Tag: protests

Border Patrol Unleashes Violence on Protesters Over Trump’s Border Wall

Since construction began on President Donald Trump’s border wall in haste on October 5, federal agents have clashed with land defenders and arrested roughly two dozen activists who camped out on private land to protest the destruction of fragile desert ecosystems on both sides of the imaginary line that separates Mexico from the tiny town of Lochiel, Arizona.

The protest received media attention after Border Patrol agents extracted and arrested a tree sitter and cut down the “Grandmother Tree,” an ancient cottonwood in a grove of several trees that stood in the way of contractors building the border wall. Estimated to be around 200 years old — older than the current border — the grove’s branches reached from the United States to Mexico, a symbol of international solidarity for the protesters.

The felling of the Grandmother Tree may have also symbolized the Trump administration’s disregard for nature and public opinion, but it did not mark the end of the protests, as construction continues. Video captured by journalist Max Granger shows land defenders climbing into a tree on the Mexican side Tuesday morning and setting up another tree-sit style blockade in a renewed attempt to halt construction. Clashes with Border Patrol continued throughout that day, with activists accusing federal agents of dragging protesters across a barbed wire fence during a chaotic confrontation that was caught on video.

On Wednesday afternoon, a protester locked themselves to moving construction machinery, according to a statement from activists. Border Patrol agents attempted to remove the protester with “extreme pain compliance” and pepper sprayed the surrounding crowd, the activists said. Protester continued to lock themselves down after construction came to a halt and construction crews left, the activists noted. “We do not intend to back down,” said Adriana, a Tierra Libre activist identified only by first name, in a statement on Wednesday. “Our resolve only grows with their violence.”

Jason, an activist from the Tierra Libre protest camp in Lochiel who declined to use his last name due to concerns over state repression, said roughly two dozen people have been arrested. Some received citations on the spot, and others were taken into custody and released onto the streets of Nogales or Tucson hours later, he noted.

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France Street Violence Hits Record Levels Amid Multicultural Youth Revolts

The French Ministry of the Interior states that street violence has reached record levels fuelled in part by the violent student uprisings seen in multicultural hubs across the country in recent weeks.

Following another day of mass mobilisation of students in concert with far-left political parties and radical trade unions apparently intent on sparking more chaos, the Ministry of the Interior released statistics showing an unprecedented level of violence in public spaces.

According to government data, public violence incidents outside the home hit a record high of 20,000 per month in September, or nearly 700 per day, Le Figaro reported.

This represented a seven per cent increase over August, suggesting a significant role for the youth riots that began in the middle of last month and have featured high levels of violent attacks on police, other students, teachers and school administrators, and other innocent bystanders.

Prominent French criminologist Professor Alain Bauer lamented that society is becoming “TikTok-ized”, in which “nothing ever has consequences anymore”, and young people are increasingly becoming “uninhibited, sometimes nihilistic”.

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Violent student protests spread from France to Belgium

Student protests have spread from France to Belgium, with demonstrations over education conditions marred by vandalism, fires, and arrests in the Liege region on Monday.

The unrest follows weeks of violent school protests across France, where students began protesting in mid-September over teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms, deteriorating buildings, and long school days. Belgian students have raised similar grievances while also opposing local education reforms, higher public transportation costs, and rising tuition fees.

Hundreds gathered outside schools across Liege, blocking entrances and marching through the city. Shops in the center closed as a precaution, while protesters attempted to damage shutters at the Saint-Michel Institute. Firefighters also reported scooter fires in nearby Herstal and Chenee.

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Failing San Antonio Public School Hosts Democrat-Backed Anti-ICE Protesters with Vulgar Displays

In yet another chapter of the saga to stop a planned U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility in San Antonio, protesters organized by the Bexar County Democrats held a march and rally that began and ended at a local public middle school. Protesters, some carrying signs with vulgar messages, fanned out in front of the campus shouting anti-ICE slogans during the early Saturday morning protest.

The anti-ICE protest, dubbed the “March for Freedom and Justice” and held at Davis Middle School, featured an appearance by U.S. Representative Joaquin Castro (D-TX). Protesters carried multiple signs and included static displays on the campus with vulgar messages.

