2026 online Bar Exams start Sept. 6 in 15 testing centers; security, road rerouting, liquor ban enforced | |
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A total of 13,441 law graduates who had been registered and qualified will take the three-day online Bar examinations starting Sunday, Sept. 6, in 15 testing centers nationwide. The two other days of the examinations are set by the Supreme Court (SC) on Sept. 9 and 13. Read more |
In German, you use the intimate du for family, pets, and God. But to politely say "you" to a stranger (Sie), you must address them as an esteemed group of people not even in the room.
This division, known to linguists as the T-V distinction, acts as a built-in social radar. It forces speakers to constantly measure the relationship between intimacy and distance. While du signals closeness, Sie creates a professional or respectful boundary when speaking to clients and authority figures. Getting it wrong risks insulting a boss or sounding comically stuffy to a child.
The existence of these two pronouns is the result of centuries of linguistic inflation. In Old High German, things were simple: du was singular and ihr was plural. During the Middle Ages, influenced by the "royal we" of Latin-speaking emperors, Germans began addressing nobility with the plural ihr to multiply their status.
By the 17th century, European society had grown so rigidly stratified that ihr no longer felt respectful enough for the true elite. Speakers shifted to the third-person singular, addressing superiors as Er (he) or Sie (she)—essentially speaking to them as if they were being discussed rather than addressed directly ("Would the gentleman care to sit?").
Peak deference eventually required the third-person plural. To show absolute respect, you addressed the person as an absent collective. Literally translated, the formal greeting became: "How are they doing?" This third-person plural pronoun, capitalized as Sie, cemented itself as the permanent standard for polite address in the 18th century.
Moving from Sie to du remains a significant social milestone today. The transition is governed by strict etiquette: the older or higher-status person must be the one to offer the du, sometimes finalized with a ritual toast known as "Bruderschaft trinken" (drinking brotherhood). While modern startup culture and international companies are increasingly adopting a universal "coworker-du," traditional German boardrooms and government offices still enforce the formal Sie, keeping a linguistic arm's length between colleagues for their entire careers.
Sofia Nicole P. Artienda
|September 5, 2026
Every high school graduation season, I witness social media—and this year, my email inbox—become a brutal battlefield for the future, split down the middle. Scrolling on one screen, bright, bold banners read, “Congratulations! We are pleased to inform you …”
On the other, a continuous scroll of eerie text boxes state, “Thank you! We regret to inform you …”
For hundreds of thousands of young dreamers, those words carry the weight of an entire Filipino fate. As most youth from the masses reach the threshold of adulthood, they face a harsh reality colder than what college life ought to be: entrance exam rejections won’t define you. The system will.
Coming from the provinces, far from the polished prep culture of the capital, college isn’t just a next step but an unimaginable expense. If you talked to some of my peers in my hometown and asked, “What are your plans for college?” the answer would be a shrug, “Probably work, Tesda [Technical Education and Skills Development Authority];” or a defeated, “I don’t even think I’m qualified for that.”
Success is subjective and isn’t defined by just completing a bachelor’s degree; still, I am a firm believer that education is one of the best chain breakers of generational poverty.
After taking entrance exams, checking up on each other’s status was the first thing that my friends and I did. Long before we chose our strands, we were explicitly warned that competitive entrance exams and most scholarships favor STEM. As busy students juggling classes, organization work, and side hustles, we often found ourselves gambling on pure luck with unfamiliar topics.
English, science, and mathematics are ultimately taken as general knowledge. But to those from non-STEM strands and underfunded public high schools, that “general knowledge” becomes a threat. Well-funded institutions’ students naturally hold the advantage through advanced facilities, specialized curricula, and review programs. The rest of us must either be exceptionally gifted or exert ten times the effort just to stand on the same starting line.
I can still vividly picture our old, beloved classroom, with our science teacher running out of time each class and even allotting extra minutes to accommodate missed junior high lessons for us to grasp them better and catch up without any judgment. Right then, maybe you’d start to understand the terrifying depth of our gap. For students with a stronger academic foundation, those complex lessons would be a simple recap.
