Government troops open fire on Yemeni protesters

18.09 2011: Troops loyal to the Yemeni president have shot dead at least 22 protesters in Sanaa today (report of over 50 dead), and injured hundreds. Witnesses are calling it a massacre, and the number of dead is likely to rise.

19.09.2011: Over 20 dead following heavy fighting today - this includes at least one infant.

Follow for information:

@tomfinn2 (+967735541159)

@MachahirNews

@kasinof

@almuslimi

@YemenPeaceNews

@AJYemen

@tota770
@Abe_Alansy 
@ichamza
@yemen_updates
@Nefermaat
@OmarMash 
@SherineT 
@acarvin 
@alguneid
@Married2aYEMENI 
@abubakrabdullah 
@JShahryar 
@ARJaber
@yemenwatch
@al_masani 
@NoonArabia
@WomanfromYemen 
@bafana3
@Yemen4Change 
@adammbaron 
@YERevolutions 
@AlaaIsam
@yementribune
@MoheebA

Live stream

I will update this blogpost with relevant sources of information in the hours to come. 

Al Jazeera has regular updates and a live blog.

#OccupyWallSteet tweets have reached 10 000 000 people

It's 14.28 in New York, and 25 800 tweets have reached 10 700 000 people via the #OccupyWallStreet hashtag, despite a shift to alternate hashtags following suspicions that Twitter had kept the hashtag from trending.

Of these tweets, 6900 (27%) were original, while RTs made up 17 700 (69%) and @ messages 1 200 (5%). The top 5 tweeters made up 5% of that traffic - so 1200 people have RTed their tweets or mentioned them. And the top 50 contributors made up 9% of the traffic, with 2300 interactions.

Al Jazeera is among the top 20 most popular tweeters, because of @ajstream. No other representatives of the mainstream media made it onto the top 20 list in terms of popularity. Three of them (@AJElive, @CNNmoney and @DemocracyNow) made the list of the 20 most influential tweeters, because of their reach, but all tweeted just once, according to my statistics.
The #Sep17 hashtag saw a boost earlier today as a result of that, but with 6400 tweets (which reached 3 500 000 people) it hasn't caught up at this time.

The #TakeWallStreet hashtag is being used alongside #OccupyWallStreet and is a more likely contender. UPDATE: the #TakeWallStreet hashtag is now trending worldwide.


You can watch events unfold live here

September 17th - The occupation of Wall Street

September 17th marks a day of international bank and financial institutions seen as responsible for the global financial crisis and the struggles and suffering it has brought about. The planned occupation of Wall Street is perhaps the most notable - in addition to occupations in other countries. Anonymous has also warned of an attack on financial institutions using a new DDOS tool known as RefRef.

Hashtagtracking (@hashtracking) is tracking a number of hashtags related to September 17th for me, and I am making them available here:

#OccupyWallStreet 

#Sep17


#OccupyCanaryWharf

and

#OccupyBankOfEngland

Here's an overview of the #OccupyWallStreet hashtag at time of writing:

These images can be used freely so long as you credit Hashtracking and myself (Fredrik Walløe). 

Map of the Marcoule nuclear waste plant, France

Map of the Marcoule nuclear site. Hardly pretty, but gives an overview. Get in touch if you own the rights to any of these images and want me to take this down

Dale Farm - a map

Map of Dale Farm made in Photoshop. I don't intend to do anything with it, so feel free to use it. Let me know if you've got an aerial photo of the scrap yard that used to be there - one that hasn't been poorly edited.

Wikileaks leaks all US diplomatic cables - here's how you get to the original file

The full trove of US diplomatic cables obtained by Wikileaks, has been leaked.

Here's how you get access to the raw file:

1. Head over to Cryptome for a full list of available files, or try this link for a direct download.

2. You'll need a program that handles Torrents in order to get the file. There are several alternatives, but uTorrent is probably the easiest one to use. Download and install it. Then find the file you downloaded in step one and open it with uTorrent.

3. You'll notice that the file you've now downloaded has a .gpg extension - that's because it's encrypted and needs to be decrypted by a specific program called GNU Privacy Guard. You can download it here.

 4.Go to the Wikileaks file you downloaded and click to open it - it should be named xyz_z -click 'choose from list of programmes' (or something of the sort). Find the folder where you installed GNU Privacy Guard (C:\Program Files by default) and choose the application called gpa. 

5. Open the Wikileaks file using GNU Privacy Guard and click decrypt. Type in ACollectionOfDiplomaticHistorySince_1966_ToThe_PresentDay# when asked for the key. I wasn't able to copy&paste here, but give it a try just in case.

6. This gives you a compressed file which you can open with a program like 7-Zip, which you can get here.

7. When you've installed 7-Zip, you right-click the decrypted Wikileaks file (the one that's not a GPG File). Hover over 7-Zip and select extract to...

8. This gives you a file called 'cables', which you can open with Microsoft Excel (there's a total of 1048576 lines!). The formatting is awful. Get in touch if you know of a better way to view the file. I'll update this post when/if I find a better solution.

9. Enjoy the file. This is a splendid opportunity for freelancers and student journalists alike. I encourage you all to go beyond reporting merely what's written in these files - contextualise, explain and expand upon whatever you cover. 


PS. please exercise caution when reporting on these diplomatic cables, as careless reporting might endanger some of those named in them.

Wikileaks has also made the files available here. Steps above are for those who want to see the original file, as it appeared in the insurance file uploaded by Wikileaks.