• Four Greenpeace activists breached a 1,650-feet security perimeter around an oil rig off western Greenland  yesterday. They then climbed up the rig and fastened themselves to it, effectively forcing it to stop drilling. As of this morning, they were still suspended 15 meters above the frigid Arctic waters of Baffin Bay.

• Russian police have detained more than 60 people demonstrating at a freedom of assembly rally in Moscow yesterday. The demonstrators chanted “Russia without Putin!” as the police led them away.

• Nearly 100 Afghan asylum seekers broke out of a detention centre in northern Australia on Wednesday to protest the long delay in processing their refugee applications.

• Four tree sitters have created a platform 100 feet up in the redwoods of Jacoby Creek California to prevent loggers from clearcutting the beautiful second growth forest.

• The Mobilization for Climate Justice West turned out 150 people on Monday afternoon in San Francisco’s financial district for a march on the offices of Chevron, the Environmental Protection Agency and BP. Their message was for Big Oil to stop harming our environment and communities and to pay for the damage they’ve caused.

• A small contingent of super heroes and one Sith Lord assembled outside the steps of City Hall Tuesday to protest the arrests made by LAPD of costumed characters along Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.

• Honduran police arrested some 150 people while using tear gas and water cannons to disperse a demonstration by teachers, students and others in Tegucigalpa on Aug. 27, the 23rd day of a strike by teachers over their pension fund and other issues.

A long running battle over the construction of a highway through Moscow’s Khimki forest has taken a surprising turn. Earlier this week I wrote about the broad based campaign to save one of Moscow’s few remaining green belts and old growth oak forests. Environmentalists and activists have been working since 2007 to halt the construction of a highway through the 2,500-acre forest, which many viewed as inevitable. Just a couple of weeks ago, one of the organizers, Yevgenia Chirikova, told the Washington Post that, “The next step is probably that they will start building. We are ready. It is going to be very loud.”

For the moment, however, the highway construction has been put on hold. In a video blog posted Thursday, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev ordered the government to, “halt the implementation” of the highway pending “further civic and expert discussions.” It is a rare victory for environmentalists or opposition activists of any kind in Russia. Perhaps not since Vladimir Putin’s 2006 decision to reroute an oil pipeline that would have come dangerously close to Lake Baikal—a national treasure and a UNESCO world heritage site—has the administration responded so forcefully to public protest.

“This has flabbergasted us. It was completely unexpected,” Sergei Ageyev, a member of the environmental group leading the opposition to the highway, told the New York Times. “It is simply a stunning victory for civil society.”

Some are also speculating that it reveals a deeper split between Russia’s President and Prime Minister. “It’s another step that destroys the myth of the all-powerful Putin,” Stanislav Belkovsky, a founder of the Moscow-based National Strategy Institute, told Bloomberg.

However, Putin is already spinning the Kremlin’s decision as entirely consistent. From the Russian Far East, where the Prime Minister was touting the opening of another roadway, the Chita-Khabarovsk highway, he said, “This is entirely consistent with the logic of our behavior and actions in recent years.”

And in a sense it is. If a local issue threatens to spin out of control and undermine the authority of the state the Kremlin will respond. Last year, in the midst of the financial crisis, Putin flew by helicopter to the beleaguered town of Pikalyovo to scold local politicians and businessmen. He forced them to pay workers back wages and turned the town’s woes into a publicity stunt. It looked good on television but of course did little to change things nation wide. It was damage control.

In the case of Khimki, Reuters summed up the strategy well:

Medvedev’s order looked like carefully orchestrated damage control by Russia’s leaders before a parliamentary election next year and a 2012 presidential ballot.

Referring to suggestions by the leaders that they planned to remain in power for years to come, Ekho Moskvy radio commentator Sergei Buntman said Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin couldn’t let the issue hinder ‘Operation Continuity’.

Nonetheless the decision is a victory for environmentalists. And, in a sense, a political victory too. The question now is whether they can build on their success and turn the Khimki campaign into a broader civic and political movement.

As Russia’s forests go up in flames, a group of activists and environmentalists is struggling to protect one of Moscow’s few remaining green belts and stands of old growth oaks. This time the threat isn’t wildfires but rather a 10-lane super highway that would link Moscow and St. Petersburg. The campaign to prevent the road from passing through the 2,500-acre Khimki forest, a long protected reserve just outside of Moscow, began in 2007. Since then journalists and editors investigating the story have been attacked (one nearly beaten to death), environmental activists have been arrested, and European investors—including the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the European Investment Bank (EIB)—have begun to question the viability of the project. Recently efforts to halt the construction of the highway and leveling of the forest have escalated.

