HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – This year marks 40 years since the People Power Revolution ousted former President Ferdinand Marcos, Sr., from office in the Philippines, and Honolulu’s Filipino community is using art to preserve that history.

The People Power Hawaii month-long art festival is raising awareness about the historic peace movement and bringing the Filipino community together through art rooted in collective trauma and history.

“Art can inspire action, you want to tell people that something matters,” said Dianne Deauna, a board member of the Hawaii Filipinos for Truth, Justice, and Democracy, and organizer of the panel and art gallery. “If we don’t prioritize sharing these stories and capturing that history, we lose our most potent weapon against forces that try to erase us, and divide us, our heritage.”

The People Power Revolution consisted of a four-day, non-violent uprising in the Philippines in February 1986 that ended Marcos’ 20-year rule. It followed public outrage over his rule under martial law, electoral fraud and the assassination of opposition candidate Benigno Aquino Jr. Democracy advocates and Marcos’ dissenters held demonstrations, protesting corruption and persecution under the Marcos administration. Marcos and his family fled to Honolulu, where he lived in exile for three years, and died in 1989.

The month-long art festival opened with Pagalala’t Pakikibaka (Memory in Art), an artists’ panel and gallery event, at the Hawaii State Library, offering a historical view into the Marcos era of the Philippines and his time in Honolulu. It also included a People Power Hawaii Concert.

A new theater play called Indigo Child will be shown at The Actors’ Group (TAG) Brad Powell Theater at Dole Cannery on March 10, 11, 17 and 18.

The theater play follows the story of a mother and son and their psychological aftermath of martial law in the Philippines.

“It’s a warning, against political, historical revisionism and unexamined history,” said Emmanuele Mante, the organizer of the Indigo Child play. “It’s also a form of ethical and political act.”

People Power Hawaii 2026 is organized by the Hawaii Filipinos for Truth, Justice, and Democracy (HFTJD) and brought by the Filipino-American Historical Society of Hawaii (FAHSOH), Filipino Association of University Women (FAUW), and the Center for Philippine Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

For more information, head to People Power Hawaii 2026.

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BOISE — The Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee voted Friday to partially restore funding to the Idaho National Guard’s education reimbursement program. The near-unanimous vote arrives after the body twice voted against making the reimbursement funding available but failed to come to a consensus on Idaho Military Division enhancements.

With this matter unresolved, JFAC once again took up the issue of funding for the National Guard’s State Education Assistance Program (SEAP), which provides enlisted soldiers and airmen up to $8,000 per year for tuition and fees at Idaho institutions.

Rep. James Petzke, R-Meridian — who has repeatedly voiced support for restoring the reimbursement funding — brought forward the motion Friday to provide a general fund enhancement of $190,800 to SEAP for fiscal year 2027. This amount allows the program to maintain 69% of funding, up from the 39% it would have been reduced to as a result of JFAC’s 5% cuts for next fiscal year.

Though the vote sailed through without comment from committee members Friday, Petzke has couched the funding as necessary as Idaho lags behind neighboring states (including Oregon, Washington and Utah), which each offer 100% tuition reimbursement through their own education programs.

This story contains discussion of suicide. If you or someone you care about may be at risk of suicide, contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988, or go to 988lifeline.org.

Staff at the nation’s largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility have placed bets on which detainee will be the next to die by suicide, according to new reporting from the Associated Press based on 911 calls and detainee accounts. 

Owen Ramsingh, a legal permanent resident who spent several weeks at the Camp East Montana detention facility in Texas, told AP that he overheard a security guard talking about a betting pool for which detainee would next die by suicide. The guard said he had paid $500 into the pot, which would all go to the winner with the most accurate predictions on detainees harming themselves. 

Without providing details, the Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told AP that Ramsingh, who was brought to the US at age 5 from the Netherlands, was lying about the suicide bets. 

In January, staff at Camp East Montana called 911 to request emergency help for Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old from Cuba. DHS described his death as an attempted suicide. A medical examiner later ruled it a homicide. That same month, staff at the detention facility called 911 to report that a 36-year-old Nicaraguan man died by suicide. The AP reports that “detainees attempted to harm themselves while expressing suicidal ideations on at least six other occasions that resulted in 911 calls.”

Once the site of an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II, Camp East Montana is made up of six long tents at the Fort Bliss Army base outside of El Paso. On an average day, the facility holds around 3,000 detainees who are living in harsh conditions: They lack sufficient food and often go without proper medical care, according to AP’s review of 130 calls made to 911. Those calls took place in just about five months—from when the tents were quickly constructed in mid-August to January 20.

“Every day felt like a week. Every week felt like a month. Every month felt like a year,”Ramsingh said. He lived in Columbia, Missouri before being stopped at the airport by DHS and sent to Camp East Montana last year. Despite holding a green card and being married to a US citizen, he was deported to the Netherlands in February over a drug conviction from when he was a teenager (which he served prison time for). “Camp East Montana was 1,000% worse than a prison,” Ramsingh added. 

Ramsingh said that the alledged bets on who would die by suicide were especially difficult because he had contemplated suicide himself.

While ICE data shows that the average stay at the tents is around nine days, detainees can be stuck at the camp for months as the courts struggle to accommodate President Donald Trump’s mass detainment and deportation campaign. 

US House Rep. Veronica Escobar, a Democrat who represents part of El Paso and has toured Camp East Montana, told AP that the facility “should not be operational.”

“It feels like this contractor is reinventing the wheel,” she said, “ and people are losing their lives in their experiment.”