I thought this article was interesting because it considers the role of the media during wartime. Should the newspapers protect the American armies’ interests by not exposing photos that can put soldiers at risk? On the other hand, it is important for journalists is to report the truth as it is…
From one of Ned’s favorite research/ think tank organizations. It would be wise to read over.
http://blogs.cfr.org/renewing-america/2012/02/27/free-trade-and-jobs/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/9200957/UN-world-is-watching-Syria-with-sceptical-eyes.html
The artdiscusses uses the UN’s view on the likelihood of Syria maintaining the ceasefire and Secretary General Ban Kimoon’s call for UN solidarity
About 100 people were gathered inside Zuccotti Park on Friday as Zak Solomon stood on a granite bench and offered instruction on protest tactics with names like “Melt,” “Wall,” and “The People’s Gong.”
While demonstrating the last, Mr. Solomon, an Occupy Wall Street organizer, was joined by Jason Shelton, 28, from Greenpoint, who contrasted the People’s Gong with the bell that closes the New York Stock Exchange.
The bell, Mr. Shelton declared, symbolizes “the validation of greed over mutual aid,” whereas the gong is a “call to fight against this injustice.”
With that, the crowd raised their voices in an approximation of the sort of deep, reverberating tone that a large gong might produce when struck by a mallet.
Last fall, Occupy Wall Street protesters exceeded their most ambitious aims, establishing an encampment in Zuccotti Park that became a model for more than 100 others across the country and making financial inequity part of the national dialogue. The group has been mainly quiet during the winter and their movement has faded from the headlines, but organizers are planning a springtime resurgence that they hope will be launched by marches and other actions scheduled for May 1.
To prepare, organizers have held weekly practice sessions, called “spring training,” inside Zuccotti Park, where participants learn about the gong and other tactics, some of them adapted from a British activist group called the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army.
Over the course of an hour on Friday, protesters practiced several tactics, including “hup,” which involves a knot of people jumping up and down (and can be used to coalesce a scattered group) and “melt,” in which protesters drift to the ground (used for a ”die-in” or to de-escalate a confrontation).
One tactic, known as “wall,” involved ranks of protesters locking elbows and trotting forward in close formation, and could be used, organizers said, to move quickly while making it difficult for the police to physically break up the group.
Organizers said the sessions, which have been followed by short marches to the stock exchange for the closing bell, are meant to teach participants to work together and instill a sense of camaraderie.
As the protesters hone their tactics, the police officers who watch them and who follow the weekly marches appear to be absorbing lessons and engaging in their own preparation.
For instance, Mr. Solomon said, one week four marches had simultaneously left the park from different points. The next week, the police had posted scooters at each corner of the park.
On Friday, the protesters divided one march into three segments, two of which broke off in different directions soon after leaving the park. The remaining segment, which included about 30 people, sometimes slowed to a near crawl and other times began jogging, as officers followed. At several points, the group executed an abrupt about face and marched in an unexpected direction.
At Broadway, the police blocked access to Wall Street, but many of the marchers made it to a spot near the stock exchange, some employing a tactic called “civilian,” in which a block dissolves into individuals who then try to blend in with nonprotesters. There, the protesters executed a performance of the People’s Gong, but word soon spread that one of the march segments had been stopped blocks from the exchange.
As the training participants streamed back into Zuccotti Park for a post-march meeting, an organizer, Sandra Nurse, said that the practices provided a sort of laboratory to see what tactics worked best in different situations.
“What feels good and what works well is something that continues to be used,” she said. “And things that we feel like are less effective we end up dropping.”
The protesters arrived on Wall Street on Wednesday night carrying bedrolls, quilts and blankets. They spread pieces of cardboard on the sidewalks. Then, as several police officers stood nearby, the protesters made signs with anticorporate slogans.
“It’s really exciting to see people actually occupying Wall Street,” said Embi Weitzel, 25, a nanny from Colorado, who came with earplugs, apples, a flashlight, a bottle of water and an orange sleeping bag. “Finally, here we are, in the belly of the beast.”
For the third consecutive night, Occupy Wall Street protesters used a tactic that many of them hope will emerge as a replacement for their encampment at Zuccotti Park, which was disbanded by the police in November.
Norman Siegel, a prominent civil-rights lawyer who visited the protesters on Wednesday night, said a decision by a federal court in Manhattan arising from a lawsuit in 2000 allowed the protesters to sleep on sidewalks as a form of political expression so long as they did not block doorways and took up no more than half the sidewalk.
The protesters first cited that ruling last week while sleeping outside bank branches near Union Square, but said this week that they wanted so-called sleep-outs to occur nightly around the New York Stock Exchange.
An organizer, Austin Guest, said protesters had scheduled such events for Friday night at four other spots, each related to the Occupy Wall Street message that the financial system benefits the rich and corporations at the expense of ordinary citizens.
The protesters’ presence on and near Wall Street has drawn the attention of the police, but officers have not dislodged them.
Dozens of Occupy encampments around the country were forcibly cleared months ago by police forces, and organizers in New York have acknowledged that it would be difficult to mount a new occupation of a park or plaza. Instead, many of them said, they would rather establish these sleeping spots.
“It takes a tremendous amount of resources to maintain a camp,” Mr. Guest said Wednesday night. “But sidewalks are everywhere.”
Another organizer, Jo Robin, said that by moving to Wall Street, the protesters hoped to address a new audience that would most likely not support the movement’s message. She added that over the past week, protesters in Boston, Philadelphia and Washington had begun sleeping near financial institutions.
About 75 protesters gathered on Wednesday night in Lower Manhattan. About 15 slept on Wall Street. Most of them stretched out on Nassau Street, just north of Wall Street. Others unrolled their sleeping bags on Broad Street, across from the illuminated colonnade of the stock exchange.
“The conversations that were happening in Zuccotti Park are happening again,” said Ray Leone, 26, from the Lower East Side. “We were separated for so long.”
Around 2 a.m. on Thursday, several protesters kicked a soccer ball across the cobblestones of Nassau Street. A large dump truck lifted a metal container with a clang and emptied its contents.
A couple of hours later, most protesters were asleep, curled under blankets, some wearing hats and scarves.
Nearby, in Zuccotti Park, empty except for a security guard, there was the hiss of sprinklers watering tulips.
By 5:30 a.m., the sound of stainless-steel coffee carts clattering over cobblestones could be heard. Workers began hosing the sidewalk across the street from Federal Hall. By 6 a.m., protesters were waking up.
As the sky brightened, workers in suits or high heels began walking down Wall Street, and a young protester offered them pamphlets.
Many ignored the literature. Some accepted, leafing through the pamphlet as they walked or shoving it into their pockets as they hurried to their jobs.
