Panel urges more scrutiny of US companies in Macau

HONG KONG (AP) ? Members of a congressional advisory panel believe U.S. regulators should tighten scrutiny of casino companies operating in Macau, the world's top gambling market, because of the risk of money laundering.

"We need to go deeper into this," said Michael Wessel, a member of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which heard testimony in Washington on Thursday.

"I'm not sure the companies are looking as deep as they need to in their own organizations and the profits are driving their activities. It's worth some stricter scrutiny."

The commission was set up in 2000 to examine national security implications of the trade and economic relationship between China and the U.S. and make recommendations to the U.S. Congress.

Nevada-based Las Vegas Sands Corp., Wynn Resorts Ltd. and MGM Resorts International are among six operators that have shared in the casino boom in Macau, the only place in China where gambling is legal. The former Portuguese colony earned $38 billion in gambling revenue last year, about six times more than the Las Vegas Strip.

Most of Macau's gambling revenue comes from the tens of millions of mainland Chinese gamblers who visit each year. However, the central government in Beijing imposes strict capital controls that limit the amount of money that can be taken out of mainland China to 20,000 yuan ($3,200) per trip.

To get around these controls, wealthy Chinese gamblers use so-called junket agents who arrange for them to travel to Macau, visit private VIP rooms, lend them money for their bets and collect on debts. VIP gamblers account for about two-thirds of Macau's total gambling revenue.

"The structure of the casino system in Macau effectively allows people to use the casinos to circumvent these capital controls," Commission Chairman William Reinsch said in opening remarks.

State and federal regulators want to make sure casino companies "do not get drawn into activities that would be considered illegal or improper in the United States," he said.

A.G. Burnett, chairman of the Nevada State Gaming Board, testified that it is "common knowledge that the operation of VIP rooms in Macau casinos had long been dominated by Asian organized crime, commonly referred to as triads."

He said the casinos themselves may not be aware of illegal transactions.

"Criminal transactions are widely alleged to take place just out of the direct purview of the casino," he said.

The commission's concerns come as Sands and Wynn face investigations from U.S. authorities over their activities in Macau. The two companies earn most of their profits from the tiny gambling enclave, an hour from Hong Kong by high-speed ferry.

Spokespeople for Sands' and Wynn's China units declined to comment. Macau's gambling regulator and a spokesperson for MGM China did not reply to a request for comment.

Burnett said that U.S. casino companies have strong compliance programs in Macau to make sure there are "no nefarious activities" in their operations. He said the influence of the junket operators in Macau may be waning and that the casinos may not have rely on them so much in the future to bring in wealthy gamblers.

When asked whether Nevada regulators had ever seen any organized crime at U.S. casinos in Macau, including at VIP rooms, or had taken any disciplinary action against a casino for violations there, he said they had not.

Burnett said that U.S. casinos had already suffered "to some extent" because they are required to cover the Nevada regulators expenses, including dispatching staff to Macau to meet their counterparts and check operations.

"Travel to China is not cheap," Burnett said. "We are routinely sending agents there now."

_____

Online:

Follow Kelvin Chan at twitter.com/chanman

Commission website: http://www.uscc.gov

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/panel-urges-more-scrutiny-us-companies-macau-073738549.html

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Hookup Shocker: The Sex Is Legal, but Talking About It Is a Felony ...

This week the Ohio House of Representatives unanimously approved a bill ostensibly aimed at fighting "human trafficking" that makes it a crime to "solicit" a legal act: sex with someone who is 16 or 17 years old. The age of consent in Ohio is 16. Yet under H.B. 130, a 20-year-old who asks a 16-year-old to have sex with him, or a 21-year-old who does the same with a 17-year-old, thereby commits a fifth-degree felony, punishable by six to 12 months in jail and a $2,500 fine. He also has to register as a sex offender. But if the teenager broaches the subject, or if the sex proceeds without any explicit verbal reference to it, no crime has been committed. Here is the relevant provision:

No person shall solicit another, not the spouse of the offender, to engage in sexual conduct with the offender, when the offender is eighteen years of age or older and four or more years older than the other person,?and?the other person is sixteen or seventeen years of age,?whether or not?the offender knows?the age of the other person.

Since there is no requirement that money change hands, this provision criminalizes ordinary sexual propositions if one person is 16 or 17 and the other is at least four years older when it is the older person who makes the suggestion, even though the sex itself remains legal. Having sex is fine, as long as you don't talk about it beforehand.

