• In Evansville, Indiana, a crowd estimated at 5,000 strong poured onto the shoulder and parking lot of the Evansville plant, protesting Whirlpool’s decision to shut down and ship jobs to Mexico.

• Carrefour SA’s 116 stores in Belgium were closed Saturday because of a strike over planned job cuts, said a company spokesman who put the resulting sales loss at the company-owned outlets at 14 million euros ($19 million).

• Scores of Jordanian politicians and trade union members staged a sit-in at the Trade Unions Complex in Amman on Saturday to denounce Israel’s addition of two West Bank holy sites to a list of Jewish heritage centers.

• Syrian Catholic Archbishop Basile Georges Casmoussa of Mosul led over 1,000 Iraqi Catholics in a silent protest on February 28 to demand that the government act to put a stop to violence against Christians there.

• In Nepal, the 48-hour sit-in protest of the Civil Movement for Democracy and Peace (CMDP), which began from Thursday in front of the Constituent Assembly building, to urge political parties to draft the constitution within the given time frame, concluded on Saturday at 8 am.

• Several Cuban dissidents say they will refuse food in protest at the death earlier this week of a jailed government opponent. Orlando Zapata Tamayo died on Tuesday in a hospital in the capital Havana after a hunger strike of 85 days. His death triggered international protests and Cuban President Raul Castro issued an expression of regret.

• Three Chinese death-row inmates who say they were tortured into confessing to crimes they didn’t commit have staged a hunger strike to draw attention to their case.

• Thousands of adherents of the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP) marched in the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa Feb. 25 to protest the slaying of civil resistance leaders under what they still consider to be the “de facto regime” of President Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo despite the change in government last month. The rally concluded in front of the National Congress building, where the march was blocked by a military cordon.

• Hundreds of Dutch activists have walked out of a Mass in protest at a Roman Catholic policy of denying communion to practising homosexuals.

• On Thursday, protesting Guatemalan teachers in Melchor de Mencos blocked the Melchor Bridge with their bodies to stop vehicular passage through the border between Guatemala and Belize. According to union president Zetina, who spoke on behalf of the teachers, they are demanding a 16% salary increase from their Government, in addition to proper renovation of school buildings.

• Thirty-eight Jamaican women — all of them asylum seekers, some of whom have lived in the UK for as long as 10 years — are on hunger strike in holding facilities in the United Kingdom, in protest of their imminent deportation to Jamaica.

• Tens of thousands of protesters calling themselves the Purple People took to the streets of Rome on the weekend in a sign of mounting opposition to the Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi. The group, Il Popolo Viola, wore purple sweaters and scarves, Berlusconi masks or striped prison dress to protest against what they say is the undermining of Italian democracy by Mr Berlusconi in his battle with the country’s legal system.

• Police in Venezuela used tear gas, plastic bullets and water cannons to scatter hundreds of students protesting against the government Thursday, while President Hugo Chavez’s supporters celebrated the 18th anniversary of his failed coup as an army officer.

• Hundreds of London Underground maintenance workers went on the first of a series of 24-hour strikes Friday morning in protest over new roster arrangements. They will continue to cause disruptions at the same time every Sunday from February 14th until the dispute is resolved.

• Dozens of Yemeni journalists, civil-society activists and members of parliament protested on Friday in front of the attorney general’s office in Sana’a against increasing harassment of journalists.

• The entrance to Kaiser Permanente’s Moanalua clinic in Hawaii was briefly shut-down on Thursday when protesters from Local 5 staged a sit-in. Kaiser employees and Local 5 members came to rally for a new contract that they say won’t out-source union work.

• In Calcutta, senior citizens staged a hunger strike on Saturday to protest against the skyrocketing prices of essential commodities.

• In Pakistan, political and social organizations continued a country-wide strike and protest this weekend against the deadly blasts in Karachi.

• Cuban police harassed and briefly jailed some 35 political dissidents last week in the eastern city of Camaguey, a Cuban human rights group said Friday.

• On Saturday, hundreds of Bahrain Petroleum Company (Bapco) staff and their families staged a protest outside the company’s refinery in Ma’ameer over pay and working conditions.

