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SIA Airfare Deals, Biz Class Tix To Be Won & Celeb Appearances To Expect At The Time To Fly Travel Fair

Before you make your way down, snag travel vouchers online for more savings on your next holiday.

Now that travel has taken off once more, you probably have more than a few destinations to check off your travel bucket list and are on the hunt for fab travel deals. Look no further.

The Time to Fly travel fair is happening from Nov 11 to 13 at Suntec City Convention Centre, Level 3 Concourse. Visitors can expect special deals for Singapore Airlines airfares and travel packages, plus there are early bird specials and free gifts in store.

To give you an idea of the deals you can expect: All-in return Economy Class fares on Singapore Airlines start at $310 to Bali, $550 to the Maldives, and $1,200 to London.

Pro-tip: Don’t head down to the Time to Fly travel fair without first earning travel vouchers that you can use at the event. Just take part in an online quiz here , answer a few questions correctly and travel vouchers are yours to download and use at the fair.

There are other travel deals that await. Every $500 purchase onsite at the travel fair earns you one chance of winning at the lucky draw. There's a daily draw where a trip for two is up for grabs every day. On top of that, there’s a grand prize of two trips for two to Perth and the Maldives with Singapore Airlines Business Class tickets that one lucky winner will walk away with on the final day of the fair.

Each of the seven participating travel agents — ASA Holidays, CTC Travel, EU Holidays, Hong Thai Travel, LGE Travel, Super Travels and UOB Travel — are also doling out promotions and freebies at the fair, including travel discounts, vouchers and bonus miles.

Besides scoring travel deals, there are celebrity appearances lined up at the roadshow at Suntec City, where you may just catch a glimpse of Tay Ying, Hong Hui Fang, Desmond Tan, Paige Chua, and cast members from Healing Heroes, King of Culinary and more.

Time To Fly Travel Fair When: Nov 11-13, 10am-10pm (Nov 11, 12) and 10am-9pm (Nov 13) Where: Suntec City Convention Centre, Level 3 Concourse More info at https://cnalifestyle.channelnewsasia.com/time-to-fly

Photo: Singapore Airlines

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Singapore Airlines Time To Travel Fair

Time out says.

There’s no time like the present to book your 2024 getaway. There’s a massive travel fair happening this weekend, and up to 370,000 Singapore Airlines (SIA) and Scoot discounts will be on sale. Get to hot destinations like Kuala Lumpur, Seoul, Taipei, The Maldives, and New York at a steal – case in point, a SIA premium economy seat to the Big Apple starts at just $1586. 

Discounted tickets will be released online from November 3 to 16, but show up at the Time to Travel Fair at Suntec Singapore Convention and Exhibition Centre Halls 405 and 406 this weekend to snag more lucky draw prizes and exclusive giveaways. For more information about how to snag discounted tickets, read here . 

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Singapore Airlines’s Travel Fair Has Promo Fares To Over 50 Destinations From S$218 All-In When You Book From 11 – 24 Nov 22

Singapore Airlines’s Time To Fly Travel Fair is here

Here’s a sale you don’t want to miss. Singapore Airlines will be running a Travel Fair at Suntec Convention Centre from 11 to 13 November.

Enjoy amazing travel deals for 2023 and stand to win fantastic prizes when you book your fares during this period.

• Date & Time: 11-12 November 2022, 10am-10pm 13 November 2022, 10am-9pm
• Venue: Suntec Convention Centre Level 3 Concourse

If you are unable to make it to the travel fair, you can still enjoy the promotional fares when you book your tickets online .

Fares to South East Asia

Fares to north asia, fares to west asia, fares to south west pacific, fares to europe, fares to north america.

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SIA and Scoot offering over 370,000 discounted flight tickets, sale starts Nov 3

Advertisement.

Singapore Airlines (SIA) and its subsidiary Scoot will offer discounts on over 370,000 flight tickets at its annual Time To Fly travel fair, which runs from Nov 3 to 5. Meanwhile, Vietjet Air will be offering one-way tickets from S$80.

