• Public sector workers went on strike across South Africa Tuesday, closing schools and wreaking havoc on a wide array of public services. As many as 1.3 million people were expected to walk off their jobs. Between 10,000 and 100,000 workers also demonstrated Tuesday across five provinces.

• Dozens of construction workers building a subway in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, have vowed to begin a hunger strike today to demand three months of unpaid wages.

• On Monday, a few dozen Embassy Suites workers who claim they are routinely denied breaks walked off the job in Irvine, California.

• Anti-government protesters in Bolivia tightened their siege of Potosi on Saturday, launching a hunger strike and cutting rail links to Chile, as tourists began negotiating their way out of the mining city, 10 days into the blockade.

• Nine protesters were arrested for blocking the main gate to Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor on Monday. They were among members and supporters of Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, which holds an annual vigil at the base on the anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

• More than 30,000 truck drivers in the Dominican Republic went on a 24-hour strike yesterday to protest a government proposal to raise the fuel tax.

• Workers at the Post-Gazette walked out at Noon on Monday to protest pending staff cuts the paper says are needed to stay afloat.

• In India, Yoga Guru Baba Ramdev staged a sit-in protest at Haridwar with a demand to halt the hydropower projects across River Ganga and also to protect the river from further exploitation and pollution. Several Hindu monks also accompanied Baba Ramdev in this crusade.

• A three-day strike launched on Monday by customs workers in Ivory Coast over benefits that have been withheld is blocking exports of cocoa from the world’s top grower of the beans.

Former workers of the Vestas wind turbine manufacturing plant on the Isle of Wight gathered last month outside the building they occupied for 19 days last summer to mark the one year anniversary of their struggle. The Save Vestas Jobs! blog described the reunion as short-lived due to “the familiar faces of the old Vestas security team” arriving on the scene within a matter of minutes, “looking very concerned.”

Such fear on the part of a company that for all intents and purposes “won” the struggle would be unwarranted if not for two factors. First and foremost, many grievances among the workers remain standing. According to the campaign blog, “… the occupiers have still not been reinstated and a tribunal that was to be held last week for some of the occupiers ended prematurely when ex-workers were threatened with full and crippling costs by Vestas and forced to withdraw their case.”

The second reason Vestas has legitimate reason to fear continued protest is that many people were energized by the events of last summer to the point of feeling involved in something magical. The very site of the reunion, for example, was known as the “Magic Roundabout” because it was where campaign supporters gathered during the occupation and then for several months thereafter. It was a place made by the coming together of people for a united cause and gave empowerment to folks who likely didn’t have much before.

A reporter for the BBC recently recalled his experience at the “Magic Roundabout” last summer:

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On Sunday, the Toronto Star ran an interesting review of Philip Carr-Gomm’s new book, A Brief History of Nakedness, in which he offers “a sustained mediation on the spiritual, cultural and political implications of being naked in public.” The book includes numerous photos, including this image of 50 women posing nude as part of Baring Witness, a group in West Marin County, California, that used nudity to protest the impending Iraq war in November 2002.

As Carr-Gomm argues, “Nakedness makes a human being particularly vulnerable but in certain circumstances strangely powerful, which is why it has become so popular as a vehicle for political protest.” According to Carr-Gomm, by disrobing, protestors demonstrate that they are both fearless and have nothing to hide.At least, that’s the ideal situation. Sometimes the political intentions of being in the buff can get lost, as happened during the recent expressions of G20 activism. “There’s a naked guy at Queen and Peter,” @one_more_night tweeted. “I think he’s protesting clothes.”

Contrary to what you might first think, it is not only hippie types that have used their naked bodies to protest. Carr-Gomm tells the story of one religious group that employed this tactic:

A radical sect of Ukrainian Christians, the Doukhobors (which translates into “spirit wrestlers”) were considered heretics by the Orthodox Church and generally irritated the Russian government. So in 1899 the Doukhobors were encouraged to move their troublemaking to Canada, where they were promised 65 hectares of free land, a bracing climate, equitable laws, peace and prosperity. More than a third of the population (nearly 8,000) said yes, but by 1903 they were unhappy, and an extremist faction called the Sons of Freedom emerged, inspired by the Quakers and Leo Tolstoy. As Carr-Gomm notes, the Sons of Freedom “decided to mount a sustained campaign of protest against the government, whom they believed had reneged on their promises regarding land rights and were enforcing compulsory education in government schools.”

In May of 1903 over 45 Doukhobors protested by marching naked, were charged with “nudism” and sentenced to jail. Naked skirmishes between the Canadian government and the Doukhobors continued into the 1970s.

