May 25, 2021, Berkeley, CA – As the Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month comes to a close, on Memorial Day the USS Telesforo Trinidad Campaign (USSTTC) will honor the thousands of Filipinos and Americans of Filipino descent who made the ultimate sacrifice in defense of our freedom.    Service in the U.S. Armed Forces has been a long-standing tradition for several generations ...

With the back-to-normal mode of most states in the U.S., operations at the San Francisco Philippine Consulate General (SFPCG) have been correspondingly adjusted in response to the different consular needs of Filipinos that really have been continually sought for even during the pandemic. In an email interview with the SFPCG staff under the leadership of Consul-General Neil Ferrer, it was learned that the numb...

The flag carrier of the Philippines is being required to transfer its boarding gates by the end of the month in the largest international airport in Southern California to the detriment of its passengers.    Philippine Airlines (PAL) regrets and expressed deep concern on the decision of the Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA) management that PAL’s Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) boarding gates...

MANILA -- Several overseas Filipino workers’ (OFW) groups in Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia and Hong Kong on May 24 questioned the proposed Department of Overseas Filipinos (DOFIL), claiming the agency will counter President Rodrigo Duterte's campaign promise of making migration an option and not a necessity.  Last December, Duterte certified as urgent proposals to create DOFIL which will streamline th...

MANILA -- The Philippine Embassy in Washington confirmed it recently organized a virtual forum aimed at providing pharmaceutical and logistics companies a platform with the tools and products from the US International Development Finance Corp. (DFC) and US Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) for the expansion of anti-COVID vaccine development, manufacturing and distribution. According to a statement rel...

Vice-president Leni Robredo said the victory last year of Joe Biden over Donald Trump may be one signal that the world is fed up with populist leaders like Rodrigo Duterte so that he can be toppled in next year’s elections if the opposition comes up with a single common candidate.  For the opposition to defeat someone as popular as Duterte, Robredo said it must not only have a common candidate but it mus...

Sen. Richard Gordon said on May 24 the virtual sixth Philippine-China Bilateral Consultation Mechanism (BCM) last week over the contested West Philippine Sea (WPS), benefits only Beijing and does not serve the interests of the Philippines at all.  Gordon urged the Duterte administration to bring the WPS issue into a multilateral discussion as “Beijing knows very well that it would lose if it deals with t...

Philippine National Police (PNP) Chief Gen. Guillermo Eleazar on May 24 said “Based on initial investigation, we identified one person who offered his high school friend two brands of vaccines for a price ranging from PHP12,000 to PHP15,500 through a social media messaging app.”  “The same person claims contacts in San Juan and Mandaluyong LGUs, the reason why he could easily get vaccines and even guaran...

President Rodrigo Duterte’s recent comments ceding control of the West Philippine Sea (WPS) to China and that the international arbitration court award was nothing more than “a scrap of paper” did not sit well with countless Filipinos. None more so than his fellow alumni at the San Beda College of Law, as well as retired generals from the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and from the Philippine National ...

Angered by reports of Filipinos picky over coronavirus vaccine make, the Duterte administration announced last week that effective immediately, patients can no longer choose their vaccine brand. This, after the Health department said countless Filipinos were shying away from the China-made vaccines, preferring to receive vaccines from Western countries, such as Moderna and Pfizer.