BusinessMirror January 05, 2025 by BusinessMirror

COVID AT 5

Breakthroughs, losses, dangling questions

By Lauran Neergaard, Laura Ungar & Mike Stobbe

The Associated Press

FIVE years ago, a cluster of people in Wuhan, China, fell sick with a virus never before seen in the world. The germ didn’t have a name, nor did the illness it would cause. It wound up setting off a pandemic that exposed deep inequities in the global health system and reshaped public opinion about how to control deadly emerging viruses.

The virus is still with us, though humanity has built up immunity through vaccinations and infections. It’s less deadly than it was in the pandemic’s early days and it no longer tops the list of leading causes of death. But the virus is evolving, meaning scientists must track it closely.

Where did the SARS-CoV-2 virus come from?

WE don’t know. Scientists think the most likely scenario is that it circulated in bats, like many coronaviruses. They think it then infected another species, probably raccoon dogs, civet cats or bamboo rats, which in turn infected humans handling or butchering those animals at a market in Wuhan, where the first human cases appeared in late November 2019. Th at’s a known pathway for disease transmission and likely triggered the first epidemic of a similar virus, known as SARS. But this theory has not been proven for the virus that causes COVID-19. Wuhan is home to several research labs involved in collecting and studying coronaviruses, fueling debate over whether the virus instead may have leaked from one. It’s a difficult scientific puzzle to crack in the best of circumstances. The effort has been made even more challenging by political snip -

ing around the virus’ origins and by what international researchers say are moves by China to withhold evidence that could help.

The true origin of the pandemic may not be known for many years—if ever.

How many people died from COVID-19?

PROBABLY more than 20 million. The World Health Organization has said member countries reported more than 7 million deaths from COVID-19 but the true death toll is estimated to be at least three times higher.

In the US, an average of about 900 people a week have died of COVID-19 over the past year, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The coronavirus continues to affect older adults the most. Last winter in the US, people age 75 and older accounted for about half the nation’s COVID-19 hospitalizations and in-hospital deaths, according to the CDC.

“ We cannot talk about COVID in the past, since it’s still with us,” WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. What vaccines were made available?

SCIENTISTS and vaccine-makers broke speed records developing COVID-19 vaccines that have

saved tens of millions of lives worldwide—and were the critical step to getting life back to normal.

L ess than a year after China identified the virus, health authorities in the US and Britain cleared vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna. Years of earlier research—including Nobel-winning discoveries that were key to making the new technology work—gave a head start for so-called mRNA vaccines.

Today, there’s also a more traditional vaccine made by Novavax, and some countries have tried additional options.

Rollout to poorer countries was slow but the WHO estimates more than 13 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered globally since 2021.

The vaccines aren’t perfect. They do a good job of preventing severe disease, hospitalization and death, and have proven very safe, with only rare serious side effects. But protection against milder infection begins to wane after a few months.

Like flu vaccines, COVID-19 shots must be updated regularly to match the ever-evolving virus—contributing to public frustration at the need for repeated vaccinations. Efforts to develop next-generation vaccines are underway, such as nasal vaccines that researchers hope might do a better job of blocking infection.

Which variant is dominating now?

GENETIC changes called mutations happen as viruses make copies of themselves. And this virus has proven to be no different. Scientists named these variants after Greek letters: alpha, beta, gamma, delta and omicron. Delta, which became dominant in the US in June 2021, raised a lot of concerns because it was twice as likely to lead to hospitalization as the first version of the virus.

Then in late November 2021, a new variant came on the scene: omicron.

It spread very rapidly,” dominating within weeks, said Dr. Wesley Long, a pathologist at Houston Methodist in Texas. “It drove a huge spike in cases compared to anything we had seen previously.”

But on average, the WHO said, it caused less severe disease than delta. Scientists believe that may be partly because immunity had been building due to vaccination and infections.

“Ever since then, we just sort of keep seeing these different subvariants of omicron accumulating more different mutations,” Long said. “Right now, everything seems to lock on this omicron branch of the tree.”

The omicron relative now dominant in the US is called XEC, which accounted for 45 percent of variants circulating nationally in

the two-week period ending December 21, the CDC said. Existing COVID-19 medications and the latest vaccine booster should be effective against it, Long said, since “it’s really sort of a remixing of variants already circulating.”

What do we know about long COVID?

MILLIONS of people remain in limbo with a sometimes disabling, often invisible, legacy of the pandemic called long COVID. It can take several weeks to bounce back after a bout of COVID-19, but some people develop more persistent problems. The symptoms that last at least three months, sometimes for years, include fatigue, cognitive trouble known as “brain fog,” pain and cardiovascular problems, among others.

Doctors don’t know why only some people get long COVID. It can happen even after a mild case and at any age, although rates have declined since the pandemic’s early years. Studies show vaccination can lower the risk. It also isn’t clear what causes long COVID, which complicates the search for treatments. One important clue: Increasingly researchers are discovering that remnants of the coronavirus can persist in some patients’ bodies long after their initial infection, although that can’t explain all cases.

CEMETERY workers in protective gear bury a person alongside rows of freshly dug graves at the Vila Formosa cemetery in São Paulo, Brazil, April 1, 2020. AP/ANDRE PENNER

In 2024, artificial intelligence was all about putting AI tools to work

By Matt O’Brien & Sarah Parvini The Associated Press

IF 2023 was a year of wonder about artificial intelligence, 2024 was the year to try to get that wonder to do something useful without breaking the bank.

There was a “shift from putting out models to actually building products,” said Arvind Narayanan, a Princeton University computer science professor and co-author of the new book AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell The Difference.

The first 100 million or so people who experimented with ChatGPT upon its release two years ago actively sought out the chatbot, finding it amazingly helpful at some tasks or laughably mediocre at others.

Now such generative AI technology is baked into an increasing number of technology services whether we’re looking for it or not—for instance, through the AI-generated answers in Google search results or new AI techniques in photo editing tools.

“ The main thing that was wrong with generative AI last year

is that companies were releasing these really powerful models without a concrete way for people to make use of them,” said Narayanan. “What we’re seeing this year is gradually building out these products that can take advantage of those capabilities and do useful things for people.”

A t the same time, since Open A I released GPT-4 in March 2023 and competitors introduced similarly performing AI large language models, these models have stopped getting significantly “bigger and qualitatively better,” resetting overblown expectations that AI was racing every few months to some kind of betterthan-human intelligence, Narayanan said. That’s also meant that the public discourse has shifted from “is AI going to kill us?” to treating it like a normal technology, he said.

AI’s sticker shock ON quarterly earnings calls this year, tech executives often heard questions from Wall Street analysts looking for assurances of future payoffs from huge spending on AI research and development. Building AI systems behind generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini requires investing in energy-hungry computing systems running on powerful and expensive AI chips. They require so much electricity that tech giants announced deals this year to tap into nuclear power to help run them.

“ We’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars of capital that has been poured into this technology,” said Goldman Sachs analyst Kash Rangan.

Another analyst at the New York investment bank drew attention over the summer by arguing AI isn’t solving the complex problems that would justify its costs. He also questioned whether AI models, even as they’re being trained on much of the written and visual data produced over the course of human history, will ever be able to do what humans do so well. Rangan has a more optimistic view.

We had this fascination that this technology is just going to be absolutely revolutionary, which it has not been in the two years since the introduction of ChatGPT,” Rangan said.

It’s more expensive than we thought and it’s not as productive as we thought.”

R angan, however, is still bullish about its potential and says that AI tools are already proving “absolutely incrementally more productive” in sales, design and a number of other professions.

AI and your job

SOME workers wonder whether AI tools will be used to supplement their work or to replace them as the technology continues to grow.

The tech company Borderless AI has been using an AI chatbot from Cohere to write up employment contracts for workers in Turkey or India without the help of outside lawyers or translators.

Video game performers with the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists who went on strike in July said they feared AI could reduce or eliminate job opportunities be -

cause it could be used to replicate one performance into a number of other movements without their consent. Concerns about how movie studios will use AI helped fuel last year’s film and television strikes by the union, which lasted four months. Game companies have also signed side agreements with the union that codify certain AI protections in order to keep working with actors during the strike.

Musicians and authors have voiced similar concerns over AI scraping their voices and books. But generative AI still can’t create unique work or “completely new things,” said Walid Saad, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and AI expert at Virginia Tech. We can train it with more data so it has more information. But having more information doesn’t mean you’re more creative,” he said. “As humans, we understand the world around us, right? We understand the physics. You understand if you throw a ball on the ground, it’s going to bounce. AI tools currently don’t understand the world.”

Saad pointed to a meme about AI as an example of that shortcoming. When someone prompted an AI engine to create an image of salmon swimming in a river, he said, the AI created a photo of a river with cut pieces of salmon found in grocery stores.

What AI lacks today is the common sense that humans have, and I think that is the next step,” he said.

An ‘agentic future’ THAT type of reasoning is a key part of the process of making AI tools more useful to consumers, said Vijoy Pandey, senior vice president of Cisco’s innovation and incubation arm, Outshift. AI developers are increasingly pitching the next wave of generative AI chatbots as AI “agents” that can do more useful things on people’s behalf.

Th at could mean being able to ask an AI agent an ambiguous question and have the model able to reason and plan out steps to solving an ambitious problem, Pandey said. A lot of technology, he said, is going to move in that direction in 2025. Pandey predicts that eventu-

ally, AI agents will be able to come together and perform a job the way multiple people come together and solve a problem as a team rather than simply accomplishing tasks as individual AI tools. The AI agents of the future will work as an ensemble, he said. Future Bitcoin software, for example, will likely rely on the use of AI software agents, Pandey said. Those agents will each have a specialty, he said, with “agents that check for correctness, agents that check for security, agents that check for scale.”

“ We’re getting to an agentic future,” he said. “You’re going to have all these agents being very good at certain skills, but also have a little bit of a character or color to them, because that’s how we operate.”

AI makes gains in medicine AI tools have also streamlined, or lent in some cases a literal helping hand, to the medical field. This year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry— one of two Nobels awarded to AIrelated science—went to work led by Google that could help discover new medicines.

Saad, the Virginia Tech professor, said that AI has helped bring faster diagnostics by quickly giving doctors a starting point to launch from when determining a patient’s care. AI can’t detect disease, he said, but it can quickly digest data and point out potential problem areas for a real doctor to investigate. As with other arenas, however, it poses a risk of perpetuating falsehoods.

