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CATCH THEM IF YOU CAN www.businessmirror.com.ph

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Sunday, November 24, 2019 Vol. 15 No. 45

P25.00 nationwide | 2 sections 16 pages | 7 DAYS A WEEK

year’s record of drugconvention busts at the Customs parcel BCDA, DOT bare plansThe to past develop biggest center in PHL office reveals an increasingly diverse arsenal for concealment by smugglers—from water filters to pen cartridges, to a Mother Mary statue to articles for babies like cribs, strollers, dresses and toys.

DECLARED as “Religious Frame”

DECLARED as “Boxing Glove”

R

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE BUREAU OF CUSTOMS NAIA

DECLARED as “Water Filter”

By Recto L. Mercene

EVELATIONS that billions of pesos worth of shabu were smuggled into the country—and went through Customs—concealed in magnetic filters stunned Filipinos several months ago.

Few know, however, that the magnetic lifters are just one of the means used by drug syndicates for concealing the contraband when they engage in the il-

licit trafficking of drugs.

It may come as a surprise to discover the myriad ways by which syndicates have tried to camouflage their evil trade from

the prying eyes of Customs and drug authorities.

The breadth of their creativity may be gleaned from the seemingly endless varieties of objects or items they send via parcels or through air cargo. Besides the big-ticket smuggling that passes through the piers such as the magnetic filters, most of the stuff find their way to the PHLPost Central Mail Exchange Center (Cemex) where reputable international cargo forwarders deliver them daily by the tons. The parcels are sorted daily for eventual distribution across the country.

In a matter of one year, air-

port authorities have amassed a wealth of these materials and objects where the illegal drugs were hidden, such as water filters, photo albums, baby cribs, car seats, medicine cabinets or car mufflers.

An innocuous-looking chair once also yielded almost a kilo of shabu, sometimes called ice or meth (metamphetamine hydrochloride.)

Another piece of furniture yielded 4.6 kilos of shabu, while a shipment of fabric was found to conceal more than one kilo of cannabis (the scientific name of marijuana) or weed.

One piece of camera yielded

half a kilogram of shabu; a bar stool, 4 kilograms of the same; wooden block toys, one kilo of shabu; adult toys, 28 kilos of shabu.

In one of the most stunning cases, pen ink cartridges yielded 51 pieces of liquid marijuana.

A child’s dress hid 69,870 tablets of Ecstasy (called party drugs), while a shipment of boxing gloves concealed 4 kilograms of weed.

A shipment of mufflers for cars was found to be a convenient hiding place for 13 kilos of meth.

Ironically, a medicine cabinet was used as sanctuary for two kilograms of shabu. A DVD player was

easy hiding spot for one kilogram of meth, a pillow for .3445 kg of meth, a Lego toy for another kilo of meth, and a baby carrier for almost a kilo of shabu.

Even something as thin as a letter envelope could be haven for tiny amounts of the meth crystals, Customs authorities found out.

Nothing’s sacred

NOTHING, indeed, is sacred anymore.

Who would ever think that an innocent-looking framed photograph of the Virgin Mary would hide almost a kilogram of meth?

Continued on A2

World’s rich are rattled and looking for old-fashioned security

A

By Ben Stupples | Bloomberg News

FEW blocks from Grosvenor Square in Mayfair, 46 Park Lane resembles a private club with wood-paneled walls and an ornate fireplace dating back to Britain’s Victorian era.

But down a flight of stairs is one of the most secure rooms in London. Built by IBV International Vaults, the steel-walled stronghold is scheduled to open next month and will cater to billionaires looking for a place to stash their most prized possessions.

“We’re getting calls every week about a room available for £2.5 million [$3.2 million] a year,” said Sean Hoey, managing director of IBV London, referring to an apartmentsize space. The firm, which also has 550 safe-deposit boxes on site and room for about 450 more, is betting on London’s reputation as a “safe haven,” even with Brexit.

This will be IBV’s sixth location, and it’s hardly the only such firm fielding queries from the wealthy. From London to Switzerland to parts of the US, the rich are looking to store precious metals, cash and cryptocurrency. For some, it’s the threat of a global recession.

Others are avoiding bank deposits as negative interest rates force lenders to charge for holding cash.

Many are concerned about natural disasters.

Hedge fund titan Ray Dalio captured the anxiety last month when he warned the global economy is under threat from an explosive mix of ineffective monetary policy, a

PESO EXCHANGE RATES n US 50.9570

widening wealth gap and climate change. A majority of wealthy investors are stockpiling cash in anticipation of a sharp market drop before the end of next year, according to a survey of clients from UBS Global Wealth Management.

Extraordinary demand

“WE’VE seen extraordinary demand for safe-deposit boxes ever since we started offering them in 2015, and that demand has really gone up since the late summer,” said Ludwig Karl, a spokesman for Swiss Gold Safe Ltd., which operates highsecurity alpine vaults. “Most people say they are planning for difficult economic circumstances.”

It’s a similar story for Sincona Trading AG, a precious-metals dealer with more than 1,000 safedeposit boxes for rent in central Zurich. It had scores of empty boxes three years ago, but now it’s renting about five a day, said Benoit Schoeni, a managing director.

“There has been an extreme demand,” he said. “It won’t take Continued on A2

n JAPAN 0.4691 n UK 65.7855 n HK 6.5163 n CHINA 7.2499 n SINGAPORE 37.3832 n AUSTRALIA 34.5641 n EU 56.3432 n SAUDI ARABIA 13.5882

Source: BSP (November 22, 2019 )

NewsSunday BusinessMirror

A2 Sunday, November 24, 2019

CATCH THEM IF YOU CAN

DECLARED as “Space Heater” Continued from A1

Based on the examples of these objects, articles and various stuff intercepted over a period of 12 months, it seems that drug syndicates have concluded that any object with a cavity, or a tiny space, could be a prospective hiding place for their nefarious trade.

A recent visit at the Customs bureau headquarters in Pasay City, presided over by a feisty Customs collector who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, showed the many objects on display which were once an asylum for shabu, cocaine, Ecstasy tablets, or marijuana and its close cousin, Kush. Kush is a strain of Cannabis indica grown mainly in Afghanistan, Northern Pakistan and North-Western India.

DECLARED as “Baby Dress”

DECLARED as “Muffler Parts”

The name comes from the Hindu Kush mountain range.

In the course of their unrelenting drive to prevent the entry of other illegal items, the Customs frontliners and anti-drug agents were also able to uncover 10 pieces of rifles and hand guns, 32,000 kilos of meat, 358 live ammunition, 3,084 wildlife or endangered species and 46 pieces of car parts and accessories.

58 busts in 10 months

AS of November 12, 2019, the Customs Bureau has successfully busted 58 attempts to bring in drugs into the country. That is an average of one drug bust every six weeks.

To date, the airport customs bureau has hauled off various drugs valued at more than P900 million,

broken down as follows: 107.5 kilos of shabu worth P731 million; 21,000 tablets of Ecstasy at P37 million; 4 kilos of cocaine worth P21 million; 73,000 tablets of valium/mogadon, P1.572 million; 83 cartridges of liquid cannabis worth P111.420, and 316 kilos of Kush worth P18.264 million, for a grand total of P920,251,200.

Training frontliners

ASKED how their frontliners were able to detect an incoming shipment of illegal items, the airport Customs chief said many veteran Customs examiners have learned the fine art of “profiling.” This takes years of training to study the objects or any commercial items being sent which could harbor illicit items. The Customs examiners make a close study of the accompany-

www.businessmirror.com.ph

ing documents.

They also study records of senders and receivers for past records or any association to any criminal act.

“Once the alarm is raised, the examiner asks for x-ray scans of the suspected object for further verification,” this reporter was told.

But before any suitcase or expensive item is wrecked to gain access to the suspected items, the source said they call in the services of the drug-sniffing K-9.

This is because more often, the sender of drugs would try their best to camouflage the hot items they send by concealing them in expensive suitcases, toys or furni-

ture or other objects.

The Customs officer explained to the BusinessMirror that trained dogs would sniff the objects in question and once the canine has positively indicated that drugs could be found inside, then the examiner would have the confidence to pull apart any object “without fear that they could have been mistaken and made to pay for their mistakes.”

The Customs frontliner attributed the agents’ high level of success to the administration’s serious fight against drugs, carried on by Customs Commissioner Rey Leonardo Guerrero.

“We were directed by Commissioner Guerrero to be relentless in

our campaign, despite the threat to our lives by drug syndicates.”

It was probably in desperation that drug syndicates have resorted to increasingly imaginative ways to distribute their deadly products anywhere in the world, because many of what they send into the country have been intercepted, the Customs official added.

They can keep trying—as the past year’s record of increasingly more diverse tools for concealment—to look for new means to smuggle the drugs, but one hopes the frontliners would be just as smart and quick to detect, aided by technology and the ever-reliable canines.

World’s rich are rattled and looking for old-fashioned security Continued from A1

too long until we’re full up.”

Safe-deposit boxes can range from a few centimeters in height to the size of a kitchen cabinet. Another option are free ports—warehouses in tax-free zones such as Singapore, Geneva and Delaware favored for storing art, but which typically limit the amount of time that pieces can be held.

There are more than 25 million safe-deposit boxes by some estimates in the US alone. They can be used for the mundane to the exotic. A private collector held the Crown of the Andes, made with 5.3 pounds of gold and more than 400 emeralds, in a Citibank box before its sale four years ago to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Still, for many banks, they’re no longer a core offering.

The amount of space they require is one deterrent. That’s especially the case in London, home to the world’s largest population of wealthy individuals, according to real-estate broker Knight Frank.

In the city center, few places have secure storage facilities as large as IBV’s on Park Lane, where customers can also purchase gold coins from across the globe.

In the US, safe-deposit boxes also have largely fallen out of favor as banks close branches and opt not to install them in new ones.

Demand has waned in recent years, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp., the nation’s two largest lenders.

“Much of the decline can be attributed to clients opting to store documents online, especially younger clients,” said Bank of America spokesman Don Vecchiarello.

Cannabis factor

BUT there’s revived interest as fears of weather disasters and wildfires have prompted more people to secure their valuables, said Jerry Pluard, founder of Safe Deposit Box Insurance Coverage. The boxes are also an option for cannabis businesses that are locked out of the US banking system because marijuana remains illegal at the federal level, he said.

“W

e’ve seen extraordinary demand for safe-deposit boxes ever since we started offering them in 2015, and that demand has really gone up since the late summer. Most people say they are planning for difficult economic circumstances.”—Ludwig Karl, a spokesman for Swiss Gold Safe Ltd., which operates highsecurity alpine vaults

Some Swiss firms are also seeing demand driven by central bank policy. Negative interest rates have left Switzerland’s banks caught between the prospect of losing money to hold client deposits and imposing fees that could chase customers away.

UBS Group AG, the world’s biggest wealth manager, and rival Credit Suisse Group AG announced plans this year to expand measures for charging rich clients for holding excess cash. To some, these extra costs have made the safe-deposit box a viable alternative. A spokeswoman for UBS’s Switzerland bank, which operates almost 250,000 safe-deposit boxes nationwide, said demand from clients has declined in recent years.

“The storage cost for cash is cheaper than negative interest rates,” said Swiss Gold Safe’s Karl. The firm offers six box sizes, with the largest renting for 4,039 Swiss francs ($4,079) a year. “Cash storage has become a strong business for us.”

Safe haven?

SOME bankers said the desire for safe-deposit boxes makes little sense. To avoid charges on their accounts, the wealthy can spread their cash across multiple banks.

Clients also need to buy insurance in case something happens to the money, such as a fire.

The proliferation of nonbanks providing safe-deposit boxes has prompted some Swiss lawmakers to question whether they’re providing a safe haven for wrongdoing such as money laundering, noting they don’t face the same level of scrutiny and regulatory oversight as traditional banks.

Storing large sums of cash

in safe-deposit boxes demands a checklist of tasks. Those include arranging transport of the money and keeping detailed records of its location to avoid raising suspicions over money laundering if the cash ever returns to a bank account.

Moreover, failing to strictly adhere to a safe-deposit firm’s protocols may result in being rejected as a customer.

“The even bigger issue is getting the cash back into your account,” said Felix Brill, chief investment officer of Liechtenstein-based VP Bank, which manages about $50 billion of assets and offers some safe-deposit boxes.

Still, “no one likes to pay negative interest rates. Everyone looks for alternatives.”

In 2015, burglars drilled through the wall of an underground vault in London, making off with $20 million of jewelry. A year earlier, a customer of a Wells Fargo & Co. branch in Highland Park, New Jersey, lost millions of dollars of rare watches that had been stored in a safe-deposit box, the New York Times reported in July.

Ironically, heists and scandals can boost other firms offering safe-deposit boxes as the rich hunt even more secure places to stash their prized possessions.

Christopher Barrow, chief executive officer of London-based Metropolitan Safe Deposits, said his company spent more than $3 million to build a facility that opened this year in southwest London.

“Hatton Garden was a classic case,” said Barrow, whose firm has more than 15,000 safe-deposit boxes in central London alone.

