Derek Chauvin has been convicted of murder after kneeling on George Floyd for more than nine minutes, in a landmark trial heralded as a turning point for police accountability in the US.

The former officer was on trial for second-degree murder, second-degree manslaughter and third-degree murder.

Mr Chauvin showed little emotion as the verdict was read out in the courtroom in downtown Minneapolis. His sentence will be determined at a later date.

A member of the Floyd family, younger brother Philonise was in court as the verdict was handed down.

It followed just 11 hours of deliberations from an ethnically diverse panel of jurors who ranged in age from their 20s to their 60s.

Footage of Mr Floyd's death led to a resurgence in the "Black Lives Matter" movement, with protesters across the nation demanding for more accountability for police killings.

The conviction marks a rare moment for the US, where officers are rarely convicted of on-duty killings.

Minnesota has only ever convicted one police officer of muder for an on-duty incident - Mohamed Noor, a black officer who fatally shot a white woman, Justine Damond, in 2017.

The verdict triggered an outpouring of emotion on the streets of Minneapolis, where protesters have gathered for days on end to demand sweeping reforms to policing.

Speaking ahead of the verdict, Michelle Gross, from the non-profit Communities United Against Police Brutality, said: "We'll never be able to actually achieve full justice in this case, but what will give some measure of justice is for him to [be sentenced] to the fullest extent of the law".

Ms Gross said a coalition of social justice groups would next turn their attention to the trial of the three other officers involved in Mr Floyd's arrest, who are scheduled to go on trial in the summer.

The intensive three-week trial was one of the most closely-watched in US history, with the proceedings broadcast live by cable networks to millions of Americans each day.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/20/derek-chauvin-trial-verdict-jury-george-floyd-death-policer-officer-live-latest/

The creation of a new Super League has been announced, with several European football behemoths deciding to break away from UEFA and found their own competition.

A statement was released on Sunday night explaining that there are 12 founding clubs and three more who could join before the first season.

What is the European Super League's format?

The statement from the organisers explained how the tournament will work.

"[There will be] 20 participating clubs, with 15 Founding Clubs and a qualifying mechanism for a further five teams to qualify annually based on achievements in the prior season," it said.

"[There will be] midweek fixtures, with all participating clubs continuing to compete in their respective national leagues, preserving the traditional domestic match calendar which remains at the heart of the club game.

"[There will be] an August start with clubs participating in two groups of 10, playing home and away fixtures, with the top three in each group automatically qualifying for the quarter-finals. Teams finishing fourth and fifth will then compete in a two-legged play-off for the remaining quarter-final positions. A two-leg knockout format will be used to reach the final at the end of May, which will be staged as a single fixture at a neutral venue.

"As soon as practicable after the start of the men's competition, a corresponding women's league will also be launched, helping to advance and develop the women's game."

Which teams would participate in the new Super League?
There had been a lot of speculation about who would compete in the competition, but now we know.

Real Madrid, Barcelona, Atletico Madrid, AC Milan, Arsenal, Chelsea, Inter, Juventus, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham are the clubs announced as founding members.

A dozen of the world’s richest and most storied soccer clubs on Sunday announced that they had formed a breakaway European club competition that would, if it comes to fruition, upend the structures, economics and relationships that have bound global soccer for nearly a century.

After months of secret talks, the breakaway teams — which include Real Madrid and Barcelona in Spain; Manchester United and Liverpool in England; and Juventus and A.C. Milan in Italy — confirmed their plans late Sunday. They said they planned to add at least three more founding members, hold midweek matches that would put the league in direct competition with the existing Champions League, and begin play “as soon as practicable.”

“We will help football at every level and take it to its rightful place in the world,” said Real Madrid President Florentino Pérez, who was named the first chairman of what the clubs were calling The Super League.

The league they have agreed to form — an alliance of top clubs closer in concept to closed leagues like the N.F.L. and the N.B.A. than soccer’s current model — would bring about the most significant restructuring of elite European soccer since the 1950s, and could herald the largest transfer of wealth to a small set of teams in modern sports history.

