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GOVT STILL HITTING BLANK WALL IN EFFORTS TO EASE TRAFFIC CONGESTION

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Untying the ‘Gordian knot’

L

By Jovee Marie N. Dela Cruz

awmakers have given up on the idea that, no matter the additional levies and charges that the government will impose, people will not stop buying cars. That’s Fact No. 1.

Also, lawmakers are aware that based on experience, the number-coding schemes did not work in easing congestion, simply because people—particularly those who can afford—will just buy new vehicles. That’s Fact No. 2.

And Fact No. 3: The government cannot put a cap on the manufacture and sale of cars.

Given all these, the riddle still

remains: How do you untie the traffic Gordian knot?

Luckily, the lawmakers also know the answer—better masstransport system and infrastructure.

Lawmakers also know that while the sale of cars cannot be stopped, imposing higher levies and charges will not only rein in auto sales, but will also generate

additional revenues to improve the state of transportation in the country.

“It is better to improve our transport system…that’s why we need a tax reform to increase the revenue of the government and fund our infrastructure programs,” House Committee on Ways and Means Chairman Dakila Carlo E. Cua of the

Garin: “Metro Manila has been experiencing problems on traffic for more than 20 years now. Almost 2.7 million vehicles ply through Metro Manila every day.”

See “Traffic,” A2

How long would govt forces take to neutralize, or drive away, terrorists still entrenched in Marawi?

‘Worrisome’ delay

S

By Rene Acosta

ecurity forces battling the MauteISIS group in Marawi City have recommended to President Duterte the extension of martial law in Mindanao, pushing for another five months more to end the terrorist group’s violent foray into the already devastated city.

PESO exchange rates n US 50.8830

The new deadline in December, according to Armed Forces Chief of Staff Gen. Eduardo M. Año, should allow the soldiers to complete their ongoing operations in the city, which has been occupied by local and foreign terrorists since May 23.

“What we are going to address here is all the terrorist groups that supported this rebellion staged in the city by the Maute-ISIS group.

Their forces are still there…so we can see that it is still far from over,” See “Delay,” A2

President Duterte (third from left), in a camouflage uniform with a pistol tucked in his waist, arrives to visit troops in Camp Ranao in Marawi City on Thursday. Duterte flew for the first time on Thursday to the besieged southern city to cheer troops who have been trying to quell a nearly two-month uprising by Islamic State group-linked militants, who he warned were plotting to attack other cities.

Ace Morandante/Presidential Photographers Division, Malacañang Palace via AP

n japan 0.4547 n UK 66.0360 n HK 6.5151 n CHINA 7.5293 n singapore 37.2442 n australia 40.4876 n EU 59.1922 n SAUDI arabia 13.5702

Source: BSP (21 July 2017 )

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A2 Saturday, July 22, 2017

Continued from a1

Lone District of Quirino said.

Capital spending

In an earlier interview with the BusinessMirror, Finance Undersecretary Karl Kendrick T. Chua said the government needs an additional P2.2 trillion in capital spending up to 2022 for the Duterte administration’s infrastructure and social programs.

Chua said half of the P2.2 trillion will come from the Duterte administration’s Comprehensive Tax Reform Package, which is composed of five tranches.

Chua is optimistic that the first tranche pending approval in the Senate will be passed by October. The first tranche seeks to lower personal income-tax rate.

Other measures

Deputy Speaker Gwendolyn F. Garcia of the Third District of Cebu said the government can resort to more creative measures to control the increasing number of cars that cause traffic in major thoroughfares.

“In other countries, like Hong Kong or Singapore, when you own a second car, the registration fees will be higher,” she said.

Consistent with this, Deputy Speaker Sharon S. Garin of AAMBIS-Owa party-list filed House Bill (HB) 3928 imposing higher fees for every additional vehicle purchased.

Delay…

The bill, however, provides that persons engaged in the business of transportation or whose business requires more than one vehicle is not covered by the increased rates.

Garin, citing the Chamber of Automotive Manufacturers of the Philippines Inc., said the Philippines is seen as an important automotive market growth area in the region, as the volume of vehicles sold is expected to surge.

More cars on the road

She said domestic vehicle sales in 2020 would account to between 8 percent and 10 percent of the projected total sales of 5 million to 6 million units in the Asean.

“Metro Manila has been experiencing problems on traffic for more than 20 years now, almost 2.7 million vehicles ply through Metro Manila every day,” said Garin, citing figures from the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA).

HB 3928 seeks to amend the current law on charges imposed to owners of all types of motor vehicles, or Republic Act 8794.

It imposes higher fees for every additional vehicle purchased.

The more vehicles owned and registered, the higher the motor vehicle user’s charge (MVUC) imposed.

For the second vehicle of a person, the bill said the MVUC shall

Continued from a1

Año said early this week.

“If we are going to fix this, we have to fix it once and for all,” the top military chief added, whose mandatory retirement from the service is in October.

With the past deadlines set by the military in crushing the Maute-ISIS Group having missed their sole and repeated objective, skepticisms have arose whether the police and the military, this

be twice the amount imposed under Executive Order (EO) 43, series of 1986, or the order “Restructuring the Private Motor Vehicle Tax”, plus 30 percent for the first year, 60 percent for the second year, 90 percent for the third year, 120 percent for the fourth year and 150 percent for the fifth year and after.

For the third vehicle of a person, the measure said the MVUC shall be thrice the amount imposed under EO 43, plus 40 percent for the first year, 80 percent for the second year, 120 percent for the third year, 160 percent for the fourth year and 200 percent for the fifth year and after. Rates for succeeding cars will be in accordance with the given pattern and formula.

time, could meet their mission within the new time frame.

‘Broken promises’

When Marawi was occupied by the band of local and foreign terrorists in May, the military has confidently declared that the rebellion would be over within a month, or before the country celebrated its Independence Day on June 12.

The deadline came and the cel-

Gordian knot

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ebration was observed with fighting in Marawi still raging at its fullest.

On three other occasions, Defense Secretary Delfin N. Lorenzana also set time frames, but all the three deadlines were not met.

And for the fourth time, Lorenzana expressed hope that the dragging Marawi operation would be finished before the Commander in Chief will speak before Congress on July 24, wherein he would face the nation for his State of the Nation Address.

But by that time, when Presi-

dent Duterte ascends to the podium on Monday, the billowing smoke of battle, along with sporadic gun fires, aerial military bombardment on the city may all still linger.

Body count

Running down its statistics as of Thursday, the military said that at least 45 civilians have been killed in the city, with another 1,723 people trapped or held by the terrorists having been rescued.

At least 421 terrorists have also been killed, with 516 firearms

To also resolve heavy vehicular traffic in the capital, MMDA Chairman Danilo D. Lim said the agency is now eyeing the implementation of a two-day number coding scheme.

Currently, Lim added, there are around 2.5 million to 2.6 million registered vehicles in Metro Manila, more than double the maximum capacity of roads.

He said the problem on lack of infrastructure projects has been aggravated by the continued increase in the volume of vehicles in Metro Manila.

having been recovered.

At least 99 soldiers were also reported to have been killed in action and more than 800 listed as wounded in action.

Security forces have also cleared additional 15 buildings that were previously held and occupied by the members of the MauteIS Group.

Narrow, fixated position

In seeking the extension of the martial rule, concentrated against the Maute-ISIS Group and focused in

Number coding

However, Garcia asked the MMDA: “Has the number-coding scheme ever really worked?”

“The rich can always buy new cars [to avoid number-coding scheme]. When you see all the vehicles plying the Edsa route, you will notice that in order to escape the prohibition on the plate number, other drivers are using temporary plates,” she said.

The two-day number-coding scheme will just add more vehicles, the deputy speaker said.

“The reality is that those that really need to ply the route cannot afford to be inconvenienced because we don’t have better masstransport system. So, how now?

They cannot go to work, they will not be able to go to their businesses because their cars are prohibited on that particular date? That [twoday number-coding scheme] is just going to add more vehicles on the road,” she said.

So, Garcia added: “There are creative measures that the government can resort to in order to control the number of cars that are owned and are on the roads, but certainly not through the numbercoding scheme.”

These measures are what the people have been demanding for decades now.

Marawi City, the military is merely duplicating the failure and blunder of the ML, although it may be able to neutralize the terrorist group.

In explaining earlier why martial law was declared and has covered the whole area of Mindanao, Lorenzana said Duterte wanted to end “once and for all” Mindanao’s security problem.

The defense chief recognized that other areas in Mindanao, like Sulu, Basilan, Tawi-Tawi, the Davao provinces, the Zamboanga peninsula and Central Mindanao, also have their own set of security concerns.

These security challenges are posed by the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters, the Abu Sayyaf Group and the New People’s Army.

But nearly two months into its implementation since it was declared on May 23, martial law has not accounted members of these three threat groups, nor even a major operation was carried out against any of them.

The operation was carried out merely against the Maute-ISIS Group and has centered in Marawi.

800 more to go

According to Año, there are still about 800 terrorists in the whole of Mindanao who are inspired by the Maute-ISIS following the killings of their 400 colleagues in the ongoing operation in Marawi City.

“They are spread out in different areas in Mindanao, and we have enough forces to confront them.

This is the beauty of martial law because we restrict…these armed groups. If there is no martial law, they can reinforce,” he said.

“With martial law, we can impose curfews and checkpoints in selected areas. While it is inconvenient for the public, it restricted the movement of armed groups,” he added.

The chief of staff said early this week that government troops and the terrorists were “barely fighting for an area that was less than 1 square kilometer” in the city, giving a picture of the advances made by the government since it launched the operation to recapture the areas previously held or occupied by the terrorists.

“But we cannot neglect or bypass buildings, it is fatal and dangerous to our soldiers and to the trapped civilians,” Año said.

But while the point of contention merely covers a small area, the soldiers still have to clear or retake at least 500 more buildings from the Maute-ISIS Group, according to Lt. Col. Jo-Ar Herrera, spokesman of the Joint Task Force Marawi.

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Saturday, July 22, 2017

A3

Isis core helps fund militants in phl, report says

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AKARTA, Indonesia—The central command of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has funneled tens of thousands of dollars to militants in the Philippines over the last year, most likely aiding their spectacular seizure of the southern Philippine city of Marawi, a report released on Friday said.

The report from the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conf lict, a research institute based in Jakarta, describes how Dr. Mahmud Ahmad, a high-level Islamic State figure from Malaysia, who is based near Marawi, worked t h roug h t he g roup’s chain of command to Syria to get money and inter nationa l recruits to help local militants seize territory in the Philippines for the caliphate.

The report provides insight into a question that has bewildered policy-makers since militants affiliated with the Islamic State swept into Marawi two months, ago: How were they able to seize an important city in the southern Philippines, and what role did the Islamic State’s central command play in the seizure?

The city has remained largely under the control of the militants for nearly two months despite a government military campaign to retake it with ground forces and aerial bombardments.

A fter the mi litants seized Marawi, they raised the Islamic State f lag and declared the establishment of a new province of the organization, also known as ISIS or ISIL. Some senior politicians in the Philippines have dismissed the Maute Group, the major Islamist militant group behind the seizure of Marawi, as “ISIS wannabes,” characterizing it as a drug mafia with little in common with the ideologically driven Islamic State fighters.

But the report suggests that Islamic State commanders in Syria took the Maute Group’s strategic ambitions seriously.

The Islamic State’s ability to support its Philippine offshoots appears limited mainly to periodic Western Union transfers of tens of thousands of dollars, the report found, suggesting that direct support from Syria was a relatively minor factor in the Maute Group’s ability to seize Marawi.

The report argues that local recruiting and fund-raising

among pious Muslims who resented the Philippines’s central government have probably played a more significant role in the insurgents’ successes.

T he institute’s research is based on field visits this year to Mindanao, the island where Maraw i sits, inter v iews w ith people close to Indonesian militants in the Philippines, and militants’ messages obtained from Telegram, the highly encrypted messaging service used by the Islamic State. Last week t he I ndone s i a n go ve r n me nt announced it would ban some features of Telegram, because of how useful the app has been for terrorists.

Intercepted chats show that the Islamic State has a sophisticated command structure in Sout heast A sia, a l low ing for complex coord ination among its supporters across the region.

In one instance from last year, two Indonesian militants were connected via a Malaysian contact to another militant based in Thailand who helped them support a prison break in that country. The goal was to free a group of Uighurs, members of a Muslim ethnic group from western China, who had been detained there.

Though the prison break was initially successful, the Uighurs were eventually recaptured by the Thai police. Still, the report notes, “The story illustrates how well-connected the ISIS network has become, with an Indonesian connecting as easily with contacts in Turkey, the Philippines and Thailand as with his own friends in prison.”

International coordination of Islamic State leaders with Southeast Asian militants may amplify the terrorism threat to neighboring Indonesia, the report said.

The last 18 months have produced a steady trickle of lowcasualty Islamic State-inspired terrorist attacks in Indonesia, but until now the actions have tended to be poorly planned and

In this photo provided by the Armed Forces of the Philippines, President Duterte (left), clad in a camouflage uniform, inspects firearms recovered from Muslim militants during his unannounced visit to Camp Ranao in Marawi City on Thursday. Duterte flew for the first time on Thursday to the besieged southern city to cheer troops who have been trying to quell a nearly two-month uprising by Islamic State group-linked militants, who he warned were plotting to attack other cities. With the President is Armed Forces Chief of StaffGen. Eduardo M. Año. Armed Forces of the Philippines via AP

The Islamic State’s ability to support its Philippine offshoots appears limited mainly to periodic Western Union transfers of tens of thousands of dollars, the report found, suggesting that direct support from Syria was a relatively minor factor in the Maute Group’s ability to seize Marawi.

Govt to pursue buyout of MRT 3

By Charlotte Furigay

W

HILE the government is still keen on pursuing the multibillionpeso buyout of the owner of the Metro Rail Transit (MRT) Line 3, a shift in policy may cause the government to backtrack from its original strategy, and further delay the much-needed improvements in the train line.

Tr a n s p o r t at i o n A s s i s t a nt Secret a r y L ea h M. Qu i a mbao sa id t he P54 -bi l l ion buyout is prog ressing , a nd t he agenc y w i l l not rev ise its pl a n, u nless t he Duter te ad m inist rat ion c ha nges its pol ic y on t he mu lt ibi l l ion- peso init i at ive. “ The buyout case is now moving for ward and, unless there is a change in policy, that will be our direction. Any talk of settlement should not delay the case any further,” she told the BusinessMirror.

Transportation Undersecretary for Rails Cesar B. Chavez

said his group intends to continue the buyout of the MRT Corp., the owner of the train system, to solve the problems of ow nership and huge tar iffs. Since it took over the management of the train system in 2000, the gover nment has been pay ing P610 mil lion monthly to the Sobrepeña-controlled cor poration in equity rental pay ments.

The facility is owned by the private sector and is being managed by the government through a bu i ld-lease-tra nsfer ag ree ment that will end in less than a decade.Former President Benigno S. Aquino III initiated the buyout in 2013, signing an executive order (EO) that requires the departments of Finance and Transportation to execute the transaction, pursuant to the provisions of the agreement with the private sector.

