G20 LINKS

-police are surrounding Arsenal Park.
-twitter report "Getting nervous"
-posted at PST 11:34

What if the protests never develop?

 http://ajmbroadcasteducator.blogspot.com/2009/09/what-if-protests-never-develop.html
(repost 11:41 PST)

It's an intriguing question, and sometime before tomorrow the purpose of this post might be made irrelevant. But as the afternoon approaches, the question of whether there will be sustained and violent protests associated with the G-20 is being asked by this blogger.

Let's presume they don't. If that's the case, there will be significant chatter about what the security officials did to ensure a peaceful G-20. The blueprint, in fact, might be matched by the next set of cities that host this important international event. Local, state and national politicians will pat themselves and each other on the back, commending themselves for a job well done.

And all of this will have missed an important point: The protesters have already won.

I'll give you a minute to digest that sentence, and as you do I'll repeat it: The protesters have already won.

Consider the evidence: Downtown Pittsburgh -- a vibrant social, cultural, educational and economic place -- has been turned into a ghost town (no people) and a police state (law enforcement is everywhere), with businesses closed and people either working from home or not working at all.

The price tag for these empty (save for law enforcement) streets is approaching $18 million. Do you think that $18 million could have been spent in more effective ways? What would $18 million mean to local or state school districts? What could that money have done for, say, a local economic stimulus plan? Could those dollars have been earmarked for relevant non-profit ventures?

I know what you're thinking: The city is not footing the entire bill. I know that, but that $18 million still could have been put to other uses. Instead it had to be used to dampen potential (and I think still inevitable) protests. The protesters know that. So do you.

My point is not that security should not have been in place. What I am saying, however, is that by simply threatening to show up, the protesters have forced millions to be spent on stopping them. The fear alone has worked.

Let me close with this analogy: If you are an NFL offensive lineman (the police on the streets) and you are facing the Pittsburgh Steelers defense (the protesters), you are anticipating a blitz.

The history of a tenacious, tough Steelers' defense already is in your mind. Your coaches (the security leadership, Secret Service and relevant politicians) are trying to put the best possible game plan in place to prevent the Steelers from turning your quarterback into a pretzel.

In all your scheming, you sacrifice some of the depth and intricacy of your entire offensive package (your budget). You do more than you normally would to keep your quarterback upright.

In this scenario, the Steelers never have to call a blitz (though you and I are 100% certain they will) in order to have already beaten you: You've altered your game to such an extent that the fear in your head has made you adjust what you typically do.

As I said, I think the protesters have already won.

(reposting)
Quick video (13 sec) we just shot of police patrolling the Pittsburgh streets. This is the scene on almost every block:  http://bit.ly/1D08jG #g20
Wednesday September 23 2009 4:49pm

Police March The Streets of Pittsburgh before the G-20 Summit

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=399JtBa5_uc

 http://www.wpxi.com/video/21105412/index.html
(1 minute clip)
No BOARDERS
No BANKS

Picture from G20

picture of sonic blaster

Climate Change drops banner in Pittsburg at G20

 http://twitpic.com/izi5t

SocialistZine Video of gas and Sound attack at the G20
 http://socialistwebzine.blogspot.com/

Video of Tear Gassing and Sound Attack
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia0wVU3RHkI&feature=player_embedded

"Some of the protesters were seen ducking into alleyways to change out of their all-black clothing." (quote AP press)

AP Gives Protesting (sic) Coverage at the G20 around 2:00pm
 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33008282/ns/business-world_business

There is a video link on their webpage

Photo Links here:
 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33008135/displaymode/1176/rstry/33008282/

True, Joe. We won, .... another battle. We've not won the "war" yet, but we haven't lost either. This was a good action. I estimate 2000, but should have much much larger. Very wide age span. Blac bloc was large & strong. They always make me happy when they show up. This was the week's big UNpermitted action. Tomorrow will see the week's big permitted march. No telling, tho, about those pesky breakways. Ha! Cindy Sheehan was with us, as just one of the group. Cool. That leftist radical Christian preacher was with us, with his megaphone. He took on a small bunch of cris-chin right-wingers by overshouting them. Cool. Hey, i got interviewed by Polish television. Today's action was spirited & intelligent & righteous. Onward! For JUSTICE!

