THE WORLD | A6
TAIWAN DRILLS WITH ANTI-AMPHIBIOUS LANDING MISSILES AMID RISING TENSIONS
PHL meat imports up 9.6% in 1st semester
By Ada Pelonia
THE country’s meat imports grew by nearly 10 percent in the first semester, driven by higher chicken and pork purchases abroad.
Data from the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI) showed that meat imports increased by 9.64 percent to 647,745 metric tons (MT) from January to June this year, compared to the 590,766 MT recorded in the same period in 2023.
Chicken imports rose 4.13 percent to 221,598 MT from 212,811 MT. Mechanically deboned meat (MDM) accounted for the bulk of chicken imports at 124,837 MT.
Based on BAI data, pork imports grew by 10.73 percent to 316,995 MT from the 286,275 MT recorded
in the same period last year. Pork cuts accounted for most of the shipments, followed by offals at 113,851 MT and 112,597 MT, respectively.
Beef imports jumped by 29.3 percent to 84,918 MT from 65,676 MT. Beef cuts held the bulk of the imports at 55,575 MT.
“The reduction in supply caused by the continuing effects of ASF [African swine fever] coupled with El Niño most likely encouraged importers to bring in more products,” Meat Importers and Traders Association (Mita) President Emeritus Jesus Cham said via Viber.
According to Cham, the “record high” domestic retail prices of pork and chicken indicate a severe supply shortage, which “allowed beef to become more competitive.”
The prevailing price of chicken in Metro Manila markets was P220 per kilo while pork belly was P380 per kilo as of August 20, based on the price monitoring report of the Department of Agriculture (DA).
Cham said that while Executive Order (EO) 62 introduced a measure of certainty over the tariff, the DA “still appears unwilling to recognize the supply shortage.”
“The pork MAV was only fully issued this week, delayed by over 6 months,” he said.
“Also, DA would reclassify certain pork offal as meat in order for it to pay higher duty and incur higher landed cost,” Cham added.
Under EO 62, pork imports have an in-quota tariff of 15 percent and
an out-quota tariff of 25 percent, while poultry MDM has a 5-percent tariff rate. Meanwhile, Brazil was the top supplier of beef and chicken imports at 30,519 MT and 121,135 MT, respectively.
In terms of pork imports, BAI data showed that Spain was the country’s biggest supplier at 80,737 MT. The United States Department of Agriculture-Foreign Agricultural Service in Manila (USDA-FAS Manila) recently said in its latest report that the country’s meat imports are expected to increase next year on the back of population growth and a positive economic outlook.
BusinessMirror
SANS IDLE FUNDS, NEW TAXES, LOANS OPTIONS
By Reine Juvierre S. Alberto
IF the fund balances of governmentowned and -controlled corporations (GOCCs) were not tapped by the Department of Finance (DOF), the national government would have to inflict additional taxes on the public or resort to higher borrowings. Kung magtataas ng buwis, iyan ramdam ng lahat iyan.
ka ng VAT or income tax or magdadagdag tayo ng excise taxes, ramdam ng lahat iyan. [If we would increase the taxes, everyone would be affected by that. If the value-added tax or income tax is raised or if we would add more excise taxes, everyone would be hit by
TAGUIG, 3 OTHER CITIES ‘MOST IMPROVED’–INDEX
By Andrea E. San Juan
The government aims to raise P4.3 trillion in revenues in 2024. Finance Secretary Ralph G. Recto admitted that revenue projections are “high targets,” but remained firm in the DOF’s stance on not imposing new taxes. Asuncion added that if the DOF let the excess funds of PhilHealth and the Philippine Deposit Insurance Corporation (PDIC) remain unused, the government would incur more debt and increase its debt-to-GDP ratio or debt measured against the gross domestic product.
@andreasanjuan
AGUIG, San Juan, LapuLapu in Cebu and Baguio are among the most improved cities based on the 2024 Rankings of Highly Urbanized Cities. According to the annual ranking of Philippine cities and municipalities which measures the performance of 33 cities, Taguig went up nine notches to the 10th spot this time from last year’s 19th; and San Juan climbed eight spots to reach 25th this year from last year’s 33rd. Lapu-Lapu city in Cebu improved by six spots to claim the 23rd ranking this year compared to its 29th spot last year, while Baguio went five notches
up to reach the 12th spot this year from last year’s 17th.
The Cities and Municipalities Competitive Index (CMCI), published on the Department of Trade and Industry’s (DTI) website, is an annual ranking of Philippine cities and municipalities developed by the National Competitiveness Council through the Regional Competitiveness Committees (RCCs) with assistance from the United States Agency for International Development.
The rankings of cities and municipalities are based on the sum of their scores in four pillars: Economic Dynamism, Government Efficiency, Infrastructure, Resilience and Innovation.
Taguig City’s productivity and
employment generation prompted the city to clinch the first spot in terms of Economic Dynamism. Under this pillar, it fell to the 25th spot in the area of active establishments in the locality. The city’s ranking also plunged to the 13th spot in the area of cost of living.
In Government Efficiency, however, it ranked 28th as its rankings in the areas of capacity of health services, social protection and recognition of performance plunged. It’s interesting to note, however, that it ranked first in terms of getting business permits. When it comes to Infrastructure, Taguig claimed the 24th spot as
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be collaborating with the judiciary department [Supreme Court] for
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and that President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. had agreed that other government agencies, such as the Philippine National Police (PNP), the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG), along with the DOJ, will work with the DOT to investigate and prosecute crimes related to tourists. Frasco failed to say, however, how many crimes exactly have been perpetrated against tourists to warrant such special courts. PNP crime statistics
Filling materials lack delays SMC Bulacan airport project News
By Lorenz S. Marasigan @lorenzmarasigan
DIVISERSIFIED conglom-
erate San Miguel Corp.
(SMC) is taking a financial hit as the delay in the construction of the Bulacan Airport adds “hundreds of millions of dollars” to the project’s costs.
SMC President Ramon S. Ang disclosed that the project has been affected by the suspension of the Manila Bay reclamation projects, which caused a shortage of filling materials needed for the airport’s construction.
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in the first quarter, breaching the 60-percent threshold recommended by multilateral lenders for emerging markets. Outstanding debt of the government reached P15.483 trillion as of end-June 2024.
He emphasized that the costs would have been even higher had SMC not successfully negotiated with its contractors.
“That’s still small; if we were not able to negotiate that with the contractors, it might have been more,” he added.
The lack of filling materials has pushed back the airport’s expected completion date to the first quarter of 2028, from the original target of 2027.
“The new additional cost includes the cost of money and the need to renegotiate terms with contractors. That one-year delay cost us several hundreds of millions of dollars,” Ang said during a recent roundtable discussion.
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do not make any distinction between crimes versus Filipinos and those committed against foreigners, but has reported a decrease in overall crime incidents in 2023 to some 390,000 nationwide, from 392,610 in 2022. The highest crime volume was recorded in the National Capital Region. Also, the DILG earlier reported a decline in the average monthly crime rate to 15.04 percent from July 1, 2022 and April
21, 2024, from 21.92 percent between July 1, 2016 and April 21, 2018.
Low budget utilization rate RECENTLY, Forbes Advisor listed Manila among the riskiest cities for tourists. No other cities in the Philippines were listed. (See, “Manila listed among the riskiest tourist sites,” in the BusinessMirror, July 17, 2024.)
According to the National
“If we can get the sand now, we can start construction and make the airport ready to operate by the first quarter of 2028,” Ang noted.
Despite these setbacks, Ang said SMC remains committed to completing the project, which is expected to alleviate congestion at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (Naia) and serve as a major gateway for the country.
To be built on a 2,400-hectare property in Bulakan, Bulacan, just north of Metro Manila, the $15-billion New Manila International Airport will have four runways, eight taxiways, and three passenger terminals. It also has provisions for future expansion to sport six runways and
Expenditure Program (NEP) for 2025 submitted by the Department of Budget and Management to Congress, the DOT will be allocated P3.394 billion in funds, 2.8 percent less than its approved budget of P3.92 billion under the General Appropriations Act of 2024. The DOT had originally proposed a budget of P13.4 billion for 2025 to the DBM, which Frasco said included additional funding to support “landmark projects.”
However, as DOT’s own documents showed as of August 2024, it has only utilized 57 percent of the
to accommodate 200 million passengers per year.
It is expected to raise tourist arrivals to 30 million visitors annually, generate over a million direct and indirect jobs, and contribute roughly P900 billion annually to the Philippine GDP by 2025.
Once built, the new international airport will be fully owned by the government under a “build-operatetransfer” program.
Under the 50-year concession agreement, SMAI will undertake the financing, design, construction, supply, completion, testing, commissioning, and operation and maintenance (O&M) of the new international gateway.
P3.03 billion allotted to it. The DBM often uses the utilization rate to determine an agency’s budget in the succeeding years, as this indicates how much funds it can actually absorb for projects. Last year, DBM Secretary Amenah Pangandaman pointed to the DOT and other agencies with low budget utilization rates. (See, “PHL tourism promotions get P1.3B for 2024,” in the BusinessMirror, August 9, 2023.)
P500-M branding budget
OF the total budget proposed for 2025, the DOT-Office of the Secretary (OSEC) was allotted P2.84 billion, 6.3 percent less than this year’s allocation of P3.03 billion. The other agencies, though, will be receiving higher allocations in 2025: the National Parks Development Committee, P384 million, up 19.06 percent from 2024; the Intramuros Administration, P146 million (+16.4 percent); and the Philippine Commission of Sports Scuba Diving P25 million (+74.5 percent).
At the DOT-Osec, P500 million will fund its Branding Campaign, and P541.3 million will go to Market and Product Development. The DOT earlier projected a return to prepandemic tourist arrivals of 8.3 million by 2025, but recently acknowledged that it may not be able to hit its arrivals target of 7.7 million this year. (See, “7.7-M arrivals goal now a ‘moving target’–DOT,” in the BusinessMirror, August 20, 2024.)
Despite President Marcos Jr.’s commitment to tourism as a means to alleviate poverty by spreading out economic development to the countryside, the tourism budget accounts for just 0.053 percent of the proposed P6.35 trillion NEP for 2025.
A number of lawmakers supported an increase in the DOT’s budget for 2025, however, any increase will likely result in the decrease of another agency’s allocation.
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it ranked 5th in Education; 9th in Accommodation Capacity; 11th in Health and Financial Technology Capacity, among others.
In contrast, its rankings plunged in the availability of basic utilities, 28th and Transportation Vehicles, 27th, among others. While it ranked only 32nd in the area of Resiliency, Taguig City ranked first in the sub-indicators such as Disaster Risk Reduction Plan and Local Risk Assessments.
Its ranking in this pillar, however, was pulled down by Emergency Infrastructure and Utilities as it ranked 30th.
It’s worth noting that it ranked 7th in the area of Innovation, thanks to claiming the top spot in terms of ICT Plan, Online Payment Facilities and Intellectual Property Registration. Its rankings plunged, however ,in terms of Internet Capability (30th) and the number of its STEM graduates (17th).
Baguio City
FOR Baguio City, its ranking in
“As much as possible, we keep [to a minimum] our debts that we are paying with very high interest,” Asuncion said.
Earlier this year, the DOF issued DOF Circular 003-2024 authorizing PhilHealth and PDIC to remit P89.9 billion and P110 billion, respectively, to the Treasury.
This sparked criticisms from lawmakers, medical groups, the Church and the public who said this violated the Universal Health Care (UHC) Law.
Finance Secretary Recto explained, however, that returning the excess funds—not monies from member contributions—simply followed the mandate of the 2024 General Appropriations Act (GAA).
In a citizens’ unity statement, the patients, civil society, public-sector and private-sector trade unions and grassroots organizations called on President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. to immediately stop the diversion of the P89.9-billion PhilHealth funds to the unprogrammed appropriations.
“We demand that PhilHealth funds stay within PhilHealth so that the institution can perform its role in achieving universal health care [UHC]. We demand the return of the P20 billion that was remitted to the Bureau of Treasury and prevent any further transfer of funds,” they said in the statement.
Despite the call, the second tranche of funds—P10 billion— was moved from PhilHealth to the Treasury.
“Diverting PhilHealth funds is both illegal and immoral in light of the fact that out-of-pocket spending for health is as high as 45 percent, underscoring the need to further expand health coverage, especially for the poor and socially excluded groups,” anti-poverty group Social Watch Philippines said.
Asuncion said tapping the unused funds is legal and in accordance with the provision of the 2024 GAA mandating the DOF to issue the guidelines in withdrawing the fund balances of GOCCs—echoing what Recto had said. The fund balances would bankroll programs and projects under unprogrammed appropriations such as foreign-assisted projects, increased personnel benefits, payment of rightof-way and routine maintenance of national roads, among others. May natutulog na pera, kung hindi natin ito gagamitin, hindi mararamdaman ng mga tao kung ano iyong benepisyo na dapat naibibigay ng pondo na iyon na nilaan ng gobyerno. [There are sleeping funds; if we do not use it, people will not feel the benefits that the funds allocated by the government should provide,” Asuncion said. These fund balances are subsidies from the national government, including tax collections from the sin tax law and shares from the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (Pagcor) which in the case of PhilHealth, ballooned since it did not spend the subsidiesduringthepandemic.(Related story: https://businessmirror. com.ph/2024/08/15/philhealthspared-as-ng-borrowed-forpandemic-costs/).
Asuncion said the government will still provide subsidies to PhilHealth next year amounting to P70 billion.
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“FAS Manila forecasts 2025 beef imports to increase to 226,000 metric tons [MT] carcass weight equivalent [CWE],” the report read.
(See: https://businessmirror.com. ph/2024/08/22/phl-meat-importsseen-to-grow-in-2025/)
“Continued greater-than-sixpercent economic growth and forecasted population increases support strong consumer purchasing power which will push beef imports higher in 2025,” it added. The report also projected pork imports next year to reach 510,000 MT CWE, up over 6 percent from last year. “Continued animal disease challenges combined with strong economic growth and forecast population increases will push imports upward.”
Government Efficiency improved as it jumped to the 12th spot this year on the back of improved performance on capacity of school and health services, compliance to national directives, among others. However, it lagged in terms of its capacity to generate local resource, ranking 27th. On Infrastructure, the city’s ranking also improved as it claimed the 14th spot, thanks to its better performance in the areas of Road Network, Health, LGU Investment, Information Technology Capacity, among others. Its rankings declined, however, in Education and Transportation vehicles.
In terms of Resiliency, it also improved as it jumped to the 10th spot, thanks to its better performance in the areas of Land Use Plan, Sanitary System, and Early Warning System. On the other hand, it declined in Utilities, Budget for DRRMP and Annual Disaster Drill. It stayed at 13th spot in Innovation. But as it obtained a higher score in this pillar, it saw an improvement in internet capability, availability of basic internet service, new technology and an increase in the number of STEM graduates.
San Juan City
MEANWHILE , San Juan city ranked 24th in terms of Government Efficiency with most of the sub-indicators rising, such as getting business permits, presence of investment promotion unit, compliance with national directives, among others.
The city, however, plunged to the 32nd spot in terms of Infrastructure due to the decline in its ranking in: Information Technology Capacity, 30th; Availability of Basic Utilities and Financial Technology Capacity.
In contrast, it ranked 7th in terms of Road Network.
San Juan ranked 23rd in Resiliency. While its ranking in this pillar improved thanks to an increase in employed population, among others, it performed poorly in Sanitary System, Utilities and Early Warning System. The city’s ranking in Innovation improved to the 17th spot this year, thanks to ICT Use: (Electronic Business Permits and LIcensing System) E-BPLS Software and Availability of Basic Internet Service, among others. However, its ranking plunged to 29th spot in Internet Capability.
Lapu-Lapu City
MEANWHILE , Lapu-Lapu City in Cebu ranked 21st in Economic Dynamism—an improvement from its last year’s ranking, thanks to improved performance in terms of employment generation and cost of doing business, among others.
In Government Efficiency, the city plunged to the 26th spot due to declined rankings on capacity of health services and social protection, among others.
In Infrastructure, its ranking improved to 17th due to Health, LGU Investment and Accommodation Capacity.
Lapu-Lapu City’s ranking jumped to the 19th spot in terms of resiliency thanks to its improved performance on Annual Disaster Drill, Early Warning System and Emergency Infrastructure, among others. In Innovation, its ranking improved to 26th because of the city’s ICT Plan and Online Payment Facilities. However, its ranking in terms of STEM graduates plunged to the 33rd spot.
Legislators denounce China aggression
By Butch Fernandez @butchfBM & Jovee Marie N. dela Cruz
LEGISLATORS on Tuesday assailed China’s provocative acts at the West Philippine Sea and called on the government to explore all legal options, including seeking international arbitration to prevent similar acts in the future.
The calls for fresh legal options received fresh momentum at the weekend as senators reacted to China’s latest aggression against Philippine ships on patrol or mercy missions at the WPS.
at risk. This is too much. They are deliberately baiting us into using force. We are not violating any international laws because the maritime activities of our maritime personnelI see no reason why they should mistreat our countrymen,” Estrada said in a statement, partly in Filipino.
“These unprofessional, illegal, and provocative actions by Chinese ships necessitate a firm response to protect our sovereign rights and ensure the safety of our troops and our maritime operations within our Exclusive Economic Zone [EEZ]. By doing so, we can uphold the rule of law and reinforce our commitment to a rules-based international order,” he added.
‘Unwavering bravery’
Besides Estrada, Sens. Joel Villanueva and Nancy Binay also weighed in on the issue.
“The safety and lives of Filipinos have repeatedly been placed
Senate President Pro Tempore Jinggoy Estrada, who chairs the Senate Committee on Defense, urged “all concerned government agencies to explore all legal avenues, including the possibility of having an international arbitration to step in to hold China accountable for its repeated and dangerous maneuvers against our vessels.”
MEANWHILE, Villanueva led off with praising “the men and women of the Armed Forces, the Coast Guard [PCG], and the civilians who risk their lives to safeguard our territory in the West Philippine Sea.”
Noting that Monday is National Heroes Day, Villanueva
added, “Your unwavering bravery in standing up to China’s continuous bullying deserves more than just a salute—it’s a true testament to your heroism.” China’s “recent provocations,” Villanueva said—“from launching flares in the path of our Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources [BFAR] aircraft last Saturday and their dangerous maneuvering on BRP Datu Sanday while operating from HasaHasa Shoal to Escoda Shoal Sunday are not just uncalled for but a blatant disregard of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.” These actions, he stressed, are a clear violation of Philippine “sovereign rights over our 200 nautical mile EEZ.” Binay, for her part, urged “the government of the People’s Republic of China to immediately cease and desist from all inflammatory actions that test the limits of our nation’s goodwill.”
Inhumane, unjustifiable actions “THESE inhumane and unjustifiable actions taken by the Chinese
Coast Guard against BRP Datu Sanday on a lawful resupply mission on August 25 are clear acts of aggression that endanger the lives of our brave servicemen.”
The leadership of the House of Representatives on Monday expressed alarm over China’s increasingly aggressive actions in the West Philippine Sea.
Speaker Ferdinand Martin G. Romualdez, in a statement, strongly condemned these latest reckless and dangerous maneuvers by the China Coast Guard, targeting Philippine vessels.
“Again, we condemn in the strongest terms this newest reckless and dangerous maneuver by the China Coast Guard on our vessels, this time a BFAR ship conducting a humanitarian mission by resupplying Filipino fishermen with food, medical supplies, and diesel,” he said.
This incident marks the second time within a week that China has used its might to harass and intimidate Philippine vessels and personnel within its own territory.
On August 19, China Coast
Guard ships rammed two PCG vessels.
The BFAR ship was resupplying fishermen in Hasa-Hasa Shoal, which is about 60 nautical miles from Rizal, Palawan, and Escoda Shoal, located around 110 nautical miles away from Rizal town.
“This area is clearly within the 200-mile exclusive economic zone of the Philippines under the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea, to which China and the Philippines are signatories,” Speaker Romualdez said.
He noted that the two shoals are more than 1,000 miles from China.
The speaker repeated his appeal for China to respect and follow the international law it signed and to exercise restraint and stop all aggressive actions.
He urged Beijing to engage in consultations and dialogue as a means of resolving conflicts, rather than resorting to confrontation and aggression.
Romualdez reiterated that the government remains steadfast in upholding the nation’s dignity, territorial integrity, and sovereignty.
Peza to beef up manufacturing tools industry
By Andrea San Juan @andreasanjuan
THE Philippine Economic Zone Authority (Peza) said it is beefing up the die and mold industry, noting that it is vital to the growth of domestic and export manufacturing.
“Its steady growth over the years is helping to position Philippines as a reliable source of highquality molds and dies, catering to both domestic and international markets,” Peza Director General Tereso O. Panga said. As the investment promotion agency aims to engage with Philippine Die and Mold Association (PDMA), Peza said it hopes to “integrate more local process subcontractors and MSMEs [micro-, small-, and medium-enterprises] into economic zone value chain and scale up the die and mold industry—so we can accelerate our
country’s industrialization and contribute to the President’s directive to bring in more strategic industries and productivity enhancing investments in the ecozones.”
Panga said the country’s ecozone locators, particularly those in the semiconductor-electronics, automotive and aerospace sectors benefit much from the integration of local die and mold providers into the ecozone value chain.
To date, Panga said Peza now has 4,404 registered business enterprises (RBEs), mostly exportoriented and where EMS-SMS and automotive are among its top
product sectors.
He highlighted the vital role of the die and mold industry as he revealed that as of May 2024, Peza has registered 180 projects in the die and mold sector, generating P19.34 billion in investments and creating 40,996 direct jobs.
