• Tens of thousands of union members, social activists and students gathered in Seoul Sunday to protest the Group of 20 economic summit meeting that begins on Thursday.

• Tens of thousands of government employees marched in Portugal’s capital on Saturday to protest an austerity budget that would slash their salaries.

• Thousands of protesters in France and Germany have attempted to block a train carrying nuclear waste. Some protesters chained themselves to the train tracks while others drove trucks on to the tracks. Hundreds of protesters have been detained.

• On Sunday, Cafe de Coral, Hong Kong’s biggest fast-food chain, said it had ditched plans to scrap paid lunch breaks for its employees after a public and Facebook campaign was mounted boycotting its restaurants.

• Hundreds of gay and lesbians protested the Church’s position on gay marriage by kissing publicly as the pope passed by on his way to the  Sagrada Familia in Barcelona on Sunday.

• In Oakland, police arrested 152 protesters who streamed through the streets Friday after a white ex-transit officer received the minimum two-year prison sentence for fatally shooting an unarmed black man on a California train platform two years ago.

• A group of 400 survivors of the Bhopal disaster have been protesting Obama’s visit to India. In addition, the cotton growers of Vidarbha, who are suffering immensely due to the prevailing agrarian crisis, staged candlelight protests ahead of US President Barack Obama’s India visit on Friday.

• On Monday, activists with the Rainforest Action Network dumped 1,000 pounds of earth and rubble brought from Appalachia on to the EPA headquarters’  lawn to compel the agency to veto the 2,278-acre Spruce mountaintop mine project in Blair, W.Va. The message: “EPA: don’t let King Coal dump on Appalachia.”

Libby and Jerica are in the front seat of the Prius, and Mary and I are in back. We just left Oklahoma, we’re heading into Shamrock, Texas, and tomorrow we’ll be Indian Springs, Nevada, home of Creech Air Force Base. We’ve been discussing our legal defense.

The state of Nevada has charged Libby and me, along with twelve others, with criminal trespass onto the base. On April 9, 2009, after a ten-day vigil outside the air force base, we entered it with a letter we wanted to circulate among the base personnel, describing our opposition to a massive targeted assassination program. Our trial date is set for September 14.

Creech is one of several homes of the U.S. military’s aerial drone program. U.S. Air Force personnel there pilot surveillance and combat drones, unmanned aerial vehicles with which they are instructed to carry out extrajudicial killings in Afghanistan and Iraq. The different kinds of drone include the “Predator” and the “Reaper.” The Obama administration favors a combination of drone attacks and Joint Special Operations raids to pursue its stated goal of eliminating whatever Al Qaeda presence exists in these countries. As the U.S. accelerates this campaign, we hear from UN special rapporteur for extrajudicial executions, Philip Alston, who suggests that U.S. citizens may be asleep at the wheel, oblivious to clear violations of international law which we have real obligations to prevent (or at the very least discuss). Many citizens are now focused on the anniversary of September 11th and the controversy over whether an Islamic Center should be built near Ground Zero. Corporate media does little to help ordinary U.S. people understand that the drones which hover over potential targets in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen create small “ground zeroes” in multiple locales on an everyday basis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Anti-BP protesters from Greenpeace disrupted a speech by the company’s chief of staff at a major oil conference in London yesterday, urging the company to change its ways following the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

• Members of an indefinite vigil held in front of the Massachusetts State House have reached their 17th day of protest against the anti-immigrant amendments added to the budget bill.

• More than 100 gay rights protesters marched in Toronto on Saturday to demand greater rights for all minority populations marginalized because of their gender, sexuality or socioeconomic status.

• Students and staff at 100 colleges and universities in Great Britain are protesting funding cuts that could keep 200,000 people out of universities next year.

• Students at the University of Puerto Rico voted to end their two-month strike against massive budget cuts on Monday after agreeing to a package with the administration that includes an extension of tuition waivers, the cancellation of a fee that would have drastically raised education costs, a commitment not to arbitrarily punish strike participants, and rejection of school privatization plans.

• Israeli soldiers injured several protesters on Sunday in an attack on a nonviolent demonstration against illegal settlements and the construction of the Israeli separation wall in the Palestinian village of Beit Jala, near Bethlehem.

• 12,000 Minnesota nurses voted to hold an open-ended strike on Monday following retaliation from employers after a one-day strike on June 10.

As oil from the BP rig continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico, activists are stepping up to hold the company to account.

Last week, the Energy Action Coalition organized 45 “Crude Awakening” vigils, rallies and events around the country to mark the one-month anniversary of the offshore drilling disaster. (Click here to see a preliminary report, with pictures and links to local news coverage, on the actions.)

In London, two Greenpeace activists scaled BP’s office building and “hoisted a flag depicting the firm’s logo covered in oil and with the slogan ‘british polluters’ above the entrance in St James’s Square.”

