• On Saturday, some 6,000 people gathered at a rally in Tokyo calling for the withdrawal of U.S. Marine base stationed on the Japanese island of Okinawa.

• Russian police broke up anti-Kremlin protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg on Sunday, and detained more than 100 demonstrators, including several opposition leaders.

• More than 150 inmates at a prison in Spuz, outside Podgorica, Montenegro launched a hunger strike last Wednesday, claiming guards are abusing them. This is the second such protest in ten days.

• In India, 10,000 teachers from 35 central universities began a two-day strike last Thursday, demanding changes in the regulation on service conditions which seeks to link their promotion to output.

• Dozens of students at Little Miami High School in Cincinnati walked out of class Monday morning on the eve of a critical levy vote. The walkout was followed by a sit-in at the school.

• A large number of staff at Copenhagen’s Kastrup airport, including security personnel, walked off the job yesterday and attended union meetings in protest against plans to outsource two employee canteens. Other employees who have downed tools include baggage handlers, the fire department, cleaning crews, technicians and drivers.

• Immigrants held in a South Texas detention center have begun an indefinite hunger strike. Its the second mass hunger strike in a year. Some of the detainees say they’ll refuse to eat until they are released.

• The Sheikh Yassin coalition organized a protest outside the Egyptian embassy in Paris on Saturday, demanding that Egypt stop building an underground steel barrier on the border with the Gaza Strip.

• Palestinians took part in a protest in Gaza City yesterday, calling for the release of their loved ones imprisoned in Israeli jails.

• 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.

I just discovered a website called Listserve that specializes in top ten lists. Most of them are pretty random, like “Top 10 Failed McDonald’s Products” or “Top 10 Fascinating Facts About Cheese.” But there are some serious ones too. The one that naturally caught my eye was titled “Top 10 Individual Protests.”

Given the recent success of Aminatou Haidar’s hunger strike, I thought this to be a wholly appropriate time to share the list and see what people think. Who else should have been on it? Once you get beyond some of the obvious names it gets tough.

In general, I think Listserve did a great job. I learned about two people I had never heard of before: Zackie Achmat, an HIV campaigner who refused to take antiretroviral drugs until all four million of his fellow South Africans had the same opportunity, and Vedran Smailovic, who played his cello in public during the midst of the seige on Sarajevo in 1992. Nor did I know about Louis Armstrong’s refusal to represent the US in Russia because of what happened in Little Rock.

I look forward to reading what other names folks come up with…

• 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.

With the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall approaching on Monday, a surprisingly thoughtful article in Forbes Magazine of all places looks at who should really take credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Konrad Jarausch, a professor of European Civilization at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, writes that the idea that Reagan simply spent the Soviets to death, as many Cold Warriors proclaim, is off the mark:

As Gorbachev’s memoirs show, this explanation is at best a half-truth. To be sure, the arms race was one of the reasons why the Russian leader decided that the Soviet Union had to reform its stagnating economy. But ultimately it was the spread of détente, helped by his personal rapport with the U.S. president that allowed Gorbachev to suspend the Brezhnev doctrine and set the satellites free to pursue–in the words of Frank Sinatra’s song “I Did It My Way”–their own road to communism.

Jarausch then even challenges the idea that it should be looked at  as the victory of the capitalist system over socialism. There is something to that argument, he says, but we must not forget that it was:

…the difficult transition from the plan to the market that threw one-fifth of the population out of work reaffirmed the importance of a functioning social safety net. And the recent financial meltdown has shown to all but the most greedy investment banker that unrestrained competition can be as dangerous as the almighty plan. Put off by destructive potential of casino-capitalism, most East Europeans today prefer the German compromise of a social market economy.

An explanation that “comes closer to the truth,” Jarausch writes, is:

…that of freedom as the prime motive of the democratic awakening in Eastern Europe. Many of the banners during mass demonstrations called for an end to dictatorship, the restoration of civil rights or the chance to travel without restraint. But a thirst for freedom alone can not overthrow a dictatorship unless it is translated into concrete action. It took a transnational grass roots movement of courageous Polish workers, Hungarian activists, German refugees and Czech dissidents braving considerable risks in order to revive civil society and regain space for public protest. In contrast to a widely held cliché, the communist dictatorship did not collapse of its own accord–rather it had to be pushed by mass demonstrations in order to agree on free elections and the return of democracy.

The fall of the Wall was magical because it signaled the peaceful triumph of people’s power over a regime that commanded enormous repressive force. Unlike the Revolutionary War in America, the terror during the French Revolution or the bloodshed during the Bolshevik seizure of power, it was nonviolent civil resistance that brought down the ugly concrete barrier that had imprisoned East Germans and East Europeans since August 1961. Keeping the process peaceful took extraordinary restraint by the dissidents inspired by the peace movement, by the frustrated people who wanted to vent their anger, by the communist rulers tempted to let the tanks roll, and by the international leaders who preferred the bipolar stability of the Cold War. That the rebels–save for those in Romania–remained peaceful, that the communist dictators were willing to give in to the popular pressure, that both sides agreed to negotiate at the Round Table, that the citizens repudiated communism in the first free elections and that the international community actually accepted their choice–all this still seems quite miraculous.

