It had been an hour and half since the clock struck midnight. My ambition to land at least one job with midnight surcharge before going home was now in full retreat. I had been cruising nonstop around CBD, passing through all the major nightspots. No luck. Tuesdays are always the slowest of the week. I decided to call it a day.
On my way home, I stopped at a 7/11 store on McCallum St to get some cigarettes. Next to the store’s entrance, in the shadow of the sidewalk, I noticed an old woman lying on the ground under the shelter of the arcade. She was resting on some empty, partially flattened cardboard boxes, and looked sound asleep. Scattered around her were some more empty boxes in various sizes, along with a small, rundown flatbed trolley. I paused for a moment in my tracks, wondering if she was ill or in need of help. I was hesitant to disturb her, however.
After I came out of the store, I saw two young ladies standing in front of the old woman and talking to her, who was now awake and sitting up against a pile of boxes. One of the girls was holding a blanket in her hand. They were talking to the old woman gingerly, apparently trying to give her the blanket. The old lady, however, seemed too tired to respond with any movement, other than mumbling something in a weak voice.
I came closer and stood next to the girls, and heard the old woman saying in Chinese, “I was too tired. I fell asleep without knowing it. I will be going very soon.” She said it apologetically, as if she was confessing something she had done very wrong.
“Can you speak Chinese?” One of the girls turned to me and asked. I said yes. She then asked me to tell the woman that this blanket was for her. So I did. But she didn’t seem to have heard me. She responded, “I am tired and have to have a rest before I can get up and going again.”
I said to the girls that she appeared to have a hearing problem, and she had probably mistaken us for someone who wanted to chase her out of here. One of the girls stepped close to the woman and laid the blanket gently on her legs and said, “This is for you.” After that, they left.
Both girls were locals and looked to be in their mid twenties. The blanket they left to the old woman was brand new. They must have bought it just now and right here in the 7/11 store after they saw the lady sleeping on the ground. Their generosity and caring spirits made me feel a little guilty in comparison.
After the girls left, I decided to stay a while longer to see if I could convince the woman into letting me drive her home, as she said she was too tired to move just now.
She was in her seventies at least, wearing a grey shirt and a pair of pants in a darker color. Both were badly wrinkled and dusted with dirt. Though she looked slightly better than a few moments ago, and her voice was a bit louder and clearer, she obviously remained weak and fragile. Her hearing was seriously impaired and despite my repeated attempts to speak to her, she did not respond as if she had understood me.
She, however, was in a mood of doing one way talking. She first lifted up the blanket from her leg and said to me, “They are so kind. I don’t need this. It will get dirty here.” She placed it carefully on top of a carton box. Then she motioned me to sit down near her, and pulled up her pants to expose her lower part of the legs from ankle to knee. The appearance of her legs astonished me. They were like thin, dead tree trunks: rugged surface and in black color. While pressing her legs with a finger at random spots, she carried on nonchalantly, “My legs no good anymore. I get tired easily. My legs used to be red, you know, like chilly pepper. After the doctors did operations on me, they became totally black.
“I was in hospital three times. One time I stayed in bed for three weeks and never came down. My hands, too, you see. Three of the fingers in each hand are frozen. Can not use anymore. Only this two (thumb and index) can move. I can not comb my hair. Can not use chopsticks also.”
At this moment, a man emerged from a narrow alley next to the 7/11 store. He was between 35 and 40 years of age, and had a bicycle with him. He was obviously here for the lady. He shot me an inquisitive look, as he spoke something to the lady in a raised voice. The lady opened a styrofoam box next to her and took out a plastic bag containing a few bottles and some other containers, all appeared to be empty, and handed to him.
I was glad to see the man as I had not been able to communicate with the woman. I first put him at ease by saying that I was just a taxi driver and was trying to see if the lady needed any help. Then I told him that I wanted to give her a ride home but could not get her to understand me. He said she could not hear properly. And she wouldn’t be going home tonight, because she needed to go to some place nearby tomorrow morning to collect discarded boxes. I asked if he was related to her and he said he was not. But he added that he had been helping her for the last 15 years. “Does she have any children?” I asked.
“Yes. She has two sons and a daughter.” He answered. “I have met them.”
“Do they take care of their mother?”
