Not The Great Singapore Sale

June is the month for the Great Singapore Sale or ‘GSS’ all over Singapore. All over, with the exception of our Courts, that is. Instead, in a judgment delivered on 5 May 2003 (Chua Chuan Heng v Public Prosecutor, Criminal Revision No 6 of 2003 [2003] SGHC 105), and reported in The New Paper on 31 May 2003, the Honourable the Chief Justice Yong Pung How, held that a sentencing court was not obliged to backdate the custodial sentence of every offender who has spent time in remand, or otherwise give him a discount on his sentence.

Seeings SARs II

Customs and quarantine checks continue to be stringent at entry check-points of non-SARS affected countries. But one wonders if they are looking at the right places. At a supermarket in Brisbane, rows and rows of SARs and Super SARs could be found for public consumption, ‘Sars’ being the abbreviation for sarsparilla root, before its present connotation of a more sinister kind.

Letting it All Hang Out

Talk about hanging out your dirty linen in public, the owners of these clothing do not seem to have any qualms leaving their laundry out for all the world to see.

Piggy-wiggy

Notwithstanding Singapore’s move away from colonial practices, other regions are slower to update on tradition. Last year, the veteran QC Colin McEachran led a campaign to have the bewigged ones dewigged. His attempt to cast aside the traditional hairpiece as a relic of a bygone age was defeated in a poll of members conducted by the Faculty of Advocates of Scotland. A few days ago, two wigs were stolen from Parliament House. His luck was out again. Neither belonged to Mr McEachran. Seems he just cannot get rid of the pesky thing at all!