• In Oslo, a thousand taxi drivers of Muslim background went on strike late Friday, early Saturday moring in protest of the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet.

• More than 200 overseas Filipino workers (OFW) in Saudi Arabia have stopped working since Saturday in protest of alleged unfair labor practices of their employer.

A number of commentators have questioned the accepted logic that disasters bring out the worst in people, directly challenging the pervasive “looters run amok” imagery often perpetuated by the media and held out by lawmakers as a rationale for military occupation. Having done relief work following Hurricanes Andrew and Katrina, I have found that people are more likely to work together – even if only out of necessity – when severe hardship strikes. In fact, it is precisely the isolation and individualism of ordinary daily life that tap into our worst instincts, while the removal of these impediments can actually liberate our better qualities.

As Dustin Howes recently observed, “the vast majority of people in Haiti responded to the earthquake with the apparently just as natural of an impulse to help one another.” The New York Times has uncovered a widespread ethic of “communal rationing” in Haiti, in which “no matter what is found, or how hungry the forager, everything must be shared.” As the article explains, many Haitians “are finding ways to share. In several neighborhoods of Carrefour, a poor area closer to the epicenter, small soup kitchens have sprung up with discounted meals, subsidized by Haitians with a little extra money…. [Three women there] started cooking for their neighbors the day after the earthquake. On many mornings, they serve 100 people before 10 a.m. Smiling and proud, the women said they did not have the luxury of waiting for aid groups to reach them in their hilly neighborhood.”

This is the untold and largely unreported state of the crisis in Haiti. Amy Goodman filed a series of reports for Democracy Now! from places where relief had yet to be delivered. In Leogane, the epicenter of the quake where perhaps 90% of the city had been destroyed, Mayor Santos Alexis noted that aside from people occasionally taking food from destroyed stores, “there’s no violence really in Leogane.” Still, the mainstream relief agencies remain obsessed with security concerns, to the extent that they will drop small amounts of food from above rather than land and talk with the people on the ground. As Mayor Alexis lamented, the people “feel humiliated, because of the airplane flying and dropping some bread to them. They feel very embarrassed by that.” Haitian expatriate blogger Wadner Pierre likewise reflects on these unfortunate realities, and how they stand in contrast to baseline Haitian values:

My beloved country is one where people know how to do ‘konbit’ (put their hands together) to help their brothers and sisters. But because so many of the organizations now involved in the relief effort do not know Haiti well and do not have Haitian employees who speak the local languages, the situation may worsen… Why are American relief organizations… humiliating people by dropping food and water to them by helicopters? Would they treat American citizens in this manner?

When we consider the practice of nonviolence, one of the foundational premises is humanization, of both self and other. In Haiti, the chasm between survivors and most of the aiders prevents the discovery of a mutual humanity from which empathy may spring, making truly “humanitarian” relief efforts problematic if not impossible. A key aspect of grassroots work in the region has been to reclaim this basic humanity, providing a voice to the Haitian people themselves so that we can see, across the chasms of distance and status, that they are people with the same complexities and desires as ourselves. (A 2008 grassroots video project called “Looking Through Their Eyes” effectively captures this sense of commonality.)

Read the rest of this article »

• A protester has a banner around his head that reads ‘Let the people judge’ during an anti-corruption protest in front of the parliament building in Jakarta last week. Lawmakers are conducting an investigation of the government’s $730 million bailout of Bank Century in 2008, which the demonstrators opposed.

• Tens of thousands of pro-life activists marched in San Francisco on Saturday, January 23, for the 6th Annual Walk for Life West Coast.

• In Albany, New York, a rally was held on Monday over plans to allow for natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale in upstate New York. Critics say the drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” could contaminate the water supplies of New York City and other areas of the state.

• Police officers in Balochistan (Pakistan) staged a sit-in on Monday to protest the fact that their salaries haven’t been increased.

• The Cairo Public Transportation workers are starting a strike in all the Cairo garages, at 6am today, demanding the modernization/replacement of the obsolete buses and spare parts, raising allowances related to work hazards, increasing bonuses, reforming the health services, and calling for the formation of a free union, independent from the corrupt state-backed NDP-run Egyptian General Federation of Trade Unions.

