AUTHOR: Redaspie DATE: Thursday, August 10, 2006 ----- BODY:

Yesterday was a very exciting day for Derry activists, who successfully stormed the Raytheon plant in Derry, wrecking the computers in the place and tossing all their documentation out of the window. Full details of the occupation can be found here. I was there in my morning, before I had to hurry off to work, so missed most of the action. I understand the police cordoned off the immediate area and that in fact it took the whole day to get the nine involved out of the building. Among the nine is Eamonn McCann, who was actually filmed talking to the TV crews from the window. If you can get it to work (my computer just blocks it as a pop-up) you might want to click on the link to the right of the BBC article and play the RealVideo footage of the protest. McCann and the others are now under arrest, and there were apparently bail hearings this morning. According to the latest reports, they were remanded in custody rather than getting bail. Which frankly is a surprise and more than a little worrying.

On vaguely related news, worldwide alerts are declared at airports! I'm not going into the details of this, as anyone not living in a hole in a forest would be aware of this situation after today. We don't know of course, at this stage, whether there was actually a plot of any real description, and past events (tanks at Heathrow, the ricin 'plot', the Charles de Menezes and Forestgate shootings) should give us cause to be suspicious. Of course, equally as 7/7 showed us, the danger is a ral one, and I'm not going to complain about the arrests made today if there was actually a plot. But why up the threat level to 'critical' and cause all this disruption to the airports after making the arrests? John Reid in one of his press conferences stated that he was satisfied that all the main players in this supposed plot were under arrest, something backed up by the BBC report. One gets the feeling that, whatever the truth of the matter, the powers that be are milking this for all the propaganda mileage they can get out of it.

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