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Dawning of a golden age for subic bay’s hotel industry

Subic Bay’s iconic boutique hotel, The Lighthouse Marina

S

By Henry Empeño | Correspondent

UBIC BAY FREEPORT—Buoyed by accessible natural tourist attractions and a conscientious program of special events that draw hundreds of thousands of visitors annually, the hotel industry in the Subic Bay Freeport has been experiencing an unprecedented growth in the past five years.

Along Subic’s famed waterfront strip, as well as in some remaining pockets of development at the already built up central business district, hotels and other accommodation facilities continue to sprout with proverbial rapidity.

According to the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority (SBMA), at least 11 new hotels began operating here since five years ago.

These are the Freeport Mansion Garden, Subic Peninsular Hotel, Buma Subic and The Cabin, which were established in 2013; Subic Grand Harbour Hotel and Subik Sun Plaza in 2014; Leciel Hotel and Horizon Hotel in 2015; Best Western Hotel and Acea Hotel Resort in 2016; and Le Charme Hotel just this year.

These new hotels brought the total number of accommodation facilities in the Subic Bay Freeport from 36 in 2012 to 45 today, and the number of available hotel rooms from 2,633 to 3,441.

Rapid growth

The continuing increase in visitor

arrivals has been fueling the rapid growth of hotels and accommodation facilities in Subic.

“Now we’re receiving project proposals for hotels and similar tourist facilities almost every week and, frankly, we find it very difficult to find a place for these projects because of the limited space in Subic,” SBMA Administrator and CEO Wilma T. Eisma said.

“So, this looks like the golden age for the local hotel industry, as things are looking up in terms of visitor arrivals, and the tourism industry in general, not only for Subic but for the whole country,” she added.

Eisma said the services provided by tourism establishments are pivotal in attracting more visitors to the free port.

“What works for Subic’s tourism industry are environment, accessibility, safety and experience,” Eisma said. “We have the natural attractions that work in our favor; we have a great location that’s accessible, but it’s also important that we have value-added factors

PESO exchange rates n US 51.0860 n japan 0.4543

Philippine Harvest, French treats

By Roger Pe

W

Subic Bay’s hotel row along the Waterfront Road blends superb environment with modern amenities.

like safety, which the SBMA ensures, and the experience that the tourism facilities like hotels and theme parks provide.”

The SBMA official added that as manager of the Subic Bay Freeport, the SBMA is gunning for bigger events like the Ad Summit and the Full Ironman next year.

It is also trying to attract cruise ships to further promote and develop local tourism.

Indicator

The growth of the hotel industry in Subic reflects the evolving tourism industry in this former

American military base, as well as the changing tastes of the people that visit Subic.

After the US Navy left Subic in 1992, the bare buildings that served as barracks for American sailors were converted into hotel rooms to billet visitors that began to turn up in droves for a look-see of the previously restricted-access military base.

Quonset huts up at the CubiTriboa area were even utilized as rough-it-out adventure lodgings for overnight family picnics and weekend corporate outings.

Continued on A2

Now we’re receiving project proposals for hotels and similar tourist facilities almost every week and, frankly, we find it very difficult to find a place for these projects because of the limited space in Subic.”—Eisma

e have many products that have reached world-class status. Among them the Malagos Da rk C ho col ate f rom Davao, Lakan, the premium lambanog sold in most Philippine Duty-Free shops. Ube, our purple yam, is taking the centerstage in patisserie and highend restaurants in the United States. By sheer coincidence, it is now a culinary superstar in New York’s Manila Social Club.

Recently, it sold ube doughnuts, garnished with gold flakes for $1,000 a dozen.

Our country is also a distinct coffee-drinking nation. Our very own Barako coffee variant is a world-class product. The pride of Batangas, popularly known as a strong coffee, belongs to the Liberica variety, one of premium coffee beans in the world.

T he Philippines is a big rum producer in Asia. Don Papa and Tanduay are not only famous in Asia but have become the world ’s second most popular rum brand in the world after Bacardi.

Operating for 20 years now, and with around 25 outlets scattered around America, 28 in Jakarta, Indonesia and one in Panama, Potato Corner is certainly one of the most inspiring franchise success stories.

Crystal Clear Water, dubbed “the business that never runs

dry”, has invaded Indonesia, Malaysia and South Africa. Locally, the company has at least 500 branches nationwide.

Fiorgelato, a famous icecream franchise, is now in Japan and the US, while Sweet Corner’s Corn cart business now operates in Australia and is soon to open in the Middle East.

And who doesn’t know about the world-renowned, succulent Philippine mango?

This year alone, China has committed to buy $1 billion worth of Philippine agricultural products and intends to stretch it for over a long time, assuring our farmer of more income.

We also export agricultural products around the world, including the US, Japan, Europe, and to our Asean neighbors— coconut oil and other coconut products, bananas, other fruits and vegetables. We boast of having one of the most diverse selections of agricultural products harvested from different regions of the country.

To promote the richness of our agricultural bounty, the Department of Agriculture, together with Central Square and the SSI Group, Inc., will once again celebrate the Philippine Harvest, an organic, artisanal, natural and indigenous AgriFood Fair to be held in Central Square, Bonifacio High Street, Bonifacio Global City in Taguig City on September 22 to 24.

See “Harvest,” A2

n UK 69.3799 n HK 6.5460 n CHINA 7.7494 n singapore 37.8555 n australia 40.5163 n EU 61.0120 n SAUDI arabia 13.6230

Source: BSP (22 September 2017 )

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Saturday, September 23, 2017

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Dawning of a golden age

for subic bay’s hotel industry Continued from A1

“Now Subic visitors enjoy the comfort of air-conditioned rooms w ith Wi-fi access, sw imming pools and fine dining and other urban perks,” Olongapo businessman Aurelio Pineda noted.

Pineda, along with two partners from Olongapo, built the Subic Grand Harbour in 2014, and is proud of the fact that their 69room hotel is one of the few establishments here that are solely owned by local businessmen.

Pineda said they took the risk of building a hotel because of the growing local tourist market, as well as the promise of more business with the return of American sailors under the Visiting Forces Agreement.

“There are just two markets for Subic hotels now: those who need rooms, and those who need function rooms,” Pineda noted.

He added most of the clientele for Subic hotels are personnel and officials of government agencies, local government units and private corporations that bring in their staff and employees for conventions, meetings and seminars.

“It’s a good thing that the SBMA is working with us to encourage people to come to Subic,” Pineda said, noting that the Subic agency is drumming up attendance for the SBMA’s 25th anniversary this November.

What guests look for

T he boom e x per ienced by ho tels in Subic cou ld a lso be attr ibuted to t he abi l it y of t hese e s t a b l i s h m e nt s t o a d a p t t o c ustomer need s.

“Our visitors want not only good service, but personalized service. They come back because

The Mansion Garden Hotel

Another hotel under construction along Subic Bay’s Waterfront Road

of the ambiance, accessibility and proximity to the places they go to, l i ke ma l ls or c hu rc h,” sa id Sheanel le Ca layag , operat ions ma nager of t he Ma nsion Ga rden Hotel.

“They want not just the basic services; they look for gym, bar, spa and, sometimes, even a convenience store,” Calayag added.

T he amenities demanded by g uests a lso ref lect t he c ha nging character istics of the t y pica l Subic v isitor. C a l ayag sa id t h a t , w h i l e t h e y g e t S o ut h Korea n, Japa nese, Ind i a n a nd ot her foreig n tour ists, 87 per cent of t he i r c l iente le were Fi l ipinos, most of whom go to Subic to at tend convent ions.

A not her sig nif ica nt g roup of visitors are families out for wee kend v ac at ion s. “ We get guests from as far as Ilocos, Benguet and Batangas in this family group,” Calayag added.

Doing good

The boom in Subic hotels is expected to continue in the next few

years, in line with the expected surge in foreign tourist arrivals in the country from traditional markets, such as South Korea, the United States, Japan and China.

In Subic, in particular, tourist arrivals are expected to further grow according to an upward trend in the past few years.

A ccord i ng to Jem C a mba , manager of the SBMA Tourism Depar tment, tour ist ar r iva ls (or those who stayed one night or more in the Subic, Freeport) grew from 1.25 million in 2012 to 1.63 million in 2015 and 1.65 million last year.

Similarly, the number of visitor arrivals, or those who entered the Subic Bay Freeport for whatever purpose, climbed from 5.22 million in 2012 to 5.69 million in 2013, and from 6.39 million in 2014 to 7.29 million in 2015 and 7.89 million in 2016.

The golden years for Subic Bay’s hotels seem to be just beginning.

Harvest. . .

Continued from A1

On these dates, exhibitors will showcase the richness of Philippine products, and they will be made available to consumers.

Hundreds of uniquely made food items, heirloom vegetables, grain varieties, spirits, wines and allnatural cosmetics that utilize the abundance of Philippine natural resources will be on spotlight.

The event is an opportune time to meet farmers, processors and retailers of premium products that reflect our agriculinary culture, which is on a par with international standards.

Malagos Cheese and Camembert. Lambanog and Bordeaux Wine. Pancit and paté. Longganisa and saucisson. French and Filipino flavors will come together this weekend at the Philippine Harvest meets Bon Appétit food market. From September 22 to 24 at Central Square, Bonifacio Global City, Taguig, over 40 French and Filipino exhibitors will offer a selection of agricultural products that showcases the flavors and traditions of France and the Philippines. Come by for a weekend of free tasting, cooking demos, wine pairing and other activities.

As part also of the continuing celebration of the 70th anniversary of French-Philippine diplomatic relations this year, the f lavors of France and the Philippines will come together w ith the “Philippine Har vest meets Bon Appétit” event. The Embassy of France is honored to join this seventh edition, which marks the first occasion for the Philippine Harvest to welcome products from foreign countries.

Agriculture is an increasingly important sector of cooperation between France and the Philippines, marked particularly by bilateral institutional engagements and exchanges between French and Filipino researchers, as well as the growing interest of French groups to invest in agri-business in the Philippines.

“There is a common misconception that French cuisine is all about high cuisine. Through Philippine Harvest meets Bon Appétit, we want to show that, with the right ingredients, anyone can prepare classic French dishes,” French Embassy Chargé d’Affaires Laurent Legodec said.

“We are very pleased to find a strong partner in the Department of Agriculture, which welcomed this idea to not only support Filipino products but French products, as well. This shows the diversity of friendship between our two countries and, of course, the common love for food and cooking that both French and Filipinos share,” he added.

Alongside 24 local producers, eight French exhibitors will offer a selection of French produce: Le Cellier (wines), Paris Délice (pastries, salads and pastas), Gerald.ph (cheeses and charcuterie), The Fruit Garden (fruit jams), Future Trade (wine), Chef Selection Inc. (cheeses and charcuterie), Pamora Farms (free-range chicken) and Wine in Tube by Chef Patrice (wines).

French chefs will also be invited to share their knowledge in food preparation to provide ideas for home-cooked French meals.

The Office of the Undersecretary for Agribusiness and Marketing and Regional Engagement, in partnership with SSI Group Inc., Central Square and the Embassy of France spearhead Philippines Harvest Meets Bon Appétit. As the Philippine food retail sector continues to modernize and expand, France’s cooperation and support for Philippine made products will continue.

For more information, follow the Embassy of France to the Philippines on social media (www. facebook .com / French Emba s s y Manila and www.t witter.com / French / French E m b a s s yMa nila and www.twitter.com/FrenchEmbassyPH and the Department of Agriculture on Facebook.

A3

Saturday, September 23, 2017 • Editor: Lyn Resurreccion

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Asia trade talks stall as TPP rebounds from Trump’s blow

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s negotiators race to wrap up a 16-nation Asia trade pact, they face a new and unexpected threat—momentum in a rival trade deal that nine months ago appeared doomed.

When President Donald J. Trump abandoned the US-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) shortly after taking office, nations turned their focus to the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP. Now, remaining TPP members are making a concerted effort to resurrect that deal, while progress stalls on the RCEP. The goal of an agreement by end-year on the RCEP, which includes China, India and Japan, but not the US, won’t be met, according to its chief negotiator. Still, for Iman Pambagyo, the bigger concern is some RCEP members may exit the deal to prioritize the TPP, a pact that doesn’t include China and was seen as a hedge against its growing clout in Asia.

“Perhaps down the road, toward the end of the year, someone will say, ‘That’s enough for me. We’re not joining at this point. We will join on some other date,’” Pambagyo said in an interview on Tuesday in Jakarta. It’s possible the pact could lose two to three members, he said, without naming those countries at risk of leaving.

“As the chair of the trade negotiation committee, I will work on the basis of my mandate: to keep everyone on board and find a possible solution that is agreeable to all,” he said. “Otherwise, it will be difficult for us to conclude this negotiation.”

TPP proposal

The move by Trump to rip up the TPP, his

predecessor’s landmark trade policy, signaled a more protectionist administration and pivoted attention to the RCEP. But some of the remaining 11 TPP nations—mostly Australia, Japan and New Zealand—are now pushing hard to keep it going.

Trade ministers from TPP group are due to present their proposal for the future of the deal to leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Da Nang, Vietnam.

“We’re all committed to working towardstrying to have something for Da Nang in November,” Australian Trade Minister Steve Ciobo said in an interview on Wednesday in Jakarta. “That’s the objective.”

China’s perception is that the RCEP talks are hitting difficulties with Japan in ways that indicate it is less keen to push the deal through, according to an official with direct knowledge of the talks who asked not to be identified speaking about private conversations.

High standards

In negotiations over Customs duties and so-called ‘invisible trade’—the transfer of nontangible goods such as services—Japan made offers that Chinese delegates felt were the worst among RCEP members, the official said. The general Chinese mood after the last round of talks was one of disappointment, the person added. RCEP nations are at different stages of development so the deal needs to incorporate the needs of a variety of players rather than just aiming for a “high standards” pact, China Commerce Ministry spokesman Gao Feng said last week.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in a speech on Wednesday in New York that countries need to press on with the TPP. He

did not mention the RCEP. “We are accelerating negotiations aimed at the early entry into force of the TPP,” Abe said. “We will use every means available to work to extend the free, fair rules-based markets across the world.”

TPP nations are meeting in Tokyo this week. Japan’s chief negotiator, Kazuyoshi Umemoto, told delegates it was important to “implement TPP as early as possible.”

