George Floyd was a 46-year-old petty criminal from Minneapolis who died on 25 May 2020 after a police officer knelt on his neck while arresting him. The protests at the brutal manner of his death began the next day and by early June an estimated half a million people demonstrated in his name across the USA. The protests went global: from Beirut to Gothenburg to Sydney where, on 2 June, around 3,000 people gathered in memory of Floyd.
The next day in London an even bigger crowd demonstrated, one of many protests held throughout the UK that month. Police officers, footballers and Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour party, ‘took the knee’, the gesture adopted by the Black Lives Matter movement to remember how Floyd died.
A fortnight ago in Tehran a 22-year-old Iranian called Mahsa Amini also died at the hands of the police. She had come to the capital on a shopping trip but was arrested by the morality police on a charge of improperly wearing her hijab.
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