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Inquirer  Grace Poe and presidential candidacy disqualification Disqualified from the presidential race by the Commission on Elections’ Second Division, Sen. Grace Poe isn’t about to throw in the towel. She is pinning her hopes on the Supreme Court, reminding the nation that her late father, Fernando Poe Jr., won his own case for Filipino citizenship in that tribunal. [...]  The Comelec ruling throwing out the senator’s candidacy rested not only on grounds of citizenship—that she is not a natural-born citizen because she was a foundling—but also on a quite unrelated fact: that by allegedly writing on her certificate of candidacy that she was a resident of the Philippines for “6 years and 6 months,” she does not fulfill the constitutional requirement of a 10-year residency for a presidential candidate. [full text] Sun.Star Cebu  on the Rule of Law and Grace Poe “Rule of law” seems to have become the forgotten principle as presidential contenders jockey for politi...

Inquirer   on  Asia-Pacific economic growth After a successful summit in Manila, leaders of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) headed home with the region facing prospects of slowing economic growth.[...] Alan Bollard, executive director of the Apec Secretariat, observed that economies across the Asia-Pacific continued to grow but now found themselves in a “holding pattern of lower growth in the absence of high trade volumes.” [...] The blame goes to the declining contribution of trade to the region’s economic growth—quite ironic because the Apec was formed with the vision to make a free-trade area of the Asia-Pacific. [full page] Sun.Star Cebu   about gambling One of the spins used by the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office (PCSO) to soften the opposition by some sectors to the introduction of the three-number combination lottery “Swertres” years ago was that it would kill the illegal numbers game called by Cebuanos as masiao. Years after Swertres ...