According to The Guardian, the head of a right wing group known as the Young Britons’ Foundation has called for trespassing environmental activists to be “shot down” by police.

In October last year, when Greenpeace activists scaled the Palace of Westminster to protest against climate change policy, he called on police to “next time shoot them down … start with water cannon and if that doesn’t work, maybe crank it up a level or two”.

His words are more than just bluster, however, considering that the Young Britons’ Foundation is in the business of training Tory parliamentary candidates.

So what if police did start using water cannons on climate protesters? My hunch is that such brutality would result in what Michael Nagler calls a “paradox of repression.” Environmentalists might gain more public sympathy than they have ever enjoyed before, much like the civil rights movement did after Birmingham.

Does that mean they should welcome the water cannons? No. But it does mean that protesters shouldn’t let threats such as these scare them away from taking action. They pose a threat of their own if they remain committed to action.

What do you think? Am I being to optomistic? Would the general public ignore, or perhaps even applaud the use of water cannons against a Greenpeace activist who scaled a government building or national monument? Would the mainstream media not be sympathetic?

• Members of Greenpeace climbed the Benelux headquarters of Samsung, in Brussels, yesterday to protest its continued use of toxic substances despite committing to eliminate certain ones by 2010.

• More than 170 people gathered outside the RBC Annual General Shareholder Meeting yesterday in Toronto after a series of creative non-violent actions all morning to protest the bank’s leading role in funding the contentious Alberta tar sands.

• Over 200 University of California students went to the Capitol on Tuesday to oppose further cuts to higher education. Five were arrested for taking part in a sit-in at the office of Assemblyman Jim Nielson. A day of action is set to take place today in California and across the country to defend education at state colleges and universities.

• An Irish town council has removed a page in its guestbook signed by the Israeli ambassador to protest Israel’s diplomatic record after the alleged use of fake Irish passports by the Jewish state’s spies.

• Hundreds gathered at a noontime rally outside the New York State Capitol in Albany to protest Governor Paterson’s proposal to close as many as 90 state parks and historic sites for budgetary reasons.

• Environmentalists gathered outside the Presidential Office in Taiwan yesterday to call on President Ma Ying-jeou to change his policies and call a national convention on climate change.

• Hundreds gathered on the muddy grounds of Queen’s Park in Toronto on Tuesday afternoon to protest plans for a 900-megawatt gas-fired power plant in Oakville.

• Students at Sussec University in England are staging a sit-in to protest plans to make 115 staff redundant, which will close the environmental science degree and impact on English, history and life science departments.

• More than 30,000 people took to the streets of Athens Wednesday after two of Greece’s largest trade unions organized a nationwide strike to protest austerity measures aimed at reducing the country’s public debt. But the largely peaceful rally of disgruntled workers was unfortunately disrupted by a group of violent youths who clashed with police.

• Hundreds of rallies took place across the nation on Wednesday—the eve of President Obama’s White House Health Care Summit—and over a million signed a petition sent to Congress urging lawmakers to “finish the job and pass real health care reform.”

• Environmentalists in Australia marched on New South Wales Parliament yesterday to protest plans for new coal power stations at Bayswater and Lithgow.

• 5,000 indigenous Dongria Kondhs of India trekked to the abode of their presiding deity Niyam Raja on Sunday and designated it as inviolate to protest a controversial alumina refinery and bauxite mine project.

• More than 320 students, faculty and community members gathered Wednesday afternoon to demonstrate for sub-contract workers’ rights at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

• Hundreds of students from several Jordan, Utah district schools walked out of their classes Thursday morning to protest announced budget cuts that could slash teacher ranks, increase class sizes and impact extracurricular activities.

• Nine days after an off-campus student party mocked Black History Month, UC San Diego went through a day of protests, on Wednesday, drawing attention to the small number of African American students enrolled at the beachside campus.

• Classes at a secondary school in Midland, Ontario were disrupted Wednesday morning when nearly 200 students walked out to protest rumoured cuts in programming.

• 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 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.

• 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.

• Activists with Witness Against Torture gathered yesterday afternoon at the U.S. Capitol to protest the voided deadline President Obama set for closing the prison camp at Guantanamo. Some held banners on the Capitol steps reading “Broken Promises, Broken Laws, Broken Lives,” while others performed a “memorial service” for the three detainees whose deaths were covered up by the military. 42 were arrested.

