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SHIFT TO ‘ACTIVE DEFENSE’ The military’s capability upgrade program continues to gain headway, highlighted by the impending acquisition of supersonic missiles.

THE Philippine Navy’s naval assets, on display during Fleet Review on waters off Bataan, December 16, 2020, the first ever in recent years for the Philippine military, which was joined by more than 60 air and sea assets. FACEBOOK.COM/PHILIPPINENAVY

T

By Rene Acosta

modernize its capability.

HE Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) is slowly beefing up both its offensive and defensive capabilities, working to boost the country’s ground-based air defense, which will be reinforced by the planned acquisition of Indianmanufactured Brahmos supersonic missiles in two years’ time.

Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana, however, stressed that the continued buildup under the ongoing modernization program of the AFP is purely for “defensive purpose,” as the military has to contend with China’s threat in the West Philippine Sea (WPS).

“Our defense posture is just to defend our territory, we are not offensive. We are not going there as an offensive force but just to defend our territory,” the defense chief told military reporters a week ago during the Navy’s fleet review, the first ever in recent years for the Philippine military which was joined by more than 60 air and sea assets.

“That’s for us not being continuously oppressed, for us having the means to fight back. If they will box you, you could also

Help from the US

RECENTLY, the United States has turned over eight unmanned aerial systems (UAS) to the military, and it was followed later on by its delivery of precision guided munitions (PGMs) and bunker-busting missiles, which both the US and the Philippines said would be used for counterterrorism operations in Mindanao.

Both deliveries, however, could also be used against Chinese forces and their fortified bases that were built on reclaimed islands in the WPS. The military’s continued acquisition of weapons, assets and equipment under its capability upgrade program, which was crafted and pushed even by previous administrations, may yet be the greatest legacy of the Duterte administration, notwithstanding criticism it has failed on its thrusts in other areas.

Leaving a legacy

LORENZANA: “That’s for us not being continuously oppressed, for us having the means to fight back. If they will box you, you could also fight back, they will also have a bloody nose.” AP

fight back, they will also have a bloody nose,” he said, disclosing that the military is already about two-thirds in its effort to

PESO EXCHANGE RATES n US 48.0910

THE strengthening of the country’s ground-based air defense, a project of the Air Force, is included in the P27-billion modernization budget for next year, and it is expected to be reinforced by the much-feared Brahmos missile initially for the Army, the procurement of which has been moved for a year or two.

Aside from the ground-based air defense project, the allocated budget for next year will also support other projects such as another frigate for the Navy; combat engi-

neering; C4ISTAR and howitzers for the Army; and unmanned aerial vehicles, attack helicopters and radars for the Air Force.

It also includes light tanks and wheeled armored personnel carriers for the Army, mediumlift aircraft and heavy-lift helicopters for the Air Force and missiles for the Navy’s fast-attack interdiction boats.

“We are not only leaving a legacy, but more importantly ensuring the protection and welfare of our people,” Lorenzana said in summing up the procurement of the military during the blessing of six of the 16 Sikorsky Blackhawk helicopters ordered from a Polish subsidiary of American defense manufacturer Lockheed Martin.

The arrival of the combat utility helicopters was among the nine big-ticket projects that were procured and delivered this year, including six Brazilian-made Super Tucano aircraft, a command and control aircraft, two Cobra attack helicopters and 14 various types of UAS. The military is also eyeing to acquire additional FA-50 fighter jets, Sikorsky-made helicopters, multipurpose attack craft, gunboats, additional frigates and even corvettes, and to initialize a blue water navy, a pair of submarines for which it was looking to France for its Scorpene-class subsea craft.

‘Watching over us’

AFP Chief of Staff Gen. Gilbert Gapay said they will sustain the military’s capability upgrade in

order for the country to secure its stake in the territory that China disputes, while putting it back in the league of modern, or at least highly equipped, armies in Southeast Asia.

“With all of these acquisitions, the AFP continues to build its momentum and is steadily moving forward towards the realization of our modernization goals and objectives,” Gapay said.

“I am proud to report that with these equipment, we have once again established effective pressure on West Philippine Sea in asserting our sovereignty,” added the top military chief, who had earlier revealed the increased presence of Chinese ships in the territory.

The military’s slow shift to territorial defense is not only about muscle, however, as it also increases both its air and land monitoring capabilities, two primary areas that seem to have been neglected in years as it busied and focused itself on internal security operations.

Military spokesman Maj. Gen. Edgard Arevalo said the three radar sites in Mindoro, Palawan and Ilocos Norte, initiatives that were pursued for years under the “Coast Watch” project, are already in operation.

“The construction and operationalization of these sites means that the entire western portion of the Philippine Air Identification Zone is now fully covered and enforced,” he said.

“Littoral monitoring detachments (LMD) and littoral monitor-

ing stations (LMS) are being used by the Philippine Navy for maritime domain awareness. These enhanced our capability in monitoring vessels transiting within our territorial waters. Two of which are in Masinloc and Nido near the shores of Palawan and both strengthens our monitoring of ships traversing our maritime territory,” he added.

Arevalo, also the commander of the AFP Education, Training and Doctrine Command, said the arrival of brand-new assets for the military has allowed it to conduct 184 air and 575 naval patrols this year.

“These resulted in the detection of a total of 897 unknown tracks, of which 217 responded, and 343 did not respond, but none of the incidents were considered as a threat. Furthermore, we have monitored a total of 94,063 vessels transiting within the Philippine waters, of which 85,178 responded, and 8,885 did not respond,” he said.

Arevalo said the delivered air and sea assets and those still in the acquisition pipeline should “bring us much closer to the realization of our vision of a worldclass armed forces with credible deterrent capability.”

“Credible deterrent.” Two loaded words that Filipinos hope will let them sleep more soundly in the year ahead, as the world ends a most traumatic year and looks to an even more uncertain future.

n JAPAN 0.4641 n UK 64.2688 n HK 6.2032 n CHINA 7.3501 n SINGAPORE 35.9990 n AUSTRALIA 36.1692 n EU 58.5027 n SAUDI ARABIA 12.8185

Source: BSP (December 23, 2020)

NewsSunday BusinessMirror

A2 Sunday, December 27, 2020

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BIDEN: “The best China strategy, I think, is one which gets every one of our—or at least what used to be our—allies on the same page.” BLOOMBERG

Biden will inherit a strong hand against Xi, thanks to Trump “Trump’s broad trade sanctions against China coupled with pushback from other countries against OE BIDEN will take office next month wielding more leverage over China’s aggressive geopolitical diplomacy will give Beijing than he would have ever the Biden administration substantial leverage when sought. He can thank Donald Trump it commences bilateral negotiations. The sanctions and Xi Jinping for that. already in place and the domestic political dynamics

Biden will be sworn in as presithe US give the Biden administradent after Trump’s administration tion a strong hand in negotiations.” in the US give the Biden administration a strong hand spent years ramping up pressure

While Biden and many Demoon China, including levying tariffs crats say they oppose the tactics in negotiations.”—Eswar Prasad on $370 billion in imports, getting Trump used to pressure China, Canada to place a Chinese executhose tools will remain on the table

J

By Peter Martin & Saleha Mohsin Bloomberg News

tive for Huawei Technologies Co. under house arrest, threatening access to US capital markets and blaming the Communist Party for the scale of the Covid-19 outbreak.

President Trump’s pressure campaign continued last week, as the administration blacklisted more than 60 Chinese companies, limiting their ability to get US technology, in order “to protect national security,” according to a Commerce Department statement.

Beijing’s behavior turned some nations that would otherwise have tried to straddle US-China tensions more firmly against President Xi’s government by asserting territorial claims in the South China Sea and in strategic areas like its border with India, as well as using economic coercion against countries like South Korea and Australia.

‘Strong hand’

“TRUMP’S broad trade sanctions against China coupled with pushback from other countries against China’s aggressive geopolitical diplomacy will give the Biden administration substantial leverage when it commences bilateral negotiations,” said Eswar Prasad, who formerly worked on China issues at the International Monetary Fund.

“The sanctions already in place and the domestic political dynamics in

as his successor seeks to negotiate with leaders of the world’s second largest economy.

“I’m not going to make any immediate moves, and the same applies to the tariffs,” Biden said in an interview published December 2 with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

“The best China strategy, I think, is one which gets every one of our—or at least what used to be our—allies on the same page,” he said in the interview. “It’s going to be a major priority for me in the opening weeks of my presidency to try to get us back on the same page with our allies.”

Despite public misgivings with Trump’s strategy toward Beijing, countries such as Britain and France have fallen into line behind the US over the threat posed by Huawei to next-generation wireless networks, while Western institutions such as the “Five Eyes” spy alliance and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have turned their attention to combating threats from China.

Forced labor issue

AS the European Union and China aim to complete negotiations over an investment agreement, lawmakers have raised concerns over allegations of forced labor in Chi-

na’s far western region of Xinjiang.

The European Parliament backed a proposal that the deal “must include adequate commitments to respect international conventions against forced labor,” Reinhard Buetikofer, a German Green party member of the European Parliament who chairs the delegation for relations with China, tweeted Monday. “European Commission should take that seriously!”

Although China’s leaders won’t look favorably upon the US rallying other nations to its cause, they have signaled that they’re looking forward to the potential improvement in ties that the change in the Oval Office could bring.

In remarks to business leaders last week, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called for the two sides to restart dialog and “go back to the right track.” Former vice foreign minister Fu Ying wrote an oped calling for “cooperative competition” between the two powers.

Restart

“CHINA’S expectation for the Biden administration is to reset China-US relations aimed at reengagement and mutual benefit,” said Gao Zhikai, a former Chinese diplomat and translator for late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping.

“Poisoned China-US relations need to be disinfected, and both China and America need to be made winners, not losers.”

Still, Biden’s challenges are formidable.

America’s global reputation has suffered under Trump, and US allies are unsure America can be trusted in the longer term. Even if Biden wants to work more with allies and embrace international institutions like the World Health Organization, leaders in other countries, including China, know there’s no guarantee he won’t be replaced by a more Trumplike leader—or even Trump—in the 2024 election.

And as much as Trump’s tactics have exhausted officials in Beijing, they have done little to change their policies.

Xi’s government has accelerated its efforts to rein in independent voices in Hong Kong and to bolster its outposts in the South China Sea and along its frontier. Looking past Biden, it has seen America’s failure to tame the pandemic as evidence that the US is already past its prime.

Even if Biden succeeds in changing such perceptions, negotiations with China will probably be every bit as tortuous and drawnout as those that took place under Trump, who never got the compre-

hensive trade deal with China that he promised to achieve when taking office in 2017.

“I don’t get the sense that China’s leaders are under such stress that they’re willing to tolerate significant concessions to remove unilateral US pressure,” said Ryan Hass, who previously oversaw China affairs at the National Security Council.

Though Biden and Xi have known each other for more than a decade, the US-China relationship has changed markedly since the president-elect was last in the White House in early 2017. China’s rapidly growing military prowess has given it more confidence to project power in the Asia Pacific, solidifying its hold on tiny South China Sea outposts despite protests from regional neighbors.

On the economy, Xi has taken a far more aggressive stance on almost every major policy front with the US. The Chinese leader has repeatedly called on his nation to strive for “self-reliance” in key sectors, signaling that he intends to double down on the industrial policies that the US has for so long found objectionable.

Building confidence

CONFIDENCE-BUILDING opportunities between the two sides

would be easy to find. About 100 official dialogs between the the US and China have stalled or been canceled under Trump. Those could be revived to get lower-level officials talking even if the nations’ leaders are still sorting out their agendas.

Perhaps more importantly, a Canadian hearing in the case of the detained Huawei executive, Meng Wanzhou, is expected in late spring 2021. Biden’s justice department could continue Trump administration outreach to Meng’s legal team about a negotiated solution that would let her return to China.

To China’s benefit, Biden’s administration may also be more cautious about using some of the tools at its disposal than Trump. While current Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin eventually succumbed to Trump’s pressure to designate China a currency manipulator, Biden’s nominee for that post—former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen—has indicated reticence about using that lever to win concessions.

“It’s really difficult and treacherous to define” when a country is gaming its currency to gain trade advantages, Yellen said in a 2019 Brookings Institution podcast.

One of the biggest risks is that Biden finds himself distracted on the domestic front, struggling to bolster a faltering economy while confronting a widening coronavirus crisis, even as vaccine distribution expands. Unless Washington can get its house in order after the most polarizing election in more than a generation and rebuild trust with allies abroad, any advantage Washington has over Beijing could remain purely theoretical.

“There’s latent potential for the Biden administration to build leverage, but doing so will depend upon whether they are able to build consensus at home on top priorities, consensus with allies and partners on China,” said former National Security Council staffer Hass, now a fellow at the Brookings Institution.

www.businessmirror.com.ph • Editor: Angel R. Calso

The World

When 6,000 islands work from home, expect the urge to merge among telcos

By Andy Mukherjee

‘I

Bloomberg Opinion

t’s time for us to work from home, learn from home, worship at home,” Indonesia’s president announced in the early days of the pandemic in March. What Joko Widodo couldn’t have known back then was how social distancing would bring rivals in the country’s competitive telecommunications industry closer together. Credit for consolidation must go where it’s due: to the sprawling geography of the world’s largest archipelago.

The investment required to serve Asia’s third-biggest population spread across 6,000 inhabited islands—out of a total of at least 17,000 isles and atolls—is already large. But with 197 million Internet users spending more time at home guzzling data, it’s pointless and wasteful for five mobile operators to seek to duplicate expensive infrastructure in a nation stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Indian Ocean.

And sure enough, Hong Kong’s CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd. is nearing a deal with Qatar’s Ooredoo QPSC to combine their Indonesian mobile operations in a cash-plus-stock deal, Bloomberg News reported this week.

A merger will be welcome news.

A smaller industry will be less likely to become a casualty of what’s likely to be a slow post-Covid-19 economic recovery next year. Fitch Ratings expects the Indonesian telecom sector’s leverage to increase toward 2 times funds from operations in 2021, from 1.7 this year, “amid rising network investment to meet demand in mobile data and fiber broadband services.”

There’s a lesson to be learned from India, where the three top operators’ combined debt burden is more than twice as high as Indonesia’s. There, profitability has bled to a point where an early rollout of fifth-generation mobile services looks doubtful. Allowing Hutchison’s 3 Indonesia to combine with the Qatari-controlled PT Indosat, the No. 3 player, might help Widodo’s administration avoid inordinate delays in introducing 5G. Rapid digitization, which has helped the commodities exporter withstand the end of a Chinese demand-led boom, will spread faster to newer applications like the Internet of Things. Indonesia will be able to build on its success in being Southeast Asia’s premier breeding farm for tech unicorns—start-ups valued at $1 billion or more.

Consolidation is inevitable, given the unique—and uniquely challenging—geography. You can already see that in 4G coverage. The

differences in network quality can be pretty stark outside of Java, the most-populated island. Telkomsel Indonesia, the dominant state-run operator, was recently rated 8.3 in nationwide 4G coverage experience

by Opensignal Ltd. on a scale of 0 to 10. Hutchison’s 3 Indonesia scored just 4.4. Telkomsel users enjoy 4G coverage in many more locations than subscribers of other networks.

The pandemic has put pressure on other carriers to raise their game and make heavy investment. No. 2 player XL Axiata’s download speed of 11.3 megabits per second is now within striking range of Telkmosel’s 12.7 Mbps, according to Opensignal.

But where XL Axiata appears to have missed out is in striking a partnership of its own—so as to lighten capacity expansion load.

In 2019, the Malaysian-based parent Axiata Group Bhd., controlled by the country’s sovereign wealth fund Khazanah Nasional Bhd., tried unsuccessfully to merge its Asian operations with Norway’s Telenor ASA. Then, in May this year, Axiata Chief Executive Jamaludin Ibrahim told Reuters that he was talking to all Indonesian players, except the largest. But if Hutchison and Indosat consummate a deal, then the Malaysian telco’s options for doing an Indonesia-specific transaction are going to be rather limited. That will once again mean looking for a regional partner. That’s easier said than done when all global networks are looking to serve their own core customers’ heightened hunger for data in the post-pandemic world.

Indonesia’s appetite is just getting whetted. In a McKinsey & Co. survey of the country this year, 28 percent of respondents said they streamed more online content than they did before lockdown, and 68 percent said they would continue to watch streamed content once the crisis had passed. Then there’s fintech and commerce. Just this month, Gojek, the most valuable start-up, paid about $160 million to increase its stake in PT Bank Jago to more than 22 percent. Also this month, e-commerce giant PT Tokopedia said it has hired Morgan Stanley and Citigroup Inc. as advisers to speed up its plan to go public.

