Govt looking to up support for social enterprises running hawker centres

SINGAPORE: The government is exploring ways to boost support to social enterprises and not-for-profit organisations, which are set to manage hawker centres of the future.

This comes after a government-appointed hawker centre consultation panel recommended that social enterprises run hawker centres of the future, with the aims of giving the disadvantaged jobs, and providing the community with affordable food.

Environment and Water Resources Minister Vivian Balakrishnan shared this at the official launch of Kampung @ Simpang Bedok, Singapore's first hawker centre to be run by a social enterprise.

In February last year, social enterprise Best of Asia took over the management of the centre.

Some of the changes include the use of space to allow patrons to shop, or just hang out. The management plans weekly flea markets and band gigs to draw in the crowd.

Deirdre Murugasu, leader of Best of Asia said: "All along, there are many Singaporeans who are unable to actually expand even if they are very good hawkers, there's no succession planning. This place is a place for them to all try out. Make it, don't make it, we're there to help them."

There are 32 stalls at the centre. Best of Asia offers various forms of help to stall holders - including charging them partial rent.

Full rentals range between S$1,500 and S$4,000, based on individual assessments of stall holders.

Dr Balakrishnan said: "This is a very important new start and we'll have to see how this develops over the years to come. The key thing is for it to remain viable, for it to provide good livelihood to people who may be disadvantaged or who may otherwise have an opportunity to start their own businesses. And also for good-hearted people with business ideas and imagination to help others to create a multi-disciplinary team to make this place viable, attractive and hopefully a model for the future."

Hawker centres run by social enterprises can help boost community ties.

Kasmah Sukor, a cook at Pitstop @ Haniff said: "I see that we are working together, helping each other. Everybody tries to support each other in any way we can. That is why I feel that we have the kampung spirit to help out and work. That is what I like about this place."

The government hopes that the 10 new hawker centres in the next five years would be run by social enterprises.

It will look into ways to best support such a model, to ensure long-term sustainability and viability.

- CNA/xq

Read More..

Sen. Rubio drowning in 'water-gate'

on your computer or on the CNN Apps for iPhone® and iPad®.

iPhone, iPad and Mac are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. App Store is a service mark of Apple Inc.

If you get CNN and HLN at home, you can watch them online and on the go for no additional chargeStart watching

Read More..

Man arrested in Alaska Coast Guard base deaths

ANCHORAGE, Alaska An Alaska man was arrested Friday in last year's shooting deaths at a Coast Guard air station on Kodiak Island that left two employees dead, the U.S. attorney said.

James Michael Wells of Kodiak is accused in a federal murder complaint of killing Petty Officer 1st Class James Hopkins and retired Chief Boatswain's Mate Richard Belisle on April 12.

Another Coast Guard member found the victims shortly after the two would have arrived for work at the station, which monitors radio traffic from ships and planes and is home to cutters, helicopters and rescue swimmers that aid mariners in the Bering Sea and Pacific Ocean. Their bodies were found in the rigger building, where antennas are repaired.

FBI agents immediately flew to Kodiak Island from Anchorage, about 250 miles away, to investigate the case as a double homicide. Few details were released in the weeks after the deaths.

Wells' arrest came after "an extensive investigation" led by the FBI and the Coast Guard Investigative Service, with help from the Alaska State Troopers, U.S. Attorney Karen Loeffler said in a statement.

Wells is expected to appear in court next week in Anchorage, Loeffler said.

No one was immediately reachable by phone Friday evening at the U.S. attorney's office to provide additional details.

Hopkins, 41, was an electronics technician from Vergennes, Vt. Belisle, 51, was a former chief petty officer who continued service to the Coast Guard as a civilian employee.

Read More..

Brecht's Galileo is a play for our times

Tiffany O'Callaghan, Opinion editor

Ian McDiarmid as Galileo (left) and James Tucker as the Bursar (Image: Ellie Kurtz)

It has been more than 400 years since Galileo Galilei pointed his telescope toward the night sky and observed the movement of the moons around Jupiter, providing proof that all things do not revolve around the Earth - and drawing the ire of the Catholic church.

