“เมื่อถึง 35 วันหลังการให้วัคซีนครั้งแรกการติดเชื้อลดลง 80% การเข้ารับการรักษาในโรงพยาบาลลดลง 90% และการเสียชีวิตลดลง 95%” ISS กล่าวและเสริมว่ารูปแบบผลการศึกษาเดียวกันนี้พบได้ในทั้งชายและหญิงโดยไม่คำนึงถึงอายุ
“ข้อมูลนี้ยืนยันถึงประสิทธิภาพของการรณรงค์ฉีดวัคซีนและความจำเป็นในการได้รับความครอบคลุมทั่วทั้งประชากรอย่างรวดเร็วเพื่อยุติภาวะฉุกเฉิน” ประธาน ISS ซิลวิโอ บรูซาแฟร์โรกล่าวในแถลงการณ์
Miss Mexico named universe’s most beautiful woman for 2020
Mexico’s Alma “Andrea Meza” Carmona beat contestants from 74 countries and territories to be crowned Miss Universe 2020 by her predecessor Zozibini Tunzi from South Africa.
In the final round, held on Sunday night at Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Miss Mexico beat the other finalists – India, Brazil, Peru and the Dominican Republic – to be named the 69th Miss Universe.
Carmona, 26, is the third Mexican woman to win the Miss Universe title. She had been crowned Miss Mexicana Universal 2020 and Miss Mexico 2017 before winning the Miss Universe crown.
Israeli airstrikes kill 42 in Gaza as Biden, regional partners push for cease-fire
TEL AVIV, Israel – Predawn Israeli airstrikes Sunday on several homes along a main road leading to Shifa Hospital in Gaza City killed 42 people, including 10 children, according to Gazas Health Ministry, and the number was expected to rise. It is believed to be the single deadliest attack since the bout of violence began last week.
Diplomatic efforts by President Biden and U.S. regional allies to reach a cease-fire have not stopped the escalation between Israel and Hamas, which on Sunday trudged into its seventh day and has spilled over into mass protests in Israeli towns and in the West Bank.
From Saturday night into early Sunday, the Israeli military said it dropped 100 bombs on Hamas’s underground tunnel system, known as the “Metro,” and destroyed the homes of Hamas leader Yehiya Sinwar, his brother and several other prominent military commanders. A Doctors Without Borders clinic in Gaza City that served as a trauma and burn treatment center was also hit, according to a statement by the organization.
Hamas on Saturday fired continuously into cities and towns across southern Israel, as well as toward the West Bank and the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, which had experienced two days of relative calm. On Saturday night alone, Tel Aviv was targeted with more rockets than during all of the 2014 Israel-Gaza war, according to Maj. Gen. Uri Gordin, commander of Israel’s Home Front Command.
The Palestinian death toll climbed to 192, including 58 children; the numbers were expected to rise as more bodies were discovered from the overnight attacks. An Israeli man whose family described him as disabled was killed in a direct rocket hit to his building in a Tel Aviv suburb on Saturday, raising the death toll in Israel to 10.
On Sunday morning, Egypt opened the Rafah border crossing, which had been closed for the Eid al-Fitr holiday, a day earlier than scheduled, to allow for the passage of students, people in need of medical care and other humanitarian cases from Gaza into Egypt, according to Gaza’s Interior Ministry.
Egypt has sent 16 ambulances into Gaza to pick up injured people seeking treatment in Egyptian hospitals, a medical source told Reuters. He added that a bus carrying 95 people had arrived from Gaza on Sunday morning.
Biden, speaking to Netanyahu on Saturday, said he supported Israel’s right to defend itself against rocket attacks from Hamas, the Islamist militant group that rules the Gaza Strip, and other Gaza-based terrorist groups, according to the White House. He voiced concern for the loss of civilians, including children, on both sides, and the Israeli targeting of journalists in Gaza.
Israel launched airstrikes Saturday that obliterated several high-rises, including a 12-story tower that contained the offices of the Associated Press and Al Jazeera. The military claimed it also housed Hamas military assets but offered no evidence.
Biden said he had “grave concern” over the clashes between Arabs and Jews that continued Saturday during Nakba Day, which marks the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Israel’s founding in 1948. The event drew thousands of Palestinians to the streets in the West Bank and Israel in the largest turnout in years.
Israeli police arrested two Jordanian residents carrying knives in the northern Gilboa region after they crossed the border, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said. They were suspected of planning to go to Jerusalem. Six Israeli police officers were injured in an apparent car ramming attack Sunday evening in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, Rosenfeld said. The current round of violence was sparked by a dispute over evictions in the mostly Palestinian neighborhood.
