News Today

Tampines v Home pre-season cracker
TWO Sundays ago, they were the toast of Singapore after being crowned Asean champions. But, for national-team stalwarts S. Subramani, Lionel Lewis, Noh Alam Shah and Indra Sahdan Daud, it is back to domestic action. All four should feature when Tampines... [Read more]

GST hike: How it will benefit the poor
A WEEK before it is due to detail the impending hike in the goods and services tax (GST), the Government has reiterated the rationale for the move.Second Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam also tackled the question of why the changes were being... [Read more]

Female seminary students in Pakistan sit-in
ISLAMABAD - VEILED in burqas and armed with canes, scores of female seminary students have occupied a children's library in the Pakistani capital to protest against government plans to demolish mosques and madrasahs built without official permission. The unusual protest has... [Read more]

Carbon offsetting becoming good business
PARIS - HUNTING for a present for a pair of environmentally-sensitive newlyweds? Try this: a 'just married' voucher worth a few hundred dollars in carbon offsets. Smaller than a toaster but more meaningful, this piece of paper will compensate for about... [Read more]

Foreign influx: Mind and check the social divide
SOME years back, I was mistaken for a prostitute from China.I was sitting at a Geylang coffee shop frequented by the working ladies with their lilting charm, when someone asked me for my fee.While the episode makes for a good yarn... [Read more]

Ghosts and lollipops for 'chair-ity'
GHOULS and gingerbread men helped raise $7,500 for charity. They were featured among the creations of 150 youths from 10 schools for the 100 Chairs project to raise funds for the Singapore Children's Society. Three Nanyang Technological University mass communication students... [Read more]

Donors pledge $12b in aid to Lebanon
PARIS - SAUDI Arabia, the United States, France and other donors pledged about US$7.6 billion (S$12 billion) in aid to Lebanon yesterday to bolster the Western-backed government in Beirut and help the country recover from war. The pledges poured in during... [Read more]

Factory output grows 5.1% despite slide in electronics
FACTORIES ended last year with a well-worn story - slumping output in the electronics sector dragged down Singapore's overall manufacturing output last month. Industrial production managed growth of 5.1 per cent in December despite the third consecutive month of decline in... [Read more]

Two leaders of Poso militant group nabbed
JAKARTA - TWO leaders of a local Islamic militant group that terrorised the Central Sulawesi province of Poso and had links to the Jemaah Islamiah (JI) have been arrested.The two were arrested after a shootout that left one of them injured,... [Read more]

S'pore 'puzzled' by report on extradition deal
SINGAPORE is a 'little puzzled' by a Jakarta Post report which said that Indonesia and Singapore had moved closer to signing an extradition treaty.The report on Tuesday quoted Indonesia's chief negotiator Arif Havas Oegroseno as saying the two countries had agreed... [Read more]

Study proves misuse of antibiotics and superbug link
PARIS - MEDICAL experts have long assumed that misuse of antibiotics breeds drug-resistant superbugs, but a study released yesterday has finally provided smoking-gun proof as to how this occurs. Bacterial diseases that were once easy to treat, such as tuberculosis, gonorrhoea,... [Read more]