“There was a flight to quality on the back of it.”

The World

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

BusinessMirror

Sunday, November 24, 2019

A3

China’s economy to stabilize in 2020, Goldman Sachs says

A

n easing in trade tensions, a bottoming out of global manufacturing activity and the continuation of cautious policy support will aid the stabilization in China’s economy next year, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

The world’s second-largest economy will grow by 5.8 percent next year, and will be helped by resilient consumer spending,

economists including Andrew Tilton and Hui Shan wrote in their 2020 outlook published Friday. The consensus among

economists surveyed by Bloomberg for 2020 output growth is 5.9 percent.

Stabilization, or even a “weak sequential reacceleration” as seen by Goldman next year would represent a good outcome for China’s policy-makers, who have grappled with the combined downward effects of their own efforts to curb financial risks and the confidence-sapping impact of the trade war through the course of 2019.

Acknowledging that the People’s Bank of China and the fiscal authorities have stepped up support this year, the Goldman economists still see the need for further easing in 2020, “with an

emphasis on fiscal measures.”

There has been a “shift in domestic policy toward a more conservative stance that puts relatively more weight on risk control and sustainability, and accepts slightly lower growth as the price for reduced tail risk,” the economists wrote.

“Chinese policy-makers appear to be increasingly focused on “playing the long game” in terms of their policy settings.”

The rise in China’s consumer price inflation in the course of the swine fever outbreak this year has presented a challenge to policy-makers as it has been coupled with deflation in the industrial sector. For 2020, that

situation is likely to continue, the economists wrote, with a recovery in the stock of sows aiding an easing of headline inflation in the second half of 2020.

Only a moderate improvement in producer-price deflation is expected, they argued.

T he big gest r isk to t his picture of stabilization is a breakdown in the US- China trade talks.

“Both sides have an incentive to bargain aggressively and each appears to perceive it has the advantage,” according to the report. “We see the next few weeks as the critical phase, before the scheduled December 15 tariff implementation.” Bloomberg News

Bacteria-infected mosquitoes take bite out of deadly dengue

W

ASHINGTON—They still bite, but new research shows labgrown mosquitoes are fighting dangerous dengue fever that they normally would spread.

Dengue infections appear to be dropping fast in communities in Indonesia, Vietnam, Brazil and Australia that are buzzing with the especially bred mosquitoes, an international research team reported Thursday.

It’s the first evidence from large-scale field trials that mosquitoes are less likely to spread dengue and similar viruses when they also carry a type of bacteria that’s common in insects and harmless to people.

Rather than using pesticides to wipe out bugs, “this is really about transforming the mosquito,” said Cameron Simmons of the nonprofit World Mosquito Program that is conducting the research.

The first hint of success came from Australia. Mosquitoes bred to carry Wolbachia bacteria were released in parts of North Queensland starting in 2011, and gradually spread through the local mosquito population.

Dengue is transmitted when a mosquito bites someone who is infected, and then bites another person, but somehow Wolbachia blocks that—and local transmission has nearly disappeared in those North Queensland communities, Simmons said in an interview.

The real test would come in dengue-plagued areas in Asia and Latin America that regularly experience outbreaks where millions get the painful and sometimes deadly disease.

Thursday, Simmons’s team reported a 76-percent decline in dengue recorded by local authorities in an Indonesian community near the city of Yogyakarta since the 2016 release of Wolbachia-carrying mosquitoes. That’s compared to dengue transmission in a nearby area where regular mosquitoes do the biting.

Researchers found a similar drop in a community near the southern Vietnamese city of Nha Trang. And preliminar y results suggest large declines in dengue and a related virus, chikungunya, in a few neighborhoods in Brazil near R io de Janeiro.

The studies are continuing in those countries and others.

But the findings, presented at a meeting of the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, suggest it’s possible to turn at least some mosquitoes from a public health threat into nuisance biters.

The work marks “exciting progress,” said Michigan State University Prof. Zhiyong Xi, who wasn’t involved with the project but has long studied how Wolbachia can turn mosquitoes against themselves.

Reducing disease “is the ultimate success of our field,” added University of Maryland biologist Brian Lovett, who also wasn’t part of the project.

More research is needed, specialists cautioned. These s t u d i e s u s e d l o c a l h e a lt h g r o u p s ’ c o u nt s o f d e n g u e cases rather than blood tests, noted Penn State University Prof. Elizabeth McGraw. And while Wolbachia has persisted

In this September 24, 2014, file photo, a technician releases mosquitoes that are infected with a dengue-blocking bacteria called “Wolbachia” in the Tubiacanga neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The nonprofit World Mosquito Program infected mosquitoes with that bacteria, called Wolbachia, and released them in communities in Indonesia, Vietnam, Brazil and Australia that agreed to be test sites. Researchers say dengue cases fell dramatically, compared to nearby communities where regular mosquitoes did the biting. AP/Silvia Izquierdo, File

in Nor th Queensland mosquitoes for eight years and counting , whether mosquitoes maintain dengue resistance that long in harder-hit regions remains to be seen.

“The results are pretty exciting—strong levels of reductions—but there clearly are going to be things to be learned from the areas where the reductions are not as great,” McGraw said.

More than half of insect species, from fruit flies to butterflies, naturally are infected with Wolbachia—but not the main dengue-spreader, Aedes aeg ypti mosquitoes. They’re daytime biters that thrive in hot urban and suburban localities where, for now, widespread pesticide spraying is the main

protection.

Researchers with the World Mosquito Program first injected mosquito eggs with Wolbachia in a lab. Infected females then pass the bacteria on through their eggs. Releasing enough Wolbachia carriers, both the females that bite and the males that don’t, allows mating to spread the bacteria through a local mosquito population.

The approach doesn’t reduce bites. Simmons said the up-front cost is cheaper than years of spraying and medical care.

It ’s j u s t one of mu lt ipl e novel mosquito-control me t ho d s u nd e r s t u d y : n M i c h i g a n S t a t e ’s X i uses Wolbac h i a in a d if fer ent way—to el im inate mosqu itoes. Release on ly ma le

Wolbachia carr iers and when t he y m at e w it h u n i n fe c t ed fema les, t he eg gs don’t hatc h. n Ot her researchers zap male mosquitoes with a small dose of radiation, sterilizing them before releasing them into the wild. n Genet ica l ly mod if y ing mosqu itoes is a not her ap proac h. Fu r t hest in development is Br it a in’s Ox itec, which gives male mosquitoes a gene to wea ken t heir of f spr ing so t hey don’t su r v ive to adu lt hood.

Each approach has pros and cons, but “our best hope to control the mosquitoes that make us sick is to box them in with multiple technologies,” said Maryland’s Lovett. AP

The world may be facing a bigger problem than a potential recession

T

he global economy is stuck in a rut that it won’t exit unless governments revolutionize policies and how they invest, rather than just hoping for a cyclical upswing, the OECD said.

The latest outlook and polic y prescriptions from the Paris-based group mark a step beyond its repeated warnings about threats to growth from US-China tensions, weak investment and trade flows. Those remain, but it also flags more systemic challenges from climate change, technology and the fact that the trade war is just part of a bigger shift in the global order.

For OECD Chief Economist Laurence Boone, the worry is that the world could continue to suffer in the decades to come

if authorities offer short-term fiscal and monetary fixes as the only response.

“The biggest concern…is that the deterioration of the outlook continues unabated, reflecting unaddressed structural changes more than any cyclical shock,” Boone said. “It would be a policy mistake to consider these shifts as temporary factors that can be addressed with monetary and fiscal policy: they are structural.”

The pessimism about the deep seated problems in the global economy contrasts with more upbeat signals coming from financial markets, where investors are increasingly betting on an upswing next year depending on the latest twists in trade talks.

Morgan Stanley sees a pickup in global growth from early next year, though risks are still skewed to the downside, while Goldman Sachs says better trade policy news recently means the drag on world growth should ease.

The OECD sees global growth stuck at 2.9 percent this year and next, and rising slightly to 3 percent in 2021. It lowered its 2019 US forecast to 2.3 percent from 2.4 previously, and left 2020 at 2percent.

On trade, the OECD said the risk of further escalation of tensions is a “serious concern.” More worrying, even if recent restrictions were reversed, uncertainties could linger. That would weigh on business investment growth in major advanced economies, which

the OECD expects to slow to about 1.25 percent a year from close to 2 percent in 2018.

The entrenched trade and investment challenges mean governments must make deeper changes beyond simply rolling back tariffs of the last two years.

This could mean updating global rules and reducing subsidies with harmful effects on trade, the OECD said.

I t u rg e d a s i m i l a r l y p ro fo u n d rethink of environmental policies amid bushfires in Australia and flooding in Venice that some have linked to climate change. The backlash against carbon emissions has even led to protest movements such as “flight shaming.”

Beyond how climate events harm the economy, how governments regulate and respond is also having an impact.

Without clear policy on issues like carbon tax, the delays to business investment have “dire consequences for growth and employment,” Boone said.

While fiscal stimulus could provide a short-term boost, the OECD said the focus should be on the long term, such as through dedicated investment funds.

“The situation remains inherently fragile, and structural challenges are daunting,” Boone said. “There is a unique window of opportunity to avoid a stagnation that would harm most people: restore certainty and invest for the benefit of all.”

Xi: We did not start trade war but we’ll fight back if necessary

C

hinese President Xi Jinping said his nation wants to work toward a phase one trade agreement with the US on the “ basis of mutual respect and equality,” his first comments on a partial deal that he could potentially sign with President Donald J. Trump.

“We did not initiate this trade war and this is not something we want,” Xi reiterated in a Friday meeting with prominent international visitors to Beijing, including former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. “When necessary, we will fight back, but we have been working actively to try not to have a trade war.”

The comments come a few days after US President Donald Trump said China was not “stepping up to the level that I want” in the negotiations, as doubts have emerged about whether the two sides can hammer out a written agreement. On Wednesday, China’s chief trade negotiator Liu He indicated he was “cautiously optimistic” about reaching the first phase of a deal.

Liu made the comments in a speech in Beijing on Wednesday ahead of the Bloomberg New Economy Forum, which is being organized by Bloomberg Media Group, a division of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News. Some of the foreigners who met with Xi on Friday were also in Beijing to attend the New Economy Forum.

Xi also repeated the official line that China doesn’t want a trade war, but is “not afraid” to fight one. The Chinese leader spoke to more than a dozen people including former US government officials, such as Hank Paulson and Gary Cohn.

Bloomberg LP Chairman Peter Grauer also attended the meeting.

Since Trump announced the phase one deal a month ago, markets have been whipsawed by comments from both sides, first indicating progress, and then the opposite.

The latest potential hurdle came after Liu made his dinner-time comments, when the US House voted 417-1 for legislation supporting Hong Kong protesters that has already been unanimously approved by the Senate. It could go to Trump as soon as Thursday and he plans to sign the bill, a person familiar with the matter said. Bloomberg News

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Sunday, November 24, 2019

The World BusinessMirror

Editor: Angel R. Calso

Obama warns technology has Hong Kong’s wealthy aren’t giving up on the city just yet created a more splintered world I

F

ormer US President Barack Obama warned that technology is creating a more splintered world, fueling the disparities among wealthy and poorer nations, and people within countries.

“The rise of extreme inequality both within nations and between nations that is being turbocharged by globalization and technology” is one of the biggest risks for young people, Obama said Thursday at Salesforce.com Inc.’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. “New technologies have allowed us reach. We have a global market. I can project my voice and you can take your technology to new markets. It has also amplified inequalities.”

Though his successor Donald Trump has taken presidential use of Twitter to new heights, Obama has long been associated with the tech industry. His 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns were known for their use of the Internet and social media to galvanize supporters. Some of Obama’s staff-

ers came from Silicon Valley companies, including Alphabet Inc.’s Google, and there’s a diaspora of former Obama administration officials who have worked in the tech industry since leaving the White House, including David Plouffe, formerly with Uber Technologies Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.’s top Spokesman Jay Carney.

Still, the 44th president talked about how the Internet has helped divide American politics and society.

“People remark on the polarization of our politics and rightfully so,” Obama said. “People rightfully see challenges like climate change and mass refugees and feel like things are spinning out of control. Behind that, what I see is a sense of anxiety, rootlessness and uncertainty in so many

Former US President Barack Obama speaks to young leaders from across Europe in a Town Hall-styled session on April 6, 2019, in Berlin, Germany. Obama spoke to several hundred young people from European government, civil society and the private sector about the nitty-gritty of achieving positive change in the government and society. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

people. Some of that is fed by technology and there’s an anger formed by those technologies.”

Soc i a l-med i a ser v ices, i nc lud i ng Facebook I nc. a nd Google‘s YouTube, have been acc u sed of f ue l i ng pol a r i z ation w ith algorithms that show people news and other content t hat matc h t heir preconceived t h in k ing a nd v iew points.

