Bangkok currently ranks sixth in Agoda.com’s search lists, highlighting a resurgence of interest in international travel.
Vaccine rollouts, talk of Covid-19 passports and alternative hotel quarantine have triggered an increase in international travel searches, said the popular travel platform on Tuesday.
However, Agoda reported Thailand-based searches had zero international destinations in the top 30 this month, indicating Thais are happy to stay at home.
The platform said its search data highlights growing optimism across Asia that international travel will start to return, with Australia, South Korea, Japan and Indonesia witnessing an increase in the number of international destinations in their top 30 searches in March compared to December.
Travellers from these markets are joining China, Taiwan and Singapore in their optimism for the resumption of international travel, said Agoda.
“There are definitely reasons for the travel industry in Asia to start to feel more optimistic,” said Agoda CEO John Brown, citing vaccine rollout and tourism subsidy schemes such as TTogether in Thailand and GoTo Japan.
However, he said the pace of vaccination will vary, with markets such as Singapore fully vaccinated this year and others like Thailand, Japan and Vietnam likely waiting until 2022.
“So these heavily tourism-dependent economies need to consider how to accelerate the return to normality. … alternative state quarantine [ASQ], as launched in Thailand and Hong Kong, might prove to be a sensible solution in line with a vaccine programme.”
Agoda said it had collaborated with Thailand’s Public Health Ministry to allow Thai nationals and residents to choose their preferred ASQ accommodation direct on the travel platform. Agoda’s ASQ platform would offer the same flexibility to international tourists when Thailand opening its borders this July, the company said.
“With more markets exploring travel corridors [or “bubbles”], alternative state quarantine accommodation provides a solution to help resume international travel by enabling travellers to choose a quarantine property that best suits their needs,” said Brown.
Russia has registered the world’s first coronavirus vaccine for dogs, cats, minks, foxes and other animals, the country’s agriculture safety watchdog said Wednesday.
Called Carnivak-Cov, the vaccine was developed by scientists at the Federal Service for Veterinary and Phytosanitary Surveillance, also known as Rosselkhoznadzor, Russia’s Tass News Agency said.
While many scientists say the virus causing covid-19 initially jumped from bats to humans, perhaps through another intermediary, infections have since been reported worldwide in animals, from zoos to mink farms.
It remains unclear how easily the virus can move between animals and humans. But after repeated outbreaks among minks at farms in Denmark and elsewhere in Europe, millions of the furry animals were killed precautionarily to cut any further transmission. Scientists have been particularly worried about mutated variants of the virus developing in minks and other animals going on to infect humans.
Russia has already approved three coronavirus vaccines for use in humans on an emergency basis. Rosselkhoznadzor deputy head Konstantin Savenkov said Wednesday that this would be the world’s first authorized for widespread animal inoculations.
The vaccine could be mass produced as soon as April, although the agency did not say when it would be on the market.
“Carnivak-Cov, a sorbate inactivated vaccine against the coronavirus infection . . . is the world’s first and only product for preventing covid-19 in animals,” Savenkov told Tass News.
Two U.S. companies, New Jersey-based veterinary pharmaceutical company Zoetis and the North Dakota-based Medgene Labs, have also been developing coronavirus vaccines for use among minks and other animals.
Scientists in Russia launched clinical trials in October and tested the vaccine on dogs, cats, foxes, including Arctic foxes, and minks, among other animals. Mass production of the vaccine could begin in April, according to Savenkov.
“The outcome of the research gives us grounds to conclude that the vaccine is safe and has strong immunogenic effect,” Savenkov said.
The vaccine is expected to produce antibody resistance that lasts at least six months.
Savenkov told Tass News that “domestic animal-breeding enterprises and commercial firms from Greece, Poland and Austria” are planning to purchase the vaccine, while companies from the United States, Canada and Singapore, among others, have expressed interest in it.
Russia’s coronavirus vaccine for humans have so far not been approved for use in the United States or Europe.
Earlier this year Zoetis’s vaccine was administered on a trial-basis to nine infected apes at a San Diego zoo. They have since recovered.
MOSCOW – Jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny declared a hunger strike on Wednesday after unsuccessful attempts to get medical care for severe back pain, according to an Instagram post in his name.
