• Thousands of Yemenis protested on Sunday against an immunity law protecting  outgoing President Ali Abdullah Saleh from prosecution and demanded he be put on  trial for offences they say he committed during his 33-year rule.

• More than 50 students from Tuscon High School walked out of class on Monday and marched toward Santa Rita Park in protest of the recent ban on Mexican American studies at TUSD schools.

• In Egypt, dozens of employees at the state-run Nile News TV Channel started an open-ended strike Sunday at the Maspero building, as they protested policies still in place since Mubarak’s rule.

• Malawi lawyers across the country Monday protested in their court regalia to pressure the governement to act on the ongoing judiciary strike.

• Truck drivers across Italy went on strike on Monday against increased fuel prices, while taxis also held a national protest over government reforms to increase competition, causing disruptions nationwide.

• Scores of protests were held across the country on Friday to protest the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which ruled corporations have a right to spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns. A dozen demonstrators were arrested on the U.S. Supreme Court steps.

• In Lebanon, severe electricity cuts fueled several protests Friday as residents and  lawmakers staged a sit-in in the mountain town of Aley and small groups of protesters blocked roads in the south of the country.

• Several women and children staged a sit-in outside the Karachi Press Club (KPC) on Friday to protest against the kidnapping of Baloch youths and the dumping of their bodies in different parts of the province.

• Protests in two West Bank universities have shut down classes in recent days, as students call for easing of tuition fees amid financial crisis in Palestine.

• Beginning last Tuesday, about 100,000 teachers from 24,000 non-government primary schools in Bangladesh held a three-day strike to demand that they be brought onto the government’s payroll.

• Dozens of cars manned by Palestinians from the West Bank tried to leave Jericho on Tuesday morning in a non-violent protest action to protest and challenge the system of Israeli-only roads throughout the West Bank, but were stopped by Israeli forces, who blocked the four lanes entering and exiting the Palestinian city.

• On Monday, survivors of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy staged a protest at a park as part of the international campaign to demand that the Organizing Committee of the London Games set to begin from July 27, cancel the sponsorship by Dow Chemicals.

• Workers at consumer goods giant Unilever staged a noisy protest outside the firm’s London offices in a dispute over pensions which is set to escalate into a series of strikes starting next Tuesday.

• More than 9,000 lawyers boycotted court proceedings in Pakistan’s major cities on Tuesday in protest of a senior attorney’s slaying outside his home in Lahore.

• Workers at a Freeport McMoran mine in Indonesia on Tuesday halted their gradual return to work one day after gunmen shot two contractors dead on the road to the Grasberg mine.

• As many as 231 Air India flight attendants refused to work on Tuesday, which delayed four international flights, to protest non-payment of salaries and sustenance allowance since August.

The message written on this protester's hands reads: "Our demand is the trial."

• Thousands of Yemenis marched toward the capital on Thursday to demand President Ali Abdullah Saleh face trial for killing protesters during 11 months of demonstrations against him and to denounce a new government that would spare him prosecution.

• Several thousand Eyptian activists gathered in Cairo after Friday prayers today for a mass protest against the ruling military and its handling of a series of clashes between security forces and demonstrators that killed 17 people and drew international criticism.

• In Somalia, residents of Sool’s provincial capital of Las Anod took to the streets and went on strike on Thursday, bringing the city to a standstill, to show solidarity with prisoners staging a hunger strike at the city’s main prison.

• On Thursday, holiday strikes to protest austerity measures paralyzed ground traffic in Belgium.

• Camped outside Hungary’s public broadcaster, a small group of television editors is on hunger strike to protest what they say is widespread news manipulation by the government.

• In Pakistan, more than 2,500 members of seven labor unions from across the country gathered at the Railways Headquarters on Wednesday to stage a sit-in against the government’s ‘inability’ to rescue the Railways.

• In Sudan, dozens of students held a protest assembly at Jackson Square on Tuesday in the heart of Khartoum to show solidarity with the month-long Manasir protest against the the Merowe Hydropower Project.

