• Building on the largest opposition rally in years Monday, Russian protests spread to more cities on Tuesday as demonstrators denounced federal election results—resulting in hundreds of arrests.

• On Tuesday, thousands of young Yemenis in Sanaa continued their sit-in, despite President Saleh’s signed agreement that he would step down, declaring that their revolution is far from over. This followed demonstrations which erupted on Sunday, as residents of Taiz marched in protest of immunity provisions given to the outgoing President.

• Greenpeace activists infiltrated a French nuclear plant Monday and hung a banner on a reactor building in an attempt to expose nuclear national security weaknesses.

• Dozens of Occupy D.C. members were arrested late Sunday in an act of civil disobedience when they refused to dismantle a structure that they were building for shelter.

• Thousands protested at the UN Climate Conference in Durban, South Africa on Sunday, calling for a strong international plan to address climate change.

• Animal rights advocates in Taipei, Taiwan gathered by the hundreds on Sunday, condemning the conditions of animal shelters throughout the country.

• In India on Sunday, thousands marched and several began a hunger strike to show their support for the decommissioning of a damn in the interest of protecting local farmers.

• Kashmir witnessed protests and sit-ins on Saturday as residents of Srinagar decried the police’s use of pepper guns in breaking up demonstrations the day before.

• On Saturday, secular Tunisians held a counter-rally in front of Parliament, opposing a group of Islamists who were calling for female university students to wear a full-face veil.

• Thousands in India blocked train tracks Saturday, agitating for compensation to be given to victims of the industrial accident at Bhopal in 1984.

On Saturday night at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, just before the third act of Faust began, a man began yelling from the audience, “Occupy Wall Street! Occupy Wall Street!” It had neither the rhythm of a chant nor the participatory quality of the usual “mic check” that has been used to disrupt so much lately, interrupting public figures including Michele Bachmann, Scott Walker, and Barack Obama. (Maybe having the quorum for a mic check would have cost too many tickets.) It was first received with a boo from someone on the opposite side of the theater, but that was quickly drowned out by a round of applause—something like what a singer might receive at curtain call for a decent performance in a supporting role. The protester was carried away by the NYPD.

Presumably this comes as part of Occupy Lincoln Center, which on December 1 held a protest attended by Philip Glass, Lou Reed, and Laurie Anderson. That night, the Met performed Glass’s opera about Gandhi, Satyagraha. One sign read, according to the LA Times, “Gandhi would be pepper sprayed.” Like the other Occupy actions under the umbrella of Occupy Museums, these protests oppose “cultural institutions that serve the nation’s wealthiest citizens at the expense of the vast majority.” (It doesn’t help that people aren’t being allowed to protest on Lincoln Center’s plaza—apparently, it’s Koch-Blocked. Or that Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s media is one of Lincoln Center’s chief funders.)

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• The Occupy Wall Street movement marked its two-month anniversary on Thursday with a series of actions in New York City, including a massive rally in Foley Square and march across the Brooklyn Bridge in which an estimated 32,000 people participated.  There were also major protests, which led to scores of arrests, in cities across the country, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, Las Vegas, Atlanta, Miami, Denver, Houston, Dallas, Seattle, St. Louis, Boston, Milwaukee, Nashville, Columbia (South Carolina), and Washington, D.C.

• Tens of thousands of people are rallying in Egypt today as part of the ongoing protests calling for a quicker transition from military to civilian government.

• In San Francisco, 95 protesters were arrested on Wednesday after occupying a Bank of America branch in the financial district. The demonstrators pitched a tent inside the branch before they were detained.

• Workers of Nigeria’s state-run power firm on Wednesday protested the deployment of armed troops to their offices across the country in the wake of an order by their union to launch a pay strike.

• Thousands of Kuwaitis stormed parliament on Wednesday after police and elite forces beat  up protesters marching on the Prime Minister’s home to demand he resign and calling for the dissolution of the parliament over corruption.

• On Tuesday, Palestinian activists describing themselves as ‘freedom riders’ were dragged by police off an Israeli bus they planned to ride into Jerusalem.

• As many as 10,000 students and Occupy activists overflowed UC Berkeley’s Sproul  Plaza on Tuesday night following a daylong classroom walkout and established a small camp in defiance of the university’s edict that no tents be erected.

• Student leaders in Colombia have called off a monthlong boycott of classes at public universities after the government met their demand to withdraw educational reform legislation.

• Some 1,000 Iranian students created a human chain Tuesday around the Isfahan uranium conversion facility to protest a recent UN report charging that Tehran may be developing nuclear weapons.

