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https://www.nationthailand.com/ann/30404345

Baekhyun gifts fans with R&B-packed ‘Bambi’

Mar 31. 2021Baekhyun “Bambi” teaser image (S.M. Entertainment)

By Choi Ji-won
The Korea Herald/ANN

Artist getting ready for military enlistment next month.

Baekhyun of boy band EXO is dropping a new solo album, “Bambi,” which is packed with relaxed yet emotional R&B chords.

The artist attended a press conference Tuesday ahead of the album’s release later that day. Fellow EXO member Xiumin was master of ceremonies at the event, which was livestreamed online due to coronavirus concerns.

According to Baekhyun, the title track is a fairytale-like song that tells a mature love story through groovy R&B sounds.

“‘Bambi’ really resembles me, so much that I feel like it was made for me. It incorporates the range of sounds and rhythms that I’m comfortable with, so the recording was done really easily. Also, I found the hook really addictive and thought ‘this is mine’ the instant I heard it,” Baekhyun said.

The title, which recalls the famous cartoon deer, has two meanings.

“‘Bambi’ refers to both the deer character and ‘night rain’ (in Korean). I tell the story of ‘Bambi’ in lyrics, and it’s interesting how the song can portray the different charms of the two elements. I tried to alter my pronunciation or tones when I spoke the word while singing to differentiate the sound according to the different meanings.”

Along with “Bambi,” the six-track R&B album also includes “Love Scene,” “All I Got,” “Privacy,” “Cry for Love” and the prereleased single “Amusement Park.”

Baekhyun speaks during a “Bambi” press conference Tuesday. (S.M. Entertainment)

Baekhyun speaks during a “Bambi” press conference Tuesday. (S.M. Entertainment)

“R&B has a very large spectrum in sound. It was a genre that I wasn’t so good at, but recently many people have told me that I’ve really carved out my own genre with it,” he said.

Baekhyun, who turned 30 in Korean age this year, said the new album was stable and relaxed compared with his past music.

“I think with ‘Bambi,’ I’m turning into an adult from a boy. It shows the more matured Baekhyun,” he said. “If the previous album had been about evolving, with this album, I tried to make those changes into mine. The album also emphasizes my vocals more, with less movements in the choreography compared to ‘Candy’ but portraying a larger vocal range.”

Since he made his solo debut in July 2019 with “City Lights,” the EXO band member has succeeded in beginning a new chapter of his career. With his album “Delight,” released last year, Baekhyun became the first South Korean artist in almost two decades — since legendary singer Seo Taiji — to have all his records, both as a soloist and as a member of a group, sell over a million copies. “Bambi” had sold 833,392 copies as of Monday, marking a presales record for Baekhyun, according to S.M. Entertainment.

“Becoming a million-seller with ‘Delight’ was an unimaginable feat, and I felt like all the hard work paid off. I know that it was possible not because I was talented, but thanks to the time I had spent honing myself with EXO and the endless love and support from EXO-Ls (EXO’s fandom).”

Baekhyun (S.M. Entertainment)

Baekhyun (S.M. Entertainment)

As he prepares to enlist in the military next month, Baekhyun said his new album is a gift for his fans before he leaves.

“I really ground myself into the album, but I feel like I’ve already been returned a gift from fans,” he said. “I received a huge love over the decade and my 20s were full of joy thanks to my fans. I really pushed myself because I felt like I wouldn’t be able to express how much I loved them if I didn’t. I hope they could wait for me listening to the songs.”

Baekhyun said he hopes to produce more relaxing music compared with his past work since 2012, when he made his debut with EXO.

“While the songs released in my 20s had been full of smashing sounds, I wanted to make more easy-listening and comforting music. But it’s actually the hardest part and I’ve turned 30 working on that. I hope that I can become an artist who makes music that can sensitively deliver the emotions.”

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https://www.nationthailand.com/ann/30404340

[Myanmar] The Brotherhood Alliance of EAOs Warns Military to Stop Shooting at Peaceful Protestors and to Find an Immediate Political Solution

Mar 31. 2021

By Eleven Media/ANN

The Brotherhood Alliance of Arakan Army (AA), Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA), and Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) released a statement on March 30th, calling on the military (Tatmadaw) to immediately stop shooting at peaceful protests and to quickly find a solution to the current political crisis. 

The statement outlines that since February 1st, police forces and military forces have been using live ammunition and hand grenades against protesting citizens. The three groups send its condolences to the families of over 400 protestors who have died in this crisis. 

