While imprisoned after his 1967 Baltimore 4 action, Philip Berrigan, in his Prison Journals of a Priest Revolutionary, wrote:

When a people arbitrarily decides that this planet and its riches are to be divided unequally among equals, and that the only criterion for the division is the amount of naked power at its disposal, diplomacy tend to be essentially military, truth tends to be fiction, and the world tends to become a zoo without the benefit of cages. And war tends to be the ultimate rationality, because reason has been bankrupted of human alternatives (5).

Post-Vietnam, the American political, economic, and militaristic landscape described by Berrigan had worsened. The “naked power” of the United States now included an arsenal of 30,000 nuclear warheads and a first-strike policy. On September 9th, 1980, Berrigan and seven others said a decisive “NO!” to nuclear madness by entering the General Electric Re-entry Division in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.  Along with Philip, Fr. Daniel Berrigan (his brother), Sr. Anne Montgomery, Elmer Maas, Molly Rush, Dean Hammer, Fr. Carl Kabat, and John Schuchardt hammered on two nose cones of Mark 12A warheads, poured their own blood on warhead documents and order forms, and prayed for disarmament and peace. With this act, the first of over 75 Plowshares disarmament actions came into being. The “Plowshares disarmament movement” is now international in scope. Many of its activists, who understand that waging peace has its price, have served a substantial amount of time in prison.

Art Laffin, a lifelong Plowshares activist and community member of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House in Washington, DC, speaks to what Plowshares activists hope to communicate through their actions in his introduction to Swords Into Plowshares: A Chronology of Plowshares Disarmament Actions:

…[there is an] underlying faith that the power of nonviolent love can overcome the forces of violence; a reverence for the sacredness of all life and creation; a plea for justice for victims of poverty, the arms race and economic sanctions; and acceptance of personal responsibility for the dismantling and physical conversion of the weapons; and a spiritual conversion of the heart to the way of justice and reconciliation (3).

In this same introduction, he explains why hammers and blood are or have been used in Plowshares actions. Hammers are used to begin the literal dismantling of weapons that rounds of “peace” talks have failed to do. They are also used to symbolize the “building again” process, e.g., a hammer can be used to build homes and hospitals. Blood clearly points to the blood that is spilled so carelessly in war. It is also an essential component of life, which points to our need for one another and our unity as one people.  In their nonviolent actions and their acceptance of responsibility for their actions, Plowshares activists are those who accept suffering rather than to impose it upon other people, as is done, for example, in the waging of armed conflict.

While commemorating thirty years of resistance to nuclear weapons at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge, TN, this past July, John Schuchardt reflected upon the first days of the Plowshares 8, “We would never be thinking about starting a [Plowshares] movement,” he said. “This was a humble, simple human action by a few people who met and prayed and studied the scripture together, spent time together for about nine months and, of course, talked about the practical, logistical aspects.” Daniel Berrigan, in his foreword to Swords Into Plowshares: A Chronology of Plowshares Disarmament Actions, writes of how community members struggled to name themselves and their action:

We were locked in a dilemma, eight of us, as summer tipped into the fall of 1980. We had met for months of prayer and discussion. But try as we might, one matter escaped us. What to name our newborn resolve (or better, our not-quite born resolve?)

… According to our Bible, the ‘name’ must go beyond itself, mean something, connect. It must evoke a tradition, a vocation, a task in the world – a gift (even a wildly difficult one!). It must hint at community desire, passion, hands-on conscience…

What most Americans took horridly for granted as ‘normal’ – nuclear weapons studding the earth like the sores of Job, the Pentagon squatting monstrously on the land, brooding, hatching its hellish eggs, its invasions, bombings (add in the year 2002 a plague of depleted uranium, sanctions throttling the Iraqi children). Quite simply, these could not be taken as ‘normal’ acts of a civilized people…

We knew it in our bones. That as yet unnamed ‘name’ of our action must echo the primordial nay.

On that late summer day, 1980, a momentous breakthrough occurred. It came as I recall, through Molly Rush, grandmother [and] founder of the Thomas Merton Center in Pittsburgh. At her suggestion, we opened our Bibles and took a close look at Isaiah 2: ‘They shall beat their swords into plowshares’ … (ix-x).