Panga explained that not only are these basic materials critical to production-scale manufacturing, but also in “fostering innovation” particularly in larger industries that rely on plastics and metals as raw materials for the production of finished goods and for various industry applications.
Moreover, he said, the die and mold industry is regarded as the “backbone of manufacturing, MSME development and industrialization. It is said that the design and manufacture of dies and molds represent a significant link in the entire production chain because nearly all mass-produced discrete parts are formed using processes that employ dies and molds.”
With this, Panga said the partnerships Peza has been entering into to support the die and mold industry.
He said Peza is collaborating
with DOST-MIRDC, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and Board of Investments (BOI), Tesda, and PDMA on the establishment of the Mold and Die Technology Support Center (MTSC) at the Cavite Economic Zone.
Panga said this Center seeks to train thousands of Filipino workers on CNC machining, precision tooling, mold designing, and production of various dies and molds.
“Through our program, we can help grow the metals, plastics and engineering sectors that serve the requirements of downstream manufacturing companies and contribute to the growth of the local and export core-manufacturing industry,” the Peza chief emphasized.
Together with DTI, Office of the Special Assistant to the President for Investment and Economic Affairs (Osapiea) and other partner agencies and industries, Peza said it aims to make more competitive the country’s tool and die industry, particularly in the production of components and parts for the automotive, aerospace and electronics sectors.
Group sets meet to tackle net zero carbon ambition
TBy Lenie Lectura @llectura
HE Net Zero Carbon Alliance (NZCA), the country’s largest private sectorbacked organization advocating for and advancing progress on net zero, will gather industry stakeholders next month to discuss how to scale up net zero ambitions and actions.
Convened in 2021, NZCA is a pioneering consortium spearheaded by renewable energy leader Energy Development Corporation (EDC). As of July 2024, it counts 31 partner-members from various industries and enterprises such as manufacturing, real estate,
hospitality, information technology, mobility, finance and the academe, and five partner-enabler organizations. The Net Zero Conference this year will gather policy leaders, financial institutions, businesses, and other stakeholders to discuss strategies guiding the Philippines’ private sector toward a meaningful, equitable and sustainable net zero transformation.
The event, scheduled on September 19 at Rockwell the Fifth in Makati City, is organized in partnership with Eco-Business, Asia Pacific’s leading and most prominent media and intelligence unit dedicated to ESG and sustainable development.
The conference will feature thought leadership panels and workshop sessions led by resource speakers from NZCA member companies such as Arthaland, BSI Group, Converge ICT, EDC, First Balfour, Holcim and Mondelez, as well as multi-sectoral representatives from the academe, legislature, media, and foreign affairs. According to NZCA convenor EDC, the Philippines is on the cusp of a massive low-carbon economic transformation, with current regulations aimed at galvanizing finance for developments aligned with the country’s sustainable development goals—a transition requiring a swift move away from coal towards the rapid adoption of
renewable energy.
The nation’s Low-Carbon Economy Bill also promises mechanisms to enable the country to seize economic opportunities as it transitions. Ahead of this legislation being enacted, the private sector is increasing its net zero ambitions, driven by mandates from global headquarters, geopolitical pressures and cross-border policies.
“This momentum, which will help the nation reduce emissions and mitigate climate-induced impact down the line, will prove crucial for the country to maintain,” said Allan V. Barcena, NZCA Executive Director and EDC Assistant Vice President and Head of Corporate Support Functions.
Ad hoc body to help DA in policy implementation
TWanted: The political CEO
By Henry J. Schumacher
AS we have just celebrated the Ninoy Aquino Day and the National Heroes Day, my todays focus is whether businessmen should take political positions. The era when top executives only voiced their opinions in background discussions seems to be over. Globally, the message is clear: “Directors, holiday from politics is over!” The challenges of transformation are becoming more complex in a “political decade” characterized by geopolitical crises and societal polarization. Boards must align their risk and compliance management with this politicization and consider political scenarios in their supply chains, investments, and business models.
However, there is debate among managers about whether this “duty to be political” obliges CEOs to publicly position themselves. Does the principle of “As a corporation, we should not engage in politics” (Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, former CEO of Nestlé, 2023) hold, or is the stance that “A CEO can, may, and should be political. Sometimes they even must be” (Joe Kaeser, former CEO of Siemens, 2018) more appropriate?
is related to the corporate strategy and business model, the more it becomes a duty to speak out. Choosing and communicating such topics should be sustainable and closely tied to the business model and brand policy. Statements against import tariffs are easier for a car manufacturer’s CEO to make than a statement for a specific political party. Before making any statements, a reality check with the company’s actual situation and alignment with corporate reports (like Corporate Social Responsibility or supply chain reports) is necessary, along with preparation for negative reactions; spontaneous remarks are riskier. Statements should be documented, as everything is public today and may be used in legal or regulatory proceedings.
The board has the ultimate responsibility for political positioning. The supervisory board, through its personnel authority, can exert significant influence. If a CEO fails in political communication, either through statements or lack of reactions leading to long-term business relationship damage or loss of public trust, their removal for “important reasons” is possible, even without criminal behavior.
The trend from the entertainment industry is to include “morality clauses” in board contracts, which can facilitate termination for damaging behavior, including in private life. Political times require corporate leaders to be bold, with a coherent overall strategy that supports the business model and company values, or risk removal.
To be honest, value-oriented communication for company leadership is not an option, it’s a moral obligation.
By Ada Pelonia @adapelonia
HE Department of Agriculture (DA) created an interim unit to assist in implementing regulatory policies and activities under the Agriculture and Fishery Regulatory Support Program (AFRSP). Agriculture Secretary Francisco Tiu Laurel Jr. issued Department Order 13 which states the need to establish an ad-hoc body in the department that would provide technical assistance in harmonizing the implementation of regulatory policies and activities under the program.
It is also set to rationalize the distribution of resources of operating units under the AFRSP and monitor and evaluate program performance.
“The unit shall provide technical support and assistance in the implementation of the regulatory policies, programs, and activities of the operating units under the AFRSP within the context of the priorities and policy direction of the department on agri-fishery regulations,” the DO read.
Aside from assisting in the development of the DA regulatory roadmap and translating policy directions and the agri chief’s directives into plans and budget
proposals, the unit is also mandated to facilitate the concerns and issues of the various operating units covered by the AFRSP.
It is also tasked to review the submitted plans and budget proposals of all operating units covered by the AFRSP and monitor the physical and financial performance of all operating units under the program.
The interim unit should also conduct “all other activities that may be relevant in the efficient and effective administration of the Department’s regulatory program.”
However, the DO stated that it would be a separate operating unit under the administrative control
and supervision of the Assistant Secretary for Policy and Regulations with the staff sourced from existing plantilla or Contract of Service (COS) positions of the DA.
“The Undersecretary for Policy, Planning and Regulations and the Assistant Secretary for Policy and Regulations shall exercise oversight over the operations of the interim Unit,” the DO read.
Under DO 13, the operating expenses of the interim unit, including the compensation of COS personnel, should be charged against available DA Office of the Secretary (Osec) or Central Office funds, subject to their availability.
Newly-approved House bill sets penalties on fake lawyers
THE
practice of law. In a unanimous vote of 202-0, the House passed House Bill 10691, which proposes penalties of prisión mayor in its minimum to medium periods or six years and one day to 12 years imprisonment, a substantial fine ranging from P100,000 to P5 million, or both, for any person who, without being a member of the Philippine Bar, engages in unauthorized legal practice.
“House Bill 10691 hopes to significantly abate instances of fraud, misrepresentation, and deceit that undermine the proper administration of justice. With this proposed law, we hope to strengthen the trust and confidence of the public not only in the legal profession but more importantly the justice system,” said
Speaker Ferdinand Martin G. Romualdez, who is also a lawyer.
HB 10691 identifies the following acts as constituting unauthorized practice of law:
(a) Presenting oneself or claiming to be a member of the Philippine Bar to the public or another individual, regardless of whether it is for profit or any other purpose;
Corporate law provides guidelines in this regard. The primary duty of management is to ensure sustainable value development in the interest of all relevant stakeholders. In recent years, the importance of a values-based corporate culture and its communication has grown. Results from the Edelman Trust Barometer 2024 highlight the public’s expectation for companies to show leadership on societal issues. Values-based communication is now a strict duty rather than a choice, as it builds resilience and reputation, and only this can ensure sustainable value creation and offer options during crises. The more political a topic
To be honest, I have only looked at the international situation; I understand that unsteady times require positioning. But to what extent is it allowed?
I have not made any reference to the Philippine “environment,” which may also require careful political positioning of CEOs. I leave this to the readers of this column. Please let me know your views: email me at hjschumacher59@ gmail.com
Oil companies set to slash prices by over ₧1 per liter
O(d) Representing oneself, by any of the means mentioned above, as capable of facilitating legal petitions, actions, or remedies, including those for annulment or nullity of marriages, or declarations of presumptive death.
Jovee Marie N. dela Cruz
(b) Except in cases permitted by law or the Rules of Court, making a court appearance or signing pleadings, motions, entries of appearance, manifestations, letters, or any other documents filed before any court, tribunal, quasi-judicial body, or government agency, thereby representing oneself as a member of the Philippine Bar; (c) Advertising or claiming to be a member of the Philippine Bar through signs, cards, billboards, advertisements, printed materials, or via radio, television, social media, websites, or any other publication means, including the use of the title “Attorney,”“Attorney-at-law,” or “Atty.” attached to one’s name, or representing oneself as a partner, associate, or member of a law firm or office; or
IL companies announced a reduction of fuel prices by more than P1 per liter starting Tuesday. In separate advisories, Petron Corporation, Shell Philippines, Chevron Philippines Inc. (Caltex), Seaoil Philippines Corp., Total Philippines, Unioil, PTT, Phoenix Petroleum, and Jetti, said they will lower prices per liter of gasoline by P1.15, diesel by P1.90, and kerosene by P1.85. The new prices will be reflected at 6 a.m. of Tuesday, August 27. As usual, Cleanfuel will implement the same changes effective 12:01 a.m. the same day.
The Department of EnergyOil Industry Management Bu -
reau (DOE-OIMB) said this week’s oil price rollback was brought about by the cease-fire talks in Gaza and the production recovery support from Libya’s Sharara Oilfield.
Oil companies adjust pump prices every week to reflect movements in the world oil market. Last week, oil companies implemented an increase of P1.00 per liter for gasoline and P1.20 per liter for diesel and kerosene. This brought year-to-date adjustments to a net increase of P8.05 per liter for gasoline and P5.95 per liter for diesel, and a net decrease of P2.15
Cassandra Ong now detained at House
By Jovee Marie N. dela Cruz @joveemarie
THE House of Representatives on Sunday took custody of Katherine Cassandra Li
Ong, a pivotal figure in the ongoing investigation into illegal Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators (Pogos).
The House Committee on Dangerous Drugs chairman, Surigao del Sur Rep. Robert Ace Barbers, said Ong, the authorized representative of the controversial Pogo hub in Porac, Pampanga, was handed over to the House by the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) in compliance with an arrest and detention order issued by the chamber.
The House Sergeant-at-Arms, retired Police Maj. Gen. Napoleon Taas, officially received Ong
at 12:57 p.m. from the NBI, with the turnover documents signed by NBI Assistant Director Winmar Ramos.
Ong was briefed on her legal rights, including the right to remain silent, the right to legal counsel, and protection against unlawful detention. All of Ong’s personal belongings were returned to her, and she signed a receipt acknowledging that the items were returned to her.
Ong faces charges and under -
DOH reports 2 more Mpox cases in NCR; total now 12
Continued from A10
“We continue to see local transmission of mpox clade II here in the Philippines, in Metro Manila in particular. Mpox moves from skin-to-skin, both during sexual encounters and also other intimate forms of skin contact. It is not airborne,” advised Health Secretary Teodoro J. Herbosa.
Asked whether mpox cases 11 and 12 were connected to case number 10, Asistant Secretary Albert Domingo replied, “We cannot determine yet any epidemiologic linkages of cases 11 and 12 to case 10. This is definitely one of the questions our epidemiologists are trying to answer as more information comes in.”
Claudeth Mocon-Ciriaco
ADB: Bid to cut poverty may spur GHG emissions hike to meet growth goal
Continued from A10
Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) data showed 4.84 million Filipinos were living below the food thresholds in 2023. Among the population, this is around 4.3 percent while the proportion of Filipino families whose incomes were not sufficient to meet their basic food requirements in 2023 stood at 2.7 percent, or equivalent to 740,000 families.
At the individual level, poverty incidence was at 15.5 percent, meaning, about 17.54 million Filipinos were poor in 2023, lower than the 18.1 percent or about 19.99 million Filipinos were poor in 2021. Poverty incidence is the proportion of Filipino families with incomes that are not sufficient to buy minimum basic food and non-food needs as estimated by the poverty threshold, PSA explained. ( See: https://
businessmirror.com.ph/2024/07/23/ poverty-rate-down-but-poor-pinoysface-risks-experts/)
The PSA earlier said the average annual income of Filipino families in 2023 was estimated at P353,230—or 15 percent more than the P307,190 average family income in 2021. The average annual family income in 2018 was recorded at P313,450. Meanwhile, Filipino families spent an average of P258,050 in 2023, an increase of 12.8 percent compared to the P228,800 expenditure in 2021.
In 2018, the average annual family expenditure was registered at P238,750. PSA said Filipinos are spending more on food consumed outside their homes, transportation, and education. The latest poverty data showed the shares of these items to total family expenditure posted the highest increases in 2023.
went inquest proceedings on August 23, 2024, for violations related to Presidential Decree 1829 and the Philippine Immigration Act of 1940 (Commonwealth Act 613). The NBI has requested notification before any decision to release Ong from congressional custody.
The House cited Ong in contempt for her failure to attend hearings regarding Pogo-related crimes, including those tied to Lucky South 99, where she is listed as authorized representatives. Its Porac hub was recently raided.
Her absence led the House quad-committee to take decisive action to ensure her participation in investigating illegal Pogos, their connection to the illegal drug trade, unlawful land acquisitions by some Chinese nationals, and extrajudicial killings linked to the Duterte administration’s war on drugs.
Barbers emphasized the importance of Ong’s testimony to the investigation.
“Cassandra Li Ong is crucial because she connects us to Lucky South 99 and other illicit Pogo hubs raided by the Paocc [Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission]. Her role appears to be as a liaison between these illegal Pogos and Pagcor [Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp.],” Barbers said in an interview.
“We also need to obtain information from her about the owners, lawyers, and incorporators involved in these operations because it’s clear that there are numerous illegal activities going on. The first question we need to ask her is whether she was aware of the scam hubs, torture, prostitution, and other illicit activities. Cassandra Li Ong is a very vital resource person in the quadcommittee’s investigation into illegal Pogos,” he added.
The House Committee on Human Rights chairman, Manila Rep. Bienvenido Abante Jr., also emphasized the importance of Ong’s testimony in addressing key issues.
“The quad-committee intends to invite Ms. Ong to our next hearing to shed light on critical issues.
For instance, her testimony will help us ascertain the true nature of Attorney Harry Roque’s ties to Lucky South 99,” Abante said.
“During our hearings, Attorney Roque has insisted that he is not representing this Pogo, despite substantial evidence suggesting otherwise,” he added.
Abante noted that Roque claims his client, Whirlwind Corporation, is merely a service provider and that Ong is just another client.
“However, given that Attorney Roque is an experienced lawyer, it is hard to believe that he is unaware that Cassandra Ong is not only the president of Whirlwind, a supposed real estate firm, but also the president of Lucky South 99, which actually owns the Pogo hub,” he said.
He also noted that Whirlwind appears to be purchasing properties to facilitate Pogo operations.
“As the saying goes, ‘If it walks
like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it is most likely a duck.’ The actions of Attorney Roque on behalf of Lucky South 99 contradicts his words, and we believe Ms. Ong can help us settle this matter once and for all,” Abante added.
The quad-committee, led by Barbers and Abante—along with Santa Rosa City Rep. Dan Fernandez, chairman of the Committee on Public Order and Safety, and Abang Lingkod Rep. Joseph Stephen Paduano, chairman of the Committee on Public Accounts—has been spearheading the inquiry into illegal Pogo activities.
The quad-committee has vowed to intensify its efforts to dismantle the illegal Pogo networks operating in the country, focusing on those who have facilitated and profited from these illicit activities.
The panel has also urged other key figures associated with the Pogo industry to come forward and cooperate with the investigation.
‘Law must take its course’ in Quiboloy case–Bersamin
By Samuel P. Medenilla @sam_medenilla
& Jovee Marie N. de la Cruz
MALACAÑANG said Monday it will ensure the law is enforced in ongoing efforts by authorities to arrest Kingdom of Jesus Christ (KOJC) founder Apollo Quiboloy.
“The law must take its course. He is answerable to the law,” Executive Secretary Lucas P. Bersamin told reporters in an interview.
He made the remark amid reports that a KOJC member died of a heart attack when the police served the warrant for Quiboloy at the headquarters of his religious group in Davao on Saturday.
Quiboloy is facing qualified human trafficking and sexual abuse cases. He denied engaging in the said illegal acts.
Mere harassment—Dutertes
Former President Rodrigo R. Duterte and his daughter, Vice President Sara Duterte, called the charges against the televangelist a mere political harassment.
The latter further alleged the police, who served the warrant, committed gross abuse of power to harass religious worshippers.
She then asked forgiveness from the KOJC members on behalf of the government over the incident.
Bersamin did not comment on the Vice President’s recent apology, but he assured that Quiboloy will
be given due process.
Quiboloy’s whereabouts remains unknown despite the P10million reward for any information on his current location.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) said the police who served the warrant against Quiboloy have rescued human trafficking victims from the KOJC compound in Davao City.
It urged victims, their families as well as KOJC members to testify against those responsible for the human trafficking.
House to Duterte: Stop meddling MEANWHILE , leaders of the House of Representatives urged former President Duterte to refrain from interfering and allow the PNP to enforce a valid arrest warrant against Quiboloy, adding that the fugitive religious leader must answer the charges against him in court.
Senior Deputy Speaker Aurelio Gonzales Jr. and Deputy Majority Leader Jude Acidre defended the PNP’s operation within the KOJC compound in Davao City, and urged the former president to “respect the rule of law and the duties of law enforcement officers.”
After the death of a KOJC member from a heart attack, former President Duterte criticized the PNP’s actions, expressing sympathy for KOJC members and claiming they were victims of political harassment, persecution,
violence, and abuse of authority.
“Former President Duterte, as a former chief executive, you understand better than anyone the importance of law enforcement in upholding justice. Our police officers were enforcing a legitimate court order, and they should be allowed to do their job without undue interference,” Gonzales said.
“Your recent remarks risk undermining the integrity of our justice system and could set a dangerous precedent where the rule of law is overshadowed by political rhetoric,” he told Duterte.
“The PNP acted in accordance with a lawful court directive. To suggest otherwise is not only misleading but also harmful to our democratic institutions. We cannot afford to erode the public’s trust in our legal processes,” Gonzales said.
Acidre emphasized that no one is above the law, regardless of their position or influence.
“Pastor Quiboloy is a fugitive facing serious charges, and the PNP was simply fulfilling its duty to enforce the law. It’s imperative that we allow our law enforcement agencies to operate without political interference,” Acidre said.
Lawmakers have also expressed strong support for the recent statement issued by the Integrated Bar of the Philippines (IBP) Davao City Chapter, which urged Quiboloy and his co-accused to surrender peacefully and submit to the rule of law.
1-Rider Party-list Rep. Rodge Gutierrez, meanwhile, commended the IBP-Davao City Chapter for issuing a “bold and necessary call,” emphasizing its crucial role in ensuring that justice is served swiftly and without obstruction.
“This is not just about following the law; it’s about showing respect for our justice system and ensuring that due process is carried out fairly. I urge Pastor Quiboloy to heed this call and demonstrate his respect for the rule of law by submitting to the judicial process,” Gutierrez, a lawyer, said.
Assistant Majority Leader Jil Bongalon echoed this sentiment: “The rule of law is the foundation of our democracy, and no one is above it. The IBP’s statement is a clear reminder that justice must prevail, regardless of who is involved.”
Deputy Majority Leader Janette Garin highlighted the importance of accountability in maintaining public trust in the legal system.
“The IBP’s insistence on a peaceful surrender by Pastor Quiboloy and his co-accused underscores the importance of accountability in our legal system,” Garin said. Deputy Majority Leader and PBA Party-list Rep. Margarita Nograles, for her part, said: “Our legal system must be allowed to operate without hindrance, and it is crucial that those accused of crimes face the charges against them in a court of law,” she added.
PHL Red Cross mounts blood donations across country for Heroes Day
THE Philippine Red Cross (PRC) has organized simultaneous mass blood donation drives across 24 sites in the country in a nationwide effort to celebrate National Heroes Day. This massive undertaking on August 25 was designed to commemorate the heroism of the nation’s forebears by inspiring modern-day acts of heroism through blood donation.
