Travel

Last year’s Seoul MICE Alliance meeting, a public-private coalition to enhance Seoul’s MICE industry [YONHAP] Voters chose Seoul as the Best MICE City of 2022 for the eighth year in a row in Global Traveler, a U.S. magazine for business travelers. MICE stands for meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions, a type of tourism that attracts large groups of people for business gatherings or retreats. According to the Seoul Metropolitan Government, Seoul was selected this year’s Best MICE City at the 19th annual GT Tested Reader Survey Awards held in Los Angeles, California, on Tuesday evening. Dubai won second place, followed by Singapore. Global Traveler has been hosting the awards every year to determine the best in a variety of travel-related categories, including MICE cities, airlines and hotels since 2014. For this year’s survey, the magazine accepted ballots from Dec. 14, 2021 to Sept. 30, 2022. The magazine did not comment on why Seoul was chosen as the best … [Read more...] about Global Traveler cites Seoul as best MICE city in the world

The entire population of a plane taking part in the mannequin challenge has been applauded online. In a video shared to TikTok by @toxicweapons on November 23, every passenger on the plane can be seen taking part in the internet trend, in which people stand completely still in various poses—like a mannequin. In the short clip, everyone from the passengers to the cabin crew is completely motionless, with poses ranging from fake phone calls to a fight. Since being posted, the footage has received 4.7 million views and more than 840,000 likes from TikTok users impressed by the travelers' dedication. What is the Mannequin Challenge? The mannequin challenge first went viral in October 2016. It was believed to have begun at Edward H. White High School in Jacksonville, Florida, where a group of teens shared footage of themselves to Twitter using the hashtag #mannequinchallenge. The trend soon went viral, with many people soundtracking their own mannequin challenges with the … [Read more...] about Laughter as cabin crew join plane passengers in the mannequin challenge

MAZATLÁN, Mexico — The tour guide’s voice dropped to a whisper as he pointed out the left side of his open-air taxi and said conspiratorially: “See that house? It belongs to Chapo.” The guide recovered his normal tone around the corner, well out of earshot of anyone who might be inside what he claimed was one of the beachfront hideaways of Mexico’s most wanted drug trafficker, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, who is known universally by the nickname El Chapo, or Shorty. Although Mazatlán markets itself as a seaside paradise in which the roughest things one might encounter are ocean swells, it is a beach resort with a dark side — one that many enterprising taxi drivers are exploiting with unauthorized “narco-tours.” Mexicans are fed up with their country’s unprecedented level of bloodshed as rival drug cartels clash with the authorities and among themselves. But the outrage is tinged by a fascination with the colorful lives of the outlaws. Ballads extolling the traffickers’ exploits, … [Read more...] about For Some Taxi Drivers, a Different Kind of Traffic

A bride-to-be's list of what she expects her bridesmaids to pay for has sparked a debate over wedding costs. A screengrab reveals the self-confessed "bridezilla" was debating whether the message she sent to her bridal party was "too harsh," after none of the women replied. In the message, she informs her bridesmaids they will have to foot the bill for their dress, shoes, hair and makeup—while also demanding they all have "natural" hair color. It seems the bride has a very specific vision that her attendants will need to stick to, as she also sent inspiration for the outfits. The post was shared to Reddit earlier this month by user Springflowers2016, although it's not clear whether she is one of the bridesmaids. "Bridezilla sends out this text and wonders why nobody responds," she captioned the post, which has been upvoted nearly 1,000 times. It reads: "I sent my bridesmaids a group message to make sure that everyone is on board with everything and NO ONE is responding. … [Read more...] about ‘Bridezilla’ Sends List of Demands to Bridesmaids, Sparks Debate Over Money

A father who eventually became frustrated with the way things were going on a family vacation he paid for was backed by fellow Reddit users on the popular "Am I the A**hole" forum for leaving and booking a hotel room for himself. "AITA for leaving my family in 'squalor' and going to a 'resort,'" u/Murky_Ad_193 asked in his post , which amassed more than 11,000 votes since it was published on Wednesday. He said he decided to pay for a vacation that included his immediate family and several in-laws. When things went downhill, u/Murky_Ad_193, who heard nothing but complaints, decided to book a room at a hotel. Difficult Family Members When dealing with difficult family members, a piece published by Psychology Today said it is not worth trying to "fix" them. "Sometimes it works, but often your efforts will not be rewarded," the outlet said. "In fact, trying to fix someone or make their life better may become a huge headache, since the more you do for them, the more they … [Read more...] about Internet Backs Dad Who Left ‘Ungrateful’ Family In ‘Squalor’ On Vacation

