This year we have a handful of TIFF films that we're hosting junkets for; junkets include interviews, premieres, and parties.
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Junkets are dangerous primarily because they cloud a journalist's judgment.
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It's a welcome respite from the blandness of most entertainment junkets.
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Our solutions won't be discovered on "apprenticeship junkets" to Germany and Switzerland.
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With her, it was eight years non-stop of videos and press junkets.
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The company has organized junkets, and paid doctors to give presentations extolling OxyContin's virtues.
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And both casinos and junkets can no longer do business with anyone using an alias.
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The junkets or specialists bring in the high-value Chinese rollers to the Macau casinos.
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He is a firm "no" to taxpayer-funded junkets abroad (not that anyone invites him).
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"During the press junkets for 'Frozen' one, Chris Buck lost his son," Anderson-Lopez said.
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Most junkets don't involve being interviewed by teenagers, but Benedict Cumberbatch doesn't play by the rules!
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The legislation is meant to improve the compliance of junkets, which often use underground banking networks.
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I've documented several instances of reporters attending junkets sponsored by Coca-Cola and the agrochemical industry.
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Junkets are middlemen who bring high rollers to play, extending them credit and collecting on their debts.
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The so-called junkets or specialists bring in the high-value Chinese gamblers to the Macau casinos.
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As is common practice with such junkets, Melas was the only CNN employee there at the time.
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Some ended up with a Chinese operator of junkets for gamblers (who denies knowing it was stolen).
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They are keeping the free lunch and snacks, ski and beach junkets, and even in-house yoga.
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In an homage to their feline costar, the pair have been organizing their press junkets at cat shelters.
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In press conferences, junkets, and interviews, Mulligan found herself having to defend her character over and over again.
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The studio already canceled the Hollywood premiere and press junkets for fear of violence by animal rights groups.
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As the entertainment producer at Chicago's WGN-TV, Tyra Martin spent hours interviewing Freeman at various press junkets.
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Taser cultivated chiefs and officers, treating them to junkets and conferences and hiring recently retired officials as consultants.
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A new bill would regulate junkets further, said Paulo Chan, director of Macau's Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau.
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"The school board was treating itself to junkets, traveling to remote vacation islands on school district money," she says.
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Analysts said the incident could have an impact on future gaming revenues with some junkets withdrawing capital following the announcement.
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Reckoning with reality Hedge fund operators still work out of trophy offices and enjoy perks like ski and beach junkets.
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"Eventually it's much better to develop your own database than rely on junkets," Ho, also Melco's CEO, said on Friday.
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Casino operators in the former Portuguese colony now have to verify and sign any large or suspicious reports submitted by junkets.
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Press junkets, she explained, are work, often more than actually making the movies they promote, as well as constant fashion opportunities.
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On Thursday, the mother of two took part in several press junkets including Access Hollywood to defend, even encourage, her statements.
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They shared private jokes at press junkets; took long walks in New York, and presented at the Nickelodeon's Kids' Choice Awards.
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Trump has accused Cruz of offering delegates trips, while others are predicting delegate-wooing junkets to Trump's Mar-a-Lago home.
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Sale of men's luxury watches have fallen as fewer officials head out on junkets although women's fashion items have fared better.
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That is, sellers could not deduct the costs of those gifts, junkets, dinners, and salespeople's salaries on their income tax returns.
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It means banning judges from going on fancy junkets where they might essentially get bribed by industries trying to grift consumers.
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Celebrities love to remind us that being famous comes with hard work: grueling shooting schedules, energy-draining performances, mind-numbing press junkets.
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LOS ANGELES — Comedy Central, Kids at Play and L/Studio are giving press junkets a comedic twist with the new series Junketeers.
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The so-called junkets are the commissioned middlemen hired by the casinos to bring in the wealthy VIP gamblers from mainland China.
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Why are our politicians enabled to travel as part of Chinese junkets that then result in real estate development across our cities?
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But as tighter regulatory controls and a lack of space crimps further development in Macau, junkets have been trying to expand overseas.
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"Don't think I can ever go back to doing regular press junkets," he wrote alongside a video yesterday, showing another interaction with fans.
