Klopp Wants Liverpool To Do More

Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp has insisted he has not given a second thought to his team's 18-matcunbeaten run ahead of their trip to Swansea City on Monday.
Klopp's side has been in imperious form recently, and ended Premier League leader Manchester City's hopes of going through the season without losing following a thrilling 4-3 win at Anfield last time out.
The Reds also eased to a 5-0 trashing of Swansea on Boxing Day, however Klopp has told his players to forget about the statistic and focus on the task in hand ahead the league match in South Wales.
"If nobody told me how often we didn't lose, I'd have no idea about it," he said.
That's all the past and I'm not really interested. You can look back on a season after the season, not during. It's not important.”
The German added: "We feel in a good moment. I see the boys training every day and it looks good, that's the truth, that's why we can play like we played so far.
- 'No easy games' -
"But we have to do it again. As a Liverpool player you cannot perform one week and then two weeks not - we need to deliver consistently, every day and each game.
"It's only the next game and I can't imagine any easy games in the Premier League. And Swansea is for sure not an easy game.
"They are bottom of the table but they are in a good way. What you have seen since the new manager has come in is a big improvement."

AFP/Liverpool

Food Trends For 2018 - Bold And Global Flavors, Grab-And-Go Meals, Novek Pinoy Cuisine

Twelve-inch Monster Burger brimming with bacon and veggies
In 2018, there will be more ready-to-eat meal options for busy people, big and bold food combinations and flavors highlighting African, Moroccan and Indian influences, and artisanal sweet confections, while many Filipino dishes will go back to locally grown and indigenous ingredients.
These are some of the food trend predictions by San Miguel Pure Foods Culinary Center (SMPFCC), based on its research and collaboration with noted culinary chef partners, among them Henry Sison, Emelita Galang, Rosemarie Lim, Sylvia and Ernest Reynoso-Gala and Gene Gonzalez.
"If there's Fashion Week, there should also be a food trend forecast," said Llena Tan-Arcenas, SMPFCC culinary services manager. "Of course, there are too many global trends to consider, but we filtered them for the local scene by consulting with our culinary partners."
With the help of its partners chefs, SMPFCC identified five emerging food trends for the year and, for each category, San Miguel created sample dishes to give homemakers and foodies peek at what's coming to tables this 2018.
"Whether traditional, trendy or innovative dishes, San Miguel products will always be there," said Tan-Arcenas. "We are always trying to stay ahead so that consumers will always have the convenience with regard to eating and dining."

Extreme indulgence
This trend, present as early as 2016, involves extravagant, extraordinary food flavors and taste combinations.
As an example, SMPFCC prepared the 12-inch Monster Burger and Sliders brimming with bacon and veggies. To introduce bold and unique flavor combinations, Chili-Infused Honey Glaze Chicken Lollipops was served with sweet potato and green peas tater tods. The earthy flavor of green peas and the tinge of sweetness from the potatoes melded well with the sweet-spicy-savory flavor of the chicken lollipops.

Ready to eat
Ready-to-eat dishes or food on the move are items that are easily consumed. These convenient meal packs are usually for the consumption of dashboard diners - those who eat inside their cars or public transport.
"Chef Heny Sison observes that traffic conditions in the metro will lead to ready-to-eat food being spent on the road, there's less time for food preparation," said Tan-Arcenas.
The grab-and-go convenience food consisted of Grilled Cheese and Truffled Caramel Bacon. The dishes were served in convenient containers as a nod to chef Emelita's prediction of a rise in popularity for meal plans and meal kits.
Also served was Honey Chili Habanero Chicken in cones, based on the chef's prediction of a higher appetite for spicy food-on-the-go.
Three varietiea of salads were also prepared: Indian Curry, Asian Chicken and Mediterranian. These were stored in mason jars and takeout cups.
Salads, the SMPFCC chef explained, are a perfect convenient food item as they can be prepared the night before, stored in the refrigerator, and grabbed the following morning.

