On November 30th last year around 300 protesters were arrested at the Los Angeles City Hall after being camped out in the vicinity for over two months. An estimated 1,400 police officers showed up and blazed through the encampment in what protesters are now calling a "shock and awe" attack on their rights. The movement activists have now filed a class action lawsuit for the arrests and the protesters' treatment while in custody. RT's Ramon Galindo brings the latest from Los Angeles.

Detroit Occupiers left Grand Circus Park nearly a year ago in the week preceding the city's Thanksgiving Day parade.

A new "mini-documentary" released on YouTube recently provides a glimpse of what it was like during those chilly days when the Detroit Occupy movement took root in October until the group left the park encampment in November 2011. "Occupy Detroit" depicts life in the encampment, from the medical tent to food preparation and the rallies it held in the streets of Detroit.

Although Occupy Detroit protestors are no longer visible on a daily basis in the public square, the movement continues to make its presence known. Members have taken an active role in supporting homeowners during bank foreclosures, occupied a school for the deaf and support other numerous causes, such as a women's rights march scheduled in Lansing later this week.

After leaving the park, a supporter donated Occupy Detroit use of a rent free building for one year. It now serves as the Occupy Detroit Activist Center at 5900 Michigan and many Occupy Detroit members have begun renting apartments above the center.

Anonymous has claimed to have leaked hours worth of video footage of the NYPD's 2011 raid on Zuccotti Park, filmed by 14 different cameras by the NYPD.

After requesting a comment, The Gothamist has received a response from NYPD Deputy Commissioner, Public Information Paul Browne who had this to say about the "leak":

Deputy Commissioner, Public Information Paul Browne returned our request to comment: " 'Purports' is the operative word," Browne writes, in reference to our inquiry of the footage that Anonymous purports to have taken from the NYPD. "Contrary to the narrator's account, there were scores of protesters who took video with no attempts by the police to confiscate it."

"Further, the west side of Zuccotti Park on Church Street was lined with television news personnel and satellite trucks, many of whom filmed events that night," Browne adds, omitting the fact that a press pen for the media was erected out of sight of the park, and that most members of the media weren't permitted to observe the raid.

Browne says that the "officer" at the outset of Anonymous' video is not wearing an authentic NYPD uniform, as its patches are out of place and the badge is "clearly bogus." To Browne, the voice of a man stating he is a detective is a sign that the footage was likely turned over in discovery, and is part of the court record: "It was not 'leaked' by the police, but possibly by someone suing us, and not much of a leak since it's park of the court record."

So this release is a leak, but not likely from a detective. There is a lot of video footage, and possibly never seen by the general public before now. This is going to take me some time, but if I come across anything significant, you'll all be the first to know.

Time to Rebel! Five Ways We Can Break the Big Banks' Death Grip on the Economy

Wall Street’s incredible greed and arrogance may have finally handed us the tools and leverage we need.
Read it at Truthout.

Court orders Occupy Hong Kong to leave HSBC

Occupy Central in Hong Kong, one of the last outposts of the global protests sparked by the Occupy Wall Street movement, has been ordered to clear its encampment outside one of the world's largest banks.

Credit Card Debt Collection Flawed

Up to 90 percent of cases filed by credit-card companies to collect bad debts may be flawed, according to one New York judge who says he has heard as many as 100 in one day. The problem, say many of the judges who oversee the slew of suits filed by American Express, Citigroup, and other credit-card companies, is that they all follow the same he-said-she-said pattern—companies eager to collect debts try to make their cases with partial records and improper documents, leaving substantial holes in their arguments. The companies disagree, with one American Express spokesman telling The New York Times that the company has “a strong process in place to ensure accuracy of testimony and affidavits provided to courts.”

Occupier Charged With Terroristic Felony

David C. Gorczynski, 22, was charged on Tuesday with attempted bank robbery and terroristic threatening, both felonies, as well as one misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct. Police detained him after he walked into an Easton, PA Wells Fargo branch with a sign that read “You’re being robbed” and another that said “Give a man a gun, he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank, and he can rob a country.”

