• In Evansville, Indiana, a crowd estimated at 5,000 strong poured onto the shoulder and parking lot of the Evansville plant, protesting Whirlpool’s decision to shut down and ship jobs to Mexico.

• Carrefour SA’s 116 stores in Belgium were closed Saturday because of a strike over planned job cuts, said a company spokesman who put the resulting sales loss at the company-owned outlets at 14 million euros ($19 million).

• Scores of Jordanian politicians and trade union members staged a sit-in at the Trade Unions Complex in Amman on Saturday to denounce Israel’s addition of two West Bank holy sites to a list of Jewish heritage centers.

• Syrian Catholic Archbishop Basile Georges Casmoussa of Mosul led over 1,000 Iraqi Catholics in a silent protest on February 28 to demand that the government act to put a stop to violence against Christians there.

• In Nepal, the 48-hour sit-in protest of the Civil Movement for Democracy and Peace (CMDP), which began from Thursday in front of the Constituent Assembly building, to urge political parties to draft the constitution within the given time frame, concluded on Saturday at 8 am.

• Several Cuban dissidents say they will refuse food in protest at the death earlier this week of a jailed government opponent. Orlando Zapata Tamayo died on Tuesday in a hospital in the capital Havana after a hunger strike of 85 days. His death triggered international protests and Cuban President Raul Castro issued an expression of regret.

• Three Chinese death-row inmates who say they were tortured into confessing to crimes they didn’t commit have staged a hunger strike to draw attention to their case.

• Thousands of adherents of the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP) marched in the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa Feb. 25 to protest the slaying of civil resistance leaders under what they still consider to be the “de facto regime” of President Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo despite the change in government last month. The rally concluded in front of the National Congress building, where the march was blocked by a military cordon.

• Hundreds of Dutch activists have walked out of a Mass in protest at a Roman Catholic policy of denying communion to practising homosexuals.

• On Thursday, protesting Guatemalan teachers in Melchor de Mencos blocked the Melchor Bridge with their bodies to stop vehicular passage through the border between Guatemala and Belize. According to union president Zetina, who spoke on behalf of the teachers, they are demanding a 16% salary increase from their Government, in addition to proper renovation of school buildings.

• Thirty-eight Jamaican women — all of them asylum seekers, some of whom have lived in the UK for as long as 10 years — are on hunger strike in holding facilities in the United Kingdom, in protest of their imminent deportation to Jamaica.

• Tens of thousands of protesters calling themselves the Purple People took to the streets of Rome on the weekend in a sign of mounting opposition to the Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi. The group, Il Popolo Viola, wore purple sweaters and scarves, Berlusconi masks or striped prison dress to protest against what they say is the undermining of Italian democracy by Mr Berlusconi in his battle with the country’s legal system.

• Hundreds of Notre Dame University students and faculty members gathered on campus yesterday to demand more equality for LGBT students. The protest was in response to an anti-gay comic strip which appeared in the student paper a few weeks ago.

• Climate activists in South Lanarkshire closed down one of Scotland’s main coal terminals yesterday when one of the protesters chained himself to a digging machine. This led to 11 coal trucks queuing at the terminal’s gate and prevented a coal train being loaded.

• Dozens of people gathered in front of Camp Phoenix, an ISAF military base in the eastern part of Kabul, to protest the death of a civilian by NATO forces. They blocked the road that links the Afghan capital to eastern provinces.

• Roughly 100 members from the UAW and Teamsters unions and their supporters gathered outside the Japanese Embassy in Washington yesterday to protest Toyota’s decision to close a California plants and hire nonunion carhaulers.

• Hundreds of students and alumni packed the steps of the Mississippi State Capitol in Jackson yesterday to show their support for higher education funding and their opposition to proposals that call for merging some Mississippi universities.

• About 1,400 construction workers defied a court order to end their strike at the $13 billion liquefied natural gas project in Western Australia. The strike started Jan. 22 to protest Woodside Petroleum Ltd.’s plans to make the workers change accommodation every month instead of providing permanent housing.

• Five concerned parents barricaded themselves inside a primary school in Glasgow this week to protest proposals to shut down the school. It was the latest in a series of school occupations which have taken place over the past year.

• Thirteen people were arrested Tuesday at a protest outside the White House against US militarism abroad. The activists lay down on the sidewalk after reading the names of Americans, Iraqis and Afghans killed in US wars.

• A 150-strong group of Belgian firefighters sprayed foam from 20 trucks over a main road in central Brussels, blocking traffic in an effort to press for speedier promotions. Government buildings, including the Minister President’s office, were targeted.