Global favors
With more people travelling to different parts of the world, ethnic flavors, as well as exotic fruits and vegetables, will become even more popular this year, said Gonzalez.
Global cooking techniques will also become influential, as more methods that heighten the dining experience croaa over from one culture to another. "One example is the process of sous vide that involves low temperature cooking in water in order to preserve more flavor," said Tan-Arcenas.
San Miguel featured Magnolia Chicken Station Free Range Chicken rubbed in African spice, and Moroccan Pork Belly using Monterey Pork Liempo, both cooked in a sous vide machine. Infused oils were also presented, as these are typically used for short cooking or to finish fried and roasted dishes.

Heritage Filipino cuisine
Mother-and-son chefs Sylvia and Ernest Reynoso-Gala, for their part, said that Filipino cuisine will gain even morw prominance this year. More restaurants will offer their own renditions of traditional Filipino cuisine and combine these with modern techniquea.
To illustrate, San Miguel prepared traditional recipe with an innovative twist: Lechon Kawaii Paella (using Monterrey Lechon Kawaii), Boneless Crispy Pata (the newest offering from Purefoods) and, to celebrate heritage, three sauces that represented Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao: Kare-Kare, Humba and Piyanggang.
Sinigang sa Suha at Kalamansi was also presented. It had the perfect level of sourness and pulpiness from fresh pomelo and calamansi, while the meat, slow-cooked Monterrey BeefShanks, was tender

Artisanal breads, hybrid desserts
French pastries with Asian influences like Korean and Japanese wil be in the thing - think Hokkaido bread, matcha croissants, doughnuts or conchas - along with healthy smoothie bowls.
San Miguel Pure Foods Culinary Center team: Rene Ruz, Pam Obieta, KC Jardin, Rowena Balanga, Llena Tan-Arcenas, Ramon Victoria, Viboy Miranda, Martin Narisma, John Valley

Gin cocktails, DIY and local ingredients
Ginebra San Miguel (GSM) is also looking at bright things in 2018.
"This year we are seeing two main trends - the use of locallt sourced ingredients that add new flavor and dimension to juniper-based alcohol, and more drinkers experimenting and creating their own simple cocktails at home," said GSM Premium Gin brand manager Giselle Villanueva.
New York-based Filipino bartender and mixologist Enzo Lim, presented two novel cocktail drinks. The Pinoy Para-sol cocktail used GSM Premium Gin mixed with lemongrass-pandan concentrate,  lemon juice, mango nectar and guyabano juice, while the Samal Beach cocktail had GSM Premium Gin blended with dalandan/orange liqueur, lemon juice and pomelo juice.