After multiple rocket sirens sounded in the area of Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv in recent days, most foreign airlines have suspended incoming and outgoing flights.
In a separate call, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas told Biden he had made “extensive contacts in order to reach a truce in Gaza,” according to Wafa, the official Palestinian news agency. Netanyahu has said repeatedly the Gaza campaign is expected to last at least several more days.
“We will continue to act, as much as is required, to restore peace and security to you, the citizens of Israel. It will take time,” Netanyahu said in a televised statement Sunday evening. “There is always pressure on us, but we are receiving support from the United States and from many other nations.”
Amr, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for Israel-Palestinian affairs, and Jonathan Shrier, chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, met with Gantz Sunday to discuss a potential cease-fire with Hamas.
Mediators from the United States, Egypt, Qatar and Jordan have been working in recent days to de-escalate the crisis.
On Sunday, Saudi Arabia convened the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation in an emergency virtual meeting “to discuss the Israeli aggression in the Palestinian territory,” the organization said.
Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan al-Saud called for an “immediate stop to military operations, and for the entry of aid and treatment for the injured,” in some of his sharpest language against Israel to date. He condemned “forced displacement” in East Jerusalem.
The U.N. Security Council met in open session to discuss de-escalation Sunday. The body met behind closed doors twice in the past week to discuss the crisis. Secretary General António Guterres declared the hostilities in Israel and Gaza “utterly appalling” and called for an immediate end to the violence.
U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said “the human toll of this past week has been devastating.” She said the Biden administration was “working tirelessly through diplomatic channels to try and bring an end to this conflict.”
Hamas has fired some 3,000 rockets since the violence exploded on Monday, according to Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces. Hundreds of rockets have misfired and landed within the Gaza Strip, he said.
Nearly 90 percent of the rockets that enter Israeli airspace are intercepted by the country’s Iron Dome defense system, according to Gordin, the commander of Israel’s Home Front Command.
Conricus said Israel has struck some 700 military targets in Gaza in the past week. He said the Israeli operation would end by “Hamas stopping the fire toward Israel … the most basic of preconditions. After that happens, there might be room for talks.” But he also said military instructions were to “carry on” until all “current and future capabilities” of Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza were destroyed.
CDC chief says any vaccine mandates in U.S. will be set locally
Any mandates in the U.S. to require people to be vaccinated against covid-19 will be set locally, not federally, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
“It may very well be that local businesses, local jurisdictions, will work towards vaccine mandates,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “That is going to be locally driven and not federally driven.”
Walensky spoke in four Sunday-morning interviews, days after the CDC announced that Americans vaccinated against covid-19 were clear to shed their face masks at most times.
The decision was kept under wraps among a small circle of top White House aides last week as they began making arrangements for the president to address the watershed moment on Thursday.
The move has created confusion, though, about who should continue to wear masks and who should be responsible for checking on peoples’ vaccination status if they’re unmasked in certain settings, like retail stores.
Walmart Inc. announced Friday that fully vaccinated staff and customers can leave their masks at home, and Starbucks Corp. also dropped mask requirements for vaccinated customers.
“This was not permission to shed masks for everybody, everywhere,” Walensky said on NBC. “This was really science-driven individual assessment of your risk.”
Governors in many states moved quickly late last week to drop mask mandates for vaccinated people. Others lifted the mandates completely, issuing strong recommendations to those not vaccinated to continue to wear masks and get immunized.
In President Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware, Gov. John Carney said Friday that effective May 21 the state will embrace CDC guidelines so that fully vaccinated people can stop wearing masks in most indoor and outdoor settings.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan announced the end of the statewide mask mandate starting Saturday, aligning Maryland with the new CDC guidance.
Hogan said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that he doesn’t think businesses will ask people to show vaccination cards.
“We’re giving the businesses the flexibility to do what they think is right,” he said. “They have the right to take actions, just like telling people, no shirt, no shoes, no service.”
On “Fox News Sunday” Walensky said the decision to shed a face mask was based on “the honor system.” She didn’t, though, rule out the need for proof of vaccination at the local level at some point.
“If you are not vaccinated, you are not safe. Please go get vaccinated or continue to wear your mask,” she said. “The vaccine is now available to over 90% of Americans within five miles.”
Published : May 17, 2021
By : Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Craig Torres, Yueqi Yang
U.K. restaurants hit with chef shortage as indoor dining resumes
Britains restaurants and bars can serve indoors again for the first time in five months on Monday. Many of them are struggling to find enough staff after Brexit and three lockdowns in a year drove workers out of the industry.