Den Mark, Vancouver

Thanks Den Mark
Keep us (((i))) updated

Here is a picture from someone who was there:
 http://twitpic.com/j11tw

 http://twitter.com/g20imc
-------------------------

1. Police Attack Students at University of Pittsburgh (Video)  http://bit.ly/2ZKx9x #g20 #reportg2028 minutes ago from twitterfeed

2. PLZ RT! Anarchists & Police Clash 9/24/09 (Video)  http://bit.ly/5OxTv #g20 #reportg20 #resistg20about 1 hour ago from web

3. Riot Police Assault Young Couple at University  http://bit.ly/ZLGQm #g20 #reportg20about 2 hours ago from web

4. Anarchists & Police Clash 9/24/09 (Video)  http://bit.ly/5OxTv #g20 #reportg20about 8 hours ago from twitterfeed

5. Riot Police Assault Young Couple at University  http://bit.ly/ZLGQm #g20 #reportg20about 8 hours ago from twitterfeed

6. Voices from the Free Tibet March (9/24/09)  http://bit.ly/4c5VrV #g20 #reportg20about 9 hours ago from twitterfeed

7. Interview with Dan Onorato  http://bit.ly/ltuDz #g20 #reportg20about 9 hours ago from twitterfeed

8. Updates from Anti #G20 protests on our webstream at  http://indypgh.org Students gassed by police in PGH(oakland neighbrhd).about 11 hours ago from web

9. Inside of the Convention Center at the #G20 now. There is no sign of life in the media area. We may have coverage from here tmrw.about 14 hours ago from web

10. RT @resistg20: guns outside presidential town hall=constitutional right, but protesters with signs 2 miles from #G20 = tear gas time?about 14 hours ago from TwitterBerry

11. Ritters Confrontation  http://bit.ly/EmvbC #g20 #reportg20about 18 hours ago from twitterfeed

MSNBC reporting the "anarchists" picked a fight with the police yesterday, they should have voluntarily given up their rights.

(from) jamesredfoot (twitter)11:30 am Friday

 http://twitpic.com/j3leo

Corporate Media reports about cupcake news on Friday (MSN) 1:30

The average joe doeesnt even know what G20 is or what is going on right now


F* the Corporate Media

G20 Police (?) takes person that 'reports are saying' was a "vandal" ?

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8CNa_viKg0

 http://www.nostate.com/

 http://twitpic.com/j0xlk

Link
G20IMC: IMC reporter summarizes Friday nighttime events in Oakland

 http://bit.ly/3I6HZ3

Hard to summarize three days of action. One point is that the c.8000 yesterday at the permitted march was way way too small. The movement has got to grow. G-20 is symptomatic of the need to continue our fight, but we need greater numbers. I don't want to think that the left has fallen asleep because democrats are in charge. Did you hear Obama's words of disrespect for protesters. "Had they been paying attention to what was going on inside ...." he said, referring to us protesting outside. Had WE been paying attention!!! We ARE paying attention, Barack!!!

Note: Please feel free to post and distribute this essay wherever you
see fit. No permission needed.

The Police Are Rioting

Reflections on Pittsburgh

David Rovics

If any elements of the corporate media have been paying any attention
to what's been happening on the streets of Pittsburgh over the past
few days I haven't noticed, so I thought I'd write my own account.

There is a popular assumption asserted ad nauseum by our leaders in
government, by our school text books and by our mainstream media
that although many other countries don't have freedom of speech and
freedom of assembly such as Iran or China we do, and it's what
makes us so great. Anybody who has spent much time trying to exercise
their First Amendment rights in the US now or at any other time since
1776 knows first-hand that the First Amendment looks good on paper
but has little to do with reality.

Dissent has never really been tolerated in the USA. As we've seen in
recent election cycles even just voting for a Democratic presidential
candidate and having your vote count can be quite a challenge as
anyone who has not had their head in sand knows, Bush lost both
elections and yet kept his office fraudulently twice. But for those
who want to exercise their rights beyond the government-approved
methods that is, their right to vote for one of two parties, their
right to bribe politicians ( lobby ) if they have enough money, or
their right to write a letter to the editor in the local
Murdoch-owned rag, if it hasn't closed shop yet the situation is
far worse.

Let's go back in history for a minute. After the victory of the
colonies over Britain in the Revolutionary War, the much-heralded US
Constitution included no rights for citizens other than the rights of
the landed gentry to run the show. This changed as a direct result of
a years-long rebellion of the citizens of western Massachusetts that
came to be known as Shays' Rebellion. Shays' Rebellion scared the
pants off the powers-that-be and they did what the powers-that-be do
and have always done all over the world passed some reforms in
order to avert a situation where the rich would lose more than just
western Massachusetts. They passed the Bill of Rights.

