MANILA, Philippines — The Erawan Group Plc., Thailand’s leading hotel developer, is planning to build up to 15 budget hotels in the Philippines over the next five years.
Kamonwan Wipulakorn, president and director of The Erawan Group, said the company is allotting P4 billion over the next five years to build 12 to 15 budget hotels under the Hop Inn brand in Manila, Cebu and Davao.
“We would like to have maybe around 10 hotels in Manila and we will build two hotels in Cebu and we are also looking at Davao,” Wipulakorn said.
For next year, the company is slated to open three more hotels — one in Aseana, a site in Alabang and another in Tomas Morato in Quezon City.
At present, The Erawan Group has two Hop Inn Hotels in the Philippines — one in Ermita in Manila and the other in Makati.
Wipulakorn said her company is optimistic about its operations in the Philippines because of the country’s robust economy and growing tourism industry.

“Right now, the Philippines has the highest economic growth and also the highest development that is why we choose to come to the Philippines because for us we look for high growth market,” Wipulakorn said.
She added the Philippine market is “very exciting” like Thailand compared to other countries in ASEAN.
“Right now we only focus in Thailand and the Philippines, we don’t see other country as exciting as Thailand and the Philippines,” Wipulakorn said.
“When we plan to come here we actually targeting for domestic market because it’s a very big market, but I think with the location that we have we also attract foreign arrivals as well. So right now about 50 percent is domestic market and the rest would be foreign markets,” Wipulakorn said.
She added  that its first Hop Inn Hotel in Malate, Manila is performing “very well” with an occupancy rate of about 80 percent.
“In the next three years, we see that the revenue contribution from Philippine hotels will go up to 10 perfect of our total portfolio. That is significant to us, right now its very small,” Wipulakorn said.
Erawan is Thailand’s leading hotel investment company with diversified hotel portfolio fro luxury to midscale, economy and budget segment across Thailand’s key destinations and ASEAN.
Currently, its hotels are under the hotel agreement partnership with world-class hotel operators including Hyatt, Marriott, Accor, IHG and its own hotel brand Hop Inn.

 (The Philippine Star) | Updated November 3, 2017 - 12:00am

You can view here the New Urban Agenda Draft for Habitat III ... 

Today we are announcing the expansion of First Draft to include a new partner network of over thirty major news and technology organisations to tackle issues of trust and truth in reporting information that emerges online according to a report by Jenni Sargent of First Draft on September 13, 2016.

Yesterday, the Washington Post’s Carlos Lozada tweeted ‘I think we can stop prefacing sentences with “in this new digital age…” and just say “today”‘. This really struck a chord because ‘digital age’ is a phrase I use all too frequently when introducing the work we do at First Draft, and explaining why it is so important. But really I should just say ‘today’.
Today, news breaks online. Today, the first images to emerge from a breaking news event have been captured by an eyewitness. Today, injustices that may never have been reported become global news stories because a bystander reached for their smartphone. Today, malicious hoaxes and fake new reports are published in increasingly convincing and sophisticated ways.
We live in a time when trust and truth are issues that all newsrooms, and increasingly the social platforms themselves, are facing. In July, the Guardian’s Editor-in-Chief Katharine Viner wrote about the ways technology is disrupting the truth, explaining “in the news feed on your phone, all stories look the same – whether they come from a credible source or not.” Filtering out false information can be hard. Even if news organisations only share fact-checked and verified stories, everyone is a publisher and a potential source.
We are not going to solve these problems over night, but we’re certainly not going to solve them as individual organisations.
There is a thriving community of specialists working around the world who have developed and honed social newsgathering and verification skills. These include journalists, human rights investigators and academics. There are also teams working within the social networks who have themselves come from newsrooms and understand the challenges of finding, verifying and reporting stories that emerge online. With the launch of this partner network, First Draft brings these people together to work on ideas and initiatives, including a train-the-trainer programme, the launch of a collaborative verification platform, and the creation of a voluntary code of practice.
This network will also create a feedback loop for representatives from each social media platform to connect with journalists and develop ideas for ways to streamline the verification process, improve the experience of eyewitnesses and increase news literacy amongst social media users.
Each partner is committed to sharing knowledge, developing policies and devising training in how journalists use the social web to find and report news. Confirmed partners include: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, CNN, ABC News (Australia), AJ+, ProPublica, Agence France-Presse, Channel 4 News, The Telegraph, France Info, Breaking News, Les Décodeurs, International Business Times UK, Eurovision News Exchange, SAM, Aljazeera Media Network, Reveal project, InVID project, Euronews, Sourcefabric, WITNESS, Amnesty International, European Journalism Centre, American Press Institute, International Fact Checking Network, Duke Reporters’ Lab.
The First Draft Coalition formed in June 2015 with support from Google News Lab. In the past year, founding members Bellingcat, Dig Deeper Media, Emergent, Storyful, Reportedly, Meedan, Verification Junkie and Eyewitness Media Hub have worked together to raise awareness and standards around the use of newsworthy information and eyewitness media sourced from the social web.  We have all recognised the value of collaboration in tackling these important issues and are proud and excited to launch this expansion today.

A re-post from:  
​https://firstdraftnews.com/social-networks-unite-global-newsrooms-take-action-misinformation-online/

WASHINGTON – In freezing President Barack Obama’s plan to tackle carbon emissions, the US Supreme Court delivered a blow to a global climate deal – but experts say that US commitments to the deal will survive.

Obama’s “Clean Power Plan” would require the power sector to cut carbon dioxide emissions by at least 32 percent compared to 2005 levels by the year 2030.

The high court’s surprise decision unleashed a wave of concern around the world.

“For a vulnerable country like India, it is important that the Paris Agreement leads to ever more ambitious actions by all countries,” said Navroz Dubash of the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research, referring to the global climate deal.

“From that perspective, this early indication from the US Supreme Court risks taking us in the wrong direction.”

The court “threw an unexpected monkey wrench into the Obama administration’s plan to cut carbon pollution from power plants,” said Union of Concerned Scientists president Ken Kimmell.

However, Kimmell told AFP, “it would be quite premature to conclude that is a blow to the Paris Agreement.”

The freeze will only last about 18 months—until a legal challenge by a coalition of 27 mostly Republican states is heard—and Obama himself has said he is confident the White House is on “strong legal footing.”

The Environmental Protection Agency gave US states individual greenhouse gas emission targets, but they have until 2022 to comply, which Kimmell noted was a “very long” timeline.

“The immediate effect of the ruling is to push back the deadline for our states to submit implementation plans, but this delay does not necessarily imperil the United States’ meeting its 2030 target,” said Scott Fulton, president of the Environmental Law Institute.

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey echoed fellow Republicans when he hailed the “historic and unprecedented victory against (the) EPA,” backed by the five conservative justices of the nine-seat court.

But climate experts note that the Supreme Court did not rule on the substance of the Clean Power Act, sending the matter back to an appeals court that will probably rule in June.
​
Other lower courts will also make related decisions.

http://www.mb.com.ph/