Navalny survived an August assassination attempt with a chemical weapon that the U.S. State Department blames on Russian security agencies, but he was jailed when he flew back to Russia in January after treatment in Germany.
He was sentenced to 21/2 years in prison for breaching parole conditions in a 2014 fraud case, partly because he failed to report to authorities while under treatment in Germany.
Navalny last week requested painkilling injections for back pain and a right leg so numb that he says it barely supports his weight.
“I have the right to call a doctor and get medicine. Neither of which I am given, stupidly,” the Wednesday post said. It said the numbness was moving to his left leg.
The Kremlin has declined to comment on Navalny’s complaints, calling it a matter for prison authorities.
The post said he was lying in his cell on his bed on a hunger strike, in what he called a major violation of prison rules. He was reading the Bible, the only book made available to him in prison.
The post said was also being “tortured by sleep deprivation,” woken up eight times every night by a guard shining a torch in his face to supposedly ensure he has not absconded.
“Why do prisoners go on hunger strikes? This question worries only those who have not been prisoners. From outside, everything looks complicated. But from the inside, it’s simple: You don’t have any other methods of struggle, so you go on a hunger strike,” the post said. Navalny is denied Internet access, and his team has not indicated how the posts in his name are made, but he meets regularly with his attorneys.
The post said other prisoners were afraid and told him that “the life of a convict is worth less than a pack of cigarettes.”
Navalny is serving his term in Penal Colony No. 2, a notorious prison that former inmates claim uses constant psychological pressure to “break” inmates.
Vyacheslav Kulikov, a member of a commission that monitors prisoners’ conditions, said Monday that monitors visited Navalny and recorded his requests for painkilling injections.
However Vladimir Grigoryan a member of the monitoring commission from Vladimir, around 111 miles east of Moscow, the nearest large town to Penal Colony Number 2, told independent Dozhd TV that “Navalny is just faking it so don’t worry about him.”
Grigoryan who worked in the prison system for 30 years said prisoners like Navalny demanded medicines that ordinary Russians could not get.
Earlier this week, Navalny posted a photograph of himself in prison, with head shaven, and reported that he had received six reprimands in two weeks for rule violations such as getting up 10 minutes too early or going to meet his attorney wearing a T-shirt. “I’m not kidding,” ran a post in his name Monday describing the reprimands.
“It seems the song ‘Bad Guy’ is the soundtrack of my prison sentence,” Monday’s post ran. After two reprimands, prisoners are sent to the punishment cell, where conditions were “close to torture,” he said.
Being reprimanded beneath a portrait of President Vladimir Putin on the wall reminded him of being a schoolboy and getting in trouble, he said in Monday’s post.
Russian authorities rounded up key members of Navalny’s team in January and placed them under house arrest. But Ivan Zhdanov, direction of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation is outside Russia. His father Yuri Zhdanov was arrested and placed in detention Friday. Ivan Zhdanov said his father’s arrest was political and aimed at himself. He called the case “an entirely new level of baseness and meanness from the presidential administration.
“I won’t hide it. For me this is the worst thing that could happen.”
Navalny’s team is collecting the names of people willing to join street protests this spring, and recording the numbers in an online map. Once 500,000 people join, they say a protest will be held. So far nearly 360,00 people have signed up.
What’s in Biden’s $2.25 trillion infrastructure and tax proposal
InternationalApr 01. 2021Contractors work on a portion of Van Ness Boulevard under construction in San Francisco on March 22, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by David Paul Morris.
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Laura Davison
President Joe Biden released a sweeping plan to pump money into transportation, renewable energy, manufacturing and efforts to combat climate change — funded by undoing some of the tax breaks that corporations received during the Trump administration.
The $2.25 trillion, eight-year proposal is a follow-up to the $1.9 trillion economic relief bill passed earlier this month. To cover the costs, Biden wants to raise corporate taxes to 28% from 21%. The plan also seeks a minimum tax on profits U.S. corporations earn overseas, increasing the rate to 21% from roughly 13%.
The White House plans a second major package, which could cost $1 trillion or more, later in April to focus on social measures, including expanding health care and paid-leave access and extending the child tax credit –offset by tax increases on wealthy individuals.
