• More than 100,000 university students, children, and teachers blocked the entrances to university buildings, occupied administrative offices, and marched in protest parades in cities across Germany on Wednesday to protest an educational system they called underfunded and unfair.

• Several thousand people in Latvia protested yesterday against budget cuts that the government says are needed to save the country from bankruptcy

• More than 2,000 workers from the Tack Fat Garment Factory in Cambodia who say they are being laid off from their current jobs and moved to another facility continue their strike for severance pay, which began on June 9th

• Between 2,000 and 3,000 teachers, farmers, miners and others in Bulgaria, led by the country’s largest trade union CITUB, gathered in front of the Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev’s office to protest the government’s failure to protect jobs during this financial crisis

• More than 100 African refugees staged a sit-in in front of the High Commission for Refugees in the Moroccan capital to demand for visas to enter Europe

• Fourteen artists in the southwestern Russian city of Chelyabinsk have begun a hunger strike to protest the confiscation of their studios and the revision of new regulations on renting the studios

• Over 130,000 people in Germany have signed a petition to protest a law that would censor the internet

• Members and supporters of the Communist Party of India-Marxists (CPI-M) staged a sit-in in the national capital yesterday to protest against the violence by the Maoists in the West Medinipur ditrict of West Bengal

• Protesters in the Dominican Republic blocked traffic, set tires on fire and confronted police after a young man was killed at a protest demanding the governement repair roads and undertake other public works earlier this week

Greenpeace, with help from radical pranksters The Yes Men and thousands of volunteers around the world, produced and distributed a million copies of a paper looking exactly like the International Herald Tribune, but dated December 19, 2009 and carrying the headline: “Heads of State Agree Historic Climate-Saving Deal.”

The stunt was reminiscent of The Yes Men’s fake New York Times that came out late last year and announced “Iraq War Ends.” The difference this time around is that the paper is being used as a vehicle to launch what’s being called a civil disobedience database. According to the press release, BeyondTalk.net “is part of a growing network of websites calling for direct action on climate change.” The site asks people to consider pledging to commit acts of nonviolent civil disobedience “in order to get our leaders to make the right climate change choices.”

Here’s what Andy Bichlbaum of The Yes Men said in the press release:

Non-violent civil disobedience has been at the forefront of almost every successful campaign for change… Especially in America, and especially today, we need to push our leaders hard to stand up to industry lobbyists and make the sorts of changes we need.

The significance of the paper’s date is to show what could happen the day after the UN climate talks are scheduled to end in Copenhagen. Environmentalists consider that meeting to be the last and best chance to seriously reduce carbon emissions.

Who knows if this “hopeful news pandemic”, as some are calling it, will inspire action, but it seems to have a better chance than most appeals since it taps directly into that Gandhian philosophy of being the change you want to see.

Over the last few days the role that Twitter is playing in the nonviolent movement in Iran has been widely lauded. Time magazine dramatically called it the “medium of the movement,” and the U.S. State Department even asked the site to delay its scheduled maintenance earlier this week so that the service would not be interrupted for Iranian users. But how important can Twitter actually be in a country where only 30 percent of the population has access to the internet? Nicholas Thompson over at Danger Room had a great post yesterday that challenges the hype:

We have no idea how many Tweets are spreading through RSS, Facebook pages, and text-messages. Nor do we know how info gets into every Twitter feed. But there’s evidence that the reach of some of the most prominent Iranian “Green Revolution” Tweeters may not be as great as it first appears. For example, many of the Iranian tweeters described in the Western press seem to have between 10,000 and 30,000 followers. That’s a lot; but Ashton Kutcher it ain’t. And many of those followers are in the U.S. Check out @Change_for_Iran, @persiankiwi, @StopAhmadi, @persiankiwi, or @mousavi1388 and you’ll see a lot of American names. At least in the first few pages, it seems to be about a third who are clearly in the U.S.

English-language tweeters of course have English-language followers. But Twitter isn’t set up to make Farsi use easy (for example, you can’t search for Farsi posts in the language section of Twitter’s advanced search feature). In fact, the always helpful Nancy Scola has done a search on Twitter of all users who have listed their location as within 250 miles of Tehran. One interesting result: there are posts there only in Spanish, German, and English.

In an e-mail interview with washingtonpost.com, Evgeny Morozov, a blogger for Foreign Policy magazine and a fellow with Open Society Institute, also had a nuanced take on how important Twitter has been:

…it has been of great help in terms of getting information out of the country. Whether it has helped to organize protests — something that most of the media are claiming at the moment — is not at all certain, for, as a public platform, Twitter is not particularly helpful for planning a revolution (authorities could be reading those messages as well!). However, in terms of involving the huge Iranian diaspora and everyone else with a grudge against Ahmadinejad, it has been very successful.

