20th Housing & Condo Festival 2009
20th Housing & Condo Festival
Date: 19 - 22 February, 2009
Organizer : Housing Business Association
Tel : +66 (0) 2 440 1274-6
Website : http://www.housecondoshow.com
Date: 31 January - 1 February, 2009
Owner: AFAIRS Exhibitions & Media Pvt Ltd. (INDIA)
The exhibition will come to Bangkok after it’s tour across India, Nepal and Bhutan and will be organized by India’s Leading Education Fair Organizer ‘Afairs Exhibitions and Media Pvt. Ltd.’ The Exhibition will be divided in two distinct sections, The ‘Schools’ section and the ‘Universities, Colleges and Higher Education’ section.
INDIAN RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS SECTION:
The Indian Residential Schools, section will showcase premier residential schools from India offering primary, middle and secondary level education, with Indian ICSE & CBSE, as well as international IB or IGCSE curriculums. It will specifically entertain queries from local Thai & expatriate Indian parents of children in the age group of 4 to 18years, who are hunting for a good residential school for their child. The line-up of boarding schools exhibiting themselves will be from all across India, providing holistic and complete education for the children. The option of Boy’s Boarding School, Girl’s Boarding School, and Co-Educational Boarding School from different parts of India will further help parents to choose an appropriate school.
INDIAN UNIVERSITIES, COLLEGES AND HIGHER EDUCATION SECTION:
The Indian Universities, Colleges and Higher Education’ section of the fair, will cater to the academic concerns of adult students in the age group of 18 to 25years. Conceived to meet a growing demand for Indian education in Thailand, it will exhibit some of India’s most legendary Universities, and elite Colleges. This segment, will offer students from Science, Commerce & Humanities streams, a choice of undergraduate, postgraduate, professional & vocational courses which can be pursued in India.
SPECIAL FEATURES:
The fair will offer quality education at affordable rates. Thai parents visiting the weekend exhibition will be able to avail the services of Thai translators at various stalls at the exhibition, so that they can collect accurate information and make ‘informed decisions. ‘Spot admissions’ and ‘Spot Counseling’ offers will be additional value adders at the fair. The Fair will provide information on a host of new-age career programs. Representatives of institutions from different parts of India, will attend to student queries and will enlighten them on the stringent admission procedures at their institutions, besides offering them ‘On Spot Admission Registrations.’ A series of Seminars and Presentations on Studying in India will run concurrently which will provide information on studying in India.
HOW THE FAIR WILL BENEFIT YOU…
In totality, the exhibition will enable people to gather greater knowledge about the Indian education system and allow greater interaction between institution representatives, parents and students, here. Finally, it will offer students and parents, the rare platform and opportunity, to connect with multiple Indian residential schools, colleges and universities… simultaneously under one roof.
Date: 29 January - 1 February, 2009
Owner: Ace Con (Thailand) Co., Ltd.
Queen Sirikit National Convention Center
10 a.m. - 8 p.m.
Enjoy an exceptional opportunity to shop for your kids at the 6th Thailand Baby & Kids Best Buy 2009 – the grand-scale trade fair for everything newborn babies to 12-year-olds could possibly require.
The event brings together over 300 leading producers of brand-name items offering up to 80% discounts and lots of special promotions. All this plus an international crawling competition and many more fun activities.
Date: 29 January - 1 February, 2009
Queen Sirikit National Convention Center
Owner: M Vision Co.,Ltd.
10 a.m. - 8 p.m.
Keep abreast of all the latest mobile phone developments in Thailand - Thailand Mobile Expo 2009. Organized by M Vision Co., Ltd, the event will, as usual, embrace the cutting-edge mobile phone hardware and services arrayed for you to choose.
The event will be separated into four zones. The Mobile Match Maker Zone offers expert advice on choosing the right mobile phone. In the Brands Zone, lots of mobile phone distributors showcase the latest innovations with special promotions offered exclusively as the event. The Software Zone will present the latest mobile phone technologies and software created by Thais, plus great software download services. Lastly, the Hardware Zone will present variety of state-of-the-art accessories, including extra memory, earphones, speakers, batteries, mobile phone masks, and much more.
CHICAGO (AFP) - - Ford Motor Co. will make even deeper cuts to its operations in the wake of a 5.9 billion dollar fourth quarter loss but said Thursday it had “sufficient liquidity” to fund its turnaround plan without US government aid.
The number two US automaker’s results showed a sharp widening of its losses as auto sales were slammed in the fourth quarter by a deep economic crisis and credit squeeze.
Ford’s loss in the fourth quarter was more than double the deficit in the same period in 2007 of 2.8 billion dollars.
Ford posted a whopping loss of 14.57 billion dollars for the year, compared with a 2.7 billion dollar loss in all of 2007.