• A group of asylum seekers who survived last weekend’s boat disaster off the Indonesian island of Java have begun a hunger strike after being moved to a detention centre where as many as 12 people are sharing each cell.

• In Kuwait, police used tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannons, and smoke bombs to disperse a large protest on Monday by the country’s stateless people in Taimaa. Around 30 men who entered a hunger strike were arrested.

• 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!”

• South Korean protesters calling attention to the women forced into sexual slavery during WWII reached their thousandth weekly demonstration on Wednesday. Marking the occasion, a statue honoring the victims was erected in front of the Japanese embassy.

• Chicago activists progressively interrupted a school board meeting on Wednesday in an act of nonviolent resistance—eventually forcing the board members to retreat out of the room—in protest of proposed changes to low-income schools.

• Demonstrators opposed to the Keystone XL pipeline staged a ‘human oil spill’ in front of Speaker John Boehner’s office in Washington D.C. Wednesday.

• Portugal’s top trade union confederation CGTP on Monday launched a week of protests against the government’s austerity policies.

• Employees of the Lahore College for Women University in Pakistan held a boycott of classes for the second day on Tuesday, demanding better terms for school workers.

• Thousands of taxi drivers in Guinea Bissau went on strike Tuesday to call for an end to police extortion.

• Disabled persons in Athens held a rally on Tuesday to oppose further austerity measures being considered by the Greek government.

• Inmates at seven Kyrgyzstan prisons coordinated a hunger strike on Tuesday to agitate for better living conditions and meals.

• Around 200 Los Angeles high school students walked out of classes on Tuesday and marched several miles to stage a sit-in at district board meeting, decrying cuts to school budgets.

• Thousands of public sector workers in Cyprus staged a three-hour stoppage Tuesday in protest over government moves to freeze salaries for two years as part of an austerity drive to avoid an EU bailout.

• A network of progressive South Korean Christian groups began a four day hunger strike on Monday to protest vote buying and corruption in the country’s largest Protestant association.

• Arab and Bedouin Israelis held a state-wide general strike on Sunday as several thousand demonstrators gathered at the Prime Ministry to express their outrage at a government plan that would relocate Negev Bedouins out of their homes into impoverished townships.

• In cities all across Russia, unauthorized demonstrations were ongoing Sunday after anti-Putin protesters escalated their dissent in Moscow at a massive rally on Saturday as tens of thousands marched for free elections.

• On Sunday, Syrians in some regions observed the opposition’s call for a general strike, despite reports that police in the capital forced shop owners to reopen.

• After leading scores of protesters inside of Durban climate talks on Friday, Greenpeace activists posed as representatives of wealthy corporations on Sunday to call attention to the beneficiaries of failed action at the ICC.

• Bangkok, Thailand saw a rare second rally in two days Saturday as a throng of marchers engaged in a ‘fearlessness walk’ reiterated their objections to laws that punish those who speak out against the monarchy.

• A flash mob erupted in a Pittsburgh Target on Saturday as Occupy organizers briefly flooded the store in protest of the company’s hiring policies.

• For the second day in a row, hundreds of Indian teachers in Bangalore boycotted classes on Friday in protest of low wages.

• Demonstrations condemning the NATO airstrike in Pakistan have been ongoing for two weeks across the country, and were sparked anew after prayers Friday.

• Tens of thousands of Yemenis took to the streets again Friday chanting ‘no partnership with the murderers’ after a new Cabinet—half filled with pro-regime politicians—was announced.

• In the Dominican Republic on Thursday, hundreds of activists rallied against the government’s practice of confiscating or annulling birth certificates for those of Haitian descent.

• Protests were ongoing Sunday in Tahrir Square after thousands of protesters rallied on Friday for an end to the Army’s rule in Egypt.

• Despite strict controls on public speech, Singapore saw a rare public demonstration on Sunday as hundreds of activists participated in the global “Slut Walk” movement, calling attention to violence against women.

• Jordanian environmentalists staged a sit-in Saturday at the Prime Ministry, objecting to the country’s atomic program.

