still haven't made it over to twitter ....
did you see the protestors?
I was right next to them. As I was watching the banner come down, I could see in my peripheral vision a guy about 10 feet away from me take off his backpack. He pulled several yellow balloons with writing on them and start to launch them towards the ceiling and then just calmly walked away. Security came and snatched the balloons out of the air before they got too high.
The press conference continued on, fairly uneventfully, for a few minutes. Then when it was officially over, and the mad dash for press kits started, I walked up on a woman who had just seconds before set a stink bomb either next to or on the hood of a new VW Golf. As the thing smoked, she took out of her backpack a few collapsible banners with the same slogan as the overhead banner and the balloons and handed them to a couple of her colleagues. Security descended upon them and snatched and destroyed the banners. The protesters slipped away in the madness.
For a minute I thought I was gonna get escorted out. As I was in the melee of trying to get press material, people were pushing and shoving like they were at a Prince concert. This one guy took his right elbow, put it in the chest of this little Asian woman and basically lifted her into me. She eventually fell to the ground. Then he put that same elbow in my chest. Here's where I WOULD have gotten escorted out. Only by God's will, I was unable to lift my right arm. Otherwise my right fist would have ended up on the bridge of his nose. I was, however able to lift my left hand and I pressed my left forefinger into his Adam's Apple and said something I cannot repeat here. He responded in French, but I'm sure he understood my English because he did back.......up.
