Taeyang of K-pop group Big Bang began his military service Monday.
The vocalist will undergo his five-week basic training in Cheorwon, Gangwon Province, after which he will be assigned to an army unit, according to his agency YG Entertainment.
Fans gathered at the scene to say goodbye to the star on Monday afternoon, while his wife Min Hyo-rin was absent from the scene.
Taeyang’s enlistment will be followed by that of bandmate Daesung, who is set to join the army on Tuesday.
Big Bang leader G-Dragon and rapper T.O.P, who is currently serving as a public service worker after being dishonorably discharged from the police due to charges of marijuana use, enlisted on Feb. 27 and January last year, respectively.
Seungri, the only Big Bang member who has yet to start military service, plans to enlist after releasing a solo album sometime during the first half of the year.
Aside from his group activities, Taeyang has led a successful solo career with hits such as “Eyes, Nose, Lips” and “Darling.” He released his third full-length album “White Night” in August last year.
INGAPORE: Retail sales fell 8.4 per cent in January from a year earlier, due in part to a drop in motor vehicle sales, according to figures released by the Department of Statistics (Singstat) on Monday (Mar 12).
This after retail sales rose a revised 6.3 per cent in the previous month, Singstat said.
Sales of motor vehicles fell 9.8 per cent from the year before and fell 20.9 per cent from December.
The year-on-year fall was also attributed to the Chinese New Year holidays, which fell in January last year but was celebrated in February this year, Singstat said.
The Government announced in October last year that it would not allow any growth in its car population from February, citing land scarcity and billions of dollars in planned public transport investments.
(Source: Singstat)
Excluding motor vehicles, retail sales declined 8.1 per cent.
Sales of food & beverage services declined 13.2 per cent in January 2018.
Due to higher sales recorded a year ago when Chinese New Year fell in January 2017, retail sales of wearing apparel and footwear, food retailers, supermarkets & hypermarkets, department stores and watches and jewellery decreased between 10.5 per cent and 17.7 per cent in January 2018.
Singstat said the total retail sales value in January was estimated at S$3.9 billion, lower than the S$4.3 billion in January last year.
The estimated proportion of online retail sales is around 4.1 per cent of total retail sales, it added.
SINGAPORE: Collagen derived from fish scales could be used to used to heal wounds, according to a study conducted by researchers at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and National University of Singapore (NUS).
The study included fish scales from fishes that are commonly cooked such as sea bass, snakehead and tilapia.
The scales, usually removed before cooking, contain collagen that can be chemically modified to be water-soluble and used for various biomedical applications, NTU said in a press release on Monday (Mar 12).
The modified collagen can also incorporate drugs to produce wound dressings with a higher healing potential, according to the findings from the team comprising associate professor Cleo Choong and associate professor Andrew Tan from NTU, and associate professor Veronique Angeli from NUS.
NTU Singapore scientists found that collagen (in right petri dish) processed from snakehead fish scales has potential for biomedical applications. (Photo: NTU)
The modified collagen was later tested on mice and it was found that it helped improve the “potential for tissue repair and regeneration”, according to the study was published in the research journal Acta Biomaterialia.
“Applying collagen dressings to a wound to stimulate tissue growth can provide relief for a wide variety of injuries.
“Collagen dressings come in all shapes and sizes – gels, pastes, powders and pads. It can potentially treat wounds of all dimensions,” said Dr Tan, who is from the NTU School of Biological Sciences.
The study also showed that fish scales-derived collagen was also easily obtained as 200mg of collagen could be extracted from one or two fish, and the extraction process costs just over S$4.
LOCAL FISHERIES TAKE PART IN RESEARCH
The research team partnered with a local fish farm that supplied the fish scales used in the study.
“We descale and sell over 200 fish a day to wholesalers, restaurants and walk-in customers. If these discarded fish scales can lead to successful biomedical applications in future, it would be a good use of these waste material,” said the owner of KhaiSeng Trading & Fish Farm, Mr Teo Khai Seng.
The research team is also in talks with a few local fisheries to find ways to convert aquaculture waste material, like fish scales, into useful materials, as well as to scale-up the collagen extraction process for effective waste-to-resource management.
OTHER MEDICAL USES
Previous studies from the same team also highlighted the effects of fish scale-derived collagen on human umbilical vein endothelial cells. The cells produced 2.5 times more collagen responsible for blood vessel formation than cells cultured on other forms of collagen.
The findings have gained international attention as the collagen from non-mammalian sources could overcome the various biological and cultural issues associated with collagen from cattle and pigs.
“Clinical application of these materials has been limited due to cultural and religious restrictions associated with these mammalian tissue-derived materials.
“In addition, more checks and processing have to be in place due to the risk of diseases that can be transmitted from mammals to humans,” said Mr Choong, who is from the NTU School of Materials Science and Engineering.