ANN/Vangie Baga-Reyes/
Philippine Daily Inquirer

Flight 555- Crashes Into Cheap Comedy

For every good Indonesian film that comes out (and there have been a lot of them recently), there is always a Flight 555.
The film, produced by Citra Visual Sinema and directed by Raymond Handaya, presents itself as an easy shot for critics because of its cheap jokes and mountains of cringea. But to take advantage of such an easy target will only be pointless and to do so will render them as cheap as the film itself.
Of course this film is not aiming for critical appeal. It is made purely for entertainment. It is what Hollywood describes as a "popcorn movie." And as long as people enjoy it, then mission accomplished. When that happens, even bad films are considered quality. But that is the dangerous premise that the mainstream Indonesian film industry is operating on.
To make it fair, those who are not interested in watching Flight 555, should simply not watch and simply not say anything or judge those who enjoyed it. But let me say this: The bar needs to be set higher so that industry folks do not get away with this sort of thing, especially with comedies. The producers said in a statement that the film was heavily inspired by the 1980 comedic masterpiece Airplane!. Jim Abram's and David Zucker's Airplane! is a film that manages to succeed in every bit of humor that is delivers, and the jokes keep on coming like machine gun fire: the moment one joke is told, another is just beginning, and the audience hasn't even finished laughing at the first. Flight 555 aims to make people laugh, it risks overwhelming the viewer.
Everyone involved in the film: the writers, the directors, the stars Tarra Budiman and Mikha Tambayong are living it up in "stereotype city."
The film relies too heavily on cheap stereotypical jokes for laughs such as fat people not fitting in airplane seats, transsexuals from Thailand acting over the top (and the extreme rejection they get), muscular people being a stupid and the extremely boring trope of ripping on people for being single. Basically, it offers low-brow Indonesian humor.
There are also several offensive segments, especially one where the main villains are Papuans, who are depicted incredibly stereotypically: rough and intimidating due to their dark skin, and carrying out their villainy in "traditional" Papuan garb (which comprises of almost naked men in body pain and spears).
We get it through. The film wants to have the subtle offensiveness of Airplane! But there is where the difference lies. Airplane! doea not put its offensive jokes blatantly at the center of every scene, and does not treat these jokes as funny beyond the context of the film. Flight 555 does it all the time.
If I can describe this film in only one word, I would choose humiliating. Films like Flight 555 obviously only appeal to the lowest common denominator, and it's hard for a public tired of low-quality Indonesian films to take it to heart.
It almost seems that the cry only tells us to support any Indonesian film regardless of quality, as long as it is made by an Indonesian. To force that mindset onto the public will only reveal the industry's severe underestimation of public intelligence. But again, as long as some people are happy and enjoy the film, does it really matter?

Director: Raymond Handaya
Scriptwriter: Isman HS, Raymond Handaya
Production Company: Citra Visual Sinema
Running time: 108 minutes
Cast: Tarra Budiman, Mikha Tambayong, Samuel Zylgwyn and Gisella Anastasia

Dylan Amirio
The Jakarta Post/Jakarta

Drogba Looks For Future As Stellar Career Winds Down

At the age of 39, Didier Drogba is in the twilight years of a glittering soccer career that has spanned two decades and six countries and brought him a harvest of trophies.
Such moments are typically occasions of nostalgia, even sadness, for many ageing football greats.
But, in an interview with AFP, Drogba showed he was brimming with passion - launching a school project for Ivory Coast's disadvantaged young and fiery about the underperforming state of the national football team.
"I say to young people who want to become Didier Drogba, Samuel Eto'o, Yaya Toure (...) education is very important, it's this which is going to allow you to have a good career," he said, referring to the country's trio of soccer heroes.
"The best way to have an impact on the future of people is to educate them. Thanks to education, we avoid a lot of socio-ethnic problems. We learn tolerance and that avoids war," said Drogba.
Drogba's seven-year-old charity is inaugurating a new school for 350 children in Guiberoua, a region of southwestern Ivory Coast whose economy is dominated by the cocoa trade.
As the world's largest cocoa producer, Ivory Coast has struggled to prevent children working in the sector, with somewhere between 300,000 and a million children doing cocoa-related work, chocolate industry figures show.
These children grow up using machetes to prise open beans for sale and most receive little, if any, education.
The new school, which will be located in Pokou-Kouamekro village, will have six classrooms, a canteen, three homes for teachers - and, of course, a soccer pitch.
"The Pokou-Kouamekro community, which has more than 4,000 people, until now had a small non-official school made of wood, with three classrooms for all the children," according to the International Cocoa Initiative (ICI), which teamed up with the Didier Drogba Foundation and food giant Nestle to build the new school.
Drogba's storied career has taken him to France, England, China, Turkey, Kanada and the United States. He is best remembered for his spell at Chelsea, helping them to four Premier League titlea, four FA Cups and the 2012 Champions League, which he famously won through an 88th-minute equalizer and the winning penalty in the deciding shootout against Bayern Munich.
He has twice named African Footballer of The Year.
Last year, as both player and co-owner, he joined Phoenix Rising, and Arizona club in the second tier of the American league system which has hopes for joining Major League Soccer (MLS), the North American elite.
"Today I'm dedicated to my club, I still have a season with the aim of getting it into the MLS," he says.
Drogba's big disappointment is Ivory Coast's national team, which he captained to runners-up in the African Cup of Nations in 2006 and 2012 and helped it qualify for the World Cup in 2006, 2010 and 2014.
But "The Elephants" failed to qualify for this year's World Cup in Russia - a set back that he bluntly says is the result of a "deplorable crisis."
Drogba is no stranger to intervening in the problems of his country, which has gripped by political crisis and civil strive between 2002 and 2011.
In October 2005, after Ivory Coast qualified for their first World Cup in Germany, the team dropped to their knees on national television and Drogba pleaded for the different warring factions to lay down their weapons. His appeal was followed by a ceasefire.
In 2007, he pushed for an African Nations Cup qualifier to be played in Bouake, a rebel stronghold, in an attempt to unify the country.
And in 2011, he joined a Truth, Reconciliation and Dialogue Commission to try to consolidate the fledging peace.
Despite this, Drogba says he has no ambitions of going into politics like fellow African soccer star-turned-president George Weah, Liberia's newly-elected leader.