• Three anti-coal activists in West Virginia have entered their fifth day of a tree-sit on Monday as part of an effort to shut down a mountaintop removal site run by the mining giant Massey Energy. The three activists are perched atop platforms on trees on Coal River Mountain.

• Tens of thousands of Venezuelans opposed to Hugo Chávez took to the streets of Caracas Jan. 23, blaming him for numerous problems in the country, including increased electricity blackouts, water rationing, and widespread crime.

• Thousands of people protested Sunday in the streets of Indian-controlled Kashmir, accusing the Indian army of killing a civilian.

As the crisis in Haiti unfolds, news reports first anticipated and then confirmed the anxiety of many on the ground: that a hamstrung or decimated police force would lead to violence and looting. There are numerous reports of looters wielding knifes, machetes and guns and mobs killing suspected looters as the rag tag police force tries to reestablish order.

These might be uncomfortable facts for those of us who believe in nonviolence. Pessimists and so-called realists find a ready-made narrative for such events in Thomas Hobbes’s description of the state of war. For them, what is happening in Haiti is the enduring natural fact that without fear of government people will take the opportunity to exploit and destroy one another. Only the threat of violence by a functioning police force keeps the worst impulses of human beings in check.

And even if you’re not a Hobbesian, there’s room for despair and cynicism. David Brooks took the opportunity to isolate the backwardness of Haitian culture (the first to end slavery in the Western Hemisphere), as the reason their infrastructure was so vulnerable to earthquakes. Pat Robertson decided it was a good time to chastise Haitians for throwing off the French. Even American assistance, given our history of pernicious meddling in the country and our conspicuous prioritizing of American lives above the lives of Haitians might seem self-serving.

Yet the vast majority of people in Haiti responded to the earthquake with the apparently just as natural of an impulse to help one another. People immediately began to risk their own lives to rescue people trapped under rubble. Previously intractable religious differences instantly melted away. In a remarkable spontaneous protest, Haitians in Port-au-Prince piled up bodies as roadblocks in a macabre protest of the delay in aid. Under the headline “Looting Flares Where Authority Breaks Down” the New York Times reported that “given the conditions, it was all the more remarkable that a spirit of cooperation and fortitude prevailed nearly everywhere else, as people joined together to carry corpses, erect shelters and share what food they could find.”

Just as remarkably, a small portion of the United States military – the same institution that so brutally occupied Haiti for two decades in the early part of the last century – has been temporarily repurposed to deliver aid that will undoubtedly save many thousands of lives. Ordinary Americans and people all over the world immediately responded with millions in donations.

In response to the argument that human history is rife with violence, Gandhi remarked that the force of nonviolence is so common that every instance of it cannot be remarked upon. Yet “thousands, depend for their existence on a very active working of this force.” No doubt this force is the dominant one in Haiti at the moment as it sustains the vast majority of those who have survived – and will save many more lives in the coming days.

To donate to Partners In Health, which has been working on the ground in Haiti for over 20 years, click here.

A HAPPY Canadian emigre in Costa Rica. Photo by author.

Nicholas Kristof has a happy-go-lucky column today in the Times about Costa Rica that reads as part tourism advertisement, part political common sense. He goes on and on about how the country is consistently ranked high in “happiness” surveys. This is true. How, then, did they get that way?

What sets Costa Rica apart is its remarkable decision in 1949 to dissolve its armed forces and invest instead in education. Increased schooling created a more stable society, less prone to the conflicts that have raged elsewhere in Central America. Education also boosted the economy, enabling the country to become a major exporter of computer chips and improving English-language skills so as to attract American eco-tourists.

I’m not antimilitary. But the evidence is strong that education is often a far better investment than artillery.

In Costa Rica, rising education levels also fostered impressive gender equality so that it ranks higher than the United States in the World Economic Forum gender gap index. This allows Costa Rica to use its female population more productively than is true in most of the region. Likewise, education nurtured improvements in health care, with life expectancy now about the same as in the United States — a bit longer in some data sets, a bit shorter in others.

