Category: Business Mirror

The Trump administration’s Cuba strategy is increasingly focused on ramping up sanctions and economic pressure rather than deploying military force to break the island’s Communist leadership, people familiar with the matter said.

US attention is now centered on cutting off all revenue sources for the regime rather than any military or special forces operation similar to the January raid that seized Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, according to the people, who asked not to be identified to detail the administration’s thinking.

The strategy is aimed at creating fractures in the ranks and room for negotiation in a government that’s rejected US calls for change after almost seven decades of one-party rule, the people said.

While the US has maintained a trade embargo on Cuba since the early 1960s, officials led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio concluded more could be done to cut off funds flowing to the powerful Castro family and military leaders, the people said.

While it’s been weeks in the making, the approach echoes a recent shift in strategy toward Iran that’s focused less on military force and more on squeezing Tehran economically. On Thursday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the US would soon impose what he said were ‘measures that have never been seen in the history of economic isolation on a country’ against Iran.

However, it’s unclear whether the new Cuba strategy can yield a breakthrough after more than half a century of controversial economic sanctions and no credible political opposition. There’s also no agreeable political leader to install, as the US did in Venezuela and as President Donald Trump has said he wanted to do in Iran – where the regime has also held out against US pressure.

Asked to comment, a US official said the Trump administration is open to a new chapter in its relationship with Cuba and that the only thing standing in the way is the nation’s current leadership. The official said a failed state in Cuba is a threat to US national security and that almost every left-wing militant group in the Western Hemisphere has relied on Cuban support at some point.

‘As with any foreign policy topic, President Trump has many options at his disposal,’ the State Department said in a statement. ‘The United States will continue to use every tool available to both address the national security threats posed by the Cuban Communist regime, and to drive the economic and political reforms to give Cuba a better future.’

The ramped-up US measures on Cuba include a naval quarantine of oil deliveries to the nation’s government that has led to repeated blackouts and warnings that ever-tighter sanctions risk a humanitarian crisis. Cuban officials have condemned the sanctions as ‘genocidal,’ saying they’re willing to make economic reforms and negotiate but that the island’s political system is not up for debate.

Since using the military to capture Maduro, Trump has repeatedly raised the prospect that Cuban leaders could be ‘next,’ and hinted at possible military operations.

Republican lawmakers from Florida, where there is a large Cuban diaspora, have also raised expectations of kinetic action. Representative Carlos Gimenez has suggested Trump and Rubio could ‘annihilate’ the Cuban regime in ‘a matter of seconds,’ and cast doubt on a report that Republican senators were cautioning Trump against an attack given the war in Iran.

Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe also visited the island of 9.4 million people in May for talks with top leaders. At the time, a CIA official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Ratcliffe wanted to make clear Trump must be taken seriously, citing what happened in Venezuela.

While the eventual use of the military can’t be ruled out for a president who values unpredictability, that option is being pushed to the back burner, the people said.

The idea Trump has floated – attacking Cuba after Iran – has also become less plausible as the unpopular war in the Middle East drags into a fifth month with the US clearly pressing Tehran for a deal ahead of midterm elections. The usefulness of bombing targets in a poor island nation off the coast of Miami is also unclear, and Trump wants to avoid putting US troops on the ground, the people said.

In Venezuela, the White House captured Maduro and gained clear influence over the government by installing his deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, as acting president. But the picture in Cuba is more complex. US officials believe President Miguel Díaz-Canel is controlled by the Castro family, with power dispersed between members of the family and officials in the military.

Rubio – a Cuban-American politician tasked by Trump to lead US policy on the issue – is well known for his outspoken condemnation of the Castro regime across 14 years in the Senate and tenure in Florida politics.

But he’s recently moderated language that was more aggressive just after Maduro’s capture.

Asked if Cuba was ‘next’ after Venezuela on a podcast released this week with Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller’s wife, Katie Miller, Rubio instead said he’s confident Cuba ‘will be on an irreversible path towards a much different future’ by the time ‘this administration ends’ in January 2029.

That’s different than his public warning that Cuban leaders were in ‘a lot of trouble’ in the hours after Maduro’s dramatic capture. ‘If I lived in Havana, and I was in the government, I’d be concerned,’ he said at the time.

US officials have struggled to navigate between what they see as competing Cuban factions including the Castro family, the military, the Communist Party bureaucracy and descendants of other revolutionary leaders. While the White House hoped to remove Díaz-Canel and the Castro family from power, the push has been complicated by the lack of a credible opposition since revolutionary brothers Fidel and Raúl overthrew the island’s military dictatorship in 1959.

It’s also unclear whether any political transition in Cuba could totally exclude all extended members of the Castro family. Their continued proximity to power would not sit well with the Cuban-American diaspora in Miami that’s cheered the administration’s pressure campaign.

That campaign saw the US in May sanction Gaesa, the military-run business conglomerate that is the largest player in the tourism industry. And in July, the US added sanctions on Cuba’s tourism ministry, the second-biggest, striking at one of the island’s main economic drivers.

