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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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NEW YORK CITY — Good news for church-going Filipino Catholics in the tri-state area.
After more than two decades, a Filipino Cardinal will say Mass at New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Manila Archbishop Gaudencio Cardinal Rosales will be coming to New York and will officiate a Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan on September 24.
The Mass is the high point of the celebration of the feast day of Filipino saint San Lorenzo Ruiz.
This was announced by Fr. Erno Diaz, coordinator of the San Lorenzo Ruiz chapel in downtown Manhattan.
“It is with great joy that I welcome His Eminence Cardinal Gaudencio Rosales to New York,” Fr. Diaz said.
Fr. Diaz said he is thankful that despite Cardinal Rosales’ very busy schedule, the Cardinal still found time to visit New York and say Mass for the Filipino American community.
“This visit of the Cardinal of Manila is a momentous occasion for us Filipinos as we celebrate the feast of our first and only saint in the person of Lorenzo Ruiz, and also as we celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Filipinos to America,“ Fr. Diaz told The Filipino Express.
Fr. Diaz said the Chapel of San Lorenzo Ruiz and other Filipino Catholic groups are busy preparing for the visit of Cardinal Rosales.
He said the San Lorenzo Ruiz Festival Choir has already began compiling a list of Filipino hymns for the September 24 Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
St. Patrick’s Cathedral is located on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
The Chapel of San Lorenzo Ruiz is located at 378 Broome St. in Manhattan’s Little Italy section.
The festival choir is composed of the members of the choral groups of the Voices of Praise, Tanglaw Society of Suffolk, Chapel of San Lorenzo, Singles for Christ and other parish choirs.
The last time a Filipino Cardinal said Mass at Cathedral of Saint Patrick was in 1984. It The late Jaime Cardinal Sin was the last Filipino Prince of Church to say Mass at the famed St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
In 2004, a golden statue of San Lorenzo Ruiz was unveiled at St. Patrick’s, with Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo in attendance.
San Lorenzo was a Filipino-Chinese, a priest acolyte who joined the Spanish missionaries in Japan to propagate Christian faith in Asia.
In Japan, he was tortured, beaten and hanged to death by the Japanese who persecuted Christians. But he remained strong and never gave up his faith up to his last hour.
He was beatified by the late Pope John Paul ll in Rome in 1997.
Fr. Diaz said he is hopeful that the Filipinos’ devotion to and faith in San Lorenzo can help unite the Filipino American community.
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MANILA -- Proposals to either incorporate the review for the nursing licensure examinations into the curriculum or allow only colleges and universities to handle review classes have placed the future of nursing review centers in doubt, Commission on Higher Education (CHEd) chairman Carlito Puno said.
“If the decision is to incorporate it in the curriculum or only colleges and universities can operate them, then they (review centers) will be forced to close down,” Puno said in an interview in Malacañang.
Puno said CHED has recommended the closure of all review centers. He said the services they provide would be made a part of the curriculum, under the control and supervision of the college or university officials.
Puno said the two options have cropped up as dominant ideas in the CHEd’s consultations with nursing deans, review centers, and other stakeholders in the wake of the scandal triggered by the leak of questions in the June 2006 nursing board examinations.
Puno said review centers may also be taken over by colleges or universities should government decide that only these institutions can operate review centers.
He said that the school authorities can charge the graduates for the services, but definitely much less than what the private review centers exact from the graduates who flock to them. He said the parents would thus be relieved of the burden.
Authorities are looking into the culpability of review centers in the leakage.
In a discussion held Tuesday, September 12, in Malacañang, Puno said graduates pay huge amount enrol in review centers.
Puno said review centers usually charge 30 to 40 thousand pesos per student.
But he said that reviewees enrol in such centers not to review but for inside tips or, worse, possibly to obtain a copy of the test questions and answers, such as what happened in the June 11-12 licensure examination.
But the Palace had admitted it will be hard going after the centers because there are no regulations covering them. Review centers are presently not under CHED or any government department.
Puno said they would make a formal proposal to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo on how to deal with the nursing reviews and are expecting the President to issue an executive order to make the proposal effective.
Asked if the proposals could prevent leakages, Puno said: “I will be making a very controversial statement: Many of those who go to review centers do so because they believe they can get tips, that’s the typical mentality of reviewees.”
“Now if it would be run by colleges or universities, I doubt if there would be leakages,” he added.
Asked what his basis was for the observation that board examiners are being bribed, he said this was the ‘observation’ of many people.
Education Secretary Jesli Lapus said the leakage of questions comes from the examiners.
But he said there is a strong “temptation” for the review centers to give in to the offers of examiners because topnotchers give them a good image.
“That’s the highest selling advertisement that the center can say, if for example they have four topnotchers,” he said.
Lapus said tougher penalty should be imposed on examiners who would be found responsible for leakages. (MNS)
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BERGENFIELD, New Jersey -- When the Llanes family immigrated to the United States from the Philippines in search of a better life, little did they know that one day they would live in a new home that is expected to become a model for the use of technological innovations to help the blind and the deaf.
