Australia

Hawaiians protests APEC, Portuguese oppose austerity measures, Australians march for the environment…

  • A few hundred protesters marched on Waikiki Saturday as leaders of Pacific Rim nations gathered for a summit to discuss free trade agreements and other issues. During the gala dinner, renowned Hawaiian guitarist Makana spent almost 45 minutes repeatedly singing his new protest ballad “We Are the Many” instead of the expected instrumental background music. Over a dozen heads of state, including President Obama, heard Makana’s message that included lines such as “The lobbyists at Washington do gnaw…. And until they are purged, we won’t withdraw.”
  • Police confronted an estimated 1,000 protesters in Portland, Oregon, on Sunday after clearing parks occupied by demonstrators for weeks. 50 were arrested after refusing to leave one of the parks. The demonstrators regrouped in the streets, blocking traffic for hours.
  • Portuguese civil servants and soldiers staged an anti-austerity protest in Lisbon on Saturday, a sign of the rising social tensions in debt-hit Portugal over deep cuts in spending.
  • Angry over a range of environmental issues, about 250 protesters erected a mock coal-fired power station on the steps of Australia’s Parliament House before marching backwards to Treasury Gardens, arguing the government’s policies have taken Victoria backwards.
  • About 100 peaceful marchers sent a clear message Sunday to vandals who torched cars and scrawled Nazi swastikas in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Brooklyn. The march included about 25 people from the Occupy Wall Street movement in Manhattan, which put out a statement condemning the vandalism.
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High-ranking Fiji junta officer talks nonviolent resistance

The world has had little reason to pay attention to the intensifying human rights meltdown in Fiji at the hands of the ruling military junta. After all, it hasn’t affected the bottom line: foreign exploitation of the island nation’s cheap natural resources or the discounted soldiers it supplies to the United Nations and American mercenary companies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Fiji Water, one of the top imported bottled waters in the United States, still markets itself as an untarnished taste of paradise, while giving millions of dollars to the country’s brutal dictatorship and hiring a military-led company to run its security. Even Gibson Guitar, the favorite of rock-stars which just became the new darling of the Tea Party after federal raids on its imported wood, is busy courting the despotic regime for preferential access to Fiji’s mahogany riches, which were behind the country’s 2000 coup.

The draconian censorship of all media in Fiji means constant suppression of reports about the increasing surveillance, harassment, detentions, beatings, rape and murder of Fijian citizens at the hands of their dictatorship. International press has recently noticed that the junta is even censoring news of tourist deaths on the island in order to maintain the facade of idyllic calm.

But in the past few months, the discontent simmering in Fijian society has come spilling out through several key fractures. There have been high-level defections, calls for global solidarity by labor unions and on-the-ground protests. For the first time since the junta took power in a 2006 coup, many Fijians have hope that the ingredients of a revolution are coming together.

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Experiments with truth: 10/5/11

  • On Monday, hundreds of activists stopped pedestrian traffic at the Perth Cultural Centre with a flash mob dance to raise awareness on climate change and push for the state to be powered by 100 per cent renewable energy.
  • Madrid secondary school teachers launched a second round of strikes on Tuesday to protest what they say is an attempt by the local centre-right government to use the debt crisis to strangle public schools and benefit private ones.
  • In Lebanon, residents of a neighborhood in Baalbek held a sit-in Sunday to protest a lack of  government action on the poor state of roads in the area.
  • Advocates for California prison inmates conducting a hunger strike said the number of participants has swelled to 12,000, making it possibly the largest prison strike in recent U.S. history. State corrections officials said the number of striking inmates is far lower than reported by advocates.
  • On Monday, over a thousand Palestinians converged on the International Committee of the Red Cross building in Gaza, Palestine, continuing a tent protest that began outside the walled compound on Sunday and bolstering a weekly sit-in by the families of Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons. Meanwhile, hundreds of Palestinians in Israeli jails have joined a hunger strike to protest against worsening prison conditions.
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Experiments with truth: 9/12/11

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  • Thousands of Greek tax collectors and customs officials walked off the job Monday in the first day of a two-day strike over plans to cut civil service salaries, the latest in a string of protests over Greek government reforms.
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Experiments with truth: 9/9/11

  • In Australia, unions are claiming victory in their campaign against the state government after an angry crowd of about 30,000 marched on State Parliament yesterday to protest the O’Farrell government’s controversial legislation that limits public sector workers’ pay raises.
  • At least 10 young illegal immigrants who have lived in the United States almost all their lives could be deported after being arrested Tuesday during a boisterous sit-in rally during which about 300 people blocked a busy intersection near uptown Charlotte to protest immigration law.
  • About 1,200 workers at Freeport McMoRan’s Sociedad Minera Cerro Verde SAA unit, Peru’s third-largest copper producer, began a 48-hour strike on Wednesday over pay increases and will hold a second strike from Sept. 14 if no accord is reached.
  • About 3,000 hotel workers started a week-long strike against Hyatt yesterday as part of a campaign in four cities—Honolulu, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles—over the subcontracting of jobs and poor working conditions.
  • In Jordan, scores of journalists staged a sit-in on Wednesday in solidarity with colleagues discharged from service by Nourmina TV earlier this month.
  • Bahrain yesterday released doctors and medical personnel who have been behind bars since March after increased international condemnation and a series of hunger strikes by supporters inside and outside the country.
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Experiments with truth: 9/2/11

  • 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.
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Experiments with truth: 8/26/11

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
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Experiments with truth: 8/19/11

  • What began as the latest public hearing organized by a U.S. Department of Homeland Security task force to address deportation policy concerns ended in the arrest of 10 immigration reform activists Wednesday evening in Chicago.

 

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Experiments with truth: 8/15/11

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
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Experiments with truth: 8/10/11

  • About 125 people gathered outside Speaker of the House John Boehner’s office in West Chester, Ohio on Tuesday to demand more jobs for people in his district.
  • Dozens of Togolese journalists marched in the capital, Lomé, on Saturday to call attention to reported allegations that government security agents planned to retaliate against critical reporters.
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