will-potter:

GREAT NEWS! All charges against Amy Meyer have been DROPPED! 

24 hours after I broke the story about her arrest under “ag-gag” for filming a slaughterhouse, and after a MASSIVE amount of public attention, the prosecutor has dropped all charges against her. 

It’s not often I get to report good news on this site. So can we get a hell yeah?!

Read about it here:

http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/amy-meyer-charges-dropped/6998/

(via veganemelda)

will-potter:

BREAKING: The first “ag-gag” prosecution is for filming a slaughterhouse from the street.

Please REBLOG! Similar bills are pending in multiple states and could pass any day now.

“These aren’t hypothetical concerns… the industry is trying to turn off the cameras.”

http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/first-ag-gag-arrest-utah-amy-meyer/6948/

(via angry-hippo)

will-potter:

Tony from No Doubt raising awareness of “ag-gag” bills. Very cool. You can watch the interviews he mentions here: 

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestoryamericas/2013/04/201341083057617468.html

www.democracynow.org/2013/4/9/debate_after_activists_covertly_expose_animal

will-potter:

URGENT: California’s ag-gag bill exempts factory farms that accidentally record their own abuses. 

Please REBLOG and call today!

angry-hippo:

Spotting the Terrorists: How Corporate-Bought Legislation Criminalizes Dissent

When: Thursday, April 18th at 6pm

Where: Seattle University School of Law’s Sullivan Hall, Room C5 (lower level of Sullivan Hall, which is located at 901 12th Ave., Seattle)

In 2004, U.S. Attorney Chris Christie indicted six animal rights activists for violations of an obscure law known as the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. The accused were, in every instance, only charged for speech activity but an anonymous jury found all six to be guilty. Josh Harper will examine the corporate interests behind this prosecution and what it means for protest movements in the United States. Josh Harper is a former political prisoner, longtime activist, and movement archivist. 

Coming up this week! Please share if you have friends in Seattle, and come on out to say hello if you are in the area.

(via angry-hippo)

fiercenyc:

The NYPD has declared a portion of Flatbush a “Frozen Zone”, meaning media are not allowed in and people can be subjected to arrest for not following police orders. It basically means the area is under temporary martial law. The last times the NYPD declared a Frozen Zone was on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and during the beginning of OWS.

Please call 311 to demand that everyone in connection to tonight’s Kimani vigil/march be released from the 71st precinct in Brooklyn. There’s one Malcolm X Grassroots Movement member arrested & two Justice Committee (JC) members arrested. A ton of community members who were at the vigil/march were also arrested. If you have friends/family in NYC please tell them to call 311. If you live in NYC please call 311. Let’s get them free! Please share!

NYPD decided not to release community members and Cop Watchers arrested at the vigil for Kimani “Kiki” Gray. Please call 7182502001 to demand NO charges be brought against all arrested

(via veganweedsoup)

blacksocialjournal:

The NYPD Declares Martial Law in Brooklyn

Thursday, March 14, 2013 20:11

0
(Before It’s News) On the heels of three nights of protests over the police slaying of 16 year old Kimani Gray, the NYPD has turned the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn into a State of Exception, claiming emergency powers to suspend the constitutional guarantees of the citizenry.

The people regularly targeted by police harassment and violence, overwhelmingly the city’s poor and minority populations, have taken to the streets to speak out against the NYPD’s draconian tactics. The police have in turn responded with even further harsh measures by suppressing the right of the people to voice dissatisfaction with that very same police force.

Cops kettled protesters at Wednesday night’s candlelight vigil, resulting in 46 arrests. Police even arrested Kimani Gray’s distraught sister, Mahnefeh.

The NYPD euphemistically calls the public spaces in which the Constitutional rights of the people are suspended “frozen zones.”

Allison Kilkenny wrote about the NYPD’s so-called “frozen zones” in December 2011:

“The ‘frozen zone’ is an arbitrary, official police business-sounding title that has absolutely zero legal merit. It’s something the NYPD made up, just as the ‘First Amendment zone’ is something [Los Angeles Mayor Antonio] Villaraigosa made up to suppress media coverage of the Occupy raids.”

According to FIERCE, the “frozen zone” in East Flatbush is being used to prevent media from covering the protests and arrests. Meanwhile, people inside the “frozen zone” can be subjected to arrest merely by exercising their constitutional rights.

“It basically means the area is under temporary martial law,” writes FIERCE. “The last times the NYPD declared a Frozen Zone was on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and during the beginning of OWS.”

An arbitrary dictate that arrests protest and free speech, set forth by the institution that is itself the target of the protests, creates a potentially dangerous precedent of placing the NYPD beyond reproach.

Occupy Austin reposted this poignant summary of events by Jen Roesch as they were unfolding in Brooklyn last night:

“East Flatbush, Brooklyn is under martial law as the NYPD declares it a ‘frozen zone’. Media are being monitored and kept from moving and reporting freely. Dozens of arrests and much brutality. Kimani was shot in the back seven times; a witness is sure he was unarmed; multiple reports are coming out that the police had been waging a campaign of harassment against the young man (including taunting him about a friend who had died in a car accident and threatening to shoot him when he tried to leave). This is just blocks from where Shantel Davis was shot, dragged from her car and left to bleed to death in the street last summer. After that shooting, police went to all the surrounding delis and confiscated their surveillance videos. Residents in the neighborhood live in a state of terror. Heartbreaking, enraging, the stuff that riots are made of. This city is at a breaking point.”

Kimani Gray’s parents are scheduled to hold a press conference this evening to address the March 9 police slaying of their young son.

