PEACE-MAKER By FORMER HOUSE SPEAKER JOSE C. DE VENECIA JR. Jose C. De Venecia Jr. On the Pacific Coast of California, we encountered some gleaming king salmon some 30 miles at sea off San Francisco, while fishing with friends, a few other tourists, and some 20 sun-burned California fishing professionals. There was a 68-year-old American lady who had caught nothing since dawn but towards noon she quietly and professionally reeled in a rather big fat silver-colored salmon some three feet long. We must confess we caught nothing but in our Filipino group of five, our son Christopher missed two big ones while reeling them in and they literally got away. Stepson Ipe caught two decent two-footers. Long-time resident friends in San Francisco, both retired from the US government-Engineer Fred Joves and architect Pepe Rosario -- were also without luck. We purchased some Chinouk salmon through friends of the boat captain who were fishing professionals and luckier, and who said the salmon might have migrated from the Sacramento, California, river delta not too far away and sold to the salmon fishing enthusiasts in our group in our group who got nothing. We were luckier three years ago with Fred Joves and a friend from India, the late Jessie Singh, then president of the San Carlos Exporters Association, when we caught about two each of good-sized salmon. Back in downtown Frisco by almost five o’clock in the afternoon, our Filipino group was at least proud of the continuous export to California of frozen “bangus” (milkfish) or “Daing na Bangus” from the Philippines which continue to be popular among Filipino families in the West Coast, all the way to New York and Washington, DC in the East Coast, with the bangus exports largely coming from Pangasinan, Malabon, Capiz, and Mindanao, and rival suppliers from Taiwan. As a proud Dagupeno, whose education was helped financed by bangus harvests, we talked to countrymen in the US who said bangus, fresh or frozen and dried “daing” continue to be popular among Filipinos in the US, Europe, and the Middle East. They talked of the proud, old first Filipinos in fish-rich Alaska in the early 1900’s who introduced bangus or milkfish to the US and which continues to be popular today. In Pangasinan dialect, we call bangus “betel.” We were in Jakarta a little while back. They also have milkfish which they call “bandeng” and when Philippine harvests are low, they export a few to the Philippines. It is also good but not the same as our Philippine bangus.

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The Youth Wing and the Women’s Wing of our International Conference of Asian Political Parties (ICAPP), of which we are founding chairman and chairman of its Standing Committee, will hold a conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, on September 5-8, 2019, with the theme “The Role of Youth in Social and Political Activities and Women Empowerment.” The meeting will be hosted by the ruling New Azerbaijan Party, which sits in the ICAPP Standing Committee and is ably represented by our good friend Ali Ahmadov, deputy prime minister of Azerbaijan and deputy chairman of the New Azerbaijan Party. We were also informed a few days ago by our hardworking ICAPP Secretary General Park Ro-byug, former South Korea’s ambassador to Russia and Armenia that the Mongolian People’s Party has offered to host the next meeting of the ICAPP Youth Wing in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, in April next year, 2020. The ICAPP Youth Wing is a subsidiary group under ICAPP, which now represents some 350 ruling, opposition, and independent political parties in 52 countries in Asia. ICAPP’s other subsidiary groups are the ICAPP Women’s Wing, ICAPP Media Forum, ICAPP Program for Disasters Assistance (IPDA), ICAPP-COPPPAL (Asian-Latin American) Business Council (ICBC), Asia Europe Political Forum (AEPF), and the Asian Cultural Council (ACC). ICAPP, the International Conference of Asian Political Parties, which we founded and launched in Manila in September, 2000, will observe its 20^th founding anniversary in Manila, the land of its birth, in October next year, 2020.