A state of emergency was declared for 15 days in Georgia today and basically a low-level military rule has replaced the democratic society. The Georgian president was originally going to just have a short state of emergency in the capital Tbilisi, but then extended it to the whole country. There have been large protests over the arrest of a political opposition figure. The protest outside parliament was broken up by tear gas and water cannons today.
I thought I'd make a little post on this seeing that cnn.com, huffingtonpost and drudgereport have it nowhere on their sites, whereas it is the top story at the BBC. Is it important? Well, I think CNN could have bumped the Britney (still? We have to hear about her still?) or Country Music Awards stories for it. It's somewhat like Pakistan, in that this is another country that is one of our friends, very "pro-Western".
There are some amazing videos from Russia Today an English-language Moscow-based news service. In the videos and photos notice the scary new riot police masks, look sort of like the Scream movie mask. Also one video mentions a sound machine that is a new crowd dispersal device.
The SWAT team also broke into the TV station that had been airing pro-opposition news and coverage of the demonstrations and took them off the air. The video of that is pretty amazing too.
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