Chefs, waiters and bartenders needed for everything from fast-food restaurants to fine dining are in short supply, with industry executives and recruiters saying that many of their most experienced people have left for other jobs.
“The people just aren’t there anymore,” said David Moore, owner of Pied à Terre, London’s longest-standing independent Michelin-starred restaurant. The industry is facing a “fairly massive, very serious skills shortage.”
It’s a sign of scars on the U.K. economy that may hold back a rebound from the worst recession in three centuries – or a spark for inflation that’s already starting to concern investors. It’s a trend that already hit the U.S., prompting McDonald’s Corp. and Chipolte Mexican Grill Inc. to raise wages for staff.
In Britain, hospitality companies were among the hardest hit by rules that closed leisure venues and pushed workers onto the government’s furlough wage subsidy program.
Despite that lifeline, the industry shed 330,000 staff through the pandemic, said Kate Nicholls, chief executive officer of the lobby group UKHospitality. About 20% of all restaurants and 10% of hotels closed shut for good, and many workers are looking at the long hours, low pay and shaky prospects of hospitality and looking elsewhere for work.
“People people are still nervous about committing to hospitality, fearful that the government may still impose restrictions, businesses unable to offer full-time posts,” Nicholls said. “The single biggest driver is uncertainty.”
Pub and restaurant stocks have rallied hard this year, with Restaurant Group more than doubling to the top performance of the FTSE 350 Index. But despite the U.K.’s speedy vaccination rollout, most hospitality companies are still trading below pre-covid levels and hope to get a lift from the return of consumers ready to spend their savings.
Staffing is one of the industry’s biggest uncertainties. Online job advertisements for “catering and hospitality” rose above pre-pandemic levels in the first week of May, the jobs search engine Adzuna said. A survey of 1,000 companies published Monday by the CIPD, a group representing human resources workers, showed two thirds of hospitality companies plan to recruit in the second quarter, up from 36% in the first.
Pizza Express in April set out plans to recruit more than 1,000 new roles, reversing cuts made over the past year. D&D, with more than 40 high-end restaurants based primarily in London, is seeking to fill 400 jobs but so far managed to recruit just half that number.
“We’re having people working much longer hours to be able to run the restaurants,” D&D CEO Des Gunewardena said. “We’re going to be fine, but it is a challenge.”
Thomas Faulkner, a former chef who now recruits for the trade, sees a “critical shortage” of staff likely to linger for some time unless restaurants deliver more incentives.
High turnover due to tough working conditions, high pressure, low pay and a “culture of machismo” meant that London was losing skilled chefs faster than they could be trained even before covid struck, according to a report published by the Centre for London.
“Being a chef is generally not healthy,” said Faulkner.
“What’s happened in this pandemic is they have gone to do other roles, realizing they can earn the same or more money standing in a car park or delivering for Amazon or Ocado. It’s a much more pleasant experience. They do fewer hours. They do sociable hours,” he said.
Britain’s exit from the European Union, which was completed in January, dried up a big pool of labor. More than 50,000 migrants left the U.K. in the second quarter of 2020, according to government estimates, with many more expected to have followed over the rest of the year. Immigration rules makes it difficult for them to return.
Before Brexit, up to a quarter of the hospitality workforce nationwide and 38% in London was made up by EU nationals, according to KPMG.
Gunewardena said the D&D is doing more to train staff, both internally and through government programs. In the short-term, its upmarket restaurants have “been a bit more liberal” with whom they take on board, offering higher pay than what was on offer before and training people to work in fine dining, he said.
“We’re hearing elsewhere within the sector of other restaurants throwing money at people,” Gunewardenza said. “We’re paying the same but bringing people up.”
Some big changes are inevitable in the sector including many moving from other industries, he said. “Longer term, it will be a higher skilled, higher wage sector.”
Published : May 17, 2021
By : Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Marc Daniel Davies
Buildings collapse, families are buried under rubble in Gaza
GAZA CITY – Sanaa al-Kulak spent the night under the rubble. It was hard to breathe; her leg was trapped. Her son, stuck beside her, managed to get out his phone and call for help. “We tried to hold out,” she said.
It was about five hours after Israeli airstrikes flattened their home before al-Kulak, 56, and her 24-year-old son, Mohammed, were pulled out by rescuers. It was not until she got to the hospital that she learned the shattering news.
Her husband, their two sons, a daughter, a daughter-in-law and a 1-year-old grandchild had been killed, alongside at least 11 other members of her extended clan that had lived across two four-story buildings in Gaza’s Wehda Street.