Wow, wait, there’s more. Not only do they bother to educate each other, but they make efforts not to destroy the environment—a turn that came only after decades of incredibly destructive government policies, often financed by American business interests.

This emphasis on the environment hasn’t sabotaged Costa Rica’s economy but has bolstered it. Indeed, Costa Rica is one of the few countries that is seeing migration from the United States: Yankees are moving here to enjoy a low-cost retirement. My hunch is that in 25 years, we’ll see large numbers of English-speaking retirement communities along the Costa Rican coast.

This is an understatement. Certain areas of Costa Rica are crawling with Americans. In addition to high happiness rankings, the country is also #1 in the world for lost or stolen US passports, an embassy official there told me.

A poster in a Costa Rican beach town. Prostitution is legal there, just not with children. Note that the sign is in English.

A pressing question, then, is what effect this influx of Americans is having there. When I spent a month last summer with the photographer Lucas Foglia traveling around Costa Rica meeting American expats, there were two main patterns we found: a leisure class intent on exploiting the locals as much as possible in search of a low-cost paradise, and an idealistic frenzy of folks Going Back to the Land in search of a better, more sustainable way of life—and it wasn’t always easy to separate the one from the other. Often the “English-speaking retirement communities along the Costa Rican coast” that Kristof looks forward to are the least sustainable things going, and they charge prices beyond what the locals can afford. (He also neglects to mention the flourishing sex trade, which is what brings so many aging American men down there in the first place.)

Costa Rica’s example is an incredibly instructive one, but we should be careful not to let it turn into another prime opportunity for careless exploitation. Rather than migrating en masse to benefit from that tiny country’s good decisions—and possibly ruining their effects in the process—Americans should work to follow its example ourselves, at home.

A pro-Kurdish demonstrator flashes a victory sign during a sit-in protest in central Istanbul on January 3. Hundreds of Kurdish women gathered in central Istanbul to protest against a ban on the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party.

• More than 100 demonstrators were detained Tuesday evening at a rally in downtown San Francisco held by hotel workers who have been without new contracts since August, police and rally organizers said. Unite Here Local 2 President Mike Casey estimated 1,300 demonstrators took part in yesterday’s action.

• More than 2,800 Chuquicamata and Mina Sur miners in Chile did not report to work on Monday to protest the wage and bonus package offered by Codelco, which is the world’s largest copper producer.

• In Manhattan yesterday, about 100 people protested the detention of Jean Montrevil, a Haitian who has had a green card since 1986 but, owing to a drug conviction for which he served time in the 1990s, has been subject to supervision and was detained by U.S. Immigration authorities on December 30. Ten protesters were arrested after failing to heed a police order to disperse as they blocked traffic.

• Angry farmers wearing broad-brimmed hats and cracking kangaroo-hide whips rallied outside Parliament in Canberra on Monday as one of their colleagues, sheep farmer Peter Spencer, entered his 43rd day on a hunger strike to demand compensation for Australian climate change policy.

• A two-day strike by Kenya’s matatu minibus taxis, which had stranded thousands of commuters, has been called off after government intervention. Matatu operators agreed to go back to work after the government promised to deal with their grievances.

• Virgin Trains booking office staff have gone on a 24-hour strike on one of Britain’s busiest rail lines, in protest of the company’s planned cutbacks.

• San Diego City College students were escorted out of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Front Street office Monday afternoon after they staged a sit-in during the morning to protest recent budget cuts in higher education.

• Anti-wall activists demonstrated outside Israel’s Ofer Prison near the West Bank city of Ramallah on Monday to demand the release of detained activist Jamal Juma to concide with the convening of his military court hearing.

• British graffiti artist Banksy popped up with 4 new murals on the Regent’s Canal in London last week, one of which was this protest of global warming denialism.

• More than 1,000 people marched in Islamabad on Friday as part of a nationwide campaign that took place in 53 other Pakistani cities and towns to protest both Taliban bombings and the American drone strikes.

