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Burma’s Struggling to Handle Surge in Visitors

Now that Myanmar is opening to the outside world, good luck getting a hotel room. Travelers and eager investors are pouring in to explore one of Asia’s most untouched countries, filling hotels to capacity, doubling room rates and spilling flight reservations onto wait lists.

As the country sheds its past as an isolated military dictatorship and taboo travel destination it is becoming a new global hotspot — topping tourism lists as the must-see place to visit in 2012.

Myanmar is eager for the hard currency that foreigners bring, but is struggling to handle the influx. At the same time, it is wondering how widely to throw open the doors — should it become another well-trodden tourist haven like Thailand or should it aim for fewer, less-transformative numbers of visitors to keep its ancient cultural sights and charm intact?

Chatrium Hotel Yangon- Rooms now start at $550 a night

For now, Myanmar is the sort of time-warped place that adventurous travelers love. It is an Asian Buddhist wonderland with red-robed monks and bicycle rickshaws where British colonial relics line the streets. There are no Starbucks or McDonald’s or name-brand Western hotels, but some of that will soon change.

New laws are being drafted to make it easier and tax-friendly for foreign hotel chains and others to do business in Myanmar. Auctions are under way for dozens of colonial buildings that some developers want to restore as boutique hotels and others want to tear down. Tourism authorities say the country needs more restaurants that cater to international tastes, more car rental agencies, more airplanes to shuttle tourists to the sacred temples in Bagan, more English-speaking tour guides, more everything.

“We especially need more hotels. We need big chain hotels,” said Kyi Kyi Aye, a consultant to the government’s Myanmar Tourism Board who is helping promote the country abroad and court foreign investment. “Tourism is booming and that means we have many challenges to overcome.”

Travel agents offer these tips for those planning a trip: Bring heaps of cash because Myanmar is a cash-only economy. With rare exception, credit cards are not accepted. Leave iPhones and BlackBerrys at home because foreign mobile phones don’t work here. Be prepared for hot, sweaty sightseeing because taxis are decades-old jalopies without air conditioning.

In 2011, the number of tourist arrivals jumped nearly 30 percent. But Myanmar still received only 816,000 visitors that year, a tiny fraction of the 19 million that visited neighboring Thailand.

British colonial architecture, Yangon (Rangoon)

Yangon currently has 5,000 hotel rooms but only 3,000 that are considered “suitable for tourists,” according to Maung Maung Swe, the vice chairman at the Myanmar Tourism Board, who told The Irrawaddy online magazine that chains like the Marriott and Sheraton have expressed interest in opening branches.

That would come as a relief to hotel managers like Ram Nurani of the 330-room Park Royal Hotel, where these days every table is full at breakfast, every sofa is taken in the busy lobby and rooms are booked weeks in advance.

“It would be nice to have a hotel you could stretch by a couple of floors,” Nurani said, half-jokingly. “The city needs to build more hotels quickly.”

The scene is the same across town at The Strand, one of the grand colonial hotels of Southeast Asia where Rudyard Kipling and Somerset Maugham slept back when the country was still called Burma. Rooms now start at $550 a night.

“We’re fully booked for the whole month. We try our best to get people rooms at other hotels, but it’s not easy,” said hotel employee Khin Sandar, who sat in the chandaliered lobby on a recent afternoon when a busload of tourists surged in and were politely escorted out.

Another popular tourist attraction is Aung San Suu Kyi, the dignified 66-year-old who became the world’s most famous political prisoner while locked under house arrest for two decades.

A busload of South Koreans crowded into her rundown opposition party headquarters in Yangon on a recent morning to take pictures and buy T-shirts printed with the face of the Nobel Peace laureate, who was not on the premises.

Village Woman selling Mask to Tourists Burma

“We went to her house, too, and took pictures in front of her gate,” said Sylvia Rhee, a university music professor from Jinju, South Korea, expressing surprise at the access they gained.