Good things are happening to Indonesia. The key to sustaining the enthusiasm is to make sure that the carriers of digital bits and bytes don’t get overwhelmed by the nearly 3,200 miles of geographic breadth — or customers who’re glued to their phones more than ever before. A little less social distancing between rival networks won’t be a bad thing at all.

BusinessMirror

Sunday, December 27, 2020

A3

The good news you might have missed as 2020 ends

D

By Kristine Servando

eath. Suffering. Economic devastation. Political turmoil.

The pandemic triggered a torrent of daily negative news. But throughout the worst health crisis in almost a century, there were also moments that brought relief and joy, or at least cautious optimism.

Here’s a rundown of some bright spots this year and what we could look forward to in 2021.

Off like a shot. Drugs that protect against Covid-19 were developed, tested and rolled out in less than a year—a speed unmatched in the history of vaccine science.

Scientists at Pfizer Inc. and partner BioNTech SE, Moderna Inc., AstraZeneca Plc. and the University of Oxford, as well as China’s Sinopharm Group Co. went into overdrive to create vaccines for billions of people. Moreover, Pfizer and Moderna’s success in using the genetic material mRNA to transform the body’s cells into vaccine factories offers hope for developing other life-saving treatments in the future, including for cancer and heart disease.

The great WFH experiment.

While it was not all smooth sailing—with childcare challenges, longer working hours, unequal access to technology or fast Internet, and psychological stress—hundreds of millions of people managed to power through and work remotely for almost a year, keeping banks, schools, government agencies, businesses and even doctors’ offices running. The radical shift is also forcing a global rethink of what work could look like when the pandemic subsides.

Flexible hours, fewer commutes or business trips, and splitting time between the home and of-

fice each week could become the new normal.

Trillions in stimulus. Unlike the response to the 2008 global financial crisis, governments and central banks unleashed support for workers and economies like never before: more than $20 trillion in support and counting. In some countries like France and the UK, that has helped reduce jobless rates as well as keep the housing market and businesses afloat. Optimists also look to China’s steady economic recovery as a guide on where the rest of the world is headed in the months ahead.

LGBTQ wins. Costa Rica legalized same-sex marriage in May, becoming the 28th country to do so. Two months later, Montenegro became the first country in the Balkans to allow same-sex civil unions. The US Supreme Court in June upheld a law protecting gay and transgender workers from job discrimination, though it exempted small businesses. A record number of LGBTQ candidates also stood in the US election, with voters electing the nation’s first transgender state senator, Sarah McBride.

And Serbia’s first female and openly gay prime minister, Ana Brnabic, won a second term after her party’s landslide victory.

Nature (briefly) healed. The crash in tourism and manufacturing came at an economic cost, but

WFH could become the new normal in the post-pandemic world. Jayme Gershen/Bloomberg

also brought a much-needed pause for the environment. Air pollution dramatically fell, as much as 65 percent, in a number of cities—if only for a few months. Turtles and whales returned to Thailand’s now-quiet beaches, prompting the government to consider closing down nature reserves for several months a year. In Hong Kong, endangered pink dolphins returned in greater numbers after a decline in ferry services, according to a local conservancy. At the height of lockdowns in April, animals emerged in the streets of Spain, Chile and the United Arab Emirates, suggesting ecosystems can quickly rebound when human presence is minimal.

Supercharged clean power. Covid-19 accelerated trends transforming how we power our world as shutdowns grounded flights, idled cars and kept people indoors. Crude demand plunged, leading some experts to call the end of the oil age. Shutdowns curbed power demand, prompting some grid operators to switch to less expensive renewable energy such as wind and solar (now the cheapest sources of new electricity in most of the world, according to Bloomberg New Energy).

Going green. The world’s toppolluting nation, China, vowed to cut carbon emissions to zero by 2060, prompting similar pledges from Japan and South Korea. Doz-

ens of cities, states and countries have set targets to phase out new sales of fossil-fuel cars. Major US banks have promised to stop financing oil-exploration projects in the Arctic Circle. Even BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, said it would put climate at the center of its investment strategy.

Time will tell whether all of these initiatives result in lasting change.

Tech united us? Imagine a life in lockdown without technology to keep us connected virtually.

Generations brushed up on their home-cooking skills, and showed them off on platforms like Instagram and YouTube. Internet users embarked on virtual safaris or converged on a tropical island in the multiplayer game “Animal Crossing.” While humans were indoors, drones and autonomous robots were also deployed to deliver urgent medical supplies, groceries and more.

A year of discoveries. It’s not just vaccines that caused excitement in the scientific world this year. Researchers found an antibiotic that can treat both acne in humans and chlamydia in koalas, evidence of rainforests in prehistoric Antarctica, a 2,500-year-old Egyptian tomb containing mummies and treasures, a way to use algorithms to potentially solve how diseases invade cells, and even signs of life in the acid-laced clouds of planet Venus. Bloomberg News

Bottlenecks rattle world economy backbone of container shipping

C

ontainer shipping, the backbone of the global trading system, is showing signs of fatigue as the pandemic descends into its darkest days.

Carriers reaping the biggest profits in at least a decade are struggling to operate reliably as bottlenecks worsen around ports from southern England to Shanghai, contorting supply chains for everything from car parts to cosmetics and medical equipment.

Just 50.1 percent of container vessels arrived on time in November, down from 80 percent a year earlier and the lowest level in records dating back to 2011, according to a service reliability index compiled by Copenhagenbased Sea-Intelligence. From Asia to North America, on-time arrivals dropped below 30 percent, less than half the long-run average globally.

Delays can add costs, induce operational headaches and restrain revenue for the shippers of cargo— companies like Costco Wholesale Corp. The Issaquah, Washingtonbased chain of 803 warehouse-size stores on four continents expects the situation involving container shortages and late deliveries to persist for a few more months.

“There are instances of 50 per-

cent or 100 percent or even more sales increases of an item, and if we could procure more we’d have even higher sales,” Richard Galanti, Costco’s chief financial officer, said on a conference call earlier this month. “We’re managing through it, and expect relief not until March or so of 2021.”

Slowly clogging up since September, the main artery for trade between China and the US is still choked. Anchored off the coast of California over the weekend were almost 20 container ships waiting to offload at Los Angeles and Long Beach, up from about a dozen at the end of November. The Port of LA expects to handle 152,000 inbound containers this week—a 94 percent increase from the same week a year ago.

Weston LaBar, the CEO of the Harbor Trucking Association in Long Beach, last month expected container volume through the LA ports would stabilize by midFebruary, when Chinese factories typically shut down for Lunar New Year. “Now we’re hearing already about a lot of bookings through June and July,” he said.

Alan Murphy, CEO of analysis and data provider Sea-Intelligence, cautions that the current imbalances in containers are con-

centrated in North America and says the strength of demand probably won’t be sustained if Covid-19 vaccines enable US consumers to quickly shift spending back to services like travel and hospitality.

T he sh ippi ng d i sr upt ion s should calm down in the first half of 2021, Murphy says, but don’t expect the container liners to make their overcapacity mistakes of the past, which included underbidding in freight rate contracts to below break-even levels.

“The game has changed fundamentally—not because of coronavirus but because of how the carriers responded,” he said, referring to a sharp reduction in sailings in the pandemic’s early months.

“They are now capable of tailoring their supply to the available demand at a tactical level that they’ve never been able to do before.”

That’s what worries freight forwarders and other shippers, and the concerns extend beyond the troubles in the Pacific. The European Shippers’ Council, a Brussels-based group representing cargo owners, is crying foul about “degraded services” and surcharges, and wants the European Commission to look into the market dynamics.

The main sticking point: Spot

rates to transport goods, which typically fade in the final weeks of the year, are still soaring despite the service disruptions. The rate to ship a container of goods from China to Europe jumped 17 percent last week, tripling from a year ago to more than $4,400, according to Hong Kong-based Freightos, an online shipping marketplace.

“Of course we want the shipping lines to be healthy,” said Jordi Espin, the council’s policy manager for maritime transport.

“However, to make these kinds of profits when we’re in pandemic rescue mode, we don’t think it’s fair.”

Shippers and container liners are always sparring over prices and reliability. But the pandemic has spotlighted the upper hand the liners now have after a decade of consolidating and forming alliances among themselves, said Olaf Merk, head of ports and shipping at the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s International Transport Forum.

“That is something that the competition authorities will have to look at, I think, and some are also doing it now,” Merk said, referring to the US Federal Maritime Commission’s investigation into the carriers’ role in American

port congestion. “The situation in which we are now gives a lot of possibilities to the carriers to coordinate capacity and that of course increases the risks for shippers.”

‘Stress test’

The world’s top container line, Copenhagen-based A.P. MollerMaersk A/S, this month called the challenges “the most dramatic stress test of the past 75 years.” Other industry representatives say there are multiple reasons on land why the system is straining, like trucker shortages, surging e-commerce purchases or Brexit stockpiling.

Stuffed with 20 percent-30 percent more cargo than it’s used to handling, the pipeline is bound to face some snarls.

“Even with this Covid cargo crunch that we’re now in the middle of, things continue to move,” said John Butler, president of the World Shipping Council in Washington, which counts the big liner companies among its members.

“When you so significantly overload the system, it doesn’t immediately snap back.”

Butler dismissed the notion that the industry lacks competitiveness, calling it “cutthroat frankly.”

Meanwhile, shares of Maersk are flirting with an all-time high and

the industry more broadly banked profits of $5.1 billion in the third quarter, a four-fold increase from a year earlier. With a solid fourth quarter, the cumulative red ink of the past five years will become net profitability, according to figures compiled by John McCown, a container-industry veteran and founder of Blue Alpha Capital.

He said the pandemic gave the container carriers a lesson about how to hold firm on capacity as they shift into a longer-term period of slower demand growth.

“It’s been a major learning experience about having more control over their destiny,” McCown said. “But it’s not been without its struggles.”

Among the turmoil of 2020: overworked mariners and cyber attacks. But one of the more remarkable events happened on November 30, when the Japaneseflagged ONE Apus hit rough seas sailing from China to the US, sending more than 1,800 containers overboard.

The ship and crew returned safely to Kobe, Japan, but the incident probably doused some shipper’s hopes of ending a turbulent year with a bang: 54 containers that plunged into the water were filled with fireworks. Bloomberg News

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Sunday, December 27, 2020

The World BusinessMirror

Vaccines don’t mean we’ll see the last of Covid, experts warn

I

n record speed, vaccines are here, and more are on their way. Less than a year since the coronavirus began ravaging the world, the first shots are raising hopes for wiping the Covid-19 pandemic from the face of the earth.

Today’s programs in the US and the UK are precursors to immunization campaigns intended to reach the planet’s entire population—all 8 billion people in every corner of the globe.

There is reason for optimism. Vaccines are the best, and perhaps only, way to eliminate infectious disease: Smallpox has been eradicated and polio is on the brink, with just two countries where transmission persists. But global vaccine campaigns take time—usually decades—suggesting that even with the latest technologies, money and might behind the unprecedented global drive to knock out Covid-19, the disease is unlikely to be eliminated any time soon.

“I would be surprised to see an actual eradication of this virus now that it’s all over the world,” said Walter Orenstein, associate director of the Emory Vaccine Center in Atlanta and former head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s immunization program. “I’d be shocked, given how contagious it is.”

Snags in supply and distribution have already arisen in the opening days of the US campaign, and the UK, the first Western country to begin immunizing, vaccinated just 138,000 people in its first week. Meanwhile, Europe has yet to start inoculations, and probably won’t do so until after Christmas.

Concerns are growing over how long it will take to immunize vast swaths of the world beyond a group of wealthy countries that have snapped up early supplies. A global program called Covax, which aims to deploy Covid vaccines around the globe, has secured deals with developers including Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca Plc. But some of those supplies are expected to come from an experimental inoculation from Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline Plc that’s been delayed and may not be ready until late next year.

“It’s really, really, really complicated to make sure we get those vaccines produced and distributed in an equitable way globally, for both moral and economic reasons,” Mark Suzman, chief executive officer of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, told reporters on a December 9 call.

Suzman pointed to research showing that broad access to vaccines could deliver significant economic benefits to all countries and save many lives.

Since wealthy nations will likely have more than enough doses to vaccinate their entire populations, they should

consider the reallocation of some supplies to those most in need, he said.

Mass vaccination has been one of the most successful public health interventions in the world and has played an important part raising US life expectancy by more than 50 percent over the last century. About a third of US deaths in 1900 occurred in children under age 5, many of them from diseases like smallpox, measles and whooping cough that are now preventable by immunization.

Some new vaccines have also gained quick and widespread use, like shots that prevent pneumococcal infections that can cause severe illness in children and adults. Introduction of the shingles vaccination has offered prevention of the painful disease to millions of people over the past two decades.

A veteran of the World Health Organization’s effort to eradicate smallpox, Orenstein would often immunize himself in front of entire villages to assuage safety fears. The agency resolved to try to eradicate the disease in 1959 when it still afflicted many developing countries, but the effort didn’t kick into high gear until 1967 when more funds and personnel were committed by the WHO and its members.

The smallpox effort initially targeted entire populations, but that turned out to be impractical, recalled William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt University infectious-disease specialist who has advised the government on vaccination. The turnaround came when the strategy switched to identifying cases and then vaccinating everyone in proximity, sometimes hundreds of households.

This approach of creating a vaccination ring around cases was only possible, however, because smallpox can be a disfiguring disease, making it easy to identify, and spreads relatively slowly.

“It has this reputation of spreading rapidly but it actually spreads rather slowly,” Schaffner said. “You also need rather close contact for transmission to occur.”

Those features allowed vaccination teams to identify patients just as they were becoming infectious and close off all opportunities for transmission.

Even so, it took two decades for the worldwide effort to contain the last outbreak in 1977.

A better comparison to Covid might be polio, an intestinal virus that sometimes causes permanent,

In this December 8, file photo, a nurse prepares to administer the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine at Guy’s Hospital in London, UK. Ugur Sahin, CEO of BioNTech says the German pharmaceutical company is confident that the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine works against the UK variant of the virus, but further studies are needed to be completely sure. AP/Frank Augstein severe disease. Polio is similar to Covid in that only a minority of infected people—about one in 100—become extremely ill.

That’s created one of the problems anticipated in widespread Covid vaccination: People who don’t believe they’re vulnerable to the disease may not want to be vaccinated, even though it may benefit others by keeping hospital intensive-care units free and possibly preventing transmission of the disease.

An important difference with polio, however, is that it can cause severe disease in young children, leaving them with lifelong paralysis, Orenstein said. That’s unlike Covid, which mainly strikes the elderly and chronically ill. That’s left some portions of the public indifferent.

“We’re getting more than a death a minute—on some days two deaths a minute,” he said. “It’s very disturbing to see the lack of concern in other people.”

Yet even with the specter of children paralyzed from polio and a vaccine available for some 65 years, global elimination of that disease still hasn’t been reached. Two countries, Afghanistan and Pakistan, continue to have spread because of insufficient vaccination rates, according to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.

To defeat Covid, “we’ve got to convince people to take the vaccine,” said Anthony Fauci, the top US government infectious-disease specialist, in an interview. “If you have a highly effective vaccine and only 50 percent of the people take it, you’re not going to have the impact that you’d need to essentially bring a pandemic down to such a low level that it’s no longer threatening society. And that’s the goal of a vaccine, the same way we did with measles, the same way we did with polio, the same way the world did with smallpox.”

Most standard immunizations provide protection for years to decades.

We still don’t know how long Covid vaccines will last, Fauci pointed out.

And it isn’t clear whether they prevent transmission along with protection against symptoms, although studies

may soon shed light on that.

The logistics and supply-chain challenge the world faces today is “more complicated than usual because for the first time in history we’ll be introducing multiple vaccines against the same target at the same time,” Rajeev Venkayya, president of Takeda Pharmaceutical Co.’s vaccines business, said in an interview.

That means countries will need databases to track the rollout and ensure people are getting the doses at the right times, as well as systems to monitor potential side effects and share the information with the public, he said.

Early on, countries plan to prioritize the most vulnerable people, as well as health-care workers and other critical staff, which will reduce deaths and suffering considerably, said Venkayya, former special assistant for biodefense to US President George W. Bush.

“But transmission won’t go down dramatically in the beginning. It’s going to take time to get to a sufficient level of vaccine-driven population immunity before we begin to dampen transmission.”