As I have argued on this site before, I still question the efficacy of nude protests. While taking off your clothes definitely can draw a crowd and the attention of the media, the focus generally seems to be on the fact that the protesters are naked rather than the issue they are campaigning around. And as a rule of thumb, activists want to avoid tactics that deflect attention from the cause they are fighting for.

• Men wearing face masks of British Prime Minister David Cameron gathered in London on Friday to call for a ban on the cloning of cattle for human consumption, following the discovery of a cloned U.S. cow that was slaughtered and eaten in Britain.

• Two members of the environmental group Six Degrees climbed onto the roof of Queensland parliament house in Australia last week to display an anti-coal mining banner that read: “Don’t undermine our farms.” Meanwhile, hundreds of farmers and green activists staged a peaceful protest outside parliament.

• The “We Are Guahan” coalition in Guam gathered at a major intersection in Tamuning on Friday to protest the use of historic and ceremonial lands for military buildup.

• Some 150 protesters gathered outside a federal prison farm in Kingston, Ontario this morning to protest its closure. They say the government is ignoring the rehabilitative and healing effects that farming offers low-risk inmates.

• Up to 60 people have been camping out in front of the county government building in Santa Cruz since July Fourth to protest the city’s camping ban, which prohibits sleeping on public or private property from 11 p.m. to 8:30 a.m. But deputies rousted the homeless protest camp just after midnight Saturday, arresting five people and handing out 17 other misdemeanor citations.

• Workers who were fired by a Brooklyn kosher food producer after demanding overtime pay have been protesting outside the owner’s house and a supermarket this summer, and preparing for a return to the National Labor Relations Board this fall.

• Baristas and community supporters shut down a Starbucks in Omaha last week demanding that management reverse all cuts to healthcare, staffing, and benefits that have been imposed during the recession. The baristas claim that executives have no justification to squeeze working families with Starbucks raking in profits of $977.2 million in the past four fiscal quarters.

Friday marked the 65th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. That’s 65 years of mourning for a city that lost 150,000 people in almost an instant. But it was the first year the city of Hiroshima marked the somber event with a US envoy present.

In a statement to the press, US Ambassador John Roos said, “For the sake of future generations, we must continue to work together to realize a world without nuclear weapons.”

As author and longtime opponent of nuclear weapons Robert Jay Lifton told Democracy Now! in the above video:

… the traditional American response to August 6th has been to justify the use of the weapon on many of the media, saying that this cruelest weapon ever devised saved lives rather than took lives. This is a reversal of that position. It’s joining in the commemoration of a tragedy and the embrace of an anti-nuclear position. So I take it to be extremely important.

Having attended Hiroshima anniversary vigils in past years—where even members of the Japanese Embassy were too uncomfortable acknowledging our presence for fear of embarrassing their modern-day US allies—I can appreciate the historic magnitude of this gesture by President Obama. At the same time, however, it is sad that such a simple—and no doubt, long deserved—act would carry such weight. After all, Obama hasn’t physically moved any closer to fulfilling his commitment to abolitish of nuclear weapons.

That being said, this is no time for activists to dampen this truly important moment. It’s an opportunity to keep the dialogue open about nuclear weapons and continue pushing for their abolition.

• Through a series of well-choreographed steps, a tiger-themed flash mob called “Freeze Tiger Trade” spearheaded by WWF-Malaysia turned heads and attracted attention on the status of our Malayan tigers here in Kuala Lumpur.

• In Turkey, nongovernmental organizations in the eastern province of Batman held a silent march and sit-in demonstration yesterday in protest of a mine explosion that claimed the lives of four people on Monday.

• On Wednesday, unionized workers of the West Indies Paper Products Limited in Jamaica walked off the job to protest against what they claimed was the failure of the management to improve wage and fringe benefits.

• More than 100 people at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in England went on hunger strike on Wednesday.

• In Azerbaijan, ten opposition activists jailed for participating in an unsanctioned rally calling for free elections in central Baku on July 31 have declared a hunger strike.

• Around 120 Chinese seasonal berry pickers in northern Sweden went on a 15-kilometre (9.3-mile) march overnight to Friday to protest their salaries

• In Malaysia, police forcefully broke up peaceful candlelight vigils held on August 1, against the Internal Security Act (ISA), and arrested 36 people in Petaling Jaya and Penang.

The average American sees 3,000 advertisements per day–each one telling us our lives are somehow lacking or insufficient. A perfect example is an ad by Pretzel Crisps that could recently be spotted on street furniture throughout Manhattan. In a cleverly worded phrase that plays on both the product’s physical appearance, as well as our inherent issues with body image, the ad declared: “You can never be too thin.”

