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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Anti-Japan Protests In China Swell, Turn Violent
By DIDI TANG 09/15/12 10:11 AM ET
BEIJING -- Protests against Japan over its control of disputed islands spread across more than two dozen cities in China and turned violent at times Saturday, with protesters burning Japanese flags and clashing with Chinese paramilitary police at the Japanese Embassy before order was restored.
Thousands of protesters gathered in front of the embassy in Beijing. Hundreds tried to storm a metal barricade backed by riot police armed with shields, helmets and batons. Many threw rocks, bottles, eggs and traffic cones at the embassy.
The embassy said protesters around the country set fire to Japanese factories, sabotaged assembly lines, looted department stores and illegally entered Japanese businesses.
"We express regret over what has happened today and ask the Chinese government to ensure the safety of Japanese citizens and businesses in China," it said in a statement.
Anti-Japanese sentiment, never far from the surface in China, has been building for weeks, touched off by moves by Tokyo and fanned by a feverish campaign in Chinese state media. Passions grew more heated this past week after the Japanese government purchased the contested East China Sea islands from their private Japanese owners.
Japan's Kyodo News agency said more than 60,000 people protested in at least 28 Chinese cities, making the anti-Japanese demonstrations the largest since the two countries normalized diplomatic relations in 1972. The protests were expected to continue Sunday.
Although Japan has controlled the uninhabited islands – called Diaoyu in Chinese and Senkaku in Japanese – for decades, China saw the purchase as an affront to its claim and as further proof of Tokyo's refusal to negotiate over them.
Beijing made angry protests and tried to bolster its claim by briefly sending marine surveillance ships into what Japan says are its territorial waters around the islands and by ratcheting up state media coverage. Some news programs featured bellicose commentary.
In Japan, candidates vying to lead the top opposition party called for a tough stand against Beijing in the dispute.
Shigeru Ishiba, a former defense minister seen as a leading contender to head the Liberal Democratic Party, said in an election debate that Japan should send a strong message to China that it will not back down.
"This is something that Japan should do as a nation," he said.
Smaller demonstrations had been staged in China throughout the week. But they boiled over Saturday, especially in Beijing. Outside the Japanese Embassy, the protesters – most of whom appeared to be students – waved Chinese flags and shouted slogans demanding that Japan relinquish the islands. Some hurled rocks, bottles and traffic cones at the embassy. As the crowd grew, police closed off a main thoroughfare to traffic. City buses skipped the stop near the embassy.
Zhang Zhong, a 32-year-old computer worker, said Chinese should stand up against Japan, remembering its brutal occupation of much of China before and during World War II.
"We cannot lose the Diaoyu Islands," he said. "We cannot forget our national shame."
A protest in Shanghai was orderly. About 200 police officers cordoned off the street leading to the Japanese Consulate, allowing protesters in groups of 100 to approach the building. Demonstrators had to register first with police.
But in Changsha, protesters ransacked the Japanese department store Heiwado. They also smashed a police car made by Mitsubishi and overturned another Japanese car, according to online reports. Provincial police asked motorists driving Japanese-brand cars to avoid major thoroughfares and refrain from parking on the street.
Kyodo said protesters ransacked at least 10 Japanese restaurants in Suzhou and damaged a Jusco supermarket run by Japan's Aeon group in Qingdao.
Li Yiqiang, a Chinese activist for the islands, said he opposes violence but that heated behavior is unavoidable when strong feelings boil over.
"When the national emotions erupt, it is understandable that some people would overreact," Li said. "How can you control spontaneous acts?"
The demonstrations came before an anniversary Tuesday of the 1931 Mukden Incident which often triggers anti-Japanese sentiment. The incident was used by Japan as a pretext to invade northern China, and activists have called for more demonstrations on that day.
The Japanese government had hoped its purchase of the disputed islands would calm rather than inflame the situation. The nationalistic governor of metropolitan Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, had proposed buying the islands in April and planned to develop them – something that Beijing would have seen as a powerful attempt to solidify Japan's claim. By purchasing them itself, the central government promised to keep them undeveloped.