Fast forward more than a century. Ostensibly this great democracy had
had the Bill of Rights enshrined in law for quite a long time now. Yet
in 1914 a supporter of labor unionism could not make a soapbox speech
on a sidewalk in this country without being beaten and arrested by
police for the crime of disturbing the peace, blocking the sidewalk
or whatever other nonsense the cops made up at the time.

If you read the mainstream media of the day you would be likely to
imagine that these labor agitators trying to give speeches on the
sidewalks of Seattle or Los Angeles were madmen bent on the
destruction of civilization. Yet it is as a direct result of these
brave fighters that we have things like Social Security, a minimum
wage, workplace safety laws, and other reforms that led, at least
until the Reagan Revolution, to this country having a thriving
middle class (the lofty term we use when we're referring to working
class people who can afford to go to college and buy a house).

Reforms are won due to these struggles proof over and over that
democracy is, more than anything, in the streets. Yet the fundamental
aspect of these social movements that have shaped our society these
social movements that have at least sometimes and to some degree
ultimately been praised by the ruling clique and their institutions,
such as the Civil Rights movement freedom of speech and assembly,
remain a criminal offense.

Fast forward another century to Pittsburgh, 2009. For those who may
have thought that the criminalization of dissent was to be a hallmark
of the Bush years, think again. Dissent was a criminal offense before
Bush, and it quite evidently still is today.

I was born in 1967, so I can't comment first-hand on things that
happened far from the suburbs where I grew up as a kid, but I can
tell you unequivocally from direct experience that I have witnessed
police riots before, during, and since the Bush years. Most recently,
last Friday in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (If you want to read about
previous police riots I have witnessed go to
 http://www.songwritersnotebook.blogspot.com
< http://www.songwritersnotebook.blogspot.com/>
.)

In a nutshell, here's how it went down. I drove to Pittsburgh from a
gig in Allentown the night before, all the while listening to BBC,
NPR, CNN, etc. on my satellite radio. Naturally, the coming G20 talks
in Pittsburgh were in the news. The most powerful people in the world,
the leaders of the world's richest nations, were meeting in Pittsburgh
to decide the fate of the planet, to decide how to deal with the
economic crisis, the climate crisis, and other crises caused by
industrial capitalism gone mad, crises which affect each and every
one of us intimately, crises about which many of us naturally want to
do something crises about which we would at least like to voice our
concerns.

Notably absent from the news coverage is anything about the lawsuits
that the ACLU had to file in order to force the local authorities to
allow any demonstrations or marches to happen at all. Permits applied
for months ago by state senators, peace groups, women's groups and
others were only granted in the past couple weeks. Many other permits
were never granted. It doesn't say anything about applying for a
permit in the First Amendment, and in many other more democratic
countries than ours no permit is required for citizens to assemble.
In many European countries where I have spent a lot of time, if
citizens choose to have an assembly in the streets the role of the
police is to escort the march in order to divert traffic and keep
things safe, and no permit is required. But not in the US not in
Philadelphia or Los Angeles in 2000, not in Miami in 2003, not in
Denver or St. Paul in 2008 and not in Pittsburgh last week.

While various progressive organizations were trying hard to work with
the intransigent authorities, other groups took the sensible (but in
the US dangerous) position that this is supposed to be a democracy
and we should not need to apply for a permit so that the authorities
could tell us where and when we could and could not protest.

The first nonpermitted march that I heard about was Thursday
afternoon. I should mention that I heard about it, but only with a
certain amount of difficulty, because I and many other people I
talked to in Pittsburgh were having strange problems with our cell
phones, problems which started in whatever states we came from and
continued in Pittsburgh right up until yesterday. People I talked to
friends and fellow engaged members of society such as Cindy
Sheehan, Joshua White, Sarah Wellington and others reported the
same phenomenae. Every time one of us would receive a call we
couldn't hear the callers, though we could hear our own voices
echoing back to us. When we'd call back it usually would work then.
Coincidence? Sure, maybe.

Reports I heard over the phone on Thursday from people I talked to
were in between bouts of catching breath and running from the police.
Reports on the local media (the only mainstream media doing any
serious coverage of the protests, as usual, mainly because they were
intimately connected to the traffic reports) said the police were
restrained (what else are they supposed to be?) until the march
reached a certain point, at which time it was declared to be an
unlawful assembly and the crowd was dispersed. How? There was no
mention.

