IN HIS first mission to Timor Leste, Senior Station Inspector (SSI) Partapjeet Singh painstakingly built up a marine police unit of eight officers and four boats.

He returned seven years later to find the fledgling unit had collapsed and the boats were missing.

Undaunted, he started over again to rebuild the Unidade Policia Maritima Timor-Leste, now 44-strong.

AFGHAN healthcare workers used to operate with no prospects of picking up skills or improving their existing ones.

Training for doctors and nurses in Bamiyan province in Central Afghanistan was ad-hoc and arbitrary at best.

But all that is changed now with the help of the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF), which sent 10 men from the construction engineering team to the area in May: This month, some 100 Afghan healthcare workers will start their first medical classes in a new training facility.

NEW rules designed to make air travel advertisements transparent have killed off those '$1' flights to Bangkok, but the actual prices of package holidays still remain anyone's guess.

A scan of travel advertisements shows that most travel agents and airlines now include other fees such as fuel surcharges and airport taxes in the cost of a ticket.