The blood donation sites spanned the entire country, reflecting a collective commitment to saving lives and reinforcing the spirit of service that National Heroes Day represents. The donation sites included major locations in Mandaluyong, Rizal, Pasig, Makati, Malabon, Laguna, Palawan, Sorsogon, Antique, Davao Oriental, South Cotabato, General Santos and Batanes; two sites in Batangas,
Baguio, Cagayan and Zamboanga del Sur; and three sites in Iloilo. Highlight in Tarlac: Army, PRC team up
AMONG the various sites, a significant blood donation event was held at the Armor Division in Camp O’Donnell, Sta. Lucia, Capas, Tarlac, a testament to the strong partnership between the PRC and the Philippine Army. The Tarlac event, organized in collaboration with the Tarlac Heritage Foundation, headed by Dr. Isa Suntay, the major sponsor, aimed to collect blood from 1,300 donors from three army divisions—the Armor Division led by its Commander, MGen Pedro Balisi, Jr., the Training & Doctrine Command (Tradoc) led by its Commander, MGen Danilo Benavides, and the Army Support Command (Ascom) led by its Commander, MGen Rogelio Ulanday. These three divisions of the
Philippine Army through the leadership of its Commander LGen Roy Galido and Vice Commander, MGen Leodevic Guinid, have been steadfast partners of the Tarlac Red Cross Chapter, contributing significantly to its blood donation efforts over the years. Tradoc has been involved since 2017, collecting a total of 1,514 units of blood. Ascom joined the initiative in 2022 and has since collected 332 units, while the Armor Division Command recently contributed 120 units in a blood drive last June 4, 2024.
Aside from the PRC Tarlac Chapter, three nearby chapters also joined the mass blood donationPRC Bataan, PRC Nueva Ecija and PRC Pampanga.
Nationwide effort to save lives
PRC Chairman and CEO Richard Gordon expressed his appreciation
for the Philippine Army’s effort to conduct a simultaneous blood donation to save lives.
“More than being grateful, I am extremely proud of our army—even if your resources are not complete, you are prepared to fight for your country. You fight for the country and now you help those who are fighting for their lives. Heroes in every sense of the word. Today you have given life to people.”
For her part, PRC SecretaryGeneral Dr. Gwen Pang also shared her gratitude for the overwhelming support from volunteers and donors nationwide: “This simultaneous mass blood donation drive is a clear demonstration of the collective spirit of bayanihan that still thrives in our communities. We are proud of every donor and volunteer who took part in this noble cause.”
Ukraine rocked by massive Russian assault causing widespread damage and casualties
By Illia Novikov The Associated Press
KYIV, Ukraine—Russia unleashed a massive drone and missile barrage throughout Ukraine on Monday that appeared to target energy infrastructure. At least three people were reported killed.
The barrage began around midnight and continued beyond daybreak in what appeared to be Russia’s biggest attack against Ukraine in weeks.
A British safety adviser working with a team of Reuters journalists was killed when a Russian missile struck a hotel in the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk, the news agency confirmed.
Ryan Evans, 38, was staying at the Hotel Sapphire with colleagues in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region when it was hit by a Russian missile Saturday night.
Two other members of the sixperson Reuters crew were hospitalized with injuries.
bility”—shelter-type places where people can charge their devices and get refreshments during energy blackouts. Such points were first opened in Ukraine in the fall of 2022, when Russia targeted the country’s energy infrastructure with weekly barrages.
Ihor Polishchuk, mayor of Ukraine’s western city of Lutsk, said a multistory residential building and an unspecified infrastructure object were hit and one person was killed.
Associated Press reporters at the scene described the hotel as “rubble,” with excavators being used to clear debris hours after the attack.
Besides the hotel, a nearby multistory building was also destroyed, Donetsk regional Gov. Vadym Filashkin said. Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv region also came under Russian fire, resulting in multiple civilian injuries, regional Gov. Oleh Syniehubov wrote on the Telegram messaging app Sunday.
In Kharkiv’s Chuhuiv region, five people were injured, including a 4-year-old boy and a 14-year-old
Local officials said the hotel was struck by an Iskander-M Russian ballistic missile, leaving the reporters with blast injuries, concussions and cuts on the body.
girl, after two houses were hit by a Russian strike.
In Kharkiv city, eight people were wounded when a two-story house was set on fire by a Russian attack.
In Russia, five people died in Ukrainian shelling in of the border region of Belgorod, officials said Sunday.
Twelve other people were wounded in the Russian village of Rakitone, 38 kilometers (23 miles) from the Ukrainian border, including a 16-year-old girl reported to be in critical condition, said regional Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov on Sunday. Another man also died in a
separate drone attack on the border village of Solovevka, he wrote later on social media.
According to Ukraine’s air force, there were multiple groups of Russian drones moving toward eastern, northern, southern, and central regions of Ukraine, followed by multiple cruise and ballistic missiles.
Explosions were heard in the capital, Kyiv. Power and water supplies in the city have been disrupted by the attack, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said.
In the wake of the barrage, the city administration announced plans to open “points of invinci -
Israel-Hamas cease-fire talks to continue as Israel-Hezbollah exchange escalates
By Josef Federman, Abby Sewell, Kareem Chehayeb & Aamer Madhani
The Associated Press
JERUSALEM—A round of highlevel talks in Cairo meant to bring about a cease-fire and hostage deal to at least temporarily end the 10-month Israel-Hamas war in Gaza ended Sunday without a final agreement, a US official said. But talks will continue at lower levels in the coming days in an effort to bridge remaining gaps.
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the talks, said lower level “working teams” will remain in Cairo to meet with mediators the United States, Qatar, and Egypt in hopes to addressing remaining disagreements. The official called the recent conversations, which began Thursday in Cairo and continued through Sunday, as “constructive” and said all parties were working to “reach a final and implementable agreement.”
The talks included CIA Director William Burns and David Barnea, the head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency. A Hamas delegation was briefed by Egyptian and Qatari mediators but did not directly take part in negotiations. The development came after Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah traded heavy fire early Sunday but backed off from sparking a widely feared all-out war, as both sides signaled their most intense exchange in months was over. Hezbollah claimed to hit an Israeli military intelligence site near Tel Aviv as part of a barrage of hundreds of rockets and drones, and Israel claimed its dozens of strikes had been preemptive to avert a larger attack. Neither offered evidence.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said the attack, a response to Israel’s killing of a top militant commander in Beirut last month, had been delayed to give the Gaza cease-fire talks a chance, and so fellow Iran-backed groups could discuss with Iran whether to attack Israel all at once. Israeli and US military deployment also played a role.
“We will now reserve the right to respond at a later time” if the results of Sunday’s attack aren’t sufficient, Nasrallah said, adding that allied Houthi rebels in Yemen—and Iran itself—had yet to respond. But he told the Lebanese people: “At this current stage, the country can take a breath and relax.”
Israel and Hezbollah said they aimed only at military targets. Israel said no military target was hit by Hezbollah but that one soldier with its navy was killed and two others were wounded either by an interceptor for incoming fire, or by shrapnel from one. Two Hezbollah fighters and a militant from an allied group were killed, the groups said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the military eliminated thousands of rockets that were aimed at northern Israel and shot down drones heading for the center of the country.
“I repeat—this is not the end of the story,” he added.
Flights diverted as air raid sirens wail Air raid sirens were reported throughout northern Israel, and Israel’s international airport closed and diverted flights for about an hour.
Israel’s military spokesperson, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said about 100 Israeli planes struck 270 targets, 90% of them rocket launchers aimed at northern Israel. He said they were investigating
the percentage of incoming rockets and drones intercepted but said the “vast majority” were thwarted.
Hezbollah said its attack involved more than 320 Katyusha rockets aimed at multiple sites in Israel and a “large number” of drones.
Some Israelis were shaken. In the northern city of Acre, retired teacher Saadia Even Tsur, 76, said he was at the synagogue and arrived home five minutes after his bedroom was damaged. “I went up and saw the size of the miracle that happened to me,” he said. A window was broken and debris was on the bed.
Lebanon’s caretaker Economy Minister Amin Salam, after an emergency government meeting, said officials were “feeling a bit more optimistic” about a de-escalation after both sides confirmed that the operations had ended.
President Joe Biden was “closely monitoring events in Israel and Lebanon,” according to Sean Savett, a spokesman for the National Security Council. The Pentagon said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke with his Israeli counterpart, Yoav Gallant, and ordered both US carrier strike groups in the region to stay. The US military has been building up its forces across the region in recent weeks.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. CQ Brown, arrived in Israel late Sunday for meetings on what the Israeli military called “joint preparations in the region as part of the response to threats in the Middle East.”
All-out war apparently averted for now
Danny Citrinowicz, an expert at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, said Hezbollah might be trying to “balance the equation without escalating into war.” Each side hopes their narrative will be sufficient for them to
declare victory and avoid a wider confrontation, he said.
Hezbollah began attacking Israel almost immediately after the start of the war in Gaza, which was triggered by Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack into southern Israel. Israel and Hezbollah have exchanged fire almost daily, displacing tens of thousands of people on both sides of the border.
Hezbollah, which fought Israel to a stalemate in 2006, is believed to be far more powerful now. The United States and Israel estimate it has some 150,000 rockets and is capable of hitting anywhere inside Israel. The group has also developed drones capable of evading Israel’s defenses, as well as precision-guided munitions.
Israel has vowed a crushing response to any major Hezbollah attack. It has an extensive multitiered missile defense system, and it is backed by a US-led coalition that helped it shoot down hundreds of missiles and drones fired from Iran earlier this year.
Hezbollah is a close ally of Iran, which has also threatened to retaliate against Israel for the killing of senior Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran last month. Israel has not said whether it was involved.
Iranian state media played up the Hezbollah attack, calling it a success, but there was no immediate comment from Iranian officials.
The US and other mediators see a cease-fire in Gaza as key to averting a wider Mideast war. Hezbollah has said it will halt its strikes on Israel if there is a cease-fire.
Madhani reported from Dover Air Force Base, Delaware. Sewell and Chehayeb
Another person was killed in the central Dnipropetrovsk region, where the attack sparked multiple fires, damaged a dozen households and completely destroyed two, regional head Serhii Lysak said. One person was rescued from under the rubble, Lysak said.
One person was also killed in the southeastern, partially occupied region of Zaporizhzhia, regional head Ivan Fedorov said. According to Fedorov, an infrastructure facility was hit and caught fire.
In the southern Mykolaiv region, three people were injured, regional head Vitalii Kim reported. He also urged local residents to use “points of invincibility” in the region.
Ukraine’s private energy company, DTEK, introduced emergency blackouts, saying in an online statement that “energy workers throughout the country work 24/7 to restore light in the homes of Ukrainians.”
In neighboring Poland, the military said Polish and NATO air defenses were activated in the eastern part of the country as a result of the attack.
In Russia, in the meantime, officials reported a Ukrainian drone attack overnight and on Monday morning.
Four people were injured in Russia’s central region of Saratov, where drones hit residential buildings in two cities. One drone crashed into a residential high-rise in the city of Saratov, and another hit a residential building in the city of Engels, home to a military airfield that had been attacked before, local officials said.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said that a total of 22 Ukrainian drones were intercepted overnight and in the morning over eight Russian regions, including the Saratov and Yaroslavl regions in central Russia.
In the outlying Kyiv region, one person was injured in an attack that hit unspecified infrastructure objects and residential houses, regional head Ruslan Kravchenko said.
Taiwan drills with anti-amphibious landing missiles amid rising tensions
By Johnson Lai
The Associated Press
PINGTING, Taiwan—Taiwan drilled Monday with antiamphibious landing missiles as part of strategy to remain mobile and deadly in an attempt to deter an attack from China, which claims the democratically ruled island as its own territory to be brought under its control by force if necessary.
Troops fired tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided missiles known as TOW 2A missiles mounted on M1167 Humvees at floating targets off a beach in Pingtung County during the two days of exercises. The area on Taiwan’s southern tip faces both toward the Taiwan Strait and China, and toward the Pacific Ocean.
The missiles are among the most effective and popular antitank weapons in the world and a key component in what some experts say is Taiwan’s best strategy to resist a potential Chinese invasion. China has ramped up its military threat in recent years based on its vast edge in numbers of warplanes, ships and missiles.
Taiwan bought 1,700 units of the newer TOW 2B system from
the US, the last of which are due to be delivered by the end of the year. The two days of testing will also gauge the more sophisticated TOW 2B’s interoperability with the TOW 2A and its ability to acquire targets at night, the Defense Ministry said.
Advocates of such weaponry argue that these more mobile systems stand the best chance in an asymmetric battle against a much larger Chinese force. China has the world’s largest standing military, but most of Taiwan is composed of steep mountains, mud flats and heavily built-up urban areas poorly suited to such a conventional force. Others have argued Taiwan needs more warplanes and surface ships. China sends warplanes and warships near Taiwan on a neardaily basis in an attempt to intimidate its citizens and degrade the island’s defenses. In response, Taiwan has extended the period of national military service to one year, building its own submarines and importing sophisticated new equipment from the U.S.
The vast majority of Taiwanese favor the current status of de-facto independence for their island, which separated from mainland China amid civil war in 1949.
Gunmen kill 31 people in 2 separate attacks in southwestern Pakistan, sparking outrage
By Abdul Sattar & Munir Ahmed The Associated Press
QUETTA, Pakistan—Gunmen in southwestern Pakistan killed at least 31 people in two separate attacks on Monday, with reports of other shootings and unrest across the same province, police and officials said.
Twenty-three people were fatally shot after being identified and taken from buses, vehicles and trucks in Musakhail, a district in Baluchistan province, senior police official Ayub Achakzai said. The attackers burned at least 10 vehicles before fleeing the scene.
In a separate attack, gunmen killed at least nine people, including four police officers and five passersby, in Qalat district also in Baluchistan, authorities said.
Insurgents blew up a railway track in Bolan, attacked a police station in Mastung and attacked and burned vehicles in Gwadar, all districts in Baluchistan. No casualties were reported in those attacks. Baluchistan has been the scene of a long-running insurgency in Pakistan, with an array of separatist groups staging attacks, mainly on security forces. The separatists have been demanding independence from the central government in Islamabad. Although Pakistani authorities say they have quelled the insurgency, violence in Baluchistan has persisted.
Suspect in the Germany attack was motivated by Islamic State group ideology–prosecutors
By Daniel Niemann & David Mchugh
The Associated Press
SOLINGEN, Germany—A Syrian man on Sunday was ordered held on suspicion of murder and membership in a terrorist organization in connection with the Solingen knife attack that left three dead and eight wounded at a festival marking the city’s 650th anniversary.
A judge at the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe ordered 26-year-old Issa Al H. held pending further investigation and a possible indictment after federal prosecutors said that he shared the radical ideology of the Islamic State extremist group—and was acting on those beliefs when he stabbed his victims repeatedly from behind in the head and upper body.
The ruling came after the suspect turned himself in, saying that he was responsible for the attack, police said. He is also suspected of attempted murder and serious bodily injury, prosecutors said. His last name wasn’t released in line with German privacy rules.
The suspect, wearing handcuffs and leg shackles, was taken Sunday from the police station in Solingen for the initial court appearance.
He “shares the ideology of the foreign terrorist organization Islamic State” and on the basis of his “radical Islamic convictions” decided “to kill the largest possible number of those he considers unbelievers” at the festival, the Office of the Federal Prosecutor said in a statement.
The suspect is a Syrian citizen who had applied for asylum in Germany, police confirmed to The Associated Press. The dpa
French
news agency reported, without citing a specific source, that his asylum claim had been denied and that he was to have been deported last year.
On Saturday, the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack, without providing evidence. IS said on its news site that the attacker targeted Christians, and that the perpetrator carried out the assaults Friday night “to avenge Muslims in Palestine and everywhere.”
The attack comes amid debate over immigration before regional elections on Sept. 1 in Germany’s Saxony and Thuringia regions where anti-immigration parties such as the populist Alternative for Germany are expected to do well. In June, Chancellor Olaf Scholz vowed that the country would start deporting criminals from Afghanistan and Syria again after a knife attack by an Afghan immigrant left one police officer dead and four other people injured.
Friday’s attack plunged the city of Solingen into shock and grief. A city of about 160,000 residents near the bigger cities of Cologne and Duesseldorf, Solingen was holding a “Festival of Diversity” to celebrate its anniversary.
People alerted police shortly after 9:30 p.m. local time Friday that a man had assaulted several people with a knife on the city’s central square, the Fronhof. The three people killed were two men, ages 56 and 67, and a 56-year-old woman, authorities said. Police said that the attacker appeared to have deliberately aimed for his victims’ throats.
David McHugh contributed from Frankfurt.
The attack in Musakhail came hours after the outlawed Baluch Liberation Army separatist group warned people to stay away from highways, as they launched attacks on security forces in various parts of the province. But there was no immediate claim of responsibility for the latest killings.
Separatists often ask people for their ID cards, and then abduct or kill those who are from
outside the province. Many recent victims have come from neighboring Punjab province.
Uzma Bukhari, a spokesperson for the Punjab provincial government, denounced the latest killings on Monday, saying the “attacks are a matter of grave concern” and urging the Baluchistan provincial government to “step up efforts to eliminate BLA terrorists.”
Authorities in Baluchistan said they responded to the latest attacks on Monday and that they would provide details on their operations later in the day. Local media said at least 12 insurgents were killed by security forces in various parts of the province in the past 24 hours.
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi in separate statements called the attack in Musakhail “barbaric” and vowed that those who were behind it would not escape justice.
Later, Naqvi also condemned the killings in Qalat
In May, gunmen fatally shot seven barbers in Gwadar, a port city in Baluchistan.
In April, separatists killed nine people after abducting them from a bus on a highway in Baluchistan, and the attackers also killed two people and wounded six in another car they forced to stop. BLA claimed responsibility for those attacks at the time.
Syed Muhammad Ali, an Islamabad-based security analyst,
said the latest killings of nonBaluch people are an attempt by separatists to harm the province economically.
Ali told The Associated Press that most such attacks are carried out with the aim to economically weaken Baluchistan, noting that “the weakening of Baluchistan means the weakening of Pakistan.” He said insurgent attacks could hamper development work being done in the province.
Separatists in Baluchistan have often killed workers and others from the country’s eastern Punjab region as part of a campaign to force them to leave the province, which for years has experienced a low-level insurgency.
Most such previous killings have been blamed on the outlawed group and others demanding independence from the central government in Islamabad. Islamic militants also have a presence in the province.
Ahmed reported from Islamabad. The Associated Press writer Asim Tanveer contributed to this story from Multan, Pakistan.
Rohingya refugees mark anniversary of
their exodus and demand safe return to Myanmar
By Shafiqur Rahman & Julhas Alam
CThe Associated Press
OX’S BAZAR, Bangladesh—Tens of thousands of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar who live in sprawling camps in Bangladesh on Sunday marked the seventh anniversary of their mass exodus, demanding safe return to Myanmar’s Rakhine state.
The refugees gathered in an open field at Kutupalong camp in Cox’s Bazar district carrying banners and festoons reading “Hope is Home” and “We Rohingya are the citizens of Myanmar,” defying the rain on a day that is marked as “Rohingya Genocide Day.”
On August 25, 2017, hundreds of thousands of refugees started crossing the border to Bangladesh on foot and by boats amid indiscriminate killings and other violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine state.
Myanmar had launched a brutal crackdown following attacks by an insurgent group on guard posts. The scale, organization and ferocity of the operation led to accusations from the international community, including the UN, of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Then-Bangladesh Prime Minis -
ter Sheikh Hasina ordered border guards to open the border, eventually allowing more than 700,000 refugees to take shelter in the Muslim-majority nation. The influx was in addition to the more than 300,000 refugees who had already been living in Bangladesh for decades in the wake of waves of previous violence perpetrated by Myanmar’s military.
Since 2017, Bangladesh has attempted at least twice to send the refugees back and has urged the international community to build pressure on Myanmar for a peace -
ful environment inside Myanmar that could help start the repatriation. Hasina also sought help from China to mediate.
But in the recent past, the situation in Rakhine state has become more volatile after a group called Arakan Army started fighting against Myanmar’s security forces. The renewed chaos forced more refugees to flee toward Bangladesh and elsewhere in a desperate move to save their lives. Hundreds of Myanmar soldiers and border guards also took shelter inside Bangladesh to flee the violence,
but Bangladesh later handed them over to Myanmar peacefully.
As the protests took place in camps in Bangladesh on Sunday, the United Nations and other rights groups expressed their concern over the ongoing chaos in Myanmar.
Washington-based Refugees International in a statement on Sunday described the scenario.
“In Rakhine state, increased fighting between Myanmar’s military junta and the AA (Arakan Army) over the past year has both caught Rohingya in the middle and seen them targeted. The AA has advanced and burned homes in Buthidaung, Maungdaw, and other towns, recently using drones to bomb villages,” it said.
“The junta has forcibly recruited Rohingya and bombed villages in retaliation. Tens of thousands of Rohingya have been newly displaced, including several who have tried to flee into Bangladesh,” it said.
UNICEF said that the agency received alarming reports that civilians, particularly children and families, were being targeted or caught in the crossfire, resulting in deaths and severe injuries, making humanitarian access in Rakhine extremely challenging.
Alam reported from Dhaka.
police detain Telegram founder Pavel Durov on money laundering, drug trafficking allegations
By Barbara Surk The Associated Press
France—The founder and CEO of the messaging service Telegram was detained at a Paris airport on an arrest warrant alleging his platform has been used for money laundering, drug trafficking and other offenses, French media reported Sunday. Pavel Durov, a dual citizen of France and Russia, was taken into custody at Paris-Le Bourget Airport on Saturday evening after landing in France from Azerbaijan, according to broadcasters LCI and TF1. Investigators from the
French prosecutors declined to comment on Durov’s arrest when contacted by The Associated Press on Sunday, in line with regulations during an ongoing investigation.
French media reported that the warrant for Durov was issued by France at the request of the special unit at the country’s interior ministry in charge of investigating crimes against minors. Those include online
AntiFraud Office, attached to the French customs department, notified Durov, 39, that he was being placed in police custody, the broadcasters said. Durov’s representatives couldn’t be immediately reached for comment.
sexual exploitation, such as possession and distribution of child sexual abuse content and grooming for sexual purposes.
