A major new airport to serve Cambodia's capital and boost tourism is due to open in July
KANDAL, Cambodia (AP) — Cambodia expects that its new airport serving the capital will open in July, a project official said Friday, in a major step forward in boosting the country's lucrative tourism sector, whose growth was interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.
Work on Phnom Penh's new airport, officially known as the Techo International Airport, began in 2019, covering an area of 2,600 hectares (6,425 acres) located at the border of Kandal and Takeo provinces, about 30 kilometers (19 miles) south of the capital.
'I think the TIA airport here is going to be launched in the soft opening in July 2025, and we believe that so many passengers are waiting and they really want to come in to see this new airport,' said Charles Vann, director of the airport's project steering committee, during a media tour.
The new airport is a $1.5 billion joint venture between the Cambodian government and the Overseas Cambodian Investment Corp. It's being built by the China Construction Third Engineering Bureau Group Co., Ltd.
The architects for the airport are the British firm Foster + Partners, whose website says its 'design embodies a strong sense of place' and is 'responsive to the tropical climate.' The terminal building sits under what is described as a single overarching roof canopy that is a lightweight steel grid shell, 'with an innovative screen that filters daylight and illuminates the vast terminal space.'
Construction is being undertaken in three phases. Initially, the airport is expected to be capable of handling up to 13 million passengers a year, with capacity increased up to 30 million passengers after 2030, and then up to 50 million passengers in 2050.
It will be the second major airport in Cambodia to open in the space of two years. In 2023, the Chinese-financed Siem Reap-Angkor International Airport began operations in the northwestern province of Siem Reap, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) east of the centuries-old Angkor Wat temple complex, the country's major tourist attraction.
Tourism is one of the main pillars supporting Cambodia's economy. According to the Ministry of Tourism, Cambodia received around 6.7 million international tourists in 2024, a 23% increase over 2023.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Hamilton Spectator
29 minutes ago
- Hamilton Spectator
One year from World Cup opener, FIFA leaves questions unanswered on tickets and security
NEW YORK (AP) — A year from the largest World Cup ever, there has been no announcement on general ticket sales, prices for most seats, location of a draw or security arrangements as FIFA has mostly avoided disclosing details of an event set for 16 stadiums across the United States, Mexico and Canada. There is uncertainty about whether fans from some nations will be welcome — 11 of the venues are located in the U.S., where all matches will be played from the quarterfinals on. Security is a concern, too. At the last major soccer tournament in the U.S., the 2024 Copa America final at Miami Gardens, Florida, started 82 minutes late after spectators breached security gates. 'That was certainly a reminder and a wake-up call if anybody needed it that those types of things are going to be used in terms of the ultimate assessment of whether this World Cup is successful,' said former U.S. defender Alexi Lalas, now Fox's lead soccer analyst. U.S. President Donald Trump's travel ban on citizens from 12 nations exempted athletes, coaches, staff and relatives while not mentioning fans. Vice President JD Vance made what could be interpreted as a warning on May 6. 'Of course everybody is welcome to come and see this incredible event. I know we'll have visitors probably from close to 100 countries. We want them to come. We want them to celebrate. We want them to watch the game,' he said. 'But when the time is up they'll have to go home. Otherwise they'll have to talk to Secretary Noem,' he added, speaking alongside Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. Back in U.S. for first time in 32 years The 1994 World Cup sparked the launch of Major League Soccer with 12 teams in 1996, and $50 million in World Cup profits seeded the U.S. Soccer Foundation, tasked with developing the sport's growth. MLS now has 30 teams, plays in 22 soccer specific stadiums and has club academies to grow the sport and improve talent. Next year's tournament will include 104 games , up from 64 from 1998 through 2022, and the 11 U.S. stadiums are all NFL homes with lucrative luxury suites and club seating. It also will be the first World Cup run by FIFA without a local organizing committee. 'The legacy initiative of 2026 is around how we ensure that soccer is everywhere in this county,' U.S. Soccer Federation CEO JT Batson said. 'How do we ensure that every American can walk, ride their bike or take public transit to a safe place to play soccer? How do we make it to where every school in America has soccer accessible to their students? And how do we make it to wherever every American can truly see themselves in the game?' Interest in soccer has vastly increased in the U.S., with England's Premier League averaging 510,000 viewers per match window on NBC's networks last season and the European Champions League final drawing more than 2 million viewers in each of the past five years on CBS. However, CBS broadcast just 26 of 189 Champions League matches on TV in 2024-25 and streamed the rest. MLS drew about 12.2 million fans last year, second to 14.7 million in 2023-24 for the Premier League's 20 teams, but MLS has largely disappeared from broadcast TV since starting a 10-year contract with Apple TV+ in 2023 . Apple spokesman Sam Citron said the company does not release viewer figures. In a fractured television landscape, different deals were negotiated by FIFA, UEFA, MLS, the NWSL, the USSF and the five major European leagues. 'You basically have over 2,800 game windows per season aired in the United States and so that requires distribution largely on streaming platforms like Paramount+ or ESPN+, but it's difficult for new fan adoption and it makes reach kind of challenging,' said Gerry Cardinale, managing partner of RedBird Capital Partners, which holds controlling interests in AC Milan and Toulouse and owns a non-controlling stake of Fenway Sports Group, parent of Liverpool. 