• 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.

• Millions of people, including members of the nation’s eleven largest trade unions, took to the streets across India today in a nationwide strike that seeks a remedy to rampant inflation, an end to the privatization of public entities, and increased labor protections — including calls for a social security system and a minimum wage.

• Tens of thousands of Muscovites wearing white ribbons ventured out under a light snow Sunday and formed a human chain along the entire 10-mile Garden Ring Road encircling the city center, creating a festive spectacle like nothing anyone remembers seeing before in the Russian capital.

• Thirteen Tibetans, detained last week for protesting against China in front of the United Nations office in Nepal, started an indefinite hunger strike on Monday to press for their release.

• Actress-turned-eco-warrior Lucy Lawless has been arrested with six Greenpeace activists after the group spent four days protesting aboard an oil-drilling ship docked in New Zealand.

• Dozens of women and young children from Kashmiri refugee camps holding placards inscribed with pro-freedom slogans staged a sit-in and a rally on Sunday to invite attention international community on Kashmir.

• In Pakistan, hundreds of tribesmen Saturday kicked off protests and a two-day sit-in against the U.S. drone attacks outside the Parliament House in Islamabad.

• Critics of the 22-year-old authoritarian rule of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev staged protests in four cities Saturday and were met by overwhelming police forces but little violence.

• Five disabled protesters in Bolivia have begun a hunger strike in their campaign demanding that the government pay an annual subsidy to disabled people. About 1,000 disabled Bolivians and their supporters rallied outside the country’s parliament building on Thursday following a 100-day protest journey to the capital to call for the $700 payment.

Home demolitions are a common practice for large landowners in Honduras. If a family is not residing on the land at the time when their land dispute comes to a hearing, they no longer have a case. Photo by La Voz de Los de Abajo

Most of what is found in the news regarding Honduras tends to converge on a single resounding theme—the deepening corruption of the state. Officials resign over scandals of embezzlement, police officers moonlight as armed robbers, entire state arsenals are found empty, supposedly the work of drug cartels. Carolina, one of many strong and energetic matriarchs who helps run—along with many other women and men—the June 10th Women’s Movement Farming Cooperative, has a different theory about the stolen arsenals. When a delegation I was a part of visited the farm last week, she told us:

The government only wants the United States to buy them more weapons, while they hoard the others. All those weapons are a direct threat against farmers. The government knows where they are hidden, and they will try to use them against us.

Communities like Carolina’s have good reason to suspect cynical motives. A week earlier, in the early morning of February 8, armed private guards of the Standard Fruit Company (Dole) invaded the campesino farming co-op of Salado Lis Lis and forced close to 500 families off the land. They had only enough time to grab their children and a few belongings before a Caterpillar bulldozer ripped through about 600 meager houses and tore wide, barren stripes through their crops.

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Before and after the mining in Yanacocha. Image via Servindi.

An agreement has not yet been reached between national and local authorities in Peru since I reported on the mining disputes there last December. While Newmont Mining Corporation stands by previous agreements with the government regarding the extraction of 11.6 million ounces of gold in Conga, the popular efforts against this and other mining mega-projects also stand resilient. The last meeting took place after a 10-day march that ended in Lima on February 10. This time, instead of solely objecting to the mining project, the protesters broadened their message to also ending the threat against their access to water.

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• Hundreds of thousands of people, many waving red and white union flags, protested across Spain on Sunday against sweeping labor market reforms that make it easier to slash pay and lay off workers.

• Hundreds of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators and prison reform activists joined forces outside the gates of a prison in San Quentin, California on Monday to protest high incarceration rates and harsh living conditions.

• Several thousand banner-waving protesters staged rallies in Athens and Thessaloniki to protest budget cuts as Eurozone ministers prepare to approve a new 130-billion-euro bailout for debt-crippled Greece.

• Thousands of Puerto Ricans marched to La Fortaleza, the governor’s residence in San Juan, on Feb. 19 to protest rightwing governor Luis Fortuño’s plan for a 92-mile, $450-million natural gas pipeline cutting through the island.

• Hundreds of Russians protesting against Vladimir Putin drove through Moscow Sunday ahead of the March 4 presidential election expected to seal his grip on power. Meanwhile, Russian protesters set up plastic elephants, toy tigers and Lego men carrying banners against Vladimir Putin’s 12-year rule in the Siberian city of Barnaul, where demonstrations have been banned ahead of the March 4 presidential election.