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Casino and vice stocks took a hit when the Chinese government decided to crack down on corruption and junkets in Macau in 2014.
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On junkets, the government said initial findings suggest increased awareness of compliance since the Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau (DICJ) began its investigation.
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In the statement, the four organizations denounced Disney's ban of the LA Times from pre-release screenings, interview junkets, and other coverage opportunities.
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I can't come home from a long day at the Four Seasons [attending press junkets and screenings] to find decaying food on my doorstep.
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However they have been decimated by the slowdown over the past two years, with many small and mid sized junkets going out of business.
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But until 2012, the Wachowskis largely refused to participate in the press junkets, TV tours, and interviews that normally come with a filmmaking career.
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When something like #OscarsSoWhite breaks, they're usually not the ones sitting on folding chairs at press junkets and putting their words on the record.
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Two reporters, CNN's Chloe Melas and WGN-TV's Tya Martin, claim that Freeman made lewd and sexually suggestive comments to them during press junkets.
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Studios can buy influence through junkets and other perks, but it's always aimed at getting critics to like their product, not dislike someone else's.
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But, despite a series of reality-TV worthy press junkets hyping this fight, neither bots nor humans have been interested in paying face prices.
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Pratt's body transformation for Guardians of the Galaxy dominated the film's press junkets: dad bod to hot bod, chubby comedian to chiseled leading man, etc.
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Just weeks later, McFadden was confirmed to be a federal judge in Washington DC. Some DOJ officials have a bigger penchant from junkets than others.
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She remains the organization's most committed spokesperson, promoting each campaign the way other celebrities might promote a film: doing talk shows, doing junkets, traveling internationally.
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Over the years, a few writers have told me that freebies, junkets and discounted rates are "standard operating procedure" in the world of travel writing.
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He had been accused of failing to report gifts — including college scholarships for his son and vacation junkets — from people and corporations seeking government contracts.
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This by no means downplays Trump's incessant lying, the outrage of his draining the Treasury for his personal junkets, or his disturbing turn toward war.
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We're just big fans of it, watching all the docs and stuff, but also being in the world where you do press junkets like this.
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Through two seasons of awards shows and junkets, however, there was one star orbit that Brown had not yet visited: that of the Kardashian-Jenner fam.
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Democrats have spent time partying in Puerto Rico and scheduling political-posturing junkets to Afghanistan, all while refusing to negotiate with the president on border security.
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The medical profession has long wrestled with a similar issue: Can pharmaceutical-company gifts like speaking fees or conference junkets influence physicians to prescribe certain medications?
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Increased scrutiny and tighter regulatory policies in Macau have also hit sentiment and slammed junkets, middlemen who are employed by the casinos to bring in wealthy gamblers.
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They wonder why they should waste their time on such junkets, which offer little insight into Chinese intentions or how the two sides might defuse a crisis.
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To offset the tightened liquidity with Macau's junkets, the Las Vegas-based company has been doing more direct lending to Chinese high rollers in the VIP market.
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An entertainment reporter who is a member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association said Freeman made comments about her skirt and her legs during two different junkets.
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But while it's good that lobbyists can't take members on junkets or buy them fancy steak dinners anymore, in the aggregate, these reforms haven't really changed much.
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Macau's junkets have been operating in the territory since the 1970s as casino gambling is illegal in mainland China and there is no formal mechanism to recoup debt.
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Her Twitter and Instagram accounts are filled with pictures of press junkets and of her hanging out with the likes of Octavia Spencer, Chris Evans, and Mads Mikkelsen.
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The junkets take on the risk for casinos, settling all credit and debt for the players in Macau, Hong Kong and China via their own internal banking networks.
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To be clear, monthly comparisons with June 2016 were particularly easy given Macau was still reeling from Beijing's corruption crackdown on junkets for high-value Chinese VIP gamblers.
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It went on to slash the number of sales reps and overhaul its business globally, stopping sales-based incentives for drug reps and reducing paid junkets for doctors.
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The author has clocked enough hours in the trenches of press junkets and industry haunts to establish herself as a credible anthropologist of La La Land's dolce vita.
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This presents a natural experiment in the value of industry events, seen by some as essential for networking and deal making and by others as price-gouging junkets.