A Boeing 777-312ER aircraft of Singapore Airlines takes off during cold winter weather from Zurich Airport near Ruemlang, Switzerland, Dec 14, 2022. (Photo: Reuters/Arnd Wiegmann)

Hazeeq Sukri

Singapore Airlines (SIA) recently announced that it will offer discounts on over 170,000 round-trip tickets from Singapore, across multiple flight classes, at its upcoming Time To Fly travel fair . These discounted tickets will apply to 71 destinations. 

Additionally, its low-cost subsidiary Scoot will offer 200,000 seats at discounted rates to 50 destinations at the same travel fair – bringing the total number of discounted tickets offered by SIA to over 370,000.

To get these tickets, head to the Time To Fly travel fair at Suntec Singapore Convention and Exhibition Centre’s halls 405 and 406 from Nov 3 to 5.

Do note that different terms and conditions apply to the discounted tickets offered by each airline.

For instance, SIA's discounted tickets are only applicable for eligible flights between January and September 2024, while Scoot's discounted tickets are only for one-way flights between November 2023 and October 2024.

According to Scoot, airfares will start "from S$68 to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia and S$140 to Taipei in Taiwan".

Those who purchase their tickets at the Time To Fly fair will also stand a chance to win daily lucky draw prizes including a pair of SIA Business Class round-trip tickets to the likes of Bali and Osaka, as well as Scoot travel vouchers worth up to S$5,000.

For those who can't be physically present at Suntec City, don't fret as the discounted tickets will be available online between Nov 3 and 16 on SIA's and Scoot's websites .

Separately, low-cost airline carrier Vietjet Air announced on Wednesday (Oct 18) that it will be offering special flight promotions to its passengers from now till Oct 20. 

Customers will be able to reserve international one-way tickets, priced from S$80, to destinations between Vietnam and Singapore, Australia, India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Kazakhstan and Southeast Asia. Do note that the travel period for these promotional tickets is from Nov 1 to Dec 20.

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‘Sinners’ and ‘Russian Talibans’: A Holy War Roils a Once Placid Village

A battle has erupted in Moldova over its links to the Russian Orthodox Church, seen by many as a tool of Moscow’s influence abroad.

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By Andrew Higgins

Reporting from Balti and Rautel in northern Moldova

The village was a placid place until the local priest, disoriented by the war in Ukraine, succumbed to Satan, according to the retired teacher in northern Moldova. Before that, people got on well and attended Sunday services at the same Russian Orthodox Church.

Now, said Tamara Gheorghies, the teacher, “they don’t even say hello to each other.” The reason, at least in her telling, is simple: a decision by the village priest to sever his allegiance to Patriarch Kirill in Moscow, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church.

The Moscow Patriarch has for decades commanded the loyalty of Orthodox Christians across the former Soviet Union. But in March, the village priest joined a rival ecclesiastical hierarchy based in neighboring Romania, a member of the European Union.

“He has taken the path of terrible sin,” said Ms. Gheorghies, a member of a group of residents who are fighting to restore the primacy of the Russian church and defeat what they see as a rush to ally with decadent Western forces.

The rift over ecclesiastical allegiance in Rautel, a village of around 4,000 people 50 miles from Moldova’s northeastern border with Ukraine, is just one of many now playing out across the country and in other former Soviet Republics. Patriarch Kirill is a zealous ally of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. He has been pressing to maintain the loyalty of Orthodox faithful beyond Russia’s borders, and with it, Russian influence.

“This is not about religion or faith. It is about geopolitics,” said Victor Gotisan, a former theology student in Moldova who researches church issues.

The rival hierarchies share the same theology and the only significant difference between them is their choice of calendar. The Russian church uses the old Julian system, while the Romanian one favors a revised calendar that puts Christmas on Dec. 25 instead of Jan. 7, the date traditionally celebrated in Russia and Moldova.

