• On Saturday, more than 100,000 turned out in the pale winter sunshine for a march in downtown Moscow against election fraud and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s plan to return to the presidency next month.

• Over 10,000 Bahrainis gathered on Sunday to begin a week-long sit-in protest in Meqsha, north of Bahrain, ahead of the one year anniversary of the revolution.

• Hundreds of flights in France were cancelled today, including 40 percent out of Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport, as unions ratcheted up pressure on day two of a strike over labor rights.

• Antiwar groups held rallies on Saturday in about 80 cities across the United States protesting a possible strike on Iran.

• In Singapore, two hundred foreign workers staged a sit-in on Monday morning in protest over unpaid wages.

• At least one activist died, and another 39 were injured on Sunday after police tried to break up a protest by indigenous groups—who have blockaded the Pan-American Highway for days—against the recent approval of mines and reservoirs in their region.

• In Canada, close to a thousand people marched through Prince Rupert’s streets on Saturday as part of a rally hosted by local first nations against Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline and the oil tanker traffic it would generate on British Columbia’s northern coast.

• At least 11 Occupy D.C. protesters were arrested Saturday just blocks from the White House as the U.S. Park Police evicted activists who had been sleeping in McPherson Square since October 1. On Sunday, police also cleared a second encampment at Freedom Plaza.

• In one of more than a hundred protests planned across Europe on Saturday, about 2,000 people marched in the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

• Some 20 residents of Khirbat al-Tawil village, south of Nablus in the occupied West Bank, went on a 24-hour hunger strike on Friday to protest against Israel’s occupation of their lands.

It has been three weeks since the protests in Romania started. For the moment they have quieted down, as bad weather is keeping a lot of protesters in their homes. The most determined of them remain to shout in the streets, especially those fighting to protect the Rosia Montana area from mining, one of the longest activism campaigns in post-communist Romania; about 30 people invaded the environment minister’s office on Tuesday. There is also a small crowd of middle-aged and elderly people, who have been organizing themselves and are present in the streets day after day.

The goals of the protests appear to be the fall of the current government and a renewal of the political class. Claudiu Craciun, a lecturer at the National School of Political Studies and Public Administration, is one of the people who has been leading the crowd in University Square, and the speech he recently made in the European Parliament presents what the people hope for. “We want to trust politicians,” he said. “We want to trust democracy. We want to trust public institutions.”

People have called upon union leaders, also, to renounce their political affiliations, end their corrupt management and start representing the people whose dues support them.

There have been some difficult times for the protests. The 15th and 19th of January were the most violent. This was when a small group of protesters started throwing rocks, bits of smashed pavement, and fireworks. The ruling politicians responded by calling the protestors different names—like ”worms,” “oxen,” and “o mahala inepta si violenta,” meaning a stupid and violent mob—trying to attract the media at their side and to make the protests look ridiculous. They almost succeeded.

That is, until the riot police began to take center stage. Thinking that the media was backing them, the police turned against all of the protestors. The law states that the riot police are meant to ensure order, discipline and safety of a demonstration. If violent actions occur, they should intervene to stop the persons responsible. But this is not what happened.

Numerous videos uploaded on the Internet show the abuses that ensued. Some of them document riot police hitting women and children; others show protestors being dragged up to police wagons and beaten until they couldn’t get up anymore.

After these incidents, Bucharest began to feel like a police state. The center of the city was encircled by police wagons, checkpoints with attack dogs, and riot police carrying guns with live ammunition. To get to the protests, you had to pass through various checkpoints. Anyone looking suspicious would be stopped and searched—as I found out for myself. At one point some police officers took me off the street, led me to a tent near the protest zone, and started to search and interrogate me with verbal and physical abuse. After they videotaped me, and saw they had no excuse to take me to a precinct, I was let go. These riot police seem to be doing everything in their power to intimidate people into not joining the protests.

The situation started to change when the media turned against the police, especially after videos appeared on the Internet showing riot police targeting journalists who were on duty. Meanwhile, groups of activists began encouraging one another to protest nonviolently. They started to hand out brochures enumerating the rights of free expression they have as citizens. Given Romania’s repressive history, many people aren’t aware of this. “It’s good that people are in the streets,” says organizer Mihai Bumbes. “Now they must learn to protest.”

Several symbolic, nonviolent actions were orchestrated to show that the intentions is not to fight the police but to protest peacefully. People informed international human rights organizations of the police abuses, and Amnesty International decided to respond to their request by submitting a letter to the minister of the interior.

