Derek Chauvin, police officer who killed George Floyd, stabbed in prison

Former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin, convicted of murdering George Floyd, was stabbed by another inmate and seriously injured. (File/AP)
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Updated 25 November 2023
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Derek Chauvin, police officer who killed George Floyd, stabbed in prison

  • George Floyd’s cries of “I can’t breathe” became a rallying call for demonstrators who took to the streets

WASHINGTON: Derek Chauvin, the US police officer whose murder of George Floyd sparked massive racial justice protests in 2020, was stabbed in prison on Friday, the New York Times reported citing unnamed sources.
Chauvin, who is white, knelt on the 46-year-old Black man’s neck for more than nine minutes on a Minneapolis street despite the dying man’s pleas.
Floyd’s cries of “I can’t breathe” subsequently became a rallying call for the demonstrators who took to the streets in the killing’s aftermath.
The US Federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed an assault to AFP without naming the person injured.
“An incarcerated individual was assaulted at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Tucson,” in the southwestern state of Arizona, it said in a statement.
“Responding employees initiated life-saving measures for one incarcerated individual,” the statement said. “The incarcerated individual was transported... to a local hospital for further treatment and evaluation.”
Chauvin was found guilty of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in 2021, and sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison.
The incident was caught on video, helping galvanize huge protests and a reckoning on racism and policing in the United States and internationally.
A subsequent Justice Department probe into the Minneapolis police, the findings of which were published in June 2023, said that officers in the department routinely resorted to violent and racist practices, “including unjustified deadly force.”
The department “unlawfully discriminates against Black and Native American people when enforcing the law,” the report said.
The city of Minneapolis, in the midwestern state of Minnesota, also settled a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the Floyd family, agreeing to pay his relatives $27 million.
Chuavin appealed his second-degree murder conviction, which was rejected by the US Supreme Court earlier this month.
“At the end of the day, the whole trial, including sentencing, was a sham,” he said from prison in a recent documentary.
After the murder, colleagues later sketched a portrait of Chauvin as a silent, rigid workaholic who often patrolled the city’s more difficult neighborhoods.
His commitment to the job earned him four medals throughout his career. But he also racked up 22 internal complaints and investigations, according to a public record scrubbed of all details.
Only one of these numerous complaints, filed by a white woman whom he had violently pulled from her car in 2007 for speeding, in front of her crying infant, was followed by a letter of reprimand.


Greek police arrest man over Athens apartment blast

Updated 15 sec ago
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Greek police arrest man over Athens apartment blast

  • Man shared the keys of the flat with the couple involved in the blast but denied any involvement in the explosion
ATHENS: Greek police have arrested a 31-year old man for his role in an strong home-made bomb explosion which killed one man and seriously injured a woman in an apartment in Athens this week, police said on Saturday. The case, according to police officials, is linked to anti-establishment guerrilla groups. Anti-terrorism police suspect the blast occurred while the bomb was being made.
The Greek man arrested had testified regarding the case on Friday night. According to police sources, he said he shared the keys of the flat with the couple involved in the blast but denied any involvement in the explosion.
He is expected to appear before a prosecutor later on Saturday.
Several left-wing and anarchist guerrilla groups, declaring war on all forms of governments, have emerged in Greece over the past two decades after the dismantling of its most lethal group, “November 17.”
Small bomb and arson attacks against politicians, police, judges and businesses were frequent during the country’s 2009-18 debt crisis. They have abated in recent years but still occur.

Harris, Trump go toe to toe in frenzied final campaign weekend

Updated 1 min 45 sec ago
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Harris, Trump go toe to toe in frenzied final campaign weekend

  • Kamala Harris is bidding to become the country’s first woman president
  • Opinion polls continue to show a tied race, particularly in the seven battleground states
WASHINGTON: Kamala Harris and Donald Trump enter the final weekend of the most tense US presidential campaign of modern times with a flurry of swing-state rallies that will test their stamina — and ability to persuade the country’s last undecided voters.
Harris, bidding to become the country’s first woman president, will use rallies in Georgia, North Carolina and Michigan to drive home her message that Trump is a threat to US democracy.
Trump — seeking a sensational return to the White House after losing in 2020 and then becoming the first presidential nominee to have been convicted of crimes — promises a radical right-wing makeover of the government and aggressive trade wars to promote his policy of “America first.”
The 78-year-old, who rallied in Milwaukee, Wisconsin late Friday just miles from Harris’s event there, will all but cross paths with her again as Trump makes whistle-stops in North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Georgia.
Their frenetic schedule will run right into Monday, culminating with late-night rallies — in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for Trump and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for Harris.
Election Day is Tuesday but Americans have been voting early for weeks, with more than 70 million ballots already cast — including a record four million in Georgia, where Democrats seek to pull out all the stops to keep the state in their column.
Opinion polls continue to show a tied race, particularly in the seven battleground states likely to determine the result in the US electoral college system, leaving the Republican businessman and his 60-year-old Democratic rival fighting hard to peel off even slivers of support from one another’s camps.
Harris, currently President Joe Biden’s vice president, is doing that by appealing to centrist voters and propelling her base to the polls with a robust ground game and get-out-the-vote effort.
And by painting Trump as a toxic authoritarian, she is also encouraging voters to “finally turn the page” on the former president.
“He is someone who is increasingly unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance — and the man is out for unchecked power,” she told supporters in Little Chute, Wisconsin.
Trump, meanwhile, has doubled down on his already extreme rhetoric in hopes of firing up his loyal base to turn out in massive numbers.
“Kamala’s closing message to America is that she hates you,” Trump fumed on Friday night in Warren, Michigan, where he trashed the economy under Biden and Harris as a disaster — which economists say it clearly is not — and warned that “a 1929-style economic depression” would ensue if Harris were elected.
Citing her hawkish foreign policy views, Trump earlier had conjured the image of former Republican representative turned Harris supporter Liz Cheney being shot.
“She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face,” Trump said.
Despite the rhetoric, Trump waxed nostalgic on Friday about how his experience campaigning over the past nine years has been “the thrill of a lifetime.”
“And now we want to take that thrill and turn it into ‘let’s do business,’ right?“
Harris, the nation’s first Black and first Asian-American vice president, meanwhile has sought to harness celebrity star power like Beyonce and Bruce Springsteen in the campaign’s waning days.
Jennifer Lopez, a pop icon of Puerto Rican heritage, joined Harris onstage Thursday, amid a firestorm triggered by a Trump rally warm-up speaker branding the US territory a “floating island of garbage.”
Grammy-winning rapper Cardi B appeared with the candidate Friday night, asking the crowd in Milwaukee, “Are we ready to make history?“
With the election just days away — and Trump refusing to say whether he would accept its results if he loses — businesses in the capital Washington have begun boarding up shop fronts as city authorities warn of a “fluid, unpredictable security environment” in the days after the polls close.
Trump is already alleging fraud and cheating in swing states such as Pennsylvania, laying the groundwork for what many fear will be more unrest, following the violence that erupted at the US Capitol in the wake of the 2020 vote.