In late July, Khimki’s administrative building was attacked by a group of anarchists and anti-fascists, while activists who had set up a camp in the forest were detained and arrested. Then, on Sunday, Moscow police and security forces broke up a rally and concert in defense of Khimki that attracted perhaps as many as 2,000 supporters.

It is difficult to hold rallies in Moscow. Obtaining a permit is a bit like playing the lottery; your chances are slim and subject to the whims of the city’s Mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, who, over the course of his 18-year rule has come to run the city like a fiefdom. He is particularly non-plussed by gay rights campaigners and has denied them the right to march in Moscow year after year. So getting 2,000 people out onto the streets in defense of a public forest is no small feat. Like Lake Baikal in the 1960s, Khimki has become the symbol of a rejuvenated Russian environmental movement, one that has largely relied on civil disobedience and non-violent protest to achieve its goals.

The face of the new movement is Yevgenia Chirikova, a 33-year-old mother of two with degrees in business and engineering. She and her husband moved to Khimki in 1998 for many of the same reasons that any young family would: It is quiet, clean, and close to a large public green space. (It is worth noting that Moscow is one of the most polluted, congested, dangerous, and expensive cities in the world.)

In 2007, when Chirikova and her husband noticed large swaths of trees marked with red x’s they were naturally concerned and did some digging. They soon found out that the forest had been sold to a Russian company, Avtodor, a spin-off of the Transport Ministry, and would be cleared to build a massive highway. The work had been sub-contracted to a French company, Vinci, and most of the financing was to come from international bodies.

The residents of Khimki were largely unaware of what was happening; the project had been kept completely under wraps. An engineer by trade, Chirikova thought it was odd that the administration had decided to build the road in this particular spot. Why build a highway that has to conform to the irregularities of a forest when there are simpler, more direct, and perhaps even less expensive routes?

“It was totally obvious that it was simply a backroom deal to begin [property] development in our oak forest,” Chirikova recently told Radio Free Europe.

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• Some 2,000 people crammed into a Moscow square amid a heavy police presence for a banned rock concert yesterday to protest plans for the building of a highway through protected forest land.

• A climate change activist was arrested Friday after she glued herself to a desk at the Royal Bank of Scotland’s headquarters. She was among 150 activists who breached the security perimeter separating a climate camp from the bank’s Edinburgh HQ at around midday.

• A group of Nigerian women in the country’s oil-rich south blocked access to a Chevron natural gas pipeline on Friday to protest poor living conditions in their community.

• Hundreds of people showed up for New York gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo’s campaign visit to Ithaca last week to demand that he hold off on supporting hydrofracking in the natural gas-laden Marcellus Shale.

• Dozens of mothers breastfed their infants at a Phoenix McDonald’s on Saturday to protest the eviction of a woman doing the same earlier this month.

• Hundreds of residents of Kaliningrad, Russia’s Baltic exclave, gathered on a central square Saturday to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s government.

• About 100 almost-naked anti-bullfighting campaigners lay down outside the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao on Saturday in a protest coinciding with the start of the northern Spanish city’s annual bullfight festival.

According to an interesting Wall Street Journal piece last week, underground rap is stoking a protest movement in Russia with songs “on such hot-button issues as drugs, police brutality and the immense power of the Kremlin-backed elite.” One of the genre’s rising stars is Ivan Alexeyev, who—under the name Noize MC—drew widespread attention with his song “Mercedes S666″, which excoriates a Russian oil executive for allegedly conspiring with police to cover-up a deadly car accident that he caused.

To a menacing beat, Mr. Alexeyev takes on the persona of the oil executive and raps: “Get out of my way, plebeians, don’t get under my wheels / Tremble, pitiful rabble, there’s a patrician on the highway / We’re late for hell, make way for the chariot.”

The song soon went viral after a friend created a South Park-inspired music video and posted it on YouTube.

To date, the YouTube video has had more than 700,000 hits, and it has helped fuel an outcry that ultimately led President Dmitry Medvedev to order a new investigation. Afisha, a popular entertainment magazine, praised Mr. Alexeyev’s song as “the most effective musical act of civil resistance in Russia for the past 10 years.”

