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Military personnel of Camp O’ Donell in Capas,Tarlac, harvest their labor of love in a vegetable garden. An 8-hectare Hardin ng Lunas was established at Camp O’Donnell in 2012. Hardin ng Lunas is an organic garden that encourages military personnel and civilian employees to plant organic vegetables, fruits and medicinal herbs, as well as raise fish and livestock in vacant lots of military camps and village backyards. Harvests from the garden are provided for free to poor residents in the area. NONIE REYES

Soldiers embark into vegetable, herb farming in fight vs. hunger, poverty, illness

Army deploys

‘green’ warriors I

By Rene Acosta

‘INSIDER THREATS’ WORRY GLOBAL ENTERPRISES

n the northern side of Central Luzon, some 1,600 kilometers away from the besieged city of Marawi in the south where soldiers are currently waging a courageous battle against terrorism, the Philippine Army has taken the offensive in a “war” on another front—hunger and poverty. While the sound of automatic gunfire incessantly reverberates and the thud of falling bombs and artillery munitions tore the ground of Mindanao’s Islamic city, a soft tone crackled through the “virginal” lands of the military in Northern Luzon, with the noise being generated by pickaxes, bars and other gardening tools used by soldier farmers. The soldiers are working in Northern Luzon to address hunger and poverty, which are two of the principal root causes of terrorism and criminality in Mindanao, they say.

Real fight

In u nder t a k ing t he fa r m ing project, particularly at Camp O’Donnell in Capas, Tarlac, the home base of the Army’s Mechanized Infantry Division, Brig. Gen. Felicisimo Budiongan said they did not only intend to fight hunger and poverty, but also wanted to chip in to the national campaign of eradicating these problems.

Actually, fighting poverty and terrorism mixes well for Budiongan. When the BusinessMirror reached him for this story, he was in Marawi leading the charge of the mechanized division’s mobility and firepower support to the ground troops operating against the Maute-IS Group. “Through the project, we are not only fighting hunger, but we’re even encouraging our soldiers to duplicate it in their backyards, and even by [residents of] communities,” said Budiongan, who is the deputy commander of the Mechanized Infantry Division. “We are also curing ailments through the natural method,” he added, referring to the use of the wide array of herbal plants that grow in their farm. Both the vegetable products and herbal plants are not only benefitting the soldiers, but even the communities near the camp, especially during harvest time. The farming project was actually undertaken with the help and support of the Tarlac Heritage

PESO exchange rates n US 51.0860 n japan 0.4543

Beefing up network security By Roderick L. Abad Contributor

Maj. Gen. Emmanuel Salamat (from left), commander of the Northern Luzon Command; Maj. Gen. Edgar F. Gonzales, commander of the Mechanized Infantry Division (MID), Philippine Army; Dr. Isa Cojuangco-Suntay, cofounder of Tarlac Heritage Foundation; retired Armed Forces chief of staff Gen. Efren Abu; and Defense Secretary Delfin N. Lorenzana harvested different vegetables from Hardin ng Lunas at Camp O’Donell in Capas, Tarlac, during the 11th Activation Anniversary of the MID, with the theme “Team Armor: Kalasag ng Bayan, Kaagapay sa Kaunlaran.” The garden benefits the soldiers and their dependents from its fruit. People from surrounding communities also benefit from buying the harvest at farm-gate price. NONIE REYES

Foundation (THF), headed by Dr. Isabel Cojuangco-Suntay, also called Dr. Isa. The non-governmental organization also undertakes other community-related projects, not only in Luzon, but even in other areas of the country. Outside of Marawi City proper, it has built temporary homes made up of bamboo and nipa for the bakwets, or residents forced out of their abodes in Marawi. Budiongan said the farming project at Camp O’Donnell began in 2010, when he was still the division’s chief of staff. Today, it has grown to what is now called the Hardin ng Lunas, with the vegetable farm occupying half a hectare of land and the orchard, which also teems with fruit-bearing trees, sitting on another 5 hectares.

“ We m ade u se of t he u nused spaces inside the camp,” he said, adding that they were not only putting up food for the table, but were even helping in mitigating the effects of climate change.

Project expansion

From C a mp O’Don ne l l , t he farming project, still with the support of the THF, was duplicated at Camp Aquino, the he a d q u a r t e r s of t he A r me d Forces Northern Luzon Command, where an orchard grew for the Air Force unit stationed at the camp sprang just like in the Camp O’Donnell project. The undertaking at Camp Aquino made use of the organic style of farming, with the seeds provided by the East-West Seed Co. Inc.

ACAU—In an era of mobile, cloud and Internet of Things (IoT), experts from global enterprise networking solutions provider Aruba warned businesses that sec u r it y t h reat s a re e ver ywhere—including their ver y own backyard—so they need to act now or be sorry. “ T he r isk is increasing inside the enterprise. Security is now frontage center for most cor porations,” A r uba Senior Vice President and Genera l Manager Keer ti Melkote told members of the media from the Asia-Pacific region during the recent ly concluded A r uba

Apac Atmosphere 2017 summit held at a Macau hotel. Insider threats are increasingly becoming a dominant risk vector for most enterprise customers, according to Melkote. As online attackers are becoming more and more sophisticated and smarter, he noted that they are not interested in just bringing down the network. “They’re interested in your corporate asset, whether it’s financial information, intellectual property, credit-card information, or patients’ medical record,” Melkote said. “They’re going after very valuable information, which they can then trade on the black market to their advantage.” Continued on A2

They’re interested in your corporate asset, whether it’s financial information, intellectual property, credit-card information, or patients’ medical record. They’re going after very valuable information, which they can then trade on the black market to their advantage.”—Melkote

Continued on 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 )

Sunday, September 24, 2017

NewsSunday BusinessMirror

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Army deploys ‘green’ warriors Continued from A1

Marvin Ramento, the company’s “point man” for Northern Luzon, said they made no qualms in joining the farming project upon the initiative of Dr. Isa after they learned that its principal beneficiaries were soldiers. Besides, he said, the undertaking augurs well with their firm’s advocacy of greater dietary consumption of vegetables by Filipinos. “We are not only helping the soldiers to become self-sufficient, teaching them of farming methods, but were also promoting our advocacy,” Ramento said. He noted that while the country was supposed to be an agricultural state, Filipinos are consuming more meat products than vegetables. Among the seeds that East-West provided were okra, pechay, mustard (mustasa), swamp cabbage (kangkong), chili (sili), eggplant (talong) and spinach. Budiongan said the farming initiative is very sustainable. “Tuluy-tuloy at pang matagalan [This is one sustainable project we intend to pursue].” Aside from the two camps in Northern Luzon, similar projects were also undertaken in lots at Fort Bonifacio in Taguig City, the general headquarters of the Army, and at the 1st Infantry Division in Zamboanga; at the compound of the Presidential Security Group (PSG) in Malacañang; and even in Marawi City. The farming project for the PSG was opened in February this year by President Duterte, who would also ensure the continuity of the project in Marawi City in the next

couple of days. The farming project in Marawi is already benefiting those who were displaced by the ongoing operations against the terrorists.

Civilian support

The reason the farming activities in lands occupied by the military has become sustainable is it has managed to tap outside support, such as that of farming and agriculture expert Corvill Agricom, headed by Tony Cortes. Like in the case of East-West, Corvill, which was tapped into the project by Dr. Isa, provided the knowledge and expertise for the military’s farming initiative— from conceptualization down to production and harvest. While Corvill is an importer and distributor of farm-nourishing products, it principally promotes organic and scientific farming. Corvill is honored in partnering with the THF for the military project, as it gave it the opportunity to work with members of the Armed Forces and their families by sharing

its technical expertise. This is the same case with all of the other projects that it has undertaken in farming communities around the country. “It’s one way of giving to the community,” said Cortes, Corvill president. In working with the military, Corvill not only provided the technical requirement, but even took care of the nourishment and product sides of the soldiers’ farming projects. The support is all the way, from start to finish, according to Cortes. “It is actually satisfying to be of the service to the soldiers, to the community in our little way,” Cortes added. In doing so, he said, they were also contributing to the country’s effort to attain food sufficiency, aside from promoting the government’s wellness program by propagating nutritious food. Also, since the project involves organic farming, the soldiers are assured that their vegetables are free from toxins, thus, boosting their vitality as they protect the country’s sovereignty.

Through the project, we are not only fighting hunger, but we’re even encouraging our soldiers to duplicate it in their backyards, and even by [residents of] communities.” —Budiongan

Beefing up network security Continued from A1

Even though there are myriad examples of cases where organizations have been impacted by a loss of such high-value assets, organizations are not adequately considering the risk from their trusted users, per Gartner’s “Market Guide for User and Entity Behavior Analytics [UEBA]” research in 2016. On a posit ive note, however, t he A mer ica n resea rc h a nd adv isor y f ir m f ielded a lmost a 10 0 - percent increase f rom c l ients look ing to add ress t he insider t hreat issue, of wh ic h, UEBA is one of t he pr ima r y tec hnolog ies. These finding shows that security not just matters to the infor mation-technolog y (IT) department, but is now also the bone of contention for most of the top executives within an organization. Beyond understanding its level of exposure to their entities, they’re more keen on risk mitigation or management as they digitize themselves. “ This is really [a concern on] cyber criminals that are aiming this thing, which is why it’s a ‘ boardroom topic’. It’s not just a teenager that is trying to have some fun at your expense. It’s really a very, very, very big issue,” the SVP and GM of Aruba said.

Security architecture

ENTERPRISE vulnerability continues to rise given the more points of entry for attackers to thrive within an organization, per results of a survey conducted by Aruba in February. From the 3,000 respondentcompanies, 72 percent and 56 percent of them have introduced and deployed IoT into their workplace, respectively. While 78 percent saw an improvement in user experience, 84 percent have unluckily experienced security breaches. One-third of the participants said successful attacks on their enterprises would be coming from shadow IT resources. “If you look at the security architectures that have been prevalent over the last decade or so, it’s basically a hard, crunchy exterior but a very soft, gooey interior. What we did was we hardened the per imeter by insta l ling security devices like firewalls, intrusion detection system, [or] anti-malware platform; and we deployed this either [on the] edge of the network facing the Internet or we deployed technolog ies on the endpoints where it was possible,” Melkote noted. “But t he net work in t he middle was mostly an open network that was transporting data between these two areas. So what we started to look at was how do you create an architecture that has a lot more defense in them, which means you have to take that gooey interior and hardy for security. Because what’s happening [or]

where these attacks originating is on the inside. And once they get in through into the device, it starts to proliferate laterally,” he said. Inside attackers find weak targets—t y pica l ly w it h IoT devices that don’t have strong operat ing env ironments or software. Based on the Aruba study, 80 percent of advanced attacks use legitimate credentials. “ T hese at t ac k s —bec au se they’re going after very highvalue assets—are very targeted [and] very low profile,” the top executive said, while citing that typical tools that look at traffic types of their offense are not sufficient to actually track them. Time-wise, the survey revealed that the attack develops around eight weeks or more before damage is done. Almost all, or 99 percent, of exploits will be vulnerabilities, which have been known by security and IT for at least a year. The median time from compromise to discovery of breach could reach about 146 days. “That is scary, in that detecting these things takes close to five months. So for five months, you have something that’s on the inside of your network that has a free range before you detect it, you discover with a shadow account,” Aruba Chief Tec h nolog y O f f icer Pa r t h a Narasimhan told the BusinessMirror at a sideline interview during the regional conclave.

