• 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.

After a village negotiating team was kidnapped and one of the village heads died suspiciously while under police custody, thousands of citizens gathered and took to the streets. Police in riot gear were sent in to quell the protest, beating dozens, but they retreated after citizens refused to back down. Local party officials fled the village as well, and police cordoned off the newly autonomous town, laying “siege.” After a tense standoff and days of exhilarating foreign press coverage, provincial-level officials stepped in and capitulated to village demands. In the year of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, Wukan represented another victory for people-powered protest.

As enticing as it is to group them together, however, the events in Wukan are no extension of OWS or the Arab Spring—but that doesn’t make it any less inspiring. According to surveys in the past decade, 9 out of 10 Chinese citizens are satisfied with the efforts of their national government while 92 percent expressed a  “great deal of confidence” or “quite a lot of confidence” in their leaders in Beijing (figures that leave Chinese netizens incredulous, but which have been consistently verified). On the contrary, local officials fare worse, receiving much lower scores. Wukan was not a repudiation of the national government and its general policies and it was not the harbinger of “some nationwide rebellion that will see the national government overthrown,” but instead, anger was directed and focused on local actors and their actions. In fact, Wukan citizens begged Beijing to intervene: “Please tell the government in Beijing to help us before they kill us all,” one woman implored a Western reporter.

It would be foolish to think that all Wukan citizens were so naïve as to not recognize that their plight was caused in part by national policies—the well-meaning repeal of agricultural taxes that starved local governments and a lack of checks and balances to prevent corruption to name but two—but the consistent declarations of how their grudge was with local officials and not national ones was likely a conscious decision meant to persuade higher officials of their good intentions. By chanting “Long live the Communist Party,” they were strategically providing Beijing a way to save face by playing the savior. The provincial party secretary Wang Yang, a strong candidate for election to the national Politburo, was happy to do so.

Savvy Wukan citizens—not your typical country bumpkins, being in Guangdong province, which is not far from Hong Kong—actively courted and supported foreign media in publicizing their plight, while making sure that Beijing was aware this would not become another Tiananmen situation. They have also distanced themselves from the language of the Occupy movement, despite being associated with it by observers abroad. (Chinese media have mixed feelings about Occupy, on the one hand gleefully commenting on America’s economic and political woes while simultaneously banning mentions of “occupy” on Weibo.)

Photo by Tom Lassetter.

Expanding the protest outside the village was not a priority and, for the most part, Wukan did not become a national cause célèbre during the protest. During the height of the siege, a few neighboring villages smuggled food supplies into Wukan, but there weren’t exactly pizzas being ordered to the village. In fact, spreading Wukan’s cause to the rest of China would have in the end done more harm than good in Wukan itself. As Ian Johnson writes, “It’s okay to say that local officials are corrupt or that the real estate deal in question was wrong. But it is not acceptable to have protesters link up with each other in a national network.” Thus, it’s perhaps fortunate that a planned march to a neighboring village did not take place, as such an effort would be seen by the national government as much more provocative and perhaps worthy of harsher responses, not unlike how China responded by jailing dozens of activists after inklings of a supposed Jasmine Revolution were in the works. Then again, the proposed march may have served as an effective threat, as a resolution came shortly after announcements of the inter-village march.

In China, the differing motives of local governments (whose primary task is maintaining social stability) and the central government (generally more concerned with maintaining legitimacy) means that each responds to different pressures. Political scientist Yongshun Cai writes:

Given the political hierarchy, it has been commonly accepted that intervention from the central government is a crucial way of achieving successful resistance in China. … [The] ability to achieve successful resistance thus depends on whether they can effectively exploit the constraints faced by the two levels of government.