• Friday marked the seventh day of protests in Pakistan as demonstrators decried a NATO airstrike in Pakistani territory which killed 24 soldiers.

• On Wednesday, a mass rally took place in Bulgaria as thousands demonstrated against austerity measures, including a government plan to raise the retirement age.

• In India, several fired workers agitating for their union’s recognition were arrested Wednesday after protesting in front of a Hyundai plant’s gate.

• Millions of shop owners in India closed their doors on Thursday, striking and marching in protest of a bill which would allow foreign superstores like Walmart to have greater access in their country.

• In the United Kingdom, Wales was the center of one of the largest public sector strikes in a generation Wednesday as around 170,000 workers—including teachers—abandoned their posts in ongoing protests against government pension reforms.

• In the Philippines, hundreds of inmates continued a hunger strike Thursday, instigating noise barrages to agitate for faster case disposition, the release of political prisoners, and to address other grievances.

• Thousands of Greek workers participated in this year’s seventh general strike on Thursday, continuing their calls to end government austerity programs.

• Students from three high schools in Seattle staged a walk out on Thursday to gather at City Hall in protest of a Washington state proposal to fill budget holes with cuts to education funding.

• Building on a series of protests this month against Bank of America’s poor environmental record, a Thursday rally in Asheville, NC culminated in the arrest of several nonviolent resisters who wanted to call attention to BOA’s support of the coal industry.

• Pakistani cricket star-turned-opposition politician Imran Khan drew as many as  100,000 people to a rally in Lahore Sunday, where Khan  lambasted the country’s leading political figures as well as the United  States.

• It was announced today that a flotilla made up of a Canadian and an Irish ship is en route to Palestine to break the siege on Gaza.

• Tens of thousands of protesters in the Yemeni  capital Sana’a took to the streets Sunday demanding the release of  fellow demonstrators arrested by government security forces since February.

• Thousands of Egyptians demonstrated on Monday in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to protest the military’s recent detention of prominent blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah on charges of inciting violence and sabotage.

• On Monday, fresh demonstrations were held in Jayapura demanding Indonesia take formal and legal responsibility for ongoing human rights abuses in West Papua, most recently the brutal attack on the Third Papuan People’s Congress (KP3) earlier this month.

• The abandoned Hotel Madrid, which was taken over by an unknown number of squatters on October 16 after a mass rally in the capital organized by the 15-M movement, opened its doors on Monday to the first person to take up the group’s stated strategy of “freeing up spaces for common use.”

• In the Philippines, over 500 inmates in Compostela Valley held a noise barrage and hunger strike over the slow resolution of their cases.

• About 100 people gathered outside the Michigan League Monday afternoon to protest Eric Cantor, the U.S. House of Representatives majority leader and a Virginia Republican.

• Dressed in their colorful traditional attire, some 200 Wixáritari or Huichol men, women and children traveled 20 hours from western Mexico to protest in the capital last week to demand a stop to the activities of foreign mining companies in the high desert of San Luis Potosí in the central state of that name.

• Last Friday, hundreds of indigenous leaders, fishermen and riverine people from the Xingu River basin who had gathered to permanently occupy the Belo Monte Dam construction site in a peaceful protest to stop its construction in Altamira, located in the state of Pará in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon were evicted.

• Hundreds of thousands of Yemenis gathered in cities and towns across the country yesterday to protest what they consider President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s latest attempt to avoid stepping down.

• In Egypt, student unions of 20 public universities protested Tuesday in support of professors’ call for academic independence.

• On Monday, the sacked teachers and staff of the National University in Bangladesh held a rally and staged a sit-in demonstration on the campus in Gazipur.

• About two-dozen anti-BART protesters marched along San Francisco’s  Market Street Monday evening in the fifth consecutive weekly rush-hour  demonstration organized by the hacker group “Anonymous.”

• In India, around 7,000 residents from coastal areas of Idinthakarai and other villages observed a massive hunger strike on Sunday to protest against the Koodankulam Nuclear Power Project (KKNPP).