This is the actual, daily lens through which students from underserved sectors have looked for years. It is vividly evident that, up until now, there has been no concrete solution made by higher-ups to address the college-ready life of high school students. Sadly, most students are still not prepared for the supposed baseline and standards universities expect.
It is absurd to expect universities to lower their academic standards or ask privileged students to adjust to what the marginalized lack. Universities are meant to pursue academic excellence, but a deep sense of inferiority naturally develops alongside more privileged students.
Thousands of applicants end up internalizing a sense of disparity, mistaking a lack of quality education for a lack of personal potential—which, I firmly believe, should be examined with holistic evaluations that account for socioeconomic and regional starting lines.
And when it comes to the tertiary level, the higher education sector suffers chronic budget changes, making allotted slots shrink each year. Look no further than the Polytechnic University of the Philippines, the most populated state university in our country, where over 125,000 applicants for AY 2026–2027 fought for barely 20,000 slots system-wide.
Even amid the wave of congratulatory posts online from incoming scholars, a profound weight of devastation from rejections rests just beneath the digital noise. Relief for a few cannot disguise the harsh truth for the majority: as budget cuts choke the educational sector, entrance exams are no longer meant to measure potential—they contribute to aggressively eliminating applicants.
If education is truly the pillar of a “Bagong Pilipinas,” where does that leave the thousands forced to watch their dreams slip away from behind closed doors?
Here are the actual results we have to face, my dearest “Iskolar ng bayan”: Congratulations! We regret to inform you that you have successfully passed into another level of an education system designed to fail you.
It is time to hear not just the grief of disappointments, but the systemic neglect behind every rejection letter. What will happen to the youth, the hope of the nation, when the system has turned its back on them?
The Filipino youth must never be waitlisted from their own dreams.
By Klaus Döring
A natural part of life that happens when goals, ideas, or feelings don't match. It can be an internal struggle inside your own mind or an argument with other people. When handled with care, conflict helps you learn, grow, and solve important problems.
Conflict bothers you intensely because your brain and nervous system treat emotional disagreement as an actual physical survival threat.
We are in conflict with ourselves many times during life. Our future gives cause for concern; the past is captured, therefore we miss the future.
Conflicts are natural clashes of opposing ideas, needs, or values. You can experience conflict internally (your own beliefs fighting your actions) or externally (disagreeing with someone else). Handled properly, conflict is a great tool to learn, grow, and improve your daily relationships.
The grief and sorrow asked the hope, "How are you?" The hope answered, " I am a little bit low and sad today!" The sorrow replied sarcastically, "I hope so!"
When conflict is mismanaged, it can cause great harm to a relationship, but when handled in a respectful, positive way, conflict provides an opportunity to strengthen the bond between two people. Whether you’re experiencing conflict at home, work, or school, learning these skills can help you resolve differences in a healthy way and build stronger, more rewarding relationships.
When people get angry with each other, they often say or do things without realizing the cause of their feelings. Understanding the dynamics behind a conflict can make it easier to resolve issues. This insight also can help you mediate a conflict between friends and relatives. Many experts break personal and professional conflicts down into basic types, based on the underlying causes of disagreements and the dynamics.
Nobody really knows what might happen after reaching the retirement age. Sure, if we can observe our neighbors and all other people in our surroundings, we really don't like to know it. If we treat ourselves with care, our real age will not be shown. I won't make any secret about celebrating my 70th birthday sometime next year. I enjoy it. I am proud to reach this age with God's help.
The Two Main Types of ConflictInternal (Intrapersonal): This happens in your own head. It is a struggle between what you want to do and what you think is right. For example, you want to spend money on a new gadget, but you also want to save for a trip.External (Interpersonal): This happens between two or more people. It can be a fight with a friend, a disagreement with a co-worker at your office in the Poblacion District, or a debate over politics.