But Alexeyev isn’t the only rapper causing a stir in Russia.

Timur Kuzminykh, who goes by the name Dino MC 47, heaped scorn on Russia’s leaders in a song about the March 29 suicide bombings that killed 40 people in the Moscow metro. Attacking officials with “insolent fat faces” who, he alleges, are more concerned with enriching themselves than fighting terrorism, he raps: “Their kids are in London and their money is in the Caymans / But what are we supposed to do, where can we run?”

This surge in politically aware rap combined with the outreach power of the Internet has led many Russian music critics to hope for an end to the vapid commercial pop of the mainstream.

“The Internet is now a much more powerful media resource in the music scene than television or radio,” the critic said. “We are seeing more and more how certain performers are popular purely thanks to the Internet, without any LPs or any support from the mass media.”

Alexeyev, however, isn’t as optomistic about the longterm strength of underground rap in Russia.

“It will probably become like American [rap], where you have some underground labels producing one thing, while TV channels choose songs for their entertainment value,” he said.

This is certainly a valid criticism. Hip-hop in America is probably as far from its socially conscious roots as it has ever been. Hopefully this is one area where Russia won’t follow in our footsteps.

• New Orleans artist Mitchell Gaudet has created a conceptual display of 53 black oil drums on the grounds of National Historic Monument Longue Vue House and Gardens. The barrels represent the amount of crude oil being spilled into the Gulf of Mexico every minute.

• Five activists from Culture Beyond Oil poured a black oil-like slick around one of the British Museum’s statues in central London to protest its sponsorship by BP. The thousand year old statue was chosen because it “represents the way in which civilisations once considered invincible can collapse in a short period of time”.

• More than 200 people, mostly Latino, gathered outside last night’s All-Star Game at Angel Stadium in Anaheim holding signs and distributing pamphlets that asked Major League Baseball to move next year’s All-Star Game from Phoenix because of Arizona’s controversial immigration law.

• A Libyan aid boat carrying 2,000 tons of food and medical supplies to Gaza was forced to reroute to Egypt yesterday because of engine trouble. A spokesman for the aid mission insisted the boat still intended to reach Gaza, but would not violently resist any efforts to stop them.

• More than a million people held a march in Barcelona to call for greater autonomy for the Catalan region after a Spanish constitutional court declared that there was no legal basis to recognize Catalonia as a nation or for the Catalan language to take precedence over Castilian Spanish.

• Several hundred hotel workers and supporters, many wearing black-eye Mickey Mouse masks, rallied at the Anaheim Convention Center on Monday to demand better health care benefits for employees of Disney.

• A small group of anarchists held an unauthorized picket at the South African Embassy in Moscow on Saturday in support of social activists and residents of informal settlements in South Africa, who were evicted for the World Cup.

• Around 200 dairy farmers gathered on the streets of Brussels on Monday to protest reforms that bring an end to permanent contracts between farmers and milk companies.

• Hundreds of Los Angeles students at Lawndale High School walked out of class Wednesday to protest a controversial decision to transfer the school’s top teachers to a neighboring school.

• Around 3,000 South Africans marched in Durban Wednesday to denounce FIFA and their government for spending 33 billion rands (4.3 billion USD) in preparation for the World Cup while millions live in poverty. Also, dozens of security workers walked off the job hours before the Brazil-North Korea soccer match Tuesday to over a pay dispute.

• West Virgina residents opposed to mountaintop removal mining rallied at the capitol in Charleston on Tuesday. The group, which calls itself  ‘Appalachia Rising’ is attempting to rally Appalachian residents opposed to mountaintop removal to join in a mass demonstration set for Sept. 27 in Washington.

• Protesters gathered outside the office of U.S. Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA) on Wednesday to demand that Perriello vote against allocating an additional $33.5 billion to fund the war in Afghanistan.

• About a dozen activists rallied on Wednesday in Samara, in central Russia to protest a new law which they say will lead to the commercialization of education in their country.

• In Nepal, indigenous groups, with the backing of  several opposition parties have promised to launch a strong protest movement against the construction a controversial 269 metre dam if surveying and evacuations of villagers go forward. The Sapta Kosi Multipurpose Project dam will submerge at least 50 Nepalese villages.

• Fourteen people were arrested in Denver on Tuesday during an immigration rights protest for kneeling and blocking traffic in front of the Federal Court House.