He shook his head and said nothing. He then told me that every day in the past fifteen years, he comes to the lady twice a day. Once in the middle of night to check on her and collect the bag and comes again before 8 in the morning to bring her food and water, and help her cut the boxes, load them on the trolley and bring them to the recycling center to exchange for money. 50 kg for $2. She used to carry 50kg herself. But not anymore. She is over 80 years old and her legs have got some lymphatic vessel problems. “Now is almost 2, so I only sleep a few hours a day. I have my own job to do in Bt Merah during the day. I have to go now.” He put the plastic bag inside a basket mounted on his bicycle and said goodbye to me, and left.
After he was gone, the lady patted the styrofoam box at her side and said, “My ice are all gone now. I have to drink cold water. I get fire in my chest if I don’t. Burning hot. Drives me crazy. I have to drink ice cold water to stay alive. Every day he fills the bottles with water and brings to me with some ice. I keep them in this box. Now, no more.”
“You give me a minute.” I said. I went to 7/11 and came back with a $2 bottle of ice cold fruit drink. The lady took it and held it to her chest, and thanked me. She then said, “Some people think I am too fussy, you know, having to drink cold water. They don’t know I have no choice. It’s burning inside here.”
I took out $10 and put it on her legs, and said, “Here is some more money. You can buy more cold drinks after you finish this one.” She didn’t hear what I said but she understood it. She took the money and said thank you again.
I left after that. It was passed two already. I made a mental note that I will come back here tomorrow to check on the woman again.
I went home by New Bridge Road. The street was empty, with only a few cars and taxis parked along the curb in front of a couple restaurants that open all night long. I picked up speed.
Suddenly, before the cantonment road junction, a man leaped out of the darkness of the roadside and ran into the middle of the road with his arm extended, and made me stop abruptly. It was a white man. He was in his forties and told me to go to Pandan Valley by Grange Road.
I gritted my teeth and drove silently towards Pandan Valley by the way he wanted. Privately, I was very annoyed with him for jumping on the road like that. I almost hit him! But then again, had he stayed off the road, I would have probably missed him.
When we reached his place, the meter fare was $8. With the midnight surcharge, the total was $12 exact.
Rather than feeling pleased that I had finally accomplished my goal, I felt somewhat eerie. This was exactly what I had given to the old lady just a moment ago!
::Homework Crapbox::
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Cai MingJie (who originally came from China, armed with a PhD from Stanford, and obtained Singaporean citizenship, worked for decades in a local scientific research institution before resigning due to distasteful politics to become a local taxi driver) regularly updates his blogs, and I must say, his blog is probably the most entertaining and educational blog around these parts.
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June 28, 2009. Sunday: Poison in disguise
Some twenty minutes before midnight, I was cooling my heels at the taxi stand next to Cuppage Plaza. Normally business was good at this place, but today it was unusually quiet.Finally, someone came in. It was a Chinese lady, and she told me in Mandarin to go to Balestier Road.
I had taken passengers from Orchard to Balestier many times in the past. I normally go either via Cavenagh Road/Kampong Java/Thomson Road, or by CTE/Moulmein Road, depending on which end of Balestier the destinations were closer to. Today, without thinking, I took the former route.
As I turned onto Cavenagh Road the lady said, “Why didn’t you go by CTE?”
“Oh, sorry,” I replied, looking at her in the mirror. “I didn’t ask you which way you want me to take. But there shouldn’t be much of difference. We can get there quickly by this way also.”
But she was unforgiving. “You don’t need me to tell you how to go. You are the taxi driver and you should know which way is the best way,” she said.
In a situation like this, I employed my stock answer: “Sorry for that. Later you can pay me whatever you want to pay. Okay?”
She didn’t respond.
She was in her early thirties. She spoke Mandarin with a northern accent. The fact she did not speak English when she first spoke to me suggested she probably did not know any. From the way she was dressed she didn’t look to be one of the Chinese girls working in the night entertainment industry.
Her place was near the end of Moulmein Road. This meant that I had indeed made a mistake. When we stopped at her destination, the meter fare was $7.
“I take taxi every day,” she said. “The fare is always $5.”
“$5 is fine. No problem.” I was eager to minimize her unhappiness. “You can just pay me $5.”
She gave me a $5 note, but then said, “I can pay you $7 if you give me a receipt.”