• Police and a specialist evictions team began a major operation to end a six-month occupation of an opencast mine site in Scotland this morning by arresting 10 Climate Camp protesters chained to tree houses and make-shift forts. There are about 40 climate campaigners now occupying tunnels, tree houses, and homemade barricaded huts.

• About 2,000 photographers gathered in London over the weekend to protest stop and search methods by British police. The photographers say they’ve been unduly targeted by Section 44 of Britain’s Terrorism Act 2000, which was designed to give police greater powers to fight terrorism.

• More than 500 Australian websites are planning to take part in a day of action dubbed ‘The Great Australian Internet Blackout’ to protest the Federal Government’s proposed internet filter.

• Over 5,000 people converged on downtown Toronto Saturday afternoon to protest the prime minister’s decision to shut down the federal Parliament until after the Olympic Games.

• Hundreds of protesters in southern China donned masks to protest a planned incinerator plant, the latest grassroots initiative to target polluting projects in the region.

• Greek farmers have been blocking roads in Greece for more than a week to protest the government’s current agricultural policy, which threatens to put 50 thousand people employed in agriculture and livestock out of work.

In Phoenix, more than 20,000 people marched on Saturday to protest the indiscriminate attacks and race-based raids conducted by Sheriff Joe Arpaio against residents of Maricopa County. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

• On Sunday, more than 25,000 people took to streets in protest against the government’s labor policies when the Confederation of Turkish Labor Unions, or Türk-İş, staged a wide-ranging demonstration called “Democracy and Rights for Livelihood, Peace and Freedom.”

• A group of Greenpeace activists interrupted a speech by Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff in Vancouver on Friday when several protesters stood up and began chanting loudly against his stance on Canada’s oilsands.

• More than 7,000 workers at steel giant ArcelorMittal’s plant in Algeria will intensify a strike aimed at forcing the management to revamp the ageing El Hadjar complex. Workers went on strike on Tuesday to protest the planned closure of the coking plant, which employs 320 people.

• Worker blockades of the Belgian breweries of Anheuser-Busch InBev, which began after the world’s largest beer maker announced it planned to cut 263 jobs out of its 2,700 Belgian workforce, were set to continue into a second week after the collapse of mediated talks last Thursday.

• Monday marked the third day of a hunger strike by students demanding housing for homeless tsunami survivors in West Aceh district in Indonesia.

• Jordanian prisoners in Iraq, most of whom are university students, drivers and traders, have embarked on an open hunger strike to press for their release.

• Hundreds of Proshika employees in Bangladesh staged a sit-in in front of their head office for the fifth consecutive day on Saturday and also held a protest march against police barring them from entering the building in the city’s Mirpur.

• In India, leaders of all-party Joint Action Committee (JAC) of Telangana Saturday began a hunger strike to demand that the central government immediately initiate the process for formation of the state.

As the crisis in Haiti unfolds, news reports first anticipated and then confirmed the anxiety of many on the ground: that a hamstrung or decimated police force would lead to violence and looting. There are numerous reports of looters wielding knifes, machetes and guns and mobs killing suspected looters as the rag tag police force tries to reestablish order.

These might be uncomfortable facts for those of us who believe in nonviolence. Pessimists and so-called realists find a ready-made narrative for such events in Thomas Hobbes’s description of the state of war. For them, what is happening in Haiti is the enduring natural fact that without fear of government people will take the opportunity to exploit and destroy one another. Only the threat of violence by a functioning police force keeps the worst impulses of human beings in check.

And even if you’re not a Hobbesian, there’s room for despair and cynicism. David Brooks took the opportunity to isolate the backwardness of Haitian culture (the first to end slavery in the Western Hemisphere), as the reason their infrastructure was so vulnerable to earthquakes. Pat Robertson decided it was a good time to chastise Haitians for throwing off the French. Even American assistance, given our history of pernicious meddling in the country and our conspicuous prioritizing of American lives above the lives of Haitians might seem self-serving.

Yet the vast majority of people in Haiti responded to the earthquake with the apparently just as natural of an impulse to help one another. People immediately began to risk their own lives to rescue people trapped under rubble. Previously intractable religious differences instantly melted away. In a remarkable spontaneous protest, Haitians in Port-au-Prince piled up bodies as roadblocks in a macabre protest of the delay in aid. Under the headline “Looting Flares Where Authority Breaks Down” the New York Times reported that “given the conditions, it was all the more remarkable that a spirit of cooperation and fortitude prevailed nearly everywhere else, as people joined together to carry corpses, erect shelters and share what food they could find.”

