Singapore’s state carrier said yesterday it would suspend half of its daily flights between the city-state and Tokyo as demand weakened following a nuclear scare in ravaged Japan.
Singapore Airlines (SIA) will halt two of its four flights between Changi Airport and Tokyo’s Haneda Airport from Sunday, the airline said on its Web site.
“Flights SQ635 and SQ636, which operate between Singapore and Haneda will be suspended from 27 March 2011,” a post on SIA’s main Web site read.
An SIA spokesman told AFP the suspension was owing to a slump in customers going to -Japan after a massive 9.0 magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami hit the country’s northeast.
The twin disasters triggered a crisis at a tsunami-hit nuclear power plant about 250km from Tokyo, where workers have been struggling to bring overheating reactors under control.
“We are seeing weakening demand in and out of Tokyo due to the situation in Japan,” he said.
Kyodo News yesterday reported that smoke and steam were again rising from damaged reactors at the troubled Fukushima plant.
White steam-like vapor was seen rising from reactor 2 and what looked like white hazy smoke from reactor 3, Kyodo said, adding that efforts to spray water and restore electricity had temporarily stalled.
Abnormal levels of radiation were also detected in shipments of certain vegetables and milk from four prefectures near the plant, fueling public anxiety about contamination from a radiation leak.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained