Man City’s Pellegrini under fire after painful derby loss |
- Man City’s Pellegrini under fire after painful derby loss
- Singaporeans urged to respect Lee Kuan Yew’s wishes to demolish old Oxley Road home
- Greece may have blown best hope of debt deal
- Clinton’s 2016 campaign logo ridiculed on Twittersphere
- So why do you want to be a doctor?
- Bloomberg Video: What Montblanc thinks of the Apple Watch
| Man City’s Pellegrini under fire after painful derby loss Posted: 12 Apr 2015 06:14 PM PDT
Manchester City boss Manuel Pellegrini saw his side blown away 4-2 by Manchester United at Old Trafford yesterday despite taking an early lead and having won the last four derbies. They have now lost six of their last eight games and their realistic hopes of retaining the Premier League title are over with leaders Chelsea 12 points ahead of fourth-placed City. Chilean Pellegrini always manages to retain a calm demeanour and it worked wonders when his side stayed cool to snatch the Premier League title off Liverpool last year. This season, though, that same mild-mannered approach seems completely amiss when hard truths and a good old-fashioned rollicking appear more appropriate for an aging side who look like they never played together before. Two-goal Sergio Aguero apart, City played nothing like one of the most expensively-assembled squads on the planet and though some blame lies in the boardroom for questionable recruitment, Pellegrini must also shoulder responsibility. His comments after the derby will hardly fill City fans with confidence with the champions at risk of dropping out of the top four, just as United did last season having won the title in Alex Ferguson's final campaign the term before. "It is very difficult to be in fourth place. We have difficult teams in the Premier League," Pellegrini told reporters. "We must fight until the end of the season. For the club, for me, for the players it is very important to be in a position for the Champions League. We have six games more to try to do it. We had been in second place all season." If he wants to look at recent history to see what fate might befall him at the end of the season, Pellegrini need only look back at what happened to former City boss Roberto Mancini. The Italian won the title in 2012 but was axed at the end of the following season having finished second and not progressed in the Champions League. Pellegrini did get City out of the group stage in Europe this year but they were outclassed by Barcelona in the last 16 and their season has plummeted since, to such a degree that he is in a worse position than Mancini before the Italian was axed. His back four was particularly woeful against United with Ashley Young getting two attempts at scoring from close range for the first and serial aerial threat Marouane Fellaini having a free header for the second. Juan Mata was afforded the freedom of Old Trafford for the third and Chris Smalling was totally unmarked to head in the fourth. The fact captain and centre back Vincent Kompany went off at halftime hardly mattered as the Belgian has not been himself recently and his replacement Eliaquim Mangala has done nothing to justify his £ 32 million (RM172.18 million) arrival in August. — Reuters  |
| Singaporeans urged to respect Lee Kuan Yew’s wishes to demolish old Oxley Road home Posted: 12 Apr 2015 06:11 PM PDT
Singaporeans urged to respect Lee Kuan Yew's wishes to demolish old Oxley Road home
Urging Singaporeans to respect their father's wishes, Dr Lee and Mr Lee Hsien Yang noted in a statement released yesterday that the late Mr Lee had made his wish public on many occasions, including in his book Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going. "In addition, both our parents have expressed this same wish with respect to our family home to their children in private on numerous occasions. Indeed, he stated in his Lee Kuan Yew will that 'my view on this has been made public before and remains unchanged'," they said. Dr Lee and Mr Lee Hsien Yang, who are the executors and trustees of the late Mr Lee's will, said their father had given them clear instructions directly and in his will — dated Dec 17, 2013 — to demolish the house immediately after his death, or after Dr Lee moved out. In his will, the late Mr Lee said this was also the wish of his wife Mdm Kwa Geok Choo. "I would ask each of my children to ensure our wishes with respect to the demolition of the House be carried out," he wrote.