T he buyout w a s i nte nde d to f ree t he gover nment f rom pay ing mont h ly t a r if fs to t he pr ivate ow ners, a nd add ress

t he issues on ow nersh ip a nd usage of t he fac i l it y.

But ever since EO 26 was signed four years ago, the government has only moved a few notches toward its goal.

Joseph Emilio A. Abaya, who sat as the transportation chief of the Aquino administration, led the execution of the presidential order, initially targeting to complete the buyout in 2014.

But his team figured into a huge snafu, when lawmakers in the same year slashed out the P53.9billion allocation for the buyout from the national budget.

Rene S. Santiago, a train expert, is glad that the buyout did not materialized during the Aquino administration, as none of the multibillion-peso allocation will be used to improve the state of the fast-aging train line.

“Not a single peso would go into the improvement of the MRT 3,” Santiago, who is also the chief executive of strategic investment and project development services

company Bellwether Advisor y Inc. The government’s plan was after the completion of the buyout, it will bid out the operations and maintenance component of the railway line to the private sector, while retaining regulatory functions for passenger protection with the government. “ The thing is the transportation department is managing and maintaining and operating the system—that’s the problem.

It should be privatized,” Santiago said, citing the improvements being implemented today on the Light Rail Transit Line 1, which is now being operated by private company Light Rail Manila Corp.

The MRT 3 has been in an almost constant state of decay over the last few years, due to government underspending, and legal battles between the facility’s owner and the state.

Such problems had caused many inconveniences to the more than 500,000 daily riders of the train system.

executed. For example, two Indonesian suicide bombers struck in the Kampung Melayu neighborhood in East Jakarta in May, but only three victims were killed.

A major concern for the Indonesian government is that some of the 20-odd Indonesian fighters who have joined up with Islamic State groups in Mindanao will acquire the equipment and expertise to commit serious terrorist attacks at home. The report calls for Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines to improve their security services’ coordination and

intelligence sharing, so that the names of key suspects are passed along. Still, the first step is ousting the Islamic State from Marawi.

When Marawi was seized in late May, President Duterte of the Philippines pledged that the militants would be defeated quickly.

But groups aligned with the Islamic State continue to maintain their grip on sections of the city, and it now appears unlikely that Marawi will be fully liberated when Duterte delivers his annual address to the nation on Monday.

The New York Times News Service

Philippines withdraws from hosting 2019 SEAG

T

By Lance Agcaoili

HE Philippines has passed up its turn to host the 30th edition of the Southeast Asian Games in 2019—no thanks to the conflict in Marawi City. Philippine Spor ts Commission (PSC) Chairman William Ramirez has officially notified the Philippine Olympic Committee (POC) on the withdrawal through a letter sent to POC President Jose Cojuangco Jr. through Secretary-General Steve Hontiveros.

“Due to the current situation in Mindanao and the threat of terrorism and atrocities, we regret to inform you that we will no longer push through with the biennial event,” the letter, dated July 19 and received by the POC on Friday, said.

“It has been resolved that government resources be focused in the rehabilitation and rebuilding of Mindanao, especially Marawi City,” the letter furthered.

The Maute terrorist group, which has links to ISIS, continued to hold fort in Marawi City, extending the conflict to its 60th day on Sunday. Death toll in the conflict has risen to 421 on the ISIS-

linked side, 99 government troops and 45 civilians as of Wednesday this week.

The Philippines has hosted the SEA Games thrice—1981 and 1991, when five of the Games member-countries alternated as host; and the last in 2005, when Filipino athletes dominated the biennial event for the first time. Brunei Darrusalam skipped its turn in 2015 reportedly because of the absence of its government’s support with Singapore, which has hosted the Asian Youth Games and Youth Olympic Games, accepting the responsibility in the 11th hour.

The POC, through Cojuangco, submitted and won its bid for 2019, which follows Malaysia’s hosting of the 29th edition next month.The Philippines spent no less than P1 billion—half of which was funded bythe government—when it hosted the Games in 2005. For the 2019 Games, Cojuangco has offered an eye-popping P7.5-billion budget primarily for operations and renovation of existing sports infrastructure.

The SEA Games is a multisport competition among the region’s 11 members with the number of sports on the program numbering more than three dozens.

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Saturday, July 22, 2017

The World BusinessMirror

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Financial crisis: Where are the guilty men?

‘W

e make the rules, pal. The news, war, peace, famine, upheaval, the price per paper clip. We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it.”

Gordon Gek ko, t he c iga r chomping antihero of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), understood that the dominant element of the art of speculative finance is the bamboozle; the draping of a blanket of complexity over all the acres of dirty linen.

When the first gusts of the global financial storm began to be felt exactly a decade ago, it began with a babble of mind-numbing jargon. The business sections of newspapers spoke of something called a “credit crunch” and ran long features on troublesome “subprime mortgages” and “special investment vehicles”. Before too long though, as Adam Tooze has described on p20, ordinary savers were forming queues outside branches of Northern Rock in Britain’s first bank run in 150 years. It was plainly serious, but what had happened? Something to do with the Rock’s reliance on “securitization”, we were told.

Bankers playing some sort of complicated games with money, pulling rabbits out of hats.

Then, a year later, the tsunami hit land and Lehman Brothers tumbled, triggering the biggest financial crisis in history. The financial system’s heart attack caused a sudden stop in world trade. Investments everywhere were cancelled. Stock markets plunged. And households ceased spending. Still, even as we slammed shut our own

wallets, most of us were baffled by the cause. We have been feeling our way through the wreckage to the truth about what happened ever since. All those “collateralized debt obligations” and “credit default swaps” that peppered coverage 10 summers ago turn out to have been a red herring. This complexity was not the source of the disaster, only the cover. All that jargon and financial engineering merely covered the greed of investment banks; camouflaged the corruption of credit-rating agencies; assisted with the capture of the regulators and politicians.

The chief immediate source of the crisis was not really penurious Americans being sold mortgages they couldn’t afford, or the slicing up and reselling of those loans, or the proliferation of complicated derivatives contracts. It was the global banking behemoths, which were funding their enormous balance sheets almost entirely with debt—or, in plainer parlance, their habit of gambling with other people’s money. Grotesquely undercapitalized, even relatively minor losses were enough to wipe them out. We learned the bitter truth of John Maynard Keynes’s satirical definition of a sound banker as one who “when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional way along with his fellows”. The biggest banks in the world were indeed all ruined

together—delivering a lethal collapse in confidence in the entire sprawling system.

But this irresponsible overleveraging was itself the symptom of a rotten culture—slowly but surely, a moral, as well as an economic crisis of finance began to come to light. The crash was like turning over a rock to reveal a morass of corruption. As lawyers, regulators and the media investigated the behaviour of failed financial institutions they soon found themselves knee deep in revelations of clients and customers being ripped off in the long years before the crisis.

Pension funds were flogged securities that were designed to fail.

Useless insurance, the now notorious Payment Protection Insurance (PPI), was pressed on households.

Small firms were tricked into signing interest rate derivative contracts that ended up ruining them.

Evidence of shar p-elbowed shysters was everywhere, and before long it was supplemented by evidence of outright criminality. Crucial benchmark interest

rates—the briefly famous Libor— were rigged by trading desks. We have learnt of the facilitation of money laundering for drug gangs and terror groups. We have learnt of industrial-scale tax dodging services, epitomised in HSBC’s Swiss operation, which was doling out bricks of cash. Court papers revealed that the bank told clients not to wire money in order to avoid creating a paper trail. And all this was for the sake of higher profits and bigger bonuses for bankers.

The slowness of the political classes to grasp they were living in an utterly changed world, even as banks came begging for state support, was astonishing. While parliamentary committees did grill the bosses of the failed lenders such as Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and HBOS (and some of them even managed to sound contrite) nobody in the industry was being prosecuted, and if any of the top brass were fingered as “the guilty men” that was mainly by the media, not our political leaders. Indeed, in 2012 when the

All those “collateralized debt obligations” and “credit default swaps” that peppered coverage 10 summers ago turn out to have been a red herring. This complexity was not the source of the disaster, only the cover. All that jargon and financial engineering merely covered the greed of investment banks; camouflaged the corruption of credit-rating agencies; assisted with the capture of the regulators and politicians.

government finally stripped an honorary knighthood from Fred Goodwin, the man whose hubris and incompetence had destroyed the venerable RBS and thereby also blown a direct hole in the public finances, Alistair Darling, the former chancellor, warned against “[going] after people on a whim”.

Periodically, the call would arise from parliament’s back benches, from city of London grandees or in the business pages of the media for an end to “banker bashing”. But as the years went by and the charge sheet of financial malfeasance kept rising, such pleas became less and less frequent. We are all banker bashers now.

And with reason. Regulatory fines and forced redress payments for conned customers from major UK banks now amount to some £40 billion. That’s more than all the additional capital these institutions were forced to raise in the wake of the crisis. That means the money coming in to shore up the system, mostly from taxpayers, has essentially flowed straight out the back door to pay for past misdeeds.

And there are more legacy costs to come; around £18 billion according to the Bank of England. This means we are probably looking at total misconduct fines and redress equivalent to around 3 percent of UK GDP. Globally, banking fines since the crisis have been estimated to amount to more than $320 billion. But the biggest bill comes from the colossal economic disruption.

The total cost in foregone global output from the crash has been tentatively estimated by Andrew Haldane, the chief economist of the Bank of England, at $60 trillion to $200 trillion. That’s between one and five times the planet’s GDP. Gordon Gekko went to jail. But back in the real world, there has been vanishingly little personal accountability for bankers after

a full decade in which their destruction has been laid bare. In June John Varley, the former Barclays chief executive, was charged with conspiracy to commit fraud during a 2008 round of capital raising after a Serious Fraud Office investigation—a case that is notable for its rarity. No other heads of banks that failed in the crisis have had any charges leveled against them, and no other senior executives that presided over cultures of malfeasance and corruption have been brought to book either. None have even been barred from working in finance.

Some have thrived. A former COO at Goldman Sachs, Gary Cohn, is now Donald J. Trump’s chief economic adviser and is leading a shameless assault on postcrisis financial regulation in the United States. Matt Ridley, the former chairman of Northern Rock, still opines from the lofty berth of the Times comment pages. Scores of others are living quietly and comfortably off years of bonuses awarded from dubious profits.

A former UBS trader, Tom Hayes, was sentenced in 2015 for 14 years for rigging interest rates.

But he insists his superiors were well aware of what he was doing.

“Either senior management knew what was going on or they did not,” says one former regulator. “If they knew, then they were complicit. If they did not, then they were incompetent.”

Ten years on and the reckoning for the great western banking disaster remains elusive. The question is no longer how the hell they did it—instead, it’s how the hell they’ve managed to get away with it.

The author of this article, Ben Chu, is the Economics editor of the Independent.

The New York Times

British foreign secretary supports Japan in stopping North Korea

B

ritish Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said on Frid ay his countr y stands “shoulder to shoulder” with Japan in efforts to put an end to North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests.

“We all need to increase the pressure on Pyongyang through diplomacy and sanctions, and that must include China using its influence to bring North Korea back to the negotiation table,” he said after meeting his Japanese counterpart, Fumio Kishida.

Johnson called North Korea’s recent launch of its first intercontinenta l ba l listic missi le, Hwasong-14, in early July, “a reckless provocation”. Beyond shared security threats, the two officials confirmed the strong economic relationship between Japan and the UK post-Brexit.

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson (left) shakes hands with his Japanese counterpart Fumio Kishida after their joint announcement in Tokyo on Friday. AP/Koji Sasahara

“We’re leaving the EU but not leaving Europe,” Johnson said, and that will allow Britain to continue to build its commercial and economic relationship with Japan. He noted the strength of both UK exports to Japan, as well as Japanese investment in the UK. Johnson is also meeting with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the governor of Tokyo on day two of a three-day trip to Japan.

The Japanese Foreign Ministry says they are discussing increased diplomatic and security cooperation and the Olympics.

In the remainder of his trip, he is set to meet with Japanese business leaders for talks on enhanced trade and investment before traveling to New Zealand and Australia. AP

CIA chief: Moscow loves to ‘stick it to America’ C

IA Director Mike Pompeo said on Thursday that Russia has no plans to leave Syria and will continue to try to meddle in US affairs to “stick it to America”.

He reiterated his belief that Russia interfered in the US presidential election and described the US-Russia relationship as “complicated ”.

“I think they find anyplace that they can make our lives more difficult, I think they find that’s something that’s useful,” he said Pompeo also said he has seen only minimal evidence that Russia has pursued a serious strategy against Islamic State militants in Syria. He said any suggestion that Russia has been a US ally in Syria is not borne out by what’s happening on the ground. But Pompeo said he was hopeful there will be places

in the world where the US and Russia can cooperate on counterterrorism.

He added it’s difficult to imagine a stable Syria with President Bashar alAssad still in power. He called Assad a “puppet of the Iranians”, who now have a “significant foothold in Syria”.

Russia will stay in Syria, he said, because it loves its naval port in Tartus, off the Mediterranean Sea. The CIA director spoke in a wide-ranging conversation at the Aspen Security Forum, an annual gathering of intelligence and national security officials and experts in Aspen, Colorado.

He said the Trump administration is working on ways to push back against Iran, which wants to be a “kingpin” in the Middle East. Pompeo continued his criticism of the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran. The Trump administration recently confirmed that

Iran had met its obligations under the deal but warned it would face consequences for breaching “the spirit” of the accord—a reference to Iran’s continued pursued of a ballistic missile program.

When it comes to Iranian compliance with the agreement, Iran is a “bad tenant”, Pompeo said. He likened their compliance with a renter who doesn’t pay rent until the landlord demands it and then sends a bad check. He noted that President Donald J. Trump has been working with Gulf states and Israel to find a common way to push back against Iranian aggression in the region.

What won’t work is appeasing Tehran or forcing them into compliance, he said.

“When we have our strategy in place, I’m confident you will see a fundamental shift in policy” toward Iran, Pompeo said.

Pompeo also addressed the threat from North Korea and said Trump asks questions about Pyongyang nearly every time he sees him. “It is at the front of his mind,” Pompeo said.

It’s one thing for North Korea to have a missile that can harm the United States and another for it to have an arsenal of such weapons, he said, adding that things can be done to narrow its capacity to develop a stockpile. While some people believe North Korea’s leader is irrational, Pompeo said he is convinced Kim Jong Un understands his core mission—“which is to keep himself in power”.

While he avoided saying the US might favor a regime change, Pompeo said he’s “hopeful that we will find a way to separate that regime” from its nuclear capabilities. AP

Sports BusinessMirror

Editor: Jun Lomibao | mirror_sports@yahoo.com.ph

O

By Greg Beacham

Saturday, July 22, 2017

ONE CHAMPIONSHIP UP FOR EXPANSION

The Associated Press

NE Championship has secured a major equity investment from venture capital firm Sequoia India and investment firm Mission Holdings, positioning the ascendant mixed martial arts (MMA) promotion to increase its presence throughout Asia.