Usually and outrageously enough whether in North America, Europe
or other places I've been, if there's a meeting of the global elite
happening you are not allowed in unless you're part of the gang or
you're a lobbyist or a (officially-sanctioned) journalist. Usually a
perimeter is formed by the police, Secret Service, FBI, and whichever
other intelligence agencies are there, that you can't cross. This
was also the case in Pittsburgh, but like Miami in 2003, St. Paul in
2008, and other occasions in recent years, the authorities were not
just being on the defensive and maintaining a perimeter around the
meetings. They were on the offensive.

If this happened in Iran or China it would be called martial law
but here in America we never have martial law, apparently, even when
the military and the police are jointly patrolling the streets with
armored vehicles and weapons of all descriptions and attacking people
for the crime of being on the streets. Any gathering other than the
permitted march (which was a great, festive march involving many
thousands of participants from all walks of life, albeit with a
ridiculously large, armored and menacing police escort ) was
declared an unlawful assembly and then attacked. I saw it myself on
Thursday night and then again, much worse, on Friday night.

And what kind of unlawful assembly are we talking about? Hundreds of
students and other folks, a few of whom may have broken a window or
two at some point during the evening in the course of being pursued
by violence-prone riot police, who were ultimately gathering on the
grass on the campus of the university in the Oakland district of
Pittsburgh. They had no weapons, they were unarmed, mostly youth,
mostly college students from various parts of the country, along with
perhaps an equal group of local college students, most of whom were
just curious and didn't even have anything to do with the protests
many of whom in fact were just wondering what there is to protest
about! They soon found out one thing to protest about police
brutality and active suppression of our Constitutional rights.

I have no doubt that the Pittsburgh police (and cops present from, of
all places, Miami as well as other cities) will in the end have
radicalized many local students who had previously been apolitical,
and for this I applaud them.

On Friday night I went to a free concert a local community radio
station was hosting on the campus. It ended around 8 pm. Over the
course of the next two hours there were more and more riot cops
arriving. Why? Because they knew what I knew that a few hundred
young folks were planning on gathering on the green at 10 pm, many of
whom came by bicycle, after having engaged in a criminal, nonpermitted
mass bike ride around the city. Around 9:30 I had to leave to go to a
different neighborhood, and I returned in my rental car around 11 pm
along with Cindy, Joshua and Sarah.

If the police had made announcements for everyone to disperse (as I'm
sure they had at some point) we were too late for that. What we
arrived in the midst of was a police riot. We parked on the street in
front of the campus and walked on the sidewalk on the campus. Within
seconds we saw a young man on a bicycle, a student at that very
university, being violently tackled by two riot cops, thrown down to
the ground with the police on top of him. All of the police all of
the time were dressed in black armor head to toe, many of them
driving armored vehicles. Earlier in the evening Cindy and Joshua and
I were hanging around one of the armored vehicles while Cindy harassed
the cops and soldiers strutting around there, telling them her son
died in Iraq because he didn't have an armored vehicle like this one.
(They studiously ignored her, of course.)

The young man with the two cops on top of him and his bicycle cried
for help, perhaps not realizing that there wasn't much anyone could
do other than take his name, which he was too freaked out to
pronounce in a way that anybody could understand. Within seconds we
found ourselves running from a group of cops, along with a bunch of
young folks who had their hands in the air, hoping vainly that this
might deter the police from attacking them. It didn't. Off the
campus, a block away, police were running in groups in different
directions, penning people in, throwing them to the ground, hitting
them with clubs, handcuffing them and arresting them.

The four of us (an affinity group I suppose) got separated. Sarah and
I were running and were about to be boxed in by police coming in
different directions. After I was myself clubbed in the back by a cop
with his truncheon, we ducked into the front of the lobby of the
Holiday Inn and started talking with guests, other protesters, and
various students who had also gone there because they were quite
naturally afraid to be on the streets. Fifty feet away in either
direction the police were assaulting and arresting people,
individually and in small groups, picking them off the sidewalks.

Cindy and Joshua had ended up running in a different direction,
through clouds of tear gas. They ducked around a corner just in time
to watch dozens of young people, running away, being shot
methodically with rubber-coated steel bullets in the back. One friend
of mine there from Minneapolis said he saw someone who had ten welts
on his back from being shot ten times. On both Thursday and Friday
nights the authorities used their fancy new LRAD weapons, a
sound-based weapon that causes people to flee because it hurts their
eardrums so badly. (At future demos, look out for the
noise-cancelling headphones accompanying the goggles...)

