• Four Greenpeace activists breached a 1,650-feet security perimeter around an oil rig off western Greenland  yesterday. They then climbed up the rig and fastened themselves to it, effectively forcing it to stop drilling. As of this morning, they were still suspended 15 meters above the frigid Arctic waters of Baffin Bay.

• Russian police have detained more than 60 people demonstrating at a freedom of assembly rally in Moscow yesterday. The demonstrators chanted “Russia without Putin!” as the police led them away.

• Nearly 100 Afghan asylum seekers broke out of a detention centre in northern Australia on Wednesday to protest the long delay in processing their refugee applications.

• Four tree sitters have created a platform 100 feet up in the redwoods of Jacoby Creek California to prevent loggers from clearcutting the beautiful second growth forest.

• The Mobilization for Climate Justice West turned out 150 people on Monday afternoon in San Francisco’s financial district for a march on the offices of Chevron, the Environmental Protection Agency and BP. Their message was for Big Oil to stop harming our environment and communities and to pay for the damage they’ve caused.

• A small contingent of super heroes and one Sith Lord assembled outside the steps of City Hall Tuesday to protest the arrests made by LAPD of costumed characters along Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.

• Honduran police arrested some 150 people while using tear gas and water cannons to disperse a demonstration by teachers, students and others in Tegucigalpa on Aug. 27, the 23rd day of a strike by teachers over their pension fund and other issues.

The Climate Camp currently set up on the grounds of the Royal Bank of Scotland corporate headquarters in Edinburgh has received some strong criticism from The Guardian in a couple recent pieces. On Tuesday, environment page editor James Randerson documented how Climate Camp organizers let Twitter get the best of them during a day of mass action against RBS and its funding of the fossil fuel industry.

Climate Camp had its own Twitter feed of course, but anyone browsing through the #climatecamp hashtag would probably not have got the impression of the day’s events that the spinsters at Climate Camp wanted. Supportive texts were swamped by tweeters ridiculing the activists or even pretending to be them.

[...]

It is surprising that an organisation that puts so much emphasis on the art of manipulating the media (according to the Climate Camp media pack journalists are “weak and cowardly” and “astoundingly unimaginative”) did not think harder about how to use a medium that cuts out the peaky middlemen altogether.

While Climate Camp should have been a little more savvy about maintaining its Twitter feed, it’s not exactly a big deal that some people made fun of them on a social networking site. Far more important to Climate Camp’s success is the effectiveness of its on-the-ground actions. That’s why this next Guardian criticism, from photojournalist Marc Vallée, is more hard-hitting.

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• Some 2,000 people crammed into a Moscow square amid a heavy police presence for a banned rock concert yesterday to protest plans for the building of a highway through protected forest land.

• A climate change activist was arrested Friday after she glued herself to a desk at the Royal Bank of Scotland’s headquarters. She was among 150 activists who breached the security perimeter separating a climate camp from the bank’s Edinburgh HQ at around midday.

• A group of Nigerian women in the country’s oil-rich south blocked access to a Chevron natural gas pipeline on Friday to protest poor living conditions in their community.

• Hundreds of people showed up for New York gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo’s campaign visit to Ithaca last week to demand that he hold off on supporting hydrofracking in the natural gas-laden Marcellus Shale.

• Dozens of mothers breastfed their infants at a Phoenix McDonald’s on Saturday to protest the eviction of a woman doing the same earlier this month.

• Hundreds of residents of Kaliningrad, Russia’s Baltic exclave, gathered on a central square Saturday to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s government.

• About 100 almost-naked anti-bullfighting campaigners lay down outside the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao on Saturday in a protest coinciding with the start of the northern Spanish city’s annual bullfight festival.

• Hundreds of climate activists cut through a perimeter fence and occupied land at the Royal Bank of Scotland’s headquarters on Wednesday to protest its multi-billion pound loans to the oil and mining industries. They expect at least 500 activists to gather for a day of direct action against RBS on Monday.

• Some 600 demonstrators blocked the main highway linking the Afghani capital of Kabul and the eastern city of Jalalabad on Wednesday to protest the mounting civilian death toll in US-led raids in the war-torn country.

• Nearly two dozen people, some in wheelchairs, blocked a major intersection in front of the California Capitol in Sacramento for several hours on Wednesday afternoon to protest proposed budget cuts to in-home health care services. They were subsequently arrested.

