• Hundreds of Afghans have taken to the streets of Kabul to condemn the recent shelling of border towns by Pakistan’s army and accusing its powerful spy agency of involvement in the killing of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the country’s influential former president.

• Corrections officials in Sacramento said Thursday that they would discipline inmates who participated in a renewed hunger strike to protest conditions in the state’s highest-security prisons, where some prisoners have been held in virtual isolation for decades.

• Hundreds of people filled a small town gymnasium in Nebraska on Thursday to protest at a State Department hearing on the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to Texas. Residents fear it will pollute the Ogallala Aquifer, a major U.S. drinking water source.

• Tens of thousands marched in Lisbon and Porto on Saturday to protest austerity measures imposed under the terms of an EU/IMF bailout, the first major rallies since a center-right government took power in Portugal in June.

• U.S. actor Sean Penn joined thousands of Egyptian activists who packed downtown Cairo on Friday demanding that military rulers speed up the transfer of power to civilians and end emergency laws once used by Hosni Mubarak against his opponents.

• Hundreds of indigenous Bolivians angry at plans to build a highway through an Amazon nature preserve resumed their protest march Saturday after a violent police crackdown a week ago.

• Thousands of Syrians took to the streets on Friday in demonstrations against the regime. Human rights activists said that at least 13 people were killed when troops opened fire.

• More than 1,000 people gathered in Savannah, Georgia on Saturday to attend the funeral of Troy Davis, the recently executed death row inmate many believe was innocent. They pledged to keep fighting the death penalty.

• Dutch police forcibly dispersed around 200 squatters in the center of Amsterdam on Saturday during a protest on the first anniversary of the introduction of a law formally outlawing squatting.

• Thousands Hungarians rallied in central Budapest against the measures of Prime Minister Viktor Orban at a demonstration organizers dubbed “D-Day.” Their demands included “fair” taxation, the constitutional protection of early retirement, the restoration of the right to strike, social dialog and the scrapping of retroactive laws.

• More than 200 Tibetans, including monks, protested in a tense area of southwestern China on the country’s 62nd National Day after a Tibetan flag and a photo of the Dalai Lama were torn down, a news report said Sunday.

• British unions organized a rally of 35,000 protesters against government budget cuts Sunday in Manchester where the Conservative Party opened its annual conference.

The execution last week of Troy Davis by the State of Georgia on the International Day of Peace was a painful blow to all sensitive people—really to all humanity, not to mention our prestige as a nation. Whatever may have been the “correctness” of the legal procedures leading up to it, it must seem to many no better than a legalized lynching.

Scholar René Girard, with his keen insights into the all-too-prevalent dynamic of scapegoating, ancient and modern (the latter more disguised but no less deadly), often cited lynching as a thinly disguised institutional form of that deadly reflex held over from (even) more barbaric times. By the sheer irrationality of its logic, the death penalty in the United States (and wherever else it is held over) must qualify as ritual. Homicides slightly increase in states where the penalty is reintroduced, and killing in order to show that killing is wrong does not deserve the name of logic.

A California prisoner not long ago who had gotten on in years waiting his turn on death row and had a heart condition by the time it came, told a guard on his way to his execution not to bother reviving him if he had an attack. “Of course we’ll revive you,” the official quickly rejoined, “we absolutely believe in the sanctity of life.”

In fact, we would maintain, all violence is irrational, which is why it is always counterproductive in the long run—and why it can be overcome despite its apparent ubiquity. Truth and nonviolence will overcome unreason and violence if we understand properly how to engage its power.

Just before he went to his death, Davis said to Edward Dubose, president of the Georgia chapter of the NAACP, that this fight is bigger than one person, “whether they execute him or whether he is freed, the fight must go on. Let this case be a crossroad.” If we can make it such, it will be a far better tribute than naming September 22nd after Troy Davis or any of the symbolic observances that have been suggested, however fitting and however much emotional satisfaction they would temporarily offer. Let us think how this could be such a crossroad.

A few weeks ago the death of a three-year-old child in Oakland, CA galvanized an entire neighborhood. Everyone pulled together and succeeded in stopping all violent crime for the time being, which in that neighborhood is an impressive achievement. Every now and then some tragedy, it is hard to predict when or how, wakes people up.

