• On Thursday, thousands of Nigerian women took to the streets in protest of religious violence that left at least 200 dead last weekend, singing and waving branches full of green leaves — a traditional sign of protest. They also carried Bibles and crosses made out of scrap lumber.

• The mass protest intended to paralyze Bangkok and topple the Thai Government began at exactly 12:12 pm today with a huge round of applause followed by the sound of gongs and Buddhist chanting.

• Workers belonging to CGIL, Italy’s biggest labor union, will walk off their jobs today for four hours to protest cuts at companies such as Fiat SpA, Alcoa Inc. and Antonio Merloni SpA. The strike called by CGIL, with a membership of 5.5 million people, and a demonstration in city centers will cripple traffic and cause delays in public transport and air travel.

• The third general strike was underway in Greece yesterday. Public services were shut down and air traffic controllers sealed off national airspace.

• Zimbabwe’s striking civil servants say they are now resorting to a hunger strike after the cash strapped government ignored their month long job boycott.

• The National Programme for Improvement of Watercourses (NPIW) workers – led by Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q) leader Marvi Memon – ended their seven-day long protest and sit-in in front of Karachi Press Club after the Sindh government assured the protesters that it will regularise 1,547 temporary NPIW employees.

• Affected villagers of Barapukuria coal mining areas in Bangladesh started an indefinite hunger strike on Wednesday to realize their compensation.

• At least 70 detainees at the West Japan Immigration Control Center, which has long been criticized by human rights groups and Diet members, have been on a hunger strike since Monday.

• Downtown Athens was paralyzed once again on Friday when thousands of Greeks took to the streets to protest against the country’s newly announced package of austerity measures.

• In the UK, an estimated 270,000 members of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union will walk out today to begin a two-day strike over redundancy payments.

• Portugal’s public services–including schools, hospitals and customs–were disrupted Thursday by strike action called by unions to protest the government’s plan to freeze wages.

• In Pakistan, the workers of the National Programme for Improvement of Watercourses (NPIW) continued their protest and sit-in in front of Karachi Press Club on Friday, protesting against the Sindh government over delay in regularizing the services of employees.

• In Egypt, protesting workers from the Tanta Flax and Oils Company ended a 15-day sit-in last week after reaching a compromise with Manpower Ministry representative Wael Allam. They were offered a sum equivalent to two months’ salary and an early retirement package of LE40,000, which they accepted.

• Dutch gay rights groups have called for a halt to protests against a Catholic church southwest of Amsterdam after it said it would no longer seek to bar homosexuals from taking communion.

• Workers at a frozen pizza factory in Ireland have ended their hunger strike after making a deal with bosses over the sacking of three men.

• In the Philippines, Gabriela – the country’s foremost alliance of progressive women’s organizations -  has declared March 8, International Women’s Day, as a “day off” for Filipinas, to be spent out in the streets, marching, protesting and asserting their rights.

• Hundreds of London Underground maintenance workers went on the first of a series of 24-hour strikes Friday morning in protest over new roster arrangements. They will continue to cause disruptions at the same time every Sunday from February 14th until the dispute is resolved.

• Dozens of Yemeni journalists, civil-society activists and members of parliament protested on Friday in front of the attorney general’s office in Sana’a against increasing harassment of journalists.

• The entrance to Kaiser Permanente’s Moanalua clinic in Hawaii was briefly shut-down on Thursday when protesters from Local 5 staged a sit-in. Kaiser employees and Local 5 members came to rally for a new contract that they say won’t out-source union work.

• In Calcutta, senior citizens staged a hunger strike on Saturday to protest against the skyrocketing prices of essential commodities.

• In Pakistan, political and social organizations continued a country-wide strike and protest this weekend against the deadly blasts in Karachi.

• Cuban police harassed and briefly jailed some 35 political dissidents last week in the eastern city of Camaguey, a Cuban human rights group said Friday.

• On Saturday, hundreds of Bahrain Petroleum Company (Bapco) staff and their families staged a protest outside the company’s refinery in Ma’ameer over pay and working conditions.

• In Oslo, a thousand taxi drivers of Muslim background went on strike late Friday, early Saturday moring in protest of the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet.

• More than 200 overseas Filipino workers (OFW) in Saudi Arabia have stopped working since Saturday in protest of alleged unfair labor practices of their employer.

The news from Pakistan seems to be getting worse by the day. On Wednesday, a massive bombing in the Lower Dir district killed 7, including 3 US soldiers disguised as Pakistanis, and wounded at least 130 others.