The riot police have suffered a serious blow to their legitimacy, as the media and much of the Romanian population looking at their behavior with fear and disgust. This constitutes a major win for Romanian human rights groups, which managed to publicize the true nature of the riot police, a state institution that only activists and certain football fans have had firsthand experience with. These groups’ efforts may lead the way for an accurate and just investigation that could compel the ministry of the interior to change its policies.

Above all, these demonstrations have sparked a change in the way Romanians understand values like solidarity, democracy, civic participation and freedom of speech—each of which are rights that they have possessed for more than 20 years but have not been accustomed to exercising. Perhaps the police will learn, too.

• About 20 people gathered on Thursday outside the Ritz-Carlton in New York City—where the Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh was said to be staying—to protest his trip to the United States for medical treatment and a deal he received that granted him immunity from prosecution for  crimes against protesters during uprisings last year.

• Thousands of Bahrainis held a peaceful anti-government protest in a suburb of the capital on Friday, demanding the release of political prisoners and political reforms in the troubled Gulf Arab state.

• Protesters defied a heavy security presence across Syria on Friday to commemorate the 30th anniversary of a deadly crackdown on Islamist opposition in the city of Hama, but were effectively prevented from turning out in the capital, Damascus.

• Several thousand people rallied in Bratislava and seven other Slovakian cities Friday to demand that early elections planned in March be postponed to allow a thorough investigation.

• Poland’s prime minister says he is suspending the ratification process for an international copyright treaty after widespread protests and attacks on government websites.

• Members of an Indian tribe in Panama are blocking roads in two provinces on the border with Costa Rica in a dispute over mineral exploitation on their lands.

• Cambodian police violently dispersed a group of around 150 women protesting forced evictions in the capital Phnom Penh on Thursday.

• Around 300 people gathered outside Budapest’s New Theater on Wednesday to protest its new director, an actor with links to far-right parties.

• Hackers associated with the activist group Anonymous posted a protest against Greece’s EU and IMF-inspired austerity policies on the website of the country’s justice ministry Friday

• Just after the National Park Service’s noon deadline Monday, by which protesters in Washington’s two Occupy D.C. camps were required to decamp, protesters fought back by stringing up a giant blue tarp in the middle of McPherson Square, which they called the “tent of dreams.”

• Belgium’s first general strike in almost two decades brought parts of the country to a halt on Monday in an anti-austerity protest aimed at the new government and at EU leaders meeting in Brussels.

• Hundreds of Romanians protested on Saturday against a plan to set up Europe’s biggest open-cast gold mine in a small Carpathian town, joining a wave of anti-government rallies.

• Three topless Ukrainian protesters were detained Saturday while trying to break into an invitation-only gathering of international CEOs and political leaders to call attention to the needs of the world’s poor.

• Thousands of cars flying white ribbons or balloons circled central Moscow on Sunday in a show of protest against Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

• Argentina’s powerful truck drivers’ union blocked postal distribution centers in several cities on Monday to protest the firing of 200 workers.

• About 200 Indonesian Christians held a prayer vigil in Jakarta on Sunday urging President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to re-open their church and stop intimidation by Muslim hardliners.

• Last Sunday, dozens of Detroit’s undertakers drove a motorcade of hearses through the city’s most violent neighborhoods to protest the high murder rate.

• Egyptian activist groups on Thursday launched an open-ended strike in Cairo to pressure the country’s military rulers  to expedite the transfer of power to an elected civilian  administration, a day after 100,000 Egyptians came out to Tahrir Square to mark the anniversary of the first massive protest that led to the overthrow of dictator Hosni Mubarak.

• Activists linked to the global ‘Occupy’ movement used giant red weather balloons to stage a flying protest over the venue of the World Economic Forum on Wednesday.

• Nearly 7,000 prisoners were on a hunger strike Wednesday in Kyrgyzstan with more  than 1,000 sewing shut their lips with staples and thread to protest jail  conditions

• On Tuesday, demonstrators with ACTA stickers on their mouths protested against Poland’s government plans to sign international copyright agreement ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), in front of the European Union office in Warsaw.

• Dozens of teachers turned out at six events across Seattle on Tuesday to protest and rally against budget cuts that are hurting education.

• Nepalese students chanted anti government slogans during a torch rally to protest against Nepal Oil Corporation’s decision to hike prices on major petroleum products, including petrol, diesel, kerosene and LPG in Kathmandu on Tuesday.

• On Tuesday, Cambodian victims held a demonstration to mark the third anniversary of a forced eviction in the Dey Krahorm community.