At every turn you could hear the sound of shocked students who had
never seen or heard about this sort of thing happening, who were
struggling to come to terms with what they were experiencing. They're
just attacking anybody on or near the campus, they're not
differentiating between us and the protesters! Some of them seemed to
think that it might be OK to club protesters as long as you don't club
the students, others had concluded that attacking people for hanging
out on the grass was over the top regardless. (This is not an easy
thing for a sorority girl from a wealthy suburb to come to terms
with, so I was duly impressed at hearing these heretofore clueless
youth having such epiphanies.) What was particularly entertaining was
the first-hand realization that the local students could not
themselves differentiate between their fellow students and the
other ones who had come from out of town. How could they? It is, in
fact, completely impossible to tell the difference between a college
student from Pittsburgh and one from Toledo, even if they do have
very different politics...

Eventually, by 1 am or so, Cindy and Joshua were able to move without
being fired on, and they joined Sarah and I in the comfort of the
patio at the Holiday Inn. The people who worked at the Inn, at least
some of them, were trying to keep protesters out. The thing was,
though, that if you could afford to buy a drink you were no longer a
protester, but a guest of the bar, which is what we were. A little
while before Cindy and Joshua arrived a convoy of limousines and
other fancy cars pulled up in front of the hotel, and then security
locked the doors. You could still go in or out, though, just not
without security opening the doors for you.

We continued going in and out of the bar, passing by none other than
Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister of Australia, and his entourage, who
were all staying that night in the Holiday Inn (of all relatively
downscale places to stay!) and watching some big Australian rugby
match on TV. In our confusion at having just escaped the riot police
only to find ourselves ten feet away from the Australian Prime
Minister, Cindy, Joshua, Sarah and I were all at a complete loss as
far as what we should say to the guy. We all talked a lot about what
we could say, but by the time we were getting close to coming up with
a plan he had gone to bed.

The next day, Saturday, I joined a couple dozen friends and
acquaintances outside the county jail where people had spent the
night, waiting to get out on bond. Most folks got out on bond, others
were (and perhaps still are) being held on a higher bond, waiting for
friends and relatives and comrades to come up with the money. Talking
to people just out of jail I heard more horror stories. One man,
Gabriel, told of being kept outside between 2 and 6 am in the rain,
and then being held in a cell where he was handcuffed to a chair
along with another man, not able to stand or lay down, for 13 hours.

I left Pittsburgh in the late afternoon from the jail, heading
towards New England to continue this northeastern concert tour. In
Connecticut this morning I got a call from Cindy Sheehan, who had
just gone to the Emergency Room because she was having trouble
breathing. People around her the night before had been vomiting
profusely as a result of the tear gas. Having suffered injury in the
past from getting gassed in Quebec City, I knew exactly why she was
in the ER.

There will be lawsuits, and the lawsuits will be won. People like
Cindy and Gabriel might make a bit of money from their suffering at
the hands of the authorities. Not to worry, though the authorities
have a multi-million dollar slush fund to deal with these lawsuits.
They expect them, and they don't care. This is democracy in the USA.
It's always been like this, under Democrats or Republicans. If you
doubt me, it's quite simply because you don't know your history.

Protest, however, matters. The end of slavery, the banning of child
labor, the fact that most working class people live to be past 30
these days, is all a direct result of protest of democracy
happening in the streets. Marches, strikes, rebellions, and all
manner of other extra-parliamentary activities. The authorities are
well aware that democracy in the streets, no matter what they say
that's why dissent is criminalized. Because as soon as we are allowed
to have a taste of our own power, everything can change. It has, and
it will again, but the powers-that-be will continue to do what they
do best try hard to make sure we don't know how powerful we are.
They require the consent of the governed, the consent of those
students in Pittsburgh, and they have now lost it, at least for many
of those who were in Oakland last Friday night. They would have lost
it a lot more if they had done mass arrests or used live ammunition,
which is why they didn't do that.

