70 Environmental Protesters Arrested Outside the New York Times

Dozens of climate change protesters were taken into custody Saturday in New York City after they blocked the traffic laying down on the avenue outside the New York Times building.

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The demonstrators who are part of the group Extinction Rebellion hanged a banner saying “climate change = mass murder” to the building. They climbed onto it to demand the news outlet to cover more climate change issues and to refer to them as emergency ones.

“The media must report on the climate change crisis as an emergency so that people can start pushing for more radical responses,” said Eve Mosher a spokeswoman for the organization.

The action was supposed to warn public opinion and to recall media outlets in general, and the New York Times in particular, of the emergency of the planet's climate situation, the organizers explained.

Another protester, Donna Nicolino, told The Guardian she was ready to be arrested because “we want the New York Times as well as all the other media to treat climate change as the crisis it is.”  

A New York Times spokesperson said that “there is no national news organization that devotes more time, staff or resources to producing deeply reported coverage to help readers understand climate change," adding that the news outlet "fully support this group’s right to express their point of view, even when we disagree with it as it relates to our coverage.”

Extinction Rebellion is an international environmental movement that implements non-violent civil disobedience in order to call for radical change and to limit the danger of human extinction and ecological disaster that are lying ahead of us, according to their website. 

On Saturday, Germany’s largest lignite coal mine was overrun by an army of climate change protesters, as demonstrators lodged a sit-in to “increase pressure on the government” to address their concerns.