Visitor arrivals to Singapore in October rose 15.8% from a year earlier to 978,000, the highest number of arrivals recorded for the month of October ever, the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) said on Wednesday.
But the number was still below July’s figure when a record 1.1 million people visited the city-state.
Singapore attracted 978,000 visitors in October, a 16% increase from a year earlier, the Singapore Tourism Board said in an e-mailed statement today. Tourism receipts in the first nine months of the year increased 47% to $13.7 billion from a year earlier, helped by the opening of two integrated casino resorts, the board said.
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Internet Browsers these days are on a competition course with various tech giants introducing updates and new UI to their version of the Internet Browsers. Recently, a survey company named as StatCounter released its data on the usage of the browsers globally in the month of September.
IIFL says Singapore banks are the cheapest in the Asean region with 1.2x-1.6x forward P/B, 10x-12x forward P/E and dividend yield of 4%-5% after they underperformed their regional peers this year.
The house says such underperformance was mainly due to the overhang of NIM contraction, as Sibor declined by 24 bps during 2010 to a 23-year low.
With the new year around the corner, it’s not too early for businesses to begin lining their compliance initiatives up with the new PCI 2.0 rules. – The onset of the new year will bring with it new compliance regulations.
The updated version of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI
DSS) will go into effect Jan. 1. Though
companies technically have until 2012 to implement any changes validation
against the previous version of …
Leonardo DiCaprio ends 2010 with a bang: The Inception star topped Forbes Magazine’s list of the year’s Highest-Grossing Star. Leo’s movies have earned $1.1 billion at the global box office, according to the Finance Bible. DiCaprio has collaborated with high-profile directors over the course of his career and his Tinseltown connectiions have been especially lucrative [...]
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been chosen as the Person of the Year by the readers of the French daily Le Monde. 11,946 people voted for Assange, while this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo received 4,737 votes.
Betty White’s been named 2010′s Entertainer of the Year by The Associated Press. The beloved octogenarian, 88 adds the 2010 honor to her arsenal of Emmys and Lifetime Achievement Awards. After 102 ballots were cast — submitted from US news organizations that make up The AP’s membership — the final tally was close: White’s 20 [...]
The year isn’t done with us yet, but MTV has gotten an early start on handing out its Year-End honors. This year’s Man and Woman of the Year trophies go to Kanye West and Lady GaGa. What a 2010 it’s been for pop sensation Lady Gaga. The multi-awarded “Poker Face” singer — Billboard’s Artist of [...]
Vanessa Hudgens, who recently split from her long-time beau Zac Efron, has insisted that she and her ex are still on friendly terms. “We”re good,†the New York Daily News quoted her as telling People, when asked about her relationship with Efron. Her statement echoed what friends have previously said about the pair, who broke [...]
There are a lot of people out there who are literally throwing their money away by discarding their two year old or even one year old computers just because theyre not running as fast as they used to.
The Olympic Committee of Serbia (OKS) has named Serbia’s top tennis player Novak Äoković and sport shooter Zorana Arunović athletes of the year.
The Serbian women’s national volleyball team was named the 2010 top women’s team, whereas among men’s teams, the best one is the men’s national volleyball team.
By: Dennis Cook
 YMSB by Chad Smith |
On December 30 and 31, Yonder Mountain String Band will gather at St. Louis, MO’s The Pageantwith their faithful Kinfolk to ring in the New Year. The NYE show will feature three sets, including one set suggested entirely by the fans – drop your suggestions at yondermountain.com, phantasytour.com or the band’s Facebook or Twitter pages. We grabbed the boys for a few minutes to discuss playing at this special time of year.
JamBase: What is it about New Year’s Eve that floats your boat? It is a special time for both bands and fans.
Dave Johnston: New Year’s Eve is pretty cool because it’s like amateur night [laughs]. There’s a lot of electricity and good vibes going on, and we’re very receptive to that sort of energy. If you put us in that situation we find it to be a good experiential and musical nexus of propulsion to the next year!
Ben Kaufmann: For me – and I guess everybody – it’s a time of reflection or 50-percent reflection, 50-percent looking forward. I get to sit there onstage and think about all the things we’ve done – all the trials & tribulations overcome, the great successes – and the other part of my brain is looking forward to the next year and the things we’re gonna do and the new ideas. It is a very liminal, transitional period of time. I don’t know how the calendar worked 2000 years ago but this was the time picked for the changing of the old from the new, and it’s a very powerful time.
Adam Aijala: It’s also, for a long time now, been a time to let loose, and that definitely goes for bands and fans around the country. There’s a bit of reflection but also a good bit of drinking going on. It’s always been fun for us. I don’t think we’ve missed a New Year’s since we started. It’s one of the bigger shows of the year for us just for the fun factor.
JamBase: New Year’s Eve is one the core tribe of a band comes out because they want to celebrate with YOU.
Adam: That’s probably true. We’ve done New Year’s in St. Louis before but it’s been 10 years. Usually we’re in our home turf, and it’s definitely true there. We also have a good core of fans in the Midwest, so I have a feeling we could be drawing people from as far North as Madison and Milwaukee and East to Indianapolis and people from Champaign, Bend and Chicago, St. Louis folks and Lawrence, KS as well. There’s so much music going on that people have their pick.
What do you get out of a multi-night run as band?
 YMSB NYE ’09 by Tobin Voggesser |
Adam: We don’t treat it any differently. From night to night, we don’t play the same show, whether or not we’re in the same town. Our crew, obviously, is thrilled when we do multiple nights in the same city and venue because there’s only one load in and load out. For us, the preparation doesn’t seem much different. We want to make it unique every night. There are people following us on any given tour and even if it’s just one or two dudes you don’t want them thinking, “Shit, they did the same tunes last night.”
