Members of Greenpeace climbed the Benelux headquarters of Samsung, in Brussels, yesterday to protest its continued use of toxic substances despite committing to eliminate certain ones by 2010.
An Irish town council has removed a page in its guestbook signed by the Israeli ambassador to protest Israel’s diplomatic record after the alleged use of fake Irish passports by the Jewish state’s spies.
Students at Sussec University in England are staging a sit-in to protest plans to make 115 staff redundant, which will close the environmental science degree and impact on English, history and life science departments.
More than 30,000 people took to the streets of Athens Wednesday after two of Greece’s largest trade unions organized a nationwide strike to protest austerity measures aimed at reducing the country’s public debt. But the largely peaceful rally of disgruntled workers was unfortunately disrupted by a group of violent youths who clashed with police.
Hundreds of rallies took place across the nation on Wednesday—the eve of President Obama’s White House Health Care Summit—and over a million signed a petition sent to Congress urging lawmakers to “finish the job and pass real health care reform.”
Hundreds of students from several Jordan, Utah district schools walked out of their classes Thursday morning to protest announced budget cuts that could slash teacher ranks, increase class sizes and impact extracurricular activities.
Nine days after an off-campus student party mocked Black History Month, UC San Diego went through a day of protests, on Wednesday, drawing attention to the small number of African American students enrolled at the beachside campus.
Classes at a secondary school in Midland, Ontario were disrupted Wednesday morning when nearly 200 students walked out to protest rumoured cuts in programming.
Here is a interesting report by Franklin Lopez of the Vancouver Media Co-op that aired on Democracy Now! about the developing protests around the Winter Olympics which began in Vancouver today. To thwart positive coverage of the protests, Canada has stopped at least two American journalists from entering the country this week, including John Weston Osburn of Salt Lake City and Chicago radio journalist Martin Macias.
More than 250 Washington State University Vancouver students staged a “mass walkout” to protest budget cuts to academic programs, the elimination of crucial financial aid, and continued tuition hikes.
Canadian anti-Olympic protesters are promising a series of protests starting this weekend, culminating in a march on the opening ceremonies Feb. 12.
A 150-strong group of Belgian firefighters sprayed foam from 20 trucks over a main road in central Brussels, blocking traffic in an effort to press for speedier promotions. Government buildings, including the Minister President’s office, were targeted.
Police and a specialist evictions team began a major operation to end a six-month occupation of an opencast mine site in Scotland this morning by arresting 10 Climate Camp protesters chained to tree houses and make-shift forts. There are about 40 climate campaigners now occupying tunnels, tree houses, and homemade barricaded huts.
About 2,000 photographers gathered in London over the weekend to protest stop and search methods by British police. The photographers say they’ve been unduly targeted by Section 44 of Britain’s Terrorism Act 2000, which was designed to give police greater powers to fight terrorism.
Hundreds of protesters in southern China donned masks to protest a planned incinerator plant, the latest grassroots initiative to target polluting projects in the region.
Greek farmers have been blocking roads in Greece for more than a week to protest the government’s current agricultural policy, which threatens to put 50 thousand people employed in agriculture and livestock out of work.
In Phoenix, more than 20,000 people marched on Saturday to protest the indiscriminate attacks and race-based raids conducted by Sheriff Joe Arpaio against residents of Maricopa County. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
Worker blockades of the Belgian breweries of Anheuser-Busch InBev, which began after the world’s largest beer maker announced it planned to cut 263 jobs out of its 2,700 Belgian workforce, were set to continue into a second week after the collapse of mediated talks last Thursday.
In India, leaders of all-party Joint Action Committee (JAC) of Telangana Saturday began a hunger strike to demand that the central government immediately initiate the process for formation of the state.
Several thousand DeKalb County school employees dressed in black yesterday to protest the superintendent’s $15,000 raise, which comes after the board slashed their pay increases and implemented a one-day furlough.
Fujitsu workers in east Manchester, Warrington, Bolton and Crewe are taking part in a 48-hour walkout as part of the UK’s first ever national IT sector strike to protest redundancies, pay and pensions.
Over 300 coalfield residents and their allies rallied at the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection yesterday to protest the blasting of Coal River Mountain and support a transition to a clean energy future.
More than 200 people were arrested in Tehran on Monday during protests by tens of thousands at universities nationwide, marking the biggest anti-government demonstrations in months. Thousands continued protesting for a second day yesterday, as Iran threatened a tougher crackdown on the opposition.
American Indian activists marked Thanksgiving by holding a “Day of Mourning” in Plymouth, calling Plymouth Rock a monument to racism and genocide. Members of the United American Indians of New England have been holding the annual protest since 1970.
A dozen Chinese women related to some of the 104 miners killed in a recent blast protested outside the mine’s entrance on Monday in an effort to demand answers.
About 2,000 students blocked the exits of a building where University of California regents voted to hike tuition 32 percent next year. After the vote was announced students lay down en masse to symbolize what they called the death of an affordable UC education.
Greenpeace activists released a floating banner inside the Chamber of Commerce Regional Government Affairs convention in San Francisco yesterday to protest Chamber president Tom Donahue’s lobbying for big polluters. The banner read “Donahue’s Climate Lies: Bad for Business, Bad for America.”
