Boss of Romanian ruling party gets 3 1/2 years in prison for graft

Romania's most powerful politician was sentenced Monday to 3 1/2 years in prison for official misconduct in a graft case. The jail time for Liviu Dragnea, party leader of the ruling Social Democrats, came after a conviction last year for having two party members paid by a public agency for fake jobs. According to prosecutors, Dragnea intervened from 2008 to 2010, when he was a government official, to keep two women employed by his party on the payroll of the family welfare agency. The women admitted working for the party while they received salaries from the public agency. Dragnea, already blocked from being Romania's prime minister because of a 2016 conviction for vote-rigging, was expected to be imprisoned shortly within 24 hours. Hundreds of Romanians took to the streets of Bucharest, the capital, on Monday to celebrate Dragnea's sentence, some of them posing for pictures with cut-outs of Dragnea in prison garb. The ruling party has been widely criticized for failing to fight corruption by officials.