SEOUL- The South Korean army faces a new problem as a number of K-pop and K-drama stars enlist this year. After G-Dragon of Big Bang enlisted in February, his agency says the military training centre has received an “excessive” amount of fan mail addressed to the star.
YG Entertainment, which represents the singer-rapper, issued a notice on its social media account and website on Saturday (March 10). The statement read: “G-Dragon is in a difficult position within his military unit as the amount of incoming mail from fans is excessive.”
According to the agency’s explanation, every e-mail sent to the military division has to be printed out and handed over to the soldier. But the number of letters sent to G-Dragon is depleting the amount of ink and paper allotted to the office’s printing machine. Office work is slowing down, while letters to other soldiers in training may be affected as well.
“G-Dragon feels sorry to fellow training soldiers and also to his fans, as he cannot possibly read all of the letters,” the notice read.
G-Dragon, whose real name is Kwon Ji Young, began his mandatory military service on Feb 27. In South Korea, all able-bodied men have to carry out their military duty for about two years.
His fellow members from K-pop group Big Bang, Daesung and Taeyang, are set to enlist this week. T.O.P began his military service in February last year.
The Korean army is also expecting a TV star: actor Lee Min Ho will start his four-week basic training on Thursday at Korea Army Training Centre in Nonsan, South Chungcheong Province.
The actor’s agency MYM Entertainment on Sunday confirmed Lee will be joining basic training. The agency added that there will be no official meeting ahead of his entering the center.
After the four-week training, Lee will return to his public service worker duty at the Suseo Social Welfare Center, where he has been serving for 10 months.
The US is like a “heavyweight sumo wrestler brow-beating wrestlers of lighter weight”, the Emeritus Senior Minister wrote in a Facebook post.
ESM Goh Chok Tong speaking at a dialogue session on Saturday (Jan 6).
(Updated: )
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SINGAPORE: New trade tariffs imposed by the US on steel and aluminium imports and the resulting jostling among countries for exemptions from them portend a “major change in the international trade order”, Emeritus Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong said on Sunday (Mar 11).
In a Facebook post, Mr Goh said this change is “bad for the world, and especially for countries like Singapore which depend on trade and an open economic environment”.
US President Donald Trump announced duties of 25 per cent on imported steel and 10 per cent on aluminium last Thursday, to come into force in 15 days. The move stoked fears of a tit-for-tat trade war that could drive up prices and depress growth around the globe.
While the tariffs are also being imposed on US allies, allies can negotiate for exemptions or lower tariffs, Mr Goh pointed out.
“So, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel says, ‘It’s purely business.'”
The European Union and Japan have urged the United States to grant them exemptions from metal import tariffs, while Canada, Mexico and Australia are likely to be exempted.
The jostling among countries reflects US President Donald Trump’s bilateral deal-making at work, Mr Goh said, adding: “The US is like a heavyweight sumo wrestler brow-beating wrestlers of lighter weight.”
Mr Goh said that if the US succeeds with its “strong-armed bilateral negotiation on tariffs”, other big countries may follow suit.
“Beyond trade, the current liberal international system in which countries have thrived, is beginning to disintegrate,” he said.
China may step in to fill in the void left by an “America First” policy, but it will carry different values and rules,” he added.
“In a world where, as Lee Kuan Yew once said, ‘Big fish eats small fish, small fish eats shrimps’, these are worrying times for Singapore. That is why Singapore and 10 other countries signed the Comprehensive Trans-Pacific Partnership to keep international trade open and rules-based. Hope the sensible countries win.”
China’s Commerce Minister Zhong Shan criticised the US tariffs on Sunday saying: “There are no winners in a trade war. It will only bring disaster to China and the United States and the world.”
The US is the world’s biggest importer of steel, purchasing 35 million tonnes of raw material in 2017. Of those imports, South Korea, Japan, China and India accounted for 6.6 million tonnes.
WASHINGTON – An 89-year-old Roman Catholic nun who has battled pop star Katy Perry for years over the sale of a Los Angeles convent collapsed and died during a court appearance, according to media reports and supporters.
Sister Catherine Rose Holzman, one of two aging nuns who were fighting the sale of the 8-acre (3-hectare) convent, died on Friday (March 9) during related legal proceedings in Los Angeles County Court, Fox affiliate KTTV reported.
“To Katy Perry, please stop. It’s not doing anyone any good except hurting a lot of people,” Sister Holzman had earlier told KTTV as she entered the courthouse with Sister Rita Callanan.
On Saturday a website set up to back the nuns’ legal battle carried a picture of Holzman with the caption, “Rest with the angels our most precious treasure.”
A spokeswoman for Perry, one of the world’s top-selling pop stars, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Los Angeles County medical examiner and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles did not respond to queries about the cause of death.