And it has been nearly 80 years since playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote the first version of A Life of Galileo while living in Denmark after fleeing Germany when Hitler took power.

Yet the latest retelling of this famous tale by the Royal Shakespeare Company underscores the emphatically contemporary nature of the struggle between static world views and dynamic knowledge.

This is reinforced by using the familiar, modern clothing of tweedy dishevelment among Galileo and his colleagues and pupils, and sets featuring the lab-staple whiteboard and a large blue backdrop that resembles a wall of solar panels.

But of course this is not simply an old story with modern accoutrements and gimmicky staging. Portrayed by Ian McDiarmid, Galileo’s compulsive curiosity, his sheer joy when his pupil grasps a new concept for the first time, and his bewildered frustration when adversaries refuse to observe the evidence literally in front of them feel both timely and timeless. “All I ask is for them to believe their eyes!” exclaims poor Galileo.

In a moment when 46 per cent of US citizens believe the Earth is less than 10,000 years old and four US states are weighing up bills that would challenge the teaching of evolution, the tension remains strong between theologies that carve out a creation story for humans and the evidence that we are the serendipitous result of millions of years of evolution.

There are strong reminders of these tensions in the play, for example, when a cleric bullies Galileo to keep his heliocentric ideas to himself, crystallising the church’s terror at the implications of his ideas: “Is no one watching us?" asks the cleric. "Has no one imagined a part for us to play other than this one?”

Galileo is cowed into compromise. His new ideas may be used to help seafarers better navigate by the stars, but not to upend the understanding of the order of things. They may answer practical questions, but not existential ones. “We may research, but we may not draw conclusions.”

He accepts the new conditions in word only. His experiments continue, and when given the slimmest opening his feverish curiosity breaks out into the light of day. When he learns that his friend and science enthusiast Cardinal Barberini may ascend to the papacy, he lauds the arrival of an era of reason. Too soon, of course.

In the second act, we meet the new pope in his undergarments. As he debates the use of torture and threats to force Galileo to renounce the Copernican ideas laid out in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Barberini dons layer upon layer of vestments. Crimson robes, a glittering great cape, and finally the mitre: when he is cloaked in the power of his office, Barberini assents to the threat of torture.

The scene parallels the opening scene of the play, in which Galileo, also in only his undergarments, is bathing and getting ready for the day. The contrast is evident: in the flesh, they are both ageing men. But their power to spread ideas is proportional to the grandeur of their garments. When Galileo is threatened and ultimately abjures his earlier assertions, he returns beaten and bare-legged in a crumpled white gown.

The legacy of Galileo’s recantation is left open. Brecht rewrote aspects of the play following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, when he was living in the US. “Overnight the biography of the founder of the new system of physics read differently,” he wrote in an introduction to the new version. “The infernal effect of the great bomb placed the conflict between Galileo and the authorities of his day in a new sharper light.”

Brecht never saw the stage production of his later version in New York, as he left the country after being questioned by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

By the end of the play, Galileo is wary of science shaped by interests more nefarious than the quest for truth. He sees a danger in scientists being reduced to little more than “inventing pygmies” for sale to the highest bidder, their ideas open to be used for cruel ends. Galileo’s public recantation and private pursuit of truth and Brecht’s ambivalence about the responsibility of scientists to shape the use of their research for the benefit of humankind are not necessarily two sides of the same coin, it seems.

But it isn’t clear that in publicly defying the church Galileo would have reshaped the way that scientific knowledge is applied. And in real life, as in the play, in sneaking his final, influential publication Discourse and Mathematical Demonstrations About Two New Sciences out under the noses of the church which held him under house arrest for the final years of his life, Galileo seems vindicated in his decision to live to think another day.

As New Yorker critic Adam Gopnik recently put it, “the best reason we have to believe in the moons of Jupiter is that no one has to be prepared to die for them in order for them to be real”.