“I’ll just take $5,” I said to her, feeling grateful for her generosity. “Don’t worry about the meter. If you want a receipt, however, I can give you one regardless.” I thought maybe she needed a receipt to claim the expense.
She thought about it for a moment and said, “I want a receipt and I will pay $7.”
“Okay, if that’s what you want,” I said. I printed out the receipt and gave it to her. She handed me a $2 note. I thanked her and took the money.
She opened the door. With one leg out, she suddenly said in a venomous tone, “I will file a complaint on you!”
With that she got out and slammed the door.
I was completely stunned.
Posted by Mingjie Cai at 11:37 PM-------------------------------
For more entries by Cai MingJie, visit his blog at :
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Hi all,
Just to share something interesting with regards to PSLE Maths:
http://www.exampaper.com.sg/miss-loi-the-tutor/psle-1-higher-education-0
Cheers.
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Atrocities (and still ongoing!!!) beyond human description.
Both articles are written by Nicholas Kristof, a journalist for The New York Times.http://members7.boardhost.com/TrueCatholic/msg/1265583140.html
It’s easy to wonder how world leaders, journalists, religious figures and ordinary citizens looked the other way while six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. And it’s even easier to assume that we’d do better.
But so far the brutal war here in eastern Congo has not only lasted longer than the Holocaust but also appears to have claimed more lives. A peer- reviewed study put the Congo war’s death toll at 5.4 million as of April 2007 and rising at 45,000 a month. That would leave the total today, after a dozen years, at 6.9 million.
What those numbers don’t capture is the way Congo has become the world capital of rape, torture and mutilation, in ways that sear survivors like Jeanne Mukuninwa, a beautiful, cheerful young woman of 19 who somehow musters the courage to giggle. Her parents disappeared in the fighting when she had just turned 14 — perhaps they were massacred, but their bodies never turned up — so she moved in with her uncle.
A few months later, the extremist Hutu militia invaded the home. She remembers that it was the day of her very first menstrual period — the only one she has ever had.
“First, they tied up my uncle,” Jeanne said. “They cut off his hands, gouged out his eyes, cut off his feet, cut off his sex organs, and left him like that. He was still alive.
“His wife and his son were also there. Then they took all of us into the forest.” That militia is known for kidnapping people and enslaving them for months, even years. Men are turned into porters, and girls into sex slaves.
Jeanne and other girls were regularly tied spread-eagle and gang-raped, and she soon became pregnant. The rapes continued, sometimes with sticks that tore apart her insides and left her dribbling wastes constantly. Somehow the fetus survived, but her pelvis was too immature to deliver the baby.
One of the people the militia had kidnapped was a doctor who was forced to treat the soldiers. The doctor, seeing that Jeanne was close to dying in obstructed childbirth, cut her open with an old knife, without anesthetic, and removed the stillborn baby. Jeanne was delirious and almost dead, so the militia dumped her beside a road.
“She was completely destroyed inside,” said another doctor, Denis Mukwege, who saved her life after she was brought here to Bukavu. Dr. Mukwege, 54, presides over the 400-bed Panzi Hospital, supported by the European Union and private groups like the Fistula Foundation. He is sometimes mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize for his heroic efforts to fight the war and heal its victims.
Dr. Mukwege operated on Jeanne nine times over three years to repair the fistulas that were causing her to leak wastes. Finally he succeeded, and she returned to her village to live with her grandmother.
“He told me to stay away from men for three months,” Jeanne remembers, to give her body time to heal. But three days after she returned to the village, the militia came again and raped again. The fistula reopened.
Jeanne, kept naked in the forest and stinking because her internal injuries had reopened, finally managed to escape and eventually found her way back to Panzi Hospital. Dr. Mukwege has already started a second round of surgeries on her, but there is so little tissue left that it is not clear she can ever be continent again.
About 12 percent of the raped women he treats have contracted syphilis, and 6 percent have H.I.V. He does what he can to repair their injuries and help them heal — until the next time.
“Sometimes I don’t know what I am doing here,” Dr. Mukwege said despairingly. “There is no medical solution.” The paramount need, he says, is not for more humanitarian aid for Congo, but for a much more vigorous international effort to end the war itself.
