Daily Archives: May 7, 2021

It can now be said, with guarded optimism, that Macau is headed in the right direction with its post-COVID-19 recovery. After suffering a year of virtually non-existent revenue, the city has now recorded two consecutive months of improvement, with March and April bringing substantial gains. The latest figures have been released by Macaus Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau (DICJ), for its Portuguese acronym), and the April win was $1.05 billion. It seems that the trend will continue, as May 1 saw the most arrivals to the city since the pandemic began.

In March, casinos in Macau reported gross gaming revenue (GGR) of $1.04 billion, with Aprils GGR improving on that by about 1.1%. While that improvement isnt significant, its a jump of more than 1,000% over what was seen a year ago when COVID-19 gripped the city. The GGR for last month is the highest amount recorded since the global pandemic began and follows an upward trend that would seem to indicate that things are returning to normal.

There is still a lot of work to be done, as the figure is still 64% lower than it was for the same period in April 2019. Still, Macau has been able to see two consecutive months of GGR that has topped $1 billion, which is a momentous achievement, given the economic damage the city has suffered over the past year. In April 2020, Macau was a virtual ghost town, with its borders closed to almost everyone and local visitation to casinos off-limits.

Its very likely that May will be an even better month, if May 1 is any indication. The first five days of May are May Day Golden Week, which has gotten off to a great start. According to statistics already released, May 1 recorded more than 44,000 arrivals, the highest number since before the pandemic began. It was also the highest recorded for this year, 34,729 from April 17. March had an average of 24,340 a day and Aprils high could represent a huge gain, but the final figures have not yet been released.

Sundays arrivals dipped to 36,000 and yesterdays number fell to 34,000. The city was expecting a daily average of around 40,000, which it hasnt reached, but the results are still positive. Many luxury hotels have been sold out for the first three nights of the long weekend and there were over 100 flights on each of the first two days of Golden Week. Casino operators continue to show more encouragement with the increasingly positive results, propelled by the fact that there have been no new locally transmitted COVID-19 cases in over a year.

Excerpt from:

April Was Good to Macau, as Casinos Record Highest Total in More Than a Year - GamblingNews.com

Paul Harris

The central governments denunciation against the chairman of the Hong Kong Bar Association Paul Harris may be a clear intrusion in the sphere of the legal profession [in Hong Kong], but its impact on Macaus legal community remains uncertain or minimal, local lawyer Srgio de Almeida Correia told the Times.The deep-rooted patriotism of Macaus legal community, which Correia regarded as very obedient and dependent on political power and business tycoons, may prevent professionals in the region from being targeted by the Liaison Office for quite some time.Correias remarks came after the Liaison Office of the Central Peoples Government in the Hong Kong SAR issued astatementon April 25, decrying Paul Harris as an anti-China politician, and warning that his continuing tenure would make the biggest irony to the Bar Association.The fierce criticism by the Liaison Office urging Harris to step down was intended as retaliation against Harris, following his earlier remarks in which he stated that he advocated the right to a peaceful protest. This speech was made after Hong Kongs High Court sentenced 10 activists, including media tycoon Jimmy Lai Chee-ying, for their roles in the illegal assemblies on August 18 and 31 in 2019.The accusation also pointed up Harris close ties with foreign organizations. Before serving as a chairman at the Bar Association he was a member of the Liberal Democrats in the U.K., and a Councillor for St Margarets Ward, Oxford. He resigned from these two positions before and after he took the post at the Bar Association in Hong Kong.

Srgio de Almeida Correia

In the wake of the Liaison Offices blunt accusation, Harris cleared up the misconception, reaffirming that he is not an anti-China politician, and he firmly supports the Basic Law and One country, two system principle and opposes any violent behavior.He also said he wishes to meet with representatives of the Liaison Office in Hong Kong to clarify these matters in person.Harris case has raised thorny questions about freedom of speech and the rule of law for some lawyers in Hong Kong.Correia echoes this viewpoint, saying that the event again calls into question the margin of autonomy of the legal profession, the rights enshrined in the Basic Law and the principles inherent to the rule of law.The credibility of the Hong Kong and Macau legal systems lies on its independence, on its autonomy vis--vis political power, and it is based in the rule of law, he said.If the courts, the judges and the lawyers are all [subject] to the political power of the government, no matter if it is local or central, and everybody is forced to follow political instructions for reasons of patriotism or something similar, there are no distinctive factors between the two SARs and the mainland legal system, he added. Staff Reporter

More here:

Chinas criticism of HK legal luminary a warning for lawyers in the two SARs - Macau Daily Times

The World Health Organization on Thursday warned of a new wave of Covid-19 infections in Africa due to delayed vaccine supplies, a slow rollout and new variants.

