Maniolas

The Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE), in partnership with SM Malls conduct nationwide jobs fair in celebration of Labor Day (May 1). Over 310,000 jobs are offered to qualified applicants. Photo shows applicants line up at Mall Event Center of SM Manila. (MNS photo) MANILA (Mabuhay) – The ways and means committee of the House of Representatives on Wednesday approved the bill increasing the tax exemption ceiling for workers’ bonuses to P70,000. The tax exemption would cover the 13th month pay, Christmas bonus, and other bonuses received by employees yearly. The current ceiling for the tax exemption of P30,000 was set by law in 1994. Marikina Representative Romero Federico Quimbo, chairman of the committee, said a report would be immediately drafted so that the measure could be reported and tackled in plenary, noting that the bill was among the priorities in the House. “We adjusted the tax exemption to P70,000.  We just want to preserve what the workers are enjoying before, because P30,000 is in actuality only P14,000 today,” he said in an interview. Based on the computation of the committee, the increase in tax exemption would result in lost revenues of around P1.5 billion a year. But Quimbo said that the government would be able to recoup these losses through taxes on purchased goods and direct taxes on deposits. “Every peso that is lost from the national treasury through the additional exemption means increased purchasing power of the workers, which improves the economy.  There’s really more upside to Read More …

THE Mindanao Power Monitoring Committee (MPMC) reported that Mindanawons can expect around 580 megawatts (MW) of additional power by 2015. According to their accomplishment report for 2013, the bulk of the power supply will be coming from the Therma South Inc.’s 300 MW Coal-fired Energy Project in Barangay Binugao, Toril, Davao City and Barangay Inawayan, Sta. Cruz, Davao del Sur. The plant is expected to begin commercial operations within the first semester of 2015. By the third quarter of 2015, the first unit of the Sarangani Energy Corporation’s 200 MW Southern Mindanao Coal-fired Power Station, located in Maasim, Sarangani, will go online supplying 100 MW to the grid. Also, in the same quarter, the Puyo Hydroelectric Power Project of the First Gen Mindanao Hydropower Corp. in Jabonga, Agusan del Norte is expected to generate 30MW. Lastly, the first unit of the 300MW SMC Davao Power Plant Project of the San Miguel Consolidated Power Corporation in Malita, Davao del Sur will be supplying 150MW to the grid by the end of 2015. “The completion of committed power projects by 2015 would bring availability of excess supply including contingency reserves in Mindanao for the first time since 2009,” the MPMC said in their report. The MPMC also reported that by 2016 an expected power supply of 720MW will go online and another 550.6 MW by 2017. “Now it can be said, that while Luzon braces for a precarious power situation next year…Mindanao, on the other hand, is starting to generate enough,” said Read More …

MANILA, Philippines—Health authorities on Friday stopped tracking passengers who were on the same flight with a Filipino female nurse initially reported to be positive for the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, after a retest showed that she was negative for the deadly virus. The test conducted by the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (RITM) showed that the nurse, who arrived in the country on Aug. 29 via a Saudi Airlines flight, was not infected by MERS, Department of Health (DOH) spokesperson doctor Lyndon Lee Suy told a press briefing yesterday. Lee Suy also disclosed that the official result of a medical test conducted on the 37-year-old nurse and her 49-year-old colleague before they left Dammam also carried a negative result.   Negative case “What’s good about it is that when there’s a negative case, there’s no way for the infection to be transmitted because there is no source,” Lee Suy told reporters. “We can safely say that as of now, the Philippines remains to be MERS-free.” “And the implication here as well is that all our activities of contact-tracing, of looking for those who were on the same flight as the two nurses will be terminated,” he added. On Wednesday, the DOH announced that a Filipina nurse, who had tested positive for MERS,  arrived in the country on Aug.  29 via a Saudi Airlines flight. Two days later, after staying overnight at her coworker’s house in Bulacan, she boarded a Cebu Pacific flight to her hometown Read More …

A man shows the new Lumia 830, left, and 730, right, smart phones during a Microsoft Nokia presentation event at the consumer electronic fair IFA in Berlin, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2014. (AP Photo) BERLIN — Microsoft will seek to draw more people to its Internet-based services with two new mid-range smartphones it unveiled Thursday, including one designed to help people take better selfies. The devices are under the Lumia brand Microsoft bought from Nokia. They run the latest version of Windows Phone 8 and feature Cortana, a Siri-like voice assistant available to help with directions, calendar appointments and messages. Many of those interactions will steer users to Microsoft services such as Bing search and OneDrive storage. Chris Weber, Microsoft’s vice president for mobile devices sales, insisted consumers should feel comfortable about storing their personal pictures on OneDrive, despite the recent exposure of celebrities’ private pictures stored on rival Apple’s cloud-based system. “I think we have to amplify the message around security regarding these cloud services,” Weber told reporters. To this end, Microsoft is also giving users more control over the kind of information — friends, diaries, home address — that the Cortana voice assistant will have access to, he said. Microsoft bought Nokia’s phone business in April as it seeks to boost Microsoft’s Windows Phone system, which has had little traction compared with Apple’s iPhones and Google’s Android system. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has made mobile phones and Internet-based services priorities for the company as its traditional businesses — Windows Read More …

By Tina G. Santos |Philippine Daily Inquirer 8:06 am | Sunday, August 31st, 2014 FILE PHOTO MANILA, Philippines—The Bureau of Customs grossed P4.7 million from auctioning off some 676,350 kilograms of smuggled garlic that it had seized in June. Six bidders participated in the auction held through a sealed bid at the Manila International Container Port (MICP) on Aug. 29. The auction was originally set for Aug. 26 but was canceled after the Bureau of Plant Industry (BPI) issued import permits that allowed the entry of several shipments of garlic on the same day. This prompted a reappraisal of the bid price for the seized garlic. No takers for 1st shipment  “From the original price of about P50 per kilo, for a total minimum floor price of P33 million, the total floor price was adjusted to P16.69 million or about P24.50 per kilo,” the bureau said. There were no takers for the first shipment—17 40-foot container vans holding about 486,870 kilos of garlic—as bidders said the shipment had started to rot. The second lot—four 40-foot shipping containers containing 104,670 kilos of garlic—was bought by KKRL Trading for P2.592 million. Another 55,850 kilos of garlic was bought by bidder Kaunlaran for P1.386 million, while the last lot—28,960 kilos—was won by a Nilo Peñaflor at P728,000. The winning bidders put down 50 percent of their bids initially, with the balance to be paid on the next business day, after which the winners had two days to remove their garlic from MICP. “The winning bidders were also required Read More …