Yet the stepped-up oil and fuel embargo – enabled by the toppling of Maduro and US control over Cuba’s energy-rich former patron Venezuela – now risks a humanitarian catastrophe, with United Nations agencies warning of food and medicine shortages, and power outages impacting hospitals and cancer treatment.

Rubio this week suggested more time was needed.

‘You can’t have something in place for 70 years – it grows roots – and then think overnight you’re just going to rip out the whole thing and put something brand-new into the ground,’ Rubio said on the podcast.

Max Verstappen sits sixth in the championship, 110 points off Kimi Antonelli’s pace – a gap that would’ve been unthinkable two years ago. He’s already said what this weekend means to him: pride and sadness both, the race gone from the calendar no matter how long he keeps driving for Red Bull. He’s won every home race at Zandvoort since 2021, but one, and Sunday is the last chance to make it two. It’s not just his goodbye, either.

The Dutch Grand Prix runs August 21-23 at Circuit Zandvoort for the last edition of the modern revival that began in 2021, closed out under a one-year extension neither side bothered to stretch further. Fittingly, it’s also the first weekend Zandvoort has ever run a sprint – a circuit built around narrow, banked corners and dune-line sightlines getting exactly one shot at hosting the shortened Saturday race before the calendar moves on without it, same as him.

The championship picture heading into the weekend isn’t close. Kimi Antonelli leaves the summer break with 219 points and a 50-point lead over Lewis Hamilton after eleven rounds, George Russell third on 160, Mercedes holding a 72-point constructors’ cushion over Ferrari, 379 to 307. The Hungaroring gave the season its closest thing to a plot twist: Lando Norris took pole by 0.012 seconds over Hamilton, lost the lead to Piastri’s cutback at Turn 2, then took it back for good once Piastri tangled with Carlos Sainz and Norris simply ran away on pace – Piastri’s own afternoon ending with a gearbox failure and fifteen laps still to run, more formality than turning point by that stage. Hamilton got demoted by a five-second pit-lane penalty and finished fifth behind Leclerc; Nico Hlkenberg scored his first points for Audi. Norris’s win was his and McLaren’s first of the season. Round eleven of twenty-two, the calendar is down two races since Bahrain and Saudi Arabia both fell off it this spring. That’s how thoroughly Mercedes has run this reset year.

Zandvoort rewards exactly the kind of high-downforce, low-degradation setup that has suited Mercedes all season, so there’s little reason to expect the order to scramble on pure competitive logic. What could scramble it is hardware. Two of the year’s more consequential upgrades land here, on the other side of the factory shutdown. Honda has confirmed Aston Martin’s upgraded power unit debuts at the Dutch Grand Prix – chief engineer Shintaro Orihara said the team needed two more races with the current specification before applying what it learns to the new one. Honda has reportedly earmarked both of its 2026 ADUO tokens – the Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities the FIA grants a manufacturer whose engine gets flagged as the field’s weakest – for a single overhaul expected to add roughly 50 horsepower, according to Motorsport Italy’s Franco Nugnes. That matters because Aston Martin has spent ten rounds at the back of the grid, Fernando Alonso holding the team’s only point, Lance Stroll still on zero. Alonso did reach Q2 for the first time all season at the Hungaroring, riding a separate aero package – sixteen updates in one weekend, by the team’s own count – but the AMR26 is still, in Nugnes’s phrase, hunting for a way back into the fight with Racing Bulls, Alpine, and Audi.

Alpine’s under its own kind of pressure. Managing director Steve Nielsen has promised a significant aero update for Zandvoort – the team’s first since round four in Miami – and Pierre Gasly calls it critical to Alpine’s hopes of salvaging fifth in the constructors’ standings. Alpine opened 2026 as the strongest midfield team, sat fifth, nineteen points behind Red Bull after Monaco. Five races later, Racing Bulls went the other way and passed them. Gasly’s own read on the A526 is unsparing: a car that doesn’t respond the way he wants it to and has, in his words, ‘quite a few things to fix’ before it can be trusted in traffic. Whether Zandvoort’s high-speed, high-commitment corners flatter that car or expose it will say a lot about Alpine’s second half.

Cadillac’s presence on the grid is itself the season’s biggest economic fact, and it has nothing to do with lap times. General Motors paid a $450 million anti-dilution fee to join Formula 1 as its eleventh team – more than double the $200 million threshold set under the previous Concorde Agreement – split evenly among the ten incumbents as compensation for a prize pool that now divides eleven ways instead of ten. The new, ninth Concorde Agreement, ratified by all eleven teams ahead of the season and running through 2030, also caps Ferrari’s long-standing legacy bonus instead of leaving it open-ended, a small but pointed rebalancing of a pool Liberty Media has put at roughly $1.4 billion. None of that money has bought Cadillac results. Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas sit last in the constructors’ championship with zero points through eleven rounds – a suspension failure for Pérez in Canada, matching brake-overheating retirements for both cars in Austria. Four hundred fifty million dollars bought Cadillac a garage, not a car. Money and competitiveness, in F1’s reset era, still aren’t on speaking terms.