• About a dozen demonstrators who gathered in front of the San Diego county clerk’s office yesterday to demand the issuance of marriage licenses for same-sex couples were arrested after refusing orders to disperse.

• More than 100 Bronxites rallied at the midtown offices of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac yesterday to demand that the lending giants cut down on predatory landlords who neglect their properties and ignore renters’ rights.

• About 200 people blocked a major highway outside of Cairo on Wednesday to protest daily power outages that have hit many parts of the country.

After more than three years of pressuring major banks that fund mountaintop removal coal mining, Rainforest Action Network [RAN] is reporting that the top four US banks have curbed their loans for this destructive practice.

Within the last two years, Bank of America, Citi, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo along with Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley have successively passed public policies limiting their financial relationships with coal operators that practice mountaintop removal (MTR) coal mining. These banks were the lead financiers of the practice prior to their policy shifts. Last month, Wells Fargo became the fourth top US bank to adopt a position limiting MTR financing. These policies signal a sector-wide shift away from a mining practice that has become increasingly controversial and a move toward more environmentally conscious fossil fuels financing.

[...]

One of the major impacts of these mountaintop mining policies is that the banks are no longer financing Massey Energy, the leading MTR coal company in the country that was involved in the April 5 Upper Big Branch mine explosion where 29 miners tragically died. In particular, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, all of which have had substantial financing relationships (underwriting bonds or providing loans) with Massey Energy since January 2005, no longer finance the notorious company.

As examples: Based on Bloomberg data, Bank of America, which was one of the ‘syndication agents’ on a $175 million revolver loan to Massey in March 2008, is no longer on the deal or any others with the company.  JPMorgan, similarly, underwrote $180 million in debt securities in 2008 to Massey and was also the lead manager on a $233 million share deal (joint with UBS) that same year. JPMorgan no longer has any financial ties to the company.

This victory could be of great importance to the larger fight for climate justice because, as RAN co-founder Mike Roselle told me last year, “If we can’t win on mountaintop removal, then there’s very little hope that anything can be done.”

• About a hundred net neutrality activists left their laptops at home Friday afternoon to gather at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters to protest the search giant’s perceived betrayal of the movement for federal internet openness rules. The protest group’s ranks included eager young activists, long-time technologists, first-time protesters and the ever-present Raging Grannies, who led anti-Google sing-alongs set to classic Americana songs.

• Around 1,000 Senegalese opposition supporters took to the streets on Saturday to protest President Abdoulaye Wade’s regime, saying they were fed up with power cuts, floods, and rising food costs.

• In Haiti, dozens of protesters held a sit-in at the National Palace Thursday to oppose the forced evictions of thousands of displaced residents from makeshift camps. The Haitian government has been urged to issue a moratorium on all forced evictions until alternative shelter options can be provided.

• Two Korean priests are publicly fasting outside a government building in the latest protest against the highly controversial Four Rivers project, which they believe will be detrimental to the environment.

• Iranian opposition members in Germany are staging a two-day hunger strike to demand a stop executions and an international investigation of prisons in their home country. A group of 20 on Friday chanted slogans such as “Stop stonings” and “Free political prisoners” on Berlin’s most prominent public spot at the Brandenburg Gate, two days after the purported TV confession of an Iranian woman facing death by stoning on adultery charges.

• On Saturday, all the taxi drivers in the provincial city of Dégolan‌ in Iranian Kurdistan went on strike parking their taxi cabs by the Bolbanabad terminal to protest a 20 day interruption in the compressed natural gas supplies.

• Sunday’s game between the Arizona Diamondbacks and Washington Nationals was briefly interrupted by protesters urging commissioner Bud Selig to move the 2011 All-Star Game from Phoenix because of Arizona’s new immigration legislation.

Former workers of the Vestas wind turbine manufacturing plant on the Isle of Wight gathered last month outside the building they occupied for 19 days last summer to mark the one year anniversary of their struggle. The Save Vestas Jobs! blog described the reunion as short-lived due to “the familiar faces of the old Vestas security team” arriving on the scene within a matter of minutes, “looking very concerned.”

Such fear on the part of a company that for all intents and purposes “won” the struggle would be unwarranted if not for two factors. First and foremost, many grievances among the workers remain standing. According to the campaign blog, “… the occupiers have still not been reinstated and a tribunal that was to be held last week for some of the occupiers ended prematurely when ex-workers were threatened with full and crippling costs by Vestas and forced to withdraw their case.”

