The transition team of presumptive president Rodrigo Duterte revealed his 8-point economic agenda for the Philippines on Thursday, May 12. His economic priorities include continuing and maintaining current macroeconomic policies, accelerating infrastructure spending, ensuring attractiveness of the Philippines to foreign direct investments, pursuing a genuine agricultural development strategy, addressing bottlenecks in the country’s land administration and management system, strengthening basic education system and providing scholarships for tertiary education, improving the income tax system to make it progressive, and expanding and improving the implementation of the conditional cash transfer program.

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Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was suspended Thursday, May 12, and will face impeachment as she ceded power to her vice president-turned-enemy Michel Temer. A nearly 22-hour debate in the Senate closed with an overwhelming 55-22 vote against Brazil’s first female president. Only a simple majority of the 81-member Senate had been required to suspend Rousseff for 6 months pending judgement on charges that she broke budget accounting laws. A trial could now take months, with a two-thirds majority vote eventually needed to force Rousseff from office altogether.

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President Benigno Aquino III signed on Thursday, May 12 an administrative order to facilitate the transition from his administration to that of presumptive president Rodrigo Duterte’s. The Presidential Transition Committee, headed by Executive Secretary Paquito Ochoa Jr, is in charge of ensuring “a peaceful, orderly, and effective transition” of power on June 30, the inauguration of the next president. Communications Secretary Herminio Coloma Jr said the committee involves solely officials of the Aquino administration and no meeting has been scheduled with the transition team of presumptive president Rodrigo Duterte.

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Three days after elections, Vice President Jejomar Binay finally congratulated presumptive president Rodrigo Duterte. Binay called Duterte on Thursday afternoon to extend his congratulations and “wish the president-elect all the best”. Binay earlier said he will not be conceding defeat until the final release of the results of the 2016 polls. But partial and unofficial results showed he only managed to get 12.9% of the votes or 5.31 million votes, trailing behind Duterte, Liberal Party standard-bearer Manuel Roxas II, and Senator Grace Poe. Poe and Roxas had already conceded.

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Commission on Elections Commissioner Christian Lim said the issue over an election-related hash code raised by the camp of Senator Ferdinand Marcos Jr has been blown out of proportion and is “being used…to discredit the elections.” The poll body confirmed on Thursday, May 12 that a change was made in the hash code of the data package containing election results, but the change was “cosmetic”in nature. Comelec Chairman Andres Bautista, who denied any cheating related to the change, said they expected much ‘political conditioning’ considering the tight vice presidential race between Marcos and current front runner, Camarines Sur Representative Leni Robredo.

Read more about what Comelec said about the hash code issue.

Read more from both camps of Marcos and Robredo.

Experts say it is very improbable for polling precincts to report a full turnout because this defies national average of about 75% in 2010, and 84% this year. But on May 9, 116 polling precincts from 18 provinces posted 100% voter turnout rates. While it seems that a 100% turnout in certain precincts shows an increased diligence in fulfilling civic duties, experts view it with suspicion, a possible indicator of poll cheating. Of the 116 precincts that delivered a 100% voter turnout, Liberal Party standard-bearer Roxas won in 65 precincts while Senator Grace Poe captured 40 of them. Presumptive president Rodrigo Duterte won in only one of the precincts in Lanao del Norte that posted a complete turnout.

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Two more pieces of debris were confirmed to be from flight MH370 on Thursday, May 12. The fragments washed up on beaches in South Africa and Mauritius in March and brought to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau’s laboratories for testing. After an expert examination they were found to have “almost certainly” come from the fated Boeing 777 aircraft, which vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014 with 239 passengers and crew on board. Five pieces of debris have now been identified as either definitely or probably from the jet, all discovered thousands of kilometers from the ongoing search zone, likely swept there by currents.

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The name of Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull emerged in the Panama Papers on Thursday, May 12. He is listed as a former director of a British Virgin Islands company, Star Technology Services Limited, set up by Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca in the 1990s. Turnbull rejected any wrongdoing, saying “as the article acknowledged, there is no suggestion of any impropriety whatsoever.” The revelation, while not incriminating, piled pressure on Turnbull as he seeks to win the July poll against Labor opposition leader Bill Shorten on a platform of boosting jobs and economic growth.

Meanwhile, law firm Mossack Fonseca said it is filing suit against the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists after it gave the public access to the Panama Papers records of over 200,000 secret offshore companies through a searchable database online. 

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Pope Francis on Thursday, May 12, said he would set up a commission to study the possibility of women entering the Catholic clergy. The 79-year-old pontiff promised to examine whether women could join the clergy at the rank of deacon, one below a priest. During a meeting at the Vatican with members of female religious orders, Francis said he had discussed the use of female deacons in the early centuries of the Church with experts on the subject but was not clear as to their exact role and status. “I believe, yes, it would do good for the Church to clarify this point,” he said.

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At Cannes, 80-year-old director Woody Allen was seated in the front row when French actor Laurent Lafitte made a rape joke that drew gasps from the audience. “It is a pleasure to see you in France, because you have shot many films in Europe in recent years, and yet in the United States you haven’t even been convicted for rape,” said Lafitte, but Allen seemed unperturbed by the gag and said “It would take a lot to offend me.”

Read more on Rappler.