NTUC is the proxy of the ruling party especially since NTUC Secretary-Generals are also hardly coincidentally PAP Ministers. NTUC, besides cynically seen as the trade union steered by the ruling party, actually also functions to make life and cost of living less painful. NTUC is more than a trade union umbrella organisation. From NTUC Income to NTUC Foodfare to NTUC Fairprice, NTUC's co-op outlets are an everyday facets of Singapore heartland consumerism.

With recent rising food prices, NTUC Fairprice is the NTUC flagship in the co-op's effort in making Singaporeans deal with inflation. While HDB and the CPF Board are more direct nation-building via rootedness agencies, NTUC Fairprice is maybe a soft nation-building supermarket at a consumerism level. Hence, with the increased cost of living and the PAP's open reluctance in distributing handouts as welfare, is NTUC Fairprice the subtle symbol of the continued compact or its lack of between the people and the ruling party as far as putting food on the table is concerned?

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This post was initially motivated by the question: Just how dangerous is Mas Selamat and what is the threat posed by his escape? Re-reading the Jemaah Islamiyah White Paper (released 7 Jan 2003) for the official threat assessment, I was then reminded that Mas Selamat had previously managed to flee before the Internal Security Department's Dec 2001 dragnet. It seems that he had been on the run for more than a year before it was announced, in Feb 2003, that he had been detained by the Indonesian authorities. After three years, Mas Selamat was finally deported back to Singapore in Feb 2006. So this isn't the first time that he has slipped through the ISD's fingers.

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The shocking assassination of Benazir Bhutto was not the only news of global significance to come out of Pakistan in the final days of 2007; the World Health Organization reported that the first ever case of human infection by the H5N1 avian flu virus had been confirmed in Peshawar.

Last week's World Health Day has its focus is on protecting health from climate change. However this post revisits the still current (but out of the news cycle) theme of World Health Day 2007 - international health security. It gives a broad overview of the current state of preparedness against the threat of pandemic disease. It then goes on to suggest that while progress has been made at the level of individual states, more can be done to enhance an overlooked aspect: going beyond coordination and moving towards the building of a transnational element into domestic preparedness programs.

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Political change beckons up north after the earthquake of an election that is reconfiguring Malaysia in more ways than one. Many would laud it as democratization; I hope it is. But here, I offer a different interpretation, partly because I am deep into writing something academic on this topic: the seismic shifting is a reconfiguration of patronage politics not democratization. Back home, two recent controversies, by Singapore standards, as the limping suspense of the escaped terrorist turns into a somewhat blasé wait for the report of the commission of inquiry, one concerning cancer research funding and the other concerning the regulation of beauty treatments by medical doctors. Yawn, perhaps they still hold some lessons?

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The rise of Singaporeans' fervor for Barack Obama, one of the two nominees for the Democratic Party in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election, has captured the attention of the mainstream newspapers in Singapore. In the ST Mar 23 article entitled 'Obama fever hits young Singaporeans', Professor Singh suggests that "Singaporeans pay such great attention to American politics because of its supposed contrast to the more predictable politics here [in Singapore]?" Did MP Sim Boon Ann hit the proverbial nail when he remarked that "interest in US politics originates mainly because it is a superpower and is fashionable, much like English Premier League football?" Are Aaron Ng's, a fellow SA blogger, comments' prevalent among Singaporeans when he mentioned that "he's [Obama is] attractive because he flies in the face of norms like experience and age that Singaporeans are used to?"

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