The same 2026 reset explains the cost cap’s redesign. Formula 1’s chassis-focused spending limit rose from $135 million plus inflation in 2025 to $215 million; the power-unit cap rose from $95 million plus inflation to $190 million – increases the sport calls roughly neutral once you factor in the accounting changes. The old four-year, $36 million capital-expenditure sub-cap got folded into the main number, annual depreciation is now counted directly, and catering and health-and-safety spending were carved out as exclusions, alongside a new allowance for teams based in high-cost jurisdictions like Audi’s home in Switzerland. The higher power-unit number – tied to this year’s 50-50 split between electric and combustion power – is also what pulled Honda back into the sport as a full manufacturer, brought Ford into a partnership with Red Bull Powertrains, and helped justify Audi’s own factory entry. It’s the financial architecture that made Cadillac’s arrival, and its rough first season, possible in the first place.

Zandvoort’s own economics are a smaller, more local version of the same story. The race is privately funded, gets no government support of the kind the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa receives to help cover F1’s sanctioning fee, and has had to absorb a so-called ‘fun tax’ of three euros per attendee that eats straight into the promoter’s margin. Circuit director Robert van Overdijk has been candid that the race needs all three days sold out just to break even – Saturday and Sunday alone don’t cover the bill – which is why a plan in The Hague to raise VAT on ticket sales from 9 to 21 percent, floated last year before it got shelved under pressure, was treated locally as an existential threat rather than a routine tax debate. Tom van der Veen, who chairs the Zandvoort entrepreneurs’ association, told NL Times this month that the town expects to keep benefiting from Formula 1’s marketing reach even after the race disappears – a roughly pound 26 million economic boost and 135 full-time jobs per race weekend – with hotels, restaurants, and beach pavilions now planning to lean harder on business tourism once the grandstands come down for good.

None of that financial math has dented demand. Saturday and Sunday sold out again – 105,000 spectators apiece, the sixth straight sellout since the race returned in 2021 – and only Friday’s Super Friday ticket remains available directly from organizers, alongside an official waiting list and a resale platform capped at face value plus a pound 15 fee on each side. The Friday-night Fanzone closes with Afrojack, Snelle, and Kraantje Pappie, plus a Ferris wheel over the circuit, simulator racing, and a pit-stop challenge with an actual F1 car. Sunday’s post-race set belongs to Martin Garrix, Davina Michelle, and Dirty Daddies, under a program organizers are billing, without much subtlety, as the ‘Final Lap.’ The event stays fully cashless, bans drones and selfie sticks, and funnels most of its 300,000 weekend visitors through public transport under a mobility plan that keeps private cars off the roads near the circuit.

Whichever way next Sunday goes – Honda’s new engine, Alpine’s new aero, Mercedes doing what Mercedes has done all year – the circuit doesn’t get a second chance to find out. Verstappen doesn’t either. This is it.

VATICAN-Pope Leo XIV has urged Catholics to prioritize attending Sunday Mass, warning that active participation in the Eucharist cannot be replaced by virtual gatherings.

‘I urge everyone to seek the best possible conditions so that even those who are unable to take time off work on Sundays may take part in Holy Mass,’ Leo said.

In his address during his general audience at the Vatican on August 12, the pontiff continued his catechesis on the Second Vatican Council’s constitution on the liturgy, ‘Sacrosanctum Concilium.’

As on August 5, his general audience was held inside St. Peter’s Basilica due to Rome’s high summer temperatures.

The importance of Sunday Mass

Leo also explained that the Church has always regarded Sunday as a weekly celebration of Christ’s Resurrection: the ‘dies Domini’ (‘the Lord’s Day’).

He urged Catholics to attend Sunday Mass and warned against using virtual gatherings to substitute for in-person attendance.

‘To sanctify Sunday, it is essential to celebrate the Eucharist,’ Leo said. ‘This assembly cannot be substituted by a solely virtual presence, nor can it be reduced to a merely passive gathering.’

‘The liturgical assembly is in fact fulfilled through the active participation of brothers and sisters,’ Leo added.

Sunday, the weekly Easter

According to Vatican News online, Pope Leo went on to recall that Pope Saint John Paul II taught that Sunday is the day of the Lord, the day of the Church, the day of man and, finally, the ‘day of days.’

‘Since Sunday is the weekly Easter,’ he said, it makes present Christ’s resurrection and reveals the meaning of time itself, directing human history towards the Lord’s return.

Pope Leo explained that in order to sanctify Sunday, ‘it is fundamental to celebrate the Eucharist’ as, according to the Council Fathers, by doing so and listening to the Word, and coming together in gathering, ‘the Christian community makes visible its communion with the Lord and bears witness to its belonging to Christ and its fidelity to the Church’.

Such an assembly, he said the liturgy is fulfilled by the assembly who come together to thank God for the ‘living hope’ received through Christ’s resurrection.

The pope urged communities to seek ‘the best possible conditions’ to enable those who cannot take time off work on Sundays to participate in Mass.