‘Inside out’ approach

INSIDER attacks on businesses are growing regardless of their size and location, according to Aruba Product Management Vice President Karthik Krishnan. “I’ve been in many countries in Europe, as well as in Asia, and I think it all comes back to use cases and to security concerns that people have,” he shared, while pointing out that there have been no region-specific barriers to these kinds of incident. “Security tends to be a lot more common across these regions. The use of cases tends to be more vertical-focused, meaning, the government customers in Asia probably share the same concerns as government customers in the US, and some other financial customers across the world tend to have very similar concerns. So it tends to break down more into sort of verticals, and less about regions,” he added. “Businesses, whether big or small, should always consider frontline detection and prevention to combat insider threats. Perimeter security, while useful, certainly has limitations because more and more of these threats are now on the inside,” Krishnan said. “So investing in securit y controls on the inside of network is probably gaining an importance. And I think all the recommendations for the enterprises will be that they start to allocate a lot more of their budget on looking at

things on the inside, versus just trying to have a perimeter security,” he said.

Value over money

MONETARY issue should not be a hindrance for companies to protect themselves from such risks, especially small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with limited financial resources. In the Philippines, for instance, where the economy is mainly driven by SMEs, he adv ised t hem to pr ior it i ze the value of protection in the long run. “If you’re a midsized bank, your concer ns are probably ver y similar to a larger bank. Because if you have things to protect, if you have things to care about, you tend to worr y about it, no matter what your size is, because the risk-case proportion [does not correspond] to the size of the company,” he explained. “I t h in k eac h enter pr ise would have to make a determination as to what it is that they want to protect, how important the security to them. And if there are things that you need to protect—sensitive information that you need to make sure doesn’t get into the hands of their own people, then you have to be able to prioritize and [allocate a] budget for it. Because, otherwise, often what happens is the budgeting ends up being a small proportion of the eventual cost that you have to pay when a data breach actually happens,” he added. A r uba, a Hewlett-Pack ard E n t e r p r i s e c o m p a n y, h a s l au nc he d du r i n g t he A p a c At mosphere 2017 a secur it y framework that prov ides complete analytics-driven attack detection and response to help organizations reduce r i s k i n t o d a y ’s c h a n g i n g threat landscape. Ca l led the A r uba 360 Secure Fabr ic, it offers secur it y and IT teams an integrated way to quick ly detect and respond to advanced c yber attacks from pre-authorization to post-author ization across mu lti-vendor infrastr uctures, suppor t. T he mu ltinational, likew ise, innovates in UEBA by expanding the Aruba I nt roSpec t produc t fa m i ly, enabling businesses to easily and rapid ly sca le machinelea r ned behav ior detect ion from sma l l projects to f u l l enter pr ise deploy ments. Other components of the A r uba 360 Secure Fabr ic inc lude A r uba C lea rPa ss a nd A r uba Secure Core. T he former being a proven net work acce s s cont rol a nd p ol ic y ma nagement secur it y solution, while the latter pertains to essential security capabilities embedded in the foundation across a l l of A r uba’s Wi-fi access points, w ireless control lers and sw itches, inc lud ing t he recent ly intro duced A r uba 8 4 0 0 c a mpu s core and ag gregation sw itch.

The World

Sunday, September 24, 2017 • Editor: Lyn Resurreccion

BusinessMirror

www.businessmirror.com.ph

Opec, allies flash mixed signals over further action on crude cuts

Barrels of refined oil and lubricant additives sit on shelves in the storage yard at Rock Oil Ltd.'s factory in Warrington, United Kingdom, on March 13. Oil declined after Saudi Arabia told Organization of Petroluem Exporting Countries it raised production back above 10 million barrels a day in February, reversing about a third of the cuts it made the previous month. Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images

China’s young globe-trotters are driving world travel gains

urgeoning wanderlust among young Chinese is becoming a key driver of global travel growth and helping reshape the domestic economy. “China, led by younger adults, has become vital to the global travel market’s growth,” according to Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Brian Egger and Margaret Huang, citing industry tracker Phocuswright Inc. “As China’s travel market takes off, all eyes should be on the country’s roughly 400 million millennials, who will drive spending on airfare, hotels, theme parks, casinos and cruises.” Chinese will take almost 70 percent more trips overseas in 2020 compared to 2015, fueling growth in tourism and aiding transportation and infrastructure, the analysts said in a report

400M The estimated number of Chinese millennials who will drive spending on airfare, hotels, theme parks, casinos and cruises

this week. In 2015 Chinese made 128 million trips abroad, government data show, with adults ages 18 to 34 accounting for about 60 percent of outbound travelers that year, according to Phocuswright.

Travel within the world’s most populous nation is booming, as consumers with more disposable income seek more exotic experiences and far-flung destinations than their parents. Industr y growth is underpinning a broad range of domestic activity, from ski resorts and tropical hotels to high-end manufacturing of trains and planes. This change is accelerating the economy’s transition away from the old smokestack drivers of growth. Travel accounted for 9 percent of China’s economy last year, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council, which projects the industry growth will average 8 percent annually from 2017 to 2027, outpacing other major economies like India and the US. A summer travel boom lifted air passenger traffic 8.7 percent on year in August to a record 50.5 million journeys, the aviation administration said on Monday. There will be 710 million trips during the October 1 to 8 national holidays, the China Tour-

ism Academy forecaston Tuesday, up 10 percent from last year. Boeing Co. this month raised its forecast for aircraft demand in China to 7,240 new planes valued at almost $1.1 trillion in the two decades through 2036, and rival Airbus SE is courting China with its first factory outside Europe to build wide-body jets. The state enterprise building China’s first large airliner announced this week it had 730 orders for the new plane. T he government estimates travel will play a bigger role in the economy and is stepping up policy support to help that happen. Authorities plan to double annual investment in the sector in the five years through 2020, when they aim to spend 2 trillion yuan ($304 billion) on infrastructure like mountain resorts and seaside getaways. “The rapid growth in China’s tourism industry is a key driver in the country’s shift to a consumer-oriented economy,” Egger and Huang wrote. Bloomberg News

n the eve of a gathering in Vienna, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) and its allies gave mixed signals on what they might do next in their bid to clear a global oil glut. Ministers from nations that together pump more than half the world’s oil at times made conflicting statements about whether they would use their meeting on Friday to address perceived shortcomings in their agreement. While their production cuts have shown signs of success in recent months, the market could return to surplus next year if the group allows the accord to expire at the end of March. “Everybody believes now that it’s still too early to talk about concrete timing of extending,” Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak told reporters in the Austrian capital on Thursday. “We will monitor closer to the end of the agreement, when it would be possible to discuss it more.” While Kuwait’s Oil Minister Issam Almarzooq agreed with his Russian counterpart, Alger ian Energ y Minister Mustapha Guitouni told his country’s state-run press service that they would discuss the matter. Novak also said there was no formal proposal for a further 1-percent cut, which Iraq’s Oil Minister Jabbar Al-Luaibi had suggested on Tuesday that some members were discussing. The Opec and its allies have several reasons to hold a steady course. Brent crude, the interna-

tional benchmark, closed at the highest level since February on Thursday, an increase of more than 25 percent since June, as the world’s bloated fuel inventories shrink. Nine months into their agreement, implementation of the pledged 1.8 million barrels a day of production cuts remains high. Still, as US shale oil continues to thrive and seasonal demand wanes, the surplus that has weighed on markets for three years could soon return. If Opec doesn’t extend the supply curbs beyond their current expiry at the end of March, the market will return to oversupply again, forecasts from the International Energy Agency indicate. T he g roup’s Joint Tec hn ical Committee, which met on Wednesday to assess members’ compliance with pledged cuts, didn’t discuss deeper or longer cuts, said a delegate, who asked not to be identified because the talks were private. T he committee did recommended that ministers should consider informal monitoring of exports in addition to production, said two delegates, a move that Saudi Arabia has been pushing for in order to improve transparency. Opec’s rules mean these figures would only be discussed internally and the so-called secondary sources production estimates— compiled from third parties and published each month—would remain the only official way for measuring compliance, the delegates said. Bloomberg News

Experts head to Beijing to test experimental nuclear reactors

hina is becoming the testing ground for a new breed of nuclear-power stations designed to be safer and cheaper, as scientists from the US and other Western nations find it difficult to raise enough money to build experimental plants at home. China National Nuclear Power Co. this month announced a joint venture to build and operate a “traveling wave reactor” in Hebei province, designed by Bellevue, Washington-based TerraPower Llc. whose chairman is Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates. The development follows Canada’s SNC-Lavalin, which has agreed to build a new recycled-fuel plant with China National Nuclear Corp. and Shanghai Electric Group, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is working with the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics on a salt-cooled system. “China is where the demand exists and where willing partners exist for this kind of plant,” said TerraPower President Chris Levesque, whose company has been working on the traveling-wave technology for a decade. “It is really encouraging when your partners are announcing a site.” While most advanced economies are slowly pivoting to energy sources like solar and wind, China’s soaring energy demand means it’s spending billions on new power plants across the energy spectrum, from coal and natural gas, to renewables and nuclear. China has the world’s most aggressive reactor construction plan, with the goal of boosting its nuclear-power capacity by about 70 percent to 58 gigawatts by 2020. “The outlook for nuclear power is brighter there than anywhere else in the world,” said M. V. Ramana, a professor at the Liu

Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia. “It is not so difficult for a company developing a nuclear reactor design to find a partner.” The systems proposed belong to the so-called fourth generation of reactors. The current generation under construction include enhanced safety features following the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011, but still typically use traditional fuel rods, cooled by water under pressure. Both Areva SA and Westinghouse Electric Co. are slated to turn on their current-generation nuclear reactors in the next year in China—well ahead of any other nation, despite delays.

