Have child in a year, get $1,000

The Electric New Paper, Singapore
This scheme really demeans women's rights...

-------------------------------------
# Matchmaking agency's gimmicks raise eyebrows
# $1 downpayment
# Interest-free instalments
JUST $1 as downpayment for a traditional China bride.
With a baby bonus carrot to boot.
That's the latest marketing gimmick by a matchmaking agency, Mr Cupid International Matchmakers.
By Dawn Chia
20 February 2007

JUST $1 as downpayment for a traditional China bride.
With a baby bonus carrot to boot.
That's the latest marketing gimmick by a matchmaking agency, Mr Cupid International Matchmakers.

But there's a catch to its eyebrow-raising offer.

Grooms will still have to pay the remaining matchmaking package eventually - in interest-free monthly instalments.

Mr Martin Wong, Mr Cupid's managing director, explained his agency's 'new initiatives'.

He told The New Paper: 'Our initiatives are introduced in accordance with the directives of the Government - which are to encourage people to marry and procreate.

'We want to encourage more people to marry by easing their financial burden when they get married, especially for those who may have to pay for a car, flat and other household expenses.'

The cost of a matchmaking package is $8,000 - a special price for the Chinese New Year period.

It is only applicable to brides from Fujian, China.

Here's how the $1 package works:
# Clients pay a $2,000 downpayment for the matchmaking package
# Upon successful selection of a bride in Fujian, clients will receive a $1,999 hongbao from the matchmaking agency

# The remaining $6,000 is payable in interest-free instalments over 10 months (or $600 monthly). Civil servants may opt for a special 15-month extended plan (or $400 monthly)
# There is a baby bonus for those who give birth to their first child within two years of marriage.

Couples who give birth to their first child within 12 months of marriage will be given a baby bonus of $1,000. Those who do so within 24 months will get $500.

Without the promotion, a China bride package costs $9,000 and does not include the $1,999 red packet, the instalment scheme and baby bonus.

In launching this interest-free instalment and catchy $1 promotion, Mr Wong is well aware of the potential backlash.

While potential clients will no doubt welcome the offer, some people have raised a cautionary flag. (See report on facing page.)

But as competition looms and industry players get more aggressive, Mr Wong sees the need to up the ante and offer something different to potential grooms.

BOLD MOVE

The $1 offer is a bold move for a once-conservative matchmaking industry, which started out by matchmaking men with brides from China.

Over the years, market forces and demand have driven agency owners to look to Vietnam, Cambodia and Kalimantan for more brides.

But Mr Wong is confident that his 'good intentions' will not be missed.

He said: 'The $2,000 token sum we collect upfront is to prevent people from abusing the system.

'We will be conducting the same checks as we do for all our packages - extensive interviews, character checks, income stability and so on.'

His agency is the only matchmaking outfit with CaseTrust accreditation - an accreditation scheme for retail and service sectors promoting fair and ethical business practices so that consumers can buy with confidence.

While Vietnamese brides are still hot favourites among many Singapore bachelors, Mr Wong noted that there is a growing number who are enquiring about China brides again.

Since last June, four in 10 customers who approached him ended up choosing a China bride. The rest chose Vietnamese women.

These China brides work and live in small towns and have never travelled outside of China.

Most work as retail assistants, factory production operators and restaurant waitresses, and earn between 800 yuan ($160) and 1,000 yuan a month.

Mr Tan, a civil servant in his late 40s, has already snapped up the $1 offer. He is earning about $3,000 a month.

He said: 'I've been putting off marriage for many years, and my mother has been nagging at me to settle down.

'It hit me that I'm not getting any younger, so when I approached the agency and learnt about this offer, I took it up.'

Mr Tan, who claimed he has never been in a relationship, doesn't see the $1 offer as a dollar value placed on his potential bride-to-be.

Yet he admitted that if he successfully found a bride, he would 'hide the truth' about how they met from his friends and colleagues.

He said: 'Other people might think that I'm paying for a wife and gossip about it, but I'm really paying for the agency's service.

'I can afford to pay for the package upfront, but since there's this interest-free instalment, I might as well take advantage of it.'

------------------------------------------------------------------

Counsellor: Don't put monetary value on marriage

CLEVER marketing gimmick, or a slap to the institution of marriage?

