WASHINGTON (SE): The large crowds that gathered on January 21, the day after Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States of America (US), was originally billed as a protest by feminists against the anti-woman policies and attitudes of the new man in the While House.

But controversy quickly broke out and a week prior to the event the registration of what had described itself as a pro-life group, taken as being anti-abortion, was rejected by the organisers as being anti-feminist.

JAKARTA (SE): Following his debut appearance at the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit held in Vientiane, Laos, on September 5 and 6, the president of The Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, made his first visit as head of state to Indonesia.

LAHORE (SE): A young Catholic woman, Asia Bibi, who was sentenced to death under Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy laws in 2010, has had a date set for her appeal to be heard in the Supreme Court in mid-October.

The British Pakistani Christian Association reported that Bibi has been held in prison since June 2009 when blasphemy allegations were made against her. It added that she had been gang raped over the blasphemy accusations and her children targeted.

BACOLOD (SE): Nanay Lani holds up her pay slip, a small piece of paper more akin to a debt notice that the kind proprietor of your neighbourhood sari-sari store hands you to point out that you have run out of credit.

She receives one from the hacienda supervisor every 15 days, usually showing her take-home pay will be less than a hundred pesos ($17) in cash for her toil as farmworker among the sugarcane.

HONG KONG (SE): As Indonesian government guns were aimed at 14 people found guilty of drug related crimes and their lifeless bodies slumped to the ground at midnight on July 28, Father Antonius Benny Susetyo was asking what the drive to execute aims to cover up.

The secretary of the Setara Institute for Democracy in Jakarta pointed to testimony given by Fredi Budiman, who fell before the guns at the hour where this life morphed into the next.

COLOMBO (UCAN): The resistance of the government of Sri Lanka to investigate war crimes committed during the 1983 to 2009 conflict between the army and the Tigers of Tamil Eelam has sown doubt and cynicism about a new office set up to investigate the fate of missing persons.

Father P. Jebaratnam, from Jaffna, which was heavily affected during the civil war, said that the office is necessary, but questioned its genuineness, based on past experiences.