Potentially by the middle of next year countries such as the UK and US will be able to see a “real dampening of transmission,” he said. “That timeline is going to be delayed in many other parts of the world that don’t have this kind of early access to vaccines.”

Unvaccinated populations always threaten to reintroduce disease into areas where herd immunity appears to have taken over. Just last year, the annual number of worldwide, reported measles case rose more than six-fold to about 870,000, the most since 1996, as immunization rates flagged.

The world is likely to see the same level of viral persistence from the coronavirus, said Klaus Stohr, a former Novartis AG vaccine executive and WHO official who championed efforts to prepare for pandemics.

“The prediction is pretty clear: The virus will never be eradicated,” he said. “Why? Because there will always be a large proportion of susceptible population in the community.”

Bloomberg News

www.businessmirror.com.ph

Racism targets Asian food, business during pandemic

By Christine Fernando & Cheyanne Mumphrey

The Associated Press

A

s the coronavirus spread throughout the US, bigotry toward Asian Americans was not far behind, fueled by the news that Covid-19 first appeared in China.

Some initial evidence suggested the virus began in bats, which infected another animal that may have spread it to people at one of Wuhan, China’s “wet markets.” Such markets sell fresh meat, fish and vegetables, and some also sell live animals, such as chickens, that are butchered on site to ensure freshness for consumers.

The information quickly got distorted in the US, spurring racist memes on social media that portrayed Chinese people as bat eaters responsible for spreading the virus, and reviving century-old tropes about Asian food being dirty. Fueling the fire, President Donald Trump repeatedly referred to Covid-19 as “the China virus.”

“That old-school rhetoric that we eat bats, dogs and rats—that racism is still alive and well,” said Clarence Kwan, creator of the antiracist cooking zine “Chinese Protest Recipes.”

The speed with which such false stereotypes resurfaced during the pandemic is “a reflection of how little progress we’ve made,” Kwan said.

In the Wuhan market where the virus is believed to possibly have originated, vendors also advertised wildlife for sale. Of the 33 samples from the market that tested positive for the coronavirus, officials say 31 were from the area where wildlife booths were concentrated. But wildlife and other “exotic” animals are not part of the modern mainstream Asian diet, either in Asian countries or in the US. All of the misinformation has had serious consequences.

Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition of Asian American advocacy groups, issued a report in August stating that it had received more than 2,500 reports of hate and discrimination across the country since the group was founded in March, around the time the outbreak began to seriously worsen in the US. The group said it received data from 47 states, with 46 percent of the incidents taking place in California, followed by 14 percent in New York.

In addition, Asian American small businesses have been among the hardest hit by the economic downturn during the pandemic. While there was a 22-percent decline in all small business-owner activity nationwide from February to April, Asian American business-owner activity dropped by 26 percent, according to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Many businesses that survived have been subject to stigmatization, Kwan said.

“Restaurants have been vandalized. As if the pandemic wasn’t hard enough, there’s this added threat to Asian businesses of this lingering hate.”

Conversations about the stigmatization of Asian food reached a crescendo this month when Philli Armitage-Mattin, a contestant on “MasterChef: The Professionals,” used the phrase “Dirty Food Refined” and the hashtag #prettydirtyfood in her Instagram bio, which described her as an Asian food specialist.

“In a year where Chinese and East Asian communities have essentially been blamed for the pandemic and chastised as ‘dirty,’ this type

of narrative is completely unacceptable,” Kwan wrote on Instagram.

Armitage-Mattin’s bio has since been changed and the London-based chef apologized on Instagram, while also insisting that she had never meant to insult anyone.

“The way I mean food to be ‘dirty’ is indulgent street food; food that comforts you as in, ‘going out for a dirty burger,’” she wrote.

But Kwan said especially in the current climate, such phrases can be dangerous.

“It was a very flippant, ignorant, tone-deaf way of talking about Asian food,” he said.

Racist rhetoric referring to Asian food as dirty or disease-laden dates back to the 1850s, said Ellen Wu, a history professor at Indiana University. Wu said the false notion that Chinese people eat rat or dog meat is rooted in the xenophobic fears of white workers who used Chinese immigrant workers as a scapegoat for their economic woes.

“To white Americans, these new immigrants were different in a threatening way, and there is fear of the ‘other,’ of difference,” said Wu, who is Asian American.

English professor Anita Mannur of Miami University said the current crisis reminds her of racist cartoons from the late 1800s that advertised for rat poison by picturing a Chinese man about to eat one of the rodents.

Mannur, who is Indian American, said other persistent false narratives such as that Chinese American neighborhoods or Chinatowns are dens of vice send the message that Asian people are less civilized, and do “very immediate damage.”

“People have had their houses graffitied with things like ‘Dog eaters live here,’” she said.

“People are beaten up and spat on. People are told to go back to China.”

Benny Yun, owner of the Yang Chow restaurant in Los Angeles’ Chinatown district and two other locations in Southern California, said even though his businesses have survived the pandemic, they get prank calls almost daily asking if they have dog or cat on the menu or impersonating a thick Asian accent.

“The worst part is if they realize you speak perfect English, then they just give you a random order and we prepare it and they don’t even come to pick it up. Waste of time and money,” Yun said.

For years, health inspectors have been accused of docking points from Chinese restaurants for employing traditional cooking and presentation methods, such as hanging roast duck in the front window. The common yet scientifically disproven claim that MSG causes illness made the Chinese food flavor enhancer highly unpopular in the 1970s, forcing many Asian American restaurants to eliminate it from their kitchens.

Kwan said it is important for Asian Americans to protest the way they are being treated; to push back against the latest onslaught of bias and racism by continuing to unabashedly celebrate their food and culture.

“We don’t have to change,” he said. “We can live, breathe and eat exactly the way we do without having to adapt to white supremacy, to the white gaze, to whiteness. We can be proud of our culinary heritage.” ( Fernando reported from Carmel, Indiana, and Mumphrey reported from Phoenix. Fernando is an intern with The Associated Press’ Race and Ethnicity team).

Hacked networks need to be burned ‘down to the ground’

By Frank Bajak

AP Technology Writer

t’s going to take months to kick elite hackers widely believed to be Russian out of the US government networks they have been quietly rifling through since as far back as March in Washington’s worst cyber espionage failure on record.

Experts say there simply are not enough skilled threat-hunting teams to duly identify all the government and private-sector systems that may have been hacked. FireEye, the cybersecurity company that discovered the intrusion into US agencies and was among the victims, has already tallied dozens of casualties. It’s racing to identify more.

“We have a serious problem. We don’t know what networks they are in, how deep they are, what access they have, what tools they left,” said Bruce Schneier, a prominent security expert and Harvard fellow.

It’s not clear exactly what the hackers were seeking, but experts say it could include nuclear secrets, blueprints for advanced weaponr y, Covid-19 vaccine-related research and information for dossiers on key government and industry leaders.

Many federal workers—and others in the private sector—must presume that unclassified networks are

I

teeming with spies. Agencies will be more inclined to conduct sensitive government business on Signal, WhatsApp and other encrypted smartphone apps.

“We should buckle up. This will be a long ride,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and former chief technical officer of the leading cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. “Cleanup is just phase one.”

The only way to be sure a network is clean is “to burn it down to the ground and rebuild it,” Schneier said.

Imagine a computer network as a mansion you inhabit, and you are certain a serial killer has been there. “You don’t know if he’s gone. How do you get work done? You kind of just hope for the best,” he said.

Deputy White House press secretary Brian Morgenstern told reporters on Friday that national security adviser Robert O’Brien has sometimes been leading multiple daily meetings with the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the intelligence community, looking for ways to mitigate the hack.

He would not provide details, “but rest assured we have the best and brightest working hard on it each and every single day.”

The Democratic chairs of four House committees given classified briefings on the hack by the Trump administration issued a statement complaining that

they “were left with more questions than answers.”

“Administration officials were unwilling to share the full scope of the breach and identities of the victims,” they said.

Morgenstern said earlier that disclosing such details only helps US adversaries. President Donald Trump has not commented publicly on the matter, but Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on a conservative talk show Friday, “I think it’s the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity.”

What makes this hacking campaign so extraordinary is its scale—18,000 organizations were infected from March to June by malicious code that piggybacked on popular networkmanagement software from an Austin, Texas, company called SolarWinds.

Only a sliver of those infections were activated to allow hackers inside. FireEye says it has identified dozens of examples, all “high-value targets.”

Microsoft, which has helped respond, says it has identified more than 40 government agencies, think tanks, government contractors, nongovernment organizations and technology companies infiltrated by the hackers, 75 percent in the United States.

Florida became the first state to acknowledge falling victim to a SolarWinds hack. Officials told The

Associated Press on Friday that hackers apparently infiltrated the state’s health-care administration agency and others.

SolarWinds’ customers include most Fortune 500 companies, and its US government clients are rich with generals and spymasters.

The difficulty of extracting the suspected Russian hackers’ tool kits is exacerbated by the complexity of SolarWinds’ platform, which has dozen of different components.

“This is like doing heart surgery, to pull this out of a lot of environments,” said Edward Amoroso, CEO of TAG Cyber.

Security teams then have to assume that the patient is still sick with undetected so-called ‘secondary infections’ and set up the cyber equivalent of closed-circuit monitoring to make sure the intruders are not still around, sneaking out internal e-mails and other sensitive data.

That effort will take months, Alperovitch said.

If the hackers are indeed from Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence agency, as experts believe, their resistance may be tenacious. When they hacked the White House, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department in 2014 and 2015 “it was a nightmare to get them out,” Alperovitch said.

“It was the virtual equivalent of hand-to-hand

combat” as defenders sought to keep their footholds, “to stay buried deep inside” and move to other parts of the network where “they thought that they could remain for longer periods of time.”

“We’re likely going to face the same in this situation as well,” he added.

FireEye executive Charles Carmakal said the intruders are especially skilled at camouflaging their movements. Their software effectively does what a military spy often does in wartime—hide among the local population, then sneak out at night and strike.

“It’s really hard to catch some of these,” he said.

Rob Knake, the White House cybersecurity director from 2011 to 2015, said the harm to the most critical agencies in the US government— defense and intelligence, chiefly—from the SolarWinds hacking campaign is going to be limited “as long as there is no evidence that the Russians breached classified networks.”

During the 2014-2015 hack, “we lost access to unclassified networks but were able to move all operations to classified networks with minimal disruptions,” he said via e-mail.

The Pentagon has said it has so far not detected any intrusions from the SolarWinds campaign in any of its networks—classified or unclassified.

Given the fierce tenor of cyberespionage—the US, Russia and China all have formidable offensive hacking teams and have been penetrating each others’ government networks for years—many American officials are wary of putting anything sensitive on government networks.

Fiona Hill, the top Russia expert at the National Security Council during much of the Trump administration, said she always presumed no government system was secure. She “tried from the beginning not to put anything down” in writing that was sensitive.

“But that makes it more difficult to do business.”

Amoroso, of TAG Cyber, recalled the famous preelection dispute in 2016 over classified e-mails sent over a private server set up by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state. Clinton was investigated by the FBI in the matter, but no charges were brought.

“I used to make the joke that the reason the Russians didn’t have Hillary Clinton’s e-mail is because she took it off the official State Department network,” Amoroso said.

The Associated Press writers Matthew Lee in Washington and Bobby Caina Calvan in Tallahassee, Florida, contributed to this report.

Science

BusinessMirror

www.businessmirror.com.ph • Editor: Lyn Resurreccion

Sunday

Sunday, December 27, 2020 A5

‘There’s zero evidence there’s any increase in severity of Covid-19 from the latest strain’

Scientists urge concern, not alarm over new virus strains D

oes it spread more easily?

Make people sicker? Mean that treatments and vaccines won’t work?

Questions are multiplying as fast as new strains of the coronavirus, especially the one now moving through England.

Scientists say there is reason for concern but that the new strains should not cause alarm.

“There’s zero evidence that there’s any increase in severity” of Covid-19 from the latest strain, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) emergencies chief, Dr. Michael Ryan said.

“We don’t want to overreact,” the US government’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, told CNN. Worry has been growing since Saturday last week, when Britain’s prime minister said a new strain, or variant, of the coronavirus seemed to spread more easily than earlier ones and was moving rapidly through England.

Dozens of countries barred flights from the UK, and southern England was placed under strict lockdown measures.

Here are some questions and answers on what’s known about the virus so far.

Where did this new strain come from?

New variants have been seen almost since the virus was first detected in China nearly a year ago.

Viruses often mutate, or develop

small changes, as they reproduce and move through a population—something “that’s natural and expected,” WHO said in a statement.

“Most of the mutations are trivial.

It’s the change of one or two letters in the genetic alphabet that doesn’t make much difference in the ability to cause disease,” said Dr. Philip Landrigan, a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scientist who directs a global health program at Boston College.

A more concerning situation is when a virus mutates by changing the proteins on its surface to help it escape from drugs or the immune system, or if it acquires a lot of changes that make it very different from previous versions.

How does one strain become dominant?

That can happen if one strain is a “founder” strain—the first one to take hold and start spreading in an area, or because “super spreader” events helped it become established.

It also can happen if a mutation gives a new variant an advantage, such as helping it spread more easily than other strains that are circulating, as may be the case in Britain.

“It’s more contagious than the original strain,” Landrigan said. “The reason it’s becoming the dominant strain in England is because it outcompetes the other strains and moves faster and infects more people, so it wins the race.”

of those is true, but clearly those are two issues we’ve got to watch,” Landrigan said.

As more patients get infected with the new strain, “they’ll know fairly soon if the new strain makes people sicker.”

A WHO outbreak expert, Maria Van Kerkhove, said Monday that “the information that we have so far is that there isn’t a change” in the kind of illness or its severity from the new strain.

What do the mutations mean for treatments?

In this November 24 photo, registered nurse Chrissie Burkhiser works in the emergency room at Scotland County Hospital in Memphis, Missouri. AP/Jeff Roberson Moncef Slaoui, the chief science adviser for the US government’s Covid-19 vaccine campaign, said scientists are still working to confirm whether the strain in England spreads more easily.

He said it’s also possible that “seeding” of hidden cases “happened in the shadows” before scientists started looking for it.

The strain was first detected in September, WHO officials said.

What’s worrisome about it?

It has many mutations—nearly two dozen—and eight are on the spike protein that the virus uses to attach

to and infect cells. The spike is what vaccines and antibody drugs target.

Dr. Ravi Gupta, a virus expert at the University of Cambridge in England, said modeling studies suggest it may be up to two times more infectious than the strain that’s been most common in England so far.

He and other researchers posted a report of it on a website scientists use to quickly share developments but it has not been formally reviewed or published in a journal.

Does it make people sicker or more likely to die?

“There’s no indication that either

‘Inauguration of AMCen-Matdev lab to strengthen country’s 3D production’

By Lyn B. Resurreccion A laboratory that is involved in additive manufacturing (AM), or 3D printing, and deals with research and development on materials for use in AM-abled products was inaugurated on December 22.

The Additive Manufacturing Center-Materials Development (AMCen-Matdev) laboratory is under the Industrial Technology Development Institute of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST-ITDI).

One of the main activities of AMCen-Matdev R&D is the development of materials for various 3D printing technologies using local materials and locallyproduced nanomaterials for property enhancement in order to reduce the cost of raw materials.

Additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, provides a transformative approach to industrial production that enables the creation of lighter, stronger parts and systems, GE.com said.

As its name implies, additive manufacturing adds material to create an object, it added.

In his keynote speech during the virtual inauguration, Science Secretary Fortunato T. de la Peña said, «The establishment of AMCen as the country’s technological hub for additive manufacturing and other advanced manufacturing technologies is proof of our strong commitment to strengthen and expand the country’s capabilities in 3D printing and advanced design and manufacturing.”

He added: “This center will harness 3D printing’s potential to improve our aerospace and defense, health, agriculture, automotive, and many other sectors.”

De la Peña pointed out that even before the laboratory’s inauguration, AMCen-Matdev’s significance was already highlighted during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic when equipment and medical devices were in short supply.

He said the two-component facilities of AMCen, the Matdev laboratory, and the Metals Industry Research and Development Center-led Research on Advanced Prototyping for Product Innovation and Development using Additive Manufacturing

T

What about vaccines?

Slaoui said the presumption is that current vaccines would still be effective against the variant, but that scientists are working to confirm that.

“My expectation is, this will not be a problem,” he said.

United Kingdom officials have said

Can travel restrictions do any good?

Landrigan thinks they can.

“If the new strain is indeed more contagious than the original strain, then it’s very, very sensible to restrict travel,” he said. “It will slow things down. Any time you can break the chain of transmission you can slow the virus down.”

