Manila Standard - 2016 October 09 - Sunday

Zambo bombing foiled

By Florante S. Solmerin

VOL. XXX • NO. 239 • 5 SECTIONS 20 PAGES • P18 • SUNDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2016 • www.thestandard.com.ph • editorial@thestandard.com.ph

TWO members of the extremist Abu Sayyaf Group, one of them carrying P5.3million government reward money for his capture, were

STILL SHOULDER TO SHOULDER.

arrested Friday which the police said foiled a terrorist plan to bomb the Zamboanga Hermosa Festival, security authorities said.

The two suspects, one of whom was involved in the Next page

Lorenzana: New arms sources not that simple

Filipino and American troops undergo what could be the last military exercise with the United States in San Antonio, Zambales during the ongoing Philblex amphibious landing exercise. AFP Photo

THE Armed Forces of the Philippines may face operability issues if it pursues President Rodrigo Duterte’s plan to procure arms from Russia and China instead of the United States, according to Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana.

“I think it will be a problem, if we decide to procure military equipment from Russia or China,” Lorenzana said.

“If just firearms, it’s easy to operate. But if sophisticated equipment, there we will have a problem because sometimes the technology [is] not the same. But we will find out if our end users can use it here,” he said, explaining Next page

Narco fight now enters third phase with P1.45b

By F. Pearl A. Gajunera and John Paolo Bencito THE war against drugs will soon enter its third phase— that of rehabilitating arrested drug users – and only China has offered to help the government which on Saturday announced the allocation of more than P1.45 billion for its National Drug Rehabilitation Program.

Speaking before a conference of banana exporters in Davao City, Duterte lauded China for quietly helping the country without fanfare for itself nor loud criticism before the international community.

He said China is already about to complete a drug rehabilitation facility inside the military’s Fort Magsaysay in Nueva Ecija that can house 1,400 drug addicts from the different parts of the country.

“China is about to complete it. No boasting, no news, no publicity. It’s about to be

Euro envoy lauds Rody’s peace tack GOIN’ BANANAS.

By Sara Susanne D. Fabunan

T

President Rodrigo Duterte tells banana exporters in Davao City that he is planning to create a new agency to attend to the needs of the industry which is the second biggest dollarearning produce of the country after coconuts.

Malacañang Photo

HERE have been many changes since the start of the Duterte administration 100 days ago, including new ideas, new policies, new language and many interpretations, European Union Ambassador Franz Jessen said in an open letter posted on social media.

“One hundred days passed very fast, lots of changes, new policies, new language, and many interpretations of statement and development,” Jessen said on the Facebook page of European Union delegation in the country.

“The ongoing peace process remains an area where President Duterte may have an early and very important breakthrough,” he said, as peace negotiators in Oslo, Norway announced on Saturday that there has been substantial progress in the ongoing talks.

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Rody eyes new agency for bananas

AFTER China lifted its ban on the importation of banana and pineapple from the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte pushed for the creation of a new agency to focus on the development of the banana industry, the second biggest foreign currency earner of the country after coconuts.

“It’s a highly competitive world today and everybody is into the business of money and that is why there is a lot of competition going on,” Duterte said during the National Banana Congress in Scan this icon to view Davao City. the PDF

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Digong: Improve or I’ll break up telco duopoly

By John Paolo Bencito EVEN President Rodrigo Duterte is not spared the aggravation caused by the poor service of telecommunication carriers, leading him to warn he would open up the telco industry if the existing duopoly does not improve its services.

“Whenever I send a text message, I have to wait so long for a reply. I even fall asleep and the text will only arrive when I wake up in the morning. I’m trying to be patient about that,” Duterte told Davao City folk.

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The President warned both PLDT-Smart Communications of the Salim Group of Indonesia and Globe Telecom of the Ayala family— the two principal telco players in the country— that he would encourage foreign investments to compete with them if they don’t improve.

“You have no competition. If you do not do it right, you wait.

I’m going to China. I’ll open up everything for competition,” he said.

The PLDT and Globe groups had earlier acquired the telecommunications business of

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MILLENNIAL IN POWER. San Juan Vice Mayor Janella Ejercito Estrada outlines her own antidrugs program, which she even augments with her own money.

Sonny Espiritu

Millennial ups own drug war SAN Juan City Vice Mayor Janella Estrada has shifted to higher gear her Jobs. Education. Livelihood and Sports (Jels) advocacy with her own money while focusing on the anti-drug campaign in line with the national administration’s unrelenting drive since the first week of July.

Estrada, who chairs the city’s anti-drugs abuse council, earlier warned drug users who surrendered to police authorities they would be arrested, Next page

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Health rejects legalized weed

By Leilani Junio

T

HE Department of Health does not believe that legalizing marijuana is necessary amid the claim of actor Mark Anthony Fernandez, who was arrested for possessing marijuana last week, that he is using marijuana to help prevent cancer.

DoH Secretary Dr. Paulyn Jean B. Rosell-Ubial said they do not subscribe to the idea of legalizing marijuana in order to provide access to it by those in medical need of the controlled substance.

“We, in the medical community, believe that legalizing a product [like marijuana] is not the way to go,” Ubial said in an interview.

She added that there is no need to legalize marijuana or cannabis because it can already be availed in the country by those needing it for medical purposes by simply seeking a permit from the Food and Drug Administration.

“The FDA Law right now pro-

Rody...

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“Maybe, just maybe, the Philippines will make it big in the agricultural area,” he said, noting that very tight competition in the new industrial sector is expected over the next 30 years.

Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Piñol said the President favors a law enacted by Congress over a proposed Executive Order which called for the creation of a Banana Development Council.

Piñol said that the new agency will oversee the development, research and marketing of Philippine bananas and support the move of banana exporters to ask Congress to enact the Banana Industry Act of 2016.

Duterte said his efforts to reach out to the different rebel groups would have a big implication on the banana industry and other agricultural activities.

“Banana farming is really in Mindanao. But if you have rebels bothering you and even burning your equipment to extort money, your business will be affected,” he said.

The Chinese government has lifted the ban on the import of bananas coming from the Philippines after destroying more than 35 tons of bananas from the Philippines valued at $33,000 last March, and eventually suspended 27 exporters.

The bananas were destroyed in Shenzen, a major entry point for Philippine bananas, after notifications of non-compliance.

Last year, the Philippines exported 448,000 metric tons of bananas to China valued at $157.5 million.

Meanwhile, Piñol said Chinese Ambassador Zhao Jianhua said his country was also interested in high-end fishery products from the Philippines including lapu-lapu, crabs, shrimps, prawns, and tuna.

China is also bound to increase imports from the Philippines particularly on high value commercial crops such as mangoes, coconut and dragon fruit, among others.

The Philippines remains the second largest producer of bananas worldwide, next to Ecuador, and it continues to supply 95 percent of the total banana demand for the Asian market.

“The lifting of the ban on banana and pineapple exports will come as a big relief to the agriculture sector which registered a negative performance of .4 percent in the first quarter of 2016,” Piñol said.

John Paolo Bencito

Millennial...

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shamed in public and booted out of the city if they continued their illicit activities.

According to Estrada, 62 of 69 surrenderers had tested positive for illegal drug use in a lightning drug test last month.

The vice mayor, who presides over sessions of the City Council, told surrenderers to “stop taking illegal drugs lest I ask the police to arrest you.”

vides access to drugs and medicines that are not registered in the Philippines for compassionate use,” Dr. Ubial explained.

FDA Circular No. 2014-009 allows the agency to provide Compassionate Special Permit to patients needing to use drug products that are not legalized in the country.

The Health chief said that the physician of a patient needing marijuana for treatment is the one required to apply for a permit with the FDA. To note, Republic Act No. 9165 or the Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act of 2002, includes marijuana resin, marijuana resin oil, and marijuana as among those considered as ille-

gal substances.

There have been several medical anecdotes which indicate that marijuana is capable of treating cancer, multiple sclerosis, pain, glaucoma, and epilepsy.

On the context of legalizing marijuana or not, the Health chief said they are leaving the issue to the country’s lawmakers.

“On its legalization, that matter is already up for Congress to decide,” Dr. Ubial said.

House Bill No. 180 or the Philippine Compassionate Medical Cannabis Act has already been refiled by Isabela 1st District Rep. Rodolfo Albano.

Meanwhile, Dr. Ubial clarified that using marijuana for medical purposes does not include its raw form.

She said the forms of marijuana used for medicinal purposes are those that have undergone scientific processing.

“It has its medicinal uses but not in its raw form. The ones actually allowed are those that have already been extracted of its medicinal component,” she added.

Using marijuana in its raw form, according to the DoH head, carries more danger of developing cancer and other illnesses. PNA

Euro...

standing of life in the Philippines,” he said.

From A1 Jessen also assured the public that the EU-Philippines strong Jessen expressed hopes that cooperation continues with the the ongoing second round of successful hosting of the first peace talks in Oslo between the EU-Philippines Business Summit Philippine government and the which was attended by 300 busiCommunist Party-led National nessmen nationwide.

Democratic Front of the PhilipIn an interview on Friday, Jessen pines will reach an agreement said there are ongoing programs soon. with the Philippine government, “This week, talks continued in such as Access to Sustainable EnerNorway and we all hope that an gy Programme (ASEP), which aims agreement will soon be reached to provide clean energy solutions between the different parties, so for 100,000 households or 500,000 that needed peace and stability in people living in remote areas.

Mindanao can be used as a basis “The financing agreement for further developments in Mind- specifies that there is timeline anao and the Philippines,” he said. but this will run for 3 to 4 years. It Jessen said he has been refus- depends on how far the money is ing to comment on Duterte’s being spent and getting into the rhetoric since he assumed office community in need,” Jessen said. because Duterte has just started Jessen also assured that the and needs more time to craft gov- funding will continue if the Philernment policy. ippines needs any development “Part of the task of an ambas- assistance. sador is to understand, as well as “I think that there’s a need for possible, changes, new ideas and development assistance in the views within the host country,” Philippines and we work hand in Jessen said. “You know that one hand with the government and way I try to learn is by reading lit- we identified the different objecerature from and about the Philip- tives and targets that we are setpines.” ting together with different de“This week I felt I had to be more partments,” Jessen assured. hands on, so I did three things: I He also said that as long as the found a street vendor who sold Philippines is accepting their asbalut, and bought; I ordered a bar- sistance, the EU programs will ong and I started Tagalog. continue.

“Time will show how and if eat“My impression is that the Philing traditional Philippines dishes, ippines is still welcoming our dewearing traditional Philippine velopment assistance and that clothes and speaking the national there’s still a need for the support language will help my under- from Europe,” he added.

CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY. Benguet Corp. and Manila Standard chairman Philip Romualdez greets President Rodrigo Duterte upon the President's arrival at an official function in Davao City on Friday.

Zambo...

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Sipadan kidnapping 16 years ago, were caught in possession of one-pound trinitrotoluene (TNT) explosive and other bombmaking components.

Police said the two suspects will be transported eventually to a court in Pasig City for trial.

The arrest coincided with reports from Davao City that Mayor Sara Duterte has commended the reported arrest of the suspected perpetrator of the deadly Davao explosion on Sept. 2, which left 15 people dead and 69 others wounded.

In a statement, Duterte said the arrest was a “welcome development,” and a step closer to giving justice to the victims of the blast.

Duterte said: “The arrest of the suspected perpetrator of the Sept. 2 bombing in Davao City is a welcome development to the operations of our law enforcers for their immediate capture.

“This development is commendable as we vow to expeditiously give justice to the 15 victims who died and the 69 others who were wounded in the blast.”

In Zamboanga City, Regional Police director, Chief Supt. Billy Beltran, identified the two suspected ASG members as 64-yearold Abdul-latip Talanghati alias Latip Sihata and Tatang, and his son, Albashrie alias Abu Tarik and Tagalog, both residents of Barangay Luuk, Banguingui (formerly Tongkil town) in Sulu.

Beltran said the suspects were arrested by operatives of the Re-

gional Intelligence Division at about 9:30 p.m. Friday while serving an arrest warrant in Barangay Sta. Barbara in Zamboanga City.

Beltran said the father and son have standing warrants of arrest for kidnapping and serious illegal detention issued by a court in Pasig City.

Beltran said the elder Talanghati has a P5.3-million cash reward for his arrest for his involvement in the kidnapping of 21 people— 10 Europeans, nine Malaysians and two Filipinos— on April 23, 2000 in the Sipadan Diving Resort in Malaysia.

The hostages were herded to the deep forest of Sulu and were released in batches several months later in the same year.

Supt. Rogelio Alabata, public information officer of the Police Regional Office 9 (PRO9), said before the suspects were arrested, police received an information the “ASG [was] planning to conduct atrocities in the City of Zamboanga.”

With this available intelligence report, Alabata said Supt. Ferjen Torred and his team worked on it to trace the whereabouts of the unknown suspects.

The intel team later traced the location of the terrorists in Barangay Sta. Barbara, beside the building of the Land Transportation Office.

Torred’s after-operation report shows the terrorists yielded one pound net high explosive TNT, detonating cord and time fuse.

Beltran said police obtained information the suspects were planning to disrupt the Zamboanga Hermosa Festival celebration before their arrest.

Chief Superintendent Camilo Pancratius Cascolan, chief of the PNP’s directorate for operations, has encouraged local government units to build their own rehabilitation centers.

Cascolan said the number of addict surrenderers have decreased due to the lack of rehabilitation centers in the country.

“They [drug surrenderers] are confused on surrendering because we do not have enough rehab centers,” he said.

But the government has allotted more than P1.45 billion to assist in the implementation of the National Drug Rehabilitation Program, to support the war on drugs, the Social Welfare Department said Saturday.

The proposed fund allocation, a total of P1,452,982,078.34 will be used in the creation of staff requirements of the DSWD Central Office, 18 Field Offices and 81 Social Welfare and Development Teams Offices, beginning October to December 2016 and January to December 2017.

Also included in the budget are fund for a Cash for Work (CFW) and the Sustainable Livelihood Program (SLP) to provide assistance to the recovering drug dependents along with other psychosocial programs of DSWD. The program targets 376,916 estimated drug surrenderers for the months of October to December 2016 and another 41,708 estimated surrenderers from January to

December next year.

Under the Phase III of the ‘war’ on drugs, the Health Department, along with the PDEA, PNP, BJMP, DILG and DDB will conduct screenings and referrals for appropriate services and provide needed support for those who will surrender and willing to rehabilitate.

The next stage of the drug rehab program will focus on a community-based and holistic recovery and rehabilitation program to make the community itself a “rehabilitation center” for the drug pusher, with the PNP, DSWD, Tesda, DILG and the DoH taking lead.

The last stage provides a wide array of after-care services to strengthen their rehabilitation and reintegration to the society.

that the US equipment currently operated by the Philippines may not be compatible with different foreign technology.

“The end user on the ground, the cutting edge of the military...

should decide what would be bought,” Lorenzana added.

For one, the ammunition that China and Russia can provide are not compatible with the firearms of the AFP, he said.

Lorenzana said he has been instructed by Duterte to see “what’s best” in terms of buying arms from China and Russia.

“The President is also [keen] on getting some equipment from China and/or Russia. He gave me instructions to visit these countries in the near future to check out what they are offering to us,” he said.

Despite interoperability issues with China and Russia, the defense chief said that the country can also

buy missiles from other countries like Germany, Israel, South Korea and France.

“Many ambassadors have come to me offering a lot of equipment. I see this as a healthy development with our relationship with other countries. They are offering to sell to us,” Lorenzana added.

She told the Manila Standard her Jels advocacy, begun when she was still a member of the City Council, would be continued regularly now.

She said she would be spending her own money on this program since the official budget is limited.

As a councilor, Estrada, daughter of Senator Jinggoy Estrada, launched livelihood projects and distributed food carts to the poor in the 21 barangays of the city, known as the site of the first battle of the Katipunan in the latter part

of the 20th century.

She reiterated her determination to remove all addicts and drug addiction in what has since become a highly urbanized city, which line she kept repeating with stiff upper-lip during the campaign for the May 9 elections.

Estrada said she has pushed for alternative ways to help rehabilitate surrenderers in the barangays with different clusters for trainings and seminars.

According to her, the surrenderers do zumba—in previously designated areas, with police se-

curity nearby—an aerobic fitness program featuring movements inspired by various styles of Latin American dance and performed primarily to Latin American dance music but has made inroads in the Philippines.

Surrenderers who failed to finish their elementary and high school education in the lower rungs are given a chance to study, using the alternative learning system offered by the Department of Education while those who did not finish higher education are given livelihood trainings.

Every weekend, Estrada said surrenderers are given drug counselling and pieces of spiritual advice, hoping the menace of drug addiction will be eradicated as soon as possible in the smallest city- in the metropolis which has been described as a “Rising City of Excellence.”

On the main, Estrada pointed to poverty as the main problem in San Juan, stressing the highest concern of the local government, led by Mayor Guia G. Gomez, is to battle head-on this problem.

Honor Blanco Cabie

Narco...

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completed,” he said. “”Four million drug addicts are no joke. We are not a rich country. It is only China who has helped us.”

A Chinese philanthropist who has been donating funds for school buildings in the Philippines, particularly in Mindanao, donated the funds for the construction of the Nueva Ecija facility.

Experts have been concerned at what the government will do with arrested drug addicts and the police has encouraged local government units to invest in their own rehabilitation facilities.

Lorenzana:...

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John Paolo Bencito

The highlight of the Zamboanga Hermosa Festival, which started Oct. 1, is the feast day of Our Lady of the Pillar, the most revered saint of Zamboanga City, on Oct. 12. \The arrest of the suspects came four days after local police operatives arrested three suspected ASG bandits near a pension house in Zamboanga City.

The suspects were caught in possession of a time fuse; two detonating cords; two blasting caps; three fragmentation grenades; a .45-caliber pistol with three magazines of ammunition; two motorcycles; and cellular phone batteries.

Beltran urged the public to continuously support and cooperate with the police by providing timely and relevant information on any wanted person and terrorist who may be hiding in their respective places.

He said they can report the presence of any person acting suspiciously to the nearest police station or to PRO-9 hotline 0917577-19-97.

The Armed Forces of the Philippines on Friday announced the arrest of the unidentified suspect in Davao City’s most popular night market.

But Duterte stressed the job did not end in the arrest because authorities must still dismantle terror groups in the country.

“It is, however, important for us to remember that the arrest must ultimately lead us to the dismantling of terror groups in our midst or result in the failure of more senseless acts of violence and extremism,” Duterte said. With PNA and Pearl Gajunera

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San Miguel Corp. for P70 billion, including SMC’s Vega Telecom Inc., New Century Telecoms Inc. and eTelco Inc., with PLDT and Globe getting 50 percent each.

The Philippine Competition Commission, however, asked the Court of Appeals to nullify the deal because the 700-MHz bandwidth of the SMC companies should have been returned to the government and not sold to the PLDT-Globe consortium.

Critics, including Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez, have also questioned the conflict of interest of Informations and Communications Technology Secretary Rodolfo Salalima, who had once served as chief legal counsel and senior advisor of Globe Telecom and senior vice president for corporate and regulatory affairs and managing director of Ayala Corp.

Salalima had earlier proposed that the government established a state-owned telecommunications company to solve the notoriously slow internet connection in the country, said Communications Secretary Martin Andanar.

“The solution eyed by Secretary Rudy Salalima is for the government to either build its own telecommunications company.

Second, for the government itself to remedy the lack of presence of cell sites or fiber optics and; third, bid out frequencies for a third player to make the competition more vibrant,” Andanar said.

The government had earlier claimed that its rules have been wrongly interpreted by PLDT and Globe, causing both telcos to refuse compliance.

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Cheaper peso better for PH T

By Maricel V. Cruz

HE peso’s depreciation against the US dollar is positive overall for the Philippines, a neophyte lawmaker said on Saturday.

Surigao del Sur Rep. Johnny Pimentel, a member of the House economic affairs committee, said it was “foolish” to attribute the peso’s recent weakness to the supposed “political volatility” created by President Rodrigo Duterte’s outbursts against Western powers.

“A weak peso is good for our exporters who earn in dollars. It is also beneficial to our overseas workers and their families here. It is likewise helpful to our booming and highly labor-intensive outsourcing sector that gener-

ates income in dollars,” Pimentel said.

“As long as the peso’s decline is driven by market forces, and the drop is not too big and not too sudden, it is generally favorable to the country,” Pimentel said.

The peso is now hovering at seven-year lows, closing Friday at 48.23 to a greenback.

“It is foolish to attribute the peso’s recent weakness to the purported political volatility created by President Duterte’s outbursts against Western powers,”

Pimentel said.

Pimentel said that two weeks before Duterte assumed office, the chief economist at the Bank of the Philippine Islands actually released a report projecting that the peso would likely hit 50 to a dollar before the end of 2016, the US Federal Reserve prepares to start raising interest rates.

