Hundreds of police barricaded the New York Stock Exchange as Occupy Wall Street protesters swarmed the Financial District for the movement's one-year anniversary, with over 180 reportedly arrested.
Police made 180 arrests by Monday evening, primarily for "disorderly conduct" or impeding "vehicular or pedestrian traffic."
Witnesses had previously reported on Twitter that demonstrators were being arrested for "blocking pedestrian traffic." A well known local artist named Molly Crapabble was sitting in a police van when she wrote on her Twitter page that people were being "yanked off of the sidewalk" by police.
The final tally will ultimately be higher, as at least seven people were arrested after falling on the Bank of America building later in the afternoon. Several more arrests were subsequently reported after demonstrators marched to the World Financial Center in lower Manhattan and the adjacent Goldman Sachs Tower. Around half a dozen protesters staged a sit-in protest outside of the Goldman Sachs headquarters and refused orders by police to disperse.
During a private fundraiser earlier this year, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney told a small group of wealthy contributors what he truly thinks of all the voters who support President Barack Obama. He dismissed these Americans as freeloaders who pay no taxes, who don't assume responsibility for their lives, and who think government should take care of them. Fielding a question from a donor about how he could triumph in November, Romney replied:
There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what...These are people who pay no income tax.
© TIME/Facts Global Energy
Comment: Lindsey Williams: "The most significant day in the history of the American dollar, since its inception, happened on Thursday, Sept. 6. On that day, something took place that is going to affect your life, your family, your dinner table more than you can possibly imagine."
"On Thursday, Sept. 6... just a few days ago, China made the official announcement. China said on that day, our banking system is ready, all of our communication systems are ready, all of the transfer systems are ready, and as of that day, Thursday, Sept. 6, any nation in the world that wishes from this point on, to buy, sell, or trade crude oil, can do using the Chinese currency, not the American dollar. - Interview with Natty Bumpo on the Just Measures Radio network, Sept. 11
This announcement by China is one of the most significant sea changes in the global economic and monetary systems, but was barely reported on due to its announcement taking place during the Democratic convention last week. The ramifications of this new action are vast, and could very well be the catalyst that brings down the dollar as the global reserve currency, and change the entire landscape of how the world purchases energy.
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Judge Katherine Forrest issued a ruling that permanently blocked a section of the National Defense Authorization Act signed by President Barack Obama at the end of last year authorizing the detention of US citizens accused of supporting terror groups.
The suit was brought by activists, including former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges and outspoken academic Noam Chomsky, who said the law was vague and could be used to curtail reporters' and other civilian citizens' right to free speech guaranteed under the US Constitution's First Amendment.
© Rajput Yasir/Demotix/Corbis
An anti-US protest in Pakistan. The poll found 78% of Pakistanis did not trust America to act responsibly.
An anti-US protest in Pakistan. The poll found 78% of Pakistanis did not trust America to act responsibly.
Suspicion of America outweighed faith in its good intentions by large margins in the Arab world and Pakistan, and even its heavyweight European ally Germany was more sceptical than trusting, a YouGov survey found. British and French opinion was more positive but still deeply divided.
Negative Arab and Pakistani perceptions of America as overweening and untrustworthy clearly pose a daunting foreign policy challenge for the Obama administration. The fact that 78% of Pakistanis questioned by YouGov said they did not trust America to act responsibly underlines Washington's serious lack of soft power in the region as it attempts to extricate itself from Afghanistan.
Attitudes towards the US in the Arab world were nearly as negative. Those respondents in the Middle East and north Africa who said they trusted America were outnumbered by more than two to one by those who said they did not, and 39% said they did not trust America at all.
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A recently released FBI 'primer' revealed some of the 'advanced interrogation methods' in use
A recently released FBI 'primer' revealed some of the 'advanced interrogation methods' in use
A 2011 FBI "primer" on overseas interrogations, which became public on August 2, 2012, as a result of Freedom of Information Act action taken by the American Civil Liberties Union, repeatedly cites the Central Intelligence Agency's 1963 KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation. KUBARK was the code name the CIA used for itself.
