• In Evansville, Indiana, a crowd estimated at 5,000 strong poured onto the shoulder and parking lot of the Evansville plant, protesting Whirlpool’s decision to shut down and ship jobs to Mexico.

• Carrefour SA’s 116 stores in Belgium were closed Saturday because of a strike over planned job cuts, said a company spokesman who put the resulting sales loss at the company-owned outlets at 14 million euros ($19 million).

• Scores of Jordanian politicians and trade union members staged a sit-in at the Trade Unions Complex in Amman on Saturday to denounce Israel’s addition of two West Bank holy sites to a list of Jewish heritage centers.

• Syrian Catholic Archbishop Basile Georges Casmoussa of Mosul led over 1,000 Iraqi Catholics in a silent protest on February 28 to demand that the government act to put a stop to violence against Christians there.

• In Nepal, the 48-hour sit-in protest of the Civil Movement for Democracy and Peace (CMDP), which began from Thursday in front of the Constituent Assembly building, to urge political parties to draft the constitution within the given time frame, concluded on Saturday at 8 am.

• Several Cuban dissidents say they will refuse food in protest at the death earlier this week of a jailed government opponent. Orlando Zapata Tamayo died on Tuesday in a hospital in the capital Havana after a hunger strike of 85 days. His death triggered international protests and Cuban President Raul Castro issued an expression of regret.

• Three Chinese death-row inmates who say they were tortured into confessing to crimes they didn’t commit have staged a hunger strike to draw attention to their case.

• Thousands of adherents of the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP) marched in the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa Feb. 25 to protest the slaying of civil resistance leaders under what they still consider to be the “de facto regime” of President Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo despite the change in government last month. The rally concluded in front of the National Congress building, where the march was blocked by a military cordon.

• Hundreds of Dutch activists have walked out of a Mass in protest at a Roman Catholic policy of denying communion to practising homosexuals.

• On Thursday, protesting Guatemalan teachers in Melchor de Mencos blocked the Melchor Bridge with their bodies to stop vehicular passage through the border between Guatemala and Belize. According to union president Zetina, who spoke on behalf of the teachers, they are demanding a 16% salary increase from their Government, in addition to proper renovation of school buildings.

• Thirty-eight Jamaican women — all of them asylum seekers, some of whom have lived in the UK for as long as 10 years — are on hunger strike in holding facilities in the United Kingdom, in protest of their imminent deportation to Jamaica.

• Tens of thousands of protesters calling themselves the Purple People took to the streets of Rome on the weekend in a sign of mounting opposition to the Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi. The group, Il Popolo Viola, wore purple sweaters and scarves, Berlusconi masks or striped prison dress to protest against what they say is the undermining of Italian democracy by Mr Berlusconi in his battle with the country’s legal system.

• The pilots’ union of Lufthansa began a 4-day strike today after a last-ditch effort at negotiations over pay and job security failed.

• In Thailand, truck operators will stage a stoppage on roads today in protest at alleged extortion by highway police, saying incidents have doubled since last year.

• Thousands of protesters in Ivory Coast call for the resignation of President Laurent Gbagbo as clashes with security forces leave an undisclosed number of people dead and wounded.

• All 600 detainees at a prison in Iraq’s southern city of Basra have gone on hunger strike to protest conditions that are “not fit for animals,” a local politician said on Friday.

• Strikes at French refineries looked likely to spread as Exxonmobil employees Friday were called to join a protest at oil giant Total that has shut down seven plants and raised fears of supply cuts.

• Greece faces a growing fuel shortage as a customs workers’ strike halts the flow of petrol into the country. Customs workers have extended their strike against wage freezes and bonus cuts until this Wednesday, when unions across Greece will hold a general strike that is set to bring the country to a standstill.

• Dozens of Egyptian women and human rights activists staged a protest last Thursday in Cairo against a recent decision that bars women from holding judicial positions.

• Last Wednesday, Kenyans marched to vent their anger at a coalition government slowly falling apart over graft allegations and its inability to further key reforms pledged two years ago.

• Last week, A group of lawyers from the Law and Democracy Platform, an Turkish NGO working to strengthen the rule of law while respecting democratic values, protested against the Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK) decision to strip prosecutors conducting a probe into jailed Erzincan Chief Prosecutor İlhan Cihaner of their special authorities.