The liturgical year according to Pius XII and Prosper Guéranger

Leo explained the importance of the liturgical year, referencing his predecessor Venerable Pope Pius XII as well as Servant of God Abbot Prosper Guéranger, OSB, the first abbot of Solesmes Abbey in France and a key figure in the liturgical movement.

It is ‘important to note that this way of referring to the cycle of Christian feasts as the ‘liturgical year’ became widespread in ecclesiastical language thanks to the work of the Servant of God, Abbot Prosper Guéranger,’ Leo said in his remarks.

The pope also stressed that the liturgical year is not merely a remembrance of past events but, as Pius XII wrote in his encyclical Mediator Dei, ‘Christ himself, who is ever living in his Church.’ Ishmael Adibuah/EWTN News via CBCP News with Vatican News

‘The liturgical year should, thus, be understood as a constant renewal of the work of salvation which Christ accomplishes in history,’ the pope said.

‘As she journeys through this temporal cycle, the Church remains in contact with the Lord’s redemptive action, so that all the faithful may be filled with his grace.’

Uniqlo’s in-store sustainability initiative Re.UNIQLO Studio introduced its newest embroidery collection, in collaboration with California-based Filipino artist and photographer Geloy Concepcion.

The collection, titled ‘Notes to Self,’ presents five empowering phrases, often left unsaid, stylized as handwritten notes by the artist himself. Each one serves as thoughtful invitations to daily mindfulness and self-expression, which can now be sown onto LifeWear pieces, including the 2026 Fall/Winter UNIQLO Jeans line-up, at RE.UNIQLO Studio until November 7.

Designs include ‘I hope you choose your own happiness,’ ‘I’ve got too much love for one life,’ ‘Learn to take up space and be louder,’ ‘Don’t let the hard days win,’ and ‘Dream a little more, my friend.’

Concepcion is known for capturing raw, human stories through intimate film photography. In 2019, he posted a simple question on his personal social media account, ‘What are the things you wanted to say but never did?’ Vulnerable confessions came in by the droves, kicking off his most acclaimed project that now extends to his partnership with UNIQLO.

The ‘Notes to Self’ collection is available at Re.UNIQLO Studio in several stores nationwide, namely, UNIQLO Manila Global Flagship Store, UNIQLO SM Mall of Asia, UNIQLO BGC High Street, UNIQLO Ayala Center Cebu and UNIQLO Davao Roadside Store.

WHEN a sports team (or in the case of the Ateneo Blue Eagles) goes through a team building ‘boot camp’ in preparation for a tournament or upcoming season, one of the primary objectives is for the players to bond and develop a form of understanding and chemistry.

The team building lasts several days with follow up sessions in the intervening weeks.

And a part of this is the toughening up process where a team goes through rigorous training and even cross training in other sports. I have shared a video of the Philippine Men’s National Football Team playing foot tennis while in preparation for the 2010 Suzuki Cup.

While there is no record of our current Filipina wunderkind Alex Eala doing cross training, tennis players usually engage in jump rope and cycling among others for high intensity interval conditioning (among others) to mirror the stop-start nature of the game.

When the Ateneo Blue Eagles went into the shallow waters on the beaches of Dipaculao, in the early afternoon of June 8, it was to train without putting stress on their joints. Water buoyancy supports body weight and prevents impact injuries. Water resistance helps build muscle strength as well.

The waters were calm (and that can be checked on tide-forecast.com) that afternoon, but sadly, two rogue waves swept the team and took the lives of Divine Adili and Rene Baterbonia.

The team was briefed on the rip currents and how to combat it. But was it adequate? And sadly, safety devices for the activity were woefully inadequate.

In the wake of the tragedy, many non-sports fans wondered why train in the water? Hindi naman Navy Seals training ang pinasok nila kung hindi basketball. So, what does running in the water have to do with basketball especially in an area such as Dipaculao? Why not train in the pool where it is safer?

They were in Dipaculao not just to train in the water, but there were other activities.

Furthermore, Ateneo isn’t the only school-based team that trains in the shallow water of beaches. You might be surprised which teams do or have done that.

Let me go back to that inane ‘Navy Seals’ remark.

While in preparation for the 1999 Brunei Southeast Asian Games and the qualification for the 2000 Sydney Summer Olympics, our national taekwondo team did exactly something that approximates Navy or even Marine training.

A few of the members of the national team were from the Navy and Marine branches and they were tasked in preparing a training program that approximated their training-and get this-for eight days.

Yes, every single member of that team including the coaches participated.

They were dumped some distance from the shore and had to swim back to the beach. Not everyone knew how to swim so there were trained servicemen to assist them in case of trouble.

They even had to rappel down a wall lizard-style meaning headfirst with a rifle on their backs!

Now what does that have to do with taekwondo?

It was meant to toughen the team up as well as bond through adversity and hardship.

The result?

Taekwondo had the biggest haul for any Philippine team to the 1999 SEA Games with four gold, four silver and six bronze medals. As for Sydney, four of our taekwondo practitioners qualified.

Training camp in Dipaculao for the Ateneo Blue Eagles ended immediately after two teammates drowned. They were not able to achieve most of the training objectives for obvious reasons.

