Daily Briefing: Fire extinguished at Shell Singaporean plant; Minority languages rise in Singapore

And here's why URA is aggressive on data collection.

From iCompareLoan.com via Yahoo! Finance:

Bids for land are now at record highs, such as a $1 billion bid for a plot of land along Stirling Road this year (the highest ever on record). Compared to 2012, developers are now buying land at a premium of 29%.

This is happening despite a slow and continuous decline in property prices, since 2014. Property prices are currently down by more than 11% from the peak in 2013, thanks to government-imposed cooling measures. As you can imagine though, the aggressive land bids – along with the subsequently higher property prices they could cause – are acting contrary to the government’s intent to keep homes affordable.

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From AFP News via Yahoo! Finance:

Kevin Martens Wong reels off sentences in Kristang, which is among several minority languages in Singapore enjoying a new lease of life after a decades-long drive to encourage the use of English and Mandarin.

"Teng bong, ozi nus prendeh sorti-sorti di tempu," the linguist told his eager students in the 500-year-old mish-mash of Portuguese and Malay -- a greeting, and information that the class would be about the weather.

A former British colonial trading post that has long been a melting pot of different cultures, Singapore has an ethnically diverse population whose ancestors mostly came from across Asia, principally China, India and the Malay archipelago.

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From Reuters:

Royal Dutch Shell said a fire at its Singapore refinery-petrochemical site was extinguished on Sunday and no one was hurt in the incident.

The fire occurred at one of its manufacturing units on Bukom Island at about 10 a.m. (0200 GMT) and was extinguished shortly after by the site’s firefighters, a company spokeswoman said in an e-mailed statement.

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Photo by Sengkang - Own work, Copyrighted free use