Earlier this month, New Yorkers won a nine-month moratorium from the state Senate on the dangerous and highly-polluting drilling practice known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” The inspiring story of civic action that led to this decision is told by Maura Stephens in a recently published piece by Yes! Magazine.

Many fighting this battle had never before been involved in political issues. But after seeing the impacts of fracking around the country or in their own daily lives, they got active.

They organized and attended forums, panels, meetings, and rallies—sometimes alongside public figures like actor Mark Ruffalo and singer-songwriter Pete Seeger. Day after day, thousands of people called state senate and assembly offices to pressure for the moratorium. Achieving it was a first-round victory beyond expectations—a small but important win.

With their air, water, land, properties, communities, and health on the line, residents have made the campaign a priority, often sacrificing family time, leisure time, and sleep to keep abreast of developments and share information. “The petrochemical-industrial complex is stealing our land and our health,” says New York resident and architect Joe Levine. “Life as we know it will change forever if we don’t stop them.”

Levine has a home near the New York State border in Damascus, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Jane Cyphers, and their two daughters. The family has turned over their lives to this issue since they were first approached by gas companies wanting to lease their land. They soon realized that their beloved Delaware River would be imperiled by drilling. Levine cofounded Damascus Citizens, a grassroots group made up of people who are fighting to keep the Delaware safe from fracking. Their influence, and the experiences of the town of Dimock, Pennyslvania, inspired Josh Fox to make the documentary Gasland.

Sullivan County, New York, resident Larysa Dyrszka, a retired pediatrician, has also taken on the role of state-level activist for the first time.

“Nobody thought drilling would really come here, to a populated area, with technology that couldn’t ensure against harmful effects to our drinking water and health,” says Dyrszka. “Little did we know it was already happening in Texas and Colorado and in other populated areas.”

Together with her friends and neighbors, Dyrszka started SACRED—Sullivan Area Citizens for Responsible Energy Development. On January 25, Dyrszka joined hundreds of New Yorkers from all corners of the state to lobby their representatives in Albany—many, like Dyrszka, for the first time.

“I was hooked,” Dyrszka says. “Now, whenever Roger [Downs, of the Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter] or Katharine [Nadeau, of EANY] or any fellow foot-soldier groups suggest a lobby day, I’m there.”

For months, Dyrszka and her fellow activists continued building relationships by phone, e-mail, and in person with legislative staff, sending them scientific, health, legal, economic, and other information on fracking.

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• Men wearing face masks of British Prime Minister David Cameron gathered in London on Friday to call for a ban on the cloning of cattle for human consumption, following the discovery of a cloned U.S. cow that was slaughtered and eaten in Britain.

• Two members of the environmental group Six Degrees climbed onto the roof of Queensland parliament house in Australia last week to display an anti-coal mining banner that read: “Don’t undermine our farms.” Meanwhile, hundreds of farmers and green activists staged a peaceful protest outside parliament.

• The “We Are Guahan” coalition in Guam gathered at a major intersection in Tamuning on Friday to protest the use of historic and ceremonial lands for military buildup.

• Some 150 protesters gathered outside a federal prison farm in Kingston, Ontario this morning to protest its closure. They say the government is ignoring the rehabilitative and healing effects that farming offers low-risk inmates.

• Up to 60 people have been camping out in front of the county government building in Santa Cruz since July Fourth to protest the city’s camping ban, which prohibits sleeping on public or private property from 11 p.m. to 8:30 a.m. But deputies rousted the homeless protest camp just after midnight Saturday, arresting five people and handing out 17 other misdemeanor citations.

• Workers who were fired by a Brooklyn kosher food producer after demanding overtime pay have been protesting outside the owner’s house and a supermarket this summer, and preparing for a return to the National Labor Relations Board this fall.

