News this week included: Anthropic researcher claims there’s a greater than 10 percent chance AI could kill all humans within the next decade; Anak Krakatoa eruption causes regional travel disruption; Kishore Mahbubani receives flak for comments on a potential China-Taiwan conflict; terrorism threat here remains high; Singaporean pleads guilty in S$260m crypto scam in the US; in China, 52 Singaporeans arrested for links to alleged pyramid scheme; DBS sued for S$1.3bn in 1MDB scandal fallout; PSP, RDU, and SDP criticise ministerial salary hikes; Grab’s new microdrama, and the backlash; Singapore students master PISA, again (read Jom’s free essay on PISA from earlier this year); activists of varying hues handed a bushel of charges; new guidelines for earlier osteoporosis and breast cancer screenings; microorganisms break down spilled oil faster under certain conditions—stopping spills (and oil use) still the best way to not destroy marine habitats; Tagore forest won’t be designated a nature reserve anytime soon; NTU undergrad creates new game simulating life choices and their consequences in Singapore; social service workers finding new ways to usher “hidden adults” back into society (an older Jom blurb on social withdrawal); CNA commentary on workplace culture’s impact on TFR; Singapore Food Agency studying whether it’s safe to donate food past its “best by” date; imminent JB-Singapore RTS Link prompts overseas Medisave scheme review; MOE student well-being survey cannot indicate “overall well-being levels”; ST graphic on Singapore’s changing playgrounds; and another fascinating one on the Singaporean accent; to pee or not to pee in Farrer Park MRT male toilet; social media jilts couple wanting love for giving their helper a shred of privacy; and the relaunch of Aijek, local fashion brand.

Below are the issues we explore in depth:

Politics: Racism, real and imagined

A troubling fortnight. When news broke that nine Singaporeans were among the thousands missing after the catastrophic flash floods in Nepal, most reactions online were a mix of dismay, concern, and desperate hope. But there was racist slurry too. Some heart-warming examples: “I only see Indian faces here. Skip. Rescue cut.” “All ABNNs [ah bu neneh—a slur] look the same, how to AI?” “Just import more.”

They were kindling for the latest anti-Indian conflagration, seemingly becoming as common here as forest fires in Indonesia. This one had been sparked a day before the Nepal disaster, when news emerged that the beleaguered Air India had asked owners Tata Sons and Singapore Airlines (SIA) for US$1.5bn (S$1.9bn) after recently posting a record annual loss of US$2.33bn (S$2.95bn). Cue the references to “Snakes”, “black magic”, “prata”, and “curry”—the latter two certainly exercise the racist imagination far more than the Indian stomach—and aspersions on Dilhan Pillay, the Indian-origin CEO of Temasek, SIA’s majority owner. Deplorable stuff. Police have questioned five individuals in connection with the comments, and investigations are ongoing, which will no doubt give pause to free-speech absolutists.

A larger concern is that there still appears to be little official appetite for a deeper, structural discussion of prevalent anti-Indian sentiment. Repeatedly, Jom has called for a national reckoning with racist words and policies of the past as well as the effects of contemporary immigration and data policies. “I also hope that the government can see that our society is getting more and more polarized...and there is a reason behind it...shutting it down as xenophobic and racists will not solve the problem,” wrote one HardwareZone commentator. When HardwareZone becomes the voice of reason, you just know a Rubicon has been crossed. But far from using this latest opportunity to introspect and illuminate, the PAP has tried to wield the cudgel of racism against legitimate questions about the Air India-SIA relationship.

To recap: the national carrier entered the Indian market in 2015 through Vistara airlines, a joint venture with Tata. Tata later bought Air India, and merged Vistara with it in 2024. In exchange for its Vistara stake and an additional S$360m, SIA thus came to own 25.1 percent of Air India. Trouble arose soon after, when an Air India Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner crashed in June 2025, killing 260 people. Serious legacy problems and ongoing geopolitical tensions that have cut the airline off from the airspace on crucial routes have further hampered it since the merger, creating a drag on SIA. Its latest capital request, which would require SIA to fork out some S$500m, raised many eyebrows, including those of Kenneth Tiong, Workers’ Party member of Parliament.

