• Hundreds of climate activists cut through a perimeter fence and occupied land at the Royal Bank of Scotland’s headquarters on Wednesday to protest its multi-billion pound loans to the oil and mining industries. They expect at least 500 activists to gather for a day of direct action against RBS on Monday.

• Some 600 demonstrators blocked the main highway linking the Afghani capital of Kabul and the eastern city of Jalalabad on Wednesday to protest the mounting civilian death toll in US-led raids in the war-torn country.

• Nearly two dozen people, some in wheelchairs, blocked a major intersection in front of the California Capitol in Sacramento for several hours on Wednesday afternoon to protest proposed budget cuts to in-home health care services. They were subsequently arrested.

• About a dozen demonstrators who gathered in front of the San Diego county clerk’s office yesterday to demand the issuance of marriage licenses for same-sex couples were arrested after refusing orders to disperse.

• More than 100 Bronxites rallied at the midtown offices of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac yesterday to demand that the lending giants cut down on predatory landlords who neglect their properties and ignore renters’ rights.

• About 200 people blocked a major highway outside of Cairo on Wednesday to protest daily power outages that have hit many parts of the country.

• 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.

• Men wearing face masks of British Prime Minister David Cameron gathered in London on Friday to call for a ban on the cloning of cattle for human consumption, following the discovery of a cloned U.S. cow that was slaughtered and eaten in Britain.

• Two members of the environmental group Six Degrees climbed onto the roof of Queensland parliament house in Australia last week to display an anti-coal mining banner that read: “Don’t undermine our farms.” Meanwhile, hundreds of farmers and green activists staged a peaceful protest outside parliament.

• The “We Are Guahan” coalition in Guam gathered at a major intersection in Tamuning on Friday to protest the use of historic and ceremonial lands for military buildup.

• Some 150 protesters gathered outside a federal prison farm in Kingston, Ontario this morning to protest its closure. They say the government is ignoring the rehabilitative and healing effects that farming offers low-risk inmates.

• Up to 60 people have been camping out in front of the county government building in Santa Cruz since July Fourth to protest the city’s camping ban, which prohibits sleeping on public or private property from 11 p.m. to 8:30 a.m. But deputies rousted the homeless protest camp just after midnight Saturday, arresting five people and handing out 17 other misdemeanor citations.

• Workers who were fired by a Brooklyn kosher food producer after demanding overtime pay have been protesting outside the owner’s house and a supermarket this summer, and preparing for a return to the National Labor Relations Board this fall.

• Baristas and community supporters shut down a Starbucks in Omaha last week demanding that management reverse all cuts to healthcare, staffing, and benefits that have been imposed during the recession. The baristas claim that executives have no justification to squeeze working families with Starbucks raking in profits of $977.2 million in the past four fiscal quarters.

• More than a thousand nurses wearing red scrubs gathered outside California Republican gubernatorial nominee and nurses union foe Meg Whitman last Thursday to protest her vow to cut the state’s nurse-to-patient ratios and fire health workers.

• More than 100 indigenous activists and supporters marched past the Ministry of Forests offices and the Ministry of Environment office in Smithers, British Columbia on Friday to protest plans for a pipeline that will carry tar sands crude to ports off the west coast of Canada.

• Members of the Ukrainian feminist group FEMEN gathered on the Independence Square in Kiev where they stripped down and bathed in a public fountain to protest hot water cut offs in the capital and rising tariffs for housing and utilities services.

• A fenced-in lot at 7th and R Streets in DC has become home to a tent city as local residents protest the building of high-income apartments, where the city had once promised to build affordable housing.

• A team of seven Washington women and men reached the summit of Mount Rainier on Friday to demand that Governor Chris Gregoire close the largest source of pollution in the state—a coal-fired plan in Centralia—by 2015.

• An estimated 2,000 farmers gathered in front of the Presidential Office Building in Taiwan on Saturday to protest the government expropriation of their land. They turned part of the wide road into a field by rolling out patches covered with plants while also paying their respects to farming deities.

• Former employees of the closed Amonsito factory in Egypt ended their sit-in, following last Wednesday’s tentative agreement for overdue early retirement payment.

• 300 people gathered at Queen’s Park in Toronto ono Saturday to call for a G20 police inquiry and the right to blow bubbles. The latter was in response to an officer caught on tape threatening to arrest a G20 protester for blowing bubbles.

On July 10th, over 200 members of ONE DC and supporters of affordable housing occupied a vacant city-owned lot at 7th & R St NW just north of downtown Washington, DC. The lot is known as Parcel 42, and has been the target of tenant leaders in the Shaw neighborhood for almost ten years, who have waged a long campaign to get the city to finance new, permanently-affordable apartments at the site. Almost three years after the current mayor promised a quick groundbreaking, and fed up with broken promises, neighborhood leaders decided to take action. A week later Tent City DC continues to blossom into an intentional community bigger and more vibrant than the organizers had hoped, hosting artists, musicians, film screenings, and even kids playing vacant-lot-racquetball.

To keep up with the campaign or find out how you can get involved visit: http://tentcitydc.wordpress.com and http://www.onedconline.org.

• A group of artists under the name The Good Crude Britannia picketed a party at the Tate Britain on Monday, calling on its bosses to cut their ties with sponsor BP.