The investment means ONE Championship has raised over $100 million in total capital less than six years after its first show, according to Chatri Sityodtong, the promotion’s chairman and CEO. Sityodtong told The Associated Press on Wednesday that ONE Championship plans to stage up to 30 events in 2018 and will financially compete to sign the world’s best fighters, all while concentrating on its primary goal of being Asia’s dominant MMA brand. To that mission, Sityodtong intends to expand the Singapore-based promotion’s reach next year into Japan, South Korea and eventually India.

“Already we’re the largest martial arts organization in the history of Asia,” Sityodtong said. “All the pieces suggest that we have a big, big runway of growth ahead of us and that we’re just scratching the surface of our potential.”

The growth is already visible: In the final five months of 2017 alone, ONE Championship has 11 scheduled shows spread among Macau, Malaysia, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Myanmar.

After doing 18 events this year, Sityodtong projects 24 to 30 shows for 2018. The increase will include aggressive expansion into China, where ONE Championship is already staging events this year in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong.

ONE Championship already claimed it was the largest sports media property in Asia before the latest round of investment, with video programming seen in 128 countries and live shows attracting large crowds throughout the Eastern hemisphere. The promotion received capital last year from Heliconia Capital Management, which is owned by

Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund.

Sityodtong is a Harvard-educated entrepreneur and a lifelong martial artist who left a lucrative career as a hedge fund manager to start ONE Championship as a showcase for homegrown Asian martial artists. He is looking forward to utilizing Sequoia’s expertise on business expansion while he plots his still-young promotion’s next moves.

“It’s been a whirlwind,” Sityodtong said. “Just six years ago, this was a PowerPoint presentation, and now we arguably have the most blue-chip shareholder base for any sports property out here in Asia.”

The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), the sport’s richest and most prominent promotion, is striving to increase its presence in Asia with shows in Singapore, Japan and China this year. UFC fights are watched avidly across Asia, and the promotion has a healthy number of fighters under contract with Asian ethnicity, but Sityodtong claims ONE Championship already has “a massive lead over the UFC” in the fight for Asian fans.

“We’re very focused on Asia, with Asian content that really resonates,” Sityodtong said. “So it’s very different scale. It would be like ONE Championship coming to America with Asian heroes and trying to ignite American audiences without any Americans on a show. It’s hard to do so.”

ONE Championship’s talent pool is Asian-focused, but not exclusive. Its champions include Filipino-American heavyweight Brandon Vera, Wisconsin-born welterweight Ben Askren, Brazilian light-heavyweight Roger Gracie—and Angela Lee, the Canada-born, Hawaii-raised atomweight who has become one of the promotion’s most popular fighters.

While ONE Championship’s roster of fighters probably doesn’t measure up to the UFC’s group on pure overall talent, Sityodtong’s promotion is about much more than blood and belts. Although he has the money to bid for top free-agent fighters alongside the UFC and Bellator, Sityodtong is more interested in creating a product that suits ONE Championship’s conception of the Asian audience’s sensibilities.

“The UFC has done a wonderful job in the Western hemisphere and deserve their success, but they focus primarily on the fighting, on the violence, on controversy, on disrespect,” Sityodtong said.

“You know, Conor McGregor, in your face, F-this, F-that. We’ve chosen to focus on Asian values, and that kind of stuff just doesn’t fly. ONE Championship is a true celebration of martial arts, which is Asia’s greatest cultural treasure, and we want to honor the Asian values of humility, kindness, integrity, strength and discipline. So it’s a very different approach.”

Sityodtong believes that cultivated, clean-cut image has the side benefit of attracting corporate sponsors and deep-pocketed partners—including Sequoia India, a branch of the famed US venture capital firm that invested in Apple, Google, PayPal, YouTube, Instagram, Yahoo!, WhatsApp and countless other foundational technology companies.

“ONE Championship has been a pioneer and major driving force of the martial arts industry in Asia, with surging popularity across major countries,” said Shailendra J Singh, the managing director of Sequoia Capital (India). “It has played an incredible role in nurturing local talent and developing local stars, led by a wonderful, mission-oriented team. We are delighted to join the team in their pursuit of developing the leading martial arts franchise for Asia’s 4.4 billion people.”

WOMEN’S TOUR DE FRANCE

Annemiek van Vleuten of the Netherlands celebrates as she crosses the finish line to win the first stage of the La Course by Le Tour de France, a women’s cycling race, over 67.5 kilometers that started in Briancon and finished on Izoard Pass, France, on Thursday. AP

A5

MERALCO VS GLOBAL

M

ERALCO Manila tries to get its winning ways back when it faces Global Cebu in the Philippines Football League (PFL) today at the Rizal Memorial Stadium.

Meralco Manila, which absorbed a 0-7 beating from Ceres Negros on the same pitch last week, will try to regain its confidence and morale against the second- running Cebuanos at 4 p.m.

Ceres Negros, meanwhile, hosts Davao Aguilas at 7 p.m. at the Panaad Park and Football Stadium in Bacolod City.

The Busmen are coming off back-to-back 7-0 victories over Ilocos United and Meralco to tote 19 points in third place.

The Davao Aguilas, on the other hand, are also in high spirits after forcing a goalless draw with Global Cebu at the Cebu City Sports Complex. They have five points on five draws in 10 matches. Lance Agcaoili

Cool Smashers face UP spikers

C

REAMLINE tries to solidify its hold of the top spot as it eyes its sixth straight win against University of the Philippines in the Premier Volleyball League (PVL) Open Conference today at the Filoil Flying V Centre in San Juan City.

The Cool Smashers take on the Lady Maroons (1-4 wonlost) at 6:30 p.m.

A victory would give Creamline at least the No. 2 seed in the semifinals and send UP out of contention.

BaliPure and Perlas-BanKo, meanwhile, take the floor in the other match at 4 p.m. BaliPure holds a 2-2 card, while Perlas-BanKo has a 2-3 record.

The Cool Smashers achieved their goal to make it to the semifinals even without four-time league Most Valuable Player Alyssa Valdez, who will miss the remainder of the elimination round to join the Japan camp of the national women’s team. Lance Agcaoili

BusinessMi

Saturday, July 22, 2017 | Editor: Jun Lomibao

A6

ELEVEN juniors from eight countries are training at the World Cycling Centre in Aigle, Switzerland.

Fine-tuning for juniors training at UCI World Cycling Centre

F

INE-TUNING for the International Cycling Union (UCI) BMX World Championships is in its final stages for the junior athletes training at the UCI World Cycling Centre (WCC) in Aigle, Switzerland.

Eleven Juniors from eight countries were selected to train at the UCI WCC in Aigle to prepare for this year’s World Championships in Rock Hill, USA, at the end of July.

Aged 17 and 18, most of them were chosen from the two-week talentidentification camp held at the UCI WCC in October last year.

They are being put through their paces by South African athlete, coach and KwaZulu-Natal Cycling’s Development Officer Tyrone Johns.

“The beauty about working with juniors is they are in some ways raw and rough. Just by polishing them and working the edges away we can immediately start to see the diamonds underneath,” Johns said.

“Working with such talent is really easy as it involves only minor adjustments. A tweak here and there can give them the edge they have been searching for.”

Their coach is full of praise not only for their ability, but also their determination and attitude.

“The work ethic in the group is fantastic,” he said. “They are more than happy to put in the prescribed training, even if it means doing so on tired legs.”

The aim of the camp has been to help the

athletes achieve the best results possible at the UCI BMX World Championships. Several have already performed well in previous years in the Challenge classes, while one of the camp participants, Japan’s Sae Hatekeyama, finished fourth in the Junior Women’s race at last year’s UCI BMX World Championships in Medellin, Colombia.

As well as training on the UCI WCC Supercross track and in the gym, they have gained valuable race experience at different rounds of the French Cup, Swiss Cup and European Cup, where they have already enjoyed considerable success—Latvia’s Vineta Petersone took first place in the overall European Cup classification.

The juniors who have made the UCI

By Andrew Keh

New York Times News Service

M WORLD champion Peter Sagan says the jury did not consult him before making the ruling.

SAGAN: IT WAS A MISTAKE

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LMOST two weeks on from his dramatic disqualification from the Tour de France, Peter Sagan (BoraHansgrohe) said that he’s unable to accept the decision made the race jury.

The world champion was sent packing from the race following a crash with Mark Cavendish in the finale of Stage 4.

With no racing until the end of the month, Sagan has had plenty of time to muse upon the ruling while at home in Monaco. Speaking to Belgian television channel VTM, Sagan said that while he has come to terms with the fact that he’s no longer in the race, he calls the decision itself a “mistake”.

“For sure, I did some analysis. I can accept that I’m out of the race, but I can’t accept the decision that the jury made. It’s just a big mistake, I think,” Sagan told reporter Merijn Casteleyn.

Following the incident, Sagan initially had points docked from his tally in the green-jersey competition and was relegated in the stage. However, a protest from Cavendish’s Dimension Data squad came and the jury reconsidered their decision.

Around two hours after the stage had finished, head of the jury Philippe Marien walked into the pressroom to announce that Sagan had been disqualified for endangering another rider.

While Dimension Data had their say on the initial ruling, Sagan says that he was never consulted in the decision-making process.

“I want to say, I’m out of the race, but the jury never spoke to me. They never

asked for an explanation,” he said. “They just said that I did wrong and I was violent.

That is bad, to say that I’m violent when you didn’t do anything wrong.

“This I don’t accept, because I didn’t do something wrong.”

Bora-Hansgrohe did attempt to appeal the ruling with the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), but it was to no avail and the disqualification stood. Sagan’s dismissal was not the last furor that the race jury would find themselves in throughout this year’s Tour de France. Following Stage 12, they handed out 20-second penalties to General Classification riders Rigoberto Uran (Cannondale-Drapac) and George Bennett (LottoNL-Jumbo).

However, they did not give Romain Bardet (AG2R La Mondiale) a penalty, despite committing the same infraction.

After digging their heels in and resolutely saying that there would be no walk back of the decision, they did just that and took away the seconds added to Uran and Bennett’s overall times. Asked by Casteleyn if there was room for improvement for the race jury, Sagan said yes, but it could only happen if they were willing.

“If somebody wants some improvement then that is important. There is always space to be better, if somebody wants to be better.

It is difficult. I just don’t see in cycling and other things we don’t have someone who can protect us, the riders.”

Sagan will return to racing at the Tour de Pologne on July 29, before the BinckBank Tour on August 7, as he prepares to defend his world title. Cyclingnews

ONT DU CHAT, France—A whitehaired man was dancing naked in the middle of the mountain road, his sunburned body rocking imprecisely to a pop song pounding from a set of speakers. His half-hearted attempt to cover himself with one hand as he swayed was mostly ineffectual, which only made his friends laugh harder and cover their eyes.

Behind them was a 20-foot-long, homemade banner that read, “VIVE LE TOUR.” It was late Saturday afternoon on Mont du Chat, a full 24 hours before the competitors of the Tour de France would ascend these brutally steep roads. But the merrymaking, as the man’s striptease made clear, was already in full swing.

For connoisseurs of cycling, mountain roads provide an optimal vantage point to see a race in person. On flat pavement, riders speed past in a thick pack, gone in a flash. On steep climbs, though, they lumber past, often slowly enough for fans to talk to them or touch them or even run alongside them for a bit.

But reaching these roads is no easy task.

Prime spots tend to be up several miles of winding pavement, on windswept outcroppings of rock, or, as here in the western edge of the Alps, cut out of thick woods. Local authorities tend to close mountain access roads in the days before the Tour passes through. There is a longtime tradition, then, of cycling fans camping out in the mountains for days, or even weeks, to claim a coveted place along the course.

That type of pop-up community was on display last weekend on Mont du Chat, the toughest climb during the first mountain stage of this year’s Tour. In the days before the race rolled through on July 9, an impermanent society of tents and mobile homes developed, where sun-bronzed hordes of multinational partyers—nature lovers and attention-seekers, rowdy young people and tranquil retirees— communed in crowded, roadside quarters.

WCC their home in the run-up to the Championships come from eight different countries—Thailand, Slovakia, Latvia, Peru, South Africa, Ecuador, Colombia and Japan.

While the long-term aim for some are the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, for now the talented young athletes have their eyes firmly set on the Worlds in Rock Hill.

“We all know what the goal is, and not many get the honor of wearing a rainbow jersey,” Johns said. “At the end of the day, that is what is driving our team, the dream of becoming the Junior UCI BMX World Champion. We train every day with that goal in mind, never forgetting to put in the hard work now so it can pay off at the end of July.”

UCI News

BMX makes its Olympic debut in Beijing as a demonstration sport.

A SHORT HISTO B

ICYCLE Motocross (BMX) originally started when children began imitating motocross riders on their bicycles. Old bikes were used on roped off tracks with turns and jumps, which gave the pedal-powered fanatics a sensation of racing motocross. The number plates on the bicycle and the trophies at the finish line made it feel real.

Pictures and footage date back to the mid1950s in the Netherlands where motocross racing was already popular. BMX was

developed as a sport in the USA in the late1960s/early-1970s, with youngsters taking their Schwinn Stingray bikes to improvised tracks all over California.

Scott Breithaupt (1957-2015), often dubbed the Godfather of BMX, was instrumental in making this happen and the activity simply took off. Bikes were made stronger to resist the massive jumps on the downhill-style tracks.

Motocross companies, such as Yamaha, Kawasaki and Suzuki, were now making BMX bikes.

BEER, BAG AND, BRIE The fans had little to do but wait. But for many of them, waiting was half the fun.

“We just enjoy being outside,” said Ferdinand van der Duin, 67, of Groningen, the Netherlands, who sat quietly in a lawn chair on that Friday morning. Van der Duin and his family had arrived Thursday and pitched a couple of tents on a narrow, slanted patch of grass next to the road. “If the cyclists never came up on Sunday, we’d still be OK.” There were more than two days to go before the race, but the mountainside was brimming with people.

Up the road, nine men from around the French department, or region, of Isère—mostly in their 50s and 60s—were constructing a refined dining room amid the trees, using bamboo scaffolding to support a tarp roof and an overhead lamp. They placed a citronella candle on a floral tablecloth to dissuade bugs, and their dinner left nothing to be desired: thick coins of saucisson, a dry-cured sausage, to start; a simmering pot of mahogany-hued chicken tagine; a wheel

AN RV adorned with flags of Swiss cantons awaits the ascent of the Tour de France up the Mont du Chat, near Bourget-du-Lac, France. NYT

FANS who had camped out cheer on riders ascending the Mont du Chat, the day before the Tour de France would do likewise, near Bourgetdu-Lac, France. NYT

of Brie and a hefty brick of Comté; and homemade génépi, a liqueur infused with alpine herbs, to cleanse their palates.

“Bravo to the chef,” they said, clapping, after mopping the stew with bread.

