Members of the trans community and allies protested in front of the Tribeca Cinemas in New York City last week.  The rally was in response to the Tribeca Film Festival’s premiering of “Ticked-off Trannies with Knives,” a transphobic film that highlights rape and violence.

The New York Times quoted an organizer’s explanation for the protest:

“The transsexual and transgender communities are all too often the victims of violence, marginalization and discrimination as a result of inaccurate media depictions like this film, which is offensive, dehumanizing and misogynistic and causes further misunderstanding and harm to an already dangerously oppressed minority group,” said Ashley Love, a Magnet organizer.

Protesters said both the derogatory language in the title as well as stark images of violence in the film lead to increased misunderstandings and violence against transpeople.

“People are telling us to lighten up,” Ms. Love added, “but I heard reports of two more trans women murdered this morning. It’s not a laughing matter. We’re not laughing at all.”

Not only do trans folks experience violence at shockingly high rates, they have problems accessing employment, medical care, and basic services such as public restrooms.

The Tribeca Film Festival declined to remove the film or change the title.  The movie description itself acknowledges the statistics–it was “inspired by the devastating increase in brutal hate crimes against the transgender community”–but its incarnation is seen as exploitative and encouraging of violence rather than explorative.

A candlelight vigil was also held, and as one activist put it:

This time we’re going to make ourselves heard. Because we’re tired of our dead being marginalized, overlooked, and even used as advertising material for a cheap gimmick of a film.

After successfully pressuring many of the largest fast food corporations – such as Taco Bell, Subway, McDonald’s and Burger King – to increase wages, improve benefits and follow new guidelines to protect the safety of the farmworkers that pick tomatoes over recent years, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has a new target: Publix Supermarkets.

Even though CIW signed an agreement with foodservice giant Aramark at the beginning of the month, Publix has refused to meet the demands of these exploited workers. In response, as Peter Rothberg at The Nation writes:

…the CIW has organized what is expected to be its largest action ever — a twenty-two mile march from Tampa to Lakeland, where Publix is based. The march is broken up into two distinct daily segments, and will culminate in a rally and concert on Sunday, April 18. The actress and activist Gloria Reuben will join Kerry Kennedy, founder of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, and Stetson Kennedy, Florida’s premier folklorist and longtime human rights champion, as rally hosts…

For all the many of you who aren’t able to join the march, please send Publix CEO Ed Crenshaw an email politely expressing your “support for the Farmworker Freedom March and your hope that he’ll begin working with the CIW to address the sub-poverty wages and abuses faced by the farmworkers who pick Publix’s tomatoes.

Check out the CIW’s site for more information on the Farmworker Freedom March, which begins this Friday, and instructions on how to register to participate.

• A New Zealand man locked himself to a silo for a day this weekend in protest of factory farming.  Police cut him down from the silo at a pig farm while animal-rights supporters watched.

• In Togo’s capital on Saturday, people gathered, as they have nearly every week since the March 4 election, to protest the re-election of Faure Gnassingbe, who took office fraudulently and whose father was a dictator.

• In Hollywood on Sunday, protesters marched for Social Security benefits for gay couples.  700 people marched and were ultimately told that legislation would be introduced to equalize benefits.

• At least two hundred people gathered at a San Francisco BART station on Saturday to engage in various forms of protest against police violence, in response to the killing of Oscar Grant last year by a police officer. People chanted “no justice, no rush!” and peacefully confronted BART law enforcement.

• Thirty to fifty Sri Lankan and Afghan men seeking asylum began a hunger strike in their camp in Sydney yesterday, in protest of Australia’s suspension on new asylum claims from those countries.  They seek to meet with officials to discuss their cases and the policy.

• Workers and people with physical disabilities continued protesting outside of Cairo’s parliament yesterday.  The sit-ins, which have lasted between 4 and 58 days so far, are in response to the closing of factories and Egypt’s lack of provision of handicapped housing.

• Dock workers in Iran protested after their company was privatized and their jobs were jeopardized.  Several hundred people gathered in front of a central building and in prayer spot to protest the change.

• About 25 people gathered in Asheville, North Carolina on Saturday to protest racial profiling done by immigration officials against Latinos.  They said they want their city to become a “sanctuary,” where people who work and pay taxes are in no danger of deportation.

• In Chicago, 350 public school students walked out of class on Thursday and demonstrated in front of the Board of Education’s headquarters, City Hall and the Thompson Center to protest budget cuts.

• Families camped outside the Hawaii governor’s office in protest Wednesday night.  The group Save our Schools is upset that Governor Lingle has not been present at discussions about days off from school; Hawaii has the shortest school year of any state.