• More than 40 veterans of the Chornobyl cleanup have gone on hunger strike in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk to protest planned pension cuts.

The 792nd consecutive weekly vigil outside of Alliant Techsystems in Minneapolis in August.

As I mentioned in this space earlier, I was recently in Barcelona at the War Resisters International’s seminar on War Profiteering and Peace Movement Responses. It was a really interesting time to be a Yankee abroad. The streets in the city center filled up with protests against budget cuts each evening, and everyone at the meetings was talking about OccupyWallStreet in slightly awed and disbelieving tones—as though to say “even the U.S. of A. is getting with the program.”

I was repeatedly asked where I thought the Occupy Movement was headed, a question I cleverly avoided—“look, is that a tapas bar over there? How do you say, ‘more wine, please’ in Spanish?” It is a good question, but as Donald Rumsfeld used to say: “that’s above my pay grade.”

At the end of each long day participating in different seminar tracks (war and exploitation of natural resources, exposing the bad guys, new trends in war profiteering) and workshops on how to research the arms trade, use social media and campaign against drone warfare, we gathered in the city center for the Trobada, convened by the Center for Study of Justice and Peace (Centre d’Estudis per a la Pau JM Delàs). Lots of people turned out for these nightly events, the one at which I presented drew more than one hundred people on a Friday night (but no one in Barcelona eats dinner before 10 pm anyway).

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Bonnie Urfer exudes calm and strength. Her eyes twinkle and her voice stretches o’s like a Wisconsinite. On Wednesday, Judge Bruce Guyton called her a “prolific criminal.”

Prolific? Sure. Bonnie has been an activist since the 1980s. Working with a group called Nukewatch out in the forests of Wisconsin, Bonnie has tracked nuclear waste and materials shipments, cut down the Extremely Low Frequency poles that studded her sylvan landscape to communicate the first strike orders to nuclear submarines, and been arrested dozens of times. Criminal? Not when nuclear weapons are illegal (at least according to international law—which by treaty is our law too), immoral and just plain useless.

But Bonnie is prolific in her artistic gifts as well as in her resistance.

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In The Trumpet of Conscience, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. conjured up an apt metaphor of urgency and transformative engagement:

There is nothing wrong with a traffic law which says you have to stop for a red light.  But when a fire is raging, the fire truck goes right through that red light… Or when a [person] is bleeding to death, the ambulance goes through those red lights at top speed…  Disinherited people all over the world are bleeding to death from deep social and economic wounds.  They need brigades of ambulance drivers who will have to ignore the red lights of the present system until the emergency is solved.

Four decades on, his words are as sharp and appropriate as ever.

Dr. King evokes the image of a world on fire. This fire burns on today, at a time of permanent war, the growing economic divide, threats to civil liberties, ecological devastation, and the structural violence of racism, sexism, and homophobia. We can continue to opt for the raging spiral of violence and injustice, or we can band together to build democratic, multiracial, and nonviolent societies where the dignity of all is respected and the needs of all are met.

This will not come easily, Dr. King suggests. This will be risky work.

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According to a press release today from the secularist Center for Inquiry:

The United States Air Force has been citing Christian teachings in its missile officer training sessions by referencing passages from the New Testament, according to recently released documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Reports show the mandatory Nuclear Ethics and Nuclear Warfare session, which takes place during a missile officer’s first week in training, is led by Air Force chaplains and includes a discussion on St. Augustine’s Christian “Just War Theory.” Also included in the PowerPoint presentation is a slide containing a passage from the Book of Revelation that attempts to explain how Jesus Christ, as the “mighty warrior,” believed war to be “just.”

The presentation goes on to say that there are “many examples of believers [who] engaged in wars in [the] Old Testament” in a “righteous way” and notes there is “no pacifistic sentiment in mainstream Jewish history.”

The CFI’s concern, of course, is that religious materials are being used in an obligatory military training course. Of course this is hardly the first time such a thing has happened; the US military makes quite a habit of infusing its literature and culture with religious tropes—to the point, in some cases, of creating a hostile environment for people of faiths other than the one being promoted.

