• Activists with Rising Tide Australia scaled a 15-metre-high coal conveyor belt this morning at Kooragang and suspended a banner that read: “We’re sorry Somalia. Coal = climate change and starvation.”

• Tens of thousands of Syrians poured out of mosques after prayers on Friday to join anti-government protests, defying the threat of a brutal crackdown to express their rage at the killings by security forces this week in the city of Hama.

• 51-year-old South Korean labor activist Kim Jin-sukis about to enter her eighth month atop a 15-story crane where she has been protesting layoffs at a major shipping company.

• A one-day general strike called in Indian Kashmir by separatists to protest the death of a shopkeeper in police custody Wednesday closed down shops, schools and offices.

• Protesters pitched tents and laid down in the middle of one of the busiest streets in the Haitian capital Monday to protest efforts to remove them from a private lot where they have been living since the January 2010 earthquake.

• More than a thousand workers at a Finnish steel making plant downed tools on Thursday morning for two days to protest low wages paid to Polish bricklayers working at the site.

• Thousands of Chinese taxi drivers in Hangzhou went on strike earlier this week to demand higher fares, pensions and the establishment of a labour union.

Last week, from July 4-8, some 50 people travelled to Queenscliff, Victoria, as part of the Swan Island Peace Convergence to enter into a week of protest and nonviolent civil disobedience to the war in Afghanistan. They came from as far away as Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane and as close as the small, sleepy seaside town of Queenscliff itself. The nonviolent resistance focused on hindering the operations of the Swan Island military base, a facility from which the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) operates, and one which trains the Special Air Service Regiment (SASR), the elite fighters playing most of Australia’s combat role in Afghanistan.

Our goal was total Gandhian transparency – as we said at our first meeting together, we didn’t know if there would be police present, but if they were they would be welcomed as we had nothing to hide. Plans and reflections were put up on our website. We had been liaising with police for weeks beforehand, telling them everything we knew, which precipitated what they called “Operation Swan 2,” a containment force of approximately 180 police members including water police, the dog squad and mounted police. Given there were never more than 20 of us at the gates at any one time, this amounted to a serious overreaction on the part of the state, a trust deficit we were keen to undo.

Part of the reason for transparency was reduced fear – on the part of the participants (many of whom were attending their first “resistance” action) and on the part of the base staff and police. It is only in the context of reduced fear that people are open to changing their minds, and build the trust which is essential for working together and building an inviting movement.

Another factor was honesty and truth – if nonviolence is “truth force” then the force of truth must be given a chance to win the day. If as Gandhi said, “we each have a piece of the truth and the untruth” then it is only in putting our truths together that we both discover a larger truth, and discern the untruth.

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Over the last year and a small group of antiwar activists from Melbourne have been escalating our nonviolent resistance to the war in Afghanistan, focussing on the Swan Island Military Base off Queenscliff, Victoria. Australia has 1550 troops in Afghanistan; most are involved in mentoring and training Afghan National Army, but approximately 350 are the elite SAS, who are doing the targeted killings. Swan Island is one of two major training facilities for SAS troops, as well as the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS).

We have chosen the tool of nonviolent direct action to disrupt and expose this secretive facility and its involvement in this ten year war. This allows us to have a disproportionate effect for the amount of time, effort and people involved, and to have a concrete, measurable, local impact on Australia’s war effort.

In March 2010, four of us entered the base; two blocked the gate with a banner reading “Base Closed: War Out of Order,” while two went inside and switched off power grids and a satellite. Our charges of Commonwealth trespass were dismissed by a magistrate on June 16.

Immediately after court we returned to Swan Island with 40 supporters, and this time nine people were arrested blocking the gate. Their charges were also dismissed by a magistrate in October 2010.

From July 4-8 we have planned a week of activities, including daily blockades of the base, children’s activities, film nights and a public stall in Main Street. The intention is to build a community of resistance in a way which is fun, empowering and effective.

The week of activity is planned to coincide with the beginning of the Talisman Saber U.S./Australia joint military exercises. There will be a series of protests and civil disobedience actions around the site of those exercises as well.

In the space of a year the Melbourne movement has grown from just eight people being involved to more than 80. In the deflated Australian political environment, where apathy and self-interest rule the day, this is a significant achievement, though one on which we will seek to build. My sense is that this growth is largely due to the personal witness of those who have put themselves on the line and repeatedly borne witness to an alternative method of political engagement, which has expanded people’s imaginations and provided a focal point.

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• About 20,000 people assembled in the Greek capital’s central Syntagma Square on Sunday, responding to calls on social networking sites for gatherings across Europe to demand “real democracy”.