Biden will offer his opening argument for the first phase of spending Wednesday in Pittsburgh. Here’re some of the key elements in the plan:
–Transportation
The plan provides $620 billion for transportation. That includes $115 billion to improve bridges, highways, roads and $20 billion for road safety, which will upgrade 20,000 miles of roads and highways. There’s $85 billion to modernize public transportation systems and $80 billion for Amtrak. The plan provides $25 billion for airports and $17 billion for ports, inland waterways and ferries. Biden is also calling for $20 billion for transportation projects for disadvantaged communities.
–Electric Vehicles
The transportation funding would specifically direct $174 billion to electric vehicles, including sale rebates and tax incentives for consumers to buy American-made cars. It also would provide grants to state and local governments and the private sector for 500,000 charging stations by 2030. It includes funds to electrify school buses and federal vehicles such as Postal Service trucks.
–Research and Development
Biden is calling for $180 billion to upgrade the country’s research infrastructure and labs at universities and federal agencies. The funding would also be directed toward climate-science research and addressing gender and racial inequalities in the science, math and technology fields.
–Manufacturing Boost
A $300 billion initiative to boost American manufacturing incorporates a number of bipartisan initiatives that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had planned to move in a broader China bill this spring. Biden will call on Congress to invest $50 billion in semiconductor manufacturing and research — as envisioned by the CHIPS Act. There’s also $50 billion for the National Science Foundation to create a technology directorate, modeled after the Endless Frontiers Act.
In addition, he is asking for $50 billion to create a new office at the Department of Commerce dedicated to monitoring domestic industrial capacity and funding investments to support production of critical goods.
–Workforce Development
Biden is proposing $100 billion for workforce-development programs, including training for those who have lost their jobs, as well as apprenticeship initiatives.
–Electric Grid
Biden is offering $100 billion to build a more resilient electric grid. He is also proposing a 10-year extension and phase-down of an expanded, refundable investment tax credit and production tax credit for renewable energy generation and storage.
The plan calls for high labor standards and allowing workers on the projects to join unions and bargain collectively. The goal is to move toward 100% carbon-pollution free power by 2035. The plan also directs $16 billion to clean up abandoned mines and gas wells.
–Carbon Capture
The plan would create 10 carbon-capture facilities retrofitted in large steel, cement and chemical production facilities. It expands the bipartisan Section 45Q tax credit for carbon capture, making it refundable and easier to claim. Another $10 billion would be spent on a Civilian Climate Corps that employs Americans in conservation work on public lands and waters.
–Clean Water
The plan includes $45 billion to eliminate lead pipes nationwide. It also calls for $56 billion in grants and low-cost loans to states, tribes, territories and disadvantaged communities to improve water systems and $10 billion to bolster rural-well and waste-water systems.
–Broadband Internet
Biden is proposing $100 billion to bring high-speed broadband internet to all Americans. The plan also includes measures to make pricing more transparent and competitive and includes short-term subsidies for low-income households.
–Housing
The proposal would provide $213 billion to build and renovate more than than two million affordable homes. The plan includes tax credits to build housing for low-income families and $40 billion for public housing.
–Schools, Child Care
The plan includes $100 billion to improve public school buildings, with $50 billion in direct grants and an additional $50 billion leveraged through bonds. The plan also calls for $12 billion for community-college facilities and technology and $25 billion to upgrade child-care facilities and provide incentives for employers to offer on-site child care.
–Elder Care, VA Hospitals
Biden is asking Congress to approve $400 billion for housing and care for the elderly and people with disabilities. He is also proposing $18 billion for the modernization of Veterans Affairs hospitals and clinics.
–Corporate Tax Hikes
The plan would raise the corporate tax levy to 28% from 21%, increasing the rate established in President Donald Trump’s tax law. The plan would also institute a 15% minimum tax on a corporation’s profits for financial-reporting purposes. This would prevent companies from racking up tax breaks to whittle down their tax bill to nothing.
–International Taxes
The plan would also impose a minimum tax on the profits U.S. corporations earn overseas, increasing the rate to 21% from the roughly 13%. It also includes several measures that would penalize companies that move assets and jobs offshore and eliminates current preferences to book profits overseas.
–Eliminate Oil, Gas Tax Breaks
The plan would eliminate all tax preferences for the oil and gas industry and would also require companies that pollute to pay into the Superfund Trust Fund to cover the cost of fuel-related cleanup.