Recycled fuel

Some Generation IV designs aim to cut construction costs by using coolants that work at atmospheric pressure—reducing the need for massive containment structures. Many recycle their fuel, reducing the need for uranium, and in some cases are fail-safe without intervention if something goes wrong. In a pebble-bed reactor, for example, thousands of tiny fuel seeds encased in tennis-ball sized graphite “pebbles” can withstand much higher heat. In the event of an accident or loss of coolant, the rising temperature automatically shuts down the nuclear reaction. Beijing’s Tsinghua University has been running a small experimental pebble-bed reactor on campus since 2003 and has worked on the technology in cooperation with researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US. China Nuclear Engineering Construction Corp. is now building the world’s first commercial plants using

the technology, including one in Shandong province, south of Beijing, that is due to connect to China’s grid next year. Some of the new designs, including TerraPower’s traveling wave unit, are breeder reactors that produce more atomic fuel than they consume, reducing the need to add costly processed nuclear elements. Some are designed to burn spent fuel from conventional reactors, or fissile material from decommissioned nuclear warheads. Coolants include liquid sodium, gases and molten metal. Some use thorium instead of uranium to power the reaction. Still, the theories behind many of the proposed systems aren’t new and often date back to the 1950s and 1960s. Some experimental plants have been built, such as the fast breeder reactors in the UK and US. Most suffered from crippling cost or design problems or were abandoned after nuclear accidents. “Most, if not all, of these so-called advanced reactor designs have been around for decades,” said Ramana at the Liu Institute. “Different designs have different problems. I don’t think anyone can be or should be confident that these problems can be resolved merely by throwing money and hiring engineers and scientists.”

Computer models

TerraPower’s traveling-wave design is based on research by Saveli Feinberg, a physicist who first proposed it in the 1950s. Levesque says that advancements in computing in the last decade have revolutionized the ability to develop these technologies. “You couldn’t get it near the concept

without the computer modeling,” he said. Yet, computers alone won’t prove the technology without a working plant. "What they really need is to construct research reactors,” said Allison Macfarlane, former head of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “And that is really expensive.” Under the Trump administration, the amount of support may not be sufficient for an advanced reactor program that could deliver an operating unit within 10 years, said Chris Gadomski, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. He estimates it would cost between $1.5 billion and $3.5 billion to commercialize a fourth-generation reactor. “In the US, where there is plenty of cheap natural gas and a preference for renewables, raising this type of cash is a challenge,” Gadomski said by e-mail. The US budget funding agreement reached for fiscal year 2017 provides the Department of Energy (DOE) with more than $1 billion for nuclear-energy programs and research, including nearly $500 million for R&D, an increase of $30 million, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute. Among the recipients of DOE funding is Greenbelt, Maryland-based X Energy Llc., which is developing a pebble-bed reactor concept. X-Energy Spokesman Melanie White Lyons said the company isn’t currently partnered with a Chinese company, but has a long-term goal of pursuing opportunities in countries with tremendous growth potential, including China. Areva is not currently working with Chinese teams to develop a fourth-generation reactor, Spokesman Mathias Schuch said in an e-mail. Westinghouse didn’t respond to

Vapor rises from a cooling tower at the E.ON AG Isar nuclear reactor plant in Essenbach, Germany, on February 9, 2011. E.ON AG, Germany’s largest utility, won permission to build a 230-megawatt wind farm off the coast of Humberside in the United Kingdom. Guenter Schiffmann/Bloomberg

requests for comment on next-generation reactors.

Fukushima disaster

Part of the reluctance to invest in new reactors in the US and Europe is related to the public’s skepticism about nuclear power. The Three Mile Island accident in the US in 1979, Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986 and Fukushima in Japan in 2011 all contributed to a decline in reactor-building in advanced economies. The US, the world’s largest generator of nuclear power, began operation last year of its first new commercial reactor in decades. Delays building reactors were part of the reason Westinghouse filed for bankruptcy protection earlier this year. "Nuclear can be a difficult industry and it needs to be heavily regulated,” Macfarlane said. “You can make rather a big expensive mess if you don’t get it right. Only one accident will seriously affect the entire industry. There are very few industries like that.” Developers say the industry is over-

regulated. Michael F. Keller, president of Hybrid Power Technologies Llc., said the NRC is a “bureaucratic straight jacket” that creates a massive financial burden on the deployment of advanced reactors. “As advanced reactors are generally passively fail-safe, there is no rational reason to apply the grossly overly complex regulations currently in use,” he said. The DOE said in a e-mail that it is promoting development of a framework that will increase regulatory certainty for advanced reactors in coordination with the NRC and industry. With fewer constraints and a burning need for more energy, China is pushing ahead with new power stations, not only in nuclear, but any technology that could help it meet demand. “China by a very large margin is the largest market in the world for new power plants of any type,” said Charles W. Forsberg, a professor at MIT. “If we do not get our act together, the low-carbon energy business will be owned by the Chinese. Bloomberg News

The World BusinessMirror

www.businessmirror.com.ph

Sunday, September 24, 2017

Russia warns US of retaliation amid risk of Syria showdown

A gamer uses a computer mouse illuminated with red lights while using a laptop computer at the Dreamhack digital festival in Moscow, Russia, on December 5, 2015. Dreamhack is the world’s largest digital festival and meeting place for gamers, fans and e-sport enthusiasts. Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Singapore emerges as top launchpad for global cyber attacks–Israeli firm By Melissa Cheok

Bloomberg

ingapore has overtaken nations, including the US, Russia and China, as the country launching the most cyber attacks globally, according to Israeli data security firm Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. The company, whose software tracks an average of 8 million to 10 million live cyber attacks daily, said Singapore rose to pole position after ranking in the top five attacking countries for the previous two weeks. “It is not particularly unusual for Singapore to be featured among

the top attacking countries,” said Eying Wee, Check Point’s AsiaPacific spokesman. A key Southeast Asian technology hub, much of the Internet traffic flowing through Singapore originates in other countries. That means a cyber attack recorded as coming from Singapore

may have been launched outside the country, she said. “Singapore is likely to be used as a gateway for attacks which may be based elsewhere,” said a Cyber Security Agency of Singapore spokesman in an e-mail.

Cyber defense

The city-state, which wants to become a global technology hub, recently stepped up efforts to tighten cyber security after several high-profile attacks on government agencies and companies. “Singapore has now found itself on someone’s list,” Singapore’s Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen said in July. “The attacks are orchestrated, the attacks are tar-

geted, they want to steal specific information, there are minds behind this orchestration.” Earlier this year, Singapore’s military established a cyber defense unit while the government drafted legislation to impose new cyber-security requirements aimed at helping companies protect critical information infrastructure. In May Singapore stopped most of its public servants from being able to access the Internet from their work computers. The nation’s central bank has also set up an international advisory committee dedicated to enhancing the safety and resilience of Singapore’s financial sector.

It is not particularly unusual for Singapore to be featured among the top attacking countries.”—Wee

Lonely Japanese guy in search of a ‘submissive’ girl he can keep in tube

ussia issued an unusually blunt warning to the US that it will retaliate against American-backed fighters in Syria, accusing them of firing on government troops battling for territory in a strategic region bordering Iraq. Russian specia l forces are fighting there alongside the Syrian soldiers, and any further attacks on them “will immediately meet with retaliation,” Defense Ministry Spokesman Igor Konashenkov said on Thursday. The ministry said Syrian troops twice came under massive mortar and artillery fire from positions held by America’s Kurdish allies. If that happens again, “the firing positions in those areas will be destroyed with all the arsenal at our disposal,” Konashenkov said, adding that a formal warning has been delivered to US regional headquarters in Qatar. Russian, US, Arab and European diplomats attended a meeting on Thursday at the United Nations in New York to discuss the crisis in Syria, which has brought the former Cold War rivals to the brink of confrontation. A peace agreement is needed that “guarantees that the country remains one, united,” said EU Foreign Policy chief Federica Mogherini. “Partition of Syria would lead to more unrest.”

Euphrates crossing

Two years after Russia’s military intervention in Syria reversed the course of the civil war in favor of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the Kremlin is backing a campaign by the Syrian president to regain control of as much of the country as possible. That’s provoked a standoff with the US, which is seeking to expand Syrian territory that’s under the control of its local allies, and to counter the influence of Assad’s other main supporter, Iran. The risk of a direct clash escalated in the past week as Russianbacked Syrian forces fighting against Islamic State crossed the river Euphrates, after breaking an almost hree-year jihadist siege of the city of Deir Ezzor. US-supported Kurdish forces broke off from their fight for the IS capital of Raqqa farther north and raced to the Deir Ezzor area, which is rich in oil deposits, as well as a key gateway to Iraq. Russia’s air force is continuing to provide support to Syrian government troops around Deir Ezzor, Deputy Foreign Minister

Gennady Gatilov told the UN meeting. The Deir Ezzor region could allow Iran a land corridor to funnel arms deliveries all the way to its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon, a prospect that would bolster its regional clout and has alarmed US allies Israel and Saudi Arabia. Still, Russia’s dominant position in Syria has already led to a shift in the balance of forces, with Turkey and Saudi Arabia, once key backers of the rebels fighting Assad, now cooperating with the Kremlin. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told the UN General Assembly on Thursday that “there are considerable additional efforts needed to stabilize the situation in the region.” But he said there are grounds for “cautious optimism” in Syria, and predicted that “deescalation zones” that have eased the fighting in parts of the country will create the conditions for direct peace talks.

