MABUHAY FESTIVAL Still community’s best despite minor setbacks

For all its years of successes, trail-blazing and league-leading, a few attempts to break new ground that fell short of expectations won’t faze Mabuhay Festival a bit. It remains in top spot among the Filipino community’s cultural extravaganza and trade shows in the Greater Toronto Area. So says a cross section of community members that we polled up… Read More »

Complicated marriage

Q. Hi Atty. Wong, I was married to MEL in 1989 when I was only 19 years old with the consent of our parents. We have two children who are now 23 and 21 years old respectively. They are still in the Philippines. However, sometime in year 2001 our marriage soured and in the presence of our barangay… Read More »

The cheers and tears of the Olympics

I am not a sports fan. Neither is I an athlete. When I was a kid, I remember that the games I joined in were only “piko” and “bahay-bahayan” The other kids did not want me to join even in “taguan”. They said I was weak-kneed, “lampa”. When I came to Canada, I noticed how important sports are… Read More »

Clashing Egos Spell Disaster for Toronto’s Mabuhay Festival

The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff. ~Ambrose Bierce LONDON – Rock star egos, swelled heads, power trips, petty rivalries, deliberate lying – they all converged in one occasion that guaranteed failure for the top Filipino community event in Toronto this last weekend of July. Witnesses who attended what should have… Read More »

SPEECH THAT IS PRESIDENTIAL

Yesterday (July 24, 2012) I watched through the internet President Aquino delivered his third SONA before Congress. I am still to figure out why only three days after full media coverage the SONA seemed to have become dead old news. Instead of gloating over or criticizing it, media and the people must have wisely, had moved on to… Read More »

Clashing Egos Spell Disaster for Toronto’s Mabuhay Festival

Member, Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) and National Ethnic Press and Media Council of Canada (NEPMCC) The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff. ~Ambrose Bierce LONDON – Rock star egos, swelled heads, power trips, petty rivalries, deliberate lying – they all converged in one occasion that… Read More »

China’s Jekyll and Hyde syndrome

In the 1886 novel, “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” the author Robert Louis Stevenson wrote about strange occurrences between Dr. Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde. As the story goes, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were two personalities within one person or commonly known as “split personality.” In recent years, China – or her government… Read More »

RH debate: Let reason prevail

“Be a listening Church,” a professor of Jesuit-run Ateneo de Manila University, Mary Racelis, said on Sunday as she appealed to irate bishops to “listen to the laity who understand what the families and the women from the grassroots are going through.” Racelis was reacting to the adamant protests of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP)… Read More »