Here's the News.
All the news worth reading. (To me anyway)
Note that this is a news clippings blog. Articles (mainly from Straits Times) are NOT written by me.
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PSP secretary-general Leong Mun Wai said the party had no intention of "downplaying" the new tariffs
A cargo ship is seen docked at Pasir Panjang port terminal in Singapore on Feb 3, 2025.
(Photo: AFP/Roslan Rahman)
09 Apr 2025
SINGAPORE: The Progress Singapore Party (PSP) on Wednesday (Apr 9) called on the government to secure a new trade deal with the United States in response to sweeping new tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump last week.
Such discussions may include “making adjustments to internal policies or making strategic investments in the US”, said PSP secretary-general Leong Mun Wai in a Facebook post.
PM Lawrence Wong on implications of US tariffs for Singapore | Full video
Trump is a moron who doesn't understand Tariffs. Sure, if the tariff makes imports more expensive, the exporting countries will probably sell less to the US. BUT, the US citizens/residents will pay MORE for the goods they need. So a microwave oven that used to cost $100, would now cost $130 or more. And the common folk will have to pay that price.
SINGAPORE – Singapore plans to procure two new submarines, and new infantry fighting vehicles with anti-drone capabilities, as well as replace its maritime patrol aircraft in the coming years.
These hardware upgrades are part of the Singapore Armed Forces’ (SAF) plan for a military that is fit for Singapore’s security purposes, especially amid a fast-changing global order, said Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen on March 3 during the debate on the Ministry of Defence’s (Mindef) budget.
No matter how big or friendly other countries are, Singapore’s policies are for Singaporeans to decide, says the Law and Home Affairs Minister in a speech.
A view of Singapore's central business district and the Merlion on Nov 16, 2022. (File photo: CNA/Hanidah Amin)
Lee Chong Ming
05 Feb 2023
SINGAPORE: Amid a global situation more uncertain and challenging than any period since its independence, Singapore continues to believe in the need for many major countries to participate in the region, to achieve a balance of power, said Law and Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam on Sunday (Feb 5).
But as a small nation, Singapore must also put its interests first and not let other countries - big or small, no matter how friendly - dictate what it does, he added.
The gap between rhetoric and action is Beijing’s biggest problem – and the region showed it isn’t afraid to call this out.
China’s Premier Li Qiang waves amid the assembled ASEAN leaders following the ASEAN-China Summit, 6 September 2023 (Willy Kurniawan, Mast Irham via AFP/Getty Images)
Trust (or the lack of it) seems to be the central theme in describing relations between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and China. Several ASEAN leaders emphasised this point during the leaders’ summit last week in Jakarta.
Law and Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam speaking to reporters on Monday (March 25) about a Facebook post by the Israeli embassy in Singapore, which local authorities asked to be taken down. Ili Nadhirah Mansor/TODAY
March 25, 2024
SINGAPORE — Singapore authorities told the Israeli embassy to remove a post made on its Facebook page on Sunday (March 24) that Minister for Law and Home Affairs K Shanmugam called an "astonishing attempt to rewrite history".
The post was “insensitive”, “inappropriate” and “completely unacceptable” as it carried the risk of undermining safety, security and harmony in Singapore, he said.
China seen as most influential power in Southeast Asia: ASEAN Studies Centre
But survey respondents from the 10 ASEAN states also expressed concern about the country's expanding influence.
Lowy Institute's Asia Power Index 2023: (from first to tenth place) United States, China, Japan, India, Russia, Australia, South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand.
Chew Hui Min
13 Feb 2023
SINGAPORE: China is seen as the most influential economic and political power in Southeast Asia, but its expanding influence is not viewed favourably by a majority of respondents in a survey of Southeast Asians.
For Chinese President Xi Jinping, a Marxist-Leninist dialectician, the events in Ukraine won’t fundamentally alter China's grand historical ascent. As a cautionary tale, Russia's military failures will simply impel China's leadership to make even more substantial preparations before seizing Taiwan.
MELBOURNE – Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, two views quickly emerged in the West about what lesson China would take from the war. The first suggested that NATO’s failure to deter Russia – or to defend Ukraine directly – would inspire China to advance the timetable for a planned invasion of Taiwan, or even to capitalize on the chaos brought about by the war to attack the island immediately. But after Russia’s military ran into significant and unexpected challenges early on, an alternate line of analysis emerged suggesting that China has now been significantly deterred from ever attempting to take Taiwan.