(via veganemelda)

action4animals:

More ag-gag laws, thanks to ALEC. Please read and share this information about how laws that define helping animals as “terrorism” come into existence.

(via fuckyeahfatvegans)

leptiir:

Above is a picture of Omar Khadr, abducted at 15, now 25 years old, he has spent a third of his life at Guantánamo Bay for a crime he never committed.

“Khadr is accused of throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier in 2002 and conspiring with Al Qaeda. There is no credible evidence to substantiate the charges, some of which date to when he was 11 years old. Charges were not even brought against him until 2007. If convicted, the Obama administration will seek a life sentence for Khadr, prosecutor David Iglesias indicated.

Army Col. Pat Parrish, the tribunal’s presiding judge, on Monday denied defense appeals to bar confessions Khadr made under torture. In hearings held in May an unnamed U.S. military officer admitted that his interrogation unit threatened to gang rape and kill Khadr if he did not cooperate with an interrogation session at Afghanistan’s notorious Bagram air base in 2002.

A U.S. military psychiatrist has said that Khadr, who has now spent a third of his life at Guantánamo, is under extreme psychological stress after years of living through torture, abuse and appalling conditions. He has been subjected to stress positions, beatings, humiliations—including being used as a “human mop” to clean up urine, threatened attack with dogs, long periods of extreme isolation and sensory as well as sleep deprivation. (Read more here)

How come we barely hear about cases like these in the news? If it happend to a white christian male, we would constantly hear about it, but when it happens to a muslim from Afghanistan, silence.

Omar Khadr has himself said:

Khadr wrote to his Canadian attorney Dennis Edney, on May 27. “And if the world doesn’t see all this, to what world am I being released to? A world of hate … and discrimination.”

Lt. Col. Frakt has said:

“It is appalling that the Obama administration is allowing charges to go forward in the military commissions against Omar Khadr. Clearly, Omar Khadr, as a juvenile of 15 at the time of his alleged offences, could not be tried as an adult in federal court, so they are allowing him to be tried as an adult in the military commissions, potentially making him the first child soldier to be tried and convicted as a war criminal in world history.” (Read more here)

(via brazilianveganfeminist)

anarcho-queer:

Senate Bill Rewrite Lets Feds Read Your E-mail Without Warrants (MUST READ)

A Senate proposal touted as protecting Americans’ e-mail privacy has been quietly rewritten, giving government agencies more surveillance power than they possess under current law.

CNET has learned that Patrick Leahy, the influential Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, has dramatically reshaped his legislation in response to law enforcement concerns. A vote on his bill, which now authorizes warrantless access to Americans’ e-mail, is scheduled for next week.

Leahy’s rewritten bill would allow more than 22 agencies — including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission — to access Americans’ e-mail, Google Docs files, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter direct messages without a search warrant. It also would give the FBI and Homeland Security more authority, in some circumstances, to gain full access to Internet accounts without notifying either the owner or a judge. (CNET obtained the revised draft from a source involved in the negotiations with Leahy.)

It’s an abrupt departure from Leahy’s earlier approach, which required police to obtain a search warrant backed by probable cause before they could read the contents of e-mail or other communications. The Vermont Democrat boasted last year that his bill “provides enhanced privacy protections for American consumers by… requiring that the government obtain a search warrant.”

Leahy had planned a vote on an earlier version of his bill, designed to update a pair of 1980s-vintage surveillance laws, in late September. But after law enforcement groups including the National District Attorneys’ Association and the National Sheriffs’ Association organizations objected to the legislation and asked him to “reconsider acting” on it, Leahy pushed back the vote and reworked the bill as a package of amendments to be offered next Thursday. The package (PDF) is a substitute for H.R. 2471, which the House of Representatives already has approved.

One person participating in Capitol Hill meetings on this topic told CNET that Justice Department officials have expressed their displeasure about Leahy’s original bill. The department is on record as opposing any such requirement: James Baker, the associate deputy attorney general, has publicly warned that requiring a warrant to obtain stored e-mail could have an “adverse impact” on criminal investigations.

Christopher Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said requiring warrantless access to Americans’ data “undercuts” the purpose of Leahy’s original proposal. “We believe a warrant is the appropriate standard for any contents,” he said.

le Democrats, people.

(via angry-hippo)

leahxvx:

WRITE TO GRAND JURY RESISTER MATT DURAN!

He was locked up yesterday 9/13/2012 after refusing to testify! Let him know he is not alone!

Matt Duran
#42565-086 
FDC SeaTac 
P.O. Box 13900 
Seattle, WA 98191

(via veganemelda)

motherjones:

What a difference four years makes.

myconquestofbread:

after having spent the last five days in the northwest and meeting some of the people that the raids directly affected, the whole situation seems to strike a bit closer to home.

(Source: meowcatz5, via burningcupidx-deactivated201209)

nezua:

mamitah:

thepeoplesrecord:

The App you should download today - Police Tape

Citizens can hold police accountable in the palms of their hands with “Police Tape,” a smartphone application from the ACLU of New Jersey that allows people to securely and discreetly record and store interactions with police, as well as provide legal information about citizens’ rights when interacting with the police. Thanks to the generosity of app developer OpenWatch, the ACLU-NJ is providing Police Tape to the public free of charge.

Download Police Tape here. Reblog & share!

http://www.aclu-nj.org/news/2012/07/03/aclu-nj-releases-police-accountability-app

Right on.

(via veganweedsoup)

(Source: geghideivant, via veganomalous)