Dave: Let’s get this straight: It’s not dudes following us, it’s hot chicks. This ain’t an Umphrey’s McGee show. Let’s get that clear. I think multi-night is a lot like multi-ball in pinball – more points, more lights, more bumpers, more flippers. I keep pushing for lasers. We all just saw Roger Waters do The Wall. Lasers and bluegrass, I swear it goes together.
Is there any special thought that goes into a New Year’s Eve show?
 Adam Aijalaby Tobin Voggesser |
Adam: This year, we decided to do three sets on New Year’s and one of the sets will be built by fans. People can write in on our website, Phantasy Tour or wherever, and we’ve given them carte blanche to suggest anything they want – things we’ve forgotten that we play, things they’ve always wanted us to play, even different jams, different seques. And we’ve been getting some crazy ideas! The more you sit with them and analyze them, the more cool they seem. Some really good ideas. And I think that’s the case with our audience and the audience in this scene. It’s a very educated audience musically. They have such a depth of musical knowledge that these people are throwing out things we’ve heard of but others we need to research. So, this year fans will build their dream setlist, what THEY want to hear, and then it’s up to us to bring it.
This shows a respect for your fans, which has been a hallmark of Yonder since the start. You guys really seem to respect the time and money and affection folks invest in YMSB.
Adam: Absolutely! When you’re a kid and you tell your parents, “I want to be in a band.” Think of the look they give you – that sort of concerned, dropped thing – and now imagine telling them you want to be in a bluegrass band! That’s a brown trouser conversation.
Ben: We’re constantly amazed at the things we get to do. I think back to all the people along the way who said, “You guys will be limited. This is as big as you’ll get,” almost in the sense of don’t dream too big. That’s a horrible thing to suggest to somebody. That being said, when we look back at what we’ve done and look ahead to the dreams we’ve yet to accomplish, it’s massive. I’m shocked by what we get to do, and it’s all because of the fans. If they weren’t there we’d be fucked.
Yonder Mountain String Band Tour Dates :: Yonder Mountain String Band News :: Yonder Mountain String Band Concert Reviews
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C&G Environmental Protection Holdings, the emerging player in China’s renewable waste-to-energy sector, says it has recently started construction of a new WTE plant located in Xiaogan City, Hubei Province.
Singapore’s exports grew at the slowest pace in a year in November as manufacturers shipped fewer electronics and pharmaceutical goods abroad.
Non-oil domestic exports climbed 10% from a year earlier, after a 34.5% gain in October, the trade promotion agency said in a statement in Singapore today. The median forecast of 11 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News was for an increase of 21.5%.
Mark Zuckerbergs honor as Time Magazines Person of the Year is a simple acknowledgement that in a few short years he built Facebook into a global social phenomenon. – Now that Mark Zuckerberg has been given the rare honor of being named Time Magazines Person of the Year,
perhaps its time to reflect on how this young man moved from creating
a Website to help college students connect to building Facebook into a
global social and cultural phenomenon. According to…
The boy banders of New Kids on the Block and The Backstreet Boys will take center stage at Dick Clark’s annual New Year’s Eve celebration on ABC. The supergroups, now known as NKOTBSB, performed together at the American Music Awards last month and are planning a tour of North America for next summer. Now the [...]
Forests are not the only habitat whose conservation matters to the climate
RUSSIA does not normally spring to mind as being in the forefront of the fight against climate change. The citizens of Moscow, however, need no explanation of one aspect of the problem—the importance of wetlands. Earlier this year they had an abrupt and lethal lesson on the dangers of peat-bog fires. An unusually hot summer set such fires across the country and the peatlands around Moscow generated a smog that blanketed the city with carbon monoxide and soot. By August 9th the daily death rate had climbed to 700, twice the normal level for that time of the year.
Whether peat-bog fires are being encouraged by climate change is debatable. But it is clear that they release prodigious quantities of climate-changing carbon dioxide when they happen. And even in the absence of fire, draining peatlands—for example, for agriculture—liberates a lot of carbon dioxide. In Russia such drainage is reckoned to free 160m tonnes of the gas every year. In Indonesia the figure is 508m tonnes. All told, the global total is about 1.3 billion tonnes—6% of man-made carbon-dioxide emissions even without the effect of fire. That is far more than the contribution made by aviation, for example. …
An international deal on deforestation makes it ever more important to measure the Earth’s woodlands
PERU’S forests cover 72m hectares of the country (278,000 square miles). That is three times the area of Britain. And Peru intends to hold on to its greenery. In 2000 its deforestation rate was 250,000 hectares a year. By 2005 that figure was down to 150,000. This year, according to Antonio Brack Egg, the country’s environment minister, it will be 90,000. In 2021, if all goes well, it will be zero.
To make sure things stay on course, Dr Brack says, the government needs to spend more than $100m a year on high-resolution satellite pictures of its billions of trees. But he hopes that a computing facility developed by the Planetary Skin Institute (PSI), a not-for-profit organisation set up by Cisco Systems, a large computing firm, and America’s space agency, NASA, might help cut that budget. …
Sandra Bullock, whose 2010 included a tabloid-charting cheating scandal, divorce, and the joy of motherhood, was named PEOPLE Magazine’s Woman of the Year on the publication’s list of the 25 Most Intriguing People of 2010. In its special issue that hits newsstands on Friday, PEOPLE also singled out stars and non-stars alike with special titles. [...]
