Update5: The ruling looks like it is coming down. Occupiers can return to park, can use sleeping bags but no tents. Confirmed. OWS has 45 minutes to appeal. NYTimes confirms. So, the answer to this is relatively simple: occupy but don’t sleep there. Have someone rent some local space to sleep and occupy the site in shifts. Journalist at the courthouse says Occupiers can get into the park but are being prevented from doing it by police.
Update4: Still unconfirmed reports that the court has ruled in favor of the occupiers to return to Zuccotti Park with tents. But there is some weird activity going on at Zuccotti park. The police are moving people away from the entrance to the park and telling them to keep moving. Still no idea what that’s all about. Hmmmm, if I was the mayor and his 1% BFFs and I lost the park to some protestors, what would I do to make them go away…. I *might* make the park uninhabitable. How would that happen? OR, I might let them have the park but make it difficult to impossible to get into it.
Update4: CNN and Huffington Post report that Occupy Wall Street has won the right to reoccupy Zuccotti Park. With tents. Still unconfirmed.
Update3: We are waiting for Judge Stallman to rule whether the police can continue to block access to Zuccotti park in spite of an injunction. Ruling to come in at around 3:15pm. Rumor: the crackdowns and evictions around the country were coordinated with the Department of Homeland Security. Mayor Jean Quan in Oakland has admitted that she was part of a conference call with the mayors of 18 other occupied cities. It’s clear by now that the evictions were coordinated. Who coordinated them is still a matter of speculation.
Update2: Globalrevolution.tv has had more than 60,000 viewers today. AND there are more and more and more people marching down to Zuccotti park in support of the occupiers who have been prevented from re-entering despite a court injunction preventing the police from keeping them out.
So, what did Bloomberg and his 1% cohort accomplish today? He alienated the press, he has lost a court case upholding the 1st amendment rights of the occupiers to assemble and he has rallied the city around the occupiers.
Yep, didn’t see *that* coming.
Oh, and there’s a general strike at UC Berkeley. (who couldda predicted?)
Unconfirmed report: Ocuupy Cleveland just mic checked VP Joe Biden. So much for Obama campaign astroturf rumors.
Update: See Not-Your-Sweetie’s personal account of the regrouping at the Trinity Church property at 6th and Canal. It looks like she got out just in time. Here’s a pic from her photo essay:
A rabbi, a buddhist and some priests walked into a crowd
Follow the action at www.GlobalRevolution.tv
Beatings of protestors now.
They are arresting a woman in a wheelchair. Yep, they really are. Four cops surrounding a woman in a wheelchair. Priscilla?
It looks like there are even more people showing up to the fenced off area around 6th and Canal(?). Soooooo, that worked out well for the police.
20 people arrested at the Trinity Church property. 4 were journalists from various media outlets. One from the AP. One man was roughed up, thrown to the ground with police physically on his back.
More first hand accounts of the eviction early this morning from journalists who were there to cover it:
The city blog Gothamist put it this way: “The NYPD Didn’t Want You To See Occupy Wall Street Get Evicted.”
As a result, much of the early video of the police operation was from thevantage point of the protesters. Videos that were live-streamed on the Web and uploaded to YouTube were picked up by television networks and broadcast on Tuesday morning.
At a news conference after the park was cleared Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg defended the police behavior, saying that the media was kept away “to prevent a situation from getting worse and to protect members of the press.”
Some members of the media said they wereshoved by the police. As the police approached the park they did not distinguish between protesters and members of the press, said Lindsey Christ, a reporter for NY1, a local cable news channel. “Those 20 minutes were some of the scariest of my life,” she said.
Ms. Christ said that police officers took a New York Post reporter standing near her and “threw him in a choke-hold.”
That reporter and two photographers with him declined to speak on the record because they are freelance workers and lack some of the job protections of full-time employees. But as they sipped coffee on Tuesday morning in Foley Square, where some of the protesters had regrouped, they expressed surprise at the extent of what they described as police suppression of the press.
And now there are a lot people angry about being displaced, irritated from lack of sleep, congregating in various places downtown. Before, there was just one venue. Now there are many.
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