• Hundreds of demonstrators rallied on opposite sides of an Israeli-Gaza border crossing on Thursday to protest at the blockade of the strip imposed by Egypt and Israel. In Gaza, about 100 international activists staged a rally with some 500 Gazans, chanting and carrying signs denouncing the blockade. A small number of anti-Zionist, Orthodox Jews were among them.

• Hundreds of relatives of prisoners in a Mexican jail protested the expected transfer of inmates to make way for a film shoot with director Mel Gibson next year.

• Internally displaced people at a campsite in Nakuru, Kenya demonstrated along a highway to protest their poor living conditions following the onset of rains and demanded building materials.

• Dozens of Jordanians held a sit-in near the Egyptian embassy in the Jordanian capital on Sunday to protest Egypt’s plan to construct a steel wall along its borders with the besieged Gaza Strip.

• Thousands of people in Hong Kong took to the streets on New Year’s Day to demand full democracy in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory. The Chinese government ruled in 2007 that the territory cannot directly elect its leader until 2017 and its legislature until 2020.

• Police detained dozens of people at an anti-Kremlin protest on Thursday, including 82-year-old Lyudmila Alexeyeva, one of Russia’s most respected rights activists.

• The streets of Qom, Iran’s holy city and the center of its religious life, filled with tens of thousands of mourners on Sunday. They came both to honor a founding father of modern Iran, Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, and to protest the government he had come to oppose.

• More than 3,000 female Burmese workers at a bra factory in Tak’s Mae Sot district again went on strike on Monday over an assault on two of an employee’s relatives by four security officers.

• In New York City, students left school early on Monday in a walk-out to protest the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s plan to stop giving students free Metrocards. The youngsters left school at 2 pm and gathered in front of the MTA’s headquarters to demand that the agency find a way to fill its $400 million budget shortfall that won’t force students to pay to commute to city schools.

• Some 300 municipal staff began a sit-in at the Town Hall in Alcoy, Spain on Monday against the local government’s decision to sack nine workers, saying they will remain there until this afternoon.

• Over 5,000 indigenous, Afro-Colombian and farming community members are occupying the community center of Piñuña Negro in the department of Putumayo, Colombia. A crowd of all ages has gathered at the highest government office in the area—the Police Inspector’s office—to demand negotiations with local and national government representatives and an end to military and paramilitary harassment and coca eradication programs that are causing thousands of residents to be displaced.

• Hundreds of Palestinian citizens on Monday evening participated in a sit-in organized by Hamas Movement near Salahuddin terminal on the Palestinian-Egyptian borders in protest at the building of a steel wall on Gaza borders.

• A protest at the New Zealand Stock Exchange (NZX) on Monday drew attention to the contribution of the New Zealand business to climate change. A sit-in occurred, blocking the entrance to the building, and police arrested nine activists. The protest featured ‘Radical Cheerleaders’, a samba band, and around 80 diverse protestors.

• The Islamabad Bar Association (IBA) on Saturday protested near Sihala police training college in Islamabad to urge the government to expel the US private security company Blackwater, which lawyers said was operating inside Sihala college.

• Greece is bracing for a 24-hour strike today by the Communist-backed PAME union even as the newly-elected Socialist government struggles to tackle the country’s ballooning budget deficit. The strike is expected to include local government workers, hospital doctors and port workers, while journalists and teachers are also staging separate strikes.

• Civil servants working at train stations across Turkey began to strike on Wednesday to protest the firing of 16 civil servants who were let go because they had participated in a warning strike in late November to protest a substandard wage increase of 2.5 percent.

• Over 2,000 inmates began a hunger strike at Tocuyito prison in Carabobo state, central Venezuela, to demand improvements in their prison conditions.

• Normal life in Muslim majority areas of the India-controlled Kashmir Tuesday remained affected due to a strike call in protest of the Central Bureau of Investigation’s (CBI) findings that two women in Shopian town were not raped and murdered but died due to drowning in May.

• Activists in the Russian Far Eastern city of Vladivostok have launched a hunger strike over the imprisonment of an organizer of protests against increased taxes on imported cars.

• In India, about 400,000 bank employees went on strike on Wednesday to protest merging state-owned banks, partially affecting cash transactions and clearing operations.