But one crucial aspect was achieved albeit in a most unexpected and painful way-the team bonded in a shared tragic experience for everyone. They lost no one to defections. In fact, they are often together on and off the court. They feel more at ease with each other because no one outside the team remotely knows what that tragedy felt like.

Now, their physical training has begun.

As for those who claim that they should not be playing because of the ongoing process, well, the sitting Vice President has a number of stacked legal cases against her. And there is an impeachment hearing going on. Does her office stop what it is doing?

Encouraging customers to mend worn clothes instead of buying new ones might seem like a self-defeating sales strategy.

But in-store repairs and sewing workshops are becoming essential retail services for clothing brands as they try to appeal to young consumers who want to save money and the planet.

While luxury fashion houses and select specialty retailers like Patagonia have offered product repairs for decades, the concept has caught on. Jeans giant Levi Strauss and Co., casual wear chain Uniqlo and budget retailer Primark are some of the apparel companies hoping to win over Generation Z shoppers with a needle and thread.

Levi’s created a hand-stitching course for high school students after determining that many Gen Zers lacked the sewing skills to match their interest in thrift store shopping and sustainability. Employees spend 90 minutes instructing teenagers on four tasks: sewing on a button, hemming, patching a hole and fixing a tear.

The Wear Longer program, which the San Francisco-based company is expanding across the U.S., builds on the repair and customization services Levi’s offers at hundreds of stores worldwide.

‘We think it’s important to empower the people who buy our clothes with the skill sets to maintain them, to get them to that second life,’ Paul Dillinger, Levi’s head of global design innovation, said.

Detroit resident Chloe Halprin, 25, is the kind of consumer retailers hope to attract with a ‘fix it, don’t ditch it’ message.

In high school, Halprin shopped at inexpensive, trendy stores. Fixing a big rip felt beyond her limited sewing ability. If she damaged a top or skirt from Forever 21, ‘I might just throw it away.’

These days, Halprin buys most of her clothes secondhand. She recently learned to hem with a sewing machine and hopes to tackle projects like turning a skirt into a shirt. ‘I try to be conscientious of my carbon footprint,’ Halprin, a nonprofit grant writer, said. ‘I really don’t like waste. I’m trying to save money as well.’

A tiny part of cutting the world’s mountains of textile waste

The evolution of mending from an economic necessity and traditional craft to a method for cultivating customers didn’t happen overnight. The fashion industry as a whole has come under intensifying pressure to reduce its contributions to environmental pollution and climate change.

Textile waste-which includes manufacturing remnants, unwanted clothes and linens, and unsold products-is one of the industry’s most pressing challenges. Each year, the world generates fabric waste at a rate equivalent to a garbage truck’s worth getting dumped or incinerated every second, the United Nations Environment Program estimates. Researchers broadly agree that repairing and reselling clothes can reduce a garment’s environmental impact, especially if it delays or replaces a new purchase. But many caution the practices remain too limited to offset continued growth in clothing production and consumption.

Clothing production roughly doubled between 2000 and 2015, while the average number of wearings per garment declined by about 36 percent, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. The sustainability nonprofit estimated that less than 1 percent of discarded clothing material got recycled into new apparel.

Enter Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2012. It’s the generation that grew up with fast fashion and e-commerce, then had school years and young adulthoods shaped by the coronavirus pandemic and post-pandemic inflation.

IF not for an online jab by Converge’s Juan Gomez de Liaño about this player who’s embraced the monicker ‘Mr. Never Heard,’ Raymond Aguilar won’t be enjoying a popularity that his team, Barangay Ginebra San Miguel, is legendary known for.

Aguilar who? He’s the other Aguilar on head coach Tim Cone’s bench, the other being the more popular and many-time national team player Japeth.

Speaking of the Ginebra bench, Aguilar’s warmed his spot at the farthest end, waiting for that call from Cone to do what he does best-defend and hustle the opponent.

So who’s Aguilar and why is he in an Ginebra uniform?

Aguilar is now 39 years old and is the only remaining player besides San Miguel Beer’s Chris Ross-who’s shown signs he’s headed for an assistant coach’s job-from the 2009 Rookie Draft who’s actively plying his trade in the 50-year-old league.

Interestingly, he wasn’t drafted in that batch that included Ross, then No. 2 overall pick Rico Maierhofer who’s now a vlogger, Jervy Cruz and Ronnie Matias and it took five years for the collegiate journeyman from San Sebastian and National University to finally get to play in the Philippine Basketball Association.

TNT Tropang 5G signed him up in 2014-2015-primarily because of his relentless energy and not exactly what he contributes in terms of scoring-and then found himself at Kia (now Terrafirma) and Blackwater.

Amazingly, he was traded to Ginebra in 2017 from the Bossing in a deal that involved Art de la Cruz for Chris Ellis and Dave Marcelo.

He wore the Gin Kings colors alright, but most of the time, he’s assigned to bang it up with the top players in practice and was called to duty on rare occasions by Cone.

‘I never asked anybody why? I just love my role, and I embrace whatever they told me to do,’ said Aguilar, a true blue Marikeño who now resides in Antipolo City. ‘I really love what I do and am so satisfied with what the management is giving me. You must not lose your confidence.’

