from indymedia.org:

At around 7:00 am on May 21, 2008, members of the Austrian elite police force (WEGA) 

stormed several apartments across the country. Some of the residents were woken up 

in their beds at gunpoint. A total of twentythree (23) apartments, houses and offices

 were searches in Vienna, Lower Austria, Styria and Tirol. In many of the apartments 

the WEGA kicked in the doors. The officers stormed the apartments like in bad 

Hollywood movies. Only after the residents had been intimidated, ”secured” on the 

wall and/or put in handcuffs did the police start the searches. 

All the arrestees are active in the animal rights movement in Austria. 

The offices of at least 4 animal rights group were search by police. 

The 10 people, a few of which are currently on hunger strike, are 

still in custody. On a bail hearing on June 6th, the judge decided to 

keep them in jail for at least 4 weeks further. 

There have been solidarity demonstrations in Austria and around 

the world to demand the immediate release of the activists and 

for the authorities to drop the charges. 

More from infoshop:

One in five New Yorkers stopped by police in 2006 encountered some use of force, from simple restraint to facing a drawn service weapon, a Daily News analysis of new data found. In 102,000 of the more than 500,000 police stops - about 20% - cops did things such as restrained people, threw them to the ground or against a wall or pointed a gun at them, the newly released data show.The NYPD has refused to release use-of-force data in previous and subsequent years. In nine out of 10 police stops involving use of force in 2006, the suspects were not arrested.”Force is liberally defined to include such things as placing the individual on a wall for a pat down, or on a car, or on the ground or handcuffing whether an arrest is made [or] not,” NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said.

last thing today, 

is online in its entirety here: http://www.archive.org/details/we_interrupt_this_empire

 events of the day were organized by Bay Area Direct Action to Stop the War (http://bayareadirectaction.wordpress.com/) which is still active. 

also, i watched this film on youtube which is worth seeing about COINTELPRO. it’s nice because it both gives a history of infiltration and also has some cool newsreel footage and interviews looking at the move from the civil rights to the black power movement. it’s shitty quality but worth watching. i posted all parts of it below. 

Talking to some people who hadn’t seen footage from the LA police riot last mayday, so here’s a really cheesey video but you get the point. 

from the PSP website (palestinesolidarityproject.org)

This morning, Friday April 11, at 4 am Israeli security forces (Shabak) raided the home of Mousa Abu Maria and kidnapped him. Mousa co-founded the Palestine Solidarity Project and has been a supporter of non-violence for several years. Mousa was last in the custody of the Shabak in 1999 when he was held for more than 3 months and tortured after which he spent more than a week in the hospital. His current location is not known but we will send updates as soon as new information is available. Please consider making a donation to PSP to cover his anticipated legal costs.

Last night I saw Un Poquito de Tanta Verdad, a documentary on Oaxaca 2006-2007 which is produced by Jill Irene Friedberg who made Granito de Arenas about the history of Oaxaca teachers strikes, and This is What Democracy Looks Like about the WTO 1999. Friedberg spoke after the screening. More later. 

On the plane I read some of Angela Davis’ book Are Prisons Obsolete? Here’s some stuff I learned (some direct quotes, some summary): 

Stats. 

• More than two million people out of a world total of nine million now inhabit U.S. prisons, jails, youth facilities, and immigrant detention centers. In the late 1960s there were close to 200,000 people in prison in the United States. In three decades, ten times as many people are now locked away in cages The U.S. population in general is less than 5% of the world’s total, whereas more than 20% of the world’s combined prison population can be claimed by the United States. Short of major wars, mass incarceration has been the most thoroughly implemented government social program of our time. 
• In 2002, there were 157,979 people incarcerated in the state of California alone, including approximately 20,000 people whom the state holds for immigration violations. 
• In 1990, a study of U.S. prison populations was published which concluded that 1 in 4 black men between the ages of 21-29 were in prison and jail and on parole or probation. Five years later, a second study revealed that this percentage had soared to almost 1 in 3. More than 1 in 10 Latino men of the same age were in jail or prison, or on probation or parole. The second study also revealed that the group experiencing the greatest increase was black women, whose imprisonment increased by 78%. 
• “In the late nineteenth century, coal companies wished to keep their skilled prison laborers for as long as they could, leading to denials of ’short time.’ Today, a slightly different economic incentive can lead to similar consequences. CCA [Corrections Corporation of America] is paid per prisoner. IF the supply dries up, or too many are released too early, their profits are affected… Longer prison terms mean greater profits, but the larger point is that the profit motive promotes the expansion of imprisonment.” 
• “Racism surrpetitiously defines social and economic structures in ways that are difficult to identify and thus are much more damaging. In some states, for example, more than one third of black men have been labeled felons. In Alabama and FLorida, once a felon, always a felon, which entails the loss of status as a rights-bearing citizen.”

• “The prison functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting undersirables those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. This is the ideological work that the prison performs–it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.” 
• “Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison.” 
• “While public discourse has become more flexible, the emphasis is almost inevitably on generating the changes that will produce a better prison system…As important as some reforms may be–the elimination of sexual abuse and medical neglect in women’s prison, for example–frameworks that rely exclusively on reforms help to produce the stultifying idea that nothing lies beyond the prison.”
• The penitentiary arose in late 18th century America, and was then considered to be a more humanitarian system of punishment. “In many ways the penitentiary was a vast improvement over the many forms of capital and corporal punishment inherited form the English. However, the contention that prisoners would refashion themselves if only given the opportunity to reflect and labor in solitude an silence disregarded the impact of authoritarian regimes of living and work.”
• “There are aspects of our history that we need to interrogate and rethink, the recognition of which may help us to adopt more complicated, critical postures toward the present and the future.” 
• “There is even more compelling evidence about the damage wrought by the expansion of the prison system in the schools located in poor communities of color that replicate the structures and regimes of the prison. When children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison.” 
• “In the nineteenth century, antislavery activists insisted that as long as slavery continued, the future of democracy was bleak indeed. In the twenty-first century, antiprison activists insist that a fundamental requirement for the revitalization of democracy is the long-overdue abolition of the prison system.”

Everyone’s probably already seen this stuff, but whatever.