Telegram was founded by Durov and his brother in the wake of the Russian government’s crackdown after mass prodemocracy protests that rocked Moscow at the end of 2011 and 2012. The demonstrations prompted Russian authorities to clamp down on the digital space, adopting regulations that forced Internet providers to block websites and cellphone operators to store call records and messages that could be shared with security services.
In the increasingly repressive environ -
ment, Telegram and its pro-privacy rhetoric offered a convenient way for Russians to communicate and share news. In 2018, Russian media watchdog Roskomnadzor moved to block Telegram over its refusal to hand over encryption keys, but ultimately failed to fully restrict access to the app.
Telegram continued to be widely used—including by government institutions—and the ban was dropped two years later. In March 2024, Roskomnadzor said that Telegram was working with the Russian government to a certain extent and had removed more than 256,000 posts with prohibited content at Roskomnadzor’s request.
Telegram also continues to be a popular source of news in Ukraine, where both media outlets and officials use it to share information on the war, and deliver missile and air raid alerts. In a statement posted on its platform, Telegram said it abides by EU laws including the digital services act, and its
PEOPLE look at a burnt vehicle that was torched by gunmen after they killed passengers at a highway in Musakhail, a district in Baluchistan province in restive southwestern Pakistan on Monday, August 26, 2024. AP/RAHMAT KHAN
HUNDREDS of Rohingyas gather in the rain to demand safe return to Myanmar’s Rakhine state as they mark the seventh anniversary of their mass exodus from Myanmar at their refugee camp at Kutupalong in Cox’s Bazar district,
UP Mindanao’s way in fostering diversity and inclusive access to quality education
The recent efforts of the University of the Philippines Mindanao to promote diversity and inclusivity within its student community demonstrate a dedication to equalizing access to quality education and establishing a secure environment for students of diverse backgrounds. The university’s commitment to offering opportunities to individuals from indigenous communities and geographically isolated and disadvantaged areas (GIDAs) is praiseworthy and sets a shining example for educational institutions across the nation. (Read the BusinessMirror story: “UP Mindanao lodges milestone in more students from tribes, GIDAs,” August 23, 2024).
By welcoming more students from minority groups and GIDAs, UP Mindanao is not only broadening access to tertiary education but also ensuring a more equitable distribution of opportunities. The increased enrollment numbers from regions like Davao, Northern Mindanao, and Caraga underscore the university’s efforts to reach students from diverse socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, thus creating a more representative and inclusive learning environment.
The institution’s initiatives, such as the Lingap Iskolar Program and the Associate in Arts in Sports Science (AASS), offer alternative routes for students to access UP education without relying on the traditional UP College Admission Test (UPCAT). These programs not only facilitate access but also provide comprehensive support to students facing financial challenges, thereby addressing barriers to higher education.
The commitment to establishing UPCAT testing centers across various provinces in Mindanao reflects a proactive approach to extending educational opportunities to marginalized youth in the region. This strategic move aims to bridge the gap and ensure that deserving students from all corners of Mindanao have a fair chance at pursuing their academic aspirations at UP.
Furthermore, the university’s vision to expand enrollment and introduce new degree programs underscores its dedication to academic excellence and innovation. Collaborations with other UP campuses to offer programs like the Doctor of Medicine and Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering demonstrate a commitment to providing a diverse range of educational pathways to students.
As UP Mindanao embarks on its “Road to 5K” plan to increase enrollment, it is vital to maintain a focus on inclusivity, accessibility, and support for underrepresented communities. By nurturing a culture of diversity and inclusiveness, the university not only enriches the academic experience for all students but also contributes to a more equitable and just society.
In a landscape where educational opportunities are not equally distributed, UP Mindanao’s initiatives serve as a beacon of hope, demonstrating that through proactive measures and unwavering commitment, institutions can create a more inclusive and diverse academic environment that empowers students from all walks of life.
In a country where access to education is often determined by socio-economic status, UP Mindanao’s efforts are commendable. By providing opportunities for students from marginalized communities, UP Mindanao is not only fulfilling its mandate as a state university but also contributing to the development of a more equitable and just society.
As Chancellor Lyre Anni Murao so aptly put it, “This is the kind of home that we have built for UP Mindanao, a home for inclusive development. We provide a safe space that will allow you to live your full potential and totality as individuals.”
We can all contribute to a more inclusive and equitable education system. Let’s support other educational institutions in following UP Mindanao’s example and creating a welcoming space for all learners.
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Withholding tax rules under Ease of Paying Taxes Act
Iatty. Mabel L. Buted
Tax Law for Business
hAve previously written in this column about the new processes, procedures, and requirements related to the claim for refund of excess and unutilized creditable withholding taxes, as modified by the ease of Paying Taxes Act. Other than these, there are also some changes introduced under the eOPT involving the withholding of taxes that taxpayers must be aware of. One of these pertains to the rule on the timing of withholding of taxes.
Before the EOPT, the rule on the timing for the withholding of taxes was not specifically provided in the Tax Code itself. This was supplied by revenue regulations and other revenue issuances, specifically RR No. 02-98 and its predecessors. Under RR No. 02-98, the withholding agent must deduct and withhold the tax at the time an income payment is paid or payable, or the income payment is accrued or recorded as an expense or asset in the books, whichever comes first. Further, the term “payable” was defined in the revenue regulations as referring to the date the obligation becomes due, demandable, or legally enforceable.
The EOPT introduced a new provision in the Tax Code that explicitly defines the rule on the timing of withholding of taxes on income payments. As modified, the tax law provides that the obligation to deduct and withhold the tax arises
at the time the income has become payable. Implementing this is RR No. 4-2024, which interprets the term “payable” in the same way as RR No. 02-98 did. It is provided in RR No. 04-2024 that an income becomes payable when the obligation becomes due, demandable, or legally enforceable. However, as to the point in time for the withholding of the tax, the said RR requires the payor to withhold “at the time an income payment is accrued or recorded as an expense or asset, whichever is applicable, in the payor’s books, or upon the issuance by the seller of the sales invoice or other adequate document to support such payable, whichever comes first.”
It can be gleaned that RR No.42024 deleted the phrase “at the time an income payment is paid or payable” and replaced it with another event, that is, at the time of the issuance by the seller of the sales in-
By Shery Ahn & Soo-Hyang Choi
SOUTh Korea’s government isn’t worried about which candidate wins the US presidential election since it expects to work with whoever takes the White house to confront the nuclear threat from North Korea, according to a senior official in Seoul.
Vice Unification Minister Kim Soo Kyung added in an interview with Bloomberg that while it has gotten far harder for North Koreans to escape the repressive state, there has been a jump in the flow of elites defecting to South Korea under Kim Jong Un’s regime.
Ahead of the US vote, some South Koreans have been worried about what they see as an omission in the Democratic Party’s platform when it comes to seeking North Korea’s denuclearization, she said, adding that the alliance between Washington and Seoul is stronger than ever.
“We are not that worried about what happens after the US election,” Kim said Friday, just hours after the
Democrats concluded their national convention. Regardless of the outcome, “we are going to deter North Korea’s threat of nuclear weapons based on the strong alliance between the two countries,” she said. North Korea has refused talks with the US since 2019, after three in-person meetings between Kim Jong Un and then-President Donald Trump failed to curb Pyongyang’s atomic ambitions. It then shunned offers from President Joe Biden’s government for talks, while further bolstering its nuclear arsenal to counter what it saw as the “hostile intent” of the US and its political “puppets” in Seoul. Biden, South Korean President
The withholding tax rule as implemented by RR 4-2024 leaves me thinking about many questions regarding the supposed change made under the EOPT and how it is being implemented. What is the difference between the withholding tax rules before and after EOPT?
voice or other adequate document to support such payable.
The withholding tax rule as implemented by RR 4-2024 leaves me thinking about many questions regarding the supposed change made under the EOPT and how it is being implemented. What is the difference between the withholding tax rules before and after EOPT?
With the exclusion of the phrase “at the time an income payment is paid or payable” by RR No. 4-2024, does this mean that the withholding of tax on advance payments of income is dispensed with and the duty to withhold is triggered only when the expenses are eventually incurred? Are prepaid expenses or advances within the contemplation of the word “asset” in the phrase “at the time an income payment is accrued or recorded as an expense or asset”?
Similarly, are mere accruals subject to withholding tax even if no billing has been issued yet by the income earner or service provider? In accounting, accrued expense refers to costs or expenses that are already incurred but remain unpaid as of specific time. Usually, at year-end,
taxpayers record expenses to reflect the costs and expenses incurred during the period, even if the purchases remain unpaid. These are reflected in the financial statements. And this can be done even before the payor receives the actual copy of the invoice or billing statement, provided that the expense has actually been incurred. This is allowed following generally accepted accounting principles so that companies and entities can fairly present their financial performance and the results of their operations during the taxable year. However, depending on the arrangement of the parties, the income payment may not yet be due and payable or legally enforceable and demandable at the same time these expenses are accrued. These are just a few of the questions related to withholding tax, specifically on the timing for withholding and remittance. With all these questions, I hope that our concerned authorities can provide further clarifications to guide taxpayers in properly complying with their withholding tax obligations.
The author is a junior partner of Du-Baladad and Associates Law Offices (BDB Law) (www. bdblaw.com.ph),
legal issue should be supported therefore by a professional study or advice. If you have any comments or questions concerning the article, you may e-mail the author at mabel.buted@ bdblaw.com.ph or call 8403-2001 local 160.
US President Joe Biden, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and outgoing Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida have since taken trilateral cooperation to new levels and enhanced joint training on scenarios such as defending against North Korea’s ballistic missiles and hunting for its submarines.
Yoon Suk Yeol
“The number of these elite group defectors is now increasing fast,” she said, adding there were about 10 last year to total around 150 under Kim Jong Un. These include diplomats, business executives and students able to leave the country and then seeking asylum.
The most recent case that came
offering aid, dialogue and a path to unification to Pyongyang. But Kim’s regime has remained silent on the proposal. North Korea’s state media has also rebuffed comments Trump made during the Republican National Convention touting his relationship with leader Kim, saying “we do not care” and warning that its nuclear arsenal stands ready for any US president. Pyongyang sees US policy toward it as remaining hostile regardless of who is in the White House, according to state media. Kim Jong Un’s regime has also seen far more of its elite defect to South Korea during his 12 years in power compared to that of the rule of his father, Kim Jong Il, who ran the state for about 17 years, the vice unification minister said.
L. Cabangon Chua
Cheap AI voice bots are suddenly everywhere in India
By Saritha Rai
EArLIEr this month, executives from Alphabet Inc.’s Google deepMind, Microsoft Corp. and Meta Platforms Inc. joined tech founders in Bangalore to watch one of India’s top AI startups unveil a new product that might change how the world’s most populous country uses the technology.
Sarvam AI, often described as India’s OpenAI, introduced software for businesses that can interact with customers using spoken voice rather than just text. t he technology was developed with data from 10 native Indian languages and priced at a rupee per minute to capture the market. In a video at the event, Vinod Khosla, a billionaire venture capitalist and investor in Sarvam, said, “ t hese voice bots have the potential to reach a billion people.”
India has tried to keep pace with the global artificial intelligence frenzy in the nearly two years since Chat gP t launched, but chatbots have often been limited by a lack of data on many of the country’s languages. Many who live in big cities can type prompts to a chatbot in e nglish, but most of India lacks the language skills to do so. n ow, a growing number of startups are betting that voice bots built with local language data can reach a wider swath of India and perhaps even appeal to users in other countries.
In the process, these startups may turn India into a proving ground for what could be the next frontier of generative AI products, albeit one that has raised some safety concerns in other markets. By incorporating AI voice features, tech companies hope to create more dynamic, conversational services that can respond to users verbally in real time and automate certain tasks. In India, that’s already playing out across a wide range of consumer and business applications.
Samsung-backed gnani AI does millions of voice conversations daily for India’s largest banks, insurers and car companies. CoRover AI offers voice bots in 14 Indian languages to the state-owned railway corporation and a regional police force. And Haloocom technologies’ voice bot can speak in five Indian languages to handle customer service tasks and help screen job candidates.
“ t he world went from digital first to mobile first to AI first, but voice is the most intuitive way to use technology,” said Ankush Sabharwal, cofounder and chief executive officer of CoRover.
CoRover’s Ask Disha voice bot went live this month for India’s train booking company, IRC tC. t he bot can book train tickets and complete payments on a customer’s behalf solely via voice. t he country needs AI agents that can perform tasks, not just provide information, Sabharwal said.
gnani offers a bot to help lenders converse with potential customers to figure out their financial needs, collect personal information and determine their eligibility for loans. t he startup also works with one of India’s largest carmakers, tata Motors Ltd., to get
South Korea. . .
Continued from A8
to light was the defection of a senior north Korean diplomat based in Cuba.
t he total number of defectors to South Korea has dropped sharply from a peak of 2,914 in 2009 after China and north Korea clamped down on the border and Kim sealed off the country during the Covid-19 pandemic. t hrough June this year, 105 people defected to South Korea, according to data from the Unification Ministry.
“ t his means that there is a high demand for defection, but it is really hard, hard to cross the border because north Korea is tightening control,” the vice minister said, refer-
Sarvam AI, often described as India’s OpenAI, introduced software for businesses that can interact with customers using spoken voice rather than just text. The technology was developed with data from 10 native Indian languages and priced at a rupee per minute to capture the market. In a video at the event, Vinod Khosla, a billionaire venture capitalist and investor in Sarvam, said, “These voice bots have the potential to reach a billion people.”
feedback for the latest car models and sell extended warranties and accessories.
Sarvam’s voice bots can handle mixed-language conversations and take actions for customers, such as setting up appointments and facilitating payments. t he company has about 50 clients, including Sri Mandir, a devotional app that has more than 10 million downloads on the Android Play Store. Using Sarvam’s voice software, Sri Mandir’s app can guide people toward specific rituals at different temples and how to ask for various types of blessings.“ try throwing gP t-4 or Claude at Sri Mandir. I can guarantee it won’t work,” said Vivek Raghavan, co-founder of Sarvam, alluding to cutting-edge AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic. t he US companies do not have access to enough spoken Indian language data, he said, including accents that vary from region to region.
Some leading AI companies in the US, including OpenAI, have developed technology that can generate convincing voices but have slow-walked bringing it to market. OpenAI recently warned that users could become emotionally reliant on its voice product and also said it had taken steps to prevent impersonations and generating copyrighted audio. t he startup has begun rolling out new voice features to a limited number of users after a delay.
Despite the concerns, India’s AI startups are optimistic about the technology. “AI made for specific use cases, languages and audiences is more accurate, less expensive to run and has vastly reduced hallucinations,” said ganesh gopalan, cofounder and CeO of gnani, using a term that refers to AI systems fabricating facts.
While these startups are focused on India, some are also eying international markets, including the Middle east and Japan. In fact, gnani’s voice bots are already deployed in Silicon Valley’s backyard, helping a large California-based Harley-Davidson leasing company reach Spanishspeaking customers. Bloomberg
ring to the typical route of crossing the border into China and seeking passage to a third country.
“ t he brokerage fee is skyrocketing because it’s almost impossible to cross,” she said.
Kim Jong Un is also facing a rare test of his rule after flooding in late July devastated a northwest area near the border with China, likely leading to numerous casualties. north Korea has been silent on the death toll, instead focusing on imagery of Kim at the forefront of relief efforts.
“We believe that there is critical damage to the north Korean society and the north Korean authorities are much concerned about it,” the vice minister said. With assistance from Shinhye Kang, Katria Alampay, Andy Hung and Rika Yoshida.
Mideast on edge after Israel bombs Lebanon to thwart attack
By Ethan Bronner
Hours after 100 Israeli warplanes swooped over southern Lebanon, taking out thousands of Hezbollah missile launchers in what was called a preemptive strike, the Middle East braced for an expanded conflagration that could involve Iran and its allied militias.
t he assault started at 5 a.m. local time and was based, Israeli officials said, on precise intelligence that Hezbollah was about to fire thousands of missiles at northern Israel as well as drones at a key intelligence center just north of tel Aviv in retaliation for the killing of its commander in July.
Israel declared a 48-hour state of emergency and shut its main airport for several hours, with numerous foreign airlines canceling flights. Hezbollah responded by firing more than 200 projectiles, according to Israel, although officials said very limited damage was caused. One Israeli soldier was killed by falling debris, while three deaths were reported in Lebanon.
If Hezbollah had successfully executed an attack on targets in central Israel, the tit-for-tat fighting that’s been simmering on the border area for 10 months may have exploded into wider warfare.
“Our hope is that the events of last night do not spill out into an escalation that leads to regional war,” US national Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters on Sunday evening during a visit to Canada. for the time being, at least, a relative calm held.
“It was a huge success that we detected the plans and now there is the possibility for both sides not to escalate this very complex situation,” said retired Brigadier general Ilan Biton, a former chief of defense for Israel’s air force. Both Israel and Hezbollah announced that for the moment, their operations were over —despite ongoing low-level fighting.
Israel reopened its airport and eased restrictions on public gatherings imposed earlier in the day.
Israel’s military spokesman, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, said there was no damage to any Israeli military base. t he Israeli army didn’t
reimpose safety restrictions on the population on Sunday night, indicating it didn’t expect another attack imminently.
Significantly, negotiations in Cairo aimed at establishing a cease-fire in gaza between Israel and the Palestinian militia Hamas commenced as planned on Sunday.
But after a Hamas delegation left Cairo on Sunday evening, Osama Hamdan, a spokesman and leader of the group, said Israel has “set new conditions for a cease-fire” and “is still procrastinating,” according to a statement posted on the group’s telegram account. In a dig at President Joe Biden’s administration, he said it’s “planting false hope by talking about an imminent agreement for electoral purposes.”
t he talks are set to continue at lower levels in the coming days in an effort to bridge gaps between the parties, the Associated Press reported, citing a US official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. t he official said the recent talks have been constructive and the parties are working to reach an implementable agreement.
Underscoring ‘consequences’
tHe Israeli exchange with Hezbollah “is more likely to aid than complicate the cease-fire talks,” said Mike Singh, managing director at the Washington Institute. “By sending a message that Israel is willing and able to escalate, and that Washington will back it when it does so, the US and Israel have underscored the consequences for Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran of continuing to refuse a deal.”
Hezbollah said its attack on Israel was planned as the start of retaliation for the killing of its commander fuad Shukr on July 30 in Beirut’s southern suburbs. t he group said it fired more than 320 missiles, fol-
lowed up by drones, to target 11 army barracks and military sites in northern Israel.
t he Mossad intelligence service’s base in glilot was the main target of the attack, Hezbollah Secretary general Hassan nasrallah said Sunday.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin netanyahu convened a security cabinet meeting Sunday and said he was “determined to do everything to defend our country, to return the residents of the north securely to their homes, and to continue upholding a simple rule: Whoever harms us—we will harm them.”
Lieutenant Colonel n adav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesman, noted that Israeli Defense Minister yoav gallant and US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke by phone over the weekend. He declined to say whether the US was given advance warning of Sunday’s attack, adding, “ t his was an Israeli operation.”
US support
tHe US has stepped up its naval and air defense presence in the region as a warning to Iran and its allies not to increase hostilities.
Asked if Israel had informed the US in advance of its plans to hit at Hezbollah, Sullivan, the national security adviser, sidestepped the question. “I can’t speak directly to the conversations that unfolded yesterday, other than to say there was continuous communication, and we have been tracking the threat of Hezbollah attacks against Israel for some time now,” he said.
But despite fresh US statements Sunday affirming support for Israel’s right to defense, the attack on Hezbollah is a setback for “American diplomacy, which has been laserfocused on de-escalation” and on the search for a cease-fire in gaza, according to Merissa Khurma, director of the Middle east program at the Wilson Center in Washington. “In private, the past 10-plus months have showcased various ebbs and flows in US-Israeli relations, and certainly a significant rise in tensions.”
She said it raises doubts among regional allies about “whether the US still has leverage over Israel.”
Water-energy efficiencies: The catalyst to semiconductor sustainability
By Eric Lai
Fu ELLEd by the explosive growth of emerging markets like AI and electric vehicles, the semiconductor industry—which manufactures the essential materials that power these technologies—is poised to grow into a massive trillion-dollar industry by 2030.
At the very heart of this growth lies Southeast Asia, as markets in the region actively pursue opportunities to capture higher value-add positions within the burgeoning global industry. In fact, the Philippines’ semiconductor market is expected to grow up to 15 percent annually, bolstered by the government’s strategic push to strengthen its capabilities in this sector.
However, despite the semiconductor industry’s immense potential for economic growth, its notorious thirst for water and energy stand at direct odds with Southeast Asia’s climate ambitions, wherein most countries across the region have committed to carbon neutrality by 2050.
How can the growth of semiconductor manufacturing be reconciled with these climate targets to achieve balanced and sustainable long-term development?
The water-energy nexus in semiconductor manufacturing Inten SI fy I ng climate events around the globe have brought the semiconductor industry’s immense resource consumption to the fore. growing concerns about global water shortages have placed the sector’s water usage under scrutiny, while its substantial electricity consumption remains a focal point of concern.