This irked a local resident and blogger enough to embellish the ad with some facts about the dangers of anorexia and pictures of people who have died from the disease. NYC The Blog was on hand to film the defacing and soon after posting it, the video went viral. It even led to a favorable news segment on local station WPIX. Most importantly, however, it so embarassed Pretzel Crisps that its vice president of marketing issued an apology and promised to take down the ads. Barely a day later, the defaced ad had been replaced with a new, less offensive one.

Last month, the Feminist Initiative (FI), a feminist party in Sweden, lit a barbecue and proceeded to publicly burned 100,000 kronor ($13,087), to protest the wage gap between men and women in the country.

As FI leader Gudrun Schyman explained to Swedish public radio:

“One hundred thousand kronor is the amount women lose each minute when we have the system we have now, where salaries are set according to gender,” she said.

“It’s not funny to set fire to money. I know it’s a lot of money. It’s a lot of money for me, and it’s a lot of money for many others,” Schyman told a radio reporter, adding she realized there was a long list of deserving charities the money could have gone to instead.

“But Feminist Initiative is a political party. We are not a charity, we work to change reality.”

The move provoked criticism, but also generated significant media coverage, both nationally and internationally, leading some to declare it a success.

When there are so many people in need, however, is burning money an ethical tactic? My gut reaction to this story was critical. But how different is physically burning money from spending the same amount on a 30-second political ad on television or a half-page ad in a national daily newspaper?

Last week, the Progressive Media Project published an op-ed – which ran in the Sacramento Bee, Philadelphia Inquirer and Charlotte Observer, among other papers – commemorating the 40th anniversary of the successful 2 1/2 year-long grape boycott by the United Farm Workers of America.

On July 29, 1970, the UFW signed its first contract with California grape growers to end their successful national and international boycott. As Alvaro Huerta recaps the struggle:

It seemed like an improbable outcome, as the battle pitted a mostly Mexican as well as Filipino immigrant work force against powerful agricultural growers in California.

Led by the late Cesar Chavez and tireless Dolores Huerta, the UFW was founded in the early 1960s in response to the inhumane working conditions for farmworkers in California and other states, such as Arizona, Texas, Florida and Washington state.

While many American workers during this period enjoyed the right to organize, 40-hour weeks, minimum wage and relatively safe working conditions, farmworkers lacked these basic rights and protections.

In an effort to seek justice, dignity and respect in the rural fields of America, UFW leaders, its members and sympathizers organized and joined picket lines and marches, signed petitions, supported labor laws, lobbied elected officials, distributed educational flyers, produced documentaries, penned songs, performed plays, held teach-ins and generally supported the nationwide boycott.

The charismatic Chavez — who graced the cover of Time magazine on July 4, 1969 — engaged in numerous and lengthy hunger strikes to draw attention to the cause.

As was the case with the civil rights movement, many UFW activists were beaten up and a few were killed for the simple act of supporting the right of farmworkers to organize a union and negotiate for fair labor contracts.

But the rightness of their cause prevailed.

While this campaign should no doubt be seen as a nonviolent success story, the farmworkers struggle for justice did not unfortunately end there. In fact, the grape boycott had to be resumed in 1973 after the major vineyards broke their contract with the UFW. As David Cortright writes in Gandhi and Beyond:

The boycotts continued for years, but the halcyon enthusiasm of the initial grape and lettuce boycotts gradually faded. Boycott activity around the country became increasingly desultory, and the tactic lost much of its effectiveness.

My takeaway message from this story is that since boycotts are extremely difficult to get off the ground and maintain, organizers must make sure, to the best of their ability, that the any agreement signed will stick before they agree to call of a boycott. Otherwise, the businesses or corporations targeted by a movement may strike a deal, without ever intending to implement it, just to take the wind of out the sails of the boycott.

While protest in China is far more widespread than most people recognize, recent high-profile strikes by workers in China, which we’ve noted on this site, appear to be having an effect, according to The Guardian.

Officials in Guangdong province – for years the country’s manufacturing heartland – are debating proposals which activists say could be a landmark, allowing workers to democratically elect representatives to carry out collective bargaining.

“The pressure of low pay, long working hours and poor working conditions that gave rise to the wave of strikes across Guangdong have elicited a timely and positive response from the government,” said Han Dongfang, executive director of the Hong Kong-based group China Labour Bulletin.

He said it showed an important change in the government’s attitude towards workers’ reasonable economic demands.

According to Chinese media, the revised draft law states that if more than a fifth of the workforce at a factory ask for wage negotiations with management, the trade union branch must organise the democratic election of representatives. If the company does not have a union, the nearest district union must arrange the vote. Union leaders in China are appointed officials and independent unions are not permitted.

Interesting, one economics professor in China interviewed in the piece says that workers are feeling empowered by the internet, where despite of government censorship, they have been able to read about how strikes have successfully won better wages and working conditions in other Chinese factories.