The day before, the US launched the largest coordinated drone strike inside Pakistan to date. According to Pakistani authorities, 9 drones fired 18 missiles, killing at least 31 people. This strike was the latest in an unprecedented wave of recent attacks. Just last month, for example, there were a record 12 strikes in the country, a nearly threefold increase over last year.

To protest the increasing use of drones in war, a group of activists with Peace of the Action unfurled a banner last month (video above) at a military unmanned aerial vehicle exhibit in the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in Washington, DC, reading “Drones Kill Kids.” This action is but the latest in a growing campaign against the drones, which we’ve been keeping close tabs on.

• A protester has a banner around his head that reads ‘Let the people judge’ during an anti-corruption protest in front of the parliament building in Jakarta last week. Lawmakers are conducting an investigation of the government’s $730 million bailout of Bank Century in 2008, which the demonstrators opposed.

• Tens of thousands of pro-life activists marched in San Francisco on Saturday, January 23, for the 6th Annual Walk for Life West Coast.

• In Albany, New York, a rally was held on Monday over plans to allow for natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale in upstate New York. Critics say the drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” could contaminate the water supplies of New York City and other areas of the state.

• Police officers in Balochistan (Pakistan) staged a sit-in on Monday to protest the fact that their salaries haven’t been increased.

• The Cairo Public Transportation workers are starting a strike in all the Cairo garages, at 6am today, demanding the modernization/replacement of the obsolete buses and spare parts, raising allowances related to work hazards, increasing bonuses, reforming the health services, and calling for the formation of a free union, independent from the corrupt state-backed NDP-run Egyptian General Federation of Trade Unions.

• Three anti-coal activists in West Virginia have entered their fifth day of a tree-sit on Monday as part of an effort to shut down a mountaintop removal site run by the mining giant Massey Energy. The three activists are perched atop platforms on trees on Coal River Mountain.

• Tens of thousands of Venezuelans opposed to Hugo Chávez took to the streets of Caracas Jan. 23, blaming him for numerous problems in the country, including increased electricity blackouts, water rationing, and widespread crime.

• Thousands of people protested Sunday in the streets of Indian-controlled Kashmir, accusing the Indian army of killing a civilian.

• British graffiti artist Banksy popped up with 4 new murals on the Regent’s Canal in London last week, one of which was this protest of global warming denialism.

• More than 1,000 people marched in Islamabad on Friday as part of a nationwide campaign that took place in 53 other Pakistani cities and towns to protest both Taliban bombings and the American drone strikes.

• Hundreds of demonstrators rallied on opposite sides of an Israeli-Gaza border crossing on Thursday to protest at the blockade of the strip imposed by Egypt and Israel. In Gaza, about 100 international activists staged a rally with some 500 Gazans, chanting and carrying signs denouncing the blockade. A small number of anti-Zionist, Orthodox Jews were among them.

• Hundreds of relatives of prisoners in a Mexican jail protested the expected transfer of inmates to make way for a film shoot with director Mel Gibson next year.

• Internally displaced people at a campsite in Nakuru, Kenya demonstrated along a highway to protest their poor living conditions following the onset of rains and demanded building materials.

• Dozens of Jordanians held a sit-in near the Egyptian embassy in the Jordanian capital on Sunday to protest Egypt’s plan to construct a steel wall along its borders with the besieged Gaza Strip.

• Thousands of people in Hong Kong took to the streets on New Year’s Day to demand full democracy in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory. The Chinese government ruled in 2007 that the territory cannot directly elect its leader until 2017 and its legislature until 2020.

• Police detained dozens of people at an anti-Kremlin protest on Thursday, including 82-year-old Lyudmila Alexeyeva, one of Russia’s most respected rights activists.

• Hundreds of activists with the Gaza Freedom March are staging continued demonstrations and sit-ins in Cairo to protest the Egyptian government’s refusal to allow them to cross the border into Gaza. Organizers say an offer by Egyptian authorities this morning to allow just 100 members of the group to go to Gaza was not sufficient.

• A ‘day of mourning’ was observed across Sindh on Tuesday, including a general strike in Hyperabad, in protest against the killing of over 40 people in a suicide attack on the central procession of Ashura in Karachi on Monday.

• The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) has called on consumers to boycott Coca-Cola for four hours a day in support of soft drink workers picketing in Pretoria. This follows a march by 700 Amalgamated Beverage Industries (ABI) workers, affiliated with the Food and Allied Worker’s Union (Fawu), at the company’s Pretoria plant on Tuesday following collapsed talks with management. 3,500 Fawu workers are already on strike, and may soon be joined by an additional 4,500 workers.

• Journalists in Mauritania held a protest on Monday in Nouakchott to call for the release of the jailed editor of a leading opposition website.