Despite his limited minutes, Aguilar, an Information Technology graduate of NU, is a family man off the court to wife Princess, a Tourism graduate at Lyceum University of the Philippines, and kids Raymond John Jr. (11), Rayver (10), Raynicia Juliana (6), Rayyan Jrew (3) and Raybron (2).

While not in practice or in a game, Aguilar always puts to heart his love of the game.

‘I coach kids in a youth league, including my sons,’ said Aguilar, who’s into construction and buy-and-sell of cars.

Just how long Aguilar’s been in the Philippine basketball scene is validated by the fact that he’s a veteran of the then semi-pro league, Philippine Basketball League, that folded way back in 2011-he played for Pharex, Pacific Pipes and Cebuana Lhuillier.

The 6-foot-5 Aguilar has so much gratitude for Cone, Ginebra governor Alfrancis Chua and San Miguel Corp. boss Ramon S. Ang for recognizing his worth as a player.

‘So thankful to coach Alfrancis, who is my mentor, for helping me through the years, and to Sir RSA (Ramon S. Ang), and coach Tim Cone,’ he said. ‘My commitment is to be in the best of shape every single day and never miss practice.’

‘Basketball is really my passion and I challenge my sons to excel. I have nothing to go but where basketball brings me,’ he said. ‘But after basketball, I aim to prosper in business, I’m hands on all the time … and we never know how long we’ll be playing the sport we love.’

So Mr. Never Heard, really?

Here’s a few facts-he scored a career-high 16 points in Ginebra’s 100-96 win over San Miguel Beer on January 28, 2018, in the Philippine Cup at the Smart Araneta Coliseum, the same points he made-but having gone 4 of 6 from beyond the arc-with Blackwater on January 20, 2017, in a 90-99 Philippine Cup loss to Ginebra.

This guy may have warmth the bench long enough but envy this-he’s an eight-time PBA champion (six consecutive years from 2016 to 2022 and the latest, this season’s Commissioner’s Cup).

IF there’s one word foldable smartphones have never quite managed to escape-besides ‘expensive’-it’s ‘fragile.’

And it’s an understandable perception. Take a regular smartphone, split its body in half, add a mechanical hinge and replace its rigid internal screen with one flexible enough to survive hundreds of thousands of folds. Then, with every new generation, make the entire thing thinner and lighter.

None of that sounds like something you’d deliberately subject to unnecessary punishment.

Tech brand Honor, however, has developed something of a habit of doing exactly that.

Last year, at the launch the Honor Magic V5, we watched the company put its foldable through an unusual strength demonstration involving a sofa and additional weights.

It was Honor’s very visual way of drawing attention to the phone’s Super Steel Hinge, which the company said had a tensile strength of 2,300 megapascals. Globally, Honor had also demonstrated the Honor Magic V5 lifting as much as 104kg in mid-air.

For most smartphone companies, hanging furniture from a foldable would probably have been enough to make the point.

But as expected, Honor saw it as something to beat the following year.

A VERY EXPENSIVE TUG OF WAR

FOR the Honor Magic V6 preview, Honor brought us to the Angeles City Flying Club in Pampanga, where a classic Toyota Land Cruiser was waiting on one end of a towing setup.

On the other was a Piper Arrow aircraft weighing a ton.

And somewhere between these two machines was Honor’s newest foldable.

The setup looked like an absurdly mismatched tug of war: the Land Cruiser providing the pulling force, the aircraft at the opposite end and a remarkably thin smartphone secured within the hardware connecting them.

Watching the rig being assembled up close was important because photographs of the stunt don’t immediately explain how it worked. Heavy steel cables, shackles and specially fabricated metal hardware were used to secure the Honor Magic V6 within the towing assembly. The phone wasn’t simply dangling from a cable, nor had someone tied a rope around its hinge and hoped for the best.

At first glance, you could understandably assume that the steel structure surrounding the Honor Magic V6 was there simply to protect it from the pull. What we were shown, however, was a fixture designed to hold the phone securely and incorporate it into the towing assembly.

And before anyone dusts off their college physics textbook, no, this doesn’t mean the Honor Magic V6 was supporting the entire one-ton weight of the aircraft. The Piper Arrow was rolling on its wheels, not hanging from the phone, so its full weight was never being suspended by the Honor Magic V6.

The point of the demonstration was whether the phone could withstand the tension placed on it while incorporated into the towing setup without suffering structural failure. There is an important difference-and I’m sure even those TikTok physics teachers would insist that we make it.

With everything secured, the Land Cruiser began moving.

The cables tightened and, for a brief moment, everyone watched the rig to see what would happen.

Then the aircraft started rolling.

It is one thing to see durability figures flashed across a presentation. It is quite another to stand beside a runway and watch an aircraft start moving while a foldable smartphone sits within the towing assembly connecting it to the vehicle doing the pulling.

And it wasn’t a one-off.

Honor repeated the demonstration four times, with the Honor Magic V6 surviving unscathed and fully operational.