In Wukan, utilizing foreign media applied the pressure, ensuring that the protest could not simply be crushed without severe repercussions—a variation on the slogan “the whole world is watching.” But the protesters’ discrete and transparently non-revolutionary goals were meant to exploit the local-national structure, skillfully setting up the central government to have to intervene. Wukan is not unique with regards to using these tactics, but the outstanding execution is certainly noteworthy, with most of their immediate aims achieved and organizers guaranteed amnesty. So long as officials don’t renege on their promises, it’s another successful model for other Chinese villages and towns to look to when faced with similar injustice. It may not be an Arab Spring, but, then again, it’s hard to plan one when 9 out of 10 people approve of the national government—or at least say they do for now. With the central government so concerned with maintaining this legitimacy, citizens have practical paths for forcing the central government to reduce income inequality, corruption, and other contentious issues. As the effect of Wukan reverberate within government and among similarly wronged citizens, protests in China may gradually become less of a conflict and more of a negotiation between two parties who want the same thing: a better future.

• 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.

Anti-government sentiments have been flaring recently in the Tibetan communities of China, which have faced the brunt of China’s internal police machinery. Since 2006, the Chinese Communist Party has been spending four times the resources to police the Tibetan communities of Kardze and Aba as compared to the rest of Sichuan. In 2008, Chinese authorities conducted a preemptive crackdown on Tibetan activists during the Beijing Olympics. Counter-protests were violently suppressed, as 10 monks from the Kirti Monastery were shot dead. Since the latest case of self-immolation, the military and paramilitary presence has further increased in the region. Telecommunications and Internet services have been restricted, and journalists have been denied permission to visit the Tibetan settlements.

The political rhetoric from the Chinese government’s public relations wing has been quick to discredit the Tibetan movement. The regime argues that Tibetans are free to practice their faith in China and accuses the Dalai Lama of “terrorism in disguise” for stirring the protests to overthrow Chinese rule in Tibet. Additionally, the Chinese government accused Kirti monks of long being engaged in acts of vandalism and self-immolation to disturb the social order of the region. According to an official document released in May this year, the regime stated that the monks “frequented places of entertainment, prostitution, alcohol and gambling, and spread pornographic CD-Roms” in the region.

Strict measures have been taken to quell the spirit of rebellion in Sichuan. Sources in Dharamsala, the capital of the exiled Tibetan government in India, have said that monks are being forcibly removed from Kirti Monastery, with their numbers slowly dwindling from 2,500 to a few hundred. The regime has planted around 200 government officials in the monastery to monitor its activities and adopted a strategy of “re-education” to tackle the religious motivation behind the protests. Local officials are enforcing laws mandating that all youths under 18 attend government school, and are fining families a hefty sum of 3,000 yuan if their children are monks or are studying at the monastery.

Tibetan political authorities, on the other hand, have been divided in their reactions to the string of self-immolations. On the one hand, during a recent trip to Japan, the Dalai Lama attributed the Chinese government’s “wrong, ruthless and illogical” policy towards Tibetans as the cause behind the suicides. Similarly, Stephanie Brigden, director of the London-based Free Tibet campaign, argued that Tibetans feel that self-immolation is the “only way that they can be heard” in China and across the globe. Both highlight a subtle support for self-immolation as a tactic to vilify the regime and highlight the plight of the Tibetans. On the other hand, the possible successor to the Dalai Lama, the 25-year-old Karmapa Lama, has appealed to his people to end the string of political suicides and find alternative means of challenging the Communist regime. “In Buddhist teaching life is precious,” he said. “To achieve anything worthwhile we need to preserve our lives. We Tibetans are few in number, so every Tibetan life is of value to the cause of Tibet.” It is a major disadvantage for the weaker power to have this kind of ideological fracture among its leaders about so costly a tactic.

It seems the violent repression and political-cultural clampdown by the Chinese regime has cornered the Tibetan monks. The situation has driven them to use their own bodies as political weapons, a last resort to voice their long-suffered plight. On the other hand, the self-immolations have yet to provide real momentum to the Tibetan struggle. While the news of self-sacrifice may momentarily melt the hearts of the global community, it fails to deliver a pragmatic stimulus. This struggle by self-sacrifice is up against a combination of political obstacles, from the almost unassailable geopolitical position of China and the lack of a robust pro-Tibetan political movement in the mainland, to an almost indifferent international community gripped by a financial crisis. Additionally, the tactic has made it easier for the Communist regime to attack the movement’s political legitimacy by branding it as violent and irrational. It has ended up reenforcing Han chauvinism in mainland China and even justifying the government’s draconian tactics to curb the Tibetan struggle. The story of self-immolations has unfortunately failed to reach the forefront of international news, which seems to treat it as outdated in comparison to the Arab Spring.

