28 September 2024: Well, that was a bit underwhelming…

It has been such a tiring week—and looks like it’ll continue to be so for the next week or two—but omg omg omg I’m going to the Stray Kids concert tonight. If anything will bring me back to life, it’s going to be that.

(1)

That was pretty anti-climatic. S Iswaran, the former transport minister, had vowed to fight corruption charges and clear his name. This created lots of excitement for the trial—what sort of drama would come out of something like that? But those who dragged themselves out of bed early to queue for a spot in the public gallery were likely disappointed: the prosecution decided to amend the corruption charges to lesser ones of accepting valuable gifts from people he was involved with in an official capacity. With the corruption charges off the table, Iswaran pleaded guilty to four charges of obtaining gifts and one of obstructing justice. (Thirty other charges will be taken into consideration for sentencing.)

The sentencing hearing will be on 3 October. The prosecution wants Iswaran to spent about six to seven months in the slammer, whereas his lawyer is suggesting about eight weeks.

This turn of events has led to many questions about why the prosecution decided not to go with the corruption charges. The Attorney-General Chambers said that the decision was made after considering the “litigation risks” of making out a corruption case beyond reasonable doubt in court and also whether the change would be in the public interest. What does this mean, exactly? How did they determine that these Section 165 (of the Penal Code) charges would be more in line with public interest than the original corruption charges? Unclear.

On social media, some have made comparisons with this 2019 case of a forklift operator who’d been imprisoned for two months and fined thousands for dollars for a corruption charge because he took bribes of between 10 cents to a dollar from truck drivers wanting to jump the queue. If that—involving a guy with far less power than a Cabinet minister and sums far smaller than the value of the gifts Iswaran received—was a corruption case, then why not this? I’m sure the AGC will have a lot to say about how it was totes different, but it doesn’t look very good optics-wise, does it?

(2)

The green line—parts of it, anyway—is busted. I haven’t paid much attention to trains since the days of Thomas the Tank Engine, but Christopher Tan, a retired transport correspondent who worked at The Straits Times, put it in plain language:

That such a massive breakdown took place so soon after the completion of a decade-long rail renewal programme costing hundreds of million dollars is disturbing, to say the least.

Equally disturbing is the fact that this disruption was caused by a derailment, which happened when a faulty train was being towed back to the depot.

In the process, a crucial undercarriage assembly became dislodged, and part of the train went off the tracks. We have to be thankful this did not happen when the train was plying with a full load of passengers. The consequences would have been unthinkable.

Indeed, the subsequent damages caused by the dislodged assembly resulted in a power fault which rendered the line inoperable. Damages were also sustained by sections of the track and trackside equipment, which in themselves would have rendered the line inoperable. Again, we must be thankful there were no human casualties.

Well, that’s no good. This problem has really messed things up for commuters, including kids taking their PSLE. Experts say this is a rare case, but wow, it’s really not been a good time for Chee Hong Tat, who’d previously also received flak for SimplyGo and ERP 2.0.

(3)

The Ministry of Social and Family Development has released a Domestic Violence Report for the first time. The report covers a range of violence in the home, from child abuse to spousal and elder abuse. The report sorts cases into Tier 1 and Tier 2: the first refers to cases with “low to moderate safety and risk concerns for the vulnerable person”, the second to cases with “high safety and risk concerns” that might require “more intrusive statutory intervention”.

Between 2021 and 2023, Tier 2 cases have thankfully decreased. Tier 1 cases, on the other hand, have increased, which isn’t a good thing to hear, but could be more reflective of an increased awareness and willingness to report cases than an actual increase in violence.

Elsewhere in the region

🇯🇵 Iwao Hakamada, the world’s longest-serving death row inmate, has finally been exonerated after having fought for decades to clear his name. He was convicted of killing four people in 1968 and sentenced to death. He was released in 2014, after 46 years on death row, after the court granted him a retrial. In acquitting him, the court found that investigators had tampered with evidence. It’s a relief that Hakamada is still alive to see this day, but plenty of damage has already been done; now 88, his long years on death row took a heavy toll on his mental health, to the point where he was unfit to attend the hearing where he was acquitted in person.

🇹🇼 Taiwan’s Supreme Court has ruled the death penalty constitutional but imposed further restrictions on its use. It’s a decision that was probably meant to be a compromise, but hasn’t pleased anyone: the abolitionists are understandably disappointed and the retentionists pissed.

🇲🇲 In keeping with the death penalty theme, human rights groups are slamming the Myanmar junta for executing anti-coup protesters. “The Myanmar junta military will execute over 120 detainees in the coming weeks, who are mostly activists and human rights defenders. Fifteen of them are women human rights defenders,” ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights reports.

I’m going to be dancing to this song tonight and I’m so excited 🤩