Month: June 2021

Benteke pens new two-year Crystal Palace deal

Christian Benteke has signed a two-year contract extension with Crystal Palace, the club have announced.

Benteke, part of Belgium’s squad for this summer’s European Championship, joined Palace from Liverpool in 2016 for a club record fee.

The 30-year-old has scored 31 goals in 137 Premier League appearances for the Selhurst Park outfit, including netting 10 times in 30 matches in 2020-21.

Antonio Conte to Spurs? It’s doomed but it’s irresistible

Benteke said on Palace’s official website: “I’m happy and proud to commit my future to Crystal Palace.

“Five years already and still a lot more to come. We have a great group of players and staff, and I’m looking forward to the season ahead and playing in front of our fans again.”

Chairman Steve Parish said: “Christian has been an integral part of consolidating our position as an established Premier League club over the last five years.

“He is an outstanding professional and has more than proven that he still has the quality and the hunger to perform for our club at the highest level, and I couldn’t be happier to see him in red and blue for another two seasons.”

Palace, who finished 14th in the league, are currently searching for a new manager following Roy Hodgson’s decision to step down as boss at the end of the season.

 

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Ex-Chelsea boss emerges as candidate for Everton job

Former Chelsea manager Maurizio Sarri has been touted as a possible replacement for Carlo Ancelotti at Everton, according to reports.

The Toffees are on the lookout for a new manager once again. Ancelotti had spent a year and a half in charge at Goodison Park.

The Italian guided them to a 12th-place finish in 2019/20. Everton were busy in the transfer market last summer. James Rodriguez and Allan were among their high-profile signings.

Antonio Conte to Spurs? It’s doomed but it’s irresistible

Everton were on course to finish in the European places for much of the season. They even sat in the top four at various points. Their poor home form proved costly though as they ended up finishing tenth.

Real Madrid have been looking for a replacement for Zinedine Zidane. Massimiliano Allegri and Antonio Conte were linked with the job but they went for Ancelotti.

The 61-year-old rejoins the Spanish giants after he previously spent two years in charge there between 2013 and 2015.

The favourite to take over at Everton is former Wolves boss Nuno Espirito Santo. Sky Sports reported on Wednesday that the Toffees “want” Santo to replace Ancelotti. 

Santo spent four years in charge at Wolves. He successfully guided them back to the Premier League before Wolves achieved back-to-back seventh-place finishes in the top flight under his tutelage.

The 2020/21 campaign was less successful for Santo and Wolves, though. They received criticism for their style of play as they finished 13th in the Premier League.

Santo left the club at the end of the season and he is also a candidate for the vacant Crystal Palace job. 

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Conte has also been linked with the Everton job. But Simon Jordan has insisted that a move to Goodison Park would not make sense for the former-Chelsea manager:

“What’s the project for him? What is he, a philanthropic? I really like Merseyside, I’d go to Everton and see what I can spin my wheels over there.

“He has just won Serie A with Inter Milan.

“He causes chaos wherever he goes and he gets paid for it, but he wins.

“What’s he going to go to Everton for?”

Italian outlet Calciomercato have reported that Lazio have given Sarri until Friday to decide whether he wants to become their new manager.

They note that “other options are on the table” for Sarri and Everton has been mentioned as a possible destination.

Two PL clubs were ‘interested’ in Aguero until ‘last minute’ – his father

Leonel Aguero (Sergio Aguero’s father) has revealed that Chelsea and Arsenal were both “interested” in the striker before he joined Barcelona.

Aguero’s ten-year spell with Manchester City came to an end after the 2020/21 season culminated.

In this time, he scored 260 goals for the Premier League champions across all competitions. He helped them win the league title five times.

Declan Rice as Andrea Pirlo and more England thoughts

With City, Aguero also won six Carabao Cups and one FA Cup. His contract with City expired at the end of the season.

After months of speculation, it was announced that the forward has signed for Barcelona. He has taken a €17m pay-cut to join the Spanish giants.

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Chelsea and Arsenal were among the clubs linked with Aguero before he completed his move to Barcelona.

Aguero’s father has told Argentinian radio (as cited by The Daily Star) that his son received interest from Chelsea and Arsenal.

“My son was waiting right up to the last moment to renew with City but it didn’t happen.