The BPI report was widely published in local newspapers.

“Actually, the peso is not fundamentally weak. The dollar is simply gaining relative strength because there is growing expectation that after years of zero interest rates, the US Federal Reserve will soon start raising rates,” Pimentel said.

He said the US Federal Reserve is widely expected to start jacking up interest rates shortly after the Nov. 8 presidential elections in America, or before the end of the

year.

“Owing to this anticipation, investors around the world, including Filipinos by the way, are starting to park some of their money in dollar-denominated assets, thus, the rising need for dollars.

And as the demand for the dollar increases, its value also climbs against other currencies, including the peso,” Pimentel said.

Pimentel said the peso’s depreciation would provide multinational business process outsourcing firms operating in the Philippines additional incentive to expand their operations here and step up hiring of Filipino staff.

Like exporters, BPO firms in the country sell their services to overseas clients. They generate revenues in dollars, but spend for their operations here, including the wages of their employees, in pesos.

Philippine exporters of merchandise goods as well as BPO firms have gained progressively because of the peso’s steady decline against the dollar over the years.

Based on Philippine Dealing System figures, the peso averaged 42.44 to a dollar in 2013; 44.39 to a dollar in 2014; and 45.50 to a dollar in 2015. From January to September this year, the peso has so far averaged 46.95 to a dollar.

Pimentel played down the potential domestic inflationary impact of a weaker peso.

“Fortunately for us, crude oil and energy prices in general are still somewhat depressed, so even in our fuel suppliers have to spend a bit more pesos to buy every dollar they need to import petroleum products, the impact on local pump prices is negligible,” he said.

Malls agree on Xmas sale regulation

MALL operators have agreed to conduct sales only during weekends amid the expected increase in traffic volume during the Christmas rush.

In a meeting Friday, mall operators and Inter-Agency Council for Traffic reached a consensus that there will be no weekday sales from Oct. 21 to Jan. 9 next year. Mall sales will only be allowed from 12:01 a.m.

Saturday to 11:59 p.m. Sunday to manage the influx of vehicles and shoppers.

The I-ACT is urging mall operators to submit their traffic management plans two weeks ahead of their planned sale.

Data from the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority show that traffic speed along Edsa slows down to 5 kph whenever there is a sale in malls along the major thoroughfare.

Meanwhile, the I-ACT and the Metro Manila Council have agreed to come up with a resolution that will remove window hours for private vehicles traversing Edsa and C5 under the number coding scheme starting

Oct. 31 to Jan. 31, 2017. PNA

Pasig ferry runs again

LA UNION CARES. Abono party-list Rep. Vini Nola Ortega pauses for a groupie with child during a feeding activity at Barangay Canaoay, a beneficiary of Governor Francisco Ortega III’s ‘I Love My Barangay’ program.

Christine Junio

By Joel E. Zurbano THE Metro Manila Development Authority on Saturday resumed its Pasig River Ferry system operation following a massive cleanup of water lilies that clogged the river from Pinagbuhatan in Pasig City to Lawton in Manila.

The carpet of water lilies, according to MMDA officer-incharge Thomas Orbos, prompted the agency to suspend the ferry’s operation last Thursday.

In its latest advisory, the MMDA stated “Pasig River Ferry System resumed operations effective 6:30 a.m. today in all stations.”

With the help of the Pasig River Rehabilitation Center, the MMDA’s clearing operation unit, was able to clear the river of water lilies in two-day cleanup operations.

The water lilies, that clogged the river during rainy season, came from Laguna Lake and it has long been the problem affecting the operation of the ferry river system since the time of then MMDA chairman Francis Tolentino.

Water lilies entangle the ferry’s propeller, preventing the boats from traveling at normal speed. Propellers have to be elevated so that tangled water lilies and even pieces of trash can be removed.

The ferry system covers 12 terminals in Pinagbuhatan, and San Joaquin in Pasig City; Guadalupe and Valenzuela in Makati City; Hulo in Mandaluyong City; PUP Sta. Mesa, Sta. Ana, Lambingan, Lawton, Escolta, and Plaza Mexico all in Manila.

IN BRIEF

14 countries sign Manila Declaration REPRESENTATIVES from 14 countries on Saturday gathered at the World Health Organization’s headquarters in Manila for the drafting and signing of the Manila Declaration on Health and the Environment.

Crafted at the triennial Asia-Pacific Regional Forum on Health and Environment, the Manila Declaration aims to specify the points of collaboration between environment and health authorities within and among member countries.

The Manila Declaration will also help member states meet the United Nation’s sustainable development goals for health and the environment.

Because “urbanization is inevitable,” WHO regional director of the Office for the Western Pacific Dr. Shin Young-soo said urban areas must also develop to accommodate its growing populace.

“We need a lot of work on infrastructure. I don’t have to say that we all observe and see [the] traffic and congestion in Metro Manila. This is all linked with environment and health,” Shin said.

UN Environment Programme deputy executive director and UN Assistant Secretary-General Ibrahim Thiaw concurred and emphasized the need to build smarter and cleaner cities.

House to insert collection items in DoF tax program THE chairman of the House committee on ways and means said it will “just improve” the Finance department’s proposal to lower personal income tax (PIT) and its offsetting measures, instead of overhauling it totally and coming up with its own version.

Quirino Rep. Dakila Qua, the panel chairman, said one of the improvements that the lower chamber will work on would be the inclusion of a provision on tax collection efficiency of revenuegenerating agencies.

“I reviewed the DoF proposal together with Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez and we see the package as well-crafted. However, our comment, we should include col-

lection efficiency measures,” Cua said.

“Our main thrust is to reflect efficiency measures to the bill because critics [of the measure] said it’s too focused on introducing new revenue measures without putting focus to tax administration efficiency measure,” he added.

But Cua said the House will retain value-added tax exemptions for senior citizens and persons with disabilities (PWDs).

“The speaker has made it clear, it is not possible to remove [VAT exemptions for senior citizens and PWDs] and of course we’ll stand by him,” the lawmaker added.

Cua also clarified that the

lower chamber will not produce a new counterproposal bill to substitute the DoF tax reform package.

“It is more like proposed amendments to the [DoF] bill, its not really a counterproposal,” Cua said.

Alvarez earlier said the House would file a counterproposal to the DoF‘s tax reform package as he rejected the agency’s proposed offsetting measures to cover up for the estimated P159 billion in foregone revenues from the planned PIT rates.

Instead of removing the VAT exemptions for senior citizens, PWDs, and excise tax on petroleum, Alvarez said the DoF and

its attached agencies should improve their tax collection efficiency.

“The House of Representatives will not be the rubber stamp of the administration. As I have said before, rest assured that we will always be on the side of the people. We won’t allow this [antipoor] proposal to pass through the House of Representatives,” Alvarez said.

Alvarez had earlier frowned on certain provisions in the proposed tax reform measure submitted by the DoF such as reducing the coverage of the value-added tax exemptions granted for senior citizens and persons with disabilities, as well as an in-

crease in excise taxes imposed on petroleum products.

The proposed DoF measure provides that workers earning not over P250,000 annually will be exempted from PIT. The proposal also seeks to expand the VAT base by reducing the coverage of its exemptions, including privileges granted for senior citizens and persons with disabilities; adjustment of excise taxes imposed on petroleum products; and restructuring the excise tax on automobiles except for buses, trucks, cargo vans, jeeps, jeepney substitutes and special purpose vehicles to cover up the estimated P159 billion government revenue lost.

Maricel V. Cruz

Lufthansa unveils new facility THE Lufthansa Group is set to hire 440 highly qualified consultants to man its newly opened outsourcing office in Alabang, Muntinlupa City.

During the launching of Lufthansa Services Philippines on Friday, Kay Kratky, the group’s German Airline board member and Austrian Airline CEO, said the new office is the result of a joint partnership between two business units of the group— the Lufthansa Global Business Services and Lufthansa InTouch —which provide services in the areas of financial and revenue accounting.

“Lufthansa Group is strengthening its footprint in Southeast Asia and particularly in the Philippines. We already have the Lufthansa Group passenger airline sale office, Lufthansa Technik Philippines, and now, we are pleased to welcome Lufthansa Services Philippines to the family,” said Kratky.

“Manila is now an attractive business location due to its excellent academic educational system, communication infrastructure and extensive busi-

ness know-how in the service industry,” he added.

LSP managing director Sharmini Krishnan said by mid2018 the group’s Manila-based service center will grow to more than 440 staff members working in modern offices for one of Europe’s leading aviation groups.

“Additionally, we are also looking into providing comprehensive accounting services and other business process scope in the near future by recruiting highly skilled consultants catering to different demographics,” Krishnan said.

The German aviation group stated that 250 consultants will join LGBS and perform mainly financial accounting services while 190 customer service consultants will work with LIT and assist passengers flying Lufthansa and any other airline within the Group to book and rebook tickets, make reservations, and process baggage enquiries.

It added once the service center is built up to its full potential, most services will be

provided on a 24-hour basis, 365 a day a year.

LIT and LGBS decided to set up a service center given the availability of highly skilled talent pool in the country.

“Adding a Manila-based service center to our portfolio contributes to the implementation of our overriding strategic goal,” LIT chief executive officer Erik Mosch said.

“The Service Delivery Center in Manila will play a key role in preparing ourselves for future growth,” LGBS senior vice president Astrid Hartmann said.

“We will be able to provide outstanding service and optimize our delivery costs; as a result we expect to expand our business portfolio and attract new customers,” she added.

At present, the Lufthansa Group has operations in the Philippines through Lufthansa Technik Philippines, a joint venture of Lufthansa Technik AG and MacroAsia Corp., offering a wide range of aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul services to customers worldwide.

Joel E. Zurbano

DRAMATIC MILLENNIALS. Students rehearse a dance number for a school program at Malacañang Park in

San Miguel, Manila. Ey Acasio

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SUNDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2016 Francis S. Lagniton, Issue Editor

News

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RELAXING VIGAN.

Horse carriages, locally called caleza, wait for passengers on a cool afternoon in Vigan City, a Unesco World Heritage Center in Ilocos Sur. Sonny Espiritu

PDEA: Many gains in war vs narcotics

By Francisco Tuyay

T

HE government’s intensified war against illegal drugs has made a significant impact on the national drug situation in the first 100 days of President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration, according to the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency.

“When I took over the leadership of PDEA, the President vowed to stop the drug problem in three to six months by all means the law allows. The government’s fight against illegal drugs has never been strongly felt by the Filipinos

until the leadership of President Duterte,” said PDEA Director General Isidro S. Lapeña.

“In response to the President’s marching orders, PDEA focused its operational thrusts towards high-impact operations and

arrests of high-value targets to suppress the supply of dangerous drugs, while stepping up the drug demand reduction efforts in the communities,” Lapeña added.

Lapeña said PDEA, the lead agency against illegal drugs, has conducted 7,928 anti-drug operations that led to the arrest of 8,428 drug personalities, the filing of 7,002 drug cases and the seizure of P8.21 billion worth of dangerous drugs and controlled precursors and essential chemicals (CPECs), from June 30 to Oct. 7, 2016.

“Due to the intensified efforts of these anti-drug units, the first

floating shabu laboratory and industrial-type shabu laboratory were discovered and dismantled.

There were five clandestine shabu laboratories dismantled during the period, compared to the two illegal facilities dismantled in 2015 and three in the first semester of 2016,” Lapeña said.

Some 573.95 kilograms of shabu, the primary drug of choice, have been seized by the authorities, with the highest seizure this year totalling 1,453.46 kilograms, exceeding the yearly seizures from 2010 to 2015.

Lapeña noted these accomplishments despite drug personalities trying to avoid detection and

Poverty promise affirmed

Palace issues Rody itinerary

By John Paolo Bencito A SENIOR cabinet official on Saturday urged government agencies to “make good” on the administration’s pledge to reduce poverty by nine percent by the end of President Rodrigo Duterte’s term.

Despite the Philippines’ commitment under the Millennium Development Goals to halve poverty from its 1991 level by 2015 (from 34.4 percent to 17.2 percent), poverty incidence has declined only a few percentage points to 26.3 percent, National Anti-Poverty Commission lead convenor Secretary Liza Maza said.

Maza said this renders the target to reduce poverty by 9 percent within six years as “ambitious”—but not impossible.

“It would be possible if government reverses decades of anti-people policies and makes a serious effort at what we hold to be the lasting solutions to poverty—the abandonment of neoliberal economic policy and the enactment of genuine agrarian reform and national industrialization,” Maza said.

“Let alone that official figures likely understate the country’s real poverty levels, this means that the economic and social policies of last two decades have largely failed in addressing poverty and have in fact left more Filipinos poor, in terms of magnitude,” she added.

making quick disposals of precursors used to manufacture shabu wherein eight incidents of recovery of abandoned chemicals in expressways were recorded.

For the period, 25 drug dens were closed down nationwide.

Drug dens are one-stop shops that facilitate administration, delivery, storage, distribution, and sale or use of illegal drugs.

Marijuana, the second prevailing drug of abuse, is also under the close monitoring of law enforcers. The confiscation of 558.96 kilograms of dried marijuana leaves during the period has surpassed the seizures in 2014 and 2015.

ROBOT GAMES CHAMPION. Schealana Villanueva demonstrates the ‘sumo’ robots she designed, built and programmed to win the 2016 World Robot Games. She was accompanied by her mentor Melvin Matulac, founder of Pinoy Robot Games. Manny Palmero

PRESIDENT Rodrigo Duterte will be making foreign trips to Brunei Darussalam, China, and Japan this October as he tries to chart his“independent foreign policy” and secure economic and trade deals as he visits neighboring countries.

Duterte’s visit to Brunei was postponed by the deadly explosion in his home city of Davao on Sept. 2, but Malacañang said Saturday Duterte will finally push through with his scheduled state visit to Brunei from Oct. 16 to 18, where he is expected to meet Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah and look into the plight of overseas Filipino workers there.

On board a chartered Philippine Airlines flight, the President will then proceed to China for his much-anticipated state visit there from Oct. 18 to 21, amid the ongoing territorial row between the two countries over islets and atolls in the South China Sea. Aside from meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premiere Li Kequiang to discuss bilateral issues, Duterte is also expected to ink important defense and economic deals with the East Asian country, with which he wanted to partner as he “crosses the Rubicon” with long-time ally the United States. John Paolo Bencito

DoH declares mosquito Public Enemy No. 1 THE Department of Health has declared the Aedes aegypti mosquito as its Public Enemy Number 1 because it brings the triple threat of dengue, chikungunya and Zika viruses, its spokesperson Dr. Eric Tayag told reporters Friday.

“Our campaign for dengue, chikungunya and Zika is only one —against the mosquito capable of transmitting these diseases,” he said, adding with the declaration,

the Health department is focused on asking the public to be “good citizens.”

Tayag noted that more than 146,000 cases of dengue fever have been reported from Jan. 1 to Sept.

24 this year, which is 11.5 percent higher than last year.

As for Zika, he said health authorities are monitoring a pregnant woman suspected of having caught the virus. The Zika virus has

been found to cause microcephaly among babies, a congenital condition associated with incomplete brain development.

Meanwhile, 3,473 suspected cases of chikungunya across the country have been recorded from Jan. 1 to Sept. 24, he said.

He said majority of the cases were reported last week in the Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Rizal and Quezon region.

Tayag said they are expecting the number of cases to drop due to the conduct of the 4S campaign, referring to Search and destroy mosquito breeding sites; Seek early consultation; use Self-Protection Measures; and Say no to fogging.

He emphasized that fogging should only be done through the local government unit if the first S or Search and destroy has been achieved. PNA

IN BRIEF Cops arrest Ping’s fake staff member

POLICE operatives arrested a female extortionist who posed as a staff member of Senator Ping Lacson during an entrapment operation Friday at a prosecutor’s office in Malolos, Bulacan.

Central Luzon police director Chief Superintendent Aaron Aquino identified the suspect as Dina Joson-Castro, who allegedly extorted money from the family of a man who was arrested on illegal gun possession charges.

In his after-operation report, Supt. Ruel Cagape of the Special Concern Unit of the Regional Intelligence Division said Castro received P30,000 from the victims in exchange to fix the case. Three other companions of Castro whom the police did not identify were also arrested.

Before the entrapment operation, Aquino said Castro called him and introduced herself as a staff of Lacson and inquired about the case of a certain Roel dela Cruz but Aquino ordered his men to verify with the office of Lacson and discovered that Castro was not a staff member.

“Castro managed to lure the mother and sister-in-law of Dela Cruz the amount of P320,000 with promises of a speedy resolution of the case,” Aquino said.

Florante S. Solmerin

DILG warns vs barangay post brokers FOLLOWING the supposed postponement of SK and barangay elections, Department of Interior and Local Government on Friday warned the public against a group trying to fool people into believing that they could be appointed temporary barangay chairmen all over the country.

DILG Secretary Ismael Sueno said his office received reports that an organization called National Interfaith Council of the Philippines was allegedly using the name of the DILG and promising them appointments in exchange of P50,000.

The group is reportedly asking interested applicants to email their resume to neccnicophil@gmail.com until Sunday, Oct. 9, 2016.

“The DILG is not in any way connected to NICOPHIL nor have we authorized the said group to recommend OIC barangay captains,” he said.

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SUNDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2016

Adelle Chua, Editor / Joyce Pangco Pañares, Issue Editor

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EDITORIAL

‘Better man tomorrow’

“I

SAID it, I was wrong and I apologize....I have said and done things I regret. These words don’t reflect who I am.”

So said the Republican nominee for the United States presidential contest, billionaire Donald Trump, referring to a video released by the Washington Post that showed him making lewd and disparaging comments about women more than 10 years ago.

In 2005, Trump was on his way to make a cameo appearance at a “Days of our Lives” episode when he happily talked to

a reporter about groping women. “When you’re a star, they let you do it...you can do anything.”

The release of the video has prompted condemnations not just from Trump’s rival Hillary Clinton and Democrats but also from among the Republicans. House Speaker Paul Ryan said he was sickened by what he had heard. John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate in 2008, said “[Trump] alone bears the burden of his conduct and alone should suffer the consequences.” Trump has been disinvited to a party event, reports say.

The release of the video and the billionaire’s apology comes before

the second presidential debate on Sunday night (Monday morning in the Philippines). It would be interesting to know how Trump would defend himself and attempt to answer substantive questions on what he intends to do if he does become president.

Hereabouts, we are no longer strangers to officials making inappropriate, lewd and incendiary statements. With President Rodrigo Duterte, each day is a surprise. As a result, his alter egos hasten to explain what he means, or what they think he means, to an aghast public.

If the reaction is particularly adverse, the President takes it upon himself to apologize, after which he is hailed for

being humble enough to admit his mistakes.

But the people do not need their leader apologizing all the time. Once or twice may show humility, but a habitual taking back of one’s inflammatory language signals a lack of deliberation by someone who should consider every word that comes out of his mouth. Everything we utter in our unguarded moments approximate our true beliefs and the actual state of our minds.

It is tempting to imagine a cozy, colorful conversation between our President and Trump, assuming he wins. Then again, we push the thought out of our minds, because it is just so unsettling.

POP GOES THE WORLD JENNY ORTUOSTE

Troya cuts slices of life on the fringes

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Presscon season LONG STORY SHORT ADELLE CHUA IT’S that time of the year again. I refer to the annual Schools Press Conference organized by the Department of Education and participated in by thousands of young campus journalists.

Whether or not the children actually pursue careers in journalism is another thing. For now, the students who are writers for their school newspapers and generally among the top performers in their class, gather in one school alongside their counterparts and compete in their respective categories: newswriting, editorial writing, feature writing, editorial cartoon drawing, sportswriting,

copyreading and headline writing, photojournalism. There are other collaborative, tech-based categories that have emerged, as well.

The months of September and October are normally for the division-level competitions.

This means that students from within the same cities are pitted against each other. Ten winners are chosen from a city, who will then advance to the regional finals. Again, ten will be chosen who will advance to the nationals. This now provides an opportunity for the students to travel; contest venue for the last stage moves from region to region; last year, the final rounds were held in Koronadal, South Cotabato.

The “presscon” occasions good memories, personal ones. As a high school campus writer I used to compete in the same contest,

under different categories (feature writing sophomore year, editorial writing junior year, and newswriting senior year) and reaching different levels of success. In my time at the nationals, though, the venue was NCR. Not much travel there—but I got to spend a full week billetted at the spacious Rizal High School in Pasig.

It’s more than a contest.

These days, every year for the past six or seven years I have been fortunate to be a speaker/ judge in some of the contest categories. There are many from

the industry who do the same, perhaps out of a sense of civic duty to act as mentors to the young. I do it whenever I can because I see myself in every student who is eager to learn to write better.

The apparent continued links with this event has given rise to some realizations.