Wine flowed throughout. The men talked politics and howled with laughter recounting their trip to the Tour last year, when a trusting stranger stumbled upon their camp and left so drunk that he passed out in the woods.

The men were lucky enough to claim one of the best views on the entire mountain—the Alps towering in the distance, Lac du Bourget shimmering below—but that was all invisible in the dark as they cleaned up their plates and refilled their glasses.

A few hundred yards up the road, a group of young men in their teens and early 20s—hailing from Le Bourget-du-Lac, the town just to the east of the mountain—was only starting their night.

They pulled beers from a cooler and played endless rounds of pétanque, a French lawn game.

They said that they come up to Mont du Chat

irror CYCLING

mirror_sports@yahoo.com.ph | Saturday, July 22, 2017 A7

Stefany Hernandez welcomes a group of asylum-seekers to her second “home”.

Olympic bronze medalist shares love of BMX cycling with refugees

ORY OF BMX racing In 1978 Dutchman Gerrit Does discovered BMX bikes while on a motocross trip to the USA. He found the bikes to be a perfect training tool for children wishing to get into motocross later on. One thing led to another and Does started a bicycle organization in the Netherlands called S.F.N. He was subsequently contacted by many other European countries and expanded the organization to the International BMX Federation (IBMXF).

BMX racing took off. The movie E.T.,

released in 1982, helped boost BMX in many countries, thanks to the young hero’s BMX bike and a popular BMX chase scene. As a result, every city had to have a BMX track. The sport was booming.

BMX continued to develop under the IBMXF, and many World Championships were held. It wasn’t until the early-1990s that BMX was integrated into the International Cycling Union (UCI), which launched a season-long UCI World Cup series in addition to the UCI

World Championships.

The ever-expanding and strong international character of BMX in both the male and female categories didn’t go unnoticed by the International Olympic Committee. In 2008 BMX was introduced into the Olympic Games in Beijing with Maris Strombergs (LAT) and Anne-Caroline Chausson (FRA) grabbing the discipline’s first Olympic gold medals.

BMX racing has been on the Olympic program ever since. UCI News

A

GROUP of refugees residing in Switzerland was introduced to BMX this week by one of the world’s best— Stefany Hernandez.

Olympic bronze medalist in the BMX in Rio last year and 2015 UCI World Champion, the Venezuelan athlete first arrived as a trainee at the International Cycling Union (UCI) World Cycling Centre in Aigle, Switzerland, in 2012.

Recently, she welcomed a group of asylumseekers to her second “home.”

Although in the final phase of preparation for the 2017 UCI BMX World Championships in Rock Hill, USA, Hernandez took time to give the visitors a tour of the UCI WCC and a short presentation of her BMX career.

“Life is to be unstoppable. Limits are

GUETTES EFLY, BIKES often, mostly to hunt wild boar and goats. They were excited about the Tour—like many other people there, they hoped to make it onto the television broadcast of the event—but the race, they said, was just another excuse to meet up on the mountain for a good time.

“Before the Tour de France we’re up here, and after the Tour de France we’ll still be up here,” said Thibault Joram, 18, who wore a beret atop his wiry frame.

At 3 a.m., the young men rumbled down the slope, setting off firecrackers and clanging an enormous cowbell. It was 6 a.m. when they finally decided to call it a night.

Just a couple of hours after that, early Saturday morning, Gisèle Machet scooted up the mountain in her Peugeot 106 with a sack of baguettes on the passenger seat. Machet, 67, who lives in the nearby town of Meyrieux-Trouet, was not a camper—just a woman who understood the daily need here for fresh bread. After picking up loaves from a local bakery, she was driving up the mountain, from RV

to RV, to drop them off.

“I’m doing this as a service,” Machet said as she accelerated up the road. She was charging the campers her cost: €1.10 per loaf, no profit. “If the situation were switched,” she said, “they’d do the same thing for me.”

Some people had arrived as early as Monday, but the mountain truly came to life on Friday afternoon. People painted the roads, leaving encouraging messages, or taunts, for the riders.

Neighbors made small talk. Some campers sought out their countrymen, taking clues from license plates and flags. Les Aigles, the only restaurant on the mountain, and the site of its only toilet, did a brisk business.

Otherwise time passed slowly. Inge Dienaar, 56, of Zutphen, the Netherlands, spent hours that afternoon seated on a prime corner of the course—a spot she and her husband had claimed Thursday—crocheting a doll for her granddaughter. Her Jack Russell terrier, Ellie Bellie, sought refuge from the punishing sun

under their RV, which boasted a satellite dish, a solar generator and, crucially, a television.

“We’ve got a season of Inspector Morse and the newest season of MasterChef Australia,” Dienaar said.

On Saturday, before the sun began to set, the police closed the road for good.

Anyone traveling it up or down from that point on would have to walk or ride a bicycle along 6 miles of curving road.

Parties in the mountains tend to get wild the night before the race, and it was no different on Mont du Chat.

A group of two dozen or so young men from Le Bourget-du-Lac and Chambéry, a nearby city, set up turntables and speakers in a clearing that featured a heterogeneous array of objects reminiscent of an American fraternity house: a barbecue grill, a hookah, a sombrero, a flat-screen television balanced on an old wooden desk, two refrigerators filled with beer, a hammock, a shopping cart, a coffee maker, many pairs of flip-flops and assorted costumes.

They planned to wear the costumes— Marge Simpson, a pig, a Dalmatian and a cockroach, among others—when they ran alongside the riders on Sunday to improve their chances of getting on television. This was the ultimate goal. When a race official suggested that the image of a syringe they had painted near their campsite, with Chris Froome’s name written next to it, would hurt their chances of getting on camera, they quickly splashed it with a layer of white paint.

“We have fun, but there are rules about what you cannot do,” said Jean-Philippe Taravele, 27, who wore an Atlanta Falcons football helmet. “We’re not stupid.”

Up the road, another party—the one that later would inspire the elderly man to remove his clothes—was raging. Fans danced in the middle of the road, yelling exaggerated encouragement to the last amateur cyclists chugging up the road ahead of Sunday’s stage.

This crew had arrived on Friday from Doussard, a town two hours to the east by car, and set up a campsite that seemed to represent a sort of platonic ideal for spectating on the mountain: majestic views of the Rhône in the

distance, and a sharp corner with a wide portion of pavement where riders would inevitably slow.

They said they scouted the location last year, when this year’s route was announced.

“We looked at the whole route on Google Street View,” said Fabien Reitz, 29, one of the revelers. “We saw this and said, ‘Well, there it is.’”

Sunday morning moved fast. More people arrived after hiking up the mountain. The riders started the stage from Nantua around midday, and the fans on Mont du Chat gathered around strangers’ televisions and radios to track their approach. An ominous early thunderstorm fortunately cleared by late morning.

Near the summit, Szymon Konieczny, 28, of Katowice, Poland, prepared enormous cutouts of his favorite riders’ faces, an idea he said he had borrowed from watching the NBA. His wet socks hung on a wire behind him.

“Paint the street? That’s old,” Konieczny said.

“Hold a flag? Old. A head? That’s new. They will come by and say, ‘Wow!’ It will give them energy.”

After days of waiting, the mountain became engulfed in noise when the first riders arrived around 4:30 p.m. Warren Barguil of France led the group at one point and inspired crazed cheers of “Allez!” Froome, the three-time Tour de France winner, was close behind and was mercilessly booed and cursed the whole way up.

Crowding the course, inches from the cyclists, the spectators could yell almost directly into their ears and look straight into their eyes. George Bennett of New Zealand cracked a big smile when he spotted a man dressed like an insect, furiously snapping his cloth pincers. But otherwise, the riders had blank, detached expressions. Some seemed pained. A few of the stragglers received pushes from helpful fans.

“They go so slowly that you can actually see the effort and see them suffering,” said Caitlin Van Kooten, 28, of Chicago.

It took a little more than half an hour for the entire pack to make it through, and when the last rider went over the top, the weekend (or, in a few cases, the week) came to an abrupt end. It grew eerily quiet on the mountain. Within an hour, most of the roadside tents had been packed up.

only in your head,” she repeated to her audience, who hailed from Afghanistan, Syria, Ethiopia and Eritrea.

Although few of them had ever heard of BMX, they could not wait to get out onto the center’s pump track under the watchful eye of Hernandez, who gave them plenty of advice and beginner’s tips.

“I really wanted to do this and I’m having so much fun,” Hernandez said.

“It’s just two hours of my time and it is so meaningful and fulfilling to share this moment with them and share my passion.

“They haven’t had an easy time.

Sometimes life gives you a slap in the face but you have to try to come back.”

The group of 15 refugees come from

EVAM (Etablissement Vaudois d’Accueil des Migrants), one of the Swiss regional centers that welcomes immigrants seeking asylum. They were accompanied by Joël Bussy, one of the heads of CABES (Contacts Amitié Bible entre Etrangers et Suisses) and Geert Hendriks.

“We found that playing sport is a good way to connect and build friendships,” Geert Hendriks explained. “We started with football about three years ago, and Stefany wanted to work with refugees which was a great opportunity for us.”

The Venezuelan has a new group of fans, who will be following her performance at the 2017 UCI BMX World Championships from July 25 to 29. UCI News

Agua Marina Espinola hopes to become the first cyclist from Paraguay to complete the road race at the International Cycling Union Road World Championships.

‘BORN TO RIDE’ N O cyclist from Paraguay has ever completed the road race at the UCI Road World Championships.

Agua Marina Espinola means to change that. Currently training at the International Cycling Union (UCI) World Cycling Centre (WCC) in Aigle, Switzerland, she is 100-percent focused on her preparation for the Worlds in Bergen (Norway) in September.

Seven years ago she didn’t even realize that cycling was a competitive sport.

“I saw some people cycling and it got me interested. I asked them how I could start, they lent me a bike and two months later I did my first race.”

The 14-year-old was one of only two females in an otherwise all-male peloton. She finished the 70-km route second-to-last.

“It was very long and I really suffered but I enjoyed it!” she said.

It was not long before the young athlete realized that this would be her sport, although she would never have dreamed of competing one day at the UCI World Championships.

“I am very excited and a little bit scared,” said the 21-year-old, who in many ways is paving the way for women cyclists in her country. She is the first Paraguayan athlete to train at the UCI WCC, hopes to become the first to finish a UCI Road World Championships and, why not, be the first cyclist from her country to compete in an Olympic Games.

“I think everything is possible,” said the young woman who tattooed “Born to ride” on her wrist after successfully completing the 2015 Tour de San Luis féminin in Argentina.

“Everyone said I wouldn’t finish, but I did!”

It hasn’t been an easy road trying to make headway in a country with few women cyclists.

It’s very hard to get to a good level. You have to race with men and sometimes they don’t want you to race with them.

She adds: “So you need to go to Argentina or Brazil to race and that can be expensive.”

Her invitation to train in Aigle came after she was detected by coaches during a training camp at the WCC Satellite center

in Mar del Plata (Argentina). She has been here since March and is adding to her experience every day by training under the watchful eye of the center’s professional coaches and racing in Europe.

“I am really happy to be here. I can improve my level and learn how to race: technique, tactics, descents, corners.... I’m getting better, I know I am improving.

“I miss home but this is what I want to do. The level in Paraguay is getting better each year and I want to show people at home that it is possible to come from Paraguay and succeed.”

Her progress is closely followed by the Federación Paraguaya de Ciclismo, which works hard to develop cycling not only at high-performance level but also across the entire population. Special emphasis is being put on developing the country’s younger riders, with the establishment of cycling acadamies and clubs, as well as increasing collaboration with schools.

A fuller racing calendar across all disciplines and age groups, as well as more training courses for coaches and commissaires are also among the federation’s priorities.

“We are committed to the training and updating of people in the cycling professions,” says the President of the Federación Paraguaya de Ciclismo Kashi Cesar Garrido Cáceres.

“Otherwise, it is impossible to develop the sport at a national level.

“Cycling is undergoing a significant boom in Paraguay, particularly with youngsters taking up mountain bike. We can measure the growth of the sport by looking at the number of riders taking out licences: at the end of 2016, 643 riders had licences, whereas 1015 licences have been delivered so far this year.”

He hopes that Agua Marina Espinola’s appearance at this year’s UCI Road World Championships will be a catalyst for other Paraguayan athletes: “Her progress gives us hope that we can achieve a result at an international level that will give us a more prominent place in future events.”

UCI News

A8 Saturday, July 22, 2017 • Editor: Efleda P. Campos

OurTime BusinessMirror

Needy Pinoy seniors look forward to meager P500 monthly pension

By Mark Kevin Reginio | Special to the BusinessMirror

P

URITA “Puring” Cruz, 74, is just waiting for a notice from the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) before she could start receiving her social pension.

After 14 years of depending from her generous neighbors and from the occasional endowments from her children and grandchildren, Puring sees the light of finally financing herself.

“I would save my social pension, of course, so that I would not be a burden to my children,” she said in Filipino.

Under the government’s socialpension program for indigent senior citizens, Puring, if approved, would receive a P500 monthly stipend.

Aside from providing for herself, she is also looking forward to fixing her house, which is perforated after a series of reblocking in Kasanduan, Quezon City. Ambitious, maybe, but for Puring, the house is the only possession she has after her husband died years ago and after her children left for their own families. She is now living alone in her small abode and is visited by her grandchildren sometimes.

“I really need to repair this house because the roof is unstable. I think this house is decent enough and is enough for me as an elderly,” she said.

Puring passed her application form and requirements, has undergone the confidential-informant procedure, and was already interviewed. She plans on going to the barangay office to inquire on the date of her confirmation and has already thought of ways she could spend her pension.

Yet, it took her more than a decade to finally apply for it. “It was only this year when the government personnel came here and offered us the social pension. In fact, I would not know it if they never came,” she said.

It was in 2011 when the program started after the Expanded Senior Citizens Act of 2010 was enacted, but surprisingly, Puring and other senior citizens in Kasanduan never knew about it. Most of them, like Puring, just heard of it this year.

The senior citizens of Kasanduan, however, are not the only elders who just applied for social pension. Out of the 4.8 million senior citizens aged 65 and older in the country, as per the coverage of the program in 2015, only 19 percent can avail of the pension.

Regionally, out of the 43,116 targeted senior citizens in the National Capital Region, only 43 percent, or 18,441 elders, were accounted for in the program. However, more than the weakness of its information dissemination, DSWD Social Pension Officer Analiza Salud credited the low turnout of indigent senior citizens to the small amount of social workers in the agency.

Social workers are tasked to go to different places, especially in far-flung areas, to look for possible beneficiaries.

Yet, these workers are only job orders or workers on call. They do not have the chance of working regularly to continue the oculars.

Still, although there are elders who are not yet accounted for, the number of indigent senior citizens is increasing every year. From the 138,960 indigent senior citizens in 2011, the number has increased to 1.3 million this year with the greatest leap of 493,965 recorded in 2015.