There must be less destructive and wasteful tactics available to garner greater international support. The Chinese regime is increasingly conscious of its image abroad, and pro-Tibet organizations abroad can take advantage of this. Moreover, as the pro-democracy movement within China continues to unfold, Tibetan leaders might work to build solidarity with it to gain a wider support base for their struggle. Isn’t there a better way than suicide?

• 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.

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:

After the high-speed rail accident in Wenzhou, I was reading all the accounts on microblogs. Subsequently, I kept checking downstairs, expecting hundreds of thousands of people to march in protest. But in reality, there was no one protesting. If you just focus on reading certain microblogs, you would imagine that the entire Chinese government and society had crumbled and that the country had sunk into anarchy. But then in retrospect, I realize that your sense of reality depends very much on whose opinion you follow on the Internet. [...] So the microblogs you track can define the world around you. And none of it is real. Perhaps we need to wait for an entire generation, like mine, to grow up in an environment where information is free and open. That is when we might see real change in the arts and in the media.

Han Han’s comments on the illusory nature of online protest are seemingly shocking for those who expect him to fit neatly into their preconceived notion of online freedom fighter. But once one gets over the fact that he is not the next Václav Havel (Will Moss so aptly describes Han Han as “dissident-lite”) and accepts that he doesn’t have to make some sort of binary choice between government toady and activist martyr, Han Han’s observations (albeit simplified and imbued with his trademark impishness) do have grounding.

General consensus and empirical studies show that China, like most of the rest of the world, uses its Internet first and foremost for entertainment. Though the Internet has successfully bred and been used to organize a number of successful on-the-ground protests (with the 2007 rally against a chemical plant in Xiamen being a well-reported on and studied one), for the most part, Han Han is right: it’s the venue for mostly armchair protesters who comment, re-post, and mock from the comfort of their home or Internet bar. As Guobin Yang indicates in his essential The Power of Internet in China, the dominant mode of many young Netizens is one of playfulness, satire, and mockery, even when it comes to activism and protest. They are often only speaking to each other, generating play and humorous memes online with their open derision of a media and government that tends to treat them like children. Especially now with the rising popularity of Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, dissent is often disconnected from the locality for which the injustice took place. Thus, in the case of the Wenzhou crash, hundreds of thousands of comments expressing outrage were merely that—expressions divorced from on-the-ground action. Thus, Han Han is correct in saying the online furor did not match the “anarchy” that he expected on the streets.

And yet, he has hope for the future. He acknowledges that his generation may not be the one to shrug off the shackles of the system they are currently forced to butt heads with. It’s a sentiment commonly echoed by Chinese internet scholars: China may not be ready yet, but it’s getting there. Rebecca MacKinnon, founder of Global Voices, wrote back in 2005:

[T]he Internet may also be enabling the development of “civil society” and public discourse around policy that could make a gradual evolution toward democracy more likely over the long run. Internet scholar Randolph Kluver argues that it is necessary to “put the impetus for change within China’s own cultural and political realities.” Rather than argue that the Internet will democratize China—which is an ideologically charged debate, impossible to prove, and depends on how one defines “democracy” in the first place—Kluver (2005b) chooses to advance the “less radical” and “less disruptive” argument that “new forms of civic discourse are emerging.”

Some Chinese bloggers have expressed the concern that an excessive focus by Western media on blogs as a vehicle for political dissent may be counterproductive, making the authorities more suspicious of the emergent new forms of online civic discourse than they might otherwise be. [...]

Powerful socio-political change can be expected to emerge as a result of the millions of online conversations taking place daily on the Chinese Internet: conversations that manage to stay comfortably within the confines of censorship. With each passing day, these conversations do their quiet part to free the collective Chinese mind.