Foremost, that school paper advisers are silent heroes. These are the ones who spend long hours after school and on weekends to train the student writers. Sometimes, they fork out money from their own pockets during contest dates when funding from the school is slow in coming.

They also get all the pressure to deliver. And on days when traffic or the weather is bad, they also end up bringing the students home to their worried parents.

And if the adviser is truly something else, he or she can influence the student to pursue a career in the field— as my own late school paper adviser, Reynaldo Binuya, did.

Second, judging is hard. At first glance it appears easy; you’re a professional, anyway, and you are used to deadlines.

But think of the implications of your actions: your decisions can make or break a young person’s dreams. One must not take light the duty of judiciously choosing who deserves to move on to the next level—and who needs more practice.

I have also observed how competitive some teachers, principals and divisions/regions can be. Certainly there must be some form of incentive for finishing among the best in Turn to next page

UNIVERSITY of Santo Tomas literature professor Joselito “Jowie” delos Reyes proves once more the fecundity of his imagination with the publication of Troya: 12 Kuwento.

The book was released close on the heels of his Titser Pangkalawakan and in time for the recent Manila International Book Fair, where Troya sold out on the Saturday of the event.

(Stocks were replenished the following day.)

Delos Reyes has received many awards for his work—the National Book Award for essay in Filipino for Istatus Nation, 2013 Makata ng Taon of the Komisyon ng Wikang Filipino, and the 2013 National Commission for Culture and the Arts Writers Prize for short story in Filipino for three of the stories in this collection.

A condition of the prize was that he had to write nine more stories, bringing the Troya trove to an even dozen. “I almost failed to finish my dissertation because I had to do this first,” he said. “This collection was six years in the making.”

Delos Reyes built the stories on the chess theme. “Chess pieces are the motifs of each story,” he said. “Barangay Pinagpala Namin” is a rook, “Derby” is a bishop, and so on. The tales, set in the Camanava (Caloocan, Malabon, Navotas, Valenzuela) area, feature common folk as protagonists engaged in daily activities.

Another theme that surfaces is gambling. The rook story features “a mystified Lotto outlet,” Delos Reyes says; “Derby” cockfighting, and “Bethany” the card game pusoy. So detailed are the descriptions of the games that the passages referring to these can serve as instruction manuals.

Interwoven with the action of the characters are narratives of corruption and abuse of power and authority by petty officials in marginalized communities.

The burden these aggressions and oppressions place on the survival efforts of the meek and masa are recounted with verisimilitude: Delos Reyes speaks truth to power. There is a sense of him pounding the streets to get his material, inhaling the pavement dust stirred up by his footsteps as he tarries here to talk to a metallizing technician, there to converse with a conman running a text scam.

Turn to next page

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Clinton is leading, and it isn’t because of a debate

By Jonathan Bernstein GENERAL-ELECTION debates rarely cause major changes in voters’ choices. That’s what political scientists believe for the most part. Yet after the first presidential debate on Sept.

26, Hillary Clinton moved back into a strong lead over Donald Trump. Indeed, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecasts, her chances of winning bottomed out on that very day (at 55 percent), and have increased steadily ever since.

So was the first debate a true game changer?

Probably not.

Polls fluctuate all the time in response to events that dominate the news. Sometimes, this is a result of real changes in the race.

For example, once candidates clinch the presidential nomination, they typically pick up same-party supporters who backed one of their rivals in the primaries and caucuses. Then around the time of the conventions, the nominees add another wave of supporters: those who don’t pay much attention to politics and who use the events as signals to start tuning in and choosing a candidate.

But a lot of changes in the polls are predictably ephemeral.

Something in the news that flatters one candidate makes marginal supporters more likely to say they have decided to vote for her or him and more likely to say they will vote, period. It even makes them more likely to answer a survey in the first place. Similarly, bad news about a candidate, if it dominates media reports, will make marginal supporters less likely to admit they have decided, less likely to claim they are certain to vote, and

Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton shakes hands with Republican nominee Donald Trump after the first presidential debate at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York on September 26. AFP

less likely to answer a survey.

All of that can be true— producing noticeable changes in polling results—even if nothing has really changed. And then when the good or bad news fades, polling returns to whatever the “normal” might be.

So most of what we’re seeing in long-term polling trendlines isn’t that a bunch of people are changing their minds back and forth. The underlying race can be fairly stable even while the polls fluctuate. That’s why analysts call these fluctuations “bounces”— they go up and back down fairly predictably. We don’t really know what “normal” is—the equilibrium we would observe if the current news environment was relatively neutral.

What we can observe, however, is which news stories are getting plenty of play. And we know there was a run of bad news for Hillary Clinton in mid-September, centered on her comment that many Trump supporters were “deplorables” (reported on Sept.

10) and her bout with pneumonia (Sept. 11). Not only did those stories linger, but they also produced a polling dip, which was a third piece of bad news.

What happened in late September was the natural ebbing of that cycle, combined with a new round of negative stories about Trump. On the weekend before the first debate, several news articles detailed Trump’s problems with the truth.

At the same time, a series of

reports by the Washington Post’s David A. Fahrenthold and others about questionable practices involving Trump’s businesses and “charity” foundation entered the news cycle, replacing talk of Clinton’s health and “deplorables.”

Several days after the debate, the New York Times ran an article on Trump’s 1990s tax returns.

The almost universal pans of Trump’s debate performance added to that avalanche of bad news. But the lasting story wasn’t the event itself; it was the story Clinton introduced at the debate about how Trump behaved toward a former Miss Universe.

This issue remained in the news because Trump decided to fight a feud over it, and Clinton’s team had had an ad on the topic ready to roll out. Those developments were independent of the debate.

As I said, we don’t know where the polls would be in a period of relatively neutral news coverage.

My guess is that Clinton is leading by something like 4 to 6 percentage points, and has throughout, with most polling surges in both directions shortterm aberrations.

But that’s a judgment call; one certainly could argue that the underlying contest is somewhat tighter than this, and that we’ve had more negative cycles about Trump than about Clinton. You could also say that given a candidate with all of Trump’s liabilities, a neutral information environment would feature quite a few negative stories about him, so we need to build that into our expectations.

The bottom line: The first debate didn’t create Clinton’s current lead. So don’t expect the debates on Sunday or the one on Oct. 19 to be the reason if it changes. Bloomberg

Math, Matter, and the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics EVERYMAN

By Pecier Decierdo THE ancient Pythagoreans, so hypnotized by the power of mathematics to describe the world, formed mystical beliefs about numbers. While other ancient philosophers believed everything was made of water, or fire, or air, the Pythagoreans believed that everything was made of numbers.

The ideas of the Pythagoreans greatly influenced Plato. In his latter work, Plato argued that the concepts of mathematics were more real than the world we can detect with our senses.

No matter how many times you draw a circle, Plato reasoned, those drawings would be nothing but shadows of Real Circles.

Real Circles, Plato said, exist in the “World of Forms”— the Real World.

Modern scientists and mathematicians are seldom as mystical in their views, at least in public (and when sober). Still, the success of abstract mathematical ideas in describing the observable world is something that keeps many of them awake in the wee hours of the morning.

In the case of David J. Thouless, F. Duncan M. Haldane, and J. Michael Kosterlitz, this success became theirs. Thouless, Haldane, and Kosterlitz were awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in physics for their use of mathematical concepts to probe how matter can be made to behave in strange ways.

Using tools from a field of math called topology, this year’s Nobel Prize winners investigated the behavior of matter at very cold temperatures.

What is topology? And what is the relevance of its study

Presscon...

From B1 the country. But teachers and education officials must check themselves every so often – is it truly just about winning and not the journey to become good journalists, per se? They have to be sure they are imparting the right message to the children they train.

to your life? Topology is very closely related to geometry.

Both branches of mathematics are concerned with shapes.

If you were a mathematician, you would describe topology and geometry as the study of spaces. To a mathematician, a space is a set of points with certain properties.

Lines and shapes, which are sets of points, are examples of spaces. There are other kinds of spaces, but for our purposes lines and shapes are good enough.

If both are concerned with shapes, what distinguishes geometry from topology? Geometry is more concerned with the local properties of the shape, such as how far apart different points in the shape are. Topology is more concerned with the global properties of the shape.

That is, topology tries to answer questions like, “what properties of this shape is shared by others?”

One interesting example of a shape would be a sphere.

Think of a globe. The points on the surface of a globe can be described by their latitude and longitude. Since you need exactly two numbers to describe the points on a sphere, we say a sphere is a two-dimensional shape (or, if you were a mathematician, a two-dimensional space).

If you were studying the geometry of a globe, you would be asking questions like, “What is the shortest path from this point on the globe to that other point?” If you were studying its topology, you would be asking questions like, “What makes a globe similar to a cylinder but different from a donut or a bagel?”

The answer to that last question is the number of holes. A globe and a cylinder both have

no holes. A donut has one hole while a bagel has two. Since a coffee cup with a handle has one hole, it shares that property with a donut. In fact, if you had a piece of clay shaped like a donut (what mathematicians call a torus), you can deform it into something that looks more like a coffee cup without messing with the hole in the middle.

The number of holes in a shape is an example of a topological property. A topological property is a property of a shape that does not change when you deform it. You can get a different topological property only when you tear apart or glue together different parts of the shape. Imagine you had a piece of clay shaped like a sphere. The piece of clay has zero holes. To turn it into something with one hole, you need to either punch a hole in the middle or join together parts that were originally far from each other.

This year’s Nobel Prize winners did not need to deform clay or break a lot of coffee mugs to do their research. Instead, they dealt with shapes in the abstract. Using the tools of topology, they dealt with them as spaces. In other words, the globes, donuts, coffee cups, and bagels they studied were abstract sets of points existing only in the World of Forms.

Which is what makes the next step in this story quite surprising.

What Thouless, Haldane, and Kosterlitz did was apply the concept of topological properties, which are properties of abstract shapes, to describe how very cold atoms and electrons behave. And the very cold atoms and electrons don’t need to be related to any donuts or coffee cups. For example, if you get a very thin sheet that can

Finally, like any other adolescent experience, participation in the presscon is always a source of happy thoughts.

You spend some time away from home and feel a measure of independence. You meet people. You gain friends. There is a bit of courtship. I personally know of a couple who met each other during the contest; they have now been married

for almost two decades and have two lovely children. As for exploring new places, it was during the presscon that I got to try the skating rink at the then-newly opened SM Megamall—but that’s betraying my age.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, the youth are sometimes unfairly portrayed as indifferent, entitled and narcissistic. This

conduct electricity and cool it down to almost absolute zero, some of its electrical properties can be mathematically described as topological properties.

In other words, they were able to connect questions about the number of holes in abstract shapes to the amount of electricity a collection of actual atoms can conduct. For example, they showed that since the number of holes in a shape come in whole numbers (0 for a sphere, 1 for a donut or coffee mug, 2 for a bagel), certain properties of a material should also come in multiples of whole numbers. They also showed how these properties could change in a way that reflects changes in the number of holes in abstract shapes.

What’s it all for?

First, the odd behavior of semiconductors was initially just a curiosity. Today, we use those properties to make computers. Who knows what engineers might cook up using the strange properties of matter Thouless, Haldane, and Kosterlitz have studied? Some of them are already thinking about applications like quantum computers. The quantum leap such applications can result in are likely beyond our imagination.

Second, they remind us how important the study of abstract, seemingly esoteric mathematics is. They remind us that the imagination of mathematicians, who are, after all, humans, is just as important in studying the world as our senses and all the telescopes and microscopes we use to improve on these senses.

Plato and the Pythagoreans will be pleased with the choice of this year’s winners.

Pecier Decierdo is a science communicator for The Mind Museum.

contest is proof that the generalization is wrong. Young people can be socially aware and articulate. Their training and experience in campus journalism will ensure they will pursue integrity, excellence and diligence—whatever path they do decide to take later on in their lives. adellechua@gmail.com

EVERYMAN Duterte’s foreign policy shift seen as ‘taradiddle’ by analysts

By Honor Blanco Cabie

yet to officially communicate Duterte’s decision. What has IMMEDIATELY after President been clear is what US Deparment Rodrigo Duterte ended his sen- of State spokesperson John Kirby tence that he would soon end said Washington remains hopejoint military exercises with the ful in moving its ties with Manila United States, Washington said, forward and that the latter will like some thunderclap chasing a remain “committed to meeting” lightning bolt, that Philippine-US significant security obligations. relations are “ironclad.”

Then in a speech early this In San Diego, California, Pen- month in Bacolod City, Duterte tagon chief Ashton Carter said continued his attack on the UnitWashington’s alliance with Ma- ed States by threatening to junk nila, its closest ally in Southeast the country’s Enhanced Defense Asia, remained unwavering Cooperation Agreement (Edca) despite Duterte’s statement to with the US, a pact that allows make matters up with China.

American forces to conduct acOn Sept. 28, the 71-year-old tivities on agreed locations inDuterte said he would soon end side Philippine military bases. joint military exercises with the But while the President’s key United States, in what political men try to explain the former’s observers call a symbolic blow statements, the Communist to a military alliance dating back Party of the Philippines, which more than 60 years. resumes peace talks with the He made the statement before Philippine government in Oslo, several Vietnam-based Filipinos Norway in the second week of in Hanoi, in his usual circuitous October, has hailed Duterte’s style, at the start of a two-day of- statements. ficial visit.

It said as the Duterte adminisDuterte said: “I will serve no- tration tries to promote “an indetice to [the Americans] now, that pendent foreign policy, such war this [military war games in Octo- maneuver exercises by US troops ber] will be the last military ex- are completely anachronistic ercise, jointly Philippine-US, the and should be put to a permalast one.” nent end.”

Senior presidential aides had But while the CPP was getting been blowing a fuse downplay- its statement printed by local ing the President’s appearingly and foreign media, the Chinese tough stance. ambassador to the Philippines But he repeated the statement said a stronger military cooperaon his return to Davao City, add- tion between Manila and Beijing ing the previous joint exercises was in the wind. Interestingly, did not result in technology some political observers have transfer from the US military. noted the soft-pedalled reaction Foreign Secretary Perfecto Ya- of the CPP to the Chinese ambassay and National Security Adviser sador’s statement.

Hermogenes Esperon Jr. separateZhao had said the Chinese and ly dashed, resembling the speed Philippine militaries “need to talk of Lydia de Vega in her prime, to to each other to enhance trust clarify the President’s remarks. and mutual confidence to avoid Yasay, who returned recent- incidents of misunderstanding...” ly from the United Nations in That followed Duterte’s anNew York, told reporters cover- nounced plans to buy arms from ing Duterte’s working visit the China and Russia, which would President “did not say that at all,” allow Moscow and Beijing to have stressing “You have to under- a toehold in the Philippine arms stand the President’s statements market, in which 75 percent of in the context of what he was weapons come from Washington. saying.”

The line of Duterte, scheduled What Yasay pushed forward was to visit China in the third week of that Duterte’s statements were de- October, is that Moscow and Beilivered in a specific context. jing have agreed to 25-year soft That context, according to loans that would allow Manila him, was the President’s earlier to purchase weapons. But some declaration there would no lon- diplomatic and political analysts ger be joint military patrols at say Duterte does not have to the West Philippine Sea to avoid veer away from its weathered provoking other claimants to the ally or use expletive-laden clapdisputed waters. trap lines.

A context, according to political Since the Philippines took the and diplomatic observers, despite One-China Policy—establishing the decision of the United Na- formal links with Beijing and droptions Arbitral Tribunal, after several ping ties with Taipei in 1975— months of hearings and submis- there have been several bilateral sion of documents, that the Phil- exchanges in the different fields. ippines has exclusive sovereign Ditto with Russia, with which rights over the West Philippine the Philippines forged diplomatSea (in the South China Sea) and ic bonds in 1976, without, some that the “nine-dash line” of China, analysts are saying, Duterte havwhich was absent throughout the ing to antagonize its major ally proceedings and refused to recog- the United States. nize the case, is invalid.

Former Senator Francisco TaAt a news conference in Ma- tad himself has asked what ananila, Yasay went to great lengths lysts consider a relevant questo explain that decisions on joint tion. Asks Tatad: “When DU30 exercises between Washington says he wants to move closer to and Manila were made by the China and Russia and away from Philippine-US Mutual Defense the US, what is he prepared to Board, which recommended to give to the two countries and Duterte’s predecessor adminis- take away from the third?” tration the continuation of war In Tatad’s view, shared by fergames up to 2017, stressing this vid political observers, Duterte could be reviewed by the Duterte “seems to have the impression administration after next year. that prior to June 30 this year we Esperon himself told report- had no working relations with ers in Hanoi the President merely China and Russia, and that his armeant to stress this month’s mili- rival alone will open a new path.” tary exercise would be the last That’s bull’s eye or dead center, for the year. according to observers of the It appears, based on state- political and diplomatic theater, ments from the US State Depart- who say the declared shift is ment, that the Philippines has “pure bunk or taradiddle.”

Troya...

From B1

Troya means “Trojan” and the author uses the word here in the context of “Trojan horse.” In the eponymous tale, a decaying horse teeming with virulent microbes is tossed into a stream by a disgruntled former politico to make trouble for the incumbent. The community’s health is threatened, but the dead horseflesh proves difficult to remove; and thereby hangs the tale.

The Trojan horse, in myth, was a large, hollow wooden horse left outside the gates of the city of Troy by the Greeks, who made a big show of leaving it as a gift and departing in their ships. The Trojans, believing the Greeks had left, brought the horse into their city. That night, Greek soldiers hiding inside the horse emerged and opened the city gates to their comrades, whereupon they sacked and destroyed Troy, putting an end to the 10-year war between the two city-states.

In other words, the Trojan horse was a con, one so massive that it

has come down through millennia as a cautionary tale— “Beware the Greeks bringing gifts.” Delos Reyes’ use of this device makes the reader peruse each tale with extra care—is there a swindle or subterfuge here? “Trojan horse” becomes a convenient metaphor for exploring the betrayals perpetrated by politicians, gamblers, and other denizens of the urban landscape upon each other, and, ultimately—themselves.

Delos Reyes is well-known for his humor, and he peppers this collection with one-liners and epithets that provoke, at the least, an upturn of the mouth at a particularly clever zinger. Troya is a worthy addition to the author’s body of work, and an engaging read.

(Disclaimer: I painted the book cover, which was digitally tweaked by a graphic artist for publication.

It’s my first book cover design commission, and I thank Dr. Delos Reyes for giving me the opportunity to extend my capabilities in visual art.)

Facebook: Jenny Ortuoste, Twitter: @jennyortuoste, Instagram: @jensdecember

World

B3

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2016 mst.daydesk@gmail.com

Sino tycoon invades Hollywood W

ANG Jianlin, China’s richest man, has been on a Hollywood shopping spree. As chief executive of the Wanda Group, he’s acquired Legendary Entertainment, producer of “Jurassic Park,” and is in talks to pay $1 billion for Dick Clark Productions, producer of the Golden Globes and other live television events. An earlier purchase, AMC Entertainment, recently announced plans to buy Carmike Cinema, which would create the world’s biggest theater chain.

REVELERS. Festivities usually held in Cinatowns across the globe. Bloomberg When Wang arrives in Hollywood for a highly anticipated visit later this month, he’ll have even bigger game in sight: one of the Big Six Hollywood studios that control as much as 85 percent of U.S. and Canadian box office revenue. If successful, he’ll be the first Chinese national to own one.

That’s aroused worries that Wang and other aspiring Chinese movie moguls may restrict creative freedoms and spread Chinese propaganda in the U.S. and beyond. Last month, 16 members of Congress wrote to the Government Accountability Office asking it to reconsider how foreign investments in the U.S. are reviewed. Since then, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee has added his signature to the letter. Wanda’s entertainment

acquisitions were on the list of worries: “Should the definition of national security be broadened to address concerns about propaganda and control of the media and ‘soft power’ institutions?” the group asked.

At home, it’s true, China operates one of the world’s most formidable propaganda and censorship programs, and tycoons like Wang have succeeded in part because of their willingness to play by its rules. China’s Communist Party has long embraced the idea that the role of art is to advance its interests. In October 2014, President Xi Jinping made that commitment explicit in a speech in which he called on Chinese painters, writers and filmmakers to “fully implement the Party’s art policy.”

Every Chinese artist knows what red lines shouldn’t be crossed; the idea of Tibetan or Taiwanese independence is off-limits, for instance, as are topics that call into question the canonical history of the Communist Party.

More recently, the government has added a few specific bans, including one barring television programming that promotes “Western lifestyles.”

The idea that Wang might be able to export Communist dogma to Hollywood, however, seems fanciful. The most successful Chinese movies tend to be harmless melodramas and martial arts films. So far, this year’s biggest box office success is a comedy about a mermaid assassin who falls in love with the greedy real estate developer she was sent to kill. On those

rare occasions when Chinese filmmakers dabble in propaganda, the films have invariably failed (unless propped up by box office fraud).