–IRS Audits
The plan calls for additional funding for the Internal Revenue Service to increase audits on corporations. The White House says it will release additional details about tax examinations on individuals in the coming weeks.
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Shelly Banjo
The New York Police Department has arrested a man in connection with a suspected hate crime against a 65-year-old Asian woman outside a Midtown Manhattan luxury apartment. The man in the incident was captured on video kicking the woman to the ground and then stomping on her in broad daylight Monday, while shouting “you don’t belong here.”
Brandon Elliot, 38, a parolee out on supervised release, was charged with felony assault as a hate crime early Wednesday, according to Police Commissioner Dermot Shea.
On Tuesday New York Mayor Bill de Blasio called the crime “disgusting” and vowed to bring the perpetrator to justice.
“I’m very frustrated by these attacks,” de Blasio said during a press briefing Tuesday. “I know a huge effort is being expended to educate, to get people involved in the solution, to find the perpetrators, to bring them to justice.”
A surveillance video, released by the police Tuesday, showed a man kick the woman outside an apartment building at 360 W. 43rd Street while the building’s security guards looked on but didn’t intervene. One guard then shut the door.
The Brodsky Organization, which manages the luxury Manhattan apartment building, said staff who saw the attacks were suspended “pending an investigation in conjunction with their union,” according to a statement Tuesday. “The Brodsky Organization condemns all forms of discrimination, racism, xenophobia and violence against the Asian American community.”
The victim of the attack, a Filipino immigrant, remains in the hospital recovering from a fractured pelvis, according to The New York Times.
The attack comes as the city’s hate crimes task force is reporting an increase in attacks and racially charged violence against Asian New Yorkers they said increased during the pandemic when U.S. political leaders insisted on referring to the coronavirus as the “Chinese flu.”
The incidents have led to protests by Asian-American leaders and community activists in New York and globally, as they respond to an outbreak of violence that includes a March 16 shooting in the Atlanta metropolitan area where eight people died, including six women of Asian descent.
President Joe Biden on Tuesday announced plans to address the hate crimes against the Asian-American community, including increasing access to hate crime data and requiring new training for local police.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland on Tuesday directed Justice Department employees to give priority to investigating and prosecuting hate crimes and incidents, noting “the disturbing trend in reports of violence against members of the Asian American and Pacific Islander community,” according to a memo to department employees.
Garland, who became the nation’s top law enforcement officer almost three weeks ago, ordered a review to be completed in a month to determine specific steps that can be taken to better combat hate crimes.
“We must recommit ourselves to this urgent task and ensure that the department makes the best and most effective use of its resources to combat hate,” Garland wrote.
Read More: Asian-American Groups Grapple With Police Response to Violence
Stop AAPI Hate identified nearly 3,800 anti-Asian incidents since last March, 6.2% of which were targeted at people over 60 years old and an overwhelming 68% at women.
“It’s disgusting and outrageous,” de Blasio said, of the video. “But then to see a security guard standing nearby and not intervening, it’s absolutely unacceptable. Look, I don’t care who you are. I don’t care what you do, you’ve got to help your fellow New Yorker.”
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Andreo Calonzo
The Philippines said Chinese “maritime militia” vessels have expanded into more disputed South China Sea areas, even after the Southeast Asian nation protested and the U.S. aired concerns over the ships’ presence.
More than 250 Chinese vessels were seen in areas including Whitsun Reef and Thitu Island, as well as an island group known in the Philippines as Kalayaan, a government task force said Wednesday, citing air and sea patrols on March 29. It added that four Chinese Navy ships were also spotted at Mischief Reef, also known as Panganiban Reef.
The Chinese ships’ presence in the contested waters comes despite Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s efforts to build closer ties with Beijing, while keeping good relations with the U.S. China earlier said that its vessels near a disputed reef were sheltering from the wind.
The Philippines repeated its call for the Chinese vessels to immediately leave the disputed areas, saying their presence is “hazardous to navigation and safety of life at sea.”
“Their swarming also poses a threat to the peaceful exercise of sovereign rights of the Philippines in its exclusive economic zone,” the Southeast Asian nation said, adding that more Philippine Navy and coast guard ships have been deployed to patrol in the South China Sea.
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Michelle Fay Cortez, Jason Gale
Nearly three dozen scientists vetted by the World Health Organization and the Chinese government gathered in Wuhan, China, early this winter to start the arduous task of finding the origins of covid-19 and determining how it spread like wildfire around the world.