However, discussions about these resources tend to occur in silos, with limited focus on the water-energy nexus—which refers to the interdependent relationship between both resources. for instance, considerable energy is required to treat and move water in semiconductor fabrication plants; conversely, water is critical for the energy generation processes that power these facilities. to truly drive sustainability in this sector, there needs to be a concerted effort to move beyond traditional energy reduction to target the energy-intensive water processes central to the water-energy nexus. firstly, all fabs require mammoth volumes of ultra-pure water (UPW) to cleanse their silicon chips. In fact, estimates show that an average fab uses about 37.8 million liters of UPW daily to ensure the quality of their output. to obtain UPW, however, fabs undergo a rigorous purification process that consists of energyintensive steps like reverse osmosis and distillation, which contribute significantly to the plant’s overall energy consumption. furthermore, producing highquality chips demands a significant cooling capacity. t his involves effectively managing the flow of water throughout the manufacturing process. It’s not just the cleanrooms
Israel and Hezbollah have been trading fire along the border since October, when the Lebanese organization entered the fray in support of Hamas in gaza. Israeli strikes have killed at least 500 people since then, most of them Hezbollah fighters. In Israel, roughly 30 soldiers and 18 civilians have been killed by Hezbollah attacks. Preventing the skirmishes from escalating even further has been at the heart of international diplomatic efforts to ease tension across the Middle east.
Hours after an Israeli airstrike on July 30 killed Hezbollah’s military chief in Beirut, Iran blamed Israel for killing the head of Hamas’ political office, Ismail Haniyeh, in tehran. Iran has vowed to retaliate but it has also said it would do so on its own timetable. Israel has repeatedly warned it not to do so. On Sunday, netanyahu warned Hezbollah and Iran that the latest attack isn’t “the end of the story,” and was “another step on the way to changing the situation in the north, and return our residents safely to their homes.”
Evacuations
tHe US has been trying to mediate between Lebanon and Israel to reach a compromise over border disputes. tens of thousands of Israelis and Lebanese have been evacuated from the border area due to the fighting, and Israel wants Hezbollah to move its fighters away from the border to allow its citizens to return. Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran and designated a terrorist organization by the US, says it will continue hostilities with Israel until the country agrees to a cease-fire in gaza with Hamas, also designated a terrorist group by the US and others. t he war in the Palestinian enclave began on October 7 after Hamas militants, supported by Iran, invaded Israel and killed 1,200 people and abducted others. Israel’s retaliation in gaza has killed at least 40,000 people, according to Hamas health officials in gaza. With assistance from Natalia Drozdiak, Omar Tamo, Marissa Newman, Jenny Leonard, Brian Platt and Jon Herskovitz.
Intensifying climate events around the globe have brought the semiconductor industry’s immense resource consumption to the fore. Growing concerns about global water shortages have placed the sector’s water usage under scrutiny, while its substantial electricity consumption remains a focal point of concern.
that require strict control over temperature, pressure, and humidity. Many processes and dedicated machines within the plant generate a substantial amount of heat during operation, for instance, in wafer fabrication, etching, and deposition. Cooling towers play a crucial role in regulating the temperature of the circulating cooling water for these processes and machines, ensuring optimal performance and efficient heat dissipation.
A 3-pronged approach to achieving efficiencieswater-energy
W Hen optimizing equipment processes, engineers typically focus on overall equipment effectiveness (Oee), which looks at an equipment’s overall productivity and efficiency—an approach that tends to deprioritize energy consumption metrics. to drive water and energy efficiencies, there first needs to be a mindset shift that encourages prioritizing energy efficiency from the get-go, rather than focusing solely on Oee for existing plants, conducting a comprehensive, measurement-based
analysis of current processes and performance can uncover the critical areas that offer the most potential for energy savings, ensuring that any changes enacted are targeted and effective in driving impact. Additionally, digital solutions are a pivotal avenue for manufacturers to attain operational efficiencies, as they enable us to understand demand and intuitively manage supply, ensuring we only use what we need. t he good news is that these technologies already exist—manufacturers just need to make the switch to achieve improved water and energy efficiencies.
for instance, grundfos has helped manufacturers across various industries optimize their cooling systems and towers by implementing realtime monitoring and automating adjustments to pump speeds and fan operations, resulting in up to 60 percent energy savings and 20 percent reduction in water loss. Ultimately, creating more water and energy-efficient processes are not just beneficial for sustainability purposes; they are also a strategic business priority that allows companies to minimize operational costs and align with the growing demand for environmentally responsible supply chains.
By prioritizing environmental impact as they seek to establish themselves in the global semiconductor arena, Southeast Asian countries can find a way to harmonize their economic ambitions with their climate goals to chart the path for a sustainable future.
Eric Lai is the
2nd Front Page
PNP blocks highway to KOJC, journos fend off both sides
By Manuel T. Cayon @awimailbox Mindanao Bureau Chief
DAVAO CITY—The highway leading to the beleaguered compound of fugitive Pastor Apollo Quiboloy was blocked by at least one kilometer from either approach on Monday as police continue to scour the compound which houses several school buildings and a 75,000-seater astrodome.
Gen. Nicolas Torre III: that is, news reporters would be allowed to cover the police operations inside the compound if they agree to turn government witness.
“The National Union of Journalists in the Philippines calls on all parties involved in the tension between the Philippine National Police and the Kingdom of Jesus Christ to let media simply do their job,” the statement said, and reminded both parties that “the media is not a party to these proceedings and are simply there for coverage.”
be police witnesses.”
The NUJP also castigated the followers of Quiboloy’s Kingdom of Jesus Christ, The Name Above Every Name (KOJC) for spewing verbal insults and threats of physical harm to reporters. Some KOJC followers accused some news outlets of underreporting some alleged violent incidents that they said favored the police. Some of them were overheard accusing reporters of being “bayaran”, or paid hacks, even as Quiboloy’s lawyer, Israelito Torreon, was issuing an apology to reporters.
DOH REPORTS 2 MORE MPOX CASES IN NCR; TOTAL NOW 12
TWO more confirmed mpox cases have been detected in Metro Manila, the Department of Health (DOH) announced on Monday. The DOH said both have MPXV Clade II, which is the milder form of mpox virus.
Transmission dynamics for the two new cases are consistent with earlier warnings: close and intimate, skin-to-skin contact. The total case count is now 12 since July 2022. Nine cases have long recovered since 2023. Three are active cases waiting for symptoms to resolve, the DOH added.
Case 11
tested at the DOH Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (RITM). The patient remains in the government hospital.
Case 12
The police extended the blockade by 1.3 kilometers from the eastern approach up to the Lyceum of the Philippines University (LPU), and by 2.3 kilometers from the western approach, which would now include the entry to the airport as among those blocked in the process. It could not be immediately ascertained if taxi-riding airport passengers would be allowed to pass through the checkpoint but in the other side, reporters saw airport passengers walking from the LPU side of the highway. Reporters also said they saw some of the KOJC vehicles and trucks already parked outside, occupying parts of the highway. Some KOJC followers were also seen burning tires on the highway. (Related story on KOJC standoff in A5 News)
ADB: Bid to
There were no untoward incident reports since Sunday, but the National Union of Journalists in the Philippines (NUJP) issued a statement assailing the condition set by police regional director, Brig.
cut poverty
may spur GHG emissions hike to meet growth goal
By Cai U. Ordinario @caiordinario
THE country’s poverty reduction efforts may come at a cost to the environment as more greenhouse gas emissions are needed to boost economic growth and raise Filipino’s incomes, according to the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
In its latest Key Indicators for Asia and the Pacific 2024 report, the ADB said reaching higher income thresholds for lower middle income countries like the Philippines require rising tonnes of carbon dioxide (tCO2) emissions per capita.
ADB said this makes it imperative for countries like the Philippines to boost energy efficiency and accelerate their transition to less carbonintensive energy sources to ease the tension between the environment and economic growth.
“The challenge lies not in reconciling poverty alleviation with climate goals, but in ensuring an economically and environmentally sustainable middle-income standard of living,” the ADB report stated.
“More research is needed to understand how to design climate change mitigation programs that drive rapid technical, behavioral, and systemic changes that also contribute to poverty reduction,” it, however, added.
The report said that to reduce the proportion of people living on less than $3.65 per capita per day to 3 percent by 2050, Asia and the Pacific may contribute an additional 1.2 percent in per capita GHG emissions.
This percentage is also expected to increase to 2.9 percent for a similar target using a higher poverty line of $6.85 per capita per day.
In terms of the Philippines, following this scenario using data provided by ADB in the report, the country may need an additional increase of around 15 percent in tCO2 per capita to reach the highest income threshold of $6.85 per capita per day.
Less than a 10-percent increase in tCO2 per capita is needed to reach the income threshold of $3.65 per capita per day and less than 5 percent in tCO2 per capita to reach the income
threshold of $2.19 per capita per day.
“The level of additional GHG emissions per capita required to meet poverty reduction targets was derived as follows: (i) The authors estimated the year when the poverty target would be met (ii) The authors counted only the GHG emissions associated with economies maintaining gross domestic product per capita levels to keep people out of poverty,” ADB said.
“The emissions needed for poverty alleviation were estimated by calculating the difference between the poverty-reduction scenario and the counterfactual no-povertyreduction scenario. This was calculated by counting the additional emissions from higher consumption of all people in all economies that have not met a 3 percent poverty reduction target,” it added.
ADB noted that alleviating poverty through various programs are typically designed to increase consumption levels of people with low incomes.
However, while higher consumption levels will boost economic growth, especially in economies like the Philippines which is consumption-driven, it will also increase carbon dioxide emissions.
Citing the findings of various studies, ADB said eradicating poverty will increase global emissions by as much as 3 percent.
“The implications that poverty reduction has for global climate goals is particularly relevant for Asia and the Pacific, whose projected growth of the middle classes is expected to dwarf that of all other regions in the world,” ADB said.
“Increased spending capacity among residents of Asia and the Pacific is expected to induce growth in the region’s already high carbon footprint,” it added.
Earlier, local economists said that despite the decline in poverty incidence rate in 2023, the government still needs to put in place economic programs that will lift “chronically poor” Filipinos out of poverty as nearly 5 million Filipinos still cannot afford their
needs
“That means that media should not be made to be government witnesses in exchange for being allowed into the Kingdom of Jesus Christ compound,” it added.
Media teams on the ground have had to deal with both the police and Quiboloy followers, some of whom drove them away and shouted at them, “bayaran!” [paid hacks].
A female NUJP officer here said Torre made the condition on Saturday when the police were about to enter the compound. He told reporters that they would be allowed to cover the search operation “on the condition they would sign a waiver and agree to
The search for Quiboloy to serve the arrest warrant against him entered its third day on Monday, as Torreon held a news briefing outside the KOJC compound to warn that the police have inserted unknown persons into the compound, suspecting them as spies for the police. Torreon warned KOJC followers that the police may be “brewing up something” to either justify their further lockdown of the compound, or to totally control the area.
The police had yet to reply to a BusinessMirror inquiry on its side to the allegations.
MPOX case 11 is a 37 -year -old male from National Capital Region who noticed symptoms starting August 20, 2024. A distinct rash began on his face, arms, legs, thorax, palms, and soles.
Initial investigation showed that case 11 had no known exposure to any person with similar symptoms, but admitted to close, intimate, and skinto-skin contact within 21 days before the start of his symptoms. He was admitted to a government hospital last August 22, from where a skin sample was taken and then
MPOX case 12 is a 32 -year- old male from NCR with symptoms that started last August 14, 2024. He noticed skin lesions -clear, fluid-filled vesicles, at his groin area. A few days later, fever started. He admits to close, intimate and skin-to-skin contact with one sexual partner. Due to persistent symptoms, he sought consultation at an outpatient clinic and was initially managed as a case of a bacterial infection. However, after a few days he started having pimple-like lesions on the face, forehead and scalp. He was advised to seek consultation at at a DOH hospital where a skin sample was taken last August 23. He was advised home isolation while awaiting results, and has been staying at home ever since.
Local government units where cases 11 and 12 are from have been informed and have the power and authority by law to disclose more detailed information including response actions, at their discretion.
Continued on A5
‘Asean must prepare youth for digital future’
By Claudeth Mocon-Ciriaco @claudethmc3
TO better prepare the region’s youth for future challenges, Education Secretary Sonny Angara called on member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to prioritize digital transformation in education during the 13th Asean Education Ministers Meeting (ASED) in Buriram, Thailand.
“We have a duty to ensure that our students are not merely passive recipients of knowledge but active citizens capable of shaping their futures and contributing to the growth of their communities and the entire Asean region,” Angara stated as he highlighted the collective responsibility of policymakers
to equip learners with the skills and values needed to thrive in an increasingly digital world.
He stressed the urgency of these reforms as Asean approaches critical deadlines for its Community Blueprints and begins developing post-2025 strategic plans.
While advocating for digital advancements, Angara reminded the audience that education remains a fundamentally human endeavor, requiring strong institutions, evidence-based policies, competent civil servants and an engaged network of stakeholders.
“Yes, the future will be increasingly digital, but we must remember that education is still a human endeavor—technology is simply a tool to address real human challenges,” he emphasized.
As President of the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (Seameo) Council from 2023 to 2024, the Philippines has initiated several programs to foster digital transformation.
Angara highlighted key initiatives such as DepEd Digital Education 2028 (DepEd DigiEd 2028), the Higher Education Digital Integration by the Commission on Higher Education (Ched), and Digital Skills Training in Technical and Vocational Education (TVET) by the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (Tesda).
He also announced the launch of a new digital transformation initiative under the Seameo Council Presidency’s Flagship Programs, aligning with Asean’s goal of creating “a community of opportunities for all.”
“Collaboration is key,” Angara asserted, reflecting the Marcos administration’s belief that unity and cooperation among Asean countries and their education ministries are essential for achieving educational excellence and accessibility across the region.
“We achieve more, together,” he added, underscoring the importance of shared commitment and partnership.
This year’s meeting also featured key milestones, including the report on the implementation of the Asean Work Plan on Education (AWPE) 2021-2025, the adoption of the Asean-Seameo Joint Declaration on Common Space in Southeast Asian Higher Education, and the updated Asean Plus Three Guidelines on Student Exchange and Mobility.
basic food
amid rising rice inflation.
EDUCATION Secretary Sonny Angara attends the 13th Asean Education Ministers Meeting (ASED) in Buriram, Thailand, August 26, 2024, where he urged member states to prioritize digital transformation in education. Emphasizing the need to equip the region’s youth with the skills to thrive in a digital world, Angara stated, “Yes, the future will be increasingly digital, but we must remember that education is still a human endeavor—technology is simply a tool to address real human challenges.”
Editor: Jennifer A. Ng
B1 Tuesday, August 27, 2024
Construction of terminal in Taguig to start soon—DOTr Ayala
By Lorenz S. Marasigan @lorenzmarasigan
The multibillion-peso Taguig
Integrated Terminal exchange (TITX) is inching closer to construction as the government is now finalizing a deal that will remove the primary hurdle to its implementation, according to the Department of Transportation (DOTr).
DOTr and partner Ayala Land Inc. plan to break ground for the multibillion-peso Taguig Integrated Terminal Exchange (TITX) before the end of 2024.
Transportation Secretary Jaime Bautista said the project, originally planned more than a decade ago, could finally begin construction as the government is close to settling land acquisition conflicts.
Bautista disclosed that the agency is finalizing an agreement with
the Philippine Veterans Foundation, whose property lies within the planned site.
He said the primary hurdle has been the foundation’s inability to sell the land directly to the government.
“We cannot buy the land because the Office of the Solicitor General [OSG] disapproved the sale; we were told that the property cannot be sold to the government,” Bautista said.
According to Transportation Undersecretary Jeremy Regino, the
OSG has proposed a right-of-way usage agreement instead of a direct purchase to avoid the complexities of a sale.
The TITX, envisioned as a six-story facility spanning 5.57 hectares within the Food Terminal Inc. (FTI) compound in Taguig, will feature a passenger concourse, a centralized ticketing area, and retail spaces. It is designed to accommodate 1,200 public utility buses and vehicles, with provisions for future expansion. Upon completion, the terminal is expected to serve approximately 160,000 passengers daily and house around 4,000 buses.
The TITX will also include a pedestrian walkway that connects to the Philippine National Railways FTI station and the proposed Metro Manila Subway system, positioning it as a crucial transport hub in the southern corridor of Metro Manila.
The project was initially approved in 2014 with an estimated cost of P5.2 billion.
The private partner will undertake the design, construction, and financing of the terminal as well as the operation and maintenance of the whole facility. The concessionaire can also undertake commercial development and collect revenues generated from it.
ERC clarifies ‘longstop date’ in PSAs
TBy Lenie Lectura @llectura
HE Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) has cautioned power generation companies against seeking for a termination of their power supply agreement (PSA) earlier than the prescribed period stated under relevant laws and regulations.
In three separate orders promulgated last August 21, the ERC told the Manila Electric Co. (Meralco), GNPower Dinginin Ltd. Co. (GNPD), Mariveles Power Generation Corporation (MPGC), and Excellent Energy Resources Inc. (EERI) that the “Longstop Date” in their respective PSAs should be interpreted and implemented in accordance with the EPIRA, Energy Virtual One-Stop Shop Act (EVOSS), and the implementing rules and regulations and the 2023 competitive selection process (CSP) guidelines.
The ERC earlier received motions to terminate other PSAs because it allegedly failed to act on the ap -
UBER Technologies Inc. was hit by a record €290 million ($324 million) by the Dutch privacy watchdog for failing to abide by European protection standards when it shipped swathes of sensitive data about its drivers to the United States. The Dutch Data Protection Authority said Uber was collecting information of drivers from Europe, such as taxi licenses, location data, and in some cases criminal and medical data, and retaining them on servers in the US.
The fine is the highest penalty ever issued by the Dutch watchdog against any company, a spokesperson said by email. It’s also the biggest fine Uber received globally.
The ride-hailing service sent the sensitive data to its US headquarters for over two years without using data transfer tools aimed at protecting privacy, which meant the data were “insufficiently protected,” the
Aplication for approval within the six-month “longstop date,” or the period in which the ERC is supposed to approve or disapprove the application of a distribution utility (DU) and its power supplier for the implementation of their PSA. It was the understanding of some that once the “longstop date” is over, the power supplier has the right to terminate the PSA by providing a written notice of such termination to the DU.
The agency clarified that the “longstop date” falls six months after the date of submission of the PSA application for approval to the ERC. However, the ERC stressed that the “longstop date” must still comply with the relevant laws and regulations.
“They have not asked for termination, but we clarified that they cannot just terminate earlier than the period provided under the EVOSS Law and should be with prior ERC approval,” said ERC Chairperson Monalisa Dimalanta.
In the case of Meralco and EERI,
the “longstop date” in their joint application for PSA approval is until September 1, 2024. The PSA between Meralco and EERI was filed last February 7. It involves 1,200MW of contracted capacity valid for 15 years starting November 26, 2024.
Meanwhile, the “longstop date” for the PSA between Meralco and GNPD is until August 22. It falls on August 29 for the PSA involving and MPGC.
Meralco’s PSA with GNPD and MPGC was filed on February 22 and February 29, respectively. The PSAs will commence on April 26, 2025 for a period of 15 years. Meralco will source 300MW each from GNPD and MPGC during the validity of the contract.
Aside from clarifying the period covered by the “longstop date,” the ERC said it has 270 calendar days to issue an action from submission of a valid application under the EVOSS Act.
“Considering that the parties did not include in their joint application any prayer for provisional authority,
watchdog said on Monday. Uber has ended the violation last year, the agency said.
The fine is “completely unjustified,” said Caspar Nixon, a spokesperson for Uber, in response to emailed questions. Uber’s data transfer pro -
cess was compliant with European laws and the company will appeal against the decision, Nixon said. Uber didn’t meet the requirements of European laws to “ensure the level of protection to the data with regard to transfers to the US.
which the commission is duty bound to act upon within 75 days from filing of the application, the timeline applicable for the action of the commission shall be 270 calendar days from filing as provided under the EVOSS Act,” the ERC ruled.
Moreover, the ERC said the reasons for PSA termination should be consistent with the conditions cited in the CSP guidelines and that a prior approval from the ERC must be sought.
By allowing for a unilateral termination by the power supplier on account of non-occurrence of the Commission’s final approval of the joint application on or before the longstop date is inconsistent with the provisions of Section 34 of the 2023 CSP Guidelines.
“The Commission hereby resolves that the Longstop Date should be interpreted and implemented in accordance with relevant laws and regulations, specifically the EPIRA, EVOSS Act, their respective implementing rules and regulations and the 2023 CSP guidelines,” the ERC said.
That is very serious,” Aleid Wolfsen, the Dutch data protection authority’s chairman, said in a statement.
The Dutch data protection authority began its investigation on Uber after more than 170 French drivers complained to a French human rights interest group. The probe was handled by the Dutch agency as Uber’s European headquarters is in the Netherlands.
This is the third penalty by the Dutch data protection authority on Uber. It was previously fined for not providing sufficient transparency about how long it retained data from European drivers and to which countries outside Europe this data was forwarded. In 2018, it was penalized for not informing the Dutch watchdog about a data breach in time.
The fines by European privacy watchdogs can amount to a maximum of 4 percent of the worldwide annual revenue of a business.
yALA L AND Logistics Holdings Corp. (ALLHC) said it broke ground for its ALogis Artico Consolacion in Cebu, which will meet the increasing demand for temperature-controlled facilities in the Central Visayas region.
The new facility will add 6,000 pallet positions to ALLHC’s cold storage portfolio. This will be ALLHC’s second facility in Cebu following the construction of ALogis Artico Mandaue in late 2022.
“Our focus is on meeting the rising demand for dependable modern cold storage solutions, which are vital for the preservation of the quality of perishable goods to reduce food waste and post-harvest losses. By investing in this facility, we are not only broadening our capabilities, but also ensuring that we can provide our clients with various locations that can meet their needs,” said ALLHC Chief Operating Officer Patrick C. Avila.
