• Hundreds of thousands of protesters flooded the streets across Yemen on Sunday to demand the ouster of President Ali Abdullah Saleh on the anniversary of his rise to power in  1978.

• Dozens of tents have been erected in Tel Aviv, with plans for further encampments in other Israeli towns and cities, to protest high house prices.

• Several Indian and Pakistani citizens Saturday gathered near Rajghat, Delhi and formed a human chain on Saturday to protest the July 13 Mumbai blasts that left at least 19 people dead and injured 130.

• Journalists at the BBC walked off their jobs Friday to protest planned job cuts as a result of lower government funding.

• Greenpeace activists dressed as polar bears occupied the Edinburgh offices of Cairn Energy on Monday as the environmental group stepped up the pressure on the company over its Arctic exploration plans.

• Around 2,000 farmers, backed by student groups and academics gathered in front of the presidential office in Taipei late on Saturday to protest government proposals that would make it easier for farm land to be forcibly turned over to developers.

• Around 200 people gathered at the Jordan Press Association headquarters earlier today to denounce an attack on journalists by riot police on Friday.

• Greek taxi drivers blocked roads to Athens’ airport and main harbor today, holding up thousands of tourists at the start of a two-day protest against plans to liberalize their trade.

• Several hundred people attended a protest march against the EU-IMF austerity programme in Dublin on Saturday.

• A small group of mass transit activists against freeway expansion unfurled a banner overlooking the 405 Freeway in Los Angeles on Sunday that read “L.A. Beyond Cars.”

On Saturday, rallies against genetically modified food were held in cities across the United States. The Millions Against Monsanto campaign, which is organized by Organic Consumers Association, is now planning on taking their effort to the next level. On World Food Day, October 16, they are calling for a million people to come out in a nationwide day of action.

While mobilizing a million people sounds like a daunting task, they have broken it down in a unique way. They are forming 435 local chapters, one for each congressional district, and are seeking to attract 2,300 supporters in each location. If they can reach this goal, they will have a million people in the streets.

I like this approach in that it reminds me of the way that military contractors influence legislators. Boeing for example manufactures the F-22 in 44 different states, which had made it next to impossible to muster the votes to cut its funding.

The Millions Against Monsanto campaign is not calling to make these genetically engineered foods illegal, but simply to make GMO labeling mandatory by law. They believe that if people knew which foods were genetically modified they would buy less of them and instead go organic. This is apparently what has happened in Europe, where there are almost no genetically modified foods in grocery stories because labeling is required.

The above video lays out the group’s strategy and also gives some advice on how to start a chapter in your area. To sign their petition click here and join a local chapter if one already exists.

Over at UN Dispatch, Mark Leon Goldberg has an interesting post on how world food prices, which reached an all-time high in December and could be at a similar level for January, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), are a contributing factor in the protests in Tunisia, Egypt and beyond. As Goldberg explains:

So what does this chart have to do with the riots in Egypt?  Several commentators have noted that the high price of food staples contributed to the overall feeling of discontent in Tunisia.  There have already been protests over the sharp increase in food prices in Jordan earlier this month.  Reading the writing on the wall, the Algerian government even put in a huge rush order of wheat.This is not to say this is the cause of the civil unrest in Egypt today. But these questions of political economy really cannot be ignored when trying to understand the protests across the Middle East and North Africa.  If this trend in the Food Prices Index continues, it is not unreasonable to expect that civil unrest will spread to several other countries.

And at Climate Progress, Joe Romm has an interesting piece looking at how this rise in food prices is connected to climate change.

President Obama and the State Department are considering the permit for a 2,000-mile dirty tar sands oil pipeline, known as the Keystone XL, that would run from Canada through six US states to refineries along the Gulf Coast. With 900,000 barrels of dirty oil flowing across the heartland every day, public water supplies, crops, and wildlife habitats will be at great risk.

