I heard the teaser promo for the 11PM news on this story, within the past hour, via the flagship CBS affiliate here in the metro NY area, WCBS-TV.
The local ABC affiliate picked it up a few minutes later. (See link HERE.)
Last but not least, here is the NY Times website....
Envelopes With White Powder Sent to Mayor and 6 Banks
By PATRICK McGEEHAN
New York Times
April 30, 2012
On the eve of planned May Day protests across the country, envelopes containing white powder were sent to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and six banks in Manhattan, officials said Monday.
The envelopes, intended to frighten their recipients but later found to be harmless, caused evacuations and shutdowns of the bank branches and a city building while the Police and Fire Departments investigated. No person or group immediately claimed responsibility for the mailings.
The letter addressed to the mayor never made it to City Hall. It was opened in a mail room on the second floor of 100 Gold Street, a city official said.
…
A city official said two of the letters sent to banks read in part: “This is a reminder that you are not in control. Just in case you needed some incentive to stop working. We have a little surprise for you. Think fast.” They ended with, “Happy May Day.”
The message led some officials to speculate that the mailings had been orchestrated by the Occupy Wall Street movement, which had scheduled protests in several places in the city on Tuesday.
But Bill Dobbs, a member of the Occupy Wall Street press team, said, “It doesn’t sound like anything that’s part of the plans for tomorrow.”
Apparently, five packages of this powder were sent to five Wells Fargo branches in the City; a sixth package was sent to JP Morgan Chase’ Park Avenue headquarters; and, a seventh package was sent to the Mayor’s office.
More to follow…but, frankly, I don’t think there’s much more to this story, other than to note that there’s a deliberate slant in the initial coverage to vilify the entire Occupy movement.
CBS Affiliate is now stating: "They think they know who did this..."
The local network affiliates are sensationalizing the sh*t out of this right now. Pathetic...
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UPDATE (Weds., May 1st 10:00AM EDT): Per this comment, below...apparently, yesterday, the NYPD and--at least in one reported incident--the FBI, have raided the homes of at least five OWS participants...
PD Raids Activists’ Homes Before May Day Protests
Gawker.com
A day before Occupy Wall Street hopes to shut down New York and cities across the country in massive May Day protests, the NYPD visited at least three activist homes in New York and interrogated residents about plans for tomorrow's protest.
Today "there was definitely an upswing in law enforcement activity that seemed to fit the pattern of targeting what police might view as political residences," said Gideon Oliver, the president of the New York Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, which offers legal to support to Occupy Wall Street. "They were asking what are your May Day plans, do you know who the leaders are—these are classic political surveillance questions."
Oliver said the National Lawyer's Guild is aware of at least five instances of NYPD paying activists visits, including one where the FBI was involved in questioning. (He wouldn't elaborate.) We spoke to three of these activists...
Checkout this post published over the past hour by Kossack Horace Boothroyd III: "Occupy May Day: NYC Schedule of Events."
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Something I had written up and never posted...seems appropriate to publish here...
Let's have some precision in language here: terrorism means deadly violence -- for a political and/or economical purpose -- carried out against people and other living things, and is usually conducted by governments against their own citizens (as at Kent State, or in Vietnam, or in Poland, or in most of Latin America right now), or by corporate entities such as J. Paul Getty, Exxon, Mobil Oil, etc etc., against the land and all creatures that depend upon the land for life and livelihood. A bulldozer ripping up a hillside to strip mine for coal is committing terrorism; the damnation of a flowing river followed by the drowning of Cherokee graves, of forest and farmland, is an act of terrorism...
― Edward Abbey
If you are a terror to many, then beware of many.
― Ausonius
There is no moral difference between a Stealth bomber and a suicide bomber. They both kill innocent people for political reasons.
― Tony Benn
Cruelty has a human heart, And jealousy a human face Terror, the human form divine, And secrecy, the human dress
― William Blake
If you are talking about terrorism, you need to sit down and understand what is making these people put dynamite around their waists and blow themselves up.
― Lakhdar Brahimi
War on terrorism defines the central preoccupation of the United States in the world today, and it does reflect in my view a rather narrow and extremist vision of foreign policy of the world's first superpower, of a great democracy, with genuinely idealistic traditions.