Singapore remains committed to the RCEP and steady progress has been made in talks, the trade ministry said in an e-mailed statement. The country was working with other members to conclude a credible and commercially meaningful agreement as soon as possible, it said.

India tensions

The TPP stoked controversy by going beyond traditional trade deals in seeking to protect labor rights, environmental standards and intellectual property. The RCEP, which includes Southeast Asian nations, is focused mostly on lowering tariffs.

The inclusion of China and India is also slowing progress on the RCEP. Deborah Elms, executive director of the Singapore-based Asian Trade Centre, said discussions were stuck on the size of tariff cuts, the issue “where India stands out the most” amid worries about opening its market to China.

“It is emblematic of the larger problem of opening up markets across 16 countries that do not have existing commitments between one another and have only lukewarm interest in doing so with some of the areas currently under negotiation,” Elms said by email.

Bloomberg News

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Columbia sweetens Filipino lives for 80 years The Philippine confectionery market

Dr. Jesus Lim Arranza

Make Sense

M

y apologies to the regular readers of my column in the B usiness M irror for discussing a topic outside of my series on The Antidote to Smuggling, which I am supposed to discuss the second part of it for my next regular column. But this is a special column feature about Columbia International Food Products Inc. (Columbia), a local confectionery company that has been much a part of Philippine history, as it celebrates its 80th anniversary today.

Founded in 1937 by Don Go Peng Kuan, Columbia provided the tinge of sweet flavor to the bitter lives of Filipinos during the country’s war and early post-war years with its yummy chocolates, candies and other snack items, even as it continues to pursue its mission today to modernize and use state-of-the-art equipment in the production of its affordable and world-class quality treats for the local market.

For almost 80 years, the strong relationships, cooperation and discipline within the family-owned corporation enabled Columbia to withstand the challenges of time. Since its establishment in 1937 by Columbia patriarch Don Go Peng Kuan, top management of the company remains within the family with Reynaldo Go, a son of Columbia patriarch Don

Go, sitting as its current president. This only shows the cohesive family and business relations among the Go family.

Where we have seen many big familyowned companies turn divided and broken down into several smaller companies after the death of the company patriarch or management had been turned over to the children, Columbia remains strong and a dominant family-owned company in the country’s confectionery industry. As the Indian author Ashwin Sanghi says about family-owned businesses, “What I have found is that, in a family business structure, sometimes what is needed is a sense of discipline rather than creativity. You have to take everyone’s ideas and make it work.

When you are dealing with money, there is a limitation on how creative you can be.”

The corporate values of Columbia on discipline and respect are, indeed, very much influenced by the values imbibed

by Columbia patriarch Don Go when he organized the company in 1937. And these are the same values that drove Columbia to where it is now in the country’s confectionery industry. Already, Columbia is among the country’s top confectionery companies that rolls out a variety of over 100 products, all meticulously created to meet global standards.

The country’s confectionery market is projected to be bullish over the next five years. Leading the gainers in the industry would be the sweetened beverages, chocolate candies and gums.

Although the entry of imported chocolates and other sweetened products have eaten up part of the local confectionery market, sweet and good-tasting locally manufactured chocolates and candies that are made of locally produced cocoa, making them cheaper from the imported ones, have helped in creating a bullish market for locally produced confectionery products.

The Filipinos’ insatiable appetite for sweet products like chocolate, beverages and crackers have kept local confectionery companies like Columbia afloat even during the world and Asian financial crisis. After all, children will always buy chocolates and candies, and beverages and crackers would always be affordable, sweet and cheaper snacks for those with limited budget.

Moreover, the shift in the country’s buying trends for confectionery products when more consumers are now buying chocolates and candies for gifts and giveaway have added to the country’s bullish market for confectionery products.

And this is where Columbia International Food Products Inc., is of most help to the Filipino market with its world-class, sweet and affordable chocolates, candies and beverages, among others.

Thus, as Columbia celebrates its 80th anniversary, it is with great honor that I offer this toast for Columbia’s 80 years of success in sweetening the lives of Filipinos, even during the country’s most bitter years.

Cheers!!!!

The World BusinessMirror

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Saturday, September 23, 2017

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China banking system won’t collapse, ex-bank director says

By Enda Curran & Alfred Liu

F

Bloomberg

oreigners predicting doom for China’s banks have got it all wrong, according to James Stent, who spent more than a decade serving on the boards of two Chinese lenders.

Instead of falling into a debtfueled crisis, China’s banks are able to stave off trouble because of the willingness of the government to throw money at problems in order to ensure financial stability, Stent argues.

“As one Chinese banker who works for an American bank said to me: ‘In the West, money flees problems; in China, money flows to problems to solve them,’” said Stent, who wrote China’s Banking Transformation: The Untold Story, a book of lessons gleaned from inside the nation’s banking system.

His book is published by Oxford University Press.

Fluent in Ma nd a r in, Stent spent more than 40 years working in commercial banking in Asia, including 13 years on the boards of China Minsheng Banking Corp. and China Everbright Bank Co., where he was on the audit committee.

While his view contrasts with those of doomsayers, such as analyst Charlene Chu and hedge fund manager Kyle Bass, Stent doesn’t dismiss all the concerns around China’s lenders. He says there are

worry spots that could cause disruptions, such as risks around lending to privately owned companies rather than state-owned ones. Yet, any bank failures will be dealt with quietly and imperceptibly, such that the outside world won’t even know about them, he says.

S&P Global Ratings cut China’s sovereign credit rating for the first time since 1999 late Thursday, citing the risks from soaring debt.

The rating was cut one level to “A+” from “AA-”.

Interviewed in Hong Kong, here are excerpts of the conversation:

Why are you so confident about China’s banks?

I saw from the inside this extraordinary change what was happening to banking, a transformation. It was really impressive and very exciting, the speed of the change and the hunger for Chinese to make the banking system work properly. But, at the same time, I was reading this unremittingly negative narrative about how Chinese banks are on the verge of collapse. Westerners don’t get China because they try to see

it through a Western lens, and it doesn’t work because China’s whole system arises out of a totally different culture and set of beliefs.

Thus far, it has worked very well.

How it will work in the future is an open question. The big question is: Does China still have the political willpower and does the Party have the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances? I maintain it does.

How does that system differ from the West?

If Xi Jinping were in charge of implementing Obamacare, he would not have done it nationwide, he would have done it in a remote county in Montana. If you understand how the banking sector works, you understand how anything works in China. It’s like a conductor conducting the orchestra—let’s go a little faster now, a little slower. Constant modulation, which they can do. They have all these levers which they can control, unlike the US. The central bank in China is not independent.

There’s a lot of skepticism when it comes to China’s banks. Some analysts say the system lacks transparency, covers up bad debt and is a crisis waiting to happen.

How do you respond?

These are real problems and we worry about them. They could bring the system down. If you don’t get it right, they might well bring the system down, hence the extraordinary caution with which the government approaches these things now. The increasing debt, the first question I think to ask, is: Was it worth it to accomplish its

objectives? I think the answer, in my opinion is, unequivocally yes.

What about the view that banks are essentially propping up zombie state-owned firms?

State-owned enterprises are basically sovereign risk. Why do banks lend to them? Because it’s sovereign risk. Anybody working in banks knows that sovereign lending is considered the lowest risk in your own country. If a local government or a state-owned corporation goes belly up, it’s an intentional decision on the part of the government to have that happen. It rarely happens because the government has the money.

The money is there. It’s a matter of how you move it around.

Are you expecting a significant decline in shadow-banking activity over the next year or so after the recent crackdown?

Not over the next year. That’s not the time frame Chinese are thinking. I would say over the next five to 10 years. There are so many tools available to the government and they are gradually using them. Bit by bit, the problem almost imperceptibly will be brought under control. The question some people always ask me, what happens if one of the city banks goes belly up? My answer to that is it won’t happen.

It may, in fact, go belly up but you’ll never notice. Very quietly it’ ll be recapitalized, management will be replaced, and it may not make a Bloomberg News report. It’ll be done to avoid social disruption. Up there in Jilin and

Heilongjiang they’ve got real economic and political problems. They don’t allow banks up there to go belly up. They know the problems up there. They are thinking they will get to it eventually but it’s going to take time. So, don’t look for quick solutions.

Are authorities doing enough to deal with the risks?

All kinds of things are happening, but happening slowly. It’s not going to be suddenly putting on the brakes, because suddenly putting on the brakes would put the whole thing into a hole. They will not tolerate that. How to balance stability and reform? Both are moving ahead.

So what does worry you?

I worry about private-sector lending. Chinese bankers have been lending to state-owned enterprises. It does not require any analysis because the management is provided by the organization department of the Party. It’s easy to lend to state-owned enterprises and it’s sovereign risk in your own country.

The minute you start getting into private-sector lending, which they are doing a lot right now—big

companies, medium companies, small companies, micro companies—then you have to use all the Western tools of cash-f low analysis, market analysis, product analysis, the stability of the shareholders, the inter-related transactions of the shareholders, the character and capabilities of the managers, etc.—none of which Chinese banks have experience in doing. I spent a week about three years ago going around. I went to Jinan, Changsha, Shenzhen, Beijing and Chengdu all in one week. I’d go into the branch, and I’d only tell them about midnight the night before which accounts I wanted to look at. I always looked at a few public sectors, a few private sectors, one or two bad-debt situations. So they had no time to prepare a sleek presentation. And I’d talk one-on-one with the account manager, and they would have a risk manager, as well. They were wonderful people, the best and the brightest that China’s universities are producing, but they’ve never seen a downturn. I had six months of credit training in Citibank. They got a few days. They have no gray hair. This is where Chinese banks will run into difficulty.

As one Chinese banker who works for an American bank said to me: ‘In the West, money flees problems; in China, money flows to problems to solve them.’”—Stent

Trump moves to widen U.S. trade Sanctions against North Korea U

NITED NATIONS—President Dona ld J. Tr ump ordered a w idening of US sanctions on North Korea on Thursday in an effort to further choke off its trade with the outside world, presenting a united front with South Korea and Japan in hopes of forging a common strategy for confronting the isolated nuclear-armed state.

A new executive order signed by Trump targeted major North Korean industries, international banks and

global shippers. The move suggested that for now, at least, the president was still committed to applying economic pressure rather than military action, despite his vow this week to “totally destroy North Korea” if the United States were forced to defend itself or its allies.

The action came amid news reports that China’s central bank had instructed the country’s banks not to do new business with North Korea and to wind down old loans, in keeping with UN sanctions. As

North Korea’s dominant economic partner, China holds the most sway with Pyongyang, but it remained unclear if its latest action would be enforced enough to have any real impact. For all of the pugnacity of Trump’s UN speech earlier this week, the president made it clear on Thursday that he was still open to negotiations. Asked by a reporter whether dialogue was still possible, he said, “Why not?”

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, however, signaled no such openness. In a statement, he denounced Trump as a “rogue and gangster fond of playing with fire” and said that rather than deter him, Trump’s speech had convinced him that “the path I chose is correct and that it is the one I have to follow to the last.”

North Korea has withstood an array of US and international sanctions for years, and it remains unclear whether the latest round will have any greater effect. Just last week the UN Security Council approved a US-drafted resolution tightening limits on North Korean trade, although it did not go as far as the Trump administration wanted.

Trump’s order enhanced the Treasury Department’s authority to punish those doing business with North Korean industries including textiles, fishing, informa-

tion technology and manufacturing while barring international banks from the US market if they facilitate transactions with North Korea. It also imposed a 180-day ban on foreign-owned aircraft and ships entering the US after leaving North Korea.

Bomb test

North Korea str uck back at Trump’s threats to destroy it, with Kim’s warning of the “highest level of hard-line countermeasure in history” and his foreign minister suggesting that could include testing a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific Ocean.

Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho spoke to reporters on Thursday in New York, where he is attending the United Nations General Assembly.

He was quoted by South Korea’s Yonhap News as saying the countermeasures flagged by Kim might refer to a “strongest-ever” nuclear detonation in the Pacific. Still, he added “we have no idea what the measures will be” and that it was for Kim to decide.

The yen gained against the dollar after the Yonhap report was published.

Trump and Kim are engaged in an increasingly hostile war of words over North Korea’s weapons program, which has seen it launch

intercontinental ballistic missiles and test its sixth—and most powerful—nuclear weapon in recent weeks. Trump this week threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea if it provokes the US or allies, and ordered new sanctions on individuals, companies and banks doing business with Pyongyang.

Kim responded to Trump’s remarks at the UN meeting in a statement on state media, calling the president “mentally deranged.”

“Now that Trump has denied the existence of and insulted me and my country in front of the eyes of the world and made the most ferocious declaration of a war in history that he would destroy the DPRK, we will consider with seriousness exercising of a corresponding, highest level of hard-line countermeasure in history,” Kim said in the statement to the Korean Central News Agency, using the initials for his country’s formal name.

Warhead progress

South Korea’s Unification Ministry said that other than routine public addresses, this is the first such direct statement by a North Korean leader it has found.

North Korea has claimed progress in its ability to miniaturize a nuclear bomb to fit a warhead onto

a missile. Still, it would be unlikely for North Korea to carry out a threat to test a nuclear weapon in the Pacific, according to William McKinney, a visiting scholar at the US-Korea Institute of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

“I think it is more that Ri’s bluster is designed to put him in good standing with his boss Kim Jong Un—they had to figure out a way to respond to the ‘Rocket Man’ comment,” McKinney said. “No one has done an above-ground test in decades,” he said. “It they did it would be condemned by everyone—the Chinese and the Russians would be just as upset at the United States.”

McKinney, a retired Army colonel who spent more than 40 years working on US-Korea military planning, said he was more concerned that North Korea may test-fire a missile toward Guam, a US territory in the Pacific.

“That would highlight the fact that the existential threat to the US is real,” he said. “The American military establishment would have to take measures to defend its territory and use the full force of our ballistic missile defense capability, as well as other strategies, to respond to such a threat.”

NYTNS and Bloomberg News

After Maria’s devastation, Puerto Rico faces mountains of obstacles on road to recovery

S

AN JUAN, Puerto Rico—A day after Hurricane Maria razed Puerto Rico, its ferocious winds smashing houses, hotels, cell-phone towers and the island’s entire electrical grid, the fear and frustration were pervasive on Thursday.