• A 27-year-old convicted murderer has died while on a hunger strike to protest restrictions on access to health, good food, legal services and other amenities in a segregation unit at a California prison, prison officials said on Friday.

• Some 200 workers at an idled steel plant in northeast France occupied the site Monday, seeking to put their plight on the political map ahead of a presidential election where industrial decline is a central theme.

• In Cambodia, more than 500 employees at a shoe factory in the capital’s Dangkor district went on strike on Wednesday morning after managers failed to respond to a list of workers’ demands.

• Hundreds of protesters blocked streets in eastern Venezuela on Wednesday to demand clean water after a recent oil spill polluted rivers and streams that supply local storage tanks.

• Thousands of supporters of Iran’s opposition Green Movement marched silently through the streets of Tehran on Tuesday to urge the Islamic regime to release political prisoners.

• Outside the White House, hundreds of people rallied on Tuesday to protest China’s treatment of Tibet, ethnic Uyghurs and members of the Falun Gong. Alim Seytoff of the Uyghur American Association urged President Obama to pressure Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping on alleged human rights abuses.

• Six Greenpeace protesters were arrested after unfurling a sign in front of the Duke Energy building Wednesday morning, protesting the company’s recently-approved rate hikes.

• In what was billed as a Valentine’s Day message to the state’s lawmakers,  hundreds of activists gathered on Tuesday at Alabama’s Statehouse to protest the state’s  controversial immigration law.

• Flight attendants and ground workers at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport marched in picket lines Tuesday to protest American Airlines’ plans to outsource jobs and cut pay and benefits under a bankruptcy reorganization.

• Thirteen people were arrested inside the lobby of the AT&T building in Atlanta on Monday during a sit-in to stop the company from laying off 740 union workers across the southeastern United States.

• Some 200 Indonesians converged on a Jakarta square on Tuesday to denounce an Islamic vigilante group known for its armed attacks on minorities and moderates.

After a storm comes the calm. Following eight months of struggling to roll back the privatization of education in Chile, the various organizations representing the Andean country’s student movement are now in a temporary and strategic withdrawal as they plan to impact the political system more directly. This year, they will not solely oppose the lack of public funding for education, but a whole political structure that they view as serving only a few.

The students have made clear that the spirit of civil resistance in Chilean society survives after the popular movement that defeated Augusto Pinochet. The persistence of the movement has already led to a re-distribution of power within President Sebastián Piñera’s cabinet, which students accused of acting like a continuation of the Pinochet regime, intensifying privatization and increasing the socioeconomic gap within the population. The government increased its 2012 budget for education by 10 percent, to $1.2 billion; this includes an increased number of scholarships for high-achieving, low-income students by 24 percent. The government also made the system of credit more flexible for students and cut interest rates on student loans.

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• On Saturday, more than 100,000 turned out in the pale winter sunshine for a march in downtown Moscow against election fraud and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s plan to return to the presidency next month.

• Over 10,000 Bahrainis gathered on Sunday to begin a week-long sit-in protest in Meqsha, north of Bahrain, ahead of the one year anniversary of the revolution.

• Hundreds of flights in France were cancelled today, including 40 percent out of Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport, as unions ratcheted up pressure on day two of a strike over labor rights.

• Antiwar groups held rallies on Saturday in about 80 cities across the United States protesting a possible strike on Iran.

• In Singapore, two hundred foreign workers staged a sit-in on Monday morning in protest over unpaid wages.

• At least one activist died, and another 39 were injured on Sunday after police tried to break up a protest by indigenous groups—who have blockaded the Pan-American Highway for days—against the recent approval of mines and reservoirs in their region.

• In Canada, close to a thousand people marched through Prince Rupert’s streets on Saturday as part of a rally hosted by local first nations against Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline and the oil tanker traffic it would generate on British Columbia’s northern coast.

• At least 11 Occupy D.C. protesters were arrested Saturday just blocks from the White House as the U.S. Park Police evicted activists who had been sleeping in McPherson Square since October 1. On Sunday, police also cleared a second encampment at Freedom Plaza.

• In one of more than a hundred protests planned across Europe on Saturday, about 2,000 people marched in the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

• Some 20 residents of Khirbat al-Tawil village, south of Nablus in the occupied West Bank, went on a 24-hour hunger strike on Friday to protest against Israel’s occupation of their lands.