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The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) on Monday warned that any attempt to change the Senate leadership or divert focus from investigations into flood control project anomalies ‘would only heighten public suspicion of a cover-up’ after revelations in congressional hearings.

The CBCP made this statement amid circulating talks of a coup d’état attempt against Senate President Vicente ‘Tito’ Sotto III.

It was just last month when Sotto replaced Senator Francis ‘Chiz’ Escudero through a minority-led ouster.

CBCP then reiterated its call on the government to conduct transparent investigations into the flood control scandal.

Several congressional hearings have been held to investigate anomalies in flood control projects nationwide.

Witnesses had testified that some lawmakers and officials from the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) were receiving kickbacks, as well as congressional insertions in the national budget, among other irregularities.

‘We strongly oppose any attempt to pre-empt or derail the investigation through backroom details, leadership takeovers, or selective justice. A nation cannot heal when its moral arteries are clogged by corruption and self-interest,’ the CBCP said.

It also highlighted the Independent Commission for Infrastructure’s function to ‘restore public trust,’ emphasizing that the probe body ‘must be empowered to investigate fully and freely, without political interference from any branch of government.’

With this, the CBCP urged Congress and Malacañang to let the ICI do its mandate ‘thoroughly, transparently, and without fear or favor.’

The bishops’ conference then said that the following must be included in the ICI’s mandate:

transparency in its proceedings, findings, and recommendations

access to all necessary documents and witnesses, including those protected by political privilege

public discourse of budget insertions and project allocations, especially those tied to unprogrammed or duplicate projects of the DPWH

protection for whistleblowers and technical personnel who come forward in good faith

ICI Executive Director Brian Keith Hosaka previously said that ICI hearings are not being livestreamed.

He will discuss the requests for livestreaming with the commission to find a ‘solution that will both balance the request for more transparency and the protection of individual rights.’

Hosaka also explained that the ‘ICI is avoiding trial by publicity, and will not allow it to be used for any political leverage or agency by any individual or group.’

The Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE) has approved the P45.8-billion initial public offering (IPO) of water concessionaire Maynilad Water Services Inc.

In an advisory on Monday, the operator of the local bourse said Maynilad would offer up to 1.66 billion firm shares to the public and up to 24.9 million reserved shares to First Pacific Co. Ltd. at up to P20 each. It also has an overallotment option of up to 249.05 million shares.

The final price will be set on Oct. 20, while the offer period will run from Oct. 23 to Oct. 29.

The water concessionaire will list under the ticker ‘MYNLD’ on Nov. 7.

Earlier, Maynilad president and CEO Ramoncito Fernandez said they would cut their maximum offer price to P15 per share in consideration of its cornerstone investment agreement with International Finance Corp. and Asian Development Bank, as these multilateral institutions were considering investing $245 million into the company’s IPO. /dda

Netflix Korea is aiming for a Chuseok sweep with its latest tentpole series ‘Genie, Make a Wish,’ starring Hallyu heavyweights Bae Suzy and Kim Woo-bin and fueled by the storytelling chops of Kim Eun-sook, the hitmaker behind K-drama touchstones such as ‘Mr. Sunshine’ and ‘The Glory.’

‘Genie, Make a Wish’ centers on Genie (Kim Woo-bin), who awakens after a millennium-long slumber, and the emotionally detached Ga-young (Bae Suzy) as they navigate three wishes that could alter their destinies. Beyond the star power, the series has already stirred buzz for its distinct characters, including a devilish genie and a morally just psychopath.

Bae, discussing her role during Monday’s press conference in Gangnam-gu, Seoul, said Ga-young is a departure from the familiar portrayal of psychopathy in K-dramas.

‘I thought the script was incredibly fresh and new. It was so fun, and my character, who lacks emotions due to antisocial personality disorder, felt very compelling to me,’ she said. She elaborated on Ga-young’s unconventional morality: ‘Ga-young is a psychopath who lives a life shaped by rote learning and the warmth of her grandmother and the villagers. In other words, psychopaths are often portrayed as frightening or criminal, but Ga-young lives by her own rules and routines, which, in the end, makes her live in a more righteous way.’

Kim, reuniting with Bae nine years after KBS’s ‘Uncontrollably Fond,’ takes on the satanic Genie, a character determined to prove that humanity is God’s failed creation.

‘Genie is a character with many sides. He can be cheerful and strong, sometimes cruel and frightening, yet also trivial and, in his own way, even a bit endearing. He may look human, but he isn’t, so I put a lot of thought into making him feel strange, awkward, and off-beat in some way,’ Kim explained. Meanwhile, the production for ‘Genie, Make a Wish’ has been eventful, generating a lot of talk over a directorial handoff. Initially helmed by Lee Byung-hun – known for ‘Extreme Job,’ ‘Be Melodramatic,’ and ‘Squid Games’ – who completed filming but stepped down midway, the series was subsequently taken over by Ahn Gil-ho (‘The Glory,’ ‘Stranger’), marking his return after a 2023 school violence controversy.