Power was out everywhere. Cell phones were mostly useless. Much of the island’s water was undrinkable. Roads were carpeted in debris. And still the full scope of the damage was unknown. By day’s end, Gov. Ricardo Rosselló said there had been no contact with officials in 85 percent of the island.

For Puerto Rico, long crippled by enormous debt and an essentially bankrupt financial system, the road to recovery just went from long to seemingly endless. Still reeling from Hurricane Irma, which knocked out 70 percent of the power when it grazed the island two weeks ago, it faces a mountain of need in the coming months just as the federal government is stretched to the limit grappling with the destruction left by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.

On Thursday the island was declared a federal disaster zone, freeing up federal emergency money.

The first major steps toward recovery will get under way on Friday morning when an airport tarmac in San Juan, cleared of debris, will open to begin receiving three or four daily emergency planeloads of muchneeded generators, water, tents, cots and other crucial supplies, said Alejandro de la Campa, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Puerto Rico. Emergency teams will also start to fan out across the island to begin helping residents with their immediate needs, he added.

Re-establishing communications was a priority, the governor said, although the task would be gargantuan. The Federal Communications Commission estimated

on Thursday that Puerto Rico had lost 95 percent of its wireless cell sites.

“In the next 24 to 48 hours, the scene will become clearer,” Rosselló said.

Complicating Puerto Rico’s recovery is the island’s devastated economy. The island has been mired in a deep recession for more than a decade and carries $74 billion in debt. With no way of repaying it, Puerto Rico declared a form of bankruptcy in May, the first time in history that an American state or territory had taken the extraordinary measure. The island’s finances are also being overseen by a federal control board.

The hope now is that, as a result of disaster aid, Puerto Rico can modernize its electrical grid, roads and bridges. It is a goal the federal government shares.

New York Times News Service

Sports BusinessMirror

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

Saturday, September 23, 2017

A5

Federer, Nadal: Doubles partners P

RAGUE—In the back seat of a new van in an old city, a stubble-faced Rafael Nadal was laughing hard on my right and a stubble-faced Roger Federer was laughing harder on my left.

The topic was doubles, which Federer and Nadal will most likely play together in earnest for the first time at the inaugural Laver Cup this weekend.

Nadal first lobbied to play doubles with Federer in 2006.

“I made him wait,” Federer joked, with a baritone giggle.

“When you make somebody wait, they appreciate it more, so that’s why he’s so excited.”

Nadal responded with his delightfully approximate English: “Good things wait. But I don’t know if that much wait is going to be for a good thing or a negative thing.”

Back across the van to Federer: “I just hope we are going to win. I hope we didn’t wait too long, because we’re too old now.”

Federer, 36, and Nadal, 31, have, of course, shared plenty of road and court in their careers.

They have played for charity: raising funds for flood relief at the Australian Open in 2011. They have played for novelty: competing against each other in the weird-but-true “Battle of Surfaces” in 2007 in Majorca, Spain, where one-half of the court was red clay and the other half grass.

They have played for posterity: facing each other 37 times in official matches during the last 13 years, including three times in 2017, their surprising season of mutual renaissance.

But until now, with the exception of a few games on the same side of the net in that Australian charity event in 2011, they have never been teammates.

“Look, we are, I think, all our lives rivals, so to be together now is going to be something very special, I think unique,” Nadal said. “I think it’s going to be a great feeling.”

Nadal and Federer (or is that Federer and Nadal?) are the main attractions of Team Europe, which will face another six-man squad representing the rest of the world in the three-day Laver Cup, beginning Friday.

The event will be played on a black, indoor hard court in a sold-out O2 Arena here. The new competition, which will be held every year except when there is a Summer Olympics, was inspired by golf’s Ryder Cup. It is named for Rod Laver, who at age 79 has made the trip here from his home in Carlsbad, California. He is the only singles player to have completed two Grand Slams—winning all four major tournaments in the same calendar year (he did it in 1962 and 1969). He was on stage on Wednesday with the teams in a packed Old Town Square for a welcome ceremony here.

Like the Ryder Cup, which dates to 1927 and now pits Europe against the United States, the Laver Cup has captains:

D

EFENDING champion De La Salle University (DLSU) guns for its fourth straight win when it takes on a vastly improved University of the Philippines (UP) in Season 80 of the University Athletic Association of the Philippines (UAAP) men’s basketball action today at the Mall of Asia Arena in Pasay City.

The Green Archers are seeking to keep their hold of the league lead as they face the Fighting Maroons, who won two of their first three matches, at 4 p.m. Prior to this, Far Eastern University (FEU) and University of Santo Tomas try to come back in the win column when they collide at 2 p.m.

The Tamaraws, who are sporting a 1-2 win-loss card, seek payback from their 82-94 setback to Ateneo de Manila last week.

The Growling Tigers hope to recover from their 0-3 start after felling short to National University, 84-94, last Wednesday.

All eyes are still on reigning Most Valuable Player Ben Mbala.

Likewise, many anticipate the Green Archers battling Paul Desiderio and the Fighting Maroons.

Returning from a fruitful stint in the 2017 Fiba AfroBasket Cup Tunisia, Mbala, who who missed the first two UAAP games, made his strong presence felt in his season debut with 32 points, 10 rebounds, and four blocks to lead De La Salle to its third straight win after dismantling Adamson University, 85-73, last Wednesday.

But despite Mbala’s one-of-a-kind season debut, La Salle Head Coach Aldin Ayo is still seeking to address the flaws of his team particularly the immaturity and lack of execution he saw in their first three matches.

“It just shows that we’re still a young team. The immaturity

happened. The important thing is the body holds up.”

Back problems

FEDERER said the back problems that hampered him during the North American hard-court season this summer were, for now, not an issue, and that he definitely needed a rest.

This is not much of one.

He was practicing in Prague less than two weeks after he lost in the quarterfinals of the US Open to Juan Martín del Potro, who pulled out of the Laver Cup because he felt he had not yet recovered (his absence further slims Team World’s already meager chances).

But Nadal, who arrived in Prague little more than a week after winning the US Open, said he felt the Laver Cup, where matches will be best-of-three sets with a super-tiebreaker instead of a full third set, was worth a quick turnaround.

“We are creating something big,” he said. “We are together in the same team, so it’s all about the personal energy and the personal feeling you have, and here we have the feeling we are getting in a place where we really want to play, because we are doing something exceptional, something that never happened.

And I’m very excited, so it doesn’t matter if I’m tired, if I’m coming from the US Open or we’re playing for a long season.”

Nadal and Federer, both driven from within, are playing this well again in 2017 in part because of each other. Would they have achieved so much for so long without the other to provide motivation?

“In some ways I believe yes, and in some ways I believe no,” Federer said. “I believe that because of Rafa, maybe I achieved less, but at the same time, I feel like he made me a better player.”

Rafael Nadal of Spain celebrates after winning the US Open men’s singles final against Kevin Anderson of South Africa at Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York on September 10. Nadal and Roger Federer are the main attractions of Team Europe; playing doubles against Team World. NYT

Bjorn Borg for Team Europe and John McEnroe for Team World. It will ultimately be Borg’s call if and when “Fedal” becomes a doubles pair.

“I think there’s a good chance,” Borg said.

Once in the quiet of the van, Federer and Nadal sounded more nervous about playing doubles than about beating Team World. Federer, who won an Olympic gold medal in doubles in 2008, has not played men’s doubles since 2015, when he went 0-3. Nadal won the Olympic gold medal last year with Marc López but has played only one doubles tournament this season.

“Where do you play normally?” Nadal asked Federer, trying to figure out who might line up on which side of the court.

Federer said he had more often played the deuce court but added, “for me, Rafa decides what side he wants to play on.”

A bit lucky

WHILE Federer and Nadal traded quips and observations as the van rumbled over Prague’s cobblestones, Borg and his vice captain, Thomas Enqvist, sat quietly in the back row and took it all in.

Borg, the Nadal or Federer of his era, never had a chance to team up with fellow Europeans. There are legitimate questions and concerns about the Laver Cup, an event that Federer and his agent, Tony Godsick, essentially imposed on a sport that has long had an overstuffed schedule.

With Tennis Australia and the US Tennis Association supporting the Laver Cup, the event could also harden battle lines with the International Tennis Federation, which is trying to preserve and revamp Davis Cup, the 117-year-old men’s team competition that is the ITF’s primary source of funding.

is still there and the tendency to relax when we have a big lead,” Ayo said. “But it’s a good thing that every time they commit those mistakes, the players are acknowledging their mistakes. But we still have to work on that.”

Despite the flaws to work on, Ayo is somehow happy now that his team is complete with Mbala joining Aljun Melecio, Ricci and Prince Rivero, Kib Montalbo, Abu Tratter, Santi Santillan and Andrei Caracut as they continue their road to their title-retention bid.

The Fighting Maroons, on the other hand, are up to the challenge on facing another undefeated team. They suffered a sorry 71-92 lost to the other league leader Ateneo de Manila two weeks ago but bounced back with a 84-71 win over Universityy of the East last week behind Paul Desiderio’s career-high 28 points.

“I think it’s really tough, but we’ll take our chances against a team like La Salle,” said UP Head Coach Bo Perasol, who banks not only on Desiderio but also with his Mali big man Ibrahim Quattara, who will try to neutralize Mbala, as well as Noah Webb, Jun Manzo, Javi and Juan Gomez de Liano. Lance Agcaoili

Federer and Godsick insist that they do not view the Laver Cup as a rival to the Davis Cup. But the Davis Cup semifinals and World Group qualifying round were played just last weekend, and the game’s biggest stars did not take part.

Nadal, back at No. 1 in the world rankings, and Federer, at No. 2, did make it to Prague, though. It is all quite a mood swing from the start of the year, when both were coming back from lengthy injury layoffs. Federer, in particular, was concerned about needing a wild card to even get into the Laver Cup, his own event.

“I believe we were a little bit lucky at the beginning of the season that we played well, and always the beginnings are tough after injuries,” Nadal said.

“You need to win these kind of matches that change the confidence, change the feeling, and that’s what

DLSU defends title vs U.P.

This September 21 photo shows Jayjay Alejandro of National University going for a lay-up—hitting Regie Basibas (left) in the process—during a game for Season 80 of the University Athletic Association of the Philippines men’s basketball tournament. University of Santo Tomas guns against Far Eastern University at 2 p.m. today. Stephanie Tumampos

Lady Eagles to battle Stags

A

TENEO Lady Eagles will try to tighten their grip in the second spot of Group B when they take on San Sebastian Lady Stags in the Premier Volleyball League (PVL) Collegiate Conference today at the Filoil Flying V Center in San Juan.

However, the Lady Eagles are likely to play depleted— missing the services of Kim Gequillana and Ana Gopico— against the Lady Stags at 6:30 p.m. due to respective injuries of their key players.

Gequillana might be done for the conference due to a left-knee injury, while Gopico is still nursing a hamstring injury.

Jhoana Maraguinot is likely to return after missing their last week’s 25-23, 25-20, 25-20 win over Lyceum of the Philippines due to a left-ankle sprain.

Prior to that, University of the Philippines and San Beda College, who are tied at the third place of Group B with a 2-1 win-loss card, battle to keep their semis hopes on track at 4 p.m.

Only the top two teams from each groups will advance to the crossover semifinals. Adamson University won all of its three

games to take the lead, followed by Arellano University holding a 3-1 card.

A tight race also looms in Group A. The three-peat-seeking National University leads the race after remaining perfect in three outings, Ateneo and Far Eastern University are tied at second place with 2-1 slates.

The Lady Eagles seek to fuel their semifinals bid as Head Coach Tai Bundit pins his hopes on skipper Bea de Leon, Ponggay Gaston, Jules Samonte, Kat Tolentino and setter Deana Wong.

San Sebastian, on the other hand, hopes to widen its slim chance of advancing to the final four as the Lady Stags, coached

by Roger Gorayeb, try to recover from their 1-2 start tied with Lyceum.

In men’s action, semis-bound Ateneo Blue Eagles gun for its six straight win when they battle third running De La Salle Green Spikers (3-2) at 8 a.m., while National University (2-2) and University of Santo Tomas (2-3) clash to keep their semis hopes in hunt at 10 a.m. Lance Agcaoili

Russia regains Fifa Council seat

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ENEVA—Russia has regained its place on the Fifa Council, six months after Deputy Prime Minister Vitaly Mutko was blocked from reelection.

UEFA member-federations on Wednesday elected Alexei Sorokin, CEO of the 2018 World Cup organizing committee, by acclamation as one of their delegates to Fifa’s strategysetting committee.

The seat, which runs through 2021, was vacant since May

when Mutko was formally forced to step down.

Mutko’s candidacy was blocked by Fifa’s then governance committee chairman, Miguel Maduro, because of a conflict of interest with his government work. Maduro, who was ousted

by Fifa weeks later, said last week that the world soccer body’s leaders put pressure on him to protect Mutko’s position.

Meeting with British lawmakers, Maduro said he was told that his ruling on Mutko’s eligibility could threaten

Fifa President Gianni Infantino’s hold on power and “would be a disaster” for the World Cup. Fifa is also investigating allegations from a World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) report into a Russian doping conspiracy at the 2014 Sochi Olympics that implicated Mutko in covering up potential doping violations, including in soccer. Evidence provided by Wada investigator Richard McLaren included a document that appeared to be linked to Russia’s 2014 World Cup squad.

Last week Maduro told British lawmakers that Infantino believes there is “no evidence” Mutko is involved in the scandal.

“I completely agree with the Fifa president,” Sorokin said on Wednesday. “So far there has been a lot of speculation but there is no factual evidence of any wrongdoing.”

“I have certainly heard that Wada has dropped many cases [arising from the McLaren report]. I hope that justice will prevail and more cases will be dropped,” he added.

Sorokin became the eighth of the nine European delegates on the 37-member Fifa Council. The ninth was left vacant in July when longtime Spanish soccer leader Angel Maria Villar resigned as a vice president of Fifa and UEFA after being arrested in a corruption investigation. AP

More nuanced

NADAL was emphatic after winning the US Open that he did not use Federer’s achievements or Grand Slam title totals for incentive. But on Wednesday, in Federer’s presence, he was more nuanced.

“I have my personal motivation, but of course to have somebody in front of you, it is easier to see the things you need to improve,” Nadal said.

Federer interjected: “They uncover you. They ‘undress’ you.”

