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Lao Hotels, Restaurants Are All Set to Welcome Tourists in the High Season

Image by tawatchai07 on Freepik

Hotels and restaurants in Laos have upgraded their standards to provide an even better service for tourists during high season, says an industry representative.

Lao Govt Sends its Condolence to India Following Bridge Collapse

Morbi Suspension Bridge collapsed on 30 October.

Lao leaders sent a message to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressing their deep sorrow after the suspension bridge collapse in the state of Gujarat.

Meth Addict with Knife Hovers Around Daycare Center in Thailand

CCTV footage from outside the daycare center Non Suwan sub district.

Following the devastating attack in Nong Bua Lamphu that claimed the lives of 38 people including 24 children, a man under the influence of the drug Methamphetamine was seen roaming around a daycare center in Non Suwan sub-district, Buriram province, northeast Thailand.

Hong Seh Motors Launches New Website For Affordable Car Leasing & Commercial EV Leasing Plans

SINGAPORE – Media OutReach – 4 November 2022 – Premier car leasing company in Singapore, Hong Seh Motors, is announcing the launch of their new website. With this announcement, Hong Seh Motors is heralding a new age in car leasing in Singapore.

Aspiring car owners are bogged down and intimidated by sky-high COE prices and other fees when buying a car. But Hong Seh Motors aims to make car rental more seamless and affordable for the everyday Singaporean.

This website will become an all-in-one platform for leasing some of the top car brands in the country. Those who want to lease a vehicle for an affordable monthly fee can now do so through this platform, allowing them to pick a make and model of their choosing.

Some car brands carried by Hong Seh Motors include BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, and Lexus. They also have the latest models, allowing drivers the chance to use newly-released vehicles for personal or corporate use.

As a Singapore first, Hong Seh Motors also offers electric van rental in Singapore. Businesses that need a more sustainable and eco-friendly mode of transport for commercial purposes will surely welcome Hong Seh Motors’ affordable EV rental packages. They can choose from several models from top EV brands, like DFSK and BYD.

Drivers can choose from two flexible car leasing packages: Lease-to-Own and Comprehensive Leasing. The first option allows them to buy out the car at the end of the lease.

Meanwhile, the Comprehensive Leasing Plan gives them a choice to renew the lease or swap the vehicle for another model after the lease.

Everything has already been covered by Hong Seh Motors — from the insurance and road tax to regular maintenance and servicing. Drivers need not worry about bidding for COEs, paying the road tax, or choosing a car insurance policy.

Instead, these flexible car leasing packages give them a chance to immediately drive their dream car on Singapore roads.

Simple, fast, and accessible. No other company does it better than Hong Seh Motors.

Hashtag: #HongSehMotors

About Hong Seh Motors

Hong Seh Motors was established 40 years ago in 1982 as a car dealership and leasing company for top-of-the-line luxury and performance cars in Singapore. It has since expanded its offerings by adding electric vehicles and other affordable car brands to its lineup.

Through car leasing, private individuals and businesses are offered a much more affordable way of navigating around Singapore’s major thoroughfares, as opposed to car ownership. Ultimately, Hong Seh Motors’ flexible plans set the gold standard when it comes to vehicle leasing in the Lion City.

Lao Govt Holds Ceremony to Return Remains of Missing US Soldiers

Photo credit: http://mofa.gov.la/

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs held a ceremony to hand over the remains of two soldiers who disappeared during the war in Laos at Vientiane’s Wattay Airport on Wednesday.

“Together, Restart from Heart” Tithe Ethical Consumption Movement 2022 Shopping Rewards Scheme, Pop-up Store, Workshop Support social enterprise with consumption

HONG KONG SAR – Media OutReach – 3 November 2022 – The 11th Tithe Ethical Consumption Movement (TECM) organised by the Fullness Social Enterprises Society (FSES) is themed with “Together, Restart from Heart” this year and the “Ethical Consumption Month” will be specially held in November 2022. Ms. Kelly Chen, who has been a keen supporter of the movement, continues her support as the Ambassador for the tenth consecutive year, starring in TECM promotional video and photoshoot. Starting from November 1st 2022, there will be a series of events including Shopping Rewards Scheme, Ethical Consumption Pop-up store, and social enterprise workshops for general public.