It may be an excruciatingly slow process, but the truth has a way of emerging into the light eventually. It was just two decades ago - and 350 years after Galileo’s death - that the Catholic church finally admitted that it had been wrong to condemn him.

A Life of Galileo is on at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK, until 30 March.

Follow @CultureLabNS on Twitter

Like us on Facebook

Read More..

Former MM Lee Kuan Yew misses Lunar New Year dinner

SINGAPORE: Former Minister Mentor and Member of Parliament (MP) for Tanjong Pagar Group Representation Constituency (GRC), Mr Lee Kuan Yew did not attend the annual Lunar New year dinner at his GRC on Friday evening.

Senior Minister of State for Law and MP for the area, Ms Indranee Rajah told grassroots leaders and residents at the dinner that Mr Lee was not feeling well and had extended his apologies for not being at the event.

Mr Lee thanked all residents for attending the event.

On behalf of the gathering, Ms Indranee wished Mr Lee a speedy recovery and hopes he feels better soon.

Channel NewsAsia understands from grassroots leaders in the division that this is the first time Mr Lee has missed the Tanjong Pagar division's Lunar New Year dinner celebrations.

- CNA/xq

Read More..

Mom of boy held in bunker is worried

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Phil McGraw speaks with mother of former Alabama child hostage


• She tells him she worried about trying to put him back on a school bus


• Ethan told her the Army killed the 'bad man'


• The 6-year-old tells his mom that 'My bus driver is dead'

(CNN) -- Jennifer Kirkland says she caught her 6-year-old son Ethan just staring at a school bus the other day.

He was mesmerized, his eyes locked on the yellow vehicle. He didn't say a thing, and she didn't know what to say to him.

The last time he was on a bus, he was sitting just behind the driver -- as he always did -- waiting for his stop so he could go home.

But the "bad man" got on, and killed the driver, his buddy Mr. Poland.

Appearing on the "Dr. Phil" show, Kirkland told Phil McGraw she was worried how her little boy was going to react the next time she tried to put him on the bus to school.

After being kidnapped, the recovery ahead

Photos: Alabama bunker standoff

HIDE CAPTION

Ethan has been having a hard time sleeping, she told the psychologist turned syndicated daytime talk show host.

He thrashes his arms, tosses and turns and sometimes he calls out.

It has only been almost 10 days since the FBI sent a rescue team into the bunker in Midland City, Alabama, where Ethan was held hostage for nearly a week by Jimmy Lee Dykes.

His mother hasn't asked Ethan what happened when he was there.

"I have not talked to Ethan about it," she said in an interview aired Wednesday. "I don't know how to. As a mother I want him to know that I'm there if he needs to talk. I don't know how to respond because I have never been through this."

Inside the bunker: From storm shelter to boy's prison

Ethan has seen two people shot to death. Dykes shot bus driver Charles Poland several times before he carried Ethan, who had fainted, off the bus and into an underground bunker Dykes had built on his property.

Then the FBI killed Dykes when negotiations broke down and authorities felt they had to rescue the boy before Dykes, who had a handgun, did something rash.

"The Army came in and shot the bad man," Kirkland said Ethan told her.

Kirkland said she had hoped Dykes wouldn't be harmed.

"From the very beginning, I had already forgiven Mr. Dykes even though he had my child," she said. "I could not be angry through this. My job was to be the mother."

She thinks Dykes had a soft spot for Ethan because he has disabilities. Dykes took care of her boy as best he could, she said.

He even fried chicken for the boy.

Still, as the crisis continued, she worried that Dykes might be spooked by something her child did -- or that he had enough supplies to stay down there for months. She worried her boy would think she had abandoned him.

She asked authorities to let her speak to Dykes.

"That's my baby. He's my world. He's my everything," she said. "Everything I do I do for him. And I was afraid I wasn't going to get him back."

When she did get him back, he was in the hospital, putting stickers on everyone in sight.