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But turnover from overseas visitors on gambling junkets, mainly wealthy Chinese, slumped 27 percent in the two months after the arrests and the decline was continuing, it said.
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VIP gambling delivered "less than 30 percent" of revenue at Crown, with 80 percent of that derived from VIP junkets from Asia, Star Chairman John O'Neill said in October.
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Over the years, he has managed to reveal extraordinarily little about himself in interviews, even toyed with the possibility of hiring an actor to play him at press junkets.
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TV's John Solomon that found senior officials used the junkets to take trips to a variety of locations, such as Panama City, Morraco, Paris, Qatar and São Paulo, Brazil.
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It might sound hard to believe because I've interviewed nearly every big name you can think of on red carpets, junkets, sit-downs, formal and informal settings, after-parties.
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As a decision approaches, Ms. Merkel has found herself caught between worried German automakers, who accompanied her on a dozen junkets to Beijing, and her own wary intelligence community.
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Ahead of Season 5, he and Murphy conduct leisurely half-hour interviews in a hotel restaurant, as opposed to the frenzied press junkets most new or returning shows require.
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Whether RNC viewers were digging the design for political press junkets or their big day, the dress was quite a hit: It sold out in just one hour, per Glamour.
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But whereas India has counted on this legacy to sustain its influence, China has busied itself with funding scholarships, think-tanks and junkets to China for Nepalese journalists and academics.
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" In a statement this week, Netflix responded to the Post article, saying, in part: "Promotional tactics like junkets, screenings and festivals are standard industry practice and not just for awards.
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Macau's new gaming regulator, Paulo Martins Chan, said the government was auditing junkets, middle men employed by casinos to lure big whale gamblers, to assess the size of their bad debts.
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A Paradise spokeswoman said the resort will also offer exclusive space for junkets to boost junket income, which it expects to make up 5 to 10 percent of initial casino revenue.
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She is in New York promoting "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot," her new film with Tina Fey, and Calvin Klein was to be her only New York Fashion Week show between press junkets.
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We took it to our favorite makeup artists (the ones who ready the likes of Tessa Thompson and Reese Witherspoon for red carpet events and extensive press junkets) to find out.
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She has observed that, when she makes the rounds to local media outlets or on cattle-call press junkets, she is repeatedly asked the same questions, many of them dumb ones.
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And the sheer number of men I know who come to press junkets freshly rolled out of bed when their female counterparts have been up since 4am going thru hair & makeup.
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"They want to show that they are not like before, so they invited us and showed us," said Aung Shin, who has been on at least 10 junkets to China since 2013.
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For years policy makers have taken expensive junkets to Germany and Switzerland to view their vaunted apprenticeship models – ones we'll never be able to replicate here for about a hundred different reasons.
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Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) and the chief of strategy for government watchdog Common Cause raised concerns this week about the use of junkets taken by senior Justice Department officials this year.
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Over the last six weeks, a parade of witnesses in federal court have described years of sordid and petty corruption — police commanders doing favors in exchange for junkets, prostitutes and luxury gifts.
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That means that the slice is already very small, and it's even more difficult given one big issue: the way studios grant access to press screenings and junkets to critics and journalists.
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First there was the stock interview series poking fun at the questions she's repeatedly asked on junkets, followed by the fake press conference she held to announce her album's title and release date.
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"The outspoken members of the Consumer Advisory Board seem more concerned about protecting their taxpayer funded junkets to Washington, D.C., and being wined and dined by the Bureau than protecting consumers," Czwartacki said.
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In the months since it first admitted how poorly it handled that situation, Zuckerberg has been on a merry-go-round of stops in Congress, EU Parliament, and press junkets to do damage control.
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Three entertainment reporters who spoke to CNN said Freeman made inappropriate remarks to them during press junkets, which are publicity events for journalists who cover new films, typically attended by the movie's biggest stars.
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After years of growth, Macau suddenly took a nosedive in 403 when the Chinese government cracked down on corruption, which brought a halt to soft briberies like Macau junkets, which were lucrative for casinos.
