Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) is looking into taking action including seeking legal recourse against Straits Times Review, a new website that borrows its newspaper's name, The Straits Times, which reported this news on May 6, 2015.

Calling for the Straits Times Review Facebook page to be removed, SPH has lodged a trademark infringement complaint with the social media giant.

SPH is quoted as saying: "We understand that Facebook is looking into our complaint."

The STR website was registered on April 18 and operates from domain name registrar Tucows Domains. It claims to be an "independent news site based in Australia".

STR went live shortly after news broke that the authorities here ordered the shutdown of The Real Singapore (TRS) portal.

STR is reportedly single-handedly run by Alex Tan, who is now based in Sydney. He contested in Ang Mo Kio GRC under the Reform Party banner during the 2011 General Elections and credited himself in 2013 for co-founding TRS with a couple from Australia.

The couple's lawyer Choo Zheng Xi has confirmed that they have nothing to do with STR.

Another lawyer Jonathan Kok of RHTLaw Taylor Wessing said in the ST news report that sites registered by foreign entities and hosted abroad are outside the legal jurisdiction of Singapore.

This view concurred with the perspective of Professor Ang Peng Hwa from Nanyang Technological University’s Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information. He said once someone is outside of Singapore, “you don’t have jurisdiction (over them)”, so nothing much can be done.

However, the MDA still has powers to block websites from being viewed here.

In 2013, it blocked extramarital dating website Ashley Madison.

And since Feb. 2 this year, it has also blocked unauthorised websites that promote, facilitate or advertising remote gambling under a new law to curtail online gambling.

Update May 6, 2015, 10pm: It appears that the Straits Times Review site had its account suspended, leaving the site inaccessible.

However, according to STR Facebook's page, this is due to an overload in traffic.