The most visited cities around the world

February 13, 2022

No matter what travel trends crop up, tourists still return to the same tried-and-tested places they know they’re bound to love.

The Mastercard Global Destination Cities Index 2019, ranks 200 cities based on how many international overnight visitors they’re set to receive this year.

For many people, off-the-beaten-path travel is more appealing than heading to a city rammed with people. The numbers, however, show tourists are still flocking to the same spots year in and year out.

The index shows the number of international overnight visitors in these cities growing by a whopping 76% since 2009 — but in recent years, the trends look pretty similar.

Here are the 19 most visited cities around the world in 2019:

Bangkok — 22.78 million
Paris — 19.1 million
London — 19.09 million
Dubai, United Arab Emirates — 15.93 million
Singapore — 14.67 million
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia — 13.79 million
New York City — 13.6 million
Istanbul — 13.4 million
Tokyo — 12.93 million
Antalya, Turkey — 12.41 million
Seoul, South Korea — 11.25 million
Osaka, Japan — 10.14 million
Mecca, Saudi Arabia — 10 million
Phuket, Thailand — 9.89 million
Pattaya, Thailand — 9.44 million
Milan, Italy — 9.10 million
Barcelona, Spain — 9.09 million
Palma de Mallorca, Spain — 8.96 million
Bali, Indonesia — 8.26 million

Source: FantasticRoutes.com

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How do I pick a life insurance company?

Roughly 1,000 life insurance companies sell life insurance in the U.S., but many are members of groups of companies and so aren’t really competitors with each other. Having separate companies enables a group to offer its products through separate distribution channels, to more efficiently meet the regulatory requirements of particular states, or to achieve other organizational goals. There are an estimated three hundred company groups. Moreover, not every group has a company licensed to operate in each state. As a general rule, you should buy from a company licensed in your state, because then you can rely on your state insurance department to help if there’s a problem. And if the insurance company becomes insolvent, your state’s life insurance guaranty fund will help only policyholders of companies it has licensed. To find out which companies are licensed in any state, contact that state’s state insurance department. There are several other points to keep in mind when selecting a life insurance company: Product – most, but not all, companies offer a broad range of policies and features, so choose a company that offers the product and features that meet your needs. Identity – life insurance company names can be confusing, and different companies can have similar names. Life insurance company names often use words that suggest financial strength (such as Guaranty, Reserve, or Security), financial sophistication (such as Bankers, Financial, or Investors, maturity (such as First, Pioneer, or Old), dependability (such as Assurance, Reliable, Trust), fairness (such as Beneficial, Equitable, or Peoples), breadth of operations (such as Continental, National, or International), government (such as American, Capital, or Republic), or well-known and respected Americans (such as Jefferson, Franklin, or Lincoln). Be sure you know the full name, home office location, and affiliation (if any) of any company you are considering (for an example, click here). Financial Solidity – life insurance is a long-term arrangement. There is no guarantee for life insurance policyholders similar to that provided for bank accounts by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Select a company that is likely to be financially sound for many years, by using ratings from independent rating agencies. Market ethics – some life insurance companies subscribe to the principles and codes of conduct of the Insurance Marketplace Standards Association, a nonprofit organization that promotes ethical conduct in life insurance marketing. Advice and service – for many people, life insurance is a strange, complex product, so that it helps to deal with a representative with whom you can communicate and who is attentive to your needs. This might be connected to the selection of a life insurance company because some agents represent only one or a very few life insurance companies. See How do I select a life insurance agent? Claims – you may want to check a national claims database to see what complaint information it has on a company. Also, your state insurance department will be able to tell you if the insurance company you are considering doing business with had many consumer complaints about its service relative to the number of policies it sold. Premium and cost – The premium is the amount you pay the company for the life insurance contract with all of its benefits. Even for a given death benefit and type of insurance (e.g., term life), the premium can vary widely among companies, either because some companies’ policies have features that others don’t, or because some charge more than others for the same coverage. So the first step in comparing policies is to make sure you compare similar insurance plans, based on: – Your age – The type of policy and policy features – The amount of insurance you are purchasing The premium for the policy isn’t the same as the cost of the protection portion of the policy. One policy might have a higher premium but also offer more benefits (for example, it might pay policy dividends) than another. Or both might promise dividends, but in different amounts at different points in time. In each case, the higher-premium policy might have a lower cost of protection. How can you tell what a policy’s cost is? Companies should tell you a policy’s Net Payment Cost Index and its Surrender Cost Index. Use the Surrender Cost Index if you’re thinking of keeping the insurance only for a specific period of time; use the Net Payment Cost Index if you expect to keep the policy indefinitely. Generally, the lower the cost index, the better.
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What you need to know about Finland, Sweden and NATO