But Ford said that unlike rivals GM and Chrysler, it had enough cash to keep operating as it executes a restructuring plan and remains “on track” to break even or return to profitability in 2011.
“Based on current planning assumptions, (Ford) does not need a bridge loan from the US government, barring a significantly deeper economic downturn or a significant industry event, such as the bankruptcy of a major competitor that causes disruption to the company’s supply base, dealers or creditors,” Ford said in a statement.
The Detroit giant said was drawing down the remainder of its line of credit, some 10.1 billion dollars, due to “concerns about the instability of the capital markets” but “has sufficient liquidity to fund its business plan and product investments.”
Ford said it finished 2008 with 24 billion dollars in available liquidity after burning through 5.5 billion dollars in cash in the fourth quarter and 21.2 billion in the year as a whole.
The automaker said it expects its cash burn to slow in 2009 as demand rebounds as a result of government stimulus packages but warned that global sales will likely fall by a record 10 percent this year.
“Ford and the entire auto industry faced an extraordinary slowdown in all major global markets in the fourth quarter that clearly had an impact on our results,” said Ford president and chief executive Alan Mulally.
“We continued to take the decisive actions necessary to lower production to match the lower worldwide demand and reduce costs, which we expect will allow us to significantly reduce negative operating cash flow in 2009 and position Ford for growth when the economy rebounds.”
Ford planned to cut its North American production by nearly 300,000 vehicles to 400,000 vehicles in the first quarter. European production was set to be slashed by 214,000 vehicles to 325,000 units.
The iconic US automaker has already shed tens of thousands of jobs and closed plants in an effort to cut costs, and sold off the bulk of its luxury European marks, including Jaguar and Aston Martin. It is considering the sale of Swedish brand Volvo and hopes to cut automotive structural costs by four billion dollars in 2009.
Thursday, Ford said it would cut 1,200 jobs at its Ford Motor Credit unit in response to weak conditions.
The announcements by Ford comes with the US automotive sector on the brink.
Ford’s cash-strapped competitors GM and Chrysler were granted 13.4 billion dollars in government loans in order to keep their operations going amid the sudden downturn. After initially requesting a nine billion dollar line of credit, Ford later told Congress it had sufficient cash on hand to get through the sales slump.
GM and Chrysler must submit a detailed restructuring plan by February 17 and a yet to be appointed “car czar” must certify by March 31 that they are making progress in carrying out the plans.
US auto sales fell 18 percent last year to their lowest level since 1992 and are forecast to fall by up to three million vehicles this year to between 10.5 and 12 million units.
Sales have hovered between 16 and 17 million vehicles for the past decade and have not been below 12 million since the recession of 1982 when the United States had 74 million fewer people than today.
Ford is basing is plans on US total industry sales of 11.5 to 12.5 million vehicles, which would represent a drop from 2008 levels but a rebound from weak sales pace of the final months of the year.
PARIS (AFP) - - Signs of global economic distress multiplied on Thursday, with more companies worldwide cutting profits and jobs, and protesters swarming the streets of France in anger at the worsening crisis.
Economic fears gripping the middle classes amid waves of cut-backs and stagnant wages spilled over in France, while elsewhere the daily treadmill of layoff announcements and plunging profits rolled on.
More than a million French public sector workers staged a massive strike on Thursday, many joining street marches as anger at the government’s handling of the economic crisis erupted.
“The capitalist economy is sick,” read one banner at a protest in the central city of Lyon. “Let’s let it die.”
Worldwide, there was some optimism over the prospects for the passage of a massive US stimulus package through Congress, but this was accompanied by further indications of the depth of the crisis worldwide.
Germany, Europe’s biggest economy , announced on Thursday that its unemployment rate surged to 8.3 percent this month.
There was more dismal news on the labour front in Asia’s largest economy. Japan’s Nippon Sheet Glass Company said it will shed 5,800 jobs by 2010 and Toshiba announced plans to cut 4,500 jobs this year.
Other titans of Japanese industry also showed the strain. Sony Corporation warned it remained on course for its biggest ever loss in the year to March following a fall in demand for televisions, cameras and games consoles.
Even the video game maker Nintendo, which has enjoyed spectacular growth in earnings in recent years, cut its annual net profit forecast by a third.
Anglo-Dutch energy giant Royal Dutch Shell said it made a net loss of 2.81 billion dollars in the final quarter of 2008 as plunging oil prices, dragged down by falling demand, slashed the value of inventories.
And US auto maker Ford Motor Co. announced a quarterly loss of 5.9 billion dollars, a sharp widening of its losses as auto sales were slammed by the downturn around the world.
“Ford and the entire auto industry faced an extraordinary slowdown in all major global markets in the fourth quarter that clearly had an impact on our results,” said Ford president and chief executive Alan Mulally.
