NEWS OF THE DAY
1 Russia rally: Thousands of people marched down a central Moscow boulevard Sunday to mark the third anniversary of the slaying of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov. He was fatally shot on Feb. 27, 2015, while walking on a bridge near the Kremlin. His death sent shock waves through Russia’s beleaguered opposition. Demonstrators at the front of Sunday’s event carried a banner reading, “These bullets are in all of us.” Two candidates in Russia’s presidential election next month — Ksenia Sobchak and Grigory Yavlinsky — participated in the march. An officer in the security forces of Chechnya’s Kremlin-backed leader Ramzan Kadyrov was convicted of firing the shots that killed Nemtsov and received a 20year prison term.
2 Kidnapped girls: Parents in Nigeria have released a list of the 105 young women they say are still missing nearly a week after Boko Haram militants attacked the northern town of Dapchi, demanding that residents direct them toward the school for girls. The fate of the girls is not yet known, though many fear they have been abducted as brides for the Boko Haram extremists. In 2014, the group kidnapped 276 girls from a boarding school in Chibok and forced them to marry their captors. About 100 of the Chibok girls have never returned to their families.
3 Cambodia politics: The ruling party of Prime Minister Hun Sen claimed a sweeping win in Sunday’s elections for the country’s Senate, a victory that it assured itself by eliminating any serious opposition. Sok Eysan, a spokesman for the Cambodian People’s Party, said it had won a landslide victory. Privately, the party was claiming to have won all 58 of the seats that were voted on by the country’s 11,572 commune councilors. Sunday’s vote was seen as a foretaste of a scheduled July general election for the National Assembly that is also expected to affirm Hun Sen’s rule. The only opposition party in Parliament, the Cambodia National Rescue Party, was dissolved in November after aggressive legal challenges by the government were sustained by politicized courts.
4 Drug extradition: A suspected drug chief known as the “Pablo Escobar of Ecuador” was extradited to the United States, Colombia’s chief prosecutor’s office announced. Washington Edison Prado had tried unsuccessfully to prevent extradition by claiming membership in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — a status that would have made him eligible for a type of amnesty under a peace deal. The prosecutor’s office said Prado was escorted by a detail of 50 commandos and agents of various police forces as he was turned over to U.S. authorities Saturday. U.S. officials accuse Prado of shipping more than 250 tons of cocaine to the United States.
5 Peacekeeping violations: The United Nations mission in South Sudan says it has recalled a 46-member peacekeeping unit after some members allegedly paid local women living in a protection camp for sex. A U.N. statement said the Ghanaian officers have been recalled from Wau to the capital, Juba. The U.N. chief in South Sudan, David Shearer, called it a “clear breach” of the code of conduct, which prohibits sexual relationships with vulnerable people. “We should not have such people in this country,” said South Sudan government spokesman Michael Makuei. The United Nations has 17,000 peacekeepers in civil wartorn South Sudan. The U.N. in recent years has struggled to deal with numerous cases of sexual abuse and exploitation by peacekeepers in some of the world’s poorest nations.