STUART MULJADI WRITES — “The day the earth stood still” is the best way to describe the past couple of weeks. COVID-19 has divided countries, tanked economies and businesses and, worst of all, the virus has caused a shortage of the world’s supply of toilet paper. People’s daily lives are…
TOM PLATE WRITES – Adept moral leadership at the top, whether in Washington or Hong Kong, is central to any serious public-health strategy. ‘Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed on the world,’ famously wrote the poet William Butler Yeats in 1919. One hundred years later, here…
NATASHA VASS WRITES – In a world in which chronic disease and childhood obesity are on the rise, it is no question that countries must come up with solutions. Enter Singapore. At the October 2019 Singapore Health and Biomedical Congress, Edwin Tong, senior minister of state for law and health,…
Chantal Nong talks about her experiences with Crazy Rich Asians and the movie’s impact on film awards. Nong is an executive producer at Warner Brothers. She recently oversaw the production of Crazy Rich Asians. She has now moved over to DC to be the VP of Production. She attended USC…
NICOLE ALAVERDIAN WRITES– As the world scrambles to adopt more environmentally friendly practices, there is one overlooked culprit of climate change: animal agriculture. Despite a recent wave of vegetarian, vegan and plant-based food offerings in the Asian-Pacific, a study by the Food Service Consultants Society predicts that in Asia “the…
Singapore lags behind many countries in its protection and support of the LGBTQ community. On September 10, 2018, 43-year-old Singaporean resident Johnson Ong filed to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code, which criminalizes any sexual behavior between two consenting adult males. Ong’s petition has since received support from international…
MICHELLE DOR WRITES — An unemployed 45-year old man in Singapore by the name of Joseph Murugan allegedly attempted to steal free roti, a native Indian dish, by knifing a store clerk. Assisted by two others, Murugan slashed the chef with a knife after he was turned down, leaving a…
“To have another language is to possess a second soul.” – Charlemagne ANAS ALZAHRANI WRITES — When non-native English speakers decide to learn English in a different country, the first locations that come to mind are the U.S and England, where English is the first language. Command over the English…
TOM PLATE WRITES – Next week, it now seems, the American President will be in Singapore, along with the North Korean leader. Both are famously quirky. Is Lee worried? We pay a call on the city-state’s prime minister, host of a monster summit that – on the off-chance all goes…
ASIA MEDIA REPORTS – The Temasek Dialogue ‘breakfast club’ invited Asia Media International editor-in-chief Tom Plate to discuss and defend his perspectives on the roiling U.S.-China relationship. Temasek Holdings is one of Singapore’s two sovereign wealth funds, and is a major shareholder in the city-state’s biggest firms, including Singapore Airlines…
ASIA MEDIA STAFF WRITES– Amos Yee, a teen blogger who fled Singapore, has been granted asylum in the United States. Yee was released from U.S. detention after 9 months of being detained. Yee first received asylum in March, but was quickly rejected by the Department of Homeland Security. However, the…
PROFESSOR TOM PLATE WRITES — The U.S. public rarely gives larger-than-life Indonesia, the most populous country in Southeast Asia, more than passing thought, and even on those rare moments it might mainly be thinking about nothing more than a dream vacation in Bali. Yet, as every cosmopolitan knows, the world’s…
EXCERPTED FROM AGENCE FRANCE PRESS AND OTHER NEWS ACCOUNTS – A Singaporean teenager who became notorious for profanity-laced attacks on Singapore’s revered late leader Lee Kuan Yew is seeking political asylum in the U.S., his lawyers said Thursday. Amos Yee, 18, a filmmaker turned activist who has been repeatedly jailed…
RYAN URBAN WRITES – On October 1, a Singapore tech startup bought half of Rolling Stone, becoming the first-ever outside investor in the 49-year-old magazine. BandLab Technologies is a social music company aimed at encouraging rising music artists to collaborate with one another by combining features from Facebook, SoundCloud and…
RYAN URBAN WRITES – The recent detention of two Singapore men under a decades-old law that allows people to be held for two years without trial shows just how worried – and ill-prepared – some countries are in the fight against modern terrorism. The men were detained under an old…
TOM PLATE WRITES – Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong suffered a scary spell during his deliverance of the annual National Day speech, but after fast work by an emergency team and a brief rest, returned to the microphone to soldier on. And this is very good news indeed. Lee,…