Finland is on the cusp of joining NATO while Sweden is on the verge of following suit. Here’s what you need to know about how the war in Ukraine pushed the two Nordic states closer to the US-backed alliance, and what comes next. Why haven’t Finland and Sweden already joined NATO? While other Nordic countries like Norway, Denmark, and Iceland were original members of the alliance, Sweden and Finland did not join the pact for historic and geopolitical reasons. Both Finland, which declared independence from Russia in 1917 after the Bolshevik revolution, and Sweden adopted neutral foreign policy stances during the Cold War, refusing to align with the Soviet Union or the United States. For Finland, this proved more difficult, as it shared a massive border with an authoritarian superpower. To keep the peace, Finns adopted a process some call “Finlandization,” in which leaders acceded to Soviet demands from time to time. Both countries’ balancing acts effectively ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. They joined the European Union together in 1995 and gradually aligned their defense policies with the West, while still avoiding joining NATO outright. Each country had different reasons for avoiding signing up for the NATO pact in tandem with the EU. For Finland, it was more geopolitical. The threat to Russia is more tangible thanks to the two countries’ shared 830-mile border. “Finland has been the exposed country, and we’ve been the protected country,” former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in a joint interview alongside former Finnish prime minister Alexander Stubb. While an independent nation, Sweden’s geography puts it in the same “strategic environment” as its liberal democratic neighbors, Bildt said. Finland and Sweden have enjoyed a close partnership for decades, with Stockholm viewing its decision to refrain from joining NATO as a way to help keep the heat off Helsinki. Now, however, Sweden is likely to follow Finland’s lead. “We share the idea that close cooperation will benefit both of us,” current Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson said at a news conference last month alongside her Finnish counterpart, Sanna Marin. What does NATO membership entail? The reason most countries join NATO is because of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which stipulates that all signatories consider an attack on one an attack against all. Article 5 has been a cornerstone of the alliance since NATO was founded in 1949 as a counterweight to the Soviet Union. The point of the treaty, and Article 5 specifically, was to deter the Soviets from attacking liberal democracies that lacked military strength. Article 5 guarantees that the resources of the whole alliance — including the massive US military – can be used to protect any single member nation, such as smaller countries that would be defenseless without their allies. Iceland, for example, has no standing army. Bildt said he doesn’t see new big military bases being built in either country should they join NATO. He said that joining the alliance would likely mean more joint military training and planning between Finland, Sweden, and NATO’s 30 current members. Swedish and Finnish forces could also participate in other NATO operations around the globe, such as those in the Baltic states, where several bases have multinational troops. “There’s going to be preparations for contingencies as part of deterring any adventures that the Russians might be thinking of,” Bildt said. “The actual change is going to be fairly limited.” Why does Russia loathe NATO? Russian President Vladimir Putin sees the alliance as a bulwark aimed at Russia, despite the fact that it had spent much of the post-Soviet years focusing on issues like terrorism and peacekeeping. Before Putin invaded Ukraine, he made clear his belief that NATO had edged too close to Russia and should be stripped back to its borders of the 1990s, before some countries that either neighbor Russia or were ex-Soviet states joined the military alliance. Ukraine’s desire to join NATO, and its status as a NATO partner — seen as a step to eventual full membership — was one of the numerous grievances Putin cited in an attempt to justify his country’s invasion of its neighbor. The irony is that the war in Ukraine has, effectively, given NATO a new purpose. “Article 5 is back in the game, and people understand that we need NATO because of a potential Russian threat,” Stubb said in an interview with CNN before the invasion. Why the war in Ukraine changed everything Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the final straw that pushed Sweden and Finland to pull the trigger on NATO membership. If the Kremlin was willing to invade Ukraine, a country with 44 million people, a GDP of about $516 million, and an armed force of 200,000 active troops, what would stop Putin from invading smaller countries like Finland in Sweden? “Everything changed when Russia invaded Ukraine,” Marin said in April. “People’s mindset in Finland, also in Sweden changed and shifted very dramatically.” Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February, public support for joining NATO in Finland has leaped from around 30% to nearly 80% in some polls. The majority of Swedes also approve of their country joining the alliance, according to opinion polls there. “Our NATO membership was decided on the 24th of February, at 5 o’clock in the morning, when Putin and Russia attacked Ukraine,” Stubb said. “Finland and Sweden would not have joined without this attack.” Officials in both Sweden and Finland have also expressed frustration that, in the lead-up to the war in Ukraine, Russia attempted to demand security guarantees from NATO that the alliance stop expanding eastward. Such a concession, however, would have effectively given Russia the power to dictate the foreign policies of its neighbors by taking away their ability to choose their own allies and partners. Russia, Swedish Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist told CNN, wants “real influence in the security choices in Europe.” “They want an influence over the countries in the neighborhood. And that is totally >>Read more
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Luke Shaw admits Manchester United were ‘awful’ in the first half of their victory at AC Milan

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What is burial insurance?