In its current form, European soccer supplements domestic league play — an English league for English teams, a Spanish one for Spanish clubs — with Continental competitions between the best clubs. The most prestigious of those, the Champions League, brings together the best teams from each domestic league each year to play for the title of Europe’s, and arguably the world’s, best club.

The current system funnels hundreds of millions of dollars of annual television and sponsorship revenue to the world’s richest clubs, who supplement their domestic revenue with multimillion-dollar payouts from the Champions League. But the format also sustains smaller teams in each country, who benefit from the gloss of their encounters with the giants and share in the money those teams bring in from broadcasters.

The new super league model would change that, by stripping the Champions League of its most attractive and most successful teams and effectively walling off the richest clubs in their own closed competition — and allowing them to split the billions of dollars in annual revenue among themselves. According to the Super League’s announcement, the founding clubs will split 3.5 billion euros (almost $4.2 billion) for signing on to establish “a sustainable financial foundation.” The per-team figure means each founding club will receive about $400 million — more than four times what the Champions League winner took home in 2020.

The 12 teams that signed up as founders are, for the moment, limited to a dozen clubs from Spain, Italy and England. A cohort of six teams from the Premier League — United, Liverpool, Manchester City, Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham — represents the biggest grouping from a single country. Atlético Madrid is the other team from Spain that is said to have endorsed the project, while the Milan rivals Internazionale and A.C. Milan would join Juventus as Italy’s representatives.

Three more clubs will join as founding — and thus permanent — members, organizers said, and a qualifying mechanism will be created to fill the five other places in the 20-team Super League each season.

A women’s league will be launched as well, the announcement said, presumably including the women’s sides of many of the same clubs.

European soccer officials moved quickly to try to block the project. The Premier League condemned the concept in a statement on Sunday and also sent a letter to its 20 member clubs warning them not to take part. Officials at European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, which runs the Champions League, labeled the proposal for a closed super league a “cynical project” in a statement.

The missive was co-signed by the Premier League, La Liga in Spain and Italy’s Serie A, as well as the soccer federations of each country. Within hours, France’s federation and the French league had added their voices to the growing opposition inside key European soccer circles. Politicians, including Britain’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, also weighed in to denounce the plans.

But UEFA was taking the threat seriously. Its leaders spent the weekend in discussions about how to block the plan, including banning the breakaway teams from their domestic leagues and blocking their players from competing for their national teams in events like the World Cup. European officials also pointedly reminded the prospective super-league clubs (and, effectively, their players) that soccer’s global governing body, FIFA, has backed their threats of expulsion.

FIFA on Sunday expressed its “disapproval” of the concept of a closed league, but refrained from the type of threats being lobbed by top officials in Europe.

“We will consider all measures available to us, at all levels, both judicial and sporting in order to prevent this happening,” the UEFA statement said. “Football is based on open competitions and sporting merit; it cannot be any other way.”

https://twitter.com/realmadrid/status/1383909135054299136

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/18/sports/soccer/super-league-united-liverpool-juventus-madrid.html

richmond500:
calm down, I only said book of lamentation.
Moreover angrily stating a fact or how things should have been done is same as lamenting.
u were lamenting.

No need to further drag this discussion

Dantedasz:


The coach always stupidly makes blunders.
Everybody knows Lindelof and Maguire are horribly slow defenders who need at least two defensive midfielders to sit in front of them in any match.
For this match the mad coach selected Fred and Pogba who is an attacking midfielder.

Brighton are looking like Barcelona here and are looking like scoring a few more goals in this match.

richmond500:
Did I say u are lamenting? ur conscience deh blame u or wat

richmond500:
book of lamentation

patrickmuf:
Chelsea and Leicester dropped points, I hope we take advantage...

richmond500:
Ferguson will sit and chew gum for 90mins X38 games and still carry league

Mann11:
I hacked her WhatsApp some months ago.
Although I've seen many chats of hers that left much to be desired, this present one is the height of it! She was chatting with her ex and they both inquired how their present relationships are going. She told him I'm not handsome. I'm really heartbroken at the moment.

