• 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.

• Twenty-seven “Occupy St. Louis” protesters were arrested early Saturday morning after defying an existing park curfew.

• 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.

• Thousands of demonstrators rallied in Rio de Janeiro on Thursday against oil legislation that could cost the port city and surrounding state billions of dollars in revenues.

• 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.

• More than 350 people linked arms to form a “human chain” on the Stirling Bridge in Fremantle, Australia on Sunday to protest the live animal export trade.

• 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.

• More than 2,000 students marched through London last week to protest cuts to public spending and a big increase in tuition fees.

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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• Greeks walked off their jobs across the nation today and as many as 20,000 marched through Athens’ central square to protest Prime Minister George Papandreou’s 6.6 billion-euro ($8.7 billion) austerity plan, challenging a government seeking European bailout funds to stave off default.

• 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.

• Hundreds of Egyptian Copts and supporters organised an angry protest and started a sit-in Tuesday night to voice fury over their renewed feeling of persecution and injustice in the wake of last month’s sectarian tensions in Aswan, Upper Egypt.

• More than 1,000 Jordanians demonstrated in central Amman on Friday to demand “satisfactory” constitutional reforms as parliament debates amendments proposed last month.

• Several hundred environmental activists and homeowners packed the sidewalks outside a natural gas industry conference in Philadelphia last Wednesday and called for a moratorium on drilling, which they said was contaminating water, harming animals and creating a public health hazard.

• 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.

• Demonstrators dumped mussel shells in front of Italy’s parliament on Saturday, accusing politicians of squeezing workers with an austerity package while clinging to their privileges like mussels cling to rocks.

• Thousands of anti-nuclear protesters took to the streets of Tokyo and other cities on Sunday to mark six months since the March earthquake and tsunami and vent their anger at the government’s handling of the nuclear crisis set off by meltdowns at the Fukushima power plant.

• Anti-mining protesters chained themselves together in the Melbourne, Australia office of a mining company’s financial underwriter over the weekend as they stepped up their campaign against exploration of brown coal in Bacchus Marsh.

• About two thousand students and workers at the American University in Cairo began an open-ended strike on Sunday to protest the recent hike in tuition fees and continuing low salaries, amid silence from the university’s administration.

• Classrooms have remained shut for more than 10 million Kenyan students at the start of the term when students sit national exams after about 200,000 members of the Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT) stayed away. Teachers marched through the streets of Nairobi Wednesday on the second day of a nationwide strike.

• Thousands of people marched on Thursday against the appointed government in Swaziland, Africa’s last absolute monarchy.

• 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.

• Thousands of teachers and students took to the streets of several of  Colombia’s  major cities Wednesday “in defense of public education.”

• 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.

• Normal life across Kashmir was disrupted on Tuesday, the first day of a 2-day general strike to press for release of political prisoners and to protest the fresh wave of arrests across the valley.

• 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.

• 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.

• Hundreds of foreign exchange students walked off their jobs at a Hershey’s chocolate plant in Pennsylvania to protest low pay and physically draining work.

• Latino activists held a protest outside President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign headquarters on Tuesday to ask him to end a criminal deportation program they say is snaring large number of illegal immigrants who have not committed crimes.

• Syrian security forces fired at thousands of protesters who poured into the streets throughout the country Friday killing at least two, activists said, a day after the United States and its European allies demanded that President Bashar Assad step down.

• Indian activist Anna Hazare began a public hunger strike in the country’s capital Friday, accompanied by thousands of cheering supporters, who want to see stronger anti-corruption measures in India.

• Hundreds of striking Verizon workers held a candlelight vigil outside their CEO’s Mendham, New Jersey mansion Thursday, hoping to draw a stark contrast between the contract demands of blue-collar workers and the quality of life enjoyed by the company’s executives.

• 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.

• Protesters gatecrashed a mining and exploration conference organised by the New South Wales government in Australia yesterday, abseiling off the balcony of a Sydney hotel to unfurl a banner against coal seam gas.

• 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.

• Ten people were arrested Monday after blocking the road to the Arizona Snowbowl ski resort near Flagstaff in an attempt to prevent construction on a new snowmaking system out of sewage that they say will defile a mountain held sacred by all the region’s indigenous people.

• Anti-fracking activists wearing gas masks and lab coats gathered in Cape Town city center on Tuesday to protest Shell’s plans for shale gas exploration in South Africa’s Karoo region.

• Tribal groups in the Philippines marked International Day of Indigenous Peoples on Tuesday with protests calling for an end to human rights violations, land grabbing and environmental destruction.

• 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.

• Some 1,000 people took part in a protest in Youghal, County Cork, Ireland last weekend over plans by the Health Service Executive to replace the town ambulance service with a first responder paramedic car.

• 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.

• Miners at Anglo American’s Moranbah North coal mine in Australia are protesting what they describe as a “dangerous practice” of sharing camp rooms, which would require workers to drive home after 12-hour shifts.