The Bay Area Campaign to End Israeli Apartheid just put out this helpful top ten list of companies that make products that directly harm Palestinians – either by exploiting labor, developing technology for military operations, or supplying equipment for illegal settlements – that should be boycotted this Christmas. Here is a sampling from their list:

1. AHAVA

This brand’s cosmetics are produced using salt, minerals, and mud from the Dead Sea — natural resources that are excavated from the occupied West Bank.  The products themselves are manufactured in the illegal Israeli settlement Mitzpe Shalem.  AHAVA is the target of CODEPINK’s “Stolen Beauty” campaign.

2. Delta Galil Industries

Israel’s largest textiles manufacturer provides clothing and underwear for such popular brands as Gap, J-Crew, J.C. Penny, Calvin Klein, Playtex, Victoria’s Secret (see #10) and many others.  Its founder and chairman Dov Lautman is a close associate of former Israeli President Ehud Barak.  It has also been condemned by Sweatshop Watch for its exploitation of labor in other countries such as Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey.

3. Motorola

While many of us know this brand for its stylish cellphones, did you know that it also develops and manufactures bomb fuses and missile guidance systems?  Motorola components are also used in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or “drones”) and in communications and surveillance systems used in settlements, checkpoints, and along the 490 mile apartheid wall.  The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation has launched the “Hang Up on Motorola” campaign.

4. L’Oreal / The Body Shop

This cosmetics and perfume company is known for its investments and manufacturing activities in Israel, including production in Migdal Haemek, the “Silicon Valley” of Israel built on the land of Palestinian village Al-Mujaydil, which was ethnically cleansed in 1948.  In 1998, a representative of L’Oreal was given the Jubilee Award by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu for strengthening the Israeli economy.

To check out their full list, visit their website.

Several hundred demonstrators took to the streets of the Italian capital Rome on Saturday to protest against the country's Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi. They did so after several internet bloggers called for a 'No Berlusconi Day'.

• Thousands of protesters have taken part in what is believed to be Scotland’s largest ever protest in support of action on climate change. The event, called The Wave, urged world leaders to agree a legally-binding deal at the United Nations climate change summit in Copenhagen next week.

• Hundreds of hotel workers rallied along the Sunset Strip on Friday, warning Los Angeles-area employers that they would not accept pay cuts, reduced benefits or other givebacks.

• More than 30 youth from Australia, Mexico, India, Sweden, the US, Germany, and around the world  staged a “die-in” today outside the main plenary at COP15 with the message – “The World Wants a Real Deal” and “Real Deal Saves Lives”.

• About 200 protesters, including about 40 striking Steelworkers members from Sudbury, protested in New York last Thursday, as Vale CEO Roger Agnelli received the Dwight D. Eisenhower Global Citizenship Award from the Business Council for International Understanding.

• On Dec. 4 tens of thousands of laid-off Mexican electrical workers and their supporters again took to the streets of the capital to protest Felipe Calderón Hinojosa’s sudden liquidation of the government-owned Central Light and Power Company (LFC) the night of Oct. 10.

Forty-five years ago this week, Mario Savio – a 21-year-old student at Berkeley and leader of the Free Speech Movement – gave a speech before a massive sit-in on the steps of Sproul Hall that would go down in history. As an intriguing article in In These Times explains:

The movement was a protest against the university’s clampdown on political speechmaking and recruiting for civil rights activism on campus. President Clark Kerr and various bureaucratic intermediaries disdained the movement as a disruption of the modern “multiversity” (Kerr’s own term) as a smooth-running, quasi-corporate knowledge factory.

Savio was apparently not your typical charismatic leader. He periodically suffered from depression, struggled with a stammer, and “was a shy, modest person who was uncomfortable in any position of leadership and never craved the public spotlight.”

Savio’s orthodox Catholic upbringing gradually morphed into sympathy with liberation theology and Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement. At Queens College in 1963, he spent the summer on a project organized by the campus Newman House, assisting the poor in Taxco, Mexico. That fall, his parents moved to California and he transferred to Berkeley. Baptized by San Francisco protests for civil rights and against the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1963-64, he became active in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, whose campaign he joined for the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi.