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After years of growth, Macau suddenly took a nosedive in 2014 when the Chinese government cracked down on corruption, which brought a halt to soft briberies like Macau junkets, which were lucrative for casinos.
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Not even after the Trump administration hit the generals where it really hurts—by cutting back on the training junkets to America that Pakistani army officers and their wives adore—have they moved an inch.
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Last September an MP from the far-right Sweden Democrats (SD), Pavel Gamov, managed to get kicked off one of these junkets by demanding that his hosts pay his bar tab and other untoward expenses.
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Lawrence Ho, head of Melco Resorts - with casinos in the Philippines and Macau - told Reuters he would be fine with junkets operating in his casinos using digital currencies, provided it was allowed by the regulator.
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He also knew that people in his district didn't like King's offensive statements and that King was off on international junkets, rather than serving on the Ag conference committee or holding local town hall meetings.
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In one chapter, according to Mr. Hamilton, the book asserts that senior Australian journalists were taken on junkets to China in order to "shift their opinions" so they would present China in a more positive light.
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In a conversation with one of the organizations offering me a trip, I asked why and was told that with Australian media outlets making cutbacks, junkets were often the only way they could cover certain issues.
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"The talent is there; the access and opportunity are not," Larson stated, explaining the lack of inclusion at press screenings and junkets and media outlets' lack of inclusion of women and critics of color in their ranks.
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Next came familiar anecdotes of Castro avoiding exploding cigars sent by the CIA, his bromance with Gabo (writer Gabriel García Márquez), press junkets to Cuba, and the usual bromides on the quality of Cuban healthcare and education.
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She doesn't do press junkets, and for most of the 224 years since she won a Best Actress Academy Award for playing Marge Gunderson, the tremendously pregnant, improbably cheerful police detective in "Fargo," she has refused interviews.
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Entertainment journalism poses more ethical problems than most with its paid movie and TV junkets to exotic locations, fancy meals and armies of publicists, managers and film studio staff who decide who gets access to glamorous celebrities.
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In fact, such superficial offerings as the paper's regular "36 Hours In _____" articles, which guide "travelers" on pass-through junkets through various target cities, help encourage the kind of consumerism-focused incursions that are killing places like Venice.
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The USD70m unsecured notes issuance does not immediately affect IPI's Issuer Default Rating of 'CCC' as the company's ratings are constrained by the higher VIP customer-receivable risks it faces due to the lack of junkets being licensed.
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MGM Cotai will open with around 177 mass gaming tables, according to analysts, with VIP gaming mostly handled by middlemen junkets set to launch by the end of the second quarter along with the resort's luxury mansion villas.
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Weissmann Junkets by The Hill Newspaper on Scribd More than half of respondents in a new Hill-HarrisX poll said legal immigrants who receive public assistance such as food stamps or Medicaid should be eligible for green cards.
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We want to know whether they have accepted free trips, junkets or press trips in the last three years, or taken assignments from publications that have negotiated a free or discounted rate on a hotel room or airfare.
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"If Mildred were alive now, I don't think she'd want to do any junkets, any of this nonsense, any of this hoopla," said Ms. Negga, on a day in which she joked that she had done 782 interviews.
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"There is plenty to blame for the miss, such as social unrest in Hong Kong ... tough year-on-year comparison, negative headlines around junkets, and macro headwinds," said DS Kim, an analyst at JP Morgan in Hong Kong.
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There's a lot of money on this table -- some $3 trillion -- money to market directly to patients, money to influence guidelines and money to buy off doctors (everything from medical education junkets, speakers bureaus, "research" funding, to outright kickbacks).
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They parceled out tickets to major sporting events, escorted influential officials on all-expenses-paid golf junkets, paid the tabs for lavish dinners and cozied up to politicians at Signatures, a restaurant Mr. Abramoff once owned on Pennsylvania Avenue.
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The gifted actor has made his (understandable) disdain for press junkets clear before—especially in this Funny or Die parody in which Kristen Stewart asks him all the alternatively personal and banal questions hackneyed journalists seem to resort to.
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There are smart little junkets in this book into everything from Japanese movies (Buruma became a film critic for The Japan Times) to the country's tattooing culture to its female elevator operators, about whom he made a documentary film.