“Exactly,” said Nadal, who leads their series, 23-14.

“If you’re the best and you don’t see the things that other people are doing better than you, it’s difficult to go on court and understand exactly what you need to do to be better. Having somebody like Roger in front of me for so many years of course helped me to go on court and understand and let me practice with a different perspective on the things I have to do.” New York Times News Service

Personalities absent in anti-Peping rally

K

EY personalities were missing on Thursday’s action against the reign of longtime Philippine Olympic Committee (POC) President Jose “Peping” Cojuangco Jr. Nonetheless, the statement was loud and clear, even as the venue, the historic Rizal Memorial Coliseum, was only filled by as many as 100 supporters of the antiCojuangco movement.

The rally, which was once promised to be attended by the likes of Sen. Richard Gordon, politician Bongbong Marcos, former Philippine Sports Commission Chairman Eric Buhain and gymnastics chief Cynthia Carrion, was carried out to oust Cojuangco and call for immediate reorganization in the embattled POC. Dr. Aparicio Mequi, also a former top man in the PSC, led the demonstration along with Philippine Volleyball Federation President Edgardo Cantada and former Sen. and Philippine Swimming League Chairman Nikki Coseteng.

All were shouting one synonymous battle cry of dislodging the POC chief for the betterment of sports.

“I can only define sports through one word— patriotism,” Mequi said.

The downward trajectory of national sports associations (NSAs) triggered the outcry of several leaders to change the leadership in the POC. Cojuangco, who just celebrated his 83rd birthday last Tuesday, has been serving at the helm for the past 12 years.

Those were the darkest days of Philippine sports, as told by many critics such PSC Commissioner Ramon Fernandez, who also organized a rally in Cebu, as the country saw a steady decline in their performance in international tournaments.

Since 2005, when Manila hosted the Southeast Asian Games and topped the overall rankings by collecting a total of 291 medals, the country has amassed lesser medals.

After that fruitful year, the Philippines went rolling down the slope, finishing sixth in 2007 Thailand, fifth in 2009 Laos, sixth in 2011 Indonesia, seventh in 2013 Myanmar, and sixth in both the 2015 Singapore edition and the recent Malaysia Games.

The poor performances root from the alleged corruption within the POC, which leads the NSAs. Mequi and his group are pushing for the government to file charges against Cojuangco over the unliquidated fundings of P127 million.

Cantada said the POC president should step down for the sake of the athletes.

“We already know that Cojuangco and his gang are corrupt, unfair and too senile to admit they are useless to remain in the POC,” Cantada lamented.

“Now we realize they are also deaf to the cries of the Filipino athletes,” he added.

Defiant of the small number of participants in the rally that coincided with the anniversary of the punitive martial law, Mequi remains confident that they can press the people to support their initiative. Ramon Rafael Bonilla

BusinessMi

A6 Saturday, September 23, 2017 | Editor: Jun Lomibao

WELCOME TO BERGEN!

The curtain has risen on the 90th edition of the International Cycling Union Road World Championships, and Norway is hosting the prestigious eight-day event for the first time since 1993 in the city of Bergen, a port surrounded by mountains and fjords, and which was founded nearly 1,000 years ago and was once a part of the Hanseatic League trading empire. After last year’s later-thanusual dates for the 2016 championships to avoid the height of the Middle East’s autumn heat, the worlds have returned to its usual September dates. Just like 11 months ago in Qatar, the lineup for this year’s edition is star-studded both in the individual and team competitions. UCI PHOTO

Team Wiggins dismisses claims of financial woes

T

EAM Wiggins directeur sportif Simon Cope said the team has funding for an additional two years and that it will run a 16-strong rider program in 2018.

The team will only consist of under-23 riders next year—thus solidifying its position as a feeder squad for World Tour teams. The team has also denied that they are in financial difficulty after French rider Corentin Ermenault told Cyclingpro.net that he had not raced after June because “the team was financially broken.”

The shift to racing with just under-23 riders means that track specialists Andy Tennant, Chris Latham and Steven Burke will leave the team. Tennant confirmed his departure to Cyclingnews on Tuesday, while Cope confirmed that junior world time trial champion Tom Pidcock would race on the road for the team in 2018.

“We’ve another two years to run with Skoda.

We’ve just signed 14 riders so far for next year,” Cope told Cyclingnews.

In relation to Pidcock, who has been compared to a young Peter Sagan, Cope said: “Yes,” in response to whether he had signed the 18-year-old, “but I don’t know if that’s common knowledge though.”

“It’s going to be all under-23 riders next year. We just need to sign two more now. We’ll go to 16, all under-23 and focus on racing in Europe. We’ll support the Premier calendar, as well.”

With a greater emphasis on developing young riders, the track specialists have been deemed surplus.

“The problem is that we have those guys, and it’s not their fault, but when we want to use them they’re not available and when we don’t really need them they are available. It’s not really working because they’ve got so much track racing going on. That’s why we’ve sort of stepped away from that.”

Despite Cope’s assurances over the stability over the future of the team, reports on Monday suggested that the well had run dry.

Corentin Ermenault, who has been with the team since the start of the year, told Velopro: “I couldn’t race after June because the team was financially broken.

My national coach expected me to race in the national championships but I couldn’t because I only raced for my brand team this year.”

The French rider’s last race in Wiggins colors came in June at the Baby Giro but he is not the only rider to have had a light calendar in the second half of the year.

Andrew McQuaid, who owns the team, and also works as a rider agent for some of the biggest names in the sport, told Cyclingnews that the team had no financial problems and that riders’ salaries had been paid. He added that the team stopped their international race program in August but have raced domestically since them.

As for next year, he told Cyclingnews: “We have complied with all British Cycling application deadlines so far and will continue to do so in order to register the team for next year.”

The team failed to qualify for the Tour of Britain as they did not meet the points criteria. Several of the team raced the Tour Alsace at the end of July. Despite racing several low-key races, that was the last UCI registered race on the team’s program.

Cope admitted that the squad’s season was virtually over, although they will race a non-UCI registered race in Hong Kong in October and some of the riders have raced domestically. Several riders will also race on the track in national colors.

“They’ve been racing. [Joey] Walker won a race in Yorkshire and others have been riding in Belgium but the other thing is that we’ve not been able to get in anything,” Cope said.

“Everyone thinks that because we’re Wiggins we can walk into any race but that’s not true. There’s not that much in August unless you go way over to Eastern Europe and the costs for that are astronomical. Not getting in the Tour of Britain was a big blow but I knew we’d be in trouble from the start of the year. The qualification doesn’t suit what we’re trying to do which is move riders onto WorldTour teams and to do that you need to race in Europe. That’s why the British Academy races in Europe.”

“McQuaid does all the dealing with the sponsors.

I just sort the race programme out. I’m waiting for the calendar to come out now. As far as I know, 2018 is on the cards. Skoda signed a contract for three years and this year was the first, so hopefully it’s another two years and beyond. I’ve put together a new spreadsheet for next year but we’re also going to Hong Kong this October for a race.” Cycling News

CARGOBIKE GAINS MOMENTUM W

HILE the bicycle enjoys a resurgence across the world, an increasing number of individuals, families and organizations are making use of the latest transport solution: the cargo bicycle.

Capable of transporting children or goods that are too heavy or cumbersome for a traditional bike, the cargo bicycle is finding its niche in towns and cities.

As part of its commitment to promote the bicycle as a sustainable mode of transport, the International Cycling Union (UCI) has decided to join the cargo bicycle revolution.

A carvelo2go e-cargo bike will be available for hire at the UCI World Cycling Centre (WCC), in Aigle, Switzerland. Users will be able to rent the bike by the hour or day, simply by reserving a rental slot online. Simple, affordable and easy to use, visitors to the UCI and local families alike, will be able to enjoy the benefits of using such a bike and admire the mountain scenery as they pedal along the EuroVelo 17 Rhone cycle route, located at its doorstep.

The worldwide trend of people moving to cities, creates challenges for urban transport as growing populations

fight for space on congested roads. Easy to maneuver and nonpolluting, cargo bikes can go a long way toward alleviating such traffic congestion. According to the EU-funded CycleLogistics project, 25 percent of all urban goods could be delivered by bicycle, with the figure rising to 50 percent for light goods.

Whether for delivering post, transporting groceries home from the supermarket or getting children to school, cargo bikes provide economical, environmentally friendly alternatives to motorised vehicles.

FEWER TRUCKS IN CITIES

A SHIFT to cycle logistics is particularly desirable in cities. Despite being only 3 percent of EU road traffic, trucks are involved in 14 percent of fatal accidents.

Reducing the number of these vehicles on urban streets, will make vulnerable road users, such as cyclists, safer. Larger vehicles are also responsible for generating air and noise pollution. In response city leaders are increasingly putting in place restrictive

CAPABLE of transporting children or goods that are too heavy or cumbersome for a traditional bike, the cargo bicycle is finding its niche in towns and cities. UCI

measures to deter large vehicles from urban areas.

As they are nonpolluting vehicles, cargo bikes are exempt from congestion or environmental charges or taxes. This makes them even more desirable for individuals or companies facing rising costs and challenges

A

nnemiek van Vleuten and Anna van der Breggen clinched a historic double triumph for the Netherlands in the International Cycling Union (UCI) Road World Championships, taking gold and silver in the Elite Women’s Time Trial.

It was the first time since Jeannie Longo and Catherine Marsal netted the top 2 Time Trial placings in Lugano, Switzerland, in 1996 that gold and silver have gone to the same country in this event.

Earlier in the same day, Thomas Pidcock captured gold in the Junior Men’s Time Trial for Great Britain, the first medal success for his country in the 2017 Championships.

In the Elite Women’s Time Trial, van der Breggen, second of the 54 starters, quickly set the best time of 29-02, clocked in an impressive average speed of over 43.5 kmh. With all the best provisional time splits in her favour, van der Breggen would clearly be an important reference

of traveling around urban areas. With models available that can carry over 250 kilogram, cargo bikes can be used to transport significant loads.

Some 40,000 cargo bikes are in circulation in the bike-friendly city of Copenhagen, representing 6 percent of all bikes in the city.

Over a quarter of all families in the city with two children or more own a cargo bike.

As more and more city-dwellers choose the bicycle as their means of transport, the cargo bike provides an elegant solution for transporting goods and children around town.

UCI News

HISTORIC DOUBLE FOR DUTCH RIDERS point for the rest of the field on the challenging Bergen course.

Young USA contender Chloe Dygert, more than 30 riders later, was the first to come close to beating van der Breggen’s first intermediate time split, just nine seconds back and Belgium’s Anne-Sophie Duyck, eight seconds down, was another. But the narrowest margin behind van der Breggen at this point was set by none other than her Netherlands’s team-mate, Van Vleuten, a mere seven tenths of a second down.

Rainfall in the middle part of the time trial then made it tougher for Van Vleuten to keep such a promising high pace, and she only pulled ahead of Van Der Breggen at the third time check. But by the finish line, the 34-year-old was 12 seconds ahead of her compatriot, eventually adding her first World Championships Time Trial (TT) title to her multiple TT victories in the Netherlands’s National Championships.

“This season I’ve surprised myself with

what I can do,” Van Vleuten said. “To be world champion in the Time Trial, I never thought I’d be able to do this.”

“It was really hard because it started almost pouring rain on the course. I lost some seconds in the descents, I practiced in dry conditions and I had to be really careful. But I was still focussed on what I needed to do.”

While gold and silver seemed clearly resolved in favor of the Netherlands, the battle for bronze was only decided at the last minute.

Several of the top prerace contenders, like defending World Champion Amber Neben (USA) faded badly. However, Australia’s Katrin Garfoot, already a bronze medalist in Qatar last year, put in an impressive late surge to push Chloe Dygert down to fourth and repeat her 2016 podium TT position.

Already a Junior World Cyclocross Champion this January, earlier in the day, Britain’s Thomas Pidcock secured gold in the Junior Men’s Event with a consistently strong performance.

The 60th of 78 starters on a course 7 kilometres shorter than in Qatar last year, Pidcock clocked the fastest times at all the intermediate checkpoints and as the only rider to record an average speed of over 45 kph, it looked as the 18-year-old would be very difficult to beat.

And so it proved. Local favorite Andreas Leknessund was the only one of the late starters able to inch past the Briton early on, overhauling Pidcock by just over one second at the first two time checks. But while the Norwegian dropped back on the second hillier part of the course, Pidcock’s consistency allowed him to stay on track for the victory, simultaneously clinching his country’s first medal of the 2017 UCI Road World Championships.

Silver went to Antonio Puppio of Italy, 11 seconds back, only a second down on Pidcock at the first check but then who slowly lost traction on the difficult Birkelundesbakken climb.

Meanwhile, Poland’s Filip Maciejuk overcame an

notably slow start to round out the podium for bronze 13 seconds down.

“I knew a podium was a possibility, but I didn’t really think I’d take the lead and then hold it all the way to the finish like that,” said Pidcock afterward.

“I haven’t recovered yet, I was struggling to sit on that chair [as provisional race leader].

When I recover, I think it will sink in a bit more.”

Pidcock is sometimes seen as a much younger version of Peter Sagan, given his similarly phenomenal win rate, and he said of the comparison, “It feels pretty good. He wins bike races, but then also has fun doing it. It’s what I like to do.”UCI News

»

Annemiek van Vleuten makes it a 1-2 finish for the Netherlands in the women’s elite time trial. UCI NEWS

irror CYCLING

mirror_sports@yahoo.com.ph | Saturday, September 23, 2017 A7

MOST Norwegian cyclists ride all winter, either on a mountain bike or with studded tires or on cleared roads. UCI PHOTO

How Norway’s cyclists brave the off-season

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ORWAY, site of the 2017 International Cycling Union (UCI) Road World Championships in Bergen, is one of the more northern countries in the cycling world: both the capital (Oslo) and Bergen are at 60 degrees north latitude, the same as Alaska.

So, how do Norwegian cyclists manage to train through the off-season?

“There are obviously a few issues with being a road cyclist in Norway. The winter is, of course, a challenge. Most of Norway is covered in snow from December to March. This makes cycling difficult, but not impossible. Most cyclists will ride all winter, either on a mountain bike with studded tires or on cleared roads,” said Øyvind Aas, communications officer at Syklistene, the Norwegian Cyclist Association, and former editor at Terrengsykkel/Landevei.

