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REPUBLICA PRESS
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Murders, Attempted Murders and Homicides

Police Response at Sarah Everard Vigil Was Appropriate, Investigators Say

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It added that “public confidence in the Metropolitan Police suffered as a result of the vigil,” and noted the effect of the images of the officers arresting women.

“A more conciliatory response after the event might have served the Met’s interests better,” investigators said. One line in the report was particularly critical of the “chorus of those condemning the Metropolitan Police, and calling for the resignation of the commissioner, within hours of the arrests,” which it called unwarranted.

It said that while “a certain degree of uninformed commentary, particularly on social media, is inevitable, in this case some of the leading voices were those in positions of some responsibility,” appearing to take aim at politicians, some of whom had called for the leader of the Metropolitan Police, Cressida Dick, to step down.

The reaction to the investigation, commissioned by the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and the Home Office, the government ministry that oversees policing, has been mixed.

Mr. Khan, who previously said he was “surprised and angry” at the police response, said that he accepted the report, in a statement to The Mirror.

But, he added, “It is clear that trust and confidence of women and girls in the police and criminal justice system is far from adequate.”

Others were more critical. Bell Ribeiro-Addy, a lawmaker from the opposition Labour Party who represents a district around the site of the vigil, said she would welcome further reviews because the report “will offer little reassurance to my constituents” and others who saw “video footage of the disgraceful scenes.”

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Beaten, Cuffed, Hauled Away: When Myanmar’s Military Comes Knocking

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When the police and soldiers arrived in the middle of the night, they fired their guns into the air, threw stones through the windows and threatened to drive a car through the front door if no one opened it. U Shwe Win and his family were asleep. It was 2:30 a.m.

The police and soldiers had come to arrest Mr. Shwe Win’s son, Ko Win Htut Nyein. When they found him, they beat and handcuffed the 19-year-old before hauling him away. His offense, the family was told, was taking videos of the police at a protest in Mandalay the day before.

More than two weeks later, Mr. Shwe Win is still searching for his son. The authorities say they have no record of his arrest. “I felt so hopeless, like I had lost everything at that moment,” Mr. Shwe Win said. “I still don’t know where my son is. I don’t want him to die in their hands, and I worry that they will torture him.”

Since the Feb. 1 coup in Myanmar, millions of pro-democracy protesters have joined demonstrations against the military and participated in general strikes and a civil disobedience movement that have brought the economy to a virtual halt. Security forces have responded with increasing ruthlessness, shooting people in the streets and arbitrarily beating and arresting people.

security forces had killed more than 320 people and arrested or charged more than 2,900, according to a group tracking arrests and killings. The youngest victim, 6, was shot and killed on Wednesday while sitting on her father’s lap.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, hundreds who were unlawfully detained have disappeared. At least five have died in custody, and two appeared to have been tortured, the agency said.

terrorists” for their brutal methods when carrying out arrests and shooting randomly into crowds and homes.

In southern Myanmar, students from Myeik University gathered for a protest when soldiers and the police arrived. One student, Ma Thae Ei Phyu, 22, a philosophy major, was shot in the back of the neck with rubber bullets from a few feet away.

“I tried not to fall down because I know they have a habit of raping women and girls,” she said. “I didn’t want to get arrested.”

The soldiers rounded up the entire group of about 70 protesters and took them to a nearby air force base and beat them with sticks, plastic pipes, chains and belts, said a teacher, U Nay Lin, 30, who was among those arrested. The beating left huge red welts crisscrossing his back, a photo showed.

Mr. Nay Lin said a man with a tattoo of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi on his chest received the worst beating of all.

Ms. Thae Ei Phyu was taken to a hospital, where she received stitches for the deep holes in her neck caused by the rubber bullets. She and most of the others were eventually released without charges. Earlier this week, the junta also released more than 600 mostly young protesters who had been detained in Yangon, in a seeming effort to appease the movement.