• Tens of thousands of mostly liberal protesters again filled Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Friday to call on the military council to end the practice of sending civilians to military trials, to expedite legal action against former President Hosni Mubarak and his associates, and to start governing with some civilian presidential council.

• Five protesters were arrested by U.S. Park Police at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC on Saturday after taking part in a flash mob to protest a recent court decision that upheld a ban on dancing within the memorial. A second protest is being planned for this weekend—and over 2,300 people say they’ll attend.

• Russian police detained more than 60 activists in Moscow and St. Petersburg on Tuesday at demonstrations against restrictions on freedom of assembly.

• Several people were arrested for participating in a banned gay-pride event in Moscow on Saturday.

• Up to 100 protesters blocked the driveway to the Brisbane, Australia hotel where mining bosses from the coal seam gas industry were holding an annual summit yesterday.

• Several dozen opponents of shale gas marched through Quebec, Canada on Monday to warn of its possible environmental impact. Training sessions on how to organize sit-ins and occupy exploration sites are also being planned.

• 15,000 people gathered in the Sbata district of Casablanca on Sunday to demand more democratic freedoms, jobs and better social conditions. But security forces intensified their hardline crackdown.

• Dozens of supporters of hunger-striking retail cleaning workers, joined by U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, rallied Sunday in south Minneapolis to demand higher wages for supermarket floor cleaners.

• Around 3,000 people marched through central Tokyo on Sunday to protest the Hamaoka nuclear-power plant, which is located about 200 kilometers southwest of Tokyo in Shizuoka Prefecture—the heart of a region that seismologists believe is well overdue for a massive undersea earthquake of a magnitude 8 or higher.

• After Bahrain’s interior ministry acknowledged that two political prisoners had died in custody last week, the daughter of a detained human rights activist began a hunger strike on Monday, calling on the authorities to release her father and other members of her family who have been arrested.

• Tens of thousands of Yemenis filled the streets of Sanaa, Taiz, Hudaydah, Ibb and the southeastern province of Hadramaut on Monday to protest the Gulf Cooperation Council’s plan for Saleh’s removal.

• Soldiers and police moved into Cairo’s main square on Tuesday to end a five-day sit-in by protesters demanding civilian rule and swifter prosecution of Egypt’s former president and his allies.

• Irish Greenpeace volunteers held a protest outside Facebook’s Dublin office yesterday, calling on it to phase out its use of coal power.

• Protesters chained themselves to a ladder inside the State Government’s offices in Melbourne, Australia on Monday and called on the Government to withdraw its support for a proposed coal and gas-fired power station in the Latrobe Valley.

• Workers at Buenaventura’s Uchucchacua silver mine in Peru have lifted an eight-day strike seeking higher bonuses and better working conditions, but a protest by villagers with their own set of unresolved problems stemming from the mining company kept the workers from returning.

• On Tuesday, tens of thousands of anti-government protestors shouted slogans and raised banners during a demonstration demanding the resignation of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, in Sanaa.

• In Syria, thousands of protesters are marching in the southern city of Daraa today following the deaths of at least five protesters since Friday.

• Several hundred teachers marched through Rabat on Monday for better pay a day after one of Morocco’s largest anti-government protests in recent decades against corruption and demanding government change.

• Relatives of at least 80 political prisoners, who are on hunger strike in prison, held a demonstration in Cairo on Tuesday, accusing the government of holding them without charge.

• In Senegal, 3,000 people participated in a sit-in at Dakar’s Place de l’Independance on Saturday to oppose corruption and the rule of President Abdoulaye Wade.

• On Sunday, 350 activists rallied and marched and some 30 were arrested at the U.S. Marine Base at Quantico in Virginia demanding freedom for PVC Bradley Manning, who is accused of leaking secret U.S. government documents to the WikiLeaks website.

• Honduran teacher Ilse Ivana Velásquez Rodríguez died around noon on Friday in a Tegucigalpa hospital from injuries she received that day when riot police and the special Comando Cobra unit attacked a demonstration of thousands of teachers in front of the National Institute of Teachers’ Social Security (Inprema).

• Hundreds of protestors gathered outside the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant Sunday to show support for victims in Japan and to renew their call to shut the Vernon plant down.

• For the past two weeks, indigenous women from in Australia have been holding a blockade against the government’s self-imposed rule over their community.

• Two members of an environmental group involved in a tree sit-in protest in Florida against a proposed biotech lab were arrested on Monday.