Both buildings and another in the neighborhood were reduced to rubble early Sunday. Forty-two people, including 16 women and 10 children, were killed in the predawn strikes, according to Gaza health authorities, the deadliest incident in the current round of violence between Israel and Hamas. A list of 30 of the dead released by the Mezan Center for Human Rights, a local advocacy group, included 17 members of the al-Kulak family.
The Israeli military said an initial investigation showed that the casualties had been “unintended.” The aim of the strike, it said, was Hamas “military infrastructure” under the street outside. The seven-day conflict, during which Hamas has fired more than 3,100 rockets toward Israel, has seen airstrikes in Gaza of a ferocity that people here say surpasses that of previous conflicts.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that the Israeli military had carried out attacks on more than 1,500 targets in seven days. The strikes in the center of the city have struck terror in Gaza.
Gaza’s health ministry says 192 residents, including 58 children and 34 women, have died in the past week. In Israel, 10 people have died as Hamas has fired of intense barrages of rockets and missiles toward cities in an attempt to overwhelm air defenses.
Sana’a al-Kulak said she awoke about 1 a.m. Sunday to the sound of bombing. The house was full. A son who ordinarily lives in northern Gaza had brought his wife home to stay with his parents in central Gaza, thinking it would be safer.
The bombardment was so frightening that some family members began to leave their third-floor apartment for lower floors. Mohammed said his mother was at the door while others were on the stairs. “They didn’t reach the first floor,” he said.
The Israeli military says it was an indirect building collapse. Mohammed said the building suffered a direct hit. It collapsed around Mohammed and his mother.
“I tried to call the police, but the connection was very bad,” he said. He called a friend and told him they were trapped. “I didn’t know about the rest of the family,” he said. He was dragged out at 6 a.m.; his mother was rescued half an hour later.
Mohammed Abu Mughaiseeb, deputy medical coordinator for Doctors Without Borders in Gaza, lives half a mile away but thought the strike was right outside. “My house was completely shaking,” he said. “It was about 15 minutes – intense bombing, continuous duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.”
One of the group’s trauma and burn treatment clinics nearer to Wehda Street was damaged. For Mughaiseeb, as for most Gazans, it’s his fourth war. “In 2014, the bombing was at the edges and then, at the end, inside,” he said. “But not in the same way it’s happening now. Now even the streets are bombed.”
Israeli commanders say their targets have included what it terms the “Gaza Metro” – Hamas’s extensive network of tunnels that snake under the city. The military has struck to degrade the group’s rocket launching capacity; some attacks have been in the heart of Gaza City. Israel accuses Hamas of using civilians as human shields.
The operation is the first test of a new “victory concept” espoused by Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, Israel’s chief of staff. It aims to turn the Israeli military into what one Israeli Defense Forces document describes as a “significantly more lethal, networked war machine that can destroy enemy capabilities in record time and with the lowest possible casualties,” and to shift away from the old methods known as “mowing the lawn” – military campaigns that buy a little respite – to more decisive victories. Part of it is adapting to more quickly identify targets in dense urban areas such as Gaza.
“This,” Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus said in a recent briefing, “is the doctrine and concept being applied.”
For those in the city, it has felt as if there is no escape.
Aya Aloul’s building partially collapsed. The 25-year-old had pulled her mattress into her parents’ room to sleep at the beginning of the conflict last week. She was lying in bed, chatting on WhatsApp early Sunday when the bombing started. “Within a second, it was black. I couldn’t see anything, and I found myself on the ground in the street,” she said.
She was covered in rubble. “I didn’t know how I could bring the strength to remove all the rubble on me,” she said. She could not free her mother, who was later pulled out by rescuers. Her father, a doctor, did not survive.
Civil defense rescue workers in orange vests were still pulling bodies out of the rubble on Sunday afternoon and loading them into white body bags. Yellow diggers pulled up concrete and twisted metal to get to families trapped underneath.
Parts of Wehba Street were collapsed and cracked. One rescuer, pulling out a newly discovered body, said he had been working since about 1 a.m. He said he had rescued 10 people and retrieved four bodies.
Maryam al-Kulak, a daughter of Sana’a, rushed to the nearby Shifa Hospital when she heard that her family home was destroyed. “There were bodies and some injured people,” she said. “I waited, crying.”
The bodies of her father and one brother arrived first. Then her mother and Mohammed were brought in alive. “They bombed the house without warning, and without any reason,” she said. “There were civilians in it who do not deserve what happened to them.”
Sana’a said she does not feel a sense of revenge. “I just want the war to end,” she said.
