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SEATAC, Wash. — Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant told a SeaTac municipal court judge Thursday that she will represent herself in an upcoming trial for disorderly conduct prompted by her arrest in November during a protest. On Nov. 19, Sawant and three others were arrested for not leaving a roadway during a protest against big airlines for not paying their workers a living wage. Of those arrested, Sawant, Socrates Bravo and John Helmiere appeared together before a judge for a pretrial hearing. A judge exonerated their bail amounts.

SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) – Students and parents from schools controlled by the Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco protested at Saint Mary’s Cathedral on Ash Wednesday, saying the church should stay out of teachers’ bedrooms and drop proposed morality clauses in teacher contracts. On Ash Wednesday, one of the holiest days on the Catholic calendar, the students and parents are hoping Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone will change his mind on the clauses, as the church heads into 40 days of Lenten reflection. "We’re here because if Jesus were alive today, he’d be standing right next to us,” Mairead Ahlbach, a student...

Paramedics took nearly a half hour to reach a stricken 62-year-old man, who later died, because they were told to wait for a police escort as a result of a protest over police brutality in downtown Berkeley, city records show. It would have taken just a couple of minutes for Berkeley firefighters to drive from Station No. 2 on Berkeley Way to Alvin Henry Jones Jr., who had collapsed near an elevator at an apartment complex at 2175 Kittredge St. on the evening of Dec. 7. But hundreds of people had gathered downtown to protest against police killings of unarmed...

A group of people describing themselves as Stanford students blocked westbound traffic on the San Mateo Bridge minutes before 5 p.m. on Monday. Television footage showed officers making arrests soon after the students, carrying banners and a Palestinian flag, took to the bridge. Protesters said they hoped to shut down traffic for 28 minutes.

Screen grab by TurtleBoySports.comBoston reporters went to the homes of several Boston area protesters who were arrested for blocking highways on Thursday. What they found were adult children playing revolutionary while living with their rich parents. A reporter for WBZ-TV, Ken MacLeod was run off a property while seeking to interview protesters. At another he was told he was harassing the protester he was seeking to interview by ringing her apartment call box. “WBZ-TV’s Ken MacLeod went to (Mark) Schwaller’s apartment in Jamaica Plain hoping for some perspective. He didn’t get that but he did get tossed by another man...

Here are some photos from the ‘Stand with the Prophet’ Rally at Texas Public School Center Curtis Culwell Center. Did they think DFW is nothing but dem voting libs? The "standers" were overwhelmed... The speaker... The next speaker Random shots of the crowd. Random shots of the crowd. Random shots of the crowd. Random shots of the crowd. North side of the street. South side of the street and the crowd went on for a long way. On the west end of the parking lot the "standers" had about a hundred folks. The "standers" are on the left and the...

Hundreds from across Texas gathered at the Martin Luther King Jr. statue at UT Saturday afternoon in protest of police brutality and discrimination. The group then marched to the State Capitol. Millions March Texas organizers are calling for the firings of Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo and Houston Police Chief Charles McClelland.

Angry Boston commuter confronts road blocking protesters... https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=932774620066078&fref=nf

Grace Brewer says she never thought she would be without health insurance at this stage of her life. "I'm a casualty of Obamacare," says Brewer, 60, a self-employed chiropractor in the Kansas City, Kansas, area. She wanted to keep the catastrophic health insurance plan she once had, which she says fit her needs. But under the Affordable Care Act, the government's health care reform law, the plan was discontinued because it did not comply with the law's requirements, and her bills doubled to more than $400 a month. "I wanted a minimal plan and I’m not allowed to have it,"...

Supporters of a large demonstration at the Mall of America last month are urging the City of Bloomington not to pursue charges for disrupting retailers and shoppers. Several people at the Bloomington City Council meeting Monday night asked prosecutors to reconsider. More than two dozen people were arrested after the Dec. 20 demonstration organized by the group "Black Lives Matter." It was part of a nationwide wave of protests following incidents in Missouri and New York in which unarmed black men were killed by police. City Attorney Sandra Johnson says she plans to file charges against protest organizers for unlawful...