“They tried to threaten us by arresting and torturing us like this, but we aren’t afraid to die,” she said. “It’s better to die than living under the junta.”

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After Sarah Everard’s Killing, Women’s Groups Want Change, Not More Policing

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Late Thursday night, Sisters Uncut, a provocative feminist organization that has emerged as a leader of the most forceful protests in Britain’s growing national movement around women’s safety, declared a small victory.

“We’ve delayed the #PoliceCrackdownBill,” the group announced on Twitter. “This is a victory, but we will not stop.”

The announcement was just the latest evidence that this movement differs from past campaigns that opposed violence against women in general terms but that rarely made sweeping demands.

Women are furious not just about the death of Sarah Everard, 33, in London — a police officer has been charged in her kidnapping and killing — but about what they see as a heavy-handed and misogynist response from the police afterward. They are directing their anger at law enforcement and the justice system, and pushing to scrap a proposed police and crime bill, which would create sweeping new restrictions on protests and grant broad new powers to the police.

the arrest of a police officer over her killing, have led many to conclude that the police are an active threat. Women’s safety and freedom, they argue, can come only from much deeper social changes — and any policy change in response to Ms. Everard’s death should focus on those.

Margaret Atwood famously said that there was nothing in her novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” that did not happen to women somewhere, at some point in history. That is often treated as evidence of in-depth sourcing, but in fact it is the force behind the novel’s visceral central horror: that any protection women might think would be offered by democracy, education, wealth or race can all too easily disappear in an instant.

For many women in Britain, Ms. Everard’s killing and the police’s violent dispersal of a London vigil in her memory have triggered a similar horror, on a less dystopian scale, about how unprotected they truly are. It has become a moment, too, to reflect on the suffering of women of color, and other groups targeted for abuse, that has long been ignored.

promised new actions to improve women’s safety: more CCTV cameras, better street lighting, and plainclothes police in bars and clubs to watch for attacks on female patrons. And it campaigned for more support for the police and crime bill, which would grant sweeping new powers to police departments across the country.

All those responses seemed grounded in the theory that women felt unsafe because there were not enough police, with enough power, in enough places.

the police action in Clapham last weekend was against one protest. But statistics tell a story of many more widespread failures.

From 2019 to 2020, less than 3 percent of rapes reported to the police were prosecuted, according to government statistics. And if unreported cases are taken into account, the real prosecution rate is even lower.

“Rape has been decriminalized, frankly,” said Emily Gray, a lecturer at Derby University who studies policing.

A 2019 report by the British newspaper The Independent found that 568 London police officers were accused of sexual assault between 2012 and 2018, but only 43 faced disciplinary proceedings. And from April 2015 to April 2018, there were at least 700 reports of domestic violence by police officers and police staff, according to documents obtained by the Bureau of Investigative Journalists from 37 of Britain’s 48 police forces.

Opponents of the police and crime bill, which would grant the police wide-ranging power to shut down protests, argue that it would make scenes like the one on Clapham Common more frequent, and would not stop the most prevalent forms of violence against women.

“Violence against women usually comes from a power imbalance,” Dr. Gray said. One reason the police bill is being attacked, she said, is that “it doesn’t do anything about that at all.”

So what are the alternatives? Different groups tend to focus on different remedies.

Sisters Uncut, which was founded in 2014 in response to government austerity measures that slashed funding for women’s shelters and other help for women at risk, has long demanded that such services be reinstated.

Perpetrator programs, which work intensively with abusive men to prevent them from attacking their partners, have shown some promise in cases where the abusers are committed to change, said Dr. Westmarland, who has studied them.

“The physical and sexual abuse reduced quite substantially and in some cases was eliminated altogether,” she said. But she noted that the programs had not been effective at reducing coercive control — the domineering emotional abuse that is the hallmark of domestic violence and that is deeply traumatic in its own right.