• In Pakistan, dozens of squatters staged a sit-in on Sunday in a protest against the demolition of their houses on Saturday by district administration to clear the land for construction of a road.

• Several thousand Slovak teachers rallied yesterday in the capital Bratislava to protest low salaries.

• In the Philippines, eight political prisoners, including a woman, started an eight-day hunger strike in Iloilo on Tuesday as part of a nationwide protest to demand the release of all political detainees in the country.

• Almost the entire police force of a small town in southern Spain went on sick leave yesterday in a dispute over payments.

Of course, this shift intensified after 9/11, and the tenth anniversary of that horrific day has given us an occasion to really revisit what it means. We should be aware that no people can survive such degradation of their most basic values. When the CIA/US Army shifts more and more to paramilitary operations it shifts more and more out of the few safeguards that were erected around  modern militaries to prevent them from carrying out grave abuse. It makes them look more like the death squads of Central America and Colombia than a democratic institution.

The medieval Church had its “secular arm,” to which “heretics” were handed over for (often horrible) deaths, providing the Church and the public with the convenient illusion that they had handed over with their victims the responsibility for killing them. The CIA (and doubtless other formal and informal “security” agencies to greater and lesser degrees) has its parallel in its “black budget” and even blacker deeds, its appeal to “security” as an excuse and cover-up for inhumane acts that can never bring security to any person or nation. The Church burned a French peasant named Jeanne d’Arc, whom it later declared had been a saint; what we are burning is the soul of American democracy.

I am focusing here on torture, but equally shameful and counter-democratic are the drone attacks which for me exemplify sheer cowardice and the necessity to carry all this out in secret so that, as the New York Times report of April 28 goes on to say, “the American spy and military agencies operate in such secrecy now that it is often hard to come by specific information about the American role in major missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and now Libya and Yemen.”

There are two things a democracy cannot tolerate, without losing its fundamental character: secrecy and violence. The latter may not be as obvious, but think about it: democracy derives its whole meaning from the sanctity of life, the worth of the individual. Violence negates both.

Perhaps the most important lesson to learn from this pernicious shift is that it was and will be inevitable, as long as violence—whether in uniform or not—is the underlying force on which we seek to build our security. The journalist Norman Cousins pointed this out long ago when it was revealed, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, that U.S. Navy personnel some time after World War II had carried out an “experiment” of spraying lethal bacteria into the fog over San Francisco Bay, killing at least one person whose grandchildren were then suing the Government. As Cousins said, there is no such thing as a clean, sanitized military that can take over the job of protecting us: people have to protect themselves with the robustness of their institutions and integrity of their values, because when we set up an elite to do it for us with destructive force it will not be possible to keep that force within civilized limits.

There are thousands of Americans who have reached out to Muslim fellow Americans to counteract, one on one or in small groups, the dependency on violent defense by overcoming the very hatred and superstition that make us think we need it. There are peace ambassadors like the tireless activist (and Waging Nonviolence contributor) Kathy Kelly who have gone to Afghanistan to carry reconciliation to the lands most devastated by the perceived need for revenge. These are the people who are really showing us the way to security, and with it the real defense of everything that makes our democracy meaningful.

The official story about the reason for 9/11 attacks has it that “they are jealous of our freedoms.”  If so, we have handed Osama bin Laden and his cohorts a victory they could scarcely have dreamed of, for a people that gives away its moral integrity to a clandestine force is neither brave nor free. In the end, the entire system of war and militarism will have to be replaced by nonviolent equivalents—and they do exist—if we want our democracy to be real. The torture and secrecy that have now come to light in the heart of that system is a good place to start.

• In the largest civil disobedience protests in the environmental movement’s recent history, 50 more people were arrested Thursday outside the White House in a protest against the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline. Since Saturday, 322 people have now been arrested.

• Seven hundred transport workers blocked a main road in western Sydney yesterday to demand new federal work safety laws.

