• In a march themed with fanciful allusions to Little Red Riding Hood, thousands of protesters swarmed Hong Kong’s streets on Sunday in the first large display of protest since the city’s elite tapped a Beijing ally to become the Chinese territory’s next leader.

• In the Dakotas, members of the proud Lakota Nation began a 48-hour hunger strike on Sunday in opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline — and all tar sands pipelines — they say will destroy precious water resources and ancestral lands in the U.S and in Canada.

• Jordanian authorities arrested more than two dozen political activists during protests Saturday critical of King Abdullah II that called for a change of government.

• An estimated 800,000 homeowners in Ireland joined a tax boycott by refusing to pay a new flat-rate $133 property tax by Saturday’s deadline.

• On Saturday, nearly 100 people wore hoodies in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to protest the killing of Trayvon Martin.

• Thousands of Palestinians protested on Friday against Israeli policies of land seizure and control of Jerusalem, leading to clashes with Israeli troops in which a 20-year-old was killed and scores of others were injured.

• Three protesters were arrested Thursday at the UC Board of Regents meeting, when a few dozen activists, some stripped down to swimsuits, called for more transparency in state funding talks and an end to tuition hikes.

• On Thursday, hundreds of Bahrainis staged a sit-in outside the offices of the United Nations in Manama demanding action over the “excessive” use by police of tear gas against protesters.

• Some 50 students at the all-boys Frederick Douglass Academy in Detroit were suspended Thursday after walking out of classes in protest of absent teachers, inconsistent classroom instruction and other issues.

• Several hundred Tibetans have protested against Chinese rule in the western province of Qinghai since a monk there set himself on fire earlier this week. The advocacy group Free Tibet has posted what it calls “unprecedented footage” of this highly restricted and restive part of western China.

• Between 5,000 and 7,000 Chilean high school students marched down Santiago’s main avenue on Thursday to demand free quality education and protest the expulsion of about 100 students who joined last year’s protests. Police broke up the march with water canons after a few hundred students crossed a police barrier and tried to march to the education ministry.

• Thousands of union workers gathered across Illinois on Thursday to protest Gov. Pat Quinn’s proposed budget cuts that include mass layoffs and the closure and consolidation of several state facilities, including prisons.

• Hundreds of people gathered in the Rotunda of the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City on Thursday to urge Gov. Gary Herbert to veto a bill that would forbid school districts to teach use of contraceptives.

• Russian opposition activist Sergei Udaltsov started a hunger strike on Thursday after being sentenced to 10 days in jail for disobeying the police following a rally against Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

• Afghans took to the streets on Thursday to demand a U.S. soldier accused of killing 16 civilians be prosecuted in Afghanistan as word spread that the American military moved him out of the country.

• A group of about 75 demonstrators assembled at LOVE Park on Wednesday to support immigrant rights. Two college students were arrested after blocking traffic with banners and refusing to move

In 2006, these two animated characters, Jingjing and Chacha, appeared on websites in Shenzhen, China, to remind Internet users that they were being monitored.

Just who owns the Internet, and who has the right to control what content is available on it? Is it sovereign territory, or is it free from the confines of antiquated earthbound laws? These questions have engaged Internet activists and scholars for over a decade. And, after the intense debate last month over proposed Internet restrictions in the U.S., announcements from Twitter and Google about enhanced efforts to voluntarily comply with national laws, and ongoing international protest over the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, popular interest in Internet regulation appears to be mounting.

To the disappointment of techno-utopians, though, the Internet is very much capable of being regulated, and some governments have been perfectly willing to do so. The most obvious example of this is China’s “Great Firewall,” a vast network of structural, social and legal controls by which it regulates Internet content. Exactly what content is being blocked, however, isn’t always easy to say.

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• Cairo and Alexandria witnessed a fresh wave of strikes and protests on Sunday, blocking roads and causing disruption to the work of the Ministry of Transport.

• On Monday, a week-long nationwide strike in Nigeria ended, after Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan announced in a televised address that fuel will be reduced in price.

• Kuwaiti riot police on Saturday used tear gas and batons to disperse hundreds of stateless demonstrators for the second day in a row and arrested dozens.

• About 4,000 Chinese workers protested over compensation and job security at a Sanyo plant in southern Shenzhen over the weekend in the latest outbreak of labor unrest in China’s manufacturing hub.

