Belated congratulations to the Ateneo Debate Society (Ateneo A), composed of David Africa and Toby Leung, for winning the World Universities Debating Championship (WUDC) 2023 in Madrid, Spain.

This is a historic first for Ateneo since it started competing in the WUDC.

The World Universities Debating Championships (WUDC) is the world’s biggest debating tournament, held annually in English with teams representing universities from across the world.

Africa and Leung went head-to-head and succeeded against representatives from Princeton University (USA), Tel Aviv University (Israel), and Sofia University (Bulgaria) in the grand finals. The Ateneans challenged the concept of “ubuntu” – a complex and multifaceted set of social ideals within South Africa which has increasingly been used as a moral compass for directing development.

Both students are taking up Applied Mathematics with specialization in Data Science at the Ateneo. Africa is now in his senior year while Leung is still a sophomore.

Marites pa more

It is increasingly clear that Marites is not just a Filipino past time. Internationally, there is a huge demand for celebrity news or gossip which expose dark secrets of well-known personalities and persons around them. A recent “tell-all” book of Prince Harry and a memoir written by a former close aide of Pope Emeritus Benedict are cases in point. Earlier, a book written by a niece of former President Donald Trump, and published just before the US elections, also grabbed quite a lot of attention.

According to a CNN London report, the sales of Prince Harry’s “Spare” went through the roof. The English language version sold more than 1.4 million copies on its first day of publication. “The first full day of sales of Spare represents the largest first-day sales total for any non-fiction book ever published by Penguin Random House, the world’s largest trade publisher.” Prince Harry and Princess Meghan are probably singing their way to the bank.

The tell-all book was preceded by a tell-all interview with Oprah Winfrey and a tell-even-more Netflix docuseries in 2022.

Some juicy bits from “Spare”:

Of King Charles III, Harry said: “What he couldn’t really stomach was someone new dominating the monarchy,” …“grabbing the limelight, someone shiny and new coming in and overshadowing him.”

In 2019, Prince William allegedly physically attacked Harry during an argument about Meghan, who William thought was “difficult,” “rude,” and “abrasive” — and whom he previously pleaded with his brother not to date. The attack left Harry with scrapes and bruises on his back.

Sister-in-law Kate Middleton reportedly voiced several “problems” she had with the arrangements for Meghan and Harry’s wedding, which Harry chalks up to “American versus British cultural differences”.

Harry claims that his stepmother — whom he and William begged his father not to marry — has always been “the most cunning royal when it comes to tabloid coverage”, so much so that she frequently leaks details of the Windsors’ lives to members of the press in exchange for favorable coverage of her own. Queen Camilla reportedly “devised and launched a campaign of getting good press for Pa and Camilla at the expense of bad press for us.”

In UK, Harry and Meghan have become quite unpopular but are hailed outside UK as the underdog in the battle royale.