The African bureau of the UN agency said the continent had to catch up with the rest of the world in terms of vaccine rollouts.

The delay in the delivery of vaccine doses from the Serum Institute of India earmarked for Africa, the delay in the deployment of vaccines and the emergence of new variants means that the risk of a new wave of infections remains very high in Africa, it said in a statement.

It added that new variants such as the ones that emerged in India and South Africa could unleash a third wave on the continent.

The tragedy in India does not have to happen here in Africa, but we must all be on the highest possible alert, said regional WHO director Matshidiso Moeti.

While we call for vaccine equity, Africa must also knuckle down and make the best of what we have. We must get all the doses we have into peoples arms.

Some African countries had been exemplary in deploying vaccines, the WHO said, without naming them.

But it added that in spite of this, only just under half of the 37 million doses received in Africa have been administered so far.

Africa now accounts for only one percent of vaccine doses administered globally, the WHO said down from two percent a few weeks ago, as other regions rollouts are progressing much faster.

The first vaccines deliveries to 41 African countries under the Covax scheme began in March but nine countries have so far administered only a quarter of the doses received, while 15 countries have used less than half of their allocations.

The vaccination rate in Africa is the worlds lowest. Globally an average of 150 vaccine doses per 1,000 people have been administered, but in sub-Saharan Africa it is hardly eight doses per 1,000, according to the WHO.

See the original post:

WHO warns of new Covid wave in Africa - Macau Business

CHINA (HAINAN/MACAU). DFS Group and LOral Travel Retail have announced ambitious plans to accelerate the growth of their beauty business in Hainan and Macau SAR.

In Hainan, LOral Travel Retail will debut later this year at the Times DF x DFS Haikou Mission Hills Duty Free Complex, with leading brands such as Lancme, Kiehls, YSL, Shu Uemura, Biotherm and LOral Paris. In January, Shenzhen Duty Free Group, in partnership with DFS, opened its first downtown store in Hainan.

Shenzhen Duty Free Group and DFS Group recently inaugurated the Haikou Mission Hills Duty Free Complex. With LOral Travel Retail they aim to re-invent a travellers beauty journey

The collaboration will see exceptional brand retail expressions together with a team of professional beauty advisors, as well as re-invent a travellers beauty journey with new tech-and data-driven solutions said the partners. The location will feature an integrated network of devices embedded with digital features to enable conversations with travellers and generate insights to better serve Chinese consumers, they added.

The partners will also create and launch pop-ups, retailtainment and exclusive gifts within DFS network of stores in Macau in the coming months.

YSL Beauty launched its Claim Your Love campaign with make-up shows at T Galleria by DFS, Macau, Shoppes at Four Seasons earlier this month. New retail expressions in spaces curated by Lancme, Armani and Kiehls will follow. Below is an image from the ultra-premium Helena Rubinstein collaboration between LOral Travel Retail and DFS Group in Macau.

Following last months collaboration for a Helena Rubinstein ultra-premium Black Bandage event, YSL Beauty began the Claim Your Love campaign with make-up shows in T Galleria by DFS, Macau, Shoppes at Four Seasons earlier this month. Exclusive retail expressions curated by leading beauty brands such as Lancme, Armani and Kiehls are planned.

Creating a Sense of Place is the Kiehls Loves Macau campaign to welcome travellers back to the region, with limited edition packaging, retailtainment, and travel-relevant products unique to Macau. The campaign will be highlighted by an exclusive Kiehls Loves Macau pop -up at DFS Four Seasons store.

The partners said: This collaboration will act as a key milestone to take travel retail to new heights and further accelerate growth in the strategic destinations of Hainan and Macau SAR.