One static display over a table under a tent read, “Fuck DHS,” while another prominently displayed a large Mexican flag with similar messaging critical of ICE. The rally concluded after San Antonio police officers escorted the group of more than one hundred protesters to the proposed ICE facility and back to the public-school campus.

Breitbart Texas attended the event at the Davis Middle School campus, which is part of the San Antonio Independent School District (SAISD). A request for information from SAISD about the partisan-sponsored anti-ICE event on the Davis campus, which included a voter registration drive, remains unanswered as of press time.

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U.S. Marine Arrested in Okinawa on Suspicion of Robbing and Murdering 39-Year-Old Japanese Woman — Japan Lodges “Strong Protest” with United States

A 20-year-old U.S. Marine stationed in Okinawa has been arrested by Japanese authorities on suspicion of robbing and murdering a 39-year-old woman inside a hotel in Naha, triggering a formal protest from the Japanese government.

Lance Cpl. Devin Jacob Ballard, assigned to Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, was taken into custody early Sunday in connection with the death of Anna Yagi, 39, a resident of Naha.

According to Stars and Stripes, Okinawa Prefectural Police allege that Ballard killed Yagi at the Naminoue Crystal Hotel in Naha’s Wakasa district sometime between approximately 2:10 a.m. and 4:17 a.m. Saturday. Police also accuse him of stealing her wallet and another personal item.

Police say surveillance footage showed Yagi entering the hotel with a man before the man later left alone carrying her belongings.

When Yagi failed to leave by checkout time, a hotel employee entered the room and discovered her unresponsive. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

Authorities later located Ballard walking alone in an entertainment district and detained him before formally arresting him on suspicion of robbery and murder. Ballard has denied the allegations.

The precise cause and circumstances of Yagi’s death have not yet been publicly disclosed, and investigators are still working to determine the relationship, if any, between Yagi and Ballard.

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Far-left French mayor says ‘violence can be legitimate’ as schools burn

At Lycée Léonard de Vinci, a high school in Roubaix, the front door burned while teenagers filmed on their phones. In Nantes, the entrance hall of Lycée Nelson-Mandela was gutted. In Lille, masked men in black kicked a chemistry teacher in the back and chased him down the street. In Marseille, Reuters reported, the principal of Victor Hugo high school was doused in petrol.

On Wednesday, Sept. 30, alone, 356 high schools were blockaded. Police made 625 arrests, about two-thirds of them minors. Eighty-three police officers and gendarmes were hurt, along with 119 students and staff. Île-de-France put school damage near €1 million, including more than €100,000 at Lycée Paul-Éluard in Saint-Denis.

There are real grievances about schools in the region. In the Créteil school district, classes have 32 to 35 students, and teachers go missing. But overcrowded classrooms do not explain masked operators moving from school to school. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez described troublemakers travelling between campuses to incite violence. And yet Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the far-left La France Insoumise party, called the students “harmless.”`

The unmasked face of the week was Bally Bagayoko, 53, mayor of Saint-Denis, elected in March with 50.77 percent for La France Insoumise. He showed up at the gate of the blockaded Lycée Paul-Éluard beside a burning dumpster, laughing and handing out high-fives as teenagers cheered. Since then, he has denied lighting anything and calls the viral framing “fake news.”

What he said on camera the next day is not in dispute, and prosecutors are now investigating it: “Violence can be legitimate, but whenever you can avoid it, that is better.” He called the students children with a right to make mistakes, then told a reporter, “If I slap you, you’re going to react.”

The same day, students surrounded a BFMTV crew, roughed up two journalists and forced the crew out under escort. A girl on camera called BFM a “racist” outlet. The mayor posted three words: “Elle a raison !” She’s right.

Paris police prefect Patrice Faure referred Bagayoko to prosecutors under Article 40 for incitement to commit a crime. Emmanuel Macron said no politician may legitimize violence. Nuñez said violence is never legitimate. Valérie Pécresse said she would send Paul-Éluard’s repair bill to the mayor’s city.

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Protests Explode As France Arrests 625 Schoolchildren

As high-school students all over France are protesting the lack of teachers, crowded classes, long school days and wretched conditions in their schools, the French authorities have detained 625 people. Most of them were minors and were detained the day before in 356 schools throughout France.