“Burial insurance” usually refers to a whole life insurance policy with a death benefit of from $5,000 to $25,000. As its nickname implies, people buy this type of policy to provide money for funeral and burial costs for themselves and/or family members. It is possible to buy a policy after answering a few health-related questions on the application and with no medical exam. Premiums are payable weekly or monthly. The premium is usually collected at the policyowner’s home or workplace, and the premium is usually a small round number, such as $2 or $3 per week; the death benefit is whatever that premium will buy given the insured’s current age. For example, a $3 per week premium might buy a $6,000 death benefit for a 36-year-old man or an $18,000 death benefit for a 9-year-old boy. Burial policies may be designed to cover one person or everyone in a family. Under some state laws, funeral homes may be licensed to sell burial insurance, but it is mainly sold through brokers and agents of insurance companies licensed to sell life insurance. An approach that is similar to burial life insurance (and sometimes called burial or “pre-need” insurance) is pre-payment of your funeral arrangements. Under this program, you may select the funeral home, type of service, casket (or cremation), flowers, headstone, burial plot, the cost of digging and filling the grave, and other items, and lock in the prices for them by paying in advance.
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‘Cookies’ track your every move online. Now there’s a fight over what should replace them

For decades, “cookies” have been tracking you around the web. They’re the snippets of code that uniquely identify your browser and allow those shoe ads to follow you from site to site after you visit an online storefront. Soon, their time may be up. Third-party cookies have increasingly fallen by the wayside as the public has become more protective of privacy rights in an age of algorithms and data. Some major browsers including Firefox and Safari now block third-party cookies by default, further reducing their usefulness to advertisers. And Google has already said it’s planning to do the same in its browser, Chrome. But last week Google (GOOGL) went further, announcing it will soon stop tracking individual people’s web browsing altogether for advertising purposes when Chrome finally drops third-party cookies. If that sounds like a big deal, that’s because it is. In a blog post explaining the change, Google said that once tracking cookies are eventually blocked by default on Chrome, the company won’t build or support browser technology designed to perpetuate individual-level data tracking. The announcement laid out Google’s intentions for what comes after the death of the third-party cookie, something it and many others in the industry had been anticipating for years. The future of tracking-based web advertising, Google argued, will be more abstract, relying less on an individual’s browser history and more on what groups of internet users may be viewing at any given time. Given Google’s enormous role in the advertising world and its control of the world’s most popular web browser, the company has the potential to determine how the next generation of ad technology works. But Google’s vision is not the only one. Sensing that change may soon be on the horizon, privacy advocates and others in the industry have put forth different ideas about how the future should unfold. At the same time, policymakers are erecting new regulations and questioning Google’s dominance in ways that could have a significant impact on the company’s ability to carry out its plan. A more anonymous way of tracking? To understand what Google’s pitching, it helps to think about Facebook. Facebook also makes its money by serving ads. It doesn’t directly sell user information to advertisers; instead, it offers advertisers the opportunity to target ads to certain categories of Facebook users based on that data. Slicing and dicing people’s identities by their relationship status, the pages they’ve liked and even the content they click let Facebook sell access to highly specific groups. The system being developed by Google and others in standards-setting forums is based on the same principle, according to policy experts. Brands would be able to advertise to “cohorts” of internet users who share similar traits as defined by an algorithm. But unlike today, the marketers wouldn’t have access to specific data about individual members of the cohort. The approach being championed by Google would theoretically give users more power than Facebook’s model. Rather than centralizing all user data under one roof, internet users’ web history would remain stored in their own browsers or on their own devices. Depending on which version of this idea is implemented — there are many — users could have settings that let them control what information their browser shares with the world. Ads for shoes and camping gear might still follow you around the internet this way, but advertisers would now be blasting those ads to you and thousands of others as a group, not as an individual. That concept, which Google is currently testing, is designed to take the place of third-party tracking cookies, which can track you from site to site and develop a highly detailed picture of your browsing history for advertising purposes. “It fundamentally creeps people out,” said David Chavern, president and CEO of the News Media Alliance, a trade association representing news publishers. So if you’re a tech giant like Google whose business depends on user tracking, Chavern said, “you want to be ahead of these curves.” Privacy advocates are wary Google says its vision of the future helps improve user privacy while still offering advertisers the same ability to target audiences. “Advertisers don’t need to track individual consumers across the web to get the performance benefits of digital advertising,” the company argued in its blog post. “Advances in aggregation, anonymization, on-device processing and other privacy-preserving technologies offer a clear path to replacing individual identifiers.” Some privacy experts agree that the Google-backed proposal would be an improvement over the status quo — at least in theory. “For me, it’s a good step and a good signal, but I’d want to see the final package of solutions,” said Ashkan Soltani, an independent privacy and security researcher and a former chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission. One of the most important factors to watch, Soltani said, is how the user controls are designed. Do they offer a one-click mechanism for users to opt-out of all data sharing? Can users pick and choose what types of data to share with advertisers? Are the controls easy for an average person to find and use? Others are more sceptical, arguing that the proposal just trades one form of invasive monitoring for another. “Google, please don’t do this,” wrote the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, in a blog post. In the post, EFF technologist Bennett Cyphers argued that depending on how small each cohort is and the ability for clever companies to cross-reference that data with other available information — such as your email address — it may well be possible for third parties to figure out who you are, anyway. “We should imagine a better world without the myriad problems of targeted ads,” Cyphers wrote. What the ad industry wants Some in the advertising industry are working on an alternative to Google’s approach. A competing standard being developed under the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media — a group comprised of the Interactive Advertising Bureau Tech Lab, many ad-tech companies, Unilever, Ford, IBM and others — >>Read more
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