Yesterday was Ms Nur Aizza’s 36th birthday.

And she started the day by getting trapped in her car after it overturned while on her way to work.

Her husband, Mr Shawal Latib, 35, was driving their blue Honda Fit at 7.05am when they were involved in a collision with a black Toyota Corolla outside Khatib Camp along Sembawang Road.

When The New Paper arrived at the scene at about 9.15am, Mr Shawal, an engineering specialist, was still there waiting for his car to be towed away.

Mr Shawal, who drives his wife to work every day, said: “After the car had flipped over, I could smell the metal and the road. I crawled out of my window, but my wife was stuck, so I went over and pulled her out.”

He said Ms Nur Aizza, a teacher, had bruises on her head and was dizzy but could still walk.

A police spokesman told TNP she was taken conscious to Khoo Teck Puat Hospital. She has since been discharged.

The couple, who have been married for 10 years and have no children, live about five minutes away from Khatib Camp.

Miss Parveen Banu was on her way to work when she drove past the scene at about 8.10am.

She told TNP she saw one car on the kerb and the overturned Honda, and that several vehicles had stopped nearby.

“Luckily, only two cars were involved in the collision, and no one was badly hurt,” she said.

TNP understands that the driver of the Toyota was an Uber driver.

Another accident happened in a car park next to Block 727, Clementi West Street 2 at 10am on Tuesday.

Lianhe Wanbao reported yesterday that a lorry crane carrying about 1,600kg of cement dropped its cargo on a Toyota Camry, crushing its roof.

No one was hurt.

hmang@sph.com.sg

This article was first published on Feb 23, 2017.
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PETALING JAYA – An American performing arts lecturer who had apparently taught at a few universities in Malaysia has been exposed as a sexual predator by a US school he worked at more than 30 years ago.

According to his LinkedIn profile, the lecturer is now based in Thailand, and attempts to contact him have been unsuccessful.

The lecturer, who taught at the prestigious Milton Academy in Boston from 1973 to 1987, was found to have engaged in sexual misconduct with students during his time there.

This came to light following a recently concluded investigation commissioned by the academy.

In a letter sent out to the Milton community on Tuesday, school officials said that a nine-month investigation by a New York security firm it hired yielded the shocking findings – the lecturer sexually abused at least 12 male students, all minors at the time.

Three other former employees, who were not named in the letter, were also found to have engaged in similar misconduct.

The lecturer was sacked in 1987 after admitting to molesting a student, but the extent of his crimes is only coming to light now following the investigation.

The probe was launched following a 2016 news report on sexual misconduct in US private schools.

The report prompted a fact-finding mission on whether any transgressions had occurred in the past.

They hired T&M Protection Resources, a private consulting firm, to conduct the investigation that began in May 2016.

The firm discovered that the school’s management at the time had allowed the lecturer to continue working despite being aware of his misconduct.

The letter mentioned that then headmaster of Milton Academy Jerome A. Pieh, “had some knowledge” of his misconduct in 1982, “but allowed him to continue working there for five more years before he was sacked in 1987”.

Since then, he has worked in Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia and is well-known in the theatre and performing arts scene.

According to his LinkedIn profile, he has worked as a theatre director, acting coach and performing arts educator for nearly 30 years in South-East Asia.

Milton Academy’s board of trustees on Tuesday expressed “deep regret” for not protecting its students all those years ago, and failing to investigate him at the time.

“On behalf of Milton Academy and its board of trustees, we want to acknowledge and deeply apologise for those failures,” said the current head of school Todd Bland, and board of trustees president Lisa Donohue.

The academy also said that it has contacted Immigration authorities about the findings of its investigation as well as the employers he worked for after leaving the school.

These, apparently, number about 18 schools and theatre organisations.

When it comes to urban tree density, Singapore wears the crown.

The City in a Garden trumped 16 cities around the world, in a study by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the World Economic Forum.

Almost 30 per cent of the Republic’s urban areas are covered by greenery.

This puts Singapore ahead of Sydney, Australia, and Vancouver, Canada, which are tied for second place with 25.9 per cent.

The US city of Sacramento, capital of California state, follows closely with 23.6 per cent.

Of the 17 cities, Paris has the smallest percentage of greened urban areas at 8.8 per cent.

More cities will gradually be added to the database, the researchers said in December, when the list was uploaded on a website known as Treepedia.

It was again highlighted by news site Business Insider earlier this week.

Researchers use data from Google Street View to measure trees and vegetation in cities around the world to form the Green View Index (GVI), presented on a scale of 0 to 100.

It shows the percentage of canopy cover for a particular location. The researchers determine this by obtaining Google Street View images in each city, then extracting green areas using computer vision techniques, which is processed to obtain the GVI.

As Google Street View shows panoramic photographs of streets and buildings, it allows the study to capture data such as vertical gardens.

ROADS

But as the images are taken by cameras perched atop cars, only areas with roads are covered in the study, said Mr So Wonyoung, a data visualisation specialist from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, which is involved in the project.

Professor Carlo Ratti, the director of the MIT Senseable City Lab and head of the project, said the goal of Treepedia is to get people to take action to improve urban tree cover in their cities, by campaigning for the authorities to plant more trees in a certain area, for instance.

Plant scientist Lahiru Wijedasa, who is pursuing a doctorate at the National University of Singapore, said the study showed the success of Singapore’s long-term planning.

Indeed, the amount of high-rise greenery in Singapore, which includes gardens on roofs and building facades, is a good indicator. This had grown from 61ha in 2013 to 72ha in 2015, which far exceeded the 2009 target of 50ha the government had hoped to hit by 2030.

The most recent figures from the authorities show it has hit 100ha. The new target is now 200ha of building greenery by the same deadline.

But Mr Lahiru said climate change poses a new threat for roadside trees here, which already grapple with stressors such as having to share space with electrical cables and drainage systems.

“I have concerns about whether our greenery as it is today can survive. We have seen healthy trees die standing up during droughts in the recent years,” he said.

The answer to this could lie in greater research on developing more resilient roadside trees, and developing better soil conditions, he said.

This article was first published on Feb 23, 2017.
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