CBS NEWS: Author, commentator, civil rights activist and Princeton University professor Cornel West has been arrested while protesting on the steps of the Supreme Court about corporate influence in politics. A Supreme Court spokeswoman says 19 people were arrested Sunday afternoon after they refused to leave the grounds of the court. MORE
RELATED: The rallies started last month in New York’s financial district, where people have been staying in lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. They widened to 1500 cities today, including Sydney and Toronto, the organisers said, in a “global day of action against Wall Street greed”. MORE
RELATED: The global “Day of Rage” demonstrations that broke out around the world in “more than 900 cities,” says the Washington Post, against economic inequality and corporate greed Saturday were mostly peaceful. Around 175 protesters were arrested in Chicago early Sunday morning after they set up tents in a downtown plaza and refused to leave, reports the Chicago Tribune. In New York, at least 88 people were arrested, according to the New York Times, for a variety of violations, including criminal trespassing and refusing to leave Washington Square Park at midnight. The Associated Press says two police officers had to be hospitalized after suffering injuries. The protests moved uptown Saturday to Times Square as thousands of demonstrators mixed with everyday tourists trying to make it to their Broadway shows. The Huffington Post blares on its front page of “estimates as high as 20,000” in Times Square but it’s unclear where that number comes from beyond early Twitter claims that WNBC was reporting 10,000-20,000 people were in the area. The BBC cites organizers of the march saying that around 5,000 people took part. There were tense moments at several points Saturday, including when protesters tried to stage “a sit-in at a Citibank branch,” reports the New York Daily News. The New York Observer cites a protester saying customers had gone into the bank to close their accounts but were locked inside by security. As most clamored for a lack of jobs, the AP finds a 25-year-old who quit his job in Texas to go protest in New York. But there were protests across the country Saturday, and a few arrests in several other U.S. cities, including Minneapolis, reports CNN. Yet that didn’t seem to be norm. In Los Angeles, for example, “the march took on a decidedly festive atmosphere,” reports the Los Angeles Times, noting that for many it was a family event.
RELATED: The Occupy Wall Street movement has close to $300,000, as well as storage space loaded with donated supplies in lower Manhattan. It stared down city officials to hang on to its makeshift headquarters, showed its muscle Saturday with a big Times Square demonstration and found legions of activists demonstrating in solidarity across the country and around the world. Could this be the peak for loosely organized protesters, united less by a common cause than by revulsion to what they consider unbridled corporate greed? Or are they just getting started? MORE
>RELATED Occupy Wall Street protests are too big to ignore in the classroom. How to tackle the world of global finance, the banking crisis, government debt and recession in your classroom. MORE