We had a lively discussion last week about violence in video games. A new story from the AP promises for more: Venezuela is going to ban violent video games and toys.

Venezuela would be one of few countries to impose an all-out ban on the “manufacture, importation, distribution, sales and use of violent video games and bellicose toys.” The proposed law would give Venezuela’s consumer protection agency the discretion to define what products should be prohibited and impose fines as high as $128,000.

As the article goes on to explain, the government’s reasoning sounds downright Gandhian, and it goes much beyond a simple ban:

The Venezuelan bill would mandate crime prevention classes in public schools and force the media to “implement permanent campaigns” to warn against the dangers of violent games. Another provision requires the government “to promote the production, distribution, sales and use” of games that teach kids “respect for an adversary.”

The very next lines, however, makes one suspect that perhaps the Chavez administration might not be the best teacher of this lesson:

Some 2,000 people marched across Venezuela’s capital Saturday to protest what they call widespread persecution of Chavez’s opponents.

“It’s a bit ironic that supporters of Chavez, who persecutes his political opponents, want to teach our children the need for respect,” quipped Tomas Sanchez, an opposition lawmaker who broke ranks with Chavez.

While I don’t believe such outright censorship is necessarily the right approach, crime prevention classes (or, rather, conflict resolution classes, to take a more positive approach), which teach “respect for an adversary,” sound like a worthwhile option. Simply enacting a ban will likely fan a black market. Somehow minimizing the demand for such things, however, offers some hope.

Mixing a class like this with a violent suppression campaign can be a fraught proposition—witness the failure of D.A.R.E. anti-drug programs in the United States. The government became so fixated on drugs that students adopted that fixation and drug use didn’t decline for people who took those classes. Much better, of course, is to offer a range nonviolent alternatives, both to drugs and violence, including a more vibrant and demanding community life, employment, and positive role models. Perhaps most of all, though, the government needs to practice what it preaches.

Greenpeace activists hung a huge banner from the St Nicholas Church Tower in Copenhagen on Friday that read “Obama: Right city, wrong date”. It was meant as a reminder to Obama, who was in town to lobby for Chicago as host of the 2016 Olympic Games, that he needs to return in December for the UN Climate Summit.

• According to organizers, 300,000 people took part in a rally against Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his control over the media in Rome’s central Piazza del Popolo.

• Health care workers gathered outside New York’s capitol building to protest an unprecedented order from state health officials that every health care worker get seasonal and H1N1 flu shots or face the possibility of being fired.

• Greenpeace activists wearing masks of Angela Merkel, Barack Obama and other world leaders blocked the conveyer belt of a coal mine in Svalbard, Norway on Friday. The action was meant to draw attention to the UN Climate Summit.

• Thousands of people demonstrated in eastern France on Saturday to demand the closure of the country’s oldest nuclear power plant amid a huge police presence.

• 16 Greenpeace activists were arrested yesterday after scaling three smoke stacks at a Shell operation in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta to protest its conversion of oil sands into fuel.

• Thirty-eight farmers imprisoned by the military-supported interim Honduran regime began a hunger strike Saturday demanding the reinstatement of deposed President Manuel Zelaya.

• Over 700 Greenpeace activists took part in a naked protest in a French vineyard yesterday to alert people to the fact that climate change is effecting local vineyards.

In a pretty funny segment from Thursday’s Daily Show, John Oliver attempts to help the G20 activists in Pittsburgh get the same “warm reception” Tea Party protesters have received from the government and media. So he talks to some Tea Partiers to seek their advice. Naturally, their suggestions are filled with irony: “They need to stay on message” and “They’re scaring everyone away”. While most of the joking is done at the expense of the Tea Partiers, the G20 activists aren’t exactly let off easy. They’re shown to have a bunch of crazies in their midst, as well as a disorganized conglomeration of competing interests. Plus, Oliver seems to paint them as somewhat weak and pathetic. But that may have more to do with the joke he seems to be making about the unnecesarily large police presence. Ultimately, I get the sense that the Daily Show sympathizes with the G20 activists, but, as is always the case when pop culture attempts to explain protests, stereotypes take over.

• On Tuesday, seventeen people were arrested at the New York offices of the insurance giant Aetna. The activists linked arms and chanted slogans “People Not Profits, Medicare for All.” The action was the first in a campaign by the group Mobilization for Health Care for All to hold sit-ins at insurance company offices nationwide.

• The World March for Peace and Nonviolence kicks off today in New Zealand, marking the start of the world’s first six-continent peace march calling for the elimination of wars, nuclear weapons and violence of all kinds.

• Stores, schools and other establishments were shuttered on Thursday in predominantly Arab communities in Israel, including the Biblical city of Nazareth, as 90 percent of the Arab Israeli population took part in a general strike to protest what organisers called “racist” policies and to mark the ninth anniversary of demonstrations at which police killed 13 Arabs.

• In San Juan, members of the Puerto Rican Workers union, SEIU Local 1996SPT, were violently removed by SWAT team agents and arrested for protesting the Governor’s announcement on Friday to lay off 16,970 government employees .

• On Wednesday, the Ecuadorian Police staged a violent raid on a group of indigenous people  blockading the bridge to protest proposed new war and land rights laws. The attack has left at least one confirmed dead, a teacher and member of the Shuar nation, and some 49 civilians and police injured.

