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For the past 17 years, The Filipino Express has provided the Filipino American community the best news, arts and entertainment coverage from around the United States and the Philippines.
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This website includes selected articles from this week's edition of the Filipino Express. Not all the stories published in the printed version appear on this site.
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NEW YORK --- Known Filipino novelist Ninotchka Rosca, who won the American Book award in 1993, wore a party hat, gave purple balloons and chocolate cakes to rally supporters as they sang “Bye Bye Ms. American Pie,” in a street party Monday night in front of Philippine Consulate on Fifth Avenue.
Unlike other rallies, there were no fiery explosion of emotions but mostly cheerful protest songs to pressure Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to step down.
“We want to express our joy for her departure,” said Rosca, a member of Gabriela Women’s International Network as protesters sang “Take her out of the office,” to the tune of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”
“Finding her tongue just long enough to be taped discussing fixing one million votes. It is given that cheating occurs in every election, even in the U.S.. But no one has been caught, until now, with his/her hand in the ballot box as it were,” said Rosca.
She is referring to the the taped conversation between Arroyo and ousted election chief Virgilio Garcillano. In the taped conversation, a woman who sounded very much like the President ordered the election official to pad votes in her favor.
To mock the embattled Philippine President, some 50 protesters toasted drinks, drank water in champagne glasses, blew paper trumpets and sang, “So long, farewell, goodbye, You’re a big cheat...the masses have spoken , so leave with no delay.”
The song was sung to the tune of “So Long, Farewell” from the Rogers and Hammerstein musical “The Sound of Music”.
Aside from charges of election fraud, Arroyo and her family are facing accusations of graft and corruption.Her husband and congressman-son are acuused of accepting moey from illegal gambling lords.
First Gentleman Miguel Arroyo and Pampanga congressman Mikey Arroyo are now in San Francisco, CA.
Dorothea Mendoza, secretary general of Gabriela, distributed blue party hats as she led the noisy, and ebullient rally and street party.
“The price of basic commodities such as food and utilities has continued to increase,” Mendoza said. “Ms. Arroyo has not delivered on her promise to raise the minimum wage but rather forced upon the people the value added tax (VAT), tripling the tax burden of the Filipino people.”
“Health care and social services for women and children are virtually non-existent....because of poverty, there are more than 800,000 prostituted women and children in the Philippines,” Mendoza said.
“One-third of Filipino families go without dinner every night and half of all children in the country are born without access to medical care,” Mendoza added.
She called for the creation of a transition council, that would include farmers, workers and various sectors of society to replace the government of Arroyo.
Several passersby and onlookers expressed support for the call for Arroyo to setp down.
“Ms. Arroyo is a very smart woman. She wants to change the government. If cheating in election is true, let the Filipinos decide her fate,” said Dr. Mila Valdez, a physician in New York, as she watched the rallyists at the Consulate in New York.
“Ms. Arroyo has no right to be in Malacanang ( President’s Palace). She cheated the institution that makes up democracy. It’s unforgivable. It’s painful to see our people suffer,” said New York-based book author Alberto Florentino.
In a move that would put a squeeze on Philippine economy, Filipinos and supporters also rallied in Queens Monday ,Tuesday and Friday night last week to campaign for a freeze on bank-to-bank dollar remittances to the Philippines and to pressure Arroyo to resign.
As anti-Arroyo sentiments ran high, over 50 Filipinos and American supporters, protested in the Filipino commercial district of Woodside, Queens to join in an internationally coordinated actions, calling for Arroyo’s ouster. The rally in Queens was headed by Philippine Forum.
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TRENTON --- Jonathan Nyce, who had confessed to smashing his Filipina wife’s head on the concrete floor of their garage in January 2004, was convicted of manslaughter on Thursday, July 14.
Nyce, 55, a former CEO of a pharmaceutical company, contended the killing of his wife Michelle was an accident.
The month-long trial also saw the lawyer for Nyce, Robin Lord, and Nyce himself make several disparaging remarks about poverty in the Philippines and Michelle Rivera-Nyce’s family in the Philippines.
In her effort to project Nyce in a positive light, Lord said in in her closing argument that Nyce saved Michelle from the ”starving Philippines”. Nyce also claimed that he saved another sister of Michelle who was starving to death on the beach in the Philippines.
Rivera’s family is from Orion, Bataan in Central Luzon.
Nyce and Lord also tried to portray Michelle and her family as greedy. Lord said the family only planned on testifying so they can continue to get more money out of Michelle’s death.
“The father and sister were biased individuals, who filed a lawsuit within a week after (Michelle’s death), who only had dollar signs in their eyes,” Lord said after yesterday’s verdict, reported the Trenton, New Jersey-based newspaper Trentonian.
The Associated Press reported that the passion-provocation manslaughter verdict by a jury of eight men and four women was the least of the slaying charges on which Nyce could have been convicted.
It means the one-time research professor from Hopewell Township faces a sentence of five to 10 years in prison, rather than a potential life sentence that could have come with a murder conviction.
Dressed in a gray suit, Nyce expressed no emotion as the verdict was read, or when an officer cuffed his hands behind his back after the judge revoked his bail, Nyce remained silent as he passed his visibly upset parents who just watched their son -- so successful in the field of asthma medication -- leave the courtroom.
Nyce also was convicted of tampering with evidence, stemming from his confession that he stuffed his wife’s lifeless body into her Toyota Land Cruiser and drove it into a half-frozen creek about a mile away, in hopes it would appear she had died in an auto accident.
That charge carries a three- to five-year term. Prosecutors said they would ask that Nyce serve the terms consecutively when he is sentenced Sept. 9.
Outside the courtroom, as mother Emma Nyce was consoled by her husband, and as whispers of the verdict flooded the century-old courthouse, their son repeated his claim that his wife’s death was accidental.