At the centre of the legal dispute is the property Holzman and other members of the Sisters Of The Immaculate Heart of Mary had once lived in.
Holzman and Cullanan, among five nuns who had lived at the convent, had sought to sell the property for US$15.5 million (S$20.4 million) to restaurateur Dana Hollister, who wanted to convert the property into a hotel.
The Archdiocese of Los Angeles sued to block the sale in 2015, arguing that the nuns did not have authority to sell the property to Hollister. A judge ruled in 2016 that the sale was invalid, paving the way for Perry to buy the site from the archdiocese.
SINGAPORE: The story about climate change arguably got its first big public hit more than ten years ago with Al Gore’s documentary about global warming An Inconvenient Truth.
But maintaining public attention and keeping the heat on climate change action have been tough.
People are hungry for news about the risk of climate change but boring, technical jargon is alienating them, said the United Nations top environment official Erik Solheim in December 2017.
People need to be excited and inspired to take action and change their behaviour, he added.
Yet “the language of environmentalists has been boring, so uninspiring … If we just speak a technical language, with many acronyms and politically-correct phrases, no one will listen,” he said in an interview during a Bonn conference on landscapes.
Perhaps the consequences of human-driven climate change seem abstract, technical or too far away in the future.
Do these in turn cause readers to look at climate change news, shrug and then move on to other stories?
There’s a strong case to be made about the importance of communicating the priority we need to place on climate change.
Recent extreme weather pattern are giving us a glimpse into the catastrophe we might find ourselves in if we fail to act.
A woman pushing her car which stalled in a flood at Bedok North on Monday morning (Jan 8), after a heavy downpour over many parts of Singapore. (Photo: Twitter/SynCPositive)
EXTREME WEATHER IN EARLY JANUARY
The start of 2018 has been marked by extreme weather with widespread impact on public safety, transport, energy and health around the world.
A major winter storm hit the United States Atlantic coast in early January, battering coastal areas with heavy snow, blizzards and strong winds and a drop in temperatures.
Boston suffered coastal flooding after it saw the highest ever recorded tide since 1921.
Flash flooding and deadly mudslides took place in southern California because of intense rain, in areas where protective vegetation have been destroyed by devastating wildfires in late 2017.
In Asia, central and eastern China saw heavy rain and snow in Shaanxi, Henan, Hubei, Anhui and Jiangsu provinces in early January, with monthly maximum rainfall levels broken in 92 counties.
In the southern hemisphere, Cape Town is running out of water, because reliable winter rains have vanished — a phenomenon one meteorologist calls a once-in-628-years weather event.
If the rains do not materialise and consumption does not fall in Cape Town, people will be forced to use standpipes, officials say. (Photo: AFP/Rodger Bosch)
Australia was gripped by intense heat, with the weather station in Sydney reaching 47.3°C on Jan 7, the hottest in 80 years.
Flash floods, strong winds and hailstones in Singapore coupled with a bout of freakish cool weather, the longest cold spell experienced here in at least a decade showed we were not immune.
These extreme weather events were both signals of a dangerous, human-made shift in Earth’s climate as much as they were a natural stretch of bad luck.
Monsoon surges that bring cool weather partially explains what transpired in Singapore.
Natural climate cycles, especially the interplay between upper atmospheric conditions over polar regions and mid-latitude conditions over the oceans and on land, were primary forces driving the extreme weather globally.
But natural cycles by themselves don’t explain the recent number of record-breaking extreme weather events.
The reality is that the forces undergirding is global warming – and it’s all coming to a head.
NASA’s Terra satellite captured this visible light image of Tropical Cyclone Berguitta moving toward Mauritius. (Photo: NASA)
HOTTER, WITH RISING SEA LEVELS
The Earth is getting warmer, with significantly more moisture in the atmosphere. Decades of data show that a long-term build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is trapping heat and warming up lands, oceans, and the atmosphere.
17 of the 18 warmest years in the 136-year global temperature record all have occurred since 2001, with the exception of 1998.
The year 2016 ranks as the warmest on record globally and here in Singapore, which had a mean annual temperature of 28.4°C.
2016 was an El Niño year, and mainland Southeast Asia encountered its warmest monthly mean surface air temperatures in April 2016 since record-keeping began.
Apart from surpassing national temperature records in mainland Southeast Asia, this event disrupted crop production, imposed societal distress and resulted in peak energy consumption.
Battered by massive cyclones, El Nino-fuelled drought and swollen king tides, fragile Pacific island nations were one of the hardest hit countries in 2016. (Photo: AFP/Giff Johnson)
El Niño might have exacerbated the situation, but the temperatures would never have happened without the human-made shift in Earth’s climate.
Some models have predicted that the warming of the Earth’s climate could increase the average strength of hurricanes and typhoons.