This is the question which ran through the minds of some people we asked.

And while some, like MP Halimah Yacob, didn't think a gimmick would push people into marriage, others had their reservations.

Family counsellor and therapist Charles Lee warned about having monetary values attached to a marriage and children.

Said Mr Lee: 'People should marry and have kids because they are emotionally and psychologically prepared, not because there is a monetary incentive dangled before them.'

Even Madam Halimah cautioned that going too far with promotions could be hurtful.

'We should not treat a marriage or the woman we want to marry as a product,' she said. 'It will cheapen the institution of marriage and demean the woman.'

Still, she acknowledged that most people are mature enough to think for themselves.

'People will get married and have kids when they are ready to, not because of a promotion like that,' she said.

'The $1 scheme is a creative and innovative way of attracting customers, but I don't think it will be the most important factor for rational people looking at marriage.'

Added Mr Lee: 'It is ultimately up to the consumer to be aware of the pitfalls, and be discerning enough to know if a particular scheme is suitable for him or her.'

As for whether the scheme could hurt the marriage, counsellor and psychologist Harry Low didn't think it would have much impact.

He said: 'If you want to hurt someone, you don't have to say you married her for only $1 or any other amount.

'Monetary value or worth is not the only thing you can use to hurt someone.'

Poverty Analysis

Measuring Inequality
The Department of Statistics (SingStat) has just released a report which confirms that the income gap is increasing. In the report, the Gini coefficient is mentioned. Above is a World Bank webpage on poverty analysis which explains how the Gini coefficient works. Some of you may remember that Human Rights Day 2006 had a slogan of "Fighting Poverty: a matter of obligation, not charity". The SingStat report can be seen here.

Features service articles - Decent work in New Zealand: Thinking globally, acting locally - Department of Communication

Features service articles - Decent work in New Zealand: Thinking globally, acting locally - Department of Communication
A great showcase of the good labour rights in New Zealand...

BBC NEWS | Europe | EU concern at US data transfers

BBC NEWS | Europe | EU concern at US data transfers

"Hot" patients setting off radiation alarms | Health | Reuters.com

"Hot" patients setting off radiation alarms | Health | Reuters.com

United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mechanisms

United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mechanisms
To look into the human rights situation in Singapore, we need to first know the current issues. To do this, a monitoring mechanism is key. sgwatchDOG will be learning from the UN article above.

United Nations Convention against Corruption

UNODC-United Nations Convention against Corruption

Search engine aids rights workers

BBC NEWS | Technology | Search engine aids rights workers
Not sure if we need another search engine...

Human Rights Day, 10 December 2006

OHCHR Human Rights Day, 10 December 2006
Human Rights Day is with us again. Lets do our part in improving the situation for everyone in the world. sgwatchDOG commemorates this year's human rights day by writing a series of articles on human rights monitoring. Watch this space.

AIR: America's Investigative Reports . Guide to Investigative Journalism | PBS

AIR: America's Investigative Reports . Guide to Investigative Journalism | PBS

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | While poverty persists, there is no freedom

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | While poverty persists, there is no freedom

eGazette

Current Notices
The eGazette contains notices from all the various Ministries in Singapore. As such, one can often find gems of information in this "vault". Do note that the free access section only lists the latest notices for the last 7 days.

The way the police treat us verges on the criminal

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | The way the police treat us verges on the criminal

An article commenting about affairs in the UK, but the points mentioned apply in Singapore also.

----------------------------

Guilty until proven innocent now seems to be the watchword of a government that increasingly treats its law-abiding citizens with absolute contempt

Henry Porter
Sunday October 29, 2006
The Observer

A father and his eight-year-old son got off a train at Blackpool on a Friday evening two weeks ago to be confronted by a number of police officers moving passengers towards a scanner. There was a mildly threatening manner about them and it was clear that they expected everyone to pass through the scanner, which they said was being used to search for knives.

The man, whose name is Danny, quietly told the police that unless they had a very good reason, he would not be searched. One or two passengers hesitated, then joined him in refusing to go through the scanner. The police were clearly disgruntled, but couldn't do anything because Danny was right: they had to have reasonable grounds for suspecting he was carrying a knife in order to search him. 'I am not some rabid left winger or civil libertarian,' he wrote in an email to me. 'It just seems we are allowing a police state to be developed without an argument.' On the phone, he seemed to modify this by saying that the police behaviour had been oppressive.