The FBI briefing also cites the CIA's 1983 Human Resource Exploitation Manual (Honduras version) which was compiled by sections of KUBARK to train interrogators in the art of obtaining intelligence from "resistant sources". This was disseminated to the intelligence services of right-wing regimes in Latin America and south-east Asia in the context of the global "war on communism". In the mid-1980s, these manuals became the subject of Congressional investigations into US-supported atrocities in Central America. Both became public in 1997 as a result of FOIA action by the Baltimore Sun.
The FBI primer favourably invokes the KUBARK manual as a resource to illustrate the value of isolation "for several days before you begin interrogation" as well as during the "multi-session, multi-day process" as a means of prolonging a prisoner's fear prior to interrogation. The encouragement of fear-production through isolation is disturbing for (at least) two reasons. First, it indicates that some elements of the CIA's psychological torture model continue to have currency, despite the scandalous record of US prisoner abuse in the "war on terror" and the Obama administration's pledge to end torture.
© Flickr/US Army
US Soldiers jog by a guard tower at Camp Delta in 2010.
US Soldiers jog by a guard tower at Camp Delta in 2010.
What a difference four years makes.
In 2008, Democrats were eager to draw a contrast with what they then portrayed as Republican excesses in the fight against Al Qaeda. Since then, the Obama administration has in many cases continued the national security policies of its predecessor - and the Democratic Party's 2012 platform highlights this reversal, abandoning much of the substance and all of the bombast of the 2008 platform. Here are a few places where the differences are most glaring:
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A US drone strike in eastern Yemen on Sunday was claimed by a security official to have killed six suspected Islamist militants. The Yemeni government has contradicted this, saying the intended target was 'completely missed', and 13 civilians were killed instead.
A US drone strike in eastern Yemen on Sunday was claimed by a security official to have killed six suspected Islamist militants. The Yemeni government has contradicted this, saying the intended target was 'completely missed', and 13 civilians were killed instead.
For several decades, protection of whistleblowers has been a core political value for Democrats, at least for progressives. Daniel Ellsberg has long been viewed by liberals as an American hero for his disclosure of the top secret Pentagon Papers. In 2008, candidate Obama hailed whistleblowing as "acts of courage and patriotism", which "should be encouraged rather than stifled as they have been during the Bush administration".
President Obama, however, has waged the most aggressive and vindictive assault on whistleblowers of any president in American history, as even political magazines generally supportive of him have recognized and condemned. One might think that, as the party's faithful gather to celebrate the greatness of this leader, this fact would be a minor problem, a source of some tension between Obama and his hardest-core supporters, perhaps even some embarrassment. One would be wrong.
Far from shying away from this record of persecuting whistleblowers, the Obama campaign is proudly boasting of it. A so-called "Truth Team" of the Obama/Biden 2012 campaign issued a document responding to allegations that the Obama White House has leaked classified information in order to glorify the president:
Back in December 2011 during a campaign stop in New Hampshire, Mitt Romney decided to drop by Vietnam War veteran Bob Garon's breakfast table for a quick photo-op. What Romney didn't realize is that Garon was sitting with his husband, whom he had married just a few months earlier.
What followed might be the single greatest "oblivious Romney" moment of the entire campaign. Enjoy.
What followed might be the single greatest "oblivious Romney" moment of the entire campaign. Enjoy.
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Tony Blair arrives at the Royal Courts of Justice in London to give evidence on media ethics to the Leveson inquiry in May 2012.
Tony Blair arrives at the Royal Courts of Justice in London to give evidence on media ethics to the Leveson inquiry in May 2012.
For years it seems impregnable, then suddenly the citadel collapses. An ideology, a fact, a regime appears fixed, unshakeable, almost geological. Then an inch of mortar falls, and the stonework begins to slide. Something of this kind happened over the weekend.
When Desmond Tutu wrote that Tony Blair should be treading the path to The Hague, he de-normalised what Blair has done. Tutu broke the protocol of power - the implicit accord between those who flit from one grand meeting to another - and named his crime. I expect that Blair will never recover from it.
The offence is known by two names in international law: the crime of aggression and a crime against peace. It is defined by the Nuremberg principles as the "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression". This means a war fought for a purpose other than self-defence: in other words outwith articles 33 and 51 of the UN Charter.