Opposition to the pipeline has already begun to take shape, with protests, town hall gatherings and press conferences taking place in Detroit, Chicago, Lincoln, Houston and Missoula. There’s even a TV ad (shown above) calling on President Obama to “prevent the next oil disaster” that’s set to air on CNN, MSNBC, and Comedy Central.

For more information, check out the No Tar Sands Oil campaign website.

• 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.

• Hundreds of people convened in downtown Pittsburgh on Tuesday to protest the development of “fracking,” a new and untested method of natural gas extraction that is threatening to take over Pennsylvania and neighboring states.

• More then 4,000 BBC employees started a 48-hour strike over pensions today, forcing the state-funded broadcaster to curtail programs and run pre-recorded shows.

• Concerned residents of the Navajo Nation, along with activists, constructed symbolic black crosses in front of Kayenta Mine in Arizona, which was named last spring as one of the most dangerous mines in the nation.

• About 40 North Carolina State University students painted the school’s “Free Expression Tunnel” black overnight to protest racist and homophobic graffiti.

• 11,000 London Underground staff began a 24-hour walkout on Tuesday night to protest job cuts.

• Hundreds of people in India’s Amritsar City gathered for a sit-in early Wednesday morning to protest the federal government’s delaying of justice to the victims of the 1984 Anti-Sikh riots.

• An extremely frail 38-year-old woman dubbed “The Iron Lady” marked 10 years without voluntarily taking food or water Thursday — a hunger strike launched to protest an anti-terror law that grants Indian soldiers sweeping powers to crack down on rebels.

Two weeks ago, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers signed workers’ rights agreements, included a promise to pay farm workers a penny more per pound of tomatoes that they pick, with Pacific Tomato Growers and Six L’s Packing Co., the first deals that have ever been struck by the organization with major tomato growers themselves. As Kari Lydersen explained at Working In These Times:

These back-to-back victories show that when confronted with social and economic pressure and a nationwide grassroots movement that refuses to back down, even the seemingly worst employers can do an about-face. Both Six L’s and Pacific Tomato Growers, which signed the agreement with the CIW last week, were responsible for cases of modern-day slavery which the coalition had worked with the Department of Justice to expose and prosecute in recent years.

Knowing they’d be hard-pressed to get results from the growers themselves at the start of their campaign a decade ago, the coalition targeted high-profile buyers, starting with Taco Bell and later McDonald’s, Burger King, Whole Foods, Sodexo and others with the idea they would pressure growers to do the right thing.

The fact that growers are in quick succession now signing on with the coalition shows an historic sea change in farm worker-employer relations – even as the coalition and their allies continue to target tomato buyers including the Florida-based supermarket Publix, Kroger, Trader Joe’s and Quiznos.

Paying a penny more per pound could raise farm workers’ income from about $10,000 to $17,000 a year. And perhaps even more importantly, the agreements signify that farm workers are indeed human beings with human rights and dignity whose labor is crucial to feeding the country and making possible the nation’s massive restaurant industry.

This campaign for worker justice, however, is not the work of these farm workers alone. Over at God’s Politics, Brigitte Gynther writes of several easy steps that we can all take:

As people of faith, and as consumers, we can ask major supermarkets to do their part in ensuring that the people who pick our tomatoes are treated with the dignity they deserve as God’s children.  Send an e-mail to Kroger, Stop & Shop/Giant, Publix, and Trader Joe’s asking them to work with the CIW to implement a code of conduct for farmworker rights and pay an additional penny per pound of tomatoes to improve farmworkers’ wages.

You can also deliver a letter to the manager of a supermarket near you next time you go grocery shopping and ask the manager to pass it on to corporate headquarters.

And, of course, if emails and letters don’t work, which they rarely do by themselves, protests and other forms of nonviolent action can create more pressure on these corporate holdouts.

As genetically modified organisms become more prevalent, so do protests against them. In just the past few months, French activists have uprooted GM vines at a research center, Spanish activists have destroyed experimental GM Maize crops, and Haitian farmers have burned Monsanto seeds. But are these destructive direct actions the best form of protest against the rising corporate control of the food system and its very genetic material?

