By Xiao Hongyu
The “Guantanamo Bay” file leak in April, revealing that of the 212 Afghans at the base, “almost half were … entirely innocent or transferred to Guantanamo with no reason for doing so on file”[1] demolished ex-Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld’s claim that those detained in Cuba were “the worst of the worst”. Some of the detainees simply had the bad luck to be in the wrong place the wrong time; others were detained on grounds that proved to be entirely baseless.
While the US continues to grapple with the …

By Eugene Ang The video was watched by millions around the world. A toddler wanders onto the road next to a busy market in the Chinese city of Foshan. She is hit by a van, and lies in agony while passers-by ignore her plight. The girl is run over by another van, yet it takes five whole minutes before a woman finally carries her to the side of the road.
This incident, which happened in October, ignited a huge debate over the reasons behind the inaction of the passers-by. Some …

By Alicea Tan
Love is amorphous and indeterminate. But this has not stopped many couples contemplating marriage from putting down their love in exact terms in a pre-nuptial agreement. A pre-nuptial agreement is a contract entered into before marriage and can govern a wide range of aspects within married life. A couple can dictate where they should live, when they should have sex, when they should conceive and how many children they are to have. Couples may also include “force-majeure” clauses dictating how the matrimonial assets should be divided, how much …

By Nisha Rajoo
The recent Criminal Law Conference held on the 13th and 14th of October certainly achieved its aim in “[promoting] discussion on a wide range of contemporary issues pertaining to matters of criminal justice…both in Singapore and beyond.” A distinguished panel of speakers from the judiciary and legal profession spoke on the various issues pertaining to the criminal justice system in Singapore, with a particular focus on the position of the Attorney-General’s Chambers vis-a-vis the Government as evinced from the speeches given by Law Minister K Shanmugam.
However, what particularly …

By Priscilla Gan
On the day former Apple CEO Steve Jobs died, I found myself staring at the New York Times website headline, wondering if it was some takeover by news parody website The Onion. Now I’m no Apple fan but one must admit the blow Jobs’ death dealt the world with. Be it in the form of brickbats or bouquets, Jobs’ death has been eliciting sharp responses from the media and refreshing conversations by the water cooler. Most of us would have heard by now that Jobs was hardly the …