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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A child sitting on an army tank in Tahrir Square, with a banner that reads "Egypt is free" on January 29, 2011. By Hossam el-Hamalawy, via Flickr.

Nearly all successful movements need to attract allies in order to win. The U.S. Occupy movement in its first few months attracted widespread sympathy and support in opinion polls; but the function of allies is to translate favorable opinion into active support.

Some movements realize this and craft their messaging and tactics in order to expand their base and win active allies. They avoid what might be called “shrinking messages” that emphasize what happens to them (i.e. the latest police repression), and instead put out “expanding messages” that emphasize how the system oppresses other people — thereby giving reasons for other people to join them. This isn’t easy. What’s more natural than to become self-absorbed, especially when taking punishment? The advice commonly used in the civil rights movement, which took much more punishment than many U.S. movements do, was to “keep your eye on the prize.” When we remember the prize, we know we need to expand beyond our ranks and win allies.

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A march in Madrid during the general strike, via the FotogrAccion collective.

Last Thursday, people across Spain made a show of force in a general strike, at a scale ranging from the government estimate of 800,000 to the 4 million claimed by the unions. It was timed to challenge new reforms that are expected to make it easier for employers to fire workers, dealing a blow to organized labor.

The 15M movement, which began with occupations in the central squares of cities around the country last year, played an important role in the strike’s success. Despite ongoing conflicts between the largest unions and 15M, several weeks ago the movement’s key organizations — including neighborhood assemblies, Democracia Real Ya, Yo No Pago and the Platform of People Affected by the Mortgage (PAH) — announced their support for the general strike and started working to make it a success.

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• Tens of thousands of students protested on Thursday against a 75 percent tuition hike at universities in Canada’s mostly French-speaking Quebec province, bringing downtown Montreal to a standstill. Since mid-February, nearly 300,000 students have boycotted classes, blocked bridges and held smaller protests around the province.

• More than 1,000 indigenous protesters reached Ecuador’s capital Thursday after a two-week march from the Amazon to oppose plans for large-scale mining on their lands. The protesters were joined by thousands of anti-government protesters in Quito.

• Hundreds of farmers gathered in the Vietnamese capital on Thursday to demand the return of rice fields they say were confiscated by heavily armed police just days after receiving an eviction notice.

• More than 1,000 people gathered in a downtown Brattleboro park on Thursday to call for the closure of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. It was the first day of the plant’s operation after the expiration of its 40-year license. Over 130 protesters were arrested for unlawful trespass as part of a civil disobedience action.

• More than a thousand people rallied in New York City’s Union Square on Wednesday evening with the parents of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager who was shot dead in Florida in late February.

• Portuguese workers halted trains, shut ports and paralyzed most public transport in the capital Lisbon on Thursday to protest austerity measures and labor reforms imposed as a condition of a 78-billion-euro ($103 billion) bailout.

• Three Tibetans who have been on hunger strike outside the UN headquarters for the past month ended their protest Thursday after the UN said investigators would look into events in Tibet.

• Several people were arrested on Tuesday after a rally in a Phoenix intersection to protest immigration policies of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Initiatives promoting self-management are spreading in Spain. The latest one is ¡Rebelaos! (translated, in the imperative, as “Rebel!”), a small publication that has been flooding the streets since last Thursday and preaching a way of life outside the government and economic system.

“We want to present proposals and strategies for social change,” says Enric Duran, one of the members of the Afinidad Rebelde collective, which is responsible for the publication. “Although there is a lot of information about how to live without capitalism, the information is quite dispersed. We worked to gather these ideas and experiences into a roadmap for generating change.” Afinidad Rebelde grew out of a few dozen people from the Cooperativa Integral Catalana, Derecho de Rebelión and the 15M movement. It was born in mid-2011 to publish ¡Rebelaos!, and it will dissolve after distribution is finished.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Hundreds of thousands of people in 60 cities across Spain took part Sunday in demonstrations called by the country’s main trade unions to protest the government’s tough new labor reforms and cutbacks.

• Hundreds of students in eastern Afghanistan on Tuesday protested against the U.S. and the American soldier who killed 16 Afghan civilians in a shooting spree on Sunday.

• Tens of thousands of people joined an opposition rally in Bangladesh’s capital on Monday to demand that a nonpartisan caretaker government oversee the next general election.

