NEW YORK (AP) — A protest against embattled Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh outside a luxury hotel in New York got heated Sunday when demonstrators saw him leave the building, with one charging toward him and another throwing a shoe.
"Everybody is living in fear of this guy at home, but here, he's getting good treatment!" said Yemeni immigrant Nasser Almroot, a Brooklyn grocer.
The dozen angry protesters were kept behind police barricades across the street from the Ritz-Carlton hotel, which was teeming with security guards, both inside and on the sidewalk where Saleh passed.
The 69-year-old leader is visiting the United States for medical treatment.
Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh waves to people protesting his presence in the United States as he exits his hotel in New York, Sunday, Feb. 5, 2012. Saleh arrived in the United States on Saturday, Jan. 28, 2012, for treatment of burns he suffered during an assassination attempt in June. Human Rights Watch, a New York-based human rights organization says it has documented the deaths of hundreds of anti-government protesters in confrontations with Saleh's security forces, and while they are not opposed to Saleh receiving care in the United States, the organization wants assurances that concerned governments will insist on prosecution for those responsible for last year's attacks. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
He exited the hotel on Central Park South on Sunday afternoon and waved and smiled sardonically toward the yelling protesters — even blowing them a kiss. Suddenly, one of them tried to charge across the street but was restrained by police, who wrestled him to the ground.
"He can't help it, the killer is here," Almroot said.
As the man bolted out, a shoe flew in Saleh's direction. Showing the sole of a shoe is an insult in Arab culture, because it is on the lowest part of the body, the foot. To hit someone with a shoe is seen as even worse.
Saleh got into his car and his motorcade left for an unknown destination.
Since he arrived in New York about a week ago, the Yemeni president has kept a low profile.
His presence, however, has been controversial.
On Sunday, the protesters hoisted placards bearing photos of Yemenis badly bloodied and brutally killed during his government's yearlong crackdown on anti-Saleh demonstrations.
Saleh signed a deal in November to transfer power to his vice president in exchange for immunity from prosecution.
An election is scheduled for Feb. 21 to select his successor in a nation mired in poverty and divided among powerful tribes and political factions.
While Saleh has been an anti-terrorism ally of Washington, the United States has not officially welcomed a leader accused of killing hundreds of people during an uprising against his 33-year rule.
Saleh traveled to the United States with permission for a private visit.
In June, he was badly injured in an attack on his presidential palace — an assassination attempt after which he spent months in Saudi Arabia being treated for massive burns from the explosion that ripped through his palace mosque as he prayed.
A world-renowned burn center is in Manhattan, at the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. Hospital officials have not confirmed whether Saleh was a patient there.
TIME magazine names you who've joined Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, etc. – "The Protester" – as PERSON OF THE YEAR! Each one of you who've gone to an #OWS demonstration, camped out illegally, spoken out against corporate greed, switched to a credit union ... Every one of you who've told your friends, your co-workers, your neighbors -- "THAT'S IT, I'VE HAD ENOUGH OF GREED"
LOS ANGELES (AP) — More than 1,400 police officers, some in riot gear, cleared the Occupy Los Angeles camp early Wednesday, driving protesters from a park around City Hall and arresting more than 200 who defied orders to leave. Similar raids in Philadelphia led to 52 arrests, but the scene in both cities was relatively peaceful.
Police arrest a member of Occupy Philly, Wednesday Nov. 30, 2011, in Philadelphia, after a small group refused to clear a street while police cleared the encampment at Dilworth Plaza. Police began pulling down tents early Wednesday after telling demonstrators they had to leave. (AP Photo/ Joseph Kaczmarek)
Police in Los Angeles and Philadelphia moved in on Occupy Wall Street encampments under darkness in an effort to clear out some of the longest-lasting protest sites since crackdowns ended similar occupations across the country.
Beanbags fired from shotguns were used to subdue the final three protesters in a makeshift tree house outside Los Angeles City Hall, police Cmdr. Andrew Smith said, describing it as a minor use of force incident. No serious injuries were reported.
Police Chief Charlie Beck praised the officers and the protesters for their restraint and the peaceful way the eviction was carried out.
Officers flooded down the steps of City Hall just after midnight and started dismantling the two-month-old camp two days after a deadline passed for campers to leave the park. Officers in helmets and wielding batons and guns with rubber bullets converged on the park from all directions with military precision and began making arrests after several orders were given to leave.
There were no injuries and no drugs or weapons were found during a search of the emptied camp, which was strewn with trash after the raid. City workers put up concrete barriers to wall off the park while it is restored. As of 5:10 a.m. PST, the park was clear of protesters, said LAPD officer Cleon Joseph.