He: How is your current relationship?
She: He is nice and caring just like you but not handsome.

He: Lol, how do you mean he's not handsome?
She: He's not, I can't lie to you

He: Why did you go for someone that is not handsome, o wrong naw
She: I don't even know how I fall for him jhare

He: How did you meet him?
She: He was formerly staying in our area.
She: In fact, I always find it difficult to kiss him. He's very neat o, but I don't know why I can't kiss him
It's been long I kissed and that was the last time I visited you
He: Oya come lemme kiss you.
The next thing was she sent my picture to him, maybe for the guy to see how ugly I'm.
He: But he is okay naw. Abi he's not serious with you ni? He's looking serious already sef
She: Laughing ( she sends a laughing sticker)
I felt like crying honestly

What should I do? I feel like dumping the fool

In a scathing rebuke of Trump, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a moderate from Alaska, became the first GOP senator to call for him to step down before his presidency ends and said Wednesday’s attack on the U.S. Capitol is making her rethink being a Republican.

“I want him to resign. I want him out. He has caused enough damage,” Murkowski told the Anchorage Daily News in an interview.

“I think he should leave. He said he’s not going to show up. He’s not going to appear at the inauguration. He hasn’t been focused on what is going on with covid. He’s either been golfing or he’s been inside the Oval Office fuming and throwing every single person who has been loyal and faithful to him under the bus, starting with the vice president,” she continued. “He doesn’t want to stay there. He only wants to stay there for the title. He only wants to stay there for his ego. He needs to get out. He needs to do the good thing, but I don’t think he’s capable of doing a good thing.”

A critic of Trump’s rhetoric, Murkowski has been faulted for not doing more to stand up to the president. When Trump’s presidency was on the line, she did not vote to hear additional witnesses during the Senate impeachment trial.

Murkowski, who is part of a dwindling faction of moderate Republican lawmakers, said she could consider leaving the Republican Party. In 2010, she won reelection as a write-in candidate running as an independent after losing the GOP primary in the tea party wave year.

“But I will tell you, if the Republican Party has become nothing more than the party of Trump, I sincerely question whether this is the party for me,” she said in the interview.

Republicans can’t threaten Murkowski with a primary when her term ends in 2022. This year, Alaska passed ranked choice voting, in which candidates of any party will run in an open primary and voters will rank them in order of preference.

Representative Ilhan Omar has said she's drafting articles of impeachment for President Donald Trump.

Omar announced the news on Wednesday, just as the National Guard and the FBI were deployed in Washington, DC – after Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol.

Omar, a Democrat rep from Minnesota, tweeted: "Donald J. Trump should be impeached by the House of Representatives & removed from office by the United States Senate."

"We can’t allow him to remain in office, it’s a matter of preserving our Republic and we need to fulfill our oath."

Earlier in the day on Wednesday, senators met to certify Joe Biden's 2020 election.

Although the action was a formality, some Republicans voted against affirming Biden's election, claiming allegations of voter fraud.

Democrat Jon Ossoff has won a Georgia Senate seat, beating Republican David Perdue in one of the state’s pivotal runoffs on Tuesday.

Ossoff is the second Georgia Democrat to win in the January 5 runoff election. Democrat Rev. Raphael Warnock also won his race late on Tuesday night, per a call from Vox’s elections partner Decision Desk. Crucially, Ossoff’s victory means Democrats have now won the two seats required to retake control of the Senate.

The race was called by Vox’s elections partner Decision Desk at 2:14 am ET.

Next2Bezee:


President Trump urged fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to “find” enough votes to overturn his defeat in an extraordinary one-hour phone call Saturday that election experts said raised legal questions.