Tech giant OpenAI has touted its AI-powered transcription tool Whisper as having near “human level robustness and accuracy,” for example. But experts have said that Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences.

Pandey, of Cisco, said that some of the company’s customers who work in pharmaceuticals have noted that AI has helped bridge the divide between “wet labs,” in which humans conduct physical experiments and research, and “dry labs” where people analyze data and often use computers for modeling. W hen it comes to pharmaceutical development, that collaborative process can take several years, he said—with AI, the process can be cut to a few days.

“ That, to me, has been the most dramatic use,” Pandey said.

Adoptive parents haunted by revelations of systemic fraud in Korea’s baby pipeline

By Claire Galofaro & Kim Tong-Hyung

The Associated Press

HER greatest fear, dormant for decades, came rushing back in an instant: had she adopted and raised a kidnapped child?

Peg Reif’s daughter, adopted from South Korea in the 1980s, had sent her a link to a documentary detailing how the system that made their family was rife with fraud: documents falsified, babies switched, children snatched off the street and sent abroad.

Reif wept.

She was among more than 120 who contacted The Associated Press this fall, after a series of stories and a documentary made with Frontline exposed how Korea created a baby pipeline, designed to ship children abroad as quickly as possible to meet Western demand. The reporting shook adoption communities around the world with details about how agencies competed for babies—pressuring mothers, bribing hospitals, and fabricating documents. Most who wrote were adoptees, but some were adoptive parents like Reif, horrified to learn they had supported this system.

“I can’t stand the thought that somebody lost their child,” Reif said. “I can’t stop thinking about it. I don’t know how to make it right. I don’t know if I can.”

Forty years ago, she was struggling with infertility. She and her husband pinned their dreams for a family on adopting a baby from Mexico, paid an agency thousands of dollars and waited for months. Then the agency’s directors were arrested, and they learned that those Mexican babies had been taken from their families against their will. Reif was heartbroken, but recalls even now looking at her husband and saying: “thank God we don’t have a child who was stolen.”

But now she isn’t sure of that.

Because then they adopted two Korean children, and brought them to their home in rural Wisconsin, first a son and then a daughter. The two were not biological siblings, but both arrived with strangely similar stories in their files: their young unmarried mothers worked in factories with fathers who disappeared after they got pregnant.

Back then, Reif still believed the common narrative about foreign adoption: it saved children who might otherwise live the rest of their lives in an orphanage, die or be damned to poverty.

“I don’t believe that anymore,” Reif said. “I don’t know what to believe.”

Cameron Lee Small, a therapist in Minneapolis whose practice caters to adoptees and their families, said many are feeling an intense sense of betrayal. Individual adoptees had long shared stories of falsified identities. But the revelations this year pointed to systemwide practices that routinely changed babies’ origin stories to process adoptions quickly, including listing them as “abandoned” even when they had known parents.

Small, who was also adopted from Korea in the 1980s, summarized what he’s been hearing from adoptees: “I’m kind of back to nothing. What do I believe now? Who can I believe?”

Reif’s daughter, Jenn Hamilton, spent her life thinking she was unwanted, often quipping: “that’s what happens when you’re found in a dumpster as a baby.”

It has taken a toll on her all her life: She’s been happily married for 9 years, she said, but she has this insatiable insecurity: “I constantly find myself asking my husband, ‘are you mad at me? Did I do something wrong?’ Do you want to leave me?’”

She has no idea anymore if abandonment was ever really her story, with revelations of abuses so systemic that even the Korean government likened it to “trafficking.”

“You can’t make that many mistakes. It has to be intentional. It was this huge tree of deception,” she said. “I feel disgusted.”

Holt International, the USbased agency that pioneered adoptions from Korea, did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story.

Reform is sweeping across Europe—countries have launched investigations, halted foreign adoptions and apologized to adoptees for failing to protect them. But the United States, which has taken in the most adopted children by far, has not done a review of its own history or culpability.

The US State Department told AP this summer that it would work with its historian to piece together its history, and detailed initial findings that some documents might have been falsified. But it said there was no evidence that US officials were aware of it. The State Department has since said that it has “been unable to identify any records that could provide insight into the US government role in adoptions from South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s.”

Korea’s National Police Agency confirmed an increase in adoptees registering their DNA for family searches—both at domestic police stations and diplomatic offices across North America and Europe—in the weeks following the release of the AP stories and documentary in September. More than 120 adoptees registered their DNA in October and November, compared to an average of less than 30 a month from January to August.

Korea’s government has maintained that adoptions were a necessary tool to care for needy children, including babies of unwed mothers or other children deemed as abandoned. However, Korea’s Ministry of Health and Welfare acknowledged to AP that the adoption boom in the 1970s and 80s was possibly fueled by a desire to reduce welfare costs.

Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been investigating government accountability over foreign adoption problems since 2022, prompted by complaints filed by hundreds of adoptees, and is expected to release an interim report in February. The Commission has posted the AP stories on its website.

A law passed in 2023 mandates that all adoption records be transferred from private agencies to a government department called the National Center for the Rights of the Child by July, to centralize the handling of family search requests. The center has confirmed that private agencies hold about 170,000 adoption files, but director Chung Ick-Joong doubts it will acquire a space to store and

manage all these records in time, due to financial constraints and other challenges. The agency expects family search requests to increase dramatically – “possibly by 10-fold,” according to Chung— yet has funding to add only five staff members to its team of six searchers.

Chung acknowledged that flaws in adoption laws had persisted for decades, and Korea only required adoptions to go through courts and birth records to be preserved after 2012.

“It’s difficult to determine who was responsible for the inaccuracies in records before then,” he said. “The adoption agency might have been at fault, the biological parents may have lied, or something might have gone wrong at the orphanage…..no one truly knows what the truth is.”

Korean adoption agencies have mostly declined AP’s requests for comment in recent months, often citing privacy concerns.

Advocates insist that most adoptive families thrive, with both the parents and children happily living their lives without questioning the industry as Reif and Hamilton have.

Hamilton grew up in a rural, almost exclusively white community in Wisconsin, and back then all she wanted was to be accepted. But having children of her own changed that. When her first child was born, she looked at him, and it took her breath away.

“It can’t explain it, like this is the first person I know in my life that I’m biologically related to,” she said.

She wanted to learn her own history, so her children could know theirs. She wrote a letter to her adoption agency, which within weeks connected her with a woman they said was her mother. It was emotional, shocking.

But soon she felt like she had more questions than answers.

The woman’s name didn’t match the one listed on paperwork, and the name she gave for the father was also different. Birthdates didn’t match, the birthplace didn’t either. They had not met in a factory, she said, they had been pen pals.

Hamilton asked the woman to take a DNA test, but she said she didn’t know how to access one.

Hamilton came to believe this woman was not her birth mother.

The AP’s reporting found numerous cases where agencies connected adoptees with supposed birth families, only for them to

later discover after emotional meetings that they weren’t related at all.

Hamilton has been trying to untangle the DNA results on her

father’s side, contacting people distantly related, cousins once removed, half great aunts.

“It becomes an obsession,” Hamilton said. “It’s like a puzzle that you start, and you have to find the missing pieces.”

Lynelle Long, the founder of InterCountry Adoptee Voices, the largest organization of adoptees in the world, said governments at the very least need to legally mandate that agencies provide adoptees with their full and redacted documents, without the payment now often required.

Long said parents like Reif have an important role, because in Western countries, laws always favored the desires of adoptive parents—designed to make adoptions quicker and easier. Many clung to the narrative that they saved needy orphans who should be grateful, she said, especially in the US, where the reckoning rocking Europe has not taken hold.

“We really need adoptive parents in the United States, if they have any inkling of guilt or shame

or loss, to step up, take responsibility and demand that legislation be put in place to criminalize these practices and prevent it from ever happening again,” Long said.

Hamilton is close to her parents; she just renovated the basement to accommodate their visits.

She’s sad for herself, she said, but she’s sadder for her mother, who is desperate to learn if her children actually had parents somewhere, searching for them.

“And I’m like, ‘why, so you can send us back?” Hamilton said. “I don’t want to be a victim.”

She said she’s glad she was adopted, and does not long for that different, alternative life in Korea. Reif loves her children profoundly, she said. But she doesn’t think she would adopt from abroad again, if she’d known then what she knows now.

“I’d rather be childless than think I have somebody else’s child that didn’t want to give them up,” she said. “I think of somebody taking my child. Those poor families, I just can’t imagine it.”

PEG REIF holds pictures of her children adopted from South Korea in the 1980s in her home on

December 17, 2024 in Platteville, Wis. AP/MORRY GASH

Mar-a-Lago: The ‘center of the universe’ where Trump meets with world leaders and celebrities

By Adriana Gomez Licon & Michelle L. Price

The Associated Press

PALM BEACH, Fla.—The cars begin lining up early in the morning to be screened by Secret Service agents under white tents near the fence that surrounds President-elect Donald Trump’s vast south Florida estate.

Famous figures such as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Tesla and X owner Elon Musk pop up at breakfasts, luncheons and other social gatherings held daily at the opulent Mar-a-Lago club.

Over the weekend, Mike Love, one of the original members of the Beach Boys, performed the band’s greatest hits under an outdoor tent there as Trump, trailed by Secret Service agents, wandered through the crowd, swinging his fists to the music, according to videos posted online. At other parts of the evening, he stood next to his wife, Melania, near the pool, bobbing his head to the music.

The resort is the “Center of the Universe,” Trump declared on social media Friday, adding, “Bill Gates asked to come, tonight.” Representatives for Trump and Gates didn’t clarify if the Microsoft co-founder did indeed join the parade of figures making the trip to Mar-a-Lago.

But the president-elect’s post reflects the way his resort, where he’s largely been holed up since the election, has become a salon and celebration for his movement.

For the people he’s selected for his administration—and those who seek to get jobs or curry favor with the incoming president—it’s the place to be.

Sightings of those turning up there, usually in photos posted online or in the occasional public event, offer a glimpse into the workings of Trump’s incoming White House and how he is setting priorities for office. They are also renewing concerns about transparency as the meetings are largely shrouded in secrecy, and raising questions about how Trump benefits financially as club members seeking to influence the new administration stay and eat there.

“It’s kind of unreal,” said James Fishback, an investor who has in recent days launched an investment fund in the club’s tea room and dined at the courtyard. “This is the power center.”