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Twelve Greenpeace activists were arrested in Budapest, Hungary for not obtaining a permit to protest in front of the Prime Minister's Office. The activists set up a green tent and brandished placards calling for the money from the sale of carbon emissions be used for environmental projects.

• Students of Tehran University are staging a sit-in to protest the brutal suppression of fellow students, particularly during a recent dormitory raid. More than 120 university professors have collectively resigned and joined the protestors.

• Nearly 200 casino workers protested in Atlantic City Tuesday, stifling traffic on a main road to call attention to unfair worker pay and health benefits.

• Protesters in Bangor Maine gathered across from a Rite Aid on Tuesday brandashing signs and 20 foot inflatable baby bottle to protest the sale of unsafe baby products.

• Twenty people at an immigration center in Bedfordshire, England have been on hunger strike for two days to protest the standard of medical care.

• Four days of protest at the Rafah border crossing in Egypt have brought in 26 Egyptians and foreign nationals. Some have gone on hunger strike and vowed to stay camped out until the Egyptian side opens the border crossing to allow aid and family members through on a permanent basis.

• A popular Italian restaurant chain in Wales is facing a boycott by Assembly workers amid claims it pays staff wages from customer tips.

• Up to 1,200 workers at an oil refinery in Lincolnshire, England staged a walk-out last Thursday after some were threatened with redundancy. Another 140 workers at a power station in Widnes walked out in sympathy on Monday.

• Thousands of Yemenis marched on Wednesday to protest the killing of three foreign hostages who were kidnapped last week along with six others by what is assumed to be al Qaeda.

According to the online “Antiterrorism and Force Protection Level 1 Annual Refresher Training” course that all Department of Defense employees are required to take, protests should be considered a form of  “low-level terrorism.”

The first question of the Terrorism Threat Factors, “Knowledge Check 1″ section reads as follows:

Which of the following is an example of low-level terrorism activity?

Select the correct answer and then click Check Your Answer.

O   Attacking the Pentagon

O   IEDs

O   Hate crimes against racial groups

O   Protests

To proceed with the exam, the correct circle must be checked: Protests.

An actual copy of question obtained by the ACLU can be found on the last page of this pdf.

Equating nonviolent action with terrorism is nothing new, as anyone involved in the peace movement knows. According to a letter that the ACLU sent to Gail McGinn, Acting Under-Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness:

Examples of this shameful pattern can be seen in the Pentagon’s monitoring of at least 186 anti-military protests, the FBI’s surveillance of potential protesters at the Republican National Convention, the Fresno County Sheriff Anti-Terrorism Unit’s infiltration and surveillance of Peace Fresno, a community peace and social justice organization and the covert surveillance by the Maryland State Police of local peace and anti-death penalty groups.

Going back even further, there was also of course J. Edgar Hoover’s notorious COINTELPRO that ran from 1956 to 1971, and the Pentagon’s Talon program, which was supposedly shut down in 2007, after it was revealed (again by the ACLU) that data had been collected on peaceful protesters.

Indians of the central Peruvian jungle block the highway in Andahuaylas, east of Lima

The use of nonviolence by Amazon Indians in Peru has been almost completely obscured by news coverage in the West. Indigenous groups have been blocking roads and rivers for nearly two months to protest the government’s free-trade agreement with the United States. But it wasn’t until the situation erupted into violence two weeks ago (due to police provocation) that the protesters received significant coverage. Unfortunately, that coverage, by the major media outlets, didn’t focus on the near two months of nonviolent protest preceding the violence or the unjust trade agreement that allows for private companies to exploit ancestral land for oil, gas and other development. Instead, the media focused on the violence. And, in doing so, it managed  to further obscure the truth.

John Gibler, a journalist based in Mexico, wrote a piece for Amazon Watch on Friday that explains how papers like the LA Times and NY Times overlooked basic facts, confused storylines and ignored the indigenous voice in its coverage.

The initial media response to the violence obscured the order and nature of events and thus the responsibility for violence, converting a bloody police raid into generic “clashes.” The Peruvian government has in turn attempted to recast state violence as the necessary response to “terrorism” with insidious speculative claims linking the indigenous protesters with an array of demonized outsiders, and the media have largely lent the government a hand in this task by widely and uncritically reporting their insinuations and slander.

What has been missing, and what is urgently needed, to understand what happened are precisely the voices and testimonies of the indigenous participants in the roadblock, the victims of the initial attack, and witnesses to the full unfolding of events from police raid to self-defense to the police cover-up operations, using helicopters to dump the bodies of slain indigenous protesters into the Maranon River.

