GEORGE TOWN, June 2 — Penang will review possible improvement measures, including strengthening compliance with fire safety requirements for old and heritage buildings, following the fire at the Odeon building on Jalan Penang here, which claimed the life of a Myanmar construction worker last Saturday.
State Local Government and Town and Country Planning Committee chairman H’ng Mooi Lye said the matter would be examined based on the findings of investigations by the relevant authorities, as well as feedback from technical agencies.
“The state government views the fire incident seriously, and among the areas that could be given attention are strengthening compliance with fire safety requirements, monitoring high-risk buildings, regulating renovation works, and increasing awareness among building owners and premises operators.
“Any proposed improvements will be studied comprehensively, taking into account safety considerations, heritage preservation and existing legal requirements,” he told Bernama.
H’ng said Penang’s two local authorities — the Seberang Perai City Council (MBSP) and the Penang Island City Council (MBPP) — have consistently prioritised the safety of old and heritage buildings through close cooperation with the Fire and Rescue Department of Malaysia (JBPM) and other relevant technical agencies.
H’ng said existing measures include monitoring building usage, regulating renovation works, ensuring compliance with licensing requirements and coordinating with technical agencies to strengthen fire safety standards.
Building owners and premises operators are also encouraged to maintain fire safety systems, including emergency exits, fire extinguishers, alarm systems and electrical wiring.
He said both the MBSP and MBPP conduct regular inspections and monitoring of buildings, renovation projects and heritage properties to ensure compliance with relevant laws and safety requirements, while also keeping track of dilapidated and abandoned buildings.
“To ensure a higher level of compliance among building owners, MBPP has previously taken the initiative to facilitate the application process for existing shophouses and heritage buildings within the Unesco World Heritage Site of George Town through the implementation of more efficient procedures.
“The initiative allows building owners to submit Building Plan applications for related works without having to undergo the Planning Permission process, subject to the stipulated conditions and criteria,” he said.
Following the Odeon fire on Saturday, H’ng said MBPP would review investigation findings and consider measures to strengthen existing procedures, guidelines and safety requirements.
“In addition, MBPP will hold further discussions with members of the Spead (Surveyors, Planners, Engineers, Architects and Developers) Committee as well as relevant technical agencies to review suitable improvement proposals, particularly those related to the safety of old and heritage buildings,” he said.
He added that the state government continues to coordinate with local authorities and relevant agencies on monitoring and follow-up actions, with enforcement measures, inspections and repair directives to be undertaken where necessary.
In the incident last Saturday, a 56-year-old Myanmar construction worker, Mohamad Boshi Sabi Ullah, died from smoke inhalation after becoming trapped in a fire at an entertainment centre premises in the Odeon building on Jalan Penang. The premises was undergoing renovation works to be converted into a restaurant. — Bernama
If you’ve ever used an online patient portal to message your doctor in the middle of the night, you won’t be surprised to learn that responding to those messages takes an increasingly big bite out of clinicians’ workdays.
So in recent years, hospitals have begun adopting an AI tool that can draft responses for them. The tool was supposed to make a time-consuming task go more quickly and smoothly, said Philip Barrison, an MD-PhD student at the University of Michigan Medical School who studies AI in healthcare.
Instead, the tool has given doctors and nurses a new to-do list. First they have to read the AI-generated response and decide if it “is actually something that they think they would say,” Barrison said. Humans are suggestible, and looking at something and deciding whether you would have thought of it on your own is a cognitively complex task.
Even if the message looks correct, the clinician still needs to “edit it to the point where they think it’s acceptable” to send to a patient, Barrison said. The AI tool introduces a totally new set of complicated judgment calls into what used to be a relatively straightforward process. As a result, many clinicians have chosen not to use it at all.
They’re fortunate to have the choice. Buoyed by expectations of cost savings and skyrocketing productivity, companies are increasingly asking (and sometimes requiring) employees to use AI to make their work more efficient. Meta, for example, last year instructed some workers to use AI to “go 5X faster by eliminating the frictions that slow us down.” The CEO of Shopify told employees they’d need to prove they “cannot get what they want done using AI” before the company would approve new hires. Some companies are even evaluating or ranking employees based on how much they use AI tools.
Workers in some sectors have found major time savings from AI. But for others, the tools just change the work rather than making it faster. Workers might be spending less time writing patient portal messages, for example, but more time editing the releases the AI tool writes.
At best, this mismatch between employer expectations and employee reality can be an annoyance. In other cases, however, it can result in workers being laid off for failing to meet unrealistic efficiency demands. Some critics say the overzealous adoption of AI in high-stakes settings like healthcare even puts people’s lives at risk. Now workers, unions, and experts are increasingly calling for guardrails to protect employees from inflated expectations around AI — and customers, students, patients, and the general public from mistakes that can happen when managers put AI adoption above all else.
Corporations are increasingly presenting employees with a choice: Use AI to be more productive or “you’re going to be automated out of a job,” said Aiha Nguyen, director of the labor futures program at the research organization Data & Society.