He recalled standing by the pasta table exchanging words with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Trump has chosen to lead the Health Department. The winter holidays have been another occasion for Trump’s celebrations and for big names to

come visit.

A representative for Zuckerberg confirmed he joined Trump for a dinner the night before Thanksgiving. A Christmas Eve video showed Trump in one of the resort’s ballrooms full of guests, dancing to one of his favorite songs, the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.,” while his daughter Ivanka sat in a gilded chair nearby.

The club held a New Year’s Eve bash Tuesday night that featured Trump, who spoke briefly to reporters near a red carpet rolled out for the occasion. He appeared briefly onstage addressing revelers, who included Love and many of his choices for Cabinet and other posts in his upcoming administration.

Trump said he thought 2025 would be a “great year” and “we’re going to do fantastically well as a country.”

During dinners with friends and family, Trump uses the Spotify account on his tablet to play many of the same tunes that were ubiquitous at his campaign rallies. One night, his guest of honor was Sara Netanyahu, the wife of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Another night, the honor went to Akie Abe, the widow of slain Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. And, yes, that was Argentine President Javier Milei doing Trump’s “Y.M.C.A.” dance between the tables at a gala dinner.

During the day, Trump often golfs at his nearby course with friends, relatives and allies, like Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

Overall, the vibe is a mix of south Florida’s monied social scene overlaid with the power dynamics of an executive job fair.

“He’s surrounded by a lot of old friends,” Graham said. “I just know that everybody I know wants

some job.”

Musk has been a constant presence at the club, so much so that Trump’s granddaughter, Kai, wrote on X that he was “achieving uncle status.” Trump has tasked Musk and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy with leading the Department of Government Efficiency, a nongovernmental task force formed to find ways to fire federal workers, cut programs and slash federal regulations.

Kevin Roberts, president of the think tank behind Project 2025, spoke at a December event with investors at the club. One of the guests at the small function was health care executive Dr. Peter Lamelas, later tapped by Trump to be US ambassador to Argentina.

Sometimes Trump relaxes for dinner alongside club members and guests under the yellow and white awnings in the courtyard. Other times, he will address large groups for black-tie events in the ballrooms. At a recent gala for a nonprofit led by Lt. Gen Michael Flynn, the song “God Bless the

U.S.A.,” a favorite of Trump’s, cued the president-elect’s entrance.

“We’re off to a really good start,” Trump told people gathered for the event. He then inquired about the whereabouts of Tom Homan, whom he has tapped to be border czar, and joked that Homan was from “central casting.”

“Just relax, Tom. I want you to relax and get ready for the big push,” Trump said.

Trump shared with the party guests that Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, whom he threatened with a 25 percent tariff on all imported goods unless she does more to tackle illegal border crossings and drug flows, “has made progress.”

At another recent event at Mar-a-Lago, this one hosted by the America First Policy Institute, the ballroom was full of recognizable Trump-world figures such as Kellyanne Conway, who served as counselor to the president, and Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist and founder of Turning Point Action. A copy

of the president-elect’s latest book was sitting on the chairs for guests as they arrived in gowns and tuxedos.

As he entered the ballroom, Musk was swarmed by guests, including Kash Patel, whom Trump would later select to lead the FBI, before the tech billionaire took his seat at the center table of the ballroom. Musk was later joined there by Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance.

“It’s the place to be and the place to be seen,” said Damian Merlo, a political strategist who advises the Salvadoran president, Nayib Bukele. Merlo was at that event as well as another event hosted by the Conservative Political Action Committee.

At a news conference Trump held recently at Mar-a-Lago, the president-elect noted the changed mood compared with his first term, saying, “Everybody wants to be my friend.”

Besides Zuckerberg, Trump has hosted other Silicon Valley executives, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

“The top executives, the top bankers, they’re all calling,” Trump said. “It’s like a complete opposite.” Actor Russell Brand traveled this month to the club to speak at an event, where he sat with actor Mel Gibson, former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson and others. Later in the evening, he stood by a palm tree on the lawn, listening to a bagpiper in a kilt. Brand later posted a video to X about his experience.

“Pretty amazing,” he said. “Is this real life, or am I in a dream?”

The Associated Press writer Mary Claire Jalonick in Washington contributed to this report.

Tragic fireworks blast prompts calls for stronger enforcement in Hawaii

By Audrey Mcavoy, Jennifer Sinco Kelleher & Gene Johnson

The Associated Press

HONOLULU—In recent years, occasions large and small—parties, Super Bowls, mixed-martial arts fights, even Thanksgiving—have provided a reason for residents across Hawaii to set off illegal fireworks. The increasingly sophisticated displays, loved by some and loathed by others, are so prevalent that some people consider them part of the state’s culture. They have rattled neighborhoods of tightly packed houses, started fires, terrorized pets and knocked a light fixture off the ceiling of an Associated Press reporter’s home, where it narrowly missed a child and shattered on the floor.

Each New Year’s Day, Honolulu officials publish a list of fireworks casualties from the night before, typically a litany of burns, shrapnel wounds or amputations. Sometimes there are deaths.

But none of the damage has matched Tuesday night’s tragedy, when a lit bundle of mortar-style aerials tipped over and shot into crates of unlit fireworks, causing a rapid-fire series of blasts that killed three women and injured more than 20 people, including children. Another person was killed in an unrelated fireworks explosion on Oahu.

Authorities and residents alike are now wondering whether the

toll will dissuade people from putting on such shows in the future, or whether it will prompt more effective efforts by police to crack down.

“This incident is a painful reminder of the danger posed by illegal fireworks,” Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi told a news conference. “They put lives at risk, they drain our first responders and they disrupt our neighborhoods.”

Efforts to crack down on contraband fireworks have had limited effect. In 2023, lawmakers created an illegal fireworks task force. Based on the ease with which it seized fireworks, including three shipping containers in its first few months in operation, the state Department of Law Enforcement concluded illegal fireworks are likely smuggled into Hawaii on a daily basis.

The task force has seized 227,000 pounds (about 103,000 kilograms) of fireworks in all, according to Gov. Josh Green. And yet, the Honolulu Fire Department reported Thursday that there were 30 fireworks-related blazes between Tuesday and Wednesday, a 30% increase from last New Year’s celebrations.

Rep. Gregg Takayama, who sponsored legislation passed last year to tighten fireworks controls, said he remembers setting them off when he was younger and agrees it’s a tradition for many.

But the ones he played with, including Roman candles, pale in comparison to those on the black market today.

“The kind of aerial fireworks that are being used now are really explosive bombs,” he said. “And so the danger is magnified.”

Charmaine Doran, the vicechair of the neighborhood board in Pearl City, northwest of Honolulu, called the notion that fireworks are part of Hawaii culture a misconception: “They have been outlawed for all of my life ... and I’m pretty old.”

In her neighborhood, the fireworks ramp up after Halloween,

exploding in the middle of the night until New Year’s. Doran said she can tell if there is a big mixed martial arts fight on TV because the booms begin earlier in the day. Enforcement is complicated because people are reluctant to report their neighbors on a small island where “we’re related to everybody, everybody knows everybody,” Doran said. People fear retribution, she added: “If I dial 911, they’re going to egg my house.”

That was the theme of some testimony to the Legislature last January. Beverly Takushi, a Pearl City resident, described once being threated by a neighbor when she told his brother to stop launching illegal fireworks in a show that lasted from 5:30 p.m. on New Year’s Eve until after midnight.

“It was the first time I was threatened not only by the danger of the aerial fireworks to my family and property, but also for my safety from this neighbor who accused me of not respecting his culture,” Takushi said. “He has since apologized, but this is the reason why no one wants to get involved and report their neighbors setting off bombs and aerials.”

Many historians believe fireworks were invented in China more than 2,000 years ago and their use came to signify joy and prosperity, as well as warding off evil. In Hawaii they are celebrated not just by residents of Chinese descent but all across the state’s diverse communities.

Takushi echoed Takayama’s point about the big difference between today’s large, professionalgrade fireworks and the smaller ones of yesteryear.

“A string of firecrackers at midnight to ward off bad spirits is cultural, not loud explosives that sound like you are in the middle of a war,” Takushi said.

Richard Oshiro, secretary of the neighborhood board for Waipahu, known as one of Oahu’s hotspots for aerial displays, said he hopes

this week’s deaths will spur a change of mentality about playing with explosives.

He said he tries to report them whenever he can, even though he knows there is not much police can do if “they can’t catch people in the act.”

Possession of over 50 pounds (about 23 kilograms) of aerial or other illegal fireworks in Hawaii is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Takayama noted the law now allows photographs and videos of fireworks to be submitted as evidence in court, but said prosecutions still face hurdles.

“We already have laws on the books. We need to find better ways to enforce them,” he said. “I mean we constantly hear about people who report on their neighbors using illegal aerials, but nothing is done about it.”

The best way to control fireworks is to stop them at Hawaii’s ports, Takayama said. Law enforcement has intelligence about which shipments contain illegal fireworks and US authorities have the power to open suspicious cargo. The task force has made seizures but needs to do more, he said.

“We need to find ways to restrict the amount of fireworks that are coming in, because once they arrive and once they’re in the community, it’s very difficult to track them down,” Takayama said.

Johnson reported from Seattle.

MELANIA TRUMP looks on as President-elect Donald Trump arrives for a New Year’s Eve party at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, December 31, 2024, in Palm Beach, Fla. AP/EVAN VUCCI

A VIEW of the house where a New Year’s Eve fireworks explosion killed and injured people on Wednesday, January 1, 2025, in Honolulu. AP/MARCO GARCIA

DOST boosts 560 MSMEs, 91 technology hubs

By Bless Aubrey Ogerio

THE Department of Science and Technology (DOST) has provided support to 560 micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and 91 technology business incubation hubs across the country in the past year.

Science Secretary Renato U. Solidum Jr. said that the agency has been offering zero-interest loans of up to P5 million to MSMEs, with a three-year repayment period. These loans are tailored to meet the specific needs of each business.

“If enterprises use science and technology they will surely make money as manifested in the high repayment of those we are supporting at more than 80 percent,” Solidum said in Filipino

in a Bagong Pilipinas forum on January 1.

Alongside financial assistance, DOST provides consultancy services to help MSMEs implement technology-driven improvements in their operations. Benefiting industries include food, construction, textiles, furniture and renewable energy.

