Besides the famiLEE saga, do you really want to know about other news?

YOU must have been spending your Sunday asleep if you don’t know of the unprecedented sibling saga that was going on online. Social media was used as the means of engagement between the Prime Minister and his sister. Of course, neither Mr Lee Hsien Loong nor Dr Lee Wei Ling directed their Facebook posts at each other directly. You can read our round-up here. We managed to track the sage right up to where Dr Lee threw a bomb into social media describing her brother as a “dishonourable son” who was sullying the memory of their father in his bid to create a dynasty.

PM Lee responded on his Facebook a few hours later:

”I am deeply saddened by my sister Dr Lee Wei Ling’s claim that I have abused my power to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s passing in order to establish a dynasty. The accusations are completely untrue.

The first anniversary of a person’s passing is a significant moment to remember him and reflect on what he meant to us. The more so with Mr Lee Kuan Yew. The Cabinet had discussed how we should mark the occasion. My advice was that we should leave it to ground-up efforts. Groups should keep their observances in proportion, and focussed on the future.

The Cabinet recognised the strong desire of many Singaporeans to show their respect for Mr Lee, and honour what he did for us. We reviewed the events and observances that different groups had planned, and agreed that they were generally appropriate. They expressed the sincerely felt sentiments of Singaporeans, which my Cabinet colleagues and I deeply appreciate.

The idea that I should wish to establish a dynasty makes even less sense. Meritocracy is a fundamental value of our society, and neither I, the PAP, nor the Singapore public would tolerate any such attempt.”

The famiLEE feud has gone viral, as well as international with news agencies picking up the story and broadcasting it further afield. There’s been no response (yet) from Dr Lee. As for ST, which sparked the saga by declining to publish her column criticising the events commemorating the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s death, its editor Mr Warren Fernandez has spoken up.

ST’s associate editor Ivan Fernandez had said over the weekend that Dr Lee’s column had contained material that was not only tangential to the focus of her piece, but had also been plagiarised. Dr Lee refutes this, and added that she had copied the material unintentionally. She also said no mention had been made in her discussions with Mr Ivan Fernandez.

Said Mr Warren Fernandez: “Dr Lee’s allegations are unfounded. ST had intended to run her commentary and our editors were working with her to get it ready for print. But some concerns arose, including over the plagiarised paragraphs. This was a serious matter, not least as our editors had spoken to her before about the pitfalls of copying material without attribution.

“Dr Lee now says this was unintended, as she ‘forgot’ to cite her sources, and besides, her end of exposing the Government justified it anyway,” he added.

“In addition to this, we found her ultimatum to print her piece unedited or she would go online, totally unacceptable. But before we could discuss this further, she went online, putting an end to any further engagement on the matter.”

Ah hah. So it seems that while her editor might not have spoken to her about copying the bits for her last column from other websites, they had “spoken to her before about the pitfalls of copying material without attribution”. Which makes Dr Lee’s assertions that she had “forgotten” or did not know the journalistic practices that accompany sourcing and attribution pretty hollow. But who cares now about plagiarism and the difference between editing and censorship? It’s the sibling saga in the famiLEE that is the more interesting show.

Now do you really want to know what else in Singapore and the rest of the world happened yesterday? You do?

Okay, the Singapore Democratic Party has put up a transition team that will help the party run the Bukit Batok town council if it wins the single-seat ward that the People’s Action Party is fighting to keep. Then there was a car chase earlier yesterday morning in the Still Road area which led to a four-vehicle pile-up and seven people injured. The driver had been trying to evade a police roadblock.

In the rest of the world, a Hindu temple in Kerala India caught fire, killing 106. Nope, it wasn’t a terrorist attack, it was caused by fireworks that the temple authorities had illegally let off. Closer to home, two Uighurs of Turkish descent suspected to be plotting attacks in Thailand are suspected to have entered Malaysia. News reports are unclear about exactly where they are (or they would have been caught!) but they seem to be plotting something nefarious. Let’s hope our new improved terror strategies will scare them away from our sunny, and terribly hot, isle.

 

Featured image by Kong Chong Yew.

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