Just as remarkably, a small portion of the United States military – the same institution that so brutally occupied Haiti for two decades in the early part of the last century – has been temporarily repurposed to deliver aid that will undoubtedly save many thousands of lives. Ordinary Americans and people all over the world immediately responded with millions in donations.

In response to the argument that human history is rife with violence, Gandhi remarked that the force of nonviolence is so common that every instance of it cannot be remarked upon. Yet “thousands, depend for their existence on a very active working of this force.” No doubt this force is the dominant one in Haiti at the moment as it sustains the vast majority of those who have survived – and will save many more lives in the coming days.

To donate to Partners In Health, which has been working on the ground in Haiti for over 20 years, click here.

• About 500 striking Algerian workers blocked a main road near the capital on Thursday—the latest in a series of outbreaks of unrest over price inflation and living conditions. They were confronted with lines of riot police equipped with water cannons and armored vehicles.
  

• When the Olympic torch passed through Manitoba yesterday it was trailed by seven horses carrying leaders from native communities, who were drawing attention to the plight of missing and murdered aboriginal women in Canada.

• Over 800 members of UNITE HERE Local 2 and 400 supporters blocked the San Francisco Hilton’s main entrance for several hours to protest the hotel chain’s proposal to cut starting wages for new hires by 25 percent.  140 were arrested.

• About 5,000 demonstrators gathered yesterday in the city of Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan to protest the deaths of children in an explosion on Wednesday that they blamed on U.S. forces.

• Five activists in Homestead Florida are fasting to protest the deportation of immigrants with families.

• Several thousand DeKalb County school employees dressed in black yesterday to protest the superintendent’s $15,000 raise, which comes after the board slashed their pay increases and implemented a one-day furlough.

• Fujitsu workers in east Manchester, Warrington, Bolton and Crewe are taking part in a 48-hour walkout as part of the UK’s first ever national IT sector strike to protest redundancies, pay and pensions.

Rising Tide North America has created a new website that assembles “images, reports, videos, and education resources” from the UN Climate Conference in Denmark as a tribute to the thousands of activists who came to Copenhagen in support of climate justice. While www.WhatIsCop15.net seems like a great idea, it sounds like the intentions of the site might be a little too celebratory. In a post for the youth activist blog It’s Getting Hot In Here, Rising Tide organizer Cascadia Brian wrote:

Much has been said about the failure and collapse of the climate of COP15 last weekend to reach a binding agreement, and you’ll find lots of analysis at www.WhatIsCop15.net.

But the real story from the climate summit — which at best was expected expand the carbon market and entrench corporate control of climate policy — is a happy one.

It’s the massive organizing success and coming of age of the climate justice movement. 100,000 in the streets, tens of thousands in attendance at the climate justice oriented Klimaforum, and countless actions against the root causes of climate change.

While we certainly shouldn’t belittle the efforts of the thousands who traveled to Copenhagen and put their freedom and safety on the line to protest the inaction of world leaders, I’m not sure we should celebrate either. With as little time as there is to prevent catastrophic climate change, activists should be analyzing their efforts in Copenhagen to figure out what went wrong and how to improve.

It seems like far too many of the exciting actions planned to disrupt the UN meetings were foiled by a massive police crackdown. For instance, the Bike Bloc, which we wrote about, was broken up by police before it ever formed. The UK group Camp for Climate Action, which organized the action, never even updated its blog to reflect upon what happened.

More than anything, activists need to examine the movement’s failure to anticipate the police crackdown or deal with it in a way that benefited the movement. Ideally the footage of nonviolent protesters getting beaten by police would have gotten some mainstream press attention. But, as should have been expected, they instead focused on the small and scattered acts of vandalism committed by a few misguided anarchists.

All of this isn’t to say that activists shouldn’t draw attention to the injustices perpetrated by law enforcement or the media, but these institutions act in predictable patterns. It’s time climate activists put as much thought into self-analysis as they do into their creative protests.

• Some 40 activists with Rising Tide Newcastle shut down the railway line leading to Australia’s biggest coal export facility for six hours yesterday to protest the failure of global climate change talks in Copenhagen. 23 people were arrested after police removed them from the human blockade.

• Two Greenpeace activists got past security at a formal state dinner at Christiansborg palace in Denmark where Queen Margrethe II hosted world leaders on Friday. They waved banners saying “Politicians Talk – Leaders Act,” in the reception hall of the palace before being evicted.