Al-Qaeda attack

Last week, it was the US that was accusing Russian forces of targeting its local allies in the area around Deir Ezzor. Military officials from the USled coalition held a face-to-face meeting with Russian counterparts this week, Col. Ryan Dillon, a spokesman for the coalition, told a Pentagon briefing on Thursday. The purpose of talks was to “adjust and expand deconfliction measures,” and they covered issues, including “the need to share operational graphics and locations to ensure the prevention of accidental targeting or other possible frictions,” he said. Russia says that rebels backed by the US discharged water from dams north of the Euphrates to hamper the crossing by Syrian troops, who were using Russianmade rafts. It has also accused the US of instigating a major attack by the former al-Qaeda wing in western Syria, to distract the Syrian army from its eastern campaign. Lavrov said that group, “which for some reason is left alone by the members of the US coalition,” should be targeted along with IS as part of joint efforts aimed at “wiping out the last terrorist hideouts.” The US has sought to back more moderate rebels in Syria and denies any ties with jihadist groups, including al-Qaeda affiliates that are classified by the State Department as terrorist organizations. Bloomberg News

German envoy: Donald Trump not a symbol of Western values

virtual lover for the lonely doesn’t sound like such a bad idea, if you don’t mind a bit of bondage. That’s the fate of women, real and digital, in the disturbing world of Japanese AI romance, where Minori Takechi is selling his prototype of a “wife of the future” for $2,700 and reports 300 pre-orders from young men. Her name is Azuma Hikari, and she lives in a bubble— like, an actual bubble, or a little transparent cylinder at any rate. Takechi set out to create a partner who “brings greater satisfaction than human interaction.” He aims to “make her into a person who understands her husband and will always be there to support him.” Her age: 20. Height: 158 centimeters. Specialty: fried eggs. Dislike: insects. Best of all, she’s bashful (coy, too, announcing “bath

time—do not peep!”). So the lucky fellow “doesn’t have to communicate with her all the time,” Takechi says with a shy grin in the second video in our Love Disrupted series. Far from the poignant, flickering image of the toughminded Princess Leia, this is a sort of holographic Handmaid’s Tale. It makes the spooky digital relationship between Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson in Her look like cuddling at prom. Nearly 70 percent of unmarried Japanese men, and 60percent of women, between 18 and 34 have no relationship with a member of the opposite sex (the sex that appears to count in this industry). That’s a lot of guys to simper for, if you’re Azuma, who texts her owner at work to say she can’t wait for him to come home. When he’s home, she responds to his commands—turn on the lights, turn

off the lights—and tenderly suggests when it’s bedtime. Elsewhere in the industry, a virtual-reality game features a wealthy, contemptuous character who looks like he made it to callbacks for American Psycho. He bought you at auction, if that’s what you’re into. “Starting today, you live here now, with me,” he snarls. “I expect you to keep me entertained.” Wait, isn’t that his job? A real young man on the streets of Akihabara, a district of Tokyo known for its animé and manga culture, is impressed by a demo of the game but declares, “Getting hit on by a man—it was pretty embarrassing.” Cringing, he looks not so much embarrassed as agonized. Takechi has a vision. His virtual world of husband and dutiful wife, he says, “could develop into love, if we keep investigating further.” Bloomberg News

rump doesn’t embody western values in the way that previous presidents such as John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama did, according to Wolfgang Ischinger, a former German ambassador to the US who now heads the Munich Security Conference. “We are losing that symbol of the West that used to be undisputed, the president of the US,” Ischinger said in an interview on Bloomberg TV. “I can’t explain to my children that they should think of President Trump as the person that represents the values of dignity, of human freedom that the West stands for. That’s a serious problem.” Ischinger’s comments come two days after the US president gave his inaugural speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, during which he said that “Rocket Man,” as he refers to North Korean President Kim Jong Un, was on a “suicide mission” and that the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran was “the worst deal ever”

and should be revisited. Ischinger said he hopes Trump’s comments were just “hot air” and that any pullback from the nuclear pact would be a mistake and would make diplomatic efforts with North Korea more difficult.

‘Major setback’

“If the US walks away from the Iran deal this will be a major setback in various dimensions,” Ischinger said. “It will be a major setback for the role and credibility of the US in international politics.” Despite a more complicated trans-Atlantic relationship, Ischinger said Europe will need to find a way to work with the US given the outsized role Washington plays in international diplomacy. “We need the US presence in Europe,” he said. “Even if we have serious rather fundamental disagreements, there’s no alternative to close cooperation and I think we will simply need to do everything we can to work as closely as possible with the US.” Bloomberg News

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Sunday

Sunday, September 24, 2017 A5

Bohol firm hits big time with DOST-FPRDI dryer

Broken sea ice emerges from under the hull of the Finnish icebreaker MSV Nordica as it sails through the Victoria Strait while traversing the Arctic’s Northwest Passage on July 21. AP/David Goldman

Cool August restrains melt of Arctic sea ice

ASHINGTON—Arctic sea ice this summer dropped to its eighth lowest level on record, new federal data show. That’s far below average, but considerably above the record low set five years ago.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center said on Tuesday that, on September 13, sea ice in Arctic shrank to its smallest area of the season: 4.64 million square kilometers. Data center scientist Ted Scambos said the Arctic sea ice set a record for the smallest winter amount earlier this year and was

4.64M sq km The area of sea ice in the Arctic, a shrinkage to its smallest area of the season, as of September 13

close to 2012’s record-low levels through July. Then a cloudy and cooler than normal August kept melt to a minimum. “Weather patterns in August saved the day,” Scambos said. The Arctic acts as a crucial refrigerator for Earth ’s climate, scientists say. A growing number of studies have linked Arctic sea ice decline to changes in the jet stream and some bouts of extreme weather. “It’s bound to have an impact on global climate,” Scambos said. T his year’s low is 610,000 square miles (1.58 million square kilometers) below the 30-year average but it is also 483,000 square miles (1.25 million square kilometers) above 2012’s record low. The data center uses satellite readings that go back to 1979.

Scambos said this year is clustered with several other recent years behind 2012. He said this year’s sea ice level fits with an overall steady decline over the decades, but one that varies in fits and starts. The latest findings do not mark a recovery from 2012, he said. Instead they suggest that 2012 was an outlier, with a combination of freak conditions that dropped levels lower than normal manmade global warming would cause, Scambos said. “It’s not going to be a staircase heading down to zero every year,” Scambos said. “It’s not the same as in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s or 1990s.” “The Arctic will continue to evolve toward less ice,” he said. “There’s no dodging that.” AP

W. Visayas Best Setup adopters receive awards

I DOST-PCAARRD exec recognized

r. Danilo C. Cardenas (right), deputy executive director for administration, resource sanagement and support services of the Philippine Council for Agriculture, Aquatic and Natural Resources Research and Development of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST-PCAARRD), receives the award of recognition for his dedication, support and guidance to the consortium during the Stakeholders’ Appreciation Night. The event is part of the 30th founding anniversary celebration of the Southern Mindanao Agriculture, Aquatic and Natural Resources Research and Development Consortium (Smaarrdec). Handing over the award are Dr. Lourdes C. Generalao (center), Smaarrdec chairman and University of Southeastern Philippines (USeP) president, and Dr. Danilo B. Pacoy, Smaarrdec director. Cardenas thanked the officials and member-agencies of the consortium for their decades-long commitment and support to the programs and policies of PCAARRD. S&T Media Service/Victor V. Oro

LOILO CIT Y—The Department of Science and Technology (DOST) recently recognized the best provincial and regional adopters of the Small Enterprises Technology Upgrading Program (Setup) during the recent Regional Science and Technology Week. Setup is the DOST’s nationwide program that aims to encourage and assist micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in adopting technological innovations to improve their products and operations. Through Setup, the DOST helps improve the MSMEs’ productivity and competitiveness by providing them a loan that is payable in three years. Rosa Foods Inc. from Aklan bagged the Best Regional Setup Adopter award. Receiving recognition at the provincial level were Tibiao Bakery Inc. (Antique); Spanggo Foods Cafe and Pasalubong Center (Capiz); Boboy’s Delicacies (Guimaras); Cefekur Gourmets (Iloilo); and LLZ Foods Corp. (Negros Occidental). Meanwhile, the agency also

recognized its two Community Empowerment through Science and Technology (CEST) partners in the region. CEST aims to alleviate poverty in the countr y by empowering the poorest and most depressed communities through science and technolog y (S&T) i nter vent ion s i n hea lt h a nd nut r it ion, water a nd sa nit at ion, d isaster-r isk reduct ion and climate-change adaptation. The program also targets to introduce to communities the S&T interventions on basic education and livelihood development. The two CEST partners are the local government units of Libacao, Aklan, and Islas de Gigantes, Carles, Iloilo. “We have piloted CEST in these communities,” said DOST Assistant Secretary Emmanuel Galvez, noting that there was no S&T scholar in Libacao before CEST was implemented there. Under the CEST program in Islas de Gigantes, livelihood programs and water sanitation, among others, were provided. PNA

ver since his firm started using the Department of Science and Technology’s Forest Products Research and Development Institute’s (DOSTFPRDI’s) furnace-type lumber dr yer (FTLD), Cirilo Sumampong’s life has never been the same again.While he used to simply be a small lumber retailer in the town of Dauis in Bohol, he is now the province’s biggest supplier of custom-built furniture. His company, Bohol Furniture and Lumber Supply, earns a gross income of P1.16 million a month, and enjoys brisk business all year round. Sumampong said, “During our first years in the business, we were producing nothing but door jambs and air-dried lumber, and earning only P1,500 a month. Sales were good only between September and December each year.” Now, with kiln-dried wood, his company is already making tr usses, f loor plank s, doors, door jambs and all kinds of furniture—beds, chairs, dining sets. “Thanks to our No. 1 client—the hotels and beach resorts that have sprung all over Bohol in recent years—our products are in demand all the time.” “When we decided to expand in 2012, we asked the Bohol Provincial S&T Center to help us acquire 10,000 board feet of FTLD,” he said. “They introduced us to the DOST ’s Small Enterprises Technology Upgrading Program

[Setup], which gave us a grant of P1 million. During our first operation in 2014, we grossed a whopping P2.5 million from a beach resort owner.” “From then on, life was never the same for us,” he said. He added that, while they used to consume only 7,000 board feet of lumber per year, they now use up to 100,000 board feet of gmelina and mahogany wood annually. “Our product lines grew and because we knew that we were using quality materials, we gained confidence in dealing with our buyers,” Sumampong said. He added their clients bec a me aw a re of t he v a lue of kiln-dried lumber and learned to trust their products. “We were able to pay the Setup grant after one year, and later on bought a big lot where we put up another store and a showroom. The dryer also created jobs for people in the community as we trained and hired operators,” he said. “We never expected this kind of success and we are very thankful for everything that the FTLD has brought to us,” Sumampong admitted. “For now, we do not have plans of adding more units to our factory. We simply want to use our dryer to bring to our clients wood products that will last for a long time because these have been dried the best way possible.” Rizalina K. Araral & Anita A. Decena/S&T Media Service

The brush-footed or four-footed butterfly has a wingspan of about 60 mm. Wikimedia Commons

