Kong Hee, the founding pastor of City Harvest Church in Singapore, who is accused of mishandling church funds, is at the center of more controversy this week after a statement he made at a conference was interpreted by some as an apology. …read more
Source: The Christian Post
Miniaturizing microscopic metallic objects while enhancing their strength is critical to developing high-performance devices that integrate transistor-like electronics with mechanical components. When these objects consist of small crystals, or grains, such as polycrystalline nanopillars, their mechanical behavior is difficult to predict because the grains vary in size and orientation. Researchers from the California Institute of Technology, USA, and A*STAR Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), Singapore, have now determined how miniaturization and intrinsic granular structure impact the deformation of ultra-small platinum cylinders. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
To keep pace with the rapidly growing consumer demand for data storage, hardware engineers are striving to cram as much electronic information into as small a space as possible. Jinmin Zhao, Mingsheng Zhang and co‐workers at the A*STAR Data Storage Institute, Singapore, have now devised a technique to assess the impact of making these devices more compact. Insights resulting from this work will guide the future design of stable disk drives. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
Molecular probes that selectively latch onto tumor cells and emit imaging signals can detect cancer without invasive procedures. These tools, however, have specific deficiencies. Fluorescent probes that image individual molecules have poor depth penetration into cells. The alternative, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) probes, resolves cells in three dimensions but with low resolution. Bin Liu at the A*STAR Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, Singapore, and co-workers have now solved this problem with a biocompatible polymer that combines MRI and fluorescence imaging in a single molecular probe. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
Scientists long believed that the fungal pathogen Candida albicans was incapable of producing haploid cells—which contain only one copy of each chromosome, analagous to eggs and sperm—for mating. Mixing of genes in sexual reproduction helps generate the diversity that is the raw material for evolution, and C. albicans’ inability to reproduce sexually appeared to give it a disadvantage. An international research team, including Yue Wang at the A*STAR Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in Singapore, has now found viable haploid strains of C. albicans. The finding illuminates C. albicans’ evolution and pathogenicity. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
Before leaving Singapore this past weekend, I had the opportunity to attend a BBQ with U.S. service members and their families stationed in Singapore, as well as crewmen from the USS Fitzgerald, docked in Singapore at the time. Joe and I also visited with service members, their families, and DOD employees in Hawaii, at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam. When Joe and I travel, we love nothing more than to meet with our men and women in uniform and their families to thank them for their service and sacrifice.
Military families face so many challenges, as spouses get deployed and families move around. When I was in Singapore, I met a woman who was in the Navy and she told me that this was her 14th move. As a military mom, I understand a bit of what these families are going through. Our son Beau was deployed for a year to Iraq as a member of the Delaware Army National Guard and our son Hunter is an Ensign in the Navy Reserves. This experience, as well as the joys and concerns we heard from military families as we traveled around the world led First Lady Michele Obama and I to start Joining Forces. It is our hope that we can rally all Americans to support our veterans and military families. Joining Forces brings together public and private resources to help with the employment, education, and wellness of our veterans, servicemen and women, and their families.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at The White House
Two weeks ago I arrived late in the day in Singapore after a long flight. I had not done much research about restaurants in town, so I dropped off my bags and wandered to Club Street, a hilly lane of restored traditional shop houses in Chinatown. Lively, attractive restaurants lined the street. I randomly picked one place. It was pretty good as well as expensive, as are many things in super modern Singapore. But I left feeling I might have done better with a little more planning. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
By Agustino Fontevecchia, Forbes Staff
derived revenue growth from Macau and earnings power from Singapore in the second quarter. Delivering a profit beat, the company run by billionaire Sheldon Adelson failed to top bottom-line expectations, and saw declining revenue in its Las Vegas operations, sending the stock down in post-market trading on Wednesday. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
A Singapore court on Wednesday charged a senior anti-corruption official with siphoning off more than a million dollars of government money to fund his casino gambling habit. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
A business or first class flight to Europe from the U.S.—or any overnight flight in the front cabin for that matter—is a case of booking a hotel with wings. One of the odder aspects of such flights is bedding down next to someone you don’t even know, even in first class. (The exception is first-class suites on Singapore and Emirates, the current equivalent of a hotel room in the sky.) Major international carriers have addressed this problem with flip-up privacy screens between seats and by designing business class cabins divided into adjacent quasi-compartments, with the seats themselves some distance apart. Having flown business class on Swiss twice in the past two months, The Hotel Detective can say that the airline has taken the solution a big step farther by doing something simple: creating single seats in business class on its A340 and A330-300 aircraft. They are used for long-haul international flights to and from Zurich and Geneva, the airline’s international gateways in Switzerland. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
In his first year heading the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, Fadi Chehade has tried to establish a more international ICANN by opening hubs in Turkey, Singapore, Beijing, and Geneva.