“This used to be a closed country. We were afraid to visit before,” she said.

The increase in tourist arrivals started after Myanmar held elections in November 2010 and then released Suu Kyi, who is now running for a seat in parliament.

Amid the rush to welcome the world’s tourists, there are calls to avoid the pitfalls of nearby countries like Thailand which benefited from mass tourism while its cities have turned into urban jungles that are magnets for backpackers and sex tourism.

Some have suggested aiming for a limited, higher-end tourism market like Bhutan.

“Although we’re way behind, I don’t think it’s a bad thing. We want to handle Myanmar with care. It’s like a fragile thing,” said Su Su Tin, who runs a travel agency and is an executive member of a consortium of more than 100 hotels, airlines and tour operators.

Myanmar strictly controls entry for people with occupations deemed sensitive, such as journalists. Others can enter with tourist or business visas obtained before travelling. The country’s moves to hand out visas on arrival were shelved after it was decided in discussions with the Tourism Ministry that it’s best to continue limiting tourist arrivals for now.

“We all agreed we should wait to start visas on arrival because that would definitely make travel to Myanmar easier, and anybody could come, but we’re not ready for that yet,” Su Su Tin said.

Conservationists say the handle-with-care approach should be applied to Myanmar’s heritage.

Downtown Yangon is lined with grand, now-deserted colonial buildings that used to house government offices but were vacated after the junta built a distant new capital a few years ago in the city of Naypyitaw.

With real estate prices soaring, the government started to auction off some of the buildings last year but agreed to a brief moratorium on future sales and any demolition until a conservation strategy is drafted, said historian and preservationist Thant Myint.

“Rangoon is one of the last cities in Asia with a lot of its 19th and 20th century architecture intact,” said Thant Myint. “We have a narrow window of opportunity to try to avoid the worst mistakes of the rest of the region.”

Travelers like American tourist Barbara Ruttenberg agree.

“There are so few places left that haven’t been taken over by McDonald’s and Western customs,” said Ruttenberg, of Providence, Rhode Island, on a tour with 20 other alumnae from Bryn Mawr college that was planned almost a year ago. A world traveler who has visited 44 countries, she had always wanted to see Myanmar but wouldn’t have come while the junta still ruled.

“This was a dream deferred,” said Ruttenberg, who turned 75 this month. “I gave it to myself as a birthday present. My kids wanted to throw me a party. I said, ‘Forget the Party, I’m going to Burma.'”

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Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding, But Still Accounting 48% Search Revenue

Google is so closely associated with its key product that its name is a verb that signifies “search.” However, Google’s dominance in that sector is dwindling.

According to eMarketer, Google will lose control of the US search industry for the first time in decades next year.

Google will remain the dominant search player, accounting for 48% of American search advertising revenue. And, remarkably, Google is still increasing its sales in the field, despite being the dominating player in search since the early days of the George W. Bush administration. However, Amazon is growing at a quicker rate.

Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding

Amazon will hold over a quarter of US search ad dollars next year, rising to 27% by 2026, while Google will fall even more, according to eMarketer.

The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the forecast.

Lest you think you’ll have to switch to Bing or Yahoo, this isn’t the end of Google or anything really near.

Google is the fourth-most valued public firm in the world. Its market worth is $2.1 trillion, trailing just Apple, Microsoft, and the AI chip darling Nvidia. It also maintains its dominance in other industries, such as display advertisements, where it dominates alongside Facebook’s parent firm Meta, and video ads on YouTube.

To put those “other” firms in context, each is worth more than Delta Air Lines’ total market value. So, yeah, Google is not going anywhere.

Nonetheless, Google faces numerous dangers to its operations, particularly from antitrust regulators.

On Monday, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that Google must open up its Google Play Store to competitors, dealing a significant blow to the firm in its long-running battle with Fortnite creator Epic Games. Google announced that it would appeal the verdict.