Sr. Anne Montgomery, who at 83 years of age has recently been indicted for her participation in the 2009 Disarm Now action, her sixth Plowshares action, writes beautifully of the communal process that helps one to prepare for such an action. In “Divine Obedience,” a chapter included in the book, Swords Into Plowshares: Nonviolent Direct Action for Disarmament, she notes:

…we begin our process with community prayers, reflection, and decision making; we try to reach a harmony, deeper than differences in philosophy and style, that will maintain our spirit through the trial and prison processes, which often require reaching consensus under difficult conditions. To make our prayer and action one, to reach out to the ‘other’ in a personal way, requires that we emphasize depth and relationship rather than numbers and high-powered organization … In such communities we can learn the true meaning of ‘conspiracy’: ‘breathing together’ the Spirit of life and beige formed by it into people faithful to the covenant of love — the law written in our hearts (27-28).

When Molly Rush walked into the GE nuclear weapons plant in September of 1980, she hammered on a warhead nose cone and “put a hole in one and a dent in another. And, I thought, these things are as vulnerable as we are, and we can undo what has been done. That was an amazing moment.” For thirty years now, Plowshares activists have refused to accept the “nuclear way of life,” a way of life that demands trillions of dollars and, potentially, millions of lives.  With courage and conviction, daring and imagination, love and patience, they have risked everything to say, quite clearly, “another way of life is possible.  We can undo what has been done.”

The state of Nevada has charged Libby and me, along with twelve others, with criminal trespass onto the base. On April 9, 2009, after a ten-day vigil outside the air force base, we entered it with a letter we wanted to circulate among the base personnel, describing our opposition to a massive targeted assassination program. Our trial date is set for September 14.

Creech is one of several homes of the U.S. military’s aerial drone program. U.S. Air Force personnel there pilot surveillance and combat drones, unmanned aerial vehicles with which they are instructed to carry out extrajudicial killings in Afghanistan and Iraq. The different kinds of drone include the “Predator” and the “Reaper.” The Obama administration favors a combination of drone attacks and Joint Special Operations raids to pursue its stated goal of eliminating whatever Al Qaeda presence exists in these countries. As the U.S. accelerates this campaign, we hear from UN special rapporteur for extrajudicial executions, Philip Alston, who suggests that U.S. citizens may be asleep at the wheel, oblivious to clear violations of international law which we have real obligations to prevent (or at the very least discuss). Many citizens are now focused on the anniversary of September 11th and the controversy over whether an Islamic Center should be built near Ground Zero. Corporate media does little to help ordinary U.S. people understand that the drones which hover over potential targets in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen create small “ground zeroes” in multiple locales on an everyday basis.

Libby, at the wheel, is telling Jerica about her visit to Kabul, in 1970. “I worked for Pan Am,” said Libby, “and that meant being able to stay for free at the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul. After landing in Pakistan, we hired a driver to take us across the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan. All along the highway we saw herds of camel traveling along a parallel old road. I wonder if the camel market in Kabul is still there?”

Jerica says she’ll look for it. She and I have been hard at work to obtain visas and arrange flights for an October trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan. [Libby is exceptional in that she hasn't tried to talk Jerica out of the dangerous travel.]

Conversation switches to whatever CD has just come on, and I tune out, wondering if I’ve done my share of issuing warnings to Jerica about traveling in a war zone.

Tinny music and rural Texan countryside blend together.

My thoughts drift to the Emergency Surgical Center for Victims of War, in Kabul. A little over two months ago, Josh and I met Nur Said, age 11, in the hospital’s ward for young boys injured by various explosions. Most of the boys welcomed a diversion from the ward’s tedium, and they were especially eager to sit outside, in the hospital garden, where they’d form a circle and talk together for hours. Nur Said stayed indoors. Too miserable to talk, he’d merely nod at us, his hazel eyes welling up with tears. Weeks earlier, he had been part of a hardy band of youngsters that helped bolster their family incomes by searching for scrap metal and unearthing land mines on a mountainside in Afghanistan. Finding an unexploded land mine was a eureka for the children because, once opened, the valuable brass parts could be extracted and sold. Nur had a land mine in hand when it suddenly exploded, ripping four fingers off his right hand and blinding him in his left eye.