In the post pandemic period, the Ethical Consumption Month aims at encouraging the public to meet with social enterprises in the community, and promoting the concept of “consume to pay it forward”, thus creating positive social impacts via daily consumptions in local social enterprises. Not only high quality products and services enchants people, the social missions behind each social enterprises are also inspiring.

Key Activity 1 – Online and Offline Rewards

The Shopping Rewards Scheme is one of the highlights of Ethical Consumption Month. In November 2022, consumers will receive a coupon with both special discounts that can be used in physical stores and on TECM MALL (www.tecmmall.hk), when a purchase is made at designated social enterprises or on TECM MALL, with no minimal purchase amount.

Shopping Rewards Scheme

Date: November 1st to 30th, 2022
Details: www.tecm.hk/tc/shopping-rewards/srs2022

*Rewards are limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis and while stocks last.

Key Activity 2 – Ethical Consumption Pop-up Store

This year, FSES is delighted to collaborate with Joyful and Health Chinese Medicine Centre to hold an Ethical Consumption Pop-Up Store at their branch in Tseung Kwan O Plaza. There is an amazing line-up of brands that promote sustainable and healthy lifestyle. From hand-made batik dyeing headband to Chinese-cuisine sauces made by locally farmed vegetables, to pesticides-and-fertilizer-free teas, over 10 social enterprise brands with healthy and made-in-Hong-Kong products are here for you to buy. Visit the pop-up store every Saturday from November 1st 2022 and complete a simple mission to receive a special gift!

Ethical Consumption Pop-up Store

Date: November 1st to 30th, 2022
Time: Monday to Sunday 10:00am – 2:00pm; 3:00pm – 8:00pm
Location: Joyful and Health Chinese Medicine Centre (Shop 1-089, Level 1, Tseung Kwan O Plaza)

Ms. Kelly Chen, the Ambassador of TECM 2022, shot a promotional video for the “Ethical Consumption Month” earlier. She was deeply interested in the social enterprise workshops, and learnt to make the famous steamed glutinous rice cake (cha kwo) from the master of Time to Gold.

Key Activity 3 – Experience Social Enterprise Workshop

Social enterprise has far more to offer than competitive products. To demystify the great work of social enterprise, nothing is better than a direct engagement. Featured social enterprise workshops are specially offered at an incredible trial price of HK$11. The featured workshops include animal-shaped cha kwo making, coffee brewing, as well as eco-friendly cultivation of mushrooms. Not only can participants experience a hands-on session in making various products, but also to understand the fascinating stories of each social enterprise. The takeaways will definitely be more than just an ordinary purchase!

HK$11 Workshops by Social Enterprise

Date: November 26th, 2022
Time: Saturday 1pm – 2pm
Location: Room B, 3/F, Shun Luen Factory Building, 86 To Kwa Wan Road, To Kwa Wan, Kowloon
Register now: www.tecmmall.hk

Featured Workshops

  1. Time to Gold – Preserving traditional handicraft; fostering women empowerment and elderly employment (Original price: $288/ person)

    Speaking of traditional snacks, what pop up in your mind? Here is a new experience!

    Our granny master will offer hands-on teaching on using powder of natural fruit and vegetable as well as creativity to make adorable steamed glutinous rice cake (cha kwo). Apart from photogenetic products and instagramable snapshots, participants will also learn the Hakka’s traditional customs.