Though identical in many ways, the Russian and Romanian churches have become proxies in an escalating struggle for influence between East and West that has convulsed the former Soviet territories since 1991.

The conflict in Ukraine, which Patriarch Kirill hails as a “holy war” against Satanism, has sharply intensified that struggle . Dozens of Orthodox priests have defected from the church since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

“Russia is fighting to keep its grip,” Mr. Gotisan said. But to do that, he added, it needs to keep its grip on Moldova’s Orthodox Christian church, and with it, the power to appoint its bishops and other senior clergy.

What priests say in their services will influence the outcome of a critical October presidential election in Moldova as well as a referendum on joining the European Union, he said.

“Priests enjoy authority in places that politicians have difficulty reaching. People listen to what they say,” said Maxim Melinte, a priest in Ghidighici, a village near the Moldovan capital, Chisinau. Mr. Melinte broke with Patriarch Kirill last year. Since then, he has received threats and venomous insults from pro-Moscow zealots. He described them as “Russian Talibans.”

Victor Turcano, the priest in Rautel, defected in March, outraged by the Russian church’s support for the invasion of Ukraine. He immediately faced a barrage of attacks from Bishop Marchel, his superior and a loyalist of Patriarch Kirill in the nearby city of Balti.

The bishop denounced Mr. Turcano as a womanizer and home breaker — “lies and slander,” responded the priest — and ordered him defrocked. In June, the bishop mobilized dozens of like-minded Orthodox clerics from across the region to try to take the Rautel church back by force and install a new priest faithful to the Moscow Patriarch.

The effort failed after Rautel’s mayor, Tudor Istrati, who had applauded Mr. Turcano’s decision, called in extra police officers to prevent a storming of the church.

Not a churchgoer himself, the mayor said he had no interest in ecclesiastical quarrels but supported Mr. Turcano because he was backed by most of his parishioners. The priest’s opponents, he added, “are just trying to get people riled up.” Moscow, he added, “has given nothing to the village” but the European Union has funded road, water and other projects.

In an interview in his office, decorated with photographs of Patriarch Kirill, and other Russian church leaders, Bishop Marchel derided the mayor and defecting priests as victims of “Russophobia well paid by the West.”

A fervent opponent of Moldova joining the European Union, the bishop said he wants his country to be part of Europe, but “not the Europe of Sodom.” In the battle over values, he added, “Russia is on the side of God.”

The Russian church has a long history of serving the Russian state, an alliance that has become ever tighter under President Putin.

Mr. Putin, hailed by Patriarch Kirill as a “miracle from God,” presents Russia as a bastion of traditional Christian values in the hope of expanding its reach and influence through opposition to liberal democracy, feminism and L.G.B.T.Q. rights.

The war in Ukraine, however, has blunted Russia’s once potent religious weapon, sundering Orthodox communities around the world and prompting widespread defections from the Patriarch.

In a letter to Patriarch Kirill last year, Metropolitan Vladimir, the head of the Moldovan Orthodox Church — a largely autonomous institution but ultimately subordinate to Moscow — warned that his church was rapidly losing support because “it is perceived in Moldovan society as an outpost of the Kremlin and a supporter of the Russian intervention in Ukraine.”

This, he said, was pushing more believers to shift their allegiance to the Metropolis of Bessarabia, a rival Orthodox hierarchy subordinate to Romania’s patriarch. “We are in a situation of institutional bankruptcy,” he warned.

Russia’s allies in the Moldovan church dismissed the letter as part of a conspiracy led by pro-Western clerics.

The Russian church’s crisis has been festering since the 1990s but intensified greatly after Mr. Putin’s invasion. Mr. Gotisan, the researcher, estimated that nearly 10 percent of Moldova’s Orthodox parishes have since changed sides. Many more will follow, he predicted, because of anger at Patriarch Kirill’s blessing of Russian soldiers.

It was Kirill’s support for the war, said Mr. Turcano, the priest in Rautel, that pushed him to shift his church’s allegiance.

