Via Supernaut, lady is blogging.:

Lady, the hot trash Korean transgender manufactured pop band noone has listened to but everyone has seen pictures of, now has a blog. Or more likely someone has made a blog pretending to be them. Anyway, Lady - now that’s what I call music. (But there used to be four and now only three? What happened to Binu?)

Technorati Tags: asia, east asia, korea, south korea

Reports that Darshan Singh, who had been the hangman for 850 of Singapore’s executions, had been sacked after an interview with an Australian newspaper are being denied by the city state.

Singapore - Prison authorities denied sacking Singapore’s hangman after the 74-year-old executioner told Australia media he was ready to retire, but shed no light on who will place the noose around a condemned Australian drug trafficker’s neck on Friday.

‘Darshan Singh has not been ’sacked’ and continues to be a contract officer engaged by the Prisons Department,’ a spokesman confirmed on Tuesday. ‘There is no change to his status.’

Singh, a Sikh who converted to the Moslem faith, revealed his identity in an Australia newspaper interview last week and said he would like to retire but no one wanted his job.

On Sunday Singh said he had been informed of his sacking by the department and that someone else would be flown in to conduct the hanging of Vietnamese-born Melbourne man Nguyen Tuong Van, sentenced to death after he was caught with nearly 400 grams of heroin while in transit from Cambodia to Melboune three years ago.

The department had no response yet to Australia’s plea that Nguyen’s mother, Kim Nguyen, be allowed to hug her son before his death.

AsiaPundit opposes capital punishment, if only because justice systems are fallible. Still Harry Hutton makes a persuasive argument.:

They are hanging Nguyen Tuong Van in the morning. I am not myself in favour of hanging Australians. I’m in favour of beheading them, but hanging is oafish. The government of Singapore has come in for a lot of criticism for this unpleasant fetish of theirs; but as long as they are sure, beyond all reasonable doubt, that he is Australian… As David C says in the comments, which of us can honestly put his hand on his heart and say that we haven’t at some time wanted to hang an Aussie? I know I have.

Let he who is without motes in his eye cast the first beam.

I don’t know why the government of Australia doesn’t string up a couple of Singaporeans in retaliation. That’s what I would do. It’s idiotic, but sometimes idiocy is all we have left.

Technorati Tags: asia, east asia, singapore rebel, southeast asia

Via Simon World, a look at the 191-vote strong Transport Constituency in Hong Kong shows that Singapore, Dubai and - naturally - Mainland China have more say in how Hong Kong’s government is selected than its average individual resident:

We found that of the 191 eligible Transport electors, 36 are taxi-related associations, 19 are minibus associations and 10 are driving instructor associations. These three lobbies alone amount to 65, or over one third, of the electorate. Bear that in mind next time you hear their legislator whinging about diesel duty being too high, when it is far lower than the duty on unleaded petrol which private motorists pay, and when LPG is exempt from duty and franchised buses are exempt from diesel duty anyway. And don’t forget the $1.4bn in taxpayer grants handed out to get the taxi and minibus owners to buy LPG vehicles in the first place. Yes, in Hong Kong, we don’t charge the transport trade for air pollution, we pay them to reduce it.

The names of some trade associations suggest overlapping membership through their geographic coverage. While some of the apparently overlapping trade associations may exist separately for historical reasons, others may have come into being, or stayed separate, simply to claim another vote for their sector. Similarly, companies under common ownership may continue to exist separately rather then undergo a full merger, and thereby avoid losing voting rights in the constituency.

Our research also identified tycoons with heavy voting interests, including 1 family with stakes in 11 electors. We also found 3 electors which are controlled by the HK Government, and several which are controlled by overseas Governments, including Dubai, Singapore and of course mainland China.

It’s worth reminding our readers that we only looked at one sector. If we had extended our coverage to sectors such as the Real Estate, Hotels, Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce, Chinese General Chamber of Commerce and others, then we would have found many of the same tycoons controlling corporate electors in those sectors too.

Don’t worry too much though, a number of above-average residents do actually have more of a say in how Hong Kong is run that Singapore or Dubai. So it is possible for Hong Kongers to get a larger say in government, so long as they can become as rich and heavily invested in the territory as  Li Ka Shing or the Kwok brothers.

Technorati Tags: asia, china, east asia, hong kong, northeast asia, singapore rebel

A local Malay tabloid in Malaysia put another blogger on the frontpage - the popular Sixth Seal who have since removed the offending posts relating to - not racial relationships, not politics, not complex corporate media issues, but recreational drugs! Granted, Malaysia is one of the few places where carrying around a stash of ganja is enough to get you hanged, while raping a classroom of 8-year-old girls wouldn’t.

One of the reasons (Malay link), according to Harian Metro, why that blog is the bane of the earth and should be strike from the face of this world is because the “activity could influence teenagers”; but being a teenager for the next four months, I must say though we teenagers aren’t all that impressionable. Reading Instapundit regularly, for example, haven’t led me to put puppies in blenders. Yet.

More paranoia and self-censorship in the Lion City. A state-funded, but generally high-quality, art school has threatened to sue an Australian newspaper for printing a photo of an installation piece that was… political.

IT was a rare public display of protest against the death penalty that even Singapore’s arts community didn’t want the world to see.

Titled “I am going to send you to a better place”, the now infamous send-off from veteran hangman Darshan Singh, the disturbing artwork is the only act of open defiance in the city-state during the final days of condemned Australian drug-trafficker Van Tuong Nguyen.

Slovenian art student Matija Milkovic Biloslav had displayed under falling nooses a single standing stool carrying a card with Van’s execution number, C856, a very deliberate reference to the Melbourne man, scheduled to be hanged at dawn this Friday.

But after The Australian unexpectantly attended last Friday night’s opening of the exhibition at the Lasalle-SIA College of the Arts, the self-censorship that pervades the country of four million took hold.

Over the weekend, The Australian newspaper was threatened with legal action by Lasalle directors if it published a picture of the work and all requests for an interview with the artist were denied.

The card carrying Van’s execution number was hastily removed. The college, which receives government funding, said the artwork was about suicide.

The reaction of the art college is typical of the sensitivity in Singapore to the very limited political and social debate allowed by the long-ruling People’s Action Party.

Local coverage of Van’s trial, conviction and sentence has been almost non-existent in the government-owned media, with daily reports only appearing in the past week and limited to the outcry in Australia or a defence of the looming execution.

Technorati Tags: asia, censorship, east asia, singapore rebel, southeast asia