Some businesses, he noted, have implemented solar energy solutions to reduce energy costs,

Handwriting assessment tool developed for children with developmental delays

FILIPINO researchers have developed a handwriting assessment tool for children with developmental delays like those with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum.

The Intelligent Stroke Utilization, Learning, Assessment, and Testing (iSulat) is a pen that provides a practical solution for assessing handwriting based on the most common handwriting tools, such as tests of visual-motor skills, Minnesota handwriting assessment, and an evaluation tool for children’s handwriting.

The iSulat has a microcontroller within the pen, which transmits data to a mobile application. The raw signal undergoes filtering, feature scaling, engineering data, and analyses before it is forwarded to the occupational therapist for diagnosis.

The occupational therapist can then efficiently assess the handwriting based on the alignment of letters, spacing, and consistency.

A report said the number of handwriting problems in developing children reached an approximate 5 percent to 25 percent range.

iSulat addresses the problem of lack of occupational therapists and high cost of therapy, said ISulat Project Manager Engr. Jomel Herras.

He added that the root problem is the problem of children in their handwriting. They do it everyday in school in Math, Arts, and English subjects.

He said some children are not enthusiastic so they are considered lazy in writing. With the help of iSulat, children with handwriting problems can undergo simultaneous testing in batches or groups.

Handwriting is still the most immediate form of graphic com -

munication, and failure to attain proficiency during school age may result in far-reaching negative effects on both the academic success and self-esteem of a child.

The project was funded by the Department of Science and Technology-Philippine Council for Health Research and Development with P3.2 million for the initial phase, a DOST-PCHRD news release said.

According to DOST-PCHRD, the standardized assessment of children with developmental delays are quite expensive and must be done with the aid of an occupational therapist or handwriting experts. The therapy usually runs from 20 minutes up to 1 hour.

Herras said that phase I of the research started in 2022 and ended last October 31, 2024.

The project team conducted pilot testing for children aged 6 to 10 years in three sites across Luzon, namely Villa Maria Elementary School in Porac, Pampanga; Juan Sumulong Elementary School in Metro Manila; and Bulacan Montesorri School Inc. in Bulacan, he explained. He said the invention needs more testing to check its accuracy or and performance.

The project leader said his team is looking for more enthusiasts and partners who will help them promote iSulat to gain more users from various locations.

Herras is hopeful that by 2026 the phase II could be held to apply the technology not only to children.

He added that the project targets those with ADHD and autism spectrum.

The project team has secured a partnership in 2024 with the Department of Education Division of Metro Manila for future testing, the DOST-PCHRD said.

achieving savings of up to 50 percent.

DOST is also supporting 91 technology business incubation hubs in state universities, colleges and private higher education institutions. These are designed to assist start-ups and MSMEs with technology development and innovation.

Initiatives are being implemented to support the development of smart and sustainable communities by helping local government units adopt digital and smart technologies.

Currently, 80 pilot sites have been established, with plans to expand the program further.

The S&T chief urged those who will be elected in the coming election to make use of the smart technology that the DOST is producing to make their respective areas have sustainable development.

Meanwhile, Bukidnon First District Rep. Jose Manuel Alba earlier lauded the efforts of the DOST in fostering growth in rural areas.

He noted that DOST’s support

for cooperatives, as well as MSMEs at the provincial and regional levels, contributes significantly to job creation and prosperity in the local economy. The Science department is also known to provide innova -

tive techniques and technologies to startup businesses and livelihood organizations.

“We are beginning to change the perception that opportunities can only be found in the capital

[National Capital Region]. There are promising prospects in our rural communities as well,” Alba said at a news conference on November 28, 2024, in Cagayan de Oro City.

Alba is a strong advocate in at the House of Representatives for alternative livelihoods through circular economy, including the promotion of the bamboo industry. His initiatives spurred the cultivation of bamboo to its processing into raw materials for construction.

The development of the bamboo industry is one of DOST’s highlights at the National Science and Technology Week (NSTW) in Cagayan de Oro City. The event also showcased startup companies and the innovative products developed by MSMEs based in Bukidnon.

DOST Regional Office X Director Romela Ratilla explained that as the regional host of the 2024 NSTW, the agency aims to provide a platform for community entrepreneurs and scientists to connect with industry leaders, which could lead to valuable partnerships and business expansions.

‘Oras Pinas’ campaign pushes culture of punctuality

WITH the New Year, Filipinos are reminded of the importance of responsible time management and punctuality for personal and national growth through the Oras Pinas, the National Time Consciousness Week.

Focusing on this year’s theme, “Oras Pinas: Tara Na! Kilos Na!” the Department of Science and Technology once again is calling on Filipinos to take decisive action by reflecting and observing effective ways on time management, which could lead to empowered communities, enhanced productivity, and a secured future, said the DOST in a news release.

With all the distractions around, the importance of respecting and valuing one’s time is often overlooked, which can lead to inconvenience and misunderstandings, affecting relationships with family, friends, coworkers, and communities in ways that are frequently underestimated.

The demands of modern life and the constant influx of diver -

sions contribute to the neglect of responsible time management.

The DOST emphasizes that responsible time management is not just about the ticking of the clock, but about creating a ripple effect across society.

With its yearly campaign for punctuality, the Science department envisions a broader societal impact, recognizing that valuing each other’s time is a foundation to businesses, relationships, and community development.

The 2025 theme speaks directly to the core issue of urging Filipinos to cultivate a culture that treats time as a precious resource. “Oras Pinas: Tara Na! Kilos Na!” embodies enthusiasm, vibrancy, and a commitment to building a responsible and progressive society.

At the heart of this year’s campaign is the emphasis on managing commitments and responsibilities as essential components of personal and collective growth.

The DOST aims to instil the value of time management, especially

among young professionals, highlighting its significant impact on future success.

By understanding the importance of time from an early age, the department believes that young Filipinos can better shape their personal and professional paths.

The campaign is aligned with the Philippine Standard Time (PhST) Act of 2013, which promotes the “Pilipino Time” initiative under Republic Act 10535.

The law mandates national and local government agencies and broadcasting companies to follow and display the PhST in their offices, fostering unity and efficiency in public administration.

The DOST’s Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical, and Astronomical Services Administration (DOST-Pagasa) serves as the official timekeeper for the nation.

The campaign was initially launched in 2011 as “Juan Time”—a play on the terms “One Time” (indicating a unified time) and “Juan,” a common name for

Filipinos.

In 2022, the campaign was rebranded to “Oras Pinas,” with the goal of promoting a culture of punctuality and unity around a standardized time. The synchronization of time is achieved through advanced technology. Since 2003, DOST-Pagasa has utilized a rubidium atomic clock, one of the two most widely used atomic clocks in the world, alongside the more accurate cesium clock.

The atomic clock is equipped with a GPS receiver that captures time signals from at least four orbiting satellites. The satellites, each with atomic clocks, are periodically synchronized with a cesium clock based in Boulder, Colorado, ensuring that the DOSTPagasa clock remains in sync with Coordinated Universal Time. To synchronize one’s timepiece, the official Oras Pinas time can be accessed through the DOSTPagasa website at http://bagong. pagasa.dost.gov.ph/. Allan Mauro V. Marfal/S&T News Service

Climate change added 41 days of dangerous heat worldwide in 2024

PEOPLE around the world suffered an average of 41 extra days of dangerous heat this year because of human-caused climate change, according to a group of scientists who also said that climate change worsened much of the world’s damaging weather throughout 2024.

The analysis from World Weather Attribution and Climate Central researchers comes at the end of a year that shattered climate record after climate record as heat across the globe made 2024 likely to be its hottest ever measured and a slew of other fatal weather events spared few.

“The finding is devastating but utterly unsurprising: Climate change did play a role, and often a major role in most of the events we studied, making heat, droughts, tropical cyclones and heavy rainfall more likely and more intense across the world, destroying lives and livelihoods of millions and often uncounted numbers of people,” Friederike Otto, the lead of World Weather Attribution and an Imperial College climate scientist, said during a media briefing on the scientists’ findings.

“As long as the world keeps burning fossil fuels, this will only get worse,” he added.

Millions of people endured stifling heat this year. Northern Cali -

fornia and Death Valley baked. Sizzling daytime temperatures scorched Mexico and Central America. Heat endangered already vulnerable children in West Africa.

Skyrocketing southern European temperatures forced Greece to close the Acropolis. In South and Southeast Asian countries, heat forced school closures.

Earth experienced some of the hottest days ever measured and its hottest-yet summer, with a 13-month heat streak that just barely broke.

To do its heat analysis, the team of volunteer international scientists compared daily temperatures around the globe in 2024 to the temperatures that would have been expected in a world without climate change.

The results are not yet peer-reviewed, but researchers use peerreviewed methods.

Some areas saw 150 days or more of extreme heat due to climate change.

“The poorest, least developed countries on the planet are the places that are experiencing even higher numbers,” said Kristina Dahl, vice president of climate science at Climate Central.

What’s worse, heat-related deaths are often underreported.

“People don’t have to die in heat waves. But if we can’t communicate

convincingly, ‘but actually a lot of people are dying,’ it’s much harder to raise this awareness,” Otto said.

“Heat waves are by far the deadliest extreme event, and they are the extreme events where climate change is a real game changer,” he added.

This year was a warning that the planet is getting dangerously close to the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming limit compared to the pre-industrial average, according to the scientists.

Earth is expected to soon edge past that threshold, although it’s not considered to have been breached until that warming is sustained over decades.

The researchers closely examined 29 extreme weather events this year that killed at least 3,700 people and displaced millions, and found that 26 of them had clear links to climate change.

The El Niño weather pattern, which naturally warms the Pacific Ocean and changes weather around the world, made some of this weather more likely earlier in the year.

But the researchers said most of their studies found that climate change played a bigger role than that phenomenon in fueling 2024’s events.

Warm ocean waters and warmer air fueled more destructive

storms, according to the researchers, while temperatures led to many record-breaking downpours.

Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Cape Cod who wasn’t involved in the research, said the science and findings were sound.

“Extreme weather will continue to become more frequent, intense, destructive, costly, and deadly, until we can lower the concentration of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere,” she said.

Significantly more climate extremes could be expected without action, the United Nations Environment Programme said in the fall, as more planet-warming carbon dioxide has been sent into the air this year by burning fossil fuels than last year.

But the deaths and damages from extreme weather events aren’t inevitable, said Julie Arrighi, director of programs at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre and part of the research.