Indeed, even on their home turf, Chinese films are no competition for Hollywood, which accounted for nearly 40 percent of China’s box office receipts in 2015 despite rampant piracy and strict limits on the number of foreign films. Wang has openly acknowledged that part of his goal is to obtain U.S. technology and knowhow in order to improve Chinese film making. He has little incentive to transform a U.S. studio into a facsimile of its Chinese peers.

A bigger concern is self-censorship. In recent years, Hollywood studios have become adept at making -- or at least, editing -films that can get past China’s

censors. Some have gone further and rewritten storylines that might raise hackles in Beijing, as when MGM decided to change Chinese villains into North Korean ones in a clumsy 2011 remake of “Red Dawn.” A Chinese-owned studio would no doubt be at least as conscientious about the Party’s sensitivities, if not more so.

Fortunately, the impact would probably be limited. Since the 1940s, Hollywood’s studio system has given way to a blossoming of independent production companies, distribution channels and exhibition formats that give an independent-minded filmmaker many options. A Wang-owned studio could still pass on controversial projects, of course. But shareholders and audiences would look askance if management repeated-

ly missed out on successful films, and at least some filmmakers and talents would look elsewhere if Wanda developed a reputation for asserting a political agenda.

Meanwhile, the proliferation of production houses -- not just indies, but major companies such as Amazon and Netflix -- means that U.S. viewers aren’t likely to be starved for choice.

In theory, Wanda could use its power as the owner of AMC to ensure that large numbers of US cinemas are stocked only with politically acceptable films. But the Justice Department’s antitrust lawyers have required AMC to sell off theaters for competition reasons in the past, and the proposed Carmike acquisition - currently under investigation - may inspire them to do so again. AFP

Starbucks upsizes in Cambodia Lullabies from

Stuffed toy from Starbucks. Phnom Pehn Facebook page

STARBUCKS Corp. is expanding in Cambodia, one of the world’s fastest economies, as the company taps Asia for growth amid a mixed outlook in the Americas.

The Seattle-based coffee chain will open a twofloor, 650 square-meter (7,000 square-feet) store in the capital, Phnom Penh, on Friday to take advantage of a 10-percent annual increase in coffee consumption in the Southeast Asian nation, according to Asia-Pacific President Mark Ring.

“In the long term, we’re positive about Asia,” Ring said in an interview on Thursday. “We’ll continue to look for opportunities over time.”

The share of Asian revenue at the world’s largest coffee-shop chain has

more than doubled in the past two years to 15 percent, putting overseas potential in focus as the US market matures. The company entered Cambodia in December and with the new store will have three outlets in an economy the International Monetary Fund estimates will expand almost 7 percent this year.

Ring said Starbucks is aiming to appeal to a broad base in Cambodia, from tourists to young professionals, and will customize aspects such as the food service to suit local tastes.

The Cambodian footprint remains a fraction of Starbucks’ more than 6,200 stores in China and the Asia-Pacific region.

Cambodia has a population of about 16 million

people and gross domestic product per capita of $1,235, compared with $8,240 in China, according to IMF data. The Southeast Asian nation’s estimated GDP growth is among the top 10 in the world, the figures also show.

Starbucks’ stock has declined 11 percent so far in 2016, compared with an increase of almost 6 percent in the S&P 500 index. The shares are up 38 percent in the past three years, exceeding the 28 percent climb in the S&P 500.

Revenue in the quarter ended June 26 missed analysts’ estimates after same-store sales climbed 4 percent in the Americas, decelerating from a 7 percent increase in the prior quarter. Bloomberg

Peace graffiti, beach trash art BOGOTA--Spray-paint cans in hand, a generation of street artists is covering Colombia’s run-down walls with rifles that shoot heart-shaped bullets and rainbow-colored pleas for peace.

After half a century of conflict, the end of which remains just beyond reach, war and peace have become central themes in Colombia’s graffiti art.

The Colombians’ shock rejection of a peace deal put its negotiators out of the running for the Nobel Peace Prize.

On the streets of Bogota, corncobs that look like grenades and gun barrels sprouting carnations have provided the backdrop as the government and the leftist rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) worked for nearly four years to conclude a historic peace agreement.

DjLu is a graffiti artist known for dotting central Bogota with black-and-white messages of peace.

“I prefer a twisted peace to a perfect war,” said the secretive artist.

DjLu, who prefers not to use his real name, doubles as an art professor at Catholic

University of Colombia when he isn’t out spray-painting public spaces as a self-described “servant of peace.”

“I wanted to send a message that would open people’s minds,” he told AFP of his turn to politically charged graffiti a decade ago.

“I’m simply human, and as a human I think the conflict is absurd.”

The prospect of turning the page on more than half a century stained by violence is increasingly fueling street artists’ creativity in Bogota, where graffiti is surging as an artistic medium.

The city’s mayor from 2012 to 2015, former guerrilla fighter Gustavo Petro, actively promoted graffiti as a public art form.

That stance helped counter the stigma of graffiti as vandalism, and giant murals sprouted up in iconic spots throughout the city.

Today, visitors and fans can even take a graffiti tour, created by Australian expatriate Christian Petersen.

In the Netherlands, every parent has watched bemused as excited kids toss aside gifts to play with the boxes instead. But what

about when they ignore the shells on a tropical beach in favor of plastic bottle tops?

That was the puzzle for Ralph Groenheijde when he and his family visited Costa Rica a few years ago -- a trip that was to spark a passionate crusade to clean up the beaches back home in the Netherlands.

His then two-year-old son paid little heed to the shells, collecting instead dozens of brightly colored bottle tops.

Eventually they used them to create a giant sun mosaic on the sand, before depositing them in a bin.

It was to trigger Groenheijde’s scheme not to just clean up the wide, sandy beaches skirting the coast of The Hague, but also to turn an unwanted “treasure trove” of trash into wacky works of art.

In a play on words, this summer’s creations have been gathered in the new TrashUre Museum, where lost balls and multi-colored plastic spades dangle like decorations from the ceiling.

Candy wrappers artfully adorn a rakish top hat tied DESCENT. A Cathay Pacific Boeing 747-400 aircraft, operating as flight with blue string, and a cas- CX8747, flies over Hong Kong’s former Kai Tak airport (bottom right) on its cade of flipflops makes a final flight over Victoria Harbor on Saturday. The airline retires its fleet of rainbow floor sculpture. AFP 747s. AFP

25 cultures

NEW YORK—The songs’ lyrics are as basic as they get, but also the most universal. Singer Sophia Brous is weaving together lullabies from some 25 cultures, exploring the deeper meaning in how to communicate with infants through music.

“In a funny way, lullabies are the most successful pop songs ever to have existed,” the Melbourne-born musician said.

“They perpetuate themselves through generations because they’re infinitely repeatable, memorable and you absorb them.”

To create “Lullaby Movement,” Brous learned cradle songs in local languages directly from mothers or others in more than 25 communities, including asylum-seekers in the wave of migration from the war-torn Middle East.

The song cycle, set to a flowing backdrop that goes from soothing ambient sounds to bouncy synthesized bass, is dramatized through a loose story line as Brous plays a sleep-deprived girl seeking security as she stands on a pebble beach.

Brous showcased “Lullaby Movement” on Saturday at National Sawdust, a year-old New York music venue with a focus on the avant-garde where the Australian has been named an artist-in-residence.

Brous, who has collaborated with artists including David Byrne of Talking Heads fame and indie pop singer Kimbra, was drawn to lullabies after speaking to an 80-year-old former ballerina from Latvia who poured emotion when relating a children’s song.

“The more that I began to consider them like a repertoire, the more fascinated I became,” said Brous, who remembers lullabies from her own parents.

Brous spent time with refugees including in the Calais “Jungle” camp in France. While stressing that she has done little to address the crisis, Brous found she could quickly relate to migrant children through lullabies in Arabic, Farsi and other languages. AFP

B4

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2016 mstdaydesk @gmail.com.ph

World

Legends rock in Desert Trip I

PIETY

NDIO, United States--Some fans rarely go to shows these days; others sport recent tour T-shirts. But one idea unites the graying crowd at this weekend’s concert of rock all-stars -- this may be the last chance to see their musical heroes.

Desert Trip, which could be the most profitable music festival of all time, is bringing out six acts from the rock canon never seen before together led by the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney.

The three-day festival’s other performers are Bob Dylan, Neil Young, The Who and Roger Waters. Of the artists, all are septuagenarians with the sole exception of Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood -- who is 69.

The fruit of the booking prowess of the company behind Coachella, the annual festival in the California desert that has helped shape youth pop culture, Desert Trip offered nostalgia and a fleeting sense of community for baby boomers.

Instead of crushing standing-room crowds, the festival provided seats and let others bring in lawn chairs; instead of Coachella’s bare-as-much-skin-as-legal fashion rules, Desert Trip’s standard attire was T-shirts and shorts. And, rather than Coachella’s omnipresent smell of marijuana, the attractions at so-nicknamed “Oldchella” included sommelier-selected wines.

“Woodstock for geezers -- that’s what this is,” joked Mike Bench, 64, who flew in from Florida, leaving behind his two dogs with friends as Hurricane Matthew approached.

Beach, who spent 32 years as a radio DJ playing rock classics, was excited not just for the scheduled acts but the prospect of surprise appearances.

“Anybody who’s anybody in the rock world will want to be here,” he said.

Gerri Redpath, 71, has seen Mick Jagger before -- when she was a flight attendant for now-defunct airline Pan Am and served him in first-class on a flight to London.

Redpath, who recalls Jagger as well-mannered, described Desert Trip as her first concert in her 70s.

“I’m impressed that this music has lasted so long,” she said. AFP

A woman helps her son light a candle during festivities in honor of patron saint “San Jeronimo” in Masaya, Nicaragua Friday. AFP

Obama urged to condemn Russia hacking THE US said publicly for the first time that intelligence agencies are “confident that the Russian government directed” the hacking of American political groups and leaked stolen material in order to interfere with the Nov. 8 election.

“These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process,” the Office of Director of National In-

telligence and the Department of Homeland Security said in a joint statement on Friday. “We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”

While intelligence officials had previously said privately that they blamed Russia for the attacks, Friday’s announcement

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puts pressure on President Barack Obama’s administration to respond even as relations with Moscow rapidly deteriorate over everything from Syria and Ukraine to nuclear cooperation.

“We should now work with our European allies who have been the victim of similar and even more malicious cyber interference by Russia to develop a concerted response that protects our institutions and deters further meddling,” said Representative Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee.

The official statement went

on to say that the intelligence community isn’t in a position to confirm that the Russian government scanned and probed state election systems, even though the intrusions in “most cases originated in servers operated by a Russian company.”

While hacking has become a prominent issue in the US presidential race, the agencies said “it would be extremely difficult for someone, including a nation-state actor, to alter actual ballot counts or election results by cyber attack or intrusion.”

Russian officials, includ-

ing President Vladimir Putin, have repeatedly rejected accusations that the government hacks the US The US statement didn’t detail evidence to back up the charges against Russia.

“This is some crap again,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday when asked about the U.S. announcement. “There are tens of thousands of hackers attacking Putin’s website every day. Many are tracked to US territory, but we don’t accuse either Washington or Langley every time,” he said, referring to the CIA’s headquarters near Washington. AFP

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IF Prime Minister Theresa May gets her way on immigration, Victor Villar says he might just leave London.

The 31-year-old Mexican portfolio analytics consultant is among the many foreigners in the City who are reeling from the government’s proposal to force companies to reveal how many non-British workers they hire as a way to push them to put natives first.

“If things get worse because they approve some anti-immigrant policies in parliament, I would definitely consider a job in the US or somewhere else,” Villar, who has lived in the capital for 2 1/2 years, said in an interview. May’s plan is “like shooting yourself in your own foot because many people who come to work here are skilled workers with

graduate degrees.”

Home Secretary Amber Rudd this week proposed to punish banks and landlords who fail to make checks on foreigners doing business with them. It’s part of the government’s strategy to address public concerns about immigration that were laid bare by the UK’s vote to quit the European Union.

A YouGov poll on Wednesday of 5,875 adults found that 59 percent of people support those policies, showing that Rudd and May are in tune with voters. That is of little comfort to the swathes of foreign-born Londoners, many of whom have become naturalized British citizens. For some, there are parallels with pre-World War II Germany.

“I’m horrified by this,” said Paula Levitan, an American

lawyer at Bryan Cave who’s lived in London for 16 years and has acquired a British passport. “I can’t help but flash on the 1930s and early 40s. Are we going to have to wear badges on our arms?”

Youssef Laouiti, a 26-yearold banker born and raised in Britain to French parents, echoes that sentiment. “It’s all a bit ridiculous: It starts with name lists and ends up with people being sent to camps,” he said. “It’s extreme, but a lot of people will confront it, so I’m not frightened” that it’ll become law.

The Nazi parallels went viral on social media after LBC radio host James O’Brien read passages of Adolf Hitler’s autobiography that had echoes in the Home Office proposals. It touched a nerve, highlighting how emotions have been whipped up. AFP

C1

Business

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2016 Ray S. Eñano, Editor / Roderick T. dela Cruz, Issue Editor extrastory2000@gmail.com

Facebook disrupts PH businesses

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F

ACEBOOK says it is out to disrupt Philippine businesses in the same way it has changed how people communicate.

“We want to disrupt the way things actually are by making the way that people, friends and companies connect to each other. We are very frictionless and are riding on this great new technological disruption which is basically all about mobiles,” says Facebook country director for the Philippines Digs Dimagiba.

Facebook, the California-based company founded by Mark Zuckerberg which posted a $3.7-billion profit and $17.9-billion revenue in 2015, is now looking at the Philippines from a business perspective.

With 54 million registered users and more than 30 million active daily Facebook users based on TNS Research, the Philippines is considered as one of the most engaged Facebook communities in the world, according to Dimagiba.

It now wants to monetize the huge following it has in the country.

“We have grown the platform beyond a social media platform to one that is a true business solutions platform,” says Dimagiba. Facebook offers business solutions to enable Philippine companies to reach out to their target audience.

Dimagiba says Facebook business solutions can help in the areas of brand building, generating demand, driving leads or sales and integrated campaigns on TV and Facebook and Instagram. He cites a study showing that three out of five Filipinos purchase a product after discovering it on Facebook.

“The world has changed. The consumer has changed. The biggest disruptor in that change is that we have gone mobile. The Philippines is a mobile first country. It means that for a lot of Filipinos, their first contact with the Internet and going digital is actually their mobile or smartphone,”says Dimagiba.

“For a lot of Filipino businesses, they ought to recognize that insight—that most Filipinos are already on mobile, they are always connected and spending 2 hours and 20 minutes everyday on smartphone mostly on Facebook. What they can do to reach people and connect their brand and business is that they can use the variety of solutions that Facebook actually has in order to connect. All the resources are actually online,” he says.

Dimagiba, who was appointed to the post at the same time Facebook opened an office in the Philippines in April this year, says the rise of smartphones led to the dramatic growth of Facebook users in the country.

TNS Research shows that the top 5 digital services used by Filipinos are Facebook (95 percent), YouTube (92 percent), Facebook Messenger (87 percent), Twitter (54 percent) and Instagram (50 percent).

Filipinos use Facebook 1.7 times more often than television, 4.5 times more than radio and 8 times more than print media, according to the study. Dimagiba says Facebook’s lead is expected to become even wider as mobile phone penetration rate increases in the country.

“We have to accept the fact that we have gone mobile. It is a digital

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg From his Facebook page

world. Some of the things we have learned in school at least from my generation is not the same as this current generation. The best thing is you can actually embrace the change and ride on it,” he says.

“The nice thing about disruption is that it is a positive disruption. We learn that we suddenly move into a completely new space that is not incremental, it is exponential. That is the kind of positive impact that we want to bring to our partners and create value for the Philippines,” says Dimagiba.

Filipinos spend two hours and 20 minutes on smartphones every day, he says. The Philippines is a mobile-first nation with 92 percent of people on Facebook accessing it via mobile devices.

Dimagiba, who studied at Ateneo de Manila University and worked for Samsung and Unilever before joining Facebook, is in charge of working closely with businesses and agencies to help them get more value out of Facebook’s solutions.

Six months into the job, Dimagiba is preparing the Facebook Philippine team to take advantage of the expected spike in online activities of Filipinos during the Christmas and New Year festivities. He says Filipinos now spend most of their media consumption time on Facebook and Instagram, exceeding the time spent on traditional media. Particularly during the months of October to December, there is significantly more activity across all demographics, he says.

He says there is around 30 percent more activity on Facebook during the festive season, beginning as early as September and continues until January of the next year. Early in January, Facebook sees the biggest spike in consumer goods related topics including household, baby and toys, food and beverage, and beauty and personal care, he says.

Dimagiba says companies that have tried Facebook’s business solutions saw dramatic results. “In the Philippines alone, the results are really fantastic. Whether small or big clients, once they embrace the platform…suddenly it doubles the number of people who are interested in their business. Big clients say that in just a couple of months, they have received more leads to their business than they have ever had in the past. About 1000 percent or 100 percent, the kind of growth that is not just incremental in single digit, but really exponential. You can really see the return on businesses. We have helped a lot of our partners. I would say it is exponentially successful in driving business solutions,” he says.

Memo Moreno, a principal partner at Mindshare, an agency that works with Facebook in the Philippines, says in this digital age, clients need to shift their traditional thinking to be more mobile first. “Before we used to spend 99 percent of our budget on TV, but here right now, we have to shift our investments more on mobile, more on digital, because it is all about that,”she says.

From left: ZipMatch chief executive John Dang, Facebook Philippines country director Digs Dimagiba, MindShare principal partner Memo Moreno and Shangri La Hotels and Resorts director of digital marketing Vincent Fajarda

DISRUPTOR. Facebook Philippines country director Digs Dimagiba

“We have actually seen this. They have shifted. We have big clients who have shifted a little more money on Facebook and other digital platforms, most of them mobile,” says Moreno.

Moreno says an automotive company that used Facebook business solutions drew thousands of business leads in just two months. “In a span of two months, we were able to increase the number of leads by 4.3 times. That’s how effective the platform is,” she says.

Vincent Fajarda, director of digital marketing at Shangri La Hotels and Resorts, says a recent online sales campaign for Shangri La Mactan has generated a significant increase in bookings. “We just used Facebook Carousel. We used Instagram Carousel as well. We are doing efforts like that so we have more channels to spread, or more channels to touch especially for consumers who are visual, who are actually looking into travelling. Slowly, we want to change the traditional image of Shangri La into something that is more progressive, cohesive and relevant,” Fajarda says.

Fajarda says the online campaign also generated a lot of inquiries from interested guests through Facebook Messenger. “We receive 100 messages everyday. They are asking for price, room nights, etc,” he says.

“On the brand side, we have observed that there is a 60-percent increase in web traffic because of the Facebook app referrals to our own website. We conducted an online sales last month and we saw an increase of 140 times than what we actually get from Google search ads.

It is a good platform to convert peo-

ple,” he says.

Dimagiba says Facebook can also supplement the traditional media in generating leads. “TV and Facebook are better together. When advertisers use Facebook and TV together, they get 8 percent more reach. They are able to reach more people, particularly the light viewers and it is also a very cost-effective and combination for them,” he says.

Dimagiba says Facebook, despite its dominant size, is expected to get even bigger in the Philippines in the coming years. “In April, when we opened the office, there were only 49 million active monthly users on Facebook. Now in October, we are happy to announce that there are 54 million Filipinos on Facebook.

If you look at a span of six months, there are five million Filipinos who are now more active and engaged,” he says.

“I believe that we Filipinos really love connecting to each other.

When we do business, it is all about connecting with people. The reason why you go to Facebook as a business or as a person is to make sure you keep having those connections that matter to you and share. You always have some kind of content or opinion and you use Facebook as the most effective medium to share that,” he says.

“Our mission is to make the Philippines more open and connected. We believe it is going to keep us growing.

If you look at the Philippines, there are still 46 million Filipinos that we believe should be connected to the other 54 million. We continue to grow. Our population continues to expand. We want a big Filipino family on Facebook,” he says. Roderick T. dela Cruz

C2

Business

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2016 extrastory2000@gmail.com

By Jasmine Mira M. Dy and Aries F. Fallorina

Serial entrepreneur backs PH start-ups

T

HE Aboitiz family which runs one of the largest and oldest conglomerates in the Philippines has drafted a constitution to ensure the sustainability of its wide range of businesses.

Aboitiz Equity Ventures Inc. chairman Jon Ramon Aboitiz

Constitution guides Aboitiz conglomerate Jon Ramon Aboitiz, the 68-year-old chairman of publicly listed holding company Aboitiz Equity Ventures Inc., cites succession and loyalty as major factors behind the success of the business group, which now employs over 30,000 Filipinos.