• 78 employees from engineering office that Yahoo opened just last year in Echirolles, a suburb of Grenoble, France, have walked out to protest the office’s closure.

Several hundred women, many holding pictures of murdered relatives, took to the streets of Kabul to demand that President Hamid Karzai purge anyone connected to corruption, war crimes, or the Taliban from his government. In a rare display of men allowing women to lead, about 500 men followed the protest group in support. (Photo: Tony Perry / Los Angeles Times)

• Over 20,000 members of the South Africa Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers’ Union (Saccawu) are planning on taking part in strike action against listed retailer Pick n Pay today, to protest alleged racial discrimination at the company.

• In Norway, thousands of people took to the streets of Oslo Thursday as President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize.

• Police arrested 33 people who were protesting budget cuts and fee hikes at San Francisco State University to end a sit-in at a campus building.

• Several thousand people in Indonesia, many of whom were students, marched through the capital of Jakarta on Wednesday against government corruption.

• More than 400 Queensland Rail workers walked off the job in Rockhampton on Wednesday to protest against the State Government’s decision to publicly list the company.

• On Tuesday, “Hungry for Justice at Vassar College,” began a hunger strike aimed at getting the school to reverse planned job cuts that have or will hit 13 support workers. Also, the Campus Solidarity Working Group held a sing-in at the main building for the same cause, that was followed by a vigil.

• World No. 1 copper producer Codelco said an indefinite union worker blockade that began on Wednesday has halted mining activities at its massive Chuquicamata mine complex.

• A Canadian citizen, who had staged a hunger strike to protest his planned deportation from Australia, has won a reprieve.

Several hundred demonstrators took to the streets of the Italian capital Rome on Saturday to protest against the country's Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi. They did so after several internet bloggers called for a 'No Berlusconi Day'.

• Thousands of protesters have taken part in what is believed to be Scotland’s largest ever protest in support of action on climate change. The event, called The Wave, urged world leaders to agree a legally-binding deal at the United Nations climate change summit in Copenhagen next week.

• Hundreds of hotel workers rallied along the Sunset Strip on Friday, warning Los Angeles-area employers that they would not accept pay cuts, reduced benefits or other givebacks.

• More than 30 youth from Australia, Mexico, India, Sweden, the US, Germany, and around the world  staged a “die-in” today outside the main plenary at COP15 with the message – “The World Wants a Real Deal” and “Real Deal Saves Lives”.

• About 200 protesters, including about 40 striking Steelworkers members from Sudbury, protested in New York last Thursday, as Vale CEO Roger Agnelli received the Dwight D. Eisenhower Global Citizenship Award from the Business Council for International Understanding.

• On Dec. 4 tens of thousands of laid-off Mexican electrical workers and their supporters again took to the streets of the capital to protest Felipe Calderón Hinojosa’s sudden liquidation of the government-owned Central Light and Power Company (LFC) the night of Oct. 10.

More than 250 people held a candlelight vigil outside the U.S. Military Academy in West Point on Tuesday night to protest President Barack Obama's decision to escalate the 8-year-old war in Afghanistan.

• Other protests against the escalation of war in Afghanistan were held in New York, Minneapolis, and many other cities across the country.

• A peaceful Boston University counter-protest of more than 200 people faced six picketers Tuesday afternoon from the Westboro Baptist Church, who held signs with messages such as “The Jews killed Jesus,” “God hates fags” and “Thank God for AIDS,” outside the Hillel House.

• Six of 31 national museums in France were closed because of a strike on Wednesday over planned job cuts, including the Georges Pompidou Center, which began the strike 10 days ago.

• An undocumented Mexican immigrant, who has been living in the United States for 20 years, recently began a hunger strike in front of the White House, calling for President Obama to pass comprehensive immigration reform by the end of the year, as he’d promised.

• Finnair canceled more than 20 flights Wednesday as ground staff extended a walkout to protest outsourcing of cargo and baggage services and the transfer of hundreds of workers.

• Dozens of people have demonstrated outside the Canadian embassy in Mexico City against the killing of an anti-mining activist. The protesters blame the death of Mariano Abarca on a Canadian-owned mining company, Blackfire Exploration Ltd , which is operating in the southern Chiapas state.