We don't have freedom of speech or assembly and we never have, but it
is through all kinds of unlawful assemblies, from Shays' Rebellion
to the Civil Rights movement, that change happens. So here's to the
next Pittsburgh, wherever it may be. I hope to see you there, on the
streets, where our fate truly lies.

 http://www.davidrovics.com <../../../../>

 http://davidrovics.guestbooks.cc < http://davidrovics.guestbooks.cc/>

 http://www.soundclick.com/davidrovics

 http://songwritersnotebook.blogspot.com
< http://songwritersnotebook.blogspot.com/>

 http://www.myspace.com/davidrovics

 http://www.facebook.com/davidrovics

 http://twitter.com/drovics

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grNHXW5sUvU

right to know
G20 video of protester citizen bulhorning towards the "suited up cops"
he demands to know who they are

More G20 videos from the same Youtube channel here:
 http://www.youtube.com/user/pghg20viewer

 http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2009/09/394382.shtml

Video's are posted on this link

More g20 pictures from -->
 http://seancolombo.com/g20/captioned/

The silver panels are the new LRAD sonic devices. They are remarkably ineffective "sound cannons" which I initially mistook to be microwave cannons. It struck me as just an annoying, directional car-alarm. I have the pleasure of being able to say I was in the first batch of "victims" of this "weapon" in America.

(repost)

 http://www.g20media.org/node/174


PITTSBURGH --

Pittsburgh City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to form a special fact-finding committee to investigate the G-20 Summit and its impact on the city. [Watch video]
 http://www.wpxi.com/news/21146270/detail.html

The committee will be made up of three council members and three members from the mayor's administration including public safety director Mike Huss and city controller Michael Lamb.

Council said they would examine every facet of the G-20, from its economic impact on downtown businesses to decisions by police.

While council praised police and gave them high marks overall, some raised questions about their strategy, particularly in Oakland last Friday night.

"Do we need as much of a police presence in the future?" asked councilman Patrick Dowd. "Should police be using this type of equipment and do we have policies in place for this type of equipment? These are questions that need to be asked and we will again hopefully learn from this experience," Dowd said.

Council said they had planned to form the committee even before some angry residents voiced their concerns at the Tuesday meeting.

"Pittsburgh was turned into a police state," said Albert Petraca.

"Pittsburgh looked like a scene from another country. As the parent of four former college students I would have gone ballistic if they had been arrested for being an innocent bystander," said Debbie McKenney.

Authorities said at several different times Thursday and Friday demonstrators failed to follow orders by police to disperse.

Channel 11's Rick Earle reported that police tossed canisters of pepper spray, fired rubbed bullets and used a noise cannon to aide in crowd control.

Council president Doug Shields told Earle that he anticipated people will be lining up to file lawsuits against the city. Shields said that is why the city purchased an insurance policy.

 http://www.wpxi.com/news/21151302/detail.html

Reflections From the G-20. What Happened? Where Are We Going?
By Carlos Jimenez, on October 2nd, 2009

*Jobs With Justice Blog Page

*Full Article:  http://tinyurl.com/y8qusbo

The G-20 meeting is over, the military got to showcase its new toys,(  link to www.truthout.org )


To say that the things that happened in Pittsburgh were, as President Obama said in the lead up to the G-20, "protests about abstractions [such] as global capitalism" and that those protests were "not really going to make much of a difference" would be missing the real story about what took place in Pittsburgh and where "the movement" is going.

The G-20 Brought People Together - Connecting Pittsburgh to the World
Jobs with Justice worked with local and national groups to plan three events as part of activities inserting "People's Voices" into the discussion during the G-20. Our coalition's work focused on ensuring that there were spaces for movement convergence that allowed local, national, and international organizations to come together learn about one another's analysis on the economic crisis and how working people are responding in different communities.

This page has lots of details about the victim of the G20 Twittering
An appalling police state intimidation with riot charges and having his home invaded
This report doesn't mention any hearing updates ...but does give some good info on just one activist in Pittsburgh that was singled out.

 link to www.gnn.tv

----- start ----
----- quote ----
By Ryan Singel

An anarchist social worker raided by the feds wants his computers, manuscripts and pick axes back. He argues that authorities violated the U.S. Constitution and the rights of his mentally ill clients while searching for evidence that he broke an anti-rioting law on Twitter.

In a guns-drawn raid on October 1, FBI agents and police seized boxes of dubious "evidence" from the Queens, New York, home of Elliott Madison. A U.S. District Judge in Brooklyn has set a Monday deadline to rule on the legality of the search, and in the meantime has ordered the government to refrain from examining the material taken in the 6 a.m. search.
------ end -----
----- quote ----

(related info)
 http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/twitter-anarchist/