• Hundreds of Tibetans carried out day-long protests and candle light vigils in Ngaba on Monday calling for the return of His Holiness the Dalai Lama from exile and demanding freedom in Tibet.

The Romanian people have been asleep for quite some time now. After more than 20 years since the end of Communist rule, Romanians have decided to wake up, to wake up and see that the faith they put in their elected officials has not brought them the life they wished for. The current economic crisis, the austerity measures implemented by the government, the corruption among the politicians, the undemocratic way in which laws are implemented by the executive branch, poor living conditions and other interrelated grievances have brought Romanians into the streets.

It started about two weeks ago when the president, Traian Basescu, wanted to remove a highly esteemed medic from his job as an official in the Ministry of Health because he did not support the new healthcare law that was drafted by the president. This official, Raed Arafat, is a Palestinian who came to Romania and built the most advanced ambulance service the country had ever seen. For almost 15 years it has been the pride of the Romania healthcare system. But with the new law, this life-saving service would disappear.

That was the spark which ignited the fire inside the hearts of Romanians. First, 500 people protested after several NGOs and activist groups, like Active Watch Romania and Militia Spirituala, posted a call on Facebook and other social media networks. After just three days, people from around the country started to gather in squares, especially University Square in Bucharest. The number of protesters throughout these two weeks of demonstrations has varied, from the 500 on that first day to more than 20,000 after only a few days.

Nobody seems to have had a concrete plan for what has happened. The important thing was that the crowd was mixed—the elderly, students, activists with different causes and ordinary working people fed up with their living conditions—not just party or syndicate activists. People decided to bear fiercely cold weather in order to show their discontent to those in power.

During these days of protest, some people took to violent tactics. Clashes erupted between the riot police and a group of football fans supporting the protesters, which resulted in injuries among some who had been protesting peacefully. Naturally, the media focused on these incidents, putting the entire protest in a bad light. However, other protesters have managed to turn the mood around, recognizing that nonviolent discipline would be vital to their cause. This kind of understanding isn’t something many Romanians have, though that may be changing.

Most days, the young activists leading the protests in University Square have been instructing the crowd to protest nonviolently, and that is what happened for most of the days. They also surprised the media with tactics meant to show the world that they were not there to fight the riot police: offering flowers, big plastic hearts, tea and free hugs to police officers standing a few feet away from them; blocking traffic around the square while offering hot chocolate to people who got out of their cars and inviting them to participate; making snowmen and putting protest signs in their hands. Most importantly, they showed their determination to hold the line and maintain their presence despite the abuses inflicted by riot police. In recent days, a fierce snow storm struck Eastern Europe, but people, although smaller in number, are still going out into the square and protest.

Already, this wave of protests has brought about results: the healthcare law, which was about to privatize the entire medical system and put thousands of medics out of work, did not pass and will probably not get into parliament any time soon. Raed Arafat has been asked to take up his old post, which he did, and the foreign minister, Theodor Baconschi, was demoted after he called the protesters “maggots.” The Constitutional Court also declared that the law to merge local and parliamentary elections of 2012 was unconstitutional—perhaps after hearing how many of the slogans shouted in University Square were against that law.

Overall, these protests show that a new way of thinking has emerged among the population of Romania. People are tired of the way things are going and have decided to do something about it—largely in a nonviolent manner. Whatever comes of the protests, they seem to be on the way to helping build a stronger civic society for in Romania the future, showing politicians that the people will not be ignored any longer.

A march in Ådalen, Sweden, in 1931.