“Countries can reduce those impacts by preparing for climate change and adapting for climate change, and while the challenges faced by individual countries or systems or places vary around the world, we do see that every country has a role to play,” she said. Alexa St. John/Associated Press

BUKIDNON First District Rep. Jose Manuel Alba (center) with Maybelle Amador-Palaypayon of DOST-FPRDI (right) at the National Science and Technology Week in Cagayan de Oro City in November 2024. Alba lauded the efforts of the DOST in fostering growth in rural areas through support for cooperatives and MSMEs at the provincial and regional levels that contribute significantly to job creation and prosperity in the local economy. DOST PHOTO

A6 Sunday, January 5, 2025

Faith Sunday

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

More than 680 Jubilee Churches in PHL ready for pilgrims

THE Catholic Church has declared 2025 as a Jubilee year, which Pope Francis dedicated to the theme of hope.

The pope inaugurated the 2025 Holy Year by pushing open the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica on Christmas Eve, reviving an ancient church tradition encouraging the faithful to make pilgrimages to Rome, the Associated Press reported. After the ceremony, the door remains open for the entire year to allow pilgrims to pass through. The gesture signifies a complete experience of the indulgence associated with the Holy Year.

The declaration of Holy Year dates back to 1300 that occurs every 25 years.

Pope Francis declared a special Jubilee in 2015-2016 dedicated to mercy. The next one planned is in 2033, to commemorate the anniversary of the crucifixion of Christ.

Pilgrims who participate in the Jubilee can obtain “indulgences” that is related to the forgiveness of sins.

As not everyone can travel to Rome as Pilgrims of Hope during the Jubilee Year, pilgrims can go to sacred Jubilee sites worldwide

“so as to manifest the great need for conversion and reconciliation.”

In the Philippines hundreds of churches around the country have been designated as Jubilee Churches, each with a Holy Door for pilgrims to enter.

This initiative aims to provide opportunities to the faithful for spiritual renewal and the experience of God’s mercy.

Cardinal Jose Advincula launched the Jubilee Year in the Manila archdiocese on December 30, 2024, urging the faithful not to lose hope despite life’s challenges, the CBCP News reported.

Here are the designated almost 700 Jubilee Churches across the Philippines: https:// cbcpnews.net/cbcpnews/list-jubilee-2025-pilgrim-churches-in-thephilippines/

These churches will serve as pilgrimage sites where the faithful can receive a plenary indulgence under the usual conditions: sacramental confession, Eucharistic communion, prayer for the intentions of the Holy Father and visit

Syria’s dwindling Jewish community can visit one of the world’s oldest synagogues again

J OBAR, Syria—In this Damascus suburb, the handful of remaining Jews in Syria can again make pilgrimages to one of the world’s oldest synagogues where people from throughout the region once came to pray.

Syria’s 13-year civil war left the synagogue partially destroyed. Walls and roofs have collapsed. Some artifacts are missing. A marble sign in Arabic at the gate says it was first built 720 years before Christ.

Since insurgents overthrew President Bashar Assad in early December, people have been able to safely visit the widely destroyed Jobar suburb that was pounded for years by government forces while in the hands of opposition fighters.

Syria was once home to one of the world’s largest Jewish communities. Those numbers have shrunk dramatically, especially after the state of Israel was created in 1948. Today, only nine Jews live in Syria, according to the head of the community, almost all older men and women. The community believes that no Syrian Jews will remain in the country in a few years.

One of the people visiting the Jobar Synagogue, also known as Eliyahu Hanavi synagogue, on Thursday was gray-haired Bakhour Chamntoub, the head of the

to the Holy Door.

Here’s a step-by-step guide for the faithful to obtain Plenary Indulgence:

n Sacramental Confession: One must go to confession. This can be done within a few days before or after the visit to the Holy Door.

itants, some 50,000 Jews reportedly fled to Damascus, making up nearly a third of residents.

Another wave of Jews later arrived from Europe, fleeing the Spanish Inquisition that began in 1492.

The community in Syria numbered about 100,000 at the start of the 20th century. In the years surrounding Israel’s creation, Syrian Jews faced increased tensions and restrictions. Many emigrated to Israel, the United States and other countries.

Under the Assad family’s 54year dynasty, Jews in Syria enjoyed freedom in performing religious duties, but community members were prevented from traveling outside the country to prevent them from going to Israel until the early 1990s.

Once travel restrictions were lifted after Arab-Israeli peace talks started, many more left.

community in Syria.

“This synagogue means a lot to us,” the 74-year-old told The Associated Press during his first visit in 15 years.

Chamntoub had heard the synagogue was damaged, but he did not expect to see that part of it had been reduced to a pile of debris.

“I am frankly disturbed,” he said.

Chamntoub said Jewish people from around the world have been calling him to say they are ready to help rebuild.

He had refused to leave Syria during the war, while all 12 of his siblings left. He said he was happy in Syria and surrounded by people who respect him.

Chamntoub said he had been one of the few Jews who openly spoke about his faith, adding that he never faced discrimination.

He said other Jews preferred not to speak openly for safety reasons amid the animosity in Syria toward archenemy Israel and fears of being labeled spies or collaborators.

The Jewish community in Syria dates back to the prophet Elijah’s Damascus sojourn nearly 3,000 years ago.

Before Syria’s conflict began in 2011, Chamntoub and other remaining community members came on Saturdays to Jobar for prayers. He recalled Torahs written on gazelle leather, chandeliers, tapestries and carpets. All are gone, likely stolen by looters.

Barakat Hazroumi, a Muslim born and raised near the synagogue, recounted how worshipers on Saturdays asked him to turn on the lights or light a candle since Jews are not allowed to do physical labor on the Sabbath.

“It was a beautiful religious place,” Hazroumi said of the synagogue, which at some point during the war was protected by rebels. It and the whole destroyed suburb “needs to be reconstructed from scratch.”

Assad’s forces recaptured Jobar from rebels in 2018 but imposed tight security, preventing many people from reaching the area.

The new rulers of Syria, led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, have said they will allow members of all religions to perform their religious duties freely.

n Eucharistic Communion: One should receive Holy Communion, ideally on the same day you visit the Holy Door.

n Prayer for the Intentions of the Holy Father: You need to pray for the Pope’s intentions. This can be done through any prayer, such

as an Our Father or Hail Mary.

n Visit to a Holy Door: Physically pass through one of the designated Holy Doors.

If anyone wants to go with his or her family to go through the Jubilee Churches, here’s a possible guide:

n Plan Your Visit: Choose one or more of the designated churches and plan your visit. It’s advisable to check the church schedules for mass and confession times.

n Obtain a Pilgrim’s Passport: At the first church visit, request a Pilgrim’s Passport, which will guide you through the pilgrimage process and allow you to collect stamps from each church visited.

n Perform the Required Prayers and Actions: Upon entering through the Holy Door, you may be asked to recite specific prayers or perform acts of devotion as instructed.

n Get Your Passport Stamped:

After completing your visit and prayers at each church, have your Pilgrim’s Passport stamped by a church official.

n Complete Your Pilgrimage: After visiting all designated churches, return to your last church to receive a certificate of pilgrimage as recognition of your journey. It’s like a local Camino de Santiago!

Biodiversity Sunday

Saving wetlands means saving migratory birds, humans

By Jonathan L. Mayuga

THE Ramsar Convention on Wetlands recently included the Sibugay Wetland Nature Reserve (SWNR) in Zamboanga Sibugay and the Del Carmen Mangrove Reserve (DCMR) within the Siargao Island Protected Landscape and Seascape (Siplas) as Wetlands of International Importance, or Ramsar Sites.

The declaration of the two Ramsar Sites in the Philippines underscores the global importance of protecting and conserving the country’s wetlands—unique ecosystems that serve as feeding and staging grounds for hundreds of species of migratory birds that travel half across the the globe for their survival.

Environment department Assistant Secretary for Biodiversity

Marcial C. Amaro Jr. and Assis -

tant Director Armida P. Andres of Biodiversity Management Bureau presented the certificates of designation to the representatives of the newly declared Ramsar Sites at the 10th Asian Wetland Symposium (ASW10) in November 2024.

George Laolao, OIC Provincial Environment and Natural Resources Officer of Zamboanga Sibugay, and the Georgina Fernandez, chief of Conservation and Development Section, received the award on behalf of the SWNR, while Mayor Alfredo Coro II of Del Carmen, Surigao del Norte, accepted the award for the DCMR.

East-Asian-Australasian Flyway

THE Philippines sits along the EastAsian-Australasian Flyway, a migration route for birds that spans 37 countries from Alaska to Australia and New Zealand. Around 600 bird species, including some of the world’s most endangered

birds, regularly use the East-AsianAustralasian Flyway.

Wetlands along these migration routes provide ecosystem services to nearly 200 million people, including support to agriculture, fisheries, tourism, and other industries.

According to scientists, over 50 million migratory waterbirds depend on the wetlands along the flyway.

Ramsar Convention

THE Ramsar Convention has been described as the first modern treaty between nations to conserve natural resources. It was signed in 1971 in the Iranian city of Ramsar and came into force in 1975.

It provides a framework for international cooperation and national action to conserve wetlands and their resources. It recognizes the ecological, economic, cultural, scientific, and recreational value of wetlands.

Almost 90 percent of UN member states, including the Philippines, have acceded to the convention, representing all the world’s geographic regions.

The United Kingdom has the largest number of Ramsar Sites in the world, with 175.

What are wetlands?

WETLANDS as areas of water, marsh, fen, or peatland that can be natural or artificial, permanent or temporary, and fresh, brackish, or salt water.

In the Philippines, an archipelago comprising of 7,641 islands and islets, natural as well as artificial wetlands can be found everywhere.

The country boasts of rich water resources that include lakes, rivers, peats, and vast wetland areas that include rice farms.

These unique ecosystems serve as feeding and staging areas for migratory birds whose ecosystem functions

can never be overemphasized.

As a contracting party, under Article 2.1 of the Convention on Wetlands, the Philippines has designated suitable wetlands for inclusion into the list, to highlight their significance not only to the host country but to the global community as well.

With the two new Ramsar Sites, the Philippines now has a total of 10 wetlands of international importance.

Sibugay wetland

ACCORDING to the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), the SWNR which was declared as Ramsar Site 2252, is a wetland complex surrounded by nine municipalities in Zamboanga Sibugay.