On a sad continuum of misfortune, Nur and his companions fared better than another group of youngsters scavenging for scrap metal in the Kunar Province on August 26th.

Following an alleged Taliban attack on a nearby police station, NATO forces flew overhead to “engage” the militants. If the engagement includes bombing the area under scrutiny, it would be more apt to say that NATO aimed to puree the militants. But in this case, the bombers mistook the children for militants and killed six of them, aged 6 to 12. Local police said there were no Taliban at the site during the attack, only children.

General Petraeus assures his superiors that the U.S. is effectively using drone surveillance, sensors and other robotic means of gaining intelligence to assure that they are hunting down the right targets for assassination. But survivors of these attacks insist that civilians are at risk. In Afghanistan, thirty high schools have shut down because the parents say that their children are distracted by the drones flying overhead and that it’s unsafe for them to gather in the schools.

I think of Nur, trapped in his misery, at the Emergency surgical center. He’ll be one among many thousands of amputees whose lives are forever altered by the war and poverty that afflict his country. Many of these survivors are likely to feel intense hatred toward their persecutors. 300 villagers in the Sayed Abad district of Wardak province took to the streets in protest on August 12, following an alleged U.S. night raid. “They murdered three students and detained five others,” one of the protesters said. “All of them were civilians.” Villagers, shocked by the killing, shouted that they didn’t want Americans in Afghanistan. According to village eyewitnesses, American troops stormed into a family home and shot three brothers, all young men, and then took their father into custody. One of the young men was a student who had returned to the family home to celebrate the traditional “iftar” fast at the beginning of Ramadan. Local policemen are investigating the allegations, and NATO recently conceded that they may have killed some civilians. (see www.vcnv.org Afghanistan Atrocities update).

The drones feed hourly intelligence information to U.S. war commanders, but the machinery can’t inform people about the spiraling anger as the U.S. conducts assassination operations in countries throughout the 1.3 billion-strong Muslim world. “Sold as defending Americans,” writes Fred Branfman, “(it) is actually endangering us all. Those responsible for it, primarily General Petraeus, are recklessly seeking short-term tactical advantage while making an enormous long-term strategic error that could lead to countless American deaths in the years and decades to come.”

The Prius is comfortable, but my side of the backseat has become a makeshift office. The most important file contains Bill Quigley’s comprehensive argumentation as to why the court should allow us to present a necessity defense based on international law. Bill is the Legal Director for the Center for Constitutional Rights. On September 14, we want to call on him as an expert witness. We and our codefendants have chosen to mount a pro se defense to try to persuade our judge that far from committing a crime we have exercised our rights and our duties, under international and U.S. law, to try to prevent one and to raise public opposition to usage of drones in “targeted” assassinations.

Jerica hands me the questions we can use to elicit Bill’s testimony. We try to word our questions so that the evidence will be admissible in court. “Could Bill please inform the court about citizen’s responsibilities under international law, could he explain to the court what articles and statutes we will be invoking?” To a layperson, it seems like an elaborate game of “Mother May-I,” and we haven’t even started developing questions to ask Col. Ann Wright, the former U.S. diplomat, who had helped re-open the U.S. Embassy in Kabul shortly before resigning her job in a refusal to cooperate with buildup toward the May 2003 U.S. Shock and Awe invasion of Iraq.

Rounding out our trio of expert witnesses is former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. We hope his personal experience within the U.S. government might arouse the court’s more careful attention to the seldom-discussed legal issues that are fundamentally at stake here. However, the judge has already indicated that his calendar only allots one day for our trial.