While many of us are working to ensure that the Occupy movement will have a lasting impact, it’s worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different. Both countries had a history of horrendous poverty. When the 1 percent was in charge, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated to avoid starvation. Under the leadership of the working class, however, both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment. Unlike the Norwegians, the Swedes didn’t find oil, but that didn’t stop them from building what the latest CIA World Factbook calls “an enviable standard of living.” Neither country is a utopia, as readers of the crime novels by Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell and Jo Nesbø will know. Critical left-wing authors such as these try to push Sweden and Norway to continue on the path toward more fully just societies. However, as an American activist who first encountered Norway as a student in 1959 and learned some of its language and culture, the achievements I found amazed me. I remember, for example, bicycling for hours through a small industrial city, looking in vain for substandard housing. Sometimes resisting the evidence of my eyes, I made up stories that “accounted for” the differences I saw: “small country,” “homogeneous,” “a value consensus.” I finally gave up imposing my frameworks on these countries and learned the real reason: their own histories. Then I began to learn that the Swedes and Norwegians paid a price for their standards of living through nonviolent struggle. There was a time when Scandinavian workers didn’t expect that the electoral arena could deliver the change they believed in. They realized that, with the 1 percent in charge, electoral “democracy” was stacked against them, so nonviolent direct action was needed to exert the power for change. In both countries, the troops were called out to defend the 1 percent; people died. Award-winning Swedish filmmaker Bo Widerberg told the Swedish story vividly in Ådalen 31, which depicts the strikers killed in 1931 and the sparking of a nationwide general strike. (You can read more about this case in an entry by Max Rennebohm in the Global Nonviolent Action Database.) The Norwegians had a harder time organizing a cohesive people’s movement because Norway’s small population—about three million—was spread out over a territory the size of Britain. People were divided by mountains and fjords, and they spoke regional dialects in isolated valleys. In the nineteenth century, Norway was ruled by Denmark and then by Sweden; in the context of Europe Norwegians were the “country rubes,” of little consequence. Not until 1905 did Norway finally become independent. When workers formed unions in the early 1900s, they generally turned to Marxism, organizing for revolution as well as immediate gains. They were overjoyed by the overthrow of the czar in Russia, and the Norwegian Labor Party joined the Communist International organized by Lenin. Labor didn’t stay long, however. One way in which most Norwegians parted ways with Leninist strategy was on the role of violence: Norwegians wanted to win their revolution through collective nonviolent struggle, along with establishing co-ops and using the electoral arena. In the 1920s strikes increased in intensity. The town of Hammerfest formed a commune in 1921, led by workers councils; the army intervened to crush it. The workers’ response verged toward a national general strike. The employers, backed by the state, beat back that strike, but workers erupted again in the ironworkers’ strike of 1923–24. The Norwegian 1 percent decided not to rely simply on the army; in 1926 they formed a social movement called the Patriotic League, recruiting mainly from the middle class. By the 1930s, the League included as many as 100,000 people for armed protection of strike breakers—this in a country of only 3 million! The Labor Party, in the meantime, opened its membership to anyone, whether or not in a unionized workplace. Middle-class Marxists and some reformers joined the party. Many rural farm workers joined the Labor Party, as well as some small landholders. Labor leadership understood that in a protracted struggle, constant outreach and organizing was needed to a nonviolent campaign. In the midst of the growing polarization, Norway’s workers launched another wave of strikes and boycotts in 1928. The Depression hit bottom in 1931. More people were jobless there than in any other Nordic country. Unlike in the U.S., the Norwegian union movement kept the people thrown out of work as members, even though they couldn’t pay dues. This decision paid off in mass mobilizations. When the employers’ federation locked employees out of the factories to try to force a reduction of wages, the workers fought back with massive demonstrations. Many people then found that their mortgages were in jeopardy. (Sound familiar?) The Depression continued, and farmers were unable to keep up payment on their debts. As turbulence hit the rural sector, crowds gathered nonviolently to prevent the eviction of families from their farms. The Agrarian Party, which included larger farmers and had previously been allied with the Conservative Party, began to distance itself from the 1 percent; some could see that the ability of the few to rule the many was in doubt. By 1935, Norway was on the brink. The Conservative-led government was losing legitimacy daily; the 1 percent became increasingly desperate as militancy grew among workers and farmers. A complete overthrow might be just a couple years away, radical workers thought. However, the misery of the poor became more urgent daily, and the Labor Party felt increasing pressure from its members to alleviate their suffering, which it could do only if it took charge of the government in a compromise agreement with the other side. This it did. In a compromise that allowed owners to retain the right to own and manage their firms, Labor in 1935 took the reins of government in coalition with the Agrarian Party. They expanded the economy and started public works projects to head toward a policy of full employment that became the keystone of Norwegian economic policy. Labor’s success and the continued militancy of workers enabled steady inroads against the privileges of the 1 percent, to the point that majority ownership of all large firms was taken by the public interest. (There is an entry on this case as well at the Global Nonviolent Action Database.) The 1 percent thereby lost its historic power to dominate the economy and society. Not until three decades later could the Conservatives return to a governing coalition, having by then accepted the new rules of the game, including a high degree of public ownership of the means of production, extremely progressive taxation, strong business regulation for the public good and the virtual abolition of poverty. When Conservatives eventually tried a fling with neoliberal policies, the economy generated a bubble and headed for disaster. (Sound familiar?) Labor stepped in, seized the three largest banks, fired the top management, left the stockholders without a dime and refused to bail out any of the smaller banks. The well-purged Norwegian financial sector was not one of those countries that lurched into crisis in 2008; carefully regulated and much of it publicly owned, the sector was solid. Although Norwegians may not tell you about this the first time you meet them, the fact remains that their society’s high level of freedom and broadly-shared prosperity began when workers and farmers, along with middle class allies, waged a nonviolent struggle that empowered the people to govern for the common good. Correction: In an earlier version, Henning Mankell was mistakenly referred to by the name of Kurt Wallender, the protagonist in several of his books.