She thanks God that she’s alive. “But now there is no sense in life without my husband and children.”
Published : May 17, 2021
By : The Washington Post · Hazem Balousha, Loveday Morris
The pandemic got seniors to buy groceries online. That might not last.
When the pandemic hit the Brookdale Chambrel senior living community in Williamsburg, Virginia, Nancy Crowell knew hopping in the car and heading to the local Harris Teeter supermarket was out of the question.
The virus was spreading fast, and Brookdale’s residents were being encouraged to stay put. Staff set up computers in the main common room and began teaching residents how to open online accounts to order groceries.
Crowell’s first attempt to order from Kroger Co.’s Harris Teeter chain failed, so the 85-year-old retiree switched to another local grocer’s website only to discover an annoyance familiar to legions of online grocery shoppers: substitutions of her favorite brands and products. “Once, I ordered a few ounces of bouillon and got a great big quart bottle,” she said. “It’s still in my closet.”
Crowell tried Harris Teeter again and succeeded, ordering seven times between May and August. But when the holidays rolled around last year, Crowell was once again walking the aisles. “There’s just something about picking up your own stalk of celery,” she said.
The covid-19 outbreak super-charged online grocery shopping, prompting industry watchers to declare that the habits of millions had forever changed. In fact, it’s a little more complicated than that. Yes, Walmart, Kroger and other chains picked up millions of new online customers-generating additional revenue and persuading even skeptical executives to expand their digital operations. But holding onto these shoppers is hardly a foregone conclusion-especially older ones like Crowell, who are already reverting to pre-pandemic behavior.
That’s bad news for web grocery specialists like Instacart Inc., which processes orders and deliveries for thousands of supermarkets and has helped almost 300,000 senior customers figure out how to use its service. It’s also not great for brick-and-mortar food retailers because shoppers spend considerably more when they buy groceries online than when they have to lug everything home themselves. And there are more seniors online than you’d think: More than three in 10 people age 60 or older shopped for groceries online in April, according to consultants Brick Meets Click and Mercatus, and the number of seniors using Instacart last year rose faster than any other age group.
Almost half of Baby Boomers surveyed by Morgan Stanley said they’ll continue to grocery shop online at the same rate they did during the outbreak. Those seniors who stay online will do so because e-commerce has “become ritualized as a part of everyday life,” says Columbia Business School lecturer Robert Morais. It’s what anthropologists like Morais call an “adaptive strategy,” not unlike when humans went from foraging for food to agriculture and then onto large-scale manufacturing.
But the number of seniors using web grocery regularly declined by 25% in April compared with the previous year, Brick Meets Click and Mercatus found, the biggest drop of any age group by far. That suggests many seniors are still hunter-gatherers at heart, Morais says, and often prefer to use their senses to choose the food that’s most appealing, like Crowell’s celery. Jody Holtzman, an expert on the so-called longevity economy and the former head of market innovation at the AARP, says seniors will probably split their shopping going forward, using the web periodically to stock up on staples like canned goods and cereal and reserving in-store trips for produce, fish and meat.
There’s also the social aspect of shopping and interacting with staff and neighbors, something that’s particularly appealing for older Americans who were unable to see friends and family during lockdowns. Vivian Paquette, 85, another resident of the Brookdale community who started online shopping last year but has since given it up, says she enjoys chatting with the cashiers at the local Harris Teeter.
“I feel I have a connection to the store,” she says. “This might be the only person I talk to today!”
Grocers are responding to the defections by offering more enticements to stay online. Kroger doled out half a trillion personalized product recommendations to its digital customers last year. Albertsons, which operates 2,277 supermarkets under banners like Safeway and Vons, is doing online cooking demonstrations. Instacart created a “Senior Support Service” last fall to help older customers get accustomed to ordering online and says it’s growing by about 1,000 users a day this year. Other chains will waive delivery fees if shoppers come back online or offer discounts.
“As the necessity imposed by the pandemic lessens,” Holtzman says, “retailers will have to start to play the price game.”
Still, all those sweeteners won’t convince Paquette to hop online again. What would? “I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe a free lobster dinner?”
Published : May 17, 2021
By : Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Matthew Boyle
Duty-free giants offer free flights to lure VIP shoppers
Last month, Hyun Jung-a boarded a flight from South Koreas Incheon Airport. Around two hours later, she was back in the same airport and loading up on duty-free shopping, despite never landing in another country.
