News this week included: Baey Yam Keng the latest politician to pose on public transport; Sheng Siong to keep prices affordable despite Iran war cost pressures (as its net profit climbs); scrapping PayNow nicknames to fight scams; a regional crackdown on online child abuse nabs 326 people, including 11 men in SG; HOME renews its call for legally mandated weekly 24-hour rest for migrant domestic workers; parental concern about introducing AI at Primary 4; more emphasis on screening for oral frailty; CNA explainer on five everyday habits that cause muscle imbalance and strain; commentary on why flexi-time arrangements are more important to parents and caregivers than work-from-home rights; Gen Zs wanting a return to the low-tech 1990s; global tariff wars might result in more American whiskies in SG; NUS orientation leader’s racist video mentioning “Indians” and smells of “curry” and “onions”; the revamped Malay Heritage Centre; Malaysia arrested 58 suspects after raiding a Kelantan resort allegedly used as a love scam centre targeting Singaporean men; 85-year-old British “Con mum” handed 34 additional charges here; ST explainer on the task force that caught 7,000 cicadas in Tampines; ST FAQs on safety issues for EV owners; ST interview with Aware’s new leader; and Singaporean Dante Chen’s five-year WWE wrestling career ends.

Below are the issues we explore in depth.

Culture: Beastly realities

“Wheel. Of. Fortune!” the audience chants before the show even begins. The set is designed in technicolour glory—metallic-coloured balloon arches over rotating vintage Mazda cars. Hosts in crisp suits and fabulous evening gowns. “Wheel of Fortune” premiered in 1975 and is still airing, making it the longest-running syndicated game show. Spin, solve a word puzzle, and potentially win a million dollars. It, and “The Price is Right”, both previously shown on Channel 5 here, are legendary, but the roots of reality entertainment stretch back to 1948, when American practical joke series Candid Camera (similar to Just for Laughs Gags) started turning unsuspecting strangers into patsies, capturing what felt like unfiltered human behaviour. By the early 2000s, the genre had evolved with the likes of “Survivor”, stranding contestants in remote locations where they competed in physical and mental challenges to avoid elimination. Cultural critic Emily Nussbaum wrote that the show “unite[d] three key traditions: Allen Funt’s prank show model; the Chuck Barris-esque game show; and the real-life soap opera”. The result? A prime-time hit for CBS that feels “big, brash, and Hollywood”.

TV viewership has declined precipitously and short-form online content rules, yet the allure of the reality show endures. YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, has scaled the format with Beast Games—a tie-up with Amazon TV. Halfway through its run, “Beast Games” has hit the number one spot on Amazon in over 80 countries, with over 50 million viewers in just 25 days. The show promises its thousand contestants a chance to win: a grand prize of US$5m (S$6.4m), a Lamborghini, and a multi-million dollar island. Reportedly produced at an eye-watering sum of US$100m (S$128m), the set includes neon-lit pedestals with trap doors to swallow eliminated players; a US$14m (S$17.9m) entire purpose-built Canadian village, dubbed “Beast City”; and a pair of tropical islands in Panama. 

But reality shows offer more than just prize money. A single appearance on a popular one  can convert local recognition into global visibility. Consider the South Korean competition series Physical: Asia. It has brought Mongolian athletes into wider view, showcasing both their performance and underrepresented cultural identity on the international stage.

For the next season of Beast Games, three Singaporeans, Nicole Liel, Calros Ong, and Willabelle Ong, are turning their followings into launchpads, rallying votes across social media in a bid to become the first Singaporean contestant on the show. When voting closes on May 1st, the top vote-getter will head to the US to compete—a rare Singaporean thread in the tapestry of global culture.

Not everyone, however, is convinced of the show’s merits. Jeff Yang, cultural critic at The Guardian, described it as “degrading” and a “dystopian nightmare”, perfect for America in 2025. Yang claimed that the show is “a lurid exploration of the humiliations humans will undergo in order to give themselves a chance at $5m” with its problematic framing of rich white technopreneurs as benevolent patrons handing out bags of cash in exchange for the contestants demeaning themselves. Yet, as Nussbaum argued in her book, “the discomfort that has always radiated around these shows—their nosiness, their brutality—isn’t an argument for looking away from them. It’s a reason to look closer.”