• Greenpeace declared the US Chamber of Commerce headquarters in Washington, D.C. a “climate crime scene” on Thursday to protest the business federation’s continued dismissal of global warming. Activists scaled the Chamber’s building and draped it in yellow crime scene tape, while simultaneously surrounding it with vehicles designed to look like police units and ambulances marked “Climate Crime Unit”.

• Thousands of people took to the streets of southern Yemen on Friday to protest a recent military operation against suspected al Qa’eda militants which claimed the lives of dozens of innocent civilians.

• More than 100 indigenous rights activists in Canada delayed the Olympic torch relay in Toronto on Thursday evening by blocking the route to protest “colonial theft of indigenous land, corporate profit grabbing, ecological destruction, militarization and migrant exploitation.”

• About 40 people protested the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s decision to close a hospital in Braddock, PA by marching on the non-profit’s corporate headquarters on Friday dressed as zombies and pushing hospital IV stands.

• Thousands of people marched in Taiwan yesterday to protest the government’s secret and non-transparant meetings with political rival China, a day before Beijing’s top negotiator arrives on the island for talks on a landmark free trade pact.

Last June was the 27th anniversary of one of the largest protests in history, when upwards of one million people gathered on the Great Lawn in New York’s Central Park to rally against nuclear weapons while the UN held a Special Session on Disarmament. Two days later 1,600 demonstrators were involved in acts of civil disobedience at the consulates of five countries.

One of the seminal figures of this movement was author Jonathan Schell, whose 1982 book The Fate of the Earth reinvigorated the anti-nuclear movement with its rallying call for a nuclear freeze. Though still very much focused on the issue today, Jonathan has started to pursue climate change with a like-minded passion, which is fitting given the similarities of the two movements. (Something about protesting outside a UN meeting sounds all too familiar right now.)

I met him at the Brooklyn Bridge March for Climate Leadership, which was one of 5,000 plus actions that took place on October 24, the 350-organized International Day of Climate Action. Although very little came of the march, it ended up being a great opportunity to hear Jonathan trace his interest in the issue back to when his good friend Bill McKibben first started writing about global warming two decades ago.

Not long after that, we sat down for a more formal discussion of climate activism. Drawing from his deep knowledge of nonviolent movements–which was the focus of his 2003 book The Unconquerable World–Jonathan offered tactical suggestions for climate activists, compared the threat of climate change to nuclear war and spoke of the general mystery surrounding the rise of mass public movements.

Bryan Farrell: Why has it taken so long for a climate justice movement to emerge.
Jonathan Schell: We just haven’t seen all that much in the way of social movements recently. We had the anti globalization movement in late 90s which flared up and died away. We also had the antiwar movement against the Iraq War but that also has kind of died away. There just hasn’t been much energy in social movements. Why that is is a very deep question. It’s a crippling disability when it comes to changes in policy that are on a deep and fundamental level, whether that’s changing the economic system or opposing these wars and the whole imperial mindset behind them or addressing global warming. If you just look historically, it’s very hard to find fundamental change in policy that wasn’t preceded by a very powerful social movement. So if you don’t have that card in your deck, I think it’s incredibly difficult to get fundamental change. In terms of public awareness [climate change] has been stronger than some of the other movements. Certainly it’s been longstanding and there are lots of strong organizations. Read the rest of this article »

• 19 Greenpeace activists were arrested on Monday in Ottawa after dodging security and scaling two of Canada’s Parliament buildings where they unfurled banners that read “Harper-Ignatieff: Climate Inaction Costs Lives” and “Stop the Tarsands” in French and English.

• 29 people were arrested Monday morning for blocking the entrance to Chevron’s headquarters in San Ramon, CA. They were protesting efforts by Chevron to undermine the fight against global warming.

• More than 30 youth activists from around the world  staged a “die-in” on Monday outside the main plenary at COP15 with the message – “The World Wants a Real Deal” and “Real Deal Saves Lives”.

• Over 300 coalfield residents and their allies rallied at the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection yesterday to protest the blasting of Coal River Mountain and support a transition to a clean energy future.

• More than 200 people were arrested in Tehran on Monday during protests by tens of thousands at universities nationwide, marking the biggest anti-government demonstrations in months. Thousands continued protesting for a second day yesterday, as Iran threatened a tougher crackdown on the opposition.

• Hundreds of Afghans took to the streets yesterday to protest the killings of 15 civilians by U.S. forces during an overnight raid on Armal village.