“I think that succession is very important in a family [business]. First of all, the most important in a family corporation is that you have to build up rules and regulations for the family and the business. We have, for example, built a constitution. We have a family council. We have rules of engagement, who can join the family [business] because not every family member is entitled to work for the company. He has to try; he has to go through different processes,” Aboitiz says.

He says this helps, as people leaving the business happen many times. “If you have the constitution, if you have the understanding of the rules of engagement, then it makes things easier because it is very clear to everyone what are the dos and don’ts,” Aboitiz says during the Anvil Business Summit 2016 organized by the Association of Young Filipino-Chinese Entrepreneurs at Marriott Hotel Manila in Pasay City.

AEV is one of the fastest growing business groups in the country, with net income climbing 34 percent in the first half of 2016 to P10.5 billion from P7.8 billion a year ago. AEV and Aboitiz and Company Inc., the private holding company established by Aboitiz patriarch Don Ramon, have stakes in various industries such as power generation and distribution, transportation, food and flour milling, banking, remittances, cement and infrastructure, construction, shipbuilding, real estate, tourism, aviation and water distribution.

Major subsidiaries include Aboitiz Power Corp., Visayan Electric Company Inc., Davao Light & Power Company Inc., Union Bank of the Philippines, Cebu City Savings Bank, PetNet Inc., Pilmico Foods Corp., Pilmico Animal Nutrition Corp., Aboitiz Land Inc., Republic Cement and Building Materials Inc., AEV Aviation Inc., Aboitiz Jebsen Group, Aboitiz Construction Group, Tsuneishi Heavy Industries (Cebu) Inc., AseaGas PRIORITY GRADUATES. IBEX Global, the world’s fastest growing business process outsourcing company, pursues a partnership with the Polytechnic University of the Philippines as they strengthen their commitment to the education of the Filipino youth. Under the partnership, PUP students will be prioritized for employment in IBEX Global.

Headquartered in Washington, D.C., IBEX Global delivers onshore, nearshore and offshore solutions in seven countries across 24 sites in seven countries and employs over 15,000 sales, tech support, and customer service professionals.

Shown are (standing, from left) IBEX Global reports analyst Clarice Jane Flor, recruitment associate Samantha Joy Garcia, marketing supervisor Joey Odulio and recruitment supervisor Jessa Cabral.

Sitting are (from left) PUP faculty member Jane Pulma, IBEX Global Shaw site director Mark Anthony Munsayac, Engineer Florinda Oquindo, PUP vice president for administration Alberto Guillo, PUP CMO director Kristine Viray and IBEX Global senior marketing manager John Moses Azarcon.

Aries F. Fallorina

Corp. and Apo Agua Infrastructura Inc. Aboitiz Power Corp., its energy unit, is one of the most active power players in the country and plays an important role in the economic growth of southern Philippines.

“Mindanao is going to have an excessive power [by] middle next year or early next year up to maybe 2025.

There are so many plants that are being built now so it would just be normal if you move from a shortage, you get to an [average]. It’s always a matter of reaction. I think they’ll also get to a point in time to rehabilitate the big hydros that we have,” Aboitiz says.

“If you look at the Philippines now, Luzon is not going to have a problem.

Right now, we have some minor problems but over the next 10 or 15 years, there are [more] plants to be built.

Within Visayas, it’s the same way. So as a whole, with the issue of power shortages in the Philippines for the next 10 or 15 years, I don’t think there’s going to be a problem,” Aboitiz says.

Aboitiz Power started as a renewable energy producer in Davao in the 1970s when they would just let water pass into a turbine and return it, without leaving storage.

“Thirty-six percent of our power portfolio is renewable. And we expect to move our portfolio from 2,000 megawatts to 4,000 megawatts by 2020. And we expect that the renewable course will stay at about 36 percent to 38 percent [of the total],” Aboitiz says.

Aboitiz is optimistic about business prospects under the leadership of President Rodrigo Duterte. Aboitiz says Duterte’s“vibrant personality” will not hurt investors’ confidence in the country.

“We are optimistic. I think many times people are asking me about our president, and my answer to them is always give him time. I think he’s a decisive person, and I think that over time we will see results,” Aboitiz says.

“I think if people would get to know how the president is, a lot of the things he says is not a personal thing,” says Aboitiz.

AEV’s roots go back to the 1800s when Aboitiz’s grandfather, the com-

pany’s patriarch, and family moved to the Philippines from Basque Country in Spain. Aboitiz says his grandfather is the type who “would get into any business.”

“We got into businesses that we knew nothing about like raising fish.

We had these fish nets. We got into air cargo, we got into a number of other businesses that we didn’t know too much about,” he says.

The family reinvented the business 20 years ago and focused on industries it could excel in. “We tried to focus on the businesses that we believe we can excel in. Over the last 20 to 25 years when we focused on our businesses, we basically focused on businesses which we felt would give us a long-term [turnaround] but most importantly that we knew how to run the business,” Aboitiz says.

Going public, or offering shares in the stock exchange, gave the conglomerate a good reputation and financial resources.

“When we went public, it really added to the professionalization of the group. Because before that, you can get [away] with things. You don’t have to make reports. But once you become a public corporation, you have responsibilities, and you have the transparency, and you need to make sure that your systems are all in order,” Aboitiz says.

“Stock markets’ prices of commodities and prices of shares of stock go up and down. That’s natural. At the end of the day if you have a strong vision of what you’re going to be doing and you show the results, the people will come back to you,” Aboitiz says.

AEV and Aboitiz Power stocks are among the best performers in the Philippine Stock Exchange in recent years.

Aboitiz says going public is “one of the best decisions we ever made because it truly transformed us into a more professional group of companies.”

Aboitiz says the group had its share of setbacks in business. On such instances, Aboitiz says: “You pick yourself up and you learn from it because I guarantee [that] you learn from your mistakes.”

FILIPINO serial entrepreneur and investor Jose “Joe” Maristela III announced through his venture capital firm, Katalyst.PH, a new wave of investment fund amounting to $1 million.

The ecosystem still faces many barriers in the Philippine startup scene despite the emergence of local startup accelerators, innovation hubs, venture capitalists and angel investors as capital flowing in is too small compared to other markets.

The government roadmap in creating 500 startups with total funding of $200 million and valuation of $2 billion by 2020 is quite a stretch, but not impossible because of the limitless possibilities that tech start-ups have, he says.

Maristela’s outlook in the Philippine start-up economy is very positive adding to his high regard for the talents and skills of Filipino entrepreneurs, a series of investment rounds coming from his pocket is imminent. With Satoshi Citadel Industries’ recent undisclosed amount of seed funding from Korean web giant Kakao’s venture capital arm KVG, Maristela is currently driven to replicate this through the new wave of investment fund he is putting in.

“In order for a start-up to really grow exponentially, they need to have strong strategic partners and investors.

It is only after almost a year that I found the right partner for SCI. John Park, the CEO of KVG and I simply agreed that there is a very promising future for finance in the Asean region and we believe that SCI will play a critical role in unearthing these potentials,” says Maristela.

SCI is one of the first start-ups he invested in that started out as a remittance business through its platform, Rebit.ph. It now continuously strengthens its list of products and services and is well on its way with a clear roadmap, a clear market and a new strategic partner.

“They said a start-up couldn’t take the ‘enterprise’ approach—in that I mean; many critics of SCI said that they couldn’t pull off so many products at the same time at such an early stage, but that is what’s being innovative is all about. The team of course is also a key component, with SCI, you will really see that they’re not afraid to try things; fail, learn, and adapt quickly. It’s what’s makes them a ‘cockroach start-up’—or a start-up that is very resilient,” Maristela says.

Corporate venture partner, 500 Startups, saw a big potential In order for for growth in one of Maristela’s venture— a start-up to Qwikwire, where he really grow was second to invest in. Kntnt Inc., another exponentially, start-up where they need to have Maristela poured in strong strategic some fund is making it big in the digital partners and media and marketing investors. space. Kntnt is earning a reputation for being able to close blue-chip accounts in its first few months of operation, making the company the official branding and marketing partner of industry giants like Samsung Philippines, Singapore Airlines and Rustan’s.

“I believe the additional $1 million will go a long way out here given the talent and strong spirit of Filipino entrepreneurs. It will allow us as well to get into several niches that we have not considered investing in yet in the past. These companies don’t need to be in the tech businesses. I believe that there are businesses that are non-tech that can still have great impact and by that I mean start-up businesses that are ready and available to engage 90-percent of the market within a year or two in operation,” Maristela says.

Aside from angel investing, his thrust is also geared towards helping the government develop a startup ecosystem for an inclusive economy—making sure that there is a chance for every aspiring entrepreneur in the Philippines to make it big.

Maristela is also backed by a new network where he is a co-founder, the Manila Angel Investors Network. It is the brainchild of Rene Benitez, a concurrent member of Sydney Angels. Benitez wants to replicate of the Australian based group in the Philippines.

Maristela finds great confidence in having MAIN behind him. “I used to do all of this heavy lifting on my own before; reporting back to my partners the progress of my venture builder office with minimal progress every week was a tough challenge, but now that I have MAIN with me, it’s been easier to access resources with due diligence. MAIN also assists me in properly assessing deals,” Maristela says.

MAIN’s reciprocal members include Business Angel Network South East Asia Ltd, Sydney Angels and New York Angels.

“I’m always on the lookout for opportunities. If people have ideas that they think can make it big out there, they can always apply for funding through www.katalyst. ph. I always check out the submissions and get in touch directly with the founders if I see a great potential in their ideas. I use my personal money in all my investments and course it through Katalyst, my private investment firm. I do not take outside funds, I carry all the risk that’s why I need to carefully assess every start-up I come across with looking for funding,” says Maristela.

Sports

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SUNDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2016 sports_mstandard@yahoo.com

The all-star Philippine team of the JrNBA/JrWNBA presented by Alaska including five young females namely: Florence JilTalas, Ma. Cecilia Quilendrino, RozieAmatong, Aloha Marie Betanio and Carly Kaye Monreal, the 10 young boys including Julian Alfonso Jugo, Fritz Felix Valencia, Harold Alarcon, Isaiah Miguel Blanco, RicOzner Gates, Andrei Philip Lechoncito, Tracy Carl Dadang, Jericho Nunez, Miguel Roy Luis Tan and Kai Zachary Sotto as well as the two coaches of the year EliginoChollo and ArayiEwon are joined by the Alaska Marketing team during the send-off at the NBA Cafe.

Dreams come true for young ballers

By Homer Vidal

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HE dreams of the 10 best boys basketball players and the five best girls basketball players in the country came true last October 6 when they were sent off to Shanghai, China to participate in a once-in-a-lifetime NBA experience JrNBA/JrWNBA Presented by Alaska.

The players were selected in a nationwide search through Regional Selection Camps in Baguio, Cebu, Bacolod, Davao and Makati. The final 10 boys and five girls were named members of the Philippine All-Stars during the National Training Camp at the SM Mall of Asia Arena.

They will join 90 other boys and girls from JrNBA Programs in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam to watch the NBA Global Games China 2016 between the Houston Rockets and the New Orleans Pelicans at the Mercedes-Benz Arena.

“I’d like to congratulate our JrNBA Philippine All-Stars on their success.

Through Alaska Milk’s Nutrition. Action.

Champion. Program and our partnership with the NBA, we have been able to help fuel the basketball dreams and life aspirations of thousands of children across the country,” said Alaska Milk Corporation President and Chief Executive Officer Wilfred Steven Uytengsu.

By Reuel Vidal THE San Beda Red Lions and Red Cubs have long dominated the National Collegiate Athletic Association in the college and high school basketball. Their counterparts in women’s volleyball hope to likewise step up as the Lady Red Spikers continue their intensive preparations for the coming season.

The Lady Red Spikers are aiming to establish a milestone by reaching the NCAA Final Four for the first time in school history.

Members of the starting unit, which includes outside hitter and star player Cesca Racraquin, middler blocker Satrriani Espiritu, outside hitter Nieza Viray, opposite hitter Ella Viray, middle blocker Criselle Amador, libero Daryl Racraquin, setter Rebecca Cuevas and Coach Mesio Gavino, are one in saying that they hope to fulfill the hopes of the San Beda community to advance to the Final Four and beyond this coming NCAA season.

The veteran Racraquin said this year’s team has the chemistry to do really well.

“We’re coming back this season stronger than ever. Our chemistry has never been better.

There is camaraderie and tight bonds of friendship. Hopefully it’s enough to propel us to the Final Four,” she said.

“This collaboration is an important element of our long-standing Nutrition. Action. Champion. campaign.

By leveraging on this initiative, Alaska Milk was able to proactively educate families and children on the important role of drinking milk and getting into sports to achieve a healthy and active lifestyle.”

The JrNBA Program is presented by Royal Friesland Campina in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam through its Alaska Milk, Frisian Flag, Dutch Lady and Foremost brands and conducted in Singapore through partnership with Sport Singapore.

Alaska Marketing Director Blen Fernando expressed her gratitude to the NBA for the partnership that has helped tens of thousands of children achieve their basketball dreams.

“I am really grateful to the NBA for always being there for the past nine years.

We started with a thousand children dur-

Carlo Singson

ing our first year. Now we’ve reached the lives of 20,000 participants,” said Fernando.

She also called on the players who will fly to China to represent not only themselves but their families and the country as well. She advised them to enjoy the experience that they will surely cherish for a lifetime.

JrNBA/JrWNBA Presented by Alaska

promotes the importance of regular physical activity, trains participants in the fundamentals of basketball and teaches the importance of core values, including sportsmanship, teamwork, a positive attitude and respect.

NBA Philippines Managing Director Carlo Singson called on the participants to make the most of the opportunity that they’ve been blessed with.

“This is the culmination of the activity that started with the NBA camps nationwide. For the children, this is a once in a lifetime experience. So I ask you to enjoy the experience. Soak in as much as possible. And conduct yourselves accordingly because you represent not just yourselves but the country as well,” said Singson.

The JrNBA program has touched the lives of more than 1.5 million children, parents and coaches across Southeast Asia by conducting camps, clinics, and NBA Cares community outreach activities.

The JrNBA/JrWNBA players will also meet NBA players and legends, receive additional basketball training and tour the city.

Alaska Basketball Power Camp Director Jeff Cariaso likewise praised the children for their hard work and sacrifice which made the experience possible.

“It was a long journey. From first day of the basketball clinics to now.

From thousands who participated

Blen Fernando

you guys are the chosen 10 boys and five girls. When you get to China you will not only experience the sights of the country but also get to watch a real live NBA game. You will also get the chance to train with some of the best NBA trainers and play with your counterparts from other countries in Southeast Asia. Work hard. Always give your best but always enjoy. And take lots of pictures,” said Cariaso.

For more information visit Alaska Milk’s sports channel www.playph.com and like @PlayPH in Facebook and Instagram for inspiring stories on Filipino sports fans of all ages and skill levels.

Fans can also visit the official website at www.jrnba.asia for more information on the JrNBA programs. “Friend” the NBA’s official account on LINE by adding @nba_global.

Follow the NBA on Facebook at www.facebook.com/nba and Twitter at @NBA for all the latest news and updates. For all things NBA, visit http:// www.nba.com./

Lady Red Spikers are ready to roar

The starting unit of the San Beda College Lady Red Spikers are ready to roar this coming NCAA season.

The starting unit include, from left: Nieza Viray, Ella Viray, Criselle Amador, Cesca Racraquin, Satrriani Espiritu, Daryl Racraquin, Rebecca Cuevas and Coach Mesio Gavino. Brosi Gonzales

Espiritu believes that this year’s SBC women’s volleyball team is the best-prepared ever.

“We hope to fulfill the wish and aspiration of the San Beda community that we advance to the Final Four. We have really prepared hard. We joined other tournaments so that we could gain more

experience in preparation for our major league which is the NCAA. We are prepared and we are confident,” said Espiritu.

Nieza, one half of the Viray twins, said they will give their all even as they aspire to crack the Final Four for the first time ever.

“We will do our best. We don’t

want to expect too much. We will just play hard. We will just show our best,” she said.

“We will do everything in order to win. We will support our teammates. We will help each other out inside the court,” echoed twin sister Ella.

The rest of the Lady Red

Spikers include Iris George Domingo, Carmina Rebolledo, Abigail Dumpit, Pham Garcia, Nicole Laguna, Noheli Cerdeña, Daisy Manuel, Joycee Baluarte, Deborah Zamudio and China Tannagan. They are led by coach Messio Gavino.

The Lady Red Spikers benefitted from exposure in the past Shakey’s V-League Reinforced Conference where they were helped by veteran Wenneth Eulalio who helped Laoag win the 10th edition of the Shakey’s Reinforced Conference.

“Participation in the Shakey’s V-League gave us good exposure.

The participating teams were among the best in the country.

The competition is keener. It served as our foundation for the coming NCAA season,” said coach Gavino who added that he expects every one of his players to step up and contribute.

“I told all my players that they need to deliver. We can’t rely on just one or two players to step up. I expect my veterans to lead the way. Then the rookies and the newcomers will follow their lead. We want to give back to the school which has given us so many privileges.”

The stint in the Shakey’s V-

Middle blocker Satrriani Espiritu practices her spiking.

Brosi Gonzales

League Reinforced Conference has given the Lady Red Spikers invaluable experience and confidence which will no doubt serve them in good stead in their quest to make the Final Four and beyond this coming NCAA season.

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Sports

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2016 Riera U. Mallari, Editor Reuel S. Vidal, Issue Editor sports_mstandard@yahoo.com

PADYAK PALAWAN. Romi Garduce (in yellow shirt) with members of the UP Mountaineers.

Eco-tourism by bike tour

By Peter Atencio

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OMI Garduce, who is preparing for two bigger adventures following his conquest of Mt. Everest 10 years ago, is embarking on a quest to raise to awareness on the sights, sounds and the wildlife of the island of Palawan.

On Oct. 10 to 23, Garduce and a group of UP Mountaineers will be off to Palawan for a fundraising bike tour.

Dubbed as Padyak Palawan, the tour will showcase some of the country’s most impressive heritage sites, as well as highlight wildlife advocacy by promoting different stunning wildlife locations throughout the region.

“This is to promote eco-tourism by bike,” said Garduce in an interview with the Manila Standard during the launch of the tour at the Bikers’ Café at the SHUTTER bug Gaps Sabuero made it as one of the 55 finalists, but eventually fell short in the Red Bull Illume 2016 at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Out of 34,624 images from 120 participating countries around the globe, Sabuero’s photograph of a surfer at Siargao Island made it as one of the top 55 finalists in the Masterpiece by Yodobashi Category.

“It’s ridiculous that I see my name there and I feel so out of place. All shots are from professionals (photographers) on big assignments, while mine’s taken with a GoPro at quicksilver not knowing what I was doing.

I’m so stoked to have my name be on the list with the people who inspired me,” said Sabuero on his Facebook post.

The winners are: Close Up: Denis Klero, Russia with his black and white shot of climber Rustam Gelmanov showing his chalk-covered hands in Fontainebleu, France.

Energy: Luke Shadbolt, Australia for his black and white image showing the power of nature. Surfer Renan Faccini is set against a huge swell in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil.

Enhance: Dean Treml, New Zealand and his image of cliff diver Jonathan Paredes jumping from the 28-meter platform on the roof of the Copenhagen Opera House during the Red Bull Cliff Div-

SM by the Bay. The tour kicks off in Bataraza and culminate in scenic El Nido.

Garduce said he was planning to go to the ends of Palawan via a kayak. But logistical issues came into play.

In between their tour, the group will enjoy traversing beautiful places like the Talbon cave, which is said to be the site of some of the world’s oldest human bones dating all the way back to 50,000 years.

Then, there are also plans to go to Estrella Falls in Aborlan, Puerto Princesa, the Matan-

glaw and Umalad Falls in Roxas, and UNESCO sites like St. Paul’s underground river in Sabang, and Sta. Isabela in Taytay, a wellknown spot for kayaking, diving and snorkelling.

“Maraming sumama dito,” added Garduce, who went up the 22,349-foot Ama Dablam in Eastern Nepal last year, which was his preparation for a possible expedition to K-2, the second highest peak in the world. He is also setting his eyes on hikes in the South Pole and North Pole, which is called a Grand Slam in the world of mountaineering.

Padyak Palawan, according to Garduce, will not just to promote adventure tourism in Palawan, but also to spread awareness on wildlife conservation to protect endangered species, interact with local communities unique to each region, and further appreciate the exquisite resources of the country.

The tour will encourage followers to do their part and give back to Center for Conservation Innovation’s Palawan Pro-

gramme: Oplan Tandikan.

Oplan Tandikan, the advocacy chosen by Garduce himself, which is a biodiversity conservation project that is committed to increasing the area of land conservation management and building conservation capacity, specifically of high profile endemic species and their rapidly diminishing habitats.

