Electrical fault suspected after 50 flee sixth-floor fire in Singapore
The Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) said it was alerted at about 9.30pm and found one of the bedrooms in the flat engulfed in flames.
Firefighters entered the smoke-filled unit and extinguished the blaze using a water jet, but the rest of the flat sustained fire and smoke damage.
No one was inside the unit when SCDF arrived, and no injuries were reported.
Preliminary investigations indicate the fire was likely caused by an electrical fault in the affected bedroom.
SCDF also urged the public to practise electrical safety, such as avoiding overloading outlets, switching off appliances when not in use, and replacing damaged wires promptly.
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An obelisk stands in the Chinese cemetery in San Pablo as a memorial to more than 600 male residents rounded up by Japanese troops and bayoneted to death in February 1945. 'People kept reminding me my father was an evil person who killed many Filipinos,' Villafuerte said, adding that it nearly caused him to drop out of school. 'It hurt, because it was never my choice to have a Japanese parent.' 'I've found my identity' Manila grocer Maria Corazon Nagai, an 82-year-old widow and mother of three, gave up her Philippine passport for a Japanese one last April with PNLSC's help. She told AFP that her Japanese father, Tokuhiro Nagai, a civil engineer, had lived with her mother in Manila during the war. Maria Corazon Nagai shows her Japanese passport. — AFP pic 'In my family, I was the only one who looked different,' said Nagai, who quit school after sixth grade when family finances bottomed out following her father's post-war death. She went to live with her maternal grandmother when her mother remarried and began working as a sales clerk in her teens. 'I'm happy now that I've found my identity,' said the bespectacled, soft-spoken Nagai, who still tends a cramped stall selling shampoo, noodles and condiments in Manila's downtown Zamora market. Nagai said she hid her parentage as she reached adulthood to avoid the bullying she endured as a child. She was 'relieved to learn my father was not a soldier' when she obtained her birth records at the civil registry in the 1990s. 'The past is the past' Before the invasion, small groups of Japanese migrated to the Philippines from the late 19th century to escape 'overpopulation', with some marrying locals, said Inomata, the legal centre director. Their offspring went into a 'spiral of poverty' when the state confiscated their assets after the war, and many were unable to obtain a formal education, he said. One male descendant hid in the mountains of the southern Philippines for 10 years after the war fearing he would be harmed, Inomata said. Views towards Japan began changing in the 1970s as Tokyo completed war reparations that helped rebuild the Philippines, and Japanese investors built factories and created jobs. The two countries are now security allies. Nagai has been unable to find any Japanese relatives and couldn't locate her father's grave during her 2023 trip to Tokyo, but she will fly to Japan for a second time later this year for a holiday. Though she does not speak the language, Nagai said she now considers herself Japanese. For Villafuerte, the situation is more ambiguous. 'Of course, it is difficult being a Filipino for 82 years and suddenly that changes,' he said. 'The past is past, and I have accepted that this is how I lived my life.' — AFP