Two priests and 25 tribal leaders from Mindoro Island (200 kilometres south of Manila) have gone a hunger strike to stop three nickel mine operations that will eventually cover almost 20 per cent of the island’s land mass.
School bus drivers in Mt. Clemens, Michigan, 25 miles northeast of Detroit, carried out a one-and-a-half day strike Monday and Tuesday to secure promised wage increases from the private transportation company which services the district.
Nearly 30 actions took place at EPA regional offices, JP Morgan Chase branches and other pillars of support for mountain top removal on Friday, as part of a national day of action. 14 activists staged a sit-in at EPA headquarters in Washington for nearly four hours, but left without incident.
A group of activists from Rainforest Action Network Toronto took part in a nation-wide campaign against Royal Bank of Canada on Saturday, setting up a coffee shop in front of RBC headquarters with seating so that passersby could stop and talk about the bank’s funding of the tar sands.
A group of climate change activists in Canada managed to breech Parliament security and disrupted a debate session last week, vowing to conduct “climate flash mobs” across the country each Monday to pressure Parliament into action on global warming.
Hundreds of activists and reporters gathered in central Moscow on Saturday for an unsanctioned human rights protest, where they chanted “Freedom!” and “Respect the constitution!”. At least 50 people were arrested.
More than 5,000 people packed the streets of downtown Chicago yesterday morning, chanting, marching and rallying outside the American Bankers Association conference on the third and final day of what was billed as the "Showdown in Chicago."
In Jordan, around 200 people staged a one-hour sit-in on Sunday at the Professional Associations Complex to protest against an assault on veteran opposition leader Leith Shbeilat by anonymous individuals earlier that day.
Catholic schools will close across Queensland today as teachers take to the streets over a pay dispute. Their 24-hour strike follows a rally by state school teachers outside Parliament House yesterday over their pay campaign.
All local trains of Mumbai on the Central and the Harbour lines were running behind schedule as motormen went on strike in protest against overwork and fatigue.
People in Rio De Janeiro posed as dead bodies at Copacabana beach in a demonstration after a man was found dead in a shopping cart in the city slum.
An estimated 1,000 protesters, many of them students from Kabul University, marched through the streets of the Afghan capital on Sunday in an anti-US protest stemming from a reported incident in which US soldiers bombed a mosque and burned a copy of the Qu’ran. Police in Kabul opened fire to disperse the crowd. Similar protests took place last week in other Afghan cities.
Waving signs that declared “Northern Secondary Jail,” around 100 students protested outside Northern Secondary School last Thursday in a bid to teach the Toronto District School Board a lesson about allowing police inside their school.
Eight people were issued citations by Chicago police after sitting in the middle of a Near West Side street during a protest rally in front of the Fisk Generating Station, a coal-fired power plant, in Pilsen on Saturday.
At Dartmouth, more than 30 students held a sit-in outside of College President Jim Yong Kim’s office last Thursday to bring attention to the need for sustainability on campus. The sit-in, which lasted approximately 40 minutes, ended when students spoke with Kim and presented him with a letter suggesting changes to the College’s current approach to sustainability.
Smartmeme recently released a video that introduces emerging climate justice organizing and activism. The video points viewers toward the Mobilization for Climate Justice coalition web site (actforclimatejustice.org), which serves as an online hub for projects with similar concerns and goals.
The US-based Mobilization for Climate Justice coalition was formed by various organizations, which are calling on others to help build a “climate justice movement that emphasizes non-violent direct action and public education to mobilize for effective and just solutions to the climate crisis.”
Bringing together forthright principles and on-the-ground actions, the coalition organizes around three key goals. These organizers urge others to join them:
1) To build a global movement for climate justice that encourages urgent action to avoid catastrophic climate change, and which addresses the root social, ecological, political and economic causes of the climate crisis toward a total systemic transformation of our society.
2) To promote and strengthen the rights and voices of Indigenous and other affected peoples, (including workers in energy-intensive industries) in climate mitigation and adaptation strategies.
3) To expose the consequences of false and market-based climate ’solutions’ as well as corporate domination of climate negotiations, while advancing alternatives that can provide real and just solutions and which protect biodiversity.
This climate justice organizing draws from prior environmental justice critiques and activism, as well as wider opposition towards corporations, and other international market structures. While focusing on global warming—as a consequence and a cause of injustices and market structures—climate justice organizers also are responding to other interrelated impacts of established energy systems. Here in Ontario, a climate justice group will be waging a campaign against various pollution from tar sands projects—while other climate justice organizers oppose mountaintop removal mining explosions, oil refinery pollution, biofuel land grabs, and a range of other interconnected devastation around prevailing energy systems.
Like other climate organizers, the climate justice coalition is focusing on the upcoming UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen (COP-15) this December. Climate justice activists will be calling on others to follow and weigh in on those negotiations—if only to question the legitimacy of the proposals or the participants.
The coalition has called a major day of action at the end of November (“N30″), but activism associated with the coalition already is underway (as you can see on their web site). Some of these related actions will be connected with the coalition more than others. Since the coalition is calling on others to take on the same concerns and strategies, it will be difficult to track where the actual coalition begins and ends. In other words, anyone who wants to join us will find many grassroots points of entry into climate justice activism.