• Thousands of Yemenis protested on Sunday against an immunity law protecting  outgoing President Ali Abdullah Saleh from prosecution and demanded he be put on  trial for offences they say he committed during his 33-year rule.

• More than 50 students from Tuscon High School walked out of class on Monday and marched toward Santa Rita Park in protest of the recent ban on Mexican American studies at TUSD schools.

• In Egypt, dozens of employees at the state-run Nile News TV Channel started an open-ended strike Sunday at the Maspero building, as they protested policies still in place since Mubarak’s rule.

• Malawi lawyers across the country Monday protested in their court regalia to pressure the governement to act on the ongoing judiciary strike.

• Truck drivers across Italy went on strike on Monday against increased fuel prices, while taxis also held a national protest over government reforms to increase competition, causing disruptions nationwide.

• Scores of protests were held across the country on Friday to protest the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which ruled corporations have a right to spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns. A dozen demonstrators were arrested on the U.S. Supreme Court steps.

• In Lebanon, severe electricity cuts fueled several protests Friday as residents and  lawmakers staged a sit-in in the mountain town of Aley and small groups of protesters blocked roads in the south of the country.

• Several women and children staged a sit-in outside the Karachi Press Club (KPC) on Friday to protest against the kidnapping of Baloch youths and the dumping of their bodies in different parts of the province.

• Protests in two West Bank universities have shut down classes in recent days, as students call for easing of tuition fees amid financial crisis in Palestine.

• Beginning last Tuesday, about 100,000 teachers from 24,000 non-government primary schools in Bangladesh held a three-day strike to demand that they be brought onto the government’s payroll.

• Thousands of Zimbabwean civil servants conducted a one-day strike Thursday to protest low wages.

• Some 40,000 people were out on the streets on Thursday in various provinces across Turkey to commemorate Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink, who was shot dead outside his newspaper’s office in Şişli on Jan. 19, 2007.

• Air traffic controllers in Cyprus walked off the job for four hours on Wednesday to protest a two-year government worker wage freeze and other deficit-reduction measures.

• Inmates in 13 Kyrgyz jails started a mass hunger strike on Wednesday to support inmates in detention center No. 1 in Bishkek, where security troops violently quelled a prisoner riot on January 16.

• On Tuesday, about 6,000 workers began an indefinite strike for higher wages at a $5.25 billion project to widen the Panama Canal to accommodate larger ships.

• Dozens of orphans in Jordan on Tuesday staged a sit-in in front of the Royal Court in downtown Amman demanding better services.

• A new anti-austerity 24-hour strike and protest hit Athens on Tuesday, as auditors of international creditors returned to Greece for talks on the release of a second aid package.

• Women employees at the Palestinian Women’s Affairs Ministry began a “hunger strike till death” on Tuesday to protest against corruption and harassment.

• The teaching fraternity in Ranchi, India carried out a sit-in rally on Tuesday, to protest Maoist atrocities against them.

• Cairo and Alexandria witnessed a fresh wave of strikes and protests on Sunday, blocking roads and causing disruption to the work of the Ministry of Transport.

• On Monday, a week-long nationwide strike in Nigeria ended, after Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan announced in a televised address that fuel will be reduced in price.

• Kuwaiti riot police on Saturday used tear gas and batons to disperse hundreds of stateless demonstrators for the second day in a row and arrested dozens.

• About 4,000 Chinese workers protested over compensation and job security at a Sanyo plant in southern Shenzhen over the weekend in the latest outbreak of labor unrest in China’s manufacturing hub.

• In Oman, thousands of expatriate laborers working for one of the Muscat International Airport projects who have been on strike since Thursday protested in front of their company premises in Azaiba on Sunday. The government’s decision to ban the export of Omani fish to the UAE was “revoked” after over 400 fishermen held a sit-in at Khasab demanding the reversal of the decision on Saturday.