“I did nothing intentional,” Dr. Nyce told The Trenton, New Jersey-based newspaper Trentonian, before being whisked away to a basement holding cell.
The Nyces met 14 years ago through a newspaper advertisement when then-Michelle Rivera was living in the Philippines. After more than a year of friendly letters, the two married and Michelle moved to the United States. They had three children.
In the courtroom following the verdict, the victim’s sister said she was disappointed, said the AP.
“He killed my sister,” Melodia Ragenil said, with tears in her eyes. “I wanted murder. I wanted life imprisonment.”
Ragenil and her father, Teodoro Rivera were barred from testifying by Judge Bill Mathesius last month. The judge said she didn’t have a good enough grasp of the English language while his testimony is not relevant to the case.
Ragenil, the youngest of Michelle’s seven siblings, would return to watch the rest of the trial, but often darted out of the courtroom every time gruesome autopsy photos of her sister’s badly beaten body and dissected brain were shown on the court’s projection screen.
Nyce’s lawyer told the AP that she was considering an appeal.
“I was hoping that Jonathan would be completely acquitted of all the homicide charges,” Lord said. “But obviously if he had been convicted of something, this was the best we could hope for.”
In the month-long trial, Lord argued the death was the result of a scuffle after 34-year-old Michelle Nyce returned home from a tryst with her lover, a Guatemalan immigrant who had once landscaped the couple’s home in well-to-do Hopewell Township.
In a videotaped confession, Jonathan Nyce said his wife lunged at him with a stiletto. Authorities never found a weapon.
Nyce had confessed to grappling with his wife and shoving her to the floor harder than he had intended. She continued to flail at him from the ground, he said, so he knelt on her back and shoved her face into the floor.
Mercer County prosecutors said they were disappointed with the verdict. The judge had instructed the jury that Michelle Nyce’s infidelity could be considered adequate provocation for the crime.
“We did not agree,” said Mercer County Assistant Prosecutor Thomas Meidt
Judge Mathesius scheduled sentencing for Sept. 9 after revoking Nyce’s $750,000 bail.
It took a little more than a day and a half for the jury to reach its verdict.
The Nyces moved to New Jersey in the late 1990s, when the defendant moved his growing drug research firm, Epigenesis Pharmaceuticals, from Greenville, N.C. to Cranbury. The company was trying to develop a new asthma drug, but venture capital dried up with the 2001 recession, and Nyce was replaced as CEO two years later. Until the time of his arrest, he had been a stay-at-home dad, receiving a monthly stipend from the company.
Michelle Nyce had worked part-time at a Macy’s makeup counter in a mall.
Rivera, who moved to Mercer County around the time of his daughter’s death to fight for custody of the Nyce’s three young children, wasn’t at yesterday’s verdict and was unavailable for comment.
Sources around the court house said Ragenil is scheduled to return to the Philippines next week.
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NEW YORK --- It took her four auditions in four straight years before she made it to “Miss Saigon”. In “Rent”, she weathered a six-hour audition line which had 6,000 actresses vying for the same role that she was auditioning for.
Now, Fil-American Julie Danao is performing the biggest role so far in her young acting career – being Yoko Ono in the Lennon broadway musical.
“It’s a great privilege for me to be playing Yoko Ono, and be able to breathe life onstage to a very important person who had greatly impacted the life of John Lennon and the Beatles,” says Julie during a break in between rehearsals at the Broadhurst Theater.
She explains that the entire musical itself poses a real challenge to her, owing to its unique storytelling genre, where nine performers of multi-ethnic backgrounds are playing the role of John Lennon – singing some 28 songs, articulating his own statements and comments as the stage recreates the ambience of the 60s and 70s through sets, props, costumes and photos.
Since it got premiered last April in San Francisco, Lennon underwent several changes. Writer-director Don Scardino allows the musical to continually evolve.
“I’m very excited with how it has shaped up so far,” said Danao.
“I think its going to be a hit here in New York,” the 33 year-old sanguine actress exclaims. Lennon opens on August 4 at Broadhurst Theater on West 44 street.
Lennon was known as the leader of the wildly popular 60s band “The Beatles”. When the group disbanded, Lennon settled with his wife Yoko in Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
Lennon was shot dead on December 8, 1980 by a mentally troubled fan on the driveway of the Dakota Apartments on 72nd Street and Central Park West where he and Yoko lived. Lennon was 40.
Danao believes Don Scardino was able to capture the psyche of John Lennon. The musical will show Lennon transcending eras, thus making him relevant to any period of man’s history.
Julie, who just got married to Filipino-Russian John Salkin last month, looks forward to visiting the Philippines in November to re-familiarize herself with her Filipino roots.
Born in Masbate but raised in Florida, she recalls how her mother, then a school teacher, never got tired of dreaming of making it to the United States though they were just an ordinary family living in a coastal village.
It was this sense of vision and family that nurtured her to continue pressing on until her dreams became a reality. She, however, admitted her family’s being musical and theatrical helped a lot in preparing her artistically early on.
“But unlike Leah (Salonga), success came in the midst of seeming failures,” Julie beams.
She got into the theater shortly after the hurricane Andrew in 1992. The hurricane razed her family’s home and the school she was atten ding then. This prompted her to take time off in Los Angeles while her family was rebuilding their house. It was during that period she auditioned for Miss Saigon.
Julie admits that it was “Miss Saigon” who started her off. After that came other productions, like “Aida”, “Saturday Night Live” and “Rent”.
In between those performances, she also honed her thespian skills in drama and theater schools.
In all those years, Julie never for a moment forgot her being a Filipino. “I still wear tsinelas and eat native delicacies.”
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