His efforts with other students to continue civil rights activism when they returned to Berkeley that fall set off the Free Speech Movement (FSM), which, with Savio as its most eloquent leader, eventually prevailed over administration opposition.

The rest of the article is worth a read, and mentions a new book – Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s, by NYU professor Robert Cohen – for anyone who wants to delve deeper into this fascinating (and largely forgotten) figure.

Here is a cool video put out about The Bike Bloc, a “new tool of civil disobedience,” which will be unleashed on December 16, the RECLAIM POWER day of action in Copenhagen. According to their website, Climate Camp and The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination have teamed up to make this “pedal powered resistance machine” with hundreds of recycled bikes. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing this thing in action. We’ll of course post a video as soon as one is available.

Also, the Guardian has put out this helpful calendar of actions for the climate summit, which I’m sure is far from complete.

More than 250 people held a candlelight vigil outside the U.S. Military Academy in West Point on Tuesday night to protest President Barack Obama's decision to escalate the 8-year-old war in Afghanistan.

• Other protests against the escalation of war in Afghanistan were held in New York, Minneapolis, and many other cities across the country.

• A peaceful Boston University counter-protest of more than 200 people faced six picketers Tuesday afternoon from the Westboro Baptist Church, who held signs with messages such as “The Jews killed Jesus,” “God hates fags” and “Thank God for AIDS,” outside the Hillel House.

• Six of 31 national museums in France were closed because of a strike on Wednesday over planned job cuts, including the Georges Pompidou Center, which began the strike 10 days ago.

• An undocumented Mexican immigrant, who has been living in the United States for 20 years, recently began a hunger strike in front of the White House, calling for President Obama to pass comprehensive immigration reform by the end of the year, as he’d promised.

• Finnair canceled more than 20 flights Wednesday as ground staff extended a walkout to protest outsourcing of cargo and baggage services and the transfer of hundreds of workers.

• Dozens of people have demonstrated outside the Canadian embassy in Mexico City against the killing of an anti-mining activist. The protesters blame the death of Mariano Abarca on a Canadian-owned mining company, Blackfire Exploration Ltd , which is operating in the southern Chiapas state.

• Daimler workers in Germany have walked out in protest at the company’s plans, announced on Wednesday, to assemble Mercedes C-Class models at its US plant in Alabama and shift German production from Sindelfingen to Bremen.

• Striking workers at a local supplier forced Fiat to halt production at its Termini Imerese plant in Sicily for a second day Thursday, to protest against the company’s decision to stop making cars at the plant after 2011.

Here is the latest biting comic from our good friend Jason Laning. For those that can’t read it, Bush is saying to Obama: “You know, you almost had us worried, for a minute there.” Again to get the full experience, check out the original on his site. There will be more on the escalation of the war in Afghanistan and resistance to it here soon.

At Creech Air Force Base, just outside of Las Vegas – where many of the operators who fly the Predator and Reaper drones that regularly launch Hellfire missiles in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, are based – a group of Code Pink activists wrapped up a nine-day presence yesterday that included:

…a mourning mother’s costumed funeral procession with child-like coffins, a four-day fast, climate change action and civil disobedience. They were joined and supported by members of the Las Vegas faith-based, veterans and military family communities.

This action was part of a nationwide campaign by Code Pink to halt these attacks from unmanned planes. On their website, the organization says this new focus for their work was inspired by the first ever protest against the drones last April, which was organized by our friends at the Nevada Desert Experience and Voices for Creative Nonviolence.

It also follows on the heals of a much larger protest against drones that occurred last month at Hancock Field in Syracuse.

With Obama dramatically escalating the number of drone attacks since his term began, this new focus of the antiwar movement is absolutely crucial.