Soon after the war started, he said, parishioners started complaining that, at the end of each service, he included a brief prayer for Patriarch Kirill. Such prayers are a routine show of respect in Orthodox churches affiliated with Russia, but for parishioners in a village with deep kinship ties to Ukraine across the border, they now seemed deeply offensive.

“Father, how can you pray for Russia when it is killing our family next door?” Mr. Turcano recalled being asked. He held a vote on whether to stick with the Patriarch or jump ship. Those favoring a change won easily, he said. His opponents say the vote was not fair because it was held without advance notice.

Tatiana Palaghiuc, a Rautel resident who wants to stick with Patriarch Kirill, said she has collected more than 600 signatures calling for legal action to stop Mr. Turcano from “leading us all astray.”

On a recent Sunday, the Rautel church was crowded with worshipers, but the dissidents all stayed away. They now go to church in Balti, Bishop Marchel’s pro-Russian bastion.

Silvia Popovic, 60, another Rautel resident, said the war in Ukraine had left her in no doubt about which side to choose. “One patriarch splashes Russian tanks with holy water. The other side calls for the bombing and killing to stop,” she said after a recent Sunday service.

“For me, it is an easy choice,” she said.

Andrew Higgins is the East and Central Europe bureau chief for The Times based in Warsaw. He covers a region that stretches from the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to Kosovo, Serbia and other parts of former Yugoslavia. More about Andrew Higgins

Our Coverage of the War in Ukraine

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After meeting with Donald Trump, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary wrote to a top E.U. official to say that Trump had told him he was planning a swift push for a peace deal  between Russia and Ukraine.

Ukraine’s Parliament is in a state of disarray , denting the government’s credibility as it struggles to reset its war effort after months of Russian advances.

The Rise of Slaughterbots: Driven by the war, many Ukrainian companies are working on a major leap forward in  the weaponization of consumer technology .

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Escaping the Russian Army: Facing grim job prospects, a young Nepali signed up to join Russia’s military, which sent him to fight in Ukraine. His ordeal turned into a tale worthy of Hollywood .

How We Verify Our Reporting

Our team of visual journalists analyzes satellite images, photographs , videos and radio transmissions  to independently confirm troop movements and other details.

We monitor and authenticate reports on social media, corroborating these with eyewitness accounts and interviews. Read more about our reporting efforts .

‘I will probably never be able to go home again’: Russian American journalist Masha Gessen on their Moscow court conviction

A court in Moscow has handed Russian American journalist Masha Gessen an eight-year prison sentence for criticizing the Russian military.

Moscow-born, Gessen is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a columnist for The New York Times. They’ve been one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s prominent critics.

Gessen was convicted in absentia after being charged with “spreading false information.” The case stems from a YouTube interview Gessen conducted in 2022 with an anti-war Russian blogger, Yuri Dud.

The World’s Host Carolyn Beeler spoke to Gessen, author of numerous books about Russia including “ The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia .”

Parts of this interview have been edited for length and clarity. AP contributed to this report.

The post ‘I will probably never be able to go home again’: Russian American journalist Masha Gessen on their Moscow court conviction  appeared first on The World from PRX .

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Leader of belarus marks 30 years in power after crushing all dissent and cozying up to moscow.

Yuras Karmanau

Associated Press

FILE - President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus gives a speech during a military parade in Minsk, Belarus, on May 9, 2020, that marked the anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. Lukashenko, who marks 30 years in power on Saturday, is one of the world's longest-serving and most ruthless leaders. (Pool Photo via AP, File)

TALLINN – For three decades, European leaders have come and gone by the dozens, but Alexander Lukashenko remains in absolute control of Belarus.

His longevity is due to a mixture of harshly silencing all dissent , reverting to Soviet-style economic controls and methods, and cozying up to Russia, even as he sometimes flirted with the West.

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Lukashenko, 69, was dubbed “Europe's last dictator” early in his tenure, and he has lived up to that nickname.