Libby, Jerica, Mary and I have blocked out at least ten days, inclusive of travel, for our small contribution to an ongoing effort of people around the world working to put drones on trial. We’re in New Mexico now. I feel cramped and restless, and I wonder if Tucumcari, where we plan to stop for lunch, has internet. We can’t possibly bring the testimony of Afghans and Pakistanis to court this Tuesday. Their testimony, borne on bodies scarred and mutilated and harbored in memories of nightmare, will never be given away and cannot be given in court. Extrajudicial killings are killings without rule of law, without trial. Few if any Afghan or Pakistani civilian survivors of U.S. wars will ever travel to a U.S. court of law for consideration of their grievances.

And at this moment I realize that if we were four Afghans or Pakistanis or Iraqis traveling in a war zone, we’d have spent this entire trip watching not the Southwestern landscape, but the skies.

If the five activists are found guilty on charges of “conspiracy, trespass, destruction of property on a naval installation, and depredation of government property,” they could each face up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The group’s website recaps the action and has some great quotes from the activists about how they’re taking the news:

…they entered Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor in the early morning hours of November 2, 2009, All Souls Day, with the intention of calling attention to the illegality and immorality of the existence of the Trident weapons system.

During the action they held a banner saying…“Disarm Now Plowshares : Trident: Illegal + Immoral”,  left a trail of blood, hammered on the roadway and fences around Strategic Weapons Facility – Pacific (SWFPAC) and scattered sunflower seeds throughout the base.  They gained entry to the secure nuclear weapons storage facility known as Strategic Weapons Facility-Pacific (SWFPAC) where they were detained, and after extensive questioning by base security, FBI and Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), cited for trespass and destruction of government property, given ban and bar letters and released.

[...]

Bichsel said he feels compelled by his faith to continue risking his freedom for peace, despite two open-heart surgeries that require him to take frequent rests during even light exertion.  “The power of the resurrection is much stronger than our destructive ways,” he said. “I believe the presence of God made manifest through the witness of nonviolent action will break the bonds of fear, hopelessness, and death in which nuclear weapons imprison us.”

[...]

Kelly said he expects the Disarm Now Plowshares trial to be “another act of resistance” because the government will try to limit what the defendants have to say about nuclear weapons and war. The judicial body functions as a legitimizer of nuclear weapons, Kelly said. “Our actions, which could be part of the solutions, are deemed illegal, because nuclear weapons are legal,” so that courtroom becomes a place of further resistance.”

• At least 10,000 protesters marched through the streets of Paris Saturday to rally against the government’s crackdown on immigrants and the recent expulsion of hundreds of Roma.

• Hundreds of people took to the streets in northern Afghanistan to protest a US-led airstrike in Takhar province that killed civilians last Thursday. The demonstrators shouted slogans against American and foreign troops and called for them to be brought to justice.

• About 3,000 Muslims marched Saturday through Indonesia’s capital to the U.S. Embassy to protest plans by a Florida church to burn the Quran on Sept. 11.

• A small sit-in at the University of Connecticut’s administration building entered its third day on Thursday, and students vowed to remain in the building until the university promises to increase janitors’ pay.

• Gaza families of prisoners detained in Israeli jails held a protest Monday against the deduction of 170 shekels from prisoners’ salaries for electricity payments. The protesters gathered at Red Cross headquarters, and chanted slogans blaming the ruling Hamas party for the deduction, which they said increased prisoners’ suffering.

• London Underground workers started a fresh wave of 24-hour strikes, threatening travel chaos for days and costing the economy almost £50 million, in protest at plans to axe 800 jobs. The action, to be followed by further stoppages in October and November, will disrupt Tube services, used by millions of passengers every day.

• Shopkeepers observed a general strike and schools were shut for the day on Saturday in Quetta, Pakistan to mourn an overnight attack on minority Shiite Muslims that killed 68 people.

• Greenpeace members protested against Japan in front of its Ankara embassy Monday following the arrest of two group activists in that country after they exposed a whale meat scandal involving a government-sponsored whaling program in the Southern Ocean.

Chilean art collective Casagrande brought its “Poetry Rain” project to Berlin last weekend, dropping 100,000 poems over the city as a protest against war. Casagrande has done this several times since 2001, focussing on cities that have been bombed during actual warfare, such as Santiago de Chile, Dubrovnik, Guernica, and Warsaw. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any video of the drop, just the perparation for it. But if it was anything like the one they did in Warsaw, it was no doubt a spectacle to behold.