“If you watch Fox News, you live in a different reality than if you read The New York Times. If you follow one rabbit hole on YouTube or the Internet, then suddenly things look completely different,” Obama said during his conversation with

Salesforce co-Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff. “We are siloing ourselves off in ways that are dangerous. I believed, and I still believe the Internet can be a powerful tool for us to finally see each other and unify us, but right now it’s disappointing.”

Since leaving the White House in January 2017, Obama has become a fixture on the paid-speaker circuit. Thursday’s appearance at Dreamforce is at least Obama’s second appearance at a tech event in San Francisco in the last two months. He also spoke at a Splunk Inc. conference in September.

Bloomberg News

Indonesia eyes vaping ban after illness reaches Asia

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he world ’s second-largest tobacco market, Indonesia, is weighing a total ban on electronic cigarettes, joining a growing number of nations cracking down on vaping due to health concerns.

The Indonesian government is working on revising existing ecigarette regulations, said Anung Sugihantono, the Health Ministry’s director general of disease control and prevention. “ The ministry’s stance is consistent: we want to ban, not limit, vaping and e-cigarettes,” he said in a text message this week.

The move comes a week after a teenager in central Philippines

who’s been vaping for six months and also smoking cigarettes was diagnosed with a lung injury­— likely the first known case in Asia of the mystery illness that’s killed 47 people in the US and afflicted over 2,000. If Indonesia follows its Southeast Asian neighbors like the Philippines and Singapore in banning vaping, the region will be all but sealed off to e-cigarette companies.

Once thought of as a useful tool to help smokers quit, the lung illness outbreak has swiftly turned regulatory attitudes around the world against vaping. It’s now banned by around 30 countries, including India and Brazil, while

China, the world’s biggest smoking market, has been tightening rules around the practice.

The proposed ban will be another setback for Juul Labs Inc., which began selling its products in Indonesia earlier this year in partnership with PT Erajaya Swasembada, a distributor known for selling Apple Inc.’s iPhones. Juul’s business in the US is struggling under regulatory scrutiny of whether it marketed products to teenagers.

Tobacco smokers make up 35 percent of Indonesia’s 264 million population, according to the World Health Organization. The market is dominated by cigarette ma kers PT Hanjaya Manda la

Sampoerna, a Philip Morris International Inc. unit, PT Gudang Garam and PT Djarum.

Indonesian Personal Vaporizer Association, a group of ecigarettes importers, vape shop owners and vaping enthusiasts, said that the government should hold public d iscussions w ith stakeholders before imposing any restrictions.

Indonesia has not reported any cases of vaping-related illness, and the rising popularity of e-cigarettes showed that smokers see benefits in switching over from traditional cigarettes, association chief Garindra Kartasasmita said.

Bloomberg News

Deadly hog virus closes in on one of China’s top pork producers

T

he deadly swine disease roiling China’s hog farms is getting closer to one of its top overseas suppliers of pork.

African swine fever was found in 20 wild boar in Poland’s western Lubusz province this month, putting the disease within 80 kilometers of Germany, the European Union’s biggest hog producer. While eastern Europe has grappled with the virus for several years, the latest cases show Germany is “increasingly exposed” to a potential spread, the agriculture ministry said.

The EU has been a crucial supplier of pork to China, boosting exports as the Asian country tries to fill a meat shortfall brought on by the unprecedented outbreak.

Those trade flows would be at risk if the virus spreads to the EU’s key producers, and the recent Polish cases follow similar ones in Belgium, on the other side of Germany, since last year.

The virus has “jumped further and faster than I think anybody expected,” said Rupert Claxton, meat director at France-based consultant Gira. “The loss of the China market would be a disaster” for the European pork industry if a bigger outbreak were to prompt broad restrictions on exports, he said.

EU pork shipments to China

s Hong Kong’s run as one of the world’s most important financial hubs coming to an end?

It’s an understandable question after one of the city’s most turbulent stretches since pro-democracy demonstrations erupted in June. The past few days have brought a drumbeat of bad news, raising concerns about the independence of Hong Kong’s judiciary, the future of its trading relationship with the US and the prospect of more violence between police and protesters.

Yet inter views this week with investors, law yers, bankers, diplomats and businesspeople suggest things will have to get significantly worse before Hong Kong’s moneyed classes give up on a city that has defied doubters time and again.

Optimists say that Hong Kong still offers a unique, if diminished, gateway between China and the rest of the world, and that both sides have too much riding on the city to stand by and watch it crumble.

That sanguine outlook may ultimately prove wrong, of course, and there are plenty of pessimists. But for all the talk of contingency plans and capital outflows, signs of a mass exodus have so far failed to materialize. Here’s what people have been saying about Hong Kong’s future:

Richard Harris, founder of Port Shelter Investment Management, who has been in the city for 50 years

There’s been no change to the taxation regime and there’s likely to be almost no change to corporate law. Those are the sort of things that impact businesses. I think in terms of Hong Kong’s economic framework, it’s still extremely good for doing business, and I can’t see how that would be changed by whatever’s happened.

Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of State, speaking at Bloomberg’s New Economy Forum in Beijing

I hope that the issue will be settled by negotiation that maintains the principles by which decolonization was carried out some period ago. I believe that this is possible, and it should be likely.

Bill Winters, C.E.O. and executive director at Standard Chartered Plc.

Not much money has actually moved. We’ve seen clients open accounts in Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan, in that order, but while the accounts were set up, not a lot of money has actually moved. We’re not seeing a crescendo.

The biggest impact of the Hong Kong protests by us has been on our staff. It’s been hard for them to get to work and there’s elements of stress with conflicts at home between people who disagree. We’ve been in Hong Kong 162 years, we’ve been through SARS, the financial crisis, and our business will keep going.

Ronnie Chan, Hong Kong-based chairman of Hang Lung Properties

I don’t think Hong Kong itself can resolve the situation. Every problem eventually will pass, and the same thing with Hong Kong, it’s just a matter of what form and shape it will be. Hong Kong will recover, how much can we recover is the question.

Fraser Howie, author of Red Capitalism: The Fragile Financial Foundation of China’s Extraordinary Rise

No one thinks China is about to collapse so there is a need still for a gateway and only Hong Kong offers that. Free flow of money, capital and people is all still possible in Hong Kong, and there still is a strong commercial law framework.

Hong Kong will be a thorn in Beijing’s side. How that escalation comes I am still unsure but there is no chance of going back. The Hong Kong bubble has popped and will not be reengineered.

Stephen Innes, chief Asia market strategist at Axitrader Ltd.

After the constant weekend carnage in the streets, financial market concerns must play second fiddle to employer safety and welfare, so I can only assume relocation discussions are happening. When you think about it these days, most noncustomer facing jobs are pretty much location-agnostic, so there is little holding back foreign businesses from possibly relocating a bulk of their staff.

Piyush Gupta, C.E.O. of DBS Group Holdings Ltd., on clients slowly moving money to Singapore, the U.K. and other locations People want an insurance policy on Hong Kong.

Phillip Hynes, head of political risk and analysis, ISS Risk

Pigs feed from a food dispenser in a pen at the Znamensky Swine Genetic Center, a unit of AVK Exima ZAO, in Topkoe village, near Orel, Russia, on May 19, 2016. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has urged a drive to increase food security, saying last year that Russia’s huge tracts of farmland “make us the richest country” in agriculture. Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg

totaled 1.5 million tons in the nine months through September, jumping 55 percent from a year earlier, European Commission data show. That’s helped push pig prices to a six-year high, and China is “buying almost everything,” from hams to hearts to loins, said Tim Koch, a market analyst at AMI in Bonn, Germany.

There haven’t been any cases found in Germany yet, and while it’s unclear what measures China would take if that were to happen,

imports from all or part of Germany could be banned. European farmers have been hesitant to expand herds despite the improved demand, partly amid concerns of a disease outbreak.

Western Europe has so far been successful in limiting the virus’ spread. Belgium has reported infected wild boar since last year, but cases haven’t reached domestic farms or nearby nations. Spain, another key EU shipper, also remains free of the disease.

For now, the threat is greatest in eastern Europe. Polish veterinary authorities are erecting fences and making more searches in the impacted region. Countries including Romania, Ukraine and Bulgaria have also had outbreaks, and Serbia and Slovakia reported their first cases this year.

“We’re learning more about how to control it, but at the moment it’s not a winning battle,” Claxton said. “We’re slowing it rather than beating it.” Bloomberg News

People were horrified by the violence of last week. But the protests couldn’t survive without sustainable support from the working class, and there’s a surprising amount of support from the middle class.

I’d caution against businesses establishing in Hong Kong now. My assessment of the protest movement is that it will continue for a long time; Hong Kong will never return to the Hong Kong it was before, it’s changed already. We’ve yet to see the impact of societal divisions created here. District elections may further polarize that.

Hong Kong will be an unwelcoming investment and business environment over the next few years, and very volatile.

Pauline Loong, a veteran China watcher and managing director at Asia-analytica in Hong Kong

Hong Kong will always have an international role regardless of political developments. But without confidence that its systems are not being subsumed into that vast opacity of mainland practices, its role would increasingly be confined to one of providing China-related services.

China is too big a market and Hong Kong too important a conduit for Chinese capital flows for anyone to make a move without a war plan on the scale of the invasion of Normandy, and that takes time. Bloomberg News

Science

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

BusinessMirror

Sunday

Sunday, November 24, 2019

A5

D.O.S.T. setting off internationalization of TBIs

T

he government is leveling up and placing in the global map the incubators in its technology business incubation (TBI) program in response to the challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0).

To stress this point, memorandums of understanding (MOUs) were signed by 12 Department of Science and Technology (DOST)assisted TBIs across the Philippines for the upgraded TBI program during the Third National Technology Business Incubator Summit on November 20.

The TBI 4.0 program aims to upgrade the capabilities of the agency’s technology business incubation network to set off their “internationalization.”

“Through the DOST TBI 4.0 program, we are currently leveling up our DOST TBIs to be on a par with well-known foreign incubators and put the Philippines on the map in terms of services and start-up support. We aim for global presence and offer our start-ups opportunities so they can scale up and grow,” Science Secretary Fortunato de la Peña said during the summit. “ The TBI 4.0 program was conceptualized w ith the goal

of elevating the ser vices and programs of the DOST TBI Network as a whole. To reiterate this point, the program aims to build upon and expand the current strengths and capabilities of the original DOST TBIs by means of codeveloping programs with inter nationa l incubators and accelerators. In doing so, this would allow our own start-ups to be exposed to the best practices available in the international innovation ecosystem,” de la Peña said.

Leaders of the 12 TBIs signed the MOUs with de la Peña and Deputy Executive Director Engineer Raul Sabularse of DOST-Philippine Council for Industry, Energy, and Emerging Technology Research and Development (PCIEERD).

The 12 TBIs are: University of the Philippines Upscale Innovation Hub; University of the Philippines Cebu; Asian Institute of Management, AIM-Dado

Leaders of 12 TBIs sign memorandums of understanding with Science Secretary Fortunato de la Peña and Deputy Executive Director Engr. Raul Sabularse of DOST-PCIEERD during the Third National Technology Business Incubator Summit on November 20. PCIEERD photo

Banatao Incubator; De La Salle University, Animo Labs; Caraga State University, Navigatú; West Visayas State University, Green Technology Business Incubator; Mindanao State University-Iligan institute of Technology, Ideya; QBO Innovation Hub; University of Science and Technology of Southern Philippines; Batangas State University, Kite; University of the Philippines Los Baños, Sibol; and Palawan State University, Palawan International Technology Business Incubator.

Foreign partners already onboard are Villgro Social Enterprise Ventures in India, Swinburne University in Australia, BCB Innovation Pte. Ltd. in Singapore, Spinoff Acadasia Pte. Ltd. in Singapore, ThaiBispa in Thailand, while the local partners are Ideaspace and Spring Valley, the

PCIEERD news release said.

The TBI 4.0 program provides funding support to DOST-funded TBIs to lead the assessment, codevelopment of incubation programs, capacity building and coincubation arrangements.

Sabularse said, “This year’s summit is aimed at fostering global partnerships as a strategy for internationalization.”

He added: “The bonds we built today with the signing of the MOUs reassures the cooperation of everyone involved to collectively undertake and implement the TBI 4.0 program and other programs of the DOST and the TBIs, and also strengthens our resolve to be responsive to the industry’s needs.... We hope to see more collaboration among the different stakeholders flourish as a result and outcome of this

summit.”

The TBI summit was part of the Philippine Startup Week 2019, the country’s first large-scale collaborative initiative by the DOST, the Departments of Trade and Investment (DTI), the Information and Communications Technology (DICT), QBO Innovation Hub and various private agencies, to showcase the Filipino start-up community through simultaneous nationwide events.

The signing of the MOU in 2018 for the Inclusive Filipinnovation and Entrepreneurship Roadmap by DTI, DOST, DICT, Department of Education, Commission on Higher Education and National Economic and Development Authority, gave the government the go signal to build the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem of the country

to seize market opportunities and address the challenges of Industry 4.0.

Industry 4.0 is a strategy and trend adopted by many countries toward automation in manufacturing technologies, which includes Internet of things (IoT), cloud computing, cognitive computing and artificial intelligence.