• Activists from a local peace group blocked entry to the main gate at the Navy’s West coast Trident nuclear submarine base Saturday for nearly a half hour in an act of civil resistance to nuclear weapons.

• Police detained a liberal opposition-party leader and another activist Saturday at a rally protesting alleged vote fraud in Russia’s parliamentary election.

• In Pennsylvania, nearly 300 students from two Chester high schools walked out of classes Friday, demanding an end to the financial crisis jeopardizing their school year.

• After five days of a sit-in protest, workers at a lingerie store in Ireland have won their battle for back pay.

• A flash mob of youngsters performed at the crowded Model Town market on Friday afternoon in Delhi as a way of celebrating Lohri with a message against corruption.

• Dozens of cars manned by Palestinians from the West Bank tried to leave Jericho on Tuesday morning in a non-violent protest action to protest and challenge the system of Israeli-only roads throughout the West Bank, but were stopped by Israeli forces, who blocked the four lanes entering and exiting the Palestinian city.

• On Monday, survivors of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy staged a protest at a park as part of the international campaign to demand that the Organizing Committee of the London Games set to begin from July 27, cancel the sponsorship by Dow Chemicals.

• Workers at consumer goods giant Unilever staged a noisy protest outside the firm’s London offices in a dispute over pensions which is set to escalate into a series of strikes starting next Tuesday.

• More than 9,000 lawyers boycotted court proceedings in Pakistan’s major cities on Tuesday in protest of a senior attorney’s slaying outside his home in Lahore.

• Workers at a Freeport McMoran mine in Indonesia on Tuesday halted their gradual return to work one day after gunmen shot two contractors dead on the road to the Grasberg mine.

• As many as 231 Air India flight attendants refused to work on Tuesday, which delayed four international flights, to protest non-payment of salaries and sustenance allowance since August.

As the Spanish May 15 movement was getting started in February of last year, it did so with almost no money. What it had, instead, was a lot of participation. Little money, but many hours of voluntary work, made possible the country’s most important social movement in recent memory.

The demonstrations that followed May 15 in more than 50 Spanish cities were a surprise for many people, but they were partly the result of months of preparation among the different nodos (local teams) of the organization Democracia Real Ya (DRY). Thousands of posters, paintings and stickers flooded the streets of Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and other cities calling citizens to the demonstrations. Each nodo had to find ways to pay for this as best as it could.

Benefit parties, for example, were the main method of financing the Madrid team. “We organized two parties in a squatted social center, where we’ve held meetings since before the 15th of May,” says Laura McMihail, one of the first members of DRY Madrid. At those events, they sold food, beverages, pictures and posters, collecting €1,400. They opened an account at a bank they considered ethical and, through their website, they received hundreds of euros more. With this money, they paid for the posters, stickers, leaflets and banners, as well as the rental of sound equipment and a stage for the demonstrations of May 15, June 19 and October 15.

The nodo of Barcelona had to manage with less money. “The truth is that we don’t have external financing,” explains Klaudia Álvarez, from DRY Barcelona. “The things we have to pay, we pay out of our own pockets.” They’ve tried to sell T-shirts and badges too, but that didn’t raise very much. “With the crisis, people aren’t in the mood to buy T-shirts. Badges worked a little bit better, but we still don’t get much money, so our position remains precarious.” They tried to solicit donations at the demonstrations, but that didn’t work either. DRY Barcelona therefore had little financial support, but it had a lot of support-in-kind from the beginning.

Supporters provided a truck, sound equipment and a place to meet. A printing house printed the posters, the stickers, the leaflets and the nodo’s monthly magazine out of solidarity with the movement. This way, although without much money, the nodo of Barcelona was able organize its demonstrations of May, June and October. The only thing they ended up having to pay for was the demonstration banner, which cost €40.

In smaller cities, fundraising falls a lot more on the activists themselves. “We have a canister and, each time we have a meeting, each one of us puts in €3,” says Jesús Bustos, a member of DRY Alicante. “That way we’ve borne the cost of materials for continuous use, like Xerox copies or ink.” That, however, is not enough to organize large actions, such as the demonstrations of May 15 or October 15. For those, DRY Alicante also turned to selling T-shirts and badges, as well as having to put up more money out of their own pockets.

Democracia Real Ya as a whole hasn’t had any kind of financing, and the only cost it has is €90 per month to pay for the server that hosts Red Dry—the internal social network—and it is paid for together by the almost 80 nodos of the platform.