That means putting pressure on neighboring Rwanda, a country so widely admired for its good governance at home that it tends to get a pass for its possible role in war crimes next door. We also need pressure on the Congolese president, Joseph Kabila, to arrest Gen. Jean Bosco Ntaganda, wanted by the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges. And, as recommended by an advocacy organization called the Enough Project, we need a U.S.-brokered effort to monitor the minerals trade from Congo so that warlords can no longer buy guns by exporting gold, tin or coltan.
Unless we see some leadership here, the fighting in Congo — fueled by profits from mineral exports — will continue indefinitely. So if we don’t act now, when will we? When the toll reaches 10 million deaths? When Jeanne is kidnapped and raped for a third time?
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24562.htm
February 02, 2010 "New York Times" January 31, 2010 -- Sometimes I wish eastern Congo could suffer an earthquake or a tsunami, so that it might finally get the attention it needs. The barbaric civil war being waged here is the most lethal conflict since World War II and has claimed at least 30 times as many lives as the Haiti earthquake.
Yet no humanitarian crisis generates so little attention per million corpses, or such a pathetic international response.
That’s why I’m here in the lovely, lush and threatening hills west of Lake Kivu, where militias rape, mutilate and kill civilians with a savagery that is almost incomprehensible. I’m talking to a 9-year-old girl, Chance Tombola, an orphan whose eyes are luminous with fear.
For Chance, the war arrived one evening last May when armed soldiers from an extremist Hutu militia — remnants of those who committed the Rwandan genocide — burst into her home. They killed her parents in front of her. Chance ran away, but the soldiers seized her two sisters, ages 6 and 12, and carried them away into the forest, presumably to be turned into “wives” of soldiers. No one has seen Chance’s sisters since.
Chance moved in with her aunt and uncle and their two teenage daughters. Two months later, the same militia invaded the aunt’s house and held everyone at gunpoint. Chance says she recognized some of the soldiers as the same ones who had killed her parents.
This time, no one could escape. The soldiers first shot her uncle, and then, as the terrified family members sobbed, they pulled out a large knife.
“They sliced his belly so that the intestines fell out,” said his widow, Jeanne Birengenyi, 34, Chance’s aunt. “Then they cut his heart out and showed it to me.” The soldiers continued to mutilate the body, while others began to rape Jeanne.
“One takes a leg, one takes the other leg,” Jeanne said dully. “Others grab the arms while one just starts raping. They don’t care if children are watching.”
Chance added softly: “There were six who raped her. One raped me, too.”
The soldiers left Jeanne and Chance, tightly tied up, and marched off into the forest with Jeanne’s two daughters as prisoners. One daughter is 14, the other 16, and they have not been heard from since.
“They kill, they rape, burn houses and take people’s belongings,” Jeanne said. “When they come with their guns, it’s as if they have a project to eliminate the local population.”
A peer-reviewed study found that 5.4 million people had already died in this war as of April 2007, and hundreds of thousands more have died as the situation has deteriorated since then. A catastrophically planned military offensive last year, backed by the governments of Congo and Rwanda as well as the United Nations force here, made some headway against Hutu militias but also led to increased predation on civilians from all sides.
Human Rights Watch estimates that for every Hutu fighter sent back to Rwanda last year, at least seven women were raped and 900 people forced to flee for their lives. “From a human rights perspective, the operation has been catastrophic,” concluded Philip Alston, a senior United Nations investigator.
This is a pointless war — now a dozen years old — driven by warlords, greed for minerals, ethnic tensions and complete impunity. While there is plenty of fault to go around, Rwanda has long played a particularly troubling role in many ways, including support for one of the militias. Rwanda’s government is dazzlingly successful at home, but next door in Congo, it appears complicit in war crimes.
Jeanne and Chance contracted sexually transmitted diseases. Like other survivors in areas that are accessible, they receive help from the International Rescue Committee, but Chance still suffers pain when she urinates.
Counselors say that most raped women are rejected by their husbands, and raped girls like Chance have difficulty marrying. In an area west of Lake Kivu where attacks are continuing, I met Saleh Bulondo, a newly homeless young man who was educated and spoke a little English. I asked him if he would still marry his girlfriend if she were raped.
“Never,” he said. “I will abandon her.”