The Air Busan Co. flight, organized by Lotte Duty Free for its VIP customers, was Hyun’s first since the pandemic began and it didn’t cost her a cent. Because the route briefly departed Korean airspace and went over a Japanese island, the 130 passengers on board qualified to shop at duty-free stores in Seoul typically reserved for people who have traveled internationally.
Destination-less flights like these are an attempt by duty-free operators to salvage an industry decimated by covid-19. Before the virus, business was booming — the global duty-free market was worth $85 billion in 2019 and on track to reach $139 billion by 2027, according to Verified Market Research.
Sales plunged as countries restricted international travel. Globally, only 1.8 billion people took scheduled flights last year compared with 4.5 billion in 2019, the International Civil Aviation Organization has said. Annual revenue for Swiss duty-free giant Dufry, which operates outlets worldwide, fell 71%.
While shoppers on flights such as Hyun’s won’t fill the financial void, they at least bring in some much-needed business.
“I saw a lot of people with bags full of duty-free items,” said Hyun, who bought a Chanel bag, shoes and cosmetics. “I tell all my friends that it’s worth taking the flight because of the duty-free shopping opportunity.”
Hotel Shilla, South Korea’s second-biggest duty-free operator after Lotte, is offering 114 seats on two so-called flights to nowhere on May 23 and 30 to customers who have spent more than $550 at its stores since May 3. Lotte is putting on another five flights this month.
Duty-free operators and other stores are among the last in South Korea to recover from the pandemic, with the country’s retailers and wholesalers shedding 182,000 positions in April even as the economy added 652,000 jobs from a year earlier, the statistics office reported Wednesday.
The industry is in less of a squeeze where domestic air traffic has rebounded and tax-free shopping zones are in place. The palm-fringed Chinese island of Hainan has become an even more popular getaway for tourists from the mainland now starved of international travel. That’s helped the province’s duty-free sales, which more than doubled to 27.5 billion yuan ($4.3 billion) last year, according to the Ministry of Commerce.
Duty-free shopping has been permitted for domestic tourists in Hainan since 2011. In July, the government raised the spending limit to allow people to buy more and it is extending some duty-free shopping to Beijing, Shanghai and other cities to tap the growing purchasing power trapped in China.
Catering to the demand in Hainan, Alibaba Group Holding’s logistics unit is starting daily cargo flights from Singapore to deliver cosmetics, handbags and other goods to the island. Japan’s leading duty-free retailer, Laox Co., which was acquired by Chinese retailer Suning Holdings Group Co. in 2009, is planning to enter Hainan as soon as the second half of this year, setting up stores designed similarly to its outlets in Japan.
“The trend of visiting Hainan to do luxury shopping is here to stay for the Chinese,” said Jonathan Siboni, chief executive officer of data-intelligence firm Luxurynsight.
International air travel, if it is happening at all, is tending toward shorter-haul, regional routes, and from places where vaccination programs are at a more advanced stage. Seven of the world’s busiest international routes in the first four months of the year included U.S. links, such as Cancun-Houston and New York-Santo Domingo, according to aviation analytics company Cirium.
Share prices suggest investors are upbeat. Dufry’s stock has climbed more than 100% since the end of September, while Hotel Shilla is near the highest in nearly 15 months in Seoul, rallying 13% this year.
Paris-based Lagardere Travel Retail, which operates duty-free stores, restaurants and other shops in airports, is counting on customers from closer to home to help it through an uncertain summer in Europe after its revenue slid 56% from a year earlier to 341 million euros ($414 million) in the first three months.
“We’re betting more on retired Europeans traveling,” said Frederic Chevalier, the company’s chief operating officer for Europe, Middle East and Africa. McKinsey forecasts passenger flows between Asia and Europe will only return to 2019 levels “beyond 2024,” said Anita Balchandani, a partner at the firm.
With vaccination rates lagging in places such as South Korea — which has delivered enough jabs for just 4% of the population, Bloomberg’s Virus Tracker shows — retailers may rely on gimmicks like flights to nowhere for a while.
“The contribution from the flights to nowhere is small but it’s better than having nothing,” said Sung Junewon, an analyst at Shinhan Investment Corp. In Seoul. “Every little bit counts.”
Seven South Korean carriers have operated these flights, carrying about 8,000 passengers in total. Authorities are also considering plans to allow overseas flights into Incheon, where passengers can spend a few hours shopping without leaving the airport before flying back to their original departure point.
Park Ju-hyun, a 31-year-old office worker from Seoul, paid about 90,000 won ($80) for a flight-to-nowhere ticket in March. It was her first time on a plane since a trip to the Philippines before the pandemic, and it was well worth it for the shopping, said Park, who spent about $600, mostly on cosmetics.