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Associated Press Television producer Aritz Parra, writer Christopher Bodeen and researcher Henry Hou in Beijing, reporter Eric Talmadge in Tokyo, and photographer Eugene Hoshiko in Shanghai contributed to this report.
Last edited by untanglingwebs on Sat Sep 15, 2012 4:16 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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Sat Sep 15, 2012 3:42 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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After the media announced Prince harry was in Afghsnistan the Taliban threatened to abduct him. They indicated they would kill him if they were unable to kidnap him.
U.S. Marines Dead In Afghanistan Attack, Official Says
By ROBERT BURNS 09/14/12 10:57 PM ET
WASHINGTON —
Heavily armed insurgents attacked a British air base in southern Afghanistan Friday, killing two U.S. Marines and wounding several other troops, U.S. officials said.
An estimated 16 Taliban fighters were also killed in the assault, said Lt. Col. Stewart Upton, a spokesman at Camp Leatherneck, a U.S. Marine based adjacent to the air base, Camp Bastion
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Prince Harry, third in line to the British throne, is stationed at Camp Bastion on a four-month combat tour. There was no immediate word on his whereabouts at the time of the attack.
U.S. officials said the attack at the base in Afghanistan's Helmand province involved a range of insurgent weaponry, possibly including mortars, rockets or rocket-propelled grenades, as well as small arms fire.
Upton said two coalition service members had been killed but he did not specify their nationalities. He said coalition forces were assessing the extent of the damage and would provide more details later.
Camp Bastion is a British air base and is used by the Marines at Leatherneck.
A number of aircraft at the base also were hit by insurgent fire, another U.S. official said.
Capt. Harry Wales, as the prince is known in the military, is serving a four-month combat deployment as a gunner on an Apache helicopter. Harry, who turns 28 on Saturday, is expected to start flying Apache missions this week. This is his second tour in Afghanistan.
It also was not clear Friday whether the attack was connected at all to the protests and violence across the Muslim world this week that has been linked to an anti-Islamic film. Afghanistan's southern region has been a hotbed of the insurgency and frequent attacks. |
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Sat Sep 15, 2012 3:50 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Al Qaeda In Yemen Praises Attack On U.S. Embassy In Libya
AP | Posted: 09/15/2012 2:45 pm Updated: 09/15/2012 2:46 pm
By AYA BATRAWY and MAAMOUN YOUSSEF, Associated Press
CAIRO --
Al-Qaida's branch in Yemen praised the killing of the U.S. ambassador in Libya in a Web statement Saturday and called for more attacks to expel American embassies from Muslim nations.
The statement suggests al-Qaida was trying to co-opt the wave of angry protests in the Muslim world over a film produced in the United States denigrating the Prophet Muhammad.
In a move to try to end the unrest, the top religious authority in Saudi Arabia said Muslims should not be "dragged by anger" into violence, suggesting the film could not truly hurt Islam.
So far, there has been no evidence of a direct role by al-Qaida in the protests, which brought a flurry of attacks on American and other Western diplomatic missions this week. The protests have been fueled mainly by ultraconservative Islamists. But U.S. and Libyan officials are investigating whether the protests were a cover for militants to target the U.S. Consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi and kill Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans on Tuesday.
Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, as the group in Yemen in known, said the killing of Stevens was "the best example" for those attacking embassies to follow.
"What has happened is a great event, and these efforts should come together in one goal, which is to expel the embassies of America from the lands of the Muslims," the group said. It called on protests to continue in Muslim nations "to set the fires blazing at these embassies."
In a separate statement, the group claimed that those who attacked the consulate in Libya were in part acting in anger over the killing in a U.S. drone strike earlier this year of Abu Yahya al-Libi, al-Qaida's then-number two.
"The killing of al-Libi only increased the enthusiasm and determination of the Libyan people to take revenge on those who belittled our religion and our messenger, so they stormed the American consulate and killed its ambassador, and they so, are rewarded by God, on behalf of Islam, the best reward," the group said in a eulogy to al-Libi, posted Friday.
