Police vigilant on possible rise in crime caused by recession

The security sector of the government remains on guard against any change in public security conditions that may be caused by economic decline, a Public Security Police Force (PSP) officer told yesterday’s daily press conference. Ma Chio Hong, head of the PSP’s Division for Action and Communication, who made that comment, also argued that based on the available data at present, the public security condition of the city has not deteriorated. Studies have shown that periods of economic decline often coincide with a rising crime rate. But according to the official, the crime rate this year has dropped compared to last year. Ma added that under the coordination of the Unitary Police Service, all public security departments will make strategic efforts to safeguard the city’s public security. Such actions will include deploying sufficient officers.
The official appealed to residents to remain calm.

Youth tobacco consumption survey planned for 2020

Sometime this year, the Health Bureau (SSM) will carry out a survey on Macau youth’s tobacco consumption. This survey is to serve as a response to the World Health Organization’s fifth appeal for studies on youth tobacco consumption habits. Since the city’s latest tobacco control law came into effect on January 1, 2018, until November 2019, the SSM recorded 27 e-cigarettes smoking cases involving the youth. In that time, the SSM recorded 4,600 cases where tobacco products evaded excise duty, including 120 kilograms of e-cigarette products. The survey is conducted once every five years. According to the survey results in 2015, 6.1% of Macau youth between the ages of 13 and 15 have had at least some experience in smoking.

UM allows free access to translation platform to support SMEs

In order to support small- and medium-sized enterprises in Macau during the epidemic, the University of Macau (UM) now allows free access to its UM-CAT, an online Chinese-Portuguese-English computer-aided translation platform. The platform can produce professional and smart full-text translation with a high degree of accuracy and is suitable for handling a large amount of translation projects involving Chinese, English, and Portuguese to improve translation efficiency. Developed by UM’s Natural Language Processing & Portuguese-Chinese Machine Translation Laboratory, UM-CAT has multiple built-in functions, such as smart translation, translation memory, glossary management, and creating terminology databases. The system can also automatically identify previously used texts. It is suitable for individuals, government departments, and companies who need to handle a large amount of multilingual translation tasks in their daily work and will help to improve translation efficiency.