Experiments with truth: 10/27/09
People in Rio De Janeiro posed as dead bodies at Copacabana beach in a demonstration after a man was found dead in a shopping cart in the city slum.
- An estimated 1,000 protesters, many of them students from Kabul University, marched through the streets of the Afghan capital on Sunday in an anti-US protest stemming from a reported incident in which US soldiers bombed a mosque and burned a copy of the Qu’ran. Police in Kabul opened fire to disperse the crowd. Similar protests took place last week in other Afghan cities.
- Six environmental activists in North Carolina were arrested Saturday in a display of civil disobedience at the Governor’s Mansion. They were protesting Duke Energy’s controversial plan to build the coal-fired Cliffside power unit in Rutherford County.
- Waving signs that declared “Northern Secondary Jail,” around 100 students protested outside Northern Secondary School last Thursday in a bid to teach the Toronto District School Board a lesson about allowing police inside their school.
- On Sunday, a group of Tibetan monks and nuns in Dharamshala staged a protest by holding a 12-hour hunger strike to draw public attention and condemn the alleged execution of four Tibetan activists by the Chinese administration over their role in last year’s riots in Lhasa.
- An estimated 400 students attended and participated last Wednesday in a teachout and walkout on California State University, Fresno’s campus that ended with a sit-in on the fourth floor of the Henry Madden Library. The students’ protest was spurred by the 32 percent fee increase that Fresno State students saw before the semester as well as the implementation of furloughs, cuts of hundreds of courses and loss of nearly 330 employees.
- Eight people were issued citations by Chicago police after sitting in the middle of a Near West Side street during a protest rally in front of the Fisk Generating Station, a coal-fired power plant, in Pilsen on Saturday.
- At least six Sri Lankan refugees at a Malaysian detention camp have been on a hunger strike for more than seven days, demanding that they be allowed to meet officials from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
- Postal workers in the UK staged a second consecutive day of strikes on Friday, with about 78,000 delivery and collection staff absent from work.
- At Dartmouth, more than 30 students held a sit-in outside of College President Jim Yong Kim’s office last Thursday to bring attention to the need for sustainability on campus. The sit-in, which lasted approximately 40 minutes, ended when students spoke with Kim and presented him with a letter suggesting changes to the College’s current approach to sustainability.
- About 150 Yemeni inmates have gone on a hunger strike in protest against their abuse at a Saudi jail.
