Judge limits evidence and refuses to move ex-cop Chauvin’s trial
MINNEAPOLIS — A judge said Friday he won’t delay or move the trial of a former Minneapolis police officer charged in George Floyd’s death over concerns that a $27 million settlement for Floyd’s family could taint the jury pool, but he’ll allow limited evidence from a 2019 arrest.
Meanwhile, a 13th juror was seated Friday — a woman who said she has only seen clips of the video of Floyd’s arrest and needs to learn more about what happened beforehand. The jury will include 12 jurors and two alternates.
Jury selection was halfway complete last week when the Minneapolis City Council announced it had unanimously approved the massive payout to settle a civil rights lawsuit over Floyd’s death. Chauvin’s attorney, Eric Nelson, subsequently sought to halt or move the trial, saying it jeopardized Chauvin’s chance for a fair trial. Chauvin is charged with murder and manslaughter.
But Cahill, who has called the timing “unfortunate,” said he thought a delay would do nothing to stem the problem of pretrial publicity. As for moving the trial, he said there’s no place in Minnesota that hasn’t been touched by that publicity.
The judge handed the defense a victory by ruling that the jury can hear evidence from Floyd’s 2019 arrest, but only that possibly pertaining to the cause of his death in 2020. He acknowledged there are several similarities between the two encounters, including that Floyd swallowed drugs after police confronted him
The defense argues that Floyd’s drug use contributed to his death.
Cahill said he would allow medical evidence of Floyd’s physical reactions, such as his dangerously high blood pressure when he was examined by a paramedic in 2019, and a short clip of an officer’s body camera video. He said Floyd’s “emotional behavior,” such as calling out to his mother, won’t be admitted.
White House aides fired:
Five White House staffers have been fired because of their past use of drugs, including marijuana, press secretary Jen Psaki said on Friday.
Marijuana has become a delicate issue for President Joe Biden’s administration because 15 states and Washington, D.C., allow for recreational usage, despite a federal prohibition. The administration has tried not to automatically penalize potential staffers for legal behavior in their communities by developing a more flexible policy, Psaki said in a statement.
“While we will not get into individual cases, there were additional factors at play in many instances for the small number of individuals who were terminated,” Psaki said.
The White House has said there can be multiple factors for dismissals, including hard drug use. The marijuana policy allows for up to 15 past uses in a year among White House staffers.
Drone attacks in Saudi Arabia: A drone attack struck an oil installation in Saudi Arabia’s capital of Riyadh on Friday, the Saudi state-run news agency reported, igniting a blaze at the facility deep in the kingdom’s territory.
The dawn attack caused no injuries or damage, and did not disrupt oil supplies, according to the official
Saudi Press Agency. The kingdom is facing more frequent airborne assaults as Saudi-led coalition forces battle Iran-backed Houthi rebels across the southern border in Yemen. Most recently, drones struck Ras Tanura, the country’s largest crude oil refinery with capacity of 550,000 barrels a day, raising concerns about the expanding capabilities of Saudi Arabia’s regional foes.
Details about Friday’s attack remained slim, and authorities did not name the impacted facility.
The Saudi statement did not blame the Houthis for Friday’s attack. But a few hours earlier, Houthi military spokesman Brig. Gen. Yehia Sarie reported the group had fired six drones at an unnamed Aramco facility in Riyadh, without providing evidence for what he described as a “high-accuracy hit.”
DOJ charges Swiss hacker: The Justice Department has charged a Swiss hacker
with computer intrusion and identity theft, just over a week after the hacker embarrassed a U.S. security-camera startup and its clients by showing how easy it was to spy on the cameras watching over hospitals, schools and corporate offices.
An indictment against 21-year-old Tillie Kottmann was brought Thursday by a grand jury in the Seattlebased Western District of Washington.
Federal prosecutors said Kottmann, of Lucerne, Switzerland, was initially charged in September. The range of allegations date to 2019 and involve the alleged theft of credentials and data and publishing source code and proprietary information from more than 100 entities, including companies and government agencies.
Kottmann has described the most recent leak of camera footage taken from customers of California security-camera provider Verkada as part of a “hacktivist”
cause of exposing the dangers of mass surveillance. Kottmann said in an online chat last week that they found the credentials needed to enter the site exposed on the open internet.
In conversations with other reporters last year, Kottmann, who uses they/ them pronouns, said data they obtained and posted online had been exposed by poor security practices and they sought to shame organizations into buttoning up their networks.
Idaho Legislature shuts down:
The Idaho Legislature voted Friday to shut down for several weeks due to an outbreak of COVID-19.
Lawmakers made the move to recess until April 6 with significant unfinished business, including setting budgets and pushing through a huge income tax cut.
At least six of the 70 House members tested positive for the illness in the last
week, and there are fears a highly contagious variant of COVID-19 is in the Statehouse.
More Myanmar journalists held:
Two more journalists were detained in Myanmar on Friday, part of the junta’s intensifying efforts to choke off information about resistance to last month’s coup.
Mizzima News reported that one of its former reporters, Than Htike Aung, and Aung Thura, a journalist from the BBC’s Burmese-language service, were detained by men who appeared to be plainclothes security agents outside a court in the capital of Naypyitaw. The journalists were there to cover legal proceedings against Win Htein, a detained senior official from the National League for Democracy, the party that ran the country before the takeover.
The coup reversed years of slow progress toward democracy after five decades of military rule.