The DOST has long supported innovation and entrepreneurship building in the country through its major programs, through the establishment of the TBI program.

It launched 45 Incubators around the country and supported over 320 start-ups, more than 1,200 jobs, more than 110 full-blown companies and generated more than 280 million private investments since its founding in 2009.

In response to the challenges of Industry 4.0, the DOST, through PCIEERD, launched the “TBI 4.0 Program” to upgrade the capabilities of the DOST TBI Network through a more transformational intervention that would prop in the global map the country’s TBIs. The TBI 4.0 Program hopes to put the country in the map by partnering and collaborating with incubators and accelerators from other countries, developing and implementing startup programs with these partners, and co-incubating and immersing Philippine startups in global environments.

Lyn Resurreccion

Faith

Sunday

A6 Sunday, November 24, 2019

Solemnity of Christ, the King of the universe: ‘Luke 23:35-43’

Neither ‘clericalism’ nor ‘anti-clericalism’

Msgr. Josefino S. Ramirez SUNDAY GOSPEL IN OUR LIFE

I

n the 19th century, there was a very strong movement to oust God from the realm of public life.

Led by atheists who proudly called themselves “philosophers,” they wanted to reconstruct society based only on human reason and achievement. They wanted to relegate God to the dark corners of the sacristy. They considered religion as a purely private affair that should have no repercussion in public and social life.

Perhaps, they were reacting to some mistaken interference of religious authorities into purely secular affairs. They were reacting to “clericalism” by substituting a virulent “anti-clericalism” which was equally wrong.

For many years, the Church suffered from this anticlericalism, and her rights were unjustly trampled upon. The notion began to spread that religion was a purely private matter and that society had to develop along its own way, without God and without socalled religious taboos.

But society without God has no firm foundation for its morals. Such absence of public morals is at the bottom of the internecine wars that have plagued the 19th and the 20th centuries.

The latest war was the devastating conflagration of the Second World War, that started more than 50 years ago. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Second World War, Pope John Paul II pointed out the underlying cause of the war: “The moral abyss into which contempt for God, and thus for man, plunged the world

50 years ago made us touch with our very fingers, as it were, the power of the ruler of this world [John 14:30], who can seduce consciences through falsehood, through scorn for man and for law, and through the cult of power and force.… The principle of equal respect for States, for each people’s right to selfdetermination and for their free cooperation in view of the higher common good of humanity.” (L’Osservatore Romano, September 4, 1989) Ultimately, Christ is the source of true peace. The Solemnity of Christ the King shows us that Christ, who is both God and Man, who redeemed mankind from the slavery of evil, is truly king of Peace. He has supreme authority over all things.

In the first place, He has to reign and govern in the heart of each individual. But he also has authority over the affairs of societies and nations.

Civil society, it is true, enjoys a legitimate autonomy and cannot be subject to a theocracy. That, after all, is part of the plan of God. But it is cannot relegate religion and the values that religion stands for, to the background.

What is needed is neither clericalism nor anticlericalism, but a wholesome mutual cooperation and recognition of spheres of competence.

Civil society has to strive for the common good of men. But the common good is not just economic development, but also includes the spiritual welfare of each member of society.

By making Christ reign, we can bring true peace back to society.

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

‘Red Wednesday’ is against religous violence, persecution

By Samuel P. Medenilla

E

Reporter

ven in a predominantly Christian country, Filipinos could still face harassment and even death just by going to Mass.

This is the reality faced by Filipino Christians, according to Jonathan B. Luciano, national director of Aid to the Church in Need Philippines (ACN) who lived in some provinces, where Catholics belong to the minority religious group.

He said the infamous example of this was the threat in the Marawi Siege in 2017, which left the city in ruins after extremists aligned with Islamic State destroyed many houses and churches.

“When I spoke with [Marawi] Bishop Edwin de la Peña, he told me stories [about the siege], which you will not stomach if you have a weak faith,” Luciano lamented.

The most recent incident, Luciano said, was the bombing of the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Cathedral in Jolo, which killed at least 20 people and injured many others.

He said Christian persecution in the Mindanao could increase in the coming years after he was informed by de la Peña of reports on the reemergence of supporters of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in some of the area’s provinces.

“ISIS is once again regrouping in Marawi, or in some parts of Mindanao,” he said.

And yet, despite these imminent threats, many Christians still practice their faith in Mindanao.

Raising awareness

Luciano said they and other persecuted Christians worldwide will be recognized in the celebration of Red Wednesday campaign this coming week.

This year’s Red Wednesday will

be held at 6:30 p.m. on November 27. The participating parishes and Catholic schools and universities will be lighting with red color their respective churches and school buildings to symbolize the martyrdom of Christians worldwide.

The highlight of the event will be the Mass at the Manila Cathedral which will be presided by Caloocan Bishop Pablo David. An ecumenical prayer will be joined by leaders of the Catholic Church and other Christian denominations. “ T he objective of t he Red Wednesday [campaign] is to wake us up of this reality, that we do not suffer such violence, persecution and oppression,” Luciano said.

Over 2,000 parishes will be joining this year’s nationwide Red Wednesday campaign.

During a press conference last Wednesday, Luciano noted the number of this year’s participants is significantly higher compared to those since Red Wednesday was launched in 2017.

“It started with just 30 [participating] Churches in 2017. It grew to 1,600 parishes last year. More than 2,070 parishes and institutions will participate in this year’s Red Wednesday,” Luciano said.

He attributed this to the rising awareness of Filipinos on the plight of persecuted Christians in the country and abroad.

Interreligious activity

This year, Luciano said the Red Wednesday campaign would be even more special since it will be joined by representatives from other Christian denominations.

The Manila Cathedral marks Red Wednesday on November 28, 2018. CBCP News

“It is not only the Catholics who become martyrs. There are other Christians, who were martyred since they also profess that Christ is God,” he said.

Bro. Robert Samson of the CBCP Episcopal Commission on Ecumenical Affairs Secretariat s a id i nte r re l i g iou s d i a log ue and activities are important in combating religious persecution and discrimination since they focus on the shared values of each religion rather than their differences.

He said this could be fostered by activities, such as corporal works of mercy like visiting the sick or helping the poor, taking care of the environment and the Red Wednesday campaign.

“There are many things we could do [with the followers of other religion] for collaboration and peace building,” Samson said.

Institutional event

Luciano said they are requesting the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) to institutionalize the Red Wednesday campaign in order to make it become an official Philippine Church event.

To support this, he said, they

Rich in dramatic Catholic history, Nagasaki hosts the pope

N

AGASAKI, Japan—It’s fitting that Pope Francis makes his first official visit to Japan in Nagasaki, the city where Christianity first took hold in the country and where nearly 500 years later it remains steeped in blood-soaked symbolism, both religious and political.

It was here that a small group of beleaguered Catholic converts went deep underground during centuries of violent persecution. It was here that their descendants dramatically emerged from hiding in the 19th century, their faith unbroken.

And, it was here that a US atom bomb brought death and destruction to the cathedral that the community was finally able to build.

As Francis makes the first papal visit to Japan in 38 years, he will likely look to the past by honoring the doggedness of those socalled Hidden Christians, while also laying out his vision for a future free from the threat of nuclear weapons.

In many ways, Nagasaki is the perfect backdrop for his visit to a nation that was once coveted by the West as a place of Catholic expansion but where only 0.35 percent of the 127 million people are Catholic.

26 crucified martyrs

One of the highlights of the visit, which started last Saturday, will be his prayer at a memorial to 26 martyrs crucified in 1597 at the start of an antiChristian persecution that lasted until about 1870.

“Our Christian ancestors were oppressed and monitored, and then suffered from the atomic attack. This all made me think, ‘What is it supposed to mean?’” Japanese Archbishop Mitsuaki Takami said. “Perhaps the followers in Nagasaki have been given a mission to convey peace.”

Takami, who heads Nagasaki’s Catholic community of 60,000, by far the biggest in Japan, is a Hidden Christian descendant who was exposed

to radiation in his mother’s womb when the atom bomb fell on August 9, 1945, near Urakami Cathedral.

He had several relatives die in the bombing that killed 74,000, a number that includes two priests and 24 followers inside the cathedral.

still can reach people’s hearts, especially given the state of global politics, said Kagefumi Ueno, a former Japanese ambassador to the Vatican.

“At a time when global leaders are increasingly becoming populist, the pope’s words can be a virtue of the international community and a moral authority,” he said.

Filipino Saint Lorenzo Ruiz, a Nagasaki martyr

Saint Lorenzo Ruiz, the first canonized Filipino martyr, together with three Dominican priests, a Japanese priest and a layman, were martyred by the shogunate in Nagasaki when they arrived there from the Philippines.

They were tortured and hanged upside down.

Ruiz died in September 1637.

They were canonized by then-Pope John Paul II in 1987, according to franciscanmedia.org.

Antinuke message

Takami, who has traveled the world with a statue of the Virgin Mary that was damaged in the blast, and other activists expect the pope will send a powerful antinuclear message on behalf of everyone in Nagasaki.

Many bomb survivors and supporters hope it will push Japan’s government, which is protected by the US nuclear umbrella, to sign the UN nuclearban treaty. Japan has refused to sign, saying it seeks to bridge the gap between nuclear and nonnuclear states.

Francis has gone further than other popes on the nuclear matter, saying that not only the use, but the mere possession of nuclear weapons is “to be firmly condemned.”

Francis will, likely, repeat his appeal for a total ban on nuclear weapons when he visits Nagasaki and Hiroshima, where 140,000 were killed by another US atomic bomb.

He will meet with survivors of those bombs,

Fascinated by Christian experience in Nagasaki People visit the 26 Martyrs Monument in Nagasaki, southern Japan. Pope Francis starts his first official visit to Japan in Nagasaki, ground zero for the Christian experience in a nation where the Catholic leader once dreamed of living as a missionary. AP/Eugene Hoshiko as well as those affected by the Fukushima nuclear disaster that followed a March 2011 tsunami and earthquake in northern Japan.

“Your country knows well the suffering caused by war,” Francis said in a video message to the Japanese on the eve of his trip. “Along with you, I pray that the destructive power of nuclear weapons never is let loose again on human history. The use of nuclear weapons is immoral.”

To meet descendants of Hidden Christians

Takami, 73, grew up hearing stories from his relatives of the suffering that many in Nagasaki endured after the bombing and is reminded of his determination for peace every time he visits Urakami Cathedral.

“Any weapon is ghastly, but nuclear weapons are hundreds of times more so,”Takami said, adding they should be abolished. “World leaders should be ashamed of talking from a safe and distant place

about nuclear weapons, calling them a deterrent even though they can kill hundreds of thousands, even millions of people.”

Many in Nagasaki are happy that the pope is coming first to their city, which is often eclipsed by the events in Hiroshima.

“I hope he will use his trip to Nagasaki to send a powerful message of the need to ban nuclear weapons,” said Chizuko Maruo, the daughter of an atomic bombing survivor who will attend the pope’s Sunday Mass at a city baseball stadium.

Francis will also greet some descendants of the Hidden Christians, who developed their own unique prayer known as the “Orasho,”or oratio, while hiding in Nagasaki’s northern islands, where some local Shinto and Buddhist residents supported them.

Francis, who is known to Japanese Catholics as Papa-sama, will also hold a Mass in Hiroshima, and in Tokyo, and meet with Japan’s emperor and prime minister.

Francis’s messages about life are universal and

As a youth Francis is said to have been fascinated by the history of the Christian experience in Nagasaki, and wanted to be a missionary there.

The area around Nagasaki became the center of a rapid Catholic expansion after the 1549 arrival to Japan of Saint Francis Xavier, the first Jesuit missionary.

More than a quarter-million Japanese are said to have converted until the Tokugawa shogunate, fearing that Christianity was the beginning of Western domination, outlawed it 1612.

Christians were forced to renounce their beliefs on pain of death and to trample on Catholic icons.

When discovered, Christians were tortured. Many were thrown into boiling hot springs or burned to death.

A small, determined Catholic minority went into hiding and practiced their faith in secret for more than 250 years.

The Hidden Christians finally broke their silence in 1865 by approaching a foreign priest. But with the ban on Christianity still in place, the 3,300 Catholics were banished from Nagasaki and were not allowed to return until the ban was lifted in 1873.

They built their long dreamed of cathedral in 1914.

Mitsuho Nakata, an artisan who makes Catholic statues near Urakami, is the great-grandson of a samurai, who cut ties with his feudal lord to pursue his Catholic faith. A group of samurai ambushed

are now gather ing feedbacks from participants of the previous Red Wednesday campaigns.

“All the feedbacks that we got are positive and they are supporting the institutionalization of Red Wednesday as an official Philippine Church event starting next year. Hopef u l ly, we pray that this will be granted [by the CBCP],” Luciano said.

He pointed out the importance of institutionalizing the Red Wednesday campaign since “being persecuted is part of our DNA as Christians.”