On Facebook, Tiong raised questions about where exactly the money would come from and the potential impact on the national reserves, given the Temasek link, before finishing: “No one, least of all Singaporeans, owes Air India a living.” Polemical? Sure. But had it crossed into racism and xenophobia? Huh? When that question was put to K Shanmugam, the coordinating minister for national security, he deftly told the reporter to “ask him [Tiong] what he intended and what he meant.” In Parliament, Jeffrey Siow, minister for transport, also invoked them in the context of Tiong’s Facebook post, prompting the opposition MP to respond: “Minister talks about racism and xenophobia, let me just be very clear that I categorically reject both racism and xenophobia, I condemn it, but I’m also puzzled as to why it is brought into a commercial matter.”

Quite. Racist abuse must be called out. But using it to obscure legitimate questions deepens our understanding of neither past nor present; of neither society nor policy.

Society: Castration conundrum

Singapore remains open to considering pharmacological anti-androgen treatments, or chemical castration, as a measure to reduce sexual offenses, but there’s not been conclusive evidence that they are efficient in bringing down crime rates. K Shanmugam, minister of home affairs, was responding in writing to a question from Gerald Giam of the Workers’ Party.

Last year, the number of sex crimes against minors rose from 2024—301 reported cases of rape and 745 of outrage of modesty involving survivors age 21 years and below, or an increase of 45 and 52 respectively. Given this, Giam asked whether the government will review existing statutory penalties and consider other ways to increase deterrence and reduce recidivism, including a sex offender register. 

Chemical castration typically involves a weekly injection of medications that block sex hormones, such as testosterone, and aims to reduce libido and sexual urges. In Asia, chemical castration has been implemented in Indonesia, Kazakhstan, and South Korea for convicted child sex offenders. While none of these countries require their consent, Kazakhstan and South Korea only impose chemical castration if the person has a paraphilia diagnosis and is evaluated to have a high risk of reoffending. Chemical castration is voluntary in Thailand and offered to sex offenders in exchange for an early release from prison. Bioethicists have asserted that this option remains “inherently coercive”, since it’s impossible for decisions to be free and consensual when both options—chemical castration or lengthy prison time—are unfavourable. This can force offenders to pick an alternative that they wouldn’t have otherwise chosen. 

Chemical castration, while reversible, may cause side effects such as osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease, and metabolic abnormalities. Measuring efficacy in recidivism is tricky, making it hard to determine if the approach outweighs the potential risks. It also takes years to observe whether the medication has a long-term effect on the reoffending rate. Besides, a professor of forensic psychiatry told the BBC, “no one will agree to randomise a high risk sex offender who does not take the medication with someone who does to compare.”

Additionally, the procedure enforces a biologically deterministic view of sexual crimes organised around the mythology that hormones are the only fuel feeding a compulsive sex drive. This view gives less weight to sociocultural factors like power asymmetries, understanding of consent and entitlement, and the lack of a comprehensive sex ed curriculum. It’s a sentiment that echoes the rhetoric of “compulsory sexuality” found in the expanding online incel and manosphere spaces that can’t conceive the concepts of intimacy without sex, identity without sexuality, or masculinity without an aggressive, fulfilled sex drive; and exacerbated by urban anomie’s disempowerment and isolation.

It could be argued that chemical castration acts as symbolic retribution for survivors traumatised by assault, but it might be more meaningful to direct the spending for such expensive procedures towards resources and services for survivors instead. Punishment alone fails to address the sociocultural roots that lead offenders to commit such crimes. And reducing recidivism often dovetails with an effective reintegration into society. An alternative approach, that may feel counterintuitive, is Circles of Support and Accountability, where volunteers befriend an offender. (Thus, creating the circle.) Based on social support networks that emphasise being responsible for one’s actions (a “no more victims” goal) and open communication (a “no secrets” policy), the Circle ensures that former inmates are held accountable while they meaningfully reintegrate. The reentry programme has consistently reduced the recidivism rate significantly (83 percent for sexual recidivism and 73 percent for all types of violent recidivism).

Perhaps too radical for the Singaporean appetite accustomed to punitive punishments. But if justice does not consider repair and rehabilitation, we’ll risk implementing harsh and ineffective measures that double as instruments of fear and control. 