Police Take Down Occupy Memphis

Officers with the Memphis Police Department on Friday morning began dismantling the Occupy Memphis camp on Civic Center Plaza in Downtown Memphis, WMC-TV reports.

The effort began around 4 a.m. Friday. City of Memphis CAO George Little told the news station the site has evolved into a homeless encampment.

Continue reading »

Occupy.com:

Prepare yourself for a journey through the Occupy L.A. encampment as seen through the eyes of journalist Sam Slovick, who narrates the proceedings like he's in a noir thriller. Slovick refers to the Occupy Movement as "the Civil Rights Movement on crank, the Sixties peace movement in a "V for Vendetta" mask with a blunt and the devil's defiance," and Occupy L.A. as a "largely dismissed, mostly misinterpreted orphan child of the Occupy Movement."

"Ultimately, Occupy LA was and is a relatively high functioning, reasonably organized productive community, but you won't read that in the paper," Slovick said. "That’s why I camped at City Hall for the better part of two months and shot the series. I wanted to meet the people and tell the real story of the American class war in Los Angeles."

Slovick produced this film - the first in a five-part series that aired on takepart.com in January - with the help of Slake, a highly acclaimed literary journal based in Los Angeles. "Occupy Los Angeles: Scenes From a Revolution" portrays a movement that refuses to go down without one hell of a fight.

German police Wednesday have cleared the Occupy Frankfurt encampment that has been in place since October 2011, ahead of scheduled anti-capitalism protests this weekend.

Via:

German authorities on Wednesday cleared out a group of protesters who have camped for months in front of the European Central Bank, ahead of huge anti-capitalism protests expected at the weekend.

Some of the demonstrators hurled paint at police who were moving them on, after they ignored a request to leave voluntarily, said an AFP reporter at the scene. There were a dozen or so arrests, according to a police spokesman.

However, the clearing of the “Occupy Frankfurt” camp was largely peaceful, with around 50 demonstrators sitting stubbornly on the ground in a show of passive resistance.

The ban on the about 100 “indignants”, who have held vigil outside the ECB since October — the longest continuous protest in Europe — runs until Sunday.

Police expect 40,000 people from Thursday for demonstrations that are expected to climax on Saturday. They want to set up a security cordon around the ECB, meaning the camp has to be cleared.

Authorities have already banned several protest actions, fearing “public disorder” after violence at similar events.

Hopefully, Occupy Frankfurt will return to their regular spot after the end of the protests.

There have been at least 40 alleged members of the hacktivist collective Anonymous arrested during the past year. In an interview with the National Post, one of the group's last remaining leaders tips us off to the group's next planned action.

Christopher Doyon, aka "Commander X," whose name is public because he's been indicted for hacking a California county government website after government officials forcibly removed a homeless encampment from courthouse steps. Doyon faces 15 years in prison for that action. For the interview, he met with a reporter and photographer from the Post in Canada where he is a now a fugitive from the FBI.

At the end of the interview, Doyon makes a whopper of a claim, make of it what you will:

Q. What’s next for Anonymous?
A: Right now we have access to every classified database in the U.S. government. It’s a matter of when we leak the contents of those databases, not if. You know how we got access? We didn’t hack them. The access was given to us by the people who run the systems.

Every classified database is a bit of a stretch for me to wrap my brain around. I can't even begin to imagine how many such databases our nation uses. But remember that Bradley Manning released a few hundred thousand emails from just one such database.

The five-star general (and) the Secretary of Defence who sit in the cushy plush offices at the top of the Pentagon don’t run anything anymore. It’s the pimply-faced kid in the basement who controls the whole game, and Bradley Manning proved that. The fact he had the 250,000 cables that were released effectively cut the power of the U.S. State Department in half. The Afghan war diaries and the Iran war diaries effectively cut the political clout of the U.S. Department of Defence in half. All because of one guy who had enough balls to slip a CD in an envelope and mail it to somebody.

Now people are leaking to Anonymous and they’re not coming to us with this document or that document or a CD, they’re coming to us with keys to the kingdom, they’re giving us the passwords and usernames to whole secure databases that we now have free reign over. … The world needs to be concerned.