To further increase the number of

PURING CRUZ, 74, is living alone in her perforated house. She has passed all the requirements for the social-pension program of the Department of Social Welfare and Development and is now waiting for the confirmation. She may look healthy, but Puring has hypertension. She needs to take three different medicines for her condition.

beneficiaries of the program, DSWD and Congress widened the coverage of the program last year to include senior citizens age 60 and older.

Salud said the DSWD accepts walkin seniors and referrals from other groups, non-governmental organizations and from the barangay to accommodate more senior citizens.

As defined in the Expanded Senior Citizens Act of 2010, a senior can be tagged as an indigent or beneficiary if they are frail and sickly, with disability, has no pension from the government or private institutions and has no regular source of income or support from families. Possible beneficiaries will be approved by DSWD regional offices and will then be endorsed by the local government in their location.

“Not all the criteria can be satisfied. It still depends on the assessment and the actual condition of the elderly because there are those who are not sick but do not have financial support and pension and they are still poor,” Salud said.

Puring may look physically healthy and strong, but she has hypertension

and needs to take three different medication to treat her condition. Her medication costs P60 a month.

To sustain the maintenance of her medicine, she accepts jobs like babysitting in her neighborhood at P200 a day. Otherwise, she receives P500 or grocery from her children when they visit, enough for her to survive in a week.

“The money lasts for me. In fact, I sometimes give some to my grandchildren when they come here,” she said.

Yet, there can be times when she both doesn’t have a child to babysit and cash gift from her children, just like this week. Fortunately, there are neighbors who give her ready-to-eat food.

That is why it is important for Puring to get a monthly stipend to finance her medicine and her daily basic needs.

However, a P500 monthly stipend is too meager for a senior to live decently on. The amount of a daily-living wage for a family of six is P1,119, or P186.5 per person. Even Salud recognizes this shortage that is why the DSWD and a number people’s organizations are lobbying for the increase of the stipend to P1,500 a month. Aside from repairing her house and financing her needs, Puring dreams of going back to her province once she receives her pension. In her 57 years in Quezon City, she has gone to Bicol only once.

“I really need money. I also want to go backtoourprovincesomyrelativeswould know that I am still alive,” she said. Out of her nine siblings, only two are alive and Puringwantstoknowtheircondition.She also wants to check on their 24-hectare land, which, according to her, was sold in the amount of P100,000. “I want to know what I can do for my family. I am also planning to talk to the buyer if I can repay the land,” she added.

After that, she would like to return to her humble house as her children are living in Montalban.

Even though she doesn’t want to be a burden to them, she really hopes that her family, especially her children, will be there when she needs them.

“I think Lea and Ernie will not abandon me,” she said.

Burnham Park’s ‘boat cabbie’ laments city’s deterioration Story and photos

by Rosabel Toledo | Correspondent

O

N nonpeak months when buses to and from Baguio aren’t even half-filled with excited tourists, the city falls into a sleepy lull: Rates for transient homes drop, the queue for a combo meal at Good Taste clears up, and one can walk Mines View Park up and down without being offered to rent traditional garb for a photo opportunity with a pink-maned horse, or a comically large dog.

The city slumber also shushes Burnham Park, a place that’s bustling with tourists on sunnier months. The little peace and quiet in effect gives boat paddlers like Tatay Greg, 66, the chance to reflect on how much the city has changed across the years.

“It’s disheartening how Baguio seems to have been neglected. It was very beautiful back then! Calamities, like earthquakes, might have had a hand in its deterioration, but the city could have recovered had it not been forsaken,” said Tatay Greg in Filipino, to the agreement of his brother and two nephews, who are boat paddlers in Burnham Park, like him.

Tatay Greg narrates how the city took his breath away when he set foot on it for the first time as a teenager in 1968. His uncle brought him in from Isabela, to have a fighting chance for a better life.

“It used to be very cold, and pine trees were everywhere. The Burnham Lake was pristine—the water was clear and it was truly beautiful.You’ll

TATAY Greg (inset) is one of the cabbies paddling the boats rented by tourists when they visit Burnham Park Lake in Baguio City.

be greeted with flowers everywhere, and there were only around 10 boats available for rent to tourists,” he said.

At present, there are 90-something paddleboats in the now-murky Burnham Lake—maintained by six different concessionaires. During peak season, boat concessionaires who own over 10 boats each easily earn P250,000 to P300,000 every day. The profit drops dramatically during the rainy season, such as now, but the hit is felt much deeply by the likes of Tatay Greg, who have no boats of their own but instead watches over other people’s boats from dawn till dusk. They suffer the most because they do not earn any money from manning these boats.

As divulged by Tatay Greg and his

copaddlers, they only get commissions when tourists ask for paddling services, priced at P50 per half hour.

This goes entirely to them, but if a group of tourists only asks to rent a boat but opts to paddle it themselves, they do not get even a fraction from the P100-per-half-hour rental rate.

Tatay Greg said it used to bother him a bit back in the day, so he sought other side jobs, but he is now content with the free meals that come with his boat gig.

“We get paid in meals. When my kids were still in school, it was tough making ends meet. I would get construction and other side jobs. Now, in God’s mercy, our three kids have finished school and are now all work-

ing,” he said.

Tatay Greg’s wife currently works as a staff member in the local health center, a job she does not actually need anymore with three children already earning, but a job that she loves with all her heart, as per Tatay Greg.

In spite of the rough beginnings, Tatay Greg did end up falling in love with Baguio, so he never left, despite initial plans of moving to Manila to seek an even better life.

“It’s cold here; I love the cold,” he said, flashing a warm, genuine, toothless grin, when asked why he never looked back. “I really love Baguio even if I was not born here —that’s why I never litter. I hope tourists do the same,” he continued more seriously.

The jolly senior loves tourists and could not wait for the peak season to start so the boats he’s manning could entertain more guests. He simply wishes for them to care of the summer capital as much as he does. He wishes for guests to think about the people they leave behind in the city when they head home, bags packed with ube and strawberry jams, loot from the night market and native handicrafts—people for whom Baguio is home, instead of a weeklong getaway.

At 66 years old, Tatay Greg is not yet looking forward to retirement. “Why, do I look old enough to retire?”

With his contagious laughter, tough limbs from his years of construction and boat-paddling, and the glint in his eyes when talking about the city he loves dearly, one could only answer “no”.

news@businessmirror.com.ph

PBEd exhorts govt to decentralize PHL education system

By Verna Mae Barrozo

Special to the BusinessMirror

B

EYOND providing access to education, an advocacy group is urging the government to decentralize Philippine education and overhaul teacher development to address the inefficiencies in the country’s current education system.

The Philippine Business for Education (PBEd) stated the problem lies with the systemic issues of the Department of Education (DepEd) as a highly centralized system.

“For one, our basic education system of 28 million learners, 800,000 teachers and 75,000 schools is too big for one agency to manage centrally. It’s no surprise then that inefficiencies and wastage continue to plague the system,” PBEd Chairman Ramon del Rosario Jr. said in a news conference in Pasig last Wednesday, July 5.

A study found about a quarter of resources do not reach schools that need it most in a centralized system.

“A study on basic-education delivery supported by the World Bank and Australian Embassy found that in 2013, 23 percent of the budget maintenance and other operating expenses got lost along the way as funds moved from the central office to the schools,” PBEd Executive Director Love Basillote said.

Three years of school-based management can increase achievement test scores by 4.2 points on average, according to a World Bank study.

Aside from the DepEd’s concentrated structure, teacher quality also raises concerns on their limitations as educators. PBEd aims to improve training and certification among teachers to make them better educators.

“Our teachers need a lot of help. Their poor contact knowledge at practically every area speaks volumes,” Basillote said.

Basillote added the Board Licensure Examination for Professional Teachers (BLEPT) is a poor measure to gauge teacher competence.

“It is no wonder that teacher quality is poor when the tool intended to separate the grain from the chaff is marred with questions that frankly do not make sense,” she said, citing sample questions from BLEPT, which she claimed do not reflect the supposed competence of a teacher.

World Bank data revealed investment in teacher development is not enough to close the gap.

“If our teachers are to do their jobs well, we must provide them with targeted, customized and relevant professional development,” Basillote said.

The appropriated budget for education has been increasing since 2010, data showed. In 2017 Congress allotted P543.2 billion to the DepEd, up from 2016’s P433.38 billion.

The 2016 rankings of the World Economic Forum placed the Philippines at 73rd out of 140 countries in terms of primary-education quality. Meanwhile, it ranked 46th out of 50 in QS rankings of higher-education strength.

The many faces of intermarriage, 50 years after Loving versus Virginia

M

ORE than 2 million marriages take place each year in the US and, increasingly, they are uniting people of different races and ethnicities. Today, according to the Pew Research Center, 1 in 6 newlyweds in the US is involved in a mixed marriage.

That is a fivefold increase from 1967, when the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in Loving v.

Virginia, the decision that made interracial marriage legal across the nation. Last month, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Loving decision, The New York Times asked readers the question: Has being in an interracial relationship united or divided your family?

Nearly 200 people—not only couples, but children of intermarried parents—responded. In those responses, several themes emerged.

Mixed marriage in 2017 goes far beyond black and white, and might more aptly be called multicultural marriage. Children also tend to unite families; many couples wrote in to say that once they became parents, relations with their own parents improved. One interracial marriage tends to beget another; the children of intermarried couples tend to intermarry, if our readers are any guide.

We heard tales of hope and disappointment, fear and hurt feelings, struggles for acceptance, but most of all, love.

Here, in their own words, are a few of our readers’ stories, edited and condensed for clarity: Robin Ligon-Eaton, 51, and Maynard Eaton, 67 Where they met: At an arts center in Atlanta.

Married in June Robin: My blonde, blue-eyed father had an interracial relationship with the African-American dancer and singer Josephine Baker when he lived in Europe in the 1950s. Ironically, even though this was a wellknown legend in my family, when I decided to wed a biracial (Native American and black) jazz musician in the 1990s, my father had an issue with it. When I told him that “the apple does not fall far from the tree,”

he stated that he was a man, which made the difference.

My daughter, Colette, was born in 1993 and was estranged from the funeral of my father in 1994, which was a terrible and regrettable irony.

I never thought and still don’t think about age or race when I am in social or personal circles. Last week my new husband and I joyously tied the knot in New Orleans with a traditional Jazz second-line parade.

We live in Atlanta, which is racially polarized and very difficult to navigate personally and professionally. For such an international city, with a storied history and present steeped in civil rights, do we not also have the right to love one another without reservation or fear of contempt from persons on both sides of the fence?

It takes a very strong resolve to stand these daily tests, but we are willing to stand firm. As writers and artists, our broad and diverse worldviews are a blessing. The combined ancestry of French, African, Miami and Cherokee Indian in our union is and will always be embraced and celebrated. Love, as in the story of the Lovings, is all about the heart and not about the color of the skin.

Myra Clark-Foster, 65, and Howard Andrew Foster, 66 Where they met: High school study hall.

Married in August 2015 Myra: Howard Andrew Foster and I began dating during the racially turbulent 1960s. After graduation in 1969 from West High School in Columbus, Ohio, Andrew, as his family calls him, attended what is now called Columbus State Community College. I attended Ohio State University.

Andrew asked to meet me in front of the OSU Student Union. He told me that he didn’t think we should see each other because society wasn’t going to let us be happy. He said he just wanted me to be happy. I said nothing. We embraced one last time, turned and walked away. About a block away, we both turned around and waved. I think we were saying, “See you later.”

The Millennials BusinessMirror

news.businessmirror@gmail.com

Saturday, July 22, 2017

A9

Patties make path to profit for students

A

T the corner of Fatima Avenue, something aromatically familiar grasps passersby.

Following the scent brings the curious to a decrepit gate that, when opened, surprises with the familiar smell and sizzling zzzztttt of a burger patty being grilled.

Welcome to Burger Mentality, a “guerrilla” food joint by originally four close friends and young entrepreneurs at the heart of this northern city of Valenzuela.

The four who created an idea using their play ful minds to start off a burger joint included senior high-school students Asharina Benito, Michael Francisco and Allen Lopez. Allen’s brother Ryan, a college student, completed the square.

These 18-year-old students battled to bring out passion into role. So, why wait for business school when you already got that entrepreneurial spirit burning?

Unplanned

ACCORDING to Benito, Burger Mentality is a product of an unplanned enterprise.

“Trip-trip lang noong una. [At first, it was just for fun],” Benito admitted with a laugh. “Mahilig naman ako magluto, so naisip namin na i-business na. [I love cooking, so we thought of starting a business out of it],” Lopez added.

Benito and her friends reflect the go-go spirit of today’s generation of entrepreneurs. They have an easy-go-lucky attitude but were driven to learn through experiences.

Ironically, these students are not the type one would actually think of pioneering a business as they seem to take things lightly.

As the nonbusiness students are juggling work and school schedules, they continuously explored the netherworld of business.

Benito, to note, didn’t consider what they were doing as work.

“Masaya katrabaho ang mga kaibigan. Sila ang nagpapagaan ng lahat sa trabaho [Working with friends is fun. they make everything at work easy],” she said.

average of 30 customers a day.

Challenges

The pioneers of Burger Mentality: Ryan Lopez (from left), Michael Francisco, Allen Lopez (standing) and Asharina Benito. Maecy Palad

Conflicts

ACCOR DI NG to B e n ito, t he burger joint star ted at their friend ’s garage early December of last year. A month after, they decided to move out and finally put up the restaurant near the Our Lady of Fatima University in Valenzuela City.

T he transfer arose from a conflict between them and their friend’s parents.

“Hindi namin napagplanuhan lahat [We did not plan everything],”

8 ways to be focused and kill distractions THE ability to concentrate and focus is at an all-time low.

T

he distractions of the world are growing stronger each day. It’s too easy to entertain ourselves on Facebook, Instagram, officemates and the urges to snack, pee, sleep and dream. The ability to ignore distractions is a skill that takes time to develop, but the focus champions actually become champions of their own work.

By improving your ability to focus on your work and saying “No” to the rest, you accomplish more.

Here’s how:

1Get a more comfortable chair.

If you spend most of the day seated, be willing to spend some money on a good chair.

Consider how many hours a day you sit at work over several years.

This isn’t a place to be stingy. You sit in your work chair more than you watch television or ride in your car.

How much did you spend on those things? If you’re comfortable, you’ll be less distracted. A sore back or rear end will cut your productivity and your ability to focus. There are German-made chairs designed with your spine and comfort in mind.

Else, stock up on pillows and back support to make work a comfort.

2

Know your priorities. Work on

the most important items of business first.

Key in one or two hours every day on your most important tasks. Use the golden hours in the morning to do the most important things. That is when you are most focused and clear headed.

Key in time for useless e-mails at the end of the day when all the big rocks have been checked off your list. Do your most important work when your ability to ignore distractions is the greatest.

3

Use headphones. Not only can

you block out the noise of your work neighbors, you can also choose to listen to something that will enhance your concentration.

Choose wisely as some people get distracted by some kinds of music.

Classical music is great for creative work, while nature sounds are good for logic and math.

