• 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.

From Whale Wars to the liberation of 50,000 minks, animal rights activists have a way of undermining the moral justness of their cause with actions that are morally dubious in their own right. That’s why it’s so refreshing to see an animal rights action that has the potential to inspire the general public to think differently about the way our culture exploits animals. As first reported by Greenopolis:

Members of the creative collective Neozoon, a group of artists based in Paris and Berlin, are staging a protest against using animal furs as fashion by turning the pelts and coats into street art graffiti.

Click here to see more photos of the fur-sculpted graffiti.

• At least 10,000 protesters marched through the streets of Paris Saturday to rally against the government’s crackdown on immigrants and the recent expulsion of hundreds of Roma.

• Hundreds of people took to the streets in northern Afghanistan to protest a US-led airstrike in Takhar province that killed civilians last Thursday. The demonstrators shouted slogans against American and foreign troops and called for them to be brought to justice.

• About 3,000 Muslims marched Saturday through Indonesia’s capital to the U.S. Embassy to protest plans by a Florida church to burn the Quran on Sept. 11.

• A small sit-in at the University of Connecticut’s administration building entered its third day on Thursday, and students vowed to remain in the building until the university promises to increase janitors’ pay.

• Gaza families of prisoners detained in Israeli jails held a protest Monday against the deduction of 170 shekels from prisoners’ salaries for electricity payments. The protesters gathered at Red Cross headquarters, and chanted slogans blaming the ruling Hamas party for the deduction, which they said increased prisoners’ suffering.

• London Underground workers started a fresh wave of 24-hour strikes, threatening travel chaos for days and costing the economy almost £50 million, in protest at plans to axe 800 jobs. The action, to be followed by further stoppages in October and November, will disrupt Tube services, used by millions of passengers every day.

• Shopkeepers observed a general strike and schools were shut for the day on Saturday in Quetta, Pakistan to mourn an overnight attack on minority Shiite Muslims that killed 68 people.

• Greenpeace members protested against Japan in front of its Ankara embassy Monday following the arrest of two group activists in that country after they exposed a whale meat scandal involving a government-sponsored whaling program in the Southern Ocean.

Long-time earth and animal liberation activist Rod Coronado has plenty of street cred, but apparently he wasn’t hip to the perils of Facebook. In early August, the seasoned activist was sentenced to four months in prison for violating the terms of his probation. The charge: “friending” a figure the FBI describes as, “a well-known environmental activist who has a history of condoning direct action and violence as a means of protest or demonstration.” That activist is Mike Roselle, the author of Tree Spiker, a confrontational and outspoken opponent of destructive environmental practices, from mountaintop removal to deforestation, who claims to have been arrested at least 50 times.

According to the Missoula Independent, Coronado’s probation officer, Rhonda J. Wallock, reported that the activist violated the terms of his supervision by becoming Roselle’s “friend” and for using an unauthorized computer. “In monitoring Mr. Coronado’s Facebook account,” the court document reads, “this officer found Michael Roselle to be a “friend” of Mr. Coronado.”

Well, yes. But apparently it was Roselle who asked Coronado to be his friend and not Coronado who approached Roselle. Moreover, they had been friends for some time, just not Facebook friends. As Roselle explained, “I sent him a friend request because someone had suggested that I friend him and given that I’ve known Rod for quite a while, I did. I guess he hit the accept button.”

The irony is that a couple of monkeywrenchers, each with a long list of arrests and convictions, have now been nabbed as friends. For Coronado, it is without a doubt the most prosaic charge he has ever faced.

For years, Coronado was the unofficial bad boy of the radical environmental movement. As a teenager he cut his teeth with the now well known Sea Shepherd Society and, in 1986, participated in a risky act of eco-sabotage: taking aim at Iceland’s refusal to conform to an international ban on whaling, Coronado and a partner destroyed the Hvalfjordur whaling station and sank two of the country’s whaling vessels, causing some $2 million in damage. Coronado went on to wage an underground war against the fur industry, targeting research facilities and fur farms across North America. (His story, and the story of the modern American environmental movement, is told in Dean Kuipers recent book, Operation Bite Back: Rod Coronado’s War to Save American Wilderness).

Coronado was a divisive figure: his use of arson and increasingly radical stance alienated even those who sympathized with his views. In 1995, Coronado was arrested for his role in an arson attack on research facilities at Michigan State University. Since then he has moved back and forth between prison and some form of house arrest or parole. He has done time for allegedly demonstrating the use of an incendiary device, dismantling mountain lion traps, and destruction of government property.

In 2006, he distanced himself from the direct action tactics of his youth and said, in an open letter that, “No longer do I personally choose to represent the cause of peace and compassion in that way.”

• 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.

• Singing choruses of “we shall not be moved” while scattering sunflower seeds, 14 activists were arrested in Kansas City on Monday after blocking an earth moving vehicle on the site of a proposed nuclear weapons manufacturing facility.

• Last Friday, around 35 Palestinians demonstrated against Hallamish settlement with around 15 Israeli and international peace activists in the village of An Nabi Salih.

• German workers on Tuesday protested against what their union says are plans by the country’s central bank to have euro banknotes printed by foreign companies.

• Some Pakistani flood victims blocked highways to demand government help on Tuesday.

• Three television channels in Ukraine went on strike on Saturday in protest of steadily increasing pressure on media in Ukraine, with hundreds of other journalists declaring readiness to join the action.

• Students from various schools and universities in the Philippines traded the four corners of their classrooms for the streets last Friday to join the National Youth Walkout and appeal for more government support for the education sector.

