It’s been a busy two weeks and this is a very short Thursday roundup, AsiaPundit hopes to return to its usual state next week. New contributors are still welcome ( email: asiapundit @ gmail.com )
An update on the Singapore sedition trial, where a blogger and a BBS poster have been charged, I should link to Elia Diodati, but Kevin Lim gets the honor because he has such a keen visual.:
Two men suspected of expressing Anti-Muslim opinions online in June this year were charged yesterday under the Sedition Act.
Two men suspected of expressing Anti-Muslim opinions online in June this year were charged yesterday under the Sedition Act. You, Nicholas.
Xu
Songfa faces three counts of the charges, indicating that on on the
evenings of June 12th, 15th and 17th, he expressed anti-Malay and
anti-Islamic sentiments on his blog “Phoenyx Chronicles”, which was
hosted on the website www.upsaid.com.
[Court documents] show
that Xu Songfa used insulting terms to address and describe Malay
people, taunting their customs and religion, and made disrespectful
jokes about Allah , the deity of Islam.
Lin You faces two
counts [of the charge]: in the early mornings of June 16th and 17th, he
wrote anti-Muslim sentiments on an online forum on the dog lover’s
website www.doggiesite.com, in response to a Malay lady’s letter in the
Straits Times Forum.
More on the Lion City via the Peking Duck, Tom Friedman praises Singapore and bashes the Bush administration.:
There is something tremblingly self-indulgent and slothful about
America today - something that Katrina highlighted and that people who
live in countries where the laws of gravity still apply really noticed.
It has rattled them - like watching a parent melt down.
That is certainly the sense I
got after observing the Katrina debacle from half a world away here in
Singapore - a city-state that, if it believes in anything, believes in
good governance. It may roll up the sidewalks pretty early here, and it
may even fine you if you spit out your gum, but if you had to choose
anywhere in Asia you would want to be caught in a typhoon, it would be
Singapore. Trust me, the head of Civil Defense here is not simply
someone’s college roommate.
Indeed, Singapore believes so
strongly that you have to get the best-qualified and least-corruptible
people you can into senior positions in the government, judiciary and
civil service that its pays its prime minister a salary of $1.1 million
a year. It pays its cabinet ministers and Supreme Court justices just
under $1 million a year, and pays judges and senior civil servants
handsomely down the line.
Friedman is right that the Singapore civil service is generally top-notch, and that the city-state is probably better prepared for disasters than any government in Asia and perhaps the world. It’s state of preparedness is freaky. For instance, private homes - by law - must have bomb shelters. And as far as I know, the Lee family’s college roommates are not guaranteed government jobs. Members of the opposition definitely aren’t. Members of the Lee family, however, have a pretty good chance of a high-level government job or position at a government-linked company.
Still, high salaries for Singapore public servants did helped
eliminate corruption among the civil service. The Philippines could
probably follow the example. Madame Chiang notes:
Office workers - overworked, underpaid, frequently
commuting appalling distances through abominable traffic to get to
their jobs - are the proletariat who help keep the economy afloat. The
most common expression for their condition describes how a chicken
eats: isang kayod isang tuka - "one scratch of the ground, one bite".
In other words: hand-to-mouth. They survive through sariling sikap, or
self-initiative: taking extra jobs, working long hours and buying and
selling things. There was the famous story of public school teachers so
hard up they sold female underwear and dried fish to their students.
They probably could have got better prices for the underwear if they were per-worn and sold on Yahoo!’s Japan auction site.
Speaking of Japan, Tokyo Times reports that Japan Tobacco is offering 150 lottery winners the chance to
see a preview of the film Sin City in a restriction-free and
smoke-friendly cinema. The one condition being that the applicant is a
smoker – preferably a heavy one. Personally, when I watched Sin City I really wanted a fag (and a lap dance from Jessica Alba).:
Did I mention North Korean Cheerleaders yesterday? No. My apologies.:
According to the Japanese weekly magazine FLASH, this marked the third
time that Pyongyang dispatched its bevy of beauties, and each time
woman have become progressively younger and more beautiful. FLASH
reports that this time around the oldest of the 124 members of the NORK
cheering squad are second year university students. Reportedly, this is
the first time that attendance at the Asian Athletics Championship hit
130,000, and organizers are admitting that it is the Pyongyang pretties
that made the difference.
The really cute Marie Mitsuki Mockett has found the square watermelon,:
AsiaPundit trumps with the Gojira egg and Watermelon Bomb!
Translated Cambodian comic books available online, no super-heroes, unfortunately.