Sunday was a bad day to order the egg-white omelet. Not content with disrupting medal ceremonies for centenarian WWII veterans, the “hands up, don’t shoot” crowd served up its latest concoction: “Black Brunch,” in which protesters stormed brunch-serving restaurants — a.k.a. “white spaces” — in Manhattan and Oakland, Calif., chanting, singing, waving banners and posters, and reading off names of black citizens killed by police. If that seems hip and edgy to you, then you were probably brunching at Lallisse on Sunday morning. In an interview in Spook magazine, “activists” Wazi Maret Davis and Brianna Gibson, discussing an earlier...

Brenden LaRosa showed up to protest during First Night festivities with a message: Americans must talk to each other about race and policing, no matter how hard — or how unpopular — the conversation is. “We almost want people to feel uncomfortable. Then you’re forced to answer this question, and you’re forced to question the way you feel about it,” said the 19-year-old from Everett, who joined other demonstrators Wednesday evening in Copley Square. He estimated that he has been to five protests against the recent grand jury decisions not to indict white officers who killed unarmed black men in...

Ferguson protesters stormed the police headquarters in downtown St. Louis today. They were going to hold a sit-in protest for four-and-a-half hours until they were maced and cuffed. X 2 reported: Protesters stormed the doors of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department headquarters Wednesday morning. Their plan is to occupy the department for four and a half hours. About 15 protesters were in the lobby and refused to leave until their demands were met. They also handed police an ‘Eviction Notice.

Anti-police protesters are planning to disrupt New Year’s Eve celebrations at major metropolitan sites. The website Stop Mass Incarceration calls upon activists to not allow New Years Eve 2015 “to go down because business as usual in Amerikkka includes wanton police murder of Black people.”The announcement says that as Americans around the country ringing in the New Year must be disrupted: “The refusal of grand juries in Ferguson and Staten Island to indict the cops who murdered Michael Brown and Eric Garner made this clear. So the powerful, beautiful and necessary outpourings that have disrupted this society’s normal routine must...

NYPD Commissioner William Bratton said Sunday it was “very inappropriate” for police offers to turn their backs on Mayor de Blasio as he delivered a eulogy for a fallen hero cop. “I certainly don’t support that action yesterday. I think it was very inappropriate at that event,” Bratton said on “Face The Nation” Sunday. “That funeral was held to honor Officer (Rafael) Ramos and to bring politics, to bring issues into that event was very inappropriate and I do not support it.”

The Bloomington city attorney is pursuing criminal charges against the organizers of a protest inside the Mall of America after police shut down stores for about two hours during the demonstration. City Attorney Sandra Johnson tells WCCO-TV (http://cbsloc.al/1JNVUll) that mall officials are figuring out how much money stores lost on Saturday. Johnson is also figuring out the cost of overtime for police, and she expects to file criminal charges soon. Johnson said she wants organizers of the police brutality protest to pay restitution. She's focusing on those who kept promoting the rally after they were told it was prohibited on...

CNN Correspondent Sara Ganim said most of the people who had showed up were paying their respects to the officers, she added “I do, just in full disclosure, want to say that in the last couple of minutes, for the first time today, we’ve seen protesters come out here and start yelling at groups of police who are mourning their slain police officers.” Ganim continued “it’s just a few of them, Suzanne, and like I said, just in the last five minutes, and they’re quite frankly yelling at a group of police officers who are standing here silently, just looking...

Vandals in Philadelphia struck multiple times over the last two days. The vandalism came during a protest against perceived police brutality. In one of the acts of vandalism, the words "Cop Lives Don't Matter" were spray-painted on a fence. You can see the picture of that below: In another, the vandals defaced a Church with the words "f*** cops" written in spray paint:

On the weekend before Christmas, last-minute shoppers descended upon Buckhead to pick up last-minute gifts for their friends and family. And protesters, who in recent weeks have taken to Atlanta's streets over the non-indictments of police officers responsible for the killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y., decided to stage one of their most disruptive demonstrations yet by shutting down a major intersection near two of Atlanta's biggest shopping centers. Atlanta Police this afternoon arrested more than a dozen protesters who blocked traffic for more than 90 minutes at Peachtree and Lenox roads...

**SNIP** The message, which was on the south side of the bridge, has since been removed by government officials, according to the New York Post. Investigators reportedly found fingerprints at the scene and are investigating the identities of potential culprits. It coincided with a clash of pro- and anti-police demonstrators in who took to the city last night. Supporters of the NYPD appeared to mock Eric Garner by wearing t-shirts reading 'I CAN breathe' - an inversion of his dying words.