• Over a million people flooded the boulevards of cities from Paris to Marseille on Tuesday to protest the government’s proposals to change the pensions system.

• Several teachers staged a protest in front of the Iranian parliament to protest the firing of their part time colleagues.

• About 120 inmates at the Monterey County jail are continuing a hunger strike that began last Wednesday to protest a new policy that reduced their allotments of soap.

• Several dozen food-service workers at George Mason University went on strike yesterday to protest working conditions in the dining halls.

• A “flash mob” of some 200 people gathered in front of the regional governor’s office in the western Russian city of Samara to protest the disallowing of some candidates to register for upcoming elections.

Western papers seem to take great pleasure in writing about protest movements in Russia. In fact, you’re far more likely to find a story about a small protest in Moscow or Siberia than you are to find news of a rally or insurrection in your own hometown. This is in part understandable: it’s difficult to stand up and make your voice heard in Putin’s Russia. When it does happen, it is newsworthy.

Take the successful campaign to stop the construction of a highway through an old growth oak forest just outside of Moscow. No one imagined that the administration would back down. After years of knocking on doors, handing out leaflets, filing lawsuits, and eventually setting up camp in the forest the environmental activists achieved their goal. It is a real possibility now that the highway will be rerouted to spare the Khimki forest. The campaign also managed to bring some 2,000 protesters onto the streets of Moscow for a concert and demonstration that was broken up by police and security forces. Several arrests were made.

Just days later, on August 31, a far smaller rally—estimates put the number at about 200 protesters—was quashed by an overwhelming display of force. The “Strategy 31” protesters have been staging rallies in Moscow’s Triumph Square for months, drawing attention to article 31 of the Russian constitution, which protects freedom of assembly. According to Agence France Press there were an astonishing 500 policemen at the latest rally and 70 protesters were detained. Moreover, several days before the scheduled protest the government announced that Triumph Square was to be converted into a massive underground parking garage. So they fenced it off. If you can’t stop the protesters from showing up you can just build a parking garage on top of the public square. At least that seems to be the strategy at the moment.

But is Russia’s opposition getting louder? And is their influence growing? Certainly, the case of Khimki was an effective campaign on several fronts. There hasn’t been a great deal of analysis as to why Medvedev suddenly backed down.

Boris Kagarlitsky, writing in the Moscow Times notes that, “a new factor in the equation is that people not previously affiliated with politics have joined the fray. The Khimki conflict does not fit into the usual paradigm of protests pitting the Kremlin authorities against the implacable opposition. In addition to Yevgenia Chirikova, leader of the Khimki forest preservation movement, music critic Artemy Troitsky, rock legend Yury Shevchuk and the country’s environmentalists have no direct connection to opposition groups. On the contrary, they tend to disassociate themselves from them.”

That seems to be another way of saying that the opposition is in fact growing. Or at least its base is and “ordinary” people like Chirikova as well as musicians and artists are more and more willing, for whatever reason, to speak out.

At bottom, though, it seems the Kremlin is losing its grip on bread and butter issues. Throughout Putin’s reign, his success has often been attributed to the fact that the economy has improved and stabilized; after the reckless pillaging of the Yeltsin years this was welcome relief. His popularity ratings soared and the Russian people were willing to put up with just about anything. But now there seem to be cracks in the walls of the Kremlin.

Witness what happened in Kaliningrad, where an unusually large protest earlier this year seems to have influenced the Kremlin’s decision to replace the exclave’s governor.

Once upon a time, governors were elected in Russia. Putin put an end to that in 2004, with little dissent or upheaval, and governors are now appointed by presidential decree, chosen from a list of candidates drawn up by the governing party.  But the people of Kaliningrad evidently weren’t impressed with their chosen leader, Georgy V. Boos. In January, 10,000 protesters took to the streets demanding that he be removed from power. In what appears to be a response to public pressure, and just plain common sense, Boos has not been offered a second term.

“On the one hand, this is a victory for the opposition thanks to the protests in January and December,” Konstantin Doroshok, the head of the Kaliningrad branch of the opposition group, Spravedlivost, told the New York Times. “On the other hand, it is important to understand that the people have not been given the most important thing: the real opportunity to independently elect governors.”

The political climate hasn’t changed—if anything it’s gotten worse—but it appears that opposition groups have been emboldened. After learning that their meeting place had been fenced off, the Strategy 31 protesters decided to simply relocate the demonstration: not only would people gather in Russian cities but they’d take to the streets elsewhere—in London, New York, Tel Aviv, Berlin, and Helsinki.

According to Bill Bowring writing in the Guardian:

“What is striking about the new protest movements is that they bring together household names of the older generation, like Alekseyeva and Lev Ponomaryov, who campaigned against Soviet repression, with the new generation of protesters and the much younger anarchists and anti-fascists, AntiFa. They match references to the constitution and to international instruments such as the European convention on human rights with direct action methods.”

