Results tagged “g20”

On Monday, the Allegheny County District Attorney dropped all charges against two Jackson Heights-based anarchists accused of listening to police scanners and sharing riot cops' movements with demonstrators on Twitter during the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh. Elliot Madison and Michael Wallschlaeger were arrested on September 24th in a Pittsburgh hotel room, where they were found sitting in front of personal computers listening to both police and EMS scanners. On Monday, lawyers for the men were poised to argue for the unsealing of a secret 18-page affidavit authorizing the raid, but then the prosecution unexpectedly withdrew all charges. A spokesman for the district attorney offered this explanation:

After an extensive review of the facts and circumstances underlying those two arrests... there appears to be sufficient evidence to suggest that certain acts that occurred during the G-20 summit were not isolated incidents confined to Allegheny County but instead may have been related to more expansive activities that went beyond the Pittsburgh G-20 in both time and substance. That being the case, a determination was made that until further investigative activities by law enforcement agencies can be completed, it would be more prudent to have the current charges withdrawn rather than prosecuted at this time.

Allen Weber says he went to Pittsburgh last month to photograph the street protests at the G20 summit, but police say he behaved like just another anarchist. According to Pittsburgh police Officer Brian Nicholas, Weber was one of hundreds of demonstrators gathered in a plaza on the evening of September 24th, after police had ordered everyone to disperse. Nicholas was in the front seat of an armored SWAT truck, and he dropped a smoke grenade from the truck, about 15 feet from the crowd.

That's right, a Twitter crackdown. A lawyer for Jackson Heights social worker Elliot Madison, 41, says that the feds searched his client's house for 16 hours on Thursday after Madison was arrested on September 24th at a Pittsburgh hotel room with another man. What were they up to? Sitting at laptops sending Twitter messages advising G20 demonstrators about riot police activity in the streets. And yet real Twitter threats like Lindsay Lohan and Courtney Love remain at large.

Have you seen this intense outtake from Children of Men, showing riot police blasting "fugees" with some sort of horrible "sound cannon"? Oh, actually, this isn't from a fictional movie about a dystopian police state; it's from last week in Pittsburgh, where G20 protesters had dared assemble without a permit from the government. For that, they were dispersed with the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), which some fear is loud enough to damage eardrums and even cause fatal aneurysms. Like Freedom Rock, you really need to turn it up, man:

       

Protester (though not as many as the reported 4,000 from yesterday) appeared for another day of criticizing world policies and promoting other messages as the Group of 20 leaders met again in London. The G20 just announced a trillion-dollar plan for the International Monetary Fund: The Wall Street Journal explains that the IMF's lending power is now tripled to $750 billion and another $250 billion will be added to the reserve currency "to boost liquidity in the global financial system by expanding member countries' foreign exchange reserves. [The leaders also] committed to selling IMF gold to help poor countries."

       

Thousands of protesters marched in London as world leaders convene for the Group of 20 conference, where the economic crisis will be the main topic. President Barack Obama met with Prime Minister Gordon Brown before the meeting; the NY Times reports that Obama "denied there is a rift between America and the world on Wednesday and urged leaders of the Group of 20 countries to act in unison to find a way out of the global economic crisis," with the president saying, "Nearly every country engaged here has done a fiscal stimulus. We can only meet this challenge together... I came here to put forward ideas but I also came here to listen, not to lecture. Having said that, we must not miss an opportunity to lead, to confront a crisis that knows no borders.”

       

World leaders convening for the G20 summit agreed they will "do more" (in the worlds of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown) to help bolster their economics and the global economy as a whole--not that they had any other choice. However, the NY Times reports, "they put off thornier decisions about how to overhaul financial regulations until next year, providing a serious early challenge for the Obama administration."