If Democracia Real Ya itself has managed to work with very little money, at many camps there was no money at all. “In the camp in Madrid we decided not to accept money,” explains Juan Cobo, one of its members. Since the night of May 15, when some dozens decided to stay in Sol square, in-kind donations were continuous. The next day, when hundreds more arrived in Sol, the donations multiplied. “Sometimes we received anonymous packages,” says Cobo. “People gave us all kinds of things: routers, solar panels, fridges and especially food. One guy came every day with a truck full of fabada and macarrons from his restaurant. People offered us money and asked for bank account information as well, but we decided not to accept money. We had to make that clear publicly, because there were people who started asking for money for themselves on behalf of the movement.”

The camp of Sol, now Asamblea Popular de Madrid (Popular Assembly of Madrid), existed for a month without a single euro. Every need was addressed with collaboration-in-kind and with what things the activists themselves could contribute. Sound equipment was provided, at the beginning, by friendly organizations; later, as sound engineers themselves started to be part of the movement, they brought their own equipment. Other members lent video cameras and formed a communication team. A library was set up with more than 4,000 books and hundreds of newspapers donated by people.

Although the more than 60 Spanish encampments disappeared months ago, assemblies continue on in neighborhoods. In the area around Madrid alone there are more than a hundred assemblies each week, all with no external financing.

The situation of the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (Platform of People Affected by Mortgage, or PAH)—closely associated with the May 15 movement—is not very different. In the beginning, its organizers themselves put up all the money that was needed to pay for posters, banners and leaflets. In the past year, they have raised €1,700 from online donations and T-shirt sales, but the most important aspect of the platform, the legal support it provides, requires no money at all. “All the lawyers that have collaborated with PAH by giving advice did it for free,” says Ada Colau, one of its founders. These lawyers offered legal advice and informed the activists about relevant legal issues, so they could give training to other activists in turn. In court, affected families use free lawyers provided by the government, whom PAH activists help advise. “By working this way, we don’t need to pay lawyers, enabling people to create new PAH chapters in lots of cities and to train people in the assemblies,” explains Colau.

PAH is looking now for new ways of fundraising—such as donations and benefit concerts—to pay for a new signature-gathering effort. The PAH’s rapid expansion is also leading it to explore other options for raising money as well. “But we’re going to think about that quietly,” Colau says. “We never want to endanger the independence of the PAH.”

• A national strike paralyzed much of Nigeria on Monday, with more than 10,000 demonstrators swarming its commercial capital to protest soaring fuel prices and decades of government corruption in the oil-rich country.

• Tensions flared at the American Licorice factory Monday as protesters associated with the Occupy Oakland movement joined the month-old factory workers’ strike, blocking entrances and turning away delivery trucks.

• Over five hundred people in the French city of Clermont-Ferrand attended the silent march on Saturday, to show their support for Wissam El-Yamini, a thirty years old man who went into coma following his violent arrest on New Year’s Eve.

• Tens of thousands demonstrating in Yemen’s capital Sanaa on Friday chanted “freedom to the detainees,” a slogan chosen by protest organizers for demonstrations in 18 cities across the impoverished nation.

• Around ten thousand people blocked railways and the Aswan-Cairo highway in the Upper Egyptian City of Nagaa-Hammadi, Qena, late on Friday, to protest the results of the ongoing parliamentary elections in their constituency.

• More than 20 Omanis continue their prison hunger strike, which began in mid-December, in protest at what they say are unfair sentences for taking part in demonstrations last year.

• In Turkey, police dispersed scores of anti-NATO activists in the southern city of Adana on Friday as they were setting up tents to stage a three-day hunger strike to show their opposition to the NATO missile system that will be established in the eastern province of Malatya.

• On Friday, thousands of shopkeepers in the Indian portion of Kashmir went on a daylong general strike to protest the killing of a student and frequent power cuts.

• A group of parents whose children attend Chicago Public Schools slated for “turnarounds,” closures or other adjustments protested the plan with a sit-in at City Hall Thursday, where they vowed to stay until Mayor Rahm Emanuel granted them a meeting to discuss alternatives.

• Dozens of street dance enthusiasts in Hangzhou, the capital of east China’s Zhejiang Province, participated in a flash mob activity advocating environmental protection last Tuesday.

Vaclav Havel, the Czech poet and politician, who died on December 18, 2011.

