TR EMERITUS

Singapore's national paddler Li Jiawei has signed up to play for the Beijing team in the China Table Tennis Super League after the Moscow World Championships, her father Li Wanxiang told Chinese reporters n a Beijing Daily (北京日报) report in April. The news was strangely not reported by the Singapore media. According to the report in Chinese: "'Jiawei has signed on with the Beijing team, and will start preparing for the Super League after the Moscow World Championships. 28-year-old Li Jiawei is born in Beijing, and started learning table tennis from her father at 6 years old. Li Jiawei was selected for the Beijing team and was teammates with other outstanding table tennis players. At age 13, Li Jiawei went to Singapore to develop her career, and obtained citizenship there." Jiawei is one of the many mainland Chinese which Singapore has "talent-spotted" and "recruited" over the years to join its table-tennis team. They are often "fast-tracked" to become Singapore citizens to be able to represent Singapore in international competitions. The players in the Singapore team which won the World Championship recently are all born in China, prompting some to sneer at the finals as a match between "China Team A and B." When Jiawei married a businessman from Beijing last year, she promised that she would return to play for Singapore after the delivery of her child. Jiawei is not the first China-born player who has returned to China. Former national paddler Zhang Xueling has since resigned from the Singapore team to return to Shanghai to join her husband, Zheng Qi the Ex-Assistant Table Tennis Coach for the Singapore's Men's Team. It seems that it is easy to bring the foreign talents over to Singapore, but keeping their hearts here is a different story, a lesson which the PAP will never learn as it continues to splurge taxpayers' monies on grooming more Zhang Xueling and Li Jiawei instead of true-blue Singaporeans.   Please join our Facebook page here and invite your friends to do so to create awareness of the current affairs affecting Singaporeans. Please use our online web form to contact us.  Read More →

The founder of City Harvest Church Senior Pastor Kong Hee was one of the 17 people called up for questioning yesterday morning by the Commercial Affairs Department to assist in the investigations into alleged misuse of church funds. The police also took away computers and financial records from their homes and offices, but stopped short of saying the exact offences they were investigating. An ex-Rafflesian, Pastor Kong is a well-known preacher in Singapore and in the region. He built City Harvest Church from its humble beginnings in 1989 into a mega-church today with a congregation of more than 33,000 and reserves estimated to exceed $100 million dollars. Besides Singapore, it also has 45 affiliate churches in Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Taiwan and Australia with a total of 48,000 members, according to a Straits Times report today. It was rumored that a few other pastors from the church were called up for questioning as well with at least one still in detention by the police. In the meantime, CHC released an official statement on its website saying that it "is cooperating fully with the investigation of the alleged allegations." and church services and operations will continue normally. It ended with a call to its followers to "keep the church in prayer" prompting one netizen to wonder "why they need prayer if they're innocent or aren't being persecuted."   Please join our Facebook page here and invite your friends to do so to create awareness of the current affairs affecting Singaporeans. Please use our online web form to contact us.  Read More →

Bangkok Post, 1 June 2010 If the government wants a smooth transition to a “normal” nation, Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva is going to have to be more attentive to civil rights. It is clear from two major directions that lifting the curfew is only a step on the way. In Parliament, the government seem determined to press its emergency-type censorship even on MPs. On the security front, Mr Abhisit has become open to charges of human rights abuse. One group claims that 39 people have disappeared in the wake of the May 19 crackdown on Bangkok protesters, and more such charges are imminent. There is no question that Mr Abhisit was pushed into declaring the state of emergency. In early April, the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) went from lawful to threatening almost at a flash. Violent red-shirt mobs attacked Parliament. They threatened lawmakers, forced MPs and ministers to clamber over walls to escape. The prime minister declared a state of emergency to make it easier to identify potential trouble and the leaders aiming for violence. The state of emergency, while a step short of martial law, provides enormous powers to unelected and unaccountable military officers and certain other security forces, including police. Arrests are possible on a wide range of grounds, and suspects can even be held incommunicado. Details are still hazy in many cases. Still, it is already clear that the Centre for the Resolution of the Emergency Situation (CRES) took its responsibility seriously. Many suspected subversives were ordered to appear for questioning by military authorities, including some with no connection to the red shirts or the current problems. A university professor, Suthachai Yimprasert, is known to have been called for questioning, then held without legal help. Other cases are less well known. The civic group Mirror Foundation claimed on Sunday to have compiled a list of 39 persons connected with the red shirt protests who remain missing. There are two compelling reasons why Mr Abhisit and ministers must address these questions seriously and speedily. The first is to make it clear — state of emergency or not — that the government is in charge of all important decisions. The other is that Mr Abhisit is accountable to the country for answering such serious charges of human, civil and constitutional abuses. If the country is, as he says, back to normal, then security authorities must be accountable. Almost as urgent is the increasingly embarrassing censorship. As soon as Mr Abhisit declared a state of emergency, government and military authorities put their blue pencils to work with an energy seldom seen even in the worst censorship of the past. It is still not clear how many websites and internet pages have been blocked, but they are in the thousands. Some, but not all, of such action was defensible to prevent incitement to violence. Now the censorship has taken a startling turn. The House Speaker and others at Parliament have demanded that video and photographic evidence for the censure debate must be vetted and approved before it is presented. While the claim that the materials could be doctored and their display cause public confusion could be true, valid evidence should never be suppressed. Even less compelling is the argument that the video and photos might be partisan, presenting only one view. This is a strange argument in Parliament, where every speech and media display is one-sided. Government and opposition MPs must be free to present their arguments in any manner within the law. — www.bangkokpost.com  Read More →