Thank God there are still people like Danny who know the law and understand that part of its fragile essence is the respect for the rights of the innocent citizen when confronted with authority. The British Transport Police may insist that its Operation Shield, as this random trawl is known, is for the common good in that it fights knife crime, but think twice about the attitude it betrays and you realise that it is another small erosion in the esteem for the individual. Such behaviour makes everyone a suspect.

Tony Blair talks incessantly about respect, yet there are few who have done more to degrade authority's respect for the public. Nowhere is that better seen than in the behaviour of the police, which gradually becomes more coercive and imbued with the idea that we are all bad hats until we prove otherwise. We now live in a country where the idea of wrongful arrest has become a historic curiosity and where anyone can be arrested for the slightest offence and compelled to become part of the government's DNA database.

We live in a country where young boys - one was just seven - are taken aside and questioned for trying to knock conkers out of chestnut trees on public ground. Where a grandmother whose neighbour accused her of not returning a ball kicked into her garden was arrested, fingerprinted and required to give her DNA. The police went through every room in her house, even her daughter's drawers, before letting her go without charge or caution.

Where two sisters can be arrested after a peaceful protest about climate change, held in solitary confinement for 36 hours without being allowed to make a phone call, then told not to talk to each other as a condition of their bail. As this paper reported, their money, keys, computers, discs and phones were confiscated, their homes searched.

There is much more, all of it enabled by Blair's laws and encouraged by a vindictive and erroneous contention that defendants' rights must be reduced in the pursuit of more and quicker prosecutions. Our prisons are full, problem teenagers are, by default, exiled to a kind of outlawry and every citizen becomes the subject of an almost hysterical need by the authorities to check up on and chivvy them.

The government regards us not just as wedded to too many regrettable vices - smoking, speeding, drinking too much, eating unhealthy food and taking no exercise - but also as innately prone to law-breaking. Perhaps with good reason, since, according to the Liberal Democrat homes affairs spokesman, Nick Clegg, some 3,000 criminal offences have been created by Labour. The more crimes there are, the more criminals there will be.

Mass surveillance has begun on our motorways and in our town centres. Metropolitan drivers increasingly find themselves pressed into numberplate-recognition camera traps on the same principle that inspires Operation Shield. Everyone has something to hide unless they can prove otherwise, which is why the police also enthusiastically pursue samples for the DNA database. (Incidentally, by next year, the total number of profiles will rise to three million, one in five of which will belong to black people.)

The police are in their very own heaven and demand more and more powers of instant justice, a contradiction in terms if ever there was one. These will allow them to crush people's cars, issue more on-the-spot fines and ban 'undesirables' from any area they choose without having to go to court. Even parish councils are to become part of this culture of minatory bossiness. Instead of having to apply to central government to introduce new bylaws, they are to be given powers by Ruth Kelly, the Communities and Local Government Minister, to levy instant £100 fines for skateboarding, not cleaning up dog mess, busking and, no doubt, scrumping for apples and playing Pooh sticks. How will it end - with CCTV cameras watching small boys for inappropriate behaviour in the vicinity of horse chestnuts?

In his frantic terminality, Blair plans the sinister information-sharing index, otherwise known as the universal child register, and last week was musing that we should all have our DNA stored on the national base. Link this to his earlier remarks about identifying problem children who might grow up to be a menace to society by intervening before they were born and you begin to feel the chill of the technology-driven authoritarianism.

What runs through all this seems to be a rather surprising dislike of the British people. It was once possible to believe the government's unusual attention to law, order and behaviour was benevolent yet ill-conceived. Now it looks more like the result of late-onset sociopathy, influenced by a long period in power and the degenerate entanglement between Downing Street and the seething red-top newspapers.

The prevailing account of Britain in the current political establishment has become deeply pessimistic and, to my mind, wrong. Yes, we have problems with home-grown terrorism, loutishness, a swelling underclass, unintegrating minorities, but there is another story. Britain is also a success and it should occur to one of our political leaders to defy the orthodoxy of decline and compliment the nation on its adaptability and deep reserves of virtue and toleration.