Genes color a butterfly’s wings; scientists want to do it now

nly nature can paint the gorgeous colors and patterns on a butterfly’s wings. But scientists said last Monday that they have mastered the first steps and hope in time to control the entire coloring system, making it possible to design living butterfly wings. The patterning and colors on butterflies’ wings are governed by suites of genes. The new CRISPR-Cas gene-editing technique now makes it much easier to figure out what a gene does by deleting it and seeing what happens. Two teams of biologists report in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they have used the technique to explore the roles of two master genes that control the appearance of a butterfly’s wings. A group, led by Linlin Zhang and Robert D. Reed of Cornell University, has found that a gene called optix has a remarkable role: It controls all the color in a butterfly’s wing. When optix is deleted from the Gulf fritillar y’s eggs, the resulting adult butterflies, which are mostly deep brown, wear a ghostly black and silver livery. That’s because in the absence of the optix gene, the butterfly’s scales produce melanin, a black pigment, instead of the usual chestnut coloring. The biologists had already suspected that optix played a role in activating the butterfly’s brown pigment. But they were surprised that the black pigment was turned on in the absence of optix. A further surprise came when they turned off the optix gene in a second species, the buckeye. The butterfly’s usual browns and yellows disappeared, replaced by scales of a blazing iridescent blue. “That

knocked our socks off,” Reed said. A second group, led by Anyi Mazo-Vargas of Cornell University and Arnaud Martin of George Washington University, has explored the role of a gene called WntA, which plays a powerful role in the patterning of butterflies’ wings. The standard pattern of nymphalid butterflies, a 90-million-year-old family of some 6,000 different species, consists of four bands, parallel to the body, that run between it and the edge of the wings. The second band, called the central symmetry system, contains the pattern in the middle of the wings, and the third band holds the eye spots. Martin’s team found that when they delete the WntA gene with the CRISPR technique, the central symmetry system band disappears entirely from the wings of the speckled wood and buckeye butterflies. But in other species, the loss of WntA has very different effects, suggesting that the gene has been adapted many times to play different patterning roles as new butterfly species evolved. In the monarch butterfly, for instance, loss of WntA affects an almost invisible white line that edges the distinctive black lines that delineate the wing’s veins. In the absence of WntA, the white lines expand into the areas between the veins, replacing the distinctive orange pigment. The WntA gene becomes active in the caterpillar stage, impressing its patterning information on the embr yonic wing structures. Martin sees the WntA gene as a sketching tool that defines the outline of the wing design, and the optix gene studied by Reed’s group as a “paintbrush” gene that fills in the color. New York Times News Service

Faith A6 Sunday, September 24, 2017

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Bishop lays out plan for Fr. Chito’s recovery

Catholic bishop said Fr. Teresito “Chito” Suganob would undergo a post-captivity reintegration process, as he hopes for the priest’s complete recovery and resume active priestly ministry.

Bishop Edwin de la Peña of Marawi could not say how long the process would take but said the prelature has laid out plan for the priest’s reintegration. “After his debriefing, the prelature has prepared a program for his rest, recuperation, healing and gradual reintegration into the ministry of interfaith dialogue in Marawi City, his original mission as priest,” he said. The bishop met with Suganob on Monday afternoon at Camp Aguinaldo for the first time after the priest’s liberation but he said what transpired during the meeting “is only something between us for now.” Suganob, who was abducted by the Maute Group when they occupied Marawi nearly four months ago, was rescued by the military when it overran the terrorists’ control center inside a mosque on September 16. The priest, commonly known as “Father Chito,” was presented to the media at the military headquarters last Sunday. He said he was not harmed by his abductors during his captivity, as he asked the public to pray for him. “Pray for me, for my recovery,” Suganob said. The priest’s freedom also gave de la Peña’s hope for the release of other hostages, including some

100 The estimated number of days Catholic priest Fr. Teresito “Chito” Suganob was held captive by the terrorist-allied Maute Group in Marawi City

workers of the prelature. He said that, while they are thankful, “we cannot say that we are happy, knowing that there are still many hostages that remain in captivity. “We are very hopeful that Father Chito’s release is just the first step, and will be followed by the rescue of the other hostages, many of them women,” de la Peña said. “We are hopeful that soon the war will be over and that the Maranaos can begin to go back home and rebuild their lives and rehabilitate their city,” he added.

Religious harmony

For more than 100 days, Suganob’s life was threatened by every

Rescued Roman Catholic priest Fr. Teresito “Chito” Suganob (center) waves to the media as he is presented in a news conference, on September 18, at Camp Aguinaldo in suburban Quezon City, northeast of Manila. Philippine troops have rescued Suganob and another civilian who were among dozens of people abducted in May when hundreds of militants aligned with the Islamic State group laid siege on southern Marawi City, officials said. With Suganob are Armed Forces Chief Gen. Eduardo M. Año (left) and Defense Chief Delfin N. Lorenzana. AP/Bullit Marquez

air strike, gunshot and artillery bombardment that targeted his Islamic State (IS) group-aligned captors in the southern Philippines. When Suganob, 51, began talking on Monday about his captivity following his rescue by Philippine troops in Marawi city, there were no bitter condemnations. He spoke of how Muslims and Christians should live in peaceful coexistence. “I still believe in an interfaith relationship, that we can be united as Muslims and Christians, that we’re not enemies,” Suganob said onboard an Air Force plane that brought him to Manila. Suga nob has long promoted a d i a log ue bet ween Musl ims and Christians in the countr y’s sout h, reg iona l assembly ma n Zi a A lonto Ad iong sa id. Top m i l it a r y a nd defense of f ic i a ls

met Suganob and he was brief ly presented to a huge g roup of jour na lists, photog raphers and T V cameras at the militar y headqu a r ters. “Pray for me, for my healing and recovery,” said Suganob, who appeared remarkably hea lthy with a long, white beard and was in a jovial mood as he thanked his rescuers. Asked how he was, Suganob said with a laugh, “Physically strong, handsome.” He smiled and waved before being ushered out of a military hall without taking any questions. Suganob was among many civilians abducted in May when hundreds of militants waving IS-style black flags laid siege to mosque-studded Marawi, a center of Islamic faith in the south of the largely Roman Catholic nation.

A few days after his abduction, Suganob appeared in a v ideo, appa rent ly t a ken u nder duress by t he mi l itants, in which he said he was with about 200 other hostages and t hat h is captors wa nted t he militar y to withdraw its forces from the city. “We want to live another day, we want to live another month,” Suganob said in the video while standing alone in front of partially burned buildings. In another video, the militants were shown smashing religious statutes, ripping a picture of Pope Francis and toppling a crucifix in a Marawi cathedral, in what the military said was an attempt to foment a religious war. Military officials asked Facebook and other social-media companies to take down the video.

Saint Vincent de Paul: Founder of Congregation of the Missions By Corazon Damo-Santiago

he patron of all charitable work throughout the Catholic world, a title bestowed on him by Pope Leo XIII, died on September 27, 1660. The founder of the Congregation of Priests of the Missions in 1626 and the Daughters of Charity in 1633 with Louise de Marillac loved the poor, forsaken, orphans, mentally deranged, prisoners and the aged unconditionally. After 357 years, Vincent de Paul’s uncorrupted heart can be viewed in the Convent of the Sisters of Charity in Puoy, France, for the secular world to ponder on.

Life of adventure

Bor n to a poor fami ly in the v il lage of Puoy, Gascony, France, on Apr il 24, 1581, Vincent’s deter mination to be a pr iest is to have a successf u l career, retire early, obtain a benefice benefits in exchange for spiritual works, support the family and have a good life. The French ter m benefice means a Church appointment, such as a rector or v icar, for which proper t y and income are prov ided in respect of pastora l duties The third of six children, his parents, Jean and Bertrande de Moras de Paul, worked hard on the farm for the family’s subsistence. After Vincent’s first communion, the priest accompanied him home to motivate his parents to send him to school. As the brightest boy in the Catechism class, a good future surely awaits him. The idea of his becoming a priest, later on becoming a bishop clothed in satin, blessing people, living in a big house and with plenty of money convinced his father to sell two cows, some

sheep and pigs to raise the funds needed for Vincent’s schooling. To augment funds, Vincent tutored the children of a lawyer friend of the priest. Robert Ellsberg in All Saints narrate that once his father visited Vincent in the seminary, Ashamed to see his old father in a shabby peasant attire, he did not honor his visit. He was ordained priest on September 23, 1600, and was appointed parish priest of Tilh. Because the council of Trent decreed that a priest should at least be 20 years old, Vincent had to defend his appointment. Rather than go to Rome to justify his post, he resigned and studied at the University of Toulouse in Paris. On October 12, 1604, he finished his Licentiate in Canon Law. In 1605 a wea lt hy pat ron gave him an inheritance, making him sail to Marseilles to sell the property. He was captured by African pirates and sold as a slave in Algeria thrice. The third buyer was Guillaume Gaufier, a former Franciscan monk from France who converted to Islam to gain freedom. Of the three wives of Guillaume the second became Vincent’s friend who learned about the Catholic faith, and convinced her husband to return to his faith. Vincent and Guillaume secretly boarded a boat and landed in A igues-Mortes, France, on June 28, 1607. From France, Vincent proceeded to Rome to study unti l 1609 when K ing He n r y I V s e nt h i m bac k to France on a mission. In Paris he met Pierre de Berulle, who became his spiritual adviser. Too, he got acquainted with Andre Duval of Sorbonne, who introduced to him the “Rule of

A portrait of Saint Vincent de Paul by Simon François de Tours (17th century) Wikimedia Commons

Perfection” by Benoit of Canfield. It was a treatise on the interior will of God. That the practice of humility, simplicity, meekness, mortification of souls are musts for the soul to perceive what are truly the spiritual will of God.

Spiritual awakening

On t he prompt ings of de Ber u l le, he accepted t he c ha rge of Saint Menard in Clinchy, a parish in the outskirts of Par is. He won t he hea r ts of t he pa r ishioners for h is concer n for t he sic k , t he poor a nd long hou rs in t he confessiona l. His next assignment was chaplain to Philippe Gondi, marshall of the French fleet and commander in chief of the French Galley. He did not only tutor the Gondi children but preached to tenants and farmers. Likewise, he

reformed and transformed the spirituality of the parishioners of the Parish of Chatillon-lesDombes in Lyons, a secret assignment from de Berulle. With the support of Madame de Gondi, a general confession in the Chapel of Foleville was organized on January 25, 1617. After hearing the confession of a dying farmer, he realized the crucial role of a priest when the farmer, in tears of thankfulness, remarked that he could have perished in mortal sin without a priest’s absolution. The quality of the training of the clergy and their dedication to their vocation also came to mind. In his own words, he became truly a man for others, more so for the poor, that, “Even though the poor are often rough and unrefined, we must not judge them from external appearances.... If you consider the poor in the light of faith, then you will observe that they are taking the place of God who chose to be poor.” Henceforth, he would work for the uplift of the poor and exert effort in the training of holy priests. W hen K ing L ou is X III assigned him general almoner or chaplain in 1619 to improve the conditions of prisoners and slaves in royal galleys, he improved not only their physical conditions but their spirituality, as well. He inspired them to conversion, built hospitals and paid for the freedom of 1,200 slaves. To the 30,000 Christian slaves in Tunisia and Algeria, Vincent sent brothers and priests to care for their needs and act as messengers for their families, too. Widely known as Monsieur Vincent, the rich and powerful in France supported his projects

and the rich loved him. He encouraged their cooperation in works of charity. “ Those who love the poor will meet death without fear.” The priory of an “ageing monastery with sprawling property” owned by the Lazarites became the center of organizing mission and charitable works of Vincent and his companions. Too, he helped reform the clergy to be more faithful in their vocation. There was a time when he was directing 53 upper-level seminaries at the same time.

