SIX people helped rescue a trapped passenger from a van after it collided with a sedan in Yio Chu Kang on Saturday.

The accident involving a silver van and a black car occurred at about 10.40pm at the traffic junction of Yio Chu Kang Road and Buangkok Green, Chinese newspaper Shin Min Daily News reported yesterday.

A 27-year-old manager, Mr Yu, who lives nearby, told Shin Min that he heard a loud sound and went downstairs to see what happened.

He said that the three passengers inside the black car managed to get out.

But the silver van had overturned and, while the two men in the front had crawled out of the window, the person in the back was trapped.

“Kind-hearted members of the public and the driver spent five minutes getting the back door open,” said Mr Yu. “An injured man lay inside and paramedics later got him out.”

Shin Min understands that the car was going straight and the van was about to turn right when the accident happened.

The Singapore Civil Defence Force said that it deployed three ambulances to the scene and sent six injured people to Tan Tock Seng Hospital.

A man, who declined to be named, told Shin Min that the van driver was his employee and that he had offered a lift to three colleagues home from church.

The driver of the van, a 50-year-old delivery man, told Shin Min yesterday morning that he was discharged from hospital early yesterday.

He said that his two colleagues in the front were still under observation, while the passenger in the back suffered the most severe injuries.

He needed stitches for injuries to his forehead and was in the intensive care unit awaiting surgery.

The police confirmed the accident and are investigating.

myp@sph.com.sg

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The symmetry of Suntec City’s Fountain of Wealth comes into stark focus in this shot by drone photographer Joel Chia, who was lauded by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in a Facebook post yesterday for his “stunning aerial photos of Singapore”.

Mr Chia, who goes by the moniker Idroneman, regularly posts the photos he takes on his Facebook and Instagram pages.

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EVEN as Singapore Management University (SMU)’s revamped campus takes shape, it is drawing up plans for another building to optimise degree education for millennials who learn on the go.

The university is in the process of seeking the necessary approvals, but SMU president Arnoud De Meyer said the building, which it hopes to build by 2019, will have classrooms that encourage active and collaborative learning both online and off-line.

It will be open 24 hours, seven days a week, and the facilities will include sleeping pods to allow students to work overnight on projects.

Professor De Meyer also gave an update on SMU’s revamped campus plan during an interview with The Straits Times, saying that most of the new facilities including the law school, the 240-seat amphitheatre and three-storey fitness centre, will be ready next year.

As for the new building, it will be named SMU-X after a new programme in teaching and learning that the university piloted last year.

Students in the programme take on projects from industries and organisations. A public policy management course, for instance, may get students to work with a social welfare agency to draw up programmes for disadvantaged families.

Prof De Meyer said the SMU-X programme was a hit with the 600 students who had a taste of it last year. This year it has been expanded to allow up to 2,000 students to take the SMU-X courses.

This means every undergraduate will be able to take up at least one SMU-X course over their four years of study. Some 150 companies have come in as industry partners.

“Students work on projects brought in by industry partners. So they are immediately applying what they learn in solving real-life problems,” said Prof De Meyer.

Professors and industry mentors guide students through projects. Students earn credits from the semester-long courses and are graded on their participation and the final outcome of the project.

Currently, the SMU-X courses are conducted at the conserved red-and-white building in Stamford Road, which was home to the flagship MPH bookstore until 2003.

Prof De Meyer said the facilities in the three-storey building were specially designed for the way millennial students learn.

Students were involved in the planning and design of the rooms. They held focus group discussions, conducted surveys and went overseas to look at facilities in other campuses.

The White Room is a favourite with students for brainstorming sessions. The walls, floors and even the table can be used for scribbling ideas.

SMU’s facilities have already proven to be a draw for full-time national serviceman Darren Lim, 20, who will be entering SMU next year to study business. He said he picked the university over another local institution partly because of its “cool city campus”.

sandra@sph.com.sg

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WORKERS’ Party chief Low Thia Khiang has been re-elected as its secretary-general, but not without facing a fight.

