Weather clears for a moment at meeting

June is already rainy in Singapore, which is bad news for reporters like me who have to commute on foot for 15 minutes between my hotel and the venue for the Shangri-La Dialogue, the annual high-end security forum at the Shangri-La Hotel.

To make things worse, I arrived in the scenic city on Thursday without an umbrella, and the three-day meetings opened on Friday.

What occupied my mind at that time was the potential responses from defense chiefs and experts about the tensions in the South China Sea, a topic that has recently dominated media headlines like a rain cloud.