The elimination of any knowledge requirement, which is problematic even when the "solicitation" involves someone below the age of consent, is especially so when the person approached is 16 or 17. Since the difference between a 16- or 17-year-old and an 18-year-old may be difficult to discern, someone keen to avoid a felony charge would be wise to demand proof of age before saying anything about sex. And if the object of his attention happens to have a fake ID?as teenagers pretending to be older than they are sometimes do, especially when they go to bars or clubs?that is no defense. As Granville, Ohio, attorney Drew Mc Farland notes, the bill imposes ?a "strict liability" sta ndard, meaning that "even an honest mistake is unforgiven." Mc Farland, who drew my attention to this bill, suggests one such scenario:

A mature 17-year-old is lawfully in a liquor-serving establishment and meets a 22-year-old who suggests they go back to his or her place for some sexual fun.?Under this change in the law, the 22-year-old is guilty of a felony.

Legislators already define "human trafficking" broadly enough to include consensual sex (when it occurs in exchange for money). Now Ohio is poised to classify merely talking about consensual sex, even when no money is involved, as a species of sexual slavery.

The Ohio Senate is expected to take up the bill after returning from its summer break.

Source: http://reason.com/blog/2013/06/28/hookup-shocker-the-sex-is-legal-but-talk

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Most Influential Ad Execs On Twitter - Business Insider

When we asked our friends at PeekAnalytics to tell us who the most influential ad execs on Twitter are, we expected to get back a list of the usual suspects. You know, the most famous CEOs at the biggest agencies, plus Seth Godin, Lee Clow's Beard, and perhaps KBS+'s Lori Senecal, who once bought promoted tweets for herself.

In fact, none of the huge names of advertising are influential on Twitter, according to PeekAnalytics. The company ranked our Twitterers by "social pull" as opposed to mere total followers. Social pull is a "metric which takes into account not only the quantity of each audience's connections across 60 social networking sites, but also how active and connected, and therefore influential, those connections are."

One of the names on our list has an amazing 313,000 followers. Most have more than 10,000, with many in the mid five figures.

We learned that to be successful on Twitter as an ad exec, you have to be positive and upbeat. No Debbie Downers here.

The way to get retweeted is to give advice, and offer a lot of aphorisms about success in business.

The medium also lends itself to specialists like John Sonnhalter. He has nearly 14,000 followers on Twitter but few on Madison Avenue will recognize his name ? he specializes in ads and sales for the construction business.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/most-influential-ad-execs-on-twitter-2013-6

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James Woods Shows Off New Young Girlfriend!

The actor is dating a new lady! Plus, check out more pics of your favorite stars on the scene!

Source: http://www.ivillage.com/star-snapshots-celebrity-photo-gallery-2012/1-b-450006?dst=iv%3AiVillage%3Astar-snapshots-celebrity-photo-gallery-2012-450006

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Adobe Dreamweaver CC

Adobe could have rested on its laurels when updating Dreamweaver to its latest incarnation in the subscription-based Creative Cloud service as Dreamweaver CC. In its previous incarnation as Dreamweaver CS6, part of Adobe's Creative Suite 6, Adobe's advanced website editor already had little or no serious competition as a tool for creating and maintaining today's multiplatform websites. Dreamweaver CS6, for example, introduced ready-to-use "fluid grid" Web layouts that use CSS to reshape webpages automatically according to the screen size, making it easy to build a single site use with phones, tablets, and desktops without the complex CSS hand-coding previously required.

The new Dreamweaver CC enhances the fluid-grid feature by supporting HTML5 structural elements such as Sections and Articles. It also adds an equally effort-saving tool, a new CSS Designer that uses an interactive graphic interface for modifying CSS properties like shadows and curved corners, so you only need to click and drag to modify complex CSS code while seeing the results in real-time. Full support for Web-based fonts?downloaded from Adobe's servers while the browser loads a page?makes it easy to create eye-catching designs. Also, like the rest of the Creative Cloud suite, Dreamweaver also gets a simplified and more easily customizable interface, and works identically under both Windows and OS X.

Pro and Semi-Pro
Dreamweaver is a professional-level tool that's worth having?if you can afford it?even if you're a non-professional. First-time Dreamweaver users may be intimidated by the multitude of menus and property panels in the default layout, but it soon becomes clear how to use these to get quick access to advanced controls over CSS elements, or to switch quickly between displays that show how a webpage will look when printed or when displayed on different size screens. Advanced Web designers can click on a menu of JavaScript-based UI widgets into their code to create pop-up dialogs, date-pickers, accordion-style menus, and everything else in the current repertory of UI effects. But even less-advanced users can create flexible HTML5-compliant sites that look good on any platform.