But the effects of AI on productivity aren’t as straightforward as some CEOs have claimed. In one 2025 study, software developers believed AI made them faster, but in fact they took 19 percent longer to complete tasks. (The researchers tried to repeat the experiment this year but had trouble recruiting developers who would agree to work without AI.) And in a recent survey of 5,000 white-collar workers, 40 percent of rank-and-file employees said AI saved them no time at all.
Workers across heavily AI-exposed fields point to hidden timesucks that come with using the technology. Julie, an art teacher, wrote in a response to a Vox reader survey that her school’s administrators routinely suggest using AI for lesson-planning, emails, and progress report comments. She’s tried AI-generated lesson plans, but they don’t account for the fact that kids may work through an activity at different speeds.
“First, I am checking what AI suggests, then I am editing them. Why add a step I can accomplish on my own?”
Julie, an art teacher who wrote in response to a Vox reader survey
“First, I am checking what AI suggests, then I am editing them,” she said. “Why add a step I can accomplish on my own?”
For an employee at an East Coast communications agency, an internal AI tool was supposed to speed up the process of drafting press releases and other documents about the pharmaceutical industry.
“The goal is, I think, to be able to plug and chug into this machine and be able to turn a lot of materials around a lot quicker than we already do,” said the employee, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of career repercussions.
But when the employee tried to use it for basic research, it made too many mistakes. Double-checking its work erased any time savings. When the employee tried using it for communications with clients, its people-pleasing tendencies became a problem, as the tool put a “weird happy spin” even on messages warning of bad news.
“Part of the reason we take a human speed to turn things around is because there is so much nuance behind everything that we do,” the employee told me. “AI is just not going to be able to catch it.”
It’s not just that AI makes errors. With the advent of agentic AI, workers are increasingly being asked to edit and oversee the output of multiple AI tools, a new kind of work that can have unexpected costs.
One recent study of 1,488 workers across industries, for example, found that excessive oversight of AI agents could lead to what the researchers called “AI brain fry,” a kind of cognitive fatigue. “Participants described a ‘buzzing’ feeling or a mental fog with difficulty focusing, slower decision-making, and headaches,” the researchers wrote in Harvard Business Review. Brain fry was also associated with an increased number of errors and an increased desire to quit one’s job.
The researchers also found that while using one or two AI tools increased productivity, adding additional tools produced diminishing returns, and after four tools, productivity actually declined.
Despite such findings, companies continue to pressure employees to use AI, and to cite AI investment as a rationale for layoffs, even as companies that try to link staff reductions to AI adoption tend to struggle on the stock market.
Some workers and organizations, however, are beginning to push back. National Nurses United, the country’s largest nurses’ union, has criticized the use of AI tools in hospitals to estimate staffing needs or to recommend treatment protocols for patients.
There’s no guarantee that these tools will take into account a patient’s individual profile, including underlying medical conditions, the way human clinicians can, Cathy Kennedy, the union’s president, told me. AI is supposed to “help us do our work more efficiently, but at the end of the day, it makes it even more burdensome,” she said.
Hospitals need to evaluate, with nurses at the table, whether AI tools really work as advertised, Kennedy said. “We have to stop — we have to go back and really see if this is truly doing what it needs to do,” she said.
The same is true across industries, Barrison, the healthcare researcher, told me. “Organizations need to be prepared to say when, if they were seeking a return on investment, if they were seeking value in a technology — how do you define what that value is? And if there’s not value there anymore, how do you turn it off?”
Some workers have found ways that AI actually helps them do their work — just not the ones management expected. Julie, the art teacher, likes to use Claude to learn more about topics she’s less familiar with, like kiln-firing ceramics.
Meanwhile, researchers have found that AI can actually reduce employee burnout, if it’s used to complete tasks employees find burdensome. “Everybody in every job has a list of things that they procrastinate on,” said Julie Bedard, a managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group who led the AI brain fry study. “Those are the places I get, unsurprisingly, a lot of enthusiasm to try AI with.”
But employers won’t find out what those burdensome tasks are unless they listen to rank-and-file employees. “Worker standards and worker rights should continue to be at the heart of all of this,” Nguyen said, “rather than just focusing too much on the AI.”
Wang Fuk Court fire survivors Jason Kong and his wife have been arrested for alleged government loan fraud – two weeks after he delivered a petition asking the estate’s administrator to meet with homeowners.
Sing Tao Daily reported on Friday morning that Kong and his wife were arrested on Thursday over “money laundering” and “conspiracy to defraud.”
The couple, both directors of an interior design company, are alleged to have used fraudulent means to obtain several hundred thousand dollars in loans under the government’s Special 100% Loan Guarantee scheme.
The scheme was launched by the Hong Kong government in early 2020 to help companies amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
According to Sing Tao Daily, Kong allegedly faked the income records for January to March 2020 of his interior design company when he applied for the loan in 2022, “creating the impression that his company was affected by Covid-19.”
It is suspected that he obtained “several hundred thousand dollars,” and some funds were transferred to his personal account, the newspaper reported.
Sources familiar with the matter told HKFP that, as of Friday morning, Kong and his wife were being detained at a police station.
HKFP has not been able to reach Kong since Thursday afternoon.