My good friend Zack Denfeld, a self-described information ecologist and lecturer at Pacific Northwest College of Art, is developing a creative form of resistance through his Center for Genomic Gastronomy. Taking a somewhat Yes Men-inspired, tongue-in-cheek approach, Zack is extending the logic of GMO’s to their unnatural conclusion by putting them in situations their inventor’s never considered.

In his first experiment with the Center for Genomic Gastronomy, Zack made sushi rolls out of GloFish—a patented brand of GM fluorescent zebrafish, which is publicly available as a pet. The idea, as Zack explains in the above video, is to give people the opportunity to beta test transgenic fish before the FDA approves GM salmon—soon to be the first genetically-engineered animal for human consumption.

We’ve made a number of recipes with these [GloFish], so you don’t have to wait for approval from the government to try these transgenic fish if you’re interested. What’s really interesting about this is they’ve been existing in science labs and all of a sudden one guy had a really interesting market strategy, which was to make them available to the public. And we think that’s really innovative and we’re building on his innovation by cooking with them. I don’t know how happy he is about that, but I want to ask you how happy you are with these recipes. If you’re all for transgenic foods, you’ll love my sushi rolls. If you don’t like my glowing sushi rolls you may want to tell the US FDA to hold off on that transgenic salmon. The decision is up to you. You are no longer passive. You are active in this process.

In another experiment—this time going after the secret nature of GM research—Zack created a recipe called Vegetarian Bouillabaisse. It calls for something known as the Fish Tomato—a somewhat mythical GM design that involves a tomato being inserted with a cold-tolerant gene from a fish.

In our research we found documents that proved this very much did exist. This brings up really important questions. Is the Fish Tomato vegetarian? Is it an animal? Is it a plant? We don’t know. But it’s important to eat this, taste this and find out. The problem is we can’t because both the genome and the data that came out of the research vanished in a cloud of confidential business information and corporate appropriation. The issue here is that if we don’t have the data we’re not doing science. Scient is about verifiability and repeatability. So we need to stop calling the people who don’t give us data scientists. They’re not scientists. They’re just biohackers like me and you. Until they make their data public we should not call them scientists.

When I spoke with Zack about his work, he stressed the imporance of being able to reach these so-called scientists with our concerns. They are people after all. And they can be reasoned with and persuaded to reconsider their actions. But when their work is challenged destructively, they, like most people, respond with indifference. They just write off the protesters. If however, the protests are targeted at discrediting their work and exposing their inability to anticipate its consequences, they are far more willing to listen. Having scientists on our side, instead of on the corporation’s side, may be the key to preserving control over our food systems.

• About 100 people demonstrated Thursday outside the Japanese Consulate in the 300 block of South Grand Avenue in Los Angeles as part of a worldwide protest against the annual slaughter of dolphins in that country.

• Union workers shut down all of France’s 12 oil refineries on a fourth day of nationwide protests over pension reforms Friday.

• About 100 workers from the Greek culture ministry barricaded themselves inside the Acropolis on Wednesday by padlocking the entrance gates and refusing to allow any tourists in until their demands for unpaid wages were met. But riot police cleared the site after obtaining a court order.

• Activists with Change Chevron infiltrated and interrupted a speech of Chevron’s CEO at the University of Chicago on Wednesday, and turned it into conversation about his company’s toxic pollution in Ecuador.

• Dozens of people dumped what they labelled as “GM-canola weeds and GM-contaminated soy infant formula S-26″ on Monsanto’s Melbourne office today as a protest to coincide with UN World Food Day.

• More than 100 Chinese writers, lawyers and activists have released a letter urging the government to release the Nobel peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo and other political prisoners.

• Activists with the Sierra Club stood frozen outside a Board of Trustees meeting on Purdue’s West Lafayette campus yesterday to protest the university’s decision to “remain frozen in the 19th century and not move into a clean energy future” by building a new coal powered boiler.

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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