One belief that cuts across nearly all the groups involved — including mainstream ones like the Women’s Institute, the largest women’s organization in the country — is that education must be a centerpiece of any change.

Such education could be “a real shot at prevention, and shaping some of the prevalent attitudes that greatly hurt girls and women, as well as nonbinary people, in our society,” said Kate Manne, a professor of philosophy at Cornell University and the author of two books on the ways sexism shapes society, said in an interview.

But while education might sound like the kind of anodyne concept that anyone could support, Dr. Manne said via text message that she believed it would actually be quietly radical for education to address the politically charged issues of misogyny, male privilege and male responsibility for ending male violence.

“Can you imagine if sex education became political?” she asked. “Sigh. It’s my dream, though.”

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Georgia Attacks Prompt a Muted Reaction in Asia

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HONG KONG — When six of the eight victims of this week’s shootings at Atlanta-area spas were confirmed to be of Asian descent, the news reopened wrenching debates in the United States about anti-Asian violence, bigotry and misogyny.

In East Asia itself, the public conversations about the violence played out with far less intensity.

The South Korean consulate in Atlanta has said that four of the people who died in the attacks on three massage parlors on Tuesday were of Korean descent. The two others of Asian descent are believed to have been of Chinese descent.

In both countries, which have low rates of violent crime and strict bans on guns, the murders were shocking but not surprising, given the frequent reports of gun violence and racially motivated crimes in the United States.

reported by Korean media outlets.

On social media, some users in South Korea expressed concern for friends or relatives in the United States. Others tagged posts with the hashtag #stopAsianHate.

“I am deeply saddened by the events that took place in Atlanta, Georgia, two days ago,” Choi Si-won, a member of popular K-pop group Super Junior, wrote on Instagram. “I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I would like to use my platform and emphasize this is an issue that needs to be addressed NOW and that ignoring it won’t help us.”

Other South Korean users pushed back against the comments by a law enforcement official in Georgia, who said after the attacks — using the gunman’s own words — that the man’s actions were “not racially motivated” but caused by “sexual addiction.”

video of an elderly woman of Asian descent in San Francisco who beat up a man who had tried to attack her.

killings of Chinese students in the U.S., where many Chinese families still aspire to send their children to be educated.

But there is little public discussion in Asia about concepts that often dominate conversations about race in the United States, including cultural appropriation and unconscious bias.

Hu Zhaoying, a university student in the southern Chinese province of Hunan, said the general lack of empathy for the Atlanta victims in China was not surprising.

“Some people don’t know about such incidents; some people choose to ignore them after seeing them; and some people are unable to empathize,” she said.

Mike Ives reported from Hong Kong and Amy Qin from Taipei. Youmi Kim contributed reporting from Seoul, and Claire Fu contributed research from Beijing.

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Policing at Sarah Everard Vigil Faces Official Scrutiny

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LONDON — The mayor of London and the British cabinet minister responsible for policing both called on Sunday for an independent investigation into how the city’s main police force broke up a vigil for Sarah Everard, the 33-year-old marketing executive whose killing has sparked a reckoning over violence against women, after images of officers clashing with women at the event prompted a widespread outcry.

The mayor, Sadiq Khan, said that “scenes arising from the policing of the vigil,” which had been banned under coronavirus restrictions, “were completely unacceptable,” and that he was “not satisfied” with explanations from the two top officers in the force, the Metropolitan Police.

A spokesman for the Home Office, the government department that oversees policing, confirmed on Sunday that Priti Patel, the home secretary, had asked the Inspectorate of Constabulary, a government body that assesses police forces, for a report into what happened at the vigil.

Mr. Khan said in a statement that he had sought a full inquiry from the same body, and that he was also asking another regulator, the Independent Office for Police Conduct, to investigate the actions of officers at the vigil.

a Metropolitan Police officer has been charged with kidnapping and murdering Ms. Everard, who disappeared while walking home from a friend’s house in Clapham on March 3.

