SingaporeSurf

A query from the public question why a civil servant who is being suspended from service after being charged in court continue to receive half pay. The reply from PMO is simple: "Innocent until proven guilt."

Which is all well and good, but I wonder if the servant will receive back his lost pay when he is proven to be innocent.

The Ministry of Manpower replied on waiver of levy for foreign domestic worker.

In this single letter, the Ministry said that:

1. For foreign workers, except when the worker is from Malaysia: if the foreign workers can produce documentary evidence that they have not entered Singapore during an extended period of time, the employers can get a waiver of levy.

2. For foreign workers who are from Malaysia, even if the foreign workers can produce documentary evidence that they have not entered Singapore during an extended period of time, the employers cannot get a waiver of levy.

Why the difference? "Many Malaysian who work here commute regularly or daily to Singapore. They do so even if they are on leave. As such, it is difficult to ascertain if they are indeed on home leave."

Apparently, the documentary evidence is not enough if the worker is from Malaysia. Either the Ministry is admitting that the policy is stupid, or they are saying that Malaysians can regularly come in and out of Singapore without generating evidence that they have entered Singapore.

Lim Swee Say assured the public that there are enough supply of chicken to meet demand, now that we've stopped importing chickens from Malaysia due to the bird flu incident.

"In fact, there is a stockpile of three months' supply of frozen chicken, he said."

Am I reading this correctly? There is a stockpile of three months' supply? Does that mean the frozen chicken wing that I've just bought from NTUC may well be from chickens that are already dead for three months already? Ewww....

Details of the new baby-making incentive from the government will only be revealed during the National Day Rally, so I guess we'll have to keep on guessing what Lim Hng Kiang mean by "flexible."

I just hope it doesn't mean that, in theory, you can take longer maternity leave, but for the sake of your job, you better come back the next day after giving birth.

Additional shop spaces have been added to various SMRT stations — such as Marsilin and Yew Tee. This will surely translate to additional monthly income to SMRT and/or LTA.

I wonder if this will translate to a lowered fare for commuters. Instinct tell us, of course, that it will not. Standard reply is that this will prevent more frequent fare increment — which of course nobody will bring up again during the next yearly fare increment exercise.

Nevertheless, I've posed this question at the feedback form over at SMRT's feedback form. I'm not expecting a reply. :-)

I am not sure how much money did Mediacorp spend to secure the broadcast rights in Singapore, but here's a pop quiz: Who are in the Singapore team? What events are they participating in? When will the events be taking place? What is the targets for the Singapore participants?

If you are not a sports enthusiasts, you'll probably can't score well in that pop quiz. And that's precisely why Mediacorp has failed in their marketing department. After spending (I assume) much money in getting broadcast rights, it failed to market the Olympics to the audience, and relegate the Olympics to yet another sporting events by foreigners for foreigners.

Unless, of couse, the broadcast is funded by MDA, and Mediacorp don't want to spend any money at all. :-)

Mah Bow Tan, National Development Minister, said that Singaporeans still want to pay for upgrading, despite recent rejects.

"In the final analysis if the programme is really not popular, we will scrap it, it's as simple as that."

No, it's not as simple as that, in my opinion. After all, PAP promised that this will be offered to all Singaporeans — whether they had voted for PAP or not. It's just that those who voted for PAP will be given priority over those that did not, all things being equal.

So, to scrap this programme is to break the election promise. And we know that PAP doesn't simply break promise, now, do we?

As discovered by Mr Brown, some, er, interesting suggestions: Head of the Jedi Council, The One, Number 0.

Now that you know what television programme I enjoy, let's move on to radio.

My radio diet is mainly from NPR (Talk of the Nation, All Things Considered, Wait Wait) and BBC World Service (The World Today, World Briefing). Then, throw in some Your Mac Life, IT Conversations, and NewsRadio, for the Singapore news.

But if you are also a regular NPR and/or BBC listener, you will discover why I consider the interviewing skills from the local NewsRadio to be amatuerish.

The presense of always-on broadband in my apartment really allowed me to rediscover the magic of radio.

When the Sunday Times (which is the Sunday edition of the local newspaper, Straits Times) was revamped last year, we, the readers, were promised a more magazine-like newspaper with better and improved layout and presentation. I was so excited: wow, magazine articles, eh? Long, insightful, detailed, and in-depth?

Turns out the publisher, SPH, was thinking of magazines like TV Guide and i-Weekly, while I was thinking of magazines like New Yorker and Wired.

So, now SPH is hyping the revamp of another of its newspaper, the Lianhe Zaobao — more vibrant, contemporary, while no compromises on coverage, professionalism, credibility, integrity, or quality. Or so SPH claims. Readers will be able to judge for themselves at the end of the month.

But at least for me, I'm not getting my hopes up this time round.

Channel NewsAsia is now available on pay TV over at Malaysia — or, at least, will soon be, when MiTV launches.

Now, can we start to have Singapore newspapers avaialble freely in Malaysia, and vice-versa? In this day and age, isn't it still stupid to restrict the avaiability of newspaper from across the causeway?

Straits Times' web server is down this morning — at least from where I'm connecting from. So, maybe a little recommendation on one of my faovrite television programmes. (Yeah, I know, these two things have nothing to do with each other.)

If you haven't seen Amazing Race, it's high time you take a look. (It's on Wednesday nights, 8pm on AXN, and 10pm on Channel 5.) Last night's episode was one of the better ones so far this season — exciting race and amazing sceneries.

Why can't any of our local television game show be of comparable quality?

Lucasfilm is setting up a digital animation studio here in Singapore, reports the Straits Times. My first reaction: no big deal. The latest Star Wars movies is really more of a demonstration of how not to make movies. My second reaction: You're no Pixar. You're not even Dreamworks.

Scotsman: Professor Sir David Lane, the internationally-renowed cancer specialist yesterday announced plans to leave his post at Dundee University and move to Singapore, fuelling fears of a new brain drain from Scotland.

Good news that Singapore is attracting top researchers to work here. I wonder if the Singapore government has any concrete plans to share its scientific wealth and to benefit the world.

Hi, and welcome to the new and improved SingaporeSurf. Well, maybe only on the "new" part, but not really on the "improved" part. Especially if you have no desire whatsoever to read all my rambligns.

Hi, and I am Heng-Cheong. I've been publishing SingaporeSurf for quite a while already, but today is the first day I am switching from more of a "link-to-headlines" mode to "blog-plus-some-links" mode here. I hope you can forward me any of your suggestions or comments on what you see here.

The latest news on the local education scene is the merger of Chinese High and Hwa Chong Junior College to form Hwa Chong Institution.

I am not from either of the schools, so I don't really have any emotion or feelings attached, and I don't really care one way or the other.

But the choice of the new English name, Hwa Chong Institution, I feel, is really quite stupid. Hwa Chong, after all, is the phonenic translation from Chinese, which means Overseas Chinese High School. So the English name actually means "Overseas Chinese High School Institution."

To put it another way, it's just like calling Yangtze Jiang River, which will get scolding from my secondary school geography teacher. (For those who don't understand Chinese, the Jiang in Yangtze Jiang already means river.)

The inquiry into the collapse of Nicoll Highway has started, and LTA wasted no time in assigning blame.