Society: The wisdom of (punting) crowds

Earlier this month, Parisians got two rude weather shocks that seemed to typify our burning earth. On April 6th, the city’s temperature rose 4°C in 12mins; and then slowly declined over the next hour. Similarly, on the 15th, up 6°C in 30mins, then back down. Time to whip off those espadrilles, scarves, and trenchcoats? Not quite. Investigators suspect the spike had less to do with anthropogenic climate change than plain human fraud. On both days, large bets were placed on Polymarket, the prediction market. For instance, on the 6th, with the market consensus at 18°C, one user bet on readings above 21°C and made almost €30,000 (S$44,800). Polymarket was determining its Paris temperature based on a single sensor near the Charles de Gaulle airport’s perimeter. Ruben Hallali, CEO of weather risk company Sereno, told The New York Times that somebody may have used a “calibrated portable heating device” on the sensor. Hairdryer or lighter, some have speculated. “The Charles de Gaulle incident is not an isolated curiosity,” Mr. Hallali said. “It is what happens when financial incentives meet fragile data infrastructure.”

Prediction markets are having a moment. They allow users to bet on just about anything. The top three bits of “Breaking news” on Polymarket yesterday were: whether the Israel x Hezbollah ceasefire will be extended by April 26th; whether talk show host Jimmy Kimmel will be fired or resign by May 31st; and whether looksmaxxing influencer Clavicular will have a pregnancy this year. Dynamic financial charts pulse and zig-zag irrepressibly as odds shift with every bet. Below them users engage each other on all manner of issues. It’s like a cross between Yahoo! Finance and Reddit. 

Their crystal ball superpowers have left many breathless. In the 2024 US presidential election, Kalshi, another betting giant, indicated a 65 percent chance of a Donald Trump win, even as many forecasters had him neck–to-neck with Kamala Harris. Luana Lopes Lara, Kalshi’s effervescent, 29-year-old Brazilian co-founder—and the world’s youngest self-made woman billionaire—narrated how they sued the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, overturning an over-100-year ban on election betting. “Election day used to be bigger than the stock market trading volume back in like 1920s. The last two weeks we had over US$2bn (S$2.66bn) traded, millions of new accounts, number one in the app store.”

The frenzy has rightfully concerned critics. Many want it regulated like traditional online gambling. Partnerships with news organisations—who increasingly consider these markets more reliable “truth-telling devices” than pundits—raise questions around conflicts of interest and the ethics of profiting from tragedy, among others. Inside trading appears rife: one US soldier has been charged with using classified information to bet on the removal of Nicolas Maduro, Venezuelan president, making over US$400,000 (S$510,700); six other insiders appear to have made US$1.2m (S$1.5m) betting on a US strike in Iran, raising suspicions (unproved) that people around Trump are “profiting off war and death”. (The platforms appear to be cracking down on insider trading.)

Singapore has blocked them since late 2024, classifying them as illegal online gambling sites. (Singapore Pools is the only licensed operator.) Kashi and Polymarket, Jom checked, have been occasionally visible this week, even without a VPN. It’s a crime to gamble through them. Still, The Straits Times (ST) reported that in April over US$100,000 (S$128,000) was bet each day, on average, on Singapore’s temperature. Last year’s GE saw close to US$720,000 (S$936,000) bet. The government told ST that “no blocking method is foolproof”. Polymarket restricts accounts from 33 places, including Singapore. Whatever one’s views on gambling, perhaps there’s an informational argument for access to the crowd’s supposed predictive powers.

Society: Just a few bad apples

On January 8th 2023, Wake Up Singapore broke the story that three senior executives had left SPH Media Trust (SMT) because of discrepancies in circulation numbers. This forced SMT into finally making its own admission the next day, over two weeks after the executives left, and possibly months after the potential fraud was first discovered. SMT announced that it had been inflating numbers by 85,000-95,000, or 10-12 percent. For all this, some staff were “taken to task, or had left the organisation”. 

That June we learned more following an internal investigation. The Newspapers in Education (NIE) Fund, for instance, was created as far back as 2000 for the distribution of bulk copies to students, needy families, halfway houses and charities, specifically to increase SPH publications’ readership. These bulk copies enabled it to meet circulation targets—and would peak in August, in preparation for inclusion in its annual report. Bulk copies through the NIE fund constituted over half of the overstated number (82,600 copies in August 2021). SPH printed copies even after some schools said they wanted only digital versions. The copies were delivered to a warehouse in Kaki Bukit and then thrown away. Separately, an unnamed airline paid SPH for unlimited digital downloads of various titles including ST, Lianhe Zaobao, Berita Harian and Tamil Murasu. Even though only 110-220 copies were downloaded daily, SPH reported it as 2,500. Meanwhile, from 2016, some ordinary subscribers to SPH’s “all-in-one” subscription package told the company that they no longer wanted print copies—SPH printed them anyway, likely destroyed them, and then included them in its circulation count. 