The second reason Vestas has legitimate reason to fear continued protest is that many people were energized by the events of last summer to the point of feeling involved in something magical. The very site of the reunion, for example, was known as the “Magic Roundabout” because it was where campaign supporters gathered during the occupation and then for several months thereafter. It was a place made by the coming together of people for a united cause and gave empowerment to folks who likely didn’t have much before.

A reporter for the BBC recently recalled his experience at the “Magic Roundabout” last summer:

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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.

• Several Greenpeace activists were arrested after rappelling off the Calgary Tower yesterday morning to hang a banner attacking the relationship between the oilsands industry and government.

• Hundreds of Afghans have taken to the streets in the southwestern Helmand province to voice their anger at the killing of a 65-year-old man by US troops. Another demonstration was held in the southern Oruzgan province over the alleged desecration of Islam’s holy book, the Quran, by US forces.

• Two men carrying Mexican flags in protest of Arizona’s immigration law ran onto the outfield during the seventh inning of the New York Mets’ game against the Arizona Diamondbacks Friday night at Citi Field. Prior to the game, about 40 people across the street from the ballpark chanted “Oppose racism!” and “Boycott Arizona!”

• Several hundred Red Shirt protesters defied a state of emergency in the Thai capital on Monday to stage a symbolic protest, with hundreds of people sprawling on the ground and chanting, “People died here!”

• An estimated 30,000 people, consisting of tourists and residents, linked hands on the Thai island of Koh Samui on Saturday afternoon to protest oil exploration due to start in the Gulf of Thailand.

• Advocates for New York City’s community gardens delivered fresh produce to the steps of city hall Monday to protest the expiration of the Garden Settlement of 2002, which protected community gardens from real estate developers.

• About half the detainees at the 216-bed Campsfield House immigration centre in Oxfordshire Britain are refusing meals to protest their prolonged detention and treatment, which has caused many to suffer from mental health problems.

• About 600 employees of a Volvo bus plant in India have been on strike for a week to demand better pay and the return to work of four colleagues suspended following a dispute at the plant.

• Members of the youth climate group Consequence hosted a Big Oil Carnival for Senate staffers on the steps of Union Station in Washington DC on Tuesday. The event was complete with oil-themed games, Tony Hayward clowns, a stilt walking Uncle Sam and a message to the Senate: “Stop playing games with our clean energy future.”

• Greenpeace U.K. shut down at least 30 BP stations in London on Tuesday, fanning out to as many as 50 BP stations and posting banners that said, “Closed: Moving beyond petroleum.” They also pulled safety switches that cut off fuel supplies at the stations — and removed the switches so they couldn’t be turned back on again.

• Four supporters of the federal DREAM Act stood before Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in full cap and gowns at a Netroots Nation luncheon in Las Vegas last week to protest his lack of conviction on a bill that would allow a pathway to citizenship for undocumented youth.

• An animal rights activist was arrested in Jordan’s capital on Sunday after covering herself in lettuce in a square along one of Amman’s trendiest streets. She held a placard reading “Let vegetarianism grow on you.”

• Rights activists, including celebrities such as Bianca Jagger and actors from James Cameron’s film Avatar, gathered outside the venue of the annual general meeting of the mining company Vedanta in London on Wednesday to protest its controversial plans to mine tribal land in the Orissa region of India.

• Eight people were arrested during a sit-in staged by the direct action group GetEqual in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday as part of an effort to push for a vote on the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, which would outlaw workplace discrimination based sexual orientation and gender identity.

• 15 people from a small town in North Queensland, Australia blocked a coal export terminal by camping on it for two nights to protest pollution and noise from the coal trains that pass through the town 15 times a day.

• About 30 people, including a priest, protesting working conditions in front of the Hyatt Regency in downtown Chicago were arrested by police Thursday in a staged act of civil disobedience.

• French air travel has suffered significantly since Tuesday morning when some air traffic controllers went on strike to protest the reorganization of European skyways.

• In Las Vegas, eight activists protesting Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s inaction on gay rights legislation were arrested for blocking traffic at one of the Strip’s busiest intersections today.

• On Tuesday, about 20 undocumented youths held sit-ins and risked arrest at various congressional offices in Washington D.C., including California Senator Dianne Feinstein, to urge the passage of the DREAM Act.

