Personal details about thousands of people - said to include those only suspected of minor public order offences such as peaceful direct action and civil disobedience - are being compiled on a database run by the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU).
The data includes pictures of people taken demonstrations and other observations made by police on the scene, such as vehicle registration numbers. These enable cars to be tracked using automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras.
MONTREAL — As George W. Bush cracked jokes with a
business crowd inside a hotel ballroom Thursday, hundreds of people
outside the building cheered while he was being burned in effigy.
Police in riot gear and others on horseback held back a crowd of
hundreds, including many people who tossed shoes at Montreal's historic
Queen Elizabeth Hotel in a demonstration of disdain for the man
speaking inside.
Two protesters who tried forcing their way through the line of
shield- and baton-carrying police were wrestled to the ground and
arrested.
A massive rally in Chicago next week aims to express public displeasure with the massive bank bailout outside the American Bank Association annual meeting. Protesters will converge at 11:30 on Monday, October 26, at 301 North Water Street, where the meeting is taking place.
ENGLAND -- There was no mistaking the target: the eight huge
cooling towers at Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station, sending plumes of
steam high into the watery blue sky of the English Midlands.
Instead
the question in the minds of an estimated 1,000 protestors gathered in
the surrounding woods and scrubland was how could they get in and shut
it down.
Thirty-one Greenpeace activists remained on the roof of the Palace of Westminster this morning protesting about climate change, the environmental group said.
Another
23 protesters have been arrested, three of whom remained in custody,
according to a Metropolitan police spokesman. Greenpeace said there had
been 24 arrests in total.
A social worker from New York City was arrested last week while in Pittsburgh for the G-20 protests, then subjected to an FBI raid this week at home -- all for using Twitter. Elliot Madison faces charges of hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility and possession of instruments of crime. He was posting to a Twitter feed (or tweeting, as it is called) publicly available information about police activities around the G-20 protests, including information about where police had issued orders to disperse.
The protesters convened for a final planning meeting, already triumphant, convinced that nine months of preparation was about to pay off. Antiwar organizers who had come to Washington from 27 states exchanged hugs inside a Columbia Heights convention hall and modeled their protest costumes: orange jumpsuits, "death masks," shackles and T-shirts depicting bloody Afghan children. Then Pete Perry, the event organizer, stood up to deliver a welcome speech.
"This is a great moment for our movement," he said. "We are continuing an incredible tradition."
ISTANBUL - Turkish police used water cannon, tear gas and pepper spray today to disperse
hundreds of demonstrators protesting against the annual meetings of the
International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
Masked protesters shattered the windows of a McDonald's restaurant and banks
and damaged vehicles as they ran into the streets behind Istanbul's landmark
Taksim Square, which is less than half a mile from the complex where the
financiers are meeting.
The quick evolution of technology has changed the way Americans do almost everything, including how law enforcement combats crime, and consequently, how criminals elude law enforcement.
Those two concepts converged during the G-20 summit, when state police arrested two New York men for using Twitter to inform protesters in Pittsburgh about the movements of local officers.
What now for the US in Afghanistan? Does the Obama Administration drop the other shoe and commit us to a second decade of war? Or will it somehow pull up short of the precipice? All of sudden, there’s doubt and the war’s opponents can see a hundred glints of hope – tops among them polls showing Americans now thinking that sending still more troops to Afghanistan because nineteen men hijacked four airplanes eight years earlier might not be the most logical course of action.
