So there was a NATO summit ongoing in Chicago over the weekend – which naturally attracts a couple of protest groups, members from the “Occupy” movement among them. It also attracted police and Homeland Security, who proceeded to handcuff protesters, detain them at gunpoint, and ram into a crowd of them with a van.
In a slightly surprising move, given the extent to which Google and Facebook have been compliant in handing data over to government enquiry, Twitter filed a motion (PDF) yesterday to block a subpoena that would force the company to turn over the data of one of its users, an arrested Occupy Wall Street protestor.
25 people have been arrested for alleged ties to hacktivist movement Anonymous in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Spain in the joint ‘Operation Unmask,’ which I’m sure has nothing to do with the INTERPOL website being taken down yesterday and everything to do with attacks against websites in Columbia and Chile dating from the middle of 2011.
Hoof. The legal battle waged by the the Occupy London camp to keep their place at St Paul’s Cathedral was lost last night – and within about five minutes of the injunction being ordered, the camp was evacuated by bailiffs and officers from the City of London Police.
There appears to be a growing trend among rich New Yorkers in response to the increased attention being paid to “the 1%”. They’ve taken to buying cargo vans that look plain on the outside, but are opulent on the inside, tricked out with massage chairs wi-fi and widescreen televisions. Some of these guys cost upwards of ZAR 4 million.
I don’t know that there are such things as iconic photographs anymore, what with the proliferation of media and all, but if there are, this is one – of Seattle activist Dorli Rainey, 84, reacting to being hit with pepper spray by cops during an Occupy Seattle protest on Tuesday, November 15, 2011.
At 2am this morning the NYPD started violently clearing out Zuccoti Park, where the peaceful Occupy Wall Street protestors have been camped out. The cops are using pepper spray, they are using LRAD sound weapons, and they are actively preventing any official media from reporting on their violation of OWS members’ constitutional rights. Shit’s gotten real.
Mayor of Denver, Michael Hancock, has been pressuring members of the Occupy Denver movement to pick a leader, “to deal with City and State officials.” So the protesters, in the most benign shove-it gesture imaginable, elected a three-and-a-half-year-old border collie. Named Shelby.
The global movement against greed has been in the news a lot lately. The Occupy Wall Street protests have been going on for just over a month now, including dismal failures locally, but one network has seen fit to draw some profit from it.
Brookfield Properties, owners of the Zuccotti Park at the OWS protestors are demonstrating in, had called up the NYPD for “ assistance during their cleaning operation”. There were concerns that this would bring the protest to an abrupt end. This was prevented by a last minute statement from Deputy May Holloway, insisting that the “cleaning” operation be postponed.
It looks like the tides that swept up the Occupy Wall Street protest campaign – ongoing after three weeks – have broken national boundaries; ‘Operation Ubuntu’ has been set up to launch a simultaneous protests on the 15th of October in Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg and Grahamstown, as part of the global Occupy Revolution campaign.