A girl here normally fetches a bride price (a reverse dowry, paid by the husband’s family) when she marries. A village chief told me that a typical price would be 20 goats — but if the girl has been raped, two goats. At most.
Thus it takes astonishing courage for Jeanne and Chance to tell their stories (including in a video posted with the on-line version of this column). I’ll be reporting more from eastern Congo in the coming days, hoping that the fortitude of survivors like them can inspire world leaders to step forward to stop this slaughter. It’s time to show the same compassion toward Congo that we have toward Haiti.
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NameWee's CNY Song 2010 (more about NameWee at end of this post)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5w0DFvcZ_vwAnother song, titled "Cinta Hello Kitty", lyrics in Malay, tells a story about a girl falls in love thru online and naively ran away from home, bringing with her nothing but her precious hello kitty doll - only to find out the cruelty of the world when she's all alone celebrating her birthday, finally ... after travelling to many different places, she finally whispers to her doll 'hello kitty, please help me, i was wrong and i miss my parents, i wanna go home now ...'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUurtulXrnIThe singer of "Cinta Hello Kitty", Malaysian Chinese Karen Kong, has many songs in her repertoire, including the following beautiful chinese song titled "Li Dao (Leaving the Island)", which tells of leaving one's home village for a foreign land, but missing one's loved ones back home :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ6SH8bQbts
Incidentally, the lyrics for the abovementioned sentimental song was written by NameWee (don't see NameWee ah beng ah beng hor, he can write lyrics for sentimental song one ok!)And in case you've forgotten who NameWee is, here is his most famous song (that almost landed him in jail and persecution by the Malaysian authorities), Negarakuku, based on the national anthem, but a critical satire on racism in Malaysia.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyiBvJtJ5Z4 -
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http://taxidiary.blogspot.com/2010/02/july-22-2009-wednesday-unbearable.html
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
July 22, 2009. Wednesday: The unbearable heaviness of being
Forty minutes into the evening peak hours, I was waiting at the Bukit Merah Central taxi stand.
Despite its proximity to Chinatown and the financial district, and its long history as the epicenter of one of the earliest housing estates in Singapore, Bukit Merah Central is far less glamorous than other regional centers. There are no modern attractions such as shopping malls, cinemas, restaurants, or disco pubs to draw the crowds. There used to be a public swimming complex next to the bus terminal, but it had been shut for many years. The only saving grace was an NTUC Fairprice supermarket, one of the largest in town.
I noticed an Indian woman walking slowly in my direction. She lumbered along, carrying several Fairprice grocery bags, her body tilting from side to side with each heavy step.
She finally reached my taxi and motioned me to open the trunk so she could place her bags inside. Then she came in, sat in the front seat and told me to go to Telok Blangah Way, a five to eight minutes drive depending on the traffic lights.
Although the short distance of the trip was a disappointment to me, it was expected. Most people taking taxis from here were residents of the neighboring HDB estates with too many grocery bags to go home by bus. My mind was occupied by something else. I glanced at her and asked, “What do you have in your bags?”
“What do you mean?” She looked at me as if she found my question rudely intrusive.
“Oh, nothing,” I quickly explained. “I just want to say that if you have seafood in there, I’d like to put some newspaper underneath your bags, since I had some troublesome experience before...”
“No seafood.” She cut me off. “Only fruits and vegetables.”
I apologized for asking the question. She said it was okay, she understood my concern.
From close up, I realized she was younger than I thought when I saw her from a distance. She was probably in her late forties, and wore an oversized brown dress.
She turned to me and asked, “What about durian? You mind if I have durian?”
“No. Durian is ok,” I said with a smile. “The smell of durian doesn’t stay long.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Otherwise, how am I supposed to carry it? Buses don’t allow it. MRT don’t allow it. If taxis also don’t allow it...”
“I am sure most taxis will allow it,” I said.
Looking for something to say, I asked, “You are not working today?”
She gave me an “are you making fun of me?” kind of look and said, “You find me a job and I will work.”
I felt stupid. I was quiet for a moment, trying to imagine what other good-natured taxi uncles would do in this case. I then told her that if she was looking for a job she could look in the newspapers, talk to friends, or ask her MPs for help.
We were reaching her stop, which was in a carpark next to an HDB block. She took out her wallet, held it in her hand, and said slowly, “Yeah. But I have this arthritis for many years. I have never been in a working condition.”