Additionally, the statement outlines that over 3,000 people have been detained while large numbers of people have been injured: these figures are likely to grow.  

As such, the Brotherhood Alliance strongly condemns the actions of the Tatmadaw and is reassessing its current ceasefire arrangements. 

The Brotherhood Alliance calls on the Tatmadaw (military) to immediately stop shooting at peaceful protestors and to quickly find a solution to this current political crisis. 

If this Tatmadaw (military) fails to do so, the Brotherhood Alliances says that it will help citizens with their defensive resistance.

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https://www.nationthailand.com/ann/30404339

๋[Japan] Hoteliers, hit hard by coronavirus, adapt to survive

Mar 31. 2021A shoeless guest stays at the Keio Presso Inn in Chuo Ward, Tokyo. (The Yomiuri Shimbun)

By The Japan News/ANN

The pandemic has packed a punch, and the hospitality industry is hurting more than most. Seeking to staunch their financial wounds, a stream of hoteliers has been turning to unconventional business models such as long-term stays — and in many cases, even checking out of the traditional hotel sector entirely, converting guest rooms into condos — as part of a larger paradigm shift that is quickly becoming the industry’s new normal.

■ ‘Live’ and ‘Work’

The Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, in Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo began accepting reservations on Feb. 1 for a special 30-night extended stay. Priced at ¥360,000, the campaign offered a nearly 80% discount off the standard room charge. All 99 rooms made available for the package were booked within the day.

The hotel said it expects the rooms to be used as second homes for the wealthy or as remote offices for teleworking corporate executives. Although there will be fewer visits from housekeeping under the plan, guests will be assigned a personal valet during their stay, and have access to swimming pool, saunas, fitness center, and other hotel facilities, the same as other guests.

A popular practice in Europe and North America, long-term hotel stays have been offered by a select handful of realtors in Japan, where such rooms are commonly called “serviced apartments.”

While these arrangements typically require renters to sign a lease agreement, the Imperial Hotel plan saves guests the hassle by capping the duration of stays at a month, which skirts the cut-off stipulated by the Hotel Business Law.

Hotel New Otani, one of Japan’s great luxury triumvirate alongside the Imperial Hotel and Hotel Okura, also began offering a similar long-stay plan last year.

Some within the industry have expressed hesitation about the trend. Slash prices once, no matter how temporarily, and it becomes hard to justify the old price bracket when guest footfall returns to normal. Concerns that the deep discounts might end up tarnishing meticulously polished brand images is another part of the calculus.

Then again, as one hotelier put it, “Someone who can afford to drop several hundred thousand yen on a room is probably already going to be among our regular clientele.”

So far, the service seems to have paid off, and been received favorably by guests.

Mariko Ishii, a hospital executive who booked an extended-stay service at Keio Presso Inn Nihonbashi Kayabacho, in Tokyo, said with a smile: “I don’t need to clean the room and can concentrate on my work. I feel safe here, too, from a security perspective.”

The hotel has even replaced the carpet in its long-stay rooms, so guests can comfortably walk around barefoot.

■ From hospitality to realty

As the pandemic drags on, other operators are hedging their bets and drastically retooling their business models.

Takuto Holdings Co., a prominent real estate agent based in Osaka, has been converting seven of the 12 hospitality-industry properties in its portfolio into condos.

In March, The Sankei Building Co. remodeled two of its hotels, including one in Akihabara, Tokyo, into office buildings.

Kyoto, home to many hotels and ryokan inns, set up a subsidy system last September to support such moves. The city will cover up to ¥3 million for renovations when remodeling a lodging into a residential complex.

About 60 companies, including hotels, are said to have applied for the subsidy.

■ Excessive investment

The situation is especially dire for hotels and inns, as many were opened in anticipation of special demand for the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics.

According to the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry, as of March 2020, there were 88,983 accommodation facilities in Japan, up about 13% from five years ago, and some areas are said to be oversupplied. More than 2.5 million people were expected to stay at hotels during the Games, but it was recently decided that spectators from overseas would not be allowed into Japan.

Data compiled by Teikoku Databank Ltd. showed there had been 1,210 corporate bankruptcies triggered by the pandemic as of Friday, of which 84 were hotels and inns. Hotels were the third-most-battered industry, after restaurants and construction.