The protests, which began last week in Paris, have been characterized by “an escalation of violence” including “projectiles, attempted arson and other forms of urban violence” against police, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said on Wednesday. In total, 83 police officers and gendarmes were injured, said the minister. Education Minister Édouard Geffray said that 119 students and staff members were injured by protesters since the start of the unrest, reported Reuters.

According to the education minister,Édouard Geffray, most of the injured staff were principals or teachers who were attacked as they tried to put a stop to the disturbances at their schools. Geffray claimed that “agitators” were “moving from school to school”. The students’ union, Unity for High School Students, a union of high school students, said that the disturbances were caused by a lack of teachers and other staff at schools, as well as by the poor conditions at many of them, including dilapidated buildings and overcrowded classes. A 16-year-old student in Paris told AFP that the education system was “completely broken” and that he and his friends were fed up with being forced to attend classes of 34 or more and with the overworked teachers who tried to teach them, added BBC.

In Marseille this morning a headteacher was attacked with petrol at Victor Hugo high school and seriously injured, the regional authorities said. Seven others including the school’s deputy head, its head of administration and four other managers were also attacked inside the school with petrol. At Saint-Exupéry high school hundreds of young people surrounded a fire truck called to the scene of a blaze and drove the firefighters out. Later a school fire was reported in Nantes. Meanwhile school and public transport have been attacked in Marseille with bus, tram and metro services suspended throughout the city because of damage to vehicles and attacks on drivers. French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has called an interministerial crisis meeting at Matignon this evening to deal with the crisis. All ministers will be expected to cancel their travel plans for the night so that they can be with their regional prefects.

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Bottoms: We Had Crime Spike in Atlanta When I Was Mayor in 2020 Due to Things Like ‘Social Justice Protests’

On Monday’s edition of CBS’s “The Takeout,” Democratic Georgia gubernatorial nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms responded to a question on crime during her tenure as the mayor of Atlanta by saying that there were drops in crime and then Atlanta “experienced spikes that we can only attribute to what was happening in 2020, between the social justice protests, between watching George Floyd be murdered before our eyes, in Georgia, watching Ahmaud Arbery be killed in the middle of the street, Breonna Taylor.”

Host and CBS News Chief Washington Correspondent Major Garrett asked, “So, you were mayor of Atlanta. Being governor of Georgia is a promotion. For every leader in this country, COVID and everything around it was a crucible of leadership. Everyone was tested, and everyone made mistakes, I think. You would agree with that? When you look back at that, as you ask for a promotion to be governor of Georgia, what would you want the voters of Georgia to know you would do better, do differently?”

Bottoms responded, “What I would say to the voters of Georgia is to remember I was the woman in the arena. I was making very tough decisions there was no blueprint for. But any leader worth her salt is going to always look back and wonder, could I have done something differently? Should I have done something –?”

Garrett then cut in to ask, “Have you identified an answer to that question?”

Bottoms responded, “There are a lot of things. Hindsight gives us this great lens that we don’t always have in the moment. So, there are things, big and small, that I wonder, should I have made a different decision, could I have made a different decision in that moment? But what I will say is that every decision that I made was based on what I truly believed to be the best decision in that moment, and just reminding people, even during that time, this huge economic downturn and all the uncertainty that came with the pandemic in 2020 and Trump 1.0, I still left the city with four years of balanced budgets. We didn’t lay off employees. We didn’t raise property taxes. We created a child savings account for our public school kindergarteners. We even closed the largest real estate transaction that’s currently the largest public-private partnership happening in the southeastern United States. And out of that, we created an affordable housing trust fund and created 7,000 units of affordable housing. So, there [was] a long list of accomplishments, even in the midst of all of the uncertainty that was happening in the world. But you don’t grow as a leader without doing your own self-assessment and considering how you can be better and stronger.”

Garrett then asked, “Your Republican opponent, Rick Jackson, hammers you on crime, and the crime rate rose in Atlanta. It rose nationwide in many urban areas. Public safety’s a part of a governor’s job. What would you say to the state — voters in the state of Georgia and the sheriffs across the counties of Georgia about your attitude and what you learned about public safety in that crucible of COVID?”