There was some positive news in Europe, where the European Commission’s economic sentiment indicator fell by less than analysts had expected in January although it reached to its lowest ever level.
Recent business and consumer surveys in Germany and France have also shown marginal improvements, fuelling hopes that the recession may have hit bottom.
Investors and analysts were meanwhile pinning hopes on President Barack Obama’s 819-billion-dollar (627-billion-euro) plan to breathe life into the recession-strapped US economy.
The US House of Representatives approved the measure on Wednesday and the Senate will now vote on its own version of the bill before a final draft reconciling the two goes to Obama for signature.
“The progress through the House of Representatives of the package with a comfortable margin will be cheering US sentiment,” said analyst James Hughes at CMC Markets in London.
“But certainly no one will be under the illusion that this is the turning point for the economy.”
US stocks stumbled after government figures showed weaker than expected jobless claims and durable orders, and there were concerns over earnings of companies reeling from recession.
US new home sales also slid 14.7 percent in December to the lowest monthly level on record.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average shed 0.69 percent at the opening bell. The tech-heavy Nasdaq dropped 1.34 percent.
Europe’s main stock markets fall sharply, dragged down by the banking sector, which ended a brief rally on profit-taking. In late deals, London fell 3.12 percent, Frankfurt dropped 2.44 percent and Paris was down 2.53 percent.
Asian markets had been lifted on Thursday by news of the US stimulus plan’s progress. Hong Kong leapt 4.6 percent, while Tokyo added 1.79 percent and Sydney 0.9 percent.
DAVOS, Switzerland (AFP) - - OPEC members need an oil price above 50 dollars a barrel to make exports worthwhile, the head of the cartel said Thursday, adding that more production cuts were possible later this year.
“We are not happy with 40 even 50 dollars a barrel,” OPEC Secretary General Abdallah Salem El-Badri told a panel discussing energy security at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Even 50 dollars did not guarantee a “decent income for our countries,” he said, adding: “I hope that the price will pick up… a 50-dollar price will not permit us to invest.”
Asked about further cuts by the cartel, he said: “If we still have some downward problems (of prices), OPEC will not hesitate to take some quantity out of the market.
“We cannot tell at this time before our next meeting on March 15.”
New York’s main futures contract, light sweet crude for March delivery, traded at 41.63 dollars a barrel on Thursday, while Brent North Sea crude for March fell 68 cents to 44.22 dollars.
Since September, OPEC has announced cuts of 4.2 million barrels per day (bpd) with a reduction of 2.2 million bpd on December 17 in Algeria.
There had been doubts about the discipline of OPEC members and their willingness to reduce output by the agreed amount, but Bardi said all of the oil would be taken off the market.
“For the information I am seeing at this time, it would be about 100 percent,” he said of the cuts. “I think we will take out 4.2 million barrels per day.”
Tony Hayward, the chief executive of British oil group BP, told the panel that OPEC countries needed a price of about 60-80 dollars per barrel to balance their budgets and invest in social programmes.
“A price somewhere between 60-80 would be appropriate,” he said.
He also explained that a high price was needed to encourage investment in new oil fields that will be required to meet future demand, particularly from energy-hungry India and China.
Badri concurred, saying that the lessons from past oil price crashes had to be learned.
“We… don’t want what happened in the 1980s where we did not invest and laid off very qualified people and when the demand picked up we were paying the price of shortages” of materials and people, he said.
“If we don’t invest now we will have the problem” of a supply crunch in the future when demand picks up, he said.
SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - - Google has begun offering tools to expose Internet service providers (ISPs) that choke traffic or shift users into slow lanes while allowing others to zip along at high speeds.
The online search and advertising king is an unabashed champion of “net neutrality” in which all Internet traffic is treated equally instead of letting service providers give preferential treatment to privileged clients.
“At Google, we care deeply about sustaining the Internet as an open platform for consumer choice and innovation,” Google chief evangelist Vint Cerf and principal engineer Stephen Stuart wrote in an online posting.
“No matter your views on net neutrality and ISP network management practices, everyone can agree that Internet users deserve to be well-informed about what they’re getting when they sign up for broadband.”
Google worked with New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab Consortium, and academic researchers to create an online Measurement Lab (M-Lab) that researchers can use to detect Internet traffic manipulation.
“When an Internet application doesn’t work as expected or your connection seems flaky, how can you tell whether there is a problem caused by your broadband ISP, the application, your PC, or something else?” Cerf wrote.
“It can be difficult for experts, let alone average Internet users, to address this sort of question today.”
M-Lab went online Wednesday with three diagnostic tools running on computer servers near Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.
The tools are available to help users “diagnose common problems that might impair their broadband speed, as well as determine whether BitTorrent is being blocked or throttled by their ISPs,” according to Cerf, a computer scientist often called “father of the Internet.”