In the Saturday statement, the group also reached out to "our Muslim brothers in Western nations," urging them "our Muslim brothers in the Western to fulfill their duties in supporting God's prophet ... because they are the most capable of reach them and vex them."
"If your freedom of speech is boundless, then let your chests bear the freedom of our actions
Al-Qaida in Yemen is considered by the U.S. the most dangerous and active of the terror network's affliates after it plotted a series of attempted attacks on U.S. territory, including the Christmas 2009 failed bombing of a passenger jet. It has suffered a series of blows since, including the recent killing of its deputy leader in a drone strike. Yemen's government, backed by the U.S., has been waging an offensive against the group, taking back territory and cities I the south that the group's fighters seized last year.
On Friday, protests against the movie, titled "Innocence of Muslims" spread dramatically, breaking out in 20 nations in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. While peaceful in most places, the protests turned into assaults on U.S. and other Western embassies in Sudan and Tunis and violent clashes with police in several countries that left at least six dead. Yemen saw protests Friday and the day before, when protesters stormed the U.S. Embassy and tore down the American flag.
Trying to contain the violence, the highest religious authority in Saudi Arabia said Saturday that "the film does not hurt the Prophet and Islam ... We have to denounce it without anger."
"Muslims should not be dragged by wrath and anger to shift from legitimate to forbidden action and by this, they will, unknowingly, fulfill some aims of the film," Saudi grand mufti Sheik Abdel-Aziz al-Sheik said. |
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Sat Sep 15, 2012 3:59 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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College Bomb Threats Prompt Campus Evacuations In Texas, North Dakota, Ohio
By JIM VERTUNO 09/14/12 11:12 PM ET
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University of Texas Police officers search a car in the parking lot of the Joe Thompson Center adjacent to the LBJ Library at The University of Texas on Friday, Sept. 14, 2012 in Austin, Texas. (AP Photo/Statesman.com, Ricardo B.Brazziell)
AUSTIN, Texas — Thousands of people streamed off three college campuses Friday after bomb threats prompted officials to issue evacuation orders for schools in Texas, North Dakota and Ohio.
The campuses of the University of Texas at Austin and North Dakota State University in Fargo had been deemed safe by early afternoon, and authorities were working to determine whether those threats were related. A third evacuation order for much-smaller Hiram College in northeast Ohio was issued hours later but lifted Friday night after a sweep found nothing suspicious.
The threats on the campuses in Texas and North Dakota ended as false alarms after tens of thousands of people followed urgently worded evacuation orders, one of which some worried didn't come fast enough.
Both of those campuses emptied at quick but orderly paces Friday morning, though students acknowledged an air of confusion about what was going on. The threats coming as violent protests outside U.S. embassies in the Middle East also stirred nervous tension among some students, and Texas officials acknowledged global events were taken into account.
The first threat came around 8:35 a.m. to the University of Texas from a man claiming to belong to al-Qaida, officials said. The caller claimed bombs placed throughout campus would go off in 90 minutes, but administrators waited more than an hour before blaring sirens on the campus of 50,000 students and telling them to immediately "get as far away as possible" in emergency text messages.
Authorities said they started searching buildings for explosives before the alert was issued. UT President Bill Powers defended the decision not to evacuate sooner.
"It's easy to make a phone call ... the first thing we needed to do was evaluate," Powers said. "If the threat had been for something to go off in five minutes, then you don't have the time to evaluate, you just have to pull the switch."
Not everyone agreed.
"What took so long?" student Ricardo Nunez said. "It should have been more immediate."
North Dakota State University President Dean Bresciani said about 20,000 people left the Fargo school's campuses as part of an evacuation "that largely took place in a matter of minutes." FBI spokesman Kyle Loven said NDSU received a call about 9:45 a.m. that included a "threat of an explosive device."
Police and school officials said the evacuation was as organized as could be expected, with one campus employee describing people as "being North Dakota nice" while driving away.
"Nobody was panicked and nobody was trying to speed or run over anybody," said Juleen Berg, who works at the NDSU heating plant. "Everybody was waiting their turn."