And perhaps most significantly, a boycott of BP is taking off. Public Citizen is calling on folks outraged by what’s happening to pledge that they will boycott BP’s gas and retail products for at least three months.

Ultimately, however, we should use the horror of this environmental disaster to push for more fundamental change. As Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, writes:

…cash compensation for economic harms caused — while necessary — doesn’t bring back destroyed ecosystems and does little to mitigate the company’s culpability for not preventing the blowout in the first place.

The only good that can come out of the BP disaster is if it forces the United States to fundamentally reorient energy policy. As a matter of simple common sense, the Obama administration should reverse its new policy and stop offshore drilling expansion. More fundamentally, BP’s oil gusher is yet another reminder of the need for a massive shift away from fossil fuels and to investments in efficiency and renewable energy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Four Czech activists climbed the Krusnohorske theatre in Teplice on Saturday to protest the planned cancellation of coal mining limits by the Social Democrats, who were hosting a conference inside.

• Hundreds of demonstrators gathered near the Erez (Beit Hanoun) border crossing on Sunday to mark the 1,000-day Israeli blockade imposed on the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

• Around 1,000 men and women gathered outside the Jerusalem home of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday to protest gender discrimination on some bus routes in ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, where women are made to sit at the back.

• About 1,000 people took part in an anti-nuclear protest in Edinburgh calling for the scrapping of Trident, saying money would be better spent public sector jobs and services.

• More than 300 Bahraini fishermen and their relatives demonstrated outside the Fishermen’s Protection Society in Muharraq on Saturday to protest the rapid decline in marine stocks due to a lack of regulation for fishing licenses and sand dredging of the seabed.

• A few hundred people gathered in the streets of Valletta, Malta on Saturday to protest the lack of enforcement of environment protection laws, such as encroachment on outside development zones, illegal hunting, air pollution, unauthorized groundwater extraction and other local issues.

In a number of theology classes, we talked about the unity of all beings and things on the earth.  We are all interconnected.  As I have sat with this over the last few years, the more I have come to believe this (from a scientific, theological, and social perspective, etc.).  Today our group – Witness Against Torture – did a Ghost Walk in the Senate Hart office building.  A number of us walked in orange jumpsuits with names of prisoners who have been cleared for release on our backs.  We each walked separately on a different floor and wing in a very prayerful and solemn way.  We went to “lobby” those in the Senate to help remember these men who have been “cleared for release” and are ready to leave yet remain in Guantánamo.

We put the jumpsuits on once in the building and after about 20 minutes a police officer came running up to me (very out of breath) as I was walking at a Thich Nhat Hanh pace… very slowly and deliberately.  He respectfully asked how I was doing and what I was doing here.  Then he requested my ID, followed by a number of investigative questions.  We weren’t doing anything illegal in our action, but they were checking on us.  After I was allowed to continue walking, another person – from the capitol police – wanted to talk to me.  As I told him that I was with Witness Against Torture, that I was not protesting or demonstrating, that I was lobbying to help follow the executive order to close Guantánamo and end torture, and that we were completely nonviolent, he responded: “Oh, Witness Against Torture.  I know you guys.  I’ve seen you for a number of years.”  They let me (and our whole group) continue to walk.

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Our good friend Kathy Kelly, who is also a contributor to this site, sent along a nice article a couple days ago – which ran on Common Dreams and several other sites – about the staggering human and financial cost of the many wars that the United States is currently engaged in. She also examines how our violence is only exacerbating the problems of terrorism and extremism, while the average Afghan continues to live in desperate need of humanitarian assistance. Kelly then explains the campaign that Voices for Creative Nonviolence has launched to address these concerns:

The U.S. Constitution states that Congress shall make no law to abridge the right of people to assemble peaceably for redress of grievance.  We are deeply aggrieved by the folly of these wars. Our right to free speech is irrelevant if we don’t exercise it, and so we intend to raise the lament of those who bear the brunt of our wars but whose voices seldom reach U.S. government figures.

For two weeks this January, leading up to the date when President Obama is due to submit his budget for Fiscal Year 2011 to Congress, Voices for Creative Nonviolence and friends will gather in Washington D.C. for a “Peaceable Assembly Campaign” project.  (www.peaceableassemblycampaign.org)

We’ll be meeting with elected representatives to raise questions about the folly and the crime of war, holding daily vigils at the White House, and engaging in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience to emphasize our refusal to cooperate with the war makers.

Please join us in this year-long campaign, whether in Washington D.C. this month, or participating locally where you live.   Visit the Voices website, www.vcnv.org, to learn more about ways to become involved, both locally through this coming summer and in the Days of Resistance in Washington.

We’ll be there from January 19th through February 2nd.