• In Oman, thousands of expatriate laborers working for one of the Muscat International Airport projects who have been on strike since Thursday protested in front of their company premises in Azaiba on Sunday. The government’s decision to ban the export of Omani fish to the UAE was “revoked” after over 400 fishermen held a sit-in at Khasab demanding the reversal of the decision on Saturday.

• Activists from a local peace group blocked entry to the main gate at the Navy’s West coast Trident nuclear submarine base Saturday for nearly a half hour in an act of civil resistance to nuclear weapons.

• Police detained a liberal opposition-party leader and another activist Saturday at a rally protesting alleged vote fraud in Russia’s parliamentary election.

• In Pennsylvania, nearly 300 students from two Chester high schools walked out of classes Friday, demanding an end to the financial crisis jeopardizing their school year.

• After five days of a sit-in protest, workers at a lingerie store in Ireland have won their battle for back pay.

• A flash mob of youngsters performed at the crowded Model Town market on Friday afternoon in Delhi as a way of celebrating Lohri with a message against corruption.

• A national strike paralyzed much of Nigeria on Monday, with more than 10,000 demonstrators swarming its commercial capital to protest soaring fuel prices and decades of government corruption in the oil-rich country.

• Tensions flared at the American Licorice factory Monday as protesters associated with the Occupy Oakland movement joined the month-old factory workers’ strike, blocking entrances and turning away delivery trucks.

• Over five hundred people in the French city of Clermont-Ferrand attended the silent march on Saturday, to show their support for Wissam El-Yamini, a thirty years old man who went into coma following his violent arrest on New Year’s Eve.

• Tens of thousands demonstrating in Yemen’s capital Sanaa on Friday chanted “freedom to the detainees,” a slogan chosen by protest organizers for demonstrations in 18 cities across the impoverished nation.

• Around ten thousand people blocked railways and the Aswan-Cairo highway in the Upper Egyptian City of Nagaa-Hammadi, Qena, late on Friday, to protest the results of the ongoing parliamentary elections in their constituency.

• More than 20 Omanis continue their prison hunger strike, which began in mid-December, in protest at what they say are unfair sentences for taking part in demonstrations last year.

• In Turkey, police dispersed scores of anti-NATO activists in the southern city of Adana on Friday as they were setting up tents to stage a three-day hunger strike to show their opposition to the NATO missile system that will be established in the eastern province of Malatya.

• On Friday, thousands of shopkeepers in the Indian portion of Kashmir went on a daylong general strike to protest the killing of a student and frequent power cuts.

• A group of parents whose children attend Chicago Public Schools slated for “turnarounds,” closures or other adjustments protested the plan with a sit-in at City Hall Thursday, where they vowed to stay until Mayor Rahm Emanuel granted them a meeting to discuss alternatives.

• Dozens of street dance enthusiasts in Hangzhou, the capital of east China’s Zhejiang Province, participated in a flash mob activity advocating environmental protection last Tuesday.

In September of last year, one of tens of thousands of annual “mass incidents” in China took place in a fishing village named Wukan. Several hundred local citizens marched to the county government seat, protesting what is now a disappointingly familiar story in towns and cities all across the country: illegal land seizures by local officials, who evict residents and sell the land to developers or corporations, pocketing a percentage. However, with greater awareness of their property rights, Chinese citizens have grown increasingly active in the past decade, fighting back against local corruption—with mixed results. Wukan was another example of this ongoing stratification of rich and poor in China, but, in December, what started as a local protest mushroomed into an international event.

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• Dozens of Bahraini Shiite employees fired over pro-democracy protests rallied on Wednesday demanding a return to work, a day after authorities said 181 would be reinstated.

• Thousands of angry Egyptian women joined a fifth day of protests in downtown Cairo to voice outrage over what they said was the military’s abuse and mistreatment of female demonstrators.

• The leaders of the rebellious Wukon village in southern China have reached a tentative resolution with senior provincial officials after a tense 10-day stand-off, which saw the villagers erect blockades around all of its entrances–effectively living outside government control–to protest their lack of basic needs.

• As many as 30,000 people protested plans for a coal-fired power plant in Guangong province, China’s most affluent and open-minded region. Residents stormed local government offices and blocked a busy highway that runs from the manufacturing hub of Shenzhen to the city of Shantou.

• A group of women from the Ukrainian topless-protest group Femen recounted their ordeal in neighboring Belarus, where on Monday they were kidnapped, beaten and abused by local security officials for a protest in Minsk in which they bared their breasts to bring attention to President Aleksander Lukashenko’s crackdown on the opposition.