Graduate student Lee Kiedrowski of Dickinson, N.D., said he was walking on the NDSU campus when he got a text message telling him to evacuate within 15 minutes.
"The panic button wasn't triggered quite immediately," Kiedrowski said. "But there was definitely the thought that we live in a different world now, and with everything that's going on with the riots at the U.S. embassies in the Middle East, your brain just starts moving. You never really know what's going on."
The UT president acknowledged officials in Texas also considered the current political climate.
"Certainly the global situation would be part of what we look at when we evaluate any threat," Powers said.
Hiram college received an emailed bomb threat about 4 p.m. and ordered everyone on campus to evacuate. Hiram spokesman Tom Ford said safety teams with bomb-sniffing dogs checked "room by room, building by building" on campus, which is about 35 miles southeast of Cleveland where about 1,300 students are enrolled.
The campus was deemed safe and reopened about six hours later. Ford said the college was fortunate the threat came in late evening, when many students were getting ready for the weekend.
"A lot of kids just piled into their friends' cars and were out of here," he said.
In Texas, Sirens wailed on the Austin campus and cellphones pinged with text messages when the initial alert when out. Students described more confusion than panic as they exited the sprawling campus, where police blocked off all roads heading in as lines of cars sat in gridlock trying to get out.
The evacuation also created logistical concerns for the 14th-ranked Texas Longhorns football team. Inside a police station across from the football stadium, executive senior associate athletics director Ed Goble asked about getting the athletics complex building cleared because the team had to leave for a Saturday game at the University of Mississippi. The team's locker room is inside the building.
Goble later said he wasn't asking that the team be made a priority. Shortly after 11 a.m., while the rest of campus remained almost deserted, Goble said police had given players permission to go into the athletic complex to pack for the game.
"All building managers are notified at the same time and all are expected to move as rapidly as possible," said Gary Susswein, spokesman for the UT president's office, noting there was no priorities list for what buildings were to be cleared first.
With rain falling, students stood under awnings and overhangs and inundated nearby off-campus restaurants and coffee shops as they waited for updates.
Abby Johnston, a production and special editions coordinator for Texas Student Media, said she received the first text message from the university while thinking about what she would publish in the next day's paper. Then the sirens blared.
"We do the siren test once a month and so at first people thought maybe it was just a test, and then we started to tell everybody, `No actually we have to get out of here pretty immediately,'" said Johnston, 22. "There was definitely a little bit of nervous tension."
Tania Lara, a graduate student at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, said she was at work inside a central campus academic building when she got a text message to get as far away was possible.
"It was calm but nobody knew what was going on," she said, describing a crush of students heading for the exits. "No one was yelling `get out of here' or anything like that."
Also Friday, Valparaiso University in Indiana increased security and posted a warning to students on its website after a vague threat was discovered scrawled in graffiti. The school said the threat claimed "dangerous and criminal activity" would occur during the university's daily chapel break.
The FBI and local authorities searched the campus but found nothing suspicious and university spokeswoman Nicole Niemi said classes and other regular activities would go on.
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Associated Press writers Will Weissert in Austin, Ramit Plushnick-Masti in Houston, Nomaan Merchant in Dallas; Paul J. Weber in San Antonio; Dave Kolpack in Fargo, N.D.; and Ashley M. Heher in Chicago contributed to this report.
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Sat Sep 15, 2012 4:05 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Russia Protests: Opposition Floods Moscow Streets In Anti-Putin Rally
By LYNN BERRY and VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV 09/15/12 02:51 PM ET
MOSCOW —
The first major protest against President Vladimir Putin after a summer lull drew tens of thousands of people, determined to show that opposition sentiment remains strong despite Kremlin efforts to muzzle dissent.
The street protests broke out after a December parliamentary election won by Putin's party through what observers said was widespread fraud, and they grew in strength ahead of Putin's effectively unopposed election in March to a third presidential term.
Huge rallies of more than 100,000 people even in bitter winter cold gave many protesters hope for democratic change. These hopes have waned, but opposition supporters appear ready to dig in for a long fight.
