Court in Myanmar sentences Suu Kyi to 5 years for corruption
BANGKOK — A court in military-ruled Myanmar convicted former leader Aung San Suu Kyi of corruption and sentenced her to five years in prison Wednesday in the first of several corruption cases against her.
Suu Kyi, 76, who was ousted by an army takeover last year, has denied the allegation that she accepted gold and hundreds of thousands of dollars in a bribe from a top political colleague.
The daughter of Aung San, Myanmar’s founding father, Suu Kyi became a public figure in 1988 during a failed uprising against a previous military government when she helped found the National League for Democracy party. She spent 15 of the next 21 years under house arrest for leading a nonviolent struggle for democracy that earned her the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize.
When the army allowed an election in 2015, her party won a landslide victory and she became the de facto head of state. Her party won a greater majority in the 2020 polls.
Suu Kyi is widely revered at home for her role in the country’s pro-democracy movement — and was long viewed abroad as an icon of that struggle, epitomized by her years under house arrest.
But she also has been heavily criticized for showing deference to the military while ignoring and, at times, even defending rights violations — most notably a 2017 crackdown on Rohingya Muslims that rights groups have labeled genocide.
She has already been sentenced to six years’ imprisonment in other cases and faces 10 more corruption charges. The maximum punishment under the Anti-Corruption Act is 15 years in prison and a fine for each charge.
Convictions in the other cases could bring sentences of more than 100 years in prison in total.
Minneapolis police probe:
The Minneapolis Police Department has engaged in a pattern of race discrimination for at least a decade, including stopping and arresting Black people at a higher rate than white people, using force more often on people of color and maintaining a culture where racist language is tolerated, a state investigation launched after the 2020 killing of George Floyd found.
The report released Wednesday by the Minnesota Department of Human Rights said the agency and the city would negotiate a court-enforceable agreement to address the problems identified in the report, with input from residents, officers, city staff and others.
The report said police department data “demonstrates significant racial disparities with respect to officers’ use of force, traffic stops, searches, citations, and arrests.” And it said officers “used covert social media to surveil Black individuals and Black organizations, unrelated to criminal activity, and maintain an organizational culture where some officers and supervisors use racist, misogynistic, and disrespectful language with impunity.”
The report also said the city and police department “do not need to wait to institute immediate changes to begin to address the causes of discrimination that weaken the City’s public safety system and harm community members.”
It listed several steps that the city can take now, including implementing stronger internal oversight to hold officers accountable.
Call for hate crimes law: People who want South Carolina to become the 49th U.S. state to pass a hate crimes law have explained, bargained and begged Republicans in the state Senate to debate the bill.
On Wednesday, they turned to one of the survivors of one of the most heinous racist attacks in modern America.
They showed a 2-minute video of Polly Sheppard to the Senate chamber, where the bill has been stuck for months with eight Republican senators objecting and only eight more legislative days to take action.
The gunman who killed nine of Sheppard’s church friends in 2015 pointed his gun at the woman, but said he would spare her life so she could let people know he was killing Blacks because he hated them.
The killer at Emanuel AME is on death row after being convicted of hate crimes under federal law, a point opponents of the bill use to say it’s unnecessary.
Census data: The next release of detailed data about U.S. residents from the 2020 census will be postponed until next year because the U.S. Census Bureau said Wednesday that it needs more time to crunch the numbers, including implementing a controversial method used to protect participants’ identities.
Two sets of detailed data about U.S. residents’ age, sex, race, Hispanic origin, relationships in households and housing won’t be released until May 2023. A subsequent round of detailed data on race and ethnic groups won’t be released until August 2023.
Other rounds of data on household relationships will be made public later in 2023, according to the Census Bureau.
The statistical agency previously had planned to release the data sets later this year.
Vatican scandal: The former director of the Vatican’s financial watchdog agency
testified Wednesday that Pope Francis asked him to help the Vatican secretariat of state get full control of a London property, once again putting the pope and his top deputies in the spotlight for their roles in the problematic deal.
Tommaso Di Ruzza is one of 10 people accused in the Vatican’s sprawling financial trial, which is centered on the secretariat of state’s 350 million euro investment in a luxury London property.
Vatican prosecutors have accused brokers and Vatican officials of fleecing the Holy See of millions of euros in fees, much of it donations from the faithful, and then extorting the Vatican of 15 million euros to get full control of the property.
Di Ruzza, the former director of the Vatican’s Financial Information Authority, or AIF, is accused of abuse of office for allegedly failing to block the 15 million payment to broker Gianluigi Torzi and of allegedly failing to alert Vatican prosecutors to a
seemingly suspicious deal.
Reptile extinction: More than 1 in 5 species of reptiles worldwide are threatened with extinction, according to a comprehensive new assessment of thousands of species published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Of 10,196 reptile species analyzed, 21% were classified as endangered, critically endangered or vulnerable to extinction — including the iconic hooded snakes of South and Southeast Asia.
Similar prior assessments had been conducted for mammals, birds and amphibians, informing government decisions about how to draw boundaries of national parks and allocate environmental funds.
Work on the reptile study, which involved nearly 1,000 scientists and 52 co-authors, started in 2005.
The project was slowed by challenges in fundraising, said co-author Bruce Young, a zoologist at the nonprofit science organization NatureServe.