The raid in Los Angeles came after demonstrators with the movement in Philadelphia marched through the streets after being evicted from their site. Over 40 protesters were arrested after refusing to clear a street several blocks northeast of City Hall, said Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey. They were lined up in cuffs and loaded on to buses by officers. Six others were arrested earlier after remaining on a street that police tried to clear.
"The police officers who were involved in this operation were hand-picked for this assignment," Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter said. "They're highly trained and disciplined and showed a tremendous amount of restraint and professionalism in carrying out this morning's operation."
Nutter said the eviction had been planned for several weeks and went off without largely without problems.
Ramsey said he would have preferred to evict the protesters without making arrests, but some refused orders to clear the street and had to be taken into custody. Three officers had minor injuries. One protester was injured when a police horse stepped on her foot, Nutter said.
The Philadelphia protesters were ordered to clear their encampment in part because a $50 million renovation project was due to start at the City Hall plaza this fall.
"Dilworth Plaza was designated as a construction site," Ramsey said. "They had to vacate. They knew that from the very beginning."
Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa raised public safety and health concerns in announcing plans for the eviction last week, while Philadelphia officials said protesters must clear their site to make room for a $50 million renovation project.
By dawn in Los Angeles, trash, flattened tents and the stench of urine were the Occupy LA legacy.
City crews were installing chain link fence and concrete barricades around once-lush lawns that are now patches of dirt strewn with tons of debris, including clothing, tents, bedding shoes, trash and two months of human flotsam. Under a tree was a guitar, a bullhorn, CDs and a black bandanna.
Defiant Los Angeles campers who were chanting slogans as the officers surrounded the park, booed when an unlawful assembly was declared, paving the way for officers to begin arresting those who didn't leave.
In the first moments of the raid, officers tore down a tent and tackled a tattooed man with a camera on City Hall steps and wrestled him to the ground. Someone yelled "police brutality."
Teams of four or five officers moved through the crowd making arrests one at a time, cuffing the hands of protesters with white plastic zip-ties. A circle of protesters sat with arms locked, many looking calm and smiling.
Opamago Cascini, 29, said the night had been a blast and he was willing to get arrested.
"It's easy to talk the talk, but you gotta walk the walk," Cascini said.
Police used a cherry picker to pluck five men from trees. Two others were in a tree house — one wore a crown and another taunted police with an American flag.
In Philadelphia, police began pulling down tents at about 1:20 a.m. EST after giving demonstrators three warnings that they would have to leave, which nearly all of the protesters followed. Dozens of demonstrators then began marching through the streets and continued through the night.
Ramsey said breaking up the camp in the early-morning hours helped minimize any disruption to businesses and traffic.
"We acknowledge the fact that we are going to have to leave this space .... but in another sense this has been our home for almost two months and no one wants to see their home taken away from them," Philadelphia protester Bri Barton, 22, said before police began clearing out the camp.
"Whether or not we have this space or work in the city is nowhere near done," she said.
The eviction overall appeared to have been carried out without any significant scuffles or violence.
Later Wednesday morning, workers used front-end loaders to scoop up tents, trash and other debris and dump it into trucks to be hauled away, while others swept the plaza clean.
Demonstrators and city officials in both Los Angeles and Philadelphia were hoping any confrontation would be nonviolent, unlike evictions at similar camps around the country that sometimes involved pepper spray and tear gas. The movement against economic disparity and perceived corporate greed began with Occupy Wall Street in Manhattan two months ago.
The Los Angeles officers staged for hours outside Dodger Stadium before the raid. They were warned that demonstrators might throw everything from concrete and gravel to human feces at them.
"Please put your face masks down and watch each other's back," a supervisor told them. "Now go to work."
The officers came from a wide range of specialized units within the force, including the bomb squad, and the arson unit. Scores of officers in hazmat suits also were sent in to deal with potentially unsanitary conditions in the park.
Before police arrived in large numbers, protesters were upbeat and the mood was almost festive. A protester in a Santa Claus hat danced in the street. A woman showed off the reindeer antlers she had mounted on her gas mask.
On Friday 18th of November, 2011, Lt. John Pike unwittingly kick-started an Internet phenomenon, when he was filmed pepper-spraying peaceful protesters at a campus at the University of California (UC).
The campus police had apparently been instructed by the UC Davis Chancellor, Linda Katehi, to remove tents from the campus, but she said she hadn’t given any directions on forcibly removing the protesters, who were sitting in as part of theOccupy Movement, a global protest aimed at social and economic inequality.