That was what caused her heavy steps, I realized.
I tried to cheer her up. “That’s okay. You don’t have to work then. At least you have your husband to support you.”
“My husband passed away,” she said under her breath. Her hands stopped opening her wallet.
I stuttered, “I…I’m sorry.”
She looked at me, her eyes two ice cubes melting under the sun. “You know a month and half ago, in the news, a husband and a son jumped off a building...”
As if struck by lightning, I felt a current bolt from my scalp to my feet. “My god. That’s your…” I froze in shock.
“Yes. That’s my…husband and…my boy.” Her tears finally overran the dam and streamed down her cheeks.
I read the news after I came back from the trip to China. This was one of the most heartbreaking family tragedies I had heard of in Singapore. I was extremely saddened by the realization that human lives were so fragile, and could be shattered at the most unexpected moments.
According to the reports, the sequence of events on June 6, 2009, were as follows:
That evening, twenty-five year old Raja was meeting with some of his friends near his residence. They had some drinks. He had been unhappy lately as he lost his job about a month ago. During the gathering, his younger brother called and asked him to go somewhere else together, but Raja said he was tired and didn’t want to go.
Around 10:30pm, he was back home in his apartment on the ninth floor, but not for long. He told his mother that he was going out again. His mother was worried about him as he looked a little tipsy and asked him to stay at home. But he was in no mood to listen to her.
On his way out his father came to speak to him, saying he should listen to his mother and not go out at this hour. They got into a heated argument. His father said he should worry about finding a job rather than hanging out aimlessly. Raja was further upset by the remarks. He stepped out of the house and locked the front gate from the outside with a padlock.
He then walked to the edge of the corridor, said he was not a worthy son to his parents and jumped over the parapet in front of his family.
The family was locked inside and could do nothing to stop him. They witnessed the tragedy in horror, and immediately called their relatives and the police for help.
The police came and had to call the civil defense personnel to cut the lock to free the family, who came out to see Raja lying dead on the ground nine floors below.
The family collapsed in grief on the ground floor, accompanied by their relatives and the police. They were then led to a nearby bench to sit and calm down. After a while, the father left and before anyone became aware of his movements, he took the lift to the tenth floor. He jumped off the building crying “my son!” and landed on the ground next to his son’s body.
Both father and son were pronounced dead at the scene.
“My boy,” the woman wiped some tears and said, “I loved him. I loved him so much. Every time he couldn’t sleep at night he asked me, mama, come here. I came to sit by him, put my hand here, where his heart was beating. He would fall asleep right away.” She put her hand over her heart to demonstrate.
She slowly turned her head, and pointed to the cement ground along the side of the building. “That’s where my son was, and that’s where my husband was.”
I stared at the ground. Cold, hard cement, only a few steps away from my car. On the surface, any trace of blood from the two people she loved most had long been washed away. But I was certain, deep in the heart of the soil, their blood was still there, and would stay there forever.
“Sometimes I tell myself,” she said, her eyes staring blankly ahead, “at least they are together up there, taking care of each other.”
I looked at the woman. Her face was still covered with tears. Could anybody in this world possibly know what she had gone through? Only a short while ago, I was worried about her bags contaminating my taxi... I bit my lip and struggled to contain my own tears.
“I have to go on with my life. I have two other children to take care of,” she said as she opened her wallet. I pressed my hand on hers and said in a shivering voice, “I can’t take money from you.”
“You can. Business is business,” she insisted.
“No. I really can’t.” That was the only thing I could say.
“Please. Even if just a little bit,” she said as she took out some money from her wallet. “It will make me feel better.”
Her wallet was thin and empty. I could see there were only three or four $2 notes inside. She took out two of them and put them in my hand. She looked into my eyes and said, “You understand me?”
The $4 she gave me was not “just a little bit”. It was almost the full fare, but I couldn’t speak. I just nodded.
She got out, took the bags, and walked slowly towards the building, shifting her weight from side to side, passing by the spots where her son and husband landed a month and a half ago.
With her heavy steps…
A note of explanation: It has been a general rule that my blog entries do not contain information which would allow the identification of persons involved in the events described. This story is an exception as it was about a tragic event that had already been made public by the news media.
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