‘I will follow’

Louise de Marillac, a widow, and her friends formed a group of ladies in gray, which became the forerunner of the Daughters of Charity, which took care of the sick, hungry and orphans. “Their convent is the sickroom, their cloister the streets of the city, their chapel the parishes.” For 60 years, France benefited from the charitable works of Vincent. It was also during his lifetime that mendicancy was the curse of Paris with more than 40,000 beggars roaming in the city, according to Fr. Anthony Netikat, CM. When Louise de Marillac was dying on March 15, 1660, he said, “Be the first to go to God, I will follow soon.” Vincent de Paul died on September 27, 1660, was beatified on August 13, 1729, by Pope Benedict XIII and was canonized by Pope Clement XII on June 16, 1737. Santiago is a former regional director of the Department of Education National Capital Region. She is currently a faculty member of Mater Redemptoris Collegium in Calauan, Laguna and Mater Redemptoris College in San Jose City, Nueva Ecija.

Other freed hostages have talked about female captives being abused and forced to marr y some of the militants. Some hostages were shot and others were forced to loot houses, handle daily chores, like cooking, or made to wear black unifor ms and car r y f irear ms to fight alongside the militants, the militar y said. Suganob said in the interv ie w onboa rd t he A i r Force plane on Monday that he and other hostages were fed r ice, sardines, nood les and cor ned beef ta ken from grocer y stores by the g unmen, but the supply later dw ind led a lar mingly as the fighting intensified. Military Chief of Staff Gen. Eduardo M. Año said the priest told him he was not harmed by the militants. Suganob will be allowed to rest and has not been subjected to a detailed questioning about his traumatic experience, Año told reporters. The ordeal took a toll on the priest, he said. When somebody at one point told him about an apparent escape plan, Suganob refused to go along. “No, allow me to die here. I have already accepted my fate,” Año quoted Suganob as telling fellow hostages, who considered making a dash to freedom out of desperation. Suganob was not aware that the military was planning to rescue him despite the odds, Año said, adding that troops managed to drive the militants away from a mosque and then grabbed the priest and another hostage. The gunmen continue to hold about 50 other hostages, Año said, adding that rescue efforts were under way. Roy Lagarde/CBCPNews and

Jim Gomez/AP

Immigrant hurricane victims turn to churches amid fear

OUSTON—Immigrants came from across Houston to a Baptist church gymnasium and stacked dollies with boxes of cereal, orange juice and household necessities, like cleaning bleach. For many of them, the church was the safest place to seek relief after Harvey devastated Houston and left thousands of immigrants fearful of turning to the government for help, amid fears they would get deported. A similar response was seen in immigrant-heavy sections of Florida after Irma swamped the state. “We have to come together as churches to help the undocumented,” Emmanuel Baptist Church pastor Raul Hidalgo said while mingling with victims and volunteers on the church gymnasium’s parquet floor. Places of worship and private charities in Texas and Florida are playing a pivotal role in the recovery effort from hurricanes Harvey and Irma because so many storm victims are immigrants in the country illegally—and, therefore, ineligible for federal disaster aid. They are doing charity giveaways like the one at Hidalgo’s church. Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston is hosting workshops for immigrants to explain Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) eligibility and answer other questions. Fema rules allow people in the country illegally to apply for disaster aid on behalf of children under 18 years old with legal status, but many worry about the government sharing information with immigration authorities. Cesia Lux, a 25-year-old Guatemalan, went to the church giveaway in the heavily Latino Houston Heights area for help, loading a family member’s pickup truck with diapers, canned beans and other goods after her house took on a foot of water. She is in the country illegally, but her husband, 2-year-old daughter and 8-month-old son are US citizens. Her husband applied for Fema aid, despite misgivings that it might lead immigration authorities to her. “One never knows what they do with the information,” Lux said. AP

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Trump slams ESPN P RESIDENT Donald J. Trump fired a fresh volley of criticism against TV sports network ESPN on September 15, demanding an apology after host Jemele Hill called the president a white supremacist on— where else?—Twitter. “ESPN is paying a really big price for its politics [and bad programming],” the president tweeted, responding to Hill’s September 11 comments. “People are dumping it in RECORD numbers. Apologize for untruth!” It’s significant that the president demanded an apology from the network, not from Hill. Since his inauguration, US companies have found it nearly impossible to stay out of the partisan crossfire. General Motors Co., Campbell Soup Co., ESPN parent Walt Disney Co., Under Armour Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc. have all faced threats and calls for boycotts from both sides, depending on how consumers viewed their relationship with the White House and stance on social issues. “People will call you out online if you speak up or you don’t speak up,” said Leslie Gaines-Ross, chief reputation strategist for the public relations firm Weber Shandwick. “There are lots of risks and a lot of rewards for speaking up. It depends a lot on your employee base and your customer base because you are going to offend someone.” Even though ESPN reprimanded Hill for airing her opinions “on a platform that implies that she was in any way speaking on behalf of ESPN,” the company attracted a fresh wave of criticism for not firing her. ESPN President John Skipper said in a staff memo on Friday that employee comments on social media shouldn’t be personal or inflammatory and that those standards were violated in recent days. He said the company’s handling of the incident was a private matter. The hashtag #boycottESPN drew more than 60,000 tweets, mostly from people who appeared to be more conservative based on their other social-media activity, said David Berkowitz, chief strategy officer at marketing tech firm Sysomos. Many of the people tweeting and retweeting had American flags in their profile and slogans such as “all lives matter,” he found. “Donald Trump, rightly or wrongly, is the focal point of a lot of anger,” said Jason Maloni, founder of JadeRoq Llc., a crisismanagement company that gives advice on sports-reputation issues. “I find it to be very sensitive ground for any reporter.”

Under pressure

ESPN seems particularly vulnerable to the new round of criticism, both because its business model is already under pressure and because its audience tends to be more conservative than the general population, according to data from Simmons Research. The audience is 27.5 percent very or somewhat conservative, versus 20.6 percent somewhat or very liberal. The rest of the viewers are middle of the road, according to the data. The so-called alt-right movement is eager to tie ESPN’s business woes to its supposed liberal tilt. A recent story on Breitbart News declared, “We may or may not, but definitely are, fast approaching a point where the vast majority of the world’s

ills can be traced back to ESPN.”The site has also said ESPN’s alleged leftist bias contributed to shrinking National Football League ratings. As proof of bias, many of the boycott supporters pointed out that last year the company fired baseball analyst Curt Schilling after he shared a critique on Facebook about North Carolina’s law banning transgender people from using bathrooms that don’t correspond to their sex. Network insiders have also given credence to the critics on the right. In April longtime SportsCenter anchor Linda Cohn went on 77 WABC radio in New York to discuss the network’s struggles, saying it overpaid for some sports rights and failed to see the rise of new competition like Netflix. But she also discussed politics. After a host mentioned distaste among some ESPN viewers regarding the network’s political alignment—its sympathetic reporting on quarterback Colin Kaepernick and support of transgender Olympian Caitlyn Jenner—Cohn agreed. “If anyone wants to ignore that fact, you’re blind,” she said. “I felt that the old-school viewers were put in a corner and not appreciated with all these changes. And they forgot their core. You should never forget your core.” This week, frequent ESPN critic Outkick the Coverage reported that Skipper called Cohn after her appearance and told her not to come to work that weekend. Cohn’s suspension, and the lack of punishment for Hill, has create more fuel for those who feel ESPN has a liberal agenda. ESPN’s own research paints a less partisan and more satisfied tone for its viewers. More than two-thirds of viewers agree with the ESPN mix of sports and politics and almost a third think ESPN skews conservative, according to a May survey for the sports network by Langer Research Associates. The same survey found that conservatives and liberals each rated the network as a positive 7 on a scale of 1 (worst) to 10 (best). The network’s public editor, Jim Brady, said in a blog post on Friday that the company “leans left,” adding that “I don’t think anyone ever made an executive decision to go that route as much as the personalities the network has promoted into high-profile positions tend to be more liberal, and as their voices are amplified, the overall voice has shifted with it.”

ERGEN, Norway—French official David Lappartient has beaten British incumbent Brian Cookson in a vote to become president of the International Cycling Union (UCI). Lappartient, the European Cycling Union leader, won the vote 37-8 at the UCI’s annual congress. Lappartient promised to “regain influence in the Olympic movement, where it has been losing ground.” Track cycling at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics will be raced in a velodrome 130 kilometers (80 miles) outside the city, though two more medals were added in men’s and women’s Madison events. Lappartient also promised to push for bans on some medications. Elected in 2013 when cycling’s image was battered by doping scandals, Cookson told voters: “I’ve delivered change, I’ve restored the UCI’s credibility.” AP

LeBron James’s, Nets’ future tied T

HE opportunity was presented in a variety of ways, the question posed in various forms. But on the subject of the Brooklyn Nets, and their progress as a team this coming season, Kenny Atkinson wouldn’t bite and neither would Sean Marks. Hence, the outlook in Brooklyn this week sounded mostly promising for the Cleveland Cavaliers and their obsession with retaining LeBron James beyond next summer. The men at the Nets’ helm say they are realistically hoping for— in Marks’ words— “small wins” in the months ahead, the kind not necessarily affecting NBA standings and potential lottery picks. Here is Marks, the general manager, on how his Nets will largely define progress in what is Year 2 of his and Atkinson’s reconstruction regime. Or, depending on one’s point of view, the final year of the draft-pick giveaway staged by Billy King, Marks’s predecessor, when he dealt the Nets’ foreseeable future to Boston in 2013 for Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett and the blessing of AARP. “It can be how guys are progressing perforJames mancewise, or what they are doing in the weight room, how they bounce back after a

Secular shifts

IN fact, the headwinds for ESPN have so far been secular, with dramatic shifts in the ways fans consume sports. One of the largest contributors to Disney’s profits, the network has been making changes to its nonsports programming, launching new shows and increasing its online presence as it copes with declining TV ratings, particularly at SportsCenter. Bloomberg News

Lingering questions

STILL, questions linger, particularly in a lost season in which so much has gone wrong for the Mets on the injury front. Isn’t it reasonable to think the ulnar nerve issue was bothering Matz for some time? If so, could the problem have been detected sooner? Should Matz have been pitching at all from June to August, if, as he later admitted, he was dealing with discomfort off and on that began in spring training?

These are, of course, the kinds of questions the Mets have been confronted with as other players, like Noah Syndergaard and Yoenis Cespedes, ended up with their seasons derailed. And the questions are never easily answered. Sandy Alderson, the Mets’ general manager, declined to talk about the way Matz’s case unfolded. But what is known is that only after it was announced that he would undergo surgery for the ulnar nerve problem was it revealed that he had been skipping numerous bullpen sessions between starts this season. And that he was limiting the use of a secondary pitch, a slider, in hopes of lessening the strain on his troublesome elbow. But if that was the case, was he healthy enough to pitch in the first place? “Ultimately, it was my decision,” Matz said recently in an interview when asked about the 13 starts he made this season before he was shut down. “I wanted to go out there and pitch because I’m so sick of being on the DL. And I did everything I could.”