Six weeks after that trip, the working group this week delivered an analysis that laid out four possible scenarios and recommended next steps for digging deeper to find the pandemic’s genesis. The 123-page report, and a nearly 200-page supplement, was immediately engulfed by criticism, with a dozen nations including the U.S., the U.K. and Japan questioning its structure and insights.
The most unexpected detractor was WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who helped negotiate the details of the trip and agreed to the scope of the work back in July. He said the theory that the virus escaped via a laboratory accident needed to be more thoroughly vetted, a hypothesis that has been vigorously denied by the Chinese government.
“There’s obviously a lot of politics,” said John Mackenzie, an Australian virologist who led a 2003 WHO-convened mission in China to study the origins of SARS, leaving him well-versed on the delicacies of undertaking such a study. “He should be standing by his committee’s report.”
“I just find it very strange that he’s demeaning it and he’s deflecting from it,” said Mackenzie, an emeritus professor at Curtain University in Perth who serves on the WHO’s emergency committee for covid-19.
It’s not that controversy was unexpected: the mission was fraught from the start, with China resisting the scientists for months before relenting to a team of experts that comprised of a local expert for every foreign one. Still, the furor now threatens to undermine scientific progress in understanding how the coronavirus came about, and the chance of WHO-led further investigation in both China and other countries — which the experts have always said is needed — is growing faint.
“Multiple attacks daily, demonstrably false, but gullible followers believe them,” said Peter Ben Embarek, an expert on zoonotic diseases at the WHO who led the international team of scientists, in a Twitter post on what he described as “right-wing media outlets.” “Real issue is that this undermines science and ironically puts U.S. citizens at risk by leading us into rabbit hole conspiracies instead of better understanding of how to prevent pandemics.”
The WHO experts, who traveled to China in January after months of negotiations, were presented with reports from local researchers, rather than being allowed to conduct their own analysis, some said in media interviews after the trip. They also didn’t have unfettered access to raw material or the lab in Wuhan that has become central to the controversy. Instead, they were required to work within the parameters negotiated by the Chinese government and the WHO more than six months before the mission began.
Their official report, itself delayed for weeks, was questioned even before its official release. The U.S. has “real concerns about the methodology and the process” of the report, including that the Chinese government “apparently helped to write it,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN on Sunday, ahead of publication.
On Tuesday, hours after it was published, a joint statement from 14 countries including the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Japan, South Korea and Norway, bemoaned a lack of access to “complete, original data and samples.” Scientists from five of the countries took part in the mission.
China dismissed the criticism as not “serious or responsible” on Wednesday. “They want to spread rumors and push their hidden political agenda,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying at a briefing in Beijing. “The experts have said they went to places they wanted to, and they met with people they wanted to.”
Some among the WHO expert team, made up of virologists, epidemiologists and other public health experts, argued that not many countries would allow unfettered access to confidential data, and noted that their work seemed to be taken out of context. At the heart of the controversy appears to be a mismatch between the slow speed and cautious precision of scientific work, and the political symbolism thrust on the origins investigation.
Marion Koopmans, a Dutch virologist who was a member of the WHO team, mused on Twitter about whether other countries would allow outsiders to conduct a similar investigation.
While much of the criticism has focused on the report’s dismissal of the laboratory leak theory, the scope of study included no mention of research specifically on labs in Wuhan, or any role they may have played.
A true audit of the lab is a “much more complex process, and that’s not what we were there to do,” said Dominic Dwyer, a microbiologist based in Sydney who was part of the team.
The lab leak theory took off when it was promoted by the Trump administration. There has been nothing to suggest it emerged from a lab in China or anywhere else, Ben Embarek said.
Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on covid, defended the report, saying the epidemiology and molecular data from 2019 is the most comprehensive she has seen, while the animal section provides details on the species that were sampled.
“We were able to create a space for the science,” said Ben Embarek. “We were never pressured to remove critical elements from our report. Personally, I am very proud of this report and, like my other colleagues, we all stand behind it on both sides, despite all the interest and the pressure and the immense difficult environments we have faced over the past few months.”
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John Brown
Alexei Navalny
Contractors work on a portion of Van Ness Boulevard under construction in San Francisco on March 22, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by David Paul Morris.
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