Padyak Palawan 2016 is presented by C.O.R.E., in partnership with the UP Mountaineers.

This event is for the benefit of Center for Conservations Innovations Inc. and made possible by the following major sponsors: R.O.X. (Recreational Outdoor Exchange), Department of Tourism Mimaropa Region, Tourism Promotions Board, Cebu Pacific as the official Airline partner, and minor sponsors: The North Face, FOX, Blackbeard’s Seafood Island, and Powerman Philippines. Padyak Palawan 2016, along with media partners: Business Mirror, Business World, Business World University Edition, and Manila Standard.

PH surfing photographer is Red Bull Illume finalist

Gaps Sabuero’s entry

ing World Series, 2013.

Lifestyle: Jody MacDonald, Canada with her mesmerizing image of her brother Ken MacDonald sitting atop a train during their adventure through the Sahara Desert.

Masterpiece by Yodobashi: Lorenz Holder, Germany showing Senad Grosic ride his bike over a bridge in an autumnal Gablenz, Germany.

New Creativity: Ale Di Lullo, Italy for his fun shot of Aaron Chase riding his mountain bike on the windshield of a NYC cab.

Playground: Lorenz Holder, Germany showing BMXer Senad Grosic ride a rusted viewing platform in Senftenberg, Germany.

Sequence by Sony: Daniel Voch, Czech Republic with his shot of Flying Bulls pilots Miroslav Krejci, Jan Rudzinskyi, Stan-

islav Cejka and Jan Tvrdic in Jarom, Czech Republic.

Spirit: Dean Treml, New Zealand for his image showing kayaker Josh Neilson being supported by fellow paddlers Barnaby Prees, Sam Sutton, Tim Pickering, Ben Brown, Jamie Sutton and Jaren Seiler after a bad landing off Mat’s Drop, Storulfossen, Norway.

Wings: Micky Wiswedel, South Africa with his shot of climber Jamie Smith mid-fall as he attempts a new route on Table Mountain, Cape Town.

Vegard Aasen of Norway won the Mobile Category, the newest photography category at Red Bull Illume, for his black and white mountaineering image taken in Hakuba, Japan.

The images of the top 55 finalists and the top 275 finalists of Red Bull Illume can be seen on www.redbullillume. com and @RedBullIllume Facebook fanpage.

The finalists” entries are published on a limited edition Coffee Table Book that can be purchased on www.redbullillumebook.com.

Vargas confident of beating Pacman

Manny Pacquiao and Jessie Vargas do the traditional staredown.

By Ronnie Nathanielsz WORLD Boxing Organization welterweight champion Jessie Vargas is very confident in his ability to knock out Philippine Senator and eight-division world champion Manny Pacquiao when they clash in a title fight at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas on Nov. 5 (Nov. 6) in Manila.

Vargas’ confidence stems from his ninth-round knockout of previously unbeaten Olympian Sadam Ali to capture the vacant world title last March in a dominating performance.

The 27-year-old Vargas said he wants to avenge the defeats suffered by his Mexican idols Marco Antonio Barrera and Erik Morales at the hands of the “Fighter of the Decade.”

“A month before the biggest fight of my career so far, I feel good, really. I feel sure of myself, I feel very strong. We are working hard and that’s been the difference. I feel quite sure what I’ll do in this fight,” Boxing Scene quoted Vargas. “I want to keep climbing, this is the fight I was expecting since I was a child. I will fight with a well-respected and wellknown figure, one of the best in the world, and this is my chance.

Once I beat Pacquiao, I will be given a lot of respect and receive recognition to my career. There is a very small list of fighters

who have become legends by beating Pacquiao. Morales beat Manny in their first fight and Marquez in their fourth.

Vargas added: “From what I saw in his last fight with Bradley, I think he was still at his best. I’m glad Manny is in good time in his career, because then no one will have any excuse. I want to beat the best Manny Pacquiao. I like challenges and I want to prove to people what I’m made of and that’s why I’m happy with this fight.”

Vargas believes that he’s capable of getting a knockout victory.

He hurt Tim Bradley very badly last year, but lost a 12-round decision. Vargas then showed off his growing power by knocking out Ali. “If given the opportunity, if I see an open window, I’ll go for [the knockout] - that’s the plan.

I feel very good with the experience I have now, but I will not come in there with the mentality that I can only win by knockout. I’m coming in there with the mentality of winning every second, every minute of every round. But I will not miss. I have the strength to knock him out, so there shouldn’t be any surprise [when it happens],” said Vargas.

The Pacquiao-Vargas and the Nonito Donaire-Jessie Magdaleno title fights will be telecast by Solar Sports over GMA 7.

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SUNDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2016 mst.daydesk@gmail.com

LGUs

Local Gov’t Units

A child-friendly hashtag PATRONESS

By Edgardo S. Tugade

I

T was reported that in the shoot for the USA for Africa video of “We Are the World,” a sign was placed on the entrance to the studio, saying “check your ego at the door.” That was exactly what stars Antonette and Tom Taus did on October 1, when they completely lost their celebrity (but not their charm and cheeriness) in the room of volunteers for the Philippine chapter of #HashtagLunchbag, a non-profit movement that started in Los Angeles, USA in December 2012.

Fittingly, this writer first heard about the movement on social media. A Facebook friend posted a poster of the group’s October feeding program and not even a second passed before I asked to be allowed to cover it. Not many seconds passed before he said yes.

Salu Restaurant, owned by Romnick and Harlene Bautista and growing popular for its authentic menu from different Philippine regions, was the original sponsor of #HashtagLunchbag Philippines. A lively crowd of young volunteers was already sorting out the goodies from new sponsor ABI Pascual—Vitamilk Double Choco soymilk, Absolute mineral water, Pascual Creamy Delight Yogurt and Rebisco crackers—so Antonette patiently attended to this non-millennial writer who did not even recognize her at first.

The volunteers asked me if I wanted to experience their work firsthand and gave me a pile of paper bags on which I was to draw hearts and hashtags using red and black markers. With my hands thus

The image of Our Lady of La Naval will be displayed at the Quezon City Hall until October 12, when a Holy Mass will be said at 9 a.m.

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occupied, Ms. Taus felt safe enough to tell me about the movement. She said she and her brother have been with it since it started in the Philippines in July. Cheska Kramer and her family joined the movement and when her fan Mina Cruz, Salu’s publicist, heard about it, a tie-up with the restaurant was firmly knotted. Antonette said that it was also through Cheska that they got the support of ABI Pascual, whose Creamy Delight Yogurt, the

Kramer family endorses.

After our talk, Antonette helped pack the rice and ground pork dish in styropor boxes, which they put in the paper bags with our high-art doodles together with the ABI Pascual products.

Tom took pictures of the volunteers and helped load the loot bags on their vehicle, which will take them to 300 poor children in Cubao, Antonette said.

The beneficiaries were selected by the Musmos Org of the Ateneo de Manila

University, she added. Then Mina took me off her hands and sat me down to a Salu lunch. But first I offered to add my little widow’s mite to the jar on the registration table for donations.

Sighing, I let go of the chance to go with the convoy to Cubao.

I pieced together what Antonette and Mina told me, enhanced by information from the Facebook pages of the US and Philippine chapters of the movement, and Mina’s e-mail.

HTLB started in the Christmas season of 2012. The US chapter’s FB page narrates: “We are a group of friends who aim to inspire others to pay it forward by incorporating random acts of kindness in our daily lives. We started #HashtagLunchbag on Christmas Day 2012 with the intention to provide a hearty and balanced meal to those in need.”

HTLB PH on their FB page posted: “The goal is to help end hunger, spread Turn to D2

QC lawmaker takes Pasig River ferry

By Rio N. Araja

RECAP. Tacloban City Mayor Cristina Romualdez shares her first 100 days with police chief, Senior Supt. Rolando Bade, and Councilor Aimee Delgado-Grafil. Mel Caspe

Mayor Kring-Kring’s stellar first 100 days

By Mel Caspe ON HER first 100 days as Tacloban City’s chief executive, Mayor Cristina Gonzales Romualdez is already making waves of hope, confidence and approval for helping her constituents, especially the poor, find new life in the long, tortuous aftermath of super typhoon “Yolanda.”

Deep in her thoughts is the upliftment of the economic conditions especially of those living in squatter areas along the shores of the city. Mayor Cristina (she is popularly called Kringkring, but I like to address her this way) set up the Comprehensive Livelihood and Entrepreneurship Program with the less privileged as benefactors.

She expressed pleasure and contentment at the progress in the construction of dwellings for the thousands of families left homeless by the world’s strongest typhoon that made Tacloban its ground zero. Of the 15,000 families affected, some 2,000 families have been moved to new houses. The number of families relocated

to the northern part of the city is expected to rise in the next few weeks.

Mayor Cristina said she was extra appreciative of the concrete response of the National Housing Authority, the GMA Kapuso Foundation, a private establishment and an international group, Habitat for Humanity, who extended substantial help in the rehabilitation efforts. The pretty lady mayor specifically mentioned the NHA who provided the most assistance. By December 2016, more families will be added to the 2,000 now living in new homes.

In the meantime, Mayor Cristina offered jobs to young ladies in her saloon in the city. The Cristina Saloon offers health and beauty services, including reflexology and massage.

The city government has 900 regular employees and accommodated about 2,000 youthful professionals under job orders to augment workers at the City Hall. Some of its buildings were constructed during the term of her husband, former mayor Alfred Romualdez.

In fact, he equates his trip with “my ferry rides in Hong Kong, China and Paris, France.”

Vargas expressed a desire to bring back the long-lost glory of Pasig River “as beautifully described by the country’s greatest national hero, Jose Rizal, in his works of art and literature.

He supported the appropriation of sufficient budget and encouragement of public-private partnerships to make the river what it once was.

The PRRC stressed the need to rehabilitate the Pasig before it is too late.

“Pasig River or Ilog Pasig is the story of the Filipino people. It is the first settlement for Tagalog inhabitants in the early years. The word ‘tagalog’ was derived from “taga-ilog” or riverside

A RIVER ferry system is supposed to be one viable solution to reduce traffic in Metro Manila.

But “unfortunately,” only a few commuters appreciate this solution, Quezon City’s 5th District Rep. Alfred Vargas lamented.

What is worse, even “some government officials do not even know of its existence,” Vargas said.

Knowing how motorists are helpless in traffic, Vargas crossed the divide and viewed the problem from the side of car-less citizens.”Out of curiosity and in line with my congressional duties, I decided to try the ferry trip myself.”

As vice chairman of the House committee on appropriations that will look into the Pasig River Rehabilitation Commission’s 2017 proposed budget, the 35-year-old actor-turned-politician took the proverbial plunge just a week ago and for a fare of just P40.

“The Pasig River is not the same filthy, pungent, polluted river anymore that it has always been reputed to be, thanks to the efforts of PRRC, the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority, the local government units and other environmental groups through the years,” the congressman noted.

“The water is clean. The air has a hint of freshness. There is greenery left and right. There are different species of fish and birds. The speed of the ferry was just right. The crew members were polite and professional. The view was remarkable as we passed by the Makati skyline, Arroceros Park, Malacañang Palace and the Post Office. The ride was relaxing,” he says.

“But for me, the most gratifying was… there was no traffic at all!”

The Quezon City lawmaker believed there was still a lot to be done, though “the improvements are noteworthy.” Vargas

dweller.”

The MMDA ferry has 12 stations in Metro Manila—Pinagbuhatan, Maybunga and San Joaquin in Pasig City, Guadalupe and Valenzuela in Makati City, Hulo in Mandaluyong City, and PUP-Sta. Mesa, Sta. Ana, Lambingan, Lawton, Escolta and Plaza Mexico in Manila.

Fares range from P15 to P95. The ferry system operates Monday to Saturday from 6:30 a.m to 5:30 p.m.

Amid deliberations on the several measures granting President Rodrigo Duterte emergency powers to fix the traffic trouble in the National Capital Region, Vargas called on the government to step up promotion of the ferry system.

D2

LGUs

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2016

Ensuring women’s health in Palawan

‘Harana’ by Max Adlao. Galeria de las Islas Facebook page

After the serenade T

HE traditional Filipino serenade, popularly known in this Southeast Asian archipelago as “harana,” is slowly bowing out.

This Latin mode of courteous courting, which romanticized postwar love was relegated to the sidelines by the brasses and bongos of the Yankees, which has evolved into the computerized tunes downloaded to computers and played on computers.

Singing the harana harks back to the Spanish colonial period that started in 1521.

In some provinces—like Quezon, Nueva Ecija, Tarlac and the whole Ilocos region—a man and his friends, classic Spanish guitar in hand, was a common sight by the window of a woman being courted past dusk.

The men in their late teens

or early 20s, in their evening best, hair styled with scented pomade from the nearest town store, belted out love songs when the night was young and the moon was yellow.

In some of the provinces, particularly those in rice-growing Nueva Ecija, the men would be politely invited inside for a singing dialogue with the beloved till past midnight.

But the old folks in the Ilocos would never let the men inside.

The Ilocana, as were many Filipino women in other parts of the country, prided herself on being shy and secretive and never showed her wooer where he stood.

Decades later, the culture of “ang-angaw” among the Ilocanos and “tuksuhan” or just teasing among the Tagalogs flourished.

It matched teens and young adults, people who may have mutual admiration or affection for each other and may end up in a romance or avoidance of each other if the scenario became embarrassing for both.

The presence of other men during the evening serenade, the close friends of the one courting or one who is interested in the woman next door or in some other barangay, was at that time a psychological boost.

In the Ilocos, the men would blend voices and sing the ballad “adayo pay nga ili ti naggapuanmi, ‘diay ili a Santa Fe…” Singing that he had come from a distant place, the town of Santa Fe in far Nueva Vizcaya across the imposing Caraballo

Davao women find new jobs as bakers

By F. Pearl A. Gajunera DAVAO CITY—For sexagenarian and retiree Lorna Raza, age was inconsequential to the pursuit of a new skill.

The former government employee recently had the opportunity to learn the basics of baking. The class was light, easy, and fun. Her classmates were women who, just like her, wanted to do something productive for themselves and their families.

The class was offered for free to teach underprivileged women and victims of domestic violence to be economically independent, productive and competitive.

The 60-year-old Raza, who worked as the Davao City area coordinator of the Presidential Commission for the Urban Poor (PUCP) for 28 years, was hopeful her new skill will work for her and her family.

“This is a new skill and I am just excited about the possibility of making a living out of this.”

A child-friendly...

From D1

love and to inspire others to do the same. We CAN change the world if we do it together!?”

They posted what they did on the social media and soon it was replicated in major US cities and was emulated by generous hearts in Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines. Some of the celebrities who supported the US efforts were Kim Kardashian and the Atlanta Braves.

A feeding program is also scheduled in Angeles City today, October 9, sponsored by Angeles Fried Chicken in Balibago.

But what HTLB PH is excited about is

The five-day course was introduced by the local government of Davao City through the City Cooperative Development Office in partnership with the Davao City Social Services and Development Office, and the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority.

Raza and 34 other women recently graduated from the course given at the Livelihood and Productivity Center, a 55-square-meter training center in SIR Matina.

Another graduate was Maria Fe Caral, a member of Samahan ng may Kapansanan sa Dabaw. A scoliotic, Fe never allowed her disability to keep her from learning a marketable skill.

Caral’s group operates a bakery in Los Amigos in Tugbok and intends to expand its operations. Although confined to her wheelchair, Caral will be one of the bakers.

The other graduates were survivors of rape and victims of violence against women. what they will do for poor children on their favorite season—Christmas! Mina said: “We’re trying to partner with some organizations so we can launch Salu’s Treat Feast. We’ll be giving our customers an option to treat families who cannot celebrate Christmas merrily, i. e. indigenous communities, poor farmers and fishermen villages. The idea is something similar to notebooks sold for P35 by National Bookstore. A customer may for a few extra bucks buy a family or community a feast this Christmas. We’ll create a compilation of video greetings from both donors and beneficiaries which we’ll upload online as well for everyone to hear and enjoy. Details are still being sorted out but we’ll reveal all the mechanics soon.”

mountains, the man told the maiden how much he has suffered for her.

Among those that evoke poignant memories is the Ta,” popular in Bugalog “ lacan and Laguna and other surrounding provinces of Metro Manila, particularly “O Ilaw (Oh, Light)” which compares the beloved to a star in the pitch-dark sky.

The song begs the woman to open her window and look out at the man, who is pining yet not whining.

But Parokya ni Edgar rocked the “Harana.” Loosely translated, it begins “Is the serenade still the trend? Perhaps it makes you meditate. Who is this looking like a fool alone, singing piteously out of tune. And he has roses in his hand. What he’s wearing are denims old in the company of friends so bold.”

Honor B. Cabie

TWENTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD Dr. Marvin Masalunga is in the United States for a series of training and orientation on reproductive health.

Masalunga works in the district hospital of Coron, Palawan as a deputy municipal health officer.

In his work, he meets and treats local patients day in and day out.

He is one of the recipients of the 120 Under 40 Campaign of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Bill and Melinda Gates Institute. This project recognizes persons who champion reproductive health. A native of Cavite, Masalunga, whose nomination was initiated and recommended by the Forum for Family Planning and Development, is the only Southeast Asian individual to receive the citation. He joins nine other awardees who will discuss ways to improve maternal and child care among locals of their respective countries.

Masalunga will discuss about the state of reproductive health in the Philippines in Baltimore, Maryland. The next sessions will take place in Washington D.C, and New York where talks on the use of contraceptives, and the future of reproductive health will be given, respectively.

When asked about how he feels with the recognition, he says “it’s a validation of what I, and our group of rural health workers in Palawan, do for the people. Aside from that, it speaks that I am probably doing something right in my service.”

The latest figures show that among all the provinces in the Mimaropa region, Palawan has one of the highest maternal mortality rate—or the number of women dying due to pregnancy and childbirth complications.

Records from the Provincial Health Office reveal that Palawan’s MMR rose to 182 in 2014 from 125 MMR per 100,000 live births in 2012.

While the municipality of Coron is one of the popular tourist spots in Northern Palawan with its pristine waters and captivating landscapes, little do most people know about the plethora of health issues that beset its locals, especially the women and the youth.

“Some areas don’t even have electricity and access to health facilities. Tara, the farthest barangay, can be reached from Coron via a three-hour boat ride.” Masalunga shared.

Teenage pregnancies, aside

from risky and complicated ones, are also health issues that need to be addressed in Coron.

According to Masalunga, “one out of 10 pregnant women in the municipality are teenagers.”

Aside from regular medical assistance, Masalunga and his team of rural health workers in Coron carry out talks on the importance of reproductive health and family planning. Just last year, they helped organized the ‘Buntis Congress’ that gathered expectant mothers together for discussions, and counseling as well as provision of free health services such as laboratory, pre-natal checkup, and ultrasound.

Masalunga also led talks among the youth, especially to members of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program of the Department of Social Welfare and Development.

Through these proactive efforts, Coron’s medical team is seeing improvements in providing maternal and child care among locals. According to Masalunga, “80 percent of our woman now give birth in the hospital, and are assisted by a health care provider and a midwife. This is a good number because we are really pushing for facility-based delivery services, and not just in the home, where the lack of medical resources puts the mother and the child’s life on the line.”

It was during one of the RH orientations that Masalunga met several members of the Forum for Family Planning and Development.

In talks about pushing for the full implementation of reproductive health, Masalunga says we are facing a huge battle in the form of religious and cultural beliefs.

Masalunga asserts that reproductive health is not just about promoting the use of contraceptives, nor does it recommend abortion. Rather, it emphasizes the need for couples to space births and plan for their family— as doing so means planning for the future of their children.

This young doctor’s work in Coron is about to end in October.

After this, he plans to take up Pathology as specialization as he further pursues his medical career.

He reveals his plan for next year, that is to come up with an adolescent forum (in partnership with different groups). This activity will aim to empower the youth to know more about their reproductive health rights, and how they can take care of themselves better. PIA

Eryx Reyes: An art for an art

I FEEL very blessed that artists in painting and photography add or accept me as a friend on Facebook and let me publish their pictures for free or write on their works. Whenever an article of mine is published I post its link on the page of the artist it is about and their other artist friends add me. My early interest in bonsai led me to join online groups and write about some of them, and then I stumbled on this network of artists who make artificial bonsai. My article on two of them came out in our Life section.

By networking with bonsai culturists, I met Zambales native Eryx

Reyes, 41. I was added by his wife Karoll whose photos I liked. Among those were pictures of Eryx’s drawings of bonsai, which were an offshoot of his love for the Japanese art of miniatured trees. I lost no time in adding him to my friends.

Like the other bonsai enthusiasts and painters, I interviewed Reyes through private messages on FB. He asked his child to write his answers to my questions on bond paper and he posted a picture of it on chat.