SINGAPORE: Israel's military response to the Oct 7 Hamas attack has "gone too far", but severing diplomatic ties with the country would not resolve the situation nor reduce the suffering of Palestinians, Minister for Foreign Affairs Vivian Balakrishnan said in parliament on Thursday (Feb 29).
Last October, Colin Kahl, then the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon, sat in a hotel in Paris and prepared to make a call to avert disaster in Ukraine. A staffer handed him an iPhone—in part to avoid inviting an onslaught of late-night texts and colorful emojis on Kahl’s own phone. Kahl had returned to his room, with its heavy drapery and distant view of the Eiffel Tower, after a day of meetings with officials from the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. A senior defense official told me that Kahl was surprised by whom he was about to contact: “He was, like, ‘Why am I calling Elon Musk?’ ”
The reason soon became apparent. “Even though Musk is not technically a diplomat or statesman, I felt it was important to treat him as such, given the influence he had on this issue,” Kahl told me. SpaceX, Musk’s space-exploration company, had for months been providing Internet access across Ukraine, allowing the country’s forces to plan attacks and to defend themselves. But, in recent days, the forces had found their connectivity severed as they entered territory contested by Russia. More alarmingly, SpaceX had recently given the Pentagon an ultimatum: if it didn’t assume the cost of providing service in Ukraine, which the company calculated at some four hundred million dollars annually, it would cut off access. “We started to get a little panicked,” the senior defense official, one of four who described the standoff to me, recalled. Musk “could turn it off at any given moment. And that would have real operational impact for the Ukrainians.”
THE PRESIDENT: Please, please sit down. Thank you. Well, first of all, you know, I had forgotten about that incident. It was the time when there was a lot of discussion going on in the administration: would we recognize same-sex marriage.
And I was rai- — I was a lucky man. I was raised by a father who was a — thought everyone was entitled to be treated with dignity. I remember when I was — I hadn’t thought about this a long time. I remember when I was a kid, I — I was a lifeguard at a country club, but I wanted to — I was — got deeply involved in the Civil Rights Movement. And so, I wanted to work in what they called “The Bucket,” which was a public housing complex — a large complex on the east side of Wilmington — and — which was all African American.
And they had the — like all big cities, they had three major swimming pools. One on the east side, which is where they — a thousand African American kids a day would come and swim in this big pool. And I wanted to be a lifeguard there.
President Xi Jinping wants to build influence among ethnic-Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, raising concerns that the Chinese Communist Party is stoking divided loyalties
Waterloo Street, one of the oldest streets in multiracial Singapore, is host to Chinese temples, food centers and newspaper vendors, alongside a Hindu temple and a synagogue.
By Shibani Mahtani Amrita Chandradas
July 24 at 5:00 p.m.
SINGAPORE — As China accelerates efforts to build its global power, President Xi Jinping has laid out an extravagant vision for overseas ethnic-Chinese communities that he hopes will “give shape to a powerful joint force for advancing the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”
In the militarised rivalry between China and the US, one side’s deterrence is another side’s escalation, says the Financial Times' Gideon Rachman.
The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Milius (DDG 69) conducts a routine Taiwan Strait transit on Sunday, April 16, 2023. (U.S. Navy via AP)
Gideon Rachman
26 Apr 2023
LONDON: Visiting Washington last week, it was striking how commonplace talk of war between the United States and China has become. That discussion has been fed by loose-lipped statements from American generals musing about potential dates for the opening of hostilities.
Personnel from the Republic of Singapore Navy and People’s Liberation Army (Navy) conducted joint training at the Damage Control Training Centre in Changi Naval Base. Ministry of Defence
Singapore and China are holding a joint naval exercise between April 28 and May 1
This comes after a US submarine made a routine port call in Singapore this week
The Sino-Singapore drills will consist of a shore and sea phase at Changi Naval Base and the southern reaches of the South China Sea respectively
SUFIYAN SAMSURI
April 28, 2023
SINGAPORE — The Singapore and China navies are holding a joint maritime exercise from April 28 to May 1, which consists of a shore and sea phase, the Ministry of Defence (Mindef) said in a press statement on Friday (April 28).