• About 500 villagers from the Afghan province of Ghanzi chanted slogans against the United States and the Afghan government as they carried the wooden coffins of four recently slain civilians by NATO forces to the provincial capital.

• Three environmentalists in West Virginia set up tree-top platforms 60-feet in the air Thursday morning to protest a mountaintop removal blast site run by Masset Energy.

• About 100 inmates at the Varick Federal Detention Center in Lower Manhattan refused to go to the mess hall on Tuesday morning and gave guards a flier declaring they were on a hunger strike to protest detention policies and practices.

• 1,200 employees at the Indian unit of mobile handset maker Nokia Corp. in Mumbai went on strike yesterday to protest the suspension of some of their colleagues.

• Thousands of French public sector workers went on strike yesterday and took part in demonstrations across the country to protest plans for job and spending cuts.

• Hundreds of ship builders went on strike yesterday to protest 370 layoffs and the outsourcing of some operations at STX Finland’s shipyard in southwestern Finland.

• Several hundred UC Berkeley staff, students, and faculty held a noon rally on Wednesday to protest UC administration plans to privatize bus service at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 14 were arrested after they linked hands and surrounded a shuttle bus.

An Australian peace activist named Sheik Haron (pictured to the right) was recently charged with writing hateful letters to families of fallen soldiers. Jarrod McKenna reflects on this incident as a reminder to activists to “love the enemy”:

The world is ready for an activism which loves its enemies. As A.J. Muste put it, “There is no way to peace — peace is the way.” The early Christians were called “people of the Way” because they lived the way of Jesus. If the sharing of our faith is to have any integrity, Christians who say “Jesus is the Way” must embody “the Way of Jesus.” The same is true of peace activists (Christian or otherwise). As Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. would often say, “Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.”

As a human being living in a time of tremendous challenge to the earth’s resources, I am quick to apply this message to the issue of sustainability. According to nonviolent principles, just as we love the soldiers and their families, we must also love those who pollute and degrade the earth. When we stand up for the earth, we might remember that most of us have polluted, and still pollute, in some ways, such as fossil fuel transport, using plastics, and heating our homes.

At this time, quickly and urgently, we are needed to build systems in which we can coexist with each other and with the earth. Sustainability is a form of peace–peace for our biosphere. Along the way to that lofty goal, when we refuse the pollution, still we may love the polluter. That love may be motivated by the vision of the reconciliation when we all will live together in peace on a healthy earth.

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.

• Supporters of the German Pirate Party assembled in nearly naked groups at airports in Berlin, Frankfurt and Düsseldorf on Sunday afternoon to protest the controversial “naked” scanners planned for security checks.

• British Airways cabin crew are routinely pouring vintage wine served to First Class passengers down the sink to protest staff cuts and a two-year pay freeze.

• About 200 people gathered for the kickoff of an 11-day series of events in Washington DC om Monday to raise awareness about the Guantanamo situation. About 100 people nationwide will participate in a liquids-only fast, while others planned to join in prayer and reflection through Jan. 22, the one-year anniversary of Obama’s executive order.

• Nearly 100 auto workers and labor activists demonstrated in snowy, blustery conditions near the North American International Auto Show on Monday, calling for a federal jobs recovery bill, a national single-payer health system and a green industrial policy.

• Around 150-200 inmates at Stillwateter Correctional Facility in Minnesota refused to return to their cells after a meal on Sunday afternoon to protest the operational rules of the unit, such as the amount of time they are allowed out of their cells. After almost two hours they complied with orders to return to their cells peacefully.

• Dockworkers at France’s top container ports in Le Havre and Marseilles staged the second 24-hour strike in as many weeks to protest government reforms.

• Around 1500 children in the villages of India’s Gujarat’s Sanand block have stopped going to school to protest the Gujarat government’s plans to acquire their parents’ farmland for industrial purposes.