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In the Senate, Republican leadership provided even less time to read and consider the legislation, waiving its debate rules to speed up consideration of the bill so that senators would not be delayed in leaving for their overseas junkets.
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He recalls with exasperation another interviewer from earlier in this day of press junkets for the band's new album, Still Cyco Punk After All These Years, saying they tried to bait him into a gaffe involving the Confederate flag.
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Receivables over 90 days — amounts owed to the casinos by gamblers or junkets — for Sands China, MGM China , Wynn Macau, Galaxy Entertainment, SJM Holdings and Melco Crown, doubled in 2015 with bad debts growing by 30 percent year on year.
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On top of filming episodes, Ivy's expected to be available for press junkets, photo shoots and pretty much anything else needed from her or likeness to promote the show -- including up to 10 personal appearances for media and the like.
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"In fact, Mnuchin's extensive and costly travel junkets — including viewing a solar eclipse [while traveling] onboard a military aircraft — strongly suggests another motive for the redactions: avoiding embarrassing public scrutiny of his costly travel jaunts at taxpayer expense," he added.
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She and Ms. Colman were first introduced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the writer and actress behind television series like "Fleabag" and "Killing Eve," while Ms. Colman was preparing for junkets for "Murder on the Orient Express" at the end of 2017.
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JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Top Academy Award nominees will have a politically charged gift in their swag bag this year - a luxury trip to Israel paid for in part by a government that hopes such celebrity junkets will offset news coverage of the country's troubles.
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"Macau relies on people bringing a lot of cash into the market, it also relies on junkets who operate by lending money to mainland residents ... there are also visa restrictions that can be used to further open or close the market," Bumazhny cautioned.
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He has randomly adopted British accents during junkets, showed up to a radio interview wearing a massive grill that made him lisp, sported a green wig to a glitzy screening, and at last year's Emmys, sat down on the red carpet and glowered.
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His testimony in one of the trials helped expose years of sordid and petty corruption within the New York City Police Department — officials who had provided favors in exchange for junkets, prostitutes and expensive gifts — that reached the highest echelon of the department.
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Between child-acting gigs and press junkets that the six siblings did for their 1994 ABC sitcom, their mother, Janet Smollett, made sure the children played sports and read about figures like Malcolm X and Langston Hughes, she told The Los Angeles Times in 1994.
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MGM Cotai, operated by the company's Macau unit MGM China , will open with around 177 mass gaming tables, according to analysts, with VIP gaming mostly handled by middlemen junkets set to open by the end of the second quarter along with the resort's luxury mansion villas.
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Eager to shed the industry's shady image and avert scrutiny from regulators, particularly in the United States which alleges that many junkets have ties to organized crime and facilitate illicit money flows, companies like Suncity have tried to diversify into industries such as dining and film.
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Not in the flesh, obviously, but inside Ashley Too, who explains that in the process of creating her personality, Ashley's entire brain was copied onto the cloud, with a firewall sectioning off anything except the part of her that deals with press junkets and album promotion.
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Theron resisted that push — which, according to people I spoke to who've worked junkets and red carpets with her, is part of the reason that she's known as no-nonsense, with little time for small talk, niceties, bullshit, or other types of performative posturing expected of celebrities.
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It may perhaps seem like a gimmicky setup, but the show has built a space of integrity and purity of conversation, driven both by Evans's perspicacity and by the personalities of his guests, who are so often ground down into corporate batter by traditional press junkets.
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Most of my chats with mega-stars over the years have been at press junkets (where celebrities meet with journalist after journalist in beige-colored, five-star hotels for 15-minute increments) or parties where I'd have maybe five minutes to coax a good quote out of a subject.
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To begin with, the major bowl games and the playoff occur a month after the conference title games, and with N.F.L.-bound stars increasingly sitting them out rather than risk injury in games that have historically existed as warm-weather junkets for well-heeled friends of the program.
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As he got his early breaks in a television mini-series and Disney's 1992 hockey comedy "The Mighty Ducks," and did press junkets for a short-lived ABC sitcom starring him and his five siblings, Mr. Smollett was also steeped in causes like AIDS activism and ending apartheid.
