Aung San Suu Kyi will appear in court virtually today for a hearing, postponed after Myanmar’s military junta blocked mobile-data networks. Ms Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s de facto leader until she was deposed in last month’s coup, faces at least five charges, including corruption. They are probably designed to disqualify her from the election promised by the junta after the year-long state of emergency it declared ends. The real emergency is in the streets. Many Burmese have heeded the call to arms of Myanmar’s parallel government, formed by members of Ms Suu Kyi’s party elected to the parliament last November. Protesters defend their barricades with slingshots and Molotov cocktails. Soldiers respond by dragooning neighbours into dismantling them, while rampaging through cities, kidnapping and shooting protesters and non-protesters alike. Over 260 Burmese have been killed. Businesses were asked to join a silent strike today, after a seven-year-old girl was shot dead in her home in Mandalay yesterday.

Source: The Economist Espresso, 24 March 2021

Crooks lay in a weighted state waiting for the dead assassin while the rust pure powder puffs, a shimmering opaque red. Papers spread, no-one driving, we hurled direct ahead, the windows dark-green tinted, the hearse a taxi instead. Snow storms forecast imminently in areas Dogger, Viking, Moray, Forth, and Orkney. Keeping cover in denuded scrub, the school destroyed raised the club, panic spreading with threat of fire. Crowding beneath a layer of foam, refugees intertwined, alone. Within the institution walls, in pastel blue, clinical white, slashed red lipsticked, mercy nurse tonight. Seems like dark grey stockings in the raking torchlight with a four a.m. stubble, a midnight transvestite.

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On Tuesday, the Kuibyshev District Court of St. Petersburg handed down the first sentence to a participant of the unsanctioned protest action on January 23.

Protesters then gathered, among other places, on Nevsky Prospekt. Petersburg resident Andrei Lomov was found guilty of pushing Russian National Guardsmen during an attempt to break through a police cordon.

The court took into account the extenuating circumstances (Lomov has seven children) and did not satisfy the state prosecutor’s request to sentence the Petersburger to three years in a penal colony, instead ordering the protest rally participant to serve two years of probation.

Source: Delovoi Peterburg