What if these healthy reactions were cumulative? What if, every time there was a salutary shock and a new set of people came to life they would not go back to complacency after the shock wore off but would add their creative energy to a growing movement? It’s not impossible. Gandhi actually felt it was a “law,” one of two that he discovered in his eight-year Satyagraha campaign to raise the dignity of the Indian communities of what is now South Africa—and by extension, he was well aware, their oppressors and eventually all of us. There is no limit to how small movements can start if they stay true to their cause, if it is just; and to their vision, if it is sufficiently inspiring, for if those conditions were met they would inevitably grow. He called it the “law of progression.”

The other was the “law of suffering,” that states that, as he put it, “things of fundamental importance to the people are not secured by reason alone but have to be purchased with their suffering… If you want something really important to be done you must not merely satisfy the reason, you must move the heart also.” We will get back to that law in a moment.

The secret of continuity, Gandhi discovered, is “Constructive Program,” whereby people create parallel institutions if necessary and go on to create the world they want rather than, or alongside protesting the injustices they don’t want and expecting others, especially governments, to do it for them. Constructive programs not only build continuity but put a movement in a stronger position when the time does come for outright resistance.The spontaneous uprising of that Oakland neighborhood was a good, if only beginning example. If those of us who are grieving the death of Troy Davis and are no longer willing to put up with our constant failures to stop such atrocities would commit ourselves to staying together to learn all we can about nonviolent techniques, including the deeper philosophical meaning of nonviolence itself—how it implies a much higher image of the human being than our mass media culture allows—and settle down to a strategic vision for a long term solution, that would be a much bigger example.

I mentioned the “law of suffering.” The forces, mental and other, that cause people to cling to an outlandish, counterproductive form like the death penalty are very strong. At some point when our constructive program has matured—when, for example, we have built up model cases of restorative (rehabilitative) justice here and there and explained their logic to educators, the media, policy makers, and anyone listening—we will nonetheless have to put up a good nonviolent fight against the entrenched superstition around us. At that time we will have to do more than carry a sign and go home, more even than put up with police brutality as others of us are doing right now on Wall Street. We will have to be ready for serious risk in some well-chosen, strategic form.

With solid training and a robust constructive program behind us, with strategy and courage, one can hope that this “redemptive suffering,” as King put it, will be brief and effective. I may be overly ambitious, but I do not believe I am naïve in envisioning that such a movement could go from the barbaric death penalty to our bloated retributive justice system to war itself, carrying out what Troy Davis bequeathed to us in his last letter:

“So thank you and remember I am in a place where execution can only destroy your physical form but because of my faith in God, my family and all of you I have been spiritually free for some time and no matter what happens in the days, weeks to come, this Movement to end the death penalty, to seek true justice, to expose a system that fails to protect the innocent must be accelerated… This fight to end the death penalty is not won or lost through me but through our strength to move forward and save every innocent person in captivity around the globe… Never Stop Fighting for Justice and We Will Win!”

• About a hundred net neutrality activists left their laptops at home Friday afternoon to gather at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters to protest the search giant’s perceived betrayal of the movement for federal internet openness rules. The protest group’s ranks included eager young activists, long-time technologists, first-time protesters and the ever-present Raging Grannies, who led anti-Google sing-alongs set to classic Americana songs.

• Around 1,000 Senegalese opposition supporters took to the streets on Saturday to protest President Abdoulaye Wade’s regime, saying they were fed up with power cuts, floods, and rising food costs.

• In Haiti, dozens of protesters held a sit-in at the National Palace Thursday to oppose the forced evictions of thousands of displaced residents from makeshift camps. The Haitian government has been urged to issue a moratorium on all forced evictions until alternative shelter options can be provided.

• Two Korean priests are publicly fasting outside a government building in the latest protest against the highly controversial Four Rivers project, which they believe will be detrimental to the environment.

• Iranian opposition members in Germany are staging a two-day hunger strike to demand a stop executions and an international investigation of prisons in their home country. A group of 20 on Friday chanted slogans such as “Stop stonings” and “Free political prisoners” on Berlin’s most prominent public spot at the Brandenburg Gate, two days after the purported TV confession of an Iranian woman facing death by stoning on adultery charges.

• On Saturday, all the taxi drivers in the provincial city of Dégolan‌ in Iranian Kurdistan went on strike parking their taxi cabs by the Bolbanabad terminal to protest a 20 day interruption in the compressed natural gas supplies.