“In winter the darkness is also a big challenge. Even in the southern parts of Norway, for example, around Oslo, it will be daylight only between 10 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon in December to January,” Aas added.

Thor Hushovd, former UCI World Champion and winner of 10 stages at the Tour de France,

echoed Aas’s comments.

“Norway does not have as big a population of cyclists as some other nations, but I think because of the winter and winter sports, we have to develop a good way to train. You know that you have to go out no matter what the weather, no matter if it is rainy or snowing,” Hushovd said.

“If you go to the coast of Norway, even in the winter, you find dry roads all year around.

Riders do different things from riding the bike. If you want to do more riding then you have to do training camps,” he added.

Aas adds: “Norwegian cyclists tend to spend a lot of time on trainers/rollers, as well as head to Gran Canaria and/or Mallorca during winter.

Edvald Boasson Hagen and Lars Petter Nordhaug both live in Oslo, even though they could live in Spain or Italy,” Aas said. “They prefer to ski during winter. Oslo is a coastal city, but gets snow all the way to the shoreline. Still, roads along the Oslo fjord tend to be rideable all year.

“Alexander Kristoff lives in Stavanger most of the winter, as well. Kristoff does not ski much, but the Stavanger region does not get covered

by snow in winter. It is a bit south of Bergen and mild because of the Gulf Stream passing along the Norwegian west coast.

“Oslo, Stavanger, Lillehammer and Trondheim are the cities where most cyclists come from, or live these days. Some smaller towns south of Oslo are also places where cyclists come from. Nordhaug is from Tønsberg, Dag Otto Lauritzen and Thor Hushovd are from Grimstad. Boasson Hagen is from Lillehammer, as is Truls Engen Korsaeth.”

However, Aas provided a note of caution.

“Road quality in Norway is not great, but not too bad either. The Oslo area has a lot of gravel roads without cars through the local forests, so a lot of cyclists use these for training,” Aas said.

“The snow also makes it easy to cross-country ski. This has proved to be a great way for cyclists to stay in shape over winter, and might help with core strength and injury prevention, as well.

“I think it is easier these days to be a cyclist than a cross-country skier because the snow conditions are not what they used to be, and the skiers have to travel around more to find snow,” Hushovd pointed out. UCI News

FAR FROM OVERWHELMED ASIAN champion Abishek Kumar brings his act for India in the world championships. UCI

T

HIS is just the beginning for us. We are so proud to be here.”

The words of Katkam Dattatraya, head coach of the Indian team at the International Cycling Union (UCI) Para-cycling Road World Championships in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, speak long and large about the country’s ambitions in the discipline.

Although the names of India’s four athletes were buried near the bottom of the results list in Pietermaritzburg, they have already made history for their country: it was the first time India has been represented at the UCI Para-cycling Road Worlds.

Proudly installed in their team tent, surrounded by nations fielding teams up to four times their size, the Indian delegation was far from overwhelmed.

“We are here to get experience and see how we can do against European athletes,” their coach explains.

“Para-cycling is developing in India and we are just so happy that we can participate in a UCI event.”

India’s qualification for the Worlds came in the wake of their impressive performance at the Asian Para-cycling Championships in Bahrain in February, when the Indian athletes made a clean sweep of the medals in the 12.8-kilometer time trial, taking gold, silver and bronze.

“I always wanted to be at a World Championships so for me this is like a dream come true,” said the Asian champion Abishek Kumar (C2), who was affected with polio in his right leg as a child. “I’ve wanted this for 11 years and it feels great to be here.”

Although he fell sick before the Worlds and was warned by his doctor not to compete, he was not going to let the opportunity slip through his fingers: “I may not have been at my best but it’s not about winning. It’s about participating. I am so glad I came. I have met many athletes and I feel encouraged.”

Kaigoulal Kaigoulal (C3) is an above-the-knee amputee since losing his leg in a train accident. All eyes were on him in Pietermaritzburg as he was the first athlete to roll out of the individual time trial start on the second day of competition.

“I was scared but it is so amazing to be here. It has been beyond my expectations.”

The four Indian athletes who competed in South Africa from August 31 to September 3 are among 15 to 20 para-cyclists who form part of the developing national squad. The majority are ex-soldiers—for example members of the Border Security Force or the Central Reserve Police Force—who were injured in the line of duty.

They are able to train and develop thanks to the support of the Cycling Federation of India, the Aditya Mehta Foundation, as well as the government.

“Without the Cycling Federation of India, none of this would be possible,” Dattatraya said.

Earlier in the year, a team of eight para-cyclists benefited from an intensive training camp in Hyderabad under the guidance of Aditya Mehta himself, a twotime silver medallist at the 2013 Asian Para-cycling Championships.

OurTime

A8 Saturday, September 23, 2017 • Editor: Efleda P. Campos

BusinessMirror

news@businessmirror.com.ph

Baguio artist paints nature’s beauty in mist for decades City and Benguet province—always misty, and devoid of loud colors or embellishments.

“Maganda ang lugar natin. Hindi ka mauubusan ng puwedeng ipinta,” he said.

The painting waiter

ROLAND Bay-an holds a painting of an Ibaloy woman at work.

Story and photos by Mau Victa | Correspondent

T

HE fate of 64-year-old Roland Bay-an of Baguio City as a visual-artist painter seemed to have been carved in stones, since he was a kid frolicking with his friends at the banks of Baguio’s rivers.

From the first time he saw the beauty of white stones beneath the crystal-clear waters of the river in Barangay Trancoville, he knew these stones could be better appreciated in a drawing. And drew he did and still does.

More than money and fame that most artists aspire for in pursuing their craft, Bay-an is driven to paint.

He paints for the sake of painting, and has never thought of painting to earn a living to support his family.

“Basta paint lang nang paint. Passion ko kasi ito na nagmula sa pagiging hobby lamang. Tuloy tuloy lang hanggang kaya ko pang magpinta,” Bay-an said.

Bay-an is one of about 3,000 artists in Baguio City who, in his humble way, wants to keep the arts culture alive and keep the city as an art capital. Having painted more than

1,000 pieces to date, he wishes that the community would truly appreciate the importance of arts in their lives, and for the young and current crop of Baguio artists to keep the enthusiasm burning and their talents continuously improving.

Beginnings

BORN from an Ibaloy mother who traced her roots to Kapangan, Benguet, Bay-an was next inspired by the beauty of the Ibaloy woman at work.

The Ibaloys are the first descendants of early Baguio people.

The working Ibaloy would become the typical subject of Bay-an’s artwork. When he started to draw and paint, his first canvases were the walls of their house and old cardboards and boxes. There, he would also draw paintings depicting the colors of early and typical Baguio

SINCE he did not plan on making painting his source of livelihood, Bayan worked as a waiter for 19 years in one of the landmark restaurants in the city, the Dainty Restaurant, until he retired in 1998. There, he got acquainted with members of the Taong Bundok, a group of pioneer Baguio visual artists who started arts exhibitions in the city. It was there people noticed his talent in painting, as he painted and drew on old cake boxes whenever there was a lull in waiting tables.

Later, he was invited to join a painting exhibit by a Taong Bundok member. There, he learned that his works could be displayed, have exposure and be sold to interested buyers.

“Noon di ko pa alam kung anong ibig sabihin ng artist at ng exhibit, at na puwede palang may bibili ng mga gawa ko,” Bay-an remembered.

So he made a painting and priced it half the price of the works of the other participants who exhibited their works. He was surprised that his painting was sold.

From then on, he has been joining art exhibits, including one held in South Korea in 2005 for the biennial art exhibit together with National Artist Ben Cabrera.

Sharing talent through Pasakalye

IN 1999 Bay-an became one of the resident artists of the Tam-awan Village, where he conducted painting sessions to teach young artists.

He taught them the basics of art painting and for them to develop their own style of painting.

“There’s an artist in everybody.

We just need to harness the talent with proper guidance,” he said.

Among those he guided were abused children, whom he cannot touch or mention things that would remind them of their experience.

But it was in a sidewalk adjoining a quaint bookshop on Claudio Street where Bay-an and other struggling but talented local artists found a space to thrive. The artists and their works’ exposure have become possible when Maricar Docyogen, proprietor of Bookends bookshop, let the sidewalk adjoining the shop to be used by the art-

MARICAR Docyogen, proprietor of Bookends bookshop, among paintings of local Baguio City artists belonging to the Pasakalye Art Circle

ists as their studio. She even provided the walls and free spaces of her bookstore as display area for the paintings to help the artists promote them to enthusiasts.

Pasakalye was born when Docyogen met local artists when she was thinking of buying things to decorate the bookstore. Instead of buying mass-produced prints, she said it would be better to choose works done by the homegrown folks, which are excellent and even more beautiful than other works.

“There are a lot of good talents in Baguio. They just needed exposure,” she said.

Together with the artists, Bookends last year mounted a painting for a cause to hit two birds: Help an ailing kidney patient and help local artists sell their artworks, and they dubbed it “Sketch mo, buhay ko” by the Pasakalye Art Circle.

Bay-an was among those who raised funds for a cause through their artworks.

Since then, Bay-an has become one of the regular mainstays at the shop. People from all walks of life and those interested to learn how to paint would come and see how the work is done and interact with the

Florida governor imposes new rules after nursing-home deaths

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OV. Rick Scott of Florida announced new rules on September 16, requiring nursing homes and assisted-living facilities in the state to have generators capable of maintaining comfortable temperatures for at least 96 hours in the event of a power loss.

The governor’s announcement came three days after eight residents of a nursing home in Hollywood, Florida, the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills, died when the home lost power to its cooling system in the wake of Hurricane Irma.

The public outcry over the episode has intensified after the home said that its staff, or people calling on their behalf, had contacted the governor himself, as well as the power utility and several county and state agencies, to get the problem resolved, to little avail.

Under the new rules, all of the state’s assisted-living facilities and nursing homes will have 60 days to obtain what the governor’s statement called “ample resources” that will “sustain operations and maintain comfortable temperatures” for at least four days after a power failure. Those resources, the statement said, include a generator and fuel.

The emergency action also requires that the state fire marshal inspect the generators within 15 days of installation.

In his statement, Scott warned that failure to comply would result in fines and the possible revocation of a facility’s license.

Lauren Schenone, the governor’s press secretary, said the rules were effective immediately and would last 90 days, after which they could be renewed. She said that Scott would “fight aggressively” to put the rules into law, and that the rules do not include state support to pay for what could end up being daunting expenses.

“It is our expectation that these facilities will do everything they can to protect lives,” she said.

In response to criticism over the home’s attempts to get the government to help, a spokesman for Scott said the calls made to the governor were referred to the state Agency for Health Care Administration and the Florida Department of Health and quickly returned.

Florida requires nursing homes to ensure emergency power in a disaster, as well as food, water, staffing and 72 hours of supplies. A new federal rule, which will not be en-

forced until November, adds that the alternative source of energy must be capable of maintaining safe temperatures. But it does not specify that the source of energy must be a generator, or that the energy source must power air-conditioning.

The nursing home under scrutiny in Florida had a generator, but the generator did not power the air-conditioning.

Hurricane Irma had affected a tree that apparently hit the transformer that powered the cooling system, leading to fatally hot conditions in the home.

Overhauling health-care rules— even after problems arise from natural disaster—can prove challenging.

Hospitals and nursing homes have sometimes pushed back against requirements, arguing they are costly, unnecessary and a particularly crushing burden on smaller homes.

In a telephone interview last Saturday, Martin Goetz, chief executive of River Garden Senior Services, a nursing home in Jacksonville that did not lose power or air-conditioning, said the governor’s newly imposed requirements would be “impossible” for many homes to comply with in such a short time.

“What I think nursing homes will do is buy a lot of fans,” he said. “You can’t

just go triple and quadruple generating capacity.” Doing so, he said, takes planning, reviews and approvals—all of which take time.

The governor, Goetz added, is “shooting from the hip” and choosing to require more resources, when in fact, “the problem at the Hollywood facility was a failure of management.”

Robert E. Solomon, a division manager at the National Fire Protection Association, said the emergency rules also seemed “like the kind of thing that normally would have to go through a public rulemaking process”.

“The idea and intent is worthy,” he said, “but that is a lot of generator capacity, design, installation and inspection to complete in 60 days”.

Kristen Knapp, a spokesman for the Florida Health Care Association, an advocate for nursing homes, said her group was reviewing the rules last Saturday.

The day before, a state senator filed legislation that would require nursing homes and assisted-living facilities to have working generators. A similar bill collapsed in the Legislature in 2006, in the aftermath of Hurricane Wilma, when it met with strong industry opposition. New York Times News Service

A LOOK inside Bookends bookshop in Baguio City

artists face to face.

“Kung merong gustong matuto, willing kami mag-share,” Bay-an said.

As a mentor, he advises young artists not to make money and fame their goal. He said they should nurture their talent by just painting regularly and keep on improving, but at the same time, find a regular job to support their daily sustenance.

He added, however, that it would

greatly support the local arts culture if people would learn to appreciate artwork. Support could come in the form of art exhibits where paintings could be promoted and sold.

“But the most important thing, for me personally, is being able to express my thoughts through painting, and allow me to treat it is a passion. Money or fame may come later,” Bay-an said.

Saving Mother from Houston floods

H

OUSTON—It was a hard choice, but in the end it was no choice at all. A small rescue boat had come up the driveway, offering help. Carl Ellis was with his frail, 73-year-old mother, Wilma Jean. The boat had room for one.

The water was already up to Carl Ellis’s knees, so there was no time to wait for rescuers with more room.

His mother would have to go alone.

Using the back of a pickup truck as a gangplank, Ellis helped his mother into the boat, her belongings trussed up in garbage bags. There were no life jackets, but it was a short trip and the rescuers promised to come right back for him.

He never saw them—or his mother—again.

Any catastrophic weather event has its measurable aspects: inches of rain, speed of wind and cubic yards of debris. Others are incalculable: waterlogged photos, frayed communities, the invisible moorings of permanence and safety swept away.

But perhaps the worst things are the unknowable, forever lost in the confusion, mysteries like what happened to Wilma Jean Ellis, who was rescued not once, but twice, and who nonetheless became a casualty of the storm.