CNN quoted Fauci as saying that he was not criticizing other countries for suspending travel to England but that he would not advise the United States to take such a step.

The presence or extent of the new strain in the United States is unknown at this time.

What can I do to reduce my risk?

Follow the advice to wear a mask, wash your hands often, maintain social distance and avoid crowds, public health experts say.

“The bottom line is we need to suppress transmission” of all virus strains that can cause Covid-19, said the WHO’s director-general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

“The more we allow it to spread, the more mutations will happen.” AP

UP researchers develop low-cost air-quality monitor

A

modified oxygen concentrator mask.

It collaborated with a university for the 3D printing of various components of Telepresence Robots, which allows users to view and interact with remote environments.

This, he said, will be useful for the new normal, especially for hospitals, homes, manufacturing plants and businesses.

With the inauguration of the laboratory, the Center will engage its stakeholders in more projects, such as in prototyping, testing, and evaluation, R&D collaborations, design concepts, materials R&D, education formation, training services, and policy standard, he said.

Matdev is currently working with Mariano Marcos State University on the development of

3D-printing materials that uses the university’s local clay and biomass materials, he added.

It is also collaborating with the DOST-Philippine Nuclear Research Institute for the 3D printing of a nerve guidance conduit for the clinical treatment of nerve injuries, de la Peña said.

“I hope af ter this inauguration, more collaborations will be forged. As I have emphasized in my previous speeches that collaborations among government and nongovernment agencies, the academe, and private firms are essential to make the Philippines fully utilize the benefits of additive manufacturing,” de la Peña pointed out.

He said that equipped with the latest machines and tools for materials development, design, property simulation, and process optimization, AMCen-Matdev “will open countless possibilities for production-grade manufacturing.”

Undersecretary for R&D Dr. Rowena Cristina Guevara and Executive Director Dr. Enrico Paringit, of Philippine Council for Industry, Energy and Emerging Technology Research and Development, expressed their support to AMCen-Matdev's innovative program in their respective messages during the virtual launch.

De la Peña acknowledged Dr. Rigober to Advincula, governor chairman of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Dr. Chee Kai Chua, Chaiman Professor at Singapore University of Technology and Design, who mentored and trained AMCen-Matdev's staff.

low-cost, high-quality aerosol monitors to help find ways in minimizing air pollution in the cities was developed in the Philippines.

Spearheaded by Dr. Len Herald V. Lim of University of the Philippines Diliman (UPD), the Robust Optical Aerosol Monitor (Project ROAM) was initiated to measure particulate matter concentration in the air.

It provides crucial information for policies and programs for environmental protection.

“ROAM units use a different method in detecting particles that does not require the manufacture/fabrication of specialized parts typical of contemporary commercial instrumentation. This allows a much lower production cost, smaller maintenance requirement, and an exclusive research chain,” Lim said.

Lim and other researchers fromUPD, in partnership with the Department of Science and Technology-Philippine Council for Industry, Energy and Emerging Technology Research and Development, have developed the project, the DOST-PCIEERD said in a news release.

The team has already produced 10 optical aerosol monitors. Four of them have been verified for performance through collocation experiments with aerosol equipment used by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources and its agency, the Environment management Bureau.

The remaining six optical aerosol monitors are being tested for performance and will be subject for stricter collocation experiments.

interconnectivity to revitalize the agriculture sector in the country.

He added that through Searca’s 11th FiveYear Plan (2020-2025) focused on Accelerating Transformation Through Agricultural Innovation, the center serves as gateway to the future of agricultural development by building an open innovation and open science spaces that will serve as the venue for emerging trends and opportunities for agriculture and rural development in the Philippines and the Southeast Asian region, the news release said.

TAU has a Sustainable Mechanized Agriculture for Research and Technology Agriculture Center that implements climate-resilient crops production and educates learners and farmers on innovations in agriculture, food security, and sustainability.

“The center aims to carry out its mission of fostering the implementation of smart agriculture

in many ways. It will be a platform for forging interdisciplinary research collaborations across disciplines, both within and outside TAU,” Guillermo said.

On the other hand, LSPU’s Technology Business Incubation for Agri-Fishery and Natural Products serves as a center for nurturing business start-ups in agricultural, aquatic and natural resources-based techno-enterprise.

Within days of the MOU signing between Searca and LSPU, 107 LSPU officials, faculty and researchers convened for a presentation on “Agriculture 4.0 Innovations for Higher Education Institutions” by Dr. Rico C. Ancog, Searca program lead for Emerging Innovation for Growth and associate professor at the University of the Philippines Los Baños-School of Environmental Science and Management.

Meanwhile, Ronquillo said BatStateU has

a Center for Technopreneurship and Innovation and the first Knowledge Innovation and Science Technology (KIST) Park registered by the Philippine Economic Zone Authority.

KIST Park is a prime destination fostering collaboration between universities, industr y players, locator companies, and tech startups, including agricultural entrepreneurs.

As such, Ancog said: “BatStateU, with its motto ‘Leading Innovations, Transforming Lives,’ is the ideal partner that Searca is looking for in our Academe-Industry-Government Model. We look forward to operationalize the Searca innovEIGhts Model fueled by our partnership.”

“Searcaa’s InnovEIGhts model will support, facilitate and implement co-created and copiloted agribusiness incubation, information and technology transfer projects, and impact- and

AMCen-Matdev staff Photo from ITDI

Science Secretary Fortunato T. de la Peña Screenshot by Lyn Resurreccion Technologies (Rappid-Admatec), have already made significant contributions in the country’s response against the Covid-19 pandemic.

They led in prototyping and production of various personal protective equipment and medical components and devices.

De la Peña highlighted AMCen-Matdev’s pandemic responses that included the 3D printing of face shields, ear relief bands, diffusers, door knobs/ handles, and respirator valves.

It also helped a hospital through the characterization of alternative filters to the Heat and Moisture Exchange filters.

The Matdev Team improved the nebulizer mask design and developed a 3D-printed filter attachment for use in commercially available masks, such as the

3 PHL universities, Searca partner on agri innovation hree state universities have recently partnered with the Philippine government-hosted Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (Searca).

Tarlac Agricultural University (TAU) and Laguna State Polytechnic University (LSPU) have inked pacts with Searca to work together on areas of mutual interest such as education, research and training, a Searca news release said.

For its part, the Batangas State University (BatStateU) also agreed to work with Los Baños, Laguna, -based Searca in the same areas,

A couple of cases in England raise concern that the mutations in some of the emerging new strains could hurt the potency of drugs that supply antibodies to block the virus from infecting cells.

“The studies on antibody response are currently under way. We expect results in coming days and weeks,” Van Kerkhove said.

One drugmaker, Eli Lilly, said that tests in its lab using strains that contain the most concerning mutation suggest that its drug remains fully active.

“they don’t believe there is impact on the vaccines,” Van Kerkhove said.

Vaccines induce broad immune system responses besides just prompting the immune system to make antibodies to the virus, so they are expected to still work, several scientists said.

with special focus on innovative agricultural technologies, agribusiness incubation and technology transfer, the news release added.

Signatories to the five-year memoranda of understanding signed by Searca with the three universities were Searca Director Dr. Glenn B. Gregorio and TAU President Dr. Max P. Guillermot; LSPU President Dr. Mario R. Briones; and BatStateU President Dr. Tirso A. Ronquillo, respectively.

Gregorio said Searca’s collaboration with agricultural universities is part of its strategy to harness academe -industr y- government

The latest version of aerosol monitor unit developed by the University of the Philippines Diliman. PCIEERD photo The ROAM team is currently exploring the creation of a spin-off company through DOST-PCIEERD’s Funding Assistance for Spinoff and Translation of Research in Advancing Commercialization program to help advance the commercialization of their technology and bring this citizen science project to the community.

DOST-PCIEERD executive director Dr. Enrico C. Paringit expressed hope that the technology can be adopted by local government units who want to improve their area’s air quality through scientific means, the news release said.

“As leader and partner in enabling innovations, we encourage our researchers for coming up with cutting-edge solutions to solve major environmental and societal issues. This technology is one significant stride in our path towards improving air quality. Now is a good time to cooperation with our innovators, adopt this solution to protect our future,” Paringit said.

action-driven extension and technical assistance engagement for Southeast Asia,” Ancog added.

He explained that the innovEIGhts components consist of Index for gap analysis and best practices benchmark, Serves to provide farmer advisory support for innovation, iDEATES to come up with practical and technical solutions, BLOCKS for rapid prototyping of inclusive technology, A4LIFE to build an agribusiness incubation network, and Space to be the platform for open innovative collaboration.

Gregorio affirmed that in the coming years, Searca intends to facilitate the partnership of players and actors of the innovation community in the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries, such as incubator houses, venture capital funders, universities and other research institutions as well as startups, small and medium enterprises, and corporations, the news release said.

Faith A6 Sunday, December 27, 2020

Sunday

Editor: Lyn Resurreccion • www.businessmirror.com.ph

Tagle: Be an angel for one another

R

OME, Italy—Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle called on Filipino migrants to be God’s presence to others wherever they are.

Leading a traditional “Simbang Gabi” Mass with Filipinos in Rome, he said that it is a Christian duty to become “angels” for one another.

“May each of us be angels— bring Good News to others. The Good News is ‘Jesus is with you,’” Tagle said at the Basilica of Sta. Maria Maggiore.

“There’s too much negative news [around us], a lot of bickering, and a lot of blaming—that’s probably the least we can do this Christmas that may have a huge impact,” he said. “Be an angel!”

Due to health protocols, the

Mass was attended by a limited number of people, including Philippine ambassador to the Holy See Grace Relucio-Princesa.

It was also the cardinal’s first Simbang Gabi, a Filipino Christmas tradition, in Rome as a Vatican official who heads the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.

Tagle also used his homily to encourage the Filipino community to look at this year’s Christmas in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic as a time for reflection on the importance of humility.

He encouraged everyone not

V

Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle celebrates Mass at the Manila Cathedral on October 4.

SCREENSHOT/MANILA CATHEDRAL

to lose hope and invited them to prayer to keep their relationship with God alive.

“Maybe there’s a lesson that is also being taught to us because Christmas, the birth of Christ,

shows the humility of God Himself,” Tagle said.

“Let us not be too sad. Maybe this Christmas brings us back to the humility of God,” he added.

CBCP News

Pope’s envoy: If coronavirus is contagious, so is goodness

Archbishop Charles John Brown, the Apostolic Nuncio to the Philippines, celebrates Misa de Gallo at the Saint Anthony of Padua Parish Church in Manila’s Malate district on December 18. ROY LAGARDE

I

f the new coronavirus is contagious, so is goodness and concern for social justice, said Pope Francis’s new envoy to the

Philippines.

A rc hbi shop C h a rles Joh n Brown, the country’s apostolic nuncio, said that kindness can

cascade across people, taking on new forms along the way.

“We’re contagious with goodness as a little bit like the opposite of corona [virus]. We spread goodness around us and society changes,” Archbishop Brown told reporters recently after celebrating Mass at the Saint Anthony of Padua Parish in Manila.

The nuncio stressed the need for Christians to work for peace and social justice, which according to him, forms an important part of the Gospel.

Archbishop Brown said the Church’s role is to bring people to God’s kingdom through the sacramental life.

And with the human society, “we want to be as just and as peaceful as possible,” the Vatican

ambassador said.

“So as Christians, we must commit ourselves to social justice as much as possible—fighting against injustices, poverty, wa r a nd a l l t he t h i ngs t h at a f f l ict t he hu ma n cond it ion,” he added.

But he reminded the faithful that working for social justice is “a spiritual battle as much as a political battle.”

He pointed out that the “most effective way” of changing a society is when people live their Christian faith.

“There are two elements: the spiritual element and the political element, both are important. But the spiritual element is probably the most important,” the archbishop said. Roy Lagarde/CBCP News

Muslims raise concerns over halal status of Covid-19 vaccine

J

AKARTA, Indonesia—In October, Indonesian diplomats and Muslim clerics stepped off a plane in China. While the diplomats were there to finalize deals to ensure millions of doses of vaccines reached Indonesian citizens, the clerics had a much different concern: Whether the Covid-19 vaccine was permissible for use under Islamic law.

As companies race to develop a Covid-19 vaccine and countries scramble to secure doses, questions about the use of pork products—banned by some religious groups—has raised concerns about the possibility of disrupted immunization campaigns.

Pork-derived gelatin has been widely used as a stabilizer to ensure vaccines remain safe and effective during storage and transport.

Some companies have worked for years to develop pork-free vaccines: Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis has produced a pork-free meningitis vaccine, while Saudi- and Malaysia-based AJ Pharma is currently working on one of their own.

But demand, existing supply chains, cost and the shorter shelf life of vaccines not containing porcine gelatin means the ingredient is likely to continue to be used in a majority of vaccines for years, said Dr. Salman Waqar, general secretary of the British Islamic Medical Association.

Spokesmen for Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca have said that pork products are not part of their Covid-19 vaccines.

But limited supply and preexisting deals worth millions of dollars with other companies means that some countries with large Muslim populations, such as Indonesia, will receive vaccines that have not yet been certified to be gelatin-free.

This presents a dilemma for religious communities, including Orthodox Jews and Muslims, where the consumption of pork products is deemed religiously unclean, and how the ban is applied to medicine, he said.

“There’s a difference of opinion among Islamic scholars as to whether you take something like pork gelatin and make it undergo a rigorous chemical transformation,” Waqar said. “Is that still considered to be religiously impure for you to take?”

The majority consensus from past debates over pork gelatin use in vaccines is that it is permissible under Islamic law, as “greater harm” would occur if

the vaccines were not used, said Dr. Harunor Rashid, an associate professor at the University of Sydney.

There is a similar assessment by a broad consensus of religious leaders in the Orthodox Jewish community as well.

“According to the Jewish law, the prohibition on eating pork or using pork is only forbidden when it’s a natural way of eating it,” said Rabbi David Stav, chairman of Tzohar, a rabbinical organization in Israel.

If “it’s injected into the body, not [eaten] through the mouth,” then there is “no prohibition and no problem, especially when we are concerned about sicknesses,” he said.

Yet there have been dissenting opinions on the issue—some with serious health consequences for Indonesia, which has the world’s largest Muslim population, some 225 million.

In 2018, the Indonesian Ulema Council, the Muslim clerical body that issues certifications that a product is halal, or permissible under Islamic law, decreed that the measles and rubella vaccines were “haram,” or unlawful, because of the gelatin.

Religious and community leaders began to urge parents to not allow their children to be vaccinated.

“Measles cases subsequently spiked, giving Indonesia the third-highest rate of measles in the world,” said Rachel Howard, director of the health-care market research group Research Partnership.

Muslim women ride a motorbike past a coronavirus-themed mural in Jakarta, Indonesia, on September 10. Writings on the mural read “Let’s fight coronavirus together.” AP/Tatan Syuflana

Pope: Consumerism has stolen Christmas

A decree was later issued by the Muslim clerical body saying it was permissible to receive the vaccine, but cultural taboos still led to continued low vaccination rates, Howard said.

“Our studies have found that some Muslims in Indonesia feel uncomfortable with accepting vaccinations containing these ingredients,” even when the Muslim authority issues guidelines saying they are permitted, she said.

Governments have taken steps to address the issue.

In Malaysia, where the halal status of vaccines has been identified as the biggest issue among Muslim parents, stricter laws have been enacted so that parents must vaccinate their children or face fines and jail time.

In Pakistan, where there has been waning vaccine confidence for religious and political reasons, parents have been jailed for refusing to vaccinate their children against polio.

But with rising vaccine hesitanc y and misinformation spreading around the globe, including in religious communities, Rashid said community engagement is “absolutely necessary.”

“It could be disastrous,” if there is not strong community engagement from governments and health-care workers, he said.

In Indonesia, the government has already said it will include the Muslim clerical body in the Covid-19 vaccine procurement and certification process.

“Public communication regarding the halal status, price, quality and distribution must be well-prepared,” Indonesian President Joko Widodo said in October.

While they were in China in the fall, the Indonesian clerics inspected China’s Sinovac Biotech facilities, and clinical trials involving some 1,620 volunteers are also underway in Indonesia for the company’s vaccine.

The government has announced several Covid-19 vaccine procurement deals with the company totaling millions of doses.

Sinovac Biotech, as well as Chinese companies Sinopharm and CanSino Biologics—which all have Covid-19 vaccines in late-stage clinical trials and deals selling millions of doses around the world—did not respond to Associated Press requests for ingredient information.

