Despite a hefty fee of $450 for men, a Singapore couple managed to secure enough interest to organise 10 sex parties in less than two months, Nanyang Siang Pau reported.

At least four to five women from Vietnam and Cambodia would come dressed like doctors and sailors to seduce the men.

The organisers would throw these parties at various high-rise units and participants would be told of the venue a day before the event.

It was learnt that a rendezvous was cancelled on June 30 when it was widely spread online.

However, the organisers made a comeback on July 12 with a small-scale party involving 12 men and three women.

Older residents who have to climb a small flight of steps to get into their Housing Board flat may soon have one less obstacle to overcome.

The Housing Board plans to expand its Enhancement for Active Seniors (Ease) programme to include subsidies for ramps more than one step high, National Development Minister Lawrence Wong said yesterday.

The goal is to make HDB estates more elderly-friendly, given the ageing population, he told reporters after visiting Nee Soon GRC’s Kebun Baru ward.

“You’ll see more of these needs emerging – mobility, access, connectivity but also community. You want (the elderly) to stay active,” he said, adding that expanding Ease is one way to help seniors.

The scheme, launched in 2012, has subsidised about 90,000 households to fit their flats with elderly- friendly features such as grab bars and slip-resistant treatment for toilet tiles.

Eligible home owners – those with an elderly household member aged 65 and above, or 60 to 64 years old for those who require assistance in daily living – pay only a small part of the cost.

Currently, only ramps that can overcome a one-level difference within the flat or at its entrance are subsidised.

This is because ramps that cover two to three steps may be put at too steep an incline to be useful, or end up obstructing the common corridor, said Mr Wong.

But the Housing Board has been looking for space-efficient solutions that would not cost residents too much money or time to maintain, the minister added.

“Once we have identified a good solution, we hope to expand the Ease programme so that more residents can benefit,” he said. “I hope it can be done as soon as possible.”

The multi-step entrance was a feature of some flats built in the 1970s and 1980s to give residents a greater sense of security and privacy.

Yesterday, Mr Wong visited one of them, retired cleaner Low Sok Chin, 70.

Madam Low was concerned that the two steps separating her three-room HDB flat from the corridor may make it difficult to take her husband out for his medical appointments.

Last month, her husband, Mr Teo Ah Koon, 78, suffered a stroke that left him unable to speak, swallow and walk. He is still hospitalised.

She said in Mandarin: “I will have to wait till my husband comes home to see what the situation is, but it is comforting to know that there are options for ramps if we need it, and that there will be subsidies.”

Besides visiting Madam Low, Mr Wong, who was joined by the ward’s MP Henry Kwek, met low-income families who are part of a grassroots welfare programme and residents having breakfast at a hawker centre.

He also attended a cooking demonstration by children and held a closed-door dialogue with residents.

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Residents of an HDB estate in Serangoon were shocked to see a domestic worker balancing precariously on a ledge to clean windows on Saturday.

The incident occurred at about 2.30pm at an eighth-floor unit of Block 539 in Serangoon North Avenue 4, Chinese newspaper Shin Min Daily News reported yesterday.

Ms He, a 40-year-old housewife who lives at a block opposite, told Shin Min that she saw a maid climbing outside to clean the windows.

“To see that maid standing on the windowsill, grabbing onto the window to clean it without any safety measures on the eighth floor, it really frightened me,” she added.

She said she had wanted to go over to stop the maid but changed her mind when she saw that there seemed to be other people in the unit.

Another resident, Mr Chen, a 45-year-old construction worker, had also witnessed the maid’s actions.

“I wanted to shout at her to ask her not to do that, but I was worried that if I did, disaster may follow if she got frightened so I could only watch.”

Mr Chen added that the maid had spent about 15 minutes wiping the windows, most of the time squatting on the sill.

Madam He said this was the first time that she had seen the domestic worker carry out such a dangerous act.

“Luckily, she climbed down safely in the end, much to my relief,” she added.

Shin Min approached the maid’s employer, who said that the woman had worked at his home for about five months.

He said the maid was hard-working although they had some difficulty communicating.

After he saw the picture of the maid cleaning the window, the employer was shocked and said that he did not know she had done such a thing.

He was normally away from home during the day, with only his mother and children around.

He added that he would advise the maid to be more careful and that he had instructed her not to clean the windows’ exterior since it would rain anyway.

myp@sph.com.sg

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SINGAPORE police and courts will get wider powers to deal with troublemakers on flights when new laws are passed in the next six to 12 months.

This will come before a global ruling by the United Nations to tackle a growing problem of unruly air passengers, The Straits Times has learnt.

Under current international civil aviation laws stipulated by the Tokyo Convention, Singapore can take action only if the culprit arrives on Singapore Airlines (SIA) or other Singapore carriers.

This means that troublemakers on foreign carriers usually escape unaffected. To plug this loophole, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (Icao) aims to replace the Tokyo Convention with the Montreal Protocol.

The new protocol, expected to come into force within two to three years, will give countries more teeth to deal with offences like travellers refusing to comply with safety instructions and physically or verbally abusing cabin crew.

Singapore, which plans to enact its own laws before the global mandate, has consulted airlines operating at Changi Airport.

All support the initiative, according to a spokesman for the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (CAAS). “The ability to take such law enforcement action would be a strong deterrence against unruly behaviour on board aircraft arriving in Singapore,” she said.

Tim Colehan, assistant director for member and external relations at the International Air Transport Association (Iata) which represents global carriers, said there has been a rise in unruly behaviour in recent years.

In 2014, airlines reported 9,316 incidents, or one for every 1,400 flights.

From 2007 to 2014, the average was one per 1,530 flights.

In an Iata survey, four out of 10 airlines had to divert a flight in the last 12 months because of troublemakers.

Singapore Airlines Staff Union president and steward Alan Tan said: “The aim is always to defuse the situation but this is not always possible so we do sometimes have to hand passengers to the local police after landing.

“But because of a lack of jurisdiction, police may not always be able to act except to issue a warning.

“This can be quite frustrating.”

karam@sph.com.sg

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