Lawyers for 13 anti-slavery activists on trial in Mauritania said they have been tortured in detention. The activists, on trial for "rebellion and use of violence," were arrested last month after angry protests in a poor district of the capital Nouakchott slum community that faces forcible relocation as part of an urban clearance plan ahead of an Arab League summit to be hosted in the city. "One by one, the 13 spoke out against the forms of torture they had been subjected to in custody," said attorney Brahim Ould Ebetty, representing the members of the Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement (ARI). The riots started when security forces stormed dwellings occupied for decades by members of the Haratin ethnic group, many of them former slaves. Authorities accused the ARI members of instigating the riots. The detained are now being held at an unknown location.

Well, this is pretty hilarious. Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who crushed the 2013 Gezi Park protest movement in Istanbul and this year instated draconian curfews across the country's southeast in response to a Kurdish intifada, is now calling for his supporters to take the streets in response to an attempted coup d'etat by the military. BBC reports that he said: "I urge the Turkish people to convene at public squares and airports. I never believed in a power higher than the power of the people." Gezi Park itself is said to be now occupied by militants of Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP), who are facing down armed troops there—certainly a perverse irony. Erdogan is at this moment boasting that the coup has been crushed, but this seems far from certain. A bomb blast has reportedly hit the parliament building in Ankara. Several police are reported killed at Ankara's Special Forces headquarters, indicating the security forces are themselves divided. 

World War 4 Report editor Bill Weinberg will be leading a weekly walking tour highlighting struggles for urban space on New York's Lower East Side over the past generation—including the squats, community centers, community gardens and Tompkins Square Park.  In addition to Tompkins Square, a focal point of popular resistance in the neighborhood since the 1850s, the tour takes in La Plaza Cultural and other community gardens, site of the evicted Charas/El Bohio community center, the former Christadora Settlement House, the historic Saint Brigid's Church (recently saved from destruction by a community acitivst campaign), the Lower East Side Ecology Center, and the former site of the Esperanza Garden, destroyed by city bulldozers in 2000. The one-hour tour leaves from the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space (MoRUS) in C-Squat, 155 Ave. C between 9th and 10th Streets, every Sunday at 3 PM.