are struggling to address the issues of depressed wages for low-skilled workers under the dual weight of automation and globalization.
For German-born artist Enno Schmidt, one of the founders of the proposal, a living wage represents continued cultural progress along the lines of women’s suffrage or the civil rights movement by providing dignity and security to the poor, while unleashing creativity and entrepreneurial spirit.
“I tell people not to think about it for others, but think about it for themselves,” Schmidt told the Times. “What would you do if you had that income?
The ultra high net worth (UHNW) population in Singapore saw the addition of 40 individuals in 2014, according to a wealth report released on Wednesday (Nov 19).
There are now a total of 1,395 UHNW individuals in Singapore – a record high. Their combined net worth is US$180 billion (S$234 billion), an increase of 12.5 per cent over the past year, according to the Wealth-X and UBS World Ultra Wealth Report.
UHNW individuals are defined as those with US$30 million and above in net assets. The size of Singapore’s UHNW population ranks sixth among Asian countries and 19th globally, according to the report.
This year, while Singapore’s UHNW population grew slower than both the global and Asian average, the combined wealth of its UHNW individuals has grown significantly faster.
“Such strong growth is reflective of the city-state’s growing international appeal with regards to the strength of its financial sector, and the ease of both establishing and conducting business in the country, allowing for rapid wealth accumulation” the report stated.
The report also found that:
Singapore’s UHNW population controls almost 17 per cent of the country’s total wealth of US$1.08 trillion.
More than 20 per cent of Singapore’s UHNW population is engaged in the finance, banking and investment industry
60 per cent of Singapore’s UHNW population is fully self-made.
25 per cent of Singapore’s UHNW population inherited their wealth and went on to grow their fortunes through businesses or other ventures
15 per cent fully inherited their wealth
Singapore’s female UHNW population accounts for a much larger share of its total population than the global average. But the average net worth of female UHNW individuals in Singapore is 45 per cent lower than that of male UHNW individuals in the country.
Kirsten Han is a Singaporean blogger, journalist and filmmaker. She is also involved in the We Believe in Second Chances campaign for the abolishment of the death penalty. A social media junkie, she tweets at @kixes. The views expressed are her own.
Singapore, we are told, is a pro-family country. The government actively introduces policies that will encourage young Singaporeans to get married and have children, and nuclear families are often given benefits in the form of tax rebates and subsidies.
Yet there are sometimes stories that make you doubt that stance.
The New Paper ran an article on 17 November about a family now torn apart: upon returning to Singapore and applying for a Long-Term Visit Pass, married couple Mr Y. C. Chen and Ms Li Qiaoyan realised that Ms Li had been served an entry ban. Her offence was not seeking permission from the Ministry of Manpower before getting pregnant and married. Ms Li is now back in China, while Mr Chen had to quit his job to care for their 10-month-old son.
Under Singapore’s current rules, existing and former work permit holders are required to obtain permission from the state before marrying Singaporeans. According to The New Paper, the Ministry of Manpower says:
“MOM reviews all marriage applications on a case-by-case basis. Factors taken into consideration include the economic contributions of the applicants, the ability of the applicants to look after themselves and their family without becoming a burden to the society or state.”
The New Paper also reported MOM’s position that “work-permit holders, as transient workers, ought to come to Singapore only for work”.
There are 980,8000 work permit holders in Singapore. It’s impossible that these men and women are here “only for work”; they don’t just come here to serve us food, work in our construction sites and clean our homes. They come here with all their likes and dislikes, their hopes, dreams and desires. They’re people. It’s hardly surprising that they might meet someone and fall in love.
Yet the state doesn’t seem to see them as the multi-dimensional human beings they are. It expects them to serve, and only to serve. When they fall in love and want to get married or have children, they are expected to apply to Singapore for permission, even though it should be none of the state’s business who anyone chooses to marry. The state will then decide if the work permit holder is a worthy (read: economically viable) spouse for the Singaporean.
This rule even applies to former work permit holders. Come to Singapore on a work permit and your desire to marry your partner – if he/she is a Singaporean – will always be dependent on special dispensation from the Controller of Work Passes.
Such rules and requirements show us that the state is, perhaps, only pro-a-certain-type-of-family. If you’re a non-Singaporean, if your “economic contribution” is deemed wanting, then maybe your family is not so important after all.