Václav Havel often said we should live life “as if”—as if there is no oppression, as if we must set an example of life well-lived even under the weight of a coercive regime. His belief in the power of exemplary actions undertaken by ordinary people—as opposed to the more formal political acts of revolutionary leaders—set Havel’s approach to resistance apart. He did not ask for heroics. He recognized the revolutionary force of everyday examples: not bowing your head, not putting the picture of a tyrant on your wall, not voting in farcical elections, not hanging the party sign in your shop window. Havel’s hero was the greengrocer, the powerless, the everyday casualty of oppression. He insistently resisted the epithet “dissident” because he did not like the idea of recognizing only one or two people of extraordinary courage and repute. Instead, he felt that there are no small acts of resistance; any act, by anyone, has the potential of reverberating—of being absorbed and replicated, and leading to meaningful change. Of course, the context dictates the significance of the act, and an awareness of that environment makes for true political consciousness and authentic acts of resistance.

To paraphrase Jan Palach, the Czech student who died from self-immolation in protest against the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1969, the purpose of “living in truth,” of acting out one’s own life choices against the imposed existence of an oppressive power, is to not give up and not give in. The parallel with Tunisia’s Mohamed Bouazizi should not be lost here, and it leads to the core of Havel’s point: it is the reverberation of a given act that makes for revolutionary change. Havel’s story of resistance centers around the active observer who sees, internalizes and interprets the act. Exemplary acts can be replicated in a different form, at a different time, with a different audience. They become a springboard for the observer’s own actions. Sarcastically invoking Marx’s opening lines of The Communist Manifesto, Havel called this “the specter of dissent.”

Havel never forgot Palach’s urge to resist demoralization and the temptation to give in. He asked the question powerless people everywhere want answered: How can we prevail over oppression? How can the individual overcome the psychological, social and political barriers imposed by the experience and history of violence? Havel maintained that while individuals might have trouble overcoming such barriers, the difficulty is not insurmountable. The individual can both recognize and overcome her circumstances. Agency from this point of view relies both on the capacity of the individual to recognize her own moral compass and the moral example set by others. Since totalitarian societies destroy the web of human relations among us in order to forestall opposition, we must rebuild our mutual ties, starting with ourselves. Havel’s idea of resistance builds on a view of life as a series of layers, an environment we create together, a work of solidarity continuously in the making. “The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart,” he wrote, “in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility.”

Havel’s work stands as a remarkable articulation of what responsible action could look like under the extreme conditions of Eastern European totalitarianism, but the value of his inquiry extends beyond that time and place. Indeed, he expected political ideas to cross boundaries of time and place. Havel the playwright and Havel the dissident intertwine in a philosophical tale of resistance and responsibility that has sparked action the world over. This is the stuff of which revolutions are made. Yet his call to political action also applies to the less extreme but equally important ways in which consumer societies with gross inequalities erode a sense of human connection. His life and work exemplify a kind of interplay between the private individual and the political world, between personal responsibility and social consciousness. Resistance can and must be reawakened within each of us. A year of revolutions has ended with the death of a true revolutionary, but we should rejoice in seeing Havel’s spirit endure in the actions of ordinary people from Cairo, to Russia, to Wall Street.

• In the largest protests Syria has seen in months, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets Friday in a display of defiance to show an Arab League observer mission the strength of the opposition movement. Despite the monitors’ presence, forces loyal to President Bashar Assad still killed at least 22 people.

• Thousands of Hungarians took to the streets yesterday to protest a new constitution which critics say increases the power of the government over previously independent institutions, ranging from the church and media to the courts and even the central bank.

• Russian police arrested at least 60 people in the capital of Moscow on Saturday during anti-government protests.

• Thousands of protesters converged on a train station in central China, angered over collapsing illegal investment schemes that residents said the government had failed to staunch.

• As part of an action called Occupy the Caucus, 12 protesters, including a 14-year-old girl, were arrested for blocking the doors to the Iowa Democratic Party headquarters on Thursday. Eighteen more arrests followed on Saturday and one on Sunday.

• A dozen anti-Wall Street protesters who had taken over a foreclosed home in Oakland to house formerly homeless individuals were arrested on Thursday.

• More than a dozen Muslim community leaders boycotted an interfaith breakfast organized by Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Friday to protest reported police surveillance of Muslim areas since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

• Large crowds of Yemenis rallied in major cities Sunday, demanding the outgoing president be put on trial for the deaths of protesters.

• Dozens of activists against gender segregation boarded buses serving Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox Jews on Sunday to protest the unwritten rule that women sit at the back.

• Thousands of angry Shia protesters staged a sit-in outside the Sindh Governor House in Karachi, Pakistan on Sunday night to protest the targeted assassination of their community leader.