The firm is expanding its cold storage footprint as it aims to provide solutions for storing perishable goods around the country. Aiming to cater to diverse sectors, its intended clientele varies--from the frozen meat, seafood, pharmaceutical and chemical industries.
ALLHC had recently opened its fourth cold storage facility, ALogis Artico Santo Tomas in Batangas.
The company said it is fast-tracking its growth by enhancing its presence in Cebu with the Consolacion site slated for completion by the third quarter of next year.
Situated in Brgy. Tayud, Consolacion, Cebu, the facility is accessible
via the Cebu-North Coastal Road and is in close proximity to key transportation hubs, including the MactanCebu International Airport and Cebu Port—both just 12 kilometers or a 30-minute drive away.
ALogis Artico Consolacion will be equipped with 16 cold rooms with temperatures ranging from 5°C to -25°C, one processing room and a capacity of 6,000 pallet positions. ALogis Artico Consolacion will be registered with the Board of Investments, the National Meat Inspection Service, the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources and the Bureau of Plant Industry.
These registrations ensure that the facility will meet stringent industry standards for food safety and quality, the company said.
“I consider Cebu as an economic hub that distributes meat products outside of Cebu going to Mindanao and the adjacent provinces of Cebu. This facility can really help us in our desire and our implementation to produce sound, safe meat for the meat-consuming public,” NMIS Regional Director Dr. Alvin A. Leal said.
“I am so thankful that ALLHC are true, good partners. This is the second facility they have established in Cebu, and they are just right on time. The population of Cebu is tremendously multiplying. Within five years, it is going to double. Logistics is very important, and I do hope that with the opening of this facility, this will lead to more investments that will be complementing the needs of the people,” Municipal Mayor Teresa P. Alegado said. VG Cabuag
Scale model of the Taguig Integrated Terminal e xchange (ITX) Project.
Photo from www.Pna.gov.Ph
Photo from www.ayalalandlogistics.com
an Uber Technologies Inc. sticker on a vehicle. PhotograPher: Jeenah moon/BloomBerg
Banking&Finance
Moody’s rating to boost legislative growth agenda
By Butch Fernandez @butchfBM
THE affirmation by Moody’s Investors Service of the coun-
try’s sovereign credit rating of investment grade Baa2 will boost the legislative agenda to entice more investors into the country, Senator Sherwin T. Gatchalian said last Monday.
“This [affirmation] bodes well with our legislative agenda of improving investor confidence and attracting foreign investments critical for the country to underpin sustained economic growth,” Gatchalian, chairman of the Senate Committee on Ways and Means, said.
The Baa2 rating is a notch higher than the minimum investment grade of Baa3. The credit rating agency also affirmed its stable outlook for the country.
A key measure in the priority agenda of Congress and the Executive in the 19th Congress is the proposed Corporate Recovery and Tax Incentives for Enterprises to Maximize Opportunities for Reinvigorating the Economy (“Create More”). Gatchalian, its main author, is advocating immediate passage of the bill.
Remolona one
Increasing foreign direct investments would lead to job generation, support domestic consumption, and further improve the country’s fiscal position, the solon stressed.
With the expected enactment of the “Create More” and other measures supportive of economic development, Gatchalian expressed optimism that the country would secure an investment rating upgrade moving forward. “Create More” is a priority measure of the Marcos administration.
“Now that we have recovered more decisively from the economic impact of the pandemic, we look forward to continuing the momentum for growth, and possible get an investment rating upgrade,” Gatchalian said.
In affirming the country’s investment grade rating, Moody’s traced its decision to several factors, including the country’s reforms to liberalize the economy, fiscal consolidation efforts, and robust macroeconomic fundamentals.
Meanwhile, the Japan-based Rating and Investment Information Inc. recently upgraded the Philippine sovereign credit rating to “A-” with a stable outlook.
of
the world’s best central bank governors
By Cai U. Ordinario @caiordinario
AFTER spending a year in office, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) Governor Eli M. Remolona Jr. was recognized by Global Finance magazine as one of the best central bank governors worldwide. Remolona, who completed his first year in office on July 3, 2024, was given a rating of A- in the magazine’s “2024 Central Banker Report Card” along with 14 other central bank governors, including the European Union’s Christine Lagarde and the United States Jerome Hayden Powell.
This year, three central bank leaders who received A+ ratings were from Denmark, India, and Switzerland while the seven ledaers who received A ratings were from Brazil, Chile, Mauritius, Morocco, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam.
“Central bankers have waged war against inflation over the past few years, wielding their primary weapon: higher interest rates. Now, countries around the world are witnessing the tangible results of these efforts, as inflation has dropped significantly,” Joseph Giarraputo, director of magazine publisher Global Finance Media Inc., was quoted in a statement as saying.
Giarraputo added that the annual “Central Banker Report Cards” honor “those bank leaders whose strategies outperformed their peers through originality, creativity and tenacity.” The annual ranking evaluates central bankers from nearly 100 countries, territories, and regions.
Global Finance magazine editors, with input from financial experts, assess central bankers based on both objective and subjective factors, including monetary policy effectiveness, supervision of the financial system, asset purchase programs, forecasting accuracy, transparency, political independence, and success in meeting national mandates. An algorithm ensures consistent grading across regions, with ratings ranging from “A+” to “F.”
Govt asset privatization unit preps vs surprises in ’25 goal
By Reine Juvierre Alberto
THE Privatization and Management Office (PMO) is banking on multiple strategies apart from aggressive sales of idle assets to reach the P101-billion target set for 2025, according to its top official.
Finance Undersecretary for Privatization and Corporate Affairs
Catherine L. Fong told the BusinessMirror that PMO has a plan to reach the privatization target. The latter was increased by 140 percent to P101 billion from this year’s P42 billion based on the 2025 Budget of Expenditures and Sources of Financing.
“I wouldn’t say I’m confident [in reaching the target since] there are always surprises that spring up,” Fong said. “But there’s definitely a plan to reach it and that plan is always to aim for more [in case something goes wrong].”
For one, Fong said the PMO is pushing for more solicited publicprivate partnerships (PPPs) to build more infrastructure and services through private sector financing and hopefully, secure more upfront payment for the national government.
The PMO is an attached agency of the Department of Finance (DOF) mandated as the marketing arm of the government concerning transferred assets, government corporations and other properties assigned to it by the Privatization Council (PrC) for disposition.
Fong wasn’t able to provide figures
on how much would be raised from the PPPs saying these are relative to the transaction and, in addition, the projects are yet to be valued.
The PMO is also drafting amendments to the PrC’s guidelines to allow unsolicited proposals, wherein the sale could be initiated by a private proponent through offering for the assets.
Since the government has many small properties, the occupants will be enabled to make offers on those properties, Fong said.
Overseas Filipino workers who also might be interested in buying idle government properties could acquire these remotely through online platforms and bank transfers, Fong added.
The new guidelines will also allow brokers, who could help in marketing the properties that are small in size and located in remote areas, such as in Mindanao.
“We’re thinking that it has more value for people who would want to own their own homes but the PMO has no capacity to market them, so brokers are welcome,” Fong told the BusinessMirror
She added that the PMO targets to
submit the revised guidelines before the end of August. The dissolution of defunct government-owned and -controlled corporations (GOCCs) is also seen as one of the factors in helping the PMO reach the privatization targets.
Earlier, Governance Commission for GOCCs (GCG) Commissioner Gideon DV. Mortel said the speedy disposition of assets owned by 31 defunct GOCCs could generate more than P25 billion for the government. Moreover, the PMO is looking into disposing of the 2.2-hectare Mile Long Complex in Makati City, mining rights, government shares in toll roads, amusement park Star City in Pasay City and the Food Terminal Incorporated (FTI) in Taguig City this year. The PMO sold the government’s stake in North Luzon Expressway (Nlex) and raised P3.3 billion last July.
Revenues from privatization rose by 673.97 percent year-on-year to P411.52 million from January to June 2024 from P53.17 million, according to the Bureau of the Treasury.
‘Made in USA’ Bitcoin threatens China’s Bitmain rule
FOR years, a Chinese company has dominated one of the most lucrative corners of the cryptocurrency universe. Rising political tensions, and the prospect of Donald Trump retaking the White House, pose an unprecedented threat to that reign.
Global Finance, founded in 1987, reaches 50,000 readers across 193 countries, targeting senior corporate and financial executives responsible for key investment and strategic decisions at multinational firms and financial institutions.
The Monetary Board has reduced key policy rates ahead of the United States Federal Reserve in the hope that lower interest rates may encourage better access to credit for Filipinos.
The BSP delivered one of at least two of the expected 25- basis-point rate cuts this year. The policy move brought down BSP’s Target Reverse Repurchase (RRP) Rate to 6.25 percent from 6.5 percent. It also said the interest rates on the overnight deposit and lending facilities were adjusted downward to 5.75 percent and 6.75 percent, respectively. (See: https://businessmirror.com.ph/2024/08/16/ bsp-cuts-policy-rate-by-25-bpsahead-of-fed/).
In an earlier interview, Remolona was asked whether the Monetary Board has entered its easing cycle, and he said another rate cut will be possible this year. Nonetheless, the monetary authorities will continue monitoring the situation.
Remolona told reporters that the Monetary Board will make another 25-basis-point reduction in policy rates either in its October or December meeting this year. (See: https://businessmirror.com. ph/2024/08/17/bsp-easing-cycleseen-as-governor-remolona-saysanother-rate-cut-possible/).
Remolona also noted that inflation has been “behaved” and remained within their expectations. He said the 4.4-percent inflation posted in July was within BSP’s expectations for the month. The BSP Governor also said the inflation rate in July was driven mainly by base effects amounting to 0.3 percentage points. Remolona said without the base effect, the inflation would only be 4.1 percent.
Beijing-based Bitmain Technologies Ltd. has a 90 percent share of the market for computers used to mine Bitcoin. One top customer likens it to diamond producer De Beers at its height: so powerful that it can dictate global prices just by adjusting the output of its machines.
But with former president and China hawk Trump saying he wants Bitcoin to be “mined, minted and made” in the US, upstart rivals see an opportunity to finally wrest business from Bitmain. Some are leaning hard into the narrative that miners will do well to diversify their supply to hedge against geopolitical risk.
Trump’s rhetoric adds to an already worsening political environment for Bitmain in the US, where most Bitcoin is mined nowadays and concerns are rising that the equipment could be used for spying.
There are many reasons why Trump may “want to challenge a scenario where there’s a single dominant company that is a Chinese company in this space,” including national security concerns, said Rajiv Khemani, chief executive of California-based startup Auradine, a Bitmain rival.
New dynamic
THE new dynamic is already playing out in the market. In July, Austin, Texas-based Bitcoin miner Core Scientific Inc. broke with tradition and announced an order from a unit of Jack Dorsey’s Block Inc.—even though Bitmain is one of its biggest investors.
California-based Auradine raised $80 million in April and shipped its first mining machines in late July. It counts Marathon Digital Holdings Inc., one of Bitmain’s largest clients, among its shareholders.
Bitmain declined to respond to questions from Bloomberg News.
When someone “mines” a Bitcoin, what they’re really doing is using specialized computing equipment to solve an enormously complicated mathematical puzzle. To get there, the machines (known colloquially as “rigs”) essentially use brute force by throwing trillions of guesses per second at the problem. Each successful attempt helps support the block-
chain and is rewarded with Bitcoin.
Using a car analogy, mining rigs are akin to drag racers: immensely powerful and built for a narrowly defined purpose. They also gobble up power, accounting for about 0.6 percent of the world’s electricity consumption last year, according to the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance.
As a result, the economics of Bitcoin mining largely boils down to the token’s price, access to cheap electricity and having the most efficient rigs.
From China to SEA BITMAIN was founded in 2013 by Micree Zhan and Jihan Wu, according to a 2018 prospectus for a subsequently scrapped listing in Hong Kong. The company’s LinkedIn page says it is headquartered in Beijing.
From its early days, Bitmain set itself apart by offering powerful, reliable machines—and then constantly upgrading its signature Antminers to stay ahead of the competition.
“When they launch a new machine, it resets the competitive dynamic in the marketplace,” said Fred Thiel, CEO of Marathon Digital. “The people that get access to that have a competitive advantage immediately.”
Seeking to stave off the threat of tariffs, Bitmain shifted some production from China to Southeast Asia years ago, according to a distributor. Trump in 2018 imposed tariffs on electronics and other goods imported from China.
The company doesn’t currently have any US-based manufacturing, four people with knowledge of the matter said, asking not to be identified to avoid jeopardizing business relationships. It has production lines in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, according to Taras Kulyk, CEO of Synteq Digital, a distributor of Bitmain equipment.
Fight for supremacy
BUT even the production moves, and the competitive moat Bitmain built around itself, may not be enough to shield it in an era of increased competition and souring relations between the two top superpowers.
The shift of Bitcoin mining to the US—after China banned it—coincided with intensified US efforts to keep its geopolitical rival from obtaining the most advanced computing equipment, such as chips used to power artificial intelligence. This fight for chip supremacy is roiling
entire supply chains. And it’s leading to more scrutiny of who’s mining cryptocurrency on US soil, and where the hardware comes from.
In May, President Joe Biden ordered a Chinese Bitcoin mining company called MineOne to vacate and sell a 12-acre property near Cheyenne, Wyoming.
One of the reasons was the presence of “specialized and foreignsourced equipment” used to mine cryptocurrency—but “potentially capable of facilitating surveillance and espionage activities,” the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States said in a statement at the time.
‘Generalized concern’ AT a July 25 hearing of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren pressed Treasury Department official Paul Rosen on whether the mining equipment at the North Range facility could have been used to spy on US military operations.
“There is a generalized concern that sophisticated equipment in proximity to sensitive facilities can be used for espionage,” Rosen, the assistant secretary for investment security, replied. The North Range site is near the F.E. Warren Air Force Base, which houses US nuclear missiles.
Rosen, who runs CFIUS, didn’t elaborate on how crypto mining machines could be used for spying, and the May announcement didn’t mention Bitmain. The Treasury Department declined to comment further.
The US hasn’t presented any public evidence that mining rigs have been used for espionage.
Even so, MineOne was ordered to remove all equipment from the site in addition to vacating the property. Most of the rigs came from Bitmain, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.
Peeking inside rigs
MINEONE agreed to sell its North Range and Campstool mining facilities in Wyoming to CleanSpark Inc. The company, which calls itself “America’s Bitcoin Miner,” was seeking a home for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of rigs it had agreed to buy in January—all from Bitmain.
That contract, with Bitmain Technologies Delaware Ltd., stipulates that all equipment “shall have a country of origin other than Chi-
na” or any Office of Foreign Assets Control-sanctioned nation. It also gives CleanSpark the right to reject any products found to originate from China or OFAC-sanctioned countries, in which case Bitmain must replace them with identical machines manufactured elsewhere, the filing shows.
“That’s really important for us,” said CleanSpark CEO Zach Bradford. “Not just for the tariffs, but with the political situation being what it is.” Bradford, however, scoffed at the notion that mining rigs can be used for spying. “There is no memory, there is nothing on these units that could actually be used for espionage,” he said.
Sphere 3D Corp., a crypto miner based in Connecticut which bought all its roughly 12,000 rigs from Bitmain, unwittingly got embroiled in the US-China tensions some two years ago.
A scaled-back order for Antminer machines was transferred to USlisted Bitfufu Inc., in which Bitmain owns a 41 percent stake, for distribution. Then, a paperwork error interrupted the shipment of 4,000 rigs, according to Sphere 3D CEO Patricia Trompeter.
Customs officers seeking to establish the equipment’s origins pried open one unit and found a tiny “made in China” tag inside, she said. The gear was held for three months until Bitmain helped resolve the issue, according to Trompeter, who declined to say how. “That was a very tough period for my company.” Bitfufu declined to comment, as did US Customs.
Crypto skeptic COMPLICATING matters further is the possible return to power of Trump, a crypto skeptic during his first term who has become an industry champion after a wave of donations from prominent digital-asset figures.
Speaking at a Bitcoin conference in Nashville, Tennessee, on July 27 in front of a rapturous crowd, Trump called for crypto to be “mined, minted and made” in the US. In a June interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, he framed it as necessary to stave off China—notwithstanding that country’s sweeping ban on cryptocurrencies, which includes mining. “If we don’t do it, China is going to figure it out, and China’s going to have it—or somebody else,” he said. Bloomberg News
Remolona CREDIT: BloomBERg
Joy Rojas zeroes in on the facts in ‘Ipso Facto’
THE prevalence of Latin terms in legal lexicon stems from historical foundations, when the classical language was used in the legal system of the Roman Empire. For providing continuity in a field that values precedent and tradition, as well as clarity for precisely and succinctly encapsulating complex concepts, many of these terms live to this day as universal language in the legal world.
The term “Ipso Facto,” for one, pertains to an inevitable result based on its translation of “by the very fact or act itself.” Lawyer/visual artist Joy Rojas merges his two worlds and applies the term as the title of his ongoing 8th solo exhibition. In the show, Rojas explores through abstraction the resultant effect of his subjects’ beings: A look into their whys through
their whats.
In collaboration with ArtistSpace, JRFII Studio, and The Saturday Group of Artists, the exhibition opened on August 18 and will run until September 3 at ArtistSpace in the Ayala Museum Annex, Makati City. Rojas runs his own law firm. A cum laude graduate from the University of Massachusetts with a double degree in Economics and International Relations, he served as the general manager of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office.
Rojas credits his late sister Carmelita, who took up Fine Arts at the Philippine Women’s University, for influencing him to pick up the paintbrush. He developed a liking for painting and started exhibiting his works in 2014. Then, in 2017, Rojas made his debut solo exhibition with a presentation at Saturday Group Gallery in Mandaluyong City. The space, of course, is run by the esteemed artist collective, which lists several National Artists and Rojas as members.
In Ipso Facto, Rojas dives deep into the essence of subjects that relate to his life. Through his signature lyrical brushstrokes and rich palette of colors that pops out of the canvas, the artist presents us with various themes such as religion, historical Philippines, his travels, and more.
Much of the showcase is likewise dedicated to Rojas’ deep-rooted passion for horses. The artist’s grade school notebooks were filled with drawings
of them, and he eventually developed an interest in horse racing. In the exhibition, Rojas pays several nods to the majestic animal, including the sculpture titled Golden Equine. The mixed media artwork is crafted from an amalgam of woods, its front legs raised and suspended mid-air in a powerful pose.
Elsewhere there are captivating abstract visualizations of Rojas’ many travels, marked by colors as vivid as the textures. There’s the stunning golden hour in French Riviera Summer and the gentle, pinkish ambience in Japan’s Cherry Blossom Rojas has also prepared imaginative works in a couple of series on shaped canvasses. First is Metanoia where the artist presents images of his faith; followed by Mother Earth, a collection of circular artworks about the changing colors of nature, each with a distinct personality yet equally charming.
While Rojas has encountered “Ipso Facto” countless times in his law practice, the term takes on new life in the context of his art career. Much about the mystery of a place or an experience can be unraveled by, as the term’s translation suggests, looking at the very fact, very essence of a subject.
Amid the run of Joy Rojas’ Ipso Facto from August 18 to September 3, an artist reception is scheduled on Sunday, September 1, at ArtistSpace in Makati City.
For inquiries, contact Gab Baez on Viber at 09761633064. ■
CAMBODIA’S PRIME MINISTER WELCOMES ARTIFACTS RETURNED BY NEW YORK’S MET AND OTHER COLLECTIONS
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia—Cambodia’s prime minister on Thursday led a celebration for the return of dozens of precious artifacts from museums and private collectors abroad, and said his government will continue working to bring more home.
Hun Manet, who became prime minister last year when he succeeded his long-serving father, Hun Sen, said the 70 returned statues symbolically reunited the Cambodian people with their ancestral souls. The artifacts were displayed at the Peace Palace, the seat of the country’s government.
Many, if not all, the pieces were looted during a long period of civil war and instability while Cambodia was ruled by
the brutal communist Khmer Rouge in the 1970s.
Cambodia has benefited from a trend in recent decades that has seen the repatriation of art and archaeological treasures taken from their homelands. These include ancient Asian artworks as well as pieces lost or stolen in turmoil in places such as Syria, Iraq and Nazi-occupied Europe.
“A total of 70 Khmer cultural objects have been returned through a range of different processes, including voluntary returns, negotiations, seizures and legal proceedings, from different collections such as from the Lindemann family, Jim Clark, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and other private collectors in the United
States,” the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts said in a statement.
The statement said the returned items include important Hindu and Buddhist masterpieces from the 9th-to-14th-century Angkor period and earlier, “especially priceless stone statues such as a mythical warrior from the Hindu epic Mahabharata, statues of Shiva and Parvati, and the statue of Ardhanarishvara from the ancient capital of Koh Ker.”
Hun Manet said that from 1996 until last month, 1,098 artifacts had been returned to Cambodia, 571 from private collections and 527 from foreign institutions and governments. The 70 items displayed Thursday included 14 that arrived from New
York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in early July; the remainder, from private collectors, arrived in late July.
The pieces that came from the New York museum were bought and trafficked by well-known art dealer Douglas Latchford, who was indicted in 2019 for allegedly orchestrating a multiyear scheme to sell looted Cambodian antiquities on the international art market. Latchford, who died the following year, had denied any involvement in smuggling.
