• Russian riot police broke up an Occupy-style protest against President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, forcing dozens of people out of a central Moscow park where they had staged a week-long sit-in and detaining about 20 people. Protesters then moved to Kudrinskaya Square in Moscow, where they remain encamped.

• In Chile, a crowd estimated at more than 100,000 marched through the streets of Santiago on Wednesday to support the demands of the nation’s students.

• Thousands of student protesters flooded the streets in Montreal on Wednesday evening after Quebec Premier Jean Charest announced a proposal for a new ‘emergency law’ in a bid to end the ongoing 14-week-old student uprising and strike.

• About 2,900 Moroccan judges began a week-long strike to protest against judicial corruption and interference by the executive branch that they say undermines their independence.

• Two Greenpeace activists were arrested after being pried from a giant iPod in front of Apple’s headquarters Tuesday during a protest against using dirty energy to power data centers.

• Dozens of Spaniards lined up outside a bank in Madrid on Monday to close their accounts to protest the unfair seizures of homes.

• Israeli and Palestinian officials announced Monday that more than 1,600 Palestinian prisoners had agreed to end a nearly month-long hunger strike in exchange for concessions by Israel, including a modification to its practice of detention without charge or trial.

• A three-week-long protest on UC Berkeley agricultural research land in Albany came to a quiet close early Monday when police arrested nine protesters who had set up an urban farming camp.

By Dave Id, via San Francisco Bay Area Indymedia.

As U.S. congressional leaders are hashing out the next Farm Bill in the Senate — an event that occurs every five years — farmers, activists, food justice advocates, environmentalists and many others are hard at work trying to salvage conservation and alternative farming programs from budget cuts. The bill, in all likelihood, will further hand the food system over to industrial agriculture and food producers. It has sweeping implications across the globe, affecting domestic and global food assistance, farmer crop insurance, conservation programs, commodity subsidies, and more. In essence, the Farm Bill props up the industrial food system, even as it contains small programs that support alternative and organic agricultural practices.

Last Sunday, when 200 people set out to grow food in the overgrown fields of the Gill Tract, a 10-acre agricultural lot in the East Bay neighborhood of Albany, Ca., owned by the University of California — and slotted for development — they were directly challenging the ethos of the industrial food system that the Farm Bill represents. The plan for the action, dubbed “Occupy the Farm: Take Back the Gill Tract,” was to celebrate Earth Day by turning this piece of rich agricultural land into a vibrant urban farm.

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"Testimony of Zea Maize," via the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor.

On April 21, approximately 100 people came to a courtroom in Iowa City to attend a mock trial called the Monsanto Hearings, the second of five such events scheduled nationwide. The trial was modeled after a preliminary hearing, an attempt to collect stories about harm caused by agribusiness giant Monsanto and determine if further public scrutiny is warranted.

The court’s five presiding judges — including a professor, a graduate student and an organic farmer — made no pretense of impartiality. “We are under no obligation to be even-handed,” they announced early on, “because in the court of public opinion, Monsanto is not even-handed. They have money for lobbyists, advertisements, corporate-funded research and media campaigns. The influence of this hearing, by contrast, depends on the power and truth of what is said.” The court, they explained, would not be considering legal violations, but rather violations of nature, ethics and human rights.

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• Tens of thousands of students protested on Thursday against a 75 percent tuition hike at universities in Canada’s mostly French-speaking Quebec province, bringing downtown Montreal to a standstill. Since mid-February, nearly 300,000 students have boycotted classes, blocked bridges and held smaller protests around the province.

• More than 1,000 indigenous protesters reached Ecuador’s capital Thursday after a two-week march from the Amazon to oppose plans for large-scale mining on their lands. The protesters were joined by thousands of anti-government protesters in Quito.

• Hundreds of farmers gathered in the Vietnamese capital on Thursday to demand the return of rice fields they say were confiscated by heavily armed police just days after receiving an eviction notice.

• More than 1,000 people gathered in a downtown Brattleboro park on Thursday to call for the closure of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. It was the first day of the plant’s operation after the expiration of its 40-year license. Over 130 protesters were arrested for unlawful trespass as part of a civil disobedience action.

• More than a thousand people rallied in New York City’s Union Square on Wednesday evening with the parents of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager who was shot dead in Florida in late February.

• Portuguese workers halted trains, shut ports and paralyzed most public transport in the capital Lisbon on Thursday to protest austerity measures and labor reforms imposed as a condition of a 78-billion-euro ($103 billion) bailout.

• Three Tibetans who have been on hunger strike outside the UN headquarters for the past month ended their protest Thursday after the UN said investigators would look into events in Tibet.

• Several people were arrested on Tuesday after a rally in a Phoenix intersection to protest immigration policies of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Occupy the Food System—the day of action for food justice on February 27—could be the beginning of a broad-based food justice movement that is global in scope but local in action. A unique coalition of food justice workers, consumers, farmers and activists, organized by Rainforest Action Network, momentarily converged under the banner of ending the corporate exploitation of our food system for a day of protest and consciousness-raising.

Noticeably lacking, however, were the rural farmers. To be sure, a number of farmer-backed groups, like Family Farm Defenders and the National Family Farm Coalition endorsed the action, but endorsing is a far cry from nitty-gritty organizing that turns people out.

