Mi’kmaq Territory, New Brunswick, Canada - RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) officers met with serious resistance after making an effort to clear a highway blockade, that targeted a company trying to exploit resources under their tribal lands by hydraulic fracturing (commonly known as fracking.) The blockade was a joint effort of Mi’kmaq tribal members and warrior society, Acadians and people from local anglo-speaking communities, who are rarely unified. The blockade had continued peacefully for weeks until the heavily armed and militarized police forces were ordered to step in and protect the interests of SWN Canada, a subsidiary of the Texas based South Western Energy company.

Yesterday the blockade was attacked by police who fired potentially deadly "less-lethal ammunition" and used pepper-spray on protesters; the attack was met with molotov cocktails, and later five police vehicles were torched. In all 40 demonstrators were arrested and no serious injuries were reported. According to authorities the local RCMP office on First Nations land itself came under attack and there was an attempt to burn it down.

According to SWN the blockade was costing them upwards of $60,000 per day. Dozens of solidarity blockades along highways and other demonstrations have taken place or a scheduled throughout North America, and beyond.

Background:

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New York, New York - Jeremy Hammond, the Chicago-based Anonymous and LulzSec affiliated hacktivist has accepted a non-cooperating guilty plea agreement for his role in hacking numerous state and private police and security related websites. Jeremy for the first time stated that he was responsible for these acts. He did so with his fist raised in the air before Judge Loretta A. Preska in a lower Manhattan Federal courtroom. He may ultimately be sentenced to as many as 10 years in prison and be ordered to pay more than $2.5 million in fines and restitution for his non-violent crimes. A sentence of that severity is many times more what his co-defendants in U.K. have been sentenced to.

The  U.S. State Attorney's Office made a statement on the case in an effort to malign Jeremy as someone simply focused on chaos and to imply that he was motivated by financial gain‽ They even attempt to deny that he was "fighting for an anarchist cause" as if anarchists should reject Jeremy as some sort of 'bad anarchist!'

The information Jeremy and his co-defendants retrieved from these sites was forwarded to Wikileaks, so that it could be released freely to the public. These hacks were not done for personal gain. Jeremy was arrested by FBI agents in early March of 2012 thanks to the aid of fellow hacker turned snitch Hector Xavier Monsegur a.k.a. "Sabu." Monsegur helped execute a computer attack against Strategic Forecasting, Inc. or Stratfor with the support of the FBI who were seemingly more interested in making a big case than protecting the so called victims of this hack.

It is possible that Jeremy could be released after his September 6th sentencing date with time served. It is more likely that this may happen if Jeremy's supporters demand it!

Jeremy Hammond's  statement:

Today I pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. This was a very difficult decision. I hope this statement will explain my reasoning. I believe in the power of the truth. In keeping with that, I do not want to hide what I did or to shy away from my actions. This non-cooperating plea agreement frees me to tell the world what I did and why, without exposing any tactics or information to the government and without jeopardizing the lives and well-being of other activists on and offline.

During the past 15 months I have been relatively quiet about the specifics of my case as I worked with my lawyers to review the discovery and figure out the best legal strategy. There were numerous problems with the government’s case, including the credibility of FBI informant Hector Monsegur. However, because prosecutors stacked the charges with inflated damages figures, I was looking at a sentencing guideline range of over 30 years if I lost at trial. I have wonderful lawyers and an amazing community of people on the outside who support me. None of that changes the fact that I was likely to lose at trial. But, even if I was found not guilty at trial, the government claimed that there were eight other outstanding indictments against me from jurisdictions scattered throughout the country. If I had won this trial I would likely have been shipped across the country to face new but similar charges in a different district. The process might have repeated indefinitely. Ultimately I decided that the most practical route was to accept this plea with a maximum of a ten year sentence and immunity from prosecution in every federal court.

Now that I have pleaded guilty it is a relief to be able to say that I did work with Anonymous to hack Stratfor, among other websites. Those others included military and police equipment suppliers, private intelligence and information security firms, and law enforcement agencies. I did this because I believe people have a right to know what governments and corporations are doing behind closed doors. I did what I believe is right.

I have already spent 15 months in prison. For several weeks of that time I have been held in solitary confinement. I have been denied visits and phone calls with my family and friends. This plea agreement spares me, my family, and my community a repeat of this grinding process.