"Hey, bug, I sure have missed you," she recounted.

"I missed you, too," he answered.

FBI: Bombs found in Alabama kidnapper's bunker

Now she worries that even though he seems like the same playful little boy, there is an emotional storm ahead.

McGraw told her to talk to Ethan about his feelings, not what happened to him in the bunker.

"Let that decay in his young mind," he said.

McGraw asked Ethan a few questions, but as 6-year-olds are apt to do, he answered most with a "Yes" or a "No."

But when the doctor asked him how he got to school, Ethan said, "On my bus, but my ..."

Then he walked over to his mother and as if telling a secret, whispered in her ear, "But my bus driver is dead."

Kirkland told McGraw that it was Poland who helped Ethan conquer his fear of descending the steep school bus steps. Poland would cheer Ethan on and one day when the child hesitated and the mother went to help, the driver said, "Let him do it."

Since then, Ethan has had no problem.

But now his cheerleader won't be there, and Kirkland is anguished about her boy.

"Mr. Poland put him behind him so he could keep a good eye on him," she said.

Ethan hasn't been back to school yet. He's been busy opening birthday presents and playing with his favorite toys. On Wednesday, he made a new friend in Gov. Robert Bentley.

There's a picture from the event where little Ethan is sitting underneath the governor's desk. The child is beaming.

"Ethan is a loving, forgiving child," Kirkland said. "He is easy to go up to a perfect stranger and say, 'Can I have a hug?'"

That was the boy who went into that bunker. She is concerned it's not the child who came out.

Read More..

Cruise passenger: People thought ship was "going to tip over"

(CBS News) Four thousand people who have been adrift at sea for four days are finally nearing shore Thursday night. This evening, the Carnival cruise ship named Triumph is being towed into Mobile Bay, Ala., and is expected to dock by midnight.

She left Galveston, Texas, a week ago, loaded with her maximum 3,143 passengers and crew of 1,100. The brochure described a four-day cruise in the Caribbean, but an engine room fire left her adrift and powerless.

All aboard have suffered in squalid conditions, stranded as Carnival slowly brought the ship in.

When CBS News flew over the Carnival Triumph, it was within sight of shore -- but still seven hours away from the dock.

Cruise ship on the move after latest setback
Carnival cancels 12 more cruises on troubled ship
Inside Carnival cruise nightmare: Passenger describes deteriorating conditions

From up there we could see people waving, some with signs that appear to be made out of bed sheets. One said "SOS" -- save our ship -- but at this point it's not the ship that needs saving, it's the passengers.

The ship has been without power since an engine room fire five days ago. CBS News reached passenger Jacob Combs on the phone.

"The really bad part is there was no running water and toilets for almost the first 30 hours," Combs said. "Once they finally did get running water, the toilets only worked in certain places. I would say it's the worst smell imaginable."

Emailed photos (above) reveal squalid conditions. Many passengers used red plastic bags as toilets. Hundreds slept in hallways or topside to escape the foul and stagnate air below deck.

Carnival CEO Jerry Cahill insists passengers were never at risk. But 22-year old Leslie Mayberry disagreed.

"It was leaning to one side it was literally like walking up hill whenever the boat was leaning," she said. "I mean it was very scary," Mayberry said. "I mean a lot of people thought it was going to tip over and sink. And then you look out on the deck and you see the ocean and there is no one, you are just by yourself and you are so alone, even though you are around 3,000 other people on this boat."

The towline pulling the 14-story tall ship snapped, delaying Thursday's operation. It was re-attached, but it will be nightfall before the ship arrives at the terminal. Nellie Betts came from Tupelo, Miss., to meet her daughter.

"There's no reason why those people should be out there as long as they have. Why? I want to understand why," she said. "What is taking them so long to get them out?"

Once the ship arrives at the terminal, Carnival plans to put most of those passengers on a two-hour bus rid to New Orleans or even to Galveston, Texas, but some already are saying, "no thanks" - they have relatives picking them up in Mobile so they can go straight home.

