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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 -- President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo on Thursday, July 20, has ordered the evacuation of Filipinos from Lebanon.
“We are now in evacuation mode,” Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita told a news briefing.
Estimates of the number of Filipinos in war-wracked Lebanon range from a low of 8,000 to 30,000.
The President has ordered the release of P150 million to fund government efforts to keep the Filipinos in Beirut out of harm’s way.
She said the amount may not be enough to carry out the kind of massive evacuation that may be required to bring the Filipino expatriates to safety, but the government is trying to address the problem of insufficient funds by coordinating with other countries in the evacuation efforts.
“Our resources may not be enough but we are trying to address the problem by teaming up with other foreign countries that could help us in the evacuation process,” the President said.
What the government lacked in ships and aircraft, it tried to make up in letters to foreign countries pleading with them to let Filipinos hitch a ride in their evacuation vessels out of war-battered Lebanon.
The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) sent a barrage of notes verbales to various embassies -- the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Italy -- that were rushing to pull out their citizens from bombed-out Beirut.
“The problem is, we don’t have ships where our nationals can board, unlike the US and French,” DFA spokesperson Gilberto Asuque said. “We have very limited resources.”
The DFA also announced a repatriation plan, called “Oplan Sagip OFW sa Lebanon,” as Israeli warplanes continued to pound Hezbollah bases there.
Malacañang said that a first batch of 200 “mostly distressed” overseas Filipino workers was to move out by bus today for the 90-km trip from Beirut to Damascus in Syria. There, they would be airlifted on Friday to Dubai and Manila by a chartered Kurdistan Airlines flight.
The 200 had sought refuge at the Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal parish in Beirut’s Christian district of Sassine. Another 900 Filipinos have registered to be moved out once an alert level 4 requiring a mandatory evacuation is declared.
The alert remained at level 3 yesterday, meaning Filipinos should leave their homes for relocation sites.
The DFA said that it had requested, through its Office of European Affairs, the embassies of France, United Kingdom and Italy “for their assistance in accommodating overseas Filipino workers in their respective vessels out of Lebanon.”
The DFA also instructed Philippine missions in Paris, London and Rome to make “similar representations” or follow the matter up with their host states.
Chargé d’Affaires Evan Garcia of the Philippine Embassy in Washington said he had already made the same appeal to the US Department of State.
In reply, Garcia said the state department “advised that, although (its) first priority is the evacuation of American nationals, the US government will try to help evacuate Filipinos as well, to the extent that it would be safe to do so, and within the limits of available resources.”
Garcia, in his report to the DFA, explained that for the United States to give such help, it would need information from Manila on the numbers, locations and identities of the Filipinos to be evacuated.
In a parallel move, the DFA also instructed Philippine embassies in the countries surrounding Lebanon to coordinate with their respective host states “to ensure the safe passage” of Filipino evacuees who may be crossing their borders.
Five “transit or staging points” outside Lebanon have also been designated for the repatriation -- Cyprus, Turkey, Rhodes in Greece and Damascus and Tartus in Syria.
With 15 staffers manning its embassy in Beirut, Manila finally came out with a concrete exit plan days into the sustained Israeli air assault on the Middle East nation.
“As we speak, it is happening now,” Asuque told reporters in a briefing later, referring to the Beirut-Damascus bus trips which he said would kick off the government’s “Oplan-Sagip OFW sa Lebanon.”
Lebanon has been under attack from Israel after the Hezbollah abducted two Israeli soldiers whom they refused to release.
Hundreds of Lebanese have been killed over the past weeks from Israeli air raids. (MNS)
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LEGAZPI CITY -- As more lava continued to flow from Mayon Volcano, Legazpi City and seven other towns near the volcano were declared under a state of calamity.
On Thursday, about 100 residents of two villages fled their homes in apparent panic.
Volcanologists said Mayon’s activity could turn into an explosive eruption within weeks if the magma pool rapidly increases.
Mushroom clouds of ash shot up into the sky starting around 7:30 a.m. Thursday, July 20,, sending farmers running for safety as parents took their children home from school.
Eduardo Laguerta, from the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, said the ash clouds were caused by the collapse and disintegration of superheated lava mounds several kilometers (miles) from the crater of the 2,474-meter (8,118-foot) volcano.
He said anyone nearby could suffocate or be severely burned.
Lava and red-hot boulders have been trickling down Mayon since it came to life Friday in a “mild and quiet” eruption, which could continue for weeks, volcanologists said.
The government has declared a no-go area in a six-kilometer (3.75-mile) zone around the crater, but several thousands still live and farm within the area and cannot be forced out until there is an official mandatory evacuation order.
Romeo Cabria, action officer of the Municipal Disaster Coordinating Council, said the fleeing residents of the villages of Lidong and San Isidro, could have been alarmed by the ash cloud they saw heading toward their place.
He said the residents were brought to the municipal gymnasium but the local government planned to send them back to their homes as the alert level to warrant evacuation had not yet been reached.
“It was not yet the impending major blast,” said Laguerta. “The ash cloud did not come from the crater but from the lava fragments that collapsed downslope.”