Whilst the campus police chief, Annette Spicuzza, has been placed on ‘administrative leave’, two policemen (including Lt. Pike) have already been placed on leave too following the pepper-spraying incident at UC.
The many wrongs of the incident speak for themselves, and everyone will have their own opinions on what happened at UC last week. But what has followed on from this is really quite remarkable. The whole Internet has been talking about the pepper-spraying cop – but why?
The footage that emerged from UC last Friday showed a string of protesters sitting, arms interlocked refusing to move, and then ‘wham!’, Pike unleashed his orange spray directly in their faces, as nonchalant as you like. Yes, it was absolutely shocking, but the manner in which he did it, it was only a matter of time before the parodies started.
A myriad of mock-ups then emerged online, portraying a maniacal pepper-spraying cop, hell-bent on attacking everyone and everything in sight. There was the Pepper Spraying Cop on Twitter, for starters, dishing out comedic nuggets such as: “After spending all my time in parents’ basement, being around that many women led to premature pepper spray release.” And then there’s the most recent one:
There’s this WordPress blog, called Pikes Corner, which has its own ‘humourous’ pepper-spraying-cop offering to share with the world.
But probably the best example of how one gung-ho cop has been transformed into a bona-fide Internet meme, is the plethora of Photoshopped (actually, maybe best not using that word as you’ll see here) images placing Pike in a range of famous scenes, the best of which can be found on this Tumblr blog. So Neil Armstrong thinks he’s safe from Pike’s pepper-spraying ways, 400,000km away on the moon’s surface? Think again:
As everyone will agree, there’s nothing funny about what happened at UC. But the manner in which Pike so casually pepper-sprayed the protesters as though he was cleaning his car lends itself to being parodied. It was that ridiculous.
Some may question whether it’s correct to lampoon what would’ve been a horrific situation for those involved. But satire, since the beginning of time, has always been closely intertwined with tragedy and unpleasant events. And laughter is what people use to counteract the bad guys with – especially when the crime in question is so blatant and can’t be disputed.
The vision of Pike ambling along a line of protesters, perhaps even whistling thetheme-tune to MASH in his head, is iconic. It’s something that has entered folklore and we’ll likely see popping up in countless comedy situations in the future.
A woman who was pepper sprayed during during a raid on Occupy Seattle last week is blaming police after she miscarried Sunday.
Jennifer Fox, 19, told The Stranger that she had been with the Occupy protests since they started in Westlake Park. She said she was homeless and three months pregnant, but felt the need to join activists during their march last Tuesday.
“I was standing in the middle of the crowd when the police started moving in,” Fox recalled. “I was screaming, ‘I am pregnant, I am pregnant. Let me through. I am trying to get out.’”
She claimed that police hit her in the stomach twice before pepper spraying her. One officer struck her with his foot and another pushed his bicycle into her. It wasn’t clear if either of those incidents were intentional.
“Right before I turned, both cops lifted their pepper spray and sprayed me. My eyes puffed up and my eyes swelled shut,” Fox said.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer photographer Joshua Trujillo snapped a picture of Fox in apparent agony as another activist carried her to an ambulance.
Seattle fire department spokesman Kyle Moore told The Washington Post that a 19-year-old pregnant woman was among those that were examined by paramedics.
While doctors at Harborview Medical Center didn’t see any problems at the time, things took a turn for the worst Sunday.
“Everything was going okay until yesterday, when I started getting sick, cramps started, and I felt like I was going to pass out,” she explained.
When Fox arrived at the hospital, doctors told her that the baby had no heartbeat.
“They diagnosed that I was having a miscarriage. They said the damage was from the kick and that the pepper spray got to it [the fetus], too,” she said.
“I was worried about it [when I joined the protests], but I didn’t know it would be this bad. I didn’t know that a cop would murder a baby that’s not born yet… I am trying to get lawyers.”
The Scoville heat chart indicates that U.S. grade pepper spray is ten times more painful than the blistering hot habanero pepper, according toScientific American. While law enforcement officials regulary claim that the spray is safe,researchers at the University of North Carolina and Duke University found that it could “produce adverse cardiac, respiratory, and neurologic effects, including arrhythmias and sudden death.”
Watch this video from IowaBoyDave, uploaded to YouTube Nov. 21, 2011.
The memo indicates that CLGC would research who has contributed financial backing to OWS, noting that, “Media reports have speculated about associations with George Soros and others.”
"It will be vital,” the memo says, “to understand who is funding it and what their backgrounds and motives are. If we can show that they have the same cynical motivation as a political opponent it will undermine their credibility in a profound way.”