It hosts thousands of migratory birds during migration season from September to March.

At least five waterbird species— the endangered Far Eastern curlew (Numenius madagascariensis), great white egret (Egretta alba), little egret (E. garzetta), intermediate egret (E. intermedia) and gull-billed tern (Gelochelidon nilotica)—have exceeded the 1 percent share of the East-AsianAustralasian Flyway population which qualifies in the global contribution of the wetland to the conservation of waterbirds.

SWNR is also home to what is believed to be the largest colony of flying foxes in the country. This Sibugay colony is composed of the Philippine endemic and endangered golden-crowned flying fox (Acerodon jubatus), the large flying fox (Pteropus vampyrus), and island flying fox (Pteropus hypomelanus).

Besides migratory birds, the SWNP is home to marine turtle species, such as the critically endangered hawksbill turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata), the endangered green sea turtle (Chelonia

mydas), and the vulnerable Olive Ridley sea turtle (Lepidochelys olivacea).

Del Carmen Wetlands

MEANWHILE , the DCMR-Siplas, identified as Ramsar Site 2553, serves as an important community asset to the municipality of Del Carmen and the entire island of Siargao.

Its mangrove cover of approximately 4,871 hectares comprises more than half of the island’s total mangrove forest.

At least eight percent of flora and 20 percent of its fauna found in DCMRSIPLAS are endemic to the Philippines and the Mindanao region.

These include the Philippine duck (Anas luzonica), Southern rufous hornbill (Buceros mindanensis), Mindanao hornbill (Penelopides affinis) and the yellowish bulbul (Hypsipetes everetti).

Most importantly, the site supports food production, livelihood, and ecotourism activities, and protects nearby communities against storm surges.

The Philippines’ other Wetlands of International Importance include the Olango Island Wildlife Sanctuary in Cebu (Ramsar Site 656), Naujan Lake National Park in Oriental Mindoro (Ramsar Site 1008), Tubbataha Reefs Natural Park in Palawan (Ramsar Site 1010), Agusan Marsh Wildlife Sanctuary in Agusan del Sur (Ramsar Site 1009), Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park (Ramsar Site 2084), the Negros Occidental Coastal Wetlands Conservation Area in Negros Occidental (Ramsar Site 2271) and the Sasmuan Pampanga Coastal Wetlands in Pampanga (Ramsar Site 2445).

LGU-managed areas

DENR-BMB’s Andres told the Busi -

nessMirror that the Sibugay Wetland Nature Reserve and the Del Carmen Mangrove Reserve in Siargao Island Protected Landscape and Seascape are both managed by their respective local government units (LGUs) in collaboration with the DENR.

Andres underscored the importance of the active collaboration among the DENR, LGU and other stakeholders to protect and conserve wetlands of international importance, such as the country’s two new Ramsar Sites.

“Conservation work requires active collaboration between the DENR and the wetland stakeholders. Building alliances with key stakeholders, such as the [LGUs], local communities, academe and the like plays an important role in conserving these wetlands of international importance, especially in the absence of a unified act that will protect them,” Andres said to the BusinessMirror via messenger sent through Joyse A. Se of the Caves, Wetlands and Other Ecosystems Division (Cawed).

“In the case of the Del Carmen Mangrove Reserve, the wetland is within the jurisdiction of the Siargao Island Protected Landscape and Seascape, thus, protected and bounded by the E-Nipas [Expanded National Integrated Protected Areas System] Act of 2018,” she said. Andres explained that the LGU of Del Carmen collaborates with the Protected Area Management Office of Siplas and aligns its management plan for the Del Carmen Mangrove Reserve with the management plan of Siplas.

Del Carmen, through its local chief executive, also serves as a member of Siplas Protected Area Management Board, the body which oversees the protection of the protected area.

Key to human survival

SCIENTISTS say these long-distance flyers help play very important ecosystem functions that are key to the survival of mankind, as well.

As pest control agents, migratory birds help control insect and pest populations, which is important in saving farmers’ money on pesticides and keeping the soil in their farms healthy.

As migratory birds are part of the natural food chain and play a role in nutrient cycling, their existence ensures ecological balance. As seed dispersal and pollination agents, they help disperse seeds and pollinate flowers, thereby supporting plant biodiversity and helping ecosystems function properly.

Meanwhile, sea birds also produce guano, a substance high in nitrogen and is considered one of nature’s best fertilizers that allows plants to grow healthy.

Thus, the presence of migratory birds that feed on insects also indicates the health of an ecosystem and the state of the environment.

Likewise, as thousands of migratory birds visit the Philippines, wetlands have become a tourist magnet both for locals and foreigners, particularly bird watchers and photographers. It provides jobs and livelihood to communities through ecotourism, underscoring the importance of keeping the country’s wetlands protected from various threats, including pollution or exploitation for unsustainable agricultural practices, human encroachment of these habitats, hunting and trading, and destructive human activities.

Finally, protecting and conserving wetlands simply means saving these feathered friends from extinction, and in a way, preserving human species.

AI will eavesdrop on world’s wildest places to track, help protect endangered wildlife

PUERTO JIMÉNEZ, Costa Rica—The endangered Geoffrey’s spider monkeys that dangle high in the rainforest canopy are elusive and hard for scientists to track.

So biologist Jenna Lawson hid 350 audio monitors in trees across Costa Rica’s lush Osa Peninsula to spy on them.

The devices recorded the sounds of the forest and surrounding countryside for a week, collecting so much data that Lawson could have spent years listening to it all. Instead, she fed it into artificial intelligence (AI) systems trained to instantly recognize spider monkey calls and detect where the animals traveled.

One of the world’s largest acoustic wildlife studies when Lawson began the project in 2021, it revealed troubling findings about the health of a treasured wildlife refuge.

More of this AI-assisted wildlife surveillance is “urgently needed” as some 28 percent of all plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, according to a paper published in the academic journal Science this summer.

Researchers from Dutch and Danish universities showed that machinelearning techniques can “handle huge amounts of data and uncover sound patterns, allowing for faster, cheaper, and better ecological studies” that can aid in biodiversity conservation. But many technical challenges remain.

Tech giant Microsoft’s philanthropic AI for Good Lab announced this month it is hoping to answer some of those technical challenges with a new kind of hardware and computing system for eavesdropping on the planet’s wildest places.

“Those remote places are also the most important places on the Earth from a biodiversity perspective,” said Microsoft’s chief data scientist, Juan Lavista Ferres, in an interview last week by video call from Colombia, where a research team was preparing to test the new approach. Powered by the sun and energyefficient AI computer chips, the devices can run for years rather than weeks without human intervention. And they can regularly transmit their data online via low-Earth orbit satellites. It’s called Spar -

row, short for Solar-Powered Acoustic and Remote Recording Observation Watch.

Pablo Arbelaez, director of an AIfocused research center at the University of the Andes, said a first Sparrow test will happen in a jungle preserve along Colombia’s largest river, the Magdalena. Eventually, the researchers hope to get a better idea of how deforestation—and efforts to reverse it—is affecting the population behavior of jaguars, bluebeaked paujil birds, spider monkeys and other endangered species.

Another project closer to Microsoft headquarters will monitor forests in Washington state’s Cascade Mountains.

By late 2025, Lavista Ferres plans to have devices on all continents, from remote corners of the Amazon rainforest to gorilla habitats of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That will then be “open-sourced” to make it accessible to a wide body of researchers in real time, but with measures to obscure sensitive location data.

“What we don’t want is these devices to ever be used for poachers to understand

where the animals are,” Lavista Ferres said. It was a concern about encroachments on Costa Rican spider monkey habitat that led Lawson, then at Imperial College London, to undertake her ambitious bioacoustic study three years ago.

She persuaded landowners to let her place recording devices on their properties outside Corcovado National Park, a jewel of Costa Rica’s decades-long efforts to preserve biodiversity by encouraging wildlife tourism.

“She basically realized the spider monkey is in a really critical situation,” said local environmentalist and bug scientist Jim Córdoba-Alfaro.

On a follow-up visit last year, he and Lawson trekked across a private reserve with an Associated Press reporter to observe the monkeys and check on the audio monitors.

Compared to the charismatic capuchin monkey and the notoriously loud howler monkey—both commonly seen or heard throughout Costa Rica—spider monkeys are far more wary of humans and the changes they bring.

“They’re the most sensitive of the primates that we have here,” said Lawson.

“The spider monkey would be the first animal to leave when there’s signs of trouble. They would be the last animal to come back once forests are restored because they need mature secondary and primary forest to be able to survive,” she added.

The Royal Society of London in March 2023 published Lawson’s findings of what the audio monitors revealed: the spider monkeys weren’t going anywhere near paved roads or the plantations harvesting palm oil and teak wood that bisect the region’s protected national parks.

That meant government-designated wildlife corridors meant to extend their range through and beyond the Osa Peninsula were not working as well as designed. She came back to present those conclusions to local officials.

After hours of searching, a troop of spider monkeys appeared—peering down at the humans who found them.

Within moments, they were on their way again—extending their lanky arms

and prehensile tails to grasp at trees and propel themselves across the canopy with spidery acrobatics.

Unattended acoustic detection of animal sounds is valuable not just in rainforests but in a wide variety of ecosystems, according to the Science paper published earlier this year.

For example, it could help sailors avoid colliding their ships with large baleen whales heard to be passing through a shipping channel.

Lavista Ferres said there are still numerous challenges to overcome, from humidity that can fray jungle monitors to elephants in African savannas unintentionally knocking them off a tree. Lawson said using the audio monitors to capture the spider monkey’s distinctive whinny enables biologists to study a larger area at lower cost, but also provides a truer account of how the monkeys behave without scientists following them around.

“We’re reducing our influence on their behavior,” she said. ”And also—they don’t want us here.”

THE Sibugay Wetland Nature Reserve in Zamboanga Sibugay was declared as Ramsar Site 2252. PHOTOS COURTESY OF DENR

THE Del Carmen Mangrove Reserve in the Siargao Island Protected Landscape and Seascape was identified as Ramsar Site 2553.

Forty-four years after Jimmy Carter’s fateful decision, the Olympics remain every bit as politicized and polarized as they were back then.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado—It was a decision that robbed hundreds of athletes of their once-in-alifetime chance at Olympic glory, and for more than four decades, it weighed heavily on the man who made it—Jimmy Carter.