• Several Jordanian families began a hunger strike on Monday and said they would appeal to Amman’s governor through the Arab Organisation for Human Rights (AOHR) to erect a tent in front of the Iraqi embassy in Amman to call for the release of their family members who are imprisoned in Iraq.

• The streets of Qom, Iran’s holy city and the center of its religious life, filled with tens of thousands of mourners on Sunday. They came both to honor a founding father of modern Iran, Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, and to protest the government he had come to oppose.

• More than 3,000 female Burmese workers at a bra factory in Tak’s Mae Sot district again went on strike on Monday over an assault on two of an employee’s relatives by four security officers.

• In New York City, students left school early on Monday in a walk-out to protest the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s plan to stop giving students free Metrocards. The youngsters left school at 2 pm and gathered in front of the MTA’s headquarters to demand that the agency find a way to fill its $400 million budget shortfall that won’t force students to pay to commute to city schools.

• Some 300 municipal staff began a sit-in at the Town Hall in Alcoy, Spain on Monday against the local government’s decision to sack nine workers, saying they will remain there until this afternoon.

• Over 5,000 indigenous, Afro-Colombian and farming community members are occupying the community center of Piñuña Negro in the department of Putumayo, Colombia. A crowd of all ages has gathered at the highest government office in the area—the Police Inspector’s office—to demand negotiations with local and national government representatives and an end to military and paramilitary harassment and coca eradication programs that are causing thousands of residents to be displaced.

• Hundreds of Palestinian citizens on Monday evening participated in a sit-in organized by Hamas Movement near Salahuddin terminal on the Palestinian-Egyptian borders in protest at the building of a steel wall on Gaza borders.

• A protest at the New Zealand Stock Exchange (NZX) on Monday drew attention to the contribution of the New Zealand business to climate change. A sit-in occurred, blocking the entrance to the building, and police arrested nine activists. The protest featured ‘Radical Cheerleaders’, a samba band, and around 80 diverse protestors.

• The Islamabad Bar Association (IBA) on Saturday protested near Sihala police training college in Islamabad to urge the government to expel the US private security company Blackwater, which lawyers said was operating inside Sihala college.

• Nearly 30 actions took place at EPA regional offices, JP Morgan Chase branches and other pillars of support for mountain top removal on Friday, as part of a national day of action. 14 activists staged a sit-in at EPA headquarters in Washington for nearly four hours, but left without incident.

• A group of activists from Rainforest Action Network Toronto took part in a nation-wide campaign against Royal Bank of Canada on Saturday, setting up a coffee shop in front of RBC headquarters with seating so that passersby could stop and talk about the bank’s funding of the tar sands.

• About a dozen people gathered outside a University of Arkansas arena where former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was giving a talk in protest his country’s actions against Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.

• Several dozen activists ran through the city of Belgrade yesterday with gay pride flags in support of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community in Serbia.

• A group of climate change activists in Canada managed to breech Parliament security and disrupted a debate session last week, vowing to conduct “climate flash mobs” across the country each Monday to pressure Parliament into action on global warming.

• Protesters gathered at Pike Street Market in Seattle on Halloween dressed as zombies to advocate for health care reforms.

• Hundreds of activists and reporters gathered in central Moscow on Saturday for an unsanctioned human rights protest, where they chanted “Freedom!” and “Respect the constitution!”. At least 50 people were arrested.

• A general strike was observed in Peshawar on Sunday to protest a car bombing that killed innocent citizens and caused material loss to the local businesses.

• Last Thursday, 54 people were arrested in nine different cities around the country at sit-ins in front of the offices of health insurance companies. The actions were organized by Mobilization for Health Care for All. Their next nationwide day of action will be October 28th.

• On Saturday forty New York human rights advocates rallied at the Madison Avenue jewelry store of Israeli settlement mogul Lev Leviev to demand that Israel release jailed Palestinian boycott activist Mohammad Othman.

• Hungarian railway workers will begin an open-ended strike today in protest against what they say are plans for mass staff dismissals.

• A groups of about 260 Sri Lankan asylum seekers, whose boat was intercepted on the way to Australia, ended their two-day hunger strike in Indonesia on Saturday, after meeting with Indonesian officials.

• More than 600 convicted prisoners went on hunger strike in Kot Lakhpat Jail in Lahore on Friday to protest the excessive burden of work as they were unable to pay illegal gratification to the new jail administration.

• Employees of SeaFrance, a unit of French railway firm SNCF, blocked passengers from disembarking or boarding ferries between Calais and Dover on Friday during a strike over layoffs and restructuring.