At the time her son believed she was being ferried to higher ground, she was found floating face down in the floodwater. In what became one of the day’s elegiac moments, Wilma Jean Ellis was resuscitated by a group of civilian boaters from Louisiana, part of an informal organization known as the Cajun Navy. That moment was hailed on national television and social media as an example of heroism and the bond between two hurricanepummeled Gulf Coast states.

But with a huge, chaotic rescue effort under way, much of it handled by private citizens who took matters into their own hands, few people paid attention to Wilma Jean Ellis’s next 10 hours.

One woman, twice saved

THE peak of desperation for northeast Houston residents inundated by Hurricane Harvey came on August 28.

Greens Bayou had swelled to a record 43.4 feet where it crossed Tidwell Road, dislodging cars and ripping apartment walls down to their studs.

In the middle-class, predominantly black neighborhood where Wilma Jean Ellis lived in a threebedroom brick house, people woke in the wee hours to find the water seeping in. New York Times News Service

The Millennials BusinessMirror

news.businessmirror@gmail.com

Saturday, September 23, 2017

A9

Dubai mesmerizes Filipina Millennial S

By Rizal Raoul S. Reyes @brownindio

KYSCRAPERS made her stay.

Especially in the evenings, Cheryl Lynne Azarraga says she doesn’t grow tired of watching the skyscrapers weeks after landing in Dubai, the largest and most populous city in the United Arab Emirates.

Azarraga, 35, a digital-marketing officer in the Philippines, initially went to Dubai to attend to her sister’s wedding. However, her plan changed when she was mesmerized by “the beautiful city, the fast-paced culture, the people from different countries and the sense of independence” she felt.

For Azarraga, Dubai gives her hope and something to dream high. “Seeing all skyscrapers everywhere fascinates me especially at night.”

Dubai at night was really splendid for the morena charmer from Laguna, especially with the dazzling city lights.

“It’s like Dubai has a [magnetic] field: you get pulled by its charm and the promise of a good fortune.”

Azarraga arrived in Dubai on June 8 during Ramadan.

“At that time, I wasn’t really looking for a job but I made some serious thought and decided to try my luck and give this city a shot,” Azarraga told the BusinessMirror in an interview.

She landed a job as a digitalmarketing officer at an events company. The Colegio de San Juan de Letran graduate is carrying an optimistic disposition in her job and is raring to start saving for the future of her two daughters in the Philippines. As a single parent, she said it is a sacrifice but considers it “a worthy undertaking for the future of my children”.

Before embarking on her Dubai adventure, Azarraga was a freel a nce soc i a l-med i a m a nager, blogger and content writer. The compensation was insufficient and it was always a challenge to

save money, especially as single mother and the sole breadwinner of the family. “I have a lot of plans mapped out already and I think despite the challenges that I would possibly have to face, I carry with me this strong determination to execute all plans no matter what.”

As a millennial, she thinks Dubai is the perfect place for people who are goal-driven, creative and not afraid of change. Furthermore, Azarraga said Dubai is a place to be if a Filipino wants to earn money, put up a business in the future and meet and experience different cultures, She added interacting with expatriates enabled her to learn how to deal with different nationalities who share the same passion when it comes to achieving what they want.

“Competition is [also intense].

In order for you to be noticed, you have to be competitive and show them that you are capable to keep up with [those who think fast on

Retailer’s new line blurs boundaries, with gender-fluid millennials in mind

L

ONDON—Serena Rees, a founder of Agent Provocateur, who earned herself a fortune in the 1990s by making kinky lingerie a wardrobe staple, sat on a velvet sofa last month in her Marylebone townhouse. She was musing about the power of reinvention.

“After selling Agent Provocateur a decade ago, I was approached by both rivals and potential partners asking me to go back into the intimates business with them,” she said. “But nothing felt quite right.”

“I felt like I’d done it all,” she added, tucking her legs, clad in silky black athletic pants and open-toe stilettos, beneath her.

But several years spent watching the way her children and stepchildren dress and share clothes changed her point of view.

“The kids that live in this house, or their friends that come through it, have such a different view to previous generations on how to dress, how to behave, how to hang out with friends and lovers and in their attitudes toward sex and sexuality,” she said. “I looked at what the market was currently offering them, and it felt like there was a big disconnect.

Victoria’s Secret and Agent Provocateur are just not relevant to them anymore.”

The result is a new label called Les Girls Les Boys, which she introduced on September 1. The 100-piece collection will be a gender-fluid array of intimates, underwear and street wear, designed to be worn by men and women. It promises to take its millennial wearers from “bed to street”, in keeping with their boundary-blurred lifestyles and a more informal approach to clothes than the generations before them. In recent years a decisive pivot away from the sex-doll look in favor of a unisex aesthetic has been on full display across the ready-to-wear runways. It’s a positive movement, Rees said, one that is also a clear sign of and reaction to the times.

“The last decade has seen the rise of totally unobtainable and hypersexualized body images, particularly for women, fueled by the era of Internet, social media and plastic surgery,”said Rees, the former daughter-inlaw of Vivienne Westwood. (Rees founded Agent Provocateur in 1994 with her ex-hus-

MILLENNIAL UNIVERSE

S

O much like almost infanticipating, my girlfriend would, as a matter of habit, crave for something, most often at such ungodly hours. And like fawning sycophant I’m like, OK, I’ll get it for you, “but, Miss, where am I supposed to get banana cue in the dead of night?”

Other than samgyeopsal and ramen, pasta is a personal favorite. Simple, yet she’s very particular with how her pesto should have been cooked. Mi goreng, char kway teow, perhaps someone’s signature pomodoro pasta couldn’t begin to match one thing if she gets really specific with it: “I want Pinoy pansit,” she would say, “and I want it prepared by you”.

I have yet to make one; best I could tell is that the first time I tried my hand in the dirty kitchen, I came up with a cutesy fried-egg sandwich slapped together over the sink.

Truth is, however simple, her palate is

Serena Rees, the cofounder of Agent Provocateur, who earned herself a fortune in the 1990s by making kinky lingerie a wardrobe staple, in London, on August 9. A new intimates line from Rees, called Les Girls Les Boys, caters to millennials with a genderfluid aesthetic. Tom Jamieson/The New York Times

band, Joe Corré.) “It is wrong and it is worrying because it makes people so unhappy and insecure. In a weird way, I feel a little responsible for it.“ When she introduced Agent Provocateur 23 years ago, Rees hoped to empower women to take control of their sexuality and the way they displayed it in public and private.

A tongue-in-cheek blend of stylishness and smut, it featured satin cutaway corsets, embroidered bra straps and barely there slips brazenly on display. All of these, Rees reasoned, could actually be tools of liberation.

“Except that people got carried away over the years,” she said with a disapproving shake of her cloud of raven curls. “Now it has all gone too far. Les Girls Les Boys has been engineered to be the antithesis of all that.”

The project began 18 months ago when Rees saw that the millennials around her were already engaged in a wardrobe revolt.

“Many of them already seem to understand that they don’t have to live up to those images,” she said. “Our garments are tools to help them feel totally comfortable in embracing whoever are, their life choices, approach to relationships and the fact that the most gorgeous thing in the world can be youth.

“Particularly when people are relaxed both mentally and physically,” she said with a grin. “These kids are creatures of comfort, but they still want to look good. And that excited me again. I really wanted to be a part of it.”

The label’s first season of briefs, bodysuits, sweatpants and pajamas, which cost $25 to

$143, will go on sale via the label’s e-commerce platform and at stores, like Nordstrom and Selfridges. (A $1.3-million robbery of Les Girls Les Boys stock from the truck of a sleeping driver in Britain this week may affect availability of some items, but the label has no plans to scale back its unveiling.)

Rees appeared sanguine about the future.

“Listen, I’ve got nothing to win or lose doing this,” she said. “I have a great life.

But it has been a real labor of love and genuine reaction to the social and political climate we are currently living in. So many brands get stuck in their ways: They don’t look anymore at what is going on in the outside world. We really are doing that. And hopefully, people will listen.”

New York Times News Service

of Shopee is on the country’s mobile users who incidentally are largely belonging to the millennial generation.

“And this move toward mobile is perfect for the Philippines, as Filipino mobile shoppers are highly social. According to our last review, we’ve seen that 85 percent of total orders done through Shopee had customers chat with sellers first, compared to the 77-percent regional average,” Castillo added.

“This is something that gives us a clear edge over other e-commerce platforms.”

Despite t he slow Inter net speed, Castillo said the future of the Philippines’s e-commerce market is ver y promising. To remedy the situation, Shopee has

formed a partnership with PLDT Inc. and Smart Communications Inc. to give users more hassle-free online-shopping experience.

PLDT Assistant Vice President Luigi Casa said they are supporting Shopee to boost the growth of e-commerce and digital transformation in the country.

“We are very excited and proud to partner Shopee Philippines.

Together, we aim to increase awareness on the benefits of ecommerce adoption and how it drives the country’s economic growth as we redefine the retail industry,” he said in a statement.

Castillo said Shopee’s partnership with its official shops allows them to offer more varieties and options to its users. Furthermore,

she said Shopee will continue to look for new and sellers to further expand the user base in the Philippines.

She added Shopee will also continue to train the staff to become more productive in their tasks.

“We will continue to train our sellers through Shopee University to help them enhance their efficiency, sales and productivity,” she said. Castillo added Shopee aims its growth in the long haul.

“We target to maintain our double-d ig it g row t h t hrough product and user-experience optimization and enhancement of our E2E [exchange-to-exchange] experience through integrated logistics and payment,” she explained. Rizal Raoul Reyes

can cope with the competition.

“I got a lot of rejection letters from companies and some offered a different line of work for me like administrative job or recruitment [because they find my English really neat and advanced!],” she said. “However, the salary they offered weren’t enough to sustain my needs.”

She also learned to live within her means and never spend on luxury. Her foreign friends proved to be a big help because they share with her their strategies on how to live in Dubai.

“I like how people here are all disciplined, especially when it comes to cleanliness.”

In two months, Azarraga has gained a lot of friends in Dubai notw ithstanding her old colleagues who have since returned to their respective countries.

She considers Dubai just a temporary affair. She said if things get stable, she will return home “and settle for good”.

I made love in the kitchen Vernon Velasco

Shopee maintains PHL as important market O NLINE shopping portal Shopee said the Philippines remains an important market as a big portion of the population is composed of technology-savvy millennials.

In an e-mail interview, Shopee Head of Commercial Operations Macy Castillo told the BusinessMirror that the potential of the country is huge that makes it logical for the company to plan for the long haul. Based on a 2017 study by Google and Temasek, the Philippines’s e-commerce market is projected to reach $9.7 billion (P498 billion) in 2025 and with a 34-percent annual growth rate, which is said to be above the global average growth rate.

Castillo said the current thrust

their feet],” Azarraga said. “Finding connections, too, is a plus.”

Working abroad as a single parent is both challenging and motivating at the same time, she added.

Azarraga considers it challenging because she has to be emotionally intelligent all the time.

“Losing control of your emotions can break you. Getting homesick is a great killer [of motivation] and destroys focus. I miss my kids but I make sure to talk to them everyday through Skype or Facebook,” Azarraga said. “I may not be there for them physically but I still keep tabs on their daily activities,” she said.

Fortunately, Azarraga has a mother who takes care of her children and thinks family support is critical to an overseas Filipino worker to ensure they don’t worry too much while overseas.

Azarraga said she made huge adjustments and had to start everything from scratch. She had to prove that she is a game player and

hard to please, and I always end up finishing her soup bowl, which is always a little over half-empty, be it even in a new Japanese noodle place she said she had been waiting for ages to eat aka ramen in, or a hole in the wall people from miles and miles around drive to to try a roast-beef sandwich. But always, at the end of the day, a slight hint of appreciation always approves of anybody’s effort of taking her there.

Because, really, how to describe her?

Imagine me whipping my wonderful kitchen stuff (and, well, getting really serious with it for the first time), and serving it as I watch her pick on it in serious degustation. She would put her fork down as a sign of disappointment and, of course, I would be sad.

Then she would pick it up again and finish the whole thing and, of course, I would be happy.

Vernon Velasco is a staff of the BusinessMirror’s Advertising Department. The views Velasco expressed here are his own and do not reflect those of the BusinessMirror’s.

My Yolo Maxine Mamba

MILLENNIAL UNIVERSE

W

HEN people say Yolo, they mean “You Only Live Once”. To the common millennial, it would be understood as a license to do stupid things because he or she will never get a chance to do stupid things again.

If you really think about it, though, if I do a stupid thing I know it will have severe repercussions. Some examples include: skydiving (you could die), breaking a law (you could go to jail), having premarital sex (you could get pregnant), skipping out on school (you could get a reprimand) and not studying (you could fail the semester and repeat a course or two). All the things that Yolo advocates are things that have the probability of getting you into one horrid consequence after another.

If you really have only one life, then your time here is very precious.

Not only that: your life cannot be undone.

This means once you make a decision, there is neither a rewind button nor a hallway pass out of the foreseeable consequences that you knowingly walk into. So if you really, really value your life, and if you really, really want to have a good time, a good life, then you will have to skip out on the badslash-dangerous things.

I’m speaking from the perspective of one who has taken the bad-slash-dangerous turns, and each and every one of those turns has led me to tears, heartache, consequences, trouble, fights and everything you do not want to experience in your one,

precious life. So I guess what I am trying to say is, from the perspective of having gone through the bad side, it is definitely not worth it.

The thing about bad consequences is that it is a chain of one thing causing another. Let’s say, you don’t study well, you get low grades, you don’t graduate on time, your parents don’t see you as a good student, you get a job while studying, you get in with the wrong crowd, and then one day you wake up and see that your life has taken one wrong turn too many.

The beauty of this is that it works the other way around, too. One good tends to multiply over time.

You do your work well, and that person recommends you to someone. You get another job, and are forced to get better.

You make improvements and soon, your path is on a roll. You don’t have to exert as much effort because your skills are honed, and everyone trusts you to do the job well. These are just singular examples of how it goes.

In any case, whether you are on a good roll or a bad roll, it only takes one moment to change the way things are going. You only live once, and that once happens now.

That’s right. Right now. Now is your once in a lifetime chance to create not just your now, but your future as well. That is the freedom of life. That is also its heavy burden, which the fate of your life lies solely in your choices right now.

So take courage, stand up and be truthful to the song in your soul. Live your passions and love your loved ones the best way you know how. Give life all you have to give right now. After all, you only live once.