Bottoms answered, “Yeah. And it’s interesting, prior to COVID, I was being called a public safety mayor, because I had given our police and firefighters the largest pay increases they had ever received in the history of the city. I was very supportive of law enforcement. And then 2020 came, and Atlanta, like so many other cities across the country and across Georgia, experienced spikes that we can only attribute to what was happening in 2020, between the social justice protests, between watching George Floyd be murdered before our eyes, in Georgia, watching Ahmaud Arbery be killed in the middle of the street, Breonna Taylor. There was thing after thing after thing. But I can say, even in 2021, when we were still in the midst of the pandemic, my first meeting in the White House in the Oval Office with President Biden, we were there to talk about the rolling out of vaccines. There were governors, Republican leaders, governors and mayors, to talk about this rollout. And I took the opportunity to advocate for more funding, for federal funding for us to put towards public safety, because I knew that people were emerging from the pandemic in a way that we didn’t go into the pandemic. I remembered looking at a draft of my State of the City address that I was scheduled to give at the beginning of March of 2020, and we ended up canceling that address. But, in that draft, I had talked about these drops in our crime numbers and how well we were trending, and then there was 2020, summer of 2020.”

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 Actresses Susan Sarandon and Hannah Einbinder Handcuffed While Protesting Netanyahu’s UN Speech

Actresses Hannah Einbinder and Susan Sarandon were taken into custody Thursday outside the United Nations in New York during a protest against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the General Assembly.

Jewish Voice for Peace organized the protest, which took place a few blocks from the UN headquarters on Thursday.

Protesters wore matching shirts that read “Fund people not bombs” and carried banners including “Stop Arming Israel” and “End the Genocide.”

Chants captured on video included “Netanyahu, you can’t hide! We charge you with genocide,” “Let Gaza live,” and “Stop arming Israel.”

An NYPD spokesperson said Community Affairs officers warned the crowd to leave.

“They continued to block the intersection. Multiple individuals who didn’t comply were taken into custody,” the spokesperson said, without giving a final headcount.

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15 Years After Occupy, the Case Against the System Has Never Been Clearer

As we mark 15 years since Occupy Wall Street, it is worth remembering that the movement against inequality has a long lineage. The Gen Z-led protests flooding the streets of India, Kenya, Bolivia, and Tunisia today have been building for generations.

On the last day of November 1999, tens of thousands of people shut down the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle. Trade unionists marched alongside environmentalists, students locked arms with farmers, and for a few extraordinary days the people who run the global economy could not get into their own meeting.

The press called protesters a rabble with no coherent demand. They were wrong. The demand was simple and it has not changed: an economy that works for the many, not for a handful at the top.

That demand lands differently when you cannot afford the basics of life. In Seattle, the debate centred on trade rules. Today, people are doing the maths as they stand in front of a grocery food shop not knowing what they can afford to buy, tackle rents that consume the entire salary, and face energy bills that arrive like a threat. What was once an abstraction has become a household emergency.

Seattle did not come from nowhere. Five years earlier, the Zapatistas had risen in Southern Mexico on the day a free trade deal took effect, declaring that ordinary people had a right to refuse the terms being set for them from above.

The Jubilee movement had brought millions of people onto the streets and into churches to demand the cancellation of crushing debts owed by the world’s poorest countries.

By 2001 a hundred thousand people were meeting in Porto Alegre in Brazil under the banner “another world is possible,” and that same year a young man named Carlo Giuliani was shot dead protesting the G8 in Genoa, Italy.

The powerful learned early that this movement would not simply ask politely. It would demand systemic change.

Then came the crash. In 2008, the same financial system that had been sold to us as untouchable collapsed, and ordinary people were handed the bill while the bankers who broke it kept their bonuses. Out of that betrayal came the next great wave of action.

2011 brought Tahrir Square, the Spanish Indignados, the Greek fight against austerity, the Chilean students, and, in September, a small camp in the shadow of Wall Street.

The Occupy Wall Street movement gave the whole movement its slogan—“We are the 99%.” A single phrase that did what a thousand policy papers could not. The protesters drew the line. There is them, and there is the rest of us, and the rest of us are almost everyone.

Occupy’s camp was eventually cleared. Critics declared the moment over, the movement a failure, the slogan a fad. Look closer and you see something different.

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