No tears, no anger

July 14, 2008

Actress Carina Lau talks about the men who abducted her in 1990, actor Tony Leung Chiu Wai and billionaire Terry Gou

HONG KONG - Actress Carina Lau has bared all in an interview with Hong Kong novelist Eunice Lam published last Friday.

For the first time in 18 years, she spoke about her traumatic experience in April 1990. She was kidnapped by triad members and photographed naked after she refused to act in a movie the triad was involved in.

Pictures taken during the incident were leaked in 2002 and one was published on the cover of a magazine, causing a sensation in Hong Kong's showbiz scene.

In the interview, Lau revealed she was kidnapped as she was driving to actor Michael Miu Kiu Wai's house at around 3am on April 25, 1990.

'A triad leader wanted me to act in a film. I refused. So they punished me. On my way to Miu's house, they bundled me into a car and blindfolded me. I was very scared that they will kill me and leave my body in a remote area. I kept chanting 'Namo Guanshiyin Pusa' (a Buddhist prayer),' she said.

'Before that, I had already received threatening phone calls... I was so scared I did not even dare to close my eyes when shampooing my hair.'

Reports later said she was assaulted, with rumours that she was raped. East Week magazine, which printed a cover picture of her half-naked, was forced to fold after outraged protests from the showbiz community.

There were no tears nor agitation when the actress finally spilled the beans to Lam.

Lam told Apple Daily after the interview was published last Friday in Guangzhou's Nanfang Daily newspaper: 'She was easygoing, open-minded and confident.'

Her comments appeared to confirm that the interview took place despite reports in Taiwan questioning why Lau spoke about her ordeal just when she was due to marry actor Tony Leung Chiu Wai, and whether the interview or its contents were fabricated.

Asked why Lau decided to spill the beans to her, Lam, a socialite who is well known as the ex-lover of the late Hong Kong songwriter James Wong, said: 'It was trust.'

In the interview, Lau said she does not hate the four men who abducted her. 'They did not assault me. They were only following orders. In my heart, I am grateful to them.'

She said as their car tailed hers, she sped into the carpark and crashed the barrier. She was then nabbed.

She said her boyfriend, actor Tony Leung Chiu Wai, supported her through the crisis. After she was released two hours later to Mui's house, 'Tony did not say a thing, he simply hugged me and asked, 'Are you okay?''.

Leung later found out who ordered the kidnapping, but Lau still ended up shooting the film for free for her abductors. She said, however, that Leung dropped his work and accompanied her to the filming in Holland.

Hong Kong triads were a powerful presence in the territory's showbusiness in the 1990s, with reports even of an A-list actor being forced at gunpoint to act in a movie and another actress being made to go nude in a film.

Talk had it then that Lau was offered a role in 1987 by a triad leader from Holland, Cai Ziming. Cai was shot dead in 1992 by a gunman in Hong Kong.

But Lau, who was born in Suzhou, China, said the East Week incident had a positive impact on her life too.

She said: 'I used to feel inferior thinking that people deride me for being a 'China girl', until the photo appeared and the Hong Kong people supported me. I did not expect that. I want to thank everyone. I was so touched. After that incident, I was rid of inferior feelings about being a 'China girl'.'

She also spoke for the first time about Taiwanese billionaire Terry Gou, who courted her last year. 'I did not fall in love with him, but he had feelings for me,' she said.

She also revealed that her romance with tycoon Julian Hui in the 1980s had fizzled out because she fell in love with Leung after meeting him while working together on a stage show.

'There are three things in life - birth, death and marriage. Marriage is a must,' she said on why she is marrying Leung after 19 years together.

'I will take care of my husband my whole life. Tony is a small kid. Every man is a small kid.'

Unconfirmed reports have put their wedding day as either in this month or October.

[Congrats to a brave and confident woman, who is able to rise above such trauma. I am impressed by her "gratitude" to her abductors.]

Syariah experts dispute Anwar's charge

July 12, 2008

KUALA LUMPUR - TWO syariah law experts have questioned the charge of wrongful accusation filed by Malaysia's opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim against his former aide.

