It's only been a day since Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi's security forces and anti-Morsi activists signed an agreement to end a week-long string of violence, but the two groups are already back at each other's throats. Security forces outside the Islamist president's palace walls fired tear gas and water cannons at protesters armed with Molotov cocktails Friday, as Morsi warned demonstrators to back off. In a message on his Facebook page, the president warned that his officers won't hesitate to act "firmly to apply the law."

More at Bloomberg News.

Thousands of people protested across Greece on Thursday against the next round of spending cuts, required in return for another bailout installment.

The 24-hour strike is the country's 20th national stoppage since the debt crisis erupted two years ago and comes as EU leaders met in Brussels.

Taxi drivers, doctors, teachers and air traffic controllers were among those taking part in the rallies.

Athens police used tear gas to disperse demonstrators throwing petrol bombs.

Syntagma Square was temporarily shut down but has since reopened to traffic; it was quite a small protest as Greek protests go and remained mainly peaceful,

Protesters threw petrol bombs and stones at police blocking off parts of the capital's main square before parliament. Officers responded with tear gas and stun grenades.

A 65-year-old man suffered a fatal heart attack during the demonstration, which was said not to be linked to the protests.

Continue reading »

Protests in Athens have turned violent as protesters clash with police on Wednesday. A demonstration outside of Parliament deteriorated when anarchists began throwing gasoline bombs and pieces of concrete at riot police. Police in turn fired tear gas at demonstrators. An estimated 50,000 people have joined the strike, which is the first trade union–led action since a conservative government came to power in June. Protesters have been demonstrating against planned spending cuts of $15 billion, which are required if Greece is to receive its next round of bailout funds, without which the country could go bankrupt in weeks.

Rioters stormed the U.S. embassy in Yemen on Thursday morning, breaching the wall of the embassy and setting fire to vehicles as security forces reportedly opened fire. Security forces managed to gain control of the compound in Sanaa by using the live ammunition, tear gas and water cannons, injuring several people, although protests continued outside the embassy walls. Protests have broken out throughout the Muslim world over an amateur U.S. film that depicts the prophet Muhammed as a fraud. In Cairo, protests continued for the third day on Thursday outside the U.S. embassy, with at least 10 people injured in overnight clashes. In Libya, the U.S. ambassador and three others were killed on Tuesday by riots over the film outside the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

U.S. officials say that it is "too early" to say who carried out the fatal attack in Benghazi, but members of both the House and Senate intelligence committees believe that it may well have been the work of al-Qaeda:

The attack in Libya that also killed three other U.S. personnel bore the hallmarks of al-Qaeda and may have been carried out by the group’s North Africa affiliate to mark the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S., said Michigan Republican Representative Mike Rogers, chairman of the House intelligence committee.

“It certainly appears to me the significance of this date was important,” Rogers told CNN yesterday. Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who heads the Senate intelligence panel, also told the network the attack may have been premeditated.

It may have been the work of al-Qaeda because “the weapons were somewhat sophisticated, and they blew a hole in the building and started a big fire, and that’s how the ambassador died, in a fire,” Feinstein said.

There is also a possibility that the attack was "planned," and that the protest was either a ruse, or the attackers took advantage of the protest as a distraction from their activities :

The chaotic scene was described by senior Obama administration officials, Libyan government officials and witnesses. Details about the attack were still emerging late Wednesday. Key facts remain unclear, particularly how Stevens died and how his body wound up at a Benghazi hospital.

Even as evidence was being assembled, the early indications were that the assault had been planned and the attackers had cannily taken advantage of the protest at the consulate.

“Was this a spontaneous act of violence, was this capitalizing on the opportunity posed by [a protest], or was this separate and apart from al-Qaeda?” asked Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), a member of the House intelligence committee. “Any of those are possible,” Schiff said, but accounts of the attack and the firepower employed “indicate something more than a spontaneous protest.”