• Baristas and community supporters shut down a Starbucks in Omaha last week demanding that management reverse all cuts to healthcare, staffing, and benefits that have been imposed during the recession. The baristas claim that executives have no justification to squeeze working families with Starbucks raking in profits of $977.2 million in the past four fiscal quarters.

Last week, Corporate Ethics International launched a multi-year ad campaign – including an online video (above), ads on Google and tourism websites, and billboards in Seattle, Portland, Denver and Minneapolis – calling on tourists to boycott Alberta over the province’s oil sands. According to the Wall Street Journal:

Tourism is important for Alberta, which attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists every year to its wilderness parks and resorts in Banff and Jasper, and to the annual Stampede rodeo and outdoor show in Calgary.

Alberta officials and members of the oil sands industry were angry at the ad campaign. Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach said in a press conference Wednesday that the campaign “does, of course, anger me to a large degree because it’s an attack on about a hundred thousand Albertans whose lives depend upon the tourism industry.”

In an interview with CTV News Channel,  executive director of Corporate Ethics International Michael Marx explained the motivation for the “Rethink Alberta” campaign and why the characterization of the the effort as an “attack” isn’t accurate:

“We think the Alberta government has been pretty arrogant in ignoring the concerns of environmental groups in the U.S., in Europe and in Canada, as well as First Nations, and that it’s been deceptive in its public relations in claiming that they’re greening the tarsands,” Marx said.

“We felt like we needed to be more aggressive in calling the government out.”

He added that his group doesn’t wish to harm tourism businesses but hopes they will get involved in oilsands issues.

“Ultimately we think that the tarsands industry, by contributing to global warming, actually endangers the tourist industry,” he said.

Whether that message will resonate with Albertans is yet to be seen. Next week the group is rolling out a similar ad campaign in the UK.

In other tar sands news:

Another campaign has been growing in the U.S. that hopes to block TransCanada from building the Keystone XL pipeline that would carry crude from Alberta to refineries in Texas. Henry Waxman, a prominent congressman, and 50 other legislators stated their opposition to the project.

• More than a thousand nurses wearing red scrubs gathered outside California Republican gubernatorial nominee and nurses union foe Meg Whitman last Thursday to protest her vow to cut the state’s nurse-to-patient ratios and fire health workers.

• More than 100 indigenous activists and supporters marched past the Ministry of Forests offices and the Ministry of Environment office in Smithers, British Columbia on Friday to protest plans for a pipeline that will carry tar sands crude to ports off the west coast of Canada.

• Members of the Ukrainian feminist group FEMEN gathered on the Independence Square in Kiev where they stripped down and bathed in a public fountain to protest hot water cut offs in the capital and rising tariffs for housing and utilities services.

• A fenced-in lot at 7th and R Streets in DC has become home to a tent city as local residents protest the building of high-income apartments, where the city had once promised to build affordable housing.

• A team of seven Washington women and men reached the summit of Mount Rainier on Friday to demand that Governor Chris Gregoire close the largest source of pollution in the state—a coal-fired plan in Centralia—by 2015.

• An estimated 2,000 farmers gathered in front of the Presidential Office Building in Taiwan on Saturday to protest the government expropriation of their land. They turned part of the wide road into a field by rolling out patches covered with plants while also paying their respects to farming deities.

• Former employees of the closed Amonsito factory in Egypt ended their sit-in, following last Wednesday’s tentative agreement for overdue early retirement payment.

• 300 people gathered at Queen’s Park in Toronto ono Saturday to call for a G20 police inquiry and the right to blow bubbles. The latter was in response to an officer caught on tape threatening to arrest a G20 protester for blowing bubbles.

• Strikes spread across eastern India yesterday to protest a rise in fuel prices, shutting down markets, schools, airports and businesses.

• Activists dressed as Founding Fathers stormed the foyer of a powerful downtown Washington lobbying firm last week, demanding that members of Congress stop meeting behind closed doors to raise money from corporate lobbyists and instead spend their time working on laws to help the American public.