A number of well-established hotels have also been closing — the Kirishima Kokusai Hotel in Kirishima, Kagoshima Prefecture, will close in May and the Hotel Grand Palace in Tokyo’s Kudan district at the end of June. They apparently found it difficult to adapt their operations, due to their location in tourist areas and aging facilities.

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https://www.nationthailand.com/ann/30404338

WHO: Animal-to-human virus transmission most likely

Mar 31. 2021Peter Ben Embarek, WHO International Team Lead of the WHO-convened Global Study of the Origins of COVID-19 attends a news conference in Geneva, Switzerland, in this Feb 12, 2021 file photo. [Photo/Agencies]

By CHEN WEIHUA
CHINA DAILY/ANN

The virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic is “extremely unlikely” to have originated in a lab, but most likely jumped from an animal to humans, according to a World Health Organization report released on Tuesday by a joint international and Chinese team probing the virus’ origins.

The 120-page report said the virus most probably jumped from an animal, potentially a bat or pangolin, to an unknown intermediate animal host and then to humans. However, the path of transmission is still not known.

“There is no record of viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 in any laboratory before December 2019, or genomes that in combination could provide a SARS-CoV-2 genome,” the report said.

“In view of the above, a laboratory origin of the pandemic was considered to be extremely unlikely.”

The report said that the two most likely scenarios to explain the emergence of COVID-19 both involve the transmission of the virus from animals to humans.

“So far, we have not been able to document any substantial transmission of SARS coronavirus in the months preceding the outbreak in December,” Thea Fisher, a member of the international team, said at a news conference on the report on Tuesday.

Peter Ben Embarek, a Danish food safety and animal disease scientist who heads the international team, said the joint team looked into all scenarios.

“We try to stay with the arguments we have, the hard facts we have,” he said.

He called it “a huge report” with a lot of new knowledge, data and information, and added that information will continue to come out after the initial studies.

He also praised the good collaboration between the Chinese and international experts.

“I think the size of the report, and the amount of material and results and analysis and data in the report, speaks for itself in terms of how the collaboration went,” he said.

“There would never be anything like that if we did not have a very strong, good collaboration with our colleagues in China,” Embarek added.

The report was written by a joint international team made up of 17 international experts and 17 Chinese experts under a mandate from the World Health Assembly, the decision-making body of the WHO. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization participated as an observer.

The team conducted a joint study from Jan 14 to Feb 10 in Wuhan, Hubei province, following initial online meetings, according to the report.

Peter Daszak, a member of the international team, tweeted, “I do hope people actually read the huge amount of new data in the report!”

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Mutations could render Covid vax ineffective in a year: Experts

Mar 31. 2021

By The Statesman/ANN

Mutations could render current Covid-19 vaccines ineffective in a year or less, according to two-thirds of 77 epidemiologists, virologists and infectious disease specialists from 28 countries surveyed by People’s Vaccine Alliance.

The results published on Tuesday deliver a stark warning of the risk the world is taking by failing to ensure all countries have sufficient vaccines to protect people from Covid-19.

Of those surveyed, almost a third gave a timeframe of nine months or less.

Fewer than one in eight said they believed that mutations would never render the current vaccines ineffective.

The overwhelming majority – 88 per cent — said that persistent low vaccine coverage in many countries would make it more likely for vaccine resistant mutations to appear.

The People’s Vaccine Alliance, a coalition of over 50 organisations including African Alliance, Oxfam and UNAIDS, warned that at the current rate it was likely that only 10 per cent of people in the majority of poor countries will be vaccinated in the next year.

Nearly three-quarters of those surveyed – who included epidemiologists, virologists and infectious disease specialists from institutions including Johns Hopkins, Yale, Imperial College, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Cambridge University, the University of Edinburgh and The University of Cape Town — said that open sharing of technology and intellectual property could increase global vaccine coverage.

“The more the virus circulates, the more likely it is that mutations and variants will emerge, which could make our current vaccines ineffective. At the same time, poor countries are being left behind without vaccines and basic medical supplies like oxygen,” Devi Sridhar, Professor of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh in Britain, said in a statement.

“As we’ve learned, viruses don’t care about borders. We have to vaccinate as many people as possible, everywhere in the world, as quickly as possible. Why wait and watch instead of getting ahead of this?”

While he didn’t specify a timeframe, Gregg Gonsalves, Associate Professor of Epidemiology at Yale University, echoed the urgency to vaccinate globally.

