'Occupy' protesters clash with traders, police outside NYSE

New York: Occupy Wall Street activists clashed with workers and police outside the New York Stock Exchange, prompting over 150 arrests on the two-month anniversary of the anti-capitalist movement. As hundreds linked arms to block access to the NYSE building yesterday, several violent scuffles broke out with organisers vowing a show of force despite recent setbacks for the Occupy Wall Street campaign which has gone global. Chanting “Wall Street’s closed!” “We are the 99 percent” and “Whose street? Our street!,” about 1,000 demonstrators engaged in a tense face-off with hundreds of police, including many on horseback outside the iconic exchange. [caption id=“attachment_133917” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“The activists clashed with workers and police outside the New York Stock Exchange. Don Ryan/AP”]  [/caption] The protests were part of a “Global Day of Action” with hundreds of demonstrations planned across the United States. Police evicted protesters in Los Angeles and Dallas on Thursday, arresting dozens of people. In London, protesters refused to budge as a deadline to leave their camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral by 1800 GMT 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. After skirmishes throughout the morning in New York, up to 2,000 people regrouped in Zuccotti Park, the symbolic heart of the movement, where the Occupy camp was dismantled by police in a night-time 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. The protesters were preparing for a later march joined by union members, planning to swarm the Brooklyn Bridge and disrupt evening commuter traffic. “The numbers I’ve heard is something less than a thousand, but it’s hard to tell because you have a group here and another group there and some go from one group to another,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg told reporters. AFP