According to The Guardian:

Organisers say that just as wartime bombings were intended to “break the morale” of the inhabitants of a city, so the poetry bombing “‘builds’ a new city by giving new meaning to events of her tragic past and therefore presenting the city in a whole new original way”.

The Berlin project, for which Casagrande worked with Literaturwerkstatt Berlin as part of the Long Night of Museums, took place in the city’s Lustgarten, where a crowd of thousands had gathered to hear readings and performances by Latin American artists.

Poems dropped from the helicopter circling the area were by poets including Ann Cotten, Karin Fellner, Nora Gomringer, Andrea Heuser, Orsolya Kalász, Björn Kuhligk, Marion Poschmann, Arne Rautenberg, Monika Rinck, Hendrik Rost, Ulrike Almut Sandig, Tom Schulz, Thien Tran, Anja Utler, Jan Wagner, Ron Winkler and Uljana Wolf, according to Lyrikline.org, one of the organisations supporting the project.

Repeating these criticisms is not only an important step toward setting the record straight, but also making Churchill’s well-worn path to war less appealing. Metta Center for Nonviolence Education founder Michael Nagler recently expanded upon this point in an op-ed comparing General Petraeus’s stubborn refusal to pull troops out of Afghanistan to Churchill’s equally obstinate declaration that he would not “preside over the dissolution of the British Empire.”

What was Churchill’s mistake? I believe there were two of them, or perhaps more accurately, one big one showing up on two levels of reality. Churchill notoriously missed the source of Gandhi’s power and the depth of determination he had roused in the Indian people. At a dinner party in Cairo, the South African leader Jan Smuts, reflecting on his own defeat at Gandhi’s hands, said the reason they had failed to stop him was that they had been unable to appeal to people’s religious feelings. Churchill, always obtuse on this point, is said to have snorted, “Nonsense; I have appointed many bishops,” and went on to preside over precisely what he denied would happen.

But there is a deeper lack underlying this one: ignorance of the fundamental fact of human nature, that violence is the wrong way to build democracy, win friends or stabilize anything worth keeping. Destructive means – and no one can deny that military means destroy people and property, indeed the planet itself – do not bring to pass constructive ends. That seems to be an underlying law of human dynamics that we ignore at our peril. General Petraeus and everyone who still dreams of a military resolution to the horrors that militant means have created in Afghanistan seem to simply miss this.

Nagler goes on to explain how the positive energy of nonviolence will have greater longterm positive effects on Afghanistan than war:

Over half the world now lives in a society that has seen huge changes – almost all of them positive in nature – emerge in the wake of a nonviolent uprising or movement of some kind; what Jonathan Schell calls “the unconquerable world,” the will of aroused people, is quite real.

That process has not happened yet in Afghanistan; but we must remember that the second greatest nonviolence advocate in Gandhi’s train, sometimes called “the Frontier Gandhi,” was Badshah Khan who raised an “army” of over 80,000 Pathans – the very people whom we are now fighting – pledged to complete nonviolence of behavior and played a great part in dislodging British control in what was then the North West Province of India. How would it work today? This much we know: the “wrong stuff” is not working, and the “right stuff” – nonviolence – is there to be developed. As it stands, however, those who call their use of violence a “job” are keeping themselves and all of us from carrying out the real job of every person alive: discovering how to live in peace by creative, nonviolent ways of dealing with one another and our difficulties. From Winston Churchill to four-star General Petraeus, we need to question and confront the overconfident leaders who seem to be oblivious to any other form of power than militarized empire.

If Churchill is rolling over in his grave at such wide-eyed optimism that can only be a good thing.

• 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.

• Singing choruses of “we shall not be moved” while scattering sunflower seeds, 14 activists were arrested in Kansas City on Monday after blocking an earth moving vehicle on the site of a proposed nuclear weapons manufacturing facility.

• Last Friday, around 35 Palestinians demonstrated against Hallamish settlement with around 15 Israeli and international peace activists in the village of An Nabi Salih.