Shenzhen Duty Free and DFS have outlined grand plans for the Times DF x DFS Haikou Mission Hills Duty Free Complex to become a key Hainan destination as future phases are developed

LOral Travel Retail Worldwide President Vincent Boinay said: Our ambition at LOral is to provide Beauty For All Travellers, therefore we continue to capture growth in the Chinese traveller beauty market. To offer personalised services, products and experiences to the most sophisticated travellers like those visiting Hainan and Macau SAR, better management of data and acceleration on beauty innovation through tech are crucially important. For sure, we feel proud to have partners like DFS who share the same passion and ambition as we do.

DFS Group Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Benjamin Vuchot said: At DFS, it is always our aim to provide our valued customers with exceptional shopping experiences. Through our partnerships with world-leading brands such as LOral Travel Retail, we are able to combine the very best products with exciting and innovative new technologies to surprise and delight our customers in Hainan and Macau at all stages of their journey.

Read the original here:

DFS Group and L'Oral Travel Retail plan beauty innovation drive with joint projects in Hainan and Macau - The Moodie Davitt Report - The Moodie Davitt...

Students in many US states are just returning to classrooms after months of remote learning due to the coronavirus pandemic but the move back has come with an unfortunate uptick in gun violence.

From the first hours of Thursday, it felt like Groundhog Day at 7:00 am an Army trainee carrying a rifle hijacked a bus full of elementary school students near Fort Jackson, South Carolina for reasons unknown, before letting them go unharmed.

Arrested a short time later, the 23-year-old man was charged with 19 counts of kidnapping, carjacking and other crimes.

Probably one of the scariest calls that we can get in law enforcement is that a school bus has been hijacked with kids on it with someone with a gun. And thats what we had this morning, local sheriff Leon Lott told the ABC station.

Then, on the other side of the country in Idaho, at about 9:00 am a girl in sixth grade meaning she is about 11 or 12 took a gun out of her backpack and started shooting. Two students and a staff member were injured.

A teacher disarmed the girl and she was taken into custody. Her motive remains unknown.

Later in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a middle school was evacuated after a teacher reported seeing a student with a gun. In the end, the offending item turned out to be a mobile phone, but the incident shows how US teachers are on high alert.

Back in South Carolina, a high school student was arrested for bringing a firearm to school. And the day before in the southern state of Alabama, another student was arrested with two guns and a knife.

The incidents are reported by local media, but they do not make national headlines.

Only a deadly shooting spree, like the one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida in February 2018 (17 dead), sparks a shockwave.

No other high income country experiences or tolerates constant school shootings, tweeted Shannon Watts, the founder of the Moms Demand Action movement against gun violence.

More than 248,000 students have been exposed to gun violence in schools since 13 people were killed in the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999, according to data compiled by The Washington Post.

The figure includes those caught up in the violence, such as witnesses and those forced to evacuate educational institutions when gunfire erupts.

In 2018, 25 school shootings were counted, and 23 more came in 2019.

The Covid-19 crisis that was declared a global pandemic in March 2020 however offered a bit of a respite.

To curb the spread of the virus, most US schools closed their physical doors to students, instead offering remote learning via Zoom and other internet tools. Many are just now starting to reopen.

Nine school shootings were recorded in 2020, and two in the first quarter of 2021.

We worry that gun violence at Americas schools may be even more likely in 2021 than before the pandemic because of a number of exacerbated risk factors for violence, wrote criminal justice professors James Densley and Jillian Peterson in an article published by The Conversation, a non-profit news website.

Those risk factors include a spike in gun sales in recent months and a mental health crisis among young people due to months of virus-related lockdowns, the experts authors of a recent book on the issue wrote in April.

On April 26, a middle school student in Minnesota opened fire in a hallway before being arrested. The 12-year-old boys father later apologized.

The Covid. These kids are getting depressed. They have no friends. They dont know what to do. Theyre sitting on their computers. Its starting to fry their brains, he told the local ABC affiliate KTSP.

Excerpt from:

In US, children return to school -- but so do the guns - Macau Business

Police in Honduras, whose president the United States accuses of being a co-conspirator in drug-trafficking, unearthed 1.5 tons of cocaine buried in the ground in a small village in the countrys north.

They found some 1,450 packets of drugs in 58 sacks buried in three large holes dug with heavy machinery, a police statement said.

The drugs had apparently been brought to Francia, which is near the coast, by sea.

The haul was the result of intelligence work and served to demonstrate the hard work done by the National Police in coordination with other institutions, with the aim of dismantling drug trafficking structures operating in the country, according to the head of the special forces police directorate, Miguel Perez.

