Clashes defiance in US anti-corruption protests news

Americans protesting corporate greed and inequality faced down authorities in parks and plazas across the country ahead of what organisers describe as 24 hours of public action planned Saturday in cities around the world.

Groups spanning the globe from Asia to Europe and in every U.S. state announced demonstrations and other actions. The rapidly growing movement could link a protest that started financial district together with longer-standing anti-austerity demonstrations that have raged across Europe amid a roiling economic crisis.

Demonstrators from San Francisco to New York resisted police, with some forming human chains and heckling corporate leaders. Hundreds have been arrested on minor charges in cities across the U.S. since the protests started about a month ago.

Protesters at the heart of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York exulted Friday after beating back a plan they said was intended to clear them from the privately owned park where they have slept, eaten and protested for the past month. They said their victory will embolden the movement across the U.S. and beyond. We are going to piggy-back off the success of today, and it’s going to be bigger than we ever imagined, said protester Daniel Zetah.

The owners of Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan had announced plans to temporarily evict the hundreds of protesters before dawn Friday so that the grounds could be power-washed and inspected. But protesters feared it was a pretext to break up the demonstration and swelled their ranks by several thousand, recruiting through Facebook, Twitter and world of month.

Minutes before the appointed hour, the word came down that the park’s owners, Brookfield Office Properties, had postponed the cleanup. Brookfield said in a statement that it had decided to delay the cleaning for a short period of time  at the request of "a number of local political leaders".

A man who identified himself as the protester, Felix Rivera-Pitre, said in a statement posted online that he did not provoke the officer. “I was just doing what everyone else was doing in the march,” he said. “It felt like he was taking his frustrations out on me.”