On Wednesday, Mr Anwar had filed a complaint with the Federal Territory Islamic Affairs Department claiming that Mr Saiful Bukhari Azlan, 23, who had accused him of sodomising him, had committed the offence of qazaf (false accusation), and challenged him to produce four witnesses to prove his allegation.

Syariah lawyer Zainul Rijal Abu Bakar, who is the president of the Syariah Lawyers Association, said the syariah penal code does not state that zina (fornication) includes sodomy.

He added that an individual would be committing qazaf only when he claims that 'someone else' had committed zina.

'This means that Mohd Saiful would have had to accuse Mr Anwar and someone else, not Mr Anwar and himself, of zina,' he said.

Another syariah expert, Dr Siti Zubaidah Ismail, said that even if the case goes to trial, Mr Saiful does not need to produce four witnesses.

'In Malaysian syariah, you need four witnesses only if you accuse someone of zina but not of liwat (sodomy),' she was quoted as saying by the New Straits Times.

'Mohd Saiful can bring whatever evidence he has as long as it fulfils the rules of evidence.'

Dr Siti Zubaidah, who heads Universiti Malaya's syariah law department, added: 'The burden of proof would be on Anwar as he has to prove that Saiful's accusations are false.'

[Just to complete the previous entry on this matter. So we know that Syaria Law isn't as dumb as Mr Anwar seems to make it out to be.]

Judge: No question of 'factual guilt' after acquittal

July 12, 2008

Justice V.K. Rajah takes issue with Govt's position on guilt and innocence
By K. C. Vijayan

A HIGH Court judge has taken issue with the Government's position that people acquitted of crimes may not necessarily be innocent.

Judge of Appeal V.K. Rajah said it was a cornerstone of the justice system that a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty, and it was for prosecutors to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

He said: 'If the evidence is insufficient to support the prosecution's theory of guilt, and if the weaknesses in the prosecution's case reveal a deficiency in what is necessary for a conviction, the judge must acquit the accused and with good reason: it simply has not been proved to the satisfaction of the law that the accused is guilty, and the presumption of innocence stands unrebutted.

'It is not helpful, therefore, for suggestions to be subsequently raised about the accused's 'factual guilt' once he has been acquitted.'

To do so, he added, would be to undermine the court's not-guilty finding. It would also 'stand the presumption of innocence on its head, replacing it with an insidious and open-ended suspicion of guilt that an accused person would be hard-pressed to ever shed, even upon vindication in a court of law.'

His remarks on acquittal, innocence and guilt came near the end of his written judgment explaining why he acquitted former teacher William Ding, 36, of molesting several schoolboys.

While he did not say so, his comments appear directed at the position taken by the Attorney-General's Chambers (AGC) in The Straits Times on May 8 and May 14.

The AGC was quoted in the first article as saying that a judge was bound by law to acquit a person if the prosecution could not prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

'This means that if there is any reasonable doubt, the accused gets the benefit of it. It does not mean that the accused was innocent in the sense that he did not do the deed,' its spokesman said.

The AGC later wrote to the Forum Page and said that the nuance of an acquittal was often not clearly appreciated by the public.

'(The accused person) may be guilty in fact, but innocent in law because the evidence was not there,' its spokesman said.

That position took many, including lawyers, by surprise. Lawyer N. Sreenivasan wrote to the Forum Page saying such a view was of 'grave concern'.

'If the prosecution, with the full resources of the police, the power to interrogate accused persons, interview witnesses, seize evidence and rely on various presumptions, cannot prove a case beyond reasonable doubt, then the prosecution should not cast any cloud on the acquittal of the accused,' said Mr Sreenivasan.

In his written judgment, Justice Rajah said he had no doubt that prosecutions are begun only after careful investigation, but emphasised that 'the decision of guilt or innocence is constitutionally for the court and the court alone to make'.

'The court cannot convict if a reasonable doubt remains to prevent the presumption of innocence from being rebutted,' he added.

'In that result, there is no room for second-guessing or nice distinctions; there is only one meaning to 'not proved' and that is that it has not been established in the eyes of the law that the accused has committed the offence with which he has been charged.'