More discomfort

MATZ’S frequent injuries have frustrated some within the Mets’ organization, something Matz is no doubt aware of. He tries to keep himself in top physical shape and seems careful about what he puts in his body. For instance, when his bone spur was discovered early last season, he resisted taking anti-inflammatory medicine. And this season, Matz said he received only “a couple” of shots of the anti-inflammatory drug Toradol for his balky elbow. “Some guys take it more,” he said. “It definitely helps.” Matz said that when he did pitch this season he felt more discomfort between starts than when on the mound, when adrenaline kicked in. His average fastball velocity was 93.1 mph, similar to last year’s average of 93.6. As Matz’s pitching deteriorated this summer, he tried to push through the pain, in part because the diagnosis he received in spring training concluded that there was no structural damage to his elbow. “In my mind,” he said, “I’m like: ‘The MRI is clean, so this is something I’m going to have to deal with. I either have an arthritic elbow or whatever it is, but I’m going to have to get past it.’” New York Times News Service

Lappartient new UCI chief

Matz sums up Mets’ painful season VER since the New York Mets selected Steven Matz out of Ward Melville High School on Long Island in the second round of the 2009 draft, his career has been defined by injuries. His latest setback, which is costing him the final month and a half of this season, helps define the current state of the Mets. A decision to play with some discomfort. A medical explanation that took awhile to emerge. These are the types of storylines that have attached themselves to the Mets in 2017, and now Matz’s narrative has taken its place among them. As the Mets proceed through the dreary final weeks of the schedule, Matz is back home. But in some ways, he is also back where he began as a Met, with an issue in his left elbow, the one he pitches with. It was that elbow on which he underwent Tommy John surgery not long after the Mets drafted him; it led to a two-year recovery. That operation set a tone for his career. For when Matz finally made it to the major leagues, in 2015, he quickly landed on the disabled list for two months with a latissimus tear. In 2016 a shoulder injury and surgery to remove a bone spur from his left elbow claimed the final month and a half of his season. So after Matz missed the first two months of the 2017 season with what the Mets described as elbow inflammation, it seemed like more of the same. Still, the Mets did not express concern that there was something seriously wrong with his arm. Matz said team doctors told him the inflammation might have been a side effect from the bone spur surgery the previous fall, and they prescribed rest and platelet-rich plasma injections. Matz then returned to the rotation in early-June and pitched fairly well in his first five starts. But he then began to pitch less effectively, his earned run average ballooned, and by the second half of August, the Mets’ medical staff decided to take another look. This time, on August 21, they concluded that he had ulnar nerve irritation in his elbow. Two days later, Matz underwent surgery to reposition the nerve—the same operation Jacob deGrom underwent last fall and from which he has made a successful comeback this season. Matz said in a recent interview that he was glad the team’s medical staff had “figured out this issue,” and took heart in the notion that he, like deGrom, would recover well.

Sunday, September 24, 2017

defeat, after a tough loss, how they practice, how they do their recovery and where their mind-set is at,” Marks told reporters on Tuesday. “So it’s about celebrating and finding those wins, but it’s also about family wins, how we talk about our cultural lives, and also about the feedback we get from the wife, the significant other.”

Domestic harmony

ALL of northeast Ohio would be thrilled for the Nets to achieve meaningful domestic harmony while continuing to fail at basketball, home and away. That might help persuade the increasingly restless James to discard any plans of free-agent relocation to Los Angeles next summer to join the Magic Johnson-run Lakers. By granting Kyrie Irving his wish to be traded, and by acquiring, among other assets, the Nets’ first-round pick in the 2018 draft from the Boston Celtics, the Cavaliers have made the lowly Nets a team to watch this coming season. Or, more to the point, scoreboard-watch. For as long as the Celtics held the Nets’ 2018 pick, that story line was a tribute to Boston’s wheeling-and-dealing Danny Ainge and a sad Brooklyn commentary on one of the more lopsided exchanges in NBA history. But with the pick now in Cleveland’s hands, and with the draft expected to be top-loaded with skilled, athletic big men, or what the Cavaliers have lacked, the Nets’ performance this season could weigh heavily on the league’s eventual balance of power. And certainly on the Eastern Conference’s competitive order. To that end, when asked if he was bothered by speculation about the strong likelihood that Cleveland will get a significant upgrade via the pick, Marks said it was none of his business. “I mean, it’s not our pick, right, so if I focus on what could have been, I wouldn’t be here, Kenny wouldn’t be here,” Marks said. “Our focus is on what we have, those 15 guys. I’d be doing them a complete disservice if I was to focus on what Boston was going to do with that pick, what Cleveland is going to do with that pick.” He’s right about that. He has no reason to care but, in Cleveland, the feeling isn’t quite mutual.

Worst record

RECENT speculation disguised as news has James all but shaking hands with Magic over lunch on the terrace of an oceanside bistro. But what if Isaiah Thomas, the pocketsize point guard Cleveland

Ateneo to clash with UE

NSCATHED leader Ateneo de Manila seeks to tighten its grip of the top spot when it eyes its fourth win in a row against the winless University of the East (UE) in Season 80 University Athletic Association of the Philippines (UAAP) men’s basketball action today at the Mall of Asia Arena in Pasay City. They will take the floor at the 2 p.m. curtain raiser of the doubleheader, with the Blue Eagles trying to extend their surge to four games, while the Red Warriors hoping to end their 0-3 slump. Ateneo, led by Thirdy Ravena’s versatile numbers with 18 points, nine rebounds and 2.3 assists per game, has been a well-oiled wrecking machine with a winning margin of 17.6 points per in their first three wins against Adamson, University of the Philippines and Far Eastern University. But coaches Sandy Arespacochaga and Tab Baldwin doesn’t want the Blue Eagles to look back on those big wins and focus on their philosophy of one game at a time bracing for a hungrier Red Warriors, who will try to breakout from their three-game misery. “Still a long way to go. Our philosophy has been looking at games one game at a time. We’re still going to do that so our minds are focused on UE,” said Arespacochaga, who also leans on the balanced-contributions from Chiz Ikeh, Anton Asistio, Isaac Go, Mike and Matt Nieto, Aaron Black, Tyler Tio and Rafael Verano. Meanwhile, National University (NU) and Adamson University, who had contrasting results in their previous matches last Wednesday, clash to improve their records

at 4 p.m. The Bulldogs survived the tough challenge from UST and escaped, 94-84, while the Soaring Falcons failed to complete their comeback, falling at the helm of defending champion De La Salle, 85-73. National U eyes its second straight win to improve its 2-1 record, while Adamson tries to bounce back for its 1-2 slate. “Well, it’s gonna be tough. Adamson is one of the darkhorses coming into UAAP Season 80, and they have a very good coach in Franz Pumaren,” said NU Head Coach Jamike Jarin, who pins his hopes on Issa Gaye, Dave Yu, Jay Alejandro, Matt Salem, Manuel Mosqueda and Jordan

obtained in the Irving deal, recovers from his hip ailment and, with his fellow former Celtic Jae Crowder, helps James return to the NBA finals for an eighth straight year? What if Lonzo Ball doesn’t set the league ablaze as a Lakers rookie, and Paul George and Russell Westbrook decide to extend their fledgling partnership in Oklahoma City? What if the Nets do poorly enough that Cleveland ends up with the No. 1 or No. 2 pick in the draft? It stands to reason that James, ever mindful of his on-court legacy and his collection of championship rings currently stalled at three, will at least be eyeing those Nets scores on his smartphone in the locker room after games this season. The Nets had the league’s worst record last season and may have overachieved by winning 20 games. (Their first pick in the 2017 draft had also been handed over to Boston, which traded it to Philadelphia.)

Rule changes

OVER the summer, Marks subtracted center Brook Lopez, his leading scorer and shot-blocker, and landed point guard D’Angelo Russell, who was the second pick in the 2015 draft, and Russian center Timofey Mozgov. To a young and reasonably athletic roster of interchangeable parts, he also added a couple of pricey wing players, Allen Crabbe and DeMarre Carroll. Rule changes to discourage teams from tanking for draft benefits are in the NBA pipeline, although they are unlikely to be adopted this season and wouldn’t apply to the Nets, anyway. With teams like Atlanta, Indiana and Chicago having traded or lost key players and considered the next wave of floppers, if not tankers, could the Nets’ youth and enthusiasm translate to more winnable games and possibly even elevation into contention for the playoffs? And, of course, a draft pick with less value. This was another performance-enhancement question Marks deftly evaded. “I think you got to be careful with that because as we saw last year, one major injury can derail every plan you may have had,” he said, referring to the returning Jeremy Lin. “So for us it’s going to be about staying fluid throughout the year, see what happens.” To which Atkinson, sitting alongside, added: “My gut is I feel the momentum of where we’re going. Obviously, we want that to translate into results.” New York Times News Service

Barlett. “This is going to be interesting. It’s gonna be hard, it’s gonna be tough. They have a lot of athletic players coming in, and it’s gonna be very interesting. We need to have our A-game again to get a victory.” Pumaren hopes to draw a better performance from his wards, led by Papi Sarr, Sean Manganti, Robbie Manalang, Kurt Lojera, Jerrie Pingoy and Jerrick Ahanmisi. Lance Agcaoili

Jordan Sta. Ana of the University of Santo Tomas goes for a lay-up past Jayjay Alejandro of National University (NU) during a game for Season 80 of the University Athletic Association of the Philippines men’s basketball tournament, as teammate Steve Akomo looks on. NU and Adamson University clash to improve their records at 4 p.m. today. Stephanie Tumampos

Sunday, September 24, 2017

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Mathilde’s Absence By Christian Ray Buendia

