Watchdog

A Russian opposition activist jailed for assaulting police during a protest in Moscow has been handed an additional two years in jail.

Sergei Mokhnatkin was found guilty of "disrupting operations of a penitentiary" on March 20 and sentenced the same day, activist Tatyana Pashkevich wrote on her Facebook account.

The Arkhangelsk regional prosecutor's office told Interfax that Mokhnatkin's remaining time in a maximum-security penal colony will end 2 1/2 years from March 20.

Mokhnatkin was sentenced to 4 1/2 years in prison in 2014 after being found guilty of assaulting two police officers during a December 2013 protest in Moscow.

Mokhnatkin's lawyers say he was severely beaten by penal-colony guards in March 2016 after he refused to be transferred to a detention center without a written ruling. He was then charged with insulting a guard and disruption of the penal colony's operations.

In June, Mokhnatkin was found guilty of insulting a guard and sentenced to an additional 11 months. That prison time runs concurrently with his March 20 sentence.

Mokhnatkin first came to prominence in 2009 when he was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison after being convicted of attacking a police officer during another opposition rally. He was pardoned by then-President Dmitry Medvedev in April 2012.

A schoolteacher in Uzbekistan has been dismissed after a video that appears to show her threatening and striking pupils was posted on the Internet, an education official says.

The mobile phone video posted on March 16 shows a primary school teacher shouting in a nearly three-minute rant in a classroom, calling the children "animals" and appearing to hit at least two of them with a textbook.

"I’ll kill you if you keep staring at me," the teacher says at one point.

An official in the education department of the Ferghana provincial government said that the video was recorded at a state school in the eastern region in February.

Speaking on condition of anonymity to RFE/RL's Uzbek Service, the official said that the teacher has been dismissed and a criminal investigation opened.

It is unclear who recorded and posted the video online.

The incident came weeks after state media in the tightly controlled country released footage showing a nursery-school employee in the southern Surkhandaryo province beating and berating children and threatening them with a knife.

Surkhandaryo authorities said that at least three employees have been jailed and several other officials were dismissed in connection with that incident.