ISPs such as US behemoth Comcast have sparked controversy by clandestinely throttling some traffic, such as peer-to-peer file sharing.
ISPs argue that such measures are necessary to manage growing congestion on the Internet highway. Google has been among those advocating against fettering online traffic, saying that doing so stifles Internet innovation and growth.
M-Lab is in a nascent phase and through the year Google will add servers in a dozen locations in Europe and the United States. More diagnostic tools will be added and results made public, according to Google.
“M-Lab is intended to be a truly community-based effort, and we welcome the support of other companies, institutions, researchers, and users that want to provide servers, tools, or other resources that can help the platform flourish,” Cerf wrote.
WASHINGTON, (AFP) - - Handing US President Barack Obama his first big win, the divided US House of Representatives approved a huge stimulus bill he touted as vital to saving the US economy from collapse.
But the 819-billion-dollar measure passed without a single vote from Obama’s Republican foes, frustrating his high-profile hunt for bipartisan support after campaign promises to drain Washington politics of decades of bile.
Still, Obama said he was “grateful” after the House approved the measure by a vote margin of 244-188, with 11 Democrats joining Republicans, and that he was willing to make changes to the legislation as it moves through the Senate.
“I hope that we can continue to strengthen this plan before it gets to my desk,” the president, who has pushed the Congress to pass a final measure by mid-February, said in a statement.
“But what we can’t do is drag our feet or allow the same partisan differences to get in our way. We must move swiftly and boldly to put Americans back to work, and that is exactly what this plan begins to do,” he said.
Republicans, who lacked the votes to block the bill in the House but have significantly more clout in the Senate, promised not to be merely “the party of ‘no’” and signaled they would keep fighting for tax cuts as the best remedy.
“Fast-acting tax relief will create more jobs in America than a lot of slow-moving government programs,” House Minority Leader John Boehner said before the Republicans’ rival bill went down to defeat 266-170.
“We want to work with the president. We’ve made clear to him that he’s reached out and we’re reaching out to him because at the end of the day, the American people need a plan that works,” said Boehner.
Democrats noted that Boehner had instructed his troops to vote against the measure on Tuesday, hours before Obama wooed Republican support in separate closed-door meetings with party members in the House and Senate.
“Today’s vote is a victory for the American people,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who predicted the plan would help create or save three-four million US jobs.
After the US Senate passes its version of the bill, the two chambers will name a “conference” to work out a final compromise measure that, if passed by both sides, would go to Obama.
“There will be a vote tonight, there will be a vote next week, there will be votes the weeks after that, until we eventually have what we think will be a bipartisan proposal to get this economy moving again,” said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs.
The House vote came hours after Obama made a last-minute call for Republican votes, demanding “bold and swift” action to resurrect US jobs and arrest the US economy’s brutal downward slide.
The vote took place against a grim backdrop of more painful economic news as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Wednesday forecast the US economy was set to contract by 1.6 percent in 2009 amid severe financial strains.
Under pressure from Obama, Democrats pulled two measures that had drawn Republican ire: Millions to help states meet family planning costs and to refurbish the National Mall, the site of his historic inauguration a week ago.
The stimulus plan includes about 275 billion dollars in tax cuts, including a credit worth 500 dollars for each worker and 1,000 dollars for couples.
Most of the package’s value however is in infrastructure spending, including more than 60 billion dollars for new power grids and to government buildings energy efficient.
Forty-one billion dollars more would go on modernizing US schools, 30 billion on highways construction and six billion to expand rural access to broadband Internet.
Some money is intended for social welfare spending, which Republicans oppose, and includes 79 billion dollars in help to state governments to prevent cuts to key services, 43 billion to increase unemployment benefits and 87 billion to expand healthcare insurance for the poorest.
LOS ANGELES (AFP) - - Former “King of Pop” Michael Jackson is being sued by the director of his seminal 1983 video “Thriller” over unpaid royalties, US media reported.
Several reports said Jackson was being sued by film-maker John Landis for allegedly failing to stick to an agreement to share profits from the 14-minute video featuring a cast of werewolves, zombies and assorted monsters.
“After a spectacular theatrical premiere the Thriller video became a worldwide megahit and an iconic pop culture phenomenon,” Landis’s lawsuit said.
The video “continued to generate profits for defendants … who have wrongfully refused to pay or account for such profits to the plaintiff.”
The suit accused Jackson of “fraudulent, malicious and oppressive conduct.”
Landis is best known for directing 1980s comedy “The Blues Brothers” and groundbreaking 1981 comedy-horror “An American Werewolf in London.”
Jackson, who throughout the 1980s was the world’s most bankable pop star, has led a reclusive existence since his acquittal for child sex abuse in 2005.
He is currently reported to be residing in Los Angeles, renting a 100,000-dollar-a-month estate.
