Daily Archives: December 22, 2020

49% of new citizens granted between 2000 and 2021 were not economically active and were granted Singapore citizenship on the basis of their family...

Six Singaporeans, aged between 23 and 30, have been arrested for suspected drug offences by Central Narcotics Bureau (CNB) officers during two anti-drug operations on Monday (20 Mar)

UBS and Credit Suisse's merger will create the biggest bank in Switzerland, raising concerns about its size. Both banks are considered too big to fail and are of strategic importance to the global banking system. Some in business, industry, and politics are sceptical about the merger and the impact on services offered to companies, costs, and competition. The merger prevented the collapse of Credit Suisse and triggered criticism among Swiss political circles, with calls for further regulation and partial nationalization.

UN warns of an imminent global water crisis with billions of people experiencing water-related issues daily. Global water consumption has increased by 1% per year, leading to the depletion of between 26-52 trillion gallons of reserves annually. Climate change-exacerbated water shortages could cost some regions up to 6% of GDP by 2050. Agricultural runoff is threatening freshwater ecosystems, and major investments, estimated to cost over $1 trillion per year, are needed to achieve access to clean water and sanitation for all by 2030.

The Housing and Development Board (HDB) has issued a written warning to a shop owner in Yishun estate for illegally partitioning the upper floor of their shophouse into four rooms and renting them out without authorization. The unit was previously listed for public rental on the PropertyGuru website, but has since been taken down from listing.

Human rights lawyer M Ravi, an advocate for those on death row for 20 years, has been suspended from practising for five years by the Court of Three Judges in Singapore, for misconduct. The maximum possible sanction for lawyers was delivered for the charges against Mr Ravi for making "baseless and ill-conceived attacks" against the Attorney-General, the Law Society and officers from the Attorney-General's Chambers. The court did not find it necessary to strike him off the roll of advocates and solicitors. In response to the latest court judgment, Mr Ravi said,

Google has invited people in the US and UK to test its AI chatbot, Bard, which can churn out essays, poems or computing code on command. CEO Sundar Pichai said the chatbot had been tested with 80,000 Google employees, and would now be tested with the public as a "first step" before going out to more countries in other languages. Unlike Microsoft-backed ChatGPT, Bard can "access and process information from the real world through Google Search and keep my response consistent with search results", the bot said.