The Washington Post obtained a recording of the conversation in which Trump alternately berated Raffensperger, tried to flatter him, begged him to act and threatened him with vague criminal consequences if the secretary of state refused to pursue his false claims, at one point warning that Raffensperger was taking “a big risk.”

Throughout the call, Raffensperger and his office’s general counsel rejected Trump’s assertions, explaining that the president is relying on debunked conspiracy theories and that President-elect Joe Biden’s 11,779-vote victory in Georgia was fair and accurate.

Trump dismissed their arguments.

“The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry,” he said. “And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.”

Raffensperger responded: “Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong.”

At another point, Trump said: “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”

The rambling and at times incoherent conversation offered a remarkable glimpse of how consumed and desperate the president remains about his loss, unwilling or unable to let the matter go and still believing he can reverse the results in enough battleground states to remain in office.

“There’s no way I lost Georgia,” Trump said, a phrase he repeated again and again on the call. “There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.”

Several of his allies were on the line as he spoke, including White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell, a prominent GOP attorney whose involvement with Trump’s efforts had not been previously known.

In a statement, Mitchell said Raffensperger’s office “has made many statements over the past two months that are simply not correct and everyone involved with the efforts on behalf of the President’s election challenge has said the same thing: show us your records on which you rely to make these statements that our numbers are wrong.”

The White House, the Trump campaign and Meadows did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Raffensperger’s office declined to comment.

On Sunday, Trump tweeted that he had spoken to Raffensperger, saying the secretary of state was “unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the ‘ballots under table’ scam, ballot destruction, out of state ‘voters’, dead voters, and more. He has no clue!”

Raffensperger responded with his own tweet: “Respectfully, President Trump: What you’re saying is not true.”

The pressure Trump put on Raffensperger is the latest example of his attempt to subvert the outcome of the Nov. 3 election through personal outreach to state Republican officials. He previously invited Michigan Republican state leaders to the White House, pressured Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) in a call to try to replace that state’s electors and asked the speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives to help reverse his loss in that state.

His call to Raffensperger came as scores of Republicans have pledged to challenge the electoral college’s vote for Biden when Congress convenes for a joint session on Wednesday. Republicans do not have the votes to successfully thwart Biden’s victory, but Trump has urged supporters to travel to Washington to protest the outcome, and state and federal officials are already bracing for clashes outside the Capitol.

During their conversation, Trump issued a vague threat to both Raffensperger and Ryan Germany, the secretary of state’s general counsel, suggesting that if they don’t find that thousands of ballots in Fulton County have been illegally destroyed to block investigators — an allegation for which there is no evidence — they would be subject to criminal liability.

“That’s a criminal offense,” he said. “And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer.”

Trump also told Raffensperger that failure to act by Tuesday would jeopardize the political fortunes of David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, Georgia’s two Republican senators whose fate in that day’s runoff elections will determine control of the U.S. Senate.

Trump said he plans to talk about the fraud on Monday, when he is scheduled to lead an election eve rally in Dalton, Ga. — a message that could further muddle the efforts of Republicans to get their voters out.

“You have a big election coming up and because of what you’ve done to the president — you know, the people of Georgia know that this was a scam,” Trump said. “Because of what you’ve done to the president, a lot of people aren’t going out to vote, and a lot of Republicans are going to vote negative, because they hate what you did to the president. Okay? They hate it. And they’re going to vote. And you would be respected, really respected, if this can be straightened out before the election.”

Trump’s conversation with Raffensperger put him in legally questionable territory, legal experts said. By exhorting the secretary of state to “find” votes and to deploy investigators who “want to find answers,” Trump appears to be encouraging him to doctor the election outcome in Georgia.

But experts said Trump’s clearer transgression is a moral one. Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University, said that the legal questions are murky and would be subject to prosecutorial discretion. But he also emphasized that the call was “inappropriate and contemptible” and should prompt moral outrage.

“He was already tripping the emergency meter,” Foley said. “So we were at 12 on a scale of 1 to 10, and now we’re at 15.”