In August, a federal judge ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly on search. That verdict could lead to the dissolution of the company’s search operation. Another antitrust lawsuit filed last month accuses Google of abusing its dominance in the online advertising business.

Meanwhile, European regulators have compelled Google to follow tough new standards, which have resulted in multiple $1 billion-plus fines.

Pixa Bay

Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding

On top of that, the marketplace is becoming more difficult on its own.

TikTok, the fastest-growing social network, is expanding into the search market. And Amazon has accomplished something few other digital titans have done to date: it has established a habit.

When you want to buy anything, you usually go to Amazon, not Google. Amazon then buys adverts to push companies’ products to the top of your search results, increasing sales and earning Amazon a greater portion of the revenue. According to eMarketer, it is expected to generate $27.8 billion in search revenue in the United States next year, trailing only Google’s $62.9 billion total.

And then there’s AI, the technology that (supposedly) will change everything.

Why search in stilted language for “kendall jenner why bad bunny breakup” or “police moving violation driver rights no stop sign” when you can just ask OpenAI’s ChatGPT, “What’s going on with Kendall Jenner and Bad Bunny?” in “I need help fighting a moving violation involving a stop sign that wasn’t visible.” Google is working on exactly this technology with its Gemini product, but its success is far from guaranteed, especially with Apple collaborating with OpenAI and other businesses rapidly joining the market.

A Google spokeswoman referred to a blog post from last week in which the company unveiled ads in its AI overviews (the AI-generated text that appears at the top of search results). It’s Google’s way of expressing its ability to profit on a changing marketplace while retaining its business, even as its consumers steadily transition to ask-and-answer AI and away from search.

google

Google has long used a single catchphrase to defend itself against opponents who claim it is a monopoly abusing its power: competition is only a click away. Until recently, that seemed comically obtuse. Really? We are going to switch to Bing? Or Duck Duck Go? Give me a break.

But today, it feels more like reality.

Google is in no danger of disappearing. However, every highly dominating company faces some type of reckoning over time. GE, a Dow mainstay for more than a century, was broken up last year and is now a shell of its previous dominance. Sears declared bankruptcy in 2022 and is virtually out of business. US Steel, long the foundation of American manufacturing, is attempting to sell itself to a Japanese corporation.

Could we remember Google in the same way that we remember Yahoo or Ask Jeeves in decades? These next few years could be significant.

SOURCE | CNN

News

The Supreme Court Turns Down Biden’s Government Appeal in a Texas Emergency Abortion Matter.

(VOR News) – A ruling that prohibits emergency abortions that contravene the Supreme Court law in the state of Texas, which has one of the most stringent abortion restrictions in the country, has been upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States. The United States Supreme Court upheld this decision.

The justices did not provide any specifics regarding the underlying reasons for their decision to uphold an order from a lower court that declared hospitals cannot be legally obligated to administer abortions if doing so would violate the law in the state of Texas.

Institutions are not required to perform abortions, as stipulated in the decree. The common populace did not investigate any opposing viewpoints. The decision was made just weeks before a presidential election that brought abortion to the forefront of the political agenda.

This decision follows the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that ended abortion nationwide.

In response to a request from the administration of Vice President Joe Biden to overturn the lower court’s decision, the justices expressed their disapproval.

The government contends that hospitals are obligated to perform abortions in compliance with federal legislation when the health or life of an expectant patient is in an exceedingly precarious condition.

This is the case in regions where the procedure is prohibited. The difficulty hospitals in Texas and other states are experiencing in determining whether or not routine care could be in violation of stringent state laws that prohibit abortion has resulted in an increase in the number of complaints concerning pregnant women who are experiencing medical distress being turned away from emergency rooms.

The administration cited the Supreme Court’s ruling in a case that bore a striking resemblance to the one that was presented to it in Idaho at the beginning of the year. The justices took a limited decision in that case to allow the continuation of emergency abortions without interruption while a lawsuit was still being heard.

