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.

Article IV, Section 3 of Republic Act No. 11054 -- otherwise known as the Organic Law for the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) -- states that “the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region shall have a parliamentary form of government.” This is repeated in Article VIII, Section 1 on the Wali: “Consistent with a parliamentary form of government, there shall be a Wali who shall serve as the ceremonial head of the Bangsamoro Government.”

The Philippine Constitution clearly states that “the State shall protect and promote the right of all citizens to quality education at all levels of education and shall take appropriate steps to make such education accessible to all.”

Here is my modest list of the major economic events this year, from international, to regional, to national news.

OVER THE LAST DECADE, scientists learned a great deal about the climate, much of it concerning the connection between global warming and extreme events -- heat waves, hurricanes, floods, droughts, and wildfires.

The guilty verdict on some of the principals responsible for the Nov. 23, 2009 Ampatuan Massacre is the first instance in which members of a powerful warlord clan have been convicted as masterminds in the killing of journalists in the Philippines. No masterminds and only 14 assassins had previously been convicted of the killing of the remaining 133 journalists out of the 165 who have been murdered for their work since 1986.