comes an article called Please Lick This iMac / Yet another utterly annoying, nearly perfect gizmo gem from those shameless bastards at Apple by Mark Morford. Faux protestation done right.
Before Genoa, before Quebec City
, before Seattle there was the APEC meeting in Vancouver. Today, the report of the RCMP’s Commission for Public Complaints was leaked. It found that, “Federal officials played an ‘improper role’ in security arrangements at the 1997 APEC summit, occasionally bullying RCMP officials who were poorly prepared for the melee officers should have known was coming, says a long-awaited report into the incident.”
I should be noted, however, that the Commission for Public Complaints is pretty much toothless, and efforts by protesters to get a higher-level inquiry going were rebuffed all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada.
They’ve killed someone
. A protester has been killed anti-globalization demonstrations in Genoa, where the G7/8 are currently meeting. The press goes to great lengths to mark the protesters as “anarchists” and to suggest that everyone’s violent, but you know what? I don’t buy it. There’s no justification for that. Damage to property doesn’t justify killing a protester.
There’s a mysterious
story by Declan McCullagh at Wired News today: Journalists Protest Gag Order. Evidently it has something to do with a piece published on the Montreal indymedia site – but a gag order was served in Seattle. It’s all very confused now, but I’m curious to see what happens, if anything.
A couple of weeks ago
, Tom Tomorrow’s This Modern World was about the OAS/FTAA Summit, being held in Quebec City in a couple of weeks. Large protests are expected, and Federal, provincial, and local forces have been in a frenzy preparing for the huge event.
One of the tactics being employed to [keep the peace | stifle public debate] is to build a huge fence surrounding the core of Quebec City – you can see Blinky the Dog standing by the fence in the cartoon. On Saturday, the Gazette published more info about the fence and the other so-called security measures being taken.
But not so fast. A Montreal-based lawyer has gone to court to bring the fence down, calling it a violation of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms – specifically, that it limits the ability of law-abiding citizens to freely assemble. I’m with him – and more to the point, I think that if the organizers had gone out of their way to accomodate and work with the protesters, a great deal of the potential for trouble could have been avoided. Alas, I think it’s too late now. And, yet again, the maxim that “the police cause riots” will be proven true in Quebec.