The question a court has to decide on is not whether it suspects the accused has done the deed, he added, but whether the prosecution has proven it beyond any reasonable doubt.

'Objective and not subjective belief is the essential touchstone of guilt and there is simply no place for subsequent speculation or implication that an acquitted accused may be 'factually guilty',' said Justice Rajah.

He noted that Singapore's adversarial system was not flawless, and perfectly proper prosecutions may sometimes fail for unexpected reasons. But the system was 'eminently credible, pragmatic and effective'.

'The rules are clear and precise, and neither the prosecution nor defence can or should complain if they fail by them,' he said.

Justice Rajah, who has been on the bench since 2004, was made a Judge of Appeal last year and also headed a committee to undertake a comprehensive review of the legal sector.

The judge also said that the doctrine of reasonable doubt was neither abstract nor theoretical.

'It has real, practical and profound implications in sifting the innocent from the guilty: in deciding who should suffer punishment and who should not,' he said.

Calling it a 'a bedrock principle of the criminal justice system' here, he said it was one which served public confidence that Singapore's system punishes only those who are guilty.

[I understand the AGC's point, and I also appreciate the distinction made in the written judgment as well as the "grave concern" by the lawyer. No doubt the AGC and the prosecution seriously and honestly believe in the guilt of Mr Ding. That they failed to convince the judge is a probable outcome of any trial. But as the judge noted, it is highly insidious to continue to cast aspersions as to the "factual guilt" of the person. As members of the society, any one accused of such heinous crimes as Mr Ding was would be subject to speculation and innuendoes. It is as much a matter of the service of justice to convict the guilty as well as to exonerate the innocent.

Acquittal means not guilty. Because in Singapore there is also discharge not amounting to an acquittal. Now that is a sword hanging over one's head.]

There is a conspiracy to do us in, says MM Lee

July 12, 2008

Minister Mentor rebuts human rights groups' criticism of Singapore
By Sue-ann Chia

MINISTER Mentor Lee Kuan Yew last night dismissed human rights organisations' criticisms of Singapore's style of governance, saying that they were trying to 'do us in'.

In a robust rebuttal of these groups' assertions that Singapore is not a liberal democracy, he said that they had never run a country and did not know what was needed to make Singapore tick.

'There is a conspiracy to do us in. Why?... They see us as a threat,' said Mr Lee at an hour-long dialogue during the Economic Society of Singapore's annual dinner.

Explaining why these groups regarded Singapore as a threat, he said it was because they saw that the Russians and Chinese have been coming and studying Singapore's success story and picking up pointers.

The leaders of these countries ask 'how does this little country with so little talent keep its ruling party in place and run a tight ship, honest, and effective, and make progress?'

'Can they (the Russians and Chinese) do it? I don't know. But they are picking up points here and there.'

Mr Lee was responding to a question on whether Singapore needed a Western-style liberal democracy to succeed.

He said groups which advocate the need for liberal democracies were prescribing universal rules for the whole world.

But he threw down this gauntlet:

'My question is to them, have you ever run Singapore? Do you know how we got here? What were we? What we are now? And how we can become better?

'We are not stupid people. They give us all these advice... Who are they? Have they ever run a country, created jobs for community and given them a life? We have and we know what it requires.

'Nobody (who) advocates this has any idea what they will do to a society if you implement these rules.'

Mr Lee believes each country will have to decide which political system suits it best.

'Different people have different cultures and forge different consensus and seek different solutions to their problems,' he said.

But he was also quick to acknowledge that the People's Action Party (PAP) will not always have the answers:

'I'm not saying the PAP government will always be supreme, will always be honest, will always be A-plus.

'The day it is no longer honest, it should be out. And another party should come in, with equally honest people.'

Turning to the opposition, Mr Lee said:

'We are not trying to block them. We are trying to force them to collect a group of people equal in competence...When we fail, they have a team that can take over.

'But unfortunately, they can't do it. Because the people with ability, drive, ambition and energy don't want to come into politics. If they wanted to, they will join us (the PAP).'

For Singapore to continue to succeed, it needs to find the next generation of top notch leaders.

Mr Lee said the present generation of leaders could last at least two terms.