'Kids today are getting weaned on Premier League football and Serie A football, and when you watch that as a product, it's hard for MLS to compete.' 1994 World Cup set attendance record The 1994 World Cup, a 24-nation tournament, drew a record 3.58 million fans for 52 matches. Ticket prices ranged from $25-$75 for most first round games and $180-$475 for the final at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. FIFA, which has about 800 people working at an office in Coral Gables, Florida, says it will announce information on general tickets in the third quarter. It wouldn't say whether prices will be fixed or variable. Hospitality packages are available on FIFA's website through On Location. For the eight matches at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, including the final on July 19, prices range from $25,800 to $73,200 per person. Variable ticket pricing possible FIFA appears to be using variable pricing for this year's Club World Cup , played at 12 U.S. stadiums from June 14 to July 13, and some prices repeatedly have been slashed. Marriott Bonvoy, a U.S. Soccer Federation partner, has been offering free tickets to some of its elite members. Asked about Club World Cup ticket sales and team base camp arrangements, Manolo Zubiria, the World Cup's chief tournament officer, hung up four minutes and five questions into a telephone interview with The Associated Press. Brendan O'Connell, the publicist who arranged the interview, wrote in an email to the AP: 'The guest was not prepared for those questions.' FIFA's media relations staff would not make FIFA president Gianni Infantino available to discuss the tournament. Ahead of the 1994 World Cup, FIFA announced in May 1992 the draw would take place at Las Vegas on Dec. 18 or 19, 1993. FIFA has not revealed plans for this year's draw but appears to be planning for Las Vegas on Dec. 5. Regular ticket sales began in February 1993 for the U.S. soccer family and general first- and second-round sales started that June. Fans submitted lottery applications in October 1993 for games from the quarterfinals on. Teams could train away from World Cup cities While not detailing ticketing plans for next year's tournament, FIFA is spreading it beyond the host cites and lists about 60 possible base camps for teams to use, paired with hotels. Some are fancy — The Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia — and some more Spartan — the Courtyard by Marriott Mesa at Wrigleyville West in Arizona. Thousands of arrangements must be coordinated. Major League Baseball is drawing up its schedule to ensure that the four teams whose ballparks share parking lots with World Cup stadiums — in Arlington, Texas; Kansas City, Missouri; Philadelphia; and Seattle — won't play home games on the dates of tournament matches. Boris Gartner, CEO of La Liga North America, a joint venture of the Spanish soccer league and Relevent Sports, said the 2026 World Cup should be viewed as just another step in the sport's long-term growth in the United States. 'If you have a clear understanding of the market and the audience, a clear understanding of the value that these properties bring to media companies, and you mix content with a commercial strategy, with the right media distribution strategy, this is something that will continue to grow over the next two decades,' he said. 'If more people are watching the NWSL, more people are going to be interested in soccer that could potentially end up watching a Bundesliga game or La Liga game.' ___ AP soccer:
Boston Globe
31 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Jillian Sackler, philanthropist who defended husband's legacy, dies at 84
Arthur Sackler died in 1987 — nine years before the opioid OxyContin was marketed by the company as a powerful painkiller. Shortly after his death, his estate sold his share of the company to his billionaire brothers, Raymond and Mortimer, for $22.4 million. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The company's misleading advertising claim that OxyContin was nonaddictive prompted doctors to overprescribe it beginning in the 1990s. The proliferation of the medication ruined countless lives of people who became dependent on it. Advertisement In 2021, the company proposed a bankruptcy settlement in which members of the Sackler family agreed to pay $4.2 billion over nine years to resolve civil claims related to the opioid crisis. In return, they sought immunity from future lawsuits. In 2024, the US Supreme Court struck down that deal. A revised settlement was reached in 2025, with the Sacklers and Purdue agreeing to pay $7.4 billion without receiving immunity. The first payment, within three years, included $1.5 billion from the Sacklers and nearly $900 million from Purdue. Advertisement But the backlash from the crisis prompted universities and cultural institutions — including the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art — to obliterate the Sackler name from programs, buildings, and galleries, and to declare that they would no longer accept any philanthropy from the family. Jillian Sackler — a British native who was made a dame by Queen Elizabeth II in 2005 for her philanthropic work — mounted a concerted publicity campaign to absolve her husband of any complicity or culpability, repeatedly reminding the public that he had died long before the scandal erupted. While she stopped short of saying that the drug was the 'root cause' of the opioid crisis, she accused the company of misleading advertising. She told The Guardian that the other members of the family 'have a moral duty to help make this right and to atone for any mistakes made.' As for Arthur, she added: 'I think he would not have approved of the widespread sale of OxyContin.' The couple were avid art collectors and patrons. One art scholar described Arthur Sackler as 'a modern Medici.' The couple was associated with major cultural and academic institutions like the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution; the Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum; the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard University (now part of the Harvard Art Museums); the Arthur M. Sackler Sciences Center at Clark University; and the Arthur M. Sackler Center for Health Communications and the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences, both at Tufts University. After Arthur Sackler died, his wife continued his philanthropic agenda. Donations from his estate and insurance benefits helped finance the Jillian and Arthur M. Sackler Wing of Galleries at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Peking University, the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquia at the National Academy of Sciences, and Studio International, an art magazine. Their name was removed from some, but not all, of those institutions. Advertisement Gillian Lesley Tully was born on Nov. 17, 1940, in Stoke-on-Trent, in central England south of Manchester. She changed the spelling of her first name when she moved to the United States to be with Arthur Sackler, whom she met in 1967 when he was visiting London; they married in 1980. Her father, Kenneth Tully, worked at Midland Bank (now HSBC UK). He married a colleague, Doris Queenie-Gillman Smith. Ms. Sackler had a younger brother, Brian Tully, who died in 2019, leaving her no immediate survivors except for Arthur Sackler's children from an earlier marriage. Among them is Elizabeth Sackler, a philanthropist who has described the estimated $13 billion amassed by her aunts and cousins during the opioid crisis as 'morally abhorrent.' Jillian Sackler attended New York University. The couple moved into a home on Park Avenue in Manhattan, where she continued to live after her husband's death. In her role as president and CEO of the Dame Jillian and Dr. Arthur M. Sackler Foundation for the Arts, Sciences and Humanities, Sackler referred to the other branches of her husband's family as the 'OxySacklers.' In an opinion piece in The Washington Post in 2019, she wrote that her husband had been smeared through 'guilt by association.' Advertisement 'Neither Arthur nor his heirs had anything to do with the manufacture or marketing of OxyContin,' she asserted. 'Suggestions that his philanthropy is now somehow tainted are simply false.' She added: 'Arthur is not here to answer back, but I can tell you that blaming him for OxyContin's marketing, or for any other wrongdoing by the pharmaceutical industry, is as ludicrous as blaming the inventor of the mimeograph for email spam.' This article originally appeared in
Yahoo
33 minutes ago
- Yahoo
EU seeks to lower a price cap on Russian oil and discourage Nord Stream pipeline investors
BRUSSELS (AP) — The European Union wants to lower a cap on the price of Russian oil to deprive the Kremlin of extra profits to fund its war in Ukraine as part of a new raft of sanctions aimed at forcing Moscow to the negotiating table, senior officials said on Tuesday. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said the bloc is 'proposing to lower the oil price cap from $60 to $45, which is lower than the market price, and lowering the oil price cap will hit Russia's revenues hard.' Kallas said the EU also wants to impose 'sanctions on the Nord Stream pipelines to prevent Russia generating any revenue in the future. In this way, it sends a clear signal we are not going back to business as usual.' All 27 EU member countries must all agree for the sanctions to enter force. In 2023, Ukraine's Western allies limited sales of Russian oil to $60 per barrel but the price cap was largely symbolic as most of Moscow's crude — its main moneymaker — cost less than that. Still, the cap was there in case oil prices rose. Oil income is the linchpin of Russia's economy, allowing President Vladimir Putin to pour money into the armed forces while avoiding worsening inflation for everyday people and a currency collapse. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said she assumed that the price cap would be discussed and agreed among the leaders of the Group of Seven major world economic powers when they meet in Canada on June 15-17. She said the United States and its G7 partners realize 'that the oil price has lowered so much that the effectiveness of the cap is to be questioned, and therefore we all want to lower the oil price from $60 per barrel down to $45 per barrel.' The Nord Stream gas pipelines were built to carry Russian natural gas to Germany but are not in operation. They were sabotaged in 2022, but the source of the underwater explosions has remained a major international mystery. The Commission has said that it wants to impose sanctions on the operating consortium to discourage investors from trying to use the pipelines in future. The blasts happened as Europe attempted to wean itself off Russian energy sources following the Kremlin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and contributed to tensions that followed the start of the war. Von der Leyen noted on Tuesday that at the beginning of the war in 2022, 'Russia had 12 billion euros ($14 billion) of energy revenues from fossil fuels" from Europe per month. "And now we're down to 1.8 billion (euros).' The new EU sanctions would also target Russia's banking sector, with the aim of limiting the Kremlin's ability to raise funds or carry out financial transactions. A further 22 Russian banks will be hit with measures, von der Leyen said. An export ban worth some 2.5 billion euros would also be imposed, and the assets frozen of more than 20 Russian and foreign companies alleged to be providing support to the Kremlin's war machine. Von der Leyen said the sanctions are aimed at forcing Russia into serious talks about peace with Ukraine. 'We need a real ceasefire, and Russia has to come to the negotiating table with a serious proposal,' she told reporters. The EU has imposed several rounds of sanctions on Russia since Putin ordered his troops into Ukraine in February 2022. Around 2,400 officials and 'entities' – often government agencies, banks and organizations – have been hit. It's last raft of sanctions, imposed on May 20, targeted almost 200 ships in Russia's sanction-busting shadow fleet of tankers, and tightened trade restrictions to stop produce that could be used for military purposes from reaching Russia's armed forces. Lorne Cook, The Associated Press