4Plan Ahead.

This allows you to show up to work on time.

It’s hard to get caught up if you show up late to work. It’s also stressful and distracting. Improve your morning routine so you can consistently arrive at work on time lets your brain focus on real work.

5

Eliminate distractions on your computer and phone. Put dis-

tracting programs, like Facebook and Snapchat, in the bin where you will have to find it.

Use your personalized homescreen to compliment your productivity, like having a reminder for the things you have to do.

One popular app is called the “pomodoro”, which comes from an Italian dish that takes about twenty minutes. This is a work system where you work for a focused 20 minutes, and have a break for about 5 or 10 minutes, then start again. This guarantees that your 20 minutes is pure and unadulterated productivity. Search it now.

6Regulate and plan your breaks.

Your breaks should be less than your work time, not the other way around.

Tell your officemates that you need to finish something, beg off the lengthy coffee meetings on their private lives, and get to your desk. Use your breaks as incentives, like you can only get a sweet pastry if you finish your report. This should create

enough steam to get you going. Give yourself incentives for breaks and punishments for overtime breaks.

water and a snack near 7Keep your desk.

You can get up and eat or drink without getting caught up on gossip at the coffee station. Keep your essentials near you.

Do not eat in the same chair or place that you do for work. This tells your body to be hungry when you are there. Shifting could be as easy as standing up and munching away, or turning your chair a certain way every time you eat.

This keeps your body in “work mode” when you sit in your desk.

up your work area at the 8Clean end of the day.

End the day on a positive note and give yourself the best opportunity to start the following day well.

A cluttered desk is a subconscious distraction to some. You can spend hours cleaning and no time working.

Keep everything in its proper place so you don’t waste time looking for things or get distracted deciding what you want to throw and keep.

Studies have shown that those in an office environment only spend a few hours each day doing productive work. The rest of the time is spent on nonessential activities and things like getting coffee, talking with a cubicle mate and playing on the Internet. This is for most people.

If you want to be a focus champion, you can use the time they slack off to get ahead and rise above the crowd of mediocrity.

Sherlyn Kim is a certified international etiquette consultant and trainer and speaks on “The Professionals and Leaders Paradigm Podcast.” The views Kim expressed in this contributed column do not necessarily reflect those of the BusinessMirror’s.

Ryan Lopez said. Using their savings, an estimated capital of P30, 000, they were able to find a place near the garage they first started their burger joint.

Benito said during the first month, they were the talk of the town and their burgers were selling like hot cakes.

They believe this was because of price, which they consider at a level comfortable to their market.

She said they earn as much as P20,000 a month, with an

BUT as they devoted time into the business, conflicts developed, Benito said.

One of their friends, a former owner, decided to withdraw.

The older Lopez pointed to the lack of professionalism and the ability to take criticisms.

Likewise, challenges arose after settling down in their new site.

“Dahil nagkaroon ng mga tambay.

Hindi na kami pinupuntahan dahil sa ambience ng restaurant [A lot of bystanders came and customers were not pleased by the ambience],” Benito said. An unplanned opening was also chaotic. Benito said they are looking for a place to move in and start again.

To address the dwindling walkin customers, the coowners decided to go into home delivery using bicycles and with a P20delivery fee.

They also engage customers through their Facebook page. They also expanded their menu like including brownies.

Benito said they also ventured into paying for booths to sell burgers in other schools. She said they started at the University of

the East (UE) where she and Allen Lopez are studying. They rented a booth during UE’s Foundation day in February.

We were sold out and students asked us if we would continue selling the burgers after the event, Benito said.

Young advice

A bright-eyed Benito advised that young entrepreneurs like them should not be afraid and should keep on trying.

“Take risks. Kasi wala namang matatalo kasi bata pa lang naman.

And nandiyan naman yung mga magulang para sumuporta kaya walang dapat ikatakot,” Allen said. (We won’t lose anything since we are still young. And our parents are always there to support us.)

With all the challenges they faced, their parents supported them financially and all throughout the entire process. They let their children experience life boldly.

“Palibutan niyo ang sarili niyo ng good people: tamang kasama, tamang tao na pagkakatiwalaan,” Ryan said. (Surround yourself with good people: the right people to be with and to trust.) Flora Aslyn Olympia & Maecy Jean Palad

Fidget spinner: That devious plot to ‘zombify’ Russia

M

OSCOW—The West, in general, and the United States, in particular, are hatching all manner of diabolical anti-Russian plots, if reports in the state-controlled news media are to be believed.

Yet, the latest example of what is being portrayed as American skulduggery might be a stretch, even by the elastic standards of Russian television.

Beware the so-called fidget spinner, a hand toy that spins and has become a rage in Russia and the US, particularly among middle-school students.

Such a harmless trinket, you might think, would be destined for a moment in the spotlight followed by a long fall into oblivion, where it would join pet rocks, Beanie Babies and New Kids on the Block.

Perhaps, not so harmless, according to one recent report on Rossiya 24, suggesting that Russia’s opposition parties were trying to lure young supporters and raise money by hawking spinners. (The fact that many of the participants in recent nationwide demonstrations organized by the anticorruption crusader Alexei A. Navalny were young Russians had to be explained somehow.)

Mystery

“IT is a mystery why it has become so popular in Russia right now,” the television reporter said. “Who is promoting this to the masses so actively?” Cut to a clip of a video blogger selling spinners during anticorruption demonstrations in June under the banner “Spinners from Navalny”.

T he repor ter then held up another piece of evidence from his investigation: a spinner bought at a Moscow children’s store packaged with writing only in English. “Not a word in Russian!” he cautioned.

A selection of fidget spinners at a bodega in Manhattan, on May 19. A recent report on the staterun Rossiya 24 network suggested that Russian opposition parties were trying to lure young supporters and raise money by hawking spinners; now Russia’s consumer-protection agency says it will investigate the popular handheld toys. Jackie Molloy/The New York Times

Commentators piled on, noting that the spinners might indeed be an attempt to “zombify people” so that they could be manipulated.

“In such a manner, our opposition is luring the youth,” Ruslan Ostashko, the editor in chief of a pro-Kremlin web site, PolitRussia. ru, told Rossiya 24 in a separate report. “Those who understand political technologies, they understand very clearly that this simple thing is controlling the masses.”

Investigation

RUSSIA’S consumer-protection agency, Rospotrebnadzor, got into the act on Tuesday, announcing that it would investigate the toys.

“There has been an aggressive promotion of so-called spinners among children and teenagers in Russia recently,” the agency said in a statement. “Taking into consideration the anxiety among the community of parents and teachers, Rospotrebnadzor, in cooperation with child health research institutions, will study the effect spinners are having on children, including the possible negative impact.”

Of course, Russia is not alone in harboring concerns about spinners. The hand held devices have been modified to carry all manner of harmful things, like knives and firecrackers, becoming more weapon than toy.

In Germany customs officials confiscated 35 tons of spinners in May. There was no clear indication of who made them, said Christine Strass, a spokesman for the customs authority, and they posed a danger to young children, who could swallow small parts, like the ball bearings that make the toys spin.

Freeloaders

ALTHOUGH some therapists have said that the spinners help people with attention disorders, various schools in the US have banned them as a distraction.

The toy seemed to achieve cult status recently after the NBC comedy show Saturday Night Live produced a spoof advertisement for a diamond-encrusted fidget spinner from Cartier.

In Russia you can actually buy a real gold spinner for almost $17,000.

Russia also seems to have cornered the market on politicizing the potential side effects.

Navalny, never one to miss an opportunity to mock the government or its suspicions, posted a video of himself on Tuesday that showed him spinning a small device while awaiting the verdict in one of his recent trials.

The consumer-protection agency going after spinners, he said, was “a gang of freeloaders sitting on our necks”. New York Times News Service

A Scorpions ditty brings back memories of a long bus ride T

By Vernon Velasco

HE playlists of country buses I usually ride in the wee hours of the morning include Scorpions’s “I’m Still Loving You”, which drives my musings into the red-light recesses of my brain and gives me homosexual thoughts.

I would think of this guy, Wilbur I’d call him, who once talked me into seeing a performance in a male strip club somewhere in the nether regions of Manila. Wilbur being a poet, a pro-

fessor and a published writer, I chose not to be a cynic and looked forward to some high-brow conversation. I also felt giddy about what I took to mean as merely an immersive gathering of strangers somewhat becoming friends—an overture of the man whom I categorically didn’t strike as gay. And then he began to get clingy while buck-naked performers gracefully slithered and sashayed to “I’m Still Loving You”, an apparent bar staple that otherwise suggested something was about to happen; a main event,

if you will, the part old gay patrons hooted for and hankered to see. The Scorpions single was passionate and, under typical circumstances, brought to mind teens canoodling and twisted on the floor, possessed by premature desires and raging hormones. But, here, replete with graceful—morose—macho dancing, it otherwise reeked of frustration. The song demanded the listener to wax poetic about some lost love and lost years, existential loneliness and fear.

I felt something ache as Wilbur’s hand inched

to places just a kiss shy of my delicate parts. And as I briskly brushed it away, he pleaded if it could remain there. I didn’t refuse nor agree. But what could I do, really, in a situation where it felt as if the body was devoid of all of its power?

Perhaps, it would be easier to just let it remain, in a way I would stay if someone asked me to stay, a gesture I took to be almost similar to something you give to someone who is crying: an emphatic sadness, perhaps, or a comforting touch. I let his hand stay there for hours on end,

and the next thing I know he was holding my hand as we sat next to each other on a bus on the leg back. Wilbur was shivering from cold, perhaps, heat, while I acted oblivious about it and looked out of the window. His hands were uneasy, and fidgeted with the arm rest as he made a proposal. He would be home alone that night and he was wondering if maybe he could invite me to sleep in his home. I flexed off my seat and briskly alighted short of my stop.

It was amorphous what relationship I had

with Wilbur in the first place, but it is apparent we now regard each other the way we regard estranged friends: what used to be longish conversations now reduced to little pleasantries and affectations. Whether he still goes to seedy places and rides buses holding hands with a male companion is out of anyone’s business. But, to me, he now exists from one bus ride to the next, out of thin air, where Scorpions’s opus about frustration and heartache is blaring from the stereo, and induces a thought for the homosexual.

BusinessMirror

A10 Saturday, July 22, 2017

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Amazon isn’t dominant, but it pervades our lives

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EW YORK—Amazon is already a huge part of many people’s lives. And its $13.7-billion deal for the organic grocer Whole Foods will likely bind its customers even more tightly.

“It kind of feels like they’re taking over so much commerce in our life,” said Erica McGivern, a Whole Foods and Amazon customer who lives in Seattle, where Amazon is headquartered. “It’s intimidating.”

The acquisition could easily hurt both Amazon’s existing rivals and future start-ups that might one day challenge it. Yet, experts don’t believe US antitrust regulators will oppose the deal. That’s largely because it doesn’t create anything resembling a traditional monopoly.

Instead, it merely extends Amazon’s long quest to make shopping so convenient that consumers won’t even think about stepping away from its embrace. The more successful that strategy, the more Amazon can monopolize the attention and shopping dollars of its customers—which, of course, is perfectly legal.

A question of price

AMAZON is just one of several major tech companies—such as Google and Facebook—facing new scrutiny over their market power, which doesn’t map neatly onto traditional notions of monopoly.

When a company dominates a market, it typically pushes up prices

to boost profits—something US antitrust law is geared to prevent.

Amazon, however, has a track record of keeping prices low and locking customers in to sell more stuff.

For instance, the company typically sells gadgets, like its tablets, for little or no profit—but then pushes people to buy digital movies they can watch on the tablet.

“Amazon’s strategy has always been a volume strategy, not a profit strategy,” said Lauren Beitelspacher, a marketing professor at Babson College in Massachusetts.

In a traditional sense, Amazon still faces lots of competition. Walmart remains the leading retailer overall, with more than three times Amazon’s retail revenue. Even with Whole Foods, Amazon will have less than 3 percent of the US market share in groceries, according to Kantar Retail. Walmart is the leader, with a 22-percent share last year.

And while Amazon is the clear leader in e-commerce, 90 percent of worldwide retail spending is still in brick-and-mortar stores, according to eMarketer. Rather than dominate in market share, Amazon dominates “in reaching into customers’ lives”, Gartner retail analyst Robert Hetu said.

In this November 3, 2015, file photo, employees smile as they unlock and open the door to the first customers at the opening day for Amazon Books, the first brick-and-mortar retail store for online retail giant Amazon. AP

Amazon has gotten some complaints that its most prominent results in shopping searches aren’t always the cheapest. But for many frequent customers—the more aff luent ones who tend to be members of Amazon’s $99-a-year Prime loyalty program—Hetu said Amazon just needs to be more convenient.

Banking on loyalty

CONVENIENCE can come in the form of Dash buttons, which put reorders of baby wipes or coffee beans a finger-press away. Voiceshopping capabilities in Alexaenabled Echo speakers make it possible to shop while doing household chores.

Amazon also offers discounts for shoppers who sign up for reg-

ular delivery of frequently purchased items. Free shipping with a Prime membership makes it tempting to check Amazon first, even if rivals also offer free shipping for larger orders. And, of course, Amazon offers bonuses and cash back when using its gift cards and credit cards.

Meanwhile, the Prime membership offers not just TV shows and movies, but also music from such artists as Coldplay, Adele and Bruno Mars. It’s a cinch to watch on an Amazon Fire TV device or listen on the Echo.

Add to that a new feature resembling the social network Pinterest.

Customers share their favorite designs, recipes, books and other items. But whereas Pinterest users can buy what they like anywhere,

Technology and cost of cheap surveillance

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URVEILLANCE used to be expensive. Even just a few years ago, tailing a person’s movements around the clock required rotating shifts of personnel devoted full time to the task.

Not any more, though.

Governments can track the movements of massive numbers of people by positioning cameras to read license plates, or by setting up facial-recognition systems. Those systems need few people to operate them, automating the collection of information about people’s lives and adding that data to searchable databases.

Surveillance has become cheap.

I study the law of identification and privacy, so I pay attention to that trend, and it’s worrying. The data maintained in our individual profiles can be used in making decisions about credit, employment, government benefits and more.

What governments and companies think they know about us—whether it’s accurate—has real power over our actual lives.

Old-fashioned surveillance

BACK in the day, the high cost of surveillance made it not a big deal when the Supreme Court ruled that government agents don’t need a warrant to follow a person in public, to sift through her trash or to fly over her property and observe it from the air.

The effort needed to collect that sort of data meant that governments would engage in surveillance only rarely, and only for compelling reasons.

For most Americans, little about their everyday comings and goings, likes and dislikes, hopes and dreams was tabulated and collected in any central source. But that’s now changed.

Because information collection is now so easy and storage is cheap, it makes sense for government to collect much more information. As a result, after 9/11, rather than the US government first trying to figure out who the bad guys might be and then collecting records of who they spoke to on the phone, federal officials simply compiled a database of who every person in the US was speaking to on the phone, updated in real time.

