NEWS OF THE DAY

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Graft testimony: South Africa’s finance minister resigned on Tuesday after acknowledging missteps during the scandal-tainted tenure of former president Jacob Zuma. The resignation of Nhlanhla Nene was announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa, who has pledged to clean up corruption and revive South Africa’s economy, which is in recession. The president appointed Tito Mboweni, former head of the South African Reserve Bank, as the new minister. Ramaphosa, a former deputy president, brought Nene back into the Cabinet after replacing Zuma, who resigned in February. Zuma has been charged with corruption.

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Corruption case: Former Guatemalan Vice President Roxana Baldetti was sentenced to more than 15 years in prison Tuesday for involvement in a fraudulent state contract to decontaminate a major lake. Prosecutors backed by a U.N. anti-corruption commission accused Baldetti and 12 other people of conspiring to grant an $18 million contract to clean up Lake Amatitlan to Israel-based M. Tarcic Engineering Ltd. The company said it had a special formula that could clean the lake within months. But investigators determined the company used a substance that was merely water, salt and chlorine.

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Wife threatened: The wife of the former Interpol president who disappeared in China has revealed that she had received a threatening phone call at her home in Lyon, France, warning of agents coming for her while she fights a so-far fruitless battle for information about her husband’s fate. In her first one-on-one interview since Meng Hongwei went missing, Grace Meng denied bribery allegations against her highprofile husband, and said speaking out about his disappearance was placing her “in great danger.” Meng Hongwei — who is also China’s vice minister of public security — disappeared while on a trip home to China late last month.

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Climate ruling: A Dutch appeals court on Tuesday upheld a landmark ruling that ordered the Dutch government to cut the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25 percent by 2020 from benchmark 1990 levels. The ruling came a day after the Nobel Prizewinning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued an urgent report saying that preventing even just an extra single degree of heat in Earth’s climate could make a life-or-death difference in the next few decades for multitudes of people and ecosystems.

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Assad grants amnesty: The Syrian government Tuesday announced an amnesty for army deserters and those who avoided military service, a gesture that could draw thousands of refugees who fled violence back to the country. President Bashar Assad issued the decree, granting “a general amnesty from all punishment” to deserters inside and outside the country, said the staterun Syrian Arab News Agency. The amnesty applies to those who “turn themselves in” within four months if they are in Syria or within six months if they are abroad. It does not include defectors who have fought against the government.

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Wiesel bust: A bust of Romania-born writer and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel was unveiled Tuesday in Bucharest on the country’s national Holocaust remembrance day. Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 and died in 2016. He and his family were among an estimated 14,000 Jews who were deported to the Auschwitz death camp from a town in northwest Romania in May 1944. His mother and younger sister died there.