Governments, meanwhile, have found a new role within ICANN, mainly in respect to the new generic Top Level Domains, while the traditional tussle between ICANN and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) over who should govern and manage the global Internet seems to have lost some momentum.
Chehade replaced Rod Beckstrom as president and CEO of the international nongovernmental organization that oversees Internet standards. He sat down with the IDG News Service at the ICANN 47 meeting in Durban to answer questions about his first year in office. The following is an edited transcript of the interview.
IDGNS: How has ICANN improved in the last year?
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Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld
Via Teleconference
9:40 A.M. EDT
MS. TROTTER: Thanks, everyone, for joining today’s call. Sorry for the delay. Our hope is to provide you with a more detailed sense of the Vice President and Dr. Biden’s schedules and goals during their trip next week to India and Singapore.
This call will be on background and our speakers are happy to take questions after they give some brief opening statements at the top.
We’d like to keep this call as focused on the trip as much as possible and remind everyone that there’s one question per person.
And with that, I’ll turn it over to our first speaker whom you can quote as a senior administration official.
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Thank you, Kingsley. What I’m going to do just for a couple of minutes is lay out top-line goals, the agenda items and schedule for the visit. And then myself and my colleagues would be happy to take your questions.
The Vice President gave a speech yesterday at George Washington in which he laid out our vision for moving forward with the Asia-Pacific rebalance policy that the President has announced and that the entire national security team is invested in. And the trip to India and Singapore comes in the context of that strategy.
The goal — the overarching goal being to tie together the nations of the Asia-Pacific from India to the western shores of the Americas through strong partnerships, institutions, alliances, and rules of the road; and part of the message that the Vice President is sending in going on this trip is that we remain all in on the rebalance.
India is obviously a key player and increasingly so in the Asia-Pacific region. And the United States and India have an increasingly important bilateral relationship as our countries grow and deepen the ties across an incredibly broad range of areas.
Four areas in particular are going to be at the top of the agenda when the Vice President visits India. The first will be our economic cooperation where the Vice President will focus on issues from investment policy to intellectual property and speak to how we can work together to close the gap between where we are today and where we can be in our bilateral trade and investment and in our cooperation in multilateral trade and investment fora.
The second area is energy and climate where the Vice President will speak to the work that we need to do together to realize the promise of the civil nuclear agreement, and the work that we should be doing together to lead — to be leaders on addressing the global challenge of climate change, building on the climate change dialogue that Secretary Kerry announced with the Indian Foreign Minister at the strategic dialogue (inaudible) month.
The third area is defense cooperation. We’ve built a strong foundation in defense cooperation and defense sales over the past few years, and the Vice President will come to talk about how we can …read more
Over the past half century, the tiny city-state of Singapore has developed arguably the most successful formula for growth and social uplift on the planet. Like the famous Singapore sling — a tropical cocktail blending gin, grenadine, sweet and sour mix, cherry brandy and club soda — the city’s mandarins created the perfect recipe for rapid economic growth by combining its strategic location and hard-driving, largely Chinese population, with first-class infrastructure, a relentlessly improved local workforce and an opportunistic immigration policy designed to fill gaps in the labor pool. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
Credit rating agency Moody’s on Monday downgraded the outlook of Singapore’s three main banks to “negative” from “stable” amid rising property prices and mounting household debt in the city-state.
“The two main drivers underpinning our opinion are the recent period of rapid loan growth and rising real estate prices in Singapore and in regional markets where Singapore banks are active,” it said in a statement.
“These have increased the probability of deterioration in the banks’ credit profiles under potential adverse conditions in the future.”
Moody’s said Singapore banks have been operating in a favourable environment for an extended period amid low interest rates and strong regional economic growth, which has led to rising credit and asset inflation in the property and financial markets.
Domestically, household debt increased to 77.2 percent of gross domestic product as of March 2013 from 64.4 percent at the end of 2007, with private property prices growing 120 percent during the same period.
“Regionally, we observe similar or even more dramatic trends,” Moody’s added, noting that Singapore banks generate more than 37 percent of their revenues from overseas markets.
A tightening of US monetary policy is a “potential trigger” that could have an impact on interest rates in Singapore and neighbouring countries as well as capital flows in emerging economies where Singapore banks are active, Moody’s said.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said last week the US central bank would maintain its growth-oriented policies “for the foreseeable future”. But some analysts expect its $85 billion-a-month bond purchases to taper off in coming months, possibly in September.
