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For the past 20 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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LOS ANGELES — Filipino American actor Lou Diamond Phillips was released from jail on his own recognizance Friday, August 11, following his arrest for allegedly physically abusing his live-in girlfriend.
“Our office reviewed the case and referred it to the city attorney’s hearing program. The parties will come in and sit with one of our attorneys, who will try to mediate the situation,” said Jonathan Diamond, a city attorney’s spokesman.
“Charges could be filed down the road, but we’re trying to resolve this through the hearing program,” Diamond added.
Phillips, best known for his roles in La Bamba and Stand and Deliver, was initially taken into custody for investigation of felony domestic violence, said police officer Marjan Mobasser.
Phillips was nominated for a Golden Globe award for his work in the 1988 film “Stand and Deliver” and has since had dozens of film and TV roles.
According to Phillips’ representative, Erik Bright, in published reports in Reuters and Los Angeles Times, “There have been no charges pressed and it was a misunderstanding.”
Officers were called about 2 a.m. to a home in the Northridge section of Los Angeles, Mobasser said.
They arrived in the actor’s home in the 8800 block of Shashone Avenue in Northridge, gathered evidence and arrested Phillips.
He allegedly got into a verbal altercation with his live-in girlfriend, makeup artist Yvonne Boismier, which eventually escalated into physical abuse. Phillips was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon. The police said the deadly weapon was bodily force.
Phillips just turned 44 last February 17.
Born in Subic Bay Naval Station in the Philippines, Phillips, who also has Spanish/Irish, Chinese, Hawaiian and Cherokee ancestry, was arrested on suspicion of co-habitant abuse. The officer did not know whether the girlfriend sustained any injuries or whether she was taken to the hospital.
Boismier was the makeup artist for the 2006 sci-fi movie “Bloodlines” where Phillips also appeared in.
Phillips, who won a Golden Globe for his performance in the film “Stand and Deliver,” was also being considered for the lead part of a movie on the life of Filipino painter Juan Luna that Maricel Lopez Pagulayan of “Superman Returns” and “X Men” was planning to do.
He also starred opposite Emilio Chavez, Charlie Sheen and Kiefer Sutherland in the 1998 Western film, “Young Guns.”
Phillips, a University of Texas at Arlington grad with a BFA in Drama, has also made appearances on television including “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and “24.”
He currently finished filming the movies “Fingerprints” (set for release in 2007) and “Death Toll” (set for release this year).
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MANILA -- A nursing-school dean on Thursday, August 17, asked the Court of Appeals to stop nursing students who passed the leakage-tainted licensure exams from taking their oath this month.
Dean Marco Antonio Sto. Tomas, vice-president of the Association of Deans of the Philippine Colleges of Nursing, petitioned the court for a temporary restraining order a day after an examinee described at a Senate inquiry how he and other reviewers were shown test questions in advance by the president of the Philippine Nurses Association.
Sto. Tomas wanted the August 22 oath-taking of successful examinees before regional officers of the Professional Regulation Commission stopped because it would be shrouded in doubts.
Sto. Tomas also confirmed that George Cordero, president of the Philippine Nurses Association, had resigned after he was implicated at the hearing. An examinee, Dennis Bautista, said that the leak originated from Cordero himself.
Sto. Tomas said Marilyn Yap, PNA vice-president for administration, would succeed Cordero.
He said, however, that other PNA officials from the regions were calling for the resignation of all five members of the PNA executive committee.
He said Victoria Ramon, PNA vice-president for programs, should also resign after Bautista told the hearing that Ramon was in the final coaching session at SM Manila, where the leaked questions were given to the students.
Ramon admitted that she was there but only because her daughter was an examinee.
On Thursday Richard Gordon called for the overhauling of the system in the nursing profession.
“Why can an owner of a nursing school also own a review center and at the same time be appointed as president of the Philippine Nurses Association?” Gordon asked, alluding to Cordero, who also owns the Philippine College of Health Sciences (PCHS) and INRESS Review Center.