International: Seeing the world differently

The African continent is large enough to fit China, India, Japan, most of Europe, Mexico, and the US within its borders. You would hardly know it from the widely used Mercator map. There Africa looks roughly the same size as Greenland; in reality it’s about 14 times larger. That could now change. The UN has voted to right this 450-year-old wrong through the “Correct the Map” resolution, which describes rectifying such distortions as an act of “cognitive justice and memorial reparation”. “A fair world begins with a fair map,” said Robert Dussey, foreign minister of Togo, which spearheaded the resolution. The point, Dussey stressed, is not to condemn Mercator, the 1569 projection devised by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator to aid maritime navigation which remains widely used today. But Dussey linked its dominance to colonial history, arguing that the map’s widespread use was itself a consequence of colonisation. “The world is changing,” he said. “Africa also is changing.”

“Fair”, in this case, looks more like the aptly named Equal Earth projection, which was developed in 2018 to represent continents more accurately by preserving their relative land areas. Mercator does the opposite: the further land masses sit from the equator, the more they are stretched, making them look disproportionately large. The effect becomes especially pronounced in a world where roughly 70 percent of the planet lies in the Northern Hemisphere, amplifying the apparent size of Europe, North America, and northern Asia, while diminishing Africa and other parts of the global south. 

The vote, although non-binding, is expected to shape how institutions use maps. Supporters argue that the shift carries geographic, educational, and symbolic significance. As a University of Tennessee geographer told nature magazine, maps don’t just identify location, they function as “social texts”, influencing how we imagine the “importance, centrality or peripheral position of places.” Correcting the distortion, then, is also an attempt to correct our tendency to conflate size and importance, and in doing so misread the world. Over time, a more proportionate map could help undo centuries of geographic bias, changing how future generations evaluate global trade, economic weight, and the relative significance of different regions.

Not everyone north of the equator agrees, however. The United States cast the sole vote against the resolution. Instead of focusing on “genuine problems of international peace, prosperity, or good relations”, the UN General Assembly was debating 16th-century map projections, said Yaryna Ferencevych, deputy US representative to the UN Economic and Social Council, in a statement. “Resolutions like this and the ideological agenda they promote, are barnacles on our work here, and the reason this institution is losing its credibility.” 

The charge of ideological overreach is a curious one, given that her commander-in-chief has himself turned place-naming into an instrument of politics, unilaterally renaming the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario. Cast under the banner of “America First”, the recent push is hardly ideologically neutral. Renaming territory is a way of projecting nationalism to assert authority, recasting history, and in some cases, staking claims over resources.

Every flat map considers projection, orientation, scale, centre, and naming. What looks fixed is often constructed. Singapore’s recently announced plans to merge several southern islands into a new western island make the point uncomfortably literal. Conservationists have warned that reclamation could permanently alter or destroy coral reefs, seagrass beds, and other marine ecosystems. Others have questioned what it means to celebrate and protect the heritage of indigenous island communities, even as the landscapes from which those histories emerged are subsumed beneath new development. Maps don’t merely describe territory. They can also legitimise who gets to name it, reshape it, and decide what disappears in the process. Maybe not so fair, after all.

Arts: Going live

Noorlinah Mohamed has been treading the boards of the Singapore stage for almost four decades. The pint-sized powerhouse stood up for nominated member of Parliament, and set up an entire festival celebrating women. But she’s still nervous about stepping on stage for this show—because she won’t get to rehearse for it. “Getting To Know You”, developed by the indie theatre collective Gangguan Theatre and playing through the weekend, relies on a deceptively simple conceit. A new pair of actors shows up each night, get the script, and go live. It’s set in a nightclub on New Year’s Eve, where two people meet after years apart, then transforms into a broader tale about friendship and coming-of-age. The play grew out of theatremaker Edward Eng’s tenure in The Necessary Stage’s Playwright’s Cove play development programme, where the 32-year-old had also written a performance-sans-rehearsals script. But it’s been a little harder for Eng, a self-described “control freak”, to “surrender to the process” than the performers he’s assembled for the task. “It’s an actor’s dream, basically,” he told The Straits Times. His co-conspirator and co-director, Tan Hui Er, agreed. “It’s fun not to know the answers and it’s very freeing,” said the 30-year-old film director and creative producer. She said in a separate interview: “...there are so many moments where it’s acutely relatable...where they’re genuinely making a connection with someone in real time.” 