Christophe Koffi
Agence France-Presse/Ivory Coast

City Plans Birthday Gift For Guardiola Against Newcastle

Manchester City plans to give Pep Guardiola a belated birthday present when the leader tries to bounce back from its first Premier League defeat in more than nine months against Newcastle in Saturday.
City boss Guardiola, who turned 47 on Thursday, watched as his side's 30-game unbeaten league record was ended in a thrilling 4-3 defeat at Liverpool last Sunday.
It meant City's lead at the top of the table was reduced to 12 points, as Manchester United moved up to second place by beating Stoke on  Monday.
Guardiola himself has repeatedly urged caution, declaring just before the Liverpool match that City could still lose the title.
The Spaniard has also said the true test of his team would come in how they responded when they did finally lose a league game - and he will find that out this weekend.
"We lost against a fantastic Liverpool team. We have to be sure to win the next one and fight until the end to win the Premier League," Guardiola said.
"We have to fight - especially in this league, with a lot of games in the last two months, with four competition. Now we must analyze and be positive.
"People asked if everything was over and done before Christmas, and now it's January and it's not. We have a lot of games to win to be champions."
City has had a mixed week off the pitch, having decided to end ite attempts to sign Arsenal forward Alexis Sanchez, but securing central defender Nicolas Otamendi on a contract extension that runs until 2022.
Otamendi has been a key player for City this season, to the extend that Guardiola has described him as "Superman," and his steadying influence is likely to prove crucial as defensive partner John Stones and goalkeeper Ederson attempt to respond positively after errors that led to Liverpool goals last weekend.
There is plenty for City to be positive about in attack, despite the failure to sign Sanchez and the continuing absence of Gabriel Jesus with a knee injury.
Guardiola's team has scored 10 times in its past three league and cup matches.
City remains without fullbacks Fabian Delph and Benjamin Mendy because of knee injuries, as well as Jesus, but Guardiola has his other senior players available.
Newcastle travels to Eastlands with fresh doubts surrounding the future of manager Rafa Benitez after the collapse of take over talks.
Mike Ashley has pulled out of negotiations to sell to Amanda Steveley's PCP Capital Partners consortium, leaving Benitez with little prospect but to continue working under the club's billionaire owner, with who he has an increasingly strained relationship.
It threatens to be a third consecutive transfer window where the manager has failed to receive significant financial backing to boost a squad desperately short of top flight quality.
Newcastle has won its past two away league games to leave it three points above the relegation zone as it bids to avoid an immediate return to the Championship.
It has failed to beat City in 20 Premier League meetings since its last victory more than 12 years ago, and Benitez came in for criticism for his ultra-defensive tactics as Guardiola's side won 1-0 at St James' Park last month.
However, Benitez said: "I'm not worried by the criticism. Would it stop me from doing the same again? No. I will do what I have to do to win for my team."