Mr. Khan said that the police had assured him last week that the vigil would be policed sensitively, and that he had met on Sunday with the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Cressida Dick, and her deputy, Stephen House, to demand an explanation. “I am not satisfied with the explanation they have provided,” he added.

In a statement overnight, Helen Ball, an assistant commissioner for the Metropolitan Police, said that officers on the ground were “faced with a difficult decision” in the evening after hundreds of people “packed tightly together, posing a very real risk of easily transmitting Covid-19.”

“Police must act for people’s safety, this is the only responsible thing to do. The pandemic is not over and gatherings of people from right across London and beyond, are still not safe,” she said, adding, “We accept that the actions of our officers have been questioned.”

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Sarah Everard Vigil Becomes Large Rally

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LONDON — Thousands of people gathered in south London on Saturday for a vigil in tribute to Sarah Everard, the 33-year-old marketing executive whose killing has touched off a national reckoning over violence against women, despite police warnings that the event would be unlawful.

As darkness fell, a growing crowd chanted “Shame on you!” and “How many more!” In what became a rally against gender violence, some clapped their hands and others held tea lights or signs that read “End Violence Against Women” and “She Was Only Walking Home.”

The event, in Clapham Common, near where Ms. Everard was last seen on March 3 on her way back from a friend’s house, had drawn small groups at first, with people gathering in silence around a memorial where flowers had been laid. Earlier, Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, was among those who placed flowers at the memorial.

Several women were arrested at the event and handcuffed by the police, according to videos shared on social media. Other protesters, some unmasked, engaged in tense faceoffs with the police.

plan to tackle violence against women and girls later this year. Home Secretary Priti Patel said on Friday that a call for testimony about harassment, which had received 15,000 contributions, would be extended for two weeks.

Lawmakers are also set to debate a bill on domestic abuse next week, with growing momentum across party lines to include an amendment treating misogyny as a hate crime.

Several lawmakers had supported the vigil’s going forward, despite the restrictions.

“Even in a pandemic a small, responsible, risk-assessed vigil could surely be accommodated?” Joanna Cherry, a lawmaker for the Scottish National Party, said on Twitter. “Women’s fear of the hate & violence against us needs expression.”

As an alternative to the vigil, organizers urged people to hold a light on their doorstep at 9.30 p.m. local time. Several officials, including Prime Minister Boris Johnson, said they would light a candle for Ms. Everard.

But the event in South London eventually turned into a large gathering, echoing an overall sentiment that flooded social media throughout the week: that women had had enough.

In a statement published hours before the rally took place, the organizers of Reclaim These Streets said, “We are clear that women’s voices will not be silenced, now or ever.”

Nailah Morgan and Christina Kelso contributed reporting from New York.

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Vigil for Sarah Everard Moves Ahead

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The organizers of a vigil for a 33-year-old woman who went missing in London last week, and whose body was identified on Friday, said on Saturday that a gathering that was canceled due to Covid-19 restrictions would go ahead on Saturday, but virtually or on people’s doorsteps.

“This evening at 9:30 p.m. we will be joining people around the country in a doorstep vigil, standing on our doorsteps and shining a light — a candle, a torch, a phone — to remember Sarah Everard and all women affected by and lost to violence,” the organizers of the event, Reclaim These Streets, said on Twitter in reference to Ms. Everard, whose killing has set off an outpouring of solidarity and anger in Britain this week.

Lawmakers, activists and women’s rights organizations had called for a gathering in Clapham Common, the South London park near where Ms. Everard was last seen alive, to demand actions to address violence against women and to pay tribute to her.

A court had ruled on Friday that the gathering could be deemed unlawful because of Covid-19 restrictions, and the police urged prospective attendees to stay at home.

charged with kidnapping and murdering Ms. Everard, the police said late Friday. Mr. Couzens, 48, appeared in court on Saturday.