Read More..

Nightmare Ends: Passengers Leave Disabled Ship

After five days without power in the Gulf of Mexico, the Carnival Triumph cruise ship carrying more than 4,000 people arrived in Mobile, Ala., to greet a cheering crowd of friends and family members waiting to embrace their loved ones.

Passengers began to disembark the damaged ship around 10:15 p.m. CT Thursday in Mobile, Ala. The last passenger disembarked the ship at 1 a.m. local time, according to Carnival's Twitter handle.

As the ship docked, passengers lined the decks of the ship, waving, and whistling to those on shore. "Happy V-Day" read a homemade sign made for the Valentine's Day arrival and another, more starkly: "The ship's afloat, so is the sewage."

Some still aboard chanted, "Let me off, let me off!" and "Sweet Home Alabama."

The Carnival Triumph departed Galveston, Texas, last Thursday and lost power Sunday after a fire in the engine room disabled the vessel's propulsion system and knocked out most of its power.

After power went out, passengers texted ABC News that sewage was seeping down the walls from burst plumbing pipes, carpets were wet with urine, and food was in short supply. Reports surfaced of elderly passengers running out of critical heart medicine and others on board squabbling over scarce food.

Click Here for Photos of the Stranded Ship at Sea

Passengers said many of the cabins became intolerable with the smell of raw sewage. They were forced to create makeshift beds out of lounge chairs on the ship's deck.

AP Photo/John David Mercer

Girl Disembarks Cruise Ship, Kisses the Ground Watch Video

Carnival CEO Gerry Cahill: 'I Want to Apologize' Watch Video

Carnival Cruise Ship Passengers Line Up for Food Watch Video

"We kind of camped out by our lifeboat. We would have nightmares about Titanic basically happening," passenger Kendall Jenkins told ABC News Radio after disembarking from the ship.

"I am just so blessed to be back home," she added.

Jenkins was one of many passengers that were photographed kissing the ground when they exited the ship.

WATCH: Carnival CEO Gerry Cahill Apologizes to Passengers

Approximately 100 buses were waiting to take passengers on the next stage of their journey. Passengers have the option to take a bus ride to New Orleans or Galveston, Texas, where the ill-fated ship's voyage began. From there, passengers will take flights home, which Carnival said they would pay for.

Inside the buses, Carnival handed out bags of food that included French fries, chicken nuggets, honey mustard barbecue sauce and apples.

Deborah Knight, 56, decided to stay in Mobile after the arduous journey was over rather than board a bus for a long ride. Her husband Seth drove in from Houston and they checked in at a downtown Mobile hotel.

"I want a hot shower and a daggum Whataburger," said Knight.

She said she was afraid to eat the food on board and had gotten sick while on the ship.

Cruise Ship Newlyweds Won't Be Spending Honeymoon on a Boat

For 24-year-old Brittany Ferguson of Texas, not knowing how long passengers had to endure their time aboard was the worst part.

"I'm feeling awesome just to see land and buildings," Ferguson said, who was in a white robe given to her aboard. "The scariest part was just not knowing when we'd get back," she told The Associated Press.

Carnival president and CEO Gerry Cahill praised the ship's crew and told reporters that he was headed on board to apologize directly to its passengers shortly before the Carnival Triumph arrived in Mobile.

"I know the conditions on board were very poor," Cahill said Thursday night. "I know it was very difficult, and I want to apologize again for subjecting our guests for that. ... Clearly, we failed in this particular case."

Luckily no one was hurt in the fire they triggered the power outage, but many passengers aboard the 900 foot colossus said they smelled smoke and were living in fear.

Read More..

Runaway stars to fill in the blanks in Milky Way map

GUIDES to the galaxy might call it Zona Galactica Incognita – the half of our home galaxy we know little about. Indeed, the Milky Way is one of the least charted spiral galaxies in the nearby universe. Now it seems that stars kicked out of their birth clusters can help fill in the void and create the first proper map of the entire galaxy.