“Our Lord Himself was persecuted. The Apostles where persecuted. The 90 percent of the early Christians were martyred,” Luciano said.

He sa id t h is is more appa r ent w it h t he r ising nu mber of persec uted C hr ist i a ns worldw ide w it h a n est imated nu mber of 30 0 m i l l ion. C hr ist i a ns suf fer not only discr imination but a lso se x u a l abuse a nd v io lent attac k s, suc h as bombing , mut i l at ion a nd mu rder.

“As Pope Francis said, Christians today are more persecuted compared to their counterparts in the early days of the Church,” Luciano said.

Pope denounces anti-gay ‘persecution’ as recalling Nazi era

V

ATICAN CITY—Pope Francis has denounced anti-gay discrimination as reminiscent of Nazi-era persecutions and evidence of a “culture of hatred” that has reemerged today.

Francis made the comments in a wide-ranging speech last week to an international penal law association. He said some public officials speak about persecuted groups the same way Adolf Hitler referred to Jews in the 1930s.

He said: “These are actions that are typical of Nazism, that with its persecution of Jews, gypsies, people with homosexual orientation, represent an excellent model of the throwaway culture and culture of hatred.”

In the speech, Francis also denounced racially based police brutality, the arbitrary use of preventive detention, as well as the failure of legal systems to punish corporate crimes against the environment. He said such “ecocide” is a sin. AP

and killed most of his great-grandfather’s family.

After studying at a Catholic theological school, Nakata returned to work in the family-run workshop his father started.

“My family is here only because our ancestors kept their faith despite constant fear of getting killed or tortured,” Nakata said at his workshop, surrounded by dozens of statues of the Virgin Mary and saints. “I’m so impressed by their devotion and their strong faith and that they abandoned everything they had for it.”

AP, franciscanmedia.org

Tourism&Entertainment Editor: Carla Mortel-Baricaua

Tourism industry seen to sustain growth

T

By Pauline Joy M. Gutierrez

ourism Promotions Board (TPB) COO Venus Tan at the recent Philippine Travel Exchange (Phitex) and MICE Buyers Invitational (MICECONnect) 2019 said that the country is poised for a stronger tourism economy with campaigns geared at positioning the Philippines as a prime tourist destination for both leisure, and meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions (MICE).

There was a 14.1-percent year-on-year increase in domestic tourists to 110 million last year, exceeding the National Tourism Development Plan’s target of reaching 89.2 million tourists by 2022. In addition, the Department of Tourism reported that international inbound traffic from January to August of this year already totaled 4,852,107 and posted a 12.36-percent increase over the same period in 2018.

“We still have a bit of fallout from the closure of Boracay and after the suspension of charter flights to Kalibo and Caticlan. It needs more time to build itself back up again. But now, tourism is peaking up in other destinations like Bohol, Siargao and Palawan.

We need to diversify the promotions of these places, especially now that tourists are going farther north and south of the archipelago,” said Tan. The country is also playing to take a significant chunk of the international MICE market as more investors start parachuting in.

With this, Tan added that local government units are urged to develop their MICE market for tourism, as business travelers tend to be higher spending than leisure tourists because all their costs are paid in advance.

“Currently, Manila and Cebu still have the largest MICE network, but now we’re also looking at Iloilo,” she said. “The reason for this is that we’re building up

on the ‘bleisure’ narrative; a MICE destination should start developing its leisure [sector] first because people who come here not only go here for business.

They also want to know where to buy, where to eat and what else to do.”

Earlier this year, Department of Tourism and TPB launched the MICE Roadmap 2030, which plants a more definitive approach to the growing industry.

Under the roadmap, the industry is eyeing to grow revenues to P24.4 billion by 2030, an estimated 430-percent rise from the P4.6 billion registered in 2016. It also targets a gross value added of the MICE industry increase by P1.4 billion and improvement of the average rate in delegate expenditure per meeting by 19 percent.

According to the TPB figurehead, organizing events like Phitex and MICEConnect is crucial in order to realize these visions.

Phitex, the biggest travel trade event in the country, provided business-to-business (B2B) session between foreign buyers and local sellers to encourage tourism-related discourse among the participants, as well as open doors for business opportunities.

“This event is mounted annually as a support for stakeholders in the travel trade industry,” said Tan. “Instead of working as individual operators and sellers, we provide a platform for them to connect to hundreds of buyers from all over the world in one venue, which saves them precious time and money.

The event also gives buyers a more comprehensive view of the different destinations and packages that they can sell to consumers, either as individual or bundled tours.”

Happening simultaneously with Phitex, MICECONnect 2019 is the continuation of a two-year program as a comprehensive educational seminar for local MICE stakeholders.

TPB Acting Deputy COO Arnold Gonzales (from left), DOT Market Representative for India and Marketing Director of Buzz Travel Marketing India Private Limited Mr. Sanjeet, TPB COO Venus Tan, EON The Stakeholders Relations Group Chief Innovation Officer Carlos Mori Rodriguez and Malaysian Association of Tour and Travel Agents Deputy President Mohd Akil bin Mohd Yusof

Duty Free PHL launches new store, signals start of Christmas season

W

ith the aim of putting the Philippines in the map of the Southeast Asia’s top shopping destinations, Duty Free Philippines Corp.

(DFPC) has inaugurated its newest downtown offairport store—the Duty Free Luxe.

“Today marks the culmination of an idea that began years ago. An idea of a world-class duty free store that will put the Philippines as a top-of-mind shopping destination to boost the country’s shopping tourism,” said DFPC Chief Operating Officer Pelagio A. Angala.

Senate Committee on Tourism Chairman Sen. Nancy Binay, Angala and Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez, graced the ribbon-cutting and Christmas tree lighting ceremony on Friday.

The launch also signaled the start of the Christmas season with a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony. The 20-foot red-and-gold adorned tree is made of solihiya, rattan balls, capiz, burlap, and anahaw designed by Tamili Exports and enhanced by Gideon Hermosa.

Conveniently located at the Mall of Asia Complex in Pasay City, the said downtown store houses international high-end retails brands that are exclusively available at Duty Free Luxe, such as Gucci Beauty (make up line), Giorgio Armani Beauty (makeup line), Hogan (shoes) and MCM (leather goods).

Duty Free Luxe also houses high-end brands in fashion, cosmetics, fragrance, confectionery, wine and spirits to provide more options to balikbayans, overseas Filipino workers, frequent travelers and, more important, the foreign tourists.

“We acknowledged our vital role and to stay ahead of our competitors and to strengthen the Philippines as a great destination for travelers, we continue to explore ways to offer unique and extraordinary experiences that cannot be replicated easily,” Angala added.

With clearer distinction between shopping malls and regular retail stores, DFPC also celebrates new gems in the tourism sector, especially boutique enterprises and export quality homegrown brands crafted, designed, and produced by local communities through Go Lokal’s! Marahuyo.

Among the Philippine brands and artisans featured during the launch of Marahuyo Go Lokal are Aranaz (handbags), Earl Carlo Gariando Enterprises (clutch bags made of bass), Quiddity (handcrafted leather bags), Helena Alegre Jewelry (scriptural and fabricated jewelry), Joanique (fashion accessories), Maria Angelica Rare Finds (antique accessories), Arnel Papa (fashion jewelry), Mele + Marie (handbags), Adante Leyesa (fashion accessories) and Ann Ong (fashion jewelry).

“With great success and opportunities, we partnered with DFPC to bring MSME products to the travel retails market, a highly competitive market that requires a high degree of craftmanship and design,” Lopez said.

More than a travel retail shop, DFPC is an attached agency of the Department of Tourism which has supported over the years its tourism projects through its revenue remittances to the government.

Duty Free Luxe’s 20-foot red and gold-adorned Christmas tree is made up of native materials.

BusinessMirror

Sunday, November 24, 2019

A7

How a fateful hike spawned a tamaraw docufilm

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Story & photos by Celine Murillo

o be given access to the magnificent Mounts. Iglit-Baco Natural Park is an opportunity one doesn’t simply pass on.

With a sweeping terrain of rolling hills and undulating peaks, this place seemed like it belonged to another time, like the present did not deserve such beauty. As if to prove this point, most of the creatures that call this place home could not be found anywhere else. It was an entire world of its own.

A creature known as the tamaraw lives here. With only about 480 individuals left in the wild, it is one of the most critically endangered animals in the world, on the brink of disappearing forever. It resides exclusively in the island of Mindoro, and Iglit-Baco is where most of them are.

I couldn’t miss the chance to see them in their natural habitat.

I’d been sure I was going to be happy—it was the mountains after all. I’d expected to be in awe, for here dwelt the tamaraws. But I hadn’t anticipated my life to be changed so fiercely by this experience.

That night in October, we were at a place they called Station 3. It lay on the foot of Mount Magawang—one of the peaks that dot the landscape of Iglit-Baco.

We were in a bunkhouse, on the terrace where some of us sat on wooden benches while others were on the floor. Our faces awash in harsh white LED light.

Among us were men we’ve come to know as the tamaraw rangers, the guardians of the elusive beasts. They have sworn to protect these creatures, making sure they don’t go extinct. On that cold night, we listened to their harrowing stories: the lack of gear, the measly—and often delayed—salary, the dangerous encounters with poachers, the loneliness from being far from their family for 22 days, the complicated relationship with the indigenous Mangyan and many, many more.

Their words left a mark on my being— one that I’m sure would no longer heal.

I’ve always known the world was full of injustices, but to come face-to-face with the reality of it blew me away. It was immediate, the effect of this conversation.

I dealt with it the only way I know how: through creating. As soon as I got back, I wrote stories—several of them—about the plight of the tamaraws and its guardians. Yet somehow, I felt like I could do so much more.

I didn’t have money to donate. I found the thought of organizing a charity drive impractical. I didn’t have much to give, but I had words and a penchant for storytelling. And so Suwag o Suko was birthed.

It was originally conceived as a proposal for a National Geographic grant.

But it was declined. I was heartbroken, because I knew what a project like this could mean for the Tamaraw Conservation Program (TCP).

For a while, I kept this project on the shelves, thinking I’d get back to it in the future—perhaps when I’ve money to pare and a less weary soul. But then Biofin came along, bearing gifts of funding. I got Ace the director and the production team, on board. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Suwag o Suko was an attempt at telling the story of the tamaraw through a lens

Kali is the only product of the unsuccessful breeding program in the 70s to 90s

other than science—not that we don’t need scientific perspectives (we do, badly), it’s just that they are oftentimes hard to relate to. And for an issue as pressing as that of the tamaraw, we needed as many

Nature campers share a snapshot with tamaraw rangers.

Tamaraws can only be found in Mindoro, and are now critically-endangered animals.

people as possible to care. The best way to do that was to “humanize” the story.

When logic and reasoning prove insufficient, I say: appeal to the heart.

We protect what we love. And how can we love something we know nothing about?

Suwag o Suko was made because protecting the country’s natural heritage is every Filipino’s business. And speaking from experience, awareness often leads to involvement. The story of the tamaraw and the rangers inspired me into action.

I’m hoping this film will propel more people to do the same.

And if you’ll allow me a moment of immodesty, I’d like to have it on record that we didn’t make anything from this movie.

We did it pro bono. All its proceeds will go to the TCP to strengthen the conservation efforts and provide better working conditions for our rangers. It was a labor of love. And I’m happy that the film is looking like it’s going to do what it’s meant to do.

This whole experience made me realize how stories are vital. And that travel has another dimension to it. Of course, most of the time, a place is just a place, and we experience it in ways we only know how.

But sometimes, a place is not just a place; it is a catalyst, and its people an inspiration. And my wish is that when a story behind a place plants a seed in your heart; nourish it and let it bloom. For no matter how grueling and traumatizing the process may be, telling a story is a wonderful thing. Stories can save the world, and in the words of Martha Postlewaite, “this world is so worthy of rescue.”

Sports BusinessMirror

A8 Sunday, November 24, 2019

Human-rights experts debate risks, gains for Fifa, IOC

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ENEVA—The tricky balancing act for sports bodies to push progressive policies while supporting host nations with human-rights issues was in the spotlight at the United Nations on Thursday.

Fifa and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) were both praised and criticized by delegates at an annual Centre for Sports and Human Rights conference.

Soccer’s world body was hailed as a model organization for recently putting a humanrights policy into its statutes, including for selecting World Cup hosts.

“It’s a playbook for what a [sports] federation could do,” Human Rights Watch Director Minky Worden told the audience during a panel debate stating “all governments commit human-rights abuses and all sports bodies are complicit.”

However, critics pointed out that just one month ago, Fifa’s ruling Council picked authoritarian China to host the 2021 Club World Cup with no other candidate offered.

That decision, announced October 24 in Shanghai, was “in direct contravention of Fifa’s statutory obligation to conduct a human rights audit,” said Craig Foster, a former Australia player and rights advocate, at the UN’s European headquarters.

Foster noted the treatment of Muslims in China’s northwest region in comments opening the two-day Sporting Chance Forum. He questioned “whether sport is willing to potentially contribute to [the world’s problems], exacerbate them or endorse them.”