Eng’s had to be particularly precise about his dialogue and stage directions so that they have the intended effect. But he may not have to be too worried. Noorlinah will be performing the play with old friend and veteran actress Karen Tan. Tan has some experience going into a show blind: she was part of the lineup for Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour’s “White Rabbit Red Rabbit” when it first toured to Singapore in 2015, a white-knuckled theatrical tour de force where the audience isn’t entirely sure which threats to the actor’s life are real, and which aren’t. Noorlinah and Tan first met in primary school, where an awestruck Noorlinah wondered how “[Karen] knew things—ways around school and best recess hangout spots”. They’ve since performed in numerous productions together, and Tan was a big part of why Noorlinah leapt at the chance to perform this piece. “It’ll be nerve-wrecking for me,” she wrote in a social media post, “Trusting friendship and pure love for an adventure. Why not! We get to know each other again and again at different phases of life. Why not on and off stage again and again and again.”

And this isn’t the only show involving improvisatory elements this weekend. If you feel like taking to the stage instead, artist Sanat Mehta is hosting a “Movement Night” subtitled “All Bodies Are Welcome”, where you’re invited to be part of a live, unchoreographed performance drawing from freestyle dancing, contact improvisation, and performance jamming. You can be a dancer or a spectator, you can stand still or lie down, you can move to the music or sit in silence. “Dance has inherited so many assumptions about what a dancer should look like, how a body should move and what counts as a good performance,” said Mehta. “Movement Night asks what happens when we loosen those assumptions. Maybe the person sitting and watching is also part of the dance. Maybe stillness is movement. Maybe you don’t need to be a dancer to participate in dance. And maybe there’s no good or bad way to dance.”

Culture: Second life

Eggshells, saris, rice bags: things you don’t immediately think about giving a second life. And yet they’ve all been reincarnated by Singaporean designers and artists bent on reducing waste in creative ways. Eden Loh, trained as an illustrator, had no experience in industrial design, but was convinced that if others could transform coffee grounds and car tyres into new products, then so could he. He found a collaborator in Carrot Cubes, a carrot cake hawker stall run by a father-daughter duo in Upper Serangoon. Since then, he’s been collecting their discarded eggshells and fashioning them into planters, plates—and egg trays themselves. “Closing the loop on the life cycle of the 🥚,” he posted to social media. Loh and his design studio Odd M. are one of a growing handful committed to repurposing what we ordinarily dismiss, and discard, as waste. He’ll collect the eggshells, wash them several times, dry them in the sun or by baking them, grind them into powder, sift them, then store them. “The process is relatively simple but tedious,” he told CNA. It takes about 40 eggs to make a planter, and 10 for a trinket tray. 

Loh’s not alone in nurturing a nascent circular economy in Singapore. Rishabh Sharma, a digital creator, experimented last year with turning one of his mother’s saris into a short-sleeved shirt with the help of a tailor. He posted the process to social media, then found his inboxes flooded with questions from fans: how could they get their hands on an upcycled sari? He soon realised that many family friends had saris gathering dust in their closets, casualties of a one-and-done culture. “A number of family friends told me about how once they have worn a sari to either a prayer or a wedding, most of their friends have already seen them in that sari,” he told ST. “The chances of them wearing it again drop quite significantly.” He convinced two childhood friends from Tanjong Katong Primary School to come on board as co-founders, and together they created Dori (Hindi for “thread”). Their line includes the Kaya Toast shirt with its green-gold gradient, another named Majulah for its evocations of the Singapore flag, and Bandung Rose for its blushes of pink and cream. Deep gold Tussar silk, intricate kantha embroidery, crinkly crushed organza: these repurposed saris, initially inherited from their mothers, are now selling for at least S$125 a pop as structured unisex shirts. 

Experiments in this vein continue at The Interchange, a circular economy lab founded by filmmakers Nicholas Chee and Chng Ying Tong, where they’ve recently been testing rice bags made from polypropylene for their future utility. These sturdy woven bags, strong enough to hold 25kg of rice, could be repurposed for tote bags, pouches, and notebook sleeves. Think Freitag: the popular brand that’s turned truck tarpaulins into a one-of-a-kind fashion statement with a cult following. Chee and Chng have prototyped everything from a stationery roll-up case with room enough for at least nine pens, and a water-resistant and tear-proof cardholder. “We want to intercept your bags,” the duo posted on their site. If you have some at home, you know where to go.

Some further reading: The co-founders of The Interchange regale Jom with their journey of understanding waste in “Farmers today: a jaunt through City Sprouts”, first published in our second print issue.

Abhishek Mehrotra, Sakinah Safiee, Corrie Tan, and Tsen-Waye Tay wrote this week’s issue.

Letters in response to any blurb can be sent to sudhir@jom.media. All will be considered for publication on our “Letters to the editor” page.

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