Start Weaving Dreams
Starting from either a blank page or sample layout, you click on items in an Insert panel to add elements like templates (with editable and uneditable regions), multimedia (HTML5 or Flash), and standard HTML features. The default screen is split into a code pane and a WYSIWYG design pane, but you can choose one or the other, or make the design pane "Live" to view media content like video, or content that will be served up from a database when the page appears in a browser. One thing I admire about Dreamweaver is that it doesn't favor Adobe's proprietary technologies like Flash over open standards like HTML5 video, but gives equal support for both?and even provides a better-looking and more usable HTML5 video player than its built-in Flash player.

When you build a page with Dreamweaver's fluid grid feature, the app first creates a page that contains a grid of vertical columns that are visible in Dreamweaver but not when the page appears in a browser. By default, a page designed for phones fits into four of these invisible columns. When the same page is displayed on a tablet, it fills eight columns, and twelve columns when displayed on a desktop machine.

When you switch between screen sizes in Dreamweaver's editing window, the content of your site rearranges itself to fit the width that you specified for the specific type of screen, and you can use the CSS Designer panel to adjust the shape, size, and other properties of individual elements to suit the different screen sizes.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/4bSyIbqqINQ/0,2817,2421105,00.asp

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Egypt: Opposition rejects Morsi's dialogue offer

CAIRO (AP) ? Egypt's main opposition coalition has rejected the Islamist president's offer for dialogue on reconciliation and says it insists on holding early presidential elections.

A statement by the National Salvation Front read by reform leader Mohamed ElBaradei said Mohammed Morsi's 2 ?-hour speech late Wednesday reflected a "clear inability" to acknowledge the difficult conditions in Egypt.

Morsi spoke ahead of opposition plans for street rallies on June 30 aimed at forcing him from office. He told his opponents to use elections not protests to try to change the government and counseled the military, which has warned it would intervene if violence breaks out, to focus on improving its capabilities and defending the nation.

Speaking Thursday, ElBaradei said "nothing will change our determination to go out on June 30 everywhere in Egypt."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/egypt-opposition-rejects-morsis-dialogue-offer-175226402.html

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Salt and Pepper Spoon Shakers Give You Precisely Portioned Seasonings

Finally putting an end to the gag where someone unscrews the lid of a salt shaker, Jaemin Jaeminlee's Sogum HuchuHuchu is a radical re-thinking of how we season our food at the table. They still require a bit of shaking to get the spices out, but instead of dumping it directly onto your food, the salt and pepper spills into a small scoop. Using your fingers you're then able to select an exact amount of seasonings for your meal, while the unused bits can be returned to the shaker.

Read more...

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/X1DU9nnjURU/salt-and-pepper-spoon-shakers-give-you-precisely-portio-600938846

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Microsoft's Xbox 180 won't inhibit online-only games on the Xbox ...

Microsoft came out beating the drum for cloud services and restrictive online requirements when it announced the Xbox One at the end of May. Since then, Redmond has completely flip-flopped on its online requirements and used game restrictions, but the Xbox Live Cloud service hasn?t been harmed in the process. Even though the Xbox One won?t require you to connect to the internet, individual games on the platform most certainly will.

With the launch of the Xbox One, Microsoft will be making Xbox Live Cloud services available to game developers. ?Cloud? is obviously a very nebulous term used in marketing speak, but it has real benefits to both developers and gamers alike. Over 300,000 servers worldwide can be allocated dynamically in service of both multiplayer and single-player games. Sure, the Xbox Live Cloud can work as online storage for game assets, but it?s much more than that. By offering server-side computation as well, Microsoft?s ubiquitous cloud offering gives developers affordable tools that they just didn?t have in previous generations.

Jon Shiring, an engineer at Respawn Entertainment, took to his company?s blog to speak about the benefits of the Xbox Live Cloud. In detail, Shiring explains the problems that go along with having player-hosted game servers, and why having affordable dynamically scaling dedicated servers is a huge benefit for multiplayer games. Microsoft?s Azure-based Xbox Live Cloud allows developers like Respawn to improve AI, remove unfair player advantages, speed up matchmaking, and dedicate all resources on the local machine to improve the visuals and frame rate.

Since Respawn?s game Titanfall is effectively multiplayer-only, it requires an always-on internet connection. Despite the fact that Microsoft is publicly slinking away from internet requirements, some games on the Xbox One will still demand an internet connection to function at all. Obviously, the benefits Microsoft originally laid out for its Xbox Live Cloud service can and will thrive in this ecosystem.