Since Mr Lee's passing on March 23, the issue of how to commemorate his legacy has been widely discussed, including what would become of his Oxley Road home, which he had lived in since the 1940s. Some have called for the house to be conserved, but in a media interview in 2011, Mr Lee said the house should be torn down after he died. It would cost too much to conserve and its presence has lowered land values of nearby homes as they cannot be built over a certain height. "I've told the Cabinet, when I'm dead, demolish it," he said. "I don't think my daughter or my wife or I, who lived in it, or my sons who grew up in it, will bemoan its loss. They have old photos to remind them of the past." The late Mr Lee had been aware of the calls to preserve his home, but his wish expressed to his children and publicly was unwavering, said Dr Lee and Mr Lee Hsien Yang. "He was concerned an order might be issued against his wishes. He therefore added in his Lee Kuan Yew will that 'If our children are unable to demolish the House as a result of any changes in the law, rules or regulations binding them, it is my wish that the House never be opened to others except my children, their families and descendants'," they said. They added: "We have a duty (as executors and trustees of his Lee Kuan Yew will), and a moral obligation (as his children) to ensure that his Lee Kuan Yew will is administered strictly as stated." Thanking Singaporeans for sharing in their grief, they also said: "Our father has given his life in service to the people of Singapore. We hope that the people of Singapore will honour and respect his stated wish in his last will and testament." Parliament is set to hear five questions filed on ways to honour Mr Lee when it sits today, among them suggestions that the Government designate a Founder's Day in memory of him, rename Changi Airport after him and place his image on the currency. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, the late Mr Lee's eldest child, is also expected to address the issue of his father's home in Parliament today. — TODAY |
| Greece may have blown best hope of debt deal Posted: 12 Apr 2015 06:06 PM PDT
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras' leftist-led government has so thoroughly shattered creditors' trust that solutions which might have been on offer a few weeks ago now seem out of reach. With a public debt equivalent to 175 per cent of economic output and an economy struggling to pull out of a six-year depression, Athens needs all the goodwill it can summon to ease the burden. It owes 80 per cent of that debt to official lenders after private bondholders took a hefty writedown in 2012. Since outright debt forgiveness is politically impossible, the next best solution would be for Greece to pay off its expensive IMF loans early, redeem bonds held by the European Central Bank and extend the maturity of loans from euro zone governments to secure lower interest rates for years to come. "This step would save Greece's budget billions of euros, while reforming the Troika arrangement, eliminating the IMF's and the ECB's financial exposure to Greece," said Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, who advocates such an arrangement. It would lower the effective interest rate on Greek debt to less than two per cent, far less than Athens was paying before the euro zone debt crisis began in 2009, and radically reduce the principal amount to be repaid over the next decade, giving Greece fiscal breathing space to revive its economy. And unlike ideas floated by Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis to swap euro zone loans for GDP-linked bonds and ECB holdings with perpetual bonds, paying out the IMF and the ECB early would be legal and supported by precedent. But if the economics make sense for Greece, the politics no longer add up for its partners. A euro zone official said there had been exploratory talks with the previous conservative-led Greek government about such a plan last year, before then Prime Minister Antonis Samaras chose to bring forward an election he lost rather than complete a bitterly unpopular bailout programme. "Now it's a political non-starter," said a euro zone official. "There's just no appetite in the euro zone for a grand bargain to take over Greece's debt to the IMF and the ECB." Leverage Tsipras' denunciations of EU-prescribed austerity, demands for German war reparations and cosying up to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Varoufakis' foot-dragging on reform negotiations and initial calls for a "haircut" on Greek debt, have dried up the reservoir of sympathy for Athens. Creditors like Germany, the Netherlands and Finland are bent on keeping the IMF involved as an enforcer of economic reform and fiscal discipline because they don't trust the Greeks to keep their word, nor the European Commission to hold them to it. "They would prefer to provide debt relief on an annual basis so they keep leverage on Greece to stick to the programme," said Miranda Xafa, senior scholar at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and a consultant on Greek debt. True, euro zone peers Ireland and Portugal, which received international bailouts after Greece, won EU agreement to pay off their costlier IMF loans faster, raising hopes in Athens. But Dublin and Lisbon were able to do so by borrowing more cheaply from private lenders after completing their bailout programmes and regaining access to the capital markets. "Ireland and Portugal are governments in difficulty, but they are not difficult governments," said Elena Daly, principal at EM Conseil, a Paris-based sovereign debt management adviser. Since Greece is stalling on its programme and lacks market access, the only way it could pay off €24 billion (RM93.57) owed to the IMF and redeem €27 billion of bonds held by the ECB would be for the euro zone's rescue fund to lend it the money. That in turn would require euro zone governments to convince their parliaments to risk more taxpayers' money than the roughly €170 billion they have already lent Greece in two bailouts totalling €240 billion. Many economists and euro zone officials believe Athens will anyway need a third bailout of around €30 billion this year, even though Tsipras insists Athens does not want that. Euro zone finance ministers promised in 2012 to "consider further measures and assistance" to ease Greece's debt provided it stuck to the terms of its programme, which it has not done. Both Xafa and Daly said Tsipras had put himself in a near impossible position by making election promises incompatible with keeping the confidence of Greece's creditors. He needs to change the politics fast to have a chance of fixing the economics without resorting to capital controls, paying civil servants with IOUs or defaulting on foreign governments and being forced out of the euro zone, they argue. A referendum asking Greeks if they want to stay in the euro at the price of painful economic reforms, or a quick coalition change to bring in pro-reform centrists, may be his best options, even if they split his Syriza party. Greece's official creditors meanwhile are torn between wanting to keep it in the euro zone to avoid the precedent of a country exiting, and fearing that if Tsipras manages to roll back austerity and secure debt relief, he could embolden like-minded political forces in Ireland, Portugal and Spain. "So they want Greece to prosper and stay in the euro while at the same time wanting the new administration to fall on its face and become an object lesson for other electorates who may be toying with the idea of rebellion," Daly said. — Reuters |
| Clinton’s 2016 campaign logo ridiculed on Twittersphere Posted: 12 Apr 2015 05:58 PM PDT
The blocky blue "H" with a horizontal red arrow running through it looked like a road sign pointing to a hospital, some said; it looked too similar to the logo for FedEx, others complained; it could easily be compared with a World War II-era Hungarian fascist party logo, a journalist for the Wall Street website Business Insider pointed out. Worse yet for the would-be 2016 standard-bearer of the left-leaning Democratic Party: The arrow pointed to the right. "So what lucky 3rd grader won the Design the Hillary Clinton Campaign Logo contest?" Tweeted a commentator with the handle @massfubar to nearly 14,000 followers. It isn't clear who designed the logo or how much Clinton's campaign team is paying for it. Staff members did not immediately respond to Reuters' questions about the logo. But the discussion kicked off what, for the Clinton campaign, will be a ceaseless cycle of scrutiny of her and the other presidential candidates. It also became an early reminder that missteps or hiccups by the campaigns, however small or trivial, can echo across social media at lightning speed. The official Twitter account for WikiLeaks, the organisation founded by Julian Assange which publishes secret information leaked from governments and corporations, tweeted its own logo, which also includes a thick red arrow pointing to the right, side-by-side with Clinton's to emphasise the similarities. "Hillary Clinton has stolen our innovative WikiLeaks twitter logo design," the tweet to Wikileaks' two and a half million followers read. Other tweets pointed out the arrow-crossed "H" resembled a stock logo available for purchase from the commonly used image database Shutterstock. Most of the commentary was negative, but there was the occasional bit of praise: "Hillary Clinton's campaign logo is Obama meets FedEx and I love it," tweeted Gina Uriarte, who described herself in her Twitter bio as the "voice of" real estate agency Coldwell Banker in California and "a lover of good design." A follower, Vince Moreschini, whose Twitter bio lists "advertising & tech" among his interests, responded: "Think you're in the minority." Linda Fowler, a political science professor at Dartmouth, said she thought Clinton's rollout was successful in general, but added the new logo made her think of a hardware store. "But maybe it's working," she told a journalist. "She's got you guys writing about her logo instead of her pantsuit and her hairstyle." — Reuters |
| So why do you want to be a doctor? Posted: 12 Apr 2015 05:54 PM PDT APRIL 13 — I sometimes wonder if we are now reaping what we sowed. A report by The Star quoted the health deputy DG as saying one in five housemen quit because of various reasons with some ending up working at the pasar malam, while another became a flight attendant. While I agree some of us have good entrepreneurial skills and many look good in kebayas, we took up medicine to become doctors. And I believe many of us, despite our grouses and complaints, would like to practise and treat patients. But if his numbers are correct, one in five, or 20 per cent of the total housemen quitting every year is a huge number and a cause for grave concern. We have 22 medical schools, accept degrees from about 350 more overseas, produce an average of 5,000 graduates a year, and yet are looking at about 1,000 housemen quitting at every intake. That, by any standard, is a worrying number. Sure, I know there are those who complete their studies, get their degrees and say to their parents, "Alright, I've done what you want. Can I now do what I want?" And there will also be those who realise that this is not what they want to do for a living during housemenship, and that there are other ways to help mankind. A few maybe. But certainly not all the whole 1,000 who quit being housemen. Lacking details So what