• Protests against Israel’s attack on the Free Gaza flotilla that resulted in the deaths of at least nine activists took place around the world yesterday. Hundreds of Iraqis took to the streets in Baghdad. Thousands gathered in Beirut, Tripoli and Sidon. Israeli embassies throughout Europe were greeted with rallies of 3,500 in Athens, 2,000 in Paris (pictured above), and 5,000 in Stockholm. Hundreds also protested in New York and Washington DC , with even larger protests planned for later today.

• Tens of thousands of people protested Arizona’s new immigration policies on Saturday in cities across the US—including Phoenix; Oakland; Boston; Passaic County, NJ; and Salem, OR.

• More than 130 activists were arrested in Moscow yesterday for protesting a government crackdown on protests despite the Freedom to Assemble guaranteed by the Russian Constitution.

• Gay and lesbian activists eluded Russian security services in a five-hour game of cat and mouse on Saturday to hold the first gay protest in Moscow not to be broken up by riot police.

• More than 30,000 people reportedly quit Facebook yesterday as part of a protest against the social networking giant’s privacy policies.

• About 25 protesters waved signs outside a Clearwater BP station on Memorial Day morning to protest the company’s disastrous oil spill.

• Tens of thousands of Romanian public workers went on strike yesterday to protest hefty wage cuts meant to reduce the country’s budget deficit.

• Tens of thousands marched in central Lisbon on Saturday to protest the government’s austerity measures, showing the first serious sign of popular discontent toward the government’s announced tax hikes, spending cuts, and freeze on civil servants’ wages.

• Thousands of people formed a human chain in Okinawa, Japan yesterday to protest the movement of a US military base there.

• 500 Afghan villagers demonstrated outside their governor’s office on Friday to protest a recent US-backed raid that killed civilians.

• Thousands of villagers in India facing displacement by steel giant POSCO are staging sit-in protests during what they have dubbed “resistance week,” which lasts through May 21.

• Communications worker union members marched through Johannesburg, South Africa demanding wage increases.

• Women vendors in Nagamapal, India staged a sit-in yesterday to protest continued price hikes. The sit-in condemned a government official’s visit to the region and shops and businesses were also closed in protest

• 160 Russian tractor factory workers have begun a hunger strike after not being paid for five months. They are also fundraising for a plane ticket for President Medvedev to come and mediate.

• A gay pride parade meant to protest rights violations against sexual minorities was violently disrupted by police in Belarus on Saturday.

• People gathered in the Maldives last week, clad in red shirts, to protest rising electricity tariffs.

• Saturday was International Day of Protest for Lolita’s Retirement, in support of an orca whale at Miami’s Seaquarium, who lives in the smallest whale tank in North America and possibly the world.

• Gun control activists protested outside an NRA conference in Charlotte, NC, saying discussion of gun violence was missing from the conference.

• Tens of thousands of people are gathering for a sit-in in Bangkok as anti-government protests continue.  The red-shirted Thais, whose action is seriously affecting the city’s economy, show no sign of retreat after they returned to peaceful methods this week.

• Bail Out the People Movement activists and the mostly Haitian-origin staff of Steelworkers Local 8751 unfurled a banner as Sarah Palin took the stage at Boston’s Tax Day Tea Party gathering at Boston Common. The banner read: “Union jobs & healthcare for all! Stop the pro-war, racist, sexist, anti-LGBT Palin/Tea Party attack!”

• Survivors of the Bhopal, India gas tragedy protested in New Delhi on Thursday, 26 years  after the accident, still asking for medical care from the government.

• Residents outside the San Cristobal mine in Bolivia have been blocking rail access to the silver/lead/zinc mine all week, demanding that the government provide electricity, among other things, to the area.

• Strikes and marches occurred throughout the United States in the last few days, as hundreds of workers, students, and community members rallied against labor rights violations committed by national food service company Sodexo.

• A hundred people, including Aboriginal elders, marched on Mumbulla State Forest in Australia on Wednesday to protest logging.  Logging continued, however, throughout the day, on land that is home to a koala colony.

• Food and poverty activists are staging a sit-in in India in response to a Food Security Bill currently facing Parliament.  The activists say the bill does not go far enough to protect poor families.

• Russian air traffic controllers are on hunger strike this week in protest of company violations of union agreements.