SO HOW TOUGH IS THE HONOR MAGIC V6 SUPPOSED TO BE?

THE stunt becomes more interesting once you look at the engineering Honor has put inside the phone.

If last year’s Honor Magic V5 used a Super Steel Hinge rated at 2,300 MPa tensile strength, Honor says the Honor Magic V6 raises that figure to 2,800 MPa.

In simpler terms, tensile strength measures how much pulling stress a material can withstand before it fails. Honor says the Super Steel Hinge has also been tested through 500,000 folding cycles.

What makes those figures particularly interesting is that Honor isn’t achieving them by turning the Honor Magic V6 into some bulky rugged phone.

Quite the opposite.

According to Honor’s global specifications, the white version of the Honor Magic V6 weighs approximately 219 grams and measures just 4.0mm when unfolded and 8.75mm when folded, excluding specified protective films and the raised camera section under Honor’s measurement conditions.

The Honor Magic V6 has a 7.95-inch inner foldable display paired with a 6.52-inch outer display. Both use LTPO panels with adaptive refresh rates from 1Hz to 120Hz, while Honor rates peak brightness at 5,000 nits for the inner screen and 6,000 nits for the outer display.

Honor uses reinforced ultra-thin glass for the folding screen, while the external display gets the company’s Anti-Scratch NanoCrystal Shield. The company also claims improvements in drop, scratch and wear resistance under its own laboratory testing.

The Honor Magic V6 carries IP68 and IP69 ratings for dust and water resistance under specified laboratory conditions. And apparently, airfield physics wasn’t enough for one afternoon. Honor also took the Honor Magic V6 to the nearby swimming pool, where the phones were used and submerged to demonstrate the water-resistance side of its durability story.

FROM STUNTS TO SPECS

Durability may have provided the spectacle, but underneath all that steel hardware is still a flagship foldable.

The Honor Magic V6 runs Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 Mobile Platform, manufactured on a 3nm process and built around a third-generation, eight-core CPU that can reach speeds of up to 4.6GHz.

Honor pairs the chipset with LPDDR5X memory and UFS 4.1 storage, while its global launch material also highlights a full-stack Vulkan graphics engine designed to handle demanding multitasking and high frame-rate gaming on that large inner screen.

For its battery, the Honor Magic V6 packs a 6,660mAh silicon-carbon battery despite its relatively slim dimensions. Charging tops out at 80W wired Honor SuperCharge and 66W wireless Honor SuperCharge with compatible Honor chargers, while wireless reverse charging is also supported.

Then there are the cameras, which deserve more attention than a single throwaway line.

The Honor Magic V6 uses what the company calls its AI Falcon Camera System, led by a 50MP Ultra Light Sensitive Main Camera. It is joined by a 50MP ultra-wide camera and a 64MP periscope telephoto camera equipped with a 1/2-inch sensor and CIPA 6.5 image stabilization.

That telephoto camera is arguably the most interesting part of the setup, particularly for a foldable where manufacturers are constantly fighting for internal space. Honor is also layering its AI imaging features on top of the hardware, including its AI Color Engine, Magic Color 2.0, Magic Video Color and AI Image to Video 2.0.

Then there is AI across the rest of the phone.

The Honor Magic V6 runs MagicOS 10 and brings Honor’s expanding collection of AI agents and productivity features to the foldable form factor. These include the AI Settings Agent, AI Photos Agent, AI Suggestion and AI Screen Suggestions.

Honor is also continuing its push toward cross-platform compatibility. The Honor Magic V6 can work with devices across Apple’s ecosystem, including iPhones, iPads, AirPods, Apple Watches and Macs, with features such as notification sharing and Mac Screen Extension.

One feature I’m particularly curious to spend more time with is Honor Fast-flex, which uses the folding motion itself to trigger split-screen multitasking, AI tools or a customized app.

And that brings us to the one specification Honor Philippines hasn’t revealed yet.

HOW MUCH?

HONOR has yet to announce the official Philippine price of the Honor Magic V6, so any number at this point would be speculation.

Last year the Honor Magic V5 launched locally at ?89,999. But given the rising prices, it would be reasonable to expect the Honor Magic V6 to arrive at a perhaps slightly higher price tag-unless Honor has another surprise waiting for us.

We’ll find out when Honor officially launches the Honor Magic V6 in the Philippines on August 18.

Until then, there is something wonderfully excessive about the way the company has chosen to introduce it.

Last year, Honor hung a sofa from its foldable.

This year, it brought an airplane.

I’m almost afraid to ask what they’re planning for the Honor Magic V7.

THE Department of Education (DepEd) has rolled out the ARAL TutorKo to bolster the Academic Recovery and Accessible Learning (ARAL) program’s learning recovery efforts.

The web-based tutoring management platform, developed in partnership with Thames International Inc. and LearnTalk Limited, seeks to make tutor application, onboarding, deployment, attendance monitoring, and session tracking more efficient.

In a statement, Education Secretary Juan Edgardo ‘Sonny’ Angara said the platform will help streamline support to ARAL program beneficiaries.