Addressing the change, Kim said, ‘I understand that both directors did not attend the press conference out of consideration. I was happy working with Lee on ‘Twenty,’ so I wish we could have seen the project through together. It’s a bit disappointing. But I’m grateful that director Ahn came onboard and guided the project well, allowing us to finish happily.’

The 13-part series premiered on Friday, Oct. 3.

A member of the Independent Commission for Infrastructure (ICI) reportedly plans to resign and is ‘losing hope’ over the body’s limited authority, Caloocan 2nd District Rep. Edgar Erice revealed, as he urged Congress to pass a law granting the commission contempt powers.

Erice bared this in his privilege speech during Monday’s plenary session, saying he had personally spoken to the ICI member.

‘I spoke to a member of the ICI, who is losing hope and will resign because of their lack of power, especially since our citizens will lose trust,’ the lawmaker said in Filipino.

‘He said that, without contempt powers, we might as well task the NBI [National Bureau of Investigation] and the Ombudsman to do the investigation. Let’s request that this be certified as urgent and if necessary, a special session be called,’ he added.

Inquirer has already sought the side of the ICI regarding Erice’s claim, but it has yet to reply as of the posting time.

Earlier, House minority lawmakers also called on the President to certify as urgent House Bill No. 4453, also known as the proposed Independent Commission Against Infrastructure Corruption Act of 2025.

Under this bill, the ICI’s subpoena power extends to all branches of the government, including constitutionally created bodies, as well as private companies and individuals.

It also grants the commission full and unrestricted access to all government records.

The bill, among other provisions, grants the power to cite in contempt individuals who fail to comply with subpoenas issued by the ICI.

Additionally, the ICI under HB 4453 cannot be subject to a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction by any court, except the Supreme Court.

Resigning does not absolve one from culpability, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said during the first part of the fifth episode of his online program titled BBM Podcast.

When asked if resigning helps one get away from being held accountable, he said: ‘That’s not enough. There is a great deal of damage that has been caused, not only financial damage or economic damage, but actual damage to people’s lives.’

‘I mean, very simple – a lousy flood control project that collapsed during the flood, that killed a family. I mean, how can you live with that? I can’t live with it. So, I won’t live with it. So, I.we’ll keep pushing,’ he added.

While no specific names were mentioned, two of Marcos’ known political allies have recently resigned from their posts amid the corruption scandal – his cousin Martin Romualdez, who resigned as House speaker; and former Ako Bicol party-list Rep. Elizaldy ‘Zaldy Co,’ who vacated his spot in Congress.

Both were accused of allegedly obtaining large commissions in exchange for infrastructure deals.

Meanwhile, when asked what would happen in the government’s fight against corruption if it led to his allies, Marcos maintained that it will continue as he stressed that he did not expose the issue on ghost flood control projects during his recent State of the nation address for mere political posturing.

‘I think we’re already there. Why would I even start such a thing if it was somehow for political advantage?’ said Marcos.

‘The reason I brought it up and made it part of the national discourse was quite simply because this could not go on. Because if it kept going – suddenly you discovered how deeply entrenched this entire system was,’ he pointed out.

Marcos said that there has always been ‘a sniff and suspicion’ of corruption in the government, but not of the same scale as the trillions poured and lost in anomalous flood control projects.

He took credit in exposing it, stating that allowing it to continue would mean no progress would ever happen to the country, including its economy, education and healthcare.

‘That’s why I brought it up and I will continue to bring it up because I do not see any point to anything that we are doing unless we move the country forward,’ said the president.

Marcos also emphasized that he has no intention of being among the presidents who ‘resigned’ themselves to inaction simply because their term lasts only six years.

‘This is what we’ve seen over so many past decades. I didn’t want to be another one. I didn’t want to be a part of that kind of attitude, especially in terms of public service,’ he explained.

The Land Transportation Office (LTO) has suspended the driver’s licenses of the owner and the assigned driver of a car in Makati City that went viral for using blinking reverse lights, an illegal car accessory in the Philippines.

According to a copy of the show-cause order released by the Department of Transportation on Monday, the licenses of the registered owner and the driver were suspended for 90 days while the case is under investigation.

The owner and driver were directed to appear before the LTO’s Intelligence and Investigation Division in Quezon City to submit a notarized explanation on why they should not be administratively charged for violating the Accessories of Motor Vehicles rule, or Section 34(d) of Republic Act 4136.

They were also instructed to bring the vehicle for inspection, which has already been placed under alarm status.