Online tracking

PRIVATE companies’ tracking of our lives has also become easy and cheap, too. Advertising network systems let data brokers track nearly every page you visit on the web, and associate it with an individual profile. Facebook canfollow much of its users’ web browsing, even if they’re not logged in.

Google’s tracking presence is even broader.

According to one recent study, Google Analytics tracks users on nearly 70 percent of the top 1 million web sites, and Google subsidiary Doubleclick

separately tracks users on almost half of the top million sites. That gives Google—or a subsidiary—access to an extensive list of who visits which web sites and when. And the company can combine that information with data derived from people’s use of Google Maps, Gmail and other Google services.

Compiling profiles

ONLINE tracking is even more powerful when it’s merged with real-world information tied to real names and identities. Facebook, for example, combines its data with information from data brokers, such as Experian and Acxiom, which compile information from government records, retailers, financial institutions, social media and other sources.

Acxiom claims to have information about 700 million consumers around the world, subdividing its information on US residents into more than 3,000 categories. (That figure may be overstated, but even with a decent discount for skepticism, that’s a lot of information.)

Another company, The Work Number, a subsidiary of credit bureau Equifax, maintains detailed salary and other payroll-related information for more than one-third of working Americans. Retailer loyalty cards are another source of data— Datalogix, a subsidiary of database giant Oracle, aggregates data on consumer purchases, including sales that suggest medical conditions or other personal concerns, such as weight-loss pills, allergy treatments and hair-removal products.

By combining online and offline data, Facebook can charge premium rates to an advertiser who wants to target, say, people in Idaho who are in long-distance relationships and are thinking about buying a minivan. (There are 3,100 of them in Facebook’s database.) If you want to reach users with an interest in Ramadan who have recently returned from overseas trips, Facebook can find them, too.

Taking action

TODAY credit bureaus evaluate financial data— income and employment history, debt-repayment records and public information, like bankruptcy filings and foreclosures—to decide a person’s creditworthiness. But companies and government agencies can crunch through all these data to find correlations they hadn’t recognized before—and then take action based on those findings, sometimes in discriminatory and socially undesirable ways.

For example, online sellers may charge higher prices to customers from poorer ZIP codes, where there is less competition from brick-and-mortar stores. A credit-card company downgraded consumers’ creditworthiness if they had used their

cards to pay for marriage counseling or tire-repair services. A major cable TV company developed procedures to discourage prospective customers with low credit scores from signing up, because data analytics revealed that those customers were less lucrative than others.

US law—unlike the law in Europe—gives ordinary people no general right to see their own digital profiles, so we have little opportunity to correct inaccuracies. But even if everything in a profile is accurate, there’s still a big problem: Proprietors’ use of our information in this way encodes discrimination in automated decisions. It means that people who have had marriage counseling, say, or who live in poor neighborhoods are treated as second-class citizens in a wide range of everyday transactions and interactions. That’s not a recipe for a healthy society.

The rise of social credit?

ALL this could spread very deeply into our lives, raising concerns about invasions of privacy. What if credit bureau ratings incorporated the creditworthiness of an applicant’s friends? Or her educational background, the make of her car or whether she uses all capital letters in her text messages? The US Consumer Finance Protection Bureau has opened an inquiry into the dangers such practices might pose.

The People’s Republic of China has begun to construct a souped-up version of the financial credit bureau that, according to some reports, would look even more broadly at a person’s life.

In that system, every citizen would have a score incorporating not only financial data, but also “anything from defaulting on a loan to criticizing the ruling party, from running a red light to failing to care for your parents properly.” The score would affect what jobs an individual could get, what schools her children could attend, even whether she could get a reservation at a fancy restaurant.

Those features haven’t been implemented yet; so far, the system is more limited. Western news reports have decried this plan as totalitarian. It’s worth asking, though, what direction we in the United States are headed in.

Indeed, it’s worth thinking about all of this more deeply. US firms—unless they’re managed or regulated in socially beneficial ways—have both the incentive and the opportunity to use information about us in undesirable ways. We need to talk about the government’s enacting rules constraining that activity. After all, leaving those decisions to the people who make money selling our data is unlikely to result in getting the rules we want. Jonathan Weinberg, Wayne State University via AP

Amazon Spark would direct customers to Amazon’s own store.

“They are pervasive in the fun parts of life, shopping and entertainment,” Beitelspacher said.

“You have all these things that evoke positive feelings. So when they introduce something new, it’s much easier for them to overcome the barriers of entry because they have this positive brand equity.”

Demands on suppliers

THE ease of Amazon deliveries may evoke goodwill among consumers, but it has hastened the decline of several brick-andmortar retailers—in particular, bookstore chains.

Amazon’s size also gives it tremendous buying power. Just like Walmart and other big compa-

nies, Amazon can use that power to wring low prices from suppliers of products and services that Amazon sells. While Amazon can pass those savings onto customers, analysts say smaller suppliers might have to reduce quality or staff to cut costs. Some might even go out of business.

On Monday a union representing food-industry workers called on the Federal Trade Commission to scrutinize Amazon’s deal for Whole Foods, citing the impact on suppliers, among other things.

But US antitrust officials tend to block deals only when they combine direct competitors—say, if Amazon were to buy Walmart, or the other way around. Amazon doesn’t currently have a big groceries business, and Whole Foods doesn’t have a huge online or delivery operation, so they likely won’t be considered direct rivals. Regulators typically look for consumer harm—and might have trouble finding any.

Some suppliers are even looking forward to reaching Amazon’s large customer base. In a statement, Amazon said it wants Whole Foods to continue working with “small farms and producers” to bring natural and organic food to shoppers. The company declined further comment.

Rutgers law professor Michael Carrier said he expects regulators to eventually say enough is enough. But he said that “still could be a while. Certainly, in a Republican administration, these arguments would fall on less receptive ears. Even in a Democratic administration, this is a bit of a reach.” AP

Hi Bixby: Samsung phone’s assistant now speaks English

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EOUL, South Korea—Samsung Electronics said its Bixby voice assistant for smartphones will start speaking English, but only in two countries: South Korea and the US. The South Korean tech giant said starting Wednesday, users of the Galaxy S8 smartphones can speak in American English to their phones to turn on the flashlight, take a selfie or make the phone search for say, pictures from a summer vacation, and create an album.

Samsung did not say why it could not make Bixby in English available to users outside South Korea or the US or when it will become available in other languages in other countries.

The service, comparable to Apple’s Siri or Google Assistant, was previously available only in Korean.

Samsung says its virtual assistant can be activated by saying “Hi Bixby” to the phone or by clicking a button on the side of the S8 phones.

The rollout of the Bixby English version was delayed by a couple of months.

In this March 24 file photo, the Bixby function of the new Samsung Galaxy S8 is demonstrated in New York. AP

Samsung’s mobile chief Koh Dong-jin had earlier told reporters that the service would be available in English before June. It also comes about one month before Samsung is widely expected to announce its latest iteration of the Galaxy Note smartphone after the discontinuation of its fire-prone Galaxy Note 7 phone last year.

Samsung, the world’s largest smartphone maker, is a latecomer in the virtualassistant race. Its rivals introduced their versions several years ago but the company said it believes its status as the world’s dominant mobile-device manufacturer will give it an edge. Bixby also enables users to find more information about real-world items by pointing a phone’s camera. AP

Toshiba resumes talks over sale of chip unit

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OSHIBA, the struggling Japanese technology conglomerate, has been locked for months in a complex dance over the sale of its $18-billion microchip business. In a series of dizzying turns, Western Digital, the US data-storage company, has acted as a supportive business partner, a wouldbe acquirer and a bitter legal adversary.

Toshiba said recently that it had resumed talks with other bidders. It previously rejected deals with Western Digital and Foxconn, the Taiwanese contract electronics manufacturer.

Just weeks ago, Toshiba had announced plans to sell the chip unit to a group of investors. It needs to get rid of the business to keep the company’s finances from unraveling, but the deal angered Western Digital and set off a public battle. Toshiba’s announcement came on the eve of an arbitration hearing in the dispute with Western Digital, with a hefty prize at stake: Whichever eventually wins control of the microchip unit will become a major player in NAND flash memory, the technology used to

The Toshiba corporate logo is seen on the top of the company’s headquarters in Tokyo on June 23. Toshiba, the struggling Japanese technology conglomerate, has been locked for months in a complex dance over the sale of its $18-billion microchip business. New York Times News Service

store data in millions of cellphones and digital devices.

Last month Toshiba said it would sell a stake in the unit to a consortium of investors from Japan, the US and South Korea, anchored by financial firms with close links to the Japanese government.

The group includes the US buyout firm Bain Capital and the South Korean technology company SK Hynix.

Toshiba needs money from the microchip sale to fill a financial hole left

by losses on nuclear power projects in the US. It has still not decided how much of the NAND business it will turn over.

(It was Toshiba’s most profitable division before it was spun off this year in preparation for the sale.)

But recently, Toshiba said in an emailed statement that because it had not reached a final agreement with the buyers it selected last month for the NAND business, “we have started discussion with other suitors.” New York Times News Service

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Saturday, July 22, 2017

A11

Philips sees L.E.D. lighting a ‘Smart City’ requirement

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NERGY efficiency is a main ingredient of a “Smart City”. By deploying “Smart light-emitting diode [LED] street lighting”, cities could achieve energy savings and reduction in carbon-dioxide emission by almost two-thirds, according to representatives of Philips Lighting NV. In a recent United Nations forum in New York, executives of the Royal Philips NV division emphasized the need for high-caliber data to understand the value of LED systems. Philips Lighting announced it has formed a partnership with the World Council on City Data (WCCD) to address the need for cooperation with cities around the world.

According to a new report jointly produced by Philips Lighting and the WCCD, Los Angeles accomplished energy savings of 63 percent in 2016 by implementing such a system, generating cost savings of $9 million and reducing its annual greenhouse-gas emissions associated with public lighting by 47,000 metric ton.

“This is equivalent to the green-

house-gas emissions from almost 10,000 passenger vehicles driven for one year,” a statement by Philips Lighting said. “If cities around the world adopted such systems, they could make vast reductions in their annual emissions and expenditure on electricity.”

The report pointed out that better-quality lighting could also bring benefits, such as reduced crime rates and improved citizen perceptions of safety, with Los Angeles observing a 10.5-percent drop in crime rates for offenses, such as vehicle theft, burglary and vandalism in the first two years of its LED conversion program.

Other benefits of connected LED street lighting cited by the report include improvements in traffic safety for all road users, city attractiveness and economic strength. By producing these benefits over and above emission reductions, smart LED lighting will also make a major contribution

to meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals, a globallyagreed set of targets for moving to a sustainable future by 2030.

In Southeast Asia Philips Lighting reported it has already successfully achieved energy savings through connected street lighting.

As part of a city-wide upgrade by DKI Jakarta Government office, Philips Lighting said nearly 90,000 of the Indonesian capital’s street luminaires have been replaced with energy-efficient LED lights to date. These lights are connected to a cloud-based smart-lighting management system.

The same system was also implemented in Melaka as part of its Green City Action Plan to make the city a Green Technology State by 2020. The new lighting system potentially offers Malaysia’s state government savings of up to 80 percent and will also improve operational efficiencies as there is less reliance on manpower being

mobilized to determine faulty or nonfunctioning lights.

“City authorities face complex and challenging choices concerning infrastructure, balancing the need to maintain existing services while investing in improvements, managing population growth and enhancing sustainability—all within tight budget constraints,” Harry Verhaar, head of Philips Lighting global public and government affairs, was quoted in a statement as saying.

According to Verhaar, the operation and maintenance of street lighting is a major cost that contributes to these challenges for local authorities. But new technologies are transforming the way cities can deliver, operate and maintain public lighting in a way that can generate a wide range of benefits to the local authorities and the communities they serve, he said. The challenge is building the investment case to enable them

to implement this technology in the first place, Verhaar added.

According to the Philips Lighting report, only about 1 in 10 of approximately 300 million streetlights across the world are energyefficient LEDs, but only 2 percent are connected.

“Combining energy-efficient lighting with connected system management can deliver energy savings of up to 80 percent—which would make a significant dent in our climate change targets,” Verhaar said.

Lighting currently accounts for 15 percent of global electricity consumption, but with a universal switch to LEDs, lighting’s share of power consumption would fall to just 8 percent.

Philips Lighting said challenges facing the adoption of publicsector smart-technology projects include financing projects upfront, particularly with squeezed localauthority budgets. Rizal Raoul Reyes

This image shows a banner, top, on the Netflix web site defending net neutrality on July 12. On Wednesday Netflix joined other tech firms and Internet activists in an online show of support for net neutrality, the principle that bars Internet-service providers from playing favorites with web sites and apps. Netflix via AP

ISPs surprise fans of net neutrality on protest day In this photo taken on July 5, Dr. Lidiia Podkopaieva speaks during an interview with The Associated Press at her clinic in Kiev, Ukraine. Podkopaieva’s clinic was one of many institutions disrupted by a June 27 cyber attack that paralyzed computers in Ukraine and across the globe. AP

Experts worried over cyber attack on Ukrainian clinics, pharmacies

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IEV, Ukraine—Dr. Lidiia Podkopaieva was about to click “send” on an order of new surgical instruments when her computer monitor suddenly went dark.

She speed-dialed the clinic’s technician but didn’t even have time to tell him what was wrong.

“We’re under cyber attack,” he told her.

“Switch off the computer immediately.”

The call would kick off a “crazy week” as Podkopaieva and her staff struggled with the sudden loss of half the computers at the Left Bank Pediatric Clinic in Kiev, where she serves as medical director. The central phone system collapsed, digital appointments vanished and diagnostic machines dropped offline, interrupting at least one patient’s exam. Podkopaieva said no one suffered in the attack, but academics argue that even glancing blows to medical facilities, like this one, represent a damaging break with international norms.

“You cannot attack hospitals,” said Duncan Hollis, a Temple University professor and a former treaty lawyer for the US State Department. Although what happened at Podkopaieva’s clinic fell short of the death and destruction that would constitute an unambiguous “attack”, Hollis said the disruption was still a step in a dangerous direction.

“It’s getting close to, if not across the line of, actual harm that international law might be prohibiting,” he said.

Crippling worm

PODKOPAIEVA’S pediatric clinic, part of Ukraine’s Dobrobut health group, was one of thousands of victims of the data-scrambling software dubbed “Nyetya” that erupted on June 27. Unlike WannaCry, a similarly quickspreading digital worm that also disrupted hospital work earlier this year, Nyetya’s masters appear to have had the ability to draw data from their targets—meaning, they either knew or could have discovered who would be at the receiving end of their attack.

Podkopaieva said the disruption to Do-

brobut was considerable.

“For a moment, we were blind and deaf,” she told The Associated Press in an interview at her clinic a week after the attack. Across Dobrobut, a CT scanner, a mammography machine and four x-ray machines were disabled after the worm crippled the Windows computers they were connected to. One patient had just finished being x-rayed when the cyber attack destroyed their scan, she said. Overall, about 100 examinations had to be canceled.