• About 150 protesters took over the platform of BART’s Embarcadero Station in San Francisco just as the afternoon commute set in Thursday, calling for the firing of a transit agency police officer who was present during the New Year’s Day 2009 shooting of the unarmed African American passenger Oscar Grant.

• Mass rallies took place across India yesterday, led by the Communist Party in protest of high prices on essential items and Congress’s failure to remedy the problem.

• Also in India on Thursday, the province of Kerala nearly shut down in commemoration and protest of a massacre committed by Maoist rebels earlier this week.  The closures of schools, businesses, and the government were in protest of the ruling party’s failure to prevent the violence.

• Shouting “Save our jobs” and “Save our kids,” more than 500 residents, youth advocates and union members protested deep cuts to parks and recreation and the loss of city workers’ jobs at a meeting with Baltimore’s top officials on Wednesday evening.

• As Indian minister Kamal Nath spoke inside a Manhattan building on Thursday, a group of NYC-based Sikhs gathered outside in protest.  They say the minister facilitated mobs that killed 3,000 people, mostly Sikhs, in 1984.

• On Thursday morning, employees at a children’s clothing factory in Warwickshire, England staged a sit-in and demanded an explanation after discovering their month’s wages had not been posted.

• Last Saturday, up to 3,000 Dominicans marched in Cotuí to protest against the Pueblo Viejo gold mine, which is operated by the Toronto-based Barrick Gold Corp.

• Workers at Carlsberg breweries in and around Copenhagen, Denmark are striking this week after a reduction of their free daily bottles of beer from three to one.  Workers are upset because they were not consulted about the change.

Anti-government protesters hold aloft weapons after taking them off from security gaurds at Parliament in Bangkok, Thailand, on Wednesday.

The Thai government, which has been under-siege by pro-democracy protesters for nearly a month, has finally started to clamp down after protesters broke from their mostly nonviolent tactics yesterday to smash through the parliament compound gate with a truck.  According to The Guardian:

Thailand’s beleaguered government shut down a satellite television station and the web sites of anti-government demonstrators today after declaring a state of emergency, then issued arrest warrants for protest leaders accused of storming parliament.

The Guardian also noted that until this point prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva was “under pressure to use force to restore order.” Also, much of the Thai media were questioning whether he was losing his control over the situation. It now seems, however, that the protesters have given him an opportunity to exert his power. According to the Business Week:

The emergency decree bans gatherings of more than five people, allows detention without charge and gives soldiers immunity from prosecution.

Perhaps Abhisit has a keen understanding of power dynamics. With support growing for the Red Shirts in the weeks before the storming of parliament, as well as rumors of dissension within the military and law enforcement, a move to crackdown on the protesters would have likely backfired. But waiting for the protesters to strike the first violent blow lends a certain legitimacy to any act of repression. He can mask it as merely doing his stately duty to protect the people of Thailand.

“The law doesn’t mean we aim to crack down or hurt people, especially innocent people,” Abhisit said in a televised address. “The nation has been severely affected by the protests and the government needs to rectify the situation.”

The question now is whether the Red Shirts have backed themselves into a corner. Has Abhisit gained the upper hand? The answer will likely depend on how the protesters respond to the crackdown. Will they use more violence? If so, they are giving up their greatest weapon and instead using the weapon of the military, which is surely better stocked.

President Kurmanbek Bakiyev in Kyrgyzstan – who came to power in the Tulip Revolution in 2005 – appears to have been ousted by massive protests that began on Tuesday in the provincial center of Talas and have since spread across the country.

According to a blog on the New York Times, a local analyst said the protests are fueled by “widespread anger at the consequences of an economic crisis whose end is not yet in sight, at the dramatic and simultaneous price rises for electricity and mobile calls, and at the sell-off of state enterprises and companies of strategic importance.”

One opposition leader, in the video above, said the demonstrations were also sparked by Bakiyev’s decision to allow the US to keep its military base outside the capital, after having vowed to close it.

While government security forces opened fire with live ammunition on protesters, those opposing the government were at least at times violent in response. Footage and images from the protests show vehicles on fire, many demonstrators throwing things at the riot police and some armed with their own guns.  In general, the scenes on the streets look extremely chaotic.

The Kyrgyz health ministry says that at least 40 people have been killed and more than 400 wounded in the clashes. The opposition, on the other hand, claim that at least 100 have died.

That said, without being there it’s impossible to determine to what extent the wider movement was nonviolent. Perhaps the vast majority of those present did maintain nonviolent discipline or approached the riot police peacefully, but the footage that has been released thus far doesn’t support such a claim.

Whether the recent rise in utility prices is tied to the privatization of state-owned industries isn’t evident from the articles I’ve read. But the fact that the protests were at least in part a response to neo-liberal economic policies pursued by Bishkek is telling.