While the authorities have tried to reassure the public by pointing out that abductions in London are rare, the city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has also acknowledged that its streets are not safe enough. Many have said that as lockdown restrictions have emptied the country’s streets, people have felt unsafe walking in public.

said in a statement in reference to the city’s Metropolitan Police.

The organizers said they had been told that they faced a fine of 10,000 pounds ($14,000) if they went ahead with the vigil. Instead, they set up a fund-raiser to support women’s causes around Britain, and moved ahead with the new approach, a doorstep vigil.

“We are clear that women’s voices will not be silenced, now or ever,” they said.

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Sarah Everhard Vigil in London Is Canceled Over Covid Restrictions

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The organizers of a vigil for a 33-year-old woman who went missing in London last week, and whose body was identified on Friday, canceled the gathering on Saturday, citing pandemic restrictions.

Lawmakers, activists and women’s rights organizations had called for a gathering in Clapham Common, the South London park near where the woman, Sarah Everard, was last seen alive, to demand actions to address violence against women and to pay tribute to her.

But a court ruled on Friday that the gathering could be deemed unlawful because of Covid-19 restrictions, and the police urged prospective attendees to stay at home.

The death of Ms. Everard set off an outpouring of solidarity and anger in Britain this week, with thousands of women sharing their own stories of street harassment and assault. She was last seen on CCTV at around 9.30 p.m. on March 3 while walking home from a friend’s house.

charged with kidnapping and murdering Ms. Everard, the police said late Friday. Mr. Couzens, 48, appeared in court on Saturday.

While the authorities have tried to reassure the public by pointing out that abductions in London are rare, the city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has also acknowledged that its streets are not safe enough. Many have said that as lockdown restrictions have emptied the country’s streets, they felt unsafe walking in public.

More than 125,000 people have died of the coronavirus in Britain, but England is gradually coming out of a monthslong lockdown, starting this week with the reopening of schools, and gatherings of two people outside now allowed. The authorities scrambled to put strict restrictions in place this year after the discovery of a more contagious variant in the country.

The organizers of the vigil, named Reclaim These Streets, said they had suggested ideas like splitting the gathering into several time slots to find a balance between freedom of assembly and safety measures.

“We have been very disappointed that given the many opportunities to engage with organizers constructively, the Met Police have been unwilling to commit to anything,” they said in a statement on Saturday morning in reference to the city’s Metropolitan Police.

The organizers said they had been told that they faced a fine of 10,000 pounds ($14,000) if they went ahead with the vigil. They said that they would instead organize a virtual event and that they were setting up a fund-raiser to support women’s causes around Britain.

“We are clear that women’s voices will not be silenced, now or ever,” they said.

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A Small Town and a Spray of Bullets in Myanmar

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Until Thursday, Myaing, a small town in central Myanmar, was best known for its production of thanaka, a bark that is ground for use as a cooling cosmetic.

But in the late morning of March 11, the town, which can be traversed in 10 minutes, became synonymous with the brutality of the military that seized power last month. Myaing’s rain-slicked streets were mottled with blood as police officers shot into a cluster of unarmed civilians, killing at least eight people and injuring more than 20, according to witnesses and hospital officials.

U Myint Zaw Win was among the crowd that scattered with the bursts of live ammunition in the late morning, outside Myaing’s police station. When he looked back, he saw a body with half its head blown apart, on a street that he has walked all his life. He did not know whose body it was, but he said a mason and a bus driver were among the dead.

“They were shooting people like shooting birds,” Mr. Myint Zaw Win said of the police officers, some of whom he said he knows personally because Myaing is a small town where almost everyone knows each other.

70 people in Myanmar have been killed by security forces since the army staged its Feb. 1 coup, ousting a civilian leadership and returning the country to the nightmare of full military rule.

While the bulk of the deaths have been in big cities like Yangon and Mandalay, security forces have shot and killed people in at least 17 different towns across the country: Taungdwingyi, Myingyan, Salin, Kalay, Htee Lin and Pyapon, among others.