• Demonstrators blocked a Vancouver intersection on Sunday to protest the arrest of hundreds of people during the recent G20 summit in Toronto.

• Conservationists in Malaysia protested a plan to build a coal-fired power plant on Borneo island yesterday, alleging authorities and companies ignore the rights of indigenous tribal communities and cause environmental harm by cutting down swaths of jungle.

• About 50 protesters from several Jewish organizations picketed outside the Russian Tea Room in Manhattan on Friday while Israeli Opposition Leader Tzipi Livni spoke inside. They protested Livni’s role in Israel’s 2006 attack on Lebanon and the winter 2009 attack on Gaza.

• About two dozen members of the Baltimore police and firefighters unions protested the city’s slashing of their pensions last week.

• More than 1,000 Italian journalists gathered in Rome last week to protest a law that curbs police wiretaps and imposes fines on news organizations that publish transcripts.

• US dairy farmers participated in a nationwide protest on Sunday against price drops by dumping a days worth of milk.

The American conscience has been in a long decay, spiraling toward a nihilism exhibited through patterns of self-destructive behavior. With rare exception, those who once represented the moral force of society – politicians, religious leaders, academics, journalists, and even leaders of so-called progressive movements – can no longer combat the pervasive influence of a consumption based society propped up by imperial threat, violence, and rapacious greed. As “We, the People,” bear the financial burdens of pathological wars on terror and corporate irresponsibility, the poor of the earth cry out.

The environmental destruction – for nearly two months oil has gushed into the Gulf because of BP’s government-endorsed “error” – has reached epic proportions. And once again, it is the poor and the marginalized – those not welcome or unheard in the halls of power and privilege – who will suffer the most: people of color, the uneducated, the developing world, the winged and four-legged creatures, the hills, the water. The mountains of Appalachia are being blown up with amounts of TNT comparable to the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Over 500 of the world’s oldest mountains in one of the most diverse bioregions have been blown up. They are gone forever. It has been five years since Hurricane Katrina and now the people of New Orleans and other Gulf Coast residents are faced with devastated shorelines and economies. And yet where are the voices of outrage? Where are the people and the mass action? Who is denouncing our insatiable appetite for oil and coal that kills the very Earth that gives us our life?

We will not win the war we are waging against the Earth as we seek to conquer and control all of its resources. We can fight the Taliban in Afghanistan and de-stabilize countries like Iraq and Pakistan to secure access to oil-rich areas. Even as we outspend the all the combined military budgets of the world, we cannot outspend, overthrow, or even intimidate the Earth. We will lose. We may think we are winning, and in the short-term it might even appear that way. But there will come a time when the peoples of the Earth, probably from a country with nuclear weapons and a capitalist ethos, will make the world an inhabitable place. The Earth, over time, with the incredible resiliency of creation that can be observed by just watching the emergence of a Sequoia tree or a mustard plant from the tiniest of seeds, will go on. Its people may not.

What is needed is a revolution. This is not a call to arms. It is a call to the heart. Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement and communities known for its hospitality to the poor and its pacifism, proclaimed that “what is needed is a revolution of the heart.” It is a revolution that begins with each one of us, but not in isolation. The revolution of the heart takes place in community. And it is only through being in community that the revolutionary vision that Dr. King called for – the radical transformation of values as he denounced the giant triplets of “racism, militarism, and consumerism” – can be embraced and waged. And this revolution is already underway. It is happening on the margins, in oppressed communities, in the abandoned places of Empire like Detroit and Philadelphia, on the borders, the inner cities and the rural farming towns. All over this country, people are coming together to build community. The state has abandoned them. The promises of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are virtues extended to the proud and the rich, not the humble and the poor. But it is in the humble and simple work of local family farmers committed to organic production practices and land stewardship that true life, liberty and happiness is found.

