It’s always difficult choosing a birthday present, and for the girlfriend it can be doubly hard, especially when you want to top your effort in the previous year.
Since Joanne’s two-year-old Samsung smartphone was dying on her, a mobile phone seemed like a good choice. After a somewhat extensive survey of the phones that come with keyboards (getting rarer by the day), I settled on the Blackberry Torch.
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| Is that a Blackberry? |
More after the jump…
Singapore’s General Election 2011 would go down in the history of the country as the first election where an opposition party won a Group Representation Constituency (GRC) since the scheme began in 1988. As a result, the opposition won six Parliamentary seats – the highest number since independence in 1965. (The previous high was four.) Also, it was the first time the opposition had contested so many seats – all but five of the total – to begin with.
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| Workers’ Party leader Low Thia Khiang (middle) and his fellow Aljunied GRC MP-elects Chen Show Mao (bespectacled man behind him) and Pritam Singh (to Chen’s right) shaking hands with delirious supporters at Hougang stadium in the early hours of May 8, 2011, after their historic win in the 2011 General Election. (The colour version of this picture appeared on page 1 of The Straits Time’s special noon edition on May 8!) |
GRCs are a unique system whereby Members of Parliament are elected in teams of three to six. The main reason behind this system, said the government, was to ensure minority representation in Parliament, because each GRC must include one MP from a minority race. There were 15 GRCs and 12 single seats up for grabs in the 2011 election, for a total of 87 places.
The Workers’ Party (WP) had staged a strong challenge to the long-ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) in Aljunied GRC in the 2006 election, winning over 40 per cent of votes. The PAP’s Aljunied team, led by Foreign Minister George Yeo, fared the worse in terms of vote share among all winning PAP teams and single candidates.
This year, the WP threw in all its best candidates in the Aljunied GRC team, with Secretary-General Low Thia Khiang leaving his longtime stronghold, Hougang constituency, to his protégé Yaw Shin Leong, and personally leading the charge in Aljunied. Their ranks were further boosted by top corporate lawyer Chen Show Mao, who advised the Agricultural Bank of China on its world-record US$22 billion IPO last August. WP Chairman Sylvia Lim, postgraduate law student Pritam Singh and freelance counsellor Muhamad Faisal Abdul Manap made up the rest of the five-man ‘A’ team.