Moody’s outlook report covers prospects in the next 12-18 months for DBS Bank, Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation and United Overseas Bank.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
A Singapore policeman once portrayed as a model officer was charged over the gruesome double murder of a businessman and his son in a case that has shocked the city-state.
Senior Staff Sergeant Iskandar Rahmat, 34, was accused of killing car workshop owner Tan Boon Sin, 67, and his son Tan Chee Heong, 42, last Wednesday.
The older man was fatally slashed in his home while his son’s body was found a kilometre (half a mile) away after being dragged under one of the family’s cars, leaving a trail of blood on a busy road as other motorists watched in horror.
Iskandar, once portrayed as a model officer on the Singapore Police Force website, abandoned the car and fled to Malaysia by scooter but was quickly arrested and repatriated to Singapore.
Singapore media said the suspect, a married 14-year veteran of the force, was bankrupt and under an official investigation for failing to report his personal financial problems to his superiors. He was banned from carrying firearms while under investigation.
There was no immediate indication of a motive for the murders but a police spokesman confirmed reports that Iskandar had attended to a theft complaint filed by the elder Tan in November last year, after which the sergeant was reassigned to another position.
The case has shocked Singapore, a densely populated island of 5.3 million people which prides itself on its low crime rate.
According to official statistics, the number of murders in Singapore hit a 20-year low of 11 in 2012, down from 16 in 2011.
In a statement issued over the weekend, Police Commissioner Ng Joo Hee said: “Our police force and every policeman and policewoman is tarred by the actions of this single officer.”
“We have now captured officer Iskandar and we will prosecute him to the maximum extent. He is a murder suspect and will eventually receive just deserts for the heinous crime that he is accused of committing,” the police chief added.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
Southeast Asian nations gathering to discuss the annual shroud of hazardous smog that blights the region are unlikely to find any immediate solutions, despite a meeting to address the issue being brought forward by a month to Monday.
Officials from five ASEAN member countries that form the so-called “haze” committee are scheduled to hold two-day talks over Indonesian forest fires that sent clouds of smoke into Malaysia and Singapore last month before environment ministers head into a showdown Wednesday.
But leaders of the two affected nations, which said they were subjected to life-threatening levels of pollution, hold little hope of a significant outcome.
Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong admitted in early July the forest fires in Indonesia would take “a very long time” to eradicate because of Indonesia’s vast size.
“I know that there will be a spirit of cooperation but I think solving the haze issue will take a very long time, with the best will in the world,” he said.
Malaysia’s environment minister Palanivel Govindasamy refused to be drawn on immediate solutions to the haze which sent pollution levels to a 16-year high, forcing a state of emergency in two southern districts.
“Our job is to work closely with Indonesia and our ASEAN partners on the haze meeting. Once an agreement is reached we can go forward,” he told AFP after stressing “long-term solutions” would be the focus of the meeting.
Formally known as the Ministerial Steering Committee (MSC) Meeting on Transboundary Haze Pollution, the three nations along with Brunei and Thailand have met on 14 previous occasions since 2006, but have little to show for it.
The main obstacle appears to be internal Indonesian politics, as slash-and-burn remains the cheapest — albeit illegal — way to clear land for agriculture.
The government has sought parliament’s approval to ratify a 2002 pact on haze pollution which has been signed by all its ASEAN partners but the proposal was rejected in 2008.
Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa said in June the treaty had been resubmitted to the current legislature, although no timeline for ratification was given.
Singapore and Malaysia have demanded Indonesia punish those behind the blazes, but Jakarta has hit back, saying fires have also been set in plantations owned by their neighbours, especially Malaysian palm oil firms.
Indonesian police said Friday they were investigating fires found in a concession held by the local subsidiary of Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur Kepong, which last month denied allegations of using slash-and-burn methods.