But if they did not find talented people with the drive and energy and integrity to match the demands of the job during this time, 'then I say, the future is in doubt'.

'The system is there, but it cannot run with mediocre men. You need top men.'

The PAP has managed to recruit good people and its leaders had, in turn, won the trust of Singaporeans through their integrity and honesty - values which the PAP still holds true today.

He said the task of finding new leaders is no longer his:

'I've done my job. I've passed it on to the next generation. Chok Tong has passed to the next generation.

'If you have a competent team on board, honest and dedicated, it will last. If you have bums, then even with best of institutions, it will fail.'

[It is not a conspiracy. It is culturalism, philosophical arrogance, and ideological colonialism. As a fan of Star Trek, these human rights advocates are violators of the Prime Directive, and are arrogant activists ideologues.

That said, Singapore's support for the Iraq Invasion is hypocritical if the explicit reason for the invasion was to install democracy in that country. No doubt Singapore's pragmatic position is that the Saddam Hussein regime in the region is promoting instability and uncertainty, but if the pretext of the invasion is to build a democratic Iraq, then that same pretext can also be use to justify invading Singapore if the ideologues are to be believed.

In any case the day of the ideologues are numbered. The (economic and ideological) primacy of the United States has peaked. They will still be influential for some time. A hundred years, maybe two. The defenders and promoters of US-style democracy will then be seen as quaint nutcases.

The US may still retain its status as the land of innovation and creativity. Or the creative talents may swarm to some other shores.]

New genes involved in autism discovered

July 11, 2008

WASHINGTON - HARVARD University researchers have discovered half a dozen new genes involved in autism that suggest the disorder strikes in a brain that cannot properly form new connections.

The findings, based on families in the Middle East, Turkey and Pakistan, also may help explain why intense education programs do help some autistic children: certain genes that respond to experience were not missing but were merely stuck in the 'off' position.

'The circuits are there, but you have to give it an extra push,' said Dr Gary Goldstein of the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, which was not involved in the gene hunt but is well-known for its autism behavioural therapy.

The genetics suggest that 'what we're doing makes sense when we work with these little kids - and work and work and work - and suddenly get through,' he said.

But the study's bigger message is that autism is too strikingly individual to envision an easy gene test for it. Instead, patients are turning out to have a wide variety, almost a custom set, of gene defects.

'Almost every kid with autism has their own particular cause of it,' said Dr Christopher Walsh, chief of genetics at Children's Hospital Boston, who led the research published in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

Autism spectrum disorders include a range of poorly understood brain conditions, from the mild Asperger's syndrome to more severe autism characterised by poor social interaction, impaired communication and repetitious behaviours.

It is clear that genes play a big role in autism, from studies of twins and families with multiple affected children. But so far, the genetic cause is known for only about 15 percent of autism cases, Dr Walsh said.

So Dr Walsh's team took a new tack. They turned to the Middle East, a part of the world with large families and a tendency for cousins to marry, characteristics that increase the odds of finding rare genes.

They recruited 88 families with cousin marriages and high incidences of autism, from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. They compared the DNA of family members to search for what are called recessive mutations, where the mother and father can be healthy carriers of a gene defect but a child who inherits that defect from both parents gets sick.

In some of the families, they found large chunks of missing DNA regions that followed that recessive rule. The missing regions varied among families, but they affected at least six genes that play a role in autism.

Here is why this matters: All the genes seem to be part of a network involved in a basic foundation of learning, how neurons respond to new experiences by forming synapses, or connections between each other.

In the first year or two of life, when autism symptoms appear, synapses rapidly form and mature, and unnecessary ones are 'pruned' back. In other words, a baby's brain is literally being shaped by its first experiences so that it is structurally able to perform learning and other functions of later life.

'This paper points to problems specifically in the way that experience sculpts the developing brain,' explained Dr Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, which helped pay for the work.

Some earlier research had pointed to the same underlying problem, so these newly found genes 'join a growing list to suggest that autism is a synaptic disorder,' he said.

If that sounds discouraging, here is the good news: The missing DNA did not always translate into missing genes. Instead what usually was missing were the on/off switches for these autism-related genes. Essentially, some genes were asleep instead of doing their synapse work.