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You know the rest of the story, or else you know its images: The white Bronco idling down an empty L.A. freeway, the huddle of defense attorneys, the press junkets and comic-relief characters, the seemingly endless taxpayer-funded soap opera that gradually played out on live TV, and, finally, the acquittal.
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"It's not my first time in Paris — I was here last year to shoot a campaign — but it is my first time to a couture show, and it's beyond exciting to be here," she said, adding that the rest of her trip would be taken up with press junkets and photo shoots.
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Once one of the most prominent Republican lobbyists in the capital, known for flying congressmen to global junkets on a private jet, his spectacular downfall led to a three-and-a-half year stint in federal prison where he wasn't even allowed to hold enough change in his pocket to operate the vending machines.
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The shows include a live morning broadcast, followed by multiple breaking news segments in the afternoon that explore entertainment news and what it means to the viewers; ongoing film and TV reviews, the No. 1 most requested addition by ScreenJunkies' fans; and on-location coverage from Hollywood sets, press junkets and red carpet premieres.
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Sanders 'Going After Every Last Vote' Ahead of Key Tuesday Primaries Now Director of Arts and Culture, Calderin has helped hook the campaign up with the likes of entertainer Harry Belafonte, activist and author Dr. Cornel West and actress Susan Sarandon, who have been let loose to stump solo and do press junkets for Sanders.
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" And an editorial about Larson's statements at the pop culture site Black Girl Nerds, which reports from festivals around the world and is listed on Rotten Tomatoes, noted that its publication has "had its fair share of pushback from publicists," citing being "ghosted from studio publicists when it comes to set visit opportunities and press junkets.
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The junkets have taken senior DOJ officials and front-line agents to some of the world's most desirable locations — Sao Paulo, Brazil, in February, Panama City in March, Morocco in May, and Paris in October, to name a few — as well as exotic locations such as the scenic Indian Ocean island of Mauritius and the glamorously modern Arabian Peninsula city of Dubai.
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" He'll do the red carpets, the premieres, and the award junkets, and then return to his home in a quaint, quiet suburb of Seattle, Washington, and again start turning over ideas in his head for his next story: "I'm quite happy to be working in short fiction, and I don't think I need to leave it in order to find ways to stretch myself.
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Today I celebrate Cully, as well as my cousin Curtis, Uncle Steve, Uncle Skip, second Cousins, Joey and Alex, besties Jared and Jeffrey, all those I've fished [or] hunted with, those who've blessed me with their challenge coins as I've encountered them on press junkets and in my travels, the many in the film industry working both in front of and behind the cameras.
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In the same instant that I am mentally chastising myself for being that girl, the Keeping Up With the Joneses star flops into a chair, swings her legs over the arm with total disregard for potential undergarment exposure, begs me to forgive her for taking off the shoes "that are killing her," and waves off the drink service commonly offered to and accepted by actors at press junkets.
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Disney recently announced that it would be using Ozo cameras for many of its 360-degree VR initiatives, but thus far they've been been bland promotional tools, taking audiences into a movie junket roundtable (spoiler alert from those of us that cover junkets: most of the time they're boring and generic), and the red carpet arrivals of The Jungle Book (second spoiler alert: nothing's less exciting than watching famous people walk to a movie you can't see).
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"In one breath he begged generous donors to save Amer-I-Can and the Peacemakers Alliance, and in the next he stole that money to support his lifestyle and his gambling junkets in Cleveland, Florida, and Las Vegas, using the charity's account as his own ATM," Rendon said Prosecutors said that from 2010 to 2015, Rucker withdrew about $48,000 from the Amer-I-Can bank account while at casinos across the country to pay off gambling debts.
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All the necessary pieces have been in play: industries from which to obtain a steady supply of precursor chemicals and pharmaceutical products; off-the-grid territory controlled by ethnic armed groups where production can be hidden and protection provided; proximity to lucrative pre-existing and ready to develop markets; great infrastructure to move product quickly; loosely regulated high cashflow businesses like casinos and junkets to launder piles of cash; compromised governments and police forces that are not candid with each other and do not cooperate effectively; and virtually no health and social response to counter the use and harmful impacts of an ever-expanding supply.
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