• Tens of thousands of people rallied near Japan’s crippled Fukushima plant Sunday demanding an end to nuclear power as the nation marked the first anniversary of a disastrous quake and tsunami.

• Thousands of students at an all-female university in Saudi Arabia boycotted classes on Saturday, protesting against poor services in a rare display of dissent from women in the conservative Islamic kingdom.

• Tens of thousands of pro-union demonstrators descended on the Wisconsin Capitol on  Saturday to voice their anger at Gov. Scott Walker and his conservative agenda, using the anniversary of the passage of his signature collective bargaining law  to rally support for efforts to remove him and five other Republicans from  office.

• Tens of thousands of Bahrainis demonstrated outside the capital Manama on Friday to demand political reforms, a year after the Gulf Arab state crushed an uprising.

• More than 50,000 workers in Italy participated in demonstrations and a nationwide strike on Friday, calling for democracy in the workplace and accusing the government of acting in the interests of the banks and industrial groups.

• As part of a campaign to fight violence against women, pictures of victims were hung on walls in the Cerro Gordo neighborhood of Ecatepec, outside Mexico City on Wednesday.

• Tens of thousands of South Africans marched peacefully through their main cities Wednesday to demand the governing African National Congress do more for the poor.

• Hundreds of native Ecuadorans began a cross-country march Thursday to protest policies by President Rafael Correa they say will result in more mining in the Amazon region and threaten the environment and their way of life.

• Hundreds of Saudi women took part in a protest against discrimination and mismanagement at the King Khalid University, in Abha, on Wednesday. At least 50 women were reportedly injured when security forces and religious police moved in to break it up.

• South Korean female workers performed in penguin costumes in Seoul on Wednesday to protest growth in temporary employment.

• Thousands of Taiwanese farmers took to the streets Thursday, staging the nation’s biggest demonstration in years against the government’s plan to allow U.S. beef imports.

• With elaborate make-up depicting bodies bruised, bleeding and burned by acid, four FEMEN activists were arrested in Istanbul on Wednesday to protest domestic violence in Turkey.

"The Storming of the Bastille," Jean-Pierre Houël (1735-1813).

In the discussion within the Occupy movement on whether violence is necessary for making change in the United States, the debate has so far conflated three of the movement’s possible goals. Are we talking about using violence to produce regime change? Or do we really mean “regime change with democratic institutions following the change”? Or is what we really mean “regime change followed by democracy in which the 1 percent lose their grip on power”?

Movements have sometimes produced regime change with no real democracy and the same 1 percent still in charge. The American Revolution did that: King George was booted out and the resulting government, to its credit highly innovative, was still not a democracy for women, the enslaved, and working class people. A couple of centuries later, the 1 percent are still running the United States. A number of other anti-colonial struggles had a similar result.

Many regimes are so oppressive that people will give their lives to change them, even without guarantees that the new regime will be a whole lot better. But as we consider what we want out of our sacrifices to the cause, we should ask: What’s the track record of movements that depend on violence to overthrow their regimes?

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• About 20,000 Russians angry over an election campaign slanted in Putin’s favor and reports of widespread violations in Sunday’s voting rallied in Moscow on Monday. Riot police quickly moved in, dispersing the crowd and detaining hundreds of demonstrators.

• Lakotas on Pine Ridge Indian land in South Dakota were arrested as they blockaded tar sands pipeline trucks from entering their territory on Monday.

• Thousands of students and activists marched on the California State Capitol in Sacramento Monday to protest cuts in higher education in an action dubbed “Occupy the Capitol.”

• As U.S. President Barack Obama met with visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington Monday, over 100 protesters converged at a park in front the White House, urging the United States not to support a potential Israeli military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

• A dozen female environmental activists in Ecuador were detained inside the Chinese embassy Monday for protesting Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa’s decision to sign a deal with a Chinese firm to open a massive copper mine in the Amazon.

• On Saturday, over 100 Bulgarian environmentalist staged a protest rally against looming amendments to the Forestry Act.

• On Friday, thousands of Bahrainis launched what they said would be a week of daily sit-in protests in a Shiite village to commemorate an uprising crushed a year ago.

• On Friday, over twenty-five hundred students protested the possible deportation of 18-year-old student and valedictorian Daniela Pelaez at the North Miami Senior High School.

• Several hundred public school students rallied in support of teachers at the offices of Premier Christy Clark at the World Trade Center in Vancouver on Friday.