• On Monday, hundreds of protesters started a sit-in outside the legislature, fueled by mounting anger over the government’s cross-strait policies and the expected passage of a controversial trade agreement with China later this week.

• The 19-day long protest in Bolivia’s Potosi province was finally brought to an end with the protesters lifting the blockade of the airport and major roads after a deal was struck with the government.

• The entire team of Sri Lanka’s government wildlife vets has gone on strike amid mounting controversy over an elephant conservation plan that has led to increased clashes between the animals and villagers.

• Through a series of well-choreographed steps, a tiger-themed flash mob called “Freeze Tiger Trade” spearheaded by WWF-Malaysia turned heads and attracted attention on the status of our Malayan tigers here in Kuala Lumpur.

• In Turkey, nongovernmental organizations in the eastern province of Batman held a silent march and sit-in demonstration yesterday in protest of a mine explosion that claimed the lives of four people on Monday.

• On Wednesday, unionized workers of the West Indies Paper Products Limited in Jamaica walked off the job to protest against what they claimed was the failure of the management to improve wage and fringe benefits.

• More than 100 people at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in England went on hunger strike on Wednesday.

• In Azerbaijan, ten opposition activists jailed for participating in an unsanctioned rally calling for free elections in central Baku on July 31 have declared a hunger strike.

• Around 120 Chinese seasonal berry pickers in northern Sweden went on a 15-kilometre (9.3-mile) march overnight to Friday to protest their salaries

• In Malaysia, police forcefully broke up peaceful candlelight vigils held on August 1, against the Internal Security Act (ISA), and arrested 36 people in Petaling Jaya and Penang.

• Members of the youth climate group Consequence hosted a Big Oil Carnival for Senate staffers on the steps of Union Station in Washington DC on Tuesday. The event was complete with oil-themed games, Tony Hayward clowns, a stilt walking Uncle Sam and a message to the Senate: “Stop playing games with our clean energy future.”

• Greenpeace U.K. shut down at least 30 BP stations in London on Tuesday, fanning out to as many as 50 BP stations and posting banners that said, “Closed: Moving beyond petroleum.” They also pulled safety switches that cut off fuel supplies at the stations — and removed the switches so they couldn’t be turned back on again.

• Four supporters of the federal DREAM Act stood before Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in full cap and gowns at a Netroots Nation luncheon in Las Vegas last week to protest his lack of conviction on a bill that would allow a pathway to citizenship for undocumented youth.

• An animal rights activist was arrested in Jordan’s capital on Sunday after covering herself in lettuce in a square along one of Amman’s trendiest streets. She held a placard reading “Let vegetarianism grow on you.”

• Rights activists, including celebrities such as Bianca Jagger and actors from James Cameron’s film Avatar, gathered outside the venue of the annual general meeting of the mining company Vedanta in London on Wednesday to protest its controversial plans to mine tribal land in the Orissa region of India.

• Eight people were arrested during a sit-in staged by the direct action group GetEqual in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday as part of an effort to push for a vote on the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, which would outlaw workplace discrimination based sexual orientation and gender identity.

• 15 people from a small town in North Queensland, Australia blocked a coal export terminal by camping on it for two nights to protest pollution and noise from the coal trains that pass through the town 15 times a day.

• On Tuesday, a group of volunteers toting vuvuzelas gathered outside of BP’s International Headquarters in London and sounded their barbaric yelps in protest of the way the company is handling the oil spill in the Gulf.

• A strike has broke out at a south China factory supplying parts for Japan’s Honda Motor on Monday, with about 90 of the plant’s 200 workers stopping work to demand a nearly 60 percent pay increase.

• Croatian police arrested more than a hundred people on Thursday, including actors, writers and city officials, after they staged a peaceful rally to prevent private construction works in the heart of the capital.

• PETA, Last Chance for Animals, and other activists were in downtown Los Angeles at the Staples Center Wednesday night to protest the opening of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. They called for a boycott of the circus based on the disturbing photos that had been turned over to PETA by an industry whistleblower.

• Workers at Nokia’s Chennai factory in south India went on strike on Tuesday, demanding higher wages. The factory is a key hub for the manufacture of mobile handsets and employs 8,000 workers.

• Flights to and from Greece were grounded for four hours on Thursday and state hospitals operated with skeleton staff as air traffic controllers and doctors joined public sector workers in another nationwide strike against labour reforms and austerity measures.

• A recently established student movement pushing for reform of Taiwan’s assembly law, which restricts people’s right to demonstrate, announced their plan today to expand their ongoing sit-in protest at Taipei’s Liberty Square that began last Friday.

• Thousands of protesters poured into the center of the main city of Indian Kashmir on Thursday after authorities lifted restrictions for the first time in five days. The Muslim-majority region has been wracked by demonstrations since June 11 when security forces were accused of killing a 17-year-old. Since then, another 14 protesters and bystanders have been killed.

• 1,000 New York City high school students walked out of classes on Friday to protest the proposed elimination of free student metro cards.

• A series of labor strikes pushing for higher wages and better conditions spread through China last week. Some 1,700 workers at a Honda Lock factory staged a march, while 2,000 workers at a Taiwanese computer parts plant walked off their jobs.

• Doctors in Massachusetts protested the use of squirrel monkeys in a NASA-funded experiment to test the effects of radiation in space on June 10.

• Thousands gathered to protest a youth’s killing by police in Indian-controlled Kashmir.

• A rally was held in Sofia, Bulgaria on Thursday to protest Neo-Nazi attacks against a peaceful refugee’s rights demonstration days earlier.

• Tens of thousands of Germans gathered in Berlin on Saturday to protest Chancellor Angela Merkel’s austerity measures.