• Argentine meat-industry workers marched to the labor ministry in Buenos Aires yesterday, protesting anticipated lay-offs.

• American Airlines employees picketed at the Dallas/Fort Worth airport on Thursday in protest of high executive compensation.  Rallying against corporate greed has become an April tradition for the airline workers.

• New York City performance artist Rev. Billy Talen was arrested on Sunday after placing a “holy hex” on JPMorgan Chase, which he calls the nation’s largest financier of coal-mining mountaintop removal.

• A group of homeless people and housing activists took over a privately owned Mission District duplex in San Francisco on Sunday in what served as the climax of a protest designed to promote use of San Francisco’s vacant buildings as shelters for the needy.

• 21 people were detained after crossing the line at the entrance of the Nevada Test Site on Easter Sunday as part of the annual Sacred Peace Walk, a six-day 62 mile trek from Las Vegas to oppose the dangers of nuclear testing.

• Activists have held rallies across Russia to protest Putin’s decision to reopen a Soviet-era paper mill beside the world’s largest freshwater lake.

• Greenpeace activists in The Netherlands chained themselves to the mooring ropes of a container ship bound for Japan with whale meat onboard last Friday. Rottderdamport police have agreed to keep the ship at the port, while its owner has decided to off load the meat rather than become complicit in the trade of an endangered species.

• Hundreds of teachers in Florida gathered at the state capital in Tallahassee on Monday to protest a controversial education reform bill passed by the state legislature that links pay raises for teachers to students’ test scores.

• United Airlines flight attendants around the world were out picketing Tuesday, including a protest at Denver International Airport, to show their discontent over long hours and no contract.

• Thousands of red-shirted protesters in Thailand are camping out near the Government House compound in Bangkok in preparation for another massive rally on Saturday, as part of their effort to restore democracy.

• Hundreds gathered in front of the Vinoy Hotel in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida yesterday to protest President Obama’s plans to expand oil drilling into the Eastern part of the Gulf of Mexico.

• Russian police detained dozens of anti-Kremlin activists in St. Petersburg on Wednesday after 300 gathered to protest restrictions on the constitutional right to free assembly.

• More than 4,500 bus and tram drivers in Bucharest went on strike yesterday to protest wage and bonus cuts.

• Palestinian prisoners in an Israeli jail went on hunger strike yesterday, demanding a better quality of life while in the justice system, including more education and family visits.

• Farmers across the state of Assam, India staged sit-ins yesterday in response to a recent police action and upcoming construction of harmful dams.

• Australia’s Pirate Party organized a flash mob yesterday after the government censored certain politically sensitive websites.  Thirty protesters met in Sydney wearing symbolic gags.

• After the military briefly arrested Guinea-Bissau Prime Minister Carlos Gomes yesterday morning, hundreds of people gathered in protest, supporting democracy.  The West African group dispersed after the military commander threatened to kill Gomes if they did not leave.

• In Somalia, hundreds of people protested violent insurgent group Shabab in a demonstration led by Sufi clerics on Monday.  The gathering was one of the biggest in recent years.

PBS’s Tavis Smiley, a disciple of Cornel West and a powerful force for elevating public discourse, has done a tremendous service by framing his second episode of Tavis Smiley Reports around Martin Luther King Jr.’s most controversial speech: the speech, one year to the day before his assassination, when he stated his opposition to the Vietnam War. The show, which premiered last night, can be watched online as well.

What makes Smiley’s program particularly brave is the way in which is insists that King’s speech that night at Riverside Church is entirely relevant today. We have our first black president; in her invocation at Obama’s inauguration, Diane Feinstein spoke of the history of nonviolent struggle that brought him there. Yet, he is a war president. Like Johnson during King’s time, Obama has an ambitious domestic agenda being tragically thwarted by his commitment to pursuing wars abroad and feeding the military machine. Obama most explicitly distanced himself from King’s antiwar commitments in his Nobel Prize speech last year. Smiley insists, as in his evocative interview on Talk of the Nation, that Obama is wrong to make this separation. King was not some naive outsider who spoke out against violence only because he didn’t really have to deal with it. King carried enormous responsibility. Violence tempted him, but he knew it had to be resisted.