The Land Stewardship Project (LSP) in Minnesota is a widening community of small-scale, organic farmers committed to building an educated and capable network of regional farmers and resisting policy that promotes an industrial, oil-based agribusiness model. Communities are emerging that are transforming the way people see the world. It is giving birth to imagination and a moral formation in a lifestyle that considers the land ethic, as Aldo Leopold referred to it. In Appalachia, hope springs eternal from communities like Coal River Mountain Watch that, through education, organization, and research, are advocating for sustainable environmental and economic alternatives to mountaintop removal such as the Coal River Wind project. Other communities like Climate Ground Zero that engage in nonviolent direct action to stop mountaintop removal exhibit tremendous courage in a society built on fear and show a willingness to suffer persecution, arrest and jail for being the voice of the mountains.

It is in places like LSP, Coal River Mountain Watch and Climate Ground Zero that the American conscience is being forged in the burning fire and struggle for social change. The communities that are built consist of strong-willed, principled individuals who have the capacity to make moral judgments and discern a course of right action. They are not distracted or dissuaded – although they are at times disillusioned and often depressed – by the empty promises of corporate-backed politicians. But the resiliency of these American people, closely connected to the life of the Earth, is what will save the people from the self-destructive war abroad in search of oil and at home in search of coal. There are many ways to resist what are termed the works of war, of which include the destroying crops and land and contaminating water. The alternative models that the aforementioned communities promote ween us from our dependency on a broken, violent system toward one of communion and sustainability.

In an epoch such as ours, where postmodern skepticism runs deep of authority figures and leaders of any sort, the force for moral transformation will not come from the likes of Day or King (we’ve seen where the Obama hope has left us). Instead our hope is in the bottom, in the communities on the margins doing the work themselves. Leaders already exist in these networks and will continue to emerge. But it is in community that we will be propelled into the revolution of the heart and our conscientization needed for peace, social change, and ecological justice.

The French Young Farmers (Jeunes Agriculteurs) union turned Paris’ Champs Elysées into a giant farm on Sunday by covering the capital’s busiest road with 8,000 plots of earth, 150,000 plants and 700 fully grown trees, as well as pigs, cows, horses and sheep. According to the BBC:

The union, which represents some 55,000 farmers under the age of 35, wants to impress on the public – and the government – the efforts required to produce what goes on the table.

“It’s about re-establishing contact with the public about what our profession is and what they want from it,” William Villeneuve, president of the Jeunes Agriculteurs, said on Friday.

“Do they want the cheapest products in the world or do they want products that pay producers?” he added.

For the Parisians who last year witnessed farmers blocking traffic and setting fire to piles of hay and tires on the Champs Elysées, this bucolic sight is no doubt a welcome approach to one of France’s most enduring issues. At the same time, however, it cost 4.2m euros to stage. But that isn’t stopping the organizers from promising to take their concept overseas.

“We want to take “Nature Capitale” to New York (to work with) the farmers and woodmen of New York state, to Istanbul with their farmers, Berlin and other cities who want to welcome us,” Gad Weil, who created the concept, told France Info radio.

Despite the cost, there certainly is a lot to be said for raising awareness among city folk about the food process. It will be interesting to see if the reaction in Paris justifies its expense and whether such an undertaking can be replicated in other parts of the world.

• Activists have put up tents and opened a protest camp they are calling Democracy Village in London.  They are mainly protesting problems with the recent election, as well as the war in Afghanistan and British capitalism, but the police have told them to leave before Parliament opens next week.

• Greenpeace activists climbed BP’s London headquarters yesterday to hang a flag accusing the company of polluting the environment.  The flag read, “BP: British Polluters,” a play on British Petroleum.

• 20,000 Greeks marched to parliament in Athens yesterday in continued protest of severe austerity measures.

• Tens of thousands of people gathered in Bucharest, the Romanian capital, on Wednesday to protest incipient wage cuts planned by the government.