So far this year, Honduran police have seized more than eight tons of drugs, said the statement.

President Juan Orlando Hernandez has stepped up the fight against drug cartels even as his brother, Tony, was found guilty in a US court in October 2019 of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States.

In March this year, he was sentenced to live in prison on this and other charges.

During his trial, the US government argued the former Honduran congressman was a large-scale drug trafficker who smuggled more than 185 tons of cocaine into the United States.

Judge P Kevin Castel found Tony Hernandez had acted as an intermediary in providing bribes to politicians, including his president brother and the ruling National Party.

US prosecutors said the president had been a co-conspirator in Tony Hernandezs crimes, though he has not been charged.

Hernandez, who has styled himself as a champion in the fight against drugs, has repeatedly denied allegations of drug trafficking.

In March this year, a New York jury found Geovanny Fuentes Ramirez, an alleged associate of the president, guilty of drug trafficking.

During his trial, US prosecutors said the Honduran leader had helped Fuentes smuggle tons of cocaine into the United States.

President Hernandez accuses the US justice system of giving credibility to drug lords seeking revenge for having been extradited to the United States by his government.

The rest is here:

Honduras police unearth 1.5 tons of buried cocaine - Macau Business

Famed as an upmarket tourist destination of white beaches and turquoise waters, the atoll nation of the Maldives is troubled by political turmoil, rising sea levels and now the Covid pandemic.

Underscoring the underlying political tensions in the South Asian nation, former president Mohamed Nasheed was seriously wounded in a bomb attack in the capital on Thursday.

The country is a collection of 26 atolls made up of 1,192 tiny islands scattered 800 kilometres (550 miles) across the equator.

The country says it has five percent of the worlds coral reefs.

Only 187 islands are inhabited with the population put at 340,000 in the last census. However, the resident population, including foreign workers, was estimated at around 515,000 in 2020 by the World Bank.

High-end tourism is the principal income earner, directly providing a quarter of gross domestic product (GDP). However, the Covid-19 pandemic devastated the tourism sector and the economy shrank 28 percent last year.

The archipelagos secluded beaches and pristine lagoons drew more than 1.7 million tourists in 2019, but arrivals dropped to 555,000 last year.

It is a prized destination for honeymooners, such as Hollywood stars Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes who visited in 2006 as well as big names in Bollywood.

Maumoon Abdul Gayoom ruled with an iron fist for 30 years until 2008, when he lost the countrys first multi-party polls to human rights activist Nasheed.

Nasheed was forced to resign in a 2012 coup led by mutinous police and troops.

In disputed elections the following year, he was defeated by Gayooms half brother, Abdulla Yameen.

In 2015 Nasheed was sentenced to 13 years in jail on a terrorism charge widely criticised as politically motivated. A year later, in 2016 he was granted prison leave for medical treatment in London.

He sought refuge in Britain and his cause was taken up by high-profile human rights lawyer Amal Clooney.

Nasheed returned after his nominee, Ibrahim Mohamed Solih won the 2018 presidential election dealing shock defeat to Yameen. The following year, he went on to win a parliamentary election and became speaker, the second most powerful position in the country.

Eighty percent of the Maldives is less than a metre (three feet) above sea level, making it one of the countries most threatened by rising sea levels linked to climate warming.

In 2009 Nasheed held a cabinet meeting underwater to raise awareness of the risk, also warning his people could become climate refugees.

Situated along Indian Ocean trading routes and about 650 kilometres southwest of Sri Lanka, the Maldives has been colonised several times.

Once a Buddhist kingdom, it converted to Islam around the 12th century.

Portuguese explorers occupied the main island of Male in the 16th century. The territory then became protectorates of the Dutch and the British before complete independence on 1965.

Sunni Islam today remains the state religion, all other religions being banned.

The Maldives follows a moderate version of Islam while banning alcohol, except in tourist hotels, and homosexuality.

There are fears of radicalisation via websites. The country has banned foreign preachers yet some 300 Maldivians are known to have travelled to Syria to join jihadists at the height of the fighting.

Nasheed had expressed fears of religious extremists taking over the country. Attacks on independent journalists have been blamed on Islamic extremists.

See original here:

The Maldives, a honeymoon haven in peril - Macau Business