Day: June 5, 2024

FLORENCE — An Italian court re-convicted Amanda Knox of slander on Wednesday, even after she was exonerated in the brutal 2007 murder of her British roommate while the two were exchange students in Italy.

The court found that Knox had wrongly accused an innocent man, the Congolese owner of the bar where she worked part time, of the killing. But she will not serve any more jail time, given the three-year sentence counts as time already served.

Knox, who had returned to Italy for only the second time since she was freed in 2011 to participate in the trial, showed no visible emotion as the verdict was read aloud.

But her lawyer, Carlo della Vedova, said shortly afterward that “Amanda is very embittered.”

Knox had written on social media ahead of the hearing that she hoped to “clear my name once and for all of the false charges against me. Wish me luck.”

The slaying of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher in the idyllic hilltop town of Perugia fueled global headlines as suspicion fell on Knox, a 20-year-old exchange student from Seattle, and her new Italian boyfriend of just a week, Raffaele Sollecito.

Flip-flop verdicts over nearly eight years of legal proceedings polarized trial watchers on both sides of the Atlantic as the case was vociferously argued on social media, then in its infancy.

Knox’s retrial was set by a European court ruling that Italy violated her human rights during a long night of questioning days after Kercher’s murder, deprived of both a lawyer and a competent translator. 

Earlier in the hearing, Knox had asked the eight Italian judges and civil jury members to clear her of the slander charge.

In a soft and sometimes breaking voice, Knox had told the court that she wrongly accused Patrick Lumumba under intense police pressure. 

“I am very sorry that I was not strong enough to resist the pressure of police,” Knox told the panel in a 9-minute prepared statement, sitting alongside them on the jury bench. She told them: ”I didn’t know who the murderer was. I had no way to know.”

The case continues to draw intense media attention, with photographers massing around Knox, her husband Christopher Robinson and their legal team as they entered the courtroom about an hour before the hearing. A camera knocked her on the left temple, her lawyer Luca Luparia Donati said. Knox’s husband examined a small bump on her head as they sat in the front row of the court.

Despite Knox’s exoneration and the conviction of an Ivorian man whose footprints and DNA were found at the scene, doubts about her role persisted, particularly in Italy. That is largely due to the accusation she made against Lumumba.

Knox is now a 36-year-old mother of two small children. She returned to Italy for only the second time since she was freed in October 2011, after four years in jail, by a Perugia appeals court that overturned the initial guilty verdict in the murder case against both Knox and Sollecito.

She remained in the United States through two more flip-flop verdicts before Italy’s highest court definitively exonerated the pair of the murder in March 2015, stating flatly that they had not committed the crime.

In the fall, Italy’s highest Cassation Court threw out the slander conviction that had withstood five trials, ordering a new trial, thanks to a 2022 Italian judicial reform allowing cases that have reached a definitive verdict to be reopened if human rights violations are found. 

This time, the court has been ordered to disregard two damaging statements typed by police and signed by Knox at 1:45 a.m. and 5:45 a.m. as she was held for questioning overnight into the small hours of Nov. 6, 2007. In the statements, Knox said she remembered hearing Kercher scream, and pointed to Lumumba for the killing.

Hours later, still in custody at about 1 p.m., she asked for pen and paper and wrote her own statement in English, questioning the version that she had signed.

“In regards to this ‘confession’ that I made last night, I want to make clear that I’m very doubtful of the verity of my statements because they were made under the pressure of stress, shock and extreme exhaustion,” she wrote. 

Yangon — Hundreds of mourners turned out Wednesday to pay their respects to a former Myanmar general turned democracy activist and confidant of Aung San Suu Kyi, in a rare sanctioned public gathering in the junta-controlled commercial capital.

Foreign ambassadors and senior figures in Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party were among those who attended the funeral in Yangon for Tin Oo, who died on Saturday aged 97.

Suu Kyi is serving a 27-year prison sentence imposed by a junta court.   

Tin Oo served as commander of the army under former strongman Ne Win, before being forced out for allegedly withholding information over a failed coup plot.

He co-founded the NLD with Suu Kyi in the aftermath of mass protests against a former junta in 1988, and went on to become one of her closest confidants.

The ambassadors of India and Singapore joined hundreds of other people paying their respects to Tin Oo, whose body was displayed in a glass-topped coffin draped with the NLD’s peacock flag.

A cortege of cars, one decked with wreaths and bearing Tin Oo’s portrait, carried the coffin slowly through the rain-washed streets to the Yay Way cemetery, where hundreds more mourners were waiting and soldiers kept watch.

While Suu Kyi was not allowed to attend, there was a bouquet of white roses at Tin Oo’s house with a card that said “from Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.”

The cemetery is also home to the remains of Sein Lwin, a former home minister accused of leading a bloody crackdown on the 1988 pro-democracy demonstrations.

Tin Oo was detained by the military in that crackdown, before being released.

He was arrested again along with Suu Kyi in 2003 after a pro-junta mob attacked their motorcade, killing dozens of people.

In 2017, the NLD stalwart suffered a stroke and in recent years receded from the political arena due to old age and poor health.

He avoided arrest in the sweeping crackdown that accompanied the 2021 coup, likely due to his advanced age, analysts say.

The NLD has been targeted in the junta’s bloody crackdown on dissent following its coup, with one former lawmaker executed in Myanmar’s first use of capital punishment in decades.

The junta dissolved the NLD in 2023 for failing to re-register under a tough new military-drafted electoral law, removing the party from polls it has indicated it may hold in 2025.

Suu Kyi’s closed-door trial in the military-built capital Naypyidaw was condemned by rights groups as a sham to shut her out of politics.

The Nobel laureate, 78, has largely been hidden from view since the coup and has reportedly suffered health problems. 

Three Trump allies charged in Wisconsin fake elector scheme  CNN

Silver Lake Dam modification information session Wednesday  KTTC

Jim Beam column:Disappointing session is over – American Press | American Press  American Press

Honoured to host Mr. Michael Siebert, Managing Director for Russia, Eastern Partnership, Central Asia, Regional Cooperation and OSCE. The delegation visited Yeraskh village and the Mission HQ in Yeghegnadzor. Good discussions on EUMA’s work and activities on the ground. pic.twitter.com/zeQWL3cUft

— European Union Mission in Armenia (@EUmARMENIA) June 5, 2024

Grateful for Armenian support on UN GA Resolution ‘Status of IDPs and Refugees from Abkhazia, Georgia and …  1Lurer