“He is happy right now after signing for Barcelona. I see him happy.

“He didn’t know what was going to happen with his future. There were several clubs interested in signing him.

“Arsenal were interested in him and Chelsea to the last minute. If he didn’t stay in England, it was going to be Italy or Spain.

“He’s been friends with Lionel Messi since they were 15 and they’ve always talked.

“It looks like Messi is going to stay at Barcelona so they’re going to play together.”

Elsewhere, City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak has insisted that they will replace Aguero:

“We lose a very important legend in Sergio Aguero, very hard shoes to fill but I am confident we will find the right player to fill those shoes.

“There are other areas in the team that need investment, not too many, it is not about numbers, it is about quality.

“The squad is a phenomenal squad, you don’t win the Premier League and get to the Champions League final if you don’t have a good squad. We will bring quality into the squad in a couple of key positions.”

Arizona Plans Executions With Same Gas Used by Nazis at Auschwitz

Death penalty abolitionists have expressed shock in recent days following the revelation that Arizona officials are preparing to execute death row inmates using hydrogen cyanide, the same gas with which the Nazis killed over a million people during the Holocaust under the trade name Zyklon B.

“You have to wonder what Arizona was thinking in believing that in 2021 it is acceptable to execute people in a gas chamber with cyanide gas. Did they have anybody study the history of the Holocaust?”
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Documents obtained by The Guardian show that Arizona’s Republican-controlled Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Reentry (ADCRR) has spent $2,000 to obtain the materials needed to make cyanide gas, including a brick of potassium cyanide purchased last December for $1,530, as well as sodium hydroxide pellets and sulfuric acid.

The documents also revealed that the state’s gas chamber at Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence—which was built in 1949 and hasn’t been used to kill anyone in 22 years—has been “refurbished.”

The Guardian called some of the techniques used to test the death chamber’s efficacy “astonishingly primitive,” including checking its air-tightness by lighting a candle and holding it up against a sealed door and windows.

The last Arizona gas chamber execution stands as a cautionary tale for death row inmates facing the choice of whether to die by gassing or lethal injection. In March 1999, Walter LeGrand, a German national, took 18 minutes to die as he suffered what an eyewitness described as “agonizing choking and gagging” in a cloud of cyanide vapor.

On April 6, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich announced the state was ready to resume killing prisoners, and that he would ask the state Supreme Court to begin issuing execution warrants. Brnovich’s announcement came a month after ADCRR said it had obtained a supply of the lethal injection drug pentobarbital. The Guardian reported in April that Arizona officials spent $1.5 million to acquire pentobarbital from an undisclosed source.

This single-drug execution method causes victims to endure “excruciating suffering, including sensations of drowning and suffocation,” according to anesthesiology expert Dr. Gail Van Norman. 

As Common Dreams reported at the time, the last inmate executed by lethal injection in Arizona took nearly two hours to die. Joseph Wood, who was killed in July 2014, gulped and snorted hundreds of times as 15 shots of an experimental mix of midazolam and hydromorphone coursed through his veins.

States have been accused of using condemned prisoners as human guinea pigs as they experiment with substitute lethal injection drugs amid growing refusal by companies to sell their products for use in executions. 

Wood’s botched execution prompted a temporary suspension of capital punishment in Arizona, as lawyers for condemned convicts and human rights defenders argued such killings violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.

According to The Guardian, officials have selected two of Arizona’s 115 death row inmates as likely candidates for killing once executions resume. Joseph Perkovich, an attorney for Frank Atwood, one of the candidates, told the paper that “neither option”—gassing or lethal injection—”is tenable.” Perkovich said a discrepancy between the potassium cyanide obtained by corrections officials and the sodium cyanide called for under state execution protocol “is not a small detail.”

“The specific compound is vitally important,” he stressed.

Anti-death penalty campaigners have sounded the alarm over Arizona’s plan to kill prisoners using the same gas with which the Nazis murdered (pdf) around 1.1 million people in extermination camps including Auschwitz. 

“This is not justice—it’s horrifying,” the ACLU tweeted. 

“You have to wonder what Arizona was thinking in believing that in 2021 it is acceptable to execute people in a gas chamber with cyanide gas,” Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) executive director Robert Dunham told The Guardian. “Did they have anybody study the history of the Holocaust?”