A10 Saturday, September 23, 2017

BusinessMirror

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www.businessmirror.com.ph

FACEBOOK TIGHTENS AD POLICIES AFTER ‘JEW-HATER’ FIASCO

THE web site for Arcade Fire’s album Everything Now opens with a cluttered cascade of Windows 98-style pop-ups.

The latest in Web design?

Retro web sites inspired by the ’90s

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BY CANDACE JACKSON New York Times News Service

O navigate the web site for Arcade Fire’s album Everything Now, users need to click through a cluttered cascade of Windows 98-style pop-ups.

Balenciaga’s new web site looks as stripped down as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, with plain black boxes and no-frills Arial font.

And the DIY-looking home page for Solange resembles the desktop of a candy-colored iMac, complete with QuickTime windows and rows of blue folders.

Web designs have come a long way in 20 years, but some are taking a step back to evoke a sort of hipster nostalgia for the early days of the Internet.

“They’re tipping their hat to the 1990s,” said David Lee, the chief creative officer of Squarespace, a Web platform company based in New York that has created millions of web sites for clients. Lee said he has seen a recent uptick in what he calls an “antidesign brutalism,” with clients opting for more bare-bones, retro-looking sites.

Some web sites are purposely cumbersome to navigate, with loud, clip-art-filled pages. Others employ a simplistic Craigslist-style utilitarianism that feels like a throwback to an era when Web pages were coded by hand.

“There’s a lot of animated GIFs and flames, but

mixing it with something new,” Lee added.

While millennials and members of Generation Z—those born in the years from the mid-1990s to the early-2000s—may not remember what the Web looked like in the era of AltaVista and GeoCities, the retro designs tap into the current cultural revival of all things 1990s. (See the return of Twin Peaks, Will & Grace and concert T-shirts.)

For those who are older, these sites recall the improvised Internet of their youth, in the days before mobile optimization and beta-tested user interfaces brought a sleek uniformity to modern Web design.

Nostalgic web sites meant to mimic the days of dial-up modems are cropping up in artsy and techgeek corners of the Web. Windows93.net, a Web project by the French music and art duo Jankenpopp & Zombectro, imagines what the Microsoft operating system would have looked like had it been released. (After a two-year development delay, Microsoft instead released Windows 95.)

The site has had more than 8 million visitors.

Neocities, built in 2013 by Kyle Drake, 33, a Web entrepreneur based in Palo Alto, California, is an ode to GeoCities, the early Web hosting platform.

(GeoCities, started in 1994, was acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 for $3.6 billion and went defunct in the United States in 2009.) “I really hate the modern Internet,” Drake said. “My vision is to bring back making web

sites as a creative thing, not just as a business thing.”

More than 140,000 web sites have been created through his platform, he said.

Paul Ford, 42, an instructor of interactive design at the School of Visual Arts in New York, agrees that the Web today can feel disappointing to early adopters.

“It’s almost like if your indie band went on to be not the size of U2, but a $4-trillion industry,” he said. “I think there’s a sense of, ‘How do we get back to that?’”

One way is to create a web site the old-fashioned way: by enlisting a friend who knows basic HTML. That is what Billy Silverman, 40, a restaurateur, did in the harried final days before opening Salazar, his acclaimed Sonoran barbecue restaurant in Los Angeles.

He tapped his buddy Zack McTee, who runs a small production company in New York, to slap together something quick. The two decided that, if they didn’t have the time or money to make the web site good, they would at least make it fun. The result recalls a personal web site built by a bored teenager in the days before Facebook and Myspace, with flashing Comic Sans text, dancing MC Hammer GIFs and cheesy keyboard music. A banner declaring “now with working e-mail” scrolls across the top.

Silverman said he regularly gets e-mails from customers who are confused. A common note: “‘I love your restaurant but saw your web site and think I can help you out.’” ■

Death at the hands of ‘brothers’ PRIMETIME

DINNA CHAN VASQUEZ @dinnachanvasquez luckydinna@gmail.com

MY Twitter feed is full of anger and disgust at what happened to Horacio Castillo III, a law student who died from injuries allegedly sustained in a hazing incident.

I can imagine the pain felt by Horacio’s parents. I haven’t seen the pictures but my daughter told me the boy’s body was bruised beyond imagination. At first, my reaction was: “It’s the danger that’s part and parcel of joining a fraternity.”

You see, I joined a sorority when I was in college so for me, hazing was “normal”. It’s not normal to beat a person to death but I believed in the premise that brotherhood and sisterhood comes at a price.

In college, I took a boy who suffered an injury while undergoing hazing to the hospital. I will not go into details and won’t make excuses for my actions.

After what happened to Horacio, I now think, “I should have gone to the police. He could have died.”

There’s no excuse for violence in any form. I was a stupid girl wanting to impress other people at that age.

I am now outraged at my own actions.

I looked at Horacio’s Twitter page and saw that he seemed to like tennis and football. It’s with deep regret that I say sorry to his parents, even if they

never read this, because I indirectly contributed to the culture of violence that killed their son. No one should die at the hands of his “brothers”.

Ateneo law student Leonardo “Lenny” Villa also died three days after hazing rites.

A name I will never forget is Arbel Liwag, who was in college at the same time I was. He died after initiation for membership to a University of the Philippines fraternity. Arbel and I had mutual friends, although I never met him. The incident that took his life happened about a year before the incident I was involved in. I even met one of Arbel’s fraternity batchmates after he died.

I wasn’t a mother when I brought that boy to the hospital, or when Arbel died. I thought it was “normal” to be a casualty of something as sacred as membership to a Greek letter society.

Life is sacred. A parent’s love is sacred. We aren’t gods to play with people’s lives. I cannot imagine how it is for anyone to hold someone’s life in his or her hands and say, “I’m going to beat this person until there’s no life left in him.” Paddling is the most common form of hazing. Each member is officially given about two strokes for the neophyte. If the fraternity has 100 members, you do the Math. The paddle is not a stick. Being hit with it is painful.

Sadly, hazing sometimes goes beyond paddling.

Some fraternity members use belts and even their fists. Usually, the neophytes are in their underwear when they are hit and verbally insulted.

Hazing doesn’t just happen in schools and universities but also in elite military units, gangs and other groups.

I say we harness the outrage over Horacio’s death to have hazing banned in the Philippines. There’s no reason another person has to die because of this.

IMAGE OF HORACIO MORALES III IS REPRINTED FROM HIS FACEBOOK PAGE

Hazing is illegal and barbaric. Wanting to belong to a group should not come at such a price. Let Horacio be the last one to die this way.

Look up the #JusticeForHoracio hashtag on social media to see how you can help.

NEW YORK—Facebook is apologizing for letting advertisers use phrases like “Jew-haters” as a targeting criteria and for not noticing it until it was pointed out.

The company is also tightening policies and tools that let businesses target advertisements to its 2 billion users, hoping to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.

The move follows a ProPublica report that found advertisers could use terms such as “how to burn Jews” to target ads to people with those terms in their profile.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, wrote in a post on Wednesday that the company “never intended or anticipated this functionality being used this way—and that is on us”.

It hasn’t been a good month for Facebook. The adtargeting fiasco follows news that the social-media giant has unwittingly allowed groups backed by the Russian government to target users with ads. The chairman of the Senate intelligence committee said on Tuesday Facebook should testify as part of its probe into Russian meddling in the US election, the company “seems to have been less than forthcoming” with Congress.

Sandberg said Facebook is taking steps to ensure that material violating its community standards cannot be used to target ads. This includes anything that attacks people on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation, disability and other categories. The company says it is also adding more manual oversight to its automated processes—a sign that as much as Facebook wants to rely on artificial intelligence to solve its problems, it is not quite there yet. And Facebook is adding a program to encourage users to report abuse of its advertising systems.

“Seeing those words made me disgusted and disappointed—disgusted by these sentiments and disappointed that our systems allowed this,” Sandberg wrote.

“Hate has no place on Facebook—and as a Jew, as a mother and as a human being, I know the damage that can come from hate.” AP

CANON Pixma Ink Efficient E3170

HOW TO BRING YOUR BUSINESS AND CREATIVE IDEAS TO LIFE

UNLEASH your inner creative entrepreneur as Canon introduces the perfect partner for your printing needs. A world leader in digital imaging, Canon (www.canon.com.ph) announces the addition of the new Pixma Ink Efficient E3170, equipped with low-cost, high yield ink cartridges for students and home offices.

“We’re happy to present a new addition to our Pixma E series printers that meets the needs of students and homebased businesses for more efficient delivery of work,” said Benny Yu, consumer group director of Canon Marketing Philippines Inc. (CMPI). “With its all-in-one features, the Pixma Ink Efficient E3170 assures users of convenient printing experience while producing high-quality prints required for school and office work.”

The Pixma E3170 delivers high-volume, low-cost printing at up to 400 monochrome documents, and 180 pages for color documents.

With its built-in Wi-Fi capabilities, the E3170 can be installed in any home within a local wireless network. Even without a wireless router, the E3170 is able to support direct wireless connection to smartphones and tablets for printing of documents and photos.

When paired with the Canon Print Inkjet/Selphy app, users can print and scan using their iPhones, iPads or any Android OS device. From the app, users can also view remaining ink levels, make changes to printer settings and register their printers to new cloud services.

The Pixma E3170 is also cloud-aware, offering true printfrom-anywhere mobility using the free Pixma Cloud Link or Google Cloud Print services.

The printer comes equipped with a segment-LCD display with intuitive icons that guide the user through all operations, from wireless setup to making multiple copies using different document sizes.

The enhanced operation panel features one-touch switching to direct wireless connection and back to standard network infrastructure mode, making it easy for friends and guests to connect and print without the need to divulge confidential wireless network passwords.

For document output, the printer is capable of printing at 7.7 images per minute (ipm) when printing in black and white, and 4.0 ipm when printing in color. Images can be printed with borderless settings for 4R, 5x5 and 5R sizes, making it versatile for general use, as well photo printing.

The printers also support intelligent power management in the Auto Power On/Off setting, allowing automated shut down after a period of inactivity, and powered up again when a print job is received. This setting can be configured easily using the printer driver, or using the Print Inkjet/Selphy app.

BusinessMirror

www.businessmirror.com.ph

Saturday, September 23, 2017 A11

/ ASIA’S FIRST-EVER

Ingress communities showing their solidarity at the NL-1331 Philippines main event in Bonifacio Global City in Taguig City.

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NIANTIC Inc. Marketing Event Coordinator Ethan Lepouttre, and Business Development and Asia Pacific Community Manager HaeRang Dong addressing the huge crowd of agents gathered within the vicinity of the NL-1331 Philippines main event

BLACK VAN SPOTTED The NL-1331 Philippines XM Detection Mobile Lab vehicle in Subic Bay, Zambales

AGENTS enjoying their once-in-a-lifetime NL-1331 Philippines experience at each pit stop

NL-1331 Philippines: Asia’s first ever Ingress XM Mobile Detection Mobile Lab vehicle journeys to the Far East for a first-ever event in Asia STORY AND PHOTOS BY MAUI DATON

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HERE was a sense of pride as we saw it for the first time. The smooth black exterior, decorated with official signs and emblems, commanded attention and yet revealed nothing of its seemingly sinister purpose. Only those who play the game know what this all-black vehicle was all about, and those who know understand the significance of its presence on Philippine soil.

Although quite renowned abroad, very few Filipino players have actually seen it in person, but that was all about to change. For it was here at last.

For the first time since Ingress started, the NL-1331 vehicle had finally reached Asia—and it landed in the Philippines.

Within the realms of the universe of Ingress, the location-based, augmented-reality mobile game developed by Niantic, NL-1331 refers to the event, which was essentially an exploration of cities or locales using a customized vehicle called the XM Detection Mobile Lab. During the event, players won real-time and in-real-life rewards, such as biocards and other Ingress items. Players also met Ingress characters in the flesh, as well as mingle and compete with their coplayers, coming from both the same and the opposing factions.

The very first NL-1331 was held on July 7, 2014, in State College, Pennsylvania, and other NL-1331 events

followed thereafter, all held in the US. The success of these events paved the way to expand the brand to other continents.

On July 16, 2016, NL-1331 was transformed into an upsized vehicle and was branded the NL-PRIME in Japan. It was near the conclusion of the Aegis Nova XM Anomaly in Tokyo, Japan, when NL-PRIME was introduced to more than 13,000 players, and it became an instant hit to Ingress agents and opened yet another opportunity to bring the vehicle closer to more communities around the world.

In the third quarter of 2016, Niantic expanded its reach and brought NL-1331 to Europe, and NL-1331E was born on August 1, 2016, using an “Enhanced” vehicle, a customized multipurpose van.

Then in the last quarter of 2016, Enlightened Pilipinas, an Enlightened community in the Philippines, decided to put together the proposal that would eventually get reviewed and approved by Niantic executives—the proposal that would bring NL-1331 to the Philippines. Thus, NL-1331 Pilipinas was born. Since NL-PRIME was used to promote the NL-1331 event in Japan, NL-1331 Pilipinas (later on NL1331 Philippines) technically became Asia’s first-ever NL-1331 Live Event.

NL-1331’s journey to Asia was unexpectedly short and relatively smooth. It took only four months of preparation, starting with a series of meetings within and outside the core team that was created to manage

the event, with members coming from different Ingress communities in the Philippines. Although planning took a backseat in December due to the holidays, by January the committee was again at work on it, and by the third week most of the details had been ironed out and finalized. We were then all set for Asia’s first ever NL-1331 event.

Ethan Lepouttre flew to the country to headline NL-1331 Philippines. He is the marketing event coordinator at Niantic Inc., and he was also the officially designated handler of the NL-1331 vehicle.

NL-1331 Philippines kicked off with a set of clues and the locations of items posted on the NL-1331 Google Plus page. These scavenger hunts, dead drops and #FindTheKlue were all part of the side programs prior to the main event.

The NL-1331 Philippines XM Detection Mobile Lab van was scheduled to appear at a given location within the given time frame and would move on to another location once the drops had been made. Of course the locations selected were scenic and/or historical sites to add more fun to the adventure.

At each pit stop NL-1331 Philippines was met by enthusiastic Ingress players, who all participated in and enjoyed a simple game of treasure hunting, looking for rare Ingress cards hidden by Niantic Inc. Marketing Event Coordinator Ethan within the vicinity of the pit stops.