Scientists are confident that rising sea levels are leading to higher storm surges and more floods – and the mean sea level in the Strait of Singapore has increased at the rate of 1.2mm to 1.7mm each year in the period 1975 to 2009.
By the end of the century, the average world temperature could increase by 5 °C, depending in part on how much carbon we emit between now and then.
The latest climate models concluded with high confidence that with continued warming projected for the rest of this century, Singapore and other countries in Southeast Asia will experience more frequent, record-breaking hot Aprils, just like the extreme weather event of 2016.
Workers in outdoor environments including those in construction and shipping are particularly at risk from heat-related health issues. (File photo: Ngau Kai Yan)
MOST LIKELY AND MOST SEVERE THREAT
The Global Risks Report 2018 of the World Economic Forum (WEF) states that extreme weather events are the most likely and most severe threat facing humanity in 2018 – because scientists expect the frequency of extreme weather events to increase substantially.
The trend towards more frequent extreme weather events only underscores how important it is that we enhance our ability to predict and manage them. So what can we do?
The solution has been clear for more than two decades: Governments must take aggressive action to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The extreme weather lends greater urgency to climate change initiatives like those under the Paris Agreement.
An essential key to meeting the challenge of extreme weather is critical environmental intelligence.
Just like the intelligence of the security world, intelligence in the environmental arena combines data, analysis, modelling, and assessment.
The smart approach to extreme weather is to attack all the risk factors, by designing crops that can survive drought, buildings that can resist floods and high winds, policies that discourage people from building in dangerous places – and of course, by shifting our economy to greener energy sources and reducing our greenhouse-gas emissions.
The Paris Agreement commits signatories to efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming, which is blamed for melting ice caps and glaciers, rising sea levels and more violent weather events. (Photo: AFP)
Singapore has taken steps to reduce the impact of extreme weather events by improving drainage to reduce flood-prone areas, developing weather-proof technologies, and cooling the island by growing urban green spaces such as rooftop gardens.
Where climate change poses a real danger, we cannot take the attitude that it’s someone else’s job to sort out.
Indeed, the biggest challenge we must guard against in this battle against climate change is people tuning out to the message about global warming.
Erik Solheim mentioned this when he said:
For this to happen, we have to speak in a different language that is simpler and breaks down the science to explain to people what climate change really means for them, in their daily lives, here and now.
As individuals, we should seize everyday opportunities to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. We can recycle, reuse and reduce. Whenever we can, we should use public transport and walk.
Quite literally, small steps can lead to large-scale change when we, citizens of the earth, act together.
Professor Benjamin P Horton is principal investigator at the Earth Observatory of Singapore at Nanyang Technological University.
SINGAPORE: Three people were sent to hospital after a fire on Saturday (Mar 9) at a residential unit at 636C Senja Road triggered by a Personal Mobility Device (PMD), the Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) said.
The three occupants of the third storey HDB unit were sent to Ng Teng Fong Hospital for smoke inhalation, SCDF added.
SCDF responded to the fire at 9.05pm and conducted “forcible entry through the front door”.
Firefighters pitched a ladder at the rear of the unit and rescued three occupants from the air-conditioner ledge of the unit, SCDF added.
In a Facebook post on Saturday detailing the incident, SCDF said: “Preliminary investigation findings indicate the cause of fire is of electrical origin and had originated from the battery pack of the Personal Mobility Device (PMD).”
The Facebook post was accompanied by tips to remind members of the public on the prevention of PMD fires:
The video scrolls on your social media feed, and unfolds into what looks like an episode of a TV series or a short film. Maybe it’s a tearjerker, which, after you’ve watched to the end, you “Like” and “Share”, with a comment on how wonderful it is – even though you realise, perhaps belatedly, that it’s advertising.
To hook viewers (read: customers), companies are now tapping into a new channel that markets their brands in a non-intrusive, even pleasing way – video-storytelling. Brunch this Saturday in the BT Weekend explores the trend.
In our Investing & Wealth section, chartist Daryl Guppy shows why gold and oil will become casualties as America rushes headlong into (more) debt. And CFA Society Insights dives into the telecoms sector with an analysis of the fundamentals that determine performance.
On the hunt for a new job? Traditional job interviews in which candidates are grilled face to face still exist, but more unconventional methods such as Skype interviews are becoming par for the course. Young or old, techie or not, Cubicle Files says it’s time for those of you looking to switch employers to get acquainted with the new interview approaches out there.
When you’re on a vacation, you want to be able to do as you like (within reason). Yet some establishments have in place rules that serve only to annoy. Our Saturday Soapbox columnist fingers a few culprits and wonders, “Why?”
And in The Finish Line this week, we preview this Saturday’s big Premier League match between Manchester United and Liverpool at Old Trafford.
