SINGAPORE: Member of Parliament Seng Han Thong, who was set on fire at a community event in January, will resume his duties from next month.
Mr Seng had spent the last five months recovering from the attack which burnt his hands, neck and back.
In his first TV appearance since the incident, Mr Seng said he is stronger now and is ready to start work.
You may call it music therapy — playing the harmonica is what Mr Seng has been doing to speed up his recovery.
Although his condition is stable now, the scars from the burns are a reminder of the attack.
Mr Seng said: "I take this incident as a very isolated one. And I hope that I’m not the first one, but I’m the only one who had met with this misfortune.
"Despite all these, I’m back and I should do more. I’ll do better, whether as a Member of Parliament or whether as a political leader or whether as a parent in the family.
"You should set a good example — that we should not be destroyed because of this misfortune. But we should emerge even stronger."
The MP for Yio Chu Kang expects to recover fully in a year, but he already plans to resume his Meet—the—People sessions next month.
On whether he will run for another term when elections are called, Mr Seng said he will leave that decision to the People’s Action Party (PAP).
He said: "The electoral boundaries will be changed. There will be more Single Member Constituencies, and smaller GRCs. There will be more younger talents joining. By then, the party will decide who is the best person to serve."
— CNA/ir

TOKYO (AFP) - - Health experts have long warned of the risk of obesity, but a new Japanese study warns that being very skinny is even more dangerous, and that slightly chubby people live longer.
People who are a little overweight at age 40 live six to seven years longer than very thin people, whose average life expectancy was shorter by some five years than that of obese people, the study found.
"We found skinny people run the highest risk," said Shinichi Kuriyama, an associate professor at Tohoku University's Graduate School of Medicine who worked on the long-term study of middle-aged and elderly people.
"We had expected thin people would show the shortest life expectancy but didn't expect the difference to be this large," he told AFP by telephone.
The study was conducted by a health ministry team led by Tohoku University professor Ichiro Tsuji and covered 50,000 people between the ages of 40 and 79 over 12 years in the northern Japanese prefecture of Miyagi.
"There had been an argument that thin people's lives are short because many of them are sick or smoke. But the difference was almost unchanged even when we eliminated these factors," Kuriyama said.
Main reasons for the shorter lifespans of skinny people were believed to include their heightened vulnerability to diseases such as pneumonia and the fragility of their blood vessels, he said.
But Kuriyama warned he was not recommending people eat as much as they want.
"It's better that thin people try to gain normal weight, but we doubt it's good for people of normal physique to put on more fat," he said.
The study divided people into four weight classes at age 40 according to their body mass index, or BMI, calculated by dividing a person's weight in kilograms by their squared height in metres.
The normal range is 18.5 to 25, with thinness defined as under 18.5. A BMI of 25 to 30 was classed as slightly overweight and an index above 30 as obese.

Channel NewsAsia - Sunday, June 21
SINGAPORE : Singapore has confirmed another 23 cases of the H1N1 flu, bringing to 126 the total so far.
Of the 23 new cases, eight are local cases from two clusters of local transmission.
The first is the Riverlife Church, which saw five students fall ill after attending its services on June 13 and 14.
One of them, a student at Chung Cheng High School (Main) was reported on Friday.
Four are new cases, including the student’s younger brother. Another three are also students at Chung Cheng High School.
A second cluster was found at the National University of Singapore (NUS), which saw three students fall ill.
One of them was reported on Friday, while the other two had their infection confirmed on Saturday.
The two new cases are a 24—year—old Columbian woman and a 22—year—old American woman.
All three are foreign exchange students who had met up on June 13. They were with a group of other NUS schoolmates on an educational trip to Thailand from June 5 to 8.
There are also two new cases that have no confirmed links with previous patients.
One of them is the father of a boy who is a close contact of an earlier case.
The Ministry of Health is investigating if both infections are related.
The remaining 15 are all imported cases, including a 14—year—old Asian Youth Games participant from the Philippines.
He has been admitted to the Communicable Disease Centre, while his team—mates and two coaches are quarantined at the Aloha Resort at Loyang.
Singapore’s total number of confirmed H1N1 cases now stands at 126, with 94 still in hospital. They are in stable condition.
Contact tracing is underway for all the cases. — CNA /ls