  2. FAIRTASTE – Advocating fair trade and organic food; diminishing poverty and environmental harm (Original price: $280/ person)

    A daily dose of coffee is essential for many. How can a day start without this tempting refreshment? Are you aware of the production chain behind the filter and cup? From the FAIRTASTE workshop, participants will be exposed to intensive coffee related-concepts, for instance flavours and aroma, preparation and brewing methods and etc. More importantly, through the stories of farmers in developing regions, maybe it is time to reconsider our daily refreshment choices.

  3. Urban Mushroom – Growing edible oyster mushrooms from recycled coffee grounds; sustainable local production (Original price: $220/ person)

    Kitchen waste goes to landfill, but what if we decide to add a twist to it? In order to tackle this avoidable waste problem, the Urban Mushroom workshop made use of the nutritious coffee grounds as the basis for planting. From packing an user-friendly mushroom growth kit, participants will understand the environmental and sustainable concept of setting up the local mushroom farm and the knowledge of mushrooms, meanwhile it is a good chance for urban people to observe the growth of the mycelium until harvest.

Hashtag: #豐盛社企學會 #社會企業 #社企 #良心消費 #十行一善 #兩不一多 #全城撐社企 #從心出發 #RestartFromHeart #EthicalConsumption

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.

About FSES

Fullness Social Enterprises Society (www.fses.hk) was set up in 2011 as a non-profit organisation. Its mission is to promote social entrepreneurship development and societal transformation in Hong Kong through a team of pracademic and knowledge volunteers. Its scope includes research, experiment, create, publish, educate, and provide consultation on social entrepreneurship across sectors. The goal is to develop a structured Social Entrepreneurship Body of Knowledge (SE-BoK) for Hong Kong.

About TECM

Organised by the Fullness Social Enterprises Society, TECM is a highly anticipated public education programme that brings together the government, business sector, volunteers, and community to drive ethical consumption and awareness to the sustainability of social entrepreneurship in Hong Kong. In the past decade, it has generated over HK$100 million of ethical consumption with the participation of over 400 social enterprises, corporations, and organisations.

Core values of TECM:

  • 10% Swap for Good: replacing “One Tenth” of people’s usual consumption with social enterprise products or services; and
  • 2 No 1 Yes:
    No Almsgiving – Consumers can enjoy equally good products/services from social enterprise.
    No Extra Spending – Consumers are encouraged to swift their regular purchase to social enterprise.
    Yes to Social Enterprise – Simply fulfilling one’s social responsibilities by meaningful consumption at social enterprises.

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Announcing NetApp BlueXP: The Unified Data Experience for the Evolved Cloud

NetApp BlueXP simplifies hybrid multicloud data storage with cost and performance optimization, security, and flexible consumption – all powered by state-of-the-art AIOps

SINGAPORE – Media OutReach – 3 November 2022 – NetApp® (NASDAQ: NTAP), a global, cloud-led, data-centric software company, today announced the availability of NetApp BlueXP, a unified control plane delivering a simple hybrid multicloud experience for storage and data services across on-premises and cloud environments.

Organizations today have increasingly moved to hybrid multicloud environments to accelerate their digital transformation and drive growth, even in uncertain times. But in managing these environments, companies face daunting challenges and inefficiencies that can impede innovation. With BlueXP, NetApp is leading the way to a more “evolved cloud” to simplify and automate critical operations across on-premises and public clouds in order to help organizations drive business impact and improve customer experience.

NetApp BlueXP allows users to manage their broader hybrid multicloud data estate, including on-premises unified storage and first-party native storage with the leading public cloud providers. Offering a simple, yet powerful experience driven by AIOps, BlueXP delivers integrated, broad data service capabilities to deploy, automate, discover, manage, protect, govern and optimize data, infrastructure, and the business processes that support them – with the flexible consumption options required in today’s cloud-led environment.

“Today’s cloud environments are complex. Organizations are looking for a better cloud experience – simpler, streamlined, governed, and optimized for performance and cost across their entire hybrid multicloud environment,” said Archana Venkatraman, Research Director, Cloud Data Management, IDC. “An ‘evolved cloud’ is one of the most grounded, AI-driven, and practical approaches to cloud management as a whole – and organizations will quickly benefit from migration to operations, to FinOps, to innovation.”