“It was nice to be back at the airport,” she said.
Published : May 17, 2021
By : Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Kyunghee Park, Bruce Einhorn, Angelina Rascouet
Designed for disaster: These homes can withstand a Category 5 hurricane
Looking at a brochure from Deltec Homes feels like watching an episode of HGTVs “House Hunters” – beachfront homes with ornate patios and panoramic windows overlook pristine ocean views.
It’s hard to believe that the same quaint, debonair homes are built to withstand Mother Nature’s ultimate test – a Category 5 hurricane.
It’s something they’ve done before, and will inevitably do again. And, in an era marked by strengthening storms and rising seas due to climate change, Deltec Homes has made a business of building for the extreme.
Deltec is one of a number of companies that designs, builds and sells custom hurricane-proof homes. The group was born in the 1950s when two brothers – one an engineer at Oakridge National Laboratories and the other an entrepreneur – began experimenting with the idea of marketing homes designed to survive the inconceivable. Since then, Deltec has contributed to the design installation of more than 5,000 homes worldwide.
Unlike other hurricane-proof homes, which are typically modular and often bunkerlike, Deltec’s homes are all custom-built. They design each structure at their facilities in Asheville, N.C., contracting out with local builders to assemble the final product to the customer’s wishes.
“Each home that we build is essentially custom-designed using a series of what we call building blocks,” said Steve Linton, a degreed engineer and the president of Deltec Homes. “There are 10 sizes of those panoramic homes. People can design whatever they want and connect them with other structures.”
Older residents may prefer single-story elongated ranch-style homes, while others may want a three-floor beach house with lots of natural light and windows facing the water. Deltec has refined their engineering over the years to be able to do it all. That’s meant a lot of time at the drawing board.
“Obviously the shape matters,” explained Linton. “It’s a round home. It’s aerodynamic to the point you get about 30 percent less pressure that builds up against Deltec home versus a conventional home.”
In other words, the shape of the house helps deflect air flow around the structure rather than absorb that force, no matter which way the wind is coming from.
“The second piece is the materials that go into the home,” continued Linton. “We look at optimizing the materials … to all be about twice as strong as in a typical home. Every board is tested for strength. The plywood is twice as strong and the metal connections we use are made in a completely different fashion.”
Joints and connections are typically a failure point in structure when they’re subjected to high winds. That’s seen especially often in surveying the damage left by tornadoes. Poorly-anchored roofs take off when wind passes overhead, lifting like airplane wings in response to relative low pressure generated over the structure. After that, it’s only a matter of time before exterior walls fail, leaving the bones of the house susceptible to flying debris.
Deltec’s homes have encountered top-tier hurricanes like Michael, a Category 5 that hit the Big Bend of Florida on Oct. 10, 2018, and Dorian, which lay siege to the northwest Bahamas in early September 2019. All have fared well, escaping with minimal damage.
Josh Morgerman, among the world’s top hurricane chasers and star of UKTV’s and BBC’s Hurricane Man, became a brand ambassador for Deltec after surviving the eyewall, the zone of strongest winds as high as 185 mph, of Hurricane Dorian on Great Abaco Island. He had heard that the homes built by Deltec were still standing after the storm. He had to learn more.
“At first, I was very skeptical,” said Morgerman. “But they gave me a very detailed Excel spreadsheet that was pages long of where their houses are along the Gulf Coast and the Bahamas. I found the ones that had gone through the eyewalls of (Categories) 4 and 5, and some that had perfect direct hits. There were a few that went through Dorian’s right front quadrant of the eyewall. I reached out to the homeowners and interviewed them.”
Morgerman learned that both homes emerged with only minor scratches and dings, primarily in the form of cosmetic damage.
“Those houses had survived the ultimate test,” said Morgerman. “Dorian was the hurricane of hurricanes. If a house can sustained that, this product’s for real.”
Dick Love, who lives in Florida, owns a Deltec home on Scotland Cay, just north of Marsh Harbour in the Bahamas, that survived Dorian. Of the 62 homes that one stood there, only three escaped with minimal damage – Love’s, and two others built by the same contractor.
“The house to the left and to the right were obliterated,” said Love. “All that was left was the foundation. The only damage to my home was a couple roof shingles, and then (a piece of wood from) the neighbor’s home that was next door. It was attached to his roof and went through the side wall and the inner wall and went through the living room and hit the other wall twenty-five feet away.”
Wind gusts on Scotland Cay were estimated to have topped 180 mph.