• After six days of protest, armed with 97,000-plus signatures, queers in Seoul, South Korea got the result they were hoping for. The Seoul Municipal Council’s passage of a Students Rights Ordinance with all clauses intact, including ones that affect the well-being of queer students.

• Demonstrators from Argentina’s UATRE farm hands union, blocked access to the Pan-American highway along some of Buenos Aires City’s main access routes to protest the passage of the controversial Farm Worker Statute, which was debated and approved today at the Senate today.

• For the second time in two weeks, former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich was temporarily drowned out by Occupy protesters as he made his final push to the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses. “Mic Check,” they announced, continuing, “Put people first!”

Sichuan Province in China has been rocked by a string of self-immolations by Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns this year. Eleven members of the Kirti Monastery in the province have set themselves alight demanding religious freedom for Tibetans in China and the return of the Dalai Lama. Six of the demonstrators succumbed to their wounds, the latest being Palden Choesto, a nun from the monastery, who immolated herself on Thursday last week. Even exiled Tibetans have self-immolated to voice their criticism of the Chinese Communist regime. On the 5th of November, a Tibetan activist did so outside the Chinese embassy in New Delhi, and on the 10th of November, another activist self-immolated at Boudhanath, a Buddhist site on the outskirts of Kathmandu in Nepal. What remains to be seen, though, is whether actions like these will have any significant political effect.

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• Occupy protesters across the country celebrated Thanksgiving on Thursday, bringing all the trimmings of a traditional meal to the unlikely location of a demonstration. In New York’s Zuccotti Park, organizers said they distributed some 3,000 individually wrapped plates for what they described as an “open feast.”

• Some 10,000 people from the majority Shi’ite community in Bahrain took to the streets of the town of Aali, chanting slogans that were taken from the inquiry led by international rights lawyer Cherif Bassiouni.

• Yemeni protesters—who have been in the millions for nearly 10 months—were out again Thursday, rejecting a provision that gives Saleh immunity from prosecution.

• Portuguese workers’ general strike halted public transport and some factories in many parts of the country on Thursday and thousands marched to protest austerity measures imposed as the price of an EU/IMF bailout.

• A Romanian mayor has begun a hunger strike to protest cuts in heating subsidies imposed under a government austerity drive, reawakening memories of the harsh final years of communism.

• Hundreds of people in Thailand’s Pathum Thani province north of the capital blocked cars from using the outbound lane of an elevated highway on Wednesday to pressure the government to accelerate the drainage of water.

• Iran’s main government-run newspaper was published Tuesday without a front-page headline, replaced by photographs of its headquarters during an assault a day earlier by forces working for the judiciary who briefly arrested the newspaper’s top official and more than 30 others.

• Several thousand Colombian students participated in multiple marches on Thursday to demand more funding for public education. In Argentina, about 1,000 student marched through Buenos Aires holding flags reading “the student struggle is walking through Latin America.”

• Thousands of Peruvians have protested a $4.8 billion open-pit gold mining project they fear will damage their water supply.

• Thousands of workers in southern China went on strike in the last week to demand higher pay and better treatment, disrupting work at companies including one that supplies equipment to International Business Machines Corp.

Han Han is a Chinese high school dropout who ended up penning a series of bestselling young adult novels. Since then, he’s evolved into an incisive political and social critic on his blog—famously posting a pair of quotation marks around an empty space after Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Prize—and his dogged commentary on corruption and government wrongdoings have given him a credibility inside and outside of China that you wouldn’t expect from someone whose fanbase was once comprised mostly of teenage girls, or whose primary occupation these days is racing cars. He’s heralded at home as the next Lu Xun, one of China’s most important intellectuals and critics of the past century, and is so popular that he’s able to get away with writing just about whatever he wants (though especially hard-hitting posts often get deleted after the fact—but not after they’ve already been re-posted thousands of times over). With Evan Osnos’s fantastically nuanced New Yorker profile over the summer and celebratory articles over the past few years, some of us here in the U.S. might be swayed into thinking that Han Han is, like Liu Xiaobo and Ai Weiwei, one of China’s Great Democratic Hopes.

All of which might make it a bit surprising to watch Han Han, the voice of China’s youth, casually dismiss his fellow netizens’ online protests in a recent Channel News Asia interview:

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