The surveys show that the Filipino people are optimistic about the new year; that their lives will be better off in 2020.

The traffic problem is real -- we have seen it with 20/20 vision and experienced it in hours spent in the slow movement from home to work to home or to wherever in Metro Manila and in major cities. They say it is because of the lack of planning by generations of lazy politicians and bureaucrats with no vision.

On Aug. 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender following its invasions of countries in the Asia Pacific region. Its colony in Korea was divided into two spheres, with the south administered by the United States and the north by Russia. The two Koreas existed with tension between them and this culminated in June 1950 when the North invaded the South. The two Koreas have been at war ever since.

A new year is typically the time to turn a new leaf -- but maybe not before past accounts have been settled. While the administration has earned plaudits from some quarters for the economy’s performance under its watch (which, to be honest, could have been better), nagging questions continue regarding the social, civil, and human cost accompanying that success. Was it a vital component, even “a necessary evil” in the words of one economic manager? Or was it a purely incidental and gratuitous -- and lethal -- diversion? In other words, would the economy and society have prospered anyway without a mounting pile of bodies (more than 7,000 drug suspects to date)?

IT IS WELL understood that S.M.A.R.T. stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound goals. In my book, The HeART of the Close, there is an offer to make goal-setting SMARTer.

THE PAST DECADE hasn’t done much to inspire optimism about the future of the planet.

In another demonstration of unpresidential pique, President Rodrigo Duterte has ordered the Bureau of Immigration to stop United States Senators Richard Durbin and Patrick Leahy from entering the country. Messrs. Durbin and Leahy were the most instrumental in the decision to include in the 2020 US budget act, which Duterte phone pal Donald Trump has signed into law, a provision ordering the Secretary of State to deny entry into the US anyone in Philippine officialdom involved in the persecution, arrest and detention of opposition Senator Leila de Lima.

NOT ALL the food you ordered or got as gifts end up on the holiday table and fully consumed by your guests. Always, there is an embarrassment of calorific riches left untouched. The household is faced with limited refrigerated space and the need to decide what to keep and what to give away -- for here or to go?

THE SEEMINGLY impossible, paradoxical news that astronomers had taken a picture of a supermassive black hole captured our imaginations in 2019 for good reason. What they actually showed us was a sort of shadow -- a spherical blackness surrounded by a cosmic hurricane of matter and energy -- but that was enough to qualify as a sign of real human progress.

THE YEAR 2019 capped off a decade in which some of the thorniest math questions finally yielded to mathematicians’ ingenuity. We learned profound facts about the distribution of primes, approximations of irrational numbers, and how to pack eight- and 24-dimensional oranges (not so useful for grocers, but important for communications technology).

Business leaders need to exercise more critical thinking to avoid and solve the problems businesses have caused in the last two decades. While business has created massive economic growth all over the world and lifted billions out of poverty, chronic management malpractices have also harmed consumers and worsened income inequality, environmental damage, and psychological and health issues for so many workers.

AS A PUBLIC relations professor, I know a few of my fellow professionals can be counted on to do things that keep my students’ jaws dropping in class each week -- and, like 2018, this year was no exception. Here are the five decisions that beat out stiff competition to rank as the worst corporate PR moves of 2019.