The idea is that the Internet in China, though not necessarily bringing the sweeping reforms and demands for free speech that activists might have hoped for, is still moving China forward in incremental steps. In this interview and in previous ones, Han Han acknowledges the limits upon him and his fellow youth. To expect his generation to rise up just because they have the tools to do so is unfair. At this stage, the very fact that a medium exists where citizens can express protest and not fear repercussion (the state can’t arrest all 100,000 people who vote in a Weibo poll) has altered the power dynamics between citizen and state, and that is reason enough to be optimistic.

Around 7:15 A.M., the student public-address system called for more dialogue between students and the government and broadcast a demand that the Standing Committee of the Politburo formally remove the label “turmoil” from the student movement. The broadcast also reminded demonstrators that maintaining rational behavior and public order was crucial to gaining the sympathy of observers around the country. In this regard, the broadcast continued, some improvements were in order: The students needed to stay well organized, should not show themselves pursuing amusements like playing cards, and should sleep in the Square as neatly as sleeping in their dormitories. They needed to keep order with their own task forces on monitoring, information, and logistics. Their aim, the broadcast said, was to get the label “turmoil” removed through the power of the people…

In the end, perhaps the focus will return to the actual issues and it won’t matter that conservative outlets are currently fixating on the superficial, using it as a pretense to dismiss the protests. But if issues like the orderliness and “rowdiness” of the protesters continue to dominate the narrative, should Occupy Wall Street protesters try to more strenuously impose limits or standards of behavior on themselves as the Beijing protesters tried to?

Then again, during this morning’s march around Wall Street, a marcher was forcibly grabbed by police, thrown to the ground and arrested simply for sweeping trash in the street with a broom.

• Hundreds of Afghans have taken to the streets of Kabul to condemn the recent shelling of border towns by Pakistan’s army and accusing its powerful spy agency of involvement in the killing of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the country’s influential former president.

• Corrections officials in Sacramento said Thursday that they would discipline inmates who participated in a renewed hunger strike to protest conditions in the state’s highest-security prisons, where some prisoners have been held in virtual isolation for decades.

• Hundreds of people filled a small town gymnasium in Nebraska on Thursday to protest at a State Department hearing on the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to Texas. Residents fear it will pollute the Ogallala Aquifer, a major U.S. drinking water source.

• Tens of thousands marched in Lisbon and Porto on Saturday to protest austerity measures imposed under the terms of an EU/IMF bailout, the first major rallies since a center-right government took power in Portugal in June.

• U.S. actor Sean Penn joined thousands of Egyptian activists who packed downtown Cairo on Friday demanding that military rulers speed up the transfer of power to civilians and end emergency laws once used by Hosni Mubarak against his opponents.

• Hundreds of indigenous Bolivians angry at plans to build a highway through an Amazon nature preserve resumed their protest march Saturday after a violent police crackdown a week ago.

• Thousands of Syrians took to the streets on Friday in demonstrations against the regime. Human rights activists said that at least 13 people were killed when troops opened fire.

• More than 1,000 people gathered in Savannah, Georgia on Saturday to attend the funeral of Troy Davis, the recently executed death row inmate many believe was innocent. They pledged to keep fighting the death penalty.

• Dutch police forcibly dispersed around 200 squatters in the center of Amsterdam on Saturday during a protest on the first anniversary of the introduction of a law formally outlawing squatting.

• Thousands Hungarians rallied in central Budapest against the measures of Prime Minister Viktor Orban at a demonstration organizers dubbed “D-Day.” Their demands included “fair” taxation, the constitutional protection of early retirement, the restoration of the right to strike, social dialog and the scrapping of retroactive laws.

• More than 200 Tibetans, including monks, protested in a tense area of southwestern China on the country’s 62nd National Day after a Tibetan flag and a photo of the Dalai Lama were torn down, a news report said Sunday.

• British unions organized a rally of 35,000 protesters against government budget cuts Sunday in Manchester where the Conservative Party opened its annual conference.