• Some retrenched workers of the Ghana Cotton Company (GCC) in Bolgatanga are on hunger strike and they and their colleagues on Thursday reiterated their appeal to government to ensure that their severance awards are paid them.

• Police arrested undocumented students who were holding a demonstration Wednesday outside the immigration offices in Los Angeles against Secure Communities, a controversial  immigration enforcement program.

• Police turned away a half-dozen protesters on Wednesday who had occupied Rep. Paul Ryan’s Kenosha office since last week.

• Around 100 lawyers in Syria defied Bashar al-Assad’s regime as it continues a violent crackdown against country-wide protests, by holding coordinated sit-ins outside bar associations in at least four regions of the country on Tuesday.

• The Pakistani city of Karachi was brought to a standstill on Tuesday after a “day of mourning” strike was called by a political party to protest against weeks of violence.

• Greek tourism workers walked off the job Tuesday in a 24-hour strike over government pension cuts, as dozens demonstrated outside three luxury hotels in the Greek capital to protest the cutbacks.

• In San Francisco, authorities arrested 45 people Monday during another protest against BART, the operators of the Bay Area train system.

• In New York City, an 82-year-old resident of Brooklyn facing foreclosure was allowed to stay in her house last Friday after more than 200 people gathered in front of her home to block the eviction.

Refugee Camp in Kabul. (Photo: Jacob George)

It’s a bit odd to me that with my sense of geographical direction I’m ever regarded as a leader to guide groups in foreign travel. I’m recalling a steaming hot night in Lahore, Pakistan when Josh Brollier and I, having enjoyed a lengthy dinner with Lahore University students, needed to head back to the guest lodgings graciously provided us by a headmaster of the Garrison School for Boys. We had boarded a rickshaw, but the driver had soon become terribly lost and with my spotty sense of direction and my complete ignorance of Urdu, I couldn’t be any help. My cell phone was out of juice, and I was uncertain anyway of the needed phone number. I bumped and jostled in the back seat of the rickshaw, next to Josh, as we embarked on a nightmare of travel over unpaved, rutted roads in dizzying traffic until finally the rickshaw driver spotted a sign belonging to our school – the wrong campus, we all knew – and eager to unload us, roused the inhabitants and hustled us and our bags into the street before moving on.

We stood inside the gate, staring blankly at a family that had been sound asleep on cots in the courtyard. In no time, the father of the family scooped up his two children, gently moving them to the cot he shared with his wife so that Josh and I would have a cot on which to sit. Then he and his spouse disappeared into their humble living quarters. He reappeared with a fan and an extension cord, wanting to give us some relief from the blistering night heat. His wife emerged carrying a glass of tea for each of us. They didn’t know us from Adam’s house cat, but they were treating us as family – the celebrated but always astonishing hospitality that we’d encountered in the region so many times before. Eventually, we established with our host that we were indeed at the wrong campus, upon which he called the family that had been nervously waiting for our errant selves.

This courtyard scene of startling hospitality would return to my mind when we all learned of the U.S. Joint Special Operations (JSO) Force night raid in the Nangarhar province, on May 12, 2011. No matter which side of the Afghanistan/Pakistan border you are on, suffocating hot temperatures prevail day and night during these hot months. It’s normal for people to sleep in their courtyards. How could anyone living in the region not know this? Yet the U.S. JSO forces that came in the middle of the night to the home of a 12-year-old girl, Nilofer, who had been asleep on her cot in the courtyard, began their raid by throwing a grenade into the courtyard, landing at Nilofer’s head. She died instantly. Nilofer’s uncle raced into the courtyard. He worked with the Afghan Local Police, and they had told him not to join that night’s patrol because he didn’t know much about the village they would go to, so he had instead gone to his brother’s home. When he heard the grenade explode, he may well have presumed the Taliban were attacking the home. U.S. troops killed him as soon as they saw him. Later, NATO issued an apology.

