Jesse Rosenfeld, 26, activist journalist
A few days before the G20, Mr. Rosenfeld appeared at a Toronto café and spoke about the difference between mainstream and alternative media.
At a protest at the Novotel on Saturday night, that difference came into sharp focus for the freelancer Mr. Rosenfeld, who reportedly took a policeman’s fist to the gut and an elbow to the back as mainstream broadcaster Steve Paikin looked on.
“He was completely defenceless,” said Mr. Paikin, host of TVO’s The Agenda, who reported the assault on Twitter after he was escorted from the same protest in far gentler fashion. He later learned Mr. Rosenfeld has only one kidney and suffers asthma.
Normally based in Israel, where he writes for The Daily Nuisance, an independent site that reports on issues in occupied Palestinian territories, Mr. Rosenfeld himself had a foot in both journalistic camps. He was to produce three G20 comment pieces for Britain’s The Guardian, while also working with a collective of alternative reporters in his native Toronto.
“We’re examining questions like how power works,” Mr. Rosenfeld, a McGill graduate in international development, was reported as saying last Monday, at an event to launch the collective.
By Mr. Paikin’s account, that question was answered in brutal fashion for the young scribe, whose whereabouts were unknown to his family until late Sunday afternoon.
After several hours spent at a bail court on Finch Avenue, his father, Mark Rosenfeld, learned Jesse had been charged with breaching the peace, and would be released from detention on Eastern Avenue late Sunday night.
The family has hired Julian Falconer, a high-profile human-rights lawyer.
Alex Hundert, 30, anarchist
Hours before his arrest in a pre-dawn police raid Saturday, Alex Hundert issued what would be his last G20 rallying cry, via Twitter: “tomorrow is gonna be even bigger. they never should've brought that twisted circus here.”
Saturday certainly was big, but as Black Bloc activists smashed their way through downtown Toronto, Mr. Hundert – who had supported their militant tactics online and in speeches for months in the summit lead-up – stood in a courtroom with three co-accused.
All were denied bail on charges of conspiring to commit indictable mischief. The charges were the product of more than a year of an undercover police investigation.
There’s been nothing covert about Mr. Hundert’s views, on which he expounded at length in a March 1 posting to rabble.ca, a non-profit news forum where activists often gather.
“The Black Block [sic] is a wrecking ball tactic that makes space for more mainstream or creative tactics,” Mr. Hundert wrote in defence of the “diversity of tactics,” including violence, employed during anti-Olympic protests in Vancouver.
Mr. Hundert, who works with a “community-based radical direct action group” in Kitchener-Waterloo, which he helped initiate at Wilfrid Laurier University
In follow-up comments online on June 20, one of his former professors, Adam Davidson-Harden, took his erstwhile student to task.
“You think you’re right, and others can line up behind you, or ‘get out of the way’,” the professor of peace and conflict studies wrote. “That is the kind of thinking that got us colonialism in the first place, Alex. That is the essence of violence.”
Emomotimi Azorbo, 30, deaf kitchen worker
For all the sound and fury of the G20, Mr. Azorbo heard none of it, but his total deafness proved no guarantee of a peaceful weekend.
Mr. Azorbo, a Montreal-born bachelor of Nigerian descent who works in the kitchen of a Swiss Chalet, walked into a melee on Friday and wound up in jail, charged with assaulting police and resisting arrest.