He described himself as simple, quiet and shy. “In elementary school, I learned wood carving, drawing and watercolor painting. But I also prac-

ticed playing the guitar, harmonics, the bugle and drums.”

He tried sports in high school— table tennis, chess, baseball and basketball. He took up architecture in college, joined a band, and went into mountaineering and rifle shooting. He said he “fell in love and became close to nature when mountain climbing.”

Love for nature often draws a person to photography, but the high cost of that art drove him to devote himself to bonsai. Up to now, he says, he is “still freshly discovering the beauty of nature” around him.

Edgardo S. Tugade

Gadgets & Games

D3

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2016 rumallari@thestandard.com.ph

Oculus:

Just like the real thing Facebook co-founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, speaks at an Oculus developers conference while wearing a virtual reality headset in San Jose, California. AFP

Wireless ATM, anyone?

3C ENTERPRISE Wireless Pty. Ltd. (3C Wireless), a global M2M financial solution expert, reaches out to the unbanked population in the Philippines by enabling traditional banks to fully integrate technology to boost financial inclusion in the country.

It is introducing 3C Secure Network, the new standard for Wireless Automated Teller Machine networks, which allows for secure and reliable M2M communications utilizing today’s high--speed wireless data networks.

According to a World Bank study in 2014, about 69% of Filipinos did not have bank accounts of their own or maintained one with someone else. The figure is quite alarming because the global average then is only 38%.

Access to financial products and services is vital, especially for the marginalized sectors of society, because it is a catalyst for economic development and fosters inclusive growth.

Huddlestone

Dr. Ted Marr

“The geography of the Philippines makes it difficult to provide easy access to financial products and services. But by being able to connect ATMs wirelessly in a secure, fast and reliable manner, we are able to reach many Filipinos spread across the 7,107 islands,” said Dr. Ted Marr Ph.D, Executive Vice President of 3C Wireless.

The 3C Secure Network can be

used to replace traditional and expensive leased line links or can be used as a backup to these links to increase availability. The solution is very reliable as it is dual carrier capable meaning that even if the primary telecommunications provider has a failure there is an inbuilt redundant link that will automatically come online.

The 3C Secure Network uses

industry standard encryption technology to secure data. This secure traffic is only encrypted and decrypted in the respective banks’ own trusted network so there is no possibility of non--encrypted traffic being captured over the air. And to top it off, the solution is very fast because it utilizes the latest high-speed cellular services and fibre optic technology.

“Our solution is readily available and can be deployed in minutes.

It also comes with an Easy—to— Use Management System giving banks total control of their communications system,” said Robert Huddlestone, Chief Technology Officer, 3C Wireless.

3C Wireless was the technology partner in the recent 2016 NCR Consumer Experience Banking Forum. NCR is the world’s number one provider of ATM’s with over 810,000 installed globally.

For more information on 3C Wireless, you may log on to www.3centerenterprisegroup.com.

Pixel phones and smart machines SAN FRANCISCO—US internet giant Google on Tuesday challenged heavyweight rivals including Apple and Amazon with an array of new gadgets aimed at digital lifestyles.

Coming products to watch for:

Smartphone ‘Made

by Google’

Pixel is the first smartphone designed by Google, with the Silicon Valley powerhouse dictating the hardware, software and services the way Apple does with its iPhones.

The Google-branded smartphone takes aim at flagship models by Apple, Samsung and others in the fiercely competitive market. Pixel, which comes in five and 5.5-inch (12.7 and 14-centimeter) screen sizes, boasts a fingerprint reader, a camera billed as the best in any smartphone, unlimited online storage for photos and videos, and quick charging combined with long battery life.

Pixel is powered by the latest version of the Android mobile operating system, Nougat, and Google promised to keep the software automatically updated.

Pixel also features Virtual Assistant artificial intelligence to enable users to manage tasks and get information in natural conversation format. Pixel’s starting price of $649 in the United States is the same as that of Apple’s newest iPhone.

cyber concierge for getting information and managing tasks about the house or flat. Home listens for commands or queries even while playing music, and can control other smart devices in range. Google Home will be available in shops in November, but could be pre-ordered beginning

knowledge amassed by the world’s leading online search engine.

Google outlined plans to infuse a growing array of devices and services with Assistant smarts, letting people get answers or manage matters in conversational styles, as though speaking with a human

form can be slipped into play in View headgear to act as screens for virtual reality experiences.

View is made of cloth, a step up from the actual cardboard from which its predecessor at Google was playfully constructed. Purportedly inspired by casual clothing, View material makes it lighter and potentially more comfortable than devices already on the market.

Streaming 4K video

Chromecast Ultra is an improved version of medallion-sized Chromecast devices that plug into TV monitors for viewing online streaming videos. Google said it has sold more than 30 million Chromecast devices since they debuted three years ago. The new generation Chromecast promised more reliable viewing and image quality ramped all the way up to ultra-high definition 4K video. Chromecast Members of the media examine Google’s Pixel phone during an event to Ultra was priced at $69 and will be introduce Google hardware products on October 4, 2016 in San Francisco, available in November in the UnitCalifornia. AFP ed States and 15 other countries.

Tuesday.The device’s price in the aide. Google laid out a vision of United States is $129. That’s $50 less becoming a leading player in artifiWifi all over than Amazon Echo, a rival that has cial intelligence, with Assistant beGoogle Wifi promises to make been popular with consumers since ing infused into many devices and sure people can connect to the interit was launched by the online titan. services allowing opportunities to net from anywhere in a home. Diskhave them work together. sized Wifi modules can be placed Spreading machine smarts in various spots in homes, acting as Google Assistant is an improved Cardboard grows up an internet-linked mesh of sorts so version of virtual helper software Daydream View virtual real- getting online is uniformly easy. Wifi the internet company previously ity headgear came as an answer to software lets people easily manage called Google Now. Facebook-owned Oculus, and a di- congestion on home networks, or Cyber concierge It competes with Apple’s Siri, Am- rect challenge to Samsung Gear VR. even selectively cut off children’s Google Home is a flower vaseSmartphones compatible with gadgets from the internet when they sized speaker infused with machine azon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Corsmarts and voice controls to act as a tana, tapping into the vast trove of Google’s Daydream software plat- should be at a meal or in bed. AFP

S

AN JOSE—Facebook worked to ramp up enthusiasm for its virtual reality line, unveiling new gear including a lower-end wireless headset prototype.

The company’s Oculus virtual reality division is set to release in coming months a new “Touch” controller and a more affordable computer for powering virtual experiences using Rift headsets.

“We are here to make virtual reality the next major computing platform,” Facebook cofounder and chief Mark Zuckerberg said at the third annual Oculus Connect developers conference in San Jose, California.

Oculus has been dealing with a series of setbacks in the rollout of its VR headgear, including shipping mishaps and a higher-than-anticipated price.

To boost excitement for the headsets Zuckerberg donned one while on stage, virtually traveling with a pair of colleagues to the bottom of a sea and the surface of Mars, pausing in the middle to take a Messenger video call from his wife Priscilla.

The CEO snapped a “selfie” with his wife in the virtual world and posted it in real time to his page at the social network.

Zuckerberg said that Oculus VR—which Facebook snapped up in 2014 for $2 billion—has a prototype of a wireless version of Rift that would not need to be plugged into a computer, though he said it was far from consumer-ready.

‘Bullish on stand-alone’

The mobile VR market currently offers headsets that act as frames into which smartphones can be mounted to serve as screens, available for less than $100.

Rift headgear meanwhile sells for $599, a price that does not include the cost of a computer that can handle the processing and graphics demands of the technology.

Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe did demonstrate an AMDpowered desktop from Cyberpower that can run Rift for $499, half the price of the other high-powered computers needed to handle virtual reality.

But according to Max Cohen, Oculus’s head of mobile, wireless is the future. He told AFP that the company sees developing a lower-end wireless headset as integral to expanding virtual reality’s availability.

“In the long run, we are bullish on stand-alone,” Cohen said.

“There are limitations to mobile, and there will be some people who don’t want to buy a PC for virtual reality, no matter how cheap.”

Other companies have also announced the development of more affordable headsets that are compatible with smartphones, including Daydream View from Alphabet Inc’s Google division.

- Not feeling Luckey -

Oculus announced the long-anticipated Oculus Touch controllers—which will give users “hands” to use in virtual worlds—will ship worldwide on December 6, going for $199.

The VR company also said it will invest millions of dollars to fund education content, promote diversity in its developer community, and broaden virtual reality content far beyond games.

Zuckerberg said Facebook would invest $250 million in developing content for Oculus VR gear, on top of the $250 million the company has already spent.

Noticeably absent from the OC3 keynote was Oculus cofounder Palmer Luckey, who has played a starring role at company events in the past.

Luckey came under fire after he said he donated $10,000 to a political group backing Republican candidate Donald Trump. The organization had claimed responsibility for creating negative social media posts about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

After word spread, some high-profile video game studios went on record saying that they would not create content for Oculus over the rift.

D4

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2016 Riera U. Mallari, Editor

rumallari@thestandard.com.ph

Gadgets &Games

REMOTECONTROLLED CAIBA.

Developer Katsumori Sakakibara wears a headmounted display to demonstrate a prototype remote-controlled robot called ‘Caiba’, during a preview of the Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies Japan in Chiba, Tokyo. Waist-high Caiba—whose name means hippocampus, a key area of the brain, in Japanese—is controlled by a human wearing a virtual reality handset and mechanical arms. AFP

COBOTS, humans

work side by side

T

HE World Robotics Report 2016, recently released by the International Federation of Robotics forecasts that compact, user-friendly collaborative robots will become a key driver in the automation market.

The report predicts the worldwide annual sales of industrial robots to increase by at least 13 percent on average per year from 2017 to 2019.

Human-robot collaboration will have a “breakthrough” in this period, enabling robots and humans to work safely sideby-side without any fences, while increasing production efficiency and quality.

“As the market leader of the cobot industry, Universal Robots welcomes the report which confirms the validity of our mission: lowering barriers and enabling automation in areas previously considered too complex or costly,” said Chief Commercial Officer of Universal Robots, Daniel Friis.

“Our installed base of more than 10,000 cobots worldwide illustrates the dramatic growth potential of this game-changing automation technology. We enable small and medium-sized enterprises to optimise their competitiveness on the global stage with an industry leading payback period.”

Industries predicted by IFR to adopt cobots at an increasing rate include automotive, the plastics industry, electronics assembly and the machine tool industry.

These are all key sectors in Southeast Asia, and where Universal Robots is see-

ing strong traction.

“UR robots are now increasingly deployed on the auto assembly line, working handin-hand with employees, by relieving them of ergonomically unfavorable tasks.

We have recent case studies documenting how cobots quadrupled injection moulding production, and how our new UR3 table-top robot is now a sought-after automation tool for light assembly, such as circuit board handling,” said Friis.

In Asia, strong, continued robot growth is forecasted by IFR,

with the recent report suggesting a rise of 18 percent in robot supplies this year, while installations are expected to rise by 15 percent. China is predicted to remain the main driver of robot growth, expanding its dominance with almost 40 percent of the global robot supply being installed in China by 2019.

“Asia is a strong focus area for Universal Robots. We opened a Shanghai subsidiary in 2013 and are constantly expanding our distributor network in the regions where customers are increasingly using our cobots to optimise product quality and automate repetitive tasks that many manufacturers have difficulty staffing with manual labour,” said Friis.

According to Friis, the demand for consumer goods across global markets is pushUR5

Filipino smokers want E-cigarettes IN A first-of-its-kind survey of adult smokers in Philippines, regional consumer advocacy group factasia.org has found that most smokers (70 percent) see e-cigarettes as a “positive alternative” to tobacco products.

The same number—70 percent—would consider switching to e-cigarettes “if they were legal, met quality and safety standards, and were conveniently available”.

The survey was conducted

by Ipsos to gauge consumers’ views on safer alternatives to conventional cigarettes, such as e-cigarettes that contain nicotine—products that do not burn tobacco and therefore do not produce the potentially dangerous particulates, tar and smoke found with cigarettes.

Eminent international public health and tobacco control experts encourage use of ecigarettes as a far less harmful alternative for smokers who either find it difficult to quit or who enjoy their nicotine.

Few smokers in the Philip-

pines have tried them—just 15 percent of the survey of three major population centres. But they are almost unanimous in believing they should have a right to access information about less harmful products (86 percent agree), while more than three-quarters agree that: “Through tax and regula-

E-cigarettes are described as more than 95 percent safer than smoking.

tory policies, the government should encourage adult smokers to switch to less harmful alternatives to cigarettes and ensure they are not used by youth.”

Smokers surveyed also said it would be wrong for the authorities to “prevent or delay the introduction of less harmful alternatives to cigarettes.” factasia carried out the survey “in order to gain a better understanding of Asian consumers’ demand for less harmful alternatives to tobacco,” said Heneage Mitchell, co-founder of factasia.org.

E-cigarettes are described as “more than 95 percent safer than smoking” and “no more harmful than coffee” by top global public health experts. In the UK, for example, they are “encouraged” by Public Health England, which recently reported e-cigarettes have become the most popular aid to quitting at the same time as successful attempts to quit have reached an all-time high. factasia.org recommends full retail availability of appropriately regulated (for product quality and safety) e-cigarettes, with age-of-sale restrictions to keep them away from youth,

although evidence from countries where e-cigarettes are widely used shows the youth take-up is no higher than youth smoking incidence.

“There is a clear need for action in Philippines to regularize the industry and to establish quality standards, tax the products rationally and ensure they are made available only to adults, like many other consumer items,” said Mr Mitchell.

“The government here has a great opportunity to ensure there is no repeat of the situation that has arisen with conventional tobacco products, where 10 to 15% of total consumption is illicit—smuggled or counterfeit product.”

Vaping should be restricted to adults, said Mr Mitchell. “But e-cigarettes are here to stay and consumers deserve the protection of regulation and standards that they expect in other product sectors. Our survey shows they are calling for positive government action.”

ing manufacturers to produce innovative, high-quality products more quickly, consistently, and sustainably around the world.

“To support the growing demand for flexible cobot solutions, Universal Robots recently launched Universal Robots+, an online showroom for end-effectors, software, peripherals and accessories from the UR ecosystem of 3rd-party developers that are optimised to work flawlessly with UR robots. This allows UR’s integrators, distributors and customers to hit the ground running when completing their next UR robot installation,” said Friis.

Complementing Universal Robots+, is the new UR Academy, which includes free e-learning modules available to all that make up the basic programming training for UR robots. This includes adding end-effectors, connecting I/Os for communication with external devices and setting up safety zones. Universal Robots expects the initiative to help support Industry 4.0.

“It’s unprecedented in the industry to provide hands-on interactive teaching modules available for free with no licensing required. The Academy offers an instrumental tool in helping us educate the market on how our technology can address key business challenges. As Southeast Asia gears up to be the world’s manufacturing hub, educating future operators and programmers now to bridge this gap becomes even more important,” said Friis.

Robot Olympics coming to Japan TOKYO—The robot olympics are coming to Japan in 2020, the same year that the eyes of the world will be on the summer games in Tokyo.

As top human athletes battle for medals, their cutting-edge droid counterparts will also be locked in fierce competition at the “World Robot Summit”.

Japan’s trade ministry is hosting the event which will feature “competitions and exhibits” involving a variety of machines including humanoid and industrial robots, a government official said Wednesday.

The exact date and location of the event has yet to be determined, with the ministry now inviting bids from cities across Japan, which is famed for its robot technology.

In recent years, the country has sent a talking robot into space as a conversation partner for Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata, as part of a project to see how the machine could act as a companion for isolated people.

Japan has also used robots to fill jobs as kitchen workers and farmers in a bid to address labour shortages that are projected to get worse as the country rapidly ages.

The government said it hopes to draw high-tech robots from around the globe for the 2020 summit.

Tokyo will host the 2020 Summer Olympics starting in late July that year, followed by the Paralympics.

Asia’s biggest tech fair— the Cutting-Edge IT & Electronics Comprehensive Exhibition (CEATEC)—kicked off near Tokyo this week with a dizzying array of robots on display. AFP

E1

Young Life

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2016 Isah V. Red, Editor / Bernadette Lunas, Issue Editor isahred@gmail.com

By Bernadette Lunas

M

ILLENNIALS want their videos accessible anytime, anywhere.

Perhaps this is why video-sharing website YouTube continues to be the preferred platform among the younger set. As a matter of fact, a 2013 study by research provider eMarketer revealed that YouTube was the social media website American users aged 14 to 34 visited the most.

Here in the Philippines, a survey found that nine out of 10 Filipinos go to YouTube first whenever they’re looking for videos. The ability to choose which content users will watch—compared with traditional platforms which feed the viewers with content—and the power to consume it whenever and wherever it is convenient for them, give YouTube its appeal to users especially to the generation that wants to get things fast.

“Filipinos watch videos at 75 minutes per session on mobile,” informs Google Philippines Country Marketing Manager Gabby Roxas.

Citing a third party survey, Roxas reveals Pinoys watch music, comedy, films, trailers, documentaries, how-tos and user generated videos the most.

However, the almost snail-like Internet speed in the country makes watching videos online an unpleasant experience. Then comes YouTube Lounge.

“Grab a snack and sit back as you watch your favorite videos on YouTube at a much faster pace.”

That is what Google Philippines wants to give users of the videosharing website in the Philippines as it partners with Ayala Malls to launch YouTube Lounge. The lounge is the first YouTube-branded space where mall-goers can watch faster-loading videos with the help of Accelerator technology.

“We built this for our users,” emphasizes Roxas. “The YouTube Lounge is where they can have the best YouTube experience through our Accelerator technology.”

The YouTube Accelerator is a pilot program currently being tested in the Philippines since February this year. The said technology lets users watch videos on the website with less buffering time by means of distributing the load on shared Wi-Fi networks.

LOUNGE Google Philippines and Ayala Malls partner to launch the first YouTube Lounge that lets users watch videos available on the website at a much faster pace.

Stop, stream and watch Users can head to the lounge— 9 and Alabang Town Center on Nov. which is an open pop-up stall—ac- 16. The lounges are set to stay in cess the free Accelerator Wi-Fi con- malls for a year. nection provided by Globe Telecom, Google Philippines promises go to their smartphone’s YouTube that additional lounges will also be app (YouTube Accelerator is avail- launched at Ayala Malls in Taguig, able only on Android devices at the Fairview, Pampanga, Subic, Nuvali, moment), and watch over 100,000 Cagayan de Oro, Cebu and Davao accelerated videos available on the sometime during year-end. website with no extra charge (acRecognizing the importance of celerated videos have the Accelera- their content creators, the Youtor badge).

Tube Lounges will also serve as “We are the first country in the event spaces for meet-and-greets world to receive accelerated You- of popular local “YouTubers,” such Tube videos,” enthuses the Google as Team Kramer, Erwan HeusPhilippines official. saff, Mikey Bustos, Lloyd CadeAside from YouTube Accelerator, na, Bogart the Explorer, Janina the site also offers its YouTube Of- Vela, Wil Dasovich, Kristine Rofline feature that lets offline viewing. ces, Say Tioco, Clara Benin, Chris The first YouTube lounge Cantada, Ralph Jay and opened at Greenbelt 5 on Joyce Sola.

Sept. 29, followed by the “Content creators make lounge at UP Town Center YouTube unique, that’s on Oct. 6. It will soon be why we built this for them present at four more other as well. For them to have Ayala Malls: Glorietta on an accessible platform to Oct. 13, TriNoma on Oct. connect and engage with Scan this icon to 26, Market! Market! on Nov. their fans,” shares Roxas. view the PDF

Google Philippines Country Manager Ken Lingan, Ayala Land Malls Inc. President Rowena Tomeldan and Google Philippines Country Marketing Manager Gabby Roxas unveil the first YouTube Lounge in the Philippines located at Greenbelt 5.

Video creators, more popularly known as ‘YouTubers,’ make the YouTube experience unique in a way of providing original content to viewers.

The wireless generation

By Ysabel Juachon SEVERAL studies reveal that today’s biggest generation, the millennials, are people who want to have it all. They want variety, they want flexibility, and they want to get the most out of their time and money.

Millennials crave for work-life blend, thus prompting them to look for jobs or relationships that are not restricting and would allow them to move freely and pursue other endeavors. And when it comes to technology devices, this generation also want those that won’t limit their movement.

With this in mind, American multinational telecommunications company Motorola launches VerveLife—a collection of wireless, waterproof and wearable audio and video accessories.

VerveLife products include HD wireless headphones, Verve Rider, Verve Rider+, Verve Ones and Verve Ones+.

“Motorola VerveLife is designed for people who want to have it all, and are determined to get what they

MOVE FREELY. Motorola VerveLife offers a range of wireless audio and video devices that allow users to engage in physical activities or go on adventure without restriction.

want,” says Digits CEO Charles Paw. Digits is the company behind tech and accessory store Digital Walker which offers VerveLife.