This year’s drills will be the second in the bilateral series, called Exercise Maritime Cooperation, between the two countries, with the first taking place in 2015.
This comes as a United States submarine — the USS Columbia — made a routine port call at the Changi Naval Base this week.
SINGAPORE - While Singapore’s relations with its immediate neighbours Malaysia and Indonesia are stable and encouraging, the situation further afield has become troubling and even dangerous.
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said this in Parliament on Wednesday as he outlined three major geopolitical tensions that make the current global situation graver than what Singapore has faced in a long time.
Singaporeans need to realise the gravity of the situation, he said. “We are facing not just one storm, but several.”
Some Southeast Asian leaders have said they will not take sides in the US-China conflict - but if pushed, it is not unlikely they will do so according to national interests, says Oh Ei Sun.
Marines at the opening ceremony of an annual US-Philippine joint military exercise at Fort Bonifacio, Taguig city, Philippines, Oct 3, 2022. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)
Oh Ei Sun
08 Mar 2023
SHANGHAI: At a press conference on the sidelines of China’s annual “two sessions”, a question posed to Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang seemed to channel Southeast Asian regional sentiments.
The question postulated that as China’s economy faces growing downward pressure, regional countries are finding it difficult to rely on the US for security guarantees, and on China for economic development.
And according to media reports, Qin was equally blunt in answering, advising that Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) should stay clear of any power rivalry between big countries. He noted that leaders of regional countries have stated that ASEAN should not be a proxy for any party.
Taiwanese Mirage 2000 fighter jets taxi along a runway during a drill at an airbase in Hsinchu, Taiwan, on Jan 11, 2023. (Photo: AP/Johnson Lai)
27 Feb 2023
WASHINGTON: US intelligence shows that China's President Xi Jinping has instructed his country's military to “be ready by 2027" to invade Taiwan though he may be currently harbouring doubts about his ability to do so given Russia's experience in its war with Ukraine, CIA Director William Burns said.
Burns, in a television interview that aired on Sunday (Feb 26), stressed that the United States must take “very seriously” Xi's desire to ultimately control Taiwan even if military conflict is not inevitable.
Defence Minister Ng Eng Heng viewing an F35 aircraft at Luke Air Force Base in Glendale, Arizona in December 2015. Raj Nadarajan/TODAY
GRAHAM ONG-WEBB
February 28, 2023
Defence planning, expenditure, and acquisition are necessary tasks that require exercising “the art of the long view”, to use the term by famous futurist and scenario-planner Peter Schwartz.
This year’s debate on the Ministry of Defence’s (Mindef) budget serves to reinforce once again that our defence spending remains prudent and balanced, and is based on “the long view”, to ensure that Singaporeans can continue to enjoy adequate security from external threats, as they have in the past.
This is a dividend which, unfortunately, cannot be consistently derived in many countries, particularly those across Europe.
One need not look further than the current situation in Ukraine, which marked the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion on Feb 24.
Against this backdrop, it’s important that Mindef and the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) remain committed to the course of transformation to stay ahead of evolving threats.
Duangpetch Promthep turned 13 when he was trapped inside the Thai cave. Reuters
By Jonathan Head South East Asia correspondent
We still do not know what caused the sudden death of Duangpetch 'Dom' Promthep at the football academy in Britain to which he had been so proud to win a scholarship last year.
It casts, for the first time, a sad shadow over a story which until now had not lost its power to inspire, to lift the spirits.
Singapore Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen speaking at the Maritime Security Roundtable during the 59th Munich Security Conference on Feb 17, 2023.
18 Feb 2023
Singapore's defence minister on Friday (Feb 17) warned that war in Asia would be devastating not just for the continent, but for the rest of the world.
Speaking at the Maritime Security Roundtable at the 59th Munich Security Conference, Dr Ng highlighted that world powers have been increasing their military presence in Asia, concluding that "pre-positioning for deterrence is alive and well".
He cited the formations of strategic groupings like the Quad (United States, India, Australia, Japan) and AUKUS (US, Australia, United Kingdom), the US gaining more access to bases in the Philippines, as well as missile defence drills in South Korea as examples of what China would construe as "preparatory moves".
Similarly, Beijing has also increased its military presence in the region, said Dr Ng - from patrols in the disputed South China Sea to Chinese jets regularly crossing the median line in the Taiwan Strait.