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Home demolitions are a common practice for large landowners in Honduras. If a family is not residing on the land at the time when their land dispute comes to a hearing, they no longer have a case. Photo by La Voz de Los de Abajo

Most of what is found in the news regarding Honduras tends to converge on a single resounding theme—the deepening corruption of the state. Officials resign over scandals of embezzlement, police officers moonlight as armed robbers, entire state arsenals are found empty, supposedly the work of drug cartels. Carolina, one of many strong and energetic matriarchs who helps run—along with many other women and men—the June 10th Women’s Movement Farming Cooperative, has a different theory about the stolen arsenals. When a delegation I was a part of visited the farm last week, she told us:

The government only wants the United States to buy them more weapons, while they hoard the others. All those weapons are a direct threat against farmers. The government knows where they are hidden, and they will try to use them against us.

Communities like Carolina’s have good reason to suspect cynical motives. A week earlier, in the early morning of February 8, armed private guards of the Standard Fruit Company (Dole) invaded the campesino farming co-op of Salado Lis Lis and forced close to 500 families off the land. They had only enough time to grab their children and a few belongings before a Caterpillar bulldozer ripped through about 600 meager houses and tore wide, barren stripes through their crops.

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Before and after the mining in Yanacocha. Image via Servindi.

An agreement has not yet been reached between national and local authorities in Peru since I reported on the mining disputes there last December. While Newmont Mining Corporation stands by previous agreements with the government regarding the extraction of 11.6 million ounces of gold in Conga, the popular efforts against this and other mining mega-projects also stand resilient. The last meeting took place after a 10-day march that ended in Lima on February 10. This time, instead of solely objecting to the mining project, the protesters broadened their message to also ending the threat against their access to water.

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Throughout history, South American nations have had their futures decided by a small number of people. It began with the Spaniards, who, as soon as they touched ground, let two or three religious and political authorities rule from 5,000 miles away. Sadly, little has changed since then, except now the ruling few are the corporate elites, empowered through government deals like the recently ratified free trade agreement between Colombia and the United States, NAFTA, and thousands of illicit licenses given to multinational companies. But this trend is beginning to change, as protests in Peru over the last month have challenged the country’s largest mining project.

The story of this ambitious and dangerously exploitative project dates back to 1993, when the US company Newmont Mining Corp. arrived in Peru to open the Yanacocha gold mine in Cajamarca, a region located in the North of the country. Using a process called “micro-mining,” which requires large quantities of a dilute cyanide solution to capture minuscule pieces of gold, Yanacocha ended up contaminating the region’s water sources–a fact overloked by then-president Alberto Fujimori and his intelligence strongman Vladimiro Montesinos.

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Environmental victories are so rare that apparently even environmentalists don’t quite know how to kick back and rejoice. At a rally in Trenton, New Jersey on Monday, discussion veered between joyous celebration of Friday’s announcement by the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) to indefinitely postpone a vote that would have paved the way for 20,000 natural gas wells in the region and serious preparation to one day block their construction through nonviolent direct action.

These activists can be excused, however, for mixing business with pleasure because even more rare than an environmental victory is one that’s complete and total. Much like the recent announcement by the Obama administration to delay a decision on the KeystoneXL pipeline that would transport tar sands oil from Canada to Texas, the DRBC vote delay was hardly an indictment of extreme carbon-based extraction that poisons water and the atmosphere. If anything, it’s a temporary roadblock to something government seems all too happy to allow.

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• A few hundred protesters marched on Waikiki Saturday as leaders of Pacific Rim nations gathered for a summit to discuss free trade agreements and other issues. During the gala dinner, renowned Hawaiian guitarist Makana spent almost 45 minutes repeatedly singing his new protest ballad “We Are the Many” instead of the expected instrumental background music. Over a dozen heads of state, including President Obama, heard Makana’s message that included lines such as “The lobbyists at Washington do gnaw…. And until they are purged, we won’t withdraw.”

• Police confronted an estimated 1,000 protesters in Portland, Oregon, on Sunday after clearing parks occupied by demonstrators for weeks. 50 were arrested after refusing to leave one of the parks. The demonstrators regrouped in the streets, blocking traffic for hours.

• Twenty-seven “Occupy St. Louis” protesters were arrested early Saturday morning after defying an existing park curfew.

• Portuguese civil servants and soldiers staged an anti-austerity protest in Lisbon on Saturday, a sign of the rising social tensions in debt-hit Portugal over deep cuts in spending.

• Thousands of demonstrators rallied in Rio de Janeiro on Thursday against oil legislation that could cost the port city and surrounding state billions of dollars in revenues.

• Angry over a range of environmental issues, about 250 protesters erected a mock coal-fired power station on the steps of Australia’s Parliament House before marching backwards to Treasury Gardens, arguing the government’s policies have taken Victoria backwards.

• More than 350 people linked arms to form a “human chain” on the Stirling Bridge in Fremantle, Australia on Sunday to protest the live animal export trade.

• About 100 peaceful marchers sent a clear message Sunday to vandals who torched cars and scrawled Nazi swastikas in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Brooklyn. The march included about 25 people from the Occupy Wall Street movement in Manhattan, which put out a statement condemning the vandalism.

• More than 2,000 students marched through London last week to protest cuts to public spending and a big increase in tuition fees.