Pamela Ortega, a PCHS student, confessed to Dr. Letty Kuan, a member of the Board of Nursing, that she overheard Cordero saying during the final coaching at SM Cinema in Manila that he “did not pay P7 million for nothing” in relation to the leakage.
Cordero has accused Ortega of providing the R.A. Gapuz Review Center with copies of the handwritten leakage.
The PRC investigation found that Cordero was involved in the leakage.
Sto. Tomas said it was “incomprehensible” that the PRC released the results of the exams and allowed a voluntary retake despite allegations of a leak.
“What are they trying to protect? The biggest question now is: who was paid the P7 million?” Sto. Tomas said, referring to the money that two examiners allegedly received in exchange for the leak.
Sto. Tomas insisted on a retake for all examinees because “there’s no other way to redeem the credibility” of the nursing board exam given in June.
Rene Tadle of the task force on leakage based at the University of Santo Tomas supports Sto. Tomas’ position.
He said allowing all the successful examinees to get their licenses to practice with this still unresolved leak scandal “posed a danger to public health and safety as their competencies were not properly measured.”
“This is very, very painful for us, but we’re telling our students that this is beyond the individual now, this involves the integrity of the exams themselves,” Tadle said.
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NEW YORK CITY- The plot was simple: Blow up a dozen U.S. jumbo jets simultaneously with bombs assembled on board using liquid in innocent-looking household containers. It was 1995, and it was similar to the terrorist plan hatched in Manila 11 years ago.
It was the idea of the same man behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
That man, Ramzi Yousef, now resides at the Supermax federal prison in Florence, Colo., isolated from a world of terrorists who still has copy his plans - including Project Bojinka, his blueprint for blowing up planes hatched and folied in Manila, the Associated Press reported.
At the time of the 1993 bombing, Yousef lived in Jersey City and plotted the attack from his apartment.
The arrests in London featured a plot eerily similar to Yousef’s recipe for air terror: the simultaneous explosions of multiple planes with bombs made of materials hidden in ordinary containers.
“The parallels with Bojinka are amazing, the number of targets, explosive solution,” said Roger Cressy, former director of counterterrorism on the National Security Council under President Clinton and President Bush. “It is something right out of the playbook. It has to be something either inspired by or directed by al-Qaida.”
Cressy said it was no surprise that terrorists were still trying to carry out the ideas of Yousef, an egotistical man known in that world for his creativity.
Pat D’Amuro, a former FBI assistant director, said the London plot showed that terrorists “like to come back to areas, like they did the World Trade Center.”
After Yousef and four others set off a bomb beneath the Trade Center in 1993, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000 others, he went across the Hudson River and watched smoke rise from the towers, disappointed he had not toppled them.
He fled the United States on a plane later that night, and evaded law enforcers until they learned in late 1994 that he was in the Philippines.
Among the Bojinka plans were plots to crash a hijacked airplane into CIA headquarters outside Washington and to assassinate Pope John Paul II and President Clinton.
Yousef was widely blamed for Project Bojinka, but his uncle - Khalid Shaikh Mohammed - also worked on the terrorism plans. Mohammed, captured in Pakistan in March 2003, was called the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Two months before his February 1995 arrest in one of Osama bin Laden’s Pakistan safehouses, Yousef had successfully tested his technique.
He assembled a bomb on the first leg of a two-flight trip with liquid explosives hidden in a bottle of contact lens cleaner and a reconfigured digital watch. He put it under a seat and then got off the Philippine Airlines jet before the explosive detonated in midair, killing a Japanese businessman and injuring 10 other passengers. The pilot was credited for heroically landing the plane.
FBI agents and Philippine policemen foiled Project Bojinka just two weeks before the plane bombings were to occur. They discovered Yousef’s multiple terrorist plots on computers in a Manila apartment where he and an accomplice accidentally set off a small fire.
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