Seismographs recorded 404 tremors during the past 24 hours compared to Wednesday’s 250, which Phivolcs said can be associated with increasing lava extrusion, rockfalls, and detaching lava fragments.
The sulfur dioxide emission, which Laguerta said is one of the indicators of surfacing magma, was relatively higher than the normal level at 1,863 tons per day yesterday.
Jukes Nuñez of the Provincial Disaster oordinating Council said no evacuation was ordered yet because the alert level remained at three. However, he said, classes were suspended in Lidong and San Isidro because of the feared ash fall.
Mayon is one of the Philippines’ 22 active volcanos. Its most violent eruption, in 1814, killed more than 1,200 people and buried a town in mud. A 1993 eruption killed 79 people.
The Philippines is in the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” where volcanic activity and earthquakes are common.
On Wednesday, the Albay provincial government has placed Legazpi City and seven other towns under a state of calamity in anticipation of Mount Mayon’s major eruption.
Gov. Fernando Gonzalez identified the towns as Daraga, Camalig, Guinobatan, Ligao, Tabaco, Malilipot and Santo Domingo. He said the declaration is in preparation for the release of funding for the relocation of residents who would be affected by the volcano’s imminent eruption.
The National Disaster Coordinating Council (NDCC) advised the provincial government Tuesday to enforce the evacuation of 4,343 people living in the six-kilometer permanent danger zone of Mayon.
About 35 evacuation centers in eight surrounding towns and cities were being readied by the Provincial Disaster Coordinating Council.
In a meeting on July 15, the PDCC and the Kapisanan ng mga Brodkaster sa Pilipinas (KBP) agreed that the local radio stations would be the main medium for conveying evacuation instructions to the residents.
PDCC data showed there were 74,969 persons or 13,870 families to be evacuated from 34 threatened villages in the eight towns and cities. (MNS)
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JERSEY CITY -- Squeezed by global competition and robust growth in other states, New Jersey is feeling the pressure of fewer high tech, pharmaceutical and manufacturing jobs, amid slowing of its economy.
This development does not augur well for the 128,233 Filipino businesses in the state, many of them engaged in technology.
New Jersey accounted for four percent of the nation’s total employment in information, professional and business services and financial in 1990. By 2005, its share had fallen to 3.4 percent.
Similarly, New York’s share to these jobs fell from 9.6 percent to 7. 3 percent, Connecticut dropped from 1. 8 percent to 1.4 percent.
Rutgers University economists James Hughes and Joseph Seneca said in a 20-page report that although New Jersey still retains a unique concentration of pharmaceutical activity, its share is rapidly eroding.
In 1990, the state accounted for 20.2 percent of the nation’s total pharmaceutical employment. This means that more than one of five “pharmaceutical jobs in America was located in New Jersey—an impressive concentration at that time.
But by 2005, the state’s pharmaceutical employment share declined to 13.7 percent. Between 1990 and 2005, the state lost 5.5 percent of its pharmaceutical jobs. In contrast, pharmaceutical employment grew by 39.2 percent nationally.
Many of the high tech jobs shifted to the Southern States and California.
Skyrocketing cost of doing business such as higher taxes led to less competitive high tech sector. Jobs in high technology wired telecommunications dropped by 50 percent to 25,000 jobs in 2004 from 50,000 jobs in 1995 due to decline of jobs at AT&T and Lucent Technologies.
Filipino companies in the technomogy sector were reportedly not spared by this recent development, leading some of them to retrench workers.
Ramz Company, which has branches in Bergenfield and in Jersey City, reported that since last year, its phone card business and high-tech printing presses were not earning enough.
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MEXICO CITY, Mexico -- President Bush has told Mexican President Vicente Fox that the U.S. Congress is unlikely to pass immigration reforms before elections in November, Fox said on Monday, July 17.
The Mexican president asked Bush about the negotiations in Congress over an immigration overhaul when the two leaders met at the G-8 summit in Russia at the weekend.
Bush cautioned that time was running out.
“He pointed out that this period is very short, there are only two or three weeks before Congress members go on the election campaign,” Fox told Mexican radio on a flight from St Petersburg to Madrid.
“So the chance of the immigration issue reaching approval in the House of Representatives and reaching joint approval isn’t very high,” Fox said.
Fox has pushed for a loosening of U.S. immigration laws to allow more Mexicans to work legally in the United States since he came to power more than five years ago.
But Mexican government officials complain this push became more difficult after the September 11 attacks and the growing U.S. focus on homeland security.
White House spokesman Ken Lisaius said Bush “did acknowledge the limited number of days the Congress is in session between now and August recess, which brings to question whether it can be approved by that date.”
“But that doesn’t change the fact that the president will push for a comprehensive bill before they adjourn for the year,” he said.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist last week gave less-than-even odds that Congress would pass the immigration law overhaul before congressional elections.
The Tennessee Republican said that election year politics and lack of movement by the House toward a comprehensive approach sought by the Senate and the president complicated negotiations for final legislation.
The Senate passed a bill that combines tougher enforcement rules and border security with a guest worker program and a plan to give many of the more than 11 million illegal immigrants in the country a path to U.S. citizenship.
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