Emma Coronel Aispuro , the wife of the notorious Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo, is set to plead guilty this week to charges of helping her husband run his multibillion-dollar empire and then, after one of his arrests, escape in dramatic fashion from a high-security Mexican prison, according to a person familiar with the case. Ms. Coronel, 31, is expected to appear on Thursday morning in Federal District Court in Washington to enter her plea. She was taken into custody in February at Dulles International Airport, near Washington, after a nearly two-year investigation by U.S. law enforcement officials into her role as an accomplice to her husband, whose real name is Joaquín Guzmán Loera. Mr. Guzmán, a onetime co-leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel, was convicted in 2019 at a federal trial in Brooklyn and is now serving life sentence in the so-called Supermax in Colorado, the most secure federal prison in the United States. Ms. Coronel, his third — or possibly fourth — wife, … [Read more...] about El Chapo’s Wife Set to Plead Guilty to Helping Run Drug Empire

The small plane, filled with a ton of Colombian cocaine, ran out of fuel as it approached the secret airstrip near Agua Prieta, Mexico. Directed by a Mexican guide, the pilot landed the craft but couldn’t slow it down. Both of its engines had died. As the plane came skidding to a halt, the wheels snapped off, the guide told jurors on Monday. And the million-dollar cargo? “It was saved,” he said. That harrowing, but ultimately successful, flight was Miguel Angel Martínez’s first full mission as an employee for a newcomer in the drug trade, a young ambitious trafficker named Joaquín Guzmán Loera. Well before he earned a billion-dollar fortune and was known to the world as El Chapo, Mr. Guzmán was the leader of a scrappy narcotics start-up, shipping drugs for Colombia’s more powerful cartels and earning profits at a less-than-even split. In his first day as a witness at Mr. Guzmán’s drug conspiracy trial in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, Mr. Martínez described the early … [Read more...] about How El Chapo Became a Kingpin, According to a Witness

To have a crack at an international kingpin, undercover officers from Boston and New Hampshire went from the mountains of northern Mexico through the Caribbean to Spain, where they discovered operatives of the powerful Sinaloa cartel setting up new routes and new markets. When it finally ended last year, Operation Dark Water, as the investigation was known, was heralded as a milestone in the fight against the global drug trade. Police officers seized 750 pounds of cocaine and caught four cartel members, including a first cousin to its infamous kingpin, Joaquín (El Chapo) Guzmán Loera. But for the Sinaloa cartel, a criminal multinational corporation handling billions of dollars, the arrests proved only a minor setback, authorities acknowledged. The cartel has established channels of cooperation with so many European criminal groups, including Sicily’s Cosa Nostra and street gangs in Budapest, that business there continues to boom. On Saturday, Mexican and American authorities … [Read more...] about El Chapo’s Arrest Unlikely to Break Mexican Cartel

SRINAGAR, Kashmir — They come for the biggest tulip garden on the continent. They come for the snow-capped Himalayas. They come for the lakes. They come for the natural beauty that over time has enchanted Hindu kings, Mughal emperors, British colonialists and millions of regular people. Tourists have returned in droves to Jammu and Kashmir, in what India calls a sign of how it has turned things around in the disputed region, where violent separatists have been active for decades. Three years ago, in a stunning move , India’s Hindu nationalist government cemented control of the Muslim-majority area, saying that would finally bring peace. “The region was a terrorist hot spot,” Amit Shah, India’s powerful home minister and a key lieutenant of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, said recently. “Now it has become a tourist hot spot.” But what lures visitors to the area offers only a brief escape for many residents, who remain stuck in an old cycle of fear, desperation and uncertainty. … [Read more...] about A Surge in Tourists in Restive Kashmir, but ‘No Mental Peace’ for Residents

As an outbreak of Ebola swept through central Uganda in late September, government officials were willing to do anything to contain the virus except take one crucial step: impose a lockdown. This was radically different from their response during the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, when Uganda introduced some of the most restrictive shutdowns in Africa by closing borders, banning public transportation and shutting schools for two years — one of the longest such shutdowns worldwide . Officials in Uganda, a landlocked nation in East Africa, now acknowledge that they hesitated to impose similar restrictions in the recent Ebola outbreak because of the lingering anger, resentment and trauma over the strict Covid measures. They worried that another harsh response to an epidemic could spark protests, batter an economy already under strain and alienate a weary population inundated with misinformation about the dangers — and even the existence — of the Ebola virus. The initial … [Read more...] about ‘Ebola Could Have Wiped Us All’: Slow Lockdown Haunts Uganda