Occupy Wall Street marched into its third month Friday after protests in several US cities and parts of Europe, with 250 arrests and clashes with police in the movement’s New York epicenter. Thousands of activists protesting against alleged corporate greed marched across New York’s Brooklyn Bridge Thursday in a show of force after being evicted from their home base in a Manhattan park earlier this week. The protests were part of a “Global Day of Action” to mark the movement’s two-month anniversary, with hundreds of demonstrations planned across the country to protest against the “one percent” of political and business elites. In London, protesters refused to budge as a deadline to leave their camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral passed, with the City of London Corporation now expected to start legal action to remove them. Thousands also marched in Spain and Athens to protest austerity measures and public spending cuts, although the demonstrations were not directly linked to the OWS movement. “We are unstoppable! Another world is possible!” chanted the crowd on the Brooklyn Bridge, which organisers said was 20,000 strong. New York police refused to offer a crowd estimate. The ensuing clashes sent police and protesters clattering to the ground. Police repeatedly clubbed one man with a baton, while several protesters were handcuffed and dragged into police trucks. Up to 2,000 people later regrouped in Zuccotti Park, the symbolic heart of the movement, where a sprawling encampment was dismantled by police in a nighttime raid early Tuesday. “We need to show we are bigger than Zuccotti Park, that we are resilient, that we refuse to submit to brutal police tactics,” said Jessica Lingel, 28, a librarian from New Jersey. At least one exasperated New York cop seemed to concede victory to the protesters. “They’ve blocked everything off. This is what happens when you kick them out of the park: you stir a hornet’s nest,” said the officer, who would not provide his name. “They wanted to disrupt Wall Street, and they’ve done it.” In Washington, more than 200 protesters marched under police escort through the heart of the US capital and across a bridge over the Potomac River. On the West Coast protests included a morning sit-in at a major downtown intersection in Los Angeles. More than 460 protests were planned across the country, according to activist group MoveOn.
London protesters occupy bank building: The Occupy London Stock Exchange movement activists have occupied an empty office block in London owned by Swiss banking giant UBS, their third protest site in the British capital, the movement said Friday. As banks repossess families’ homes, empty bank property needs to be repossessed by the public,” Occupy LSX member Jack Holburn said in a statement. “We hope this is the first in a wave of ‘public repossessions’ of property belonging to the companies that crashed the global economy.”
