Word: boom
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Seat The man who has to cure the ill-effects of the casino boom is the man who started it: Edmund Ho, a 53-year-old former accountant who became Chief Executive of the Macau Special Administrative Region when it was returned to China by Portugal in 1999. When Ho took over, Macau was economically dormant. The gaming industry was a moribund monopoly controlled by tycoon Stanley Ho (who is unrelated to Edmund). Many residents of nearby Hong Kong stayed away from the city's seedy casinos because they feared they might be caught up in the occasional burst...
...process of revising labor laws to provide greater protection for local workers, and in July, the Finance Secretary, Tam Pak-yuen, implored the casino operators to promote Macanese to higher managerial positions. Backed by Beijing, Ho is also putting the brakes on Macau's casino boom. In April, he froze the issuance of new gaming concessions and imposed a moratorium on new casino projects, beyond those already in progress. In July, Macau's government announced it would tighten visa restrictions for mainland tourists, halving the maximum length of their stay from 14 days to seven and requiring special approval...
...These steps may slow the gambling boom, but to a cash-strapped populace, the sound of the clinking chips is simply too enticing to pass up. Lei Ka-ling, 20, opted out of college and enrolled instead in a free dealer-training course at the government-run Macao Tourism and Casino Career Centre. Lei says she had little choice. Her father, a hotel repairman, and mother, a janitor at a construction site, were barely able to support the family as Macau's costs rose. The salary Lei can earn as a dealer, roughly $1,900 a month, will instantly double...
Piracy declined in subsequent centuries, thanks to increasingly vigilant militaries and the development of the steam engine. But amid a drop in naval patrols and a boom in international trade following the end of the cold war, it has flourished anew--particularly in narrow choke points such as Asia's Strait of Malacca and the Gulf of Aden, which links the Red and Arabian seas. Buoyed by fast boats, fearsome weaponry and high-tech communications gear, pirates carried off 263 reported heists in 2007--28% of which occurred in the lawless waters off Nigeria and Somalia. With its vast coastline...
...sedimentary layer more recent than McCain's crowd but still more a part of the past than of the future. They had cleaned up the Reagan-era mess. They had actually balanced the budget and created a surplus. They had - contra voodoo - raised taxes and yet produced an economic boom. There was a fair amount of argument behind closed doors, I'm told, between the two groups that sparred at the dawn of the Clinton era, the deficit hawks and the populists. In the end, though, there was a general agreement on the need for more government activism. Obama...