• Daimler workers in Germany have walked out in protest at the company’s plans, announced on Wednesday, to assemble Mercedes C-Class models at its US plant in Alabama and shift German production from Sindelfingen to Bremen.

• Striking workers at a local supplier forced Fiat to halt production at its Termini Imerese plant in Sicily for a second day Thursday, to protest against the company’s decision to stop making cars at the plant after 2011.

In China, more than 1,000 people took to the streets in a district of Guangzhou to protest against the building of a waste incinerator near their homes.

• Over 250,000 public sector workers in Ireland, including teachers, nurses and civil servants, went on strike on Tuesday in protest against government plans to cut pay and prevent the national debt from spiraling out of control.

• In Turkey, public employees across the country are set to take part in a nationwide strike today to protest the government for failing to meet their demands on collective bargaining and strike rights.

• The first education sector strike in France since the beginning of the academic year got underway Tuesday. The educational professionals were joined by striking postal workers, who are protesting the privatisation of postal services.

• Workers at Repsol’s La Pampilla oil refinery in Peru said on Tuesday they had started a two-day strike to pressure the company for better benefits and to end forced overtime.

• Players from a lower-league Portuguese football club have vowed to continue with a hunger strike, which began on Friday, in protest at the fact they have not been paid for six months.

• The Pompidou Centre was forced to shut down on Monday after staff went on strike to protest planned job cuts at the Parisian mecca of modern and contemporary art.

• In Nepal, thirteen student unions on Monday announced a five-day long agitation protesting Tribhuvan University’s recent decision to hike tuition fees ten fold in all its constituent and affiliated colleges.

• A hunger strike by opponents of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has grown, with 24 university students vowing not to eat until the Organization of American States sends a delegation to Venezuela to review allegations of human rights abuses.

• In South Africa, Musina municipal workers staged a sit-in on Tuesday in protest against alleged corruption and financial mismanagement by officials.

Earlier this month, I had an article on Yes! Magazine’s website, which was really just a longer version of a post for this site, about how many nonviolent movements that have successfully earned political rights and freedoms fail to address issues of poverty and economic inequality.

Writing that piece led me to reflect on what examples we do have of nonviolence seriously changing economic relationships. While I could think of a few important victories – like how the Bolivian people were able to kick Bechtel out of their country in 2000 after their water was privatized – I realized that we really should develop a list of these stories to complement the many examples of nonviolent movements bringing down dictators or repressive regimes over the last several decades that are well-known.

With that thought in mind, I was happy to find one great example that we can add to this collection on the front page of the New York Times last week.

The often raucous [anti-sweatshop] student movement announced on Tuesday that it had achieved its biggest victory by far. Its pressure tactics persuaded one of the nation’s leading sportswear companies, Russell Athletic, to agree to rehire 1,200 workers in Honduras who lost their jobs when Russell closed their factory soon after the workers had unionized.

From the time Russell shut the factory last January, the anti-sweatshop coalition orchestrated a nationwide campaign against the company. Most important, the coalition, United Students Against Sweatshops, persuaded the administrations of Boston College, Columbia, Harvard, New York University, Stanford, Michigan, North Carolina and 89 other colleges and universities to sever or suspend their licensing agreements with Russell. The agreements — some yielding more than $1 million in sales — allowed Russell to put university logos on T-shirts, sweatshirts and fleeces.

Going beyond their campuses, student activists picketed the N.B.A. finals in Orlando and Los Angeles this year to protest the league’s licensing agreement with Russell. They distributed fliers inside Sports Authority sporting goods stores and sent Twitter messages to customers of Dick’s Sporting Goods to urge them to boycott Russell products.

The students even sent activists to knock on Warren Buffett’s door in Omaha because his company, Berkshire Hathaway, owns Fruit of the Loom, Russell’s parent company.

The rest of the article is worth a read, so check it out. And please tell us about any stories of nonviolent movements winning tangible concessions from corporations or achieving a greater degree of economic justice that you know of in the comment section.