• In India, over 10,000 engineers and account officers of state-owned telecom firm BSNL will go on hunger strike today on Gandhi Jayanti Day demanding absorption of officers on deputation and pay revisions, nearly one and a half months after engineers struck work for four days.

• About 150 immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and India who had been living and working  for years in Greece began a mass hunger strike on Sunday at the airport in Athens after being detained.

• In Vermont, four women were arrested earlier this week after blocking entry to a nuclear plant in the town of Vernon. The four members of Vermont Yankee Shut It Down Affinity Group entered the plant housing the Vermont Yankee reactor and sat down on folding chairs. The group includes the ninety-year-old peace activist Frances Crowe.

• A group of migrants from Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan, Palestine, and Egypt, began a highly visible hunger strike on Wednesday in France that they plan to continue until Western countries co-operate to offer them asylum.

• The pilots of Air India ended their five-day-old strike after an assurance over payment of allowances from Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel.

The video documentation of last week’s G20 protests offers more than just proof of the ever-escalating brutality of security forces at such events. It also offers activists the chance to observe, critique, and learn from their actions.

In the following video, we are told that three masked and quasi-undercover police officers harassed protesters and even broke someone’s camera. The video then follows the officers as the crowd becomes aware of their presence and begins to shout at them. The purpose of the video is clear: to expose the dirty behavior of these cops and elicit a sense of street justice.

I see a different, unintended lesson from this video. The protesters let anger get the best of them and failed to take advantage of a situation where they could have engaged “the enemy” and diffused the situation, perhaps even explained their legitimate and peaceful ambitions. Instead, their anger and name-calling likely had an emboldening effect on the officers’ oppressive mission.

Perhaps that sounds like naive reasoning. But I got the idea from this video, taken at the G20 protests in London last April:

This video shows that there is a better way to handle security forces. And it’s not just a matter of winning the moral high ground. It’s strategic and subversive. In a sense, this British protester was able to disarm a policeman, if only for a brief moment, and get him to see that the people he’s up against, are normal people, with a sense of humor. Perhaps that will cause him some distress and even make him pause in carrying out his duty. But more importantly, for those watching, it shows far more clearly than an angry crowd chanting “F— the Police” who is in the right.

While public opinion has turned sharply against the war in Afghanistan this year, the White House and Congress are slow to listen.

In fact, Obama’s only response has been to send tens of thousands of additional troops and mercenaries to the “graveyard of empire.”

Therefore, we must send those in Washington a message stronger than polls. As difficult and unpleseant as it may be, we must sacrifice more – and do so more often – until this national nightmare has ended. Business as usual simply must not continue.

With the eighth anniversary of the war quickly approaching, the War Resisters League has cued us in to an important action.

On October 5, activists with the WRL and other organizations and communities will attempt to deliver a petition against the war to President Obama and request a meeting. In the process, some of the participants will risk arrest in an act of civil disobedience in front of the White House.

Read the WRL’s full Call to Action at: www.warresisters.org/calltoaction

To sign up for the action, or if you have any questions, e-mail: octoberactions@warresisters.org

To sign up for the October 5th National Day of Action Against the War in Afghanistan listserv, go to: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/listinfo/octoberactions

For October 5th in DC Logistics, Housing, Food, Transportation & Legal information, go to: www.warresisters.org/logistics

For Resources for Organizing for October 5th, go to: http://www.warresisters.org/october5-resources

And if you can’t make it all the way to D.C., there will also be local actions and educational events against the war across the country on October 7 and again on October 17. To learn more, click here and here.

Get information on local October 7 actions in New York!

A dozen people gathered in Kanawha City, West Virginia outside the Department of Environmental Protection on Tuesday to protest the agency's leniency in granting surface mining contracts. They set up a "coalfield cool-ade" stand offering up jugs of black liquid to represent the slurry water coming from the faucets of those who live near coal mining.

• About a thousand indigenous farm workers marched through the streets of downtown Cuenca in southern Ecuador on Monday to protest new water, mining and oil laws that many fear will lead to privatization and destruction of their land and resources.

• The Peasant Movement of the Philippines and the National Federation of Peasant Women in the Philippines held a demonstration in front of the United Nations Climate Change Negotiations in Bangkok on Monday, using street theater to protest false solutions to climate change—such as biofuels.

• 23 Greenpeace activists shut down a conveyer belt used for the extraction of tar sands near an open pit mine in Northern alberta owned by Suncor, Canada’s largest oil company. They held banners reading: ‘Tar sands climate crime.’

• More than 150 university students in Caracas have joined a hunger strike that began last week to demand the Organization of American States investigate allegations that dozens of Venezuelans have been jailed for their opposition to President Hugo Chavez. Some of the students were hospitalized after sewing the mouths shut.

• More than 50 American Indian activists and others demonstrated at the University of North Dakota yesterday to protest the school’s Fighting Sioux nickname and logo. The Board of Education is set to discuss the matter today.

• Around 200 Penn State University students took part in The Sierra Club’s Coal-Free Campus Campaign by holding a silent protest inside the student center on Tuesday.

• Around 20 pro-Tibet supporters stood outside the Empire State Building’s Fifth Avenue entrance yesterday morning to protest its decision to make the nighttime lights red and yellow this week in honor of China’s 60th anniversary.