C arter’s passing has unearthed memories from his 1977-1981 presidency. Somewhere between his greatest foreign-policy success (the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt) and his greatest failure (the Iran hostage crisis) sits the US boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.

It was Carter who called for that boycott—a Cold War power play intended to express America’s disdain for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

In his 1980 State of the Union Address, Carter said the invasion “could pose the most serious threat to world peace since the second World War.”

T he boycott garnered more than two-thirds support from the 2,400 members of the unwieldy US Olympic Committee house of delegates, the governing body that made the official move to keep the athletes out of Moscow.

I n short time, that move came to be seen as the textbook example of the risks, confusion and low success rate of injecting politics into sports.

We were not allowed to go for a not-so-clear reason,” said Edwin Moses, the hurdling great who won 122 straight races between 1977 and 1987, which included the Olympic gold-medal contests in 1976 and 1984.

For decades, members of the 1980 US Olympic team—recognized as Olympians at home but not by the International Olympic Committee abroad—told stories about opportunities missed and dreams unfulfilled because of the trip to Moscow they never took.

O f the 474 athletes who had qualified for the team in 1980, 227 would not get another chance to compete in the Olympic Games.

M any athletes told stories of meeting Carter at a White House visit

Carter on 1980 Olympic boycott: A bad decision

in the summer of 1980 that served as a tepid substitute. In Washington, the athletes received the highest honor civilians can receive from Congress: the Congressional gold medal. But those medals were only gold-plated bronze, not pure gold, and they weren’t recorded in the Congressional record until a push was made nearly three decades later.

Swimmer Jesse Vassallo, a reigning world champion in multiple events at the time, told Swimming World Magazine about meeting Carter in the reception line.

C arter “reached out to shake my hand and he said ‘How would you have done in Moscow?’” Vassallo recalled.

“And I said, ‘I would have won two golds and a silver.’ And he just gave me this [pained] look. He didn’t ask anybody else that question.” Wrestler Jeff Blatnick, a champion on the 1984 Olympic team, met Carter on an airplane years later.

According to an essay written by the late USOC spokesman Mike Moran, Blatnick said: “He looks at me and says, ‘Were you on the 1980 hockey team?’

I say, ‘No sir, I’m a wrestler, on the

summer team.’ He says, ‘Oh, that was a bad decision, I’m sorry.’”

I n his 2021 biography on the 39th President, Kai Bird writes that the boycott was a byproduct of a hard line Carter decided to take against the Soviets at the urging of his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had been in a longrunning struggle with the less-hawkish Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, to influence Carter’s thinking. “History would prove Vance correct; Brzezinski’s ‘Carter Doctrine’ never amounted to much more than a cover for wasteful arms exports,” Bird wrote.

A nd Carter’s boycott did nothing to deter the Soviets. They stayed in Afghanistan for another nine years, while further disrupting the Olympic movement and America’s own turn as an Olympic host four years later. AP

Golf goes indoors on prime time with high-tech TGL league

ALM BEACH GARDENS, Florida— Xander Schauffele is making his season debut twice in the span of seven days at venues separated by a lot more than some 5,000 miles.

One is at The Sentry, the season opener on the Professional Golfers Association (PGA) Tour that started Thursday on hilly terrain in Maui with endless views of the Pacific Ocean. Schauffele knows what to expect at Kapalua having won the tournament six years ago with a 62 in the final round.

The other starts next Tuesday inside a 250,000-square-foot building on the campus of Palm Beach State College, a technological wonder when it comes to golf and a game that will only look familiar because of the players involved.

T his one makes Schauffele curiously excited.

It’s the debut of the TMRW Golf League, a six-team league featuring Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy among 24 players—13 of them major champions—in fast-paced, two-hour matches to be televised in prime time on ESPN platforms.

I’ve been in there twice and played a mock match, and there was still a wow factor—even the second time around with lights and the stadium and really

big screens,” said Schauffele, who plays for New York Golf Club.

It’s different from what they’ll see from a conventional standpoint.”

It’s team golf played indoors in the SoFi Center, a combination of simulator golf and actual shots to a huge putting surface that can rotate 360 degrees to change angles and slopes for different shots.

Ne w York takes on The Bay Golf Club (San Francisco) in the opener Tuesday at 9 p.m. EST. Three players from the four-man teams compete in 15-hole matches—nine holes of alternate shot and six holes of singles, with each player going two holes.

Woods and his Jupiter Links face Los Angeles on January 14. The schedule was created to mesh with players’ tour schedule. The top four teams advance to the playoffs, and the best-of-three championship series is two weeks before the Masters.

T he team winning the SoFi Cup gets $9 million.

TGL is a product of TMRW Sports, the entertainment group of which Woods and McIlroy are co-founders. It hopes to appeal to a new audience, and even traditionalists, in an arena that can hold 1,500 fans. Players hit off real grass (or sand,

Keleti, oldest living Olympic medal winner, dies at 103

BUDAPEST, Hungary—Ágnes Keleti, a Holocaust survivor and the oldest living Olympic medal winner, has died. She was 103. K eleti died Thursday morning in Budapest, the Hungarian state news agency reported. She was hospitalized in critical condition with pneumonia on December 25. S he won a total of 10 Olympic medals in gymnastics, including five golds, for Hungary at the 1952 Helsinki Games and the 1956 Melbourne Games. She overcame the loss of her father and several relatives in the Holocaust to become one of the most successful Jewish Olympic athletes.

These 100 years felt to me like 60,” Keleti told The Associated Press on the eve of her 100th birthday. “I live well. And I love life. It’s great that I’m still healthy.” B orn Ágnes Klein in 1921 in Budapest, her career was interrupted by World War II and the cancellation of the 1940 and 1944 Olympics.

Forced off her gymnastics

the same used in bunkers at Augusta National) from 35 yards away into a screen 64 feet wide and 53 feet high. Architects have pitched in to design 30 holes that will be used at given times during the competition. For shots 50 yards or closer, players hit actual shots into the green.

T he TV window is two hours, and the competition includes a 40-second shot clock. This should move quickly, another element that sets it apart from traditional golf. It’s nothing like we’ve ever seen before, especially in golf,” McIlroy said.

I see this as being complementary to everything else that is going on in the world of golf,” he said. “I’m still a traditionalist in a lot of ways.... But I think there are certain things that we can do to innovate and try to appeal to a different and younger demographic, especially trying to condense it into a time frame that is a little bit more digestible and putting it on at a time where we’re maybe going to get a few more eyeballs.”

TGL is a year behind schedule. It was supposed to debut at the start of 2024 until a power outage caused damage to the inflatable dome structure. With another year to plan, organizers went with a permanent arena that

at Auschwitz, among the more than half a million Hungarian Jews killed in Nazi death camps and by Hungarian Nazi collaborators.

R esuming her career after the war, Keleti was set to compete at the 1948 London Olympics, but a last-minute ankle injury dashed her hopes.

Four years later, she made her Olympic debut at the 1952 Helsinki Games at the age of 31, winning a gold medal in the floor exercise as well as a silver and two bronzes. In 1956, she became the most successful athlete at the Melbourne Olympics, winning four gold and two silver medals.

W hile she was becoming the oldest gold medalist in gymnastics history at age 35 in Melbourne, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary following an unsuccessful antiSoviet uprising.

K eleti remained in Australia and sought political asylum. She then immigrated to Israel the following year and worked as a trainer and coached the Israeli Olympic gymnastics team until the

FLAG and sign bearers march around Moscow’s Lenin Stadium during closing ceremonies of the XXII Summer Olympic Games in Moscow which was boycotted by then US President Jimmy Carter. AP

Well-being over Weight loss

This new year, focusing on welfare-focused resolutions outweighs everything else

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YOUNG AND FREE

How FIG’s individualism resonates through her

By Vincent Peter M. Rivera

WITH today’s diverse and dynamic range of artists, the 22-year-old singer-songwriter, FIG has entered the music scene with her “Do It Yourself (DIY)” attitude to echo her experiences and emotions through songs and creative content.

The Malaysian indie-pop and R&B artist, FIG, started writing songs at the age of 19. Not wanting to use her original name in the music industry, his brother came up with a moniker, “FIG” which stands for, “Fay Is Good.” While she described her stage name as funny, it was something that she loved from the get-go and it kinda stuck with her.

Since childhood, Fay has been flying to different countries. Fun fact, she has already visited the Philippines, Shanghai, Singapore, Beijing, and Frankfurt before settling in NYC last 2019 to study. This allowed her to experience various cultures and environments at such a young age which contributes to her craft.

“Moving around as a kid exposed me to diverse experiences and people, which helped me grow up faster. It’s also shaped my artistry, as I draw inspiration from what I’ve experienced and the stories I’ve encountered” FIG shared in an interview with SoundStrip.

Aside from producing music, FIG is also dedicated to building a community around her music. She does creative content, hosting, social engagement, touring, and even her own event productions called “Cob Stand” – a

platform which launched an event series called, ‘A Mini Concert’ focused on helping her fellow Asian American Pacific Islanders (AAPI) artists.

When asked about any musical influences, “One artist that I fell in love with was Ryan Beatty. I remember watching all his music videos and loved how creative and DIY they were, inspiring me to try it out myself” she answered.

This complemented her first-hand experiences from various cultures and led her to further value self-expression and creative freedom.

Now that she’s a music artist of her own, FIG revealed her thought process in composing her own music. “Melodies usually come first! When thinking of melodies I would usually sing gibberish which would lead to potential lyrics. I like to think of melodies first as I feel more free when brainstorming and not as tied down trying to think of specific lyrics. I see the melody as the silhouette and the lyrics as the details.” This liberty allowed her to share a piece of her own through authentic and sincere music.

On November 08, FIG released an eight-track album called, “FITS” which

music

describes her own experiences about friendships and relationships. Filled with lush beats and soulful vocals, Fay aims to demonstrate the metaphor of throwing “fits,” internally, when people experience inner turmoil and self-conversations within themselves when they encounter connection and closure in a relationship.

“FITS took around a year and a half to make, where the main inspiration is diving deep into the emotional arc of friendships and relationships, capturing both their beautiful beginnings and sometimes their inevitable endings. I started by working with my collaborators and trying out ideas and once this theme came to play I started focusing on writing more songs in that world for FITS!” She added.