Single-player games will definitely benefit as well. Computation-intensive sections of a game, like large dynamic backgrounds, can be handled in the cloud while latency-sensitive portions like aiming and damage calculations can happen in real-time on the console itself. For example, a developer could use the cloud to render an accurate depiction of what the night sky looks like where you live while the console itself has more resources freed up to improve moment-to-moment gameplay.

Fundamentally, the fact that Microsoft is offering cheap access to cloud storage and computing for all participating developers is a win for everyone. This initiative lets developers expand game worlds, takes a substantial load off of the Xbox One?s CPU and GPU, and has the added benefit (for Microsoft) of keeping most people connected to the internet for all of these features. The Xbox One will need an internet connection for a nontrivial amount of games, and that?s okay. Provided the gaming industry learned its lesson about failing gracefully from the SimCity debacle, the Xbox One could have a significant edge over PS4 if the Xbox Live Cloud delivers on its promises.

Now read: Microsoft reverses Xbox One always-on policies, but removes positive features in process

[Image credit: Microsoft & Respawn]

Source: http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/159653-microsofts-xbox-180-wont-inhibit-online-only-games-on-the-xbox-one

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Think You Can?t Quit Your Job? These People Did.

Some of us go through our professional lives wondering if we?re in the right line of work or if there?s something else we could be doing that would make us happier. Musing about a career change or other life pivot can be a potent source of motivation, yet most of us never act on these impulses. Those who do follow through often engineer second acts that are game changers.?

For our special series on Second Acts, we asked readers to share their stories of starting over. Slate?s David Plotz discusses some of his favorites in the video above.

Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/video/the_hive/2013/06/midcareer_shift_best_stories_of_second_acts_from_slate_readers_video.html

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Help Your Home With Some Home Improvement - Home Reno

You may think that they could never improve your own home. Know that there are lot of projects that someone who is inexperienced can easily master. Home improvements are valuable for a number of reasons, and the article below provides you with some of the things you need to know to be successful.

If you are considering major structural modifications to your floor plan, then employ an architect to draw up your plans. If you don?t have the expertise to back up your vision, your plans are most likely going to be dysfunctional from the start. A professional designer can come up with concrete plans that are viable and that conform to local building codes.

There are two easy things you can do if you would like your ceiling to look higher than it truly is. Add a funky lamp to your room or paint your walls in more than one color. This will make a optical illusion that makes the room seem bigger. Your eyes focus on the lines and make the ceilings look like they are higher.

You can make a huge positive difference in the appearance of a room by installing a new floor in it. A reliable contractor can lay down a new carpet, hardwood or laminate floor in no time at all or, if you are so inclined, look for supplies a a local retailer and do the project yourself.

Use a wet sponge on your drywall installation. Rather than sanding the seams in your drywall, sponge them. A sponge can smooth the seams as effectively as a sander. With the sponge, though, you?ll avoid getting all that drywall dust all over your house.

Apply striping to the walls prior to doing a paneling installation. No matter how careful you are when installing paneling, the old wall still peeks through. To minimize this issue, measure and mark where each panel will meet before installing. Use paint that matches the paneling.

When remodeling the tile floors, consider more high-tech options such as tiles that radiate heat. These are a special form-factor, which allows electricity to create power through a heating element and warm the ground beneath your toes. Radiant heat tiles are easy to install. This makes it a project you can add on whether you are hiring someone or doing it yourself. Either way, you will be thankful that you chose radiant heat tiles on the first cold day of the season.

Purchase transparent plastic bins with lids to help organize your garage properly. Get labels for these boxes, and be sure that they can stack together. This will not only make your garage nice and tidy, but it will also keep pests out of your stuff.

Do not get rid of your doors because they look dirty. You should instead remove the door and then sand down the wood. Then, find an oil that you can paint over the door with. Buy fancier doorknobs if you want to give your door a new feel.

It is possible to give your kitchen a better, more current look without becoming bankrupt in the process. Is your refrigerator still working good? Do you like stainless steel Consider buying appliance spray paint to color your appliances in any hue you can imagine. This can easily change the feel of your kitchen in no more than a day.

Anyone can work on their house if they really try and are dedicated to the process. Now that you have read these tips, you hopefully have gained some confidence in yourself and are ready to tackle your own home improvement projects. Seeing the results of your own handiwork will give you a feeling of pride and accomplishment.

Source: http://www.renmenbi.com/help-your-home-with-some-home-improvement/

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