It seems that the respectable treatment of our beloved seniors around us are disappearing into the past and are forgotten by the younger generation. Praising the elderly nowadays means to attest to their impudent and imperishable youthfulness. I am sure, with His help many seniors are still strong, still indefatigable, still a phenomenon, still intellectual and still spiritual on top!
Let's not forget our respect, when sometimes just being artificial or affected by stammering, that "our old lady" or "our old gentleman" hasn't become senile yet.
On our way to an honorable and respectful age we should try to fulfill some of our greatest longings in life.
During the last decades, I met many people around the whole globe. Unbelievable, I found out, no matter where in this world, the conflicting attitude is everywhere. "It's an absolute certainty, those doubts are the main certainty!" stressed already the German author, philosopher and dramatist Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956).
Please allow me, once in a while, to be able to say NO. Please allow me to delete inferior and defeatist feelings. Please allow me to admit that I can't do everything during a single day. Please allow me to no longer be afraid about other people and their spiteful comments about me.
Please allow me to accept my silence. Please accept me being terribly tired from time to time. Please allow me to be excused even without having an intelligent reply. Please allow me to be carried by salvation and bliss.
Hopefully, we may have enough understanding people with us to accompany us during the voyage of our sometimes very conflicting life.
Her roles have generally been wholesome. The language is clean. Sexual innuendo? Rarely, if ever. So, there is something genuinely amusing about watching Forteza in “Saving Cherry,” a Regal Entertainment sex-dramedy, and seeing her throw much of that image out the window.
Well, almost.
There is no nudity here, but Forteza swears, gets herself into increasingly ridiculous sexual situations and even does an orgasm scene. For an actress whose screen persona has been closely associated with propriety, this is quite a detour.
Her fans don't seem to mind.
Some of them watched the movie with us and were more than happy to cheer Forteza on from the get-go. There was no shock. If anything, they seemed pleased to see their favorite actress taking on something this different.
“Saving Cherry,” however, isn't simply about a good girl getting naughty.
Cherry is a bride-to-be who has some very traditional ideas about being a woman, particularly the notion of saving herself for the man she intends to marry.
That's about where the traditional part ends.
She is otherwise a modern woman, a go-getter with dreams, passions and plans of her own. She is also stubborn and, at times, pretty self-centered.
An injury ends her career as a track athlete, followed by the death of her mother. Cherry loses herself and leaves, supposedly to figure things out. Josh, the boyfriend she leaves behind, is left hanging.
Years later, Cherry decides to come back and pick up where they left off. She agrees to marry Josh, only to discover him with another woman on their wedding night.
Cherry goes berserk.
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She cannot accept what has happened and wants revenge. Her solution is to sleep with another man, partly to spite her husband and partly because, well, this is a sex comedy.
Her friends, played by Mikee Quintos, Mika Salamanca, AC Bonifacio and Sassa Gurl, are more than willing to help.
The result is a series of increasingly absurd situations that turn Cherry's heartbreak into a running joke.
And it works.
The language is unrestrained, the mood is loose, and the movie is comfortable with its own silliness.
Forteza carries it.
She gets to play furious, pathetic, horny, funny and vulnerable, sometimes within the same scene. There is one moment when she packs so much emotion into a single expression that you are reminded just how much acting she has had to leave on the table in some of those good-girl roles.
If you're into raunchy comedy, lots of swearing and a heroine who can be messy, impulsive, this one should work for you.
It isn't high art.
It's a good time.
MINDANAO GINTONG PARANGAL 2026 
Awards Date: November 8, 2026
Venue: DE LUXE HOTEL, CAGAYAN DE ORO CITY.
Who May Be Nominated
Selection Criteria
Excellence and professionalism in one’s field Integrity, leadership, and ethical standards Significant contribution to community and nation-building Proven track record of service and achievement
How to Nominate
About Mindanao Gintong Parangal
Nominate now and be part of honoring excellence on NOVEMBER 8 2026 at DE LUXE HOTEL CAGAYAN DE ORO CITY.