There were also a lot of group photos taken, with

Ethan and Niantic Inc. Business Development and Asia Pacific Community Manager HaeRang Dang of course, and with the NL-1331 vehicle.

The entire series of events was attended by more than 400 local and foreign agents from Australia, Bahrain, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, Taiwan, the US, South Korea and Japan.

It is also worthwhile to note that NL-1331 Philippines was the longest NL-1331 event ever, lasting for five days, usually done in a single day per country or city.

The staging of NL-1331 Philippines proved that even a small group of individuals can make a big difference. With the right mind-set, ample support and in collaboration with other groups and organizations equally invested in ensuring the success of the endeavor, a vision can become the reality. The success of NL-1331 not only put the Philippines on the Ingress map for future live events, but it also paved the way for another NL-1331 event that was held in Malaysia in May. For more information on NL-1331 Philippines and other Ingress Live Events, visit www.ingress.com/ events, www.nl1331.ph or www.enlightened.ph. NL-1331 Philippines was presented by BUSINESSMIRROR in partnership with the Tourism Promotions Board, the Department of Tourism, United Laboratories Inc., Laruan Café Atbp., Bonifacio Global City, Bonifacio High Street and the BGC Citizen. ■

5,000 job seekers slated to attend Kalibrr job festival on Saturday WITH unemployment rates at 5.7 percent as of April 2017, according to the Philippine Statistics Authority, young millennial workers across Metro Manila are set to try their luck at various companies looking to fill roles ranging from service personnel, technical developers to midcareer manager roles, at the Kalibrrate Job Festival (bit.ly/Kalibrrate2017).

The festival is organized by recruitment-technology maverick Kalibrr Technology Ventures, which is changing the way young workers in the Philippines and Indonesia are looking for their next career jump. Now on its second year, the paperless job festival, powered by the Kalibrr Job Search App, is set for September 23 at Bonifacio Global City, High Street Central, Taguig City, from 10 am to 6 pm. This year the Kalibrrate Job Festival is expected to process a minimum of 5,000 early to midcareer job seekers who will apply to

some of the Philippines’s top employers, such as Magic Inc., Astoria Hotels, Toyota Motor Philippines, Bank of Makati, SM Corporate, Rudolf Lietz, Tanda, Keyland, SMDC, Home Credit Philippines, Appco and many more.

One differentiating factor for this jobfest is that it is an all mobile application process. Job seekers are looking forward to Kalibrr’s new end-to-end mobile job-search experience.

“Job seekers don’t even have to bring paper resumes anymore. Mobile technology has largely democratized the job application and matching process. It’s no longer about how eye-catching a resume is designed that may or may not catch a recruiter’s eye. Qualifications are stripped down to the bone, to what matters, which are the technical hard skills and character qualifications. The first step is just to download the Kalibrr app and complete their profile. The technology

then matches jobs with qualified, short-listed candidates,” says Paul Rivera, CEO of Kalibrr Technology Ventures.

Each company hiring at Kalibrrate this year is assigned a booth where job openings are posted and have dedicated QR codes. Jobseekers simply have to use the Kalibrr App on their smartphones to scan a job opening’s unique QR code to instantly submit their application.

“The Kalibrrate Job Festival is on its second year, and we really wanted to provide a unique and useful experience for both users and companies alike. The afternoon of September 23 is packed with a terrific roster of inspirational speakers from whom Manila’s intellectual workers can learn from and really treat themselves to the notion of possibility, of new opportunity and self-betterment,” Rivera added.

The Kalibrr app is now available to download for free on

the Apple App Store and Google Play. Through the app, job seekers can sign up, complete their profiles before the event itself and get a head start at the company booths as gates open at 10:30 am.

In addition to hiring booths, this year’s Kalibrrate Job Festival will showcase lifestyle booths ranging from fitness to food. “Kalibrr is also setting up an exclusive pool of midcareer professionals from different disciplines, such as Retail and FMCG, real estate and engineering, IT [information technology] and digital media and the medical fields for more specialized job-matching. So for those who are currently employed or aren’t actively seeking yet, but want to know what’s out there, do drop by the Kalibrr Talent Services booth and speak with one of our talent consultants. Just see what’s out there,” Rivera said.

NL-1331 Philippines: Asia’s first ever A11

BusinessMirror

Editor: Gerard S. Ramos • lifestylebusinessmirror@gmail.com

Twitter to meet with Senate investigators WASHINGTON—The social-media company, Twitter, says it will meet with a Senate committee investigating Russia’s interference in the presidential election.

The company says in a statement on Wednesday evening that its representatives will meet with staff of the Senate Intelligence committee next week.

The committee has been scrutinizing the spread of false news stories and propaganda on social media during the election. The panel has heard from Facebook.

The committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, had said he wanted to hear from Twitter, as well, to learn more about the use of fake accounts and bot networks to spread misinformation.

Twitter says it has been cooperating with the panel’s investigation and is working to strengthen its efforts to combat activities that violate its terms of service. AP

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GLOBE myBusiness, Mercato Centrale and the rest of the Restaurant Business Network partners

GLOBE MYBUSINESS COOKS UP RESTAURANT BUSINESS NETWORK TO BOOST FOOD FIRMS

GLOBE myBusiness, in partnership with Mercato Centrale, launches Restaurant Business Network, the first restaurantand café-specific business ecosystem devised to provide relevant services to companies in the food industry.

Business ecosystems are a network of interrelated businesses offering products and services relevant to member-companies. Through Restaurant Business Network (RBN), restaurant and café owners will be given access to workshops, events and online materials about the latest trends and development in the food industry.

They will also have the opportunity to receive exclusive deals and promos from Globe myBusiness (goo.gl/yWw5Te) and Mercato Centrale.

RBN is the result of a massive partnership among companies and groups involved in food and technology.

Among its members are Unilever Food Solutions, Zomato, Mynt, Manila Foods and Beverages Expo and Cebu Food and Beverage Expo, Booky, The Spark Project, the Department of Trade and Industry, GoNegosyo, Association of Filipino Franchisers, Lee Chiu Property Consultants, FoodSHAP, Bluespark Solutions, Manila Workshops, Mida Food, Caper Group, First Circle, Courage Asia Management Consulting and tech start-ups Serve Happy and Taxumo, among others. These partners have been key players in past Globe myBusiness customer events, and through a business ecosystem approach, the partnership becomes more sustainable and easier to access by food entrepreneurs.

“It goes without saying that the food industry, like all other industries, is moving rapidly toward digital,” Globe myBusiness Senior Advisor Derrick Heng said. “This movement has inspired us to build a community of experts to create an ecosystem that can help homegrown restaurants and cafés keep up with technology’s unprecedented pace.”

Through RBN, Globe myBusiness will continue engaging restaurant and café owners until the end of the year with Zomato’s Restaurant Hacks roadshows, Booky’s Restaurant roadshows, The Spark Project crowdfunding initiative in food parks, Unilever Food Solutions’ Chefmanship Academy Online and more.

Globe myBusiness, with fully owned Globe start-up Mynt, will launch G-Pay, which will establish the first cashless food park in Mercato Centrale. It will also introduce the latest leading-edge broadband Internet technology and software built specifically for restaurants.

Globe myBusiness will also bring in its latest technology and digitization solutions to RBN to enhance small and medium enterprises operations, one of which is access to the RUSH Rewards App. With RUSH, restaurant and cafe entrepreneurs can build a custom-branded loyalty app to keep customers coming back by rewarding customers for every visit or purchase.

Restaurant and café owners who are Globe myBusiness customers gain instant access to the RBN’s suite of exclusive offers and events. Heng added those interested in RBN have plenty to look forward to after its first salvo as more events and exclusive offers are already in the pipeline.

Saturday, September 23, 2017 A12

Apple Watch goes solo, but don’t dump your phone yet

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BY ANICK JESDANUN The Associated Press

ANTA CLARA, California—A chief gripe with Apple Watch is that it requires you to keep an iPhone with you for most tasks. The inclusion of GPS last year helped on runs and bike rides, but you’re still missing calls and messages without the phone nearby.

A new model with its own cellular-network connection is Apple’s next step toward an untethered world. Now you can make and receive calls and messages on the watch while leaving your phone at home.

But the watch still needs regular contact with an iPhone, and for most tasks, the phone needs to be on and connected, even if it’s nowhere nearby. So you can’t get away with ditching the iPhone altogether.

(Android users have their own wristwear options, including Samsung Gear and Android Wear watches, some of which can already manage their own network connections.)

The new Apple Watch Series 3, distinguished by a red crown, comes out on Friday starting at about $400. You can forgo cellular, and the red crown, for $70 less. Or get a first-generation model, without GPS, for about $250.

WHERE IT HELPS YOU might not want to bring your phone on a short jog; the watch can still keep you in touch. Or you can leave the phone home while walking the dog or performing a quick errand.

You need a data add-on from the same wireless provider as your phone. It typically costs $5 or $10 a month and uses the phone’s data allotment.

While the watch technically has its own phone number, the major carriers have worked out number syncing. Calls to your phone will go to the watch, and calls from the watch will appear on caller ID with your regular number. Same goes for texts and iMessage chats. Calls use the watch’s speaker and microphone, or wireless earphones. Colleagues say call quality was fine. It came in handy for sneaking in runs during conference calls (though if you’re my boss, just kidding! Now, about that raise...).

Phone calls and iMessage chats work on the watch even if your phone is off, as do turn-by-turn maps and queries to the Siri voice assistant. For texts, the phone needs to be on—somewhere. With the phone on, you can perform a variety of other tasks, including checking weather apps, Yelp recommendations and notifications that go to the phone.

Coming soon: the ability to stream Apple Music, even with the phone off. Unfortunately, this doesn’t apply to rival music services or Apple’s podcast app.

LIMITATIONS ON Wednesday Apple acknowledged that the Series 3 can have trouble connecting to a cellular network.

This can happen when the watch tries to join a Wi-Fi network you’ve previously logged onto using an iPhone or other Apple device. The company says it is investigating a fix for the problem.

In the meantime, there’s a workaround: Get your

phone to “forget” the errant Wi-Fi network.

Because the watch screen is small, many apps offer only a sliver of information and refer you back to the phone to view more.

That was little more than an annoyance when the phone was in the same room. If you’ve left the phone behind, though, you’ll be left hanging. You can also run into trouble while roaming, particularly internationally. For one thing, engineers weren’t able to squeeze in support for cellular frequencies around the world. And outside the United States, only a handful of carriers are supporting the cellular watch.

In any case, don’t forget to switch to airplane mode on flights. Cellular data also drains the battery quicker.

Apple’s promised 18 hours of battery life includes about four hours of such use. An hour of phone calls over LTE will drain the battery completely.

I got dropped from two conference calls because the battery was low to begin with. Plan ahead. A spare watch charger at your desk helps for those days you’re dumb enough to leave your phone on the kitchen counter.

EMBRACING THE TETHER IT can be handy to untether the watch at times, but

it’s not always necessary. Even when tied to the phone, Series 3 offers improvement such as tracking elevation, so you get credit for climbing stairs or jogging up a hill.

And you can now hear Siri responses on the watch speaker, something enabled by the new version’s faster processor.

SOFTWARE UPDATE FOR owners of past models, a software update out this week, watchOS 4, will bring easier access to music playback controls when exercising—just swipe left. There are more prompts when reaching or nearing daily goals, and options for multiple sports in a single workout. A new heart-rate app now shows heart rate at rest and averages when walking or recovering from exercise. These can help you gauge your overall fitness.

And if your heart- rate is high without any signs of exercise, you’ll get an alert. You enable this when you first open the heart-rate app.

It can signal health problems, though Apple is stopping short of telling you to see a doctor or visit the emergency room, as the watch isn’t marketed—or certified—as a medical device. ■

Google bites off big piece of HTC in $1.1-B bet on devices

BY RYAN NAKASHIMA AND MICHAEL LIEDTKE The Associated Press SAN FRANCISCO—Google is biting off a big piece of device manufacturer HTC for $1.1 billion to expand its efforts to build phones, speakers and other gadgets equipped with its arsenal of digital services.

The company is buying the HTC team that built the Pixel smartphone for Google in a cash deal, they said in a joint statement on Thursday. Google is also getting a nonexclusive license for Taiwan-based HTC’s intellectual property to help support Pixel phones.

The deal announced on Thursday underscores how serious Google is becoming about designing its own family of devices to compete against Apple and Amazon in a high-stakes battle to become the technological hub of people’s lives.

“For Google, this agreement further reinforces its commitment to smartphones and overall investment in its emerging hardware business,” the statement said.

Over the past decade, Google had focused on giving away its Android operating system to an

array of device makers, including Taiwan’s HTC, to ensure people would keep using its ubiquitous search engine, e-mail, maps, YouTube video service and other software on smartphones and other pieces of hardware. But that changed last year when Google stamped its brand on a smartphone and Internetconnected speaker. HTC manufactured the Pixel phones that Google designed last year, paving the way for this deal to unfold.

Although Android powers about 4 out of every 5 smartphones and other mobile devices in the world, the software can be altered in ways that result in Google’s services being de-emphasized or left out completely from the preinstalled set of apps.

That fragmentation threatens to undercut Google’s ability to increase the ad sales that bring in most of the revenue to its corporate parent, Alphabet Inc., as people spend more and more time on smartphones and other devices instead of personal computers.

Apple’s iPhone and other hardware products are also particularly popular among affluent consumers prized by consumers, giving Google another incentive to develop its own high-priced phone as a mobile

platform for its products and ads.

Google also wants to build more Internetconnected devices designed primarily for home usage, such as its voice-controlled speaker that’s trying to catch up with Amazon’s Echo. The Home speaker includes a digital concierge, called Google Assistant, that answers questions and helps manage people’s lives, much like the Alexa in Amazon’s Echo.

The purchase is a gamble on several fronts for Google and Alphabet.

Google’s previous forays into hardware haven’t panned out to be big winners so far. It paid $12.5 billion for smartphone maker Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion five years ago, only to sell it off to Lenovo Group for less than $3 billion after struggling to make a dent in the market. And in 2014, Google paid more than $3 billion for home device maker Nest Labs, which is still struggling to make money under Alphabet’s ownership.

Expanding into hardware also threatens to alienate Samsung Electronics, Huawei and other device makers that Google relies on to distribute its Android software.