This was the first time the 59-year-old opposition leader faced contest for the post since he took it up in 2001.

At the party’s biennial Central Executive Committee (CEC) election yesterday, Mr Low came head to head with fellow Aljunied GRC MP Chen Show Mao, 55.

Sources say Mr Low retained his seat with 61 votes, to Mr Chen’s 45.

Party chairman Sylvia Lim, 51, was re-elected unopposed.

In all, 21 members vied for the other 12 CEC places at yesterday’s election.

All of the party’s Members of Parliament and Non-Constituency MPs (NCMP) were elected into the committee.

While Mr Chen lost the challenge against Mr Low, he made it into the CEC along with fellow Aljunied MPs Pritam Singh and Muhamad Faisal Abdul Manap, as well as Hougang MP Png Eng Huat, and NCMPs Daniel Goh, Dennis Tan and Leon Perera.

Former Punggol East MP Lee Li Lian and former NCMP Gerald Giam also kept their spots.

Rounding out the committee are three new faces, Kenneth Foo and Firuz Khan, who were both fielded in last September’s general election, and Tan Kong Soon, who is Mr Low’s legislative assistant.

Those who are out of the party’s top decision-making body include Mohammed Rahizan Yaacob, who was party vice-chairman, L. Somasundaram, who was deputy treasurer, John Yam and Mohamed Fairoz Shariff, who was co-opted into the CEC in October last year.

This year’s internal election took place at a rented conference room along Cecil Street, instead of the party’s Syed Alwi headquarters, to accommodate the larger number of cadres.

The party had last month appointed 28 new cadres, bringing the total to about 130.

Workers’ Party new faces

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The Straits Times, WP Facebook, WP Instagram, Youtube

rachelay@sph.com.sg

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EVEN as its first nine bus services started plying the roads yesterday, Singapore’s third bus operator, Tower Transit, already has its eyes set on expanding its presence here.

The Anglo-Australian firm, which won its first government bus contract a year ago, said it will compete in an upcoming tender, likely to be held next month, to run more bus routes.

Tower Transit chief executive Adam Leishman said the company’s attention to customer experience, its engineering capabilities and success in recruiting locals to become bus captains put it in good stead to contribute to Singapore’s transport sector.

Click on thumbnail to view photos. Source: 

The Straits Times

Tower Transit’s debut on the roads here marks a key step in the restructuring of Singapore’s bus industry to raise service standards.

Under the contracting model, operators are subject to stricter reliability standards, with performance incentives or financial penalties given depending on whether standards are met.

Tower Transit Singapore’s managing director Andrew Bujtor said the firm is “very confident” in meeting these standards, which include regularity in bus arrivals – often a bugbear among commuters here.

Mr Bujtor said a lot of training has been conducted so that bus captains can co-ordinate with the operations control centre to regulate bus headways or intervals, to “deliver the consistent gap between the buses that the passengers desire”.

Tower Transit’s first nine services – 77, 106, 173, 177, 189, 941, 945, 947, 990 – operate out of Bukit Batok bus interchange. Next month, it will gradually take over 17 more routes from SBS Transit, also in the western part of the island.

At around 5.30am yesterday, the first Tower Transit service in Singapore, service 945, left the interchange. This was followed by service 106, which was taken by Mr Leishman, Mr Bujtor and National Transport Workers’ Union executive secretary Melvin Yong, also an MP for Tanjong Pagar GRC.

More than 20 “bus spotters” also turned up in Bukit Batok to photograph the first Tower Transit buses arriving from Bulim depot. These were in lush green, the colour chosen in a public voting exercise.

Tower Transit took over around 90 buses from SMRT, which remained in their original colour scheme. It also received 10 buses painted in green from the Government, which owns all assets in the contracting model.

Institute of Technical Education student Muhd Naz Farihin, 19, said: “The arrival of the green buses mark a leap forward in the bus industry to the new contracting model.”

adrianl@sph.com.sg

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