SINGAPORE: Shoppers on Saturday were out early in the heart of Singapore's shopping district, Orchard Road, hoping to avoid crowds and the heavy rain that dampened festive shopping spirits on Friday.
A female shopper said: "This is the only time I can spend to do last minute shopping. I'd love to come on the weekdays but sometimes it's very packed, so I come earlier, but I still see a lot of people.
"But it's nice shopping at the last minute too. At least we enjoy the festive mood. So I'm quite happy with it."
A British man said: "I couldn't get out of the house. I needed to buy some presents to surprise my wife. She thinks we're at the park now with the kids, but we just bought some stuff for my wife."
Retailers Channel NewsAsia spoke with said their business was severely affected by Friday's wet weather - some reported a 90 per cent drop in earnings.
With Saturday being the eve of Christmas, businesses and shop-owners are expecting brisk sales, helped by last-minute shoppers.
Sunday, 25 December 2011
MP sorry for "racist" remark
SINGAPORE: Member of Parliament (MP) Seng Han Thong has apologised for his remark made on Channel NewsAsia's programme, Blog TV.SG, which was telecast on Monday.
Mr Seng said on Blog TV.SG that "I noticed that the PR mentioned that some of the staff, because they are Malays, they are Indians, they can't converse in English well enough".
The comment by the deputy chairman of the Government Parliamentary Committee (GPC) for Transport suggested SMRT staff failed to communicate with commuters during the two massive train breakdowns last week, because of their ethnicity.
That remark got Mr Seng -- one of the five guests on a special edition of BlogTV which discussed the recent spate of MRT breakdowns -- in hot soup.
It incurred the wrath of Singaporeans, who vented their anger on his Facebook page.
It also drew a rebuke from Minister of State for Community Development, Youth and Sports Halimah Yacob, who said the remark was "inappropriate and unfair".
"English is a very important language that is used very widely, in all job applications, in all jobs, and whether that would then lead to employers thinking that, 'look, perhaps we should re-think about employing minorities because they may not be able to speak English so well'," Madam Halimah said.
"This could then affect job opportunities, particularly in the current situation when the labour market is softening, and people are really quite concerned about their jobs and that's the reason why I think we need to correct this."
In his online apology, Mr Seng said he made a regrettable mistake in his language, which may be misconstrued as him saying that people speak bad English because of their ethnicity.
He said Singaporeans of all ethnicities and backgrounds speak varying standards of English, and that his Chinese-educated background gives him a special empathy for the non-English-speaking sections of the society.
The point he was trying to make was that different standards of linguistic ability should not prevent people from communicating, especially in times of emergency.
Mr Seng also said he was simply repeating what he heard from an SMRT spokesperson in a radio interview.
SMRT told Channel NewsAsia that Mr Seng may have misunderstood comments made by its senior vice-president for communications & services, Goh Chee Kong, in a radio interview last Saturday.
During the interview, Mr Goh had said SMRT staff who are of different races find it difficult to make announcements in English.
But he did not highlight any particular race.
SMRT said it is training its staff so that they can better communicate with passengers when a situation arises.
Mr Seng said on Blog TV.SG that "I noticed that the PR mentioned that some of the staff, because they are Malays, they are Indians, they can't converse in English well enough".
The comment by the deputy chairman of the Government Parliamentary Committee (GPC) for Transport suggested SMRT staff failed to communicate with commuters during the two massive train breakdowns last week, because of their ethnicity.
That remark got Mr Seng -- one of the five guests on a special edition of BlogTV which discussed the recent spate of MRT breakdowns -- in hot soup.
It incurred the wrath of Singaporeans, who vented their anger on his Facebook page.
It also drew a rebuke from Minister of State for Community Development, Youth and Sports Halimah Yacob, who said the remark was "inappropriate and unfair".
"English is a very important language that is used very widely, in all job applications, in all jobs, and whether that would then lead to employers thinking that, 'look, perhaps we should re-think about employing minorities because they may not be able to speak English so well'," Madam Halimah said.
"This could then affect job opportunities, particularly in the current situation when the labour market is softening, and people are really quite concerned about their jobs and that's the reason why I think we need to correct this."
In his online apology, Mr Seng said he made a regrettable mistake in his language, which may be misconstrued as him saying that people speak bad English because of their ethnicity.
He said Singaporeans of all ethnicities and backgrounds speak varying standards of English, and that his Chinese-educated background gives him a special empathy for the non-English-speaking sections of the society.
The point he was trying to make was that different standards of linguistic ability should not prevent people from communicating, especially in times of emergency.
Mr Seng also said he was simply repeating what he heard from an SMRT spokesperson in a radio interview.
SMRT told Channel NewsAsia that Mr Seng may have misunderstood comments made by its senior vice-president for communications & services, Goh Chee Kong, in a radio interview last Saturday.
During the interview, Mr Goh had said SMRT staff who are of different races find it difficult to make announcements in English.
But he did not highlight any particular race.
SMRT said it is training its staff so that they can better communicate with passengers when a situation arises.
Singapore sits top in the wealth pole
Last month, if Singapore had been a person, it would have stood above the unwashed tableau of Occupy Wall Street (OWS), watching from its penthouse and laughing into its cognac.
But it has spent the year being a little down in the mouth, preoccupied with property prices, taxi fares and faulty trains.
This gloom is hard to explain in the grander scheme of things.
When OWS's gross simplification of the one per cent trampling on the 99 per cent is contemplated, Singapore is practically part of the world's one per cent.
This is a country where, every single day, 25 people bought either a Mercedes-Benz or a BMW for the first 11 months of the year.