“With the launch of BlueXP, NetApp is uniquely positioned to help organizations unlock the promise of the cloud by making infrastructure, applications and data true assets to their business,” said George Kurian, Chief Executive Officer at NetApp. “By taking an evolved cloud approach, customers can integrate cloud into their architecture and operations, eliminate complexity and increase their speed of innovation to deliver quickly on the business outcomes that matter most.”

NetApp BlueXP capabilities include:

  • Unified Storage Management: The SaaS-delivered BlueXP global control plane gives a single point of visibility and management over wide-ranging hybrid multicloud environments. This includes the ability to manage NetApp AFF, FAS, StorageGRID, and E-Series on-premises storage, as well as the major clouds with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, Azure NetApp Files, Google Cloud Volumes Service and Cloud Volumes ONTAP, all in a single console.
  • AIOps-Driven Health: Integrated AI/ML-driven automation reduces manpower demands, resource loads, and risk profile, while AI-enabled health and status monitoring not only alerts of infrastructure and workload issues, but offers proactive guidance to avoid trouble scenarios. BlueXP integrates NetApp’s leading Active IQ technology for always-on telemetry across the hybrid multicloud.
  • Cyber Resilience: Unified control of data protection and security with an integrated zero-trust model. A single ransomware dashboard provides company-wide visibility into ransomware vulnerabilities with the ability to fix many issues automatically with a single click.
  • Governance at a Glance: A complete view of the digital estate to monitor compliance and permissions. The AI/ML capability audits both user and data level activity, immediately detecting anomalies and taking prescribed actions.
  • Seamless Mobility: Integrated data movers allow for copying, syncing, tiering, and caching data across all major clouds and the data center as easily as “drag and drop.” Integrated security and efficiencies ensure data is protected in transit and stored on the lower-cost storage tier possible.
  • Flexible Consumption: BlueXP allows customers to only pay for the capabilities they need, billed on usage. A Digital Wallet allows for licenses for data services to be easily interchanged as an enterprise’s needs change. NetApp Keystone, the leading Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) offering, is integrated into BlueXP to allow customers to manage their consumption-based data center storage side by side with their cloud storage.

“OpenText serves the majority of the Fortune 100 companies as customers, delivering enterprise-grade, cloud-native solutions and information management software that helps power their businesses,” said Mark J. Barrenechea, CEO and CTO, OpenText. “We are investing in centralizing systems to reduce complexity. As we help organizations move to the cloud, we are leveraging NetApp’s portfolio to actively monitor and manage our hybrid multicloud environment with a unified control plane, allowing us to efficiently onboard new customers to their cloud of choice in one seamless experience.”

“We are excited to deliver a whole new, unified cloud experience that is simple, secure, sustainable and cost effective,” said Sanjay Rohatgi, Senior Vice President and General Manager, NetApp Asia Pacific & Japan. “With BlueXP, our customers and partners in Asia Pacific can better compete in the hyper-dynamic digital economy of tomorrow and realize the full potential of a true hybrid multicloud world.”

NetApp BlueXP is the preferred method to manage NetApp ONTAP, NetApp’s industry-leading data management software, both in the cloud and on-premises. The latest release of ONTAP, announced today, contains over twenty major innovations including a new tamper-proof snapshot feature and integrated AIOps-driven anti-ransomware protection, making ONTAP the leading option for secure data storage. In addition, an expansion of NetApp’s innovative unified multi-protocol technology allows simultaneous NAS file and S3 object access to the same data, increasing the flexibility of ONTAP as a repository for massive data lakes used for today’s modern AI/ML pipelines.

Learn more about BlueXP and sign up for a free trial here.