The haze has been a bone of contention in ASEAN for nearly two decades, with the worst haze crisis in 1997-1998 estimated to have cost the region $9 billion.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
Millions of years of evolution have molded our eyes into highly sensitive optical detectors, surpassing even many man-made devices. Now, Leonid Krivitsky and his co-workers at the A*STAR Data Storage Institute and the A*STAR Institute of Medical Biology, Singapore, have shown that the photoreceptor cells found in the retina are even sensitive to the statistical properties of light. This ability could be harnessed in ‘bioquantum’ interfaces, a novel class of optical devices that use biological systems to detect the quantum nature of light. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
Removing excess carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere may be essential to curb severe climate change. Possible, but expensive, methods include burying the gas underground between rock layers or ‘scrubbing’ the CO2 in power station cooling towers before it is released. James Highfield at A*STAR’s Institute of Chemical and Engineering Sciences, together with co-workers at the National Junior College of Singapore and Åbo Akademi University in Finland, has now described a cheaper and more permanent solution that would prevent the CO2 escaping back into the atmosphere. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org
By Scott Mendelson, Contributor
As will be the case at least a few times this summer, the big box office news will be not in America but in foreign markets as major summer movies open overseas prior to their domestic debuts. As is the case with Iron Man 3. My press screening isn’t until tomorrow, but the Shane Black-directed and Robert Downey Jr./Gwyneth Paltrow-starring threequel has already made a rather stunning $195 million overseas since opening in 42 markets on Wednesday. This is even more than the $185 million The Avengers debuted with overseas last summer on this weekend in 39 markets. Iron Man 2 also opened overseas first three summers ago, earning $92 million for its trouble, while the first Iron Man earned $99 million in its overseas debut, so this is pretty much par for the course. One could argue that the 3D ticket-price bump somewhat accounts for the gap between Iron Man 3 and the first two films, but I’m not going to nitpick a $195 million five-day debut. The first two Iron Man films earned $266 million and $311 million overseas respectively, with the second film out-grossing the first ‘over there’ even as it came in slightly under the first film’s domestic gross, so Iron Man 3 will have out-grossed the overseas numbers of its predecessors probably by the end of next week. In terms of overseas debuts, it’s the eighth-biggest, behind the $199 million debut for Twilight: Breaking Dawn 2 and ahead of the $193 million debut of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. For the record, overseas openings are sometimes tough to compare because of how many markets a given film opens in and/or what day of the week a film opens, but this is still a shockingly good debut for what should be a major worldwide box office player for summer 2013. It broke opening weekend records in Singapore, Indonesia, Argentina, Vietnam, Taiwan, Philippines, Malaysia, and Hong Kong. Of note, the film earned $7.2 million on 113 IMAX screens alone (about $64,000 per screen), also the IMAX debut of The Avengers last year.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
By Karsten Strauss, Forbes Staff
In scanning the globe for interesting startups, we at Forbes reach out to international contacts to give us intel on up and comers. Recently, Singapore-based strategy consultant, Solidiance, shot us a list of what that firm feels are the most innovative cities and some of the companies that call them home. The group includes game developers, mobile app builders and one company that can turn a wheelchair into a veritable racecar. Here’s a taste… Singapore ShowNearby: This is a Singaporean location-based service provider, serving information-seeking users, business owners and public agencies with relevant points of interests across mobile and web platforms. Its app is available on Android, iOS and Blackberry platforms. The company’s main revenue stream is via deals, discounts, promotions and advertisements run by businesses on its platform. In 2010, Global Yellow Pages invested about $3 million in ShowNearby. To increase business interest, ShowNearby has recently launched its analytics services and plans to expand operations to neighbouring Southeast Asian countries. Sydney BlueChilli: This technology and software development company that creates online web applications and injects them into online start-ups – an investment strategy the company calls “Venture Technology.” It welcomes and screens new online business ideas and if selected they embed their software team with the start-up under the same roof to build business value. Companies within the BlueChilli network receive cloud computing and storage credit worth up to $2,000 per month for up to a year from the australia-based Ninefold cloud and storage company. ClickView: ClickView is a fully-managed video content distribution and viewing system that focuses on producing media suites for education, government and enterprise. The company has assembled a comprehensive curriculum-linked video and worksheet library – called ClickView Exchange – from Australian educational video production companies, including Discovery Channel Education and Channel 4. Ninja Blocks: This Eveleigh, australia company claims to be able to connect the real world to the web by enabling devices like electricity outlets, room temperature/humidity sensors, motion sensors, and window & door contact mechanisms to be monitored through apps. Melbourne Engineair: Engineair is a company focusing on the development of air motor technology based on a unique rotary piston concept. Different from conventional air motors, the Engineair motor has virtually eliminated vibration, internal wear, friction and offers superior performance for a wide variety of applications. Melbourne city government was the first to use and deploy this motor for a yearlong testing process. Hong Kong GreenTomato: This mobile enterprise solutions and mobile technology company providing end to end services from consulting and design to coding and testing and finally launching content through mobile. GreenTomato has launched over 150 WAP services serving more than 3 million subscribers and over 50 iPhone apps. It won the technology company of the year award in Hong Kong in 2011. Auckland Nexus6: Makes inhalers under the brand ‘Smartinhaler’. This product allows physicians and patients to monitor real life use of inhaled treatments for respiratory conditions. This means that physicians can remotely ensure that
From: http://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2013/04/18/asian-pacific-tech-on-the-move/