In response, the Pentagon has ordered two warships to the Libyan coast which carry Tomahawk cruise missiles, although they have no specific mission at this time.

A police shooting that left a man dead led to a near-riot Saturday as angry witnesses threw bottles at officers who responded with tear gas and beanbag rounds.

The man was shot around 4 p.m. in front of an apartment complex on the 600 block of North Anna Drive following a foot chase, Anaheim Sgt. Bob Dunn said. He died three hours later at a hospital.

Said Susan Lopez, “I had my baby with me. My baby! The dog scratched me and then grabbed me.” She added, “They shot at me while I was holding a baby!” Another woman yelled, “They just shot at us, they shot at a little kid, too.”

According to police, two patrol officers observed three male suspects in an alley.

Police said the suspects tried to flee on foot when a chase ensued.

Four people claimed that police offered to buy their cell phone video.

[Via]

This week, a group of clergy in San Francisco removed $10 million from Wells Fargo with an Ash Wednesday press conference calling on the bank to put an immediate freeze on its foreclosures and repent for their misconduct.

Think Progress has the full story here.

"Anonymous" has been exceptionally busy of late. This week, they hacked into the L.A. county police and sheriff databases, replacing them with contact information and nude pictures.

The Occupied Wall Street Journal has an in-depth piece on the different levels of lethality of tear gas, and the companies that manufacture it.

What Big Banker ran up a $133.54 tab and left the waitress only a 1 percent tip, and a note that said "GET A REAL JOB."?

Continue reading »

Citing Oakland Police's continued use of violent tactics against Occupy Oakland, the hacktivist group known as Anonymous has published sensitive personal information of several Oakland government employees and officials.

The cyber attack was announced on Twitter, with Anonymous posting links to a statement published on Pastebin. (Sorry, I'm not going to link to the information site.)

"Anonymous has been watching. Since the inception of Occupy Oakland, We have been actively monitoring your behavior, and exposing the identities and sensitive information of Officers of the Oakland Police Department; as they have continued to act in an unprofessional and violent manner. You tear gassed Us. You shot Us with your weapons."

"You arrested Us. You beat Us. You also did this to Our Friends, and to Our Families. We watched as you cut budgets, cut Our jobs, closed Our schools, Our parks, and Our libraries, while leaving your own salaries alone."

"The people on this list are supposed to represent the best of what the City of Oakland has to offer. If they are the best, why is there so much trouble within the Police Department, and in the City of Oakland?"

[Photo via Flickr]

By: Joshua Holland

Downtown Oakland turned ugly once again on Saturday, as Occupy activists attempting to squat in a long-abandoned city building were met by lines of heavily-armored riot police. Police officials said that 400 arrests followed – a number that may represent as much as 30 percent of everyone who participated in the day's actions, according to police estimates of the crowd's size.

Occupy Oakland organizers said some protesters were hospitalized, but the exact number of injuries is unknown as if this writing. According to organizers, four journalists were swept up by police, including AlterNet contributor Susie Cagle and Mother Jones correspondent Gavin Aronsen. Cagle was reportedly cited and released; organizers say Aronsen was jailed overnight (update: Aronsen tells us that he was released last night).

It was, once again, a tale of two protests. Accounts in the corporate media relied primarily on police statements to paint protesters as wild animals running amok in the city, while those following the day's events via a small group of “citizen-journalists” broadcasting raw, unedited footage from their cell-phones and flip-cams got a wildly divergent view of exactly how things escalated.

A livestream offered by Occupy Oakland's Mark Mason and Chris Krakauer showed protesters approaching the Henry Kaiser Convention Center in the early afternoon, where they were greeted by skirmish lines of police clad in riot gear. At one point, Mason, narrating as he moved through the crowd, could be heard saying, “uh-oh, some people are throwing things at the cops,” before moving away from the front-lines. Later, an Occupier visiting from Los Angeles told Mason of confronting one of the protesters who had thrown an object at police. “That's just stupid, you know,” said the young woman. “And she threw it from the middle of the crowd, which just puts people in the front in danger.”