Last month in China, Fifa President Gianni Infantino had defended the hosting award saying: “It is not the mission of Fifa to solve the problems of the world.”

The IOC will also soon to go China, for the 2022 Beijing Winter Games, returning 14 years after the city’s Summer Games led to less state

reform than many hoped for.

Like Fifa, the IOC’s policy embeds humanrights demands into hosting agreements, though it takes effect after Beijing for the 2024 Paris Summer Games.

“People [working] in human rights don’t want to wait,” Mary Harvey, chief executive of the conference organizers and an Olympic gold medalist in soccer, told The Associated Press.

Worden detailed types of human-rights risks associated with staging major sports events: Forced evictions without compensation, migrant construction workers dying preventable deaths, activists arrested, Internet access shut down.

Fifa has been credited with urging Qatar toward labor reforms that better protect hundreds of thousands of migrant construction workers involved in a massive, decade-long project in searing heat to prepare for the 2022 World Cup. The Building and Wood Workers’ International labor union eventually reached accords with Qatari authorities but has been rebuffed by organizers of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

“I have to give credit to Fifa, they did step in,” the BWI’s Jin Sook Lee told the conference.

“This is what we would like to see with the IOC.” The IOC is creating its own strategic policy framework and has enlisted Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and Rachel Davis. She chairs the Fifa advisory board and cofounded New York-based nonprofit agency Shift.

“That is a significant team,” said Harvey, goalkeeper on the United States team that won the 1991 World Cup. Fifa, Qatari World Cup organizers and European soccer body UEFA are among sports bodies signed up to the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights that the IOC will adopt for Paris but not Beijing. AP

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

JAPANESE, ENGLISH, NO FRENCH?…WHY?

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By Stephen Wade The Associated Press

OKYO—The French language has been almost invisible during the drawn-out preparations for next year’s Tokyo Olympics.

News conferences in Tokyo are conducted in Japanese or in English—or with English interpretation.

Signs around the organizing committee offices are in Japanese and English.

Printed material is largely in Japanese and English.

News conferences in Tokyo are conducted in Japanese or in English—or with English interpretation. Signs around the organizing committee offices are in Japanese and English.

Printed material is largely in Japanese and English.

French is seldom seen or heard.

The L’Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, known also as The Francophonie, signed an agreement with organizers on Thursday that it hopes might change things.

The body represents countries and regions where French is used, or the culture is represented.

“La Francophonie welcomes the Tokyo 2020 commitment to respect the Olympic Charter with regard to official languages, of which French is an integral part,” Louise Mushikiwabo, the secretary-general of the

organization, said in a statement.

La Francophonie even has an overseer called the Grand Temoin—the Great Witness—to monitor French use.

Organizers said the agreement was designed to encourage the use of French “through the establishment of an official Tokyo 2020 web site in French, and the promotion of French culture.”

Article 23 of the Olympic Charter specifies that French and English are the official languages of the games. In fact, the charter suggests French has standing over English.

This is the legacy of Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics.

“In the case of divergence between the French and English texts of the Olympic Charter and any other IOC document, the French text shall prevail unless expressly provided otherwise in writing,” the document says.

The reality is different.

French usage has been slipping in recent Olympics. It seemed to have disappeared altogether three years ago in Rio de Janeiro. Signage in French was nowhere. And to be fair, the organizing committee could barely afford to put up signs in the local Portuguese, or English—much less French.

In a st atement to T he A ssoc iated Press, t he Ca nad ia n Oly mpic

Com m it tee dec l i ned to e va lu ate “t he orga n i zi ng com m it tee’s u se of t he of f ic i a l IOC l a ng u ages.”

“We can confirm that all communication at the Games from the Canadian Olympic Committee will be available and conducted in Canada’s official languages: French and English.”

French is the predominant language of Quebec, the Canadian province that makes up almost one-quarter of the country’s population.

Interpretation for athletes and for news conference during the Tokyo Olympics will be in Japanese, English, French, and eight other languages: Spanish, German, Russian, Italian, Arabic, Chinese, Korean and Portuguese.

The opening ceremony and closing ceremony will be in French, English and Japanese, as will most announcements at venues.

But signs are unlikely to appear in French, and few Olympic volunteers are likely to speak French.

The good news for French is that the trend is likely to change when Paris holds the 2024 Summer Olympics.

Denis Masseglia, the head of the French Olympic Committee, told AP he was “not aware of any problem whatsoever” with Tokyo.

“For us, it looks like these Games won’t be different than the others,” he said.

Which means, not a lot of French.

Tourists visit the Tokyo Metropolitan Government building’s observation deck. AP

Paris hoteliers angered by IOC sponsorship deal with Airbnb

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he newest Olympic sponsor has sparked the ire of French hoteliers, who have suspended their collaboration with 2024 Paris Games organizers over fears the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) agreement with home-sharing company Airbnb will create unfair competition.

The nine-year, five-games sponsorship deal announced this week starts in time for next year’s Tokyo Olympics and runs through the 2028 Los Angeles Games. Over the course of the deal, the IOC is pledging to make at least $28 million worth of Airbnb accommodation available to athletes at the Olympics and Paralympics.

The deal has been criticized by Paris city officials, who believe the platform is responsible for the rise of rents in the French capital.

It also triggered a wave of anger across the French hotel industry.

“We are now waiting for clarification before we can restart our working relationship with Paris 2024 organizers,” Ophelie Rota, a spokesman for the Union of Hotel-related Trades and Industries, told The Associated Press on Thursday.

Rota said Tony Estanguet, the president of Paris organizing committee, has already contacted the union to set up a meeting aimed at easing the growing tensions. Paris organizers confirmed Estanguet was set to hold discussions with the union’s officials later Thursday.

According to Rota, the hoteliers want guarantees that Airbnb will be forced to

respect the same stringent conditions applied to professionals of the hotels trade.

“In the case Airbnb is confirmed for Paris 2024, will they need to respect the same security standards as us? Will they be asked to offer a 24-hour reception service? Will they be forced to have a breakfast offer? We have been working with Paris 2024 since they started their bid, they should have warned us that this deal was coming up,” Rota said.

When Paris successfully bid for the games, the accommodation offer in the French capital was a strong asset. Paris organizers boasted at the time that more than 133,000 hotel rooms were available, 70 percent of which are located within a 10-kilometer radius of the

French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe (second left) and Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo look at an architectural model as they attend a ceremony to mark the start of the construction of Paris 2024 Olympic Village in Saint-Ouen, Paris. AP

city center. They also secured a sponsorship deal with hospitality group AccorHotels and negotiated fixed prices for the 2024 Games with hoteliers.

The hotel union, known as UMIH, described the IOC-Airbnb partnership as “totally disrespectful toward the hotel professionals who have been working since the inception of the bidding process with the Paris 2024 organizing team.”

“Once again, two different sets of rules for the same match. Where is the fair play?” questioned Roland Heguy, a UMIH official.

Didier Chenet, the head of the GNI union representing hoteliers and restaurateurs, said the deal is an insult to IOC values. AP

Millennials should be happy they are stuck renting

Millennials should be happy they are stuck renting

By Gary Shilling Bloomberg Opinion

M

illennials spend a lot of time bemoaning their inability to buy a home, forcing them to keep renting. They should want to stay renters, if they know what’s good for them financially.

It’s generally believed that appreciation in home values is what created middle-class wealth in earlier decades. But that was only because monthly loan payments forced homeowners to save and eventually retire their mortgage debt. Most of the rise in single-family house prices over time is due to larger new structures with more marble bathrooms, fancier kitchens, etc.

The quality-adjusted house price index, developed by Prof. Robert Shiller of Yale University, removes this upward price bias by comparing the prices of the same house when it is sold repeatedly over time. It shows that average quality-adjusted singlefamily house prices, corrected for overall inflation, have risen a paltry 1.1 percent at a compound annual rate since 1972. The reason the results have an upward bias at all is that they don’t adjust for interim owners doing upgrades.

But then there’s the mortgage rate offset. Since 1972, 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rates in real terms have averaged 4.1 percent, meaning it has cost the homeowner 3 percent per year to own a house before taxes, maintenance, utilities and insurance.

That’s a real negative return.

No wonder only about a third of millennials owned their homes in 2016, compared to half of Generation X at a similar age in 2001 and half of Baby Boomers in 1989. The homeownership rate for people under 35 has declined by 7.2 percentage points from a peak of 43.6 percent in mid2004 to 36.4 percent in mid-2019, steeper than the 5.1-percentage point drop from 69.2 to 64.1 in the total rate. To be sure, millennials do face financial strains not encountered by previous generations. According to Federal Reserve data, millennial households in 2016 had an average net

worth of $92,000, or 40 percent less than Generation Xs at the same age and 20 percent less than Baby Boomers in 1989.

Many millennials, born between 1980 and 1996, entered the work force during the Great Recession or shortly after at low pay, and history suggests they’ll never catch up.

When the unemployment rate jumps five percentage points, as it did then, cumulative earnings fall by 10 percent over the first decade of a new employee’s career.

Some millennials were caught up in the subprime mortgage boom and collapse, and remain scarred by it. They believed they could buy houses with no money down and never shell out a dime because continuing rapid appreciation would allow for continual refinancings.

So the bursting of the subprime mortgage bubble and subsequent one-third decline in house prices was a rude awakening, es-

pecially since it was the first nationwide drop in values since the 1930s.

In the aftermath, mortgage lending standards have been dramatically tightened and millennium incomes and net worth growth weak. So by choice or necessity, many millennials are renters.

Since the housing collapse, multifamily housing starts, mostly rental apartments, have surged past their previous 300,000 annual rate level to 340,000 in September.

But single-family starts, after nosediving from a 1.82 million annual rate in January 2006 to 350,000 in March 2009, have only revived to 920,000, well below the longterm average of 1.2 million.

Also, investors have bought huge quantities of single-family houses and converted them to rental units. Last year, investors bought 20 percent of houses in the lowest one-third price range, up from the 15-percent average. These are abodes that firsttime home buyers normally purchase.

Many millennials are accepting their fate. A new Freddie Mac survey found 24 percent of renters “extremely” unlikely to ever own a house, four percentage points lower than four years ago. Some 82 percent said renting is cheaper than buying, 15 percentage points higher than in February 2018 even though at $1,008 a month average as of the second quarter, rents nationally risen 20 percent faster than inflation between 1980 and 2016.

The trend toward renting over owning should persist and may even increase. I continue to favor investments in rental apartments—assuming, of course, they meet the location, location, location test.

Spiking health problems in young adults may make them poorer

M

ore millennials in the US are suffering from chronic health problems, potentially restraining the lifetime economic potential of a generation of young adults.

A spike in conditions like depression, hypertension and high cholesterol among younger people could increase health-care costs and lower incomes in coming years, according to a recent report from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, a federation of 36 independent companies that together provide coverage for 1 in 3 Americans.

Between 2014 and 2017, rates of depression among millennials surged by 31 percent, while hyperactivity rose 29 percent and hypertension increased 16 percent, according to the report. High cholesterol and tobacco-use disorder also increased.

Without change, the effects of those trends could be game changing for the US and its economy, the report warned. Health-care costs in the US are already high and climbing, on track to make up nearly 20 percent of gross domestic product in coming years.

It’s likely that a tough economy has played a role in millennial health, since the group entered the work force in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis and is grappling with burdensome student-debt loads, said Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, which prepared the report using Blue Cross Blue Shield data. Zandi called it a self-reinforcing dynamic and “vicious cycle” that needs to be disrupted.

“To address this brewing crisis, it’s going to take action not only from the perspective of the economy but also from the perspective of health care,” he said in an interview.

Biggest Generation Millennials were born between 1981 and 1996, meaning the oldest turned 38 this year. The generation is known for its technological savvy, generally high levels of education, and demographic diversity. There are roughly 73 million US millennials, and this year, they are expected to become the largest US generation as more Baby Boomers die, according to the Pew Research Center.

2 BusinessMirror

The new report didn’t provide a precise estimate for the effects of worsening millennial health on US economic output. Instead, it predicted the generation’s lower levels of health could eventually cost the oldest millennials more than $4,500 in annual income.

Under the worst-case scenario, millennial health-care costs could climb 33 percent compared with the prior generation, according to the report. If nothing changes, current trends could also indicate an increase of more than 40 percent in death rates among millennials as compared with Generation X, the group born between millennials and Baby Boomers, the report found.

A prior analysis from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association in April focused on the increasing prevalence of the 10 most common conditions among millennials, a list that included hyperactivity and diabetes, finding that they were more frequent among millennials than the previous generation.

November 24, 2019

Opioids, Wars Other research has also raised concerns about millennial health, particularly mental health. Drug-related deaths among the group have surged in the past decade, as have alcohol-induced fatalities and suicides, according to an analysis this year by the groups Trust for America’s Health and Well Being Trust.

Health problems have afflicted earlier generations, influenced by factors like the Vietnam War and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the report said. But the breadth of millennial health issues makes finding a specific cause trickier. Along with the shadow cast by the financial crisis, Moody’s Zandi pointed to the opioid crisis and said extended wars in Afghanistan and Iraq could also be important.