Cambodian-US relations are generally strained, mainly because of Washington’s criticism of alleged political repression and human rights violations by Cambodia’s government. AP
‘take that, boss!’ BY PAUL
By Eugenia Last
inquisitive will lead to unexpected opportunities and a chance to develop your skills to use them in new and exciting ways. Explore the possibilities and turn your talents into something sustainable. ★★★★
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Explore how you feel about the people around you and the relationships you are building. Attend events that interest you, see whom you encounter and learn from the experience. Funnel your energy into growth, learning and discovering what makes you happy. ★★★
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Overspending to impress someone will fall short of your expectations. Use your ingenuity and intelligence if you want to acquire someone’s attention. Don’t let emotions interfere with the choices you make. ★★★
CANCER (June 21-July 22): Gossip may intrigue you, but passing along information can damage someone else’s reputation and your own. Invest more time in developing your skills and pursuing personal growth and self-improvement; the results will make others envious. ★★★
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Reach out and join forces with like-minded people to make a difference. Stop complaining or criticizing and start doing something that results in positive change. Be a part of the solution, not the problem at home, work or within your community. ★★★★
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Leave yourself some wiggle room; self-improvement doesn’t have to cost you. Scour the internet for information that can help you get ahead, or revise your portfolio or resume to greater emphasize what you can offer. ★★
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Be open to suggestions but research whatever you want to pursue thoroughly, especially if it concerns your health or finances. Someone will mislead you if you believe everything you hear. Reliable sources and factchecking will prove to be valuable. ★★★★★
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Don’t feel you have to participate in something that doesn’t feel right. Keep your money and possessions safe and your personal information to yourself. Focus on creativity and using your skills uniquely and fortuitously. Trust your instincts. ★★★
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Slow down; only make snap decisions or sign up for something if you know what you are getting. You may crave change, but the wrong move could make you anxious and vulnerable. ★★★
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Make positive changes to your diet and lifestyle to counter poor health and stress. Discipline and routine are encouraged, along with letting go of toxic connections and pastimes that lead to temptation and poor habits. Life adjustments geared toward looking and feeling your best are favored. ★★★
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Participation is the name of the game. Don’t sit down or take a pass when your dance card should be overflowing. Movement, research and getting those close to you to join in will help you maintain your lifestyle of choice. Do what’s best for you. ★★★★★
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Rethink your current situation and who influences your life. Consider paying less attention to what others are doing and more to what helps you establish and maintain a lifestyle that leads to happiness, longevity and peace of mind. ★★
BIRTHDAY BABY: You are sensitive, intelligent and complex. You are helpful and kind. TODAY’S HOROSCOPE
LEISTRA
The Universal Crossword • Edited by David Steinberg/Anna Gundlach/Adrian Johnson/Jared Goudsmit/Taylor Johnson
MOTHER Earth No. 6, Joy Rojas, 2024, mixed media, 12" diameter
METANOIA 3, Joy Rojas, 2024, mixed media, 24"x18"
GOLDEN Equine, Joy Rojas, 2024, mixed media on horse-shaped sculpture
Show BusinessMirror
Pilita Corrales celebrates 85
WATCH CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD
HORROR FILMS IN AYALA MALLS CINEMAS
BE afraid. Be very afraid.
In celebration of Ghost Month, an August tradition believed to be a time when the spirits of the dead come to visit the living, Ayala Malls Cinemas is holding their annual Thrill Fest ongoing until September 3. This year’s lineup consists of spine-tingling horror and thriller Hollywood classics that are celebrating milestone anniversaries this year—old goodies that are back once again on the big screen for a limited time only. Even more spooktacular? Movie lovers can watch remastered versions of these frightening old favorites for only P200 to P250.
The Thrill Fest runs for two straight weeks, offering moviegoers a rare cinematic experience. This exclusive opportunity is quite affordable, too. Audiences can watch these classics where they were originally made for—on the big screen. After Interview with the Vampire and Gremlins, moviegoers can enjoy from August 28 to September 3 two other classics celebrating their anniversaries this year: the horror-slasher A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and epic disaster movie The Towering Inferno (1974).
Catch the classic films of the Thrill Fest for only P250 in the following Ayala Malls Cinemas branches: Glorietta, Greenbelt, The 30th, Circuit, Market Market, Fairview Terraces, Feliz, TriNoma, UPTC, Manila Bay, Harbor Point and Solenad. Movie tickets for the Thrill Fest are at P200 in the following branches: Ayala Center Cebu, Centrio, Capitol Central and Central Bloc. Ayala Malls Cinemas ensure an enhanced and enjoyable movie-watching experience, thanks to their state-of-the-art facilities, including plush seating, generous legroom, cutting-edge laser projections, better images and superior audio technologies, like Dolby Sound and Dolby Atmos.
Ayala Malls Cinemas also exclusively offer the rare chance to watch old movies on the big screen, allowing audiences to re/discover timeless masterpieces and experience them the way filmmakers originally intended for them to be seen. Where classic movies are concerned, there’s a whole other—and bigger—world than the smartphone streaming experience.
More information on screening schedules and more are, www.sureseats.com or the socia-media pages of the participating cinemas.
LOS ANGELES—In a sleepy summer weekend at the box office, holdovers reigned supreme as newcomers landed without a splash.
Deadpool & Wolverine reclaimed first place at the North American box office in its fifth weekend with $18.3 million. Its cumulative international earnings now sit at over $1.2 billion.
The Walt Disney Co., which owns 20th Century Studios, claimed the top two spots on the charts for the second weekend in a row with Alien: Romulus following close behind the foul-mouthed superhero movie. The latest installment in the 45-year-old franchise brought in $16.2 million in its second weekend after a promising opening. Disney’s Inside Out 2 also remained on the charts, raking in $2.1 million domestically in its 11th weekend. Its global earnings are now over $1.6 billion.
“This is an incredible turnaround for Disney,
ICONIC artist Pilita Corrales turned 85 a few days ago and had an intimate celebration with her most precious ones at The Manila Hotel over the long weekend.
Many consider Corrales a national treasure in the field of the performing arts, having been in the business for nearly seven decades, captivating the hearts of many around the globe with her natural charm, classy wit and inimitable gift of voice.
From her breakthrough years in Australia where she first recorded albums and experienced sold-out performances, to her conquering Manila and the entire Philippine archipelago thereafter, Corrales was always at the top of her game.
As she was peaking, Corrales performed with the world’s best, including legendary artists Matt Monroe, Sammy Davis Jr., Bob Hope and The Beatles. She also successfully ventured into radio, television and the movies.
We lived not far from each other when Corrales was still staying in Quezon City, and had some precious conversations with her then, but she has since moved to the south of the metropolis and is enjoying her quiet, happy life.
Her family visits her from time to time, her grandchildren making time to see their Mamita, and she already has three great grandchildren. “I am so happy when they come to the house and spend time with me. I’m getting old and traveling through highways and going in and out of these toll junctions make the journey longer and the destination seem farther, that’s why I am at home most of the time.”
I recall one of these conversations with Corrales. She told me she misses her old home and would still be there if not for the freak flood that devastated her abode, which destroyed many personal stuff including her precious music sheets. “I guess it was time to move to somewhere new. But my old house had many beautiful and priceless memories that were so hard to leave behind. If I had my way, I’d still moved back to our New Manila neighborhood, perhaps look for a house that is on higher ground.”
As a performer, Corrales has always struck us as one of those in the higher league. When we watched her show at The Theatre at Solaire in 2017, we were awed by her luminous stage presence, the same radiance she had in her many past shows and concerts. She had the audience in awe with what she can do on stage, considering that at that time, she was already nearing 80.
Corrales was in her mid 20s when she gave birth to her unica hija Jackie Lou Blanco, who recently turned 60. Blanco turned a bit emotional when we asked her what is her birthday wish for her mom.
“I am choking up just thinking how wonderful and amazing my mom is. My wish is for her to live her years happy, and for her to always know how much we love her.”
Blanco continued, “The most important advise I
who almost fell off the radar, shockingly enough, last year and over the course of the pandemic,” said Paul Dergarabedian, the senior media analyst for Comscore.
“They got a couple of billion-dollar films out so far and Moana 2 is still up on the way. This is a huge comeback year for Disney—no question about it.”
The new releases were victim to the crowded movie marketplace, resulting in what Dergarabedian called “box office déjà vu,” with the familiar films dominating and making it harder for the new releases to find their footing.
Dergarabedian says the upcoming Labor Day holiday will likely benefit the newer titles as wordof-mouth spreads and more people head to theaters during the long weekend.
Blink Twice, directed by Zoë Kravitz and starring her life partner Channing Tatum, saw a modest opening, taking in $7.3 million and claiming fourth place on the charts. The Amazon MGM Studios psychological thriller follows Tatum as tech magnate Slater King, who whisks two women away to his private island. While it may seem like a pictureperfect vacation at first, much more sinister events unfold as the visitors learn the truth about the island and the billionaire. The film’s budget has been reported at $20 million.
Reviews have been mixed, with audiences giving the film a “B-” CinemaScore, but the film has been deemed Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes with a 79 percent score.
got from my mom is to always be kind to everyone, that true kindness is never selective. And as an artist, she has always instilled in me the value of professionalism, and also to be generous, to always share what you know so someone can be better. My mom is a very generous person, never s’yang naging maramot, and this applies to everything. She is a giver, and sharing makes her happy.”
Corrales’ actor-son Ramon Christopher Gutierrez, a man of few words, also told us that his mom instilled in him to be very professional when he decided to pursue show business. “She places high value on integrity and punctuality, always reminding me to never make people wait. My wish is good health and happiness for her and for the family,” he said.
Actor Ricky Davao, a good friend of ours for many years, and father to some of Corrales’ lovely grandchildren, told us that he wishes to see his mother-in-law perform again onstage. “Just one more time, one full song number. She is the original iconic diva, and I’d love to see her sing onstage again. That’s why I wish her good health so she can do what she does best—to sing and perform. In the innermost corner of my heart, I also secretly pray that she will, one day, be accorded the highest honors a Filipino artist can get, the National Artist award, because she certainly deserves it. I love her very much.”
We also spoke to two of Corrales’ grand children, Rikki Mae and Ara Davao. Rikki Mae learned from her Mamita the importance of making time for the people that matter, “...especially your loved ones.”
Another new release, The Crow, was beat out by Twisters and Coraline in the rankings. Twisters entered its sixth week with $6.2 million in domestic earnings and Coraline, which was re-released for its 15th anniversary last week, brought in an additional $5.1 million in its second weekend.
Lionsgate’s The Crow, an R-rated adaptation of the acclaimed graphic novel and a remake of the 1994 film of the same name, opened with $4.6 million.
The studio also floundered in August with the release of Borderlands, an adaptation of the video game, which made $15.2 million over three weekends compared to its reported $120 million budget. AP
She recalled that when she was in high school, she invited her Mamita to be a guest in her class. “I was in my early teens then and I didn’t realize how busy her schedule was, but she showed up nonetheless, dressed in one of her signature outfits and performed for the whole class. Much to Mamita’s surprise, I also wore a dress and did a short number for her, and she was just laughing out loud. “My birthday wish for Mamita is for her to always stay healthy and continue to exude her youthful energy to those around her. She proves that age is just a number and I just want her to continue being the beautiful person that she is, the person that we all love.”
For Ara, who is earning a lot of followers for her role in the widely followed TV series Batang Quiapo, her Mamita Pilita is her ultimate idol and she puts her on pedestal when it comes to professionalism as an artist. “Observing her while I was growing up, Mamita walks her talk and she is a true professional. The most important thing I learned from her is to be consistently kind to people and also to be sincerely generous.“
One song has always been associated with Corrales: “A Million Thanks to You,” composed by Alice Doria Gamilla. At 85, Asia’s Queen of Songs says she is thankful for the continued blessings she gets from day to day, and she appreciates the love of her family and close friends who consistently shower her with love, special people whom she also blesses with her unconditional love for many decades now. Cheers, dearest Mamita Pilita, and here’s wishing you a beautiful and happy life ahead. n
MITZI JOSH’S LATEST SINGLE
‘COULD GET USED TO YOU’ RELEASED WITH a voice that stirs the soul, Sparkle artist Mitzi Josh introduces her debut single under GMA Playlist, “Could Get Used to You.” Now available on digital platforms worldwide, the acoustic ballad feels like an embrace—warm, comforting, and filled with love. The song captures the feeling of finding someone you can’t imagine life without, making it a perfect addition to a wedding playlist.
“The first time I heard it, sobrang na-in love agad ako,” shares Mitzi.
“It’s been a while since I recorded it and I’ve been dying to share it with everyone. I can imagine this song being played at a wedding—that kind of love song. The song’s lyrics, penned by Rina Mercado, paint a picture of a couple deeply in love and comfortable with each other’s company. Although Mitzi has previously contributed to the soundtrack of GMA’s hit series Royal Blood with the song “Balik,” “Could Get Used to You,” is her first official single and Mitzi is more than eager to focus on her music career.
“I’m torn between acting and music, but for now, I want to concentrate on my music. I’m excited to explore different genres and showcase my growth as an artist. I want to join musicals and my dream role is to be Joy of Ang Huling El Bimbo: The Musical I’d also love to try out for international musicals. Mitzi Josh’s “Could Get Used To You,” under GMA Playlist, is now available on major streaming platforms worldwide. More information is available at www. gmanetwork.com.
SINGER Mitzi Josh
Manila Exposition Complex, EVOxCharge launch EV charging station at WTCMM
THE Manila Exposition Complex (MEC) recently announced a strategic partnership with EVOxCharge to introduce a new electric vehicle (EV) charging station at the World Trade Center Metro Manila (WTCMM), the premier venue for international trade shows, exhibitions, and events in the Philippines.
MEC’s decision to collaborate with EVOxCharge underscores its dedication to supporting green transportation solutions. The charging station will be open to the public, ensuring all EV owners benefit from this cutting-edge facility. “This initiative reflects a commitment
to promoting sustainable practices and providing enhanced amenities to our visitors,” said WTCMM Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Pamela D. Pascual. “It also aligns with the broader goal of fostering sustainability within our operations and contributing to the growing EV infrastructure in the Philippines.”
As part of a five-year agreement, MEC will provide designated EV parking slots at WTCMM, offering convenient access for electric vehicle owners. The charging station, supplied, delivered, and installed by EVOxCharge, will feature a 7kW double output EV charger, equipped with real-time monitoring and remote access capabilities through EVOxCharge’s advanced web backend platform.
The EV charging stations will offer a seamless experience for EV users through the EVOxCharge mobile application, which facilitates easy digital payments and usage monitoring. MEC will maintain oversight of the station’s usage through access to EVOxCharge’s dashboard, ensuring that the facility meets the needs of its users.
National Art Fair ManilART 2024: Reflecting the Radiance of Filipino Artistic Expression
MANILART, the country’s national art fair, returns this year with the theme “Prisms & Mosaics,” highlighting the multifaceted nature of contemporary Filipino art. Set to run from October 9-13, 2024, at the SMX Aura Convention Center, this year’s event is a dynamic celebration of diversity, complexity, and interconnectedness in artistic expression.
This theme aligns with the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA)’s 2024 Museums and Galleries Month theme, “Ani ng Sining, Bayang Malikhain” (Art’s Harvest, A Creative Nation), which emphasizes that the abundant harvest of Filipino creativity stems from the nation’s collective imagination.
As a prism refracts a beam of light into different wavelengths and spectra of colors, contemporary Filipino art encompasses a breadth of perspectives, techniques, and stories. Artists draw from a wellspring of inspiration: from history and traditional folklore to global trends and emerging schools of thought. While each facet retains its unique qualities, collaboration is crucial, connecting and enhancing each artist’s contribution and enriching the overall picture.
Much like a mosaic, where distinct pieces form a cohesive image, art fairs and the Philippine arts and cultural scene unite individual talents into a collective celebration of artistic expression — in this unity, the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. This emphasis on collaboration reflects the Filipino spirit, known for its bayanihan, where collectivism is deeply rooted in our cultural heritage.
This year’s roster explodes with diverse offerings that interpret the theme in both figurative and literal ways. Among the anticipated exhibits is the showcase and biographical book launch of glass master Ramon Orlina. The three-dimensional lineup includes works in glass and crystal by powerhouse Marge Organo, oversized iridescent wall-bound metalworks by Ombok Villanueva, woven wood functional art by Agi Pagkatipunan, giant brass insects and birds by Jik
Villanueva, and filigreed translucent ostrich egg carvings by ManilART Head Curator Danny Rayos del Sol.
Two-dimensional works include masterworks by Romulo Galicano, surreal figurative semi-murals by Darby Alcoseba, works of cultural iconography by Adeste Deguilmo, ethereal whimsical expressionism by Joe Marie Sanclaria, and bold impastos and cutting-edge glasswork by the all-female power trio of Anna Orlina, Bea Policarpio, and Abby Añover.
A special multimedia exhibit entitled “Plugged Into Fernalia— Art in the Age of AI” will juxtapose AI-generated works alongside human-made art given a set of specially-curated prompts and seeks to explore the complex interplay of technology and human creativity. Gromyko Semper assembles a roster of local and international artists to participate in this ambitious project. The lineup includes Noel Sadicon, Joshua Palisoc, Pen Medina, Isobel Francisco, Jonathan Benitez, Maria Magdamit, Judeo Herrera, Gilbert Semillano, Cheryl Hironaka, Glenn Martinez, Ali Alejandro, Roman Padilla, Angelo Padilla, Paul Benjamin Hilario, Jopeter Arias, Hermino Tan, John Melvin Garcia, Joyce Pertez, Rem Kulas, AJ Pascua, Jascha Tolentino, Vince Balandra, Raeun Ramos, James Koehnline, Christian Townsend, and Peter Gric.
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PSBA Alumni See Resurgence of School Under New Management
THE Philippine School of Business Administration (PSBA), once regarded as a formidable academic institution providing the best business and accounting graduates, could again reclaim, even surpass its former glory as a top school in the Philippines.
This was the consensus among alumni of PSBA, as many of them expressed hope that the institution, under the new leadership of the STI Education Services Group (STI ESG), will again become the go-to business and accounting school, similar to its stature in the 1970s and 1980s.
The five-day fair is co-presented by the National Commission on Culture and the Arts and ManilART Foundation, and banners Museums and Galleries Month in October, and coincides with satellite shows around the country.
ManilART‘24 is supported by partners Museo Orlina, The City of Taguig, SM Supermalls, SMX Convention Center, Ladder Events Production, Vision Prime Media, Future Studios, Design Phoundry, Ticketbooth.ph, Via Mare Catering, Pure Foods Deli, BDO, MOD Coffee, Grentek Solutions, Marco Polo Ortigas, Art Caravan, and Sebastiao Cocktails. Media partners include ABS-CBN News Channel (ANC), The Philippine Star, Inquirer.net, Metro, Inquirer Pop!, The Manila Times, Manila Bulletin, Preen. ph, BusinessMirror, Peoples Journal, WhenInManila.com, Scout, Pilipino Mirror, Nolisoli.ph, Klik.ph, Cebu Daily News, Experience Travel & Living, Hue TVEverywhere, Malaya Business Insight, Manila Standard, and Alike. ManilART’24 tickets are available at Ticketbooth.ph. For group tours and school groups, email manilartsecretariat@gmail. com. For more details and the official activities calendar, follow our social media pages at ManilART on Facebook and @manilartfair on Instagram or visit www.manilartfair.com.
Several alumni present at the event also expressed their intention to support the new administration by applying for faculty member positions and offering their time and advice to the Tanco-led group.
STI ESG, known for its track record in transforming educational institutions, said among the programs being put in place to rebuild PSBA includes a complete overhaul of the school’s curriculum to ensure it matches current educational standards and industrial requirements. Key programs like BS Accountancy, BS Business Administration, MBA, and DBA will see significant changes. In addition, additional programs will be added, including the BS in Managerial Accounting, BS in Accounting Information Systems, and BS in Entrepreneurship.
“We are confident that with our extensive experience in elevating the standards of STI Education, we can replicate this success at PSBA. Our goal is to restore PSBA to its former glory as the country’s premier business school,” Eusebio Tanco, Chairman Emeritus of STI Holdings, said. Atty. Monico Jacob, Vice Chairman and CEO of the STI ESG, reaffirmed the organization’s commitment to restoring PSBA’s glory. “STI has a strong commitment to make PSBA what it used to be. And we will not stop, with your help of course, to pursue this mission, this vision,
this commitment that we will make you proud once again of PSBA.”
STI ESG has a well-established reputation for quality education. With 64 STI campuses around the country, including the highly recognized STI West Negros University, the organization has proven its ability to revitalize institutions and considerably increase student enrollment.
Vanessa Tanco, Director of STI Holdings, also shared insights into the recent developments. “We officially started the management of PSBA in Quezon City on July 1 and in Manila on August 1. Significant improvements have already been made, including painting the facade, fixing bathrooms, setting up computer labs, and equipping classrooms with TVs. Our revamped website and Facebook page now offer online applications, making the enrollment process more accessible.”
PSBA graduates have responded favorably. Many have expressed their appreciation for STI ESG’s involvement and their optimism for the future of their alma mater.
“People are so happy. They feel that it’s fortunate that STI is coming as its entry gives a sense of hope for their alma mater,” Vanessa Tanco added. PSBA is positioned for a bright future after introducing new scholarship programs in partnership with partners such as SGV, Bingo Plus, and Asian Terminals, as well as revising the BS Accountancy curriculum.
Alberto Lina, former Bureau of Customs Commissioner and a prominent PSBA alumni has shown strong support for the new management of PSBA by pledging scholarships for deserving students at the Quezon City campus. Plans for the standardization of curricula, tuition fees, and academic schedules across the Quezon City and Manila campuses would reinforce the institution’s integrated approach to education.