The rest of Gibler’s article goes into greater detail on a lot of these points. My only problem is that he gives too much justification to the protesters’ use of violence in their self-defense. While it is extremely important to note that the police ignored pleas for dialogue and killed 40 or more mostly unarmed indigenous protesters, their violent self-defense led to the deaths of 22 police officers and as a consequence nearly ruined their hard fought struggle for justice. As Dr. King once said, “When violence is tolerated even as a means of self-defense there is grave danger that in the fervor of emotion the main fight will be lost over the question of self-defense.”

Fortunately for the Amazon Indians, Prime Minister Yehude Simon, a former left-wing activist appointed to help President Alan Garcia improve relations with indigenous groups, stepped forward this week and promised to exert his influence over Congress to get the laws in question revoked. Simon also announced that he will resign once the crisis settles and is seeking forgiveness from the protesters over their losses. It still seems like a ways from being settled, but nonviolence has helped progress the situation this far.

• Forty-six Afghan migrants have gone on hunger strike in Indonesia to press their case for political asylum in Australia

• Forty demonstrators were detained and many injured in Tbilisi as Georgian police crack down on protests against President Saakashvili

• A general strike called by Nepal’s former Maoist rebels to protest against the alleged killing of one of their leaders has shut down Kathmandu
  

• Students in over 70 German cities will avoid classes and participate in demonstrations all week to protest tuition fees and the country’s decision to model its degrees on more internationally recognised bachelor and master degrees, which many argue do not allow for in-depth exploration of a subject

• Earlier this month, students from the State University of Haiti (UEH) began a series of militant demonstrations and blocked roads in downtown Port-au-Prince to protest the failure of President René Préval to promulgate a measure raising the minimum wage

• In response to an immigration raid on campus last Friday that led to the deportation of six janitors, students at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London held a sit-in and have now begun negotiations with the university

• Since May 16, youths and campesinos have been staying at a protest encampment in the Dominican Republic in an effort to prevent the construction of a cement factory that they say would displace 500 peasant families and degrade the water

• In Ontario, Canada, about 100 protesters conducted a sit-in that blocked dozens of dump trucks on a road leading to the site of a controversial landfill in Tiny Township

• In the UK, around 20 people went on hunger strike at Yarl’s Wood immigration detention center yesterday in protest against inadequate medical care.

In Detroit, hardly a soul has been left unscathed by the economic downturn. Hardly a soul, that is, except for dozens of business leaders who have gathered in the city this week for the National Summit – an economic forum designed to “define America’s future in a global economy.”

The Summit’s website states that it is “a call to those who want to have a voice in shaping tomorrow,” but then lists exactly who they have in mind: “top corporate leaders from multiple industries, top federal, state and local government officials, mid- to senior-level executives… academic leaders, entrepreneurs, and young talent.” With tickets being sold for over $1,400 each, it is unlikely that the many unemployed voices of Detroit will be a part of the conversation.

In response, hundreds of local groups and community members have organized the People’s Summit – four days of nonviolent resistance, including demonstrations, creative art and performance, collaborated strikes, and sit-ins. During this alternative summit, protesters also plan to implement a moratorium on foreclosure evictions by “going into neighborhoods and supporting homeowners who are willing to confront the bailiffs.”

The event kicked off on Sunday with the construction of a “tent city” in the heart of downtown Detroit.

On Monday evening, roughly 200 people marched to the Renaissance Center to confront the National Summit CEOs and bankers. Shouting slogans such as “Bail out the people. Not the banks,” demonstrators from as far as Atlanta and Boston challenged the business leaders to “stop meeting in secret” and allow access to the Renaissance Center (home of GM). The objective was to point out that the corporations and banks responsible for the worst crisis since the Great Depression cannot provide a solution to the problems facing Detroit, such as home foreclosures, plant closings, school closings and environmental degradation.

Today, unemployed autoworkers led a second march to the Renaissance Center where the CEO of American Axle, Richard Dauch, was scheduled to address the business summit regarding the future of manufacturing. As David Gilbert, an unemployed resident of Detroit told the AFP, “They don’t care about homelessness. They only care about profits, and people are expendable.”

The contrast between the National Summit and the People’s Summit could not be starker. As members of the People’s Summit protest unemployment and foreclosure outside the Renaissance Center, their former employers convene inside to “determine the future of U.S. business.”  Though the National Summit is being sold as a way to recover America’s economic strength, there has been little media recognition of the role business leaders played in the current economic situation.

In a town that is all too familiar with recession and corruption, the people have learned to take matters into their own hands. Derek Grigsby, an employee of the city water department for 23 years, lost his job this past week. “These CEOs have the audacity to say they are going to plan out our future,” he said. “We can plan out our own future.”