‘Failure to appear and submit the notarized comment/explanation as required shall be construed by this Office as a waiver of your right to be heard, and the case shall be decided based on the evidence at hand,’ the order reads./mcm

The Philippine National Police (PNP) has yet to record any crimes in Cebu province after the magnitude 6.9 earthquake struck last Sept. 30.

‘One commendable thing is that of our people are really peace-loving Filipinos, especially in Cebu. Zero recorded focus crime. That’s in Cebu,’ acting PNP chief Lt. Gen. Jose Melencio Nartatez Jr. said in a press briefing in Camp Crame on Monday.

Focus crimes include murder, homicide, physical injury, rape, robbery, theft, and carjacking.

‘The actual rehab [is now putting] northern Cebu, the entire Cebu into normalcy,’ the acting PNP chief further claimed.

The Office of Civil Defense previously said it had ended search and rescue operations in the province after all missing persons were accounted for.

However, the PNP remained on ‘full alert,’ focusing on relief and rehabilitation. More than 2,500 police officers from Central Visayas and surrounding regions have been deployed.

‘We supported them with the necessary administrative support like human resources, our logistics and just so that it will be continuous, we gave them subsistence allowances,’ Nartatez said.

In a phone interview with reporters in Camp Crame later on Monday, Police Regional Office Central Visayas (PRO 7) Director Brig. Gen. Red Maranan said they were now only deploying 1,500 officers as authorities turned to recovery efforts.

‘We’re now at the relief and rehabilitation phase. We’re helping deliver relief goods being brought to our areas,’ Maranan said in Filipino.

He further said police were helping to set up tent cities for affected individuals, opening police assistance desks at the evacuation sites to maintain peace and order.

At least 72 have died and 559 others were injured as of 6 a.m. on Monday, according to the latest National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) situation report.

Meanwhile, according to Maranan, at least 193 PRO-7 personnel said the earthquake damaged their homes while more than 30 of the region’s police stations also sustained damage./apl /abc

English pop stars Zayn Malik and Louis Tomlinson will reunite for a three-part docuseries that is likely to be released on Netflix in 2026.

The show will see the two members of British boy band One Direction take a road trip across the United States in a ‘spontaneous adventure of reconnection, exploration and a lot of laughter,’ said a press statement.

The announcement comes one year after the death of band member Liam Payne in October 2024 at age 31. The singer died of multiple traumas and internal and external hemorrhages after falling from a third-floor balcony of a hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The new series will see the duo ‘opening up about life, love, loss and fatherhood’.

Malik, 32, shares a five-year-old daughter with his former girlfriend, American model Gigi Hadid. Tomlinson, 33, has a nine-year-old son with American stylist Briana Jungwirth, whom he dated briefly.

The duo reportedly exchanged heated words on Twitter (now X) after Malik left One Direction in 2015 to pursue a solo career.

Following his departure, the remaining four members – Tomlinson, Payne, Harry Styles, and Niall Horan – carried on as a quartet, but went their separate ways in 2016 without an official break-up announcement.

In 2022, when talking about Malik, Tomlinson admitted on American radio program Zach Sang Show that neither has the other’s number.

However, all four came together to attend Payne’s funeral.

In January, Tomlinson was spotted at Malik’s concert in Los Angeles, prompting Malik to tell the crowd: ‘Tonight is special. An old friend is supporting me tonight. Louis is here tonight.’

Malik – who performs under the moniker Zayn – released his fourth album, Room Under The Stairs in 2024 and will have a seven-night residency in Las Vegas in January. Tomlinson is set to release his third album, How Did I Get Here?, in January, followed by a world tour.

Dynasties don’t endure because they are richer, luckier or more charismatic. They endure because they run on a different operating system. On Sunday, the family shares a meal. On Monday, the same people sit across a board table with roles, rights and rules that are crystal clear. When pressure spikes-succession, acquisitions, crises or sudden success-this operating system does the heavy lifting: it turns emotion into process, opinion into evidence and status into accountability.

In my work advising multigeneration owners across Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the Americas, and optimizing their businesses with my teams, the highest-performing families look unremarkable from a distance. Inside, you find precise mechanisms: external voices with authority, conflict protocols, apprenticeship paths for heirs and a relentless bias for truth over ego.

Part 2 goes under the hood of two often-misread components-outside-in wisdom and family harmony-and connects them to the practical disciplines that keep an enterprise resilient over 50-year arcs.

They embrace external wisdom to avoid echo chambers

The most dangerous sentence in a family boardroom is, ‘We already know.’ Loyalty, longevity and shared history create comfort; comfort creates blind spots. Enduring empires inoculate themselves by institutionalizing dissent and importing perspective-not as theatre, but as process.

What this looks like in practice:

A standing outer circle. Independent outside experts who don’t rely on the family for their next mortgage payment. They meet the owners quarterly with live data, not slide decks and they have license to call time-outs on initiatives that drift away from reality.