• German workers on Tuesday protested against what their union says are plans by the country’s central bank to have euro banknotes printed by foreign companies.

• Some Pakistani flood victims blocked highways to demand government help on Tuesday.

• Three television channels in Ukraine went on strike on Saturday in protest of steadily increasing pressure on media in Ukraine, with hundreds of other journalists declaring readiness to join the action.

• Students from various schools and universities in the Philippines traded the four corners of their classrooms for the streets last Friday to join the National Youth Walkout and appeal for more government support for the education sector.

• On Monday, hundreds of protesters started a sit-in outside the legislature, fueled by mounting anger over the government’s cross-strait policies and the expected passage of a controversial trade agreement with China later this week.

• The 19-day long protest in Bolivia’s Potosi province was finally brought to an end with the protesters lifting the blockade of the airport and major roads after a deal was struck with the government.

• The entire team of Sri Lanka’s government wildlife vets has gone on strike amid mounting controversy over an elephant conservation plan that has led to increased clashes between the animals and villagers.

• A group of desperate job-hunters—who’ve been out of work so long their unemployment benefits ran out—staged a protest rally on the steps of Federal Hall on Wall Street yesterday to demand that the Senate pass the Tier 5 unemployment extension.

• A crowd of approximately 35 gathered at JP Morgan Chase’s offices in San Francisco on Tuesday to demand that banks and private equity firms pay California counties millions in overdue real estate taxes related to corporate acquisitions stemming from the economic crisis.

• Four Greenpeace activists climbed onto the roof of Poland’s environment ministry in Warsaw this week to protest the government’s lackluster defence of the Bialowieza Primeval Forest, one of Europe’s most precious environments.

• Employees at the Mott’s apple processing plant in Williamson, N.Y., have been on strike for at least two months with no end in sight, as the company insists on wage cuts despite posting record profits.

• A crowd of about 300 villagers in Kabul blocked a main road in eastern Afghanistan on Thursday to protest the killing of three innocent villagers by US Forces. In the first six months of this year, 386 civilians were killed by NATO or Afghan government forces.

• Police arrested five of about 100 protesters gathered outside a Minneapolis hotel yesterday, trying to deliver petitions to commissioner Bud Selig to move the 2011 All-Star game out of Arizona because of that state’s new immigration law.

• Expatriate Kashmiris and Pakistanis from different parts of the United Kingdom staged a big demonstration in front of 10-Downing Street on Thursday to protest against British Prime Minister David Cameron’s remarks on issues of Pakistan and Kashmir.

• Public sector workers went on strike across South Africa Tuesday, closing schools and wreaking havoc on a wide array of public services. As many as 1.3 million people were expected to walk off their jobs. Between 10,000 and 100,000 workers also demonstrated Tuesday across five provinces.

• Dozens of construction workers building a subway in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, have vowed to begin a hunger strike today to demand three months of unpaid wages.

• On Monday, a few dozen Embassy Suites workers who claim they are routinely denied breaks walked off the job in Irvine, California.

• Anti-government protesters in Bolivia tightened their siege of Potosi on Saturday, launching a hunger strike and cutting rail links to Chile, as tourists began negotiating their way out of the mining city, 10 days into the blockade.

• Nine protesters were arrested for blocking the main gate to Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor on Monday. They were among members and supporters of Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, which holds an annual vigil at the base on the anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

• More than 30,000 truck drivers in the Dominican Republic went on a 24-hour strike yesterday to protest a government proposal to raise the fuel tax.

• Workers at the Post-Gazette walked out at Noon on Monday to protest pending staff cuts the paper says are needed to stay afloat.

• In India, Yoga Guru Baba Ramdev staged a sit-in protest at Haridwar with a demand to halt the hydropower projects across River Ganga and also to protect the river from further exploitation and pollution. Several Hindu monks also accompanied Baba Ramdev in this crusade.

• A three-day strike launched on Monday by customs workers in Ivory Coast over benefits that have been withheld is blocking exports of cocoa from the world’s top grower of the beans.