downtown n ®
VOLUME 24, NUMBER 48
TRIBECA FILM FEST GUIDE, P. 13
express ss THE NEWSPAPER OF LOWER MANHATTAN
APRIL 18 - 25, 2012
Wall Street sleepover denied, O.W.S. moves on
Downtown Express photo by Milo Hess
Dog-day afternoons
BY ZACH WILLIAMS For Occupy Wall Street activists the past week has been about reasserting themselves, both in name and in the spirit of the movement. With two weeks left until the promised mass mobilization on May 1, aimed at ushering in the ‘American Spring,’ activists last week, reasserted their claims to public spaces by sleeping on the sidewalks of Wall Street directly across from the New York Stock Exchange. But a 2000 court ruling allowing people to sleep on city sidewalks as a form of political expression did not deter NYPD officers from ending the protest Monday morning. Five arrests were made, according to activ-
ists. But that was not the end of the ‘occupiers’ presence in the neighborhood. Tess Cohen, a Brooklyn resident, said Thursday night that police actions which forced protesters to vacate Union Square in the middle of the night spurred activists to sleep on nearby streets, an “organic and spontaneous” strategy which soon led them to Wall Street. “The cops totally forced our hands in this,” said Cohen. “They don’t let anybody sleep anywhere. Obviously at the very beginning of all this, if there was one thing that they were protecting and trying to keep a distance from us, [it] was right here. It’s just amazing that the name Occupy Wall Street
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With the temps rising to degrees that resemble summer rather than spring, even man’s best friend needs to keep hydrated.
Army agrees to hold Chen trials on U.S. soil BY ALINE REYNOLDS Community advocates and elected officials involved in the Danny Chen case have scored a major victory by helping to persuade the U.S. Army to hold the trials of eight soldiers implicated in the soldier’s apparent suicide on U.S. soil. Last week, Army officials announced that the courts-martial, which were scheduled to begin earlier this month at Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan, will instead be administered at the Fort Bragg military base in North Carolina. The
military’s decision about the trials’ locale follows months of petitioning by the New York chapter of the Organization of Chinese Americans (OCA-NY) to have the trials moved to the U.S. “This is a welcome victory for the community and the family,” said OCA-NY President Elizabeth OuYang at an April 12 press conference at the organization’s Chinatown offices. “It’ll be easier for our community to get there, and it’ll be easier for the family to get there. The family deserves to be there, and the
public needs to see what’s going on, in order for there to be legitimacy to this process.” Making the courts-martial accessible to Chen’s parents and other relatives is one of the main reasons why the Army decided to hold them on U.S. turf, according to Colonel Kevin Arata, chief public affairs officer at Fort Bragg. The Army had previously advised the family against traveling to Afghanistan for the trials for safety reasons.
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Merchants River House in BPC Beat. Page 12.