Think of the charitable activity in this country, of the level of public debate that wells up in BBC programmes such as Any Questions, the deep interest in history, the eagerness of the audiences at arts festivals all over Britain, the humour and generosity of spirit, the commitment to local communities, to understanding each other's needs and of the array of passions and hobbies which absorb so many millions of people whose quiet, law-abiding fulfilment as Britons goes undescribed by the furious negativity of the moment. It is these people, with their stored-up virtue and unself-conscious decency, who the government seeks to turn into suspects and infantilise by its morbid intrusion.

It is not the government's business to encroach on our experience as individuals in a democracy, to threaten us with so much oppressive legislation and always to assume our guilt. But there is another reason and that is because we are soon going to have to have the debate about individual liberty in the context of rapid climate change. That will only work if the government treats us like adults and says: 'Look, this is potentially the greatest crisis civilisation has ever faced and we need your help.' The resulting contract must be between equals - the people and the state - and in a relationship where respect flows both ways.That, ultimately, is what this nagging and suspicious government threatens.

henry.porter@observer.co.uk

BBC NEWS | Technology | Free speech online 'under threat'

BBC NEWS | Technology | Free speech online 'under threat'

The Special Rapporteurs

BBC NEWS Programmes Documentary Archive The Special Rapporteurs
sgwatchDOG finds out more about the UN special rapporteurs. For example, these rapporteurs are not paid by the UN...

Digital @ AsiaOne

Digital @ AsiaOne

What it should have been

Well, this is a strange development of events...

"Sep 9, 2006
Activists held, ordered to leave

By Tania Tan

ANIMAL rights activists were detained and ordered to leave Singapore yesterday before they could stage their planned protest outside a KFC fast-food outlet in Victoria Street.

Police acted on Thursday after they were alerted to the plans of a duo from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) to parade naked outside the outlet wearing banners saying 'Naked Truth: KFC Tortures Chicks'.

Police tracked the cellphone signals of American Jason Baker, 34, and Canadian Ashley Fruno, 20, and found the pair at a coffee shop in Bencoolen Street at 3.30pm.

They were taken to a police station at about 7pm and allowed to leave three hours later, after being told to board the next available flight out of Singapore.

A third member, Filipina Sonia Astudillo, 26, who arrived here later on Thursday, was immediately detained and also told to leave.

Police confirmed that all three were told to leave, before they could repeat a stunt they had carried out in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur days earlier.

Peta activitists are protesting against KFC because, unlike McDonald's and Burger King, the fried chicken franchise has yet to sign on to 'welfare policies', and had ignored recommendations for animal welfare improvements, the US-based Peta claims.

A KFC spokesman: 'KFC is committed to good animal welfare practices and all KFC poultry suppliers meet or exceed animal welfare legislation and industry standards.'

Mr Baker said just before his flight to Hong Kong at 3pm yesterday: 'We are shocked at being deported.'

This is not the first time the group has protested here. Its most recent attempt was made in February, when a Peta member paraded along Orchard Road in a chicken suit and gas mask, protesting the poultry culling sparked by the avian flu threat.

'The police didn't bat an eyelid then,' said Mr Baker, who is also director of the Asia-Pacific arm of Peta.

'Perhaps they were using us to send a message to IMF protesters,' he added, referring to the annual International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings to be held here next week."

What it should have been

"In Saturday's report 'Activists held, ordered to leave', we said that the police had tracked the cellphone signals of the activists from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

This is wrong. The police had responded to calls from the public who witnessed the duo behaving suspiciously.

We are sorry for the error."

PTC approves fare increases

http://www.ptc.gov.sg/news16.pdf
sgwatchDOG reads the Public Transport Council's fare increase document with interest...

062404.pdf (application/pdf Object)

egazette
Interesting nuggets of information are always on show at the E-gazette website. Take the one above, for example. It mentions that,

"pursuant to paragraph 2.3 of the Code of Conduct for Ministers (Cmd No. 8 of 2005), the Prime Minister, having considered it to be in the national interest, has granted the
Minister Mentor, Mr Lee Kuan Yew, permission to be a special advisor to Citigroup Inc., with effect from 5th September 2006."

Joint Statement From World Bank And IMF On CSO Participation In The Annual Meetings In Singapore

Press Release
Well, the press release from the World Bank & IMF makes their stand crystal clear... they want all accredited civil society representatives to be allowed into Singapore...