• Residents of cities in southern Yemen on Sunday staged a general strike to protest what they termed government oppression as well as action taken against a daily newspaper, activists and witnesses said. The strike was almost total in the southern provinces of Dhale, Lahaj, Shabwa and Abyan as all shops were shut and transportation ground to a halt,

• In Iran, more than 100 police and plainclothes officers broke up a gathering of the Mourning Mothers in Laleh Park Saturday afternoon. The group — formed by women whose children have been killed in recent anti-government protests — gathers every weekend at the park to call attention to the deaths.

• Hundreds in Hong Kong ringed the city’s legislature on Friday as public frustration mounted over government attempts to bulldoze through a high speed railway, an issue that has also catalyzed a fresh push for full democracy.

• Unionized workers of South Korea’s third-largest carmaker Kia Motors Crop. will hold a partial strike for four hours a day this week in a protest against wages.

• Ground staff striking at Geneva International Airport have voted to continue their week-long protest action over salary and work conditions.

• About 300 Egyptian workers at the fishing boats of Nea Michaniona (a village near Thessaloniki, Northern Greece) continue their strike, which began on Christmas, after blockading the small port of the village last week to protest a severe decrease in their income over recent months.

• Climate justice activists will converge outside the 2nd Annual Carbon Trading Summit in New York on January 12-13 to oppose market-based trading of greenhouse gas emissions credits and call for real solutions to the climate crisis.

• The mediamen in Indian administered Kashmir on Friday staged a sit-in to protest against the shooting of a photo-journalist by a police officer in Srinagar on Thursday.

• Waving signs reading: “We All Deserve the Freedom to Marry,” more than 200 gay-rights activists and union members representing hotel employees rallied outside the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego on Saturday in the latest protest over the owner’s support for a ban on gay marriage.

A HAPPY Canadian emigre in Costa Rica. Photo by author.

Nicholas Kristof has a happy-go-lucky column today in the Times about Costa Rica that reads as part tourism advertisement, part political common sense. He goes on and on about how the country is consistently ranked high in “happiness” surveys. This is true. How, then, did they get that way?

What sets Costa Rica apart is its remarkable decision in 1949 to dissolve its armed forces and invest instead in education. Increased schooling created a more stable society, less prone to the conflicts that have raged elsewhere in Central America. Education also boosted the economy, enabling the country to become a major exporter of computer chips and improving English-language skills so as to attract American eco-tourists.

I’m not antimilitary. But the evidence is strong that education is often a far better investment than artillery.

In Costa Rica, rising education levels also fostered impressive gender equality so that it ranks higher than the United States in the World Economic Forum gender gap index. This allows Costa Rica to use its female population more productively than is true in most of the region. Likewise, education nurtured improvements in health care, with life expectancy now about the same as in the United States — a bit longer in some data sets, a bit shorter in others.

Wow, wait, there’s more. Not only do they bother to educate each other, but they make efforts not to destroy the environment—a turn that came only after decades of incredibly destructive government policies, often financed by American business interests.

This emphasis on the environment hasn’t sabotaged Costa Rica’s economy but has bolstered it. Indeed, Costa Rica is one of the few countries that is seeing migration from the United States: Yankees are moving here to enjoy a low-cost retirement. My hunch is that in 25 years, we’ll see large numbers of English-speaking retirement communities along the Costa Rican coast.

This is an understatement. Certain areas of Costa Rica are crawling with Americans. In addition to high happiness rankings, the country is also #1 in the world for lost or stolen US passports, an embassy official there told me.

A poster in a Costa Rican beach town. Prostitution is legal there, just not with children. Note that the sign is in English.

A pressing question, then, is what effect this influx of Americans is having there. When I spent a month last summer with the photographer Lucas Foglia traveling around Costa Rica meeting American expats, there were two main patterns we found: a leisure class intent on exploiting the locals as much as possible in search of a low-cost paradise, and an idealistic frenzy of folks Going Back to the Land in search of a better, more sustainable way of life—and it wasn’t always easy to separate the one from the other. Often the “English-speaking retirement communities along the Costa Rican coast” that Kristof looks forward to are the least sustainable things going, and they charge prices beyond what the locals can afford. (He also neglects to mention the flourishing sex trade, which is what brings so many aging American men down there in the first place.)

Costa Rica’s example is an incredibly instructive one, but we should be careful not to let it turn into another prime opportunity for careless exploitation. Rather than migrating en masse to benefit from that tiny country’s good decisions—and possibly ruining their effects in the process—Americans should work to follow its example ourselves, at home.