While this understanding of the collapse of the Soviet Union isn’t new to those who study nonviolence, this article is a reminder that there is still an important battle over the narrative of that historic event. As this anniversary approaches, we should all take the time to talk with others about how it was the people themselves in Eastern Europe, who courageously took to the streets and harnessed the power of nonviolence, that won the day twenty years ago.

• 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.

• About a dozen people gathered outside a University of Arkansas arena where former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was giving a talk in protest his country’s actions against Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.

• Several dozen activists ran through the city of Belgrade yesterday with gay pride flags in support of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community in Serbia.

• 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.

• Protesters gathered at Pike Street Market in Seattle on Halloween dressed as zombies to advocate for health care reforms.

• 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.

• A general strike was observed in Peshawar on Sunday to protest a car bombing that killed innocent citizens and caused material loss to the local businesses.

In a dramatic act of civil disobedience today, six national education leaders blocked the main entrance of the U.S. Department of Education in an effort to protect the endangered Washington, D.C. school voucher program.

• Protests are being planned for Thursday’s dedication of the new Cheney International Center on the University of Wyoming’s Laramie campus.

• Sudanese police have detained 40 women protesting outside a courthouse in support of a female journalist on trial for wearing trousers in public.

• Hundreds of pilots from India’s Jet Airwaves went on strike yesterday, canceling nearly 120 flights, to protest the dismissal of two senior pilots last month by the airline.

• Between 30 and 50 protesters marched with signs in an area known as Cargo City at Miami International Airport on Monday to support Amerijet workers, who went on strike over a week ago to protest for low wages, poor benefits and unsafe working conditions.

• Up to 5,000 workers at four coal mines in Hunan Province, Central China, have been on strike since the 22nd of August over new contracts.

• Some 50 retired miners in the western Russian city of Zverevo have held a protest near the local highway demanding free utilities from the local government.

• More than 100,000 university students, children, and teachers blocked the entrances to university buildings, occupied administrative offices, and marched in protest parades in cities across Germany on Wednesday to protest an educational system they called underfunded and unfair.

• Several thousand people in Latvia protested yesterday against budget cuts that the government says are needed to save the country from bankruptcy

• More than 2,000 workers from the Tack Fat Garment Factory in Cambodia who say they are being laid off from their current jobs and moved to another facility continue their strike for severance pay, which began on June 9th

• Between 2,000 and 3,000 teachers, farmers, miners and others in Bulgaria, led by the country’s largest trade union CITUB, gathered in front of the Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev’s office to protest the government’s failure to protect jobs during this financial crisis

• More than 100 African refugees staged a sit-in in front of the High Commission for Refugees in the Moroccan capital to demand for visas to enter Europe

• Fourteen artists in the southwestern Russian city of Chelyabinsk have begun a hunger strike to protest the confiscation of their studios and the revision of new regulations on renting the studios

• Over 130,000 people in Germany have signed a petition to protest a law that would censor the internet

• Members and supporters of the Communist Party of India-Marxists (CPI-M) staged a sit-in in the national capital yesterday to protest against the violence by the Maoists in the West Medinipur ditrict of West Bengal

• Protesters in the Dominican Republic blocked traffic, set tires on fire and confronted police after a young man was killed at a protest demanding the governement repair roads and undertake other public works earlier this week

Last Thursday, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin made a surprise visit to the town of Pikalyovo, where two days prior several hundred people blocked a federal highway for six hours to protest job cuts and unpaid wages. The purpose of his visit, however, was not to scold those who took to the streets, but to get the town’s sole factory – which had recently stopped production – running again.

In what sounds like a publicity stunt, Putin chastised Oleg Deripaska, a metals tycoon who used to be Russia’s wealthiest man, and the two other businessmen who jointly own the factory at a meeting that was broadcast on national television.

“You have made thousands of people hostage to your ambitions, your lack of professionalism — or maybe simply your trivial greed. Thousands of people. It’s totally unacceptable,” Putin angrily said during the meeting.

After threatening to nationalize the plant, which was privatized only five years ago, the owners were then forced to sign a contract that would reopen the facility. At the same time, $1.5 million in back wages was returned to the workers, many of whom are now living in desperate poverty.

Nonviolent action may spread in Russia, according to the New York Times, which is feeling the effects of the economic crisis:

As they celebrated, citizens here said they could never have attracted Mr. Putin’s attention if it were not for the protests.

[...]

Mikhail Viktorovich Shmakov, chairman of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions, said Thursday that the protest mood was rising in “many one-factory towns,” among them the cities of Tsvetlogorsk and Baikalsk, where 42 employees of a paper mill have begun a hunger strike over unpaid wages.

Svetlana Antropova, the energetic head of Pikalevo’s trade union, was more blunt in her assessment. “Other trade unions should behave like us,” she said.