Police declared the protest an unlawful assembly, and soon afterward, a series of explosions could be heard on the livestream as police deployed either teargas canisters or “flash-bang” grenades to disperse the crowd. This appears to be a violation of the Oakland Police Department's (OPD) own crowd-control guidelines, which were drawn up as part of a settlement of a 2003 suit filed by the National Lawyers Guild and the ACLU of Northern California after a case in which OPD used an abundance of violence against peaceful protesters demonstrating against the invasion of Iraq.

Read the full article at Alternet.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of Drop him anThe 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy: And Everything else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America.

Clashes in Oakland: 400 Arrests, Tear Gas, Flash-Bang Grenades
Posted on Jan 29, 2012, Source: AlterNet

[Photo via Flickr from Saturday at Occupy Oakland.]

There were 300 arrests Saturday at Occupy Oakland during a planned week-long festival that included "occupying" a vacant building and establishing a community center there.

[Photo via Flickr]

LAT:

Dozens of police maintained a late-night guard around City Hall in Oakland, California, following daylong protests that resulted in 300 arrests. Earlier, Occupy Oakland demonstrators broke into the historic building and burned a U.S. flag, and officers earlier fired tear gas to disperse people throwing rocks and tearing down fencing at a convention center.

Saturday's protests -- the most turbulent since Oakland police forcefully dismantled an Occupy encampment in November -- came just days after the group said it planned to use a vacant building as a social center and political hub and threatened to try to shut down the port, occupy the airport and take over City Hall.

An exasperated Mayor Jean Quan, who faced heavy criticism for the police action last fall, called on the Occupy movement to "stop using Oakland as its playground."

[Scott Olsen at Occupy Oakland Saturday via Flickr]

Continue reading »

Update: Confirmation - Occupiers broke in to City Hall this evening and an American flag was burned. Pictures and livestream here.

People, Fox News is going to love this, do you know that?

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Update: Spencer was invited to film from inside an apartment near the YMCA, and we're now watching bus after bus of arrested protesters being hauled away. Police are eating Chinese food on the back of their police cruisers.

Working now to confirm that some of the protesters broke into City Hall, and that an American flag was burned.
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Update: Susie Cagle was arrested and has been unarrested already, you can follow her on Twitter @susie_c.

Update: Some official with the police department made a statement that I think was going out to the msm (sorry, they don't identify themselves for us following at home) that no occupiers have been injured. That the people carried away on stretchers were police, and that 3 total police were injured. Those chatting on the livestream site are strongly disagreeing with that statement. Arrests are continuing.

Update: Via Livestream and Spencer Mills, Graphic journalist Susie Cagle was arrested, and he is taking down names of as many of the arrested as possible. Injuries, although I can't see how bad, but there have been ambulances called in. One person from Occupy Portland among the arrested. Another Twitter report that claims possibly a journalist with a pair of expensive looking cameras was beaten by police with batons and taken away.

This has been going on all day, folks, it's just unreal. This is America?
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Update: Oakland Police just started announcing that everyone is under arrest for "failing to disperse." This is taking place in front of a YMCA. Police also telling protesters that they must submit to the arrest. There are over 2,000 protesters by all media accounts, that's going to be a lot of arrests. I can hear shots being fired now, batons are out, and they're arresting those they can catch at the moment.

More soon....

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Spencer Mills on Livestream, as long as it lasts. I can fill in more details as I find them. Just getting home and someone sent me the livestream, seems the Oakland cops have totally lost it today. There are confirmed reports of tear gas, flash grenades, rubber bullets, and they are now kettling protesters and (now this is unconfirmed) searching out people with cameras.

See here.

CNN

Reuters

I've never seen such a violent police action continue so long against a group, especially a group of peaceful protesters. Will update more soon, let's just get this up for you to see.