In the same period, every four days, someone drove away from the Ferrari showroom with a big smile on his face. (One assumes that, each time, it's a different person.)
When it comes down to it, Singapore can be almost as Wall Street as Wall Street.
Last year, 8.5 per cent of New York City's workforce was on the payroll of the finance and insurance industries.
Singapore had about 6.4 per cent of its resident population on it, while Hong Kong had 6 per cent.
If a demonstrator with anti-banking invective to expend were to imagine the two as corporate entities - which is not hard - he would therefore be more inclined to picket Singapore than Hong Kong.
"One per cent" might be a dirty term these days, but would-be picketers here have to be careful about calling others names that might apply to themselves.
On a per-adult basis, Singapore has the sixth highest net wealth in the world: a mean value of US$284,692, according to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2011.
"Net wealth" here is defined by a person's financial and real estate assets minus debt.
The mean value, however, gets short shrift from experts, since it ignores wealth distribution.
"(It is the) mean without information on inequality. A very high personal net wealth with high inequality is likely to imply a skewed prosperity within the country . . . Actually, it is not something we would like to boast about," says Ho Weng Kong, senior lecturer at SIM University.
The median net wealth figure then - which is less vulnerable to being yanked up or down by the obscenely rich or the devastatingly poor - sees Singapore ranked eighth out of 160 countries, at US$101,033.
On this score, the only countries that outrank it are Australia, Japan, Belgium, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom.
Last year, the odds of being born in any one of these countries, including Singapore, was 2 per cent - not quite the fabled one per cent, but close enough.
This is better than the best odds in the Singapore Toto (one in 321), but to properly appreciate the jackpot-like nature of being born in any of these eight countries, the rest of the world needs to be surveyed.
At the best end of the ovarian lottery, more than half the adults in Singapore belong to the wealthiest 8.8 per cent of adults globally.
And while the one per cent of the United States might be under the onslaught of scrutiny there, the global one per cent club is thriving in Singapore; two out of every 25 adults here can claim membership.
On the losing end of the ovarian lottery, however, only 0.3 per cent of the adults here have less than US$1,000 in net assets.
Perhaps it is not so much that Singapore is fabulously wealthy (which it is), but that the rest of the world is poor (very much so).
Suppose you represent Singapore's population with 100 people riding on a bus.
If that bus were to stop at the world's poorest neighbourhood to let residents get off, less than one person would alight.
This shantytown, however, is where more than one-fifth of the world's adults have to live.
This says as much about the rest of the world as it does Singapore.
To be better off than half the adults on this planet, the threshold is heartbreakingly low. All it takes is US$4,200 in net assets.
But it has spent the year being a little down in the mouth, preoccupied with property prices, taxi fares and faulty trains.
This gloom is hard to explain in the grander scheme of things.
When OWS's gross simplification of the one per cent trampling on the 99 per cent is contemplated, Singapore is practically part of the world's one per cent.
This is a country where, every single day, 25 people bought either a Mercedes-Benz or a BMW for the first 11 months of the year.
In the same period, every four days, someone drove away from the Ferrari showroom with a big smile on his face. (One assumes that, each time, it's a different person.)
When it comes down to it, Singapore can be almost as Wall Street as Wall Street.
Last year, 8.5 per cent of New York City's workforce was on the payroll of the finance and insurance industries.
Singapore had about 6.4 per cent of its resident population on it, while Hong Kong had 6 per cent.
If a demonstrator with anti-banking invective to expend were to imagine the two as corporate entities - which is not hard - he would therefore be more inclined to picket Singapore than Hong Kong.
"One per cent" might be a dirty term these days, but would-be picketers here have to be careful about calling others names that might apply to themselves.
On a per-adult basis, Singapore has the sixth highest net wealth in the world: a mean value of US$284,692, according to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2011.
"Net wealth" here is defined by a person's financial and real estate assets minus debt.
The mean value, however, gets short shrift from experts, since it ignores wealth distribution.
"(It is the) mean without information on inequality. A very high personal net wealth with high inequality is likely to imply a skewed prosperity within the country . . . Actually, it is not something we would like to boast about," says Ho Weng Kong, senior lecturer at SIM University.
The median net wealth figure then - which is less vulnerable to being yanked up or down by the obscenely rich or the devastatingly poor - sees Singapore ranked eighth out of 160 countries, at US$101,033.
On this score, the only countries that outrank it are Australia, Japan, Belgium, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom.
Last year, the odds of being born in any one of these countries, including Singapore, was 2 per cent - not quite the fabled one per cent, but close enough.
This is better than the best odds in the Singapore Toto (one in 321), but to properly appreciate the jackpot-like nature of being born in any of these eight countries, the rest of the world needs to be surveyed.
At the best end of the ovarian lottery, more than half the adults in Singapore belong to the wealthiest 8.8 per cent of adults globally.
And while the one per cent of the United States might be under the onslaught of scrutiny there, the global one per cent club is thriving in Singapore; two out of every 25 adults here can claim membership.
On the losing end of the ovarian lottery, however, only 0.3 per cent of the adults here have less than US$1,000 in net assets.
Perhaps it is not so much that Singapore is fabulously wealthy (which it is), but that the rest of the world is poor (very much so).
Suppose you represent Singapore's population with 100 people riding on a bus.
If that bus were to stop at the world's poorest neighbourhood to let residents get off, less than one person would alight.
This shantytown, however, is where more than one-fifth of the world's adults have to live.
This says as much about the rest of the world as it does Singapore.
To be better off than half the adults on this planet, the threshold is heartbreakingly low. All it takes is US$4,200 in net assets.
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