Throughout the call, Trump detailed an exhaustive list of disinformation and conspiracy theories to support his position. He claimed without evidence that he had won Georgia by at least a half-million votes. He floated a barrage of assertions that have been investigated and disproved: that thousands of dead people voted; that an Atlanta election worker scanned 18,000 forged ballots three times each and “100 percent” were for Biden; that thousands more voters living out of state came back to Georgia illegally just to vote in the election.

“So tell me, Brad, what are we going to do? We won the election, and it’s not fair to take it away from us like this,” Trump said. “And it’s going to be very costly in many ways. And I think you have to say that you’re going to reexamine it, and you can reexamine it, but reexamine it with people that want to find answers, not people who don’t want to find answers.”

Trump did most of the talking on the call. He was angry and impatient, calling Raffensperger a “child” and “either dishonest or incompetent” for not believing there was widespread ballot fraud in Atlanta — and twice calling himself a “schmuck” for endorsing Kemp, whom Trump holds in particular contempt for not embracing his claims of fraud.

“I can’t imagine he’s ever getting elected again, I’ll tell you that much right now,” he said.

He also took aim at Kemp’s 2018 opponent, Democrat Stacey Abrams, trying to shame Raffensperger with the idea that his refusal to embrace fraud has helped her and Democrats generally. “Stacey Abrams is laughing about you,” he said. “She’s going around saying, ‘These guys are dumber than a rock.’ What she’s done to this party is unbelievable, I tell you.”

The secretary of state repeatedly sought to push back, saying at one point, “Mr. President, the problem you have with social media, that — people can say anything.”

“Oh this isn’t social media,” Trump retorted. “This is Trump media. It’s not social media. It’s really not. It’s not social media. I don’t care about social media. I couldn’t care less.”

At another point, Trump claimed that votes were scanned three times: “Brad, why did they put the votes in three times? You know, they put ’em in three times.”

Raffensperger responded: “Mr. President, they did not. We did an audit of that and we proved conclusively that they were not scanned three times.”

Trump sounded at turns confused and meandering. At one point, he referred to Kemp as “George.” He tossed out several different figures for Biden’s margin of victory in Georgia and referred to the Senate runoff, which is Tuesday, as happening “tomorrow” and “Monday.”

His desperation was perhaps most pronounced during an exchange with Germany, Raffensperger’s general counsel, in which he openly begged for validation.

Trump: “Do you think it’s possible that they shredded ballots in Fulton County? ’Cause that’s what the rumor is. And also that Dominion took out machines. That Dominion is really moving fast to get rid of their, uh, machinery. Do you know anything about that? Because that’s illegal.”

Germany responded: “No, Dominion has not moved any machinery out of Fulton County.”

Trump: “But have they moved the inner parts of the machines and replaced them with other parts?”

Germany: “No.”

Trump: “Are you sure? Ryan?”

Germany: “I’m sure. I’m sure, Mr. President.”

It was clear from the call that Trump has surrounded himself with aides who have fed his false perceptions that the election was stolen. When he claimed that more than 5,000 ballots were cast in Georgia in the name of dead people, Raffensperger responded forcefully: “The actual number was two. Two. Two people that were dead that voted.”

But later, Meadows said, “I can promise you there are more than that.”

Another Trump lawyer on the call, Kurt Hilbert, accused Raffensperger’s office of refusing to turn over data to assess evidence of fraud, and also claimed awareness of at least 24,000 illegally cast ballots that would flip the result to Trump.

“It stands to reason that if the information is not forthcoming, there’s something to hide,” Hilbert said. “That’s the problem that we have.”

Reached by phone Sunday, Hilbert declined to comment.

In the end, Trump asked Germany to sit down with one of his attorneys to go over the allegations. Germany agreed.

Yet Trump also recognized that he was failing to persuade Raffensperger or Germany of anything, saying toward the end, “I know this phone call is going nowhere.”

But he continued to make his case in repetitive fashion, until finally, after roughly an hour, Raffensperger put an end to the conversation: “Thank you, President Trump, for your time.”

Next2Bezee:


Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) and President Donald Trump's defeated electors from Arizona may force Vice President Mike Pence to publicly pick a side in Trump’s bid to overturn his 2020 election loss.

Gohmert and a handful of the would-be electors sued Pence in federal court on Monday in a long-shot bid to throw out the rules that govern Congress' counting of electoral votes next week. It’s an effort they hope will permit Pence — who is tasked with leading the Jan. 6 session of the House and Senate — to simply ignore President-elect Joe Biden's electors and count Trump's losing slates instead.

The lawsuit asserts that the 1887 law known as the Electoral Count Act, the vague statute that has long governed the electoral vote counting process with minimal drama, unconstitutionally binds Pence from exercising total authority to choose which votes to count.

"Under the Twelfth Amendment, Defendant Pence alone has the exclusive authority and sole discretion to open and permit the counting of the electoral votes for a given state, and where there are competing slates of electors, or where there is objection to any single slate of electors, to determine which electors’ votes, or whether none, shall be counted," the suit contends.

The lawsuit comes before Judge Jeremy Kernodle, a Trump appointee to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. It's unclear if he'll grant the request for an expedited judgment.

Though the lawsuit itself is unlikely to gain legal traction, it does put Pence in the position of having to either contest the suit — putting him on the opposite side of Trump and his GOP defenders — or support it and lay bare the intention to subvert the will over the voters in the 2020 election.

Pence has engaged with GOP lawmakers seeking to reverse the election results but has avoided publicly taking a side in the matter, and he has given no indication how he intends to handle his role presiding over the Jan. 6 session of Congress set to certify Biden's victory.

Though Biden was the certified winner in states like Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan and others, the Republicans who would have been Trump's electors met anyway and purported to cast their votes for Trump's reelection. They're counting on Pence and congressional Republicans to treat those informal votes as equal to the slates certified in those states where Trump was defeated.

Pence, the suit contends, may only be guided by constitutional provisions and may exercise "sole discretion in determining which electoral votes to count for a given State, and must ignore and may not rely on any provisions of the Electoral Count Act that would limit his exclusive authority."

Gohmert indicates in the suit that he will be one of the House Republicans who intend to challenge Biden's electors from key states. Dozens of other House Republicans intend to follow suit, and at least one incoming GOP senator — Tommy Tuberville of Alabama — has signaled he's likely to join them. It's unclear if other GOP senators will as well.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has worked to dissuade his caucus from participating in the challenges, and the second-ranking GOP leader, Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), drew a fierce attack from Trump after he told reporters that any challenges to the results were doomed to fail.

Under the rules Gohmert is challenging, all it takes is a single member of each branch to challenge electors from multiple states to force a vote on the matter. But any challenge is likely to fail under the expected rules. The Democrat-led House will vote to uphold Biden's win, and numerous GOP senators have indicated they do not intend to support Trump's efforts.

Throwing out those rules, per Gohmert, would allow Pence to decide which electors to consider in the first place, raising the specter that he could simply choose to count Trump's slate.

Trump allies have repeatedly pointed to Pence's role at the center of the Electoral College certification process as a reason to take hope that the election results could still be reversed. Trump even amplified one such theory last week, retweeting a suggestion that Pence could intervene in the transmission of electoral votes to the National Archives.

At least earlier this month, Pence was planning to oversee Biden’s victory and then try to escape Trump’s ire by heading abroad for what might be his final diplomatic trip in office. If Pence ultimately opts out of participating in the session, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the Senate president pro tem, would likely preside.

BestAccessories:

NEVER EVER BEAT A WOMAN. WHETHER YOUR GIRLFRIEND OR YOUR WIFE. DON'T EVER DO THAT AGAIN. IT MAKES YOU A WEAK MAN.

Kyase:


We have mata