“It looked like an atom bomb went off,” said Love. “For the other homes, it wasn’t just that all four walls were gone, the furniture was gone … the refrigerators, freezers in the houses were nowhere to be found. Everything was blown into the sea. It’s indescribable.”
A Deltec home remains standing in Mexico Beach, Fla. following the passage of Category 5 Hurricane Michael in October of 2018. MUST CREDIT: Deltec
Love has lived through four hurricanes in Florida, including Jeanne and Frances in 2004. He wasn’t on Scotland Cay when Dorian struck, something he says he’s thankful for.
“My home had 175 mph rated Deltec shutters, and they survived but with huge bashes and dents in them,” he explained.
After some small repairs, Love’s home is now good as new.
Matt Oblinksy, Deltec’s director of engineering, spearheads an effort to constantly find better building materials to further strengthen its designs.
“After each and every hurricane … we reach out to each and every homeowner in the path of a storm to ask how they are,” said Linton. “99.9 percent of the time we’re seeing ‘we lost a couple shingles’ or ‘we lost a piece of trim, but our neighbor’s home was demolished.’ Our homes have been field tested for a number of years.”
Deltec allows customers the flexibility to customize their homes. About two thirds of homes they produce are one story, with the remainder generally two floors. Once in a while the company builds a three-story structure, but those are rare, and usually for commercial purposes. Three stories is the limit. Many customers opt for impact-resistant windows.
Hurricane-proof homes are designed to protect inhabitants from the wind, but nothing can counteract the power of water. That’s why the homes are located to avoid storm surge flooding.
“We do homes up on pilings to elevate them to avoid storm surge,” said Oblinsky. “We highly recommend two feet above flood elevation to protect them from those situations.”
The company also has a propriety anchoring technique that ensures homes remain firmly affixed in place no matter what Mother Nature throws their way.
Leslie Chapman-Henderson, president of the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes, or FLASH, said hurricane-resilient homes like Deltec are worth the price in the long run.
“Often in the industry people will talk about price point as the purchase point,” explained Chapman-Henderson. “We urge homeowners to consider that the house isn’t just what you pay for it the first day … it’s the time horizon after the hurricane. The homes that are really the most affordable are the ones that survive the storm.”
Chapman-Henderson, whose organization closely studies the recovery process after major storms, says that aspect of storms is rarely talked about – and lasts long after the television crews and reporters leave.
“We have a project we’re doing on hurricane Michael. We still have hundreds of families who are not back in their home,” she said. “To us that’s the cost.”
Even for residents who can’t afford a hurricane-proof home, there are plenty of tactics for fortifying your home. Many, said Chapman-Henderson, can be done for under $50.
“The cost of these things is so minuscule,” she explained. “A couple handfuls of additional nails that keep the roof there when you need it, for instance.”
Deltec isn’t the only company marketing hurricane-proof homes to consumers. Fox Blocks Insulated Concrete Forms, headquartered in Omaha, helps build hurricane-proof structures too, but they take a different approach.
“We are an insulated concrete form manufacturer,” said Mike Kennaw, Fox Blocks’ vice president. “We basically manufacture, produce, sell and market the insulate concrete form, which is part of a steel reinforced wall assembly, and the testing we have done for poured-in-place concrete walls has shown that we have very high wind test rating.”
The concrete can be one hard shell, meaning fewer failure points, and is more impact-resistant than traditional wood homes. When it comes to roofs and interior walls, however, that’s up to the individual builder.
“We are a component of high wind construction,” explained Kennaw.
Building a hurricane-proof home may cost you a pretty penny, but it’s something people like Chapman-Henderson advocate could pay for itself over time. Meanwhile, forecasters are looking forward to what will likely be another anomalously busy hurricane season. The National Hurricane Center began issuing its daily tropical weather outlooks on Saturday.
ควมปันป่วนที่เกิดขึ้นกับสกุลเงินคริปโคเคอร์เรนซี่ที่ใหญ่ที่สุดยังไม่จางหายไป แม้แต่เอลอน มัสก์ก็ยังไม่เลิกเถียงกับผู้ที่เขามาโต้แย้งกับเขาเรื่องการตัดสินใจสะเทือนโลกเมื่อสัปดาห์ที่แล้ว
ประสิทธิภาพของวัคซีนได้รับการยืนยันอีกครั้งจากการศึกษาของอิตาลี หนึ่งในประเทศที่เผชิญกับการระบาดที่ร้ายแรงที่สุดเมื่อปีที่แล้ว
A Deltec home remains standing in Mexico Beach, Fla. following the passage of Category 5 Hurricane Michael in October of 2018. MUST CREDIT: Deltec