Mike Whalley
Agence France-Presse/Manchester

Website? Century-Old French Newspaper Seeks New Linotype Instead

Jenny Braconnier sits at a hulking grey machine, amid the fumes of molten said, swiftly typing out the news from northeast France on a strange-looking keyboard that produces lines of metal type.
Beside her is a smartphone, one of the few nods to modernity in the deliberately retro newsroom of Le Democrate de l'Aisne (The Aisne Democrat).
Braconnier, 21, and four young colleagues have mastered a 1970s Linotype machine for the weekly newspaper which covers an area near Belgium that proudly sticks with a technology most papers abandoned decades ago.
The four-page broadsheet, which bills itself "100 percent lead, zero percent web," covers the local farming scene along with more timely concerns like trends in New Year's greeting cards or the tally of anti-fraud operations carried out in the area last year.
"It's a place where we do whatever it takes," said Braconnier, who started three years ago at what she readily admits is "an unusual job."
Each strike of the Linotype's keyboard sends a "matrix", part of a mould for forming each character of type, into a cartridge that sets a single line of text.
Once it's ready, the molten lead - in fact an alloy of lead, tin and antimony - is poured into the moulds, which are then set for printing.
It's an exacting process, and not easy to pick up.
"There are no more schools, no more courses. I learned it all in a couple month's before two fellow typesetters retired, Braconnier said.
And it isn't not easy to keep a Linotype up and running - in September the rotary pres from 1927 broke down.
"The clutch gave up, and so did the drive belt," said Kevin Germain, 26, who originally trained as a car mechanic.
The newspaper had to find a foundry to make replacement parts out of steel.
The Aisne Democrat was founded in 1906 by Pascal Ceccaldi, a recently arrived Corsican who was elected to parliament representating the town of Vervins.
At one point the paper was publishing 20,000 copies a day, employing 20 type-setters who could put out up to six pages.
These days circulation stands at some 1,500 copies a week that sell for 60 euro cents (70 US cents) each, with the young team backed by former employees as well as the paper's director, Jacques Piraux, 76.
I've got my succession plans in place," says Piraux.
He is convinced that "young people can adapt" and keep up the hot-metal-type tradition, which has earned the paper subscribers from as far away as Sydney and Hong Kong.
His most recent recruit is Nicolas Laplace, 29, who recently was fishing around for matrices to slot into the cartridges.
"It wasn't easy at the beginning," he acknowledged.
"It's part of what sets us apart," said Eleonore Dufrenois, a reporter and assistant director.
"The other part is the layout itself, the columns, made with the lead - it's the last in Europe," she said.
The Democrat even won a special mention at the "Future of the Press" trade show outside Paris last November.
But maintaining its financial balance is a constant battle, even with a solid base of some 1,100 subscribers who pay £26 a year.
The paper accepts no advertising beyond legal notices - its main source of revenue - and refuses the subsidies offered by the French government to newspapers, as a gauge of its independence.
Annual revenue stands at around £150,000, and the paper is thinking of setting up a foundation or a museum dedicated to the history of the press.
There are no plans, however, to expand onto the internet: the Aisne Democrat appears destined to continue emerging from a workshop heavy with the smell of lead and the clacking of metal on metal.