• Thousands of civil servants have marched through Athens, the Greek capital, as they went on a 24-hour strike in protest against the government’s plans to freeze wages, gather more taxes and reform pensions. The action left flights grounded and many schools and government offices closed, while public hospitals were expected to only take emergency cases. A two-million-strong federation of unions will also start a general strike Feb. 24.

• Ikea offered Wednesday to meet with labor union leaders after strikes shut down several stores in France — but only if six workers end a sit-in at its Paris office first. Workers walked off the job starting Saturday in protest over pay.

• Disneyland hotel workers  began a water-only fast Tuesday to protest what they describe as life-threatening safety issues on the job.  To show support for workers fasting outside the Grand Californian, over 300 people marched in front of Disney’s Paradise Pier Hotel in Anaheim yesterday.

• In Iran, numerous opposition figures reported police harassment on Thursday, including the firing of tear gas and paint balls at protests in the capital Tehran.

• Also in Tehran, workers of Tohid Tunnel gathered in front of the entrance of the tunnel they work for in protest of unpaid salaries. The gathering resulted in the closure of the connections between north and south Chamran Freeway from Milad tower to the entrance of Tohid tunnel.

• Syracuse Peace Council members protested outside the Syracuse Air National Guard base on Tuesday against unmanned drones that are now being operated from the site.

• In Texas, dozens of prisoners have gone on a hunger strike at a Los Fresnos immigration jail in protest of inhumane conditions. It’s at least the third hunger strike at the Port Isabel Detention Center in less than a year.

• Tomorrow, citizens of Florida and Destin will have the opportunity to show their opposition to oil drilling off Florida’s coastline. Hands Across the Sand encourages Florida residents concerned with pending drilling legislation to gather on beaches at noon and hold hands forming lines in the sand against oil drilling in coastal waters.

• Thousands of Australians will let their tastebuds do the talking when they sit down later this month for “Vindaloo Against Violence”, a mass dining event to protest attacks against Indians.

• Police in Venezuela used tear gas, plastic bullets and water cannons to scatter hundreds of students protesting against the government Thursday, while President Hugo Chavez’s supporters celebrated the 18th anniversary of his failed coup as an army officer.

• Hundreds of London Underground maintenance workers went on the first of a series of 24-hour strikes Friday morning in protest over new roster arrangements. They will continue to cause disruptions at the same time every Sunday from February 14th until the dispute is resolved.

• Dozens of Yemeni journalists, civil-society activists and members of parliament protested on Friday in front of the attorney general’s office in Sana’a against increasing harassment of journalists.

• The entrance to Kaiser Permanente’s Moanalua clinic in Hawaii was briefly shut-down on Thursday when protesters from Local 5 staged a sit-in. Kaiser employees and Local 5 members came to rally for a new contract that they say won’t out-source union work.

• In Calcutta, senior citizens staged a hunger strike on Saturday to protest against the skyrocketing prices of essential commodities.

• In Pakistan, political and social organizations continued a country-wide strike and protest this weekend against the deadly blasts in Karachi.

• Cuban police harassed and briefly jailed some 35 political dissidents last week in the eastern city of Camaguey, a Cuban human rights group said Friday.

• On Saturday, hundreds of Bahrain Petroleum Company (Bapco) staff and their families staged a protest outside the company’s refinery in Ma’ameer over pay and working conditions.

• In Oslo, a thousand taxi drivers of Muslim background went on strike late Friday, early Saturday moring in protest of the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet.

• More than 200 overseas Filipino workers (OFW) in Saudi Arabia have stopped working since Saturday in protest of alleged unfair labor practices of their employer.

• A 150-strong group of Belgian firefighters sprayed foam from 20 trucks over a main road in central Brussels, blocking traffic in an effort to press for speedier promotions. Government buildings, including the Minister President’s office, were targeted.

• Police and a specialist evictions team began a major operation to end a six-month occupation of an opencast mine site in Scotland this morning by arresting 10 Climate Camp protesters chained to tree houses and make-shift forts. There are about 40 climate campaigners now occupying tunnels, tree houses, and homemade barricaded huts.

• About 2,000 photographers gathered in London over the weekend to protest stop and search methods by British police. The photographers say they’ve been unduly targeted by Section 44 of Britain’s Terrorism Act 2000, which was designed to give police greater powers to fight terrorism.

• More than 500 Australian websites are planning to take part in a day of action dubbed ‘The Great Australian Internet Blackout’ to protest the Federal Government’s proposed internet filter.

• Over 5,000 people converged on downtown Toronto Saturday afternoon to protest the prime minister’s decision to shut down the federal Parliament until after the Olympic Games.

