“A shadowy international mercenary and security firm” employed by Energy Transfer Partners sent undercover agents to infiltrate protest camps at Standing Rock, harvested information from social media, used aerial surveillance, and eavesdropped on radio communications. TigerSwan, which started life as a U.S. military and State Department contractor, also collaborated closely with local, state, and federal law enforcement to target protesters. Continue reading
Filed under human rights, media, organizing
Linda Tirado was shot by police on Friday, May 29. “I was aiming my next shot, put my camera down for a second, and then my face exploded,” she told the New York Times. She is a photojournalist, who had press credentials and a camera, and was covering the protests in Minneapolis. She lost her eye. […]
All across St. Paul, corner mailboxes disappeared on Monday. “A big flatbed truck loaded with mailboxes,” one neighbor told me. They had a mailbox on the corner in front of their house. I had walked over yesterday to mail a letter, not long after the mailbox disappeared. Strange, I thought, but despite my news addiction, […]
I hope this is the morning after. I hope that tonight will bring no more fires, that familiar streetscapes will emerge from behind their plywood masks, that the work of rebuilding can begin in earnest on Lake Street and wherever fires and vandals destroyed parts of our cities. I hope that today and tomorrow and […]
If your windows were broken, your family business destroyed, in the protests and violence following the killing of George Floyd, how would you respond? With compassion and understanding, if you were any of business owners whose responses were compiled by Andrea Fjeldberg on her Facebook page. They focused on what is most important: the life […]
Local voices tell the same story: white men in vans setting fires, protesters trying to stop arsonists, a white man with a hammer smashing windows, people coming from outside to destroy community institutions. The governor and other public officials insist that the rioters come from out of town, many from out of state. Is that […]
Mary Turck