“The raids occur ‘every night. We are very much miserable,’ said Roshanak Wardak, a doctor and a former member of the national Parliament.” I am reading a McClatchy news report, dated August 8th of this year. “Residents of the Tangi Valley area, in eastern Wardak Province, about 60 miles southwest of Kabul, issued similar complaints about the night raids in their vicinity, charging that they have killed civilians, disrupted their lives and fueled popular support for the Taliban.”

Imagine it. People in an Afghan village pass sleepless nights, anxious that their home might be targeted by a U.S.-led night raid. Villagers are enraged when they hear stories of elders and imams being roughed up and detained, of wives and children being killed, of belongings stolen and property destroyed. Increasingly, the U.S. military battles against the so-called insurgency are creating a stronger resistance as more Afghans grow determined to fight back.

In Helmand province, in Nad Ali, the district governor told a New York Times reporter one incident in the spiral of violence: a NATO foot patrol came under fire from a family home on August 5, 2011, killing one soldier and wounding an Afghan interpreter. The NATO troops called in an airstrike. NATO is now investigating a report that the airstrike killed eight civilians, seven of them children. “The home belonged to Mullah Abdul Hadi, 50, a local imam who Afghan officials say was helping the Taliban,” said Mr. Shamlani. “He was killed along with one of his two wives and his seven children, all younger than 7 years old.”

People in Nad Ali are expected to embrace closer relations with the United States and its troops after the deaths at our hands of seven children, children they knew aged one to seven, who had committed no crime.

Now comes the U.S. determination to seal a “Strategic Partnership Declaration” with its client Afghan government. Many in that country (and this one) expect such an agreement to allow the U.S. to establish permanent military bases, a permanent occupation presence that will provoke resistance groups there to declare perpetual war.

The Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers, a group of young people dedicated to ending wars and inequalities in their country, write in their August 9th statement:

The US-Afghanistan Strategic Partnership Declaration will perpetuate ‘terrorism’ and bring it to everyone’s doorsteps.

The ‘partnership’ will allow permanent joint US-Afghanistan military bases to launch and project hard power. The ‘extreme’ Taliban will conveniently ‘use’ these bases as a stand-alone reason for their ‘holy jihad.’ We cannot forget that one of Osama Bin Laden’s reasons for attacking the US on September 11^th was the presence of US military bases in Saudi Arabia.

This Strategic Partnership Declaration will kill any chance for our madness to slow down and our violence to calm down.

It will doom ordinary Americans and Afghans to permanent terrorism.

Why can’t we quiet our nerves, look deep inside humanity, and begin healing?

Everyone wants to be safe, but I think of the Lahore family taking us into their sleeping courtyard and their home that night, knowing nothing of these crazy Americans who had been dropped on their doorstep. We had woken them up but they chose to stay awake and take care of us. Americans seem to respond to our endless wake-up calls from Afghanistan by just going, every time, back to sleep, rather than working to make the situation better.  I think of the night raids, families being woken up to sudden horror somewhere every night in the region, children killed sleeping in our efforts to make ourselves more safe (among other motives), and an ever escalating conflict arising from the violence.

We are startlingly, terrifyingly lost, and we’re getting ever more so. If we see a sign here in the darkness, an opportunity to make contact with the people around us, we should take it gratefully. The letter from my Afghan Youth friends is another sign for me that we do not belong in the Afghan home forever, occupying it at gunpoint. However groggily we may have awoken or reawoken to this dreadful situation and our role in it, we must act now to free our Afghan hosts of their overstaying guests, and get the U.S. safely back to where it should be.

• More than 300,000 people took part in demonstrations across Israel on Saturday night calling for “social justice,” a blanket term covering demands for reforms in housing, taxes, healthcare, childcare, and education.

• Forty-five thousand Verizon Communications Inc. workers from Massachusetts to Washington, D.C., went on strike Sunday after negotiations fizzled over a new labor contract for more than a fifth of the company’s work force.

• Tens of thousands of opponents of embattled Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh held rallies across the country following prayers on Friday.

• Thousands of protestors largely drawn from Pakistan Justice Party staged a sit-in protest in front of country’s Parliament in Islamabad on Saturday evening to protest corruption, unemployment and US drone strikes.

