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Human Rights Group Concerned Over Journalists’ Arrests at Occupy Wall Street

A human rights office for the Americas on Thursday criticized the arrest and assault of journalists during Occupy Wall Street protests in New York and other U.S. cities in recent weeks...

The office alleged in a statement that at least three journalists have been assaulted since October by police officers, and two others by participants, in demonstrations in Nashville, Tennessee, and Oakland, California.

“In addition, at least a dozen journalists have reportedly been placed under temporary arrest while performing their professional duties,” the statement said.

See this also from RT : Police cracking down on media at OWS?

And finally, here's hopey-changey on World press Freedom Day:

"We rededicate ourselves to the basic principle enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that every person has the right to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

"We recognise the courageous journalists who work every day to give meaning to these rights, often at great risk to their lives, as we have seen most recently with the tragic deaths of journalists in Libya," Obama said.

"As we witnessed in the historic events in Tunisia and Egypt, new media tools can also help empower citizens exercise their freedoms of speech and association, yet these same 21st century tools can be used to filter, block, and restrict free expression.

"That is why we must always stand up for the free flow of information around the world," he said.

"History shows that one of the ingredients of successful, prosperous, and stable societies is a free press where citizens can freely access information and hold their governments accountable," said the US President.

Dozens of countries curbing the press freedom: Obama

Sainsburys had a 5 minute free advert on the Today programme last week. Peak time. Justin Webb was enamoured, mmm-ing and aagh-ing and popping a few dummy questions to the CEO (Justin King), but mostly leaving him to stray over the high quality of sainsbury products, expanding profits, the uniqueness of the Sainsbury service, how they were doing the right thing for customers, responding to their needs, helping them with their weekly budgets. And to plug the new Sainsbury campaign: live well for less (twice).

"It's very interesting talking to you" says Webb, "you get a sense that you are preparing yourelf and your business for a really very different longer term situation when it comes to the decisions that shoppers make..."

A longer term situation where people can't afford to shop. Or eat.

"Keith Harrold of Project 5000 in Loughborough, which runs a hot food service once a week from a local church, agrees. "People are struggling. Supermarket prices are shooting up and they aren't coping."

"[Fairshare] works from 17 sites in the UK and shifts 3,600 tonnes of food a year, worth more than £8m. In the past 12 months the number of people it feeds has risen from 29,000 to 35,500. The number of organisations signed up to receive food has risen from 600 to 700. And 42% of those organisations are recording increases of up to 50% in demand for their services.

John Willetts, a former NHS trust chief executive and now the volunteer project director for FareShare in Leicester, said: "It's a constant ramping up in demand all the time. The volume of food we're distributing has risen from 41 tonnes a year three years ago to 98 tonnes now, and that's to the same number of organisations."

From http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/oct/01/families-queue-for-food-ha...

Listen to Webb at http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9607000/9607794.stm

UPDATED: A public ponging

Correspondence:
Ping (me)
Pong (Rentoul)
Ping (me)
Pong (Rentoul)
PING...
POOOONG (You shill, you)
NO PINGS ALLOWED

John Rentoul, chief political commentator at the Independent on Sunday, has also boarded the We Hate The Human Rights Act bandwagon, along with the Daily Mail, the Sun and Daily Torygraph. How Independent. How liberal.

He joins other esteemed correspondents at the Indy who hate human rights - or who hate them when they get in the way of our middle class 'freedoms'. Mary Dejevsky believes in deportation of the Roma, on the grounds that they are criminal and parasitic, and too expensive for the richer nations to support. Bruce Anderson believes we have a duty to subject the families of terrorists (suspected terrorists?) to torture: 'torture the wife and children' if the terrorist won't talk. And Rentoul, who is a bit more circumspect about the details of which rights he would withdraw, and from whom, thinks the concept of inhuman and degrading treatment 'is too broad and subjective', and therefore probably is fine for terrorists, suspected terrorist (and foreigners).

I wrote to complain about a single paragraph in one of his (two) recent articles against the HRA:

From his article
A Pincer movement on No 10

[Blair] and his home secretaries talked of "revisiting" or even "repealing" the Chahal judgment of the European Court of Human Rights that would not allow the UK to deport a suspected terrorist. Which, needless to say, could not be done.

UPDATED:
Correspondence with Evan Davis

Good old BBC. Let's try as hard as we can not to make the banks look too bad.

Nearly all outlets are reporting that Barclays paid out less than 1% of its stupendous profits in corporate tax:

The Guardian
Sky News
FT (uses Barclays' own initial declaration of 11.6 bn in profit, which gives the 1% figure for corporate tax.)
The Daily Torygraph (yes, even them)
The Mirror
The Daily Mail (uses 11.6 bn figure)

The Independent ... manages to bump it up to 4.5%

And the BBC?

This page on the BBC says 'Barclays has revealed it paid £113m in corporation tax to the UK in 2009, 2.4% of its £4.6bn global annual profit.'

This page (BBC) says 'Barclays has said it paid £113m in corporation tax in 2009, which was 2.4% of its global profit.'

Evan Davis reveals all in his morning chat with Joe Lynam on the Today programme:

ED: First just tell us what the profits are, because the Guardian calls it 11.6 billion pounds of profit
JL: ... and Barclays say that was correct for 2009. But then they changed the number when they released their figures this week on Tuesday, so they .. they're now saying that the official figure that they should have said last year was £4.6 billion. Both the Guardian and Barclays are correct, because they sold a huge management company called BGI for around 7 billion, they then took that back off the profits that they had ...
ED: So let's call it ... let's call it 4.6 billion, be generous to Barclays, which makes it a rate of 2.4%...

'Let's be generous to Barclays'!!?