In a poem entitled, “And Now,” Adrienne Rich sets a task for herself: she will pay close attention to our political landscape, to its details and public voice, so that she might better discern just when it was that “the name of compassion was changed to the name of guilt, when to feel with a stranger was declared obsolete.” She points to an “owning up” to the suffering that is inflicted upon the vulnerable,  the poor and the oppressed, and asks: “who was in charge of definitions and who stood by receiving them.”

During my time with a CODEPINK delegation in Israel and the occupied West Bank, I, too, was challenged to learn how to “pay attention.” Though a rather jolting experience, I am grateful for it. Given the enormity of suffering in the world, this is hardly the time to be walking about in some kind of stupor. “Wake up!” is a phrase that often appeared in my notes written at the end of each day, particularly after the day our delegation joined Palestinians, Israelis and other internationals in a nonviolent demonstration in Bil’in.

Bil’in, a village of about 1800 Palestinians, is nestled within the foothills of the Judean mountains. Though it is just seven miles northwest from the city of Ramallah, the village relies primarily upon agricultural production to sustain its inhabitants. Within the first few moments of my sojourn into Bil’in, I marveled at the magnificence of the land. There is at once the play of light upon the silvery leaves of the olive trees, the contrast of its cream-colored rocks against an azure sky and the gentle beauty of its undulating hills. The panoramic view, visible from any street in the village, offered an antidote to the thoughts and feelings of fear that were beginning to crowd my mind and heart. The land was instructive in its capaciousness; it spoke to me of the necessity of a large heart and mind in the work of nonviolence.

Just after the arrival of our CODEPINK delegation, the muezzin’s sonorous call beckoned Bil’in’s Muslim inhabitants to prayer. From Abdullah Abu Rahmeh, the coordinator of activities of Bil’in’s Popular Committee Against the Wall and the Settlements, we learned that the Friday protest walks, which have been held every Friday since February 2005, begin after the noontime prayers are completed. His statement reminded me of something that Daniel Berrigan, S.J. has often shared with members of Kairos, an interfaith New York City-based peace community. According to Berrigan, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. described the churches of the American South as the places from which “we  [the Civil Rights Movement] go forth.” I imagined Dr. King and folks from the Civil Rights Movement with us in Bil’in; what a wonderful sharing of stories, songs and experiences there could have been.

Abu Rahmeh led us to the Popular Committee’s meeting house where he and Iyad Burnat, the head of the Popular Committee, gave an orientation and nonviolence training. From the outside walls of the house hung large and brightly colored banners which read, “President Obama, Have a Look!” Had President Obama “looked” on April 17th, he would have seen the violent death of 31-year-old Basem Ibrahim Abu Rahmeh. Abu Rahmeh, a beloved member of the village and steadfast participant in the Friday marches, was blasted in the chest by “the rocket,” a high velocity tear gas projectile. It was shot by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) directly at him and at close range, no more than forty meters away. Though he was not killed immediately, Abu Rahmeh’s chest was ripped open and his lungs were soon flooded with blood. He died in a private car en route to a hospital in Ramallah. Just prior to being shot, he had come to the assistance of a French female journalist who had been slightly injured in the face by rebounding shrapnel. He pleaded with the IDF to stop shooting but was only able to get a few words out before being felled: “We are in a nonviolent protest, there are kids and internationals …”

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• Supporters of Iran’s defeated presidential candidate are reportedly staging another mass rally in Northern Tehran, despite Mir Hossein Mousavi’s urging that his supporters not risk clashes with demonstrators backing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

• Hundreds of environmentalists in Turkey are protesting construction work in a national park.

• While hundreds of big business executives gather in Detroit this weekend for the National Summit—a conference on the future of manufacturing, technology, energy and the environment—hundreds more will be taking to the streets for the National People’s Summit and Tent City—a protest that will feature a prayer march, discussion groups, picket lines and tents, symbolizing the loss of homes.

• Protesters in Peru shut down a gold mine on Monday over labor and environmental demands.

• Travel writer and protesters are planning to boycott British retalier WH Smith for its decision to only stock guides published by Penguin at its airport and train station stores.

• Hundreds of Iraqi prisoners have gone on a partial hunger strike to protest dire prison conditions, torture and rape.

• About 70 activists in Oregon protested plans to build a 12-lane bridge over the Columbia River connecting Portland to Vancouver, citing climate and air quality effects.

• Hundreds of survivors of Italy’s April earthquake protested outside parliament today as lawmakers debated a bill authorizing Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s reconstruction plan, which many fear will come too slowly and not meet their needs.