Dobrobut wasn’t alone. Ukraine’s Ministry of Health says public hospitals weren’t touched, but at least two other private medical institutions in Kiev were also affected, according to the Ukrainian web site Censor.

NET, which published a running tally of affected firms. The media group said several pharmaceutical companies also were affected by Nyetya, and anecdotal evidence suggests pharmacies across Ukraine experienced shortages when the cyber attack derailed deliveries of medication.

Swiftly, calmly

VOLODYMYR Varenytsia, who runs a drug store in the Luhansk region of Ukraine, said he ran out of iodine and Citramon, a headache medicine, in the days after June 27. The shortage lasted until deliveries resumed a full week later. Meanwhile, he had to turn some clients away empty-handed.

“People suffered because of this virus,” he said in a telephone interview.

Podkopaieva’s clinic recovered faster.

She said staff moved swiftly and calmly to restore her facility’s systems and work around faults. Even when diagnostic work was canceled, every patient was still seen by a professional. Doctors wrote information down on paper, just as they had in the years before the hospital went digital. Within a day, the appointment system had been restored and by June 30, Podkopaieva finally ordered the instruments she was sending for when her computer went dead. They

arrived that evening. “We had good backups, which helped in part,” she explained.

Training helped, too, she said, “even if we never expected that medical organizations would be affected by a cyber attack”.

That anyone might be held accountable for the disruption seems unlikely.

Constitutional moment

UKRAINIAN officials have laid the blame for Nyetya at Moscow’s door, but Russian officials have denied any responsibility and, in any case, hackers who operate at the scale of the June attack are notoriously difficult to bring to justice.

Even verbal condemnation has been hard to come by. US officials have said nothing about the attack on Ukrainian medical facilities and little about the outbreak in Ukraine, in general, despite the fact that spillover from the digital outbreak snarled traffic at American ports—formally considered critical national infrastructure—and disrupted several US multinationals. A small US care network, the Heritage Valley Health System, was also affected, with several operations rescheduled.

Academics said President Donald J. Trump’s administration was inviting trouble by not reacting publicly to cyber attacks on civilian infrastructure, whether at home or abroad.

Scott Shackelford, the chairman of the Cybersecurity Program at Indiana University in Bloomington, said that the past progress toward setting international norms for behavior in cyber space “is in danger of eroding”.

“What’s needed is leadership, and right now that’s in dangerously short supply, especially coming from Washington,” he said.

Hollis, the Temple professor, said American leaders at the very least needed to speak up.

“We’re in this era right now that’s almost a constitutional moment for cyber security and cyber space,” he said. “When you’re silent in the face of bad behavior, that does sort of imply that it’s permissible.” AP

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EW YORK—AT&T has a surprise for tech firms and Internet activ ists supporting net neutrality, the principle that bars Internet-service providers (ISPs) from playing favorites with web sites and apps.

Although AT&T has fiercely fought the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) net-neutrality rules, it’s backing Wednesday’s “day of action” denouncing AT&T and other ISPs. Of course, AT&T doesn’t actually agree with the aim of the protest—to support the 2015 regulation that the FCC wants to overturn now that Republicans are in charge.

AT&T says it supports an “open Internet” and believes companies shouldn’t block web content or slow down videos from other providers. Rather, AT&T says it merely opposes the FCC rules that set it in place. Comcast and Verizon joined

AT&T in making that distinction.

ISPs don’t like the FCC’s approach because it treats Internet service as a utility and comes with more oversight. They worry about price regulation and say the rules hurt broadband investment.

Tim Karr, the campaign director for Free Press, an advocacy group that supports net neutrality, slammed the ISPs for “simply attempting to fake the funk, pretending to support net neutrality while opposing the [FCC] rules that make it an enforceable reality.”

Small square

THE 2015 regulation is the only set of net-neutrality rules that courts have upheld.

Internet activists and tech firms hope that the protest will pressure Congress and the FCC, the way a highly visible 2012 online protest—including the blackout of Wikipedia’s English-language site

for 24 hours—helped kill antipiracy legislation that tech companies equated to Internet censorship.

This year’s online protest is more muted. Netflix put a gray banner at the top of its home page and is tweeting out “gif ” animations in support. Amazon’s web site has a small square inviting users to “learn more”. Twitter is promoting “net neutrality” as the top trending topic in the US Google tweeted a blog post. Smaller tech companies, including Airbnb and Etsy, have fat banners on their home pages.

Karr said that Internet users have taken “hundreds of thousands of actions”, like contacting the FCC. There had been about 6 million filings on net neutrality’s overturn made to the FCC as of Tuesday night, both supporting and opposing the policy; that had risen to 6.7 million on Wednesday afternoon. AP

Apple names new China top exec as its sales fall

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HANGHAI—Apple has just created what is likely to be one of the toughest jobs in tech: managing director of greater China. The company said in a statement on Tuesday that a longtime manager, Isabel Ge Mahe, would step into the newly established position based in Shanghai.

Ge Mahe, a Mandarin speaker born in China with an extensive background in engineering, will have her work cut out for her.

She takes the helm of the China operations as Apple’s dominance in one of its most important markets has become increasingly uncertain. In recent quarters, its sales in the country have struggled—for the period ending April 1, revenue dropped 14 percent—in part because of increased competition from a range of domestic competitors putting out ever-cheaper, high-performing smartphones.

Apple’s huge successes in China have also left it more vulnerable to new rules that Beijing has set up to push back against foreign companies. Apple said this month

MAHE

that it would cooperate with a local company to build its own data center in the country, in part to satisfy the requirements of a new cybersecurity law. And experts say the law is just the beginning of further restrictions on foreign companies like Apple.

The regulatory and sales issues mean increased pressure on the release of the new

iPhone this autumn. In China the iPhone is as much a status signifier as a useful device, and analysts argue that many have put off buying a new iPhone until this year, with the hope that the latest model will look different enough to be noticed.

Ge Mahe stands out for her experience as an engineering manager in a position that many foreign companies have typically filled with a sales or regulatory official.

Ge Mahe led Apple’s wireless softwareengineering teams for nine years, working on technologies, like Wi-fi and Bluetooth, according to the statement from Apple.

Apple also said that she was deeply involved in developing China-specific features for the iPhone and iPad, including support for QR codes, the square bar codes that booming mobile payments businesses use.

“I am looking forward to deepening our team’s connections with customers, government and businesses in China to advance innovation and sustainability,” Ge Mahe said in the statement. New York Times News Service

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Siemens cites promising PHL F&B industry’s digitalization

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IEMENS AG noted the digitalization of the Philippines’s food and beverage (F&B) industry is promising. Digitalization is particularly important for the Philippines, as the country is growing rapidly in terms of population and production capacities, according to the German conglomerate company. “ D i g it a l i z at ion wou ld l ay the foundation of how the local [F&B] industry will perform in the next few years and be able to compete with other countries in the region,” a statement by Siemens AG said.

The Berlin and Munich, a Germany-headquartered firm, defines digitalization as the interaction of the virtual and real world.

“It is a major trend and innovation driver, creating completely new business and growth opportunities for companies,” said Roland Heymann, head of Siemens AG Global Food and

B e ve r a ge Te c h n ic a l A ccou nt Management. “Digitalization of the entire value chain is crucial for catching new trends and ensuring competitiveness.”

The F&B industry in the Philippines is a highly competitive one, and it is expected to amount to approximately $26 million in revenue this year, Siemens said, sans citing where it acquired the data.

“For manufacturers in the industry, operating productive production facilities requires many factors for consideration, including a consistently high level of product quality, maximum plant

availability, optimum resource efficienc—and, increasingly, the greatest possible flexibility in order to meet more and more individual customer requirements,” Heymann said.

Additionally, about 1.3 billion tons of food—which is about a third of all that is produced— around the world is wasted due to factors, such as poor equipment, transportation and infrastructure, rejection due to aesthetics, and overpurchasing.

The supply chain has to be more agile to allow companies to produce the right amount of products to cater to consumer demands, at the right time and at the right location, according to Heymann “Digitalization is an integral part of the industrial revolution.

You have this shift coming,” Enrico Buergo, Siemens Philippines vice president and country division lead, was quoted in a July 18 statement as saying. “It’s about the analysis, integration and standardization. We’re bringing it here to kick-start a very vibrant market, which is food and beverage, and we really want to use it as a way for each company to achieve whatever it is they are aspiring and not to be left in the game.” Alladin S. Diega

This undated handout photo shows Roland Heymann, head of Siemens AG Global Food and Beverage Technical Account Management, speaking at a seminar on “Digitalization of the Food and Beverage Industry in the Philippines”.

Is America’s digital leadership on the wane?

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MERICAN leadership in technology innovation and economic competitiveness is at risk if US policy-makers don’t take crucial steps to protect the country’s digital future. The country that gave the world the Internet and the very concept of the disruptive start-up could

find its role in the global innovation economy slipping from reigning incumbent to a disrupted has-been.

My research, conducted with Ravi Shankar Chaturvedi, investigates our increasingly digital global society, in which physical interac tions—in communications,

social and political exchange, commerce, media and entertainment—are being displaced by electronically mediated ones.

Our most recent report, “Digital Planet 2017: How Competitiveness and Trust in Digital Economies Vary Across the World”, confirms that the US is on the brink of los-

ing its long-held global advantage in digital innovation.

Our yearlong study examined fac tors that inf luence innovation, such as economic conditions, governmental backing, start-up funding, research and development spending and entrepreneurial talent across 60 countries. We found that while the US has a ver y advanced digital environment, the pace of American investment and innovation is slowing. Other countries—not just major powers like China, but also smaller nations like New Zealand, Singa pore and the United Arab Emirates ( UA E ) — a r e b u i l d i n g s i g n i f i c a n t public and private ef for ts that we expec t to become foundations for f u t ur e gener at ions of innovat ion and successful star t-up businesses.

B as e d on our f indings, I b elieve t h a t r o l l i n g b a c k n e t- n e u t r a l i t y rules will jeopardize the digital s t ar t- up e co s y s tem t hat has c re ated value for customer s, wealth for inve s tor s and glob ally re co gnize d leader ship for American technology comp anie s and ent repreneur s. The digital economy in the US is already on t he ver ge of s t alling; f ailing to protec t an open Internet would f ur t her er o de t he US’s digi t al com p e t i t i vene s s, mak ing a t r o ub ling si t uat ion even wor s e.

Comparing competitiveness

I N t h e US, t h e r e i n s o f I n t e r n e t connec tivit y are tightly controlled.

Just f ive companies—Comcast, S p e c t r u m , Ve r i z o n , C e n t u r y L i n k a n d AT &T— s e r v e m o r e t h a n 8 0 p ercent o f w i r e d - Inter n e t c u s to m er s. What thos e comp anie s provide i s b o t h s l owe r an d m o r e e x p e n si ve t han i n m any co u n t r i e s a r o u n d t h e wo r l d . E n d i n g n e t n e u t r a l i t y, a s t h e Tr u m p a d mi nis t r at i o n ha s p r o p os e d, would give inter ne t prov id e r s e ve n m o r e p owe r, l e t t i n g t h e m d e c i d e w h i c h co m p an i e s ’ i n n ov a t i o n s c an r e a c h t h e p u b li c , an d at w hat co s t s an d sp e e d s .

However, our research shows that the US doesn’t need more limits on start-ups. Rather, it should work to revive the creative energy that has been America’s gif t to the digital planet. For each of the 60 countries we examined, we combined 170 factors—including elements that measure technologic al inf ras truc ture, government policies and economic activity—into a ranking we call the Digital Evolution Index.

To evaluate a country’s competitiveness, we looked not only at current conditions, but also at how fast those conditions are changing. For example, we noted not only how many people have broadband Internet service, but also how quickly access is becoming available to more of a country’s population. And we observed not just how many consumers are prepared to buy and sell online, but whether this readiness to transact online is increasing each year and by how much.

The countries formed four major groups: n “Stand Out” countries can be considered the digital elite; they are both highly digitally evolved and advancing quickly. n “St all O u t ” co u nt r i e s have reached a high level of digital evolution, but risk falling behind due to a slower pace of progress and would benefit from a heightened focus on innovation. n “Break Out” countries score relatively low for overall digital evolution, but are evolving quickly enough to suggest they have the potential to become strong digital economies. n “Watch Out” countries are neither well advanced nor improving rapidly.

They have a lot of work to do, both in terms of infrastructure development and innovation.

The US is stalling out

THE picture that emerges for the US is not a pretty one. Despite being the 10th-most digitally advanced country today, America’s progress is slowing.

It is close to joining the major EU countries and the Nordic nations in a club of nations that are, digitally speaking, stalling out.

The ‘Stand Out’ countries are setting new global standards of high states of evolution and high rates of change, and exploring various innovations, such as self-driving cars or robot policemen.

New Zealand, for example, is investing in a superior telecommunications system and adopting forward-looking policies that create incentives for entrepreneurs. Singapore plans to invest more than $13 billion in high-tech industries by 2020. The UAE has created free-trade zones and is transforming the city of Dubai into a “smart city,” linking sensors and government offices with residents and visitors to create an interconnected web of transportation, utilities and government services.

The Break Out countries, many in Asia, are typically not as advanced as others at present, but are catching

up quickly, and are on pace to surpass some of today’s Stand Out nations in the near future. For example, China—the world’s largest retail and e-commerce market, with the world’s largest number of people using the Internet—has the fastest-changing digital economy. Another Break Out country is India, which is already the world’s second-largest smartphone market. Though only one-f if th of its 1.3 billion people have online access today, by 2030, some estimates suggest, 1 billion Indians will be online.

By contrast, the US is on the edge between Stand Out and Stall Out. One reason is that the American start-up economy is slowing down: Private s tar t-ups are at trac ting huge investments, but those ef forts aren’t paying of f when the star t-ups are either acquired by bigger companies or of fer themselves on the public stock markets.

Investors, business leaders and polic ymakers need to take a more realis tic look at the be s t way to prof it f rom innovation, balancing ef for t s toward both huge result s and modest ones. They may need to recall the lesson from the founding of the internet itself: If the government invests in key aspec ts of digital infrastructure, either directly or by creating subsidies and tax incentives, that lays the groundwork for massive private investment and innovation that can transform the economy. In addition, investments in Asian digital star t-ups have exceeded those in the US for the f irst time. According to CB Insights and PricewaterhouseCoopers, $19.3 billion in venture capital from sources around the world was invested in Asian tech star t-ups in the second quar ter of 2017, while the US had $18.4 billion in new investment over the same period.

This is consistent with our findings that Asian high-momentum countries are the ones in the Break Out zone; these countries are the ones most exciting for investors. Over time, the US-Asia gap could widen; both money and talent could migrate to digital hot spots elsewhere, such as China and India, or smaller destinations, such as Singapore and New Zealand.

For the country that gave the world the foundations of the digital economy and a president who seems perpetually plugged in, falling behind would, indeed, be a disgrace. Bhaskar Chakravorti, Tufts University via AP