• Yesterday morning, a group of Barriere Lake Algonquins set up a peaceful blockade on the access road leading to their reserve, about 300 km north of Ottawa. The defensive action was aimed at stopping a government-appointed electoral officer from holding a nomination meeting on the reserve for the government’s highly-controversial imposed Band Council Election.

• The Teamsters Union, the Center for Health, Environment & Justice, Clean New York, WEACT for Environmental Justice, concerned parents, students and consumer activists protested toxic PVC plastic used in toys at the Toys R Us flagship store in Times Square yesterday.

• Rainforest Action Network activists disrupted Massey CEO Don Blankenship’s talk at the National Press Club yesterday sending by holding up two large banners that said:“Massey coal – not Clean, Safe or Forever.” They were eventually escorted out by security.

At 1am this morning, Democracy Village – the antiwar protest camp on Parliament Square in London that began on May 1 – was finally brought to an end. According to witnesses, it took about 60 bailiffs, with the assistance of police, to remove the remaining protesters after a few tied themselves to scaffolding.

The activists involved, however, do not appear discouraged. According to the AFP:

“People from ‘Democracy Village’ are going to carry on with this protest. We’re not going away,” said Pete Phoenix, a 36-year-old protester with blond dreadlocks and sunglasses.

“Lots of areas around the city are going to be taken over in the next few days and weeks.

“Our spirit is stronger after this eviction,” he told AFP, saying the camp had “raised awareness around the world” about Britain’s involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The BBC is reporting that some are even planning on returning to their makeshift camp on Parliament Square once the fences that have been erected are removed.

While Democracy Village was started by antiwar protesters, they were over time joined by an eclectic  mix of climate change activists, pro-democracy campaigners, anarchists and the homeless.

According to Maria Gallastegui, who has run a vigil for Gaza in the square for four years, in its 11 weeks the camp changed from being “from 100% activist to 30% activist and 70% homeless.” This led to many activists focusing more of their energy on helping those in need than direct action.

The eviction order will not affect Brian Haw, the most well-known protester at Parliament Square, who has camped out there since 2001 to protest Britain’s involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Apparently, Haw was never a fan of Democracy Village, calling the protesters “deliberately unreasonable, even depraved and outrageous.”

While it was probably not a wise move strategically to include activists pushing so many different issues in the camp, or to allow alcohol and drugs on the premises, they were no doubt fighting the good fight.

• 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.

• Police arrested 37 people for entering a Tennessee nuclear weapons plant on Monday during a demonstration marking the anniversary of the landmark Plowshares protest in 1980 at a missile plant in Pennsylvania, where Dan and Phil Berrigan were able to get inside the General Electric facility, damage a missile nose cone and pour blood on various documents. Four of the original “Plowshares Eight,” each of whom served time in jails or prisons for their actions participated in the protest: John Schuchardt, Molly Rush, Anne Montgomery and Carl Kabat – as well as Liz McAlister, Phil Berrigan’s widow.

• Merchants in Tehran’s main bazaar gathered in protest on Tuesday to protest a government plan to dramatically increase taxes on their businesses. With threats of a general strike looming, authorities were forced to back down.

• Hundreds of people staged a demonstration in Rome on Wednesday to demand help from the government for the reconstruction of places damaged by the April 2009 quake.

• About 1,000 ex-militants in Nigeria, who last year laid down their arms under a government amnesty, drove a convoy of buses towards the Nigerian capital yesterday and blocked the highway for several hours to protest their exclusion from the on-going post-amnesty retraining program.

• Religious and immigrant rights activists gathered outside the White House yesterday to urge the Obama administration to approach immigration reform and voice support for the Justice Department’s recent challenge of Arizona’s hardline immigration policy.

• Four Earth First! protesters were arrested today after they temporarily stopped a semi-truck carrying a 140-foot wind turbine blade to Kibby Mountain in Maine. The protesters oppose alternative energy projects that profit corporations at the expense of sensitive ecosystems.

• The wife of a quadriplegic in Britain has gone on hunger strike to protest the lack of National Health Service care for her husband. She has vowed to starve to death to win the support he needs.

• Thousands of Italian farmers took part in a demonstration on the Austrian border to protest the importation of food with Italian-sounding branding that they feel harms Italy’s reputation for quality food.

• 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.