• Sunday’s game between the Arizona Diamondbacks and Washington Nationals was briefly interrupted by protesters urging commissioner Bud Selig to move the 2011 All-Star Game from Phoenix because of Arizona’s new immigration legislation.

• Protesters draped large black tarps that represented oil spills over beachgoers in Miami Beach yesterday to demonstrate the negative effects of offshore drilling.

• Two thousand people gathered in front of the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince, Haiti yesterday to call for the resignation of Rene Preval after his ineffective handling of the February earthquake.

• Opposition groups continue to sit-in in front of the Cairo parliament against the emergency law in Egypt, even as politicians say they will not remove the decree.

• People marched through Paris and demonstrated in front of the Iranian Embassy there on Sunday to protest the five executions in Tehran that day.

• Colombian presidential candidate Robinson Devia chained himself to a statue and declared a hunger strike in Bogotá yesterday to protest biased media coverage of his campaign.

• Laotians demonstrated in front of the embassy in DC this week for the release of political prisoners and refugees in detention.

• A hundred protesters marched from the Department of the Interior to the White House today to protest government support of fossil fuels.  They carried a banner that read, “Obama: This is your crude awakening.”

• Parent protesters succeeded in lowering the jail bond for a group of Detroit teenagers from $25,000 to $500 yesterday after picketing the courthouse.

In Syracuse, more than 150 picketers protested Sunday afternoon at the New York Air National Guard base against the use of unmanned drones in Iraq and Afghanistan, which will be flown from the base starting next fall. (Mike Greenlar / The Post Standard)

• Human rights activists protesting torture being carried out by the United States marched to the main gate at Fort Huachuca Army Intelligence Center in Arizona on Sunday. Five crossed into the base and were taken into custody.

• In Finland, 750 Finnair pilots went on strike on Monday after weekend negotiations over a labor contract between the airline and the pilots’ union failed. The industrial action on first day grounded at least 215 international and domestic flights, which would have carried about 15,000 people to destinations.

• The prominent Western Saharan human rights activist Aminatou Haidar, dubbed the “Saharan Gandhi,” has launched a hunger strike at a Spanish airport, accusing Morocco and Spain of preventing her from entering Western Sahara.

• Eighty-seven Tamil political prisoners in Sri Lanka began a hunger strike protest from Saturday morning demanding that their lives be better protected following an attack on fellow Tamil prisoners Friday by Sinhalese prisoners in the presence of prison officials.

• Last Thursday, several dozen SEIU 1021 members and staff occupied San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office, while hundreds more cheered them on inside and outside City Hall. The action was to highlight the solutions 1021 has been proposing over the mayor’s latest attempt to decimate public services.

• In Lebanon, Zahle residents, backed by MPs from the capital of the Bekaa as well as popular and student delegations, on Monday staged a daylong sit-in outside the government Serail in protest against increasing armed robbery and assaults in their city.

• More than 40 Kurdish political prisoners are continuing with their hunger strike to protest the execution of Ehsan Fatahian.

• Students took over the Science and Engineering Library at the University of California at Santa Cruz Friday night to keep it open that night and Saturday — as had been the case before budget cuts limited its hours.

• In Sri Lanka, the petroleum sector trade unions vowed to continue their strike, which began on Friday, after politicians threatened to take action against the protesting employees.

• Peruvian police used tear gas to clear demonstrators who had blocked traffic with stones and drums to protest their eviction from a settlement in the southern town of San Jose de Chilca.

• In Beijing,  about a thousand people publicly protested against government plans to install the controversial Green Dam filtering software on computers, in response to the call by artist Ai Weiwei for a day of boycott of the internet.

• The Abolitionist Action Committee, a human rights organization promoting nonviolent alternatives to the death penalty, staged a hunger strike for the past 4 days in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, in Washington D.C.

• Workers at the Malawi Telecommunications Limited on Wednesday went on strike protesting against what they described as an insignificant salary increase given the skyrocketing cost of living and increased responsibilities.

• Employees of India’s flagship carrier Air India have announced they will be on strike for two hours today in protest against the non-payment of salaries.

• In Indiana, couples in wedding dresses and suits filed through the Monroe County Courthouse yesterday to protest the denial of marriage licenses to same-sex partners.

• Five activists were arrested and held by police for 54 hours in connection with a 24-hour Vigil to End Torture in front of the White House, sponsored by the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition (TASSC).