Putin’s strategy, though, is the same as ever. In a recent interview with Kommersant, one of Russia’s leading dailies, he said that the issue is simple: protesters need a permit (he didn’t comment on the fact that obtaining one is nearly impossible if the authorities don’t approve of your message). Then, in typical Putin-speak—a kind of crass, juvenile messaging that he is famous for—he said, “If they go out without permission, they’ll take a cudgel to the head. That’s all there is to it.”

• 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.

Not only that, but it violated Russian law. The Khimki forest was protected. For its defenders, this was the most promising line of attack. But as Chirikova and others began to make their case—going door to door alerting residents, filing lawsuits in Russia and abroad, and lobbying European banks to cut off funding for the project—Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin issued a decree that effectively did away with the forest’s protected status. The decree, issued last year, states that Khimki is now zoned “for transport and infrastructure,” a designation that, according to Forests.org, applies to 26 road construction projects on public conservation lands throughout the country.

If Putin’s move was designed to silence critics and speed things along it has hardly been successful. Over the last year, activists have become more vigilant and opposition to the highway has only grown. Activists have camped out in the forest in an attempt to delay construction. On August 3, about fifty protesters holding what the government deemed an unsanctioned protest there were detained. Two days later Chirikova herself was arrested at a Moscow press conference in front of dozens of reporters. City police said she had failed to respond to a summons for questioning about the attack on the Khimki administration building on July 28. “I honestly told them that I know nothing [of the July 28 attack] as I was at the logging site at the time,” Chirikova told the Moscow Times.

Chirikova and her colleagues have been highly critical of the evening attack on the administrative building, referring to its leaders as members of “extremist groups.” Numbers vary but the demonstration was led by at least 100 anti-fascists (some estimates are as high as 500) who threw smoke grenades at the building, breaking windows and damaging an art gallery. They covered the building with the slogan, “Save the Russian Forest.” No one was injured but Khimki officials said that the attacks caused “considerable damage.”

The immediate effect of the attacks, however, was the detention of nine environmental activists, including Chirikova, who had set up a protest camp in the forest. They were fined for allegedly making a fire and released the same day. Because authorities in Russia need little justification to crackdown on opposition activists, the conflation of the July 28 demonstration with the non-violent tactics of the forests defenders may have far reaching consequences.

Anton Belyakov, a member of the State Duma who has supported the non-violent protesters, told the liberal radio station Echo Moscow:

“I am truly disappointed that extremists and provocateurs are more and more mixing themselves up with the true ecologists and genuine defenders of the Khimki forest.”

Meanwhile, the high visibility of the protests has given European funders pause. The EBRD and EIB have both announced that they are reconsidering their plans to finance the project, which could ultimately derail the development. But perhaps most importantly, the forests defenders are being taken seriously and have reached a wider audience. They’re well organized, media savvy, and one step ahead of the often tone deaf Russian government. This doesn’t mean they’ll win but it does perhaps mark a shift in the ability of everyday citizens to influence government decisions.

As Radio Free Europe recently noted:

Chirikova is emblematic of a new wave of civic activists in Russia — ordinary people motivated by everyday bread-and-butter concerns who are increasingly finding their voices as engaged — and sometimes enraged – citizens.

From automobile owners in Vladivostok taking to the streets to protest import tariffs to teachers and students in Ulyanovsk staging a hunger strike over school closures, the last several years have witnessed a whole new class of Russians becoming more socially and politically aware.

Whether a “whole new class” of politically minded Russians has come to the fore is debatable. But small groups often fighting single-issue campaigns are finding ways to organize themselves and, in some cases, have emerged victorious. This is all unfolding against the backdrop of an increasingly authoritarian state, one that has been weakened by the financial crisis and its inability to deal effectively with a crippling drought, heat wave, and forest fires that have consumed more than 2 million acres of woodland.

Civil disobedience in Russia isn’t a spectator sport. Those who choose to challenge the state often face severe and, in some cases, deadly reprisals. Russia remains one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists, trailing only Iraq and Algeria, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Some of its most prominent investigative reporters have been killed in broad daylight in the nation’s capital. Mikhail Beketov, a journalist and activist who covered the Khimki forest issue and was critical of the local administration, was left brain dead after being beaten by thugs. Human rights lawyers and activists continue to come under the gun in Russia. At the Sunday rally in Moscow, prominent human rights leader Lev Ponomaryov and two Solidarity opposition leaders were arrested.

Yet none of this has deterred Chirikova or her colleagues. Holding few illusions, the young activist recently acknowledged that the construction of the highway would likely begin very soon.

“The next step is probably that they will start building,” she told the Washington Post. “We are ready. It is going to be very loud.”

• 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.