As I have written about on this site, many recent victories for nonviolent movements have been reversed or diluted after the governments that they help install enact economic policies that end up worsening the plight of the poor.

• New York City performance artist Rev. Billy Talen was arrested on Sunday after placing a “holy hex” on JPMorgan Chase, which he calls the nation’s largest financier of coal-mining mountaintop removal.

• A group of homeless people and housing activists took over a privately owned Mission District duplex in San Francisco on Sunday in what served as the climax of a protest designed to promote use of San Francisco’s vacant buildings as shelters for the needy.

• 21 people were detained after crossing the line at the entrance of the Nevada Test Site on Easter Sunday as part of the annual Sacred Peace Walk, a six-day 62 mile trek from Las Vegas to oppose the dangers of nuclear testing.

• Activists have held rallies across Russia to protest Putin’s decision to reopen a Soviet-era paper mill beside the world’s largest freshwater lake.

• Greenpeace activists in The Netherlands chained themselves to the mooring ropes of a container ship bound for Japan with whale meat onboard last Friday. Rottderdamport police have agreed to keep the ship at the port, while its owner has decided to off load the meat rather than become complicit in the trade of an endangered species.

• Hundreds of teachers in Florida gathered at the state capital in Tallahassee on Monday to protest a controversial education reform bill passed by the state legislature that links pay raises for teachers to students’ test scores.

• United Airlines flight attendants around the world were out picketing Tuesday, including a protest at Denver International Airport, to show their discontent over long hours and no contract.

PBS aired a documentary last night called Among the Righteous that attempts to answer the question: Did any Arabs save any Jews during the Holocaust? The answer, as the PBS narrator puts it, “might change how Arabs view the Holocaust and how Arabs and Jews view each other.”

Since it was established in 1953 by the Knesset, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, has recognized some 20,000 non-Jews. None of the names, however, are Arab. But as this documentary shows, many Arabs did help Jews in parts of Nazi-occupied Tunisia.

PBS has a website loaded with resources connected to the documentary, where you can not only read about some of the uplifting stories, but also find out when the program airs again.

In the current issue of the Indypendent, I have an interview with Connie Field, the director and producer of Have You Heard From Johannesburg, an epic seven-part documentary series about the global campaign to end the racist apartheid regime in South Africa that will be opening at the Film Forum here in New York on April 14.

The film chronicles three generations of that struggle — from the early freedom fighters and the work of African National Congress (ANC) leader Oliver Tambo to the international campaign to boycott corporations operating in South Africa and impose economic sanctions on the regime — through some 135 interviews spanning 12 countries, including interestingly the perspectives of former apartheid officials and profiteering corporate executives, and archival footage from around the world.

After attending a recent advanced screening at the Ford Foundation of one part of the eight-and-a-half-hour series, which I thought was very moving, I spoke with Field about whether nonviolent action played the decisive role in bringing down the apartheid regime, why economic justice has eluded post-apartheid South Africa, and what activists today can learn from the anti-apartheid movement.

Check out the Q&A here, and try to make it to the movie if you can. As is always the case, the better the film does here, the greater chance it has of being shown more widely at theaters throughout the country.

• Four hundred California high school students walked out of class on Friday in response to announced teacher pay cuts and are now facing consequences for the protest.

• Thousands of Thai red-shirted activists began a protest on Saturday that froze downtown Bangkok and will continue to demonstrate this week, although in a different location.  The pro-democracy protesters urge Prime Minister Vejjajiva to call new elections.

• Worshipers at Dublin’s Pro Cathedral placed children’s shoes on the altar during Easter Mass on Sunday, in protest of child abuse committed by Catholic clergy.

• Cuban journalist Guillermo Fariñas, who has been hunger striking and refusing hospitalization for weeks in support of political prisoners denied medical attention in Cuban jails, was in declining health on Saturday.  Two of the prisoners also began hunger strikes.

• More than one hundred Bulgarian workers began a hunger strike on Saturday in the town of Kostenets.  They protest their paper plant’s decision to fire employees without providing compensation.

• On Saturday in Sri Lanka, Buddhist monks commenced a hunger strike to protest the arrest of an opposition presidential candidate.  The four men refused to move when confronted by police but were dispersed late Saturday night.

• In Munich on Sunday, hundreds of German activists marched in protest of the war in Afghanistan.  They call for immediate return of troops and an end to fighting, spurred by the recent deaths of German soldiers.

• Three hundred Egyptians demonstrated in front of the parliament in Cairo on Saturday, urging an increase in minimum wage.  The current level, at approximately $7 per month, has not increased in 25 years.

• Two dozen people walked through Portland, Maine without their shirts on Friday, demonstrating against the double standard of nudity for men and women.