Moscow denies ‘baseless’ claim Russia behind fake US election video

Updated 10 min 43 sec ago
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Moscow denies ‘baseless’ claim Russia behind fake US election video

  • Russian embassy in the United States: ‘We view these allegations as baseless’

MOSCOW: Moscow on Saturday denied it was behind fake videos about the US election after American intelligence said Russia was behind a fake video showing a Haitian immigrant claiming to have voted multiple times.
Three US intelligence agencies on Friday said in a joint statement that “Russian influence actors” created the video as part of “Moscow’s broader effort to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the US election.”
The statement also said Russian actors were behind another fake video.
“We have noticed the statement of the US intelligence services accusing our country of disseminating fabricated videos about electoral violations in the United States. We view these allegations as baseless,” the Russian embassy in the United States said in a statement on Telegram.
The 20-second clip features a man saying in a stilted, robotic delivery: “We are from Haiti. We came to America six months ago, and we already have our American citizenship — we’re voting Kamala Harris.”
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the top election official in the swing state, said Friday the video was an example of “targeted disinformation.”
Raffensperger said the “obviously fake” video was likely a production of “Russian troll farms.”
The embassy said that Russia had not received “any proof for these claims during its communications with US officials.”
“As President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly stressed, we respect the will of the American people. All insinuations about ‘Russian machinations’ are malicious slander,” the embassy said in a statement also released by the Russian foreign ministry.


Air monitor records pollution level in Lahore 80 times WHO limit

Updated 02 November 2024
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Air monitor records pollution level in Lahore 80 times WHO limit

LAHORE: Air pollution in Pakistan’s second biggest city Lahore soared on Saturday more than 80 times over the level deemed acceptable by the World Health Organization (WHO), with an official calling it record high.
The level of deadly PM2.5 pollutants — fine particulate matter in the air that causes the most damage to health — peaked at 1,067, before dropping to around 300 in the morning, with anything above 10 considered unhealthy by the WHO.
“We have never reached a level of 1,000,” Jahangir Anwar, a senior environmental protection official in Lahore told AFP.
For days, Lahore has been enveloped by smog, a mix of fog and pollutants caused by low-grade diesel fumes, smoke from seasonal agricultural burning and winter cooling.
“The air quality index will remain high for the next three to four days,” Anwar said.
On Wednesday, the provincial environmental protection agency announced new restrictions in four “hot spots” in the city.
Tuk-tuks equipped with polluting two-stroke engines are banned, as are restaurants that barbecue without filters.
Government offices and private companies will have half their staff work from home from Monday.
Construction work has been halted and street and food vendors, who often cook over open fires, must close at 8 pm.
Smog is particularly pronounced in winter, when cold, denser air traps emissions from poor-quality fuels used to power the city’s vehicles and factories at ground level.


Japan urges 200,000 people to evacuate due to heavy rain

Updated 02 November 2024
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Japan urges 200,000 people to evacuate due to heavy rain

  • Japan’s highest-level warning is typically issued when it is extremely likely that some kind of disaster has already occurred

Tokyo: Nearly 200,000 people in western Japan were urged to evacuate on Saturday as authorities warned of landslides and floods while the remnants of a tropical storm trickle over the country.
The Japan Meteorological Agency said “warm, moist air... was causing heavy rainfall with thunderstorms in western Japan” partly due to Kong-rey, which was downgraded to an extratropical low-pressure system from a typhoon.
The city of Matsuyama “issued the top-level warning, urging 189,552 residents in its 10 districts to evacuate and immediately secure safety,” a city official told AFP.
While the evacuation was not mandatory, Japan’s highest-level warning is typically issued when it is extremely likely that some kind of disaster has already occurred.
Forecasters warned that landslides and floods could affect western Japan on Saturday and eastern Japan on Sunday.
Due to rain, shinkansen bullet trains were briefly suspended between Tokyo and southern Fukuoka region in the morning before resuming on a delayed schedule.
Kong-rey smashed into Taiwan on Thursday as one of the biggest storms to hit the island in decades. It claimed at least two lives and knocked out power to tens of thousands of households.
Scientists say human-driven climate change is intensifying the risk posed by heavy rains because a warmer atmosphere holds more water.