In China, none of the Covid-19 vaccines has been granted final market approval, but more than 1 million health-care workers and others who have been deemed at high risk of infection have received vaccines under emergency-use permission.

The companies have yet to disclose how effective the vaccines are or possible side effects.

Pakistan is at late-stage clinical trials of the CanSino Biologics vaccine. Bangladesh previously had an agreement with Sinovac Biotech to conduct clinical trials in the country, but the trials have been delayed due to a funding dispute.

Both countries have some of the largest Muslim populations in the world.

While health-care workers on the ground in Indonesia are still largely engaged in efforts to contain the virus as numbers continue to surge, Waqar said government efforts to reassure Indonesians will be key to a successful immunization campaign as Covid-19 vaccines are approved for use.

But, he said, companies producing the vaccines must also be part of such community outreach.

“The more they are transparent, the more they are open and honest about their product, the more likely it is that there are communities that have confidence in the product and will be able to have informed discussions about what it is they want to do,” he said.

“Because, ultimately, it is the choice of individuals.” AP

ATICAN—Pope Francis advised Catholics recently not to waste time complaining about coronavirus restrictions, but to focus instead on helping those in need.

Speaking from a window overlooking St. Peter’s Square, the pope encouraged people to imitate the Virgin Mary’s “yes” to God at the Annunciation.

“What, then, is the ‘yes’ we can say?” he asked. “Instead of complaining in these difficult times about what the pandemic prevents us from doing, let us do something for someone who has less: not the umpteenth gift for ourselves and our friends, but for a person in need whom no one thinks of!”

He said that he wished to offer another piece of advice: that in order for Jesus to be born in us, we should devote time to prayer.

“Let us not let ourselves be swept up by consumerism. ‘Ah, I have to buy presents, I must do this and that.’ That frenzy of doing things, more and more. It is Jesus that is important,” he stressed.

“Consumerism, brothers and sisters, has stolen Christmas. Consumerism is not found in the manger in Bethlehem: there is reality, poverty, love. Let us prepare our hearts to be like Mary’s: free from evil, welcoming, ready to receive God.” In his Angelus address, the pope meditated on the Gospel reading for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, the final Sunday before Christmas, which describes Mary’s encounter with the angel Gabriel (Luke 1:26-38).

He noted that the angel told Mary to rejoice because she would conceive a son and call Him Jesus.

He said: “It seems to be an announcement of pure joy, destined to make the Virgin happy. Among the women of that time, which woman did not dream of becoming the mother of the Messiah?”

“But along with joy, those words foretell a great trial to Mary. Why? Because in that moment she was ‘betrothed’ to Joseph. In such a situation, the Law of Moses stipulated there should be no relations or cohabitation. Therefore, in having a son, Mary would have transgressed the Law, and the punishment for women was terrible: stoning was envisaged,” Pope Francis said.

Saying “yes” to God was, therefore, a life-and-death decision for Mary, the pope said.

“Certainly the divine message would have filled Mary’s heart with light and strength; nevertheless, she found herself faced with a crucial decision: to say ‘yes’ to God, risking everything, even her life, or to decline the invitation and to continue her ordinary life,” he said.

The pope recalled that Mary responded by saying: “May it be done to me according to Your word” (Luke 1:38).

“But in the language in which the Gospel is written, it is not simply ‘let it be.’ The expression indicates a strong desire, it indicates the will that something happen,” he said.

“In other words, Mary does not say: ‘If it has to happen, let it happen… if it cannot be otherwise…’ It is not resignation. No, she does not express a weak and submissive acceptance, but rather she expresses a strong desire, a vivacious desire,” he explained.

“She is not passive, but active. She does not submit to God, she binds herself to God. She is a woman in love prepared to serve her Lord completely and immediately,” the pope said.

“She could have asked for a little time to think about it, or even for more explanations about what would happen; perhaps she could have set some conditions… Instead, she does not take time, she does not keep God waiting, she does not delay.”

He contrasted Mary’s readiness to accept God’s will with our own hesitations.

He said: “How often—let us think of ourselves now—how often is our life made up of postponements, even the spiritual life! For example, I know it is good for me to pray, but today I do not have time…”

He continued: “I know it is important to help someone, yes, I must do it: I will do it tomorrow. Today, on the threshold of Christmas, Mary invites us not to postpone, but to say ‘yes.’”

While each “yes” is costly, the pope said, it will never cost as much as Mary’s “yes,” which brought us salvation.

He observed that “May it be done to me according to your word” is the last phrase we hear from Mary on the final Sunday of Advent.

Her words, he said, were an invitation to us to embrace the true meaning of Christmas.

“For if the birth of Jesus does not touch our lives—mine, yours, yours, ours, everyone’s—if it does not touch our lives, it slips past us in vain.

“In the Angelus now, we too will say ‘Be it done unto me according to Thy word’: May Our Lady help us to say it with our lives, with our approach to these last days in which to prepare ourselves well for Christmas,” he said.

After reciting the Angelus, the Holy Father highlighted the plight of seafarers on the eve of Christmas.

“Many of them—an estimated 400,000 worldwide—are stranded on ships, beyond the terms of their contracts, and are unable to return home,” he said.

“I ask the Virgin Mary, Stella Maris, to comfort these people and all those in difficult situations, and I urge governments to do all they can to enable them to return to their loved ones.”

The pope then invited pilgrims, who stood wearing face coverings in the square below, to visit the “100 Nativity Scenes at the Vatican” exhibit.

The annual event is being held in the open air, to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, under the colonnades that surround St. Peter’s Square.

He said that the nativity scenes, which come from all over the world, helped people to understand the meaning of the Incarnation of Christ.

“I invite you to visit the Nativity scenes under the Colonnade, to understand how people try to show how Jesus was born through art,” he said. “The cribs under the colonnade are a great catechesis of our faith.”

Greeting residents of Rome and pilgrims from abroad, the pope said: “May Christmas, now close at hand, be for each of us an occasion of inner renewal, of prayer, of conversion, of steps forward in faith and of fraternity among ourselves.”

“Let us look around us, let us look especially at those who are in need: the brother who suffers, wherever he may be, is one of us. He is Jesus in the manger: the one who suffers is Jesus. Let us think a little about this.”

He continued: “Let Christmas be closeness to Jesus, in this brother and sister. There, in the brother in need, is the nativity to which we must go in solidarity. This is the living nativity scene: the nativity scene where we truly meet the Redeemer in the people in need. Let us therefore journey toward the holy night and await the fulfillment of the mystery of salvation.”

Catholic News Agency via CBCP News

Biodiversity Sunday BusinessMirror

Asean Champions of Biodiversity Media Category 2014

Editor: Lyn Resurreccion

Scientists focus on bats for clues to prevent next pandemic

R

IO DE JANEIRO—Night began to fall in Rio de Janeiro’s Pedra Branca state park as four Brazilian scientists switched on their flashlights to traipse along a narrow trail of mud through dense rainforest.

The researchers were on a mission: capture bats and help prevent the next pandemic.

A few meters ahead, nearly invisible in the darkness, a bat made high-pitched squeaks as it strained its wings against the thin nylon net that had ensnared it.

One of the researchers removed the bat, which used its pointed teeth to bite her gloved fingers.

The November nighttime outing was part of a project at Brazil’s state-run Fiocruz Institute to collect and study viruses present in wild animals—including bats, which many scientists believe were linked to the outbreak of Covid-19.

The goal now is to identify other viruses that may be highly contagious and lethal in humans, and to use that information to devise plans to stop them from ever infecting people—to forestall the next potential global disease outbreak before it gets started.

In a highly connected world, an outbreak in one place endangers the entire globe, just as the coronavirus did. And the Brazilian team is just one among many worldwide racing to minimize the risk of a second pandemic this century.

To some, it might seem too soon to contemplate the next global outbreak, with the world still grappling with the devastating fallout of the ongoing one.

But scientists say it’s highly like that, without savvy intervention, another novel virus will jump from animal to human host and find the conditions to spread like wildfire.

As this pandemic has shown, modern transport can disperse the pathogen to all corners of the globe in a matter of hours and spread easily in densely populated cities.

It’s not a question of if, but of when, according to Dr. Gagandeep Kang, an infectious diseases expert at Christian Medical College at Vellore in southern India.

She pointed to previous research that found India was among the most likely places in the world for such a “spillover” event to occur, due to population density and increasing human and livestock incursion into its dense tropical forests teeming with wildlife.

It’s no coincidence that many scientists are focusing attention on the world’s only flying mammals—bats.

Why bats?

Bats are thought to be the original or intermediary hosts for multiple viruses that have spawned recent epidemics, including Covid-19, severe acute respiratory syndrome, Middle East respiratory syndrome, Ebola, Nipah virus, Hendra virus and Marburg virus.

A 2019 study found that of viruses originating from the five most common mammalian sources—primates, rodents, carnivores, ungulates and bats—those from bats are the most virulent in humans.

Bats are a diverse group, with more than 1,400 species flitting across every continent except Antarctica.

But what many have in common are adaptations that allow them to carry viruses that are deadly in humans and livestock while exhibiting minimal symptoms themselves—meaning they are able travel and shed those viruses, instead of being quickly hobbled.

“The secret is that bats have unusual immune systems, and that’s related to their ability to fly,” said Raina Plowright, an epidemiologist who studies bats at Montana State University.

To get off the ground and sustain flight requires an incredible amount of energy, with bats’ metabolic rate increasing sixteen-fold, Plowright said.

“You’d expect them to get cell damage from all that metabolic exertion,” she said.

But that doesn’t happen. Instead, bats are remarkably resilient, with many species living more than 30 years—highly unusual for such small mammals.

Evolution of bats

Plowright and other bat scientists believe evolutionary tweaks that help bats recover from the stress of flying also give them extra protection against pathogens.

“Bats seem to have evolved a collateral benefit of flight—resistance to deal with some of the nastiest viruses known to science,” said Arinjay Banerjee, a virologist at McMaster University in Canada.

While scientists are still untangling the mystery, two leading theories are that bats may have evolved what Banerjee called “an efficient DNA repair mechanism,” or that their bodies may tightly regulate inflammation triggers and not overreact to viral infections.

Probing the secrets of bat immune systems may help scientists understand more about when bats do shed viruses, as well as providing hints for possible future medical treatment strategies, he said.

Bats and other animals that carry pathogens don’t innately pose a risk to humans—unless conditions are right for a spillover event.

“The virus has to come out of the host for us to get infected,” said Cara Brook, a disease ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

The bad news: Increasing destruction and fragmentation of habitats worldwide—especially biodiverse areas like tropical forests—means “we are seeing higher rates of contact between wildlife and humans, creating more opportunities for spillover,” she said.

That’s why the Brazilian researchers chose Pedra Branca park.

As one of the world’s largest forests within an urban area, it offers a constant interaction of wild animals with the thousands of humans and domestic animals in surrounding communities.

Studying other primates

The scientists are studying not just bats, but also small primates, wild cats and domestic cats in homes with confirmed Covid-19 cases.

Scientists and governments would stand a better chance at containing future outbreaks if they had faster notice of when and where they begin, said Ian Mackay, a virologist at Australia’s University of Queensland.

“Ongoing, constant, nonstop surveillance,” along the lines of the flu labs set up by the World Health Organization across the globe, could help researchers be better prepared, he said. He also suggested that labs for virus discovery could regularly sample waste water or materials from hospitals.

In India, a National Mission on Biodiversity and Human Well-Being has been pending since 2018 and will likely be launched next year.

Abi Tamim Vanak, a conservation scientist at Ashok Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment in Bengaluru, said that a core part of the plan is to set up 25 sentinel surveillance sites across the country in both rural and urban areas.

“They will be the first line of defense,” he said.

A varied patchwork of virus surveillance programs exists in several countries, but funding tends to wax and wane with the political climate and sense of urgency.

Among the most ambitious endeavors is the Global Virome Project, which aims to discover 500,000 new viruses over 10 years.

The US Agency for International Development recently announced the launch of the $100 million STOP Spillover project, an effort led by scientists at Tufts University and including global partners to study zoonotic diseases in Africa and Asia.

Treating bats as enemy won’t help

One approach that won’t help, scientists say, is treating bats as the enemy–vilifying them, throwing stones or trying to burn them out of caves.

This spring, villagers in the Indian state of Rajasthan identified bat colonies in abandoned forts and palaces and killed hundreds with bats and sticks.

They also sealed some crevices where the bats lived, effectively trapping them. In the Indian state of Karnataka, villagers cut down old trees where bats tend to roost.

Scientists say those those tactics are likely to backfire.

An investigation by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Ugandan health authorities found that, after a mining operation attempted to exterminate bats from a cave in Uganda, the remaining bats exhibited higher infection levels of Marburg virus.

This led to Uganda’s most severe outbreak of Marburg hemorrhagic fever, caused by the virus, in 2012.

“Stress is a huge factor in upsetting the natural balance that bats have with their viruses—the more you stress bats, the more they shed viruses,” said Vikram Misra, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada.

Although orders issued by Indian forest officials reiterating the complete ban on killing of wildlife and information campaigns to dispel myths were largely successful, convincing people not to attack bats means dispelling long-running cultural assumptions.

“People have a lot of misconceptions about bats. They’re nocturnal and look a little weird flying, and there’s a lot of literature and culture built around bats being scary,” said Hannah Kim Frank, a biologist at Tulane University.

“But bats aren’t aggressive—and attacking bats doesn’t help control diseases.”

Sunday, December 27, 2020

A7

‘With no healthy biodiversity, the fight against climate change is impossible’

S

By Jonathan L. Mayuga

outheast Asia is fortunate to have been blessed with rich biological diversity. Had it not been for the region’s rich biodiversity and healthy ecosystem, the fight against climate change and its impacts would not have been possible.

At a recent webinar, Executive Director Theresa Mundita S. Lim of the Asean Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) said there is no denying that climate change and its severe impacts on the environment, to people’s lives and well-being are already being strongly felt in the region.

Co-organized by the ACB and the Philippines’s Climate Change Commissions the webinar, dubbed “Biodiversity and Building Resilience to the Impacts of Climate Change in Asean,” coincided with the fifth anniversary of the Paris Agreement.

such as forest and coral reefs, serve as buffers against stronger winds and weather disturbances.

“Sustainably managed mangroves and coastal areas help defend communities against storm surges. All these support livelihood, health and well-being, and build resilience of the people of the Asean,” she said.

Lim said the webinar is an excellent opportunity to exchange perspectives, insight and knowledge on ecosystembased adaptation and biodiversity as nature-based solution to climate change.

Supported by the Swedbio, a program of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the webinar sought to highlight the need to incorporate nature-based solutions as part of the approach in addressing climate change.

The discourse on nature-based solutions, as well as the ecosystem-based approach to climate-change adaptation, has been gaining more ground in light of the current ecological and health crises.

During the webinar, the panelists noted the discussion’s relevance as the global community is developing post-2020 biodiversity targets.

The upcoming 15th Conference of Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity and the 26th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change will take place in 2021.

UK Ambassador to Asean Jon Lambe said the webinar is a well-timed event and equally crucial to the next year’s events—the 15th Conference of the Convention on Biodiversity and later in the UK, the 26th Conference of the Parties.

Lambe said the UK is “incredibly committed” to next year’s events and has created the Global Ocean Alliance, spearheading the call of 30 countries for greater ocean protection.

The Global Ocean Alliance is championing an international commitment for a minimum 30 percent of the global ocean to be protected through Marine Protected Areas by 2030.

Highlights and relevance

Far-reaching effect

“We can no longer keep this [climate change] to the backburner as this issue cuts across the present challenges that hound us today. The far-reaching consequences of climate change disrupt our daily lives and spank our development,” Lim said.

Lim, who advocates the mainstreaming of biodiversity, said Asean countries, most especially in the past few months, have experienced stronger and more disruptive typhoons that came one after the other, leaving people dead and destroying millions worth of property.

“Climate change is one of the main culprits that drive the loss of nature,” Lim said, recalling the recent climaterelated disasters that hit several Asean member states.

“However, the main paradox here is that biodiversity and its ecosystem services underpin our principal solutions and efforts to tackle climate change and its impacts. Without healthy biodiversity, our fight against climate change would be an impossible feat,” she said.

Biodiversity-rich region

Lim said, for tunately, the A sean is one of the r ichest in ter ms of biolog ica l d iversit y.

“Occupying only 3 percent of the world’s total surface, yet it is home to almost 20 percent of the known animals and plant species in the planet,” she said.

Lim added that diverse ecosystems,

Well-timed event

Important region

Lambe said Asean is a particularly important region given its relatively small area in the planet.