"We have to defend the rights that we were deprived of, the right to have elections. We were deprived of honest elections and an honest government," opposition activist Alexander Shcherbakov said. "I've come to show that and to demonstrate that the people are opposed. I'm opposed to the illegitimate government and illegitimate elections."
Leftists, liberals and nationalists mixed with students, teachers, gay activists and others as they marched down Moscow's tree-lined boulevards chanting "Russia without Putin!" and "We are the power here!" Many wore the white ribbons that have become the symbol of the protest movement.
About 7,000 police officers stood guard along the route of the march, and a police helicopter hovered overhead. A protest rally, held on a wide street named for the late Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, remained peaceful as it stretched into the evening. As the 10 p.m. deadline neared, a couple of hundred people were still on the street and police herded them toward a subway station. One of the opposition leaders, Sergei Udaltsov, was detained along with a handful of his supporters when he tried to lead a group of about 50 on a new protest march.
Putin has shown less tolerance for the opposition since his inauguration in May. New repressive laws have been passed to deter people from joining protests, and opposition leaders have been subject to searches and interrogations. In August, a court handed down two-year prison sentences to three members of the punk band Pussy Riot for performing an anti-Putin song inside Moscow's main cathedral.
Big balloons painted with the band's trademark balaclava masks floated over the crowd on Saturday, while some rally participants wore T-shirts in support of Pussy Riot.
Many demonstrators targeted Putin with creative placards and outfits. Some mocked Putin's recent publicity stunt in which he flew in a motorized hang glider to lead a flock of young Siberian white cranes in flight.
One protester donned a white outfit similar to the one worn by Putin on the flight with a sign reading: "Give up hope, each of you who follow me." Another person held a placard that said: "We are not your cranes."
Alexei Navalny, a charismatic anti-corruption crusader and a popular blogger, remains the rock star among the protest leaders. When he took the stage, young people in the crowd held up their phones to record the moment.
Navalny urged the demonstrators to show resolve and keep up the pressure on the Kremlin with more street protests.
"We must come to rallies to win freedom for ourselves and our children, to defend our human dignity," he said to cheers of support. "We will come here as to our workplace. No one else will free us but ourselves."
The rally appeared as big as the last major protest in June, which also attracted tens of thousands. More of the demonstrators, however, came not as members of the varied political organizations that make up the protest movement, but with groups of friends and co-workers, some of them organizing on social networks.
As part of a new initiative, activists collected contact information and addresses from demonstrators to make it easier to organize civic actions on a neighborhood level.
Gleb Pavlovsky, a former Kremlin political consultant, who attended Saturday's rally, estimated that up to 500,000 people have taken part in the protests in Moscow, a city of 11.5 million.
He said the Kremlin has not figured out how to deal with the protest movement.
"Therefore, they alternate between taking tough action and stepping back from confrontation," Pavlovsky said. "For the Kremlin, it is very worrying that Moscow no longer supports Putin, but it is very important that this is purely a Moscow phenomenon."
Although opposition protests also were held Saturday in several other Russian cities, the largest, in St. Petersburg, drew only a few thousand people. Protests elsewhere attracted only hundreds or even dozens. About 100 attended an unsanctioned rally in Nizhny Novgorod and about 20 of them were detained.
The Moscow organizers had spent days in tense talks with the city government over the protest route for Saturday, typical of the bargaining that has preceded each of the opposition marches.
A protest on the eve of Putin's inauguration ended in clashes with police, and the Kremlin responded by arresting some of the participants and approving a new draconian law that raised fines 150-fold for taking part in unsanctioned protests. The city, however, granted permission for the subsequent opposition rally in June, which was peaceful.
A day before the weekend rally, parliament expelled an opposition lawmaker who had turned against the Kremlin and joined the protest movement. Anger over the ouster of Gennady Gudkov may have helped to swell the ranks of the protesters.
"Russia no longer has a constitution," Gudkov told the rally. "Russia no longer has rights, and Russia no longer has a parliament worthy of respect. Shame on this parliament, and shame on this government!"