A pro-Kurdish demonstrator flashes a victory sign during a sit-in protest in central Istanbul on January 3. Hundreds of Kurdish women gathered in central Istanbul to protest against a ban on the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party.

• More than 100 demonstrators were detained Tuesday evening at a rally in downtown San Francisco held by hotel workers who have been without new contracts since August, police and rally organizers said. Unite Here Local 2 President Mike Casey estimated 1,300 demonstrators took part in yesterday’s action.

• More than 2,800 Chuquicamata and Mina Sur miners in Chile did not report to work on Monday to protest the wage and bonus package offered by Codelco, which is the world’s largest copper producer.

• In Manhattan yesterday, about 100 people protested the detention of Jean Montrevil, a Haitian who has had a green card since 1986 but, owing to a drug conviction for which he served time in the 1990s, has been subject to supervision and was detained by U.S. Immigration authorities on December 30. Ten protesters were arrested after failing to heed a police order to disperse as they blocked traffic.

• Angry farmers wearing broad-brimmed hats and cracking kangaroo-hide whips rallied outside Parliament in Canberra on Monday as one of their colleagues, sheep farmer Peter Spencer, entered his 43rd day on a hunger strike to demand compensation for Australian climate change policy.

• A two-day strike by Kenya’s matatu minibus taxis, which had stranded thousands of commuters, has been called off after government intervention. Matatu operators agreed to go back to work after the government promised to deal with their grievances.

• Virgin Trains booking office staff have gone on a 24-hour strike on one of Britain’s busiest rail lines, in protest of the company’s planned cutbacks.

• San Diego City College students were escorted out of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Front Street office Monday afternoon after they staged a sit-in during the morning to protest recent budget cuts in higher education.

• Anti-wall activists demonstrated outside Israel’s Ofer Prison near the West Bank city of Ramallah on Monday to demand the release of detained activist Jamal Juma to concide with the convening of his military court hearing.

• 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.

Bicyclists in Brooklyn were upset when Mayor Bloomberg recently closed a bike lane in Williamsburg over purported safety concerns. But they were even more upset when rumors started circulating that it had more to do with the neighborhood’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish residents, who complained of seeing too many scantily-clad female bikers.

To protest this decision, Brooklyn bicyclists planned what they called a “Freedom Ride”, or, more accurately, a topless ride. But when the day came, temperatures were too low to go without some sort of insulation. So many of the bikers pinned fake breasts over their clothes.

Haaretz reported on the event:

The bike lane battle is pitting Hasids against hipsters and, in some cases, Jew against Jew.

Those who say safety is the main reason for doing away with the lane “are lying,” says Herzfeld, who was born a Satmar but says certain practices should be abolished.

“The mayor made a deal with religious fanatics trying to enforce old traditions that don’t belong in the 21st century,” he said.

Our own Nathan Schneider also covered the protest over at Religion Dispatches:

It was sponsored by Candy Rain, “a lifestyle magazine for women that love d**ks,” according to Calisha Jenkins, who works for the magazine. She said in an interview while riding her bike, “They’re essentially moving it because they don’t want to look at girls dressed like sluts. And I want to dress like a slut.” Lead organizer Heather Loop, a 27-year-old bicycle messenger with a purple fixed-gear and a septum ring, added, “I feel like they’re forcing their beliefs on us. It’s in the Bill of Rights to not force your religion on anybody.”

The evening’s weather turned out to be especially hostile, with a snowstorm already underway, so all the cyclists remained fully clothed. Of the 40 or so present, at least half were journalists, disappointed to miss the prime photo-op of more-than-half-naked hipsters and bewildered Hasidim. Many rode with the activists as part-participant, part-observer. Trailing them, with lights flashing, was a police car and a van full of officers at the ready.

Having lived in Williamsburg, I can attest to the tension that exists between Hasids and other residents of the neighborhood. It’s somewhat predictable, if not understandable. The Hasids live very seperately and tend not to interact with anyone who is not Hasidic, unless it’s for business. Meanwhile, the young hipster population has very little patience for any kind of conservative religious behavior.

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