Now this claim, that the Anons next action could be the result of an inside job is quite plausible, and again, recall Bradley Manning. As we saw with Manning's Cablegate, just that one database created quite the stir for the U.S. government. Even with the "keys" to but a few of these databases would make Anonymous quite the force to be reckoned with, despite their diminished membership.

The city of Cleveland will not renew Occupy protesters' permit allowing a permanent encampment. The group has maintained an encampment in downtown Cleveland since October of last year.

Cleveland Mayor Jackson's chief of staff, Ken Sillman, said that the decision not to renew the permit was made before the FBI's arrest of five men who planned to blow up an Ohio bridge.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio questioned the timing of the permit revocation, saying it was concerned Jackson's announcement was an attempt to connect the entire Occupy movement to the bomb plot.

"Individuals are responsible for their own actions, not the groups they affiliate with," ACLU of Ohio Legal Director James Hardiman said in a statement. "City officials should not be in the business of condemning an entire group of people based on the actions of others."

Bill Dobbs, a spokesman for Occupy in New York, also said the arrests have nothing to do with the Occupy movement that began last fall.

"This incident has nothing to do with Occupy Wall Street, which explicitly stands for non-violence," he said. "Before there's a rush to judgment, facts need to come out. Those charged are entitled to a fair trial and due process."

[Via, Via]

In this video, a member of Occupy Denver films a Denver Health Department van stopping in front of the Occupy encampment and dropping off a group of people believed to be mental health patients, and many appearing to be homeless.

It does seem highly improper to release patients just exiting mental healthcare into a camp of activists rather than make arrangements for more stable, permanent housing without fear of police raids and arrests.

From Occupy Denver:

On Saturday, April 14th, a white van with Denver Health markings stopped on Broadway directly across from Occupy Denver's encampment. The van was then emptied of several people - many of whom appear to be homeless - who are thought to have been receiving mental health care, who can then be seen simply joining the crowd at Occupy Denver.

Is this how mental patients are to be handled? Why does Denver Health take the time and energy to bring these patients to Occupy Denver? At best, this is an awful, misguided, and irresponsible way to deal with patients who are exiting treatment. At worst, this is an attempt to ensure that Occupy Denver's encampment is kept populated with people who the City and the opposed public can then point to as creating "health and safety hazards".

People who have been at Occupy Denver for a while reported that this kind of scene is normal, and that this is apparently an ongoing practice of Denver Health. Amid the ongoing battle against the proposed Urban Camping Ban that the Denver City Council is pushing through despite a public outcry and a lack of public consultation, this is one more piece of evidence that Denver does not have the ability to deal with it's homeless population, and that no matter how the law changes, homeless persons will be hurt due to lack of services and alternatives.

We demand that the homeless issue be addressed properly, and that this practice of Denver Health be investigated.

According to a document from Washington D.C. Mayor Gray, he is requesting for the National Parks Service to remove occupiers from their encampment. This comes at a time when occupiers from around the nation are gathered in D.C. for what is known as Occupy Congress. According to the document, the Mayor cites safety and unsanitary conditions for the need to remove protestors from McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza in Washington D.C.

Critics have publicly condemned cities on their handling of Occupy evictions over the last two months. Jesse Jackson chastised Mayor Gray on Friday the 13th, and told POLITICO, "They should know that to remove the protestors, they will be expanding the tentacles of the movement."

POLITICO mentions the involvement of Interior Department Secretary in the assessment of the Occupy DC encampment:

In a letter to Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar Tuesday, Issa repeated an earlier request that the department provide the committee a slew of information about the D.C. Occupiers, including details of the National Park Service’s views on whether protesters in McPherson Square are violating the law and when, if ever, the agency will force protesters to leave the encampment.

Gray’s spokeswoman Doxie McCoy told POLITICO this week that McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza “were not rat-free prior to Occupy D.C.,” but that “there is evidence of increased rat presence in both locations” since the protesters took over the sites.

McCoy also emphasized that D.C. officials do not have the right to “actively remove” property of the protesters or officially inspect and shut down the demonstrations, citing federal jurisdiction over the two camps.

With law enforcement using questionable tactics it seems that the Occupy movement is generating a lot of fear that more people are waking up to the abuse of power and politics.