I would like to thank all of my friends and supporters for their amazing and ongoing gestures of solidarity. Today I am glad to shoulder the responsibility for my actions and to move one step closer to daylight.

Jeremy Hammond

Stockholm, Sweden - Rioting spreads into a fourth day since police fatally shot a 69-year-old mentally ill man in an immigrant neighborhood. "Youths" are being singled out as being largely responsible and are said to be motivated by a lack of hope in the future, racism, and joblessness. Sweden has been scaling back it's social welfare programs since the 1990s, leading to the enormous increases in economic inequality, at a greater rate than in any other advanced economy.

Disturbances of this sort are nearly unknown in Sweden, and certainly are on this scale. What began as rock throwing at police in the Husby area, where the shooting occurred has escalated. More than a hundred cars being set alight and then even a number of state buildings including two schools. A police station in the suburb of Jakosberg area was also attacked. Rioting has spread to more than a dozen Stockholm neighborhoods.

Today marks the five year anniversary of the death of Brad Will.

Brad Will ¡Presente!

Everywhere - The Occupy Wall Street movement has gone global, after just a few thousand gathered in lower Manhattan one month ago. Momentum and support is continuing to build, and spread to new locations.

Bombs and Shields is on hiatus.

Check out some of our other projects!
A New World in Our Hearts - NYC
Sticks and Stones - Santa Cruz

Riot porn wise, there was some pretty sweet burning and looting outside the NATO summit in Strasbourg recently.

Social Rupture is a frequently updated blog on attacks in the U.$. and links to a number of similar blogs from Europe and Canada.

Manila, Philippines - Hundreds of students clashed with police outside the U.S. embassy and Filipino Supreme Court, demanding the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces and expressing rage at the Filipino Government as well. The U.S. military has maintained a presence in the Philippines since 1898.

Another anti-U.S. youth action in Manila got rowdy in June and also involved clashes with police while attempting to storm the embassy.

Rumieh, Lebanon - Over a hundred inmates rioted in Beirut's largest prison, "burning mattresses and other items to press their demands for reduced sentences".

The same prison was the scene of a mutiny in April last year in which seven warders were held hostage. A riot also broke out at the Qubbah prison in the northern Lebanon city of Tripoli in January with inmates holding two wardens hostage.

Nairobi, Kenya - An anti-police demonstration sparked by the police killings of a student and two human rights activists turned into a riot in the Kenyan capital. Thousands of youth, who have faced a rising tide of police violence in "anti-gang" crackdowns in recent years, built barricades, beat up journalists, pelted police with stones and looted businesses. Witnesses said a rally of about 2,000 students more than doubled in size as slum dwellers, jobless and others joined in.

Dresden, Germany - Anarchists and antifascists broke away from a permitted demonstration of 10,000 to battle police protecting 6,000 Nazis and nationalists gathered to mark the 65th anniversary of the firebombing of Dresden by the U.S. Rage against the fascist presence resulted in two flipped police vehicles and hours of clashes with rocks and other objects hurled at police.

Tongxiang, China - Hundreds of migrant workers clashed with more than 100 regular and armed police in this city in the southern province of Zhejiang on Saturday, leaving six police vehicles smashed or burned, witnesses and said. One witness described thousands of people besieging the police detachment: "the protesters, most of whom seemed to be migrant labourers, were so discontented and indignant that they hurled almost everything within their reach, including bricks, stones and bottles, even when the police seemed prepared to retreat."

Bilbao - Hundreds of demonstrators in the Basque region's largest city built barricades of burning dumpsters and fought police for control of the streets. Incendiary devices were thrown at the offices of the Basque Nationalist Party. The provocation for the riot was the banning by Spain of pro-independence groups from participating in elections. The Basques are one of Europe's longest-colonized and least-assimilated indigenous cultures, with an equally long history of resistance to the rule of Madrid and Paris.

Monterrey, Mexico - In a fourth day of evening-rush-hour street protests against mlitary operations in the region, masked protestors blockaded major streets of this industrial city in northern Mexico and burned a truckload of wooden pallets. The day before, fireworks and molotov cocktails were thrown at police.

Authorities and the media have portrayed demonstrators as tools of the drug cartels, but admit the global economic crisis is a major force behind the unrest. In the past five months, the U.S. consulate and a TV station in Monterrey have been attacked with grenades.