Yewon Kang
Aung San Suu Kyi remains leader of Myanmar’s ruling party
Representatives of Myanmar’s ruling National League for Democracy party voted to keep Aung San Suu Kyi as the party’s leader at their two-day national congress in Yangon, even though this violates Myanmar’s 2008 constitution, the Myanmar Times reported Monday.
State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi and president U Win Myint as deputy chair did not attend the congress, as the 2008 constitution prohibits anyone in union-level government position from staying in political party.
The Nobel Peace Prize laureate Suu Kyi has been stripped of international awards and accolades as she has refused to take action while nearly 900,000 Rohingya people fled the country in what what the United Nations called a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”
Illegal surrogacy operation persists in Cambodia
Police arrested five people on charges of human trafficking in Phnom Penh after the discovery of 33 Cambodian women who were paid to have surrogate children for Chinese clients, The Phnom Penh Post reported Monday.
Cambodia is one of four Asian countries, along with Thailand, Nepal and India, to have banned commercial surrogacy after cases of exploitation in recent years.
The surrogacy requests from China have increased as some 90 million couples have become eligible to have a second child after the decades-old Chinese one-child policy was relaxed in 2015, Reuters reported.
USA to provide free feminine hygiene products for prisoners
US lawmakers have pushed for better access to menstrual products for incarcerated women, The Christian Science Monitor reported.
Advocacy groups say it has been a largely overlooked issue, even though women are the fastest growing demographic in prison in the country.
Last year a group of Democratic US senators introduced the Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act. In 2016 New York City became the first city to put into law the provision of free pads and tampons in homeless shelters, schools and correctional facilities.
April Editors
Helen Yeung
Youjin Lee