Paw added that people are now moving towards the “age of wirelessness.”

Thus, he realized that nobody wants to be left physically restricted.

Speaker Joey Cheung, a sales director of Motorola, demonstrated and explained the uses of the VerveLife collection during the product launch.

Cheung submerged the VerveOnes+ in water to show its waterproof quality, which proves its efficiency as an ideal fitness product for those who engage in physical activities and sweat in the process.

“That is the beauty of technology. We continue to innovate and address the needs of our consumers,” says Paw. Furthermore, the products come with Hubble Connect, an app which helps users locate their device in case they lose it.

Hubble Connect also enhances VerveLife by optimizing the perfect sound, reviewing and streaming video.

“Technology is meant to enhance everyday living, not limit it. With Motorola VerveLife, we are creating more than just gadgets, but adventure companions you can always rely on,” ends Paw. Motorola VerveLife products are available at all Digital Walker stores, Astroplus/Astrovision, Mobile 1, The InboxStore, Listening Room, Gadgets in Style, and Games and Gadgets.

Young Life

E2

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2016 isahred@gmail.com

QUIRKY TASHA.

Australian mixologist Tasha Lu believes that she could be a wizard and that office jobs are boring. She also loves creating unusual cocktails using Hendrick’s Gin.

Unlike the usual London Dry gins, Hendrick’s is a distilled Scottish gin made with 11 botanicals and infused with rose and cucumber.

Photo from Hendrick’s Instagram Account

4 things about a

PECULIAR MIXOLOGIST T

WENTY nine-year-old Australian mixologist Tasha Lu is anything but ordinary. The sloe-eyed cocktail expert, whose life is as a colorful as the tattoos on her arms, believes that the world will never be the same without cucumbers or that she could be a wizard if she weren’t doing what she does today.

Tasha is quirky, approachable and cool—someone you would want to talk to all night over a glass (or four) of gin tonic. In the last eight years, she has been in the hospitality industry, managing and operating bars such as Eau de Vie Melbourne. And in October 2015, she became Hendrick’s Gin’s brand ambassador for Southeast Asia.

It’s a match made in heaven, to say the least, as the peculiar mixolgist meet the equally oddly gin. Hendrick’s, unlike London Dry gins, is made of 11 botanicals including yarrow, juniper, elderflower, angelica root, orange peel, caraway, chamomile, coriander, cubeb berry, orris root and lemon.

Tasha recently had a bar shift at Sage Bar in Makati Shangri-La. For a one-night-only “Date with Tasha,” she let guests taste the wonderful flavors of Hendrick’s Gin as she talked about starting in the bar biz.

Tasha had a lot of ‘office jobs’

“When I was young my mom told me to get a real job and I was like, ‘okay.’ So I had a lot of office jobs, like a sales administrator for a real estate firm. But no

B ULLETIN

offense to people who do these jobs, they’re boring—boring for me. And I was 19 at that time and everyone in those offices were a lot older than me, I wanted to make friends my own age.”

She became a mixologist because she liked getting paid to party

“It allowed me to earn a living and have fun. I got an opportunity to start learning skills and I realized that I have a talent for mixing things together, mixing flavors together, matching flavors together.”

Her most favorite part of the job is meeting people

“The most interesting part of being a bartender is meeting interesting people. Seeing them have a good time is worth all the hard work.”

She likes her cocktails bitter

“I don’t like citrus-heavy cocktails.

If I would drink Hendrick’s, it’s definitely in a Negroni (Editor’s note: Tasha creates her own version of the cocktail and calls it Unusual Negroni, where she puts burning cinnamon bark). I also like drinking Hendrick’s with soda or sparkling water and cucumber.”

The iconic Hendrick’s gin and tonic with slices of cucumber

Tasha Lu’s cocktail recommendations: For first-time gin drinker: Fairytale or Gin Garden (Fairytale: Hendrick’s Gin, toasted juniper and rhubarb syrup, maraschino liqueur and lemon juice / Gin Garden: Hendrick’s, fresh apple juice, coriander, lime juice, sugar syrup, egg white and black pepper) For a night in: French 75 (Hendrick’s, fresh lemon juice, syrup and champagne or sparkling wine) For party with friends: Gin Garden Punch (Hendrick’s, apple juice, mint, elderflower syrup, soda water, and slices of apples and mint leaves) For an afternoon on the beach: Eastside Highball (Hendrick’s, cucumber, fresh lime, sugar, mint and soda water)

BOARD

Books and nooks for elementary pupils THE eyes of students of Nangka Elementary School in Marikina lit up as they flipped the pages of the new books that Citi Philippines and Philippine Business for Social Progress (PBSP) turned over to their school.

The country’s largest foreign bank and the largest corporate-led social development foundation joined forces for the book drive, which the latter initiated, that aims to provide a set of age-appropriate and bilingual books in every public school in the country.

Through PBSP’s “Give a Gift of Change” program, Citi Philippines turned over 43 reading nooks to Nangka Elementary School. Citi is a founding member of the PBSP and has been supporting its endeavors through the years.

During the turnover ceremony, Citi Philippines Public Affairs and Corporate Citizenship Director Aneth Lim was delighted to see the excited faces among students – ranging from grades 1 to 6, eager to get their hands on the books.

“Reading is a great habit to pick up, and I hope these children will get lost in the pages and discover new adventures, travel to new places and open their minds to new knowledge,” said the Citi official.

Study in NZ FILIPINO students are encouraged to take advantage of the five undergraduate scholarships The Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand is offering.

The scholarship for 2017 is open to those with excellent academic records from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations region.

On the back of unprecedented spike of interest among Filipino students to study in the island nation recorded last year, Education New Zealand (ENZ), the country’s government agency for international education, expects applications from the Philippines.

“The number of Filipino students in New Zealand almost doubled in 2015. We hope Filipinos would tap into this opportunity as they look to pursue international studies in New Zealand,” says Ben Burrows, ENZ Regional Communication and Strategic Relations manager for Southeast Asia.

The ASEAN Undergraduate Tuition Fees scholarship covers the tuition for the first year of study for an undergraduate degree commencing 2017. Applicants must be under the age of 23 on Dec. 31, 2016 and students must begin their course at Victoria in either Trimester 1 or Trimester 2.

LOST IN THE PAGES. Nangka Elementary School students get their hands on the new books which Citi Philippines and Philippine Business for Social Progress donated to them.

Applications will be accepted today until Oct. 31. Visit www.victoria.ac.nz/asean for more information.

Showbiz

T

HE Korean Embassy’s Korean Cultural Center recently treated mallgoers to a K-Pop Festival featuring the Happy Hallyu Day and the 2016 Pinoy K-Pop Star competition at the SkyDome at SM City North EDSA. A joint project of the The Korean Cultural Center of the Korean Embassy, in partnership with SM and the Philippine K-Pop Convention, Inc. (PKCI), the Happy Hallyu Day promoted Korean culture and products as well as its K-Pop music and dramas.

“Hallyu” is the term used for the Korean cultural wave and its fastgrowing popularity of entertainment and culture. The Hallyu Day celebration included fun activities and games about all things Korean - the Trip to Korea musical chairs and the Korean Drama Quiz. There were also Korean artists’ photo areas, Fanclub exhibits and booths, talks from different K-Pop writers about traveling to Korea, K-Pop fashion and style, Korean make-up demo, and open stage performances. Winners from the open stage performances have an opportunity to be an opening act for the annual KPop Convention 8 in December.

The Korean Cultural Center also opened the 2016 Pinoy K-Pop Star competition to talented Filipinos with the growing interest in Korean culture. Twenty finalists showed off their talents as they aimed to be the Philippines’ representatives for the K-Pop Festival (cover dance competition) and the KBS K-Pop World Festival (singing competition) in the two categories: performance and vocal categories, respectively.

In the vocal category, Andrea Fe Padilla was declared as the Grand Prize Winner, followed by John Paul Soliva for the 2nd place and Venisse Nicole Siy for the 3rd place.

Padilla and Soliva will represent the Philippines in the Online Regional Finals for the 2016 K-Pop World Festival in Changwon, South Korea.

In the dance category, ten groups showed off their K-Pop moves with costumes to complement the whole performance. The group Exotixemerged as Grand Champion, winning a free trip to Korea to participate in the 2016 K-Pop Festival in Changwon, South Korea.

They will represent the Philippines and compete with other dance teams from around the world. The group Amigo 7 won the 2nd Place, while Noxxwon the 3rd place.

The event was started by an opening number of the host, and last year’s Pinoy Pop Star winner, Val John Librea. A performance

by Dasuri Choi, the Korean Cultural Center of the Korean Embassy K-Pop dance instructor and Eat Bulaga’s Korean Dancing Diva, was a hit by the K-Pop lovers and the curious alike. Hwang Yohan, the Grand Touristar of ABS-CBN’s I Love OPM serenaded the K-Pop fans as the closing act of the whole event.

The K Pop Festival’s Happy Hallyu Day and the 2016 Pinoy K-Pop Star competition is one of the many exciting cultural events at the SkyDome at SM City North EDSA.

A festival of everything

K-POP

(Top) John Paul Soliva, the 2016 Pinoy KPop Star 2nd placer in Vocal category performs “Rhythm Ta” by iKON. (Left) The Korean Cultural Center Traditional Dance Team performs the Traditional Korean Fan Dance, Buchaechum

Most followed Pinoy personalities on TWITTER’S days as an independent company are numbered. But the question on who is going to take over the microblogging site is still left unanswered.

Rumor has it that the omnipotent Google and Apple are already out of the bidding process. So, that leaves our favorite microblogging site in a not-so-good situation.

Obviously, Twitter faces a bleak future. Hence, before anything drastic happens to the popular networking site, we decided to present a ranking of the most popular local accounts.

Collectively, they have reached a total of 50 million followers online, which is half the population of the entire Philippines. Here is the list of celebrities who are so influential they can make issues, events and happenings trend with just a single tweet: Anne Curtis-Smith The former Dyosa star, who introduces herself to her 8.4 million followers as a Fil-Aussie actress/host, pursuer of dreams, and UNICEF celebrity advocate for children, is the most followed local celebrity on the microblogging site. And she’s been the top local Twitter personality for five years now. To give you an idea on how popular Anne on Twitter is, she has more followers than AlDub’s Maine Mendoza and Alden Richards combined.

Angel Locsin This generation’s most favorite Darna lands on the list in second place with 8.2 million virtual army. Angel’s feed is mostly about the promotion of her latest projects, including that of her friends, and the meaningful causes that she actively supports.

Her Twitter account is also an extension of her Instagram account, which is on the other hand, has 2.3 million followers.

Vice Ganda He is one of the most influential members of LGBT community online and IRL (in real life). With 7.9 million Twitter fans, the It’s Showtime host uses the social networking site to update his supporters on the latest happening in his life as a television personality and as expected, his fans are also treated with an avalanche of witty punchlines, jokes and “hugot” posts.

Kathryn Bernardo There are a little over 6.4 million people watching her every post. She caught the heart of netizens with her occasional “good morning” and “good night” greetings to her fans. Almost all of her tweets are generated via Instagram. So, if you missed any of her tweets, or if you don’t have a Twitter account at all, you can still get fresh feed from the so-called “Teen Queen” using a different platform.

Yeng Constantino She has amassed a Twitter following of more than 6 million. The singer-songwriter is the most followed recording star in the country. She even got more followers than music channel MYX Philippines that missed a spot in the top 5 with 300,000 less followers compared to the Pinoy Dream Academy winner.

Rounding up the top 10 of the most followed local celebrities on Twitter are: Bianca Gonzales (5.5 million followers); Daniel Padilla (5.4 million followers); Luis Manzano (5.1 million followers); and KC Concepcion (5 million followers).

CROSSWORD PUZZLE Sunday, October 9, 2016

ACROSS 1 Clothing 5 By itself 10 Orange boxes 16 Civvies 21 Linen shade 22 Send elsewhere 23 Epoch of mammals 24 From Bangkok 25 — dunk 26 Piano exercise 27 Jot down 28 On the up-and-up 29 Night spots 31 Survey choice 33 Laurel wreath sub 35 Primate 36 “Be still!” (2 wds.)

37 Weather info 40 Johnny — 41 Persia, now 42 “Cheers” bar owner 45 Surf music duo — and Dean 46 Hectic place 48 Mouths, in biology 50 Pure carbon 52 Like some elders 54 Fearsome cape 55 Digestive juice 57 Friendly advice 58 De Mille or Moorehead 59 Phyllis Diller’s husband 60 Antony the Roman 62 Boxer’s measure 66 Subatomic particle 67 Obdurate 69 Leave behind 71 Frog’s pad 72 Draft horse 74 “— to Billie Joe” 76 Internet hookup 78 Tour guide?

79 Give the raspberry 80 Deduces 83 Knickknack stand 85 Boutonniere’s place 88 Madrid art gallery 89 Dentists inspire it 90 Exam smudge 93 Investigating 95 Luigi’s farewell 97 Groundhog mo.

98 — Vanilli 100 Racket 101 A tossup (2 wds.)

106 Dusting powder 108 Readies, as a pool cue 110 Metamorphic rock 112 Bad habit 113 Not neatniks 115 Large cay 116 “— No Sunshine” 117 Tarantula toxin 118 NATO turf 120 Freight rider

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SUNDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2016 isahred@gmail.com

122 123 124 128 129 130 131 132 133 135 137 139 140 142 144 148 150 153 155 156 157 158 159 160 161

Ground up Romantic sight Gray-brown bird Ares’ main interest Math subj.

Once and for — Poultry buy Robins’ beaks — Mineo of films Pitt of filmdom Vibrant Always, to Byron Female vampire Canine command Teacher’s base Good smell Classic 1740 novel Iowa commune Ready to eat Deadly reptile Shut Palm off Lamb’s alias Papyrus, for one Netflix series “— a Murderer” 162 Shetland’s neighbor 163 Did a salon job DOWN 1 Fam. tree sprig 2 Westwood’s Bruins 3 Like khaki 4 Tannin source 5 Weapons stockpile 6 Jelly thickener 7 Pull — — one 8 Aunt or bro.

9 Deuce successor 10 Swing a thurible 11 Milne marsupial 12 Circus routine 13 Pair of oxen 14 ATM key 15 Removed the pits 16 Browser’s delight 17 Do something with 18 Opera barber 19 Clavell novel (hyph.)

20 Plan to 30 Punjab royalty 32 Bond’s alma mater 34 Somewhat (2 wds.)

38 Crush of people 39 Excellent, in slang 41 Strong-arm 42 Philately item 43 Bicker 44 Not as important 46 Urban concern 47 AAA and BBB 49 Sirens and bells 51 Oxygen source 53 Park fixtures 54 Moon phenom 56 Hence 59 Pelts

61 63 64 65 67 68 69 70 73 75 77 81 82 84 85 86 87 91 92 93 94 95 96 99 102 103 104 105

Yield, as territory Filmdom’s Anouk — Bow of the silents Over-publicized “Bonjour, — amis!”

Souped-up cars (2 wds.)

Catering for Lunar New Year Scar on a bean Abu — Sir’s opposite Loan abbr.

Prez after Jimmy LP features Boxing jabs You’re — — pal!

Picasso or Casals Rocker — Ocasek Post-kindergarten Sleeper’s need Turning right — la vie!

Connections Mascara target Wall climber Beethoven symphony Quebec school Gulf nation

107 109 111 114 117 119 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 130 134 136 137 138 140 141 143 145 146 147 149 151 152 154

They have handles Shish — Workbench item California’s Big — Trombone slide Diva — Ponselle Bobby of ice hockey Wash out It’s cold in the North Skulks about Canada’s Trudeau In Europe, say Bead money Maria Conchita — Rain-forest growth “Not with — — but ...”

By — — (barely) Blew it After midnight On a rampage Iron hook Too glib Sheriff Taylor’s kid Honey wine Soviet plane Prefix for center Writer — Deighton Ostrich look-alike

E4

Showbiz

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2016 Isah V. Red, Editor / Nickie Wang, Issue Editor isahred@gmail.com.ph

SEDUCTIVE Da King’s daughter looks every inch of sexy royalty on the latest cover of the popular men’s magazine

By Nickie Wang

A

ward-winning actress and recording artist Lovi Poe offered a sexy sight when she stripped for the latest issue of the revamped men’s magazine FHM.

On the cover of the popular glossy, the sultry actress posed in two-piece black lingerie with her slithering friend: a Burmese python, which the magazine describes as a symbol of seduction and temptation. In the magazine folds, Lovi was phenomenal showing off her curves in barely there black numbers.

Days before the latest issue of the magazine was made available, Lovi teased her 1.1 million Instagram fans with a series behind the scenes videos of her photo shoot with lensman Mark Nicdao. She also posted a 17-second black and white clip with her holding an apple and her two ophidian pals gliding across her waist down to her thighs.

“I’ve had shoots with snakes before, but never like this. I’ve never had to wrap one around me like that. The snake was heavy. But I just let the snake go and executed the poses we had planned…

Snakes are not really one of my primal fears. I’m much more afraid of heights,” the actress exclaimed.

It’s good to note that it’s her second time to land on the cover of FHM. The first time being was in 2011 when the team behind the popular magazine flew the then 22-year-old Lovi to Bangkok for their cover shoot, which included an elephant.

For being FHM’s latest cover girl, the 34th sexiest woman in the Philippines (based on the FHM’s Sexiest Poll 2016) also talked about not entertaining pesky perceptions that people have about her. But she briefly explained that she is more than proud to show the product of the photo shoot because it was done in good taste.

“It’s just an image I exude. I don’t know why people think of me in the way they see me when I pose for a magazine, but sometimes I like to think that I’m the exact opposite,” she shared.

Lovi furthered that she may look sexy onscreen, wear revealing outfits or pose provocatively during photo shoots, but she’s very shy in real life. In fact, Lovi is stuck to her guns of keeping her personal life closely guarded as she barely shares her personal life on social media.

“Honestly, I may look like this onscreen, but I’m really very shy. People would say, ‘she’s such a flirt,’ ‘she shows too much skin,’ but honestly, if you ask the people I’m close with, they’ll say that I’m very shy. But I guess what I can say is, I can probably seduce a guy with my awkwardness,” the Someone To Watch Over star concluded.

In 2011, Lovi Poe and FHM team flew to Bangkok to do the actress’s first sexy cover. The shoot involved this giant mammoth.

WILD THING

Lovi Poe smolders

The sultry actress has again graced the cover of the magazine, this time, she is accompanied by her slithering friend

in sexy shoot

Indonesia’s Dubsmash King is Pinoy Teejay Marquez’s Indonesian fans call him a SocMed (social media) star for amassing almost a million Instagram followers

TEEJAY MARQUEZ

People may not be familiar with the name Teejay Marquez as they are to Alden Richards, James Reid or Daniel Padilla, but in Indonesia, where he’s considered a social media superstar, the young actor is making a name for himself both in the small and the big screens.

Early this year, the 23-year-old announced on Facebook that he’s going to play the lead role in a teen drama entitled Dubsmash The Movie. It’s loosely based on his life as an online celebrity who has almost a million followers on Instagram, half a million followers on Facebook and 135 thousand followers on Twitter only the movie is embellished with romantic twists.

In August, a popular magazine in Indonesia officially christened Teejay as the King of Dubsmash. And in the cover article featuring the Filipino talent, he confirmed that after filming the movie, his next project would be

a television series.

“I came here because people like me, because of my dubsmash [videos], and I feel blessed because they gave me a chance to star in a movie about dubsmash,” Teejay told his fans in one of the promo tours of the movie in Jakarta.

Teejay had to speak the Indonesian language and acted opposite other Indonesian costars. And he didn’t find it hard to learn the language because he’s been practicing to speak in Bahasa even before he decided to try his luck in the neighboring country.

“I’ve noticed on Instagram that most of my followers are Indonesians. Though I don’t understand what they say, the emojis they use simply indicate that they enjoy what I post on social media. So, I post short messages for them in Bahasa,” Teejay said in previous interviews.

Before he landed a lead role in the Indonesian teen flick, the young actor was reluctant to visit the country to meet his fans.

For several months, a producer from Indonesia was trying to get in touch with him giving him an offer to do a television commercial. He was hesitant because he wasn’t sure if the person who was contacting was from a legitimate agency.

In the Philippines, Teejay started in showbiz in 2011 as one of the cast members of GMA-7’s Tween Hearts. He even won the Best Male New TV Personality trophy (tied with his co-star Derrick Monasterio) at PMPC Star Awards on the same year. Four years later, he transferred to ABS-CBN where he landed a role in the hit primetime series Dream Dad topbilled by Zanjoe Marudo and Jana Agoncillo. Most recently, he had a very short stint in the family drama The Greatest Love.