Al Jazeera has just a launched a new program called Activiate which anyone interested in nonviolent action will want to keep their eyes on. The show is described as, “Telling the stories of activists around the world as they challenge authority and stand up for what they believe in,” and the first episode looks at Debby Chan and activists with Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) who are campaigning for better working conditions at Foxconn, one of Apple’s main suppliers based in China.

The documentary follows Chan as she puts herself in harm’s way to collect evidence against Foxconn, and has great footage of protests against the company both in the streets and at its shareholder meeting. Chan also talks with one former employee who is suing Foxconn and travels all the way to Apple headquarters in California to share her findings with company executives.

The film shows an organized and multi-pronged campaign against the company, but it isn’t clear what the activists long-term strategy is or how they intend to build momentum. It was also dissapointing to see how Chan’s visit to Apple’s headquarters played out. Despite traveling such a long distance to meet with company executives, who had repeatedly turned down requests for a meeting, she in essence left her documents with a security guard who said he’d pass them along. It’s hard not to see a lost opportunity in that anti-climatic ending to the film. From a strategic perspective, there were countless tactics she could have used to draw more attention to the cause and put greater pressure on Apple, like arriving with a larger group that would refuse to leave without a meeting and contacting the local and national media to capture the confrontation.

Nevertheless, I applaud Chan and SACOM for their work to highlight and stop the injustices taking place in these horrible factories that produce our latest electronic marvels.

• At least 26 protesters were killed and more than 550 were injured, hundreds by gunshot, when security forces fired live bullets and tear gas at a massive demonstration in Yemen’s capital Sanaa on Sunday.

• At least 3,000 Moroccans demonstrated on Sunday calling for greater political freedoms, as the country’s pro-democracy movement attempted to regain momentum lost over the summer.

• Environmental activists gathered in Hartmann Park in east Houston Sunday to protest the Keystone XL pipeline, which they say will lead to more pollution in smog-filled Houston.

• About 50 women in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, donned miniskirts to protest remarks by the Jakarta city governor who blamed a recent gang rape on the victim’s choice of clothing.

• In Poland, a mass anti-austerity protest called by unions took to the streets Saturday, as EU ministers cut short talks on the eurozone debt crisis a day after Washington told them to end their bickering.

• In a fresh indication of growing public anger over pollution, hundreds of demonstrators in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang on Sunday were camped outside a solar panel manufacturing plant that stands accused of contaminating a nearby river.

• Men, women and children from Somalia’s Saydika displaced camp took to the streets to protest the lack of basic necessities like proper shelter, food and water.

• Friday Prayer in northern Paris drew a small but angry protest against a ban on street prayer.

• About 10,000 people marched through a restive village near the capital of Bahrain on Thursday for the funeral of a 14-year-old boy killed during a protest against the government the day before.

• At least 11 people were shot dead by Syrian security forces, backed by the army, when thousands demonstrated across the country today against the Baathist regime’s brutal crackdown on pro-democracy activists.

• Another 137 people were arrested yesterday in the rolling sit-in outside the White House against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would carry oil from Canada’s tar sands to Gulf Coast refineries. Thus far, 843 people have been arrested since August 20.

• Hundreds of Australians and New Zealanders in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Wellington have taken part in protests against deteriorating human rights in Fiji today.

• A strike in provinces close to Metro Manila that was launched on Wednesday to protest continuing increases in oil prices was successful in paralyzing transportation routes in many parts of two regions—Calabarzon (Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Rizal and Quezon) and Bicol.

• Kurds in Turkey, which number around 20 million, have taken to the streets in Istanbul and elsewhere in the country to protest against political repression, cultural suppression, discrimination and a decision by Turkey’s election board to ban prominent Kurdish politicians from upcoming elections.

• Hundreds of relatives and family members of those who went missing over the period of 20 years of unrest in Indian-controlled Kashmir staged a sit-in protest in Indian Kashmir’s summer capital on Tuesday demanding the whereabouts of there loved ones.

• An estimated 80,000 Hong Kongers marched Sunday in honor of eight locals killed in a bus hijacking in Manila, denouncing the Philippine government for botching the rescue operation and demanding justice for the dead.