'I find that hopeful' because 'there are ways that are being discovered to activate genes,' Dr Walsh said. 'This might be an unanticipated way of developing therapies in the long term for autism: Identifying these kids where all the right genes are present, just not turned on in the right way.'

At Kennedy Krieger, Dr Goldstein thinks the work may provide a gene-level explanation for why some children already are helped by intense therapy.

'We have trouble getting through to these children, but with repeated stimulation we can do it,' he said. 'These are circuits that have an ability not so much to recover but to work around the problem.' -- AP

An American life is worth US$1m less than it was 5 years ago, says govt

July 11, 2008

WASHINGTON - IT is not just the US dollar that is losing value. A government agency has decided that an American life is not worth what it used to be.

The 'value of a statistical life' is US$6.9 million (S$9.38 million), the Environmental Protection Agency reckoned in May - a drop of almost US$1 million from just five years ago.

The Associated Press discovered the change after a review of cost-benefit analyses over more than a dozen years.

Though it may seem like a harmless bureaucratic recalculation, the devaluation has real consequences.

When drawing up regulations, government agencies put a value on human life, then weigh the costs versus the lifesaving benefits of a proposed rule. The less a life is worth to the government, the less the need for a regulation, such as tighter restrictions on pollution.

Consider, for example, a hypothetical regulation that costs US$18 billion to enforce but will prevent 2,500 deaths. At US$7.8 million per person (the old figure), the lifesaving benefits outweigh the costs. But at US$6.9 million per person, the rule costs more than the lives it saves, so it may not be adopted.

Some environmentalists accuse the Bush administration of changing the value to avoid tougher rules, which the EPA denies.

'It appears that they're cooking the books in regards to the value of life,' said Mr S William Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, which represents state and local air pollution regulators. 'Those decisions are literally a matter of life and death.'

Mr Dan Esty, a senior EPA policy official in the administration of President George W Bush's father, George H W Bush, and now director of the Yale Centre for Environmental Law and Policy, said: 'It's hard to imagine that it has other than a political motivation.'

Agency officials say they were just following what the science told them.

The EPA figure is not based on people's earning capacity, or their potential contributions to society, or how much they are loved and needed by their friends and family, some of the factors used in insurance claims and wrongful-death lawsuits.

Instead, economists calculate the value based on what people are willing to pay to avoid certain risks, and on how much extra employers pay their workers to take on additional risks. Most of the data are drawn from payroll statistics; some comes from opinion surveys. According to the EPA, people should not think of the number as a price tag on a life.

The EPA made the changes in two steps. First, in 2004, the agency cut the estimated value of a life by 8 per cent. Then, in a rule governing train and boat air pollution this May, the agency took away the normal adjustment for one year's inflation. Between the two changes, the value of a life fell 11 per cent, based on today's dollar.

EPA officials say the adjustment was not significant and was based on better economic studies. The reduction reflects consumer preferences, said Mr Al McGartland, director of EPA's office of policy, economics and innovation.

'It's our best estimate of what consumers are willing to pay to reduce similar risks to their own lives,' Mr McGartland said.

But EPA's cut 'doesn't make sense,' said Vanderbilt University economist Mr Kip Viscusi. EPA partly based its reduction on his work.

'As people become more affluent, the value of statistical lives go up as well. It has to.' Mr Viscusi also said no study has shown that Americans are less willing to pay to reduce risks.

At the same time that EPA was trimming the value of life, the Department of Transportation twice raised its life value figure. But its number is still lower than the EPA's.

The environmental agency traditionally has placed the highest value of life in government and still does, despite efforts by administrations to bring uniformity to that figure among all agencies.

Not all of EPA uses the reduced value. The agency's water division never adopted the change and in 2006 used US$8.7 million in current dollars.

From 1996 to 2003, EPA kept the value of a statistical life generally around US$7.8 million to US$7.96 million in current dollars, according to reports analysed by The AP. In 2004, for a major air pollution rule, the agency lowered the value to US$7.15 million in current dollars.

Just how the EPA came up with that figure is complicated and involves two duelling analyses.