The report relied on five years of data from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Health Index, which is based on health-insurance claims from more than 41 million Blue Cross Blue Shield members who are commercially insured. Bloomberg News

BusinessMirror

YOUR MUSIC OUR BUSINESS Art by Jimbo Albano based on photo by Jav Velasco courtesy of MINT College. Background inspired by The Starry Night painting of Vincent Van Gogh.

JAGGED LITTLE PILL ACOUSTIC SENSATION SYD HARTHA ON FINDING HER OWN VOICE

By Darwin V. Fernandez Interview by Edwin P. Sallan

‘W

OKE’ is among the many terms invented by the young community of the internet.

Other than the past tense of the word ‘awake’ it bares the meaning of being aware of the grander picture of society—a liberated way of thinking and a more skeptic way of perception.

The youth with their strong statements and their passionate vigor could teach this generation a thing or two. Take for example, teenage artist

syd hartha (stylized as all lowercase) who not only managed to teach herself how to be a musician but also fearlessly went against mainstream

themes and found her own sound punctuated by compelling messages in big, bold capital letters.

Starting out like most young artists, syd hartha started her fan base by giving her personal creative twist to cover songs and as that grew along with her confidence, she then posted her original compositions through her online platforms—music that was immediately favorably received by music fans.

Among her influences are the stylings of Yano, Bullet Dumas, Joey Ayala, and Gary Granada as well as hip-hop rappers such as Loonie, Abra, Ron Henley, BLKD, and Calix who all factored in her poetic style of lyricism.

But the one who really encouraged her to enter the OPM scene was indie pop artist, Reese Lansangan, also regarded as an empowering woman figure.

“Reese was the one who really inspired me to put my music out there, not just music for my ears only, [but] the more I started writing and creating my own music I eventually found my own sound,” syd shared.

It didn’t take long for syd to make an immediate impact with her very first hit, “TilaTala,” a song relatable to the natural hopeless romantic in all of us and did not at all feel unusual Continued on page 6

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Sound BusinessMirror

NOVEMBER 24 , 2019 | soundstrip.businessmirror@gmail.com

YOUR MUS

LEARNING BY DOING

SCHOOLS THAT ROCK PART 3

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By Mony Romana

USIC business students are afforded the opportunity to experience working on projects that simulate real world scenarios as supervised by these mentor-professionals. These efforts are often characterized by collaborations with internal “clients” to give students an idea of what to expect as they graduate and step out of their halls.

For their part, MINT College, launched their own college label, Herbabuena, where students have the opportunity to A&R, produce and promote their own music releases.

These opportunities are provided students even as some have actually began actual work in the industry.

Label signings like Nathan and Mercury, One Click Straight and syd hartha have actually began their industry journey even as they are pursuing their studies.

These initiatives have contributed to students developing into well-rounded music business professionals. Xavi Aguilar, Sony Music Philippines’ A&R and Digital Associate and MINT MBM graduate shares, “There are three big things that MINT has taught me that has helped me in my career in the label.

The first is collaboration. MINT is a school that promotes collaboration.

Our projects allowed us to work with schoolmates from different degrees

National Artist for Music Ryan Cayabyab as MINT College guest speaker during a PhilPop workshop

and learn about working with people with different temperaments. Second is empathy. Artists don’t just want to be understood. They want us to feel what they feel. Last but not least is to always be open new ideas. MINT is an atypical school. Bean bags, open mics during lunch, and going in costume as your everyday outfit, the school taught me that you don’t change the world by walking on paved roads but paving your own in hopes people will use yours to pave their own.”

De La Salle-College of St. Benilde Music Production alum and the ShowBT Philippines Corp.

Music Marketing Specialist Lendl Raiza Bunagan, who helped in the groundbreaking launch of Pinoy group SB19 explains: “The Music Business class I took in Benilde has given me the essential knowledge to help make history in the local music industry and made me realize that there’s more to the music and entertainment industry than just the creative aspect.”

As in any creative industry,

hybrids, left and right brained professionals, have a distinct advantage.

Junior A&R/Digital Marketing Executive of Ivory Records and MINT MBM graduate Eunice Honrado shares: “My time as a music business student has shaped my way of thinking as a creative and helped me understand the true value of music—other than as form of art and expression, the essence of being of an influencer which is both the artist and listener.”

INTERNSHIPS

A critical element in any college course is the internship program. It affords students the best possible opportunity to be exposed and to learn from music companies. CSB sees this as helpful for future music production professionals who go through apprenticeship with more seasoned production companies that can help them learn the tricks of the trade and get established in the industry.

Music companies likewise see an advantage to getting music business students as interns. Music Solutions Agency Homonym CEO and founder Mike Constantino has been getting interns from MINT College’s MBM program and finds these music business students as better prepared and best suited for the requirements of their company.

“We’ve come to prefer Music Business interns as they seem to be purpose-built for our company’s needs. As the only Music Solutions Agency in this market, we don’t have the luxury of hiring from a pool of previously-trained or experienced talents in our fields like Music Strategy, Sonic Branding, Sync, Music Publishing. We have to train them from the ground up and make them competent in our unique service offerings. Music Business students have that perfect blend of business knowledge and practical knowhow that serves as a great foundation for a very fruitful stint at Homonym.

We’ve hired quite a number of MBM students in the past few years!”

d trip

soundstrip.businessmirror@gmail.com | NOVEMBER 24 , 2019

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SIC OUR BUSINESS

STILL ADDICTED TO ACOUSTIC Princess Velasco on her comeback, motherhood, and new single

By Darwin V. Fernandez | Interview by Edwin P. Sallan

A

T one point every person has to choose between family and career. The choice would seem easy from an outsider’s point of view until the concerned person is actually presented with the option. Imagine giving up decades of work to stay at not knowing if you would ever return to the craft that filled you with so much life.

For ASAP Sessionista and now GMA Music recording artist Princess Velasco, returning to the limelight with a brand new single (“Kaunti Na Lang”) was pretty much a no-brainer.

One of OPM’s most celebrated acoustic singers is back with a renewed passion for singing. Now a mother of two with a higher outlook in life, the same soulful voice that gave older millennials the feels as a young cover artist with such well-loved recordings like her 2009 Addicted to Acoustic album is now using her wide range of experience to serenade a whole new generation of music fans.

“I love how my audiences still request for my old covers,” Princess told SoundStrip during the recent NeighborGoods trade fair that she graced at Ayala Malls the 30th, “It’s been 10 years since Addicted to Acoustic and most my listeners then are now working. I find it funny when they say my songs are #throwback.”

Yes, throwback. The same fans that appreciated her acoustic stylings from Day 1 are no longer the carefree, single minded teens and like her, now have their own jobs and families that pretty much take up most of their time.

“Getting married and having kids changed me tremendously,” she affirmed, “I now have a greater sense of responsibility. As a singer, I feel more and find more meaning in the lyrics I sing.

Although Princess took a break from the ASAP Sessionistas back in 2015 to prioritize her pregnancy with her first son, music was something that never left her consciousness.

“One month after giving birth, I was already doing shows so I did not really stop doing music, it was always there but I was also focused on taking care of my baby,” she revealed.

“Some people think I retired from music when I became a mom, but it’s not true, I took a very short break to start a family, but I will always be a singer. Even when the time comes that I no longer get paid to sing, I will still do it anyway because I love it so much.”

Reflecting now on how much she has changed as an artist, Princess sums up the experience in her her song.

“The single “Kaunti Na Lang” is an original song composed by Noah Zuniga. When I first heard it, I thought it was perfect for where I am now in my life. For me, the song’s message is so universal and a reflection of every

Pinoy’s struggle in life.”

With a more enlightened spirit and a broader view on her artistry, Princess Velasco is set to keep her presence in the OPM stage with new material she has yet to write and the new generation of artists she hopes to collaborate with including Ben & Ben, December Avenue, Unique and Julie Anne San Jose.

A consistent social media blogger who continues to post about her daily life as a mom and musician, you can follow her at Facebook: Princess Velasco Official Instagram:@princessvelasco YouTube: AcousticPrincessTV.

Sound trip BusinessMirror

YOUR MUSIC OUR BUSINESS

Publisher : T. Anthony C. Cabangon Editor-In-Chief

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: Aldwin M. Tolosa

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: Anabelle O. Flores

Contributing Writers

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Darwin Fernandez,

Mony Romana,

Leony Garcia, Stephanie Joy Ching

Columnists

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SOUNDSTRIP is published and distributed free every Sunday by the Philippine Business Daily Mirror Publishing Inc. as a project of the

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NOVEMBER 24 , 2019 | soundstrip.businessmirror@gmail.com

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YOUR MUSIC OUR BUSINESS

SoundSampler

by Tony M. Maghirang

Welcome distractions from Half-Lit, Still Dreams and Rey Infante Trio under the singular command of a singer songwriter. There’s whimsy in the delivery and lyrical context of “Backspace Me” but it still stands out due to the videogame farts and gurgles at the tail end of the song. Old school harmonies battle out of tune robots?

Hmm. BP Valenzuela stretches her musical reach and does a good job at it in the company of kindred music makers.

HALF-LIT Paradigm Shift

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ALF-LIT is indie wunderkind BP Valenzuela on vocals, guitars and synths, Charles Villanueva on drums and Nick Lazaro at the production helm. Their debut EP titled “Paradigm Shift” is a pop-rock album and each of the six songs on the recoding builds on Valenzuela’s melodic work on guitars and her voice that evokes empathy on the listener in contrast to the power vocals in televised singing competitions.

The titles of the tracks (“Empty Houses”, ”Backspace Me”) could refer to misfortunes in personal lives and except for “Constantly,” they’re propelled by attractive hooks that keep you entertained for the duration of the short album.

“Fri the 13th” is especially charming, featuring the allure of a ‘60s girl group collapsed

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for a young artist in her teens to be identified with.

But it was “Ayaw,” syd’s recent original release that she made a bold statement with an anthemic number about women empowerment.

“As a woman, not a day passes by that I don’t get a catcall, it actually happens. I wanted to express on the song that just because it doesn't happen to you doesn't mean that it doesn't happen,’ she declared.

“The first few songs are basically hugot, it was sort of my comfort zone then until then I realized there are more topics that could be talked about, everyone's writing about love and heartbreak, why isn’t anybody making a noise about issues like rape and sexual harassment?”

The recent single that has millions of view on YouTube was full of symbolisms and was also thematic to the song it featured. The clear message of syd’s lyrics is that “no means no” and to force the issue

new wave records. “The Message” opens the 8-track recording with synth-heavy ambience topped by Aqua vocals. Next track, “Addicted” nails Wham!’s dancefriendly drive to adenoidal vocals that should bring up happy memories of good ole XB 102.

Clattering street beats and pumping drums are the hallmarks of the equally engaging “Heart Keeps A Beat” while a throwback to New Order’s descending chord patterns surround the weird singing in a strangely melancholic envelope.

Still Dreams seem to reclaim memories of lost youth but we’ll take any time over the tiresome histrionics of Whitney Houston and Air Supply wannabes.

STILL DREAMS Lessons Learned

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ELT Records, a record label based in Cebu, plays host to the new music of Still Dreams, a pop group from Osaka, Japan. Their latest album showed up in a Google search for Filipino music recordings 2019 so here we go sampling freshly minted goodies from the Land of the Rising Sun. True to its album title, Still Dreams apply lessons learned listening to ‘80s

is clearly rape. The song’s music video also depicted this message when syd was stripped of her clothes by her male back-up dancers.

The construction workercostumes of her dancers was also a reference to a very recent rape case that happened on a school premise where a construction worker was the offender.

“I was portrayed as the victim and then symbolically, my clothes were being slowly taken off. It (the video) represents that rape happens because of the rapist and not because of what women wear or not what men wear or whoever is raped,” she further pointed out.

As for her latest single, “Paraparo” syd says it’s “a song to remind everyone to practice being responsible with our words and considerate of how others could take it.”

“I am a strong believer that there is always a right time to speak and that some words are better left unsaid,” she added.

REY INFANTE TRIO Contemplation

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AZZ rock fusion great Herbie Hancock has been quoted to have said, “The spirit of jazz is the

Right before our eyes, syd hartha quickly grew from the young girl online posting beautiful vocals and well-timed instrumentals to an artist more focused on finding her originality as well as using her platform to address the current flaws society.

“I want to fight for issues that are very close to my heart in a

spirit of openness.” Eclectic Pinoy guitarist Rey Infante interprets that to mean the openness to absorb contemporary music idioms in the quest for the original spirited jam.

Such animated spirit shows up early on the Ray Infante Trio’s recent EP which, despite its pensive title, Contemplation, actively crisscrosses the malleable boundaries of jazz and progressive rock. The easy reference point is the Mahavishnu Orchestra although Ray Infante’s cool melodic riffage also brings to mind the bluesy hush of Paul Desmond.

