SINGAPORE – Cows, scholarships and million-dollar lottery draws – governments around the world have dangled these and other incentives in front of their citizens to help them overcome vaccine hesitancy and give national Covid-19 vaccination drives a booster shot. While Singapore has been making steady progress on the vaccination front, some observers have asked whether […]
SINGAPORE – Food delivery platforms may not be the easy answer to solve the current woes faced by hawkers amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Many are worried that the costs of hopping onto food delivery platforms would eat into their already-thin profit margins. Onboarding charges and commission fees could force them to choose between keeping their […]
SINGAPORE – Dinner-time crowds were thin at Jem and Westgate on Sunday (June 6), the first day the two shopping malls in Jurong East reopened for business after a mandatory two-week closure. The two malls were linked to a Covid-19 cluster that numbered 63 cases as at Saturday. When The Straits Times visited the malls […]
BEIJING (REUTERS) – A social media account for popular Chinese e-commerce site Xiaohongshu, or “Little Red Book”, was unavailable on Sunday (June 6), after it issued a post on Friday, the anniversary of the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy activists in Tiananmen Square, a highly sensitive date in China. The Friday post on its account on […]
SINGAPORE – Around 190 home owners and contractors of Housing Board flats were found to have carried out unauthorised renovation works infringing on the HDB’s guidelines in the past three years. More than 38,000 flats were inspected by the HDB from 2018 to 2020. Of these, less than 0.5 per cent of flats were found […]
SEOUL (BLOOMBERG) – South Korea plans to accelerate its space development programme including by boosting cooperation with the US in a move that may help the Biden administration’s Asia strategy to counter China’s growing global clout. “We will expand our space cooperation with the international community, including the US,” South Korean President Moon Jae-in said in […]
SINGAPORE – Convicted match-fixer Wilson Raj Perumal has been fighting human trafficking allegations in Hungary for almost a year, fearing he will be deported to Singapore, where he is wanted for skipping bail. In a letter in March this year to his sister Malar, which The Straits Times saw, he said the “noose is so […]
SINGAPORE – For the last 54 years, a flat at Block 45 Tanglin Halt has been Madam Soh Kim Tee’s home. She was 16 when she moved into the estate with her family. At 20, she got married and the couple moved out for two years, but they returned after buying the current unit. Please […]
TOKYO – Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been shoring up his power base within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) by launching new study groups and raising his public profile with more media interviews. This has given rise to widespread speculation that Mr Abe, 66, who resigned last year due to a flare-up […]
SINGAPORE – Girls and women here enjoy a relatively high degree of safety, but this may not be the case when they are online, said Senior Minister of State for Foreign Affairs and National Development Sim Ann on Saturday (June 5). She and Parliamentary Secretary for Communications and Information and Health Rahayu Mahzam were speaking to the […]