After analyzing more than 50 videos of such killings, Amnesty International concluded in a report published Thursday that the security forces were using battlefield weaponry on protesters. In some cases, commanders ordered extrajudicial killings, Amnesty International said, while in other instances bullets were sprayed indiscriminately.

worst attacks have been reserved for ethnic minorities, such as Rohingya Muslims whose persecution is being tried as genocide in international courts.

populace accustomed to massacres by the military. On Thursday, three people were shot dead in the cities of Yangon, Mandalay and Bago. Another person who had been shot on March 3 in the town of Myinchan succumbed to his injuries on Thursday as well.

Before the gunfire turned downtown Myaing into a battlefield on Thursday, residents had gathered daily, in hard hats and motorcycle helmets, to march against the military’s seizure of power last month. Its residents were just as determined as those in larger metropolises to speak out against the coup, during which dozens of elected politicians, including the civilian leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, were detained.

On Thursday, a military spokesman accused Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi of having illicitly received 25 pounds of gold and about $600,000. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi heads the National League for Democracy, which won the last two elections by landslides. She has been charged with various other crimes that could see her imprisoned for years, including the obscure infraction of possessing foreign walkie-talkies without proper import licenses.

Two days after the putsch, Myaing’s residents began marching down its half-paved streets, demanding that Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi and other elected officials be returned to office. They have carried on every day since. On Thursday, at least two youth from a local monastery were arrested and a crowd gathered at the police station to find out why. They sat in quiet protest.

There was no warning that live ammunition was to come, witnesses said. The police refused to comment.

Around the same time, in Yangon, the nation’s largest city, security forces fired on a crowd in North Dagon township, striking Ko Chit Min Thu, a 25-year-old collector of recycled materials, in the head. He died almost immediately, his relatives and other protesters said.

Worried that security forces would seize the body — as has happened in recent days and in Mandalay on Thursday — other protesters carried Mr. Chit Min Thu away from the shooting zone.

By early afternoon, his body was back at home with mourners gathered around. A bandage obscured his fatal head wound. His widow, Ma Aye Chan Myint, keened, their two-year-old son by her side. She is pregnant, in her first trimester.

“Why didn’t they just shoot at the legs, why did they shoot at the head?” she asked. There was no answer.

Ms. Aye Chan Myint reached out to touch the feet and face of her husband, who went to protest each day with hopes that a surge of civilian strength could somehow dislodge the military from power.

“You said I should be proud,” she told her husband’s body. “I’m proud of you, my love.”

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She Was Imprisoned for Killing Her 4 Children. But Was It Their Genes All Along?

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SYDNEY, Australia — The tabloids in Australia called Kathleen Folbigg a murderer of innocent babies — the nation’s “worst female serial killer.” In 2003, a court sentenced her to 40 years in prison for smothering her four children before each had turned 2.

But all along, Ms. Folbigg has insisted that she is innocent, and that her children were all victims of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

Now, 90 leading scientists say they’re convinced she is right. New genetic evidence, the scientists say, suggests that the children died from natural causes, and they are demanding that she be pardoned.

In a petition sent to the governor of New South Wales last week, the group of scientists, which includes two Nobel laureates, called for Ms. Folbigg’s immediate release and an end to the “miscarriage of justice.”

The paper was published in November.

Further research into Caleb’s and Patrick’s genomes has revealed that they had a separate rare genetic variant, which in studies with mice has been linked to early lethal epileptic fits.

In all, 90 eminent scientists have agreed that the medical evidence proves Ms. Folbigg’s innocence. The signatories to the pardon petition include Dr. Schwartz; John Shine, president of the Australian Academy of Science; and Elizabeth Blackburn, a 2009 Nobel laureate in medicine who teaches at the University of California, San Francisco.

“We would feel exhilarated for Kathleen if she is pardoned,” Professor Vinuesa said. “It would send a very strong message that science needs to be taken seriously by the legal system.”

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