Case in point: “Song for Daphne” goes smooth and easy most of the way then takes off on the 4th minute to the stratosphere. It’s as much “Take Five” as the Allman Brothers’ “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.”

“Supernova” moves aggressively at the starting gate before slowing down to a meditative mid-point and exploding in the final stretch to a Van Halen meets Jeff Beck electric crunch. Last track, “Blues for Nelson,” is atypical head-bopper highlighting Rey’s nimble fingers on the fretboard.

Bassist Josh Tulagan and drummer Tim Dadivas provide ample support to the main man’s restless soul. This trio is one more proof that there’s something exciting going on in the supposedly dormant local jazz scene.

way that listeners can easily comprehend whoever they may be and regardless of their age. I want them to relate. I know it’s a risk that I would lose some of my earlier audience but what’s happening now is part of my growth as an artist. If they don’t like it, that’s okay. This is me now,” she concluded.

Most teens rarely or never talk to their parents about appropriate online behavior, survey finds

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hile the majority (93 percent) of parents say they discuss appropriate online behavior with their kids at least “occasionally,” teens disagree, according to a new Digital Civility Survey commissioned by global online entertainment platform Roblox.

The survey of more than 3,500 US parents with kids ages seven to 17 and 580 teens, uncovers the disconnect with 60 percent of teens claiming they “rarely” or “never” have conversations with their parents about appropriate online behavior, highlighting the opportunity to better prepare kids and teens for interactions in the online world.

While 91 percent of parents also believe their kids are likely to come to them for help if they experience issues like online bullying, teens are more likely to report such issues to the platform where they occurred (53 percent) or tell another adult (33 percent) than talk to their parents (26 percent). When asked to share advice with their younger peers, teens recommend reporting bad behavior, blocking strangers, or telling someone who can help. “This data highlights the importance of initiating potentially uncomfortable conversations about appropriate online behavior and keeping open communication channels with your children,” said Laura Higgins, director of digital civility at Roblox.

“The Internet is a vast and daunting place, particularly for those of us who didn’t grow up in the digital world, but getting involved in our kids’ digital lives is our best chance to raise a generation of empowered digital citi-

zens.”

She added: “Simply checking in every day to see what your kids are experiencing online will help build a trusting and open relationship, encouraging them to ask you for help when they need it most.”

Millennial parents are better at monitoring their children’s online activities

Survey results revealed generational differences when it comes to parental involvement in children’s digital lives: in comparison to Gen X and Baby Boomers, millennial parents spend more time monitoring their kids’ online behavior, with 68 percent saying they are “very aware” of their children’s online activities compared to less than half of Gen X and Baby Boomer parents (48 percent and 47 percent, respectively).

Millennial parents are also making better use of digital monitoring tools such as parental controls—over half (55 percent) of millennial parents use them for tracking kids’ online activities compared to 42 percent and 47 percent of Gen X and Baby Boomers.

Millennial parents monitor and track their child’s online gaming habits more often than

other generations of parents, and are more likely to play video games with their kids as a way to keep tabs on their activities (37 percent compared to 29 percent of Gen X and 24 percent of Baby Boomers).

Despite these differences, millennial, Gen X, and Baby Boomer parents who don’t monitor their children’s behavior do so for nearly the same reasons: 42 percent of parents just don’t feel the need to do so; 20 percent say they don’t know how; and 12 percent say they want their child to be independent.

“It can feel intimidating at times to keep up with the fast pace of which apps and devices our children use. This requires parents to educate themselves and ensure they understand how functions like chat work on a platform, or how to report bad actors and harmful content,” said Stephen Balkam, CEO of the Family Online Safety Institute.

“We also encourage parents to sit down with their kids and familiarize themselves with the platforms together. This creates an opportunity to have a meaningful conversation about safety and protecting personal information.”

Teens help teens

Parents and teens are strongly concerned

about online bullying, with the majority of parents (91 percent) and teens (77percent) saying it’s at least somewhat of a problem for young people today. Twenty-two percent of parents have reported incidents involving their kids, and nearly 1 in 5 teens (19 percent) said they had dealt with online bullying in the past 12 months.

Teens classify a variety of actions as bullying. For example, 51 percent of teens said making fun of someone in comments falls into this category for them when they are playing online, and 42 percent see calling someone a rude name or encouraging players to target others in a game as bullying, too.

While the majority of teens (65 percent) report often seeing others use inappropriate language while playing online, a lot fewer (27 percent) teens say they themselves use offensive or inappropriate language. Nearly all teens (96 percent) will likely help a friend they see being bullied online, and the majority of teens confirmed they get help from other players when they need it at least “sometimes,” with 41 percent saying they get peer help “often” or “always.”

“While we can’t always control what our kids see on the Internet, we can help shift control back to the kids by empowering them with the tactics and tools to handle bad actors or bad behavior,” Higgins said.

Why they play

Teens play online for a variety of reasons.

For many, it brings a frequent boost of confidence—a quarter of teens (26 percent) say gaming is what they are best at and it makes them feel good about themselves. Moreover, 42 percent of teens who play online report frequently giving compliments to other players, and over a quarter (26 percent) report also receiving compliments when playing games online, though males are more likely than females to report this—33 percent versus 16 percent.

Business Wire via AP

More than 25,000 students receive school supplies from EDC, NBSFI

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he Energy Development Corp. (EDC) has partnered with National Bookstore Foundation Inc. (NBSFI)’s Project Aral program for its annual corporate social responsibility initiative of financial support and school supplies donation to more than 25,000 students in different regions of the country where the geothermal energy company operates.

“Our partnership with EDC is a testament of our continuous support for the education of every Filipino child,” said NBS Foundation Executive Director Bea Andrea A. Torres. “We strongly believe that through the merging of efforts of EDC and NBSFI, we are able to serve more children and make education accessible or within their reach. EDC has helped us extend our Project Aral initiative to areas we have not yet covered in the past years.”

According to EDC’s CSR-PR head Atty. Allan Barcena, education is the most basic means of capacitybuilding for their stakeholders, empowering them to

Students from Nagotgot Elementary School and Inang Maharang Elementary School in Manito, Albay, express their gratitude for being chosen as beneficiaries of school supplies donations from EDC and NBSFI.

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improve their lives and contribute positive impact to society and the environment.

“Enhancing the education of students by providing them the proper tools and implements for learning is the goal of this simple yet long-running initiative of ours,” he said.

The beneficiaries of the nationwide drive were comprised of over 15,500 pupils in the Visayas, 5,000 students from the Manobo indigenous community in Mindanao, and 4,500 schoolchildren in Luzon, across 85 partner schools. The effort is a private-public collaboration between EDC and its partners, together with local government officials.

EDC is the country’s premier renewable energy company and one of the world’s largest geothermal producers. Its facilities located in specific regions in Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao have been delivering 1,457.8 megawatts of clean and renewable energy to the Philippines for almost 40 years.

What to do if your parents need financial help

By Liz Weston

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NerdWallet

ost parents in the US provide some sort of financial support to their adult children, multiple surveys have found. But often, financial aid goes the other way.

A 2015 survey by TD Ameritrade found 13 percent of American adults provided financial support to a parent. Millennials were far more likely than older generations to report they were helping their folks. Of people born between 1981 and 1996, 19 percent helped support their parents, compared with 13 percent of Gen Xers (1965 to 1980) and 8 percent of Baby Boomers (1946 to 1964).

Sometimes the money is provided happily, or at least without resentment, by those following cultural norms or personal conviction that they owe it to their parents. Other times, financial aid to parents is a source of tension—between parent and adult child, among siblings and between partners.

Certified financial planner Austin A. Frye had no idea when he married his wife four decades ago that they would one day

Sometimes the money is provided happily, or at least without resentment, by those following cultural norms or personal conviction that they owe it to their parents. Other times, financial aid to parents is a source of tension—between parent and adult child, among siblings and between partners. support her parents. The older couple, now in their 80s, cover their day-to-day expenses with a union pension and Social Security. Frye and his wife cover unexpected expenses and travel for her parents, Frye says, and also pay $15,000 a year for a longterm care policy.

Frye says that though he’s happy to be in a position to help his in-laws, he still wishes they had saved money for their retirement.

“They just spent what they made,” Frye says. “They didn’t really plan.”

Certified financial planner Kashif A. Ahmed, on the other hand, comes from a Pakistani culture where younger people get into arguments about who will have the honor of caring for an older relative.

Ahmed said he needed a spreadsheet to coordinate the dozens of relatives who volunteered to help his great-grandparents in their final illnesses.

Ahmed invited his mother to move in with him after his father died in 2001.

His wife, Simona, an economist who grew

up with similar values in Romania, supported the move, and Ahmed’s mother is helping to raise their four daughters, ages six to 16.

Ahmed says financial advisers from other cultures often have trouble grasping the deep sense of obligation. He’s heard peers criticize clients who aren’t saving enough for retirement or are neglecting other goals while supporting parents, saying the clients don’t “get it.”

Balancing competing goals is what financial planning is all about. If you’re supporting a parent or think you may in the future, the following steps could help make the balancing act a bit easier.

TALK TO YOUR PARTNER If you’re married or in a committed relationship, it helps to get on the same page about how much you’re willing and able to give. Brainstorm different scenarios, such as emergency expenses (how much can you give, and what constitutes an emergency?) or long-term care (can you provide care in your home or help pay

for in-home or nursing care?). If you’re not clear what you can afford, a consultation with a financial planner could help. If you don’t have a partner, talking to a trusted friend or a financial planner can help you clarify what you can offer and when.

TALK WITH YOUR PARENTS Just over half of the people supporting parents in the TD Ameritrade survey had ever talked with them about it. Financial planners say that understanding the parents’ financial situation can help you prepare, and might also provide an opportunity for you to reduce their need for your help.

You could help them budget, give them a session with a financial planner or check benefits.gov for assistance programs. You also can let them know how much help you can afford to provide.

ROPE IN YOUR SIBLINGS, IF YOU HAVE THEM Even if they can’t contribute financially, they may be able to help in other ways: running errands, taking parents to the doctor, handling bill paying and other paperwork, or providing respite care.

TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF You may have to delay retirement, buying a house or having kids to support your parents. Many people do, according to the survey. But you should have a plan to eventually reach your own goals. Unlike your parents, you may have only yourself to rely on when you’re older. AP

5 financial tasks you should tackle by year-end

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task without a deadline is just wishful thinking.

Sometimes, you can get away with procrastinating. If you never get around to alphabetizing your spices, no one’s life will change. But putting off some tasks could have a huge impact on loved ones.

The close of the year is a good time to set some firm deadlines to make sure you won’t leave a financial mess for people you love if you unexpectedly die or become incapacitated. Consider putting these items on your to-do list with a December 31 due date:

claim. But far too often, heirs are unaware that the money exists. A Consumer Reports investigation in 2013 found about $1 billion in life insurance proceeds waiting to be claimed.

Updating your contact information with your insurer also may help prevent policies from lapsing. Many insurers will allow you to name someone who can be notified if a payment is overdue or they can’t find you. You’ll want to keep the contact information for those backup people updated with the company, as well.

1. CHECK YOUR BENEFICIARIES

4. VISIT YOUR SAFE DEPOSIT BOX

If you need convincing that updating beneficiaries is important, consider the case of David Egelhoff, a Washington state man who died two months after his divorce was final in 1994. Because he had not changed his beneficiaries, his life insurance proceeds and pension plan were paid to his ex-wife rather than his children from a previous marriage. The children sued, and the case went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which ruled in 2001 that the beneficiary designations had to be honored.

You’re typically prompted to name beneficiaries when you sign up for a 401(k) or other retirement account. Beneficiaries also are usually required when you buy annuities or life insurance. You often can check and change beneficiaries online, or you may need to call the company to request the appropriate form.

If you forget to pay your annual fee and your bank can’t find you, after a few years your safe deposit box will be drilled and the contents turned over to the state. Photos and documents could be destroyed and family heirlooms sold at auction. Visit your box once a year to make sure your payments and contact details are current. Leave clear instructions with your executor or your heirs about where to find the box and its keys.

2. REVIEW PAY-ON-DEATH DESIGNATIONS You may not have been required to name beneficiaries when you opened your checking account or a non-retirement investment account. Instead, fi-

nancial institutions may offer a “pay on death” option. This allows you to name a beneficiary who can receive the money directly. Otherwise, the account typically has to go through probate, the legal procedure to distribute your property after you die.

Some states also have “transfer on death” options for vehicles and even real estate. Like pay-on-death accounts, these options allow you to pass property directly to heirs without the potential delays and costs of probate.

3. UPDATE INSURERS—AND YOUR HEIRS Insurers usually don’t pay out life insurance proceeds until someone files a

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5. CREATE OR REVISE POWERS OF ATTORNEY Powers of attorney allow others to make financial and health-care decisions for you if you become incapacitated. If you don’t have these documents, or the designated people have died or are otherwise unavailable, your loved ones may have to go to court to take over. The expense and delay can add trauma at an already difficult time. Spare everyone that pain by naming a backup person or two and reviewing the documents every year to make sure the people named can still serve. NerdWallet via AP