• Thousands of residents of the Northeastern Chinese port city Dalian took to the streets on Sunday to demand the relocation of a petrochemical plant that threatened to spill toxins into the city last week when a typhoon breached a nearby dike. Chinese authorities have complied and ordered the closure of the plant.

• Hundreds of thousands of Yemenis poured into the streets of major cities and towns across the country on Friday, keeping the pressure on the nation’s embattled president to step down.

• About 100 people participated in a two-mile march in Santa Cruz, California on Sunday to demand a halt to construction of 32 homes on what is believed to be a 6,000-year-old Native American burial site.

• More than 1,000 people led by the poet turned activist Javier Sicilia have joined a march in Mexico City to protest the government’s strategy in the fight against drug gangs.

• Tunisian security forces used tear gas and truncheons Monday to disperse several hundred protesters in the capital demanding that the government step down for failing to prosecute supporters of the ousted president.

• Thousands of people turned out at rallies across Australia on Sunday to call on federal MPs to support a ban on live animal exports.

• Thousands of people took to the streets of Dublin yesterday to demand civil marriage equality.

• Tens of thousands of people gathered across Israel on Saturday to call for lower living costs in an effort to show the government their protest movement has countrywide support.

• Activists with Rising Tide Australia scaled a 15-metre-high coal conveyor belt this morning at Kooragang and suspended a banner that read: “We’re sorry Somalia. Coal = climate change and starvation.”

• Tens of thousands of Syrians poured out of mosques after prayers on Friday to join anti-government protests, defying the threat of a brutal crackdown to express their rage at the killings by security forces this week in the city of Hama.

• 51-year-old South Korean labor activist Kim Jin-sukis about to enter her eighth month atop a 15-story crane where she has been protesting layoffs at a major shipping company.

• A one-day general strike called in Indian Kashmir by separatists to protest the death of a shopkeeper in police custody Wednesday closed down shops, schools and offices.

• Protesters pitched tents and laid down in the middle of one of the busiest streets in the Haitian capital Monday to protest efforts to remove them from a private lot where they have been living since the January 2010 earthquake.

• More than a thousand workers at a Finnish steel making plant downed tools on Thursday morning for two days to protest low wages paid to Polish bricklayers working at the site.

• Thousands of Chinese taxi drivers in Hangzhou went on strike earlier this week to demand higher fares, pensions and the establishment of a labour union.

• Thousands of human rights defenders gathered in cities across globe on Monday to observe International Day of Solidarity and Support for California Prisoners’ Hunger Strike and to support the strikers’ Five Core Demands.

• Before the debt deal vote was held in Washington on Monday, 22 people were arrested protesting House Speaker John Boehner from the chamber gallery. The protesters unveiled a large banner and shouted chants criticizing Republicans for opposing taxes on the wealthy.

• About 30 demonstrators occupied the Oregon State Department of Forestry office in Molalla on Monday to protest a timber sale in the Elliott State Forest near Coos Bay. Three people were arrested after they locked themselves together inside the office using modified pipes and refused to leave.

• Thousands of BBC radio journalists went on strike on Monday to protest against compulsory redundancies while management enjoy Prime Minister-style salaries and chauffeur-driven cars.

• Unionized concrete laborers without a contract since June stopped work for a second day yesterday at the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan in protest over proposed wage cuts.

• In China, striking cab drivers in Hangzhou denouncing rising fuel prices and demanding the government make good on pledges to raise fares abandoned their vehicles for a second day on Tuesday.

• Striking Greek taxi owners stepped up protests Monday, blockading highways and a busy regional airport, after fresh negotiations with the government on new licensing laws collapsed.

• Four people were killed the morning of July 28 when provincial police forcibly evicted some 700 families from land they had been occupying in the city of Libertador General San Martín in the northwestern Argentine province of Jujuy.

• Hundreds of union members took to the streets Thursday in cities and towns around Swaziland to protest government moves to cut civil servants’ salaries amid a deepening financial crisis.