IKEA Annual Clearance Sale
IKEA friends Sale Preview: 3 July 2009, 8am-10am (By Invitation Only)
Official sale period: 3-26 July 2009

Get ready for great deals and bargain steals at IKEA's anual sale, happening in the month of July! From now till 26 July, both IKEA outlets will be extending their opening hours to 11pm on Fridays and Saturdays. Besides receiving an invitation to the sale preview, friends of IKEA will also enjoy exclusive offers during this period.


Hair For Hope 2009 - A Project by Children's Cancer Foundation
Date: 5 July 2009
Time: 12pm to 7pm
Venue: Velocity, Novena Square

Come Sunday, a total of 691 people with a heart for cancer-stricken children will be shaving their heads to raise funds for the Children's Cancer Foundation. To date, $332,455.70 has been raised through online pledges for these shavees, comprising 538 males and 153 females. Head down to Velocity to watch (and perhaps throw in a donation of any amount) as they get their locks chopped for a noble cause!

With the Integrated Resorts at Marina Bay and Sentosa slated to open their doors in the next six months, you can expect Singapore's landscape – both physical and economic – to evolve quite drastically.

To prepare for the road ahead (as well as to allay concerns over the potential negative impact of the IRs as their opening day draws near), the authorities have undertaken various initiatives to ensure their operations remain good and clean.

Starting yesterday, a two-day training symposium is being held for officers from the Casino Regulatory Authority (CRA) and Criminal Investigation Department (CID). There, they will learn to tackle and curb organised crime and money laundering from casino industry experts from the United States, Australia and Macau.

"We are very good at the effective regulation of our financial sector. However, the casinos bring with them a whole variety of related problems and pose an operational paradigm challenge even for police officers who are generally used to dealing with people who are law abiding," said Minister for Law and Second Minister for Home Affairs K Shanmugam, during the opening address at the symposium.

Indeed, the unique dynamism and business structure within the casino industry makes it a whole other ball game altogether. To meet these challenges head-on, CRA has also called for the casinos to have regulatory systems in place, such as the mechanical shuffling of cards and the use of bar-coded vouchers instead of tokens for slot-machine wins, amongst other anti-fraud measures.

However, should these prove ineffective, not all is lost. There will always be our trusty Neighbourhood Police Centres (NPC) to fall back on – the newly-opened Marina Bay NPC for the Marina Bay IR, and Bukit Merah West NPC if you're further south in Sentosa.

With the current economic crisis, businesses have become more cautious in hiring and expenditure. Hence it comes as no surprise that 2008 has seen a smaller wage increase amongst the workforce in the private sector, as compared to the year before.

The 2008 wage report released by the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) highlights that within the private sector, total wages (which includes bonuses) increased by merely 4.2%, compared to 5.9% in 2007; while bonuses dropped to an average of 2.31 months, compared to 2.36 months in 2007.

After taking into account the rise in Consumer Price Index by 6.5% in 2008, real wages actually decreased by 2.3% – a stark contrast to the increase of 3.8% the year before.

Amongst the three categories of employees, rank-and-file employees experienced the steepest decline in wage increase (5.4% to 3.2%), followed by senior employees (6.1% to 4.8%), and junior management (6.9% to 5.8%).

Visit MOM for more details on the 2008 wage report.