Trial process in Floyd murder case begins today – National & International News- MON 8Mar2021

Jury selection in Floyd case begins. $1.9T COVID bill goes back to House. US presses Afghan government for Taliban peace talks. Iran hits British woman with new charges after sentence ends.

NATIONAL NEWS

Trial process in George Floyd murder case to begin today

Jury-selection will begin today in Minneapolis for the case of ex-police officer Derek Chauvin, who faces murder charges in the death of George Floyd last year. Video of Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes sparked months of protests across the country. Those protests and the often brutal reaction by riot police in many cities renewed discussion on police brutality and racial profiling. 

Attorneys on both sides expect the jury-selection process to take at least 3 weeks. Each side will have to weed out potentially biased jurors. Chauvin’s attorney had argued that the pre-trial publicity would make it impossible to find impartial jurors in Hennepin County where the incident took place. But Judge Peter Cahill countered that a change of venue would be pointless since “no corner of the State of Minnesota” has been shielded from pretrial publicity.

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Senate approves $1.9T stimulus; House to vote

Over the weekend, the Senate approved President Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID stimulus package. The bill passed along party lines through reconciliation. All Democrats supported the bill and no Republicans voted in favor. Amendments made in the Senate mean the bill will have to return for a vote in the House, which should come early this week. 

The bill includes $1400 stimulus checks and extends a federal unemployment supplement until September. Small business will also receive fresh aid and state and local governments will get $350 billion in further federal funding. Low- and middle-income families will also see new tax credits. The bill also sets aside $160 billion in funding for COVID vaccination and testing.

The minimum wage increase to $15 approved in the House version was omitted from the Senate version. The Senate parliamentarian ruled last week that the wage increase could not be passed through reconciliation.

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INTERNATIONAL NEWS

Afghanistan: US pushes for UN-led peace process

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has written to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to advocate a 90-day ceasefire and the formation of a transitional government with Afghan government and Taliban representation.  The Trump administration struck a peace deal with the Taliban last year. That deal included a May 1st deadline for the withdrawal of all US troops from Afghanistan. The signing of that pact was supposed to signal the start of negotiations on a similar pact between the Taliban and the Afghan government. Those negotiations have dragged on for months with little result.

The tone of Blinken’s letter makes it clear that the onus is on the Afghan government to negotiate earnestly and make concessions. The letter called on Ghani to show “urgent leadership” and warned that the Taliban could make “rapid territorial gains” across the country in a “spring offensive”. Blinken urges Ghani to come to the table to head off further fighting and loss of ground. To keep the pressure up on both sides, Blinken said the White House had not yet decided whether or not to remove the last US troops on May 1 as stipulated in the Taliban agreement.

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Iran: Briton released from house arrest, faces new charges

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian national, has completed a 5-year prison sentence in Iran for antigovernment activity. Due to a COVID outbreak in the main women’s prison, Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been under house arrest in recent months with an ankle monitor. No sooner had the ankle monitor come off than the Iranian government hit Zaghari-Ratcliffe with new charges. This time, she is charged with engaging in “propaganda against the system” for her participation in a 2009 demonstration outside Iran’s embassy in London.

Her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, maintains that Iran his holding his wife hostage over a decades-old debt owed to Iran by the British government. Prior to the 1979 revolution, the shah had purchased British tanks for 400 million British pounds (more than $550 million) which were never delivered.

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