This is Smiley, on Obama’s Nobel speech:

Had the president stopped by giving Martin King his just respect—as he did, to his credit—it would have been okay. But when he turns the corner and then says, essentially, that Martin’s philosophy wouldn’t work in today’s world, he goes on to say that Dr. King didn’t know al-Qaida, as if to suggest that Martin didn’t understand evil, that Martin didn’t understand violence, that he himself had not been subjected to it. He was stabbed at one time. His house was bombed.

He gave a famous speech about the fact that he—when stabbed in New York at a book signing, the blade was just a scintilla away from his aorta. He turned that into a great speech when he got out of the hospital. Because he received a letter from a little white girl who said, Dr. King, I read the newspaper that had you sneezed that blade would’ve moved, ruptured your aorta and you would’ve drowned in your own blood. And King gives a great speech out of that hospital called “If I Had Sneezed.” It’s a powerful refrain, Neal, about what would’ve happened in his life, what he would’ve missed if he had sneezed at that very moment.

So King understood violence. Of course, he’s assassinated in Memphis a year to the day later after giving this speech. So when the president suggests—and whether directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally diminishes in that Nobel speech Martin’s powerful, nonviolent philosophy, it tweaked some people, and you’ll see that in the presentation Wednesday night.

Let’s stop putting words in Martin’s mouth, who knew that it was nothing short of racism to expect nonviolence of oppressed minorities at home while packing them away in ships to do enormous violence abroad: “As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems,” he said that night in Riverside. “But they ask—and rightly so—what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted.” Nonviolence on American streets and the massacre in Vietnam represented an impossible contradiction that no political convenience could soothe. “For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.”

Speaking this way cost King his popularity, and it cost him his good relationship with President Johnson. His advisers counseled him against it, for all the harm it might do to the civil rights movement, but he wouldn’t let them stop him.

“I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences,” said King at Riverside, “and to speak from the burnings of my own heart.”

• Hundreds of people gathered in Moscow yesterday to protest the reopening of a factory environmentalists say will lead to waste being dumped into the world’s oldest lake.

• Hundreds of protesters, many in kayaks, took to the water off Horseshoe Beach in Newcastle, Australia yesterday morning to prevent shipping movements at the world’s top coal port. Rising Tide Newcastle said the protest stopped ships from entering and leaving the port between 10am and 5pm, but the Newcastle Port Corporation denies these claims.

• Landmarks around the world—including Beijing’s Forbidden City, the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Sydney Opera House—went dark Saturday evening to observe Earth Hour, a global effort to raise awareness of climate change. 126 countries and more than 4000 cities and towns took part worldwide.

• Greenpeace activists unfurled banners of every size today outside the offices of Dell in Bangalore, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen, just as Dell executives meet to discuss a roadmap to finally remove the worst toxic chemicals from their electronics. The message around the world to Dell’s founder and CEO: “Michael Dell: Drop the Toxics!”

• Covered head-to-toe in black, a Saudi woman lashed out at hard-line Muslim clerics’ harsh religious edicts in verse on live TV last week at a popular Arabic version of “American Idol.”

• Students at two New Jersey high schools cut class yesterday morning to protest Governor Chris Christie’s State school-aid cuts.

• More than 7,000 people gathered in the main park of the northern Mexico city of Monterrey yesterday to protest a wave of violence that has affected the country’s third largest city in recent weeks. Most of the protesters wore white and some released white balloons and a white dove as signs of peace.

• Around 1,000 Egyptian university students held a protest on Wednesday to voice their opposition to Israeli construction plans at disputed holy sites in East Jerusalem.

• More than 3,000 Kyrgyz rallied in the capital Bishkek on Wednesday to express their discontent with President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who was hailed as Central Asia’s most democratic leader when he came to power in 2005, but has since tightened his grip on power and jailed political opponents.

• The six major Estonian newspapers left one of their pages completely blank today to protest of the source protection act 656 SE, which would make possible to punish with imprisonment journalists in the field of investigating journalism.

• Tibetan high school students protested in the streets of at least two towns in western China this week to mark the anniversary of an uprising against Chinese rule. At least 20 teenagers were taken into custody by police.

• A union representing New Jersey government workers says it staged more than 20 lunch hour demonstrations outside state agencies Thursday to protest Gov. Chris Christie’s proposed spending cuts.

• Thousands of Russians are preparing to take to the streets on March 20 for nationwide rallies against worsening living conditions and official corruption.

• For almost a week, a group of around 300 students have been occupying a lecture hall at the University of Sussex in England to protest proposed cutbacks.