For all this, and much more, SMT filed a police report. And this week the police, in consultation with the Attorney-General’s Chambers, said it’ll be taking no further action. How lucky.

History weekly with Faris Joraimi

“Well, our origin is in Iran, in a place called Shiraz, south of Iran, not far from the ancient Achaemenian capital of the old Persian empire, a dynasty which ruled between the 3rd and 5th centuries B.C.” With a storyteller’s cadence, perhaps by the dying embers of a caravan campfire, Haji Mohamed Javad Namazie began the fabulous saga of his family to the interviewer at the National Archives of Singapore in 1982. Javad Namazie, lawyer and member of Singapore’s Legislative Council (1947-51) was part of the colony’s small but well-connected Asian elite. Born into a family of merchants, he was also in a web of long-distance relationships threading through Singapore. The Singapore Namazies descend from just one male ancestor whose brothers and cousins made fortunes worldwide: in Egypt, Hong Kong and Iraq. Javad’s grandfather, an indigo trader, first went to Madras where Javad’s father Mirza Mohamed Ali was born; the latter came to Singapore in 1910 to import woven sarongs (“because the Malays in those days used to invariably wear sarongs”). He later grew wealthy enough from various ventures to build Namazie Mansions, still standing today as the Capitol Building.

Javad’s father joined a trade predating colonial Singapore: merchants had been bringing cloth from India to this region since at least the 13th century. In 1685, the Shah of Iran, Suleiman I, sent an embassy to the court of Ayutthaya, and an account of that voyage, named the Ship of Suleiman, records many details of everyday life and culture in 17th-century South-east Asia. From the late 17th century, the Armenians of Esfahan began establishing themselves in places like Malacca, Java, and Penang. Their move to Singapore—with legacies as prominent as the Raffles Hotel and our national flower, Vanda Miss Joaquim—was an event centuries in the making.

But Persianate culture extended beyond the modern-day borders of Iran; the formal prestige of the Persian language in India meant that the South Asian traders in this region (who certainly outnumbered those from “Iran” proper) helped transmit Persian loanwords into Malay, like shahbandar (harbourmaster), nakhoda (captain), anggur (grapes), gandum (wheat), and kismis (raisins). The colonial secretary Richard Wilkinson, who wrote a monumental English-Malay dictionary in 1932, may have had help from Javad Namazie’s father, his good friend, in identifying Persian loanwords in Malay. The geopolitical punditry we get in Singapore tends not to reach back far enough to consider this deep Persianate history, beyond the crude “Sunni versus Shi’a” dynamic that supposedly explains South-east Asian Muslims’ attitudes towards Iran today.

Tech: A different kind of blockade

China has asked Meta to “reverse” its acquisition of Singapore-based agentic AI start-up Manus, bringing an end to a saga that began when the deal was announced in December last year. A small minority has cheered the decision on grounds that Meta—which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—has inflicted much damage on the world with the tech already at its disposal. The longer the company is deprived of powerful AI tools, so it goes, the better.

But Manus’s systems have already been embedded in Meta’s for some time, making it likely that much technology and knowledge transfer has already occurred. China will know this. Its latest salvo is as much about blocking this specific deal as it is about warning others against emulating Manus: using Chinese tech, talent, and infrastructure to create coveted intellectual property, then jettisoning their roots for supposedly neutral shores from which to court foreign capital. Or selling themselves to the highest bidder, especially if that bidder is American.

The intended “chilling effect” is taking hold, with at least one AI founder already putting safeguards in place to prevent cross-border technology transfers and minimise personnel, data, and asset movements between his Chinese and US businesses. “Admittedly, this approach can feel like ‘cutting off our own limbs,’ but under the current regulatory environment, it is a necessary compromise,” MiroMind’s Chen Tianqiao told Bloomberg.