• Hundreds of protesters in southern China donned masks to protest a planned incinerator plant, the latest grassroots initiative to target polluting projects in the region.

• Greek farmers have been blocking roads in Greece for more than a week to protest the government’s current agricultural policy, which threatens to put 50 thousand people employed in agriculture and livestock out of work.

Jackie Robinson and Martin Luther King Jr. talk before a press conference in New York City in 1962.

Writing online for Sports Illustrated this week on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, columnist Dave Zirin reminds readers that Dr. King, while perhaps not the greatest athlete himself, nonetheless embraced sports as an effective and serious platform from which to promote civil rights.  “Dr. King,” Zirin writes, “was involved in three of history’s most critical collisions of sports and politics”—Jackie Robinson’s integration of modern baseball in 1947; Muhammad Ali’s struggle against the Vietnam War and the draft board in the late 1960s; and the protests promulgated by Harry Edwards and his Olympic Project for Human Rights at the 1968 Mexico City Summer Olympics.

Dr. King, argues Zirin, embraced a broad view of sports, correctly seeing them as a powerful medium by which to convey his message.  Dr. King didn’t see “athletes” as a distinct subset of the population, that is, as mere performers who daily displayed wondrous feats of physical prowess for everyone to enjoy.  Rather, athletes were human beings who happened to be involved in sports.  In other words, Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali drew their principal identities from their humanity, not from their idiosyncratic physical talent.  It is a concept that we frequently seem to forget.

Too often today, an athlete’s visibility determines how he will be treated and accepted in society.  It was widely speculated, for example, that ex-New York Giant Plaxico Burress received a harsh, two-year prison sentence for attempted weapons possession in the second degree, because New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg wanted to make an example of the Super Bowl XLII hero.  Gilbert Arenas, erstwhile All-Star guard for the N.B.A.’s Washington Wizards, is currently embroiled in his own gun-possession brouhaha and some expect the D.C. courts to use his sentence (to be handed down on March 26) as an opportunity to send society a message similar to the one channeled through Burress.  Granted, these men did in fact willfully break the law and place themselves in legal jeopardy, and illegally possessing firearms isn’t strictly a basic Second Amendment rights issue.  Still, the notion that one’s stardom—and subsequent visibility—as a star athlete makes one’s legal situation more juridically noteworthy—and therefore riper for a harsh punishment—is ludicrous and patently unfair.

Martin Luther King Jr. recognized that a person was a man before he was a sportsman, and Zirin quotes Dr. King’s invocation of Ali to make this point: “Like Muhammad Ali puts it,” he said in 1967, “we are all–Black and Brown and poor–victims of the same system of oppression.”  That same venal system of oppression must today be transformed into the “same system of fairness and tolerance” in which one’ status as an athlete doesn’t trump his status as a person.  If we are to eliminate prejudice based on (as is commonly cited) “race, color, creed, religion, national origin, citizenship, sex, age, marital status, sexual orientation, disability, or military status,” then we also need to eliminate “fame”-based discrimination as well.

Civil rights—and unbiased jurisprudence—need to apply to everyone equally, not more harshly to others because we think their status as athlete lends more gravitas to their respective case.  Last time I checked, Lady Justice wore a robe and carried a scale, not a zebra-suit and a whistle.

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, not the national holiday which is Monday. As an activist member of Jewish Voice for Peace, I have at times faced counter-demonstrations while I speak out against unjustifiable atrocities being committed allegedly for me and by “my” side. Being from the United States, I could be doubly responsible for the US/Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. As a long-time member of the War Resisters League, King and I share a belief that (in his words) “social change comes more meaningfully through nonviolence,” that the “business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love,” and that God didn’t choose “America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world.” 42 years have passed since he was assassinated.