Angara expressed in Filipino that many are willing to help Filipino children, but the department also needs a process that is easy, clear, and appropriate for tutors and schools. The platform, he said, will also advance targeted learning interventions among those needing support in foundational literacy and numeracy.

The secretary said that through the ‘TutorKo,’ DepEd is strengthening the system behind tutoring: from application up to deployment and monitoring, so that more learners will receive proper support at the right time.

The platform is expected to support real-time tracking of tutoring sessions, while improving coordination across schools, divisions, regions, and the central office. It also boosts data-driven decision-making through its dashboards and monitoring tools.

For the DepEd chief, each tutoring session is an opportunity for a child to catch up, understand the lessons more, and gain confidence to continue.

By the end of School Year 2025-2026, 4.5 million out of the 6.7 million struggling learners from the start of the period have raised their reading proficiency. This was made possible with the efforts of 442,906 ARAL tutors nationwide.

The Education chief cited the importance of the department’s support not only for the learners, but also for the tutors who are offering time, endurance, and care for them.

Other streamlined features include an easier process in tutor recruitment, screening, onboarding, lesson management, learner grouping, scheduling, attendance tracking, Daily Time Record submission, and report generation.

Administrators, coordinators, school heads, tutors, learners, and education officials will also enjoy role-based access in the platform.

FILIPINO workers are emerging as some of the world’s most advanced users of artificial intelligence (AI), but its rapid adoption is raising a more important question for educators and employers: What should people learn when AI can already do much of the work?

The 2026 Microsoft Work Trend Index Annual Report found that 25 percent of Filipino workers qualify as ‘Frontier Professionals:’ the most advanced category of AI users, compared with a global average of 16 percent. These workers use AI agents for multi-step workflows, rethink processes, and help establish quality standards for AI-assisted work.

The findings point to a shift in the skills that matter in an AI-enabled workplace. Among Filipino AI users, 77 percent said they are producing work they could not have produced a year ago, compared with 58 percent globally. Among Frontier Professionals, the figure rises to 86 percent.

But greater reliance on AI does not necessarily mean less need for human expertise. In fact, the report found that 65 percent of Filipino AI users consider critical thinking the most important human skill as AI takes on more work-the highest proportion among the markets surveyed and well above the 46-percent global average. The challenge for education, training and workplaces, therefore, is increasingly about teaching people how to assess, question and improve what AI produces.

Critical thinking in focus

THE emphasis on human judgment is also reflected in how Filipinos use AI. Sixty-five percent of Filipino AI users identified critical thinking as the most important human skill as AI takes on more work-the highest proportion among the markets surveyed and well above the 46-percent global average. Another 59 percent identified quality control of AI output as a top priority.

That caution is evident in how Filipino workers approach AI-generated content. Ninety-three percent said they treat AI output as a starting point rather than a final answer and ‘stay responsible for the thinking,’ compared with 86 percent globally. Among the country’s Frontier Professionals, 53 percent intentionally complete some work without AI to keep their skills sharp, while 61 percent deliberately pause before beginning a task to determine what should be handled by AI and what should remain human-led.

For schools, universities and training firms, the findings point to a broader definition of AI literacy. Knowing how to operate an AI tool is only part of the equation; learners also need to develop the ability to question outputs, verify information and make sound judgments about AI usage.

That principle extends into continuing education and the workplace. During his executive studies, PLDT and Smart First Vice President and Head of Information Technology and the Transformation Office Gilbert Gaw shared that he used AI to help narrow down research and references, but still had to do the actual work himself. The experience shows a key lesson of AI-assisted learning: The technology can accelerate the process, but it does not remove the need for human thinking.

Training must follow the work

THE report found that Filipino workers are ready to adapt, but organizational support has not fully kept pace. Only 35 percent said their leadership is clearly and consistently aligned on AI, while 25 percent said they are rewarded for reinventing how they work with the technology.

The experience of PLDT and Smart illustrates workplace learning helping close that gap. After initially deploying 200 Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses, the conglomerate required users to demonstrate concrete use cases and results before expanding access. Training was also designed with employees’ roles in mind, with programs developed for groups such as managers, project managers, finance, legal, and marketing.

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PLDT and Smart first vice president and head of information technology and Transformation Office Gilbert Gaw said: ‘AI training has to be relevant to the work employees actually perform.’

The company’s approach also reflects a broader principle in the report: Organizational factors-including culture, manager support and talent practices-account for more than twice the impact of individual mindset and behavior on AI adoption.

Building a learning system

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MICROSOFT’S report describes the next stage of organizational transformation as becoming a ‘Learning System’-an organization capable of capturing, sharing and scaling what its people learn from working with AI. The number of AI agents has increased 15-fold year over year across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem and 18 times in large enterprises.

For local educators and employers, this points to a larger shift in the meaning of skills development. The objective is no longer simply to prepare people to use today’s technology, but to help them remain capable of learning as tech changes.

The report’s central question may therefore apply as much to classrooms and training institutions as it does to companies: ‘The real question isn’t whether people have the right skills-it’s whether the organization is built to unlock them.’