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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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MANILA -- The death toll from Typhoon Milenyo (international codename Xangsane) in the Philippines has risen to 197, with at least 22 other people still reported missing, rescue workers said.
The industrial belt south of Manila bore the brunt of the storm, with at least 154 people killed in five provinces, the civil defense office and other government agencies said.
The figure included six people who drowned overnight in the hills near the towns of Antipolo and Teresa on the eastern outskirts of Manila and 14 others who drowned near the remote town of San Francisco, southeast of the capital.
Five other people were still reported missing in San Francisco, Nancy Toribio of the social welfare and development office in Quezon province said.
She denied a report by the region’s disaster coordinating center that a landslide had occurred in San Francisco, killing three people and leaving 72 others missing.
Elsewhere in the islands, 23 people were killed and 17 others were missing after a bus was swept off a bridge by a swollen river near the town of Igbaras on the central island of Panay, police said.
At least 20 other deaths have been reported by officials in the Bicol region, metropolitan Manila and nearby provinces to the north after Xangsane struck last Thursday, October 28.
The typhoon, the strongest to hit the Philippine capital in a decade, displaced 1.33 million people and blacked out the country’s main island of Luzon, leaving some 43 million people in the dark.
The storm wrecked 146,000 houses and tens of thousands of hectares of farmland. Some 171,000 people displaced by floods and strong winds remained in evacuation centers.
Meanwhile, the Department of Energy (DOE) estimates that the damage to the Philippines’ power generation and delivery system brought by Typhoon Milenyo may rise to at least half a billion pesos.
Energy Undersecretary Melinda Ocampo said initial reports indicated that the two-day battering of Typhoon Milenyo resulted to about P480 million in damaged infrastructure of the National Power Corp., the National Transmission Corp. and the electric cooperatives in the entire Luzon grid.
Energy Secretary Raphael P.M. Lotilla confirmed the reports, but said the cost of damage may still vary as the DOE has yet to complete checking up the country’s power infrastructure.
For its part, Meralco, which supplies power to about 70 percent of Luzon, put the damage to its infrastructure initially at P500 million, which it said could go up as the days go by. (MNS)
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MANILA -- Malacañang on Wednesday, October 4, deferred the issuance of an executive order that would serve as the basis for the retaking of June’s leak-tainted nursing licensure examination.
Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita said the Palace decided to recall the draft order presented by Labor Secretary Arturo Brion to President Arroyo because the President wanted Brion to incorporate the inputs from his meetings last Saturday with the Professional Regulatory Commission, the Board of Nursing, the Philippine Nurses’ Association, the deans of nursing schools, officials of review centers and nursing experts.
Ermita said there would be a second special Cabinet meeting on the leak on Tuesday, October 10.
In the draft executive order he submitted, Brion suggested that the 42,000 nursing graduates who took the June exam should retake Tests 3 and 5 because the results of these two subjects have been invalidated.
Ermita also announced the National Bureau of Investigation has promised to issue on or before October 15 the result of its inquiry into review centers where the reported leak came from.
Mrs. Arroyo also ordered the NBI to reconstruct the list of nursing students in five review centers in Luzon where test questions were reportedly distributed to their reviewees.
The NBI has filed charges against Anisia Dionisio and Virginia Madeja, two examiners of the nursing board who allegedly released the questionnaires for Tests 3 and 5 to the Inress Review Center, owned by George Cordero, head of the Philippine Nurses’ Association.
Ermita said the five centers are in Luzon and have branches in provinces in the north including Pangasinan and Baguio City, as well as in Manila.
“We have to determine who passed the exams and who among them were enrolled in review centers where the questions were leaked,” Ermita said. He said the NBI’s findings could lead to certain causes of action that would later be considered by Malacañang in drafting the executive order.
Ermita also assured students that the government would incur the P52-million expenses for the retake of nursing exams. Malacañang has already instructed Budget Secretary Rolando Andaya to prepare the amount right in time for the December retake.
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SAN DIEGO — A Filipino American member of the United States Navy Hospital Corps accused of kidnapping and murdering an Iraqi man will give testimony about seven Marines’ role in the incident in return for having charges against him dropped, his attorney said.
Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class Melson J. Bacos was a medic who patrolled with the Marine squad that allegedly kidnapped and murdered 52-year-old Hashim Ibrahim Awad last April in the town of Hamdaniya. All eight were charged with crimes including premeditated murder and kidnapping.
“We have reached an agreement with the government which will take Bacos out of harm’s way,” attorney Jeremiah Sullivan III told The Associated Press on Wednesday, October 4. “He is innocent of these murder charges and they are being dismissed and rightfully so.”
Under the deal, Bacos will give details of the incident at a general court-martial Friday at Camp Pendleton, Sullivan said. In return, all of the charges against him will be dismissed. But he will plead guilty to two additional charges, said Sullivan, who declined to elaborate.
When asked if Bacos would be freed after Friday’s testimony, Sullivan said he would not be.
Marine Lt. Col. Scott Jack, Bacos’s military attorney, also declined to elaborate on the deal, but said: “It is a very beneficial agreement for Bacos, and gives him an extremely bright future.”
The plea deal came as two of the Marines charged in the case, Pfc. John J. Jodka III and Cpl. Marshall L. Magincalda, pleaded not guilty at their arraignment Wednesday.
The arraignment for a third Marine is expected next week and preliminary hearings for the others are expected in coming weeks.
Besides murder and kidnapping, Jodka and Magincalda also are charged with conspiracy and housebreaking. Jodka also faces an assault charge and Magincalda is additionally charged with larceny and making a false official statement. All eight troops have been in the brig since May.
Jodka is accused of firing an automatic weapon at Awad, along with four other troops alleged to have opened fire.
Some of the troops, including Magincalda, are accused of stealing an AK-47 assault rifle and a shovel and placing them in the hole with Awad’s body, apparently to make it look like he was an insurgent planting a bomb.
Bacos was accused of firing the AK-47 in the air, and Magincalda of placing the expended shell casings by Awad’s body.
Since the start of the Iraq war in 2003, at least 14 members of the U.S. military have been convicted in connection with the deaths of Iraqis. Two received sentences of up to life in prison, while most others were given little or no jail time.
Bacos, a former high school wrestler, was born in Chicago to Filipino immigrants. His wife is also a corpsman; they have a little girl.
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MANILA --- The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) confirmed on Wednesday, October 4, that the Philippine candidate to the Ms. Globe International pageant was among the passengers of the hijacked plane in Turkey.
In its report to the DFA, the Philippine Embassy in the Turkish capital of Ankara said Jaime Liv Castillo, 23, was one of the passengers on board the plane that was hijacked over Greek airspace. The hijacking, which forced the plane to land in southern Italy, ended Tuesday night.
In a live phone interview with Mel Tiangco on “24 Oras” over GMA-7, Castillo said they were held inside the plane for three to four hours by a lone hijacker.
“Nakakatakot (It was scary),” Castillo said of the experience. “At that time, hindi ko naiintindihan ang nangyayari kaya natatakot ako (I didn’t understand what was happening so I was scared).”
Aside from Castillo, three other beauty contestants from Singapore, Malaysia and India, and organizers of the Globe International 2006 pageant in Tirana, Albania were also on board the hijacked plane.
“The four of us were together all the time. Gusto ko po sana (I would have liked) to be strong for the three others because they were already breaking down,” Castillo said, adding that they were calmed down by the male passengers.
An ABS-CBN news report said that she was able to call her parents from Italy where the plane landed. Castillo, a math major from De La Salle University, was the Mutya ng Pilipinas titlist for 2003.
Consul General Alfonso Ver of the Philippine Embassy in Ankara said Turkey’s airline has sent a special plane to fetch the hijacked passengers who arrived in Istanbul at 8:40 a.m. (Turkey time).
Honorary Consul Rassim Zaimonglu was directed to proceed to the airport to extend consular assistance to Castillo.
Castillo, however, said in the television interview that her flight back to Manila was still being arranged by Turkey’s airline as of press time yesterday.
Reports said that a Turkish man seeking political asylum hijacked the jetliner carrying 113 people. The hijacker, identified as Hakan Ekinci, 28, was an army deserter. He surrendered and the passengers were released unharmed.
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