BMReports
‘Breaking hearts’ legally costly for many Filipinos By Joel R. San Juan
@jrsanjuan1573
Part Three
F
IVE years ago, the High Tribunal confirmed an anomaly involving resolutions of petitions for annulment involving a provincial court judge. The case originated from reports by the Local Civil Registrars (LCRs) of Manila and Quezon City to the Office of the Court Administrator (OCA). The LCRs said they have received an alarming number of decisions, resolutions and orders on annulment of marriage cases issued by Judge Cader P. Indar, presiding judge of the Regional Trial Court (RTC) Branch 14 in Cotabato City and acting presiding judge of the RTC Branch 15 in Shariff Aguak, Maguindanao. The Court has established that Indar issued decisions on numerous annulment of marriage cases when, in fact, he did not conduct any judicial proceedings on the cases. Worst, it was discovered that the decisions were issued without even the filing of the petitions by concerned parties. The Court held that Indar made it appear in his decisions that the annulment cases complied with the stringent requirements of the Rules of Court and the strict statutory Continued on A2
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Wednesday, February 22, 2017 Vol. 12 No. 133
DOE bid to implement RCOA stopped anew T By Joel R. San Juan
@jrsanjuan1573
27
he Supreme Court (SC) has temporarily barred the government from implementing new regulations that compel big consumers to enter into a power-supply deal with any of the retail electricity suppliers (RES) accredited by The current number of Departthe Department of Energy (DOE) and the ment of Energy-accredited Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) by retail electricity suppliers February 26. See “DOE,” A2
MOBILE-DATA PRICE WAR HURTING TELCO’S PROFITS
P
otpot Pinili, a Philippine travel blogger, is paying less to access the Internet on the go— almost half as much as three years ago, thanks to a price war. “Data has become definitely cheaper,” said Pinili, 41. “You can do more online quicker and at less cost.” Pinili and other Philippine customers are benefiting, as the nation’s two largest phone companies fight
for smartphone subscribers in a market that, according to International Data Corp. (IDC), had 30-percent penetration as of 2015. PLDT Inc. and Globe Telecom Inc. are luring prospective consumers with data packages that are among Asia’s cheapest, saying they need to spend money now to counter a decline in revenue from calls and text messages. See “Mobile-data,” A2
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IBBY Copeland reviews Bill Schutt’s new book, Cannibalism, for Slate. We recall the cannibalism of the soccer team whose plane crashed in the Andes. In Stephen King’s The Shining there’s reference to the Donner party, which dined on each other when they were lost in a snowstorm. In China, an edict of 205 BC allowed Chinese to exchange one another’s kids, so the kids could be eaten by nonrelatives. And human flesh was regarded as a delicacy by the Chinese elite. (So let’s think carefully about substituting the supremacy of an America far away for a partnership with China within cooking distance.) Continued on A11
Is your smartphone making you shy? By Joe Moran
Liverpool John Moores University
D
uring the three years I’ve spent researching and writing about shyness, one of the most common questions people ask is about the relationship between shyness and technology. Are the Internet and the cell phone causing our social skills to
atrophy? I often hear this from parents of shy teenagers, who are worried that their children are spending more time with their devices than with their peers. This anxiety isn’t new. At the first international conference on shyness, organized in Wales in 1997 by the British Psychological Society, Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo was the keynote speaker. He noted that since he
began the Stanford Shyness Survey in the 1970s, the number of people who said they were shy had risen from 40 percent to 60 percent. He blamed this on new technology, like e-mail, cell phones and even automated teller machines, which had loosened the “social glue” of casual contact. He feared the arrival of “a new ice age” of noncommunication, when we would easily be able to
go an entire day without talking to someone. Some of Zimbardo’s fears have been realized. Look at any public space today and you’ll see faces buried in tablets and phones. The rise of loneliness and social anxiety is now a familiar refrain in the work of sociologists such as Robert Putnam, John Cacioppo and Sherry Turkle. See “Smartphone,” A2
n japan 0.4437 n UK 62.5719 n HK 6.4662 n CHINA 7.2992 n singapore 35.3818 n australia 38.5448 n EU 53.2782 n SAUDI arabia 13.3815
Source: BSP (21 February 2017 )