She forgot where she’d put that goddamned lipstick. Rummaging through the drawer, cursing at everything, dewdrops of sweat forming on her brow, she was all the while harboring a vague suspicion that the dark universe was intent on heaping misery on her without letup. Deaf to her exhortations, her husband sat on his haunches by the door, staring blankly into the orange pall of the afternoon, smoking the last of his Champion cigarettes, drinking weak coffee. Every now and then, the thick cesspool stench from the river nearby, where children swam with abandon amid f loating diapers, broken twigs and dead cats, would rise up to her nose and make her stomach lurch. A termite-infested door framed the silhouette of her husband, whose back was turned to her, puffing smoke, making him appear as if his hair had caught fire. Faint ripples formed on the surface of the coffee when he put down the cup on the f loor to his left. Neither she nor he paid attention to their infant son who was bawling like an agitated monkey in their cot. She was already running late; at this rate, she would not have enough time to change into this days’ outfit before Mr. Arcega, her employer, arrived home from his office. Quitting the search, hoping she’d left that lipstick somewhere in Mr. Arcega’s house, brimming with unspent fury, she picked up her bag and went out of their shanty, a whirlwind upsetting her husband’s cup, her face half-made up, lips contrastingly pale—a sullen, charging mask. The heels of her stilettos stabbed the dirt road, leaving a trail of punctures on soil wetted by the recent rain. She could not shake off the image of Mr. Arcega f lying into a rage on account of her failure to follow everything to the letter, and she shuddered at the prospect of getting fired. Preoccupied, her eyes cast down, she traced a beeline on the path from which the entire world seemed to emerge before morphing into a wall of incoherent blur, and this was why she didn’t notice the dog lying in the middle of the road. She was jolted back to reality by the creature’s growls and barks, and the first thought that crossed her mind was how ugly it was. Emaciated, whatever was left of its fur was crawling with ticks and f leas. It was barking madly at her, trying to bite into her f lesh, as if by doing so it will be able to transfer some of the excruciating pain. Then a gate opened to let out a fat lady who started shouting at her, “Slut! Slut! Go away, you slut!” and called the dog by an invented name. Whimpering, the dog turned back and limped toward the fat lady, who then gave her the finger. Dazed, catching her breath, without any idea what to feel, she proceeded to cover the remaining distance to the street corner, where she f lagged a jeepney that would take her to Mr. Arcega’s house. Strange forms and frenetic shadows reeled, recoiled and collapsed unto themselves inside her mind, unveiling a terror more horrifying for its indeterminacy. A malevolent sheen was cast on everything, pulsing to the rhythm of her nervous heartbeat, imputing cruel intentions to otherwise innocuous people, places and things. For the duration of the trip, she kept avoiding looking at her fellow passengers and kept her eyes glued to the f loor, except when she swept a glance over the jeepney’s innards after settling in a seat at the rear. Opposite her, two teenagers still in school uniform held each other’s hands, the girl’s head propped on the boy’s right shoulder. On the seat nearest the driver to her side, she heard a faint rustling inside a perforated box and then the subdued cackling of hens. An old man with white mustache who was sitting at the right-hand side of the driver was coughing loudly, spitting a mixture of saliva and phlegm out of the open side of the jeepney. She felt their twisted grins aimed at her. She calculated the time left for her to prepare everything before Mr. Arcega arrived: a little over ten minutes for the rest of the jeepney ride, less than an hour to prepare dinner, thirty to forty minutes to look for that lipstick, freshen up and change into that dress. She was thinking: perhaps, there’s a chance, however slim, that she would make it just in time. With the key Mr. Arcega gave her, she let herself inside his three-storey house, a house that she only saw in dreams and magazines, which she can now embrace with a twisted sense of appropriation—because, why not?—although she still lacked the vocabulary to name everything in it (and thus,

in a sense, cannot entirely possess all the fixtures, the odds and ends, the wistful luxury). Throwing her bag onto a chair, she wasted no time and proceeded carefully to scour the house for that lipstick (called Bobbi Brown or something, she must check with the long note Mr. Arcega gave her, in case she couldn’t find it and be forced to buy another one). She finally found it inside the bottom drawer of the Hoosier cabinet on the third f loor; she remembered now that she put it there yesterday because that’s where she placed the clothes she took off upon arriving for work, making a mental note to pick it up together with the clothes when she heads for home. When she finished cooking dinner, she fetched her bag from the couch, fished out her makeup kit and, proceeding to the first f loor bathroom, retouched her face, although she now emerged with the bright red smear on her lips taking out the sullenness from the mask. From her bag she got out a wig fashioned into a light brown bob and went upstairs to step into the red chiffon dress she took from the wardrobe. She looked at herself in a tall mirror, smoothened the creases on the dress with the f lat of her hands, and saw an elegant woman smiling sweetly back at her. When she heard the wheels of a car crunching gravel as it was being parked in the garage, she quickly ran downstairs, opened the door to a man in a business suit—Mr. Arcega—kissed him on the cheek and gestured toward the dining table, where a steaming banquet was already prepared. He asked, “What’s for dinner?” even though he had perfect knowledge of what to expect when he came home every night. With slightly trembling hands, she unfolded a piece of paper and ran a finger from the top of the page to the point where a list indicated what to serve for today’s dinner; afterwards, she laboriously recited a long string of food names, her tongue tripping on most of the French. It was the musky smell of his perfume that alerted her to his discomfiting closeness: soon there was his hand caressing hers, then his embrace holding her in place from behind, then his lips playfully grazing the back of her neck. She said, not in so many words, and as softly as possible, that he must be already tired, that it was better if he eat first and then take a quick bath. They settled in their seats, with dinner conversation consisting mainly of her tentative questions and his patronizing answers. She kept consulting the folded piece of paper—she

hasn’t reached the stage yet where she could extemporize with confidence—but she was starting to learn, or at least that was what she told herself. Hand in hand, they went upstairs, toward the master bedroom. While Mr. Arcega was taking a bath, she could hear drizzling water from the shower; it was like a well-played nocturne dedicated to things to come. She cast her gaze on the window, where a segment of the city’s scaly hide appeared to be trapped forever, although it was accorded that illusion of agency with a multitude of variations—night and day, drought and f lood, sin and virtue, filth, crime, birth, old age, death—all of which, when one comes to think of it, are in fact truly inescapable. She approached the window to pull down the curtain, and, turning to the dresser, picked up a framed picture, traced the borders of its frame with her forefinger, the cover glass glinting from the f luorescent light overhead, distorting the image inside In the picture was a beaming Mr. Arcega, two to three years younger, his arms wrapped around his wife’s—Mathilde’s—waist. Mathilde, who was captured in the picture smiling a week before the fatal car accident, was wearing the same red chiffon dress, her hair the same light brown bob of her wig. Her lips twitched to form an imitation of the woman’s smile in the picture—the smile of the dead. The resemblance was uncanny. Soon it was time, and today was one of those days. After Mr. Arcega stepped out of the bathroom, she walked toward him, and with one swift motion removed the towel from his waist and began to dry his hair, his chest, his waist, past his growing member to dry his legs, his feet, and all the while she was peppering him with kisses, the coldness of the water droplets on his skin and the warmth of his f lesh meeting at the juncture of her lips, which in turn smeared with bright red the territory it has explored and taken as its own. While all these were happening, Mr. Arcega mumbled his wife’s name, softly at first and then later with urgency. The name soon took over her, enveloping her like some invisible amniotic sac, compelling her to smile in response, a smile that, obscured partly by shadows, was a perfect replica of the woman’s smile in the picture. Yet that night, something happened for the first time in their relationship, or whatever it was fit to call their setup. In bed, both of them now com-

pletely naked, she felt something hard, warm and throbbing entering and leaving her being in rhythmic fashion. She froze in terror, muttering her protestations, but quickly a hand stif led her cries. The world now seemed to be all grunt, heave and push, and the world now seemed to be an enormous paper-like creature with folds and creases that has come to crush her under its weight, and the world was now a-shudder as he came inside her. She felt empty, as if her soul has been pounded out of her, and after an hour or so she lay there, staring at the f litting shadows that swept the ceiling (which seemed to be closing in on her), oblivious to Mr. Arcega’s panting and a faint but lingering smell that suggested ammonia. Perhaps something inside her should have revolted, in fact during her first few days she had almost quit, but now there was no recourse other than to accept everything as part of the natural order of things. She got out of bed and staggered toward the bathroom. A steady stream gushed from the faucet and swirled in the sink down the drain, and with her cupped hands she brought water to her face. Gasping, she looked at her naked self in the mirror, yet only managed to capture her ref lection for a split-second before it was blurred by gray tears. She dressed, now in her usual clothes, and went downstairs to get her bag, and, as a matter of course, to take the one thousand-peso bill Mr. Arcega has placed under the conch shell that served as paperweight on the cabinet near the grand piano. The early morning air greeted her at the door, cold, biting cold. Unknown forms and shadows still stalked her on her way home, but now she didn’t feel out of place; instead, she felt certain there was a place for her in the darkness. She imagined the world being bent into her will, the universe existing merely as a piece of paper that can be crumpled or folded into shape. She walked past the street corner, past the limping dog and into her house, retrieved her husband’s bolo under their cot, looked long and hard at the two figures sleeping soundlessly under a threadbare blanket, and again went outside to meet the newborn day. Shortly before dawn, the fat lady woke to the sound of piteous howling. She scrambled out of bed and through the window saw someone, a woman, hacking repeatedly at the body of a dog.

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Sunday, September 24, 2017

Burial in Marawi Red dimpled f lesh where a tooth was pulled, isn’t the pit like a grave-hollow-the body fills with itself, sealing the lesion and, along with it, the pain of removal. But in Dalipuga, honeycomb crypts grow black and bitter with every ill-fitting casket deposited in no order, for every candle lit is for all and no one. They are bodies unclaimed and their tombs, nailed shut, an open wound.

By Anne Carly Abad

Womb I have this monster to thank for letting me gestate it over years of regarding myself in the mirror, alive long before I had my child— claws for eyes to catch on f laps of my post-birth skin. It made me pull at my hide stretch it out for all to see don it over my head, like a heavy blanket before anyone could unwelcome my change I was deaf to unkind words.

Deliverance Men in masks plant bullets into their heads— someone’s son, someone’s daughter— mask their faces with layers of tape and a note that names crimes alleged. Bodies are retrieved from streets and dark alleys. The parents find a familiar mark. Criminals are named and buried. I cannot devour you, my child, not like the wild dams do. If only a lake were a womb I could entrust you to its waters. You would swim among gentle reeds; cho os e t he t i me of you r emergence.

What We Tell Our Girls Tell her of the gap between her teeth and she will smile less. Call her natural cavity empty and she will think herself hungry; she will seek herself full have her fill bear the child that she must she must have. Finally, tell her of her cracks as if she were a jar of clay number the jagged lines traveling up her belly. Once more she will believe herself broken.

A Stranger I could no longer tell dream from day a snake molts a chick sheds its f luff the white of a nail breaks off the child is out of my body it cries as I hold it to breasts dry of milk and when Mother takes it it ceases wailing in passing, I watch for I must go about my day what of that job I lost? or that call I have to make?

Tourism&Entertainment A10 Sunday, September 24, 2017

BusinessMirror

Editor: Carla Mortel-Baricaua

Transfiguration Chapel, a favorite backdrop for pre-nuptial photo-ops

Entrance to a secret garden invites visitors to wander

Kois add that playful touch to the calming scene

Damires Hills in Janiuay

Ephrathah Farm Resort in Badiangan

Midway Hills in Passi City