So I am perplexed when I see “pro-Israel” signs that extol Martin Luther King’s defense of Israel, using quotes (which I also am fond of doing) by the late revolutionary, but in their case, highlighting things he said that seem to place him on “their” side of the police line, not mine. On the occasion of his birth, newsletters of synagogues may even have articles touting King as a staunch defender of Israel’s right to defend itself. They take quotes from 42 years ago as I do, to make our points. Certainly, after the Six Day War of 1967 (and before), King defended Israel. However, events of the last two score years I think would have reinforced King’s pacifism and “eternal hostility towards militarism, racism and economic exploitation.” He never would have become an anti-Semite, but I do think facts on the ground would have led him to become quite critical of Israel. I want to briefly mention five specific issues that would have negatively effected King’s perspective on Israel:

Read the rest of this article »

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…

Several hundred women, many holding pictures of murdered relatives, took to the streets of Kabul to demand that President Hamid Karzai purge anyone connected to corruption, war crimes, or the Taliban from his government. In a rare display of men allowing women to lead, about 500 men followed the protest group in support. (Photo: Tony Perry / Los Angeles Times)

• Over 20,000 members of the South Africa Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers’ Union (Saccawu) are planning on taking part in strike action against listed retailer Pick n Pay today, to protest alleged racial discrimination at the company.

• In Norway, thousands of people took to the streets of Oslo Thursday as President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize.

• Police arrested 33 people who were protesting budget cuts and fee hikes at San Francisco State University to end a sit-in at a campus building.

• Several thousand people in Indonesia, many of whom were students, marched through the capital of Jakarta on Wednesday against government corruption.

• More than 400 Queensland Rail workers walked off the job in Rockhampton on Wednesday to protest against the State Government’s decision to publicly list the company.

• On Tuesday, “Hungry for Justice at Vassar College,” began a hunger strike aimed at getting the school to reverse planned job cuts that have or will hit 13 support workers. Also, the Campus Solidarity Working Group held a sing-in at the main building for the same cause, that was followed by a vigil.

• World No. 1 copper producer Codelco said an indefinite union worker blockade that began on Wednesday has halted mining activities at its massive Chuquicamata mine complex.

• A Canadian citizen, who had staged a hunger strike to protest his planned deportation from Australia, has won a reprieve.

Forty-five years ago this week, Mario Savio – a 21-year-old student at Berkeley and leader of the Free Speech Movement – gave a speech before a massive sit-in on the steps of Sproul Hall that would go down in history. As an intriguing article in In These Times explains:

The movement was a protest against the university’s clampdown on political speechmaking and recruiting for civil rights activism on campus. President Clark Kerr and various bureaucratic intermediaries disdained the movement as a disruption of the modern “multiversity” (Kerr’s own term) as a smooth-running, quasi-corporate knowledge factory.

Savio was apparently not your typical charismatic leader. He periodically suffered from depression, struggled with a stammer, and “was a shy, modest person who was uncomfortable in any position of leadership and never craved the public spotlight.”

Savio’s orthodox Catholic upbringing gradually morphed into sympathy with liberation theology and Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement. At Queens College in 1963, he spent the summer on a project organized by the campus Newman House, assisting the poor in Taxco, Mexico. That fall, his parents moved to California and he transferred to Berkeley. Baptized by San Francisco protests for civil rights and against the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1963-64, he became active in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, whose campaign he joined for the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi.

His efforts with other students to continue civil rights activism when they returned to Berkeley that fall set off the Free Speech Movement (FSM), which, with Savio as its most eloquent leader, eventually prevailed over administration opposition.

The rest of the article is worth a read, and mentions a new book – Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s, by NYU professor Robert Cohen – for anyone who wants to delve deeper into this fascinating (and largely forgotten) figure.

“America’s Toughest Sheriff” Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, whose cruelty we profiled in July, will be making fewer arrests on behalf of America.

Last month, the US Department of Homeland Security restricted Arpaio’s 287(g) contract.  Named for section 287(g) of the 1996 Immigration and Nationality Act, the 287(g) program authorizes police officers of participating agencies to act as immigration enforcement agents.  Under the new contract, Arpaio’s deputies may no longer make immigration arrests in the field, only among inmates in his jails.

Nevertheless, Arpaio appears poised to continue harassing communities of color with his notorious, racially profiling “sweeps.”  That’s not surprising given previous investigations showing Arpaio would rather use limited public safety funds to round up taxpaying people instead of promptly replying to 911 calls.

In restricting Arpaio’s ability to make immigration arrests, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) apparently responded to numerous complaints, including a high-profile letter to President Obama criticizing the entire 287(g) program.  In a feat of organizational prowess, the letter was signed by over 500 advocacy groups organized by the National Immigration Law Center.

But stripping Arpaio of his full contract does not go far enough.  Rampant abuses of police power across the U.S. (such as in Cobb County, Georgia, as the ACLU documented) indicate that Arpaio was not just a bad apple, but that 287(g) is a racist and counterproductive program that should be terminated altogether.