Red-team drills. For every cherished project, a rotating red team argues the bear case with the same facts. It’s not cynicism-it’s quality control.

A sensing network. Outside analysts scan for weak signals (customer behavior shifts, regulatory tremors, insurgent competitors, defensible AI use-cases). The deliverable is a one-page ‘Stop/Start/Keep’ memo monthly. Less noise, more judgment.

Aligned incentives. If expert advice saves 50 million euros in bad integration costs, they should feel it in their pocket.

Two outcomes recur when families do this well.

First, they find money in the margins: pricing power you never exercised, channels you underfed, brands you’ve under-positioned.

Second, they avoid expensive romance: acquisitions that look strategic on paper but fail culturally; ‘innovation’ programs that automate trivia while missing the few AI applications that actually move profit and cash.

Artificial intelligence (AI), properly used, is a perspective machine. It shouldn’t be a mascot for ‘we’re modern.’ Deploy it to cross-check your story against reality: where your pricing deviates from value perception, where customer friction concentrates, where your cost curves diverge from peers. The outsider armed with clean data becomes a mirror you can’t ignore.

They prioritize family harmony as much as business success

Money magnifies what is already there-generosity and ego, courage and insecurity. As wealth compounds, so does emotional complexity. The paradox: families often pull together in crisis and pull apart in calm. Enduring dynasties treat family harmony as a strategic asset and manage it with the same rigor as cash flow.

Mechanisms that work:

Swim lanes with teeth. Document decision rights, advisory roles and escalation paths in a one-page ‘Family Operating System.’ Pre-agree consequences for lane-crossing. When conflict hits, you won’t be inventing rules while emotions spike.

Two rooms, two agendas. A Family Council (identity, values, education, philanthropy) and a Board (strategy, capital allocation, performance). Publish agendas two weeks ahead. If someone drags board business into the family room-or vice versa-pause, reset, continue.

No-business time. Mandatory nonbusiness gatherings where shop talk is banned.

Love must have a place that PandL can’t touch, or the PandL will eventually touch everything.

A standing facilitator. An external moderator who enables effective communication, resolves conflicts and gets rid of the elephant in the room. I have seen this again and again with clients: Most families do not talk enough and once they reach a certain threshold of miscommunication, an outside expert can fix it and get them back on track.

I’ve watched a common pattern play out: a high-performing sibling leading a growth division triggers status anxiety in another branch. Budget skirmishes turn into public feuds; top executives shift from playing to win to playing politics. In one case, fraud flourished in the fog.

The repair was mechanical, not heroic: rehabilitated board with independent members, monthly owner huddles chaired by an outsider, clarified decision rights and a short family charter that codified conflict protocols. Within a year: higher profitability, higher trust, no oxygen for opportunists.

Training heirs: Apprenticeship over accolades

Diplomas are nice; scar tissue is necessary. The families that last don’t crown capability; they create it. They put heirs through rotational apprenticeships with hard PandL accountability and a simple rule: earn authority, don’t inherit it.

Rotations in sales, operations, finance and customer success-no vanity projects.

The 100-day immersions with scorecards that blend people metrics (retention, engagement) and business outcomes (gross margin, cash conversion).

Mentorship triangles: one internal operator, one external industry veteran, one leadership coach. Three angles prevent flattery from masquerading as feedback. This builds competence and, just as importantly, credibility-inside the company and inside the family.

Five to thrive

1. Install an outside-in cadence. Get the best expert external advice. Give them authority to flag ‘stop now’ issues.

2. Codify swim lanes. Write a one-page Family Operating System defining roles, decision rights and escalation paths. Have every owner sign it. After the next real conflict, update it, don’t litigate it.

3. Separate the rooms. Create a Family Council (identity, values, education) and a Board (strategy, capital). Publish agendas two weeks in advance. Ban cross-talk. If lines blur, pause and reset.

4. Apprentice the next gen. Launch 100-day rotations with PandL and people metrics. Pair each heir with an external mentor who gains from telling the truth, not from pleasing the family.

5. Run a red-team drill + AI reality check. Pick one cherished initiative. Put a red team on it for two weeks. In parallel, deploy an AI-enabled listening post to capture outside-in customer and competitor signals. If the red team and the data disagree with your narrative, change the plan. INQ

Another wave of fuel price hikes will hit motorists this Tuesday, with diesel and kerosene increasing for the seventh straight week.

In an advisory, Seaoil said diesel and kerosene would be more costly by 80 centavos and 20 centavos per liter, respectively.

Gasoline will also inch up by 20 centavos a liter.

Industry sources said last week that the expected increases could be attributed to the market’s fears of supply shortfalls, especially amid Russia’s partial diesel export ban.

Another major factor affecting prices was the new US sanctions against Iran over allegedly failing to comply with its commitments under the 2015 nuclear deal./tad