went wrong? Attempting to answer that raises more questions. For instance, how many of those who left were government sponsored, and how many were self-sponsored? How many were trained in our "world class" universities, and how many in real and "pseudo" world class medical colleges overseas? Is it their syllabus that is lacking? Or the difference in management style between what they learn abroad and the practice at home? And how many of them resigned because of the lack in interest and passion, pressures from family members etc? What is the ministry and medical colleges doing to reduce disillusionment among potential doctors, one of the main reasons identified for their departure from medicine? Who is monitoring all this? More importantly, is anyone monitoring at all? We also need to know how many of those whose tuition were paid by tax payers? What is being done to recover them? Because as the deputy DG has correctly pointed out, RM500,000 (at a minimum) is not a small sum. And it is never just about money, since the nation loses a five-year equivalent in terms of training, teaching, moulding someone into becoming a doctor for every houseman we lose. The same person could have been trained into an engineer, teacher, nurse, architect in less time, and significantly contribute to their family's economy and national development. Then imagine when that is multiplied by a thousand. What could we have potentially achieved as a society and country? What could it have meant to the 1,000 families? Does anyone care? Bringing the numbers down We have 22 medical schools for a population of about 30 million. Just as a comparison, United Kingdom, with a population of about 64 million has 34 medical colleges, Canada at about 35 million, has 17 institutions offering medical degrees. While we cannot close down existing schools in the country, we can at least bring down the number of graduates they produce each year. Logically, if each class is smaller, the schools would be able to focus more on students, improve the overall student to tutor, student to lecturer and student to patient ratios. This should improve the overall quality of medical graduates and reduce the number of dropouts. Next, we should consider reducing the number of schools we recognise overseas. The number is currently at about 350 schools, a big number considering the number of medical students graduating each year, and that some of these schools belong to countries engaging in conflict and territorial wars with questionable medical and basic infrastructural facilities. Singapore Medical Council recognises only 150 schools, and there's a huge discrepancy between our list and theirs.
They recognise nine schools in India, and we recognise 89. They do not recognise any medical schools in Bangladesh but we recognise four. If the discrepancy is because of the difference in standards set, we need to revisit what constitutes the "Malaysian" standard. What do we base our "standards" on? Bearing in mind that no standard is high enough when sending our brightest to study medicine. Thirdly, and if the first two fails, what happened to the entrance exam for medical graduates mulled by the Ministry? We need that as a gatekeeper to only admit deserving graduates into the housemanship program and we need it yesterday. And lastly, and as crazy as it sounds, I suggest medical colleges be held partly responsible should their graduates fail to complete housemenship, or fail in the proposed entrance exam. Perhaps the ministry could impose a fine on them, or a reduction in the number of student intake the following year. While we understand medical schools, like any other business entity, must remain profitable to support their operations, they also need to remember that they shoulder the responsibility of producing not just safe doctors, but doctors who are passionate about medicine and their patients. The proposed penalty and reduction in intake will serve as a deterrent to schools interested only in profit, at the same time ensuring they adopt stringent and thorough interview processes prior to enrolling candidates while adopting a medical syllabus par excellence for those they allow into their faculties. Studying medicine should be viewed by both students and their colleges as a privilege. And not necessarily a choice. There will of course be those who excel in their studies, and do everything right in medical school but somehow find a doctor's life unsuitable for them. Excellent students do not necessarily make good doctors. But they are the exceptions, not the norm. Heroes are made, not born The journey is meant to be long and difficult. Arduous and challenging. It is a reflection on their role as the guardian and saviour of men. As CS Lewis rightly said, "Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny." After all, it is the doctors who will be with patients during their darkest hours, and fight for them when they have given up. Hence the need to be very selective to ensure that not only those who can be entrusted with another's wellbeing are smart, but also responsible enough to make the right call when it matters most. Ministry of Health should ensure that all that can be done, is being done to safeguard the health and well-being of Malaysians. And the well-being of all Malaysians starts with the well-being, the passion and preparedness of our housemen. *This is the personal opinion of the columnist. |
| Bloomberg Video: What Montblanc thinks of the Apple Watch Posted: 12 Apr 2015 05:50 PM PDT Duration: 05:23, Published 13 Apr 2015 Alexander Schmiedt, head of Montblanc's watch business, discusses the marriage of fine watchmaking and technology with Bloomberg's Pimm Fox on 'Taking Stock.' — Bloomberg |
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