Julia Pavesi
Agence France-Presse/France

Teens Are Growing Up Slowly, And They Seem Fine With It

Teenagers are taking longer to become adults than previous generations, according to a new study that cites the rise of smartphones, safer environtments and even a declining birth rate as factors.
Mid-to-late teens are delaying the classic milestones of adulthood, namely working, going out without their parents, driving, dating, having sex, and drinking alcohol, according to four decades of surveys reviewed for the study, led by San Diego State University professor of psychology Jean M. Twenge.
Today's 18-year-olds exhibit similiar milestone behaviours as did 15-year-olds in the late 1970s, Twenge said. Moreover, they're mostly doing this voluntarily - parents aren't imposing this delayed independence.
The spread of smartphones, which allow teens to socialise from the safety of their homes, is part of the explanation, said Twenge.
The author of Generation Me, she has released a new book on the generation born after 1995 called iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy - and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood.
But while smartphones and social media enable these trends, Twenge says it's not the whole explanation. Advances in safety and declining rate of childbirth drive this process. When parents have fewer children and expect them to grow up, they will expend more care on them.
The study was published in the journal Child Development. Twenge was the lead author, and Heejung Park of Bryn Mawr College was co-author. They drew their conclusions from seven surveys of 8.3 million 13 to 19-year-olds between 1976 and 2016.
Twenge said an evolutionary explanation called life history theory appears to be behind the trend. It classifies the maturation of species into "fast" and "slow" strategies. Fast strategies involve producing prolific amounts of offspring with minimal care. Spawning fish and lobsters are examples. Very high death rate are acceptable, because only a tiny fractiom need to survive to perpetuate the species.
Humans, with many years of care and training required for independence, represent the slow strategy more feasible than before, Twenge said.

Life in the slow lane
"Life history theory makes the case that a slow life strategy is going to be more likely in a safe environtment, where people have fewer children and people live longer, and expect their kids to start their own families later, and to have their education last longer," Twenge said. "And that's a pretty good description of today's environtment."
Meanwhile, Twenge has been getting a lot of attention for her latest book, some of it disapproving. A review on NPR called it a "cocktail of exaggeration and alarmism."
Its conclusions on smartphone use were criticized in the Houston Chronicle by Christopher Ferguson, a psychology professor at Sketson University.
A Wall Street Journal review was more positive, describing the book as persuasive. The study itself got generally favorable comments from Laurence Steinberg, an expert on adolescent development. Steinberg said he agreed that teens are taking longer to develop the habits of independent adults.
"My quick take on this is that it's very interesting, although it isn't clear what the right interpretation is," said Steinberg, a professor of psychology at Temple University and author of Age of Opportunity: Lessons From the New Science of Adolescence.
"Some of these trends may be influencing each other - for instance, driving and drinking are activities that are themselves linked to working (which generates income that is used to pay for alcohol and car expenses), and dating or going out with friends (which my require driving and is often associated with drinking)," Steinberg said by email.
"Certainly these trends are consistent with other data on the delayed entrance of young people into adult roles, like marriage, childbearing, entrance into the full time labor force, establishing a separate residence, and attaining economic independence," he said.
"So I think it is reasonable to view that adolescence is lasting longer than it has before."
Steinberg said he was not sure the "life history theory" explanation was correct.
"I'd like to see some international data to see whether this is an American phenomenon or something more universal," he said.

A net good?
It's also possible that increasingly protective "helicopter parents" could be restricting their children's actions, Steinberg said,  making it more difficult for them to get out of the house.
"But I'd be careful to avoid interpretations that invoke images of today's young people as being less mature or more childlike," he said.
Twenge said the adolescent surveys indicate that since children actually have fewer major fights with their parents, overly protective parents aren't the cause of these changes.
"I agree with Dr Steinberg that it's not correct to say that today's teens are less mature," she said.
"For example, is it more or less mature to have sex during high school? Is it more or less mature to drink alcohol as teen? It's neither. These trends are not about maturity or immaturity, but about taking longer to engage in adult activities."
"Overall, I think these trends are a net good," she said. "However, parents also needed to recognize that older teens in particular need more experience with independence if they're going to be successful college students and workers."
Brent Crandal, a clinical psychologist at Rady Children's Hospital, said the study provides, useful insights.
"These are pretty strong findings," Crandal said. "They're found in several different data set with more than one million participants. The trend identified shouldn't be ignored."
Making the same point as Twenge, Crandal also said the results aren't good or bad.
"It's just that development is happening over longer course of time," Crandal said.

The Star/ANN