NEW YORK (AP) — Hundreds of police officers in riot gear raided Zuccotti Park early Tuesday, evicting dozens of Occupy Wall Street protesters from what has become the epicenter of the worldwide movement protesting corporate greed and economic inequality.
An Occupy Wall Street protester yells out at police after being ordered to leave Zuccotti Park, their longtime encampment in New York, early Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2011. At about 1 a.m. Tuesday, police handed out notices from the park's owner, Brookfield Office Properties, and the city saying that the park had to be cleared because it had become unsanitary and hazardous. Protesters were told they could return, but without sleeping bags, tarps or tents. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)
Hours later, the National Lawyers Guild obtained a court order allowing Occupy Wall Street protesters to return with tents to the park. The guild said the injunction prevents the city from enforcing park rules on Occupy Wall Street protesters.
At a morning news conference at City Hall, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the city knew about the court order but had not seen it and would go to court to fight it. He said the city wants to protect people's rights, but if a choice must be made, it will protect public safety.
About 70 people were arrested overnight, including some who chained themselves together, while officers cleared the park so that sanitation crews could clean it.
By 9 a.m., the park was power-washed clean. Police in riot gear still ringed the public space, waiting for orders to reopen it.
The city told protesters at the two-month-old encampment they could come back after the cleaning, but under new tougher rules, including no tents, sleeping bags or tarps, which would effectively put an end to the encampment if enforced.
Bloomberg said the evacuation was conducted in the middle of the night "to reduce the risk of confrontation in the park, and to minimize disruption to the surrounding neighborhood."
"The law that created Zuccotti Park required that it be open for the public to enjoy for passive recreation 24 hours a day," Bloomberg said. "Ever since the occupation began, that law has not been complied with, as the park has been taken over by protesters, making it unavailable to anyone else."
Concerns about health and safety issues at Occupy Wall Street camps around the country have intensified, and protesters have been ordered to take down their shelters, adhere to curfews and relocate so that parks can be cleaned.
Hundreds of former Zuccotti Park residents and their supporters marched along Lower Manhattan before dawn Tuesday.
Some paused and locked arms outside the City Hall gates but left peacefully when police in riot gear appeared on the scene. About 300 to 400 kept moving along the sidewalks, taking care not to block them.
Some were chanting, "This is what democracy looks like."
Others chanted: "Hey, hey, ho, ho, our billionaire mayor has got to go."
At about 1 a.m. Tuesday, New York City police handed out notices from Brookfield Office Properties, owner of Zuccotti Park, and the city saying that the park had to be cleared because it had become unsanitary and hazardous.
Paul Browne, a spokesman for the New York Police Department, said the park had been cleared by 4:30 a.m. and that about 70 people who'd been inside it had been arrested, including a group who chained themselves together. One person was taken to a hospital for evaluation because of breathing problems.
Police in riot gear filled the streets, car lights flashing and sirens blaring. Protesters, some of whom shouted angrily at police, began marching to two locations in Lower Manhattan where they planned to hold rallies.
Some protesters refused to leave the park, but many left peacefully.
Ben Hamilton, 29, said he was arrested "and I was just trying to get away" from the fray.
Rabbi Chaim Gruber, an Occupy Wall Street member, said police officers were clearing the streets near Zuccotti Park.
"The police are forming a human shield, and are pushing everyone away," he said.
Hundreds of police officers surrounded the park in riot gear with plastic shields across their faces, holding plastic shields and batons which were used on some cases on protesters.
Police also came armed with klieg lights, which they used to flood the park, and bull horns to announce that everyone had to clear out.
Jake Rozak, another protester, said police "had their pepper spray out and were ready to use it."
Notices given to the protesters said the park "poses an increasing health and fire safety hazard to those camped in the park, the city's first responders and the surrounding community."
It said that tents, sleeping bags and other items had to be removed because "the storage of these materials at this location is not allowed." Anything left behind would be taken away, the notices said, giving an address at a sanitation department building where items could be picked up.
Alex Hall, 21, of Brooklyn, said police walked into the park "stepping on tents and ripping them out."
Occupy encampments have come under fire around the country as local officials and residents have complained about possible health hazards and ongoing inhabitation of parks and other public spaces.
Anti-Wall Street activists intend to converge at the University of California, Berkeley on Tuesday for a day of protests and another attempt to set up an Occupy Cal camp, less than a week after police arrested dozens of protesters who tried to pitch tents on campus.
The Berkeley protesters will be joined by Occupy Oakland activists who said they would march to the UC campus in the afternoon. Police cleared the tent city in front of Oakland City Hall before dawn Monday and arrested more than 50 people amid complaints about safety, sanitation and drug use.