One could argue that this is a continuation of China’s long-standing efforts to curtail US influence. The “Great Firewall” blocks most Google and Meta services; and imposes strict constraints on Amazon and Apple. But AI is likely to be more transformative than anything that has come before, with wide-ranging implications for national security among other things. Increasingly, deals involving advanced tech will be viewed through a geopolitical lens. (The US, too, has mechanisms to review business deals for security implications).

China’s willingness to intervene even after regulatory approvals will make both entrepreneurs and investors skittish—it’s unclear how Meta will recoup the money it has already paid Manus’s investors. The result may be a slowdown in Chinese AI development but that appears to be an acceptable risk for Beijing if it slows US progress too. (Not a bad thing, AI sceptics may say.)

For Singapore, the Manus episode is ominous. For long, it has positioned itself as neutral ground between China and the US, enabling the kind of “Singapore-washing” that Manus attempted. But “there is a risk that Singapore is [increasingly] seen as a grey space for technology transfers—including people moving to new firms—that one or both major governments disallow to take place,” National ​University of Singapore political scientist Chong Ja Ian told Reuters. “This could result in restrictions being placed on Singapore.” For now, the country’s embrace of AI and AI talent, and its studied neutrality still give it some leeway. However, as the push to keep technology stacks separate intensifies between the two giants, that space will narrow—with downstream impacts on the local economy.

Tech: Turning up the heatmap

You’re a French soldier named Arthur, and like 195m other people around the world, you’re on the sports app, Strava. You can scroll through your friends’ running and cycling routes, give them a thumbs-up (“kudos”), see their pace improve over time, watch as they try out new sports or lope through scenic spots. But like many fitness apps, Strava runs on streaks, with monthly challenges and rewards that keep you going. If you went for a run, and didn’t log it on Strava, did you go on the run at all? Then you’re deployed on the Charles de Gaulle, France’s first-ever nuclear-powered surface vessel, in the eastern Mediterranean. It’s a decent 261.5m in length. What do you do? You go on a 35-minute run as your ship glides northwest of Cyprus, dodging surveillance, 100km from the Turkish coast. Your smartwatch automatically posts it to Strava, and you reveal to the entire world the location of your country’s secret carrier strike group, drafted to keep a “defensive” eye on the ongoing fracas in the Middle East.

This isn’t the first time Strava’s been criticised for easy access to its GPS and geolocation data. One of the app’s major selling points is its “global heatmap”, which gathers trillions of data points from all of its users to assemble a snapshot of all their activities. Users can make their own heatmaps, compare it to others, mark out photogenic spots, name segments of their workout. A route at the Changi Naval Base is labelled “wakey wakey”, and someone in the Sungei Gedong Camp has called their spot “Weird L-Shape”. This, and several other military installations are clearly visible on the island nation’s heatmap, a thick crosshatch of well-trodden paths around 400m tracks, barracks and outposts. “[Here] the risk is not primarily about revealing locations, but about exposing patterns and behaviours within and around installations,” Razwana Begum, head of global security and strategy at the Singapore University of Social Sciences, told CNA. The hosts of local podcast “Yah Lah But” pointed out that a bit of digging into Strava metadata can reveal a soldier’s fitness level: “If every Tuesday right, this guy, he’s not the fittest ah, that’s when we attack.” They chortled. 

But access to data works both ways. As early as 2018, the investigative journalism group Bellingcat had put together resources for gathering and interpreting Strava data, whether that’s cross-referencing blips on the heatmap with satellite imagery to figure out American bases in Afghanistan, or verifying whether GPS coordinates on military activity is deliberately falsified, like the Kremlin’s spoofing of data to Vnukovo Airport, over 30km away. With treasure troves of data like this, you could get investigative journalists turning up what should be exposed, alongside malicious actors exploiting what shouldn’t. 

We live in a world where we’re paranoid with our privacy in some ways, and so careless with it in others. We give away so much of our offline selves in our online domains that sometimes we forget that we’ve relinquished anything at all. Sherry Turkle, sociologist of technology, pointed out that these public disclosures may even feel gratifying: “[It] feels like validation, not violation. Being seen means that they are not insignificant or alone.” But it’s not the lone individual being observed that’s necessarily the peril here; rather it’s our collective unleashing of all of our interconnected patterns into the world that we need to pay more attention to.

Faris Joraimi, Abhishek Mehrotra, Sakinah Safiee, Corrie Tan, and Sudhir Vadaketh 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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