“It is an incredibly vibrant and biodiversity-rich part of the world. Three of the most biodiversity-rich countries, and four of the world’s biodiversity hot spots are here,” he said.

Lambe underscored the need for government and leaders across the globe to work together to protect and conserve biodiversity, particularly in the Asean.

“There is a huge need for us to work together to protect the biodiversity and mitigate the impacts of climate change in this region,” he said.

Highly vulnerable

The Philippines remain highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, experiencing an average of 20 typhoons every year. It is also experiencing heavy rainfall that trigger geological hazards, such as floods and landslides.

Assistant Secretary for Climate Change Ricardo Calderon said the Philippines is already experiencing what experts have predicted to happen because of climate change.

“Five typhoons hit the country. Despite the well-managed protected areas with an average forest cover of 75 percent, there is still flooding, there is swelling of the rivers, which simply means that our natural ecosystem cannot anymore absorb this kind of extreme rainfall and typhoon events,” said Calderon, a forestry expert and concurrent Biodiversity Management Bureau (BMB) director.

The impact to the community, to the natural resources, including wildlife, is

A screenshot of the panelists at the recent ACB-Climate Change Commission webinar.

Photo from ACB

very severe and very difficult to recover, he added.

Rich biodiversity, healthy ecosystems

According to Calderon, Asean hosts 20 percent of the world’s biodiversity and possesses exceptionally healthy and beautiful ecosystems.

“We have 49 Asean heritage parks and five Unesco [United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization] World Heritage Sites all over the region. The region’s biodiversity serves as the most important gene pool of rare and endemic species,” he said.

As such, he said the Asean, including the Philippines, stands to lose these resources as they are constantly being threatened by climate change.

“Climate change has seriously impacted our biodiversity. Basically the collapse of this natural ecosystem threatens our sources of food, our sources of clean water, our clean air, including medicines, our defense against natural hazards, our natural defense mangroves forests and reefs,” Calderon said.

“Once they are damaged, they would practically put our lives in danger and that is what we have experienced in the last series of typhoons,” he said.

Catastrophic events

According to Calderon, the 1.5-degree global threshold set by leaders under the Paris Agreement, a point of no return as the world will be experiencing catastrophic weather and climate events, are already being felt as far as the Philippines is concerned.

“Are we doing the right thing as far as adaptation and mitigation that we are currently implementing? To both the government and the private sector, the [answer] is we should,” he said.

Calderon added: “We should be moving more than enough on the intervention on the mitigation that is currently ongoing. We need the investment coming from the private sector along this line.”

“Are we ready to declare a climate emergency? In my personal opinion, we are already in the middle of a climate emergency,” he pointed out.

Under immense pressure

Von Sok, head of Environment Division, assistant director of the Sustainable Development Directorate, Asean Socio-Cultural Community Department of the Asean Secretariat, said while the region is rich in biodiversity it is also under immense pressure and threat over land use, invasion of exotic species and of the increasingly devastating impact of climate change.

This underpins the need to look at the linkage between biodiversity and climate change, he said.

“Climate change becomes a significant driver of biodiversity loss by the

end of the century,” he warned.

He added that such interconnection between biodiversity and climate change is reciprocal.

“Several interactions result in degradation. One adversely affects the other caused by the human-induced factor or stress factor,” he said.

In recognition of these linkages, the global community has focused on how to incorporate biodiversity protection to climate action and vise versa, he said.

“The discourse around the naturebased solution and ecosystem-based adaptation has subsequently emerged as a possible solution toward climate sustainability and one of the main focused area of upcoming future meetings,” he said.

Wrong way

Tristan Tyrrell, program officer of SwedBio at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, said recent reports are showing that “trends are going in the wrong way when it comes to climate change,” as the gaps between commitments and action to achieve the Paris targets of reducing greenhouse-gases (GHG) emissions are widening.

“As devastating as the impacts of Covid-19 have been, some scenarios suggest that it will have a positive impact in terms of global GHG emissions,” Tyrrell said.

“We could use this opportunity as what has been called, ‘the great reset,’ to ramp up positive ecosystem-based actions in climate-change adaptation and mitigation,” he said.

Inclusive global economy

Dr. Isabelle de Lovinfosse, head of Southeast Asia Conference of the Parties to the 26th meeting of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change of the British High Commission Strategy, mentioned that “as the world recovers from the coronavirus pandemic, we owe it to future generations to base our recovery on solid foundations.”

This includes “a greener, more resilient and inclusive global economy,” he said.

Appropriate and effective national policies and programs on climate actions are central to building resilience, he said.

In a recorded presentation, Dr. Nagulendran Kangayatkarasu, deputy secretary-general of Malaysia Ministry of Environment and Water, discussed how Malaysia has prioritized its Nationally Determined Contributions, and how the the country is working toward them through supporting various adaptation measures.

In Indonesia, Krissusandi Gunui, executive director of Institut Dayakologi, shared that the knowledge and wisdom of indigenous peoples and local communities are significant in strengthening climate change adaptation and biodiversity conservation.

Vital roles in ecosystems

Bats also play vital roles in ecosystems: They consume insects like mosquitos, pollinate plants like agave, and disperse seeds.

“We actually need bats in the wild to consume insects that otherwise destroy cotton, corn and pecan harvests,” said Kristen Lear, an ecologist at Bat Conservational International.

A better approach to minimize disease risk, Frank said, is simply to minimize contact between wild bats and people and livestock.

She suggested that research on when bats migrate, and when new pups are born, could inform decisions about when people should avoid certain areas or keep their livestock penned up.

In North America, some scientists advocate restricting public access to caves where bats roost.

“Cave gating—bat-friendly gates, built with iron crossbars—can keep humans out and allow bats to move freely,” said Kate Langwig, an infectious disease ecologist at Virginia Tech.

“If we leave the bats alone, and don’t try to hurt or exterminate them, they are going to be healthier,”Langwig said.

Destruction of habitat

Perhaps the most significant factor bringing bats into more frequent contact with people and domestic animals is the destruction of habitat, which forces bats to seek out new foraging and roosting grounds.

In Australia, widespread destruction of winter flowering eucalyptus trees that provide nectar for fruit bats— known locally as “flying foxes”—prompted the bats to move into areas closer to human settlements looking for alternate meals, including to a suburb of Brisbane called Hendra.

There, the bats transmitted a virus to horses, which in turn infected people.

First identified in 1994 and named Hendra virus, it is highly lethal, killing 60 percent of people and 75 percent of horses infected. AP

Thousands of trees to reforest Ipo watershed in 2021

I

po Watershed, which supplies fresh water to 20 million people living or working in Metro Manila, will be bolstered with hundreds of thousands of new trees next year.

Through donations generated from GCash, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), the United Nations Development Programme’s Biodiversity Finance Initiative (Biofin) and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) will plant the first of 365,000 native trees like narra, lauan, kupang and yakal as soon as Covid-19 restrictions are lifted in 2021, a GCash news release said.

“We originally wanted to plant in mid-2020, but decided to heed lockdown guidelines to ensure public safety,” said Mabel Niala, Mynt public affairs and CSR head of GCash in the news release.

GCash is the Philippines’s top cashless service and serves a fifth of the country’s population, plus 75,000

partner merchants and 75 nonprofits.

Using their mobile phones, users can plant trees through GCash Forest. Users earn Green Energy Points by reducing their individual carbon footprints.

Paying bills online for instance, eliminates the need to drive to a bank and consume paper for receipts and forms. More points can be garnered for walking to work, taking the stairs and avoiding single-use plastic items.

When users reach 20,560 points, his or her virtual tree will be fully-grown and a corresponding native tree shall be planted in Ipo Watershed.

Trees for water

Trees provide innumerable services for people and nature. They provide oxygen, shade, habitats, erosioncontrol, food, medicine and other benefits.

Sadly, they are being cut down at astronomical rates. The Philippines is losing at least 52,000 trees daily.

Logging, slash-and-burn-farming and land development are annually erasing 47,000 hectares of forestland—an area thrice the size of Quezon City. Just 7.168 million hectares of forestland remains in the Philippines.

Watersheds are zones which naturally collect and store water. They are typically heavily-vegetated because trees absorb rainwater which drains into streams, rivers and lakes.

Ipo Watershed, together with the Angat and Umiray watersheds, supplies 98 percent of Metro Manila’s water needs.

Located northeast of the sprawling metropolis, it covers 7,236 hectares in Norzagaray and San Jose del Monte in Bulacan, plus Rodriguez in Rizal.

It is home to several species of charismatic animals, including the Philippine brown deer, Philippine warty pig, tarictic hornbill, grey-headed fish eagle and osprey.

Though protected by several proclamations, including a Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title for the Indigenous Dumagat tribes of the watershed, Ipo Watershed is pockmarked by patches of burnt soil.

From 85 percent, forest cover plummeted to 40 percent in recent years, mostly due to slash-and-burn or kaingin farming and charcoal-making.

It is estimated that for 2021, Metro Manila’s water demands will overtake supply by as much as 13 percent during peak days, meaning more dry faucets and unserved households—but taking care of watersheds can avert this, the news release said.

“GCash Forest has proven that mobile technology can generate real change for our forests,” Niala said.

“Everyone can now get a chance to plant a tree through the click of a button. If you haven’t tried GCash Forest yet, please download the app and help restore our forests today.”

A8 Sunday, December 27, 2020

Sports BusinessMirror

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

OVERSEAS GAMES ON NBA WISH LIST T

HE National Basketball Association (NBA) is still looking at scenarios that could allow teams to play in Europe and China again next season, deputy commissioner Mark Tatum said Tuesday.

Tatum also said the NBA’s season-opening doubleheader Tuesday night would be shown in China on Tencent, a league streaming partner. But the coronavirus pandemic is preventing the league from playing any games outside the US this season, except possibly a return by the Toronto Raptors to Canada—something that won’t happen before March at the earliest.

Typically, the NBA has played preseason games in China and takes some regular-season games to Mexico and Europe. This season’s plans called for a game in Paris, though the pandemic forced those to be tabled.

“We do anticipate that once it becomes healthy and safe to be able to do that that we’ll return to a schedule of international preseason and regular-season games,” Tatum said on a call with international reporters.

NBA games were available on Tencent last season even while the league and the Chinese government worked through a very strained relationship—an October 2019 tweet by then-Houston general manager Daryl Morey showing support for antigovernment protesters in Hong Kong prompted major fallout, including state broadcaster CCTV not showing any NBA games for a full year. CCTV put the NBA back on its channel lineup for the last two games of the NBA Finals last fall.

Commissioner Adam Silver said at the All-Star break this past February that the league’s issues with China would lead to perhaps as much as $400 million

Fifa files criminal complaint against Blatter over museum

G

ENEVA—Fifa has filed a criminal complaint against former president Sepp Blatter over the finances of its loss-making soccer museum in Zurich.

Soccer’s governing body said on Tuesday it suspected “criminal mismanagement by Fifa’s former management and companies appointed by them” to work on the museum—long seen as a pet project of Blatter’s—in a renovated and rented city center building.

The Fifa World Football Museum opened in 2016 after $140 million of soccer money was spent refurbishing the 1970s office building to also include 34 rental apartments.

It was meant to open around May 2015, when Blatter won a fifth presidential election, but was delayed until after he left office amid pressure from American and Swiss investigations of international soccer officials.

Blatter committed Fifa to a rental contract with the building’s owner, insurance firm Swiss Life, that requires paying $360 million through 2045 at above market rates, soccer’s world body said.

Fifa said its criminal complaint following an external audit of the project was delivered by hand to canton (state) prosecutors in Zurich.

“That audit revealed a wide range of suspicious circumstances and management failures, some of which may be criminal in nature and which therefore need to be properly investigated by the relevant authorities,” Fifa deputy secretary general for administration Alasdair Bell said in a statement.

The Zurich prosecution office acknowledged receiving the complaint without giving more details.

Blatter’s lawyer, Lorenz Erni, said in a statement: “The allegations are baseless and are vehemently denied.”

Blatter risks investigation at local level while already a suspect in two criminal proceedings opened by federal prosecutors into how he spent Fifa’s money as president.

Those investigations involve Fifa paying $2 million to former UEFA president Michel Platini in 2011 and $1 million to the Trinidad and Tobago soccer body—effectively to disgraced former Fifa vice president Jack Warner—weeks before the Caribbean islands’ general election in 2010.

“Given the massive costs associated with this museum, as well as the general way of working of the previous Fifa management, a forensic audit was conducted in order to find out what really happened here,” Bell said.

The museum has made a loss each year including $50 million in 2016 that included one-off costs, Fifa said then in its financial report.

The most recent Fifa accounts for 2019 show almost $3.5 million revenue from the Fifa World Football Museum and $6.3 million costs for “investment and expenses.” There was a record 161,700 visitors at the Zurich building last year.

In the 2018 accounts, museum revenue was almost $4 million against $12 million in spending.

The Fifa museum was identified closely with Blatter from the time it was announced in April 2012.

His executive committee had already approved

in lost revenue—and that was before the pandemic struck and led to even more revenue missed leaguewide.

“There’s no doubt that we have a long history in China, a more than 40-year history of doing business in China, and that we remain committed to peopleto-people exchange with the hundreds of millions of fans that we have there,” Tatum said. “Playing global games has been and will continue to be an important part of how we engage with our fans in China and in other parts of the world, as well.”

Tatum’s comments came on the day the NBA revealed its roster breakdown of international players for this season; 107 such players from 41 countries made opening-night rosters, including a record 17 Canadian players and a record-tying 14 African players.

“It’s just not the quantity

of the players but the quality,” Tatum said. “These are some of the best players in the game.”

That list includes Greece’s two-time reigning NBA MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo of Milwaukee, Slovenia’s Luka Doncic of Dallas, Serbia’s Nikola Jokic of Denver, and Toronto’s Pascal Siakam and Philadelphia’s Joel Embiid—both from Cameroon.

The NBA regular season is scheduled to run through mid-May, with the playoffs going from May 22 through July 22. That has led to much speculation about NBA players being able to participate in the Olympics, which open in Tokyo on July 23.

There are 24 nations—Greece, Canada, Serbia and Slovenia among them—scheduled to compete starting in late June for the final four spots in the Olympic men’s tournament. Japan, the US, Argentina, Iran,

SAGAN’S WINNING S-WORKS BIKE STOLEN

PETER SAGAN is riding the Paris-Roubaix winning S-Works Roubaix on his way to winning the 2018 ParisRoubaix race.

180 million Swiss francs ($203 million) for what was being called “Project Libero,” and forecast to attract 300,000 visitors each year.

“It is high time that world football had a meeting place for its millions of fans,” Blatter said then of a museum originally to be built underground next to Fifa’s headquarters on a wooded hillside above the city.

One year later, the museum plan changed to a Fifa-funded renovation of a modernist building owned by Swiss Life.

Fifa said in a 2013 news release it signed a 40-year rental of “Haus zur Enge.” The museum would “occupy the second basement level through to the first floor” with office space and apartments on the upper levels to the ninth story.

“The Fifa museum project is a stroke of luck for Zurich and is a perfect fit for Swiss Life’s investment policy,” the insurance firm’s chairman, Rolf Dörig, said in the Fifa statement.

In a statement on Tuesday, Swiss Life said “we consider this a matter for Fifa.

Therefore, we have no further comment.”

When the museum formally opened on Feb. 28, 2016 it was a first public duty for the new Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, who had been elected two days earlier.

Blatter did not attend the ceremony and had begun serving a ban from soccer by Fifa’s ethics committee after Swiss authorities revealed the Platini payment in September 2015. The ban expires next October when Blatter will be 85.

Fifa said on Tuesday its files on the museum project will be sent to ethics investigators.

The complaint filed against Blatter is the latest act in a busy year in criminal investigations linked to Fifa’s past and present presidents.

At least four criminal complaints were filed anonymously against Infantino and Switzerland’s attorney general, Michael Lauber, about three meetings they had in 2016 and 2017. Lauber was forced from office in the fallout including misleading a committee overseeing his work.

A special prosecutor appointed by Switzerland’s parliament to examine the meetings opened a case against Infantino in July. Potential charges include inciting Lauber to abuse his public office.

Blatter spoke this month with the special prosecutor, Stefan Keller.

Keller also recommended this month that federal prosecutors investigate Infantino for using a private jet on Fifa business in 2017. He could not open his own case because his remit is limited to matters involving Lauber.

Fifa said two weeks ago that Keller’s “malicious and defamatory” statement “borders on character assassination.” AP JOSEPH BLATTER (left) symbolically launches the construction work of the Fifa museum in Zurich in April 2013. AP

Nigeria, France, Spain and Australia have already qualified.