In one of the songs in the album called, Opposite Day, FIG featured his fellow AAPI artist, Yoshi T. whom she idolizes and respects. She described her experience collaborating with him saying, “Working with Yoshi T. was amazing! I’ve been a fan of his work for so long and I really respect him. I loved how we seamlessly blended indie pop and hip-hop on ‘Opposite Day.’ Even though we don’t hang out often, shooting the music video was so fun—we naturally got along and worked well together. In the video, we had to constantly argue, and it was hilarious how easily we slipped into it.”

When asked about her favorite in the FITS album, FIG picked the song, Solo Dates, as it resonated the most to her. “Right now my favorite track from the project is Solo Dates! That song truly embodies me as a person as I am someone who loves going on adventures and spending time with myself. It is a song that feels authentically FIG and a lot of people related to it and even felt inspired to go on solo dates themselves!” She explained.

As she steadily moves forward with her career, FIG emphasized the importance of having complete control over her work explaining that it is the only way to fully express yourself in the most authentic way possible regardless of its form – whether it be music, video or more.

Before the interview ended, Fay was asked about her thoughts on coming back to the Philippines. “I would love to come back! I was only able to experience the Philippines as a baby so I don’t remember much and I would love to go back to eat lots of food but also I love to discover nature and see that side of the Philippines outside of the city,” FIG further shared. With the year coming to an end, FIG looks forward to releasing new music, hosting events, and doing some awesome shows for 2025.

FIG. Photos: Michael Stocke

TIMELESS MUSIC

How artists can change the way people hear songs

NEW music is derivative. What sounds fresh and original is derived from a previous source — which artists refer to as the inspiration that leads to the creation of something new.

That’s how Swedish DJ and electronic dance music (EDM) superstar Avicii achieved his goal of making “timeless music” in just two albums before his untimely death at age 28 in 2018.

A documentary on his life and music, “Avicii: I’m Tim,” is currently streaming on Netflix.

Born Tim Bergling in Stockholm, he adapted the name Avicii — Sanskrit for “waveless,” also a term for “the lowest level of Buddhist hell” — since he couldn’t use his real name after creating his Myspace page.

As a child he had a natural affinity for music — learning to play the guitar while listening to all kinds of tunes, and then becoming adept at mixing them in his laptop.

Sharing his mixes online drew attention and led to his first gig as a DJ at EDM shows.

In 2011 his big break came when he produced a single, “Levels,” with a vocal sample, the first line (“Oh-oh, sometimes I get a good feeling”) from Etta James’ 1962 gospel-flavored song “Something’s Got a Hold on Me.”

“Levels” topped the singles charts in Sweden and Norway, and peaked in the top 10 charts in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, Ireland, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom (UK).

Best of all, it went platinum eight times in Sweden, and three times in the UK and the United States.

Two years later, his debut album, “True,” featured the lead single,

“Wake Me Up,” a country-influenced track with Mike Einziger of Incubus on acoustic guitar, and Aloe Blacc on vocals.

Avicii debuted “Wake Me Up” with a live band at the Ultra Music Festival in Miami, Florida but was booed by the audience.

Yet the tune went on to become the highest charting dance track of the 2010s at No. 13 among 100 from the official UK Singles Chart. It was no. 1 in much of Europe and also charted well in other countries.

By fusing older music genres with EDM, Avicii achieved fame and fortune. But success and its pressures became so overwhelming, his health suffered and he retreated from the scene a number of times — until his death in 2018.

Jett Pangan jams with Black Cows OLD music itself can also sound new — or the way artists interpret a song from the past can make listeners hear it in another perspective.

This happened at a gig featuring the Steely Dan tribute band Black Cows at 19 East.

Friends and I were in the audience when the band debuted at the same venue in 2017 — and it was heartwarming to see an SRO crowd at its seventh anniversary show Dec. 29, 2024.

But things got off on the wrong foot. The band’s lead singer and guitarist, Pido Lalimarmo, lost his voice that night.

Saxophonist and occasional singer Ronald Tomas — one of the band’s four-member horn section along Dix Lucero, Atchie Constantino, and EJ Celestial — took lead vocal chores on the opening track, Donald Fagen’s “IGY,” but sounded off-key at the start.

Likewise, drummer Gibson Viduya flubbed some of his parts several times.

During the break, the band’s founder and keyboard player Wowee Posadas said he must get hold of lyrics of the other songs so he could help fill in for Lalimarmo — who thankfully could still play lead guitar.

The rest of the band — female vocalists Gail Blanco-Viduya, Elke Saison, and Drizzle Muniz, bassist Bolichie Suzara, and percussionist Ryan Peralta — kept the music going.

However, I felt a different kind of vibe, something unexpected and exciting, when Jett Pangan strode on

stage as a guest singer.

Right on the first line in “Deacon Blues,” Pangan sounded like he owned the song: “This is the day of the expanding man…”

His enunciation was so clear, it somehow gave new life to the otherwise cryptic lyrics. Surely the song was still enigmatic, but Pangan’s phrasing with much clarity enabled the audience (at least in my case) to fully appreciate its bittersweet and verging-ondesperation mood.

It could be a tune for the down and out (“They got a name for the winners in the world/I want a name when I lose/They call Alabama the Crimson Tide/Call me Deacon Blues…”), but I felt good and worry-free upon hearing it, thanks to Pangan.

He sang one more song, “Do It Again,” and that’s exactly what the Black Cows should be telling him at its next gig.

Avicii

Jett Pangan with Black Cows

Well-being over Weight loss

This new year, focusing on welfare-focused resolutions outweighs everything else

By Shelly russell-Mayhew & Elizabeth Tingle University of Calgary

january is the time of year for setting new year’s resolutions for selfimprovement. For many, these might be health-related, from exercising more to losing weight.

The values of diet culture are pervasive and include the celebration of weight loss and body manipulation. And with that often comes pressure to conform to unrealistic ideals and the assumption that thinness always represents good health.

As such, New Year’s resolutions connected to our health tend to be hijacked by diet culture. While it’s admirable to invest time and effort into improving one’s health and well-being, it’s counterproductive to decide that the number on a scale, the size of our pants or having defined abs are indicators of success in our pursuit of well-being.

This year, we want to invite people to consider weight- and body-neutral resolutions that prioritize how we feel and function in our bodies and minds and take a more holistic view of health. A weightneutral approach to health focuses on pursuing health-promoting behaviors that are under our control, maintaining a positive relationship with movement and eating and challenging negative stereotypes about people in larger bodies.

Weight-loss resolutions

As researchers of body image issues with our own history of being harmed by diet culture, we tend to avoid New Year’s resolutions because of negative associations. But maybe that’s giving too much power to diet culture. We think there might be a new way to approach resolutions if people do so in a way that promotes self-care (beyond the physical) and holistic well-being.

Firstly, it is important for anyone who has felt disappointed by not achieving success with a previous weight-loss resolution to practice self-compassion and forgiveness. It is completely understandable to set

“ When we focus on improving health, rather than losing weight, there is a greater likelihood to engage in physical activity long term,” write the authors, researchers of body image issues with their own history of being harmed by “diet culture.” Photo by Lucas Pezeta on Pexe L s .com

a goal like this in response to the weightcentric messages in our culture.

It’s also completely understandable, even predictable, that such resolutions will not lead to lasting change. Research indicates that weight, body size and muscle definition are impacted by numerous factors that are not all under our control.

Lastly, focusing on our appearance and body size can lead to unhealthy obsessions for some and prove a frustrating focus for others, leading to abandoning healthy behaviors that have many benefits.

Pursuing this kind of weight loss usually compromises our relationship with food in the long term and can set us up for the many physical and psychological downsides of yo-yo dieting or weight cycling. Weight is not a behavior, and so it’s not an appropriate target for behavior modification.

A weight-neutral approach

The weight-neutral approach is related to a broader “body-neutral” movement that calls for a holistic view of our entire selves, including social relationships and our own

talents and interests, and less of a myopic focus on physical appearance. Weight-centric approaches start with a goal weight and outer appearance as the focus.

Weight-neutral practices, in contrast,

sure, cholesterol and blood sugar levels.

A weight-neutral approach can also lead to improved mental health, including greater self-compassion and self-esteem.

A body-neutral approach takes an even broader view of well-being to include multiple dimensions of wellness beyond the physical (social, emotional, financial, intellectual, spiritual, vocational, for example), and may be especially healing for people who have struggled with a weight-centric approach in the past.

some resolutions to consider

A W eIghT-Neu T RAL resolution could be to walk frequently enough to be able to enjoy a hike in the mountains this summer with family and friends. Another might be to prioritize sleep, learn more about sleep hygiene and perhaps experiment with mindfulness strategies as part of sleep routines.

A more body-neutral goal may be focused on adding more social opportunities, whether it’s committing more regularly to seeing old friends or joining a class or group to find new ones. Or, maybe a goal is to find that volunteering role for a charity or cause that provides greater meaning and purpose in your life.

Diet culture is often about surrendering our decision-making to external guides and experts—a number on a chart, an eating plan, an exercise regimen or an app. This year, focus on reclaiming your own self in self-improvement and decide what excites you rather than following the scripts and goals offered to us from diet

‘new Year’s resolutions connected to our health tend to be hijacked by diet culture.’

start with our internal experience of our body and may include adding movement to improve functionality and fun to our lives, or eating better to feel nourished and satisfied. Research demonstrates this framing can have positive outcomes for our overall well-being.

When we focus on improving health, rather than losing weight, there is a greater likelihood to engage in physical activity long term. And there are improvements to health indicators like improved blood pres-

culture. When we broaden our perspective beyond how our bodies look, and consider how we feel in our life and what is important to us, it’s possible that resolutions for the new year can create energy and excitement for what’s to come.

s o , give yourself a gift and take care of yourself holistically for the whole year. That is certainly our intention for 2025. The Conversation

n Cover photo by Breakingpic on Pexels.com

Study: Younger people are more likely to make a resolution

Am A jORITY of us adults say they intend to make a New Year’s resolution of some type. mi llennials and gen Z are especially likely to be on board with about two-thirds expect to do so, compared to about half of older

adults, according to a new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Anthony Tremblay, 35, from Pittsburgh, for instance, hopes to lose some weight and focus more on self-care—

more sleep, meditation and breathing exercises.

“It’s probably a good year to focus on mental health,” he said.

ma ny others agree. About 3 in 10 adults choose resolutions involving exer-

cise or eating healthier. About one-quarter said they’ll make a resolution involving losing weight and a similar number said they’ll resolve to make changes about priorities of money or mental health. AP