“With millions of people around the world infected with this virus, new mutations arise every day. Sometimes they find a niche that makes them more fit than their predecessors,” Gonsalves said.

“These lucky variants could transmit more efficiently and potentially evade immune responses to previous strains. Unless we vaccinate the world, we leave the playing field open to more and more mutations, which could churn out variants that could evade our current vaccines and require booster shots to deal with them.”

The survey shows that it is imperative for the safety of all citizens in all countries that people in developing countries are vaccinated as soon as possible. Failure to tackle global vaccine inequality heightens the risk of further mutations.

Despite this imperative, rich country defence of the monopolies of pharmaceutical giants mean that global supplies are being artificially rationed, with a handful of companies deciding who lives and who dies.

Earlier this month, rich countries blocked a proposal to waive intellectual property rights for Covid-19 vaccines.

The People’s Vaccine Alliance is urging them to reconsider when talks resume at the World Trade Organisation in April.

The alliance is also calling for all pharmaceutical corporations working on Covid-19 vaccines to openly share their technology and intellectual property through the World Health Organization Covid-19 Technology Access Pool, in order to speed up and ramp up the production and rollout of vaccines to all countries.

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Asean finance ministers agree to roll out Covid-19 vaccination widely: DPM Heng

Mar 31. 2021Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat (bottom row, centre) met his Asean counterparts and central bank governors through virtual meetings hosted by Brunei. PHOTO: HENG SWEE KEAT/FACEBOOK

By Calvin Yang
The Straits Times/ANN

SINGAPORE – Asean finance ministers have agreed to redouble efforts to roll out vaccination widely in order for their borders to reopen safely.

To grow their economies, the ministers agreed to strengthen their digital connectivity, especially for cross-border payments, said Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat on Tuesday (March 30).

He said this after the 7th Asean Finance Ministers’ and Central Bank Governors’ Meeting.

“Many also highlighted how we can build back differently, with a greater emphasis on sustainability and resilience.”

Mr Heng met his Asean counterparts and central bank governors through virtual meetings hosted by Brunei, the current Asean chair, on Tuesday.

The last time the ministers met physically was in Chiang Rai in 2019.

The ministers had a full day of discussions on how they can collectively recover from the Covid-19 pandemic, be better prepared for future crises and prosper together as a region, said Mr Heng, who is also Deputy Prime Minister, in a Facebook post.

“While we miss the face-to-face interactions of physical meetings, the virtual meetings were very engaging,” he noted.

Also present at one of the meetings were the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, regional multilateral development banks like the Asian Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and the Asean+3 Macroeconomic Research Office.

Mr Heng said: “As the global order becomes more uncertain, Asean must remain united, work together and collectively chart our way forward.

“We will need to maintain Asean centrality, as we work with partners around the world. In this way, we can build a brighter, greener and more resilient future.”

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https://www.nationthailand.com/ann/30404311

India’s Manipur withdraws previous order to ‘politely turn away’ Myanmar refugees

Mar 30. 2021

By The Daily Star / ANN

Sensing potential public anger, India’s Manipur government yesterday withdrew an earlier order directing authorities in districts bordering Myanmar to “politely turn away” nationals of the neighbouring country who are trying to enter India.

The fresh letter was issued by H Gyan Prakash, special secretary (home), the government of Manipur, to deputy commissioners of Chandel, Tengnoupal, Ukhrul, and Churachandpur districts.

The letter mentions that the earlier order issued on March 26 has been misconstrued and interpreted differently. It also states that the Manipur government has been providing aid to Myanmar nationals who have entered India via the shared borders.

In the circular, which had been issued, on March 26 to the DCs of Chandel, Tengoupal, Kamjong, Ukhrul, and Churachandpur districts, H Gyan Prakash said, “District administration should not open any camps to provide food and shelter. The civil society organisations should also not be allowed to open any camps to provide shelter/food.”

However, it added that medical attention “may be provided on humanitarian considerations” in case of severe injuries sustained by Myanmar nationals.

There was widespread resentment in the neighbouring Mizoram state against the Indian government’s March 26 advice to stop the entry of refugees from Myanmar.

Mizoram Chief Minister Zoramthanga had recently written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi urging him to provide asylum to the refugees, saying a “human catastrophe of gigantic proportions” is happening in Myanmar and innocent citizens are being killed by the military, which is supposed to protect them.

Yesterday’s order stated that to avoid misunderstanding, the earlier letter has been withdrawn.