In contrast, Texas has been a vocal proponent of the injunction’s continued enforcement. Texas has argued that its circumstances are distinct from those of Idaho, as the state does have an exemption for situations that pose a significant hazard to the health of an expectant patient.

According to the state, the discrepancy is the result of this exemption. The state of Idaho had a provision that safeguarded a woman’s life when the issue was first broached; however, it did not include protection for her health.

Certified medical practitioners are not obligated to wait until a woman’s life is in imminent peril before they are legally permitted to perform an abortion, as determined by the state supreme court.

The state of Texas highlighted this to the Supreme Court.

Nevertheless, medical professionals have criticized the Texas statute as being perilously ambiguous, and a medical board has declined to provide a list of all the disorders that are eligible for an exception. Furthermore, the statute has been criticized for its hazardous ambiguity.

For an extended period, termination of pregnancies has been a standard procedure in medical treatment for individuals who have been experiencing significant issues. It is implemented in this manner to prevent catastrophic outcomes, such as sepsis, organ failure, and other severe scenarios.

Nevertheless, medical professionals and hospitals in Texas and other states with strict abortion laws have noted that it is uncertain whether or not these terminations could be in violation of abortion prohibitions that include the possibility of a prison sentence. This is the case in regions where abortion prohibitions are exceedingly restrictive.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which resulted in restrictions on the rights of women to have abortions in several Republican-ruled states, the Texas case was revisited in 2022.

As per the orders that were disclosed by the administration of Vice President Joe Biden, hospitals are still required to provide abortions in cases that are classified as dire emergency.

As stipulated in a piece of health care legislation, the majority of hospitals are obligated to provide medical assistance to patients who are experiencing medical distress. This is in accordance with the law.

The state of Texas maintained that hospitals should not be obligated to provide abortions throughout the litigation, as doing so would violate the state’s constitutional prohibition on abortions. In its January judgment, the 5th United States Circuit Court of Appeals concurred with the state and acknowledged that the administration had exceeded its authority.

SOURCE: AP

News

Supreme Court Rejects Appeal From ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli, To repay $6.4 Million

Washington — The Supreme Court rejected Martin Shkreli’s appeal on Monday, after he was branded “Pharma Bro” for raising the price of a lifesaving prescription.

Martin appealed a decision to repay $64.6 million in profits he and his former company earned after monopolizing the pharmaceutical market and dramatically raising its price. His lawyers claimed the money went to his company rather than him personally.

The justices did not explain their reasoning, as is customary, and there were no notable dissents.

Prosecutors, conversely, claimed that the firm had promised to pay $40 million in a settlement and that because Martin orchestrated the plan, he should be held accountable for returning profits.

Supreme Court Rejects Appeal From ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli

Martin was also forced to forfeit the Wu-Tang Clan’s unreleased album “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin,” which has been dubbed the world’s rarest musical album. The multiplatinum hip-hop group auctioned off a single copy of the record in 2015, stipulating that it not be used commercially.

Shkreli was convicted of lying to investors and defrauding them of millions of dollars in two unsuccessful hedge funds he managed. Shkreli was the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals (later Vyera), which hiked the price of Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 per pill after acquiring exclusive rights to the decades-old medicine in 2015. It cures a rare parasite condition that affects pregnant women, cancer patients, and HIV patients.

shkreli

He defended the choice as an example of capitalism in action, claiming that insurance and other programs ensured that those in need of Daraprim would eventually receive it. However, the move prompted criticism, from the medical community to Congress.

Supreme Court Rejects Appeal From ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkreli

Attorney Thomas Huff said the Supreme Court’s Monday ruling was upsetting, but the high court could still overturn a lower court judgment that allowed the $64 million penalty order even though Shkreli had not personally received the money.

“If and when the Supreme Court does so, Mr. Shkreli will have a strong argument for modifying the order accordingly,” he told reporters.

Shkreli was freed from prison in 2022 after serving most of his seven-year sentence.

SOURCE | AP