• More than a thousand people converged on Sydney’s town hall demanding that the Gillard government protect Australian-born Wikileaks frontman Julian Assange in the first offline mass action in the country since “cablegate” broke.

• Tens of thousands of students flooded the streets of London and other cities yesterday as lawmakers approved a new round of education cuts and tuition hikes.

• Thousands of commuters in Mumbai protested the suburban Western Railway for treating its commuters like “animals” on a day that is marked as International Human Rights Day. A sit-in was held in front of the Western Railway general manager’s office.

• As many as 9,000 inmates in 26 prisons across Greece launched a hunger strike to protest overcrowded detention facilities on Wednesday.

• Teachers in the La Habra City School District in Orange County, California went on strike Wednesday to protest a two-percent pay reduction, cuts to health care benefits and two required furlough days.

• Families and friends of drone attack victims came from the tribal areas of Pakistan to Islamabad on Friday, where they gathered outside the Parliament House to protest drone attacks.

• One of the largest demonstrations in the Irish Republic’s history brought more than 100,000 people on to Dublin’s streets in protest over the international bailout and four years of austerity ahead.

• Several thousand demonstrators gathered in Austria’s capital Saturday to protest government cuts in education, heath care and family allowances.

• Tens of thousands Italians marched in Rome on Saturday in a rally organised by Italy’s largest union to protest bleak job prospects and demand more rights for workers.

• Almost 100 people from Idaho, Montana, Washington, Utah, Oregon, California, Oklahoma and different parts of Canada converged outside of Missoula last week for the anti-tar sands resistance summit, which non-violent direct action trainings and network strategy development.

• More than 30 people took part in a march and rally in Thornbury, England on Saturday to protest plans for a new nuclear power plant in South Gloucestershire.

• Reverend Billy Talen of The Church of Life After Shopping was arrested after protesting (and singing) in the lobby of UBS during Black Friday. He and his church members were dressed in white robes to protest the bank’s funding of mountaintop removal.

• Hundreds of truckers staged a slow-moving convoy in British Columbia on Saturday to push for enforcement of minimum pay rates.

• Over a hundred people joined a community sit-in at Melbourne, Australia’s only aboriginal school last week to protest plans for its partial demolition.

• A sit-in protest by 600 workers at a Hyundai factory in Ulsan, southeast of the Seoul, stopped the production of 922 vehicles worth 7.9 billion won ($7 million) on Monday.

• Dutch postal workers staged a 24-hour strike yesterday to protest plans by post and express mail company TNT NV to slash thousands of jobs.

• About 100 asylum seekers at a Sydney detention center have begun a hunger strike to protest their detention and the apparent suicide of an Iraqi detainee.

• In Peshawar, three different labor unions of Pakistan Railway staged a protest on a railway track and stopped the Awam Express which was bound to Karachi to protest a delay in the payment of their salaries.

• On Monday, hundreds of Bentley workers demonstrated outside the firm’s headquarters in the UK in protest at a proposed 4.5 per cent pay rise. Shopfloor workers staged their 30-minute silent protest after objecting to the firm’s pay offer.

• Students at the engineering department of the Science and Technology University in Tehran have refused to attend classes since Saturday in protest to educational challenges.

• In Fiji, prisoners at the Naboro Maximum Remand Cell went on hunger strike Monday afternoon to protest alleged mistreatment by prison guards.

• About 100 people demonstrated Thursday outside the Japanese Consulate in the 300 block of South Grand Avenue in Los Angeles as part of a worldwide protest against the annual slaughter of dolphins in that country.

• Union workers shut down all of France’s 12 oil refineries on a fourth day of nationwide protests over pension reforms Friday.

• About 100 workers from the Greek culture ministry barricaded themselves inside the Acropolis on Wednesday by padlocking the entrance gates and refusing to allow any tourists in until their demands for unpaid wages were met. But riot police cleared the site after obtaining a court order.

• Activists with Change Chevron infiltrated and interrupted a speech of Chevron’s CEO at the University of Chicago on Wednesday, and turned it into conversation about his company’s toxic pollution in Ecuador.

• Dozens of people dumped what they labelled as “GM-canola weeds and GM-contaminated soy infant formula S-26″ on Monsanto’s Melbourne office today as a protest to coincide with UN World Food Day.

• More than 100 Chinese writers, lawyers and activists have released a letter urging the government to release the Nobel peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo and other political prisoners.

• Activists with the Sierra Club stood frozen outside a Board of Trustees meeting on Purdue’s West Lafayette campus yesterday to protest the university’s decision to “remain frozen in the 19th century and not move into a clean energy future” by building a new coal powered boiler.