On Saturday, he marks 30 years in power — one of the world's longest-serving and most ruthless leaders.

As head of the country sandwiched between Russia, Ukraine and NATO members Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, Lukashenko was elected to his sixth term in office in 2020, in balloting widely seen at home and abroad as rigged.

Months of mass protests that followed were harshly suppressed in a violent crackdown that sent tens of thousands to jail amid allegations of beatings and torture. Many political opponents remain imprisoned or have fled the nation of 9.5 million.

But the strongman shrugged off Western sanctions and isolation that followed, and now he says he will run for a seventh five-year term next year.

Lukashenko owes his political longevity to a mixture of guile, brutality and staunch political and economic support from his main ally, Russia.

Most recently, in 2022 he allowed Moscow to use Belarusian territory to invade Ukraine and later agreed to host some of Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons.

“Lukashenko has turned Belarus into a fragment of the USSR, dangerous not only for its own citizens but also threatening its Western neighbors with nuclear weapons,” said independent political analyst Valery Karbalevich.

He describes the Belarusian leader as “one of the most experienced post-Soviet politicians, who has learned to play on both on the Kremlin’s mood and the fears of his own people.”

When the former state farm director was first elected in July 1994 just 2½ years after Belarus gained independence following the USSR's collapse, he pledged to fight corruption and boost living standards that had plunged amid chaotic free-market reforms.

An admirer of the Soviet Union, Lukashenko pushed soon after his election for a referendum that abandoned the country’s new red-and-white national flag in favor of one similar to what Belarus had used as a Soviet republic.

He also quickly bolstered ties with Russia and pushed for forming a new union state in the apparent hope of becoming its head after a full merger — an ambition dashed by the 2000 election of Vladimir Putin to succeed the ailing Boris Yeltsin as Russian president.

Under Lukashenko, Belarus' top security agency retained its fearsome Soviet-era name of the KGB. It also has been the only country in Europe to keep capital punishment, with executions carried out with a shot to the back of the head.

In 1999 and 2000, four prominent Lukashenko critics disappeared, and an investigation by the Council of Europe concluded they were kidnapped and killed by death squads linked to senior Belarusian officials. Belarusian authorities stonewalled European demands to track down and prosecute the suspected culprits.

“Lukashenko never bothered with his reputation,” said Anatoly Lebedko, leader of the now-outlawed United Civil Party of Belarus. “He relished in calling himself a dictator and bragged about being a pariah even when he was publicly accused of political killings and other crimes.”

Lukashenko initiated constitutional changes that put parliament under his control, removed term limits and extended his power in elections that the West didn't recognize as free or fair. Protests following the votes were quickly broken up by police and organizers were jailed.

His Soviet-style centralized economy depended heavily on Russian subsidies.

“Instead of helping Belarus, cheap Russian oil and gas have become its curse, allowing Lukashenko to receive windfall profits from exporting oil products to Europe and freeze the situation in Belarus,” said Alexander Milinkevich, who challenged him in a 2006 election. “Opposition calls for reforms and movement toward the European Union literally drowned in the flood of Russian money.”

But even while relying on Moscow, Lukashenko repeatedly clashed with the Kremlin , accusing it of trying to strong-arm Belarus into surrendering control of its most prized economic assets and eventually abandoning its independence .

While maneuvering for more subsidies from Russia, he often tried to appease the West by occasionally easing repressions. Before the 2020 election, the U.S. and EU lifted some sanctions as Belarus freed political prisoners.

The balancing act ended after the vote that sparked the largest protests ever seen in Belarus. In the subsequent crackdown, over 35,000 people were arrested, thousands were beaten in police custody, and hundreds of independent media outlets and nongovernmental organizations were closed and outlawed.

While Putin had been annoyed by Lukashenko’s past maneuvers, he saw the protests as a major threat to Moscow’s influence over its ally and moved quickly to shore up the Belarusian leader who came under Western sanctions.

Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who challenged Lukashenko in that election and then fled the country to lead the opposition from exile, said the vote marked a watershed as it became clear that he had "lost support of the majority of the Belarusians.”

“Lukashenko has survived primarily thanks to Russia, which offered him information, financial and even military support at the peak of the protests,” she told The Associated Press. “The Kremlin’s intervention prevented a split in the Belarusian elites. Now Lukashenko is paying back that support with the country's sovereignty.”

Belarus’ leading human rights group Viasna counts about 1,400 political prisoners in the country, including group founder and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski , who has been held incommunicado like other opposition figures.

“Lukashenko has created a harsh personalist political regime in the center of Europe with thousands of political prisoners where civic institutions don’t function and time has turned back,” said Bialiatski’s wife, Natalia Pinchuk. “Torturous conditions in which Ales has been held are emblematic for thousands of Belarusian prisoners and Lukashenko’s path in politics.”

In one of the most vivid episodes of the crackdown, a commercial jet carrying a dissident journalist from Greece to Lithuania was forced to land in Minsk in May 2021 when it briefly crossed into Belarusian airspace in what the West condemned as air piracy. The journalist, Raman Pratasevich, was convicted of organizing protests and sentenced to eight years in prison. He later was pardoned and become a Lukashenko supporter.

The Belarusian leader is sometimes blustery and mercurial. He once praised Adolf Hitler for “raising Germany from ruins.”

Lukashenko shrugged off the COVID-19 pandemic as “psychosis” and advised people to “kill the virus with vodka,” go to saunas and work in the fields because “tractors will cure everybody!”

Amid the 2020 crackdown, Lukashenko declared that “sometimes we shouldn’t care about the laws and just take tough steps to stop some scum."

He kept his youngest son, 19-year-old Nikolai, at his side at official events, fueling speculation that he could be nurturing him as a successor.

Lukashenko maintained a tough-guy image by playing hockey, skiing and doing other sports. After contracting COVID-19, he said he recovered quickly, thanks to physical activity.

But he's become visibly less energetic in recent years amid rumors of health problems that he denied with his usual bravado.

“I’m not going to die,” he said last year. “You will have to tolerate me for quite a long time to go.”

Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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Get Paid $15,000 to Visit State Fairs With Your Family This Summer — Here’s How

Enter this family-friendly contest by July 25.

It’s state fair season, and one hotel is looking for a family to travel around the country and take in the best food, rides, and fun these fairs have to offer — and get paid.

AmericInn by Wyndham is seeking one family to travel to up to three state fairs in the Midwest over the course of a week and share their tips on social media as they go, the hotel group shared with Travel + Leisure . The lucky family will then get paid $15,000 for the job. 

Travis - stock.adobe.com/Courtesy of Wyndham Hotels & Resorts

“Just like it’s all about family-friendly fun at the fairground, guests count on AmericInn hotels to connect them to memorable experiences across the heartland and beyond,” Clem Bence, the vice president and brand leader of AmericInn by Wyndham, said in a statement provided to T+L. “Alongside the good old-fashioned hospitality and modern comforts at our hotels, the lucky State Fair Family will fully immerse themselves in the best of the Midwest’s iconic state fairs, all while captivating an audience on social media with their memorable adventures along the way."

To enter the contest, families must submit a 300 word-minimum written entry (with a family photo) or a 60 second video application online or by email at [email protected] showing why they are “the ideal candidates for the role, while showcasing family flair and social-media savviness.” Each family should also provide their social media handles.

Submissions must be received by July 25 and the winner will be notified around the week of Aug. 2.

The winning family will receive a seven night stay at AmericInn hotels, a $10,000 travel stipend to cover airfare, ground transportation, and any other expenses, $5,000 in cash, Wyndham Rewards Diamond level membership, and a suitcase full of AmericInn “swag.”

The lucky group will then attend up to three state fairs around Aug. 10 to 18 and post about their experience in real time. The family will also be expected to contribute to the future AmericInn “Best of the Midwest Fair Guide.”

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