• Crow Creek Sioux tribal members and supporters in South Dakota are planning to set up tepees on land auctioned by the Internal Revenue Service. Tribal Chairman Brandon Sazue intends to fast and pray on the land “until I drop.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Around 200 people blocked the entrance to the Parliament House in Canberra Australia this morning to press Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to secure a strong, legally binding treaty at the upcoming UN Climate Meeting in Copenhagen. Police arrested approximately 150 people taking part in the nonviolent direct action.

• Four people were arrested yesterday morning after they walked into Fort Benning during a protest against the activities of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, which has a record of training some of the most brutal Latin American military officers. This year marked the 20th annual protest at Fort Benning, which was sparked after six Jesuit priests were massacred in El Salvador in 1989.

• Two “concerned citizens” locked down to a drill rig on Coal River Mountain’s Bee Tree mountaintop removal site yesterday morning, effectively stopping the blasting, while two others held a banner with the message “Save Coal River Mountain”.

• Hundreds of clergymen, congregants and reform advocates lined the sidewalks outside Independent U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman’s Stamford home Sunday night in a show of support for universal health care.

• About 70 University of California, Santa Cruz students ended their occupation of the main campus administrative building without arrest yesterday morning. This was the latest protest at a UC campus since the university announced a 32 percent tuition increase and cuts in funding on Thursday. 41 students were arrested on Friday for occupying a Berkeley building most of the day.

• Thousands of workers protested in four Dutch cities on Saturday against a government decision to increase the state retirement age from 65 to 67 by 2025.

• Thousands of Spanish farmers marched on Saturday through the streets of Madrid, halting traffic to protest the low prices they receive for their produce which they say is leading them to financial “ruin.”

• About 2,000 students blocked the exits of a building where University of California regents voted to hike tuition 32 percent next year. After the vote was announced students lay down en masse to symbolize what they called the death of an affordable UC education.

• Dozens of protesters gathered outside Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig’s office in Midtown Manhattan on Wednesday to protest a fundraiser for the notoriously racist settler community of Hebron being held at Citi Field, home of the New York Mets, this Saturday.

• Greenpeace activists released a floating banner inside the Chamber of Commerce Regional Government Affairs convention in San Francisco yesterday to protest Chamber president Tom Donahue’s lobbying for big polluters. The banner read “Donahue’s Climate Lies: Bad for Business, Bad for America.”

• Two priests and 25 tribal leaders from Mindoro Island (200 kilometres south of Manila) have gone a hunger strike to stop three nickel mine operations that will eventually cover almost 20 per cent of the island’s land mass.

• More than 100 youth climate activists lay down in the lobby of a Royal Bank of Canada branch in Fort Providence, Northwest Territories and pretended to be dead in protest of the banks’ funding of Alberta tar sands projects.

• After a 45-minute sit-in to protest budget cuts, SUNY students held a mock eulogy mourning many of the programs that could be eliminated.

• In Colombia, 300 students at the Technological University of Pereira dressed as zombies and participated in a flash mob dance to Michael Jackson’s Thriller to protest the death of public education.

• More than 1,600 Finnish shipyard workers put down their tools Wednesday to protest planned job cuts at STX Finland’s shipyard in Turku.

• Protesters supporting healthcare reform staged more demonstrations at U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s offices in Hartford and Washington on Tuesday; a total of 10 people were arrested.

• Groups including Veterans For Peace, Military Families Speak Out, the A.N.S.W.E.R Coalition, National Assembly, National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance, United for Peace and Justice, and World Can’t Wait have issued a “Call to Action,” urging their members to protest as soon as possible President Obama’s expected announcement of a troop escalation in Afghanistan, and again the day following an announcement.

• On the eve of next week’s World Summit on Food Security, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) has called for a day-long, worldwide hunger strike against chronic hunger this Saturday.

• In Toronto, thousands of riders are planning to ditch the subway on Friday to protest proposed fare hikes.

• A number of Indian and Bangladeshi fishermen being held hostage by Somali pirates have gone on hunger strike to protest against the conditions in which they are being held.

• School bus drivers in Mt. Clemens, Michigan, 25 miles northeast of Detroit, carried out a one-and-a-half day strike Monday and Tuesday to secure promised wage increases from the private transportation company which services the district.

• Maoist activists in Nepal have blocked major roads leading to the capital, Kathmandu, in the latest stage of a two-week protest against the government.

• Several hundred people protested on Monday in Belgrade against “growing fascism” in Serbia, marking the International Day Against Fascism and Anti-Semitism on the anniversary of the Nazi Kristallnacht.