Their home was recently transformed by the Pinnacle Companies, a real estate company that installs technological innovations for the home.
The Llanes family’s Extreme Makeover will be featured as the Emmy Award-winning reality television show’s two-hour pre-season premiere, airing on Sunday, September 17, at 8:00 pm.
Vicente, 42, of Bergenfield, the father who is blind due to a hereditary disease, came to the United States in 1997 in search of better medical care for himself; his mother, who is also blind; his two daughters, who are going blind; his son, who is deaf due to German measles contracted by his mother during pregnancy; and his wife, who has thyroid cancer.
Despite their disabilities, the family functions amazingly well. Vicente sends books in Braille to children all over the world and even manages to do repair work around the house and most of the cooking for the family.
Daughter Guenivir, 19, is a student at a local community college and his wife Maria is a physical therapist. Moreover, they are proud to be United States citizens. Grandmother Isabel, 74, was previously a citizen, while Vicente and Maria just gained citizenship on April 13.
The main impediment to even better lives was their former house. The 50-year-old, 1,312-square-foot split-level was the source of a multitude of problems.
Because the blind substitute reliance on the sense of hearing for the loss of sight, the noise generated by the nearby street was a constant irritant. For instance, Vicente could only work on his Braille books at night because he could not concentrate due to street noise during the day.
The noise problem was exacerbated by the fact that they couldn’t have any noise-absorbing carpeting in their house because son, Zeb, 16, suffers from severe allergies. Also, because Guenivir and her sister, Carrie, 12, can still see some light and color, the darkness of their former home was an impediment to the use of their little remaining sight.
All of these -- plus a host of other problems -- changed when Pinnacle built the family a new house that is friendly to the blind.
The house has good lighting, sliding doors instead of traditional doors that get in the way of the blind when they are left open and sound-proofing insulation to keep out street noise. In addition, there is an incredible array of high tech gadgetry to make their lives easier and more economical, from talking thermostats to solar electricity.
This year ABCs Extreme Makeover: Home Edition earned an Emmy for Outstanding Reality Program. The show airs on Sundays (8:00-10:00 p. m. ET), on the ABC Television Network.
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CHICAGO -- Jocelyn “Joc-joc” Bolante is taking on US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, naming her and other high-ranking US government officials as respondents in his petition to gain freedom in the United States.
In a 26-page petition for a writ of habeas corpus, Bolante asked a Wisconsin district court to order Rice, US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and other US officials to release him from custody.
But during the hearing in Chicago on Wednesday, September 13, the judge has denied a petition for bail filed by the ex-agriculture undersecretary, but granted his motion to conduct a closed-door hearing, lawyer Harry Roque said.
“It seems that his motion for bail was denied because Bolante is still in jail,” Roque, who is in Chicago, said.
Bolante is accused of diverting P728 million in fertilizer funds to the campaign kitty of President Arroyo during the 2004 elections. He was arrested on July 7 at the Los Angeles airport, where he flew in from Seoul, South Korea, due to a canceled US business and tourist visa.
Bolante filed a petition for habeas corpus in Illinois days before his appearance at a Chicago immigration court.
The defense, led by lawyer Christian Schmidt, is questioning the legality of Bolante’s continued detention. He is presently held at Kenosha County Detention Center in Wisconsin. The petition was transferred to a Wisconsin court.
Judge George Katsivalis granted a motion to conduct a closed-door hearing but placed Roque’s amicus brief petition under advisement. The hearing lasted for an hour and a half, with the next hearing set for September 27.
The defense lawyers questioned the cancellation of Bolante’s visa, arguing that it is valid until next year. The prosecution, however, insisted that his visa is inadmissible because it was cancelled by the US embassy in Manila.
Roque said Katsivalis may still rule in favor of the amicus brief he filed.
Roque said Bolante’s decision to include Rice as a respondent indicated that there was “a more significant” reason behind the cancellation of his visa.
“To me, this is his tacit understanding that his case is not just an ordinary revocation of a B1/B2 visa but involves a more significant reason,” Roque said.
“The document indicates that Bolante himself is perhaps aware that Presidential Directive No. 212 --- which denies safe haven in the US to kleptocrats -- is already being applied against him,” he added.
Bolante’s petition also said the US Embassy in Manila did not notify Bolante that it was going to scrap his visa and it failed to give him a chance to air his side.
The petition said Bolante got an indication of the embassy’s motives only when Immigration and Naturalization Service officer Rene Arambulo mentioned the Philippine Senate’s arrest warrant against him after he was detained at the Los Angeles international airport on July 7.
Besides Rice, Gonzales, and Chertoff, Bolante also named as respondents Deborah Achim, field office director of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Chicago; David Beth, sheriff of Kenosha County; and Gary Preston, detention division commander of the Kenosha County Jail. (MNS)
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