• Thousands of nurse-anesthetists staged a sit-in at a Paris train station yesterday and demanded greater professional recognition and higher salaries.  The blockade halted rail traffic.

• 250 students and workers at the University of Illinois in Chicago protested high administrative salaries and tuition increases as they gathered outside a Board of Trustees meeting yesterday.

• 160 United Steelworkers members gathered in Washington, DC yesterday to protest Mexican President Felipe Calderón’s visit to the U.S.  Ralliers denounced Calderón’s treatment of workers in his country and referred specifically to the Cananea mine workers, who have been on strike since 2007.

• Dairy farmers gathered with milk cans and cows in towns across Colombia on Wednesday to protest a new trade accord with the EU; they say they cannot compete with subsidized European farmers.

• Inmates of a Japanese immigration center have been on hunger strike for more than a week after recent deaths of fellow residents.  They are also demanding to be released.

Greenpeace dubbed its campaign against Nestlé a success earlier this week when the food giant announced that it will no longer use products that drive tropical rainforest destruction, specifically palm oil that comes from companies like Indonesia’s Sinar Mas Group. Despite this success, which should by no means be overlooked, there is a lingering question: how does this effect the 10 million palm oil farmers in Indonesia?

I raised this point last month after coming across an article in the Jakarta Globe that said farmers were prepared to boycott Nestlé products and block all exports of crude palm oil to the US and the EU in an effort to save their jobs. While it doesn’t seem like anything came of these plans, the crisis facing a country with millions of low-wage workers dependent on a single crop that is no longer desired by a global food giant remains.

On the flip side, their silence could be evidence that Nestlé’s decision doesn’t have as dramatic an effect on palm oil production as we in the West would like to believe. For starters, Nestlé buys less than one percent of the global production of palm oil, which means there is still plenty of demand for the product. Secondly, Sinar Mas Group weathered an even greater loss in 2009, when Unilever, the world’s biggest consumer of palm oil, canceled its contract after learning about a dossier of evidence to be published by Greenpeace. As Media.Asia recently reported:

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After successfully pressuring many of the largest fast food corporations – such as Taco Bell, Subway, McDonald’s and Burger King – to increase wages, improve benefits and follow new guidelines to protect the safety of the farmworkers that pick tomatoes over recent years, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has a new target: Publix Supermarkets.

Even though CIW signed an agreement with foodservice giant Aramark at the beginning of the month, Publix has refused to meet the demands of these exploited workers. In response, as Peter Rothberg at The Nation writes:

…the CIW has organized what is expected to be its largest action ever — a twenty-two mile march from Tampa to Lakeland, where Publix is based. The march is broken up into two distinct daily segments, and will culminate in a rally and concert on Sunday, April 18. The actress and activist Gloria Reuben will join Kerry Kennedy, founder of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, and Stetson Kennedy, Florida’s premier folklorist and longtime human rights champion, as rally hosts…

For all the many of you who aren’t able to join the march, please send Publix CEO Ed Crenshaw an email politely expressing your “support for the Farmworker Freedom March and your hope that he’ll begin working with the CIW to address the sub-poverty wages and abuses faced by the farmworkers who pick Publix’s tomatoes.

Check out the CIW’s site for more information on the Farmworker Freedom March, which begins this Friday, and instructions on how to register to participate.

• A New Zealand man locked himself to a silo for a day this weekend in protest of factory farming.  Police cut him down from the silo at a pig farm while animal-rights supporters watched.

• In Togo’s capital on Saturday, people gathered, as they have nearly every week since the March 4 election, to protest the re-election of Faure Gnassingbe, who took office fraudulently and whose father was a dictator.

• In Hollywood on Sunday, protesters marched for Social Security benefits for gay couples.  700 people marched and were ultimately told that legislation would be introduced to equalize benefits.

• At least two hundred people gathered at a San Francisco BART station on Saturday to engage in various forms of protest against police violence, in response to the killing of Oscar Grant last year by a police officer. People chanted “no justice, no rush!” and peacefully confronted BART law enforcement.

