> Not an offence to take photographs in public areas: lawyer

CRIMINAL lawyer Adrian Wee, from Characterist LLC, said it is not an offence to take photographs in public areas.

15 June 2009

CRIMINAL lawyer Adrian Wee, from Characterist LLC, said it is not an offence to take photographs in public areas.

‘The owner of a private property, like a shopkeeper, is entitled to set any rule he wants on people entering his shop,’ said MrWee.

‘But in a public area, there is no law against photography.’

This means that even if a person takes pictures of the merchandise which are openly displayed in a public area, it is not an offence to do so.

In fact, the shop owner has no right to chase the photographer away as long as the photographer is on public ground.

‘Technically, the shopkeeper can only prevent the photographer from entering his shop, but they cannot stop someone from photographing from outside,’ he said.

‘Someone could be standing outside their shop and take pictures all day, and that would not be an offence.’

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If a photographer uses a zoom lens to shoot the interior of the shop, it is also not illegal.

The same goes for taking the pictures of the facades of buildings like the National Library Building and the Esplanade.

In fact taking pictures on private property is also not criminal in nature.

‘The person taking the pictures is only flouting the rules of the property set by the owner but this would render the person liable to be thrown out,’ he said.

But Mr Wee further elaborated, if a person has been thrown out of a private property and barred from entering, then to enter the property again would be trespassing which is a criminal offence.

> Earth may collide with Venus

PARIS – A FORCE known as orbital chaos may cause our Solar System to go haywire, leading to possible collision between Earth and Venus or Mars, according to a study released on Wednesday.

The good news is that the likelihood of such a smash-up is small, around one-in-2500. And even if the planets did careen into one another, it would not happen before another 3.5 billion years.

Indeed, there is a 99 per cent chance that the Sun’s posse of planets will continue to circle in an orderly pattern throughout the expected life span of our life-giving star, another five billion years, the study found.

Using powerful computers, Mr Laskarand colleague Mickael Gastineau generated numerical simulations of orbital instability over the next five billion years.

Unlike previous models, they took into account Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Over a short time span, this made little difference, but over the long haul it resulted in dramatically different orbital paths.

The researchers looked at 2,501 possible scenarios, 25 of which ended with a severely disrupted Solar System. ‘There is one scenario in which Mars passes very close to Earth,’ 794km to be exact, said Laskar.

‘When you come that close, it is almost the same as a collision because the planets gets torn apart.’Life on Earth, if there still were any, would almost certainly cease to exist.

The key to all the scenarios of extreme orbital chaos was the rock closest to the Sun, found the study.

‘Mercury is the trigger, and would be be the first planet to be destabilised because it has the smallest mass,’ explained Mr Laskar. At some point Mercury’s orbit would get into resonance with that of Jupiter, throwing the smaller orb even more out of kilter, he said.

Once this happens, the so-called ‘angular momentum’ from the much larger Jupiter would wreak havoc on the other inner planets’ orbits too. — AFP

> SAF serviceman dies in Taiwan

A SINGAPORE Armed Forces (SAF) regular serviceman was found unconscious in his bunk in a Taiwanese military facility on Monday morning June 15, 2009.

First Sergeant (1SG) Ang Joo Pin, was discovered motionless at 7.15am and was given immediate medical attention by an SAF senior medic.

The 30-year-old ammunition technician was sent to the nearby hospital and efforts to resuscitate him continued en route but to no avail.

He was pronounced dead at 7.40am.

Ang was in Taiwan to support the SAF’s unilateral training.

The Ministry of Defence (Mindef) and the SAF said they extend their deepest condolences to Ang’s family and will assist the family in their time of grief.

Mindef is investigating the incident.

> Man had sex with girl, 15

AFTER having had sex with a man several times, an underage girl filed a police report against him.

And even though karaoke lounge employee Kang Boon Khoon knew he was being investigated for having sex with an underage girl, the two had sex again in his flat five days after the report was made.

The pair met online in 2006 and hit it off. Kang told her he was 22, when he was actually 26 then, more than a decade older than she was.

Yesterday, he was given a six-month jail term for having sex with a minor below 16 on two occasions in 2007.

Three other similar charges involving the girl were taken into consideration in his sentencing.

Kang was separately jailed a day and fined $2,000 for stealing liquor from his place of work in 2006.

The court heard that he and the girl corresponded online for three months from August 2006 before their first face-to-face meeting.

Their first date was at K-Box Karaoke Lounge in Orchard Cineleisure, where he worked. Two days later, they checked into an East Coast Park chalet, where they had sex.

In January the following year, the girl lodged a police report against him, stating that she had had sex with him on several occasions.

But less than a week after this, she again had sex with him – this time in his Tampines flat – and this was after Kang became aware that she had made the report.

But they were still a couple. It was not stated in court documents why she filed the report.