Gudkov's expulsion also means he loses his immunity from prosecution, and his supporters fear he could face arrest.
His son, Dmitry Gudkov, also a lawmaker, said he hopes the Kremlin will think twice about arresting his father after seeing the size of the protest. "They will either have to think about serious reforms and end their repressions, or they will come to a very bad end," he said as marched with a column of protesters.
"It's necessary right now for all Russians to come out into the streets to show the regime that changes are needed in our country, and that without them our country can't develop," said teacher Valentina Merkulova, who participated in Saturday's protest. "The most important thing is that, the more Russians come out, the less bloody the change of regime, the change of power. A change of power is necessary."
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Sat Sep 15, 2012 4:15 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Occupy Wall Street Plans To Surround New York Stock Exchange To Mark Anniversary
Reuters | Posted: 09/15/2012 6:59 am Updated: 09/15/2012 11:54 am
By Chris Francescani
Sept 15 (Reuters) - Occupy Wall Street marks its first anniversary on Monday, and, in a bid to rejuvenate a movement that has failed to sustain momentum after sparking a national conversation about economic inequality last fall, activists plan once again to descend on New York's financial district.
The group, which popularized the phrase "We are the 99 percent," will attempt to surround the New York Stock Exchange and disrupt morning rush hour in the financial district, according to a movement spokeswoman.
Monday's protests will cap a weekend of Occupy Wall Street seminars, music and demonstrations in New York, said Linnea Paton, 24, an OWS spokeswoman. Demonstrations are also planned in other U.S. cities, other OWS organizers said.
The grassroots movement caught the world by surprise last fall with a spontaneous encampment in lower Manhattan that soon spread to cities across North America and Europe.
Occupy Wall Street briefly revived a long-dormant spirit of U.S. social activism, and drew enduring attention to economic injustice.
CONCERT, "SIT-INS" PLANNED
But the movement's colorful cast of theatrical demonstrators struggled through last winter to sustain the momentum that first drew attention to its patchwork of economic grievances - including corporate malfeasance on Wall Street, crippling student debt and aggressive bank foreclosures on American homes.
On Sunday, organizers will provide live music, including a Foley Square concert featuring Tom Morello, guitarist for the rock band Rage Against the Machine.
At 7 a.m. Monday, some protesters will try to surround the NYSE, while others will engage in a loosely choreographed series of "sit-ins" at intersections throughout the financial district, according to OWS's website.
The tactics are designed to undermine New York police efforts to contain protesters on the narrow, winding streets of the financial district.
Last year's demonstrations featured the spectacle of activists breaking into sudden dashes down one narrow street or another, pursued by visibly frustrated police and television reporters tripping down cobblestone streets.
Sound permits for Sunday's events have been secured, Paton said, but OWS has not sought permits for Monday's protests - which last fall led to mass arrests and clashes between police and protesters. Occupy Wall Street maintains about $50,000 in its bail fund, several organizers said.
NYPD READY FOR CONFRONTATIONS
Chief New York Police Department spokesman Paul Brown confirmed that no OWS demonstration permit applications were submitted, but said police will be prepared for demonstrations.
"We accommodate peaceful protests and make arrests for unlawful activity," he said.
Brown said that based on previous experience with OWS, the NYPD expects that "a relatively small group of self-described anarchists will attempt unlawful activity and try to instigate confrontations with police by others while attempting to escape arrest themselves ... we expect most demonstrators to be peaceful."
New York police have made a total of 1,852 Occupy arrests as of September 12, 2012, according to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance's office, including the arrest of 700 protesters who spilled into the roadway while marching across the Brooklyn Bridge last October.
On Friday, Twitter was ordered by a New York judge to turn over the tweets of one of the protesters arrested on the bridge. That case has emerged as a closely watched court fight over law enforcement access to users' social media content .
Six weeks after the Brooklyn Bridge arrests, citing public health concerns, New York authorities entered the Manhattan OWS camp and disbursed protesters. The movement has never regained its initial momentum.
Earlier on HuffPost: |
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Sat Sep 15, 2012 4:21 pm |
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