• Israeli forces targeted three separate rallies across the West Bank on Friday, firing tear gas at participants and lightly injuring dozens.

• In Jordan, dozens of activists staged a sit-in following Ramadan evening prayers on Friday night in front of Salt city’s cultural center, protesting what they concidered government stalling in impementing nesessery political and economic reforms.

• Thousands of demonstrators angry about the government’s austerity program briefly reoccupied a central Madrid plaza on Saturday after police withdrew following widespread outrage at officers’ handling of a protest two days earlier.

• The pro-LGBT activists from GetEqual Texas braved the Houston sun on Saturday to protest outside Reliant Stadium, where Governor Rick Perry and thousands of  Evangelicals were holding an unabashedly political “day of prayer,” “The Response.”

• Nepalese riot police arrested teachers affiliated with temporary teacher struggle committee during a sit-in protest in front of the education ministry in Kathmandu on Thursday.

• Two months after they launched a movement against the economic crisis and soaring unemployment, thousands of Spain’s so-called “indignant” protesters converged on Madrid again on Saturday.

• Several Syrian towns observed calls for a general strike on Saturday, a day after protests in which at least nine people were killed by security forces.

• Ecuador’s largest circulation daily newspaper has run a blank front page to  protest a $40m libel ruling imposed for running a column critical of President  Rafael Correa.

• More than 2,000 workers at the world’s largest private copper mine have gone on strike in Chile to protest reductions in their production bonuses.

• On Saturday, about twenty people rallied and marched in downtown Santa Cruz in solidarity with prisoners at Pelican Bay who have ended their hunger strike and declared it a success

• Thousands of labor activists staged a protest rally in downtown Seoul on Saturday, demanding that strike-bound Hanjin Heavy Industries & Construction Co. withdraw its decision to cut hundreds of jobs.

• On July 20 and 21, 300 workers from the Guizhou Dazhong Rubber Company in China held a sit-in to protest their bosses’ embezzlement of government resources and exploitation of workers’ interests, and to ask the authorities to address the problems.

• Political prisoners around the country started a nationwide hunger strike campaign last Thursday to pressure President Benigno Aquino III to release political prisoners and declare a clear human rights policy.

• In Kenya, hundreds of truck drivers in Kisumu went on strike last Wednesday to protest the increased carjacking incidents.

• In Pakistan, Voice for Baloch Missing Persons (VFBP) staged a sit-in demonstration in front of the Commissioner Office on Thursday for the safe and immediate recovery of missing Baloch political activists.

• Hundreds of thousands of protesters flooded the streets across Yemen on Sunday to demand the ouster of President Ali Abdullah Saleh on the anniversary of his rise to power in  1978.

• Dozens of tents have been erected in Tel Aviv, with plans for further encampments in other Israeli towns and cities, to protest high house prices.

• Several Indian and Pakistani citizens Saturday gathered near Rajghat, Delhi and formed a human chain on Saturday to protest the July 13 Mumbai blasts that left at least 19 people dead and injured 130.

• Journalists at the BBC walked off their jobs Friday to protest planned job cuts as a result of lower government funding.

• Greenpeace activists dressed as polar bears occupied the Edinburgh offices of Cairn Energy on Monday as the environmental group stepped up the pressure on the company over its Arctic exploration plans.

• Around 2,000 farmers, backed by student groups and academics gathered in front of the presidential office in Taipei late on Saturday to protest government proposals that would make it easier for farm land to be forcibly turned over to developers.

• Around 200 people gathered at the Jordan Press Association headquarters earlier today to denounce an attack on journalists by riot police on Friday.

• Greek taxi drivers blocked roads to Athens’ airport and main harbor today, holding up thousands of tourists at the start of a two-day protest against plans to liberalize their trade.

• Several hundred people attended a protest march against the EU-IMF austerity programme in Dublin on Saturday.

• A small group of mass transit activists against freeway expansion unfurled a banner overlooking the 405 Freeway in Los Angeles on Sunday that read “L.A. Beyond Cars.”