• Around 400 miners in Mongolia participate in a work stoppage, and 6 began a hunger strike this week, for additional wages and compensation

• About twenty foreign workers and their supporters staged a sit-in in front of the Diet in Japan to demand that a new immigration bill be scrapped

• At least eighteen Indians were arrested by police in Melbourne, Australia for blocking a road to protest a recent wave of violent racial attacks against their community

• Dozens hold a sit-in at Tabby’s bar in Cincinnati, Ohio after an openly gay man was assaulted there last week

• Hundreds of high school students in Barrow, England walk out to protest the closure of three schools and their replacement with an academy in the fall

• Police in Kashmir detained 70 people, including a senior politician, for protesting the death of two women that they blame on Indian security forces on Tuesday

• About 600 people from Pikalyovo, a smalltown in northern Russia, blocked the motorway between St. Petersburg and Vologda to protest job cuts and unpaid wages

The Washington Post ran a great Associated Press story last week about one of Russia’s leading dissidents, both present and Soviet era.

79 year-old Sergei Kovalyov was, as the AP put it, one of the “human faces of the Cold War, waging nonviolent resistance against a cruel and cynical system.” But despite his “role in breaking the chains of communism,” Kovalyov is considered a pariah by the current government for his unyielding critique of “the new Russia and Vladimir Putin.”

As one political analyst and Kremlin insider was quoted as saying, “Anyone who says anything good about Kovalyov risks being branded a Russia-hater.” But like all good dissidents, Kovalyov’s only concern is speaking the truth. And Russia isn’t his only target for contempt:

In Kovalyov’s view, the West doesn’t realize that hiding behind a democratic facade is an authoritarian country that violates free speech and manipulates elections.

“Your countries are so accustomed to the fact that the law is something to be abided by that you can’t understand a bandit society,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press, earnestly sitting forward in his chair in a Moscow office, his gaze penetrating through owlish glasses.

[...]

“You fear the Cold War, but you won it!” he said. “And now you allow this dragon to grow new heads. I absolutely don’t understand why you are doing this.”

Aside from the interesting look at Russian politics and activism, this article also offers a sober reminder that glory is often shortlived in the struggle for justice. “As the Soviet Union headed to dissolution, [Kovalyov] went from persecuted dissident to star of the new liberal order.” But with most critics being ousted under Putin’s reign, he now finds himself feeling “marginalized by the very society he and his fellow dissidents struggled to set free.”

• A general strike over the death of two Muslim women, that residents blame on Indian security forces, brings life in Kashmir to a virtual standstill

• At least 33 were arrested at Triumph Square in Moscow on Sunday at a protest against Prime Minister Vladimir Putin

• Flight attendants for Russia’s KrasAir end their hunger strike yesterday due to health problems, but vow to take their fight to the courts

• Med school students in Pakistan end their hunger strike as the government agrees to their demands for a better work schedule

• Indian lawyers went on strike yesterday to protest the kidnapping of one of their colleagues, Ahibaran Singh

• Protestors stage a wedding “die-in” at a military base in London on the anniversary of a bombing that killed 47 at a wedding party in Afghanistan two years ago

• Prisoners on hunger strike since May 2, in Arizona jails to protest their treatment by notorious Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio

• Russian flight attendants for KrasAir vow to continue their 12-day hunger strike despite six hospitalizations

• Opposition forces in Mauritania staged a demonstration on Monday against the electoral agenda announced by the military junta

• Warehouse Workers United will stage a “dramatic act of nonviolent civil disobedience” tomorrow in California to protest their low wages

• Four hundred inmates at a prison in Kyrgyzstan went on hunger strike, and three sewed their mouths shut

• Some 200 Iraqi refugees in Syria stage a sit-in outside a UN office to protest delays in their resettlement

• Events held in 117 cities across the U.S. and Canada to protest the California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the ban on same-sex marriage

• More than 150 people were arrested for blocking a street in San Francisco yesterday to protest Prop 8

On Tuesday, the traditional military parade for Independence Day in Tbilisi was canceled over fears of clashes with protesters, who have been blocking the street in mock prison cells for weeks.  In its place, at least 60,000 opposition supporters gathered at Dynamo national stadium to call on President Saakashvili to resign, and then proceeded to march to the parliament building. Thousands also blocked the central train station. According to the Associated Press:

Throngs of demonstrators surrounded one train, sitting on the track and climbing on the engine to prevent it from leaving the station. The engine started and then cut off quickly as protesters banged on its sides, shouted and whistled.

Opposition leaders also warned that they will begin to block highways and the country’s main airport until Saakashvili decides to step down and announce new elections.

Since April 9, Georgians have been rallying and blocking roads nearly every day. The opposition is angry with the pro-Western, U.S.-educated president for starting the disastrous war against Russia last year that led to the loss of territory, temporary occupation by Russian troops and the bombing of their cities. They are also gravely concerned with the erosion of democracy and freedom since Saakashvili came to power in the U.S.-backed, nonviolent “Rose Revolution” in 2003.