Tatum said the NBA is working closely with the International Olympic Committee and Fiba, the sport’s global governing body, to ensure there is “the best possible schedule for everybody involved.” And it’s possible that the finalizing of Olympic rosters could be pushed back to allow NBA players the maximum amount of time before making decisions on whether to play or not.

“It’s my expectation that our federation, Fiba, together with the IOC, will also work with us on potential accommodations, even in terms of when rosters would otherwise need to be submitted, recognizing that they’re going to need to be more flexible and work with us this season given how much uncertainty there is around the virus,” Silver said earlier this week. AP

P

ETER SAGAN’S Paris-Roubaix winning S-Works Roubaix was stolen along with employee and historical bikes at the Specialized headquarters in Morgan Hill in California recently, according to a report in CyclingTips.

The stolen equipment from an in-house museum were worth $160,000, the report said.

Sagan won the 2018 Paris-Roubaix after attacking alone with 54 kilometers to race and then beating Silvan Dillier in a two-up sprint in the Roubaix velodrome. He topped the race on a Specialized S-Works Roubaix in “Sagan Collection” finish, a special gold and black inspired by the Slovak’s love for muscle cars and Americana fashion.

Also among the stolen bikes were Sagan’s custom-painted S-Works Venge ridden at the 2019 Tour de France and Fabian Cancellara’s yellow-painted S-Works Tarmac ridden at the 2010 Tour de France.

The S-Works Shiv ridden by Tony Martin that earned a silver medal at the London 2012 Olympics and the S-Works Epic ridden by Jaroslav Kulhavy that won gold also in London 2012 were also stolen, along with Ned Overend’s national championshipwinning S-Works Fatboy.

In addition, prototypes and employeeowned bikes were stolen, including company owner Mike Sinyard’s two personal Stumpjumpers.

Morgan Hill Police Department confirmed that two vehicles were used in the robbery, which happened during daylight. The vehicles used were a maroon Toyota 4Runner that was later located unoccupied in Salinas, California, and a white box van containing the stolen bikes that is still outstanding.

Specialized is offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction of those responsible for the burglary and the return of all stolen bicycles.

NOT ONLY IN THE PHILIPPINES

Djokovic

Tiafoe

Federer

Djokovic, Federer, Nadal, Tiafoe win 2020 ATP awards

L

ONDON—Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Frances Tiafoe were among the winners of the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) top awards for 2020 on Monday.

Djokovic was the year-end No. 1 for a record-equaling sixth time after winning four titles including a record eighth Australian Open.

US Open champions Mate Pavic and Bruno Soares are the doubles No. 1s.

Federer, who played only six singles all year, was the singles fans’ favorite for a record-extending 18th straight year, and Nadal received the Stefan Edberg Sportsmanship Award for the third year straight and fourth time overall after

winning a 13th Roland Garros crown.

Andrey Rublev of Russia was the most improved in rising from No. 23 to a careerhigh 8 after winning five titles, more than anyone else on the tour.

Tiafoe was given the Arthur Ashe Humanitarian Award for his social activity. The American auctioned signed memorabilia to Athletes for Covid-19 Relief and posted a video that united the Black tennis community in the wake of George Floyd’s killing.

The 17-year-old Carlos Alcaraz of Spain was the newcomer of the year after winning three Challengers.

Vasek Pospisil is the comeback player of the year after undergoing back surgery

in 2019. The Canadian reached two finals and rose to No. 61 after dropping to No. 150 in 2019.

Egyptian player Mostafa Hatem was banned for two years on Monday as part of a match-fixing case.

The Tennis Integrity Unit (TIU) said Hatem admitted to two charges, including failing to report an offer to manipulate a match. He is banned from playing in or attending any authorized tournament or event until October 2022.

A ban for a third year plus a fine of $3,000 were both deferred, the TIU said.

The 26-year-old player reached a careerhigh ranking of 1,556 in 2016 and has never played a match at ATP level. AP

ITALY’S Andrea Vendrame reported a vehicle driver to Italian police after being punched in a road rage incident while out training.

The AG2R La Mondiale rider was not injured but revealed the incident to his local newspaper in the north of the Veneto region.

According to the Gazzettino newspaper and subsequently via other Italian media, Vendrame was hit on the same side of his face that was injured in 2016 when a car cut across his path. He suffered deep cuts and scars after going through the car’s window and still has shards of glass in his neck four years after needing 60 internal stitches and 50 external stitches.

He was shocked by the latest incident.

“I was riding towards Conegliano to head into the hills at about 10 a.m. I was inside the white line when a car passed me really close at high speed. Then the driver suddenly hit the brakes, got out and threw a punch at me as I passed,” Vendrame said.

“I was caught by surprise but I managed to brake and so didn’t fall off. I also managed to get out my phone and take a photograph of the vehicle’s number plate after it did a U-turn and almost caused an accident,” the Italian continued.

“I then went to the ER unit of my local hospital to be treated by the doctor who followed me after my serious accident in 2016.

I’m going to go to the police to report the driver in the hope they can identify them,” he added.

Cyclingnews

Meet Youtube’s top creator of 2020

The North Carolina kid who cracked the online platform’s secret code

2

BusinessMirror DECEMBER 27, 2020 | soundstrip.businessmirror@gmail.com

YOUR MUSI

ENDING 2020 WITH A BANG

Ben & Ben, Darren Espanto, Moira, SB19, more to headline BYE2020

W

DARREN Espanto

Publisher

: T. Anthony C. Cabangon

Editor-In-Chief

: Lourdes M. Fernandez

Concept

: Aldwin M. Tolosa

Y2Z Editor

: Jt Nisay

SoundStrip Editor

: Edwin P. Sallan

Group Creative Director : Eduardo A. Davad Graphic Designers Contributing Writers

Columnists

: Niggel Figueroa Anabelle O. Flores : Tony M. Maghirang, Rick Olivares, Darwin Fernandez, Leony Garcia, Stephanie Joy Ching Pauline Joy M. Gutierrez : Kaye VillagomezLosorata Annie S. Alejo

Photographers

: Bernard P. Testa Nonie Reyes

By Stephanie Joy Ching

ITH 2020 drawing to a close, what better way to celebrate the year end than with a bang?

Enter Bye2020, dubbed as the biggest concert event of 2020 featuring then participation of several “Philippine record labels and musicians of all stripes.”

28 artists are slated to take part in this event with virtual performances designed to make the experience as immersive and enjoyable as possible. The lineup includes some of the biggest local and foreign acts including Ben&Ben, Darren Espanto, Moira, SB19, Matthaios, The Itchyworms, Leanne & Naara, Maximillian (DK), Peach Tree Rascals (US), Tate Mcrae (CA), Glaiza de Castro, Kean Cipriano, Lala Vizon, Zack Tabudlo, Keiko Necessario, Fern., Elha Nympha, Autotelic, Sud, Miguel Odron, VVS Collective, Ace Banzuelo, Paolo Sandejas, Earl Generao, FANA, TALA, J-Nine and Dia Mate.

Set to welcome the new year on various social media platforms on December 31, 2020 at 7pm, Bye2020 intends to be powerful statement that not only recognizes the small but impactful triumphs of the music community despite a very challenging year, but also honors the collective efforts of everyone in holding each other up during the pandemic.

The utmost goal is to bring together the Filipino people through music and inspiring them to help cope better in the face of adversity.

Although 2020 is a year that a

lot of people would rather forget due to the loss of lives, loss of loved ones and in the case of entertainers and everyone else involved in the industry, loss of jobs and income, many of these featured artists are nonetheless grateful that what is now referred to as the new normal has at least allowed them to create new music while stuck in quarantine.

“The first few months of quarantine were tough because I was also still in school, so I was swamped with school work also. But over the summer break, since I couldn’t go out with my friends or anything because of the lockdown, so I was kind of just cooped up in my room, and I had a lot of opportunities to write new songs. I think that was the most productive I have ever been in writing songs.” said singer-songwriter Paolo Sandejas.

However, nothing can match the adrenaline of performing, so many also had to adjust to doing online concerts and gigs to connect with audiences nationwide. For some artists, this event marks one of the first times in months that the band have just jammed in the same room together.

“It’s surreal, you wouldn’t think you’d miss playing with the band, but it’s exciting,” said Paolo.

Indeed, 2020 was a year where music kept most of us grounded in reality. Whether it be listening to your

PAOLO Sandejas

THE Itchyworms

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favorite artists as you work from home or trying out a new instrument, music kept many of us going despite the horrors 2020 presented.

As such, with the year finally ending, it only seems right to usher in a better year with the songs that made 2020 more bearable as a last hurrah before 2021.

“Sana bye-bye sa sunod sunod na bad news, sana man huwag maging 2020 2.0 yung 2021. Yun, we just want to say goodbye to the year 2020 and hopefully saying hello to a better 2021,” said Itchyworms’ lead guitarist Chino Singson.

Bye2020 is a six-hour continuous virtual event that will be streamed live on multiple platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and more on December 31, 2020, from 7pm onwards. It will also air on Sky Cable (Ch 955 HD and 155 SD).

For exclusive concert privileges such as access to zoom pits, backstage content with the artists, and limited-edition merch, visit ticket2me.net to get tickets.

BYE2020 is brought to you by Pepsi, Tinder, and Its More Fun in the Philippines, and is presented by MCA Music, Sony Music Philippines, Warner Music Philippines, O/C Records, Star Music, Universal Records, and Midas Records.

The virtual showcase is also copresented by Official Beer Partner, Heineken; Official Streaming Partners, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok; Official Music Partner, Spotify; Official Cable Partner, Sky Cable; in partnership with Viber; and Media Partners, CNN Philippines, Manila Concert Scene, We The Pvblic, UDoU PH, Wonder, Rank Magazine, Adobo Magazine, Starmometer, and Rakista.

IC

soundstrip.businessmirror@gmail.com | DECEMBER 27, 2020

3

BUSINESS

BETTER COLLABORATION Singapore’s Gentle Bones joins forces with Benjamin Kheng for chillin’ new single

GENTLE Bones

BENJAMIN Kheng

H

By Edwin P. Sallan

OT on the heels of his millionstreaming Mandarin debut single, “Don’t You Know Yet?,” the singersongwriter known as simply Gentle Bones has recently released two new songs, a solo pop track called “Put My Hands Up” and “Better With You,” a collaboration with fellow Singaporean Benjamin Kheng.

Recorded in the middle of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, “Better With You” is a song about a heartfelt conversation with a loved one amid uncertain times. Gentle Bones (born Joel Tan) describes the song as “a frank, thoughtful attempt at reaching out to people you love and letting them know that the people around them value and appreciate them and that life indeed is better when they are around.”

Bones added that while the pandemic has witnessed many people cope with many personal issues especially their mental health, it was still quite encouraging that even in their most depressed state, music has been the one thing they are still able to turn to.

“Better With You” is not the first time that the duo, respected solo acts in their own right, joined forces on a song. Being longtime pals, they are often seen interacting on social media. Back in 2014, the duo worked on their “first baby,” a song

called “Father Father” and a year later, shared the stage at a YouTube festival.

“Joel is obviously so much more assured of himself and a complete superstar in his own right. He knows what he wants and he’ll say it. Quietly, but he’ll still say it. He has such a keen eye for these things. He won’t accept this title, but to me he’s one of, if not the best pop writer we have in Singapore. But he wouldn’t let me call the project Gentle Beng,” Kheng quipped.

For his part, Bones says their latest collaboration, “Better With You” is even more special and was “quite a journey.”

“Much of the lyrics was inspired by how much Ben has inspired me in life. He is such a bright light in this world and every time I am reminded of my troubles with pursuing a career like music in this side of the world, I have the pillar of Benjamin’s strength in his own journey to seek comfort from,” the former shared.

Kheng, formerly of the acclaimed indie pop rock group, the Sam Willows, however, admits that he initially found the lyrics of “Better With You” to be “sounding cheesy.”

“But after the song was recorded and mixed, the finished product sounded great,” he enthused.

Characterized by the duo’s soothing vocals and chill, hiphop vibe, “Better With You” is a meaningful song that serves as the perfect bittersweet soundtrack for this rather unique Yuletide season that most people will be spending indoors at their homes.

Gentle Bones’ other new song, “Put My Hands Up” is an experimental dive into the hip-hop genre as it “denotes the light-hearted aspect of

GENTLE Bones and Benjamin Kheng

having an infatuation on a person, and is the written expression of the googly heart-eyes emoji.”

To date, he has released two solo tracks “dear me,” and “Why Do We” and four collaboration tracks with another talented Singaporean artiste: debut Mandarin track “Don’t You Know Yet?” with Tay Kewei, “Two Sides” with Charlie Lim, “Shouldn’t Have To Run” with Joie Tan and “Be Cool” with Gareth Fernandez.

Despite the pandemic, 2020 has been a very good year for Gentle Bones as he managed to release music that showcases not only his talents and versatility but also his ability to work well with other artists, regardless of genres. Hopefully, we will hear more from him in 2021.

Meet Youtube’s top creator of 2020

The North Carolina kid who cracked the online platform’s secret code

By Lucas Shaw & Mark Bergen

I

Bloomberg

n the fall of 2016, Jimmy Donaldson dropped out of college to try to solve one of the biggest mysteries in media: How exactly does a video go viral on YouTube?

Donaldson, then 18, had been posting to the site since he was 12 without amassing much of an audience. But he was convinced he was close to unlocking the secrets of YouTube’s algorithm, the black box of rules and processes that determines what videos get recommended to viewers.

In the months that followed, Donaldson and a handful of his friends tried to crack the code. They conducted daily phone calls to analyze what videos went viral. They gave one another YouTuberelated homework assignments, and they pestered successful channels for data about their most successful posts.

“I woke up, I studied YouTube, I studied videos, I studied filmmaking, I went to bed and that was my life,” Donaldson recalled during a recent interview.

Then, one day, he was struck with an idea for a video that he was sure would work. It was as simple as counting. Donaldson sat down in a chair and, for the next 40-plus hours, murmured one number after the next, starting from zero and continuing all the way to 100,000.

At the end of the exhausting stunt, he looked deliriously at the camera. “What am I doing with my life?” he said.

It was an oddly mesmerizing performance, the kind of thing every kid in elementary school thinks about but never tries. The resulting video—entitled “I COUNTED TO 100000!”—was a viral smash. Since its debut on January 8, 2017, it has earned over 21 million views.

Now counting millions

The video helped give rise to one of the unlikeliest success stories on YouTube.

Over the past four years, Donaldson’s channel, MrBeast, has amassed more than 48 million subscribers. In the last 28 days, people have spent more than 34 million hours watching his videos. On December 12, MrBeast was named Creator of the Year at the Streamy Awards, YouTube’s equivalent of the Oscars.

“Once you know how to make a video go viral, it’s just about how to get as many out as possible,” said Jimmy Donaldson, 22, aka “MrBeast,” who was named Creator of the Year at the Streamy Awards, YouTube’s equivalent of the Oscars.

The consistent success of MrBeast’s videos has gotten the attention of the YouTube establishment. Last year, every video he posted eclipsed 20 million views. Such consistency is unparalleled, even among YouTube’s biggest stars. “He lives on a different planet than the rest of the YouTube world,” said Casey Neistat, a filmmaker turned YouTuber.

Donaldson, now 22, has a baby face and a patchy goatee. He speaks with an aw-shucks modesty and doesn’t do many interviews. But the restraint quickly fades away when he starts talking about YouTube.

“Once you know how to make a video go viral, it’s just about how to get as many out as possible,” he said. “You can practically make unlimited money.”

“The videos take months of prep,” Donaldson added. “A lot of them take four to five days of relentless filming.

There’s a reason other people don’t do what I do.”

‘Double the effort isn’t double the views—it’s like 10x’

The success of the counting video taught him an important lesson. While many of his friends were interested in getting the most views with the least effort, he wanted to convey to the audience how hard he was working. His stunts grew more extravagant. He watched a

4 BusinessMirror

fellow YouTuber’s rap video on loop for 10 hours. He spent 24 hours in a prison, then an insane asylum, then a deserted island.

The views on his videos, which are YouTube’s primary currency, started to snowball. In his first six years on the site, he had generated just 6 million views. But at the age of 18, with his full attention on YouTube, he earned 122 million annual views. At 19, he attracted more than 460 million. He now generates 4 billion views a year.

“The beauty of YouTube is double the effort isn’t double the views, it’s like 10x,” he said. “The first million subscribers you get will take years, but the second will come in a few months.”