• Thirty to fifty Sri Lankan and Afghan men seeking asylum began a hunger strike in their camp in Sydney yesterday, in protest of Australia’s suspension on new asylum claims from those countries.  They seek to meet with officials to discuss their cases and the policy.

• Workers and people with physical disabilities continued protesting outside of Cairo’s parliament yesterday.  The sit-ins, which have lasted between 4 and 58 days so far, are in response to the closing of factories and Egypt’s lack of provision of handicapped housing.

• Dock workers in Iran protested after their company was privatized and their jobs were jeopardized.  Several hundred people gathered in front of a central building and in prayer spot to protest the change.

• About 25 people gathered in Asheville, North Carolina on Saturday to protest racial profiling done by immigration officials against Latinos.  They said they want their city to become a “sanctuary,” where people who work and pay taxes are in no danger of deportation.

Environmentalists were calling Greenpeace’s campaign against Nestlé a success two weeks ago when it agreed to drop its Indonesian palm oil producer Sinar Mas Group, which is responsible for the destruction of rain forests and orangutan habitats. But it seems success was claimed not only too early, but perhaps a bit inappropriately. Enviros forgot about the millions of Indonesian farmers who rely on Sinar Mas to make a living. According to the Jakarta Globe:

“About 10 million oil palm farmers in 20 Indonesian provinces have stated their readiness to boycott Nestle products. Apkasindo [Indonesian Palm Oil Growers Association] is now preparing to draw up a list of Nestle products on the market,” Asmar Arsjad, Apkasindo secretary general, said over the weekend, adding that if Nestle stops buying from Sinar Mas it would hurt palm oil producers.

So, as is often the case, environmentalists have indirectly pitted themselves against workers. And given their numbers, these workers may have the upper hand when it comes to persuasion. In addition to the boycott, Indonesian and Malaysian palm oil producers are prepared to stop exports of crude palm oil to the US and the EU if negative campaigns over their environmental practices continue.

Greenpeace and it’s supporters have said little about the farm workers’ reaction. Instead, they’ve continued to post negative comments to Nestlé’s Facebook page regarding its indirect ties to Sinar Mas through its supplier Cargill.

Given that Indonesia has lost almost three-quarters of its natural forest, Greenpeace is right to continue its protest. But they must acknowledge the plight of the workers. The isn’t so much about getting Nestlé to sever ties with one particular palm oil producer, it should also be about demanding that Nestlé and other multinationals help make developing countries less dependent on producing a handful of crops. Resources will eventually be drained from Indonesia and its farm workers will have nothing then because they will have become too reliant on producing one crop. Nestlé and other multinationals have a responsibility to these countries and Greenpeace should be there to remind them and hold them accountable.

• 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.

• 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.

• The Great Climate Swoop—an action devised during August’s Climate Camp in London—took place last weekend as more than 1,000 descended upon the Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal plant in Nottinghamshire. 52 were arrested on Saturday for breaching the perimiter fence. Many were bitten by police dogs in the process.

• Seven activists were arrested at West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin’s office yesterday during a peaceful sit-in to protest the destruction of Coal River Mountain by Massey Energy.

• Farmers from around the world gathered in Brussels to present the EU Commissioner for Health with a 180,000-signature-strong petition against potential legislation authorising the introduction of genetically engineered rice.

• More than 50 gathered in Gloucester, Englandon Saturday to form a human clock face to show time is running out for action.

• The Teamsters union has launched a six-week campaign at dealerships throughout the US to protest Chrysler’s decision to use more nonunion carhaulers—a move General Motors may follow.

• Firefighters in South Yorkshire, England began 24 hours of strike action yesterday following a dispute over shift changes.

• The International Federation of Iraqi Refugees announced yesterday that nearly 50 asylum seekers are on hunger strike at a detention center in West Sussex, England.