― Zbigniew Brzezinski
The war on terrorism can never be won.
― Warren Buffett
One of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror.
― George W. Bush
Terrorism takes us back to ages we thought were long gone if we allow it a free hand to corrupt democratic societies and destroy the basic rules of international life.
― Jacques Chirac
Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.
― Noam Chomsky
Any power must be an enemy of mankind which enslaves the individual by terror or force, whether it arises under a facets government or communist flag. All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual.
― Albert Einstein
The war against terrorism is terrorism.
― Woody Harrelson
There is no doubt that the United States has much to atone for, both domestically and abroad...To produce this horrible confection at home, start with our genocidal treatment of the Native Americans, add a couple hundred years of slavery, along with our denial of entry to Jewish refugees fleeing the death camps of the Third Reich, stir in our collusion with a long list of modern despots and our subsequent disregard for their appalling human rights records, add our bombing of Cambodia and the Pentagon Papers to taste, and then top with our recent refusals to sign the Kyoto protocol for greenhouse emissions, to support any ban on land mines, and to submit ourselves to the rulings of the International Criminal Court. The result should smell of death, hypocrisy, and fresh brimstone.
― Sam Harris
The violent subjugation of the Palestinians, Iraqis, and Afghans will only ensure that those who oppose us will increasingly speak to us in the language we speak to them—violence.
― Chris Hedges
Today, we talk a lot about terrorism, but we rarely talk about state terrorism.
― Bianca Jagger
What really alarms me about President Bush's 'War on Terrorism' is the grammar. How do you wage war on an abstract noun? How is 'Terrorism' going to surrender? It's well known, in philological circles, that it's very hard for abstract nouns to surrender.
― Terry Jones
Terrorism is not new to black people.
― Vernon Jordan
We all have to be concerned about terrorism, but you will never end terrorism by terrorizing others.
― Martin Luther King III
What separates us from the animals, what separates us from the chaos, is our ability to mourn people we’ve never met.
― David Levithan
Both terrorism and insurance sell fear -- and business is business
― Liam McCurry
'The greatest danger of a terrorist's bomb is in the explosion of stupidity that it provokes
― Octave Mirbeau
No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.
― Edward R. Murrow
The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?
― George Orwell
Terrorism is in good part an effect of government propaganda; it serves to deflect attention from governmental abuse toward a mostly imagined, highly dangerous outside enemy
― Mark Poster
Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease. Terrorism has no country. It's transnational, as global an enterprise as Coke or Pepsi or Nike. At the first sign of trouble, terrorists can pull up stakes and move their "factories" from country to country in search of a better deal. Just like the multi-nationals.
Terrorism as a phenomenon may never go away. But if it is to be contained, the first step is for America to at least acknowledge that it shares the planet with other nations, with other human beings who, even if they are not on TV, have loves and griefs and stories and songs and sorrows and, for heaven's sake, rights.
― Arundhati Roy
How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized. Don't let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.
― Salman Rushdie
If we like them, they're freedom fighters . . . If we don't like them, they're terrorists. In the unlikely case we can't make up our minds, they're temporarily only guerrillas.
― Carl Sagan
Terrorism isn't a crime against people or property. It's a crime against our minds, using the death of innocents and destruction of property to make us fearful. Terrorists use the media to magnify their actions and further spread fear. And when we react out of fear, when we change our policy to make our country less open, the terrorists succeed -- even if their attacks fail. But when we refuse to be terrorized, when we're indomitable in the face of terror, the terrorists fail -- even if their attacks succeed.
― Bruce Schneier
There are many ways to honor America. This book is mine. I have completed this journey of self-education in the belief that the most terrifying possibility since 9/11 has not been terrorism--as frightening as that is--but the prospect that Americans will give up their rights in pursuing the chimera of security.
― David K. Shipler
We first fought the heathens in the name of religion, then Communism, and now in the name of drugs and terrorism. Our excuses for global domination always change.
― Serj Tankian
If terrorism is based on creating fear, The greatest terrorism is media.
― Simen Valom
How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?
― Howard Zinn