A singing crowd forced Sheriff Joe Arpaio out of a forum at Arizona State University this week:

PHOENIX — A night aimed at discussing First Amendment issues with the controversial Maricopa County Sheriff ended with protesters disrupting the session and Sheriff Joe Arpaio walking out. …  After 45 minutes of questioning Monday night, a group of protesters started to sing and chant in the back of the room, interrupting Sheriff Arpaio’s response to questions about illegal immigration.  …  ”Is this legitimate?” the protesters sang, to the tune of Bohemian Rhapsody, a popular ballad by Queen.

Was the action constructive? Or did protesters miss a chance to query the notorious sheriff on the inhumane conditions he maintains at the county jail, his shackling of female inmates giving birth, or his immigration sweeps that even the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency finds excessive?

In his 16-year reign, Joe Arpaio has faced heated commentary both locally and nationally for his abuses.  Nothing has changed. A Q&A would not have accomplished much in this case. Sometimes depriving someone of a platform says much more than a tightly worded comment at the event microphone.

• More than 100 people gathered outside the Bank of America’s California Street location in San Francisco on Monday to protest the bank’s financing of oil, gas, coal and mountaintop removal mining. 20 were arrested for blocking the doors.

• Protesters blockaded a biomass plant in Port Talbot, Wales on Sunday to protest against plans to develop two further plants in the area which would produce electricity from imported woodchips.

• A group of roughly 30 climate activists, joined by NASA scientist and outspoken climate change expert James Hansen gathered in front of the headquarters of the Natural Resources Defense Council on Monday to protest the environmental advocacy group’s collaboration with big pollutors.

• A coalition of groups led by DC activists staged a sit-in inside the John A. Wilson Building and a mock funeral procession outside the White House on World AIDS Day to call attention to the suffering of those afflicted with the disease. Two were arrested for squatting in front of mayor’s office.

• Nearly 100 bicycle messengers rallied at John F. Kennedy Plaza in Philadelphia on Monday evening to protest what they called a growing “anti-cycling” mood in the city.

• 5,000 students and hundreds of union activists picketed the Latvian parliament’s passage of a budget filled with tax rises and spending cuts designed to win more international bailout funds.

• Dozens of people wore face masks and waved placards as councillors visited the site of a proposed waste incinerator in North Yorkshire, England yesterday.

• An 81-year-old activist fasting as “a prolonged act of mourning” of the destruction of the environment in West Virginia was arrested Tuesday at the state capitol for an outstanding warrant stemming from an incident back in October when he and a group of seniors marched to protest mountaintop mining.

Close to two hundred people marched through the streets of downtown Chicago visiting some of the nation’s worst climate criminals as part of the November 30 Global Day of Action.  With its own marching band, puppetistas, signs and banners, the Chicago coalition of activists and environmentalists delivered “citations” to the EPA, JP Morgan Chase, Midwest Generation, and the Chicago Board of Trade for their part in contributing to destructive environmental practices and false, market-based “solutions” to climate change, such as the cap and trade and carbon offsets.  Check out the Act for Climate Justice website for more photos and information from Chicago.

The day’s march and rally culminated at the Chicago Climate Exchange, North America’s largest carbon trading system for greenhouse gases and the epitome of capitalism’s willful ignorance of the folly of market solutions for dealing with the ever-present reality of climate change.  Activists took to the streets, blocking police officers and traffic as 12 women and men locked themselves together and blocked the intersection leading to the CCE in protest of the false hopes promised by government and business leaders.  The blockade drew hundreds more onlookers and passer-bys wondering what the point of this protest was.  Leaflets and conversation ensued as we spoke about the need to put pressure on leaders for the upcoming international talks at Copenhagen, the hoodwinking of public resources by private industry, and government aid and complicity in mountain-top removal and rainforest destruction.  The protest had high energy as we danced and sung and marched our way back to Federal Plaza, grateful for the witness of men and women willing to put their bodies on the line and try their convictions in court.

Today’s action followed a weekend’s worth of teach-ins, skill sharing, organizing, nonviolent direct action training, and community building.  Hopefully events and actions such as this, following the October 24 “350 ppm” day of witness, will continue to go deeper into nonviolent resistance and engage in creative conflict with the corporate criminals whose insatiable greed for the market is destroying our earth and its peoples.