Over time, he deduced more of YouTube’s mysteries. Make a clip too long, no one watches or wants to watch another. Make one too short, people won’t linger. Use a bad thumbnail photo or title and no one will click. Donaldson typically makes videos that are between 10 minutes and 20 minutes long. He picks a concept that is easy to communicate in the title—“I Adopted EVERY Dog in a Dog Shelter”—and then uses the first 30 seconds to establish the stakes.

Donaldson denies having a true formula. The majority of his views don’t come from new clips, but from people who stumble on older footage that the site’s algorithm has recommended. His

December 27, 2020

real secret, he said, traces back to the video of him counting to 100,000. Viewers are attracted to displays of sheer willpower.

Donaldson now generates tens of millions of dollars in advertising sales from his social-media feeds, which include his main channel, a gaming channel and pages on other social-media sites. He invests almost every dollar back into his business. In recent years, his average cost of making a single video has climbed to $300,000 from $10,000.

“Money is a vehicle to do bigger videos and make better content,” he said.

To date, his priciest video cost $1.2 million. In it, he promised to give $1 million to the contestant who could keep his hand on a stack of cash for the longest period of time. In the end, he felt bad for the three people who didn’t get the $1 million, so he gave them some money too.

These days, many of his stunts have a philanthropic angle. He has given away money to homeless people, to his subscribers, to users of the popular video site Twitch, and to people he met on the street.

Life after YouTube

Reed Duchscher, Donaldson’s manager who has also worked with the YouTube standout Dude Perfect, is pushing the 22-year-old to invest his money in areas beyond YouTube, preparing for a life after streaming. On December 19, Donaldson announced a new venture called “Beast Burger.” He is partnering with more than 300 restaurants and kitchens across the country that will make burgers based on his instructions—a model known as ghost kitchens.

Over the weekend, the MrBeast Burger app soared in popularity. As of last week, it was the second most popular free app in the entire iOS store. Donaldson and Duchscher plan to double their footprint by the end of next year. Customers can order on delivery apps like Postmates or Grubhub.

A MrBeast consumer line is in the works, and Donaldson, an avid gamer, has also talked about wanting to own an eSports team. In just seven months, his side channel devoted to gaming has racked up more than 11 million subscribers.

Yet, try as he might, Donaldson can’t shake his primary obsession.

“I can’t envision a world where I’m not making YouTube videos,” he said.

“In a perfect world, I live and breathe this, working 12- to 15-hour days until I die.”

sunday, December 27, 2020

cover story

Melding, Rizal, Althists & Bare Bones page 6

page 8

Women artists lay bare inner being in dead layers

A Christmas Outreach from Winford Manila and PAGCOR

E-book Tales for a Rainy Season includes eleven short stories, available for download at Amazon Kindle Store and Kindle Unlimited.

BusinessMirror

Sunday, December 27, 2020 3

cover story

Melding, Rizal, Althists & Bare Bones

BY Korinna Pia A. Saavedra

T

Photo & images courtesy of Wincy Ong

he year is 1888 and Jose Rizal had made his way to London after visiting the United States.

He was to annotate Antonio de Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas (1609) after considering it “necessary to invoke the testimony of an illustrious Spaniard who governed the destinies of the Philippines in the beginning of her new era and witnessed the last moments of our ancient nationality.”

H i s a n not at ion s were meant to clarify and add details, to refute statements where necessa r y, a nd to confirm others as checked against other sources.

It was unclear how long he had been working on Sucesos, but it is said that he spent many a day poring over its pages and reading the old histories of his country, that is, aside from the many other books available on Philippine history. And between that and his many activities, he seemed to be enjoying himself in London. However, it was barely a year later when he decided to leave London for Paris in March of 1889, leaving behind Gettie Beckett with whom he had had a serious relationship, in order to pursue his mission.

The timing could not have been more coi nc ident a l .

Here is a well-travelled man with surgical knowledge, an intellectual and foreigner.

Enter speculation, speculative fiction and, to be more precise, alternate history.

I spoke to Wincy Ong, author of the recently published short story anthology, Tales for a Rainy Season, that carries The Opthalmologist’s Case, a story that takes on Rizal althist on an indie ride of his making.

So…Sherlock vs. Rizal?

“Sherlock has the lead; (he’s

got) home court advantage si nce it is h appen i ng i n London in 1887 and Rizal was interred in the British Library at the time.”

This was in answer to the question—what could happen if the story continued and we’re looking at Rizal and Sherlock butting heads as it were in this What If scenario?

It ’s R i za l w it hout t he whitewashing.

“Rizal was an illustrado, a coño of the time. He had the opportunity to travel. I was fascinated.… In terms of brains, who wou ld be smarter?”

There was also the similarity between the two characters in terms of intellectual acumen and, to contextualize the obra, perhaps even in arrogance.

“You know that Rizal wrote with biting sarcasm.”

Leaps of Faith Tales for a Rainy Season was a leap of faith, Ong says. “I had to push myself. My wife told me to write it because someone might beat you to it.

“Writing a horror story is tough. I have a day job. Truth be told, we’re living in a developing country and we can’t afford to be a full time writer, and you need a day job that pays the bills and then you have to have something that could save your soul.

Wincy Aquino Ong is a writer, musician, filmmaker, and podcaster.

If Ong were to meet with Ripperologists, what is the one question he would ask them?

“I don’t think Rizal did it. It’s fun to think about it, but I really don’t think so. I would ask—were there actual interviews by Scotland Yard?

Did they take in Rizal and interview him? And is there a transcript of that interview?

“During the time, Scotland Yard was interviewing suspects left and right, and the possibility of having Rizal taken in for questioning is intriguing.”

Ong’s thoughts and words Based on your work thus far (Tales for a Rainy Season, San Lazaro), you seem to be more drawn to working dark themes, thrillers, and the paranormal...

Is this a conscious choice?

O ng : Yes! I ’ve a lw ay s (loved) a good spooky story.

I grew up reading all things horror. And now with the Internet, I’m always on Reddit looking for the next great story hook or I’m always watching horror movie reviews on YouTube. It’s a great time to be a horror fan.

There’s always something about thrillers and the paranormal that I connect to on a visceral level. You know it’s an exciting read when one sentence after another hook you, and you want to reach the last

page to finally see the puzzle pieces fit together.

One thing I realized after finishing my book is that the horror that happens in your brain is when you start connecting the dots. That’s the time when you get the goosebumps.

Do you think it will always be this tone/genre for you?

It’s funny that you asked this because the two films I write and directed San Lazaro and Overtime were intended to be straight-up thrillers, but by accident, they ended up as horror-adjacent black comedies.

I think there’s always been a comedian inside me, and most of my readers have told me that some of the parts in my book make them laugh, which is quite strange for a horror anthology.

But yes, I can see myself writing science fiction, if not horror. But the horror genre has always been my first love.

The theory of “Rizal as Jack the Ripper” mentioned first in Ambeth Ocampo’s article/column—can you share what your initial reaction to this was?

It’s actually the first article that you’ll be reading on his seminal book, Rizal Without the Overcoat. And when I first saw the title, something about it grabbed me.

At sc hool , we’ve been

taught that Rizal was this hy per-patriotic, super-intellectual hero. But upon reading more about his life, he was a rather complex person. He was actually kind of an eccentric—a rather strange man.

I had to write something about his exploits in Europe when he studied there.

And hence, the idea of him meeting Sherlock Holmes in London struck me.

How important was research to The Opthalmologist’s Case?

I did a ton of research, but it didn’t feel like work at all. I’ve been a lifelong fan of Sherlock Holmes so I only needed to fact-check some details on the Internet. With the Rizal and the Jack the Ripper parts, it had to be intensive as there were lots of gaps in my knowledge.

But of course, I didn’t want historical accuracy to get in the way of a spooky detective story, so I took some liberties also.

All in all, it was like I got to know Sherlock, Watson and Rizal intimately. They’ve become my close friends in the three months that I wrote The Ophthalmologist’s Case.

Alternate History and Bare Bones The subgenre is not on its first ride in Asia, but its bare bones spea k to t he generations within which it has taken root. The Opthalmolog ist’s Case d a res readers to go outside their socmed box and discover history for what it is: questions that have been answered, its blanks looking for brilliant questions to own them.

And Tales for a Rainy Season? Pick it up, digest it well and laugh with us and, yes, support more local authors.

There is always something about finding a quiet corner, rain or not, and being absorbed into the plotlines of an intriguing train of thought, after all. Meld, while you’re at it—althist has planted its seeds in you.

Balakid

By Annie Concepcion

2x3ft Ballpoint and metal leaf of watercolor paper

The Void Becomes II

By Jan Sunday

27.5 x 19.6 inches Paper assemblage Aerosol on watercolor paper, photocopied meat on acid free paper, graphite and steel bolts

The Void Becomes III

By Jan Sunday

19.6 x 13.75 inches Paper assemblage Aerosol on watercolor paper, photocopied meat on acid free paper, graphite and steel bolts

Naghi-hinagpis

By Annie Concepcion

2x3ft Ballpoint, charcoal and metal leaf of watercolor paper

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Sunday, December 27, 2020 7

Women artists lay bare inner being in dead layers

R

By Carla Mortel Baricaua Photos courtesy of Robert Besana

ecently, four contemporary artists bared their souls in a concluded exhibit held in the heart of Makati.

Four women artists shared their unique inner thoughts and emotions culled from their respective circumstances amidst the challenges brought by current pandemic.

Four different voices stood out in unison to expose their being. Four disciples of the visual art boldly showed four different strokes in an interpretation of Dead Layer in a single show.

“Dead layer refers to a layer of paint after an underpainting, characterized by its gray, achromatic tones. At this stage, an artist doesn’t concern himself yet with capturing the color of the subject. The main concern is to establish the correct value of the darkness and lightness, and the full spectrum of grays in between. Figuratively, dead layer may be illustrated as what is true in our eyes, in terms of how light or dark reality is,” said Robert Besana, the exhibit curator and executive director of the Asia Pacific College’s School of Multimedia and Arts.

For Besana, Dead Layer is “a group show that aims to showcase works from four promising contemporary female artists, in reference to the exhibit’s premise. The curatorial challenge to the artists is for them to react on these two concepts, how deep they need to harrow until they arrived on what dead layer is for them.”

As progressive thinkers, Besana believes that “they represent their generation well, the topics/concerns they discuss.

Primarily what’s common to these artists is their use of monochrome tone in their works.

In my current practice in art, I’m interested in rediscovering

the classical methods of painting. Employing of the dead layer is certainly unique in classical art. We used and explored this technique as our key theme in this exhibit.”

Dead Layer show leads you in four directions in today’s contemporary art.

Erotica becomes her: artworks by Katarina Estrada

Dead layer exposed In March, Quezon City resident Jan Sunday was caught in a lockdown in Cebu while visiting her parents. Despite having no access to her art materials and her trusted camera, Sunday heeded the call to create wherever she may be, just like a true artist from two previous shows.

Fixating on the texture and patterns from the cemented floor, Sunday began to conceptualize her pieces while on laundry duty. Fascinated by the layering of grime, soot, paint and dirt on cemented pavements, dead layer for her came in concrete and abstract nature while utilizing watercolor, spray paint, oil pastel and graphite pencil. She also added scans of raw meat and infused them using an inkjet photocopier to complete her The Void Becomes series.

From her solo exhibition last year, Anne Concepcion continues to manifest her maternal love for children, may they be her own, or not. A tattoo artist by

as part of her healing process as she dealt with past traumas and toxic relationships. For Estrada, dead layer comes in figurative forms of erotica, where warm bodies turn cold and mortal.

Layers of relevance

Ivy Floresca’s cyberpunk in acrylic and in full view profession, she is meticulous to details and is quite comfortable creating images using ballpoint pens, even in a challenging dead layer technique. In Balakid, Concepcion raises her skepticism over her own daughter’s world under the community quarantine. Inside her home, she finds her daughter somehow easing her loneliness through gadgets and technology. In another work called Paghihinagpis, Concepcion drew a weeping child’s face burdened with trauma and worries,

a scene drawn from the recent bombing incident in Beirut.

Art also has been the coping mechanism of Ivy Floresca as she dealt with life in a pandemic. Inducing a meditative state to her being, she escapes into her own world in a spiritual realm. Recently, her acrylic creations have given way to her expressions of cyberpunk.

Known for the use of pen and ink, Katarina Estrada processes her pain and translates them on Korean Hanji paper. In the recent Art Fair, Estrada unveiled nudes,

Not a just an exhibition of the mastery of their skills, this quartet is also making a mark for themselves, as women artists, through Dead Layer.

“I’m proud that I was able to put them together in one show because these are thinking artists. It’s important for curators to be proud of what they hang on the walls of the gallery. When you see these like-minded women artists work together they create a more solid statement, in effect, makes them to be more relevant in the contemporary art scene,” concluded Besana.

The Dead Layer exhibit was staged from November 27 to December 11 at the White Walls Gallery in Makati City.

BusinessMirror

8 Sunday, December 27, 2020

A Christmas Outreach from Winford Manila and PAGCOR

C

hristmas and the holiday season are not quite the same this year.

Instead of the familiar sense of togetherness at family gatherings, there were fewer hugs and more space between loved ones in this era of social distancing.

Beautifully wrapped presents under the Christmas tree might be less abundant and, for some, a vacation to popular destinations had to be postponed until further notice.

Despite this new reality, however, there is still much to be thankful for. While 2020 has given the world a fair share of downs, we find comfort in the knowledge that the fast-approaching New Year heralds the arrival of a fresh start and an opportunity for us to continue to do our part in curbing the spread of Covid-19.

Although nobody has been spared by this global pandemic, the less fortunate members of society have it worse than others. The hardships they were once accustomed to before the health crisis crippled the economy have only become more challenging, with their livelihood completely compromised and employment opportunities as scarce as ever before.

Recognizing the dire situation, luxury hotel Winford Manila Resort and Casino, in partnership with the Philippine Amusement & Gaming Corporation (PAGCOR), was just one of the countless companies in the country that embarked on Christmas community outreach programs to lend a helping hand to those in need.

Dubbed Paskong Pasasalamat mula sa PAGCOR at WINFORD MANILA, the fourth edition of the corporate social responsibility initiative in as many years pushed through on December 10. The joint effort is an annual Christmas giftgiving and meal-sharing activity, with beneficiaries being indigent residents of neighboring barangays in Sta. Cruz, Manila, where Winford is located.

PAGCOR GM Jethro Chancoco (from left), PAGCOR Chairman Andrea Domingo, Winford President and COO Jeff Evora and PAGCOR AVP for Corporate Communications Carmelita Valdez.

Winford President & Chief Operating Officer Jeff Evora delivers his welcome remarks Each beneficiary was identified and selected by their barangay captains, with whom both proponents have maintained a close and healthy relationship since the luxury casino hotel opened its doors to the public in 2017.

Present during the morning activity were Winford Manila President & Chief Operating Officer Jeff Evora; PAGCOR Chairman & Chief Executive Officer Andrea Domingo; and PAGCOR Branch Manager Jethro Chancoco.

“Paskong Pasasalamat has been Winford Manila Resort & Casino and PAGCOR’s annual Christmas outreach program since 2017. It is our way of giving back to the local community who has welcomed us here in Sta. Cruz, Manila, ever since we opened our doors almost four years ago. Winford Manila would not be where it

Winford President and COO Jeff Evora (from left), PAGCOR Chairman Andrea Domingo and PAGCOR GM Jethro Chancoco during the gift giving activity is today if not for their continuous support,” said Evora.

“In the spirit of the Christmas season, we invited 150 residents from a chosen barangay for our Paskong Pasasalamat gift-giving activity. Although we would have liked to spread Christmas cheer to a larger number of beneficiaries, we thought it prudent to keep it smaller than previous years for everyone’s health and safety, while also complying with social distancing guidelines mandated

by the government.”

Last year, on its third edition, Paskong Pasasalamat mula sa PAGCOR at Winford Manila helped brighten the holidays for an estimated 500 beneficiaries, a substantial increase from the previous year. Both Winford and PAGCOR had hoped to steadily grow the event this year and top last year’s edition that saw attendees being serenaded by Christmas carollers as they received gift hampers and treated to hearty meals.

Despite the growth of Paskong Pasasalamat being stunted this year due to the pandemic, Evora and the team are satisfied with this year’s offering and remain optimistic that things will get back on track in the New Year.

“We pray that we overcome this crisis in 2021 so that we may all return to life as we know it and hope that this year’s Paskong Pasasalamat helped brighten the holiday season for our beneficiaries and their loved ones.”