Mr Viscusi wrote one of those big studies, coming up with a value of US$8.8 million in current dollars. The other study put the number between US$2 million and US$3.3 million. The co-author of that study, Ms Laura Taylor of North Carolina State University, said her figure was lower because it emphasized differences in pay for various risky jobs, not just risky industries as a whole.

EPA took portions of each study and essentially split the difference - a decision two of the agency's advisory boards faulted or questioned.

'This sort of number-crunching is basically numerology,' said Mr Granger Morgan, chairman of EPA's Science Advisory Board and an engineering and public policy professor at Carnegie Mellon University. 'This is not a scientific issue.'

Other, similar calculations by the Bush administration have proved politically explosive. In 2002, the EPA decided the value of elderly people was 38 per cent less than that of people under 70.

After the move became public, the agency reversed itself. -- AP

[This has implications for govt policies. I wonder what is the statistical value of a singaporean's life.]

S'pore govt dismisses human rights allegations in IBA report

July 9, 2008

By Irene Ngoo
THE Singapore Government, responding to human rights allegations by an international association of lawyers, on Wednesday dismissed them as without substance and feeble.

In its 72-page report released late on Tuesday, the London-based International Bar Association's (IBA) Human Rights Institute said Singapore has failed to meet international standards and expressed concerns about the independence of its judiciary.

The association, which represents 30,000 lawyers globally, noted that while Singapore courts had a good reputation when adjudicating commercial cases that did not involve members of the ruling People's Action Party (PAP), 'there are concerns about an actual or apparent lack of impartiality and independence', when it came to cases involving 'the interests of PAP members or their associates'.

The Singapore government said the association did not justify its 'grave allegation' of bias with evidence, and slammed its statement as 'a feeble justification'.

The Ministry of Law, in a statement issued on Wednesday evening, said: 'The cases brought by PAP members usually relate to scurrilous and completely untrue allegations of corruption made against them,' said a statement from the Ministry of Law.

'Providing clean and efficient governance is a longstanding cornerstone of the PAP Government's policy. Thus defamatory allegations cannot be allowed to rest. The accuser has to prove his allegations.'

'The decisions of the Courts in these cases are matters of public record, and can be analysed. Anyone questioning these verdicts should try to do so by examining these decisions properly, rather than making vague unsubstantiated allegations.'

It added: 'It is also absurd to suggest that honourable and upright judges in commercial cases become compliant and dishonourable when dealing with defamation cases involving government ministers.'

The IBA 's report, which comes several months after it held its annual convention in Singapore last year, listed 18 recommendations which it said the government should implement urgently.

These include ratifying the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, easing restrictions on the media and ensuring that its courts are free from government influence.

The Singapore government statement said human rights groups were prescribing for Singapore the 'Western norms of liberal democracy as the only way to bring stability and prosperity'.

'No NGO has greater interest and understanding of Singapore's history and internal balance than Singapore's leaders,' said the Law Ministry.

Dismissing the human rights allegations in the report as having 'no substance', the statement said Singapore subscribes to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

'Human rights are interpreted and implemented according to the specific histories, cultures and circumstances of each country,' it added. 'Every society must find and decide the appropriate balance between rights and responsibilities for themselves.'

It pointed out that human rights groups in IBA have closed ranks with other Western human rights NGOs to prescribe for Singapore and all new countries, especially China, Western norms of liberal democracy as the only way to bring stability and prosperity.

'They believe that free market policies cannot succeed without Western liberal democracy, and it is their mission to make other societies adopt the Western model,' it noted.

Whatever the shortcomings of the Singapore government, the statement stressed that the overriding objective has been 'to get Singaporeans better educated, to understand and be exposed to the globalised world we are now in.'

'So we adjust our laws and systems to maximise the benefits from global forces to make Singapore a thriving cosmopolitan city, where Singaporeans and foreigners live and work in a peaceful, safe and open environment,' it said

'We listen carefully to all advice and then decide the right balance for ourselves. So far we have not done badly.'

[In other words, before the IBA or other human rights organisations decide that Singapore has a poor record, they should get 4 male witnesses. Witnesses who are subsequently sued for libel/slander and lose are not counted.]