Read the rest of this article »

In case you aren’t convinced that the Tea Party Movement gets disproportionately more media coverage than protests waged by those on the Left, I submit the following as evidence:

Hundreds of African Americans marched on the White House Saturday to protest the policies of President Obama in what the AFP called, “the first public demonstration by African Americans against the Obama administration since his historic inauguration in January.”

It seems the French news agency was the first to cover it. But, as best I can tell, no mainstream American newspaper or news show has followed their lead. Most telling, perhaps, is that Iran’s PressTV and Tehran Times seem to be two of the more prominent news links.

Why is this protest being ignored by American media? I would wager it has something to do with their message. Protest organizer Omali Yeshitela, a civil rights leader with the Black Is Back coalition, summed it up best by saying, “We recognize that Barack Hussein Obama is white power in black face.”

According to the AFP, the protesters also “slammed the president for continuing what they described as Washington’s ‘imperialist’ agenda around the world” and demanded that he “bring US troops home.”

So, I guess the lesson here is: if you ever want to do something that’s highly visible and involves large numbers of people without drawing media attention to yourself, make sure to mention these issues.

The New York Review of Books has been much concerned with prison issues lately, thank goodness, and their most recent piece is David Cole’s “Can Our Shameful Prisons Be Reformed?” I commend to you the whole of it, but for the purpose of this short post, I’d just like to point out one section. Cole is thinking through the proposals for reform made by Paul Butler in Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice (published by the good folks at The New Press). Most of them he finds sensible: decriminalizing possession of small amounts of drugs, stay-in-school incentives, lead paint removal, and sentence reduction for nonviolent offenders. But there is one proposal that Cole finds troublesome:

Butler calls on juries, for example, to engage in “nullification” of the criminal law to protest mass imprisonment. Because juries need not give reasons for their decisions, they have the discretion to acquit even where the state has proved criminal behavior beyond a reasonable doubt. Butler proposes that jurors consciously adopt the tactic, as a kind of civil disobedience, to resist mass incarceration—but only in cases involving victimless crimes.

This proposal has many problems. First, jurors act episodically and in secret. Thus, unlike civil disobedience, acts of nullification are unlikely to have a galvanizing effect. Second, to engage in a conscious strategy of nullification will often require dissembling, itself criminal behavior. If a potential juror admits that she will not vote to convict no matter how strong the evidence is, a judge will not let her sit on the jury. Thus, to engage in this practice may require citizens to lie. It is not wise to build a movement for social change on deceit. Third, it is often difficult to know whether a crime is in fact “victimless.” Prosecutors often pursue relatively low-level offenders in the hope that they can “encourage” them to identify wrongdoers further up the chain of command. Even if the foot soldier is not engaged in activity that harms victims, an organized crime ring may have many victims. How is a juror to assess whether a given prosecution is a legitimate part of such a broader investigation?

Here we venture into the endless gray area that troubles acts of nonviolent resistance. Is one really not doing violence? Is disruption of an unjust system always a good thing? And how can one be sure one is right about a given offender?

I wonder if any of you out there have faced a situation like this, and if you have any insight about the wisdom of Butler’s proposal.

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.

Originally designed after the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 to help the US Navy repel unwanted approaching boats, the non-lethal Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) has not surprisingly worked its way down to the level of local law enforcement.

At two different town hall meetings and a sand castle building competition in San Diego recently, local police had the LRAD – which generates a narrow beam of intense sound that can be physically painful and even permanently damage hearing – on the ready in case any shenanigans broke out.

This is the first I’ve heard of this weapon being deployed domestically at political gatherings, although I’m sure it won’t be the last.

In a recent episode of Bang Goes The Theory, a new popular science show on the BBC, the team sees whether the LRAD can be defeated by a ridiculous looking sound proofed helmet. To see what happens, check out the video.

David Hambling over at Danger Room puts this latest effort at “foiling non-lethal crowd control weapons” in context:

Ever since police and security forces started using non-lethal weapons for crowd control, people have been looking for ways to counter them, trying everything from onions, tinfoil and Viagra.

Take tear gas, which has been around in various forms since the First World War and has been a regular feature of demonstrations from Seattle to Tehran to Khartoum. Experienced protesters expecting a blast of tear gas bring eye protection in the form of goggles and use a bandanna soaked in water or vinegar as an improvised gas mask. Real pros bring actual gas masks. An alternative approach is to use onion juice, which allegedly reduces the effect, a technique which is used everywhere from Israel to Iran. Read the rest of this article »