A 28 year old woman from India's socially backward Dalit community has made history by becoming the youngest mayor in India's fourth-largest city.
Priya Rajan, a postgraduate in commerce, was named 49th mayor of Chennai city, the capital of Tamil Nadu state in southern India. She is a member of the ruling DMK party of Tamil Nadu and the third woman to hold the prestigious post.
With a population of 10 million, Chennai is considered the second-oldest city council in the world after London and was formed in 1668 by the then British rulers. In Tamil Nadu, half of the posts in city corporations and town municipalities are reserved for women and marginalized communities like Dalits in an effort to empower such groups.
Dalits are excluded from the four-tier Hindu caste system and face widespread discrimination in many parts of India. Dalits make up about 25 percent of India's estimated 1.3 billion people. About 70 percent of Indian Christians hail from Dalit castes.
The government in Catholic-majority Timor-Leste has decided to send humanitarian aid worth 1.5 million US dollars to war-torn Ukraine in a show of solidarity with the country following the Russian invasion.
The aid would be delivered through the United Nations World Food Program. The move came after Prime Minister Taur Matan Ruak recently called the invasion "unacceptable." The premier referred to his country's suffering during the 24-year rule of Indonesia until it gained independence in 1999.
Timor-Leste was one of the countries that supported a United Nations General Assembly resolution reaffirming Ukrainian sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity. Analysists have hailed Timor-Leste's move as significant for the tiny nation's regional and international standing.
The United Nations human rights office says it has verified 1,335 civilian casualties so far in Ukraine, including 474 killed and 861 injured since the Russian invasion started on February 24.
The Catholic-majority Philippines has passed a new law that raises the age of consent from 12 to 16 years. President Rodrigo Duterte signed the bill into law on Monday.
The legislation seeks to protect minors from sexual abuse and rape, which are widespread in the country. This gender-neutral law stipulates that any adult having sex with anyone under 16 years would be guilty of statutory rape.
Lawyers and women's rights activists have welcomed the law as statistics show that many victims of rape have been children aged 12-14. Police reported 18 rape cases per day in 2020, which was spurred further by Covid-19 community quarantines.
For years activists have been pushing for the age of consent to be raised as sexual predators have manipulated underage girls. That also triggered a rise in teenage pregnancies and sex trafficking of young girls in the Philippines.
The Catholic Church is Sri Lanka has urged the United Nations to investigate the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks after describing them as a political conspiracy.
Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith made the call while addressing the 49th session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday. The prelate said that the attacks were first seen as solely the work of Islamic extremists, but subsequent investigations showed they were part of a grand political plot.
Cardinal Ranjith lamented that despite repeated requests from the Church and civil society for truth and justice for the victims, the incumbent government of Sri Lanka remains reluctant to cooperate even three years after the attacks.
Members of a local Islamic extremist group carried out suicide bombings on three churches and three hotels on April 21, 2019, leaving 269 people dead and more than 500 injured. After a protracted investigation, police charged 25 men with plotting the bombing. Their trial began last November.
Indonesian authorities have recovered the bodies of eight technicians five days after they were shot dead by armed separatists in Christian-majority Papua province. Officials said they had to wait until Monday to carry out a rescue operation using helicopters in the remote and mountainous region due to bad weather.
Armed rebels shot dead the technicians on March 2. All were working for an agency making improvements to a transceiver station in Beoga in Puncak district. The West Papua National Liberation Army and Free Papua Movement claimed responsibility for the shootings.
A spokesperson for the rebel group said the workers paid the price for entering an area which the rebels had previously declared a no-go zone for civilians. Violence between armed insurgents and security forces have intensified in Papua in recent times.
Rights groups say there were at least seven attacks on civilians by rebels in January and February that left 13 people killed. An armed insurgency has engulfed Papua since 1960s when Indonesia annexed the region at the end of Dutch colonial rule.
Catholics in Macau started a week-long novena prayer for the citizens of Hong Kong as it struggles to contain its worst outbreak of Covid-19.
The special prayer began on March 11. Hong Kong has been recording alarmingly high numbers of new cases of the fast-spreading Omicron variant over the past few weeks. It has registered 540,000 infections and more than 2,300 deaths, mostly in the past two weeks. On Tuesday, Hong Kong recorded 43,100 new cases. The next day it registered the highest death rate per million globally.
The surge has triggered panic in the city of 7.4 million, leaving hospitals, isolation centers and funerals parlors overstretched. An acute manpower crisis has hit public transport, shopping malls, markets and pharmacies.
To contain the virus, Hong Kong's administration has planned a mass testing of all residents starting from March 26 that will continue for nine days.
Intense fighting between the military and rebel forces has turned 16 Catholic parishes in Myanmar's predominantly Christian Kayah state into ghost towns.
In Loikaw Diocese, priests, nuns and Catholics have fled the area to save their lives from deadly violence. Kayah state has about 90,000 Catholics and most have totally abandoned their areas for safety. In Loikaw Diocese, 16 out of 38 churches have been affected as fighting escalated in recent months.
Church sources said that military forces used airstrikes and artillery shelling to target both rebels and civilians, forcing thousands including women, children, the elderly and the infirm to flee their homes to seek refuge in nearby jungles or churches.
Since May last year, at least 650 houses and civilian properties have been burned or destroyed in Kayah state. Fighting has displaced more than half of the state's estimated 300,000 people.
The government of Thailand has launched an unprecedented, multipronged campaign to tackle the country's looming demographic crisis. Record low birth rates in the southeast Asian nation have triggered alarm bells.
Among the new initiatives is the expansion of childcare and fertility centers. Such centers are currently limited to capital Bangkok and other major cities, but now these will be expanded to all 76 provinces.
Moreover, social media influencers have been hired to promote the joys of having children. Last year the nation of 69 million registered 544,000 births compared to 563,000 deaths. For the first time in history, Thailand's deaths outpaced births.
Already the country's birth rate has been well below replacement level at just 1.2 child per woman for years. A senior health official said officials are trying to slow down the decline of births and reverse the trend by getting families that are ready to have children faster.
The Catholic Church in South Korea has welcomed a report from the state-run Truth and Reconciliation Commission that found North Korea's military murdered 1,145 Christians including 119 Catholics and 1,026 Protestants for their faith during the Korean War.
Among the victims were Catholic Bishop Francis Hong Yong-ho of Pyongyang, who was imprisoned by North Korean forces in 1949 and later disappeared. In 2014, the Vatican accepted Bishop Hong as a Servant of God -- the first stage of canonization in the Church, making him the first candidate for sainthood from North Korea.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday, South Koreans elected Yoon Suk-yeol from the conservative People Power Party as their next president. He replaces the country's second Catholic president Moon Jae-in.
Unlike his predecessor, Yoon has threatened a pre-emptive strike and swift responses to missile tests to teach lessons to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.
Source: Ucanews
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