Additional Resources

Hashtag: #NetApp

About NetApp

NetApp is a global, cloud-led, data-centric software company that empowers organizations to lead with data in the age of accelerated digital transformation. The company provides systems, software and cloud services that enable them to run their applications optimally from data center to cloud, whether they are developing in the cloud, moving to the cloud, or creating their own cloudlike experiences on premises. With solutions that perform across diverse environments, NetApp helps organizations build their own data fabric and securely deliver the right data, services, and applications to the right people—anytime, anywhere. Learn more at or follow us on , , , and .

NETAPP, the NETAPP logo, and the marks listed at are trademarks of NetApp, Inc. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Alan Brown steps down as Vistra Group CEO; Simon Webster to lead the next phase of growth for one of the world’s leading Fund and Corporate Service providers

HONG KONG SAR – Media OutReach – 3 November 2022 – Following a planned succession process leading into the next phase of growth, Vistra, one of the world’s leading Fund and Corporate Service providers announced today the appointment of Simon Webster as the new Chief Executive Officer for Vistra Group, effective 7 November 2022.

Simon Webster, Vistra Group CEO

Alan Brown shared, “It’s been a privilege to have shaped and led Vistra’s team of 5000 colleagues over the past few years. Watching such an extraordinarily diverse group of people come together to form One Vistra has been one of the highlights of my 42-year career. Together with my great leadership team, we have built an industry-leading global operating platform. It has been very rewarding to see this translating into strong organic growth. I wish Simon Webster every success as, with BPEA’s support, I truly believe Vistra will become the leading player in the Fund & Corporate Services Industry”.

Based in Vistra’s headquarters in Hong Kong, Simon will lead the business across 47 jurisdictions as it positions itself for ongoing growth as the global market leader in the Fund and Corporate Services industry. Simon will also join Vistra’s Board following Regulatory approval.

Commenting on the appointment, Simon Hinshelwood, Vistra Board Chair said, “Vistra has grown exponentially over the past seven years, both organically and through strategic M&A, and has transformed into a truly global platform and enterprise. Alan Brown (our outgoing CEO) leaves us with the thanks of the Board for his significant role in this transformation. He has also been at the forefront of our journey to become the pre-eminent global player in our industry with a resilient, scalable, enterprise-wide technology platform that delivers expert services to organisations and enterprises operating across multiple jurisdictions. In addition, Vistra’s global platform will also facilitate further accelerated growth by enabling Vistra to continue adding services and jurisdictions seamlessly, both organically and through M&A.

As a result, we are well positioned to become an even stronger market leading player and I am thrilled to welcome Simon Webster to the Vistra team to lead us through this next phase of our growth journey.”

With over 30 years’ experience, Simon was most recently the Group CEO of CPA Global, the world’s leading provider of intellectual property software, services, data and analytics for corporates and law firms. He is an experienced, global business leader who helped transform CPA Global from a single product, 250-person firm into the de facto intellectual property industry platform, including leading the acquisition and integration of multiple businesses around the world. In prior roles, he also led significant investment, offshoring and transformation programs across sales, product and support areas to deliver significant value creation with cultural and organisational change.

Simon Webster shared, “I am excited to join Vistra, a company I have admired for many years and have recognised as a global leader with a strong management team, expert professionals, and unparalleled client service. I look forward to working with the Board, the Executive Committee and colleagues around the world to take this incredibly strong platform and grow the business to new heights and to help both our colleagues and clients seize opportunity.

Hashtag: #Vistra

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.

About Vistra

Ranked in the Top 3 in the industry, Vistra is a global Fund and Corporate Service provider with more than 5,000 professionals in over 45 jurisdictions. Vistra ensures clients reduce risk and enhance efficiency through the provision of expert advisory and administrative support. Vistra’s resilient, scalable, enterprise-wide technology platform is a core enabler of global economic activity. The Market uses it to empower legal entities to work smarter, grow faster, act responsibly, protect capital and scale across borders.