PSBA’s newly appointed team, including Vice President for Administration, Fleur Domingo; Vice President for Academic Affairs, Seth Cecilia; and Dean of Accountancy Program, Christy Gonzaga are dedicated to ensuring that PSBA continues to provide quality education and regaining its esteemed reputation. For more information, please contact: PSBA Quezon
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IN photo during the launch ceremony are, from left, BDO first vice president Robert John Tolentino, EVOxCharge Transnational Diversified Group Logistics Division President Lawrence Mendoza, EVOxCharge Transnational Diversified Group Chief Operating Officer Dan Florentino, WTCMM Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Pamela Pascual, EVOxCharge Vice President and General ManagerDerrick Tolentino, WTCMM Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Louella Caridad, and MEC Director Rommel Leuterio.
‘We were expendable’: Downwinders from world’s
first atomic
test are on a mission to tell their story
LBy Susan Montoya Bryan The Associated Press
OS ALAMOS, N.M.—It was the summer of 1945 when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan, killing thousands of people as waves of destructive energy obliterated two cities. It was a decisive move that helped bring about the end of World War II, but survivors and the generations that followed were left to grapple with sickness from radiation exposure.
At the time, US President Harry Truman called it “the greatest scientific gamble in history,” saying the rain of ruin from the air would usher in a new concept of force and power. What he didn’t mention was that the federal government had already tested this new force on US soil.
Just weeks earlier in southern New Mexico, the early morning sky erupted with an incredible flash of light. Windows rattled hundreds of miles away and a trail of fallout stretched to the East Coast. Ash from the Trinity Test rained down for days. Children played in it, thinking it was snow. It covered fresh laundry that was hanging out to dry. It contaminated crops, singed livestock and found its way into cisterns used for drinking water.
The story of New Mexico’s downwinders—the survivors of the world’s first atomic blast and those who helped mine the uranium needed for the nation’s arsenal—is little known. But that’s changing as the documentary “First We Bombed New Mexico”
racks up awards from film festivals across the United States.
It’s now screening in the northern New Mexico community of Los Alamos as part of the Oppenheimer Film Festival. It marks a rare chance for the once secret city that has long celebrated the scientific discoveries of J. Robert Oppenheimer—the father of the atomic bomb—to contemplate another more painful piece of the nation’s nuclear legacy.
The film, directed and produced by Lois Lipman, highlights the displacement of Hispanic ranching families when the Manhattan Project took over the Pajarito Plateau in the early 1940s, the lives forever altered in the Tularosa Basin where the bomb was detonated and the Native American miners who were never warned about the health risks of working in the uranium industry.
Their heart-wrenching stories woven together with the testimony of professors and doctors spurred tears in Los Alamos, as they have in Austin, Texas, Annapolis, Mary-
land, and every other city where the film has been screened.
Andi Kron, a long-time Los Alamos resident, was in awe of the cinematography but also horrified as she learned more.
“Just unbelievable,” she said, noting that even people who have been involved in studying different aspects of the Trinity Test decades later remain unaware of the downwinders’ plight.
Lipman and others hope to distribute the documentary more widely as part of an awareness campaign as downwinders push for the federal Radiation Exposure Compensation Act to be reauthorized and expanded to include more people who have been exposed by nuclear weapons work carried out by the federal government.
Over the past 10 years, Lipman has followed Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium co-founder Tina Cordova as she has appeared before Congress, held countless town halls and shared meals and prayers with
community members.
Lipman expressed her frustrations during the premiere in Los Alamos, noting that despite testimony about the injustices that followed the Trinity Test, the federal government has yet to acknowledge its failures in recognizing the damage that was done nearly 80 years ago.
As the film notes, there were about a half-million people— mostly Hispanics and Native Americans—living within a 150mile (241.4-kilometer) radius of the blast. The area was neither remote nor unpopulated, despite government claims that no one lived there and no one was harmed.
In the film, Cordova—a cancer survivor herself—tells community members that they will not be martyrs anymore. Her family is among many from Tularosa and Carrizozo who have had mothers, fathers, siblings and children die from cancer.
“They counted on us to be unsophisticated, uneducated and
unable to speak up for ourselves. We’re not those people any more,” Cordova said. “I’m not that person. You’re not those people.”
The US Senate passed a bill earlier this year that would finally recognize downwinders in New Mexico and in several other states where nuclear defense work has resulted in contamination and exposure. However, the bipartisan measure stalled in the US House over concerns by some Republican lawmakers about cost.
Cordova and others turned out Wednesday in Las Cruces to demonstrate as US House Speaker Mike Johnson visited New Mexico to campaign for Republican congressional candidate Yvette Herrell. The downwinders have vowed to make it a campaign issue in the must-win district as well as in the dozens of other Republican districts around the US that would benefit from an expansion of RECA.
At the film festival, Cordova told the audience that people for too long have been living separate lives, a poignant statement particularly for Los Alamos where science can sometimes be compartmentalized as experts work on solving specific aspects of bigger problems.
“There are no boundaries. We are not separate people. We all live in this state together and I would like to think that because of that we consider each other to be neighbors, friends, we’re relatives with some of you,” she said, thanking them for being there to hear another side of the story.
“We should be standing together for what is right,” she said, prompting applause.
The audience included workers from Los Alamos National Laboratory, county officials and a state senator.
Experts are fighting over whether to treat heat waves
By Olivia Rudgard
WHEN a 40 ° C (104 ° F)
heat wave threatened the UK for the first time in 2022, officials were caught flat-footed. This was uncharted territory for Britons, whose typical summer is dreary gray interspersed with flashes of welcome sunshine. Top temperatures in July in the UK barely graze 20C on average, even in our modern, warmed-up climate. Now 40C heat was set to affect the whole of Europe, cutting a swath through the UK that would put millions of people in danger.
“What happened back then had never happened before,” says Candice Howarth, head of climate adaptation and resilience at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. “The UK doesn’t have much experience of these types of risks. So the severity of the issue is quite difficult to convey.”
To prepare for the high temperatures, the Met Office—the UK’s official weather forecaster—issued its first ever “red” warning for a heat event. Fortunately, the most intense temperature spike lasted a single day, and emergency services were able to cope. But the heat wave still killed an estimated 1,200 people in the UK, and sparked a conversation on how to handle the next one.
Unlike hurricanes, wildfires or floods, the problems caused
by heat are often invisible until it’s too late. It’s hard to illustrate why “feeling hot”—a routine human experience—can easily become dangerous, and even harder to tell people when and how to react. As academics and governments debate the most effective tactics, calls are growing to mobilize around one: giving heat waves names. Very preliminary results suggest there might be benefits.
“Heat waves are a weather event that should be treated with the severity that other weather events are treated,” says Andrew Mackenzie, associate director of strategy and external relations at the Physiological Society, a global group of experts in how the human body works.
The Physiological Society is among several organizations calling on meteorologists to start naming heat waves as a way to raise awareness of the dangers they pose. Doing so would follow the long-established convention of giving hurricanes names, which began in the mid-20th century as a way to help meteorologists, emergency services and the media avoid confusion.
Heat is much less visible than a looming hurricane, and can be a far more nuanced threat. Specific groups are especially vulnerable to overheating, including children; the elderly; anyone with diabetes, high blood pressure, heart or lung disease; and those dealing with
mental health issues. Dying from extreme heat can also seem like a nebulous threat: Heat deaths often occur at home or in a hospital days after temperatures spike, rather than right away.
In that same summer of 2022, the Spanish city of Seville became the first to put the naming idea in motion. A pilot program geared at raising public awareness dubbed a six-day stretch of high temperatures in July as “Zoe.” Hurricanes are given names in alphabetical order; Seville decided to go in the opposite direction, though it too would alternate names between male and female.
“Everything should be on the table to save lives,” says Kathy Baughman McLeod, chief executive officer of the nonprofit Cli -
mate Resilience for All and coauthor on a study about the “Zoe” experiment published in Scientific Reports this year.
Among the first peer-reviewed academic papers to assess the value of naming any weather phenomenon, the study found that two months after the heat wave, some 6% of people across southern Spain remembered the name Zoe without being prompted. That cohort was also more likely to have taken steps to avoid overheating, more likely to have warned others about the heat, and more likely to trust their government’s response to heat waves.
In the wake of Zoe, other countries have tried similar measures.
Last year, the Greek, Israeli and Cypriot weather authorities jointly named a particularly brutal heat
“I think a lot of people were surprised,” she said after the first screening. “They don’t know the history.”
The Trinity Site was on a short list for possible locations for testing the bomb. The others included two sites in California, one in Texas and another in Colorado. The flat, arid nature of the White Sands Missile Range won out, with scientists initially thinking that predictable winds would limit the spread of radiation. That ended up not being the case as erratic weather often accompanies New Mexico’s summer rainy season. Aside from shifting winds, rain the night after meant fresh fallout likely found its way into the rainwater that was captured by residents’ cisterns, according to a 2010 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC also noted that another path of exposure involved dairy cows and goats, which residents depended on for sustenance.
New modeling used by a team of researchers led by Princeton University showed in 2023 that nuclear explosions carried out in New Mexico and Nevada between 1945 and 1962 led to widespread radioactive contamination. The team reported that the world’s first atomic detonation made a significant contribution to exposure in New Mexico and eventually reached 46 states, as well as Canada and Mexico.
Cordova said the federal government didn’t warn residents before or after the detonation and continued for decades to minimize it because “we didn’t matter, we were expendable.”
“There’s no excuse for it,” she said.
Bernice Gutierrez was born in Carrizozo several days before the bomb was detonated. She had no words to describe how important she believes it is for the people in Los Alamos to learn about the downwinders.
like hurricanes
wave “Cleon.” In India, Ahmedabad uses color-coding to grab people’s attention, ranking hot days on a scale of yellow to red. Baughman McLeod says naming heat waves is just “one tool among many.”
But for all of the momentum, many meteorologists aren’t sold on naming heat waves—including those at the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the US National Weather Service. In 2022, the WMO released its own paper arguing that there isn’t sufficient evidence to support the idea, adding that it could even be counterproductive. A WMO spokesperson told Bloomberg Green that the organization’s view hasn’t changed since.
The Met Office, which academics and even some lawmakers have called on to introduce a Seville-like pilot program, says it’s following the WMO’s lead, though it’s keeping the topic under review.
Ironically, the arguments against naming heat waves aren’t so removed from the arguments in favor: Heat is complicated, and its threat level tricky to generalize. Differences in climate mean that there is no universal definition for a heat wave; experiencing one in Finland is different than in Spain or India. Even within countries, one jurisdiction deciding not to name a heat wave might cause confusion or promote a false sense of security. And for the most vulnerable,
heat risks increase well before an actual heat-wave threshold is crossed, says Adeline Siffert, a senior climate policy adviser at the British Red Cross.
The WMO report also pointed to the risk of “warning fatigue.” Even in a world of rising climate threats, it said, too many pleas, instructions and cautions coming from authorities can cause people to simply stop listening.
“Why spend this money…in order to make the people understand, was it Romeo or was it Juliet?” quips Andreas Matzarakis, a professor in biometeorology and environmental meteorology at the University of Freiburg, who was until earlier this year responsible for Germany’s heat health warning system. “More important is having actions. Not only having actions, but also how to communicate the actions that we have.” Indeed, one takeaway from the UK in 2022 was a gap in the availability and uptake of practical advice, says Howarth, who earlier this year published a research paper on the government’s heat wave response. Many people who are vulnerable to heat—especially older people—don’t see themselves as vulnerable. And offering tips and tricks to individuals doesn’t solve structural problems that make heat more dangerous, including unsuitable housing and poor workplace protections. Bloomberg News
DOWNWINDER Paul Pino heads through the SALA Event Center toward the screening of “First We Bombed New Mexico” during the Oppenheimer Film Festival in Los Alamos, New Mexico on Saturday, August 17, 2024. The documentary tells the stories of those who lived near the Trinity Test Site when the US government detonated the first atomic bomb and the Native Americans who worked in the uranium industry. AP/SUSAN MONTOYA BRYAN
Sports BusinessMirror
B8 Tuesday augusT 27, 2024
mirror_sports@yahoo.com.ph
Editor: Jun Lomibao
MVP commits to PHL hosting of FIVB men’s volleyball worlds
TV. Pangilinan
ace in committing
support and guarantee the country’s successful solo hosting of the FIVB Volleyball Men World Championship set September 12 to 28 next year.
Pangilinan made the solid commitment during a recent meeting at his PLDT office in Makati City with Philippine National Volleyball Federation (PNVF) president Ramon “Tats” Suzara, MVP Sports Foundation president Al Panlilio and PLDT Business Transformation Group Head and sports leader Ricky Vargas.
“Mr. MVP has once again brought the meaning of sports patron to a superlative level,” Suzara said. “With Mr. MVP’s commitment, the Local Organizing Committee [LOC] will be shifting to a higher gear preparations for the world championship which is a little over a year away.”
The confidence level is consistently increasing on the national men’s team, Alas Pilipinas, which after having been formed barely a month ago, booked bronze medal finishes in the Southeast Asia Men’s V.League in Manila and Indonesia.
“Those bronze medals are already milestones for Philippine men’s volleyball in Southeast Asia,” Suzara
said. “The program is working and we are confident that Alas Pilipinas will make an impact in the world championship.”
The FIVB MWCH 2025 will feature the world’s top 32 teams, including the Philippines as host and is initially set at two top venues—Smart Araneta Coliseum and the SM Mall of Asia Arena.
The official kickoff will be the Draw set on September 14 and will be trumpeted by a series of friendly matches between two top Japanese club teams and Alas Pilipinas Men and Women squads on September 7 and 8 at the PhilSports Arena in Pasig City.
“We are all excited about this historic hosting because Filipin fans will get the opportunity to witness elite volleyball action from 32 teams,” Suzara said.
Pangilinan is a vital part of the FIVB MWCH LOC Board co-chaired by youthful Presidential son William Vincent “Vinny” Araneta Marcos, Senator Alan Peter Cayetano and Department of Tourism Secretary Christina Garcia Frasco with Suzara as president.
With Pangilinan in the LOC Board are Senator Pia Cayetano, Philippine Olympic Committee president Abraham “Bambol” Tolentino and Philippine Sports Commission chairman Richard Bachmann.
Karate wants back in Olympics
find its way back as a medal sport in the Olympics after breaking into the Tokyo 2020 program.
“We must convince the IOC [International Olympic Committee] that it is not fair to exclude karate from the Olympics,” Espinós told BusinessMirror during his brief Manila visit to grace the 22nd Asian Cadets, Juniors and U-21 Championships held last week at the PhilSports Arena in Pasig City. Karate wasn’t staged in Paris 2024 and won’t again be on Los Angeles 2028’s roster after organizers deemed the sport “lacked entertainment value and is unable to attract a significant following among younger audiences.”
“Karate is a universal sport with a great structure and federation,” said the 76-year-old Espinós, a native of Bilbao in Spain who has led the WKF since
1998. “We are continuing to work for karate’s return to the Olympics, sooner or later, as a regular Olympics sport.” A Civil Engineer and a Sixth Dan sensei, Espinós said the lobby is for the sport to return in Brisbane in 2032.
“There’s a big possibility for a comeback,” he said. Espinós was in the country upon the invitation of Karate Pilipinas president Ricky Lim and had an audience with Philippine Olympic Committee president Abraham “Bambol” Tolentino. Josef Ramos
KARATE head Antonio Espinós received a gift from Philippine Olympic Committee president Abraham “Bambol” Tolentino.
THERE’S no stopping Armand Duplantis after the Swede wonder broke the world record in the pole vault again this time clearing 6.26 meters in a Diamond League meet in Chorzow, Poland, on Monday.
Asian record-holder Ernest John “EJ” Obiena, meanwhile, finished fifth but vowed to bounce back at the final in Brussels next month before calling it off for the season.
Jim Lafferty, Obiena’s longtime adviser, told BusinessMirror that the world No. 3 experienced back spasm and had a tough time on the run-up, limiting his strength to vault and missing his chance twice at 5.92 meters.
He failed at 6 meters that left him out of the podium.
“EJ run through the pit multiple times. No attempt to vault,” Lafferty said. “Why? Because his back was spasming so heavily in the run-up he was unable to vault.”
“It is difficult to adequately explain EJ’s frustrations, knowing he can go head to head at six meters but his body will not let him,” he said. “Our focus now is wrapping up this season as
best we can and get EJ’s back repaired in the off season.”
One centimeter at a time ARMAND DUPLANTIS, the Louisiana-born 24-year-old called Mondo who competes for his mother’s native Sweden, added another centimeter to his world record in Chorzow. It’s the third time this year that he
is widely known as “Mondo,”
President Marcos honors athletes as ‘modern heroes’
SPORTS and athletes have a special place in the heart of President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr.
By Samuel Medenilla
FILIPINO athletes shared the limelight in Monday’s National Heroes Day celebration with no less than President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. hailing them as “modern day heroes.”
“The national pride they brought and continue to bring home is unrequitable—not by awards, not by effusive praises, not by incentives,” the Chief Cxecutive said in his speech at
if you will, of women’s sports the last several years and a nation known for its diversity and inclusion.
The country did better than nations that were expected to win more medals like Canada, Spain, Sweden and Brazil.
“New Zealand finished 11th on the medal table with 10 gold,
the momentum to hopefully surpass and overachieve again.
City, referring to athletes who saw action in the Paris 2024 Olympics and those who will participate in the Paralympics that opens Wednesday also in the French capital.
He noted how each athletes demonstrated discipline and sacrifice in their training and overcome challenges including injury and financial constraints to qualify for the international sporting events.
The Philippine team in the Paris Olympics brought home two gold medals courtesy of gymnast Carlos Yulo and two bronze medals through boxers Nesthy Petecio and Aira Villegas.
Duplantis: Sky’s the limit
Six athletes, meanwhile, are ready to do battle in the Paralympics.
“That is the definition of a modern hero and a testament that each of us is capable of becoming one—by uplifting our fellow men and women, serving our communities, and working to save our heritage for future generations,” the President said.
Such “heroism” is also demonstrated by those who have dedication to their craft and profession such as the Philippine navy, coast guard, and the army as they secure the country’s borders, according to Marcos.
It is also shown by healthcare workers, who put their lives at risk to take care of others—overseas Filipino workers who leave the comfort of their homes to support their loved ones— ordinary workers, who contribute to the country’s economic development; as well as farmers and fisherfolks, who help ensure the national food security.
The President also recognized
teachers who fight illiteracy, journalists who promote truth and accountability, and environmental advocates as modern day heroes.
He said they carry the legacy of the country’s past heroes, who remained defiant against foreign aggressors and fought for the country’s freedom such as Lapu-Lapu and Dr. Jose Rizal.
“Their bravery and determination paved the way to the freedom that all of us enjoy today, although it came at a high cost—their peace, their rights, [and] their lives,” Marcos said.
Each Filipino, he said, should strive to emulate their examples and also leave a great legacy to future generations.
“In the spirit of shared responsibility, I call on everyone to be heroes in their own right,” he said.
“Uphold the principles of democracy, abide by the rule of law, and defend our sovereignty,” he added.
Coach Guiao talks about PSC funds
THE recent Supreme Court decision ordering the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. (PAGCOR) to remit the proper amount to the Philippine Sports Commission (PSC) will be tackled in the Philippine Sportswriters Association (PSA) Forum with main petitioner Yeng Guiao appearing as special guest at the Conference hall of the Rizal Memorial Sports Complex.
Guiao, a former First District Representative in Pampanga and current head coach of Rain or Shine,
will discuss the benefits and effects of the Supreme Court ruling in the session that starts at 10:30 a.m. Meanwhile, organizer Rio De la Cruz will appear in the first half of the public sports program to promote the coming Manila Marathon. The forum is presented by San Miguel Corp., PSC, Philippine Olympic Committee, Smart/PLDT, Milo and the 24/7 sports app in the country, ArenaPlus and livestreamed via the PSA Facebook page fb.com/ PhilippineSportswritersAssociation
Kyle Kuzma: From But First, Coffee to mom to 4-pt shot
By Josef Ramos
DAY after savoring a brew from
ABut First, Coffee and talking about how his mom has been his inspiration of his now illustrious athletic career, Kyle Kuzma talked about basketball, the Filipino fan and the four-point shot.
“A hundred percent yes, I think it’s really good for the game,” said Kuzma of his opinion on the 27-foot, fourpoint shot that’s been introduced in the Philippine Basketball Association in its 49th season-opening Governors’ Cup.
“It allows more space especially nowadays, a lot of us are shooting 3s anyway,” said the 29-year-old, 6-foot-9 starter for the Washington Wizards. “So it’s kind of a bad shot if we’re able to take deep shots that far because there is no need, no lines out there.”
“But a lot of us can shoot from that far. I think it could be more dramatic in the NBA [National Basketball Association] and fans would probably like it, too,” he said.
“Steph [Curry] would probably try it from half court, too,” added the sevenyear NBA veteran during Monday’s news conference and media availability at the Dusit Thani Hotel in Makati City. Kuzma admitted he’s not familiar with Philippine basketball, although he’s heard a lot about Filipinos’ love for the game from his good friends in the NBA, including Filipino-Americans Jordan Clarkson of the Utah Jazz, Jalen Green of the Houston Rockets and the Philippine Basketball Association’s second overall draft pick Sedrick Barefield of Blackwater.
“Unbelievable
SPORTS patron Manny V. Pangilinan (third from right) makes his commitment with Philippine National Volleyball Federation president Ramon “Tats”