Young star clusters and clouds of hydrogen that formed in our galaxy help trace the shapes of the Milky Way's arms, so astronomers are reasonably certain that it has a spiral structure (see right). Observations of stellar motion show that there is a supermassive black hole at its core.

But figuring out how fast the arms rotate or even counting how many there are is tricky, in part because we are embedded in one of its arms and unable to get an outsider's view. In addition, everything behind the galactic centre is shrouded by a dense wall of stars and dust, blanking out a whole area of the Milky Way map.

"It's quite difficult to see the actual structure," says Manuel Silva of the University of Lisbon in Portugal. "I'm a little upset, really, that we don't know our own galaxy that well."

A space telescope called Gaia, scheduled for launch later this year, will map the positions and distances of about one billion stars on our side of the Milky Way, plotting the three-dimensional structure in unprecedented detail. But even Gaia won't be able to pierce the material that blocks our view of the far side.

Instead of trying to look across, Silva and his colleagues suggest looking up, where hundreds of runaway stars fly high above the disc of the galaxy. These stars are born in clusters inside the Milky Way but get ejected during gravitational jostling with other stars. Precise measurements of their velocities, ages and distances would allow astronomers to trace the stellar fugitives back to their homes, even on the far side.

"The idea is that the runaway stars act as signal flares, showing the position of the spiral arm, the same way someone lost in the middle of a dense forest could fire one to the sky to show his or her location to an outsider," says Silva.

His team traced the origins of about 40 runaway stars, observed by the Hipparcos satellite, ranging from roughly 1000 to 100,000 light years above the galactic plane (arxiv.org/abs/1302.0761v1). Although none of these stars came from the far side, the technique seems to work because the results agreed with previous studies that mapped star clusters in the visible section of the galaxy.

"The idea is a new one, and is an interesting one," says Jacques Lepine of the University of São Paulo in Brazil, who was not involved in the new study. Comparing Gaia's view of stars with the runaways will be helpful, he adds. "It is good to have different methods, to compare results. If the results are similar, we get more confident."

Jacques Vallée of the Canadian National Research Council in Victoria, British Columbia, agrees that the proof of concept is impressive. But that doesn't stop him fantasising about easier ways: "Wish I had a friend on a planet around a runaway star in the halo, sending me back a photo."

This article appeared in print under the headline "Runaway stars flesh out Milky Way map"

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.

If you are having a technical problem posting a comment, please contact technical support.

Read More..

Scientists discover new owl species in Indonesia

JAKARTA: Researchers in Indonesia unwittingly identified a new species of owl believed to be unique to the country, raising hopes of further new bird discoveries, a scientist said on Thursday.

The brown-and-white Rinjani Scops owl was first spotted in 2003 on the island of Lombok, while researchers were looking for another nocturnal bird. It was formally identified by four scientists on Wednesday in the online "Plos One" journal.

Prior to that, the bird had been mistaken for the related Moluccan Scops owl, found in the Maluku islands in central Indonesia.

"Ornithologists have long patted themselves on the back, believing that the taxonomy of birds was almost complete," researcher George Sangster from the Swedish Museum of Natural History, told AFP.

"Our study shows that even after more than 250 years of taxonomic research, we can still find new species, even of birds."

Sangster discovered the bird days before another researcher, Ben King, made the same discovery independently when both were on the island to collect sounds of large-tailed Nightjars.

They noticed the owl's songs were "completely different" from the Moluccan Scops owl.

He said further research should be carried out on the nearby island of Sumbawa to verify if the bird was unique to Lombok.

Ornithologists have often overlooked Lombok during field work in the region, believing there were no endemic bird species there, Sangster said.

Sangster has called for more research on birds in Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago of around 17,000 islands that he calls "a treasure trove for taxonomists".

The Rinjani Scops owl was named after the volcano in the heart of Lombok island.

- AFP/al

Read More..