In response to HKFP’s enquiry, police said on Friday afternoon that they arrested a local man and a local woman in Yuen Long on Thursday, following an investigation by the Regional Crime Unit of New Territories South.
The pair were arrested on suspicion of money laundering and conspiracy to defraud, police said. The suspects, aged 62 and 64, are accused of defrauding the government’s Special 100% Loan Guarantee scheme.
Kong is a flat owner at the fire-ravaged Tai Po residential estate. He was also a member of the Wang Fuk Court owners’ board when the fire broke out.
He and his wife survived the fire, but their dog died in the blaze.
Kong has been outspoken on matters of displacement and long-term resettlement. He has been urging the government and the government-appointed administrator, Hop On Management, to hold a meeting with homeowners.
On April 29, Kong delivered a petition, which garnered 247 handwritten signatures, to Hop On, asking the firm to hold a general meeting with homeowners to discuss long-term resettlement and related financial matters. He was one of the petition organisers.
Hop On said on Wednesday that it would seek to extend the statutory deadline for holding a homeowners’ meeting, citing the need for more time to verify owners’ signatures and find a suitable venue.
The company also said it would not communicate with “specific” residents.
“As the administrator, Hop On’s responsibility is to represent and serve all owners of Wang Fuk Court, rather than communicating only with a portion of owners or specific individuals,” the company said.
In early April, state-backed newspaper Ta Kung Pao reported that Kong collected 500 online signatures for a petition urging Hop On to hold a general meeting with homeowners.
The report questioned the authenticity of the signatures and asked why Kong did not introduce a mechanism to verify them.
It also questioned why Kong joined the owners’ board of a residential estate in Sai Kung District. In response, Kong, who owns a property on the estate, asked why somebody should not be allowed to serve on several owners’ boards across different housing estates.
Since last year, there have been other arrests related to the government’s pandemic loan scheme.
In April 2025, police arrested six people, including at least one director of independent media outlet Channel C’s parent company, for allegedly defrauding the Special 100% Loan Guarantee scheme.
Channel C – founded by a small group of former Apple Daily employees in July 2021 following the closure of the pro-democracy newspaper – ceased operations soon after the arrests.
In March this year, businessman Jason Poon, who took on corruption in the construction sector, was arrested over the same government loan scheme.
He was active in highlighting issues in renovation projects at Hong Kong’s residential estates, including the quality of scaffolding nets and the bid-rigging epidemic – issues that arose in the wake of the Wang Fuk Court fire.
Following his arrest, Poon said that he would focus more on his family.
“When I look for places in the city to locate my sculptures, or take photographs, it is a bit similar to [mushroom hunting]. I like to observe the city with that gaze for little details.”Read the full article by Silke Tudor by clicking above.
The post In Plain Sight: Isaac Cordal Creates Tiny Worlds Which Mirror Our own first appeared on Hi-Fructose Magazine.
Over in Europe, Chanel stores were mobbed this week as Matthieu Blazy fans lined up to get their hands on the designer’s first Métiers d’Art collection. But at the Greenwich Hotel Courtyard in New York, a much more subdued, yet equally Chanel-clad, group gathered. On Friday, June 5, Chanel hosted its annual lunch in celebration of Through Her Lens: The Tribeca Chanel Women’s Filmmaker Program. There, the brand and Tribeca Film Festival toasted eleven years of an initiative that highlights and connects bold, visionary female filmmakers.
The guest list was a cross-generational mix of stars from film, television, art, and music with Katie Holmes, Meg Ryan, Jodie Foster, Myha’la, Bethann Hardison, and filmmakers Patty Jenkins and Mira Nair (aka the First Mother of New York) all in attendance. Ryan, in a tonal cream look featuring oversized pants, found some much-coveted shade in the restaurant’s courtyard where she chatted with Foster (casual in a Chanel Charvet shirt) and nibbled on passed hors d'oeuvres. Meanwhile, Francesca Scorsese, who arrived fashionably late, took a moment to connect with Tommy Dorfman.
Guests beat the 90-degree weather with glasses of rosé in hand and caprese salads, and after everyone had a chance to mingle, the Tribeca Festival’s co-founder and CEO, Jane Rosenthal, hushed the crowd to say a few words and make a big announcement. Jean-Michel, the documentary, by Quinn Whitney Wilson had been bought by Netflix. The room erupted in applause as Wilson broke into a celebratory dance, drawing cheers from the crowd. It was the kind of moment that epitomized the reason for the afternoon, as Rosenthal explained. “The goal [of Through Her Lens] was to create something unique and needed,” she said. “A space where women filmmakers could tell their stories on their own terms with access to mentorship, resources, funding, and a community that believes in them.” She continued, emphasizing the importance of “women who take risks, who are not waiting for permission, who are making work that is bold, complicated, funny, painful, messy, and true.” By the end of lunch, that mission felt less like a talking point than a shared feeling—one worth dancing about.
Quellin Images posted a photo:
Kodak Tri-X 400 with the Mamiya C220 and I think this would be the 80mm lens here (must get sorted with my note taking). Film developed in 510 Pyro.
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