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As Bryan already noted, the five Disarm Now Plowshares were sentenced at the end of last month for trying to beat the American nuclear weapons into plowshares—literally, with ordinary hammers—as prophesied in the book of Isaiah, as well as pouring blood over them. Yesterday at Religion Dispatches, though, there was also an excellent essay by Kristin Tobey about the action, its background and context, its symbolism and planning, and the longstanding communities that made it possible. Here’s a bit of it:

Like the Plowshares Eight, The Disarm Now Plowshares intended their act of civil disobedience — or “divine obedience,” as Plowshares activists prefer to call their actions — to function as symbolic disarmament, purifying the land and equipment from its sinful purpose; to draw attention to the danger of nuclear weapons (or “idols”); and to offer atonement, via the spilling of their own blood and the risking of their own freedom, for the sins of nuclear violence and idolatry. To ensure metaphysical efficacy, the action adhered to a ritual template that has remained strikingly consistent since the first Plowshares action — trespass, blood, hammers. But another crucial element of the Plowshares’ actions is the wait to be apprehended, which illuminates the ways in which the actions are meant to function.

Keep reading at Religion Dispatches.

The five Disarm Now Plowshares activists who infiltrated Kitsap-Bangor Naval Base in Washington to symbolically disarm the nuclear weapons stored there received sentences yesterday ranging from six to 15 months confinement. With the action having taken place in November 2009, this decision has been a long time coming. Over the past year we’ve covered many of the major developments, from a hilarious video produced by the Seattle Times that satirized the military’s decision to prosecute 80-year-old peace activists to the more serious trial itself. But now the judge has rendered his final ruling.

According to a press release sent out yesterday:

About two hundred fifty people gathered at the courthouse to support the Plowshares activists with their presence, song, and prayer.  After the trial, they sang peace songs and processed out as a group, celebrating the beacon of hope the five activists have been for their community.Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, and others testified on behalf of the defendants.  Bishop Gumbleton, retired bishop of Detroit and founding president of the peace group Pax Christi, testified that the Catholic Church has spoken out very strongly against nuclear weapons, saying that no use of nuclear weapons can be justified morally.  “We must abolish these weapons before the earth is destroyed.” Ramsey Clark, U.S. Attorney General under President Lyndon B. Johnson, testified that never in his life has he encountered such unselfish people as those who participate in the Plowshares tradition of direct action against nuclear weapons.  Regarding their decision to live a life of civil resistance, he said, “Their consciences tell them they have to do it.  God will bless them for it and the courts of the United States should too.”

Speaking as part of the Disarm Now Plowshares legal team, Anabel Dwyer and Bill Quigley laid out the broader legal picture of the case. “The problem is that nuclear weapons and the rule of law can’t exist side by side,” Dwyer said.  “The other problem is, we cannot disarm nuclear weapons unless through the rule of law.  We are in a conundrum here.” Quigley submitted that lawyers are obligated to “understand difference between law and justice and to narrow that gap.”  He encouraged the judge to look back one hundred years and consider how many of the laws of that time were “legal but manifestly unjust.”  Dwyer is a Michigan attorney and Board Member of The Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy (LCNP), and an expert in humanitarian law and nuclear weapons.  Quigley is the Legal Director for the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and Professor at Loyola New Orleans.

Each of the five co-defendants, Bill “Bix” Bichsel, SJ, Susan Crane, Lynne Greenwald, Steve Kelly, SJ, and Anne Montgomery, RSCJ, read statements in court.  They focused on the personal responsibility they feel to disarm nuclear weapons, and their desire to prevent pain, suffering, and death for “those deprived by our wars and military budget of a human way of life.”

Character witnesses spoke to the defendants’ solidarity with Native people, children, working people, and the wider Tacoma community.  Rosella Apel, age 11, said in her character witness for Steve Kelly, “I have a clear image that when I grow up I’m going to do the exact same thing that these five have.”

While this may be the end of the legal road for the Disarm Now Plowshares, it is only the beginning, as this last statement testifies, of the lasting impact their action will have on future generations and the anti-nuclear movement as a whole.

In the summer of 2009, an 18-person interfaith delegation from Tacoma, WA came together to organize a trip to Japan to interact with atomic bomb survivors as a means to resist nuclear weapons. Their trip also coincided with the 64^th anniversaries of the atomic bombings. To help publicize their journey and continue the spirit of reconciliation after the trip, the Journey of Repentance decided to have a documentarian follow them while on their trip. I was that lucky documentarian tasked to prepare and direct the international production.

Once filming had completed, the Journey of Repentance persuaded me to continue working on the film in the editing room. The result was Free World, a 38-minute film that documents the group’s history of civil resistance to the nuclear weapon stockpile in the Puget Sound of Washington state, as well as their interactions with the Hibakusha in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The filmmakers and the Journey of Repentance invite you to watch the film to learn more about what this group boldly set out to do to help the disarmament movement along. If you have already seen the film, you have already taken a step toward a world free of nuclear weapons. Thank you for this first step, but please do not let it be the last.

To purchase a DVD or Public Screening Package please visit www.freeworlddocumentary.com.