• More than 11,000 Egyptians responded to a Facebook call on Friday to protest the death of Egyptian businessman Khalid Said by police brutality.

• Eight people were arrested in San Francisco yesterday for occupying the city’s Human Services Agency in protest of the closing of a homeless shelter and the mistreatment of the people who had used its services.

• A group of US military veterans hung a large banner on an abandoned hotel in Detroit on Saturday to protest and reveal the effect of war spending on American cities. The 10 x 15-foot sign read: “How is the war economy working for you?”

• Greek workers staged walk-offs on Tuesday, as part of the latest in a series of general strikes called to protest pension and labor reforms proposed by the government in an effort to reduce the nation’s soaring deficit.

• More than 1,000 people rallied outside police headquarters in Toronto on Monday to protest the police department’s brutal crackdown and arrest of 900 people, including many journalists, during the G20 summit.

• Some 200 people were arrested in Bangladesh on Monday for violating a ban on processions in thoroughfares during a march that was part of a 24-hour general strike to protest the “failures and excesses” of the government.

• India’s opposition parties have called a nationwide strike on July 5 to protest a rise in fuel prices they say will stoke inflation and hurt poor people.

• A Saudi man walked on an electric wire to protest frequent power cuts in his community. The man said that he wanted to prove that the wires often did not carry electricity.

• Women and children in Nepal stage a demonstration to protest against human trafficking.

• In Copenhagen, tens of thousands of people demonstrated outside Parliament to protest the Danish government’s three-year austerity package.

• An Irish nurse sat atop a ladder for seven hours to protest her family’s eviction from their home for back-rent.

• Thousands of priests from around the world rally in Rome in support of the Pope.

• More than 5,000 Guatemalan peasants blocked a border crossing with Mexico in protest against constant power outages in parts of the western province of San Marcos.

• New York City performance artist Rev. Billy Talen was arrested on Sunday after placing a “holy hex” on JPMorgan Chase, which he calls the nation’s largest financier of coal-mining mountaintop removal.

• A group of homeless people and housing activists took over a privately owned Mission District duplex in San Francisco on Sunday in what served as the climax of a protest designed to promote use of San Francisco’s vacant buildings as shelters for the needy.

• 21 people were detained after crossing the line at the entrance of the Nevada Test Site on Easter Sunday as part of the annual Sacred Peace Walk, a six-day 62 mile trek from Las Vegas to oppose the dangers of nuclear testing.

• Activists have held rallies across Russia to protest Putin’s decision to reopen a Soviet-era paper mill beside the world’s largest freshwater lake.

• Greenpeace activists in The Netherlands chained themselves to the mooring ropes of a container ship bound for Japan with whale meat onboard last Friday. Rottderdamport police have agreed to keep the ship at the port, while its owner has decided to off load the meat rather than become complicit in the trade of an endangered species.

• Hundreds of teachers in Florida gathered at the state capital in Tallahassee on Monday to protest a controversial education reform bill passed by the state legislature that links pay raises for teachers to students’ test scores.

• United Airlines flight attendants around the world were out picketing Tuesday, including a protest at Denver International Airport, to show their discontent over long hours and no contract.

In a recent Guardian op-ed, Jessica Reed wrote about Jeudi Noir, a group of Parisian housing activists, who—for the past two-and-a-half months—have been squatting in a piece of real estate fit for a king, literally. Place des Vosges, located in the chic neighborhood of Le Marais, is the oldest square in Paris. Originally named Place Royale, this beautifully-manicured square was built by Henri IV to celebrate the wedding of his son Louis XIII. Jeudi Noir has taken over 1 Place des Vosges, which has been vacant for over 40 years. Their goal is to bring attention to the housing crisis as well as bring light to the fact that one out of 10 buildings in Paris are vacant, many of which could be used for low-income housing, student housing, or for the number of homeless Parisians who have recently started building tent villages along the Seine.

Jeudi Noir has gained attention through their surprisingly-festive actions. After clicking around their website I found several videos of the activists, along with a guy dressed up as some sort of Disco Stu, showing up at marches, real estate agencies, and apartments for rent and throwing impromptu parties. Maybe this fun, creative protest is what has gained them support from not only the public, but also from members of France’s Green and Socialist parties (both of which may sound like small-potatoes movements here in the U.S, but are veritable political parties in France.)

Perhaps this is the sort of action we should be taking at home. New Yorkers, like myself, could put Jeudi Noir’s suggested party kit to good use. In 2006 Picture the Homeless conducted a survey of vacant property in Manhattan and found that there are 24,000 potential apartments in vacant buildings and lots in Manhattan alone. (Keep in mind, that that number does not include all five boroughs.) Picture the Homeless believes that the vacant property that they’ve assessed could house the city’s entire homeless population, which according to Friday’s Department of Homeless Services Daily Report is at roughly 37,487 people.

Jeudi Noir’s mission statement rightfully points out that the right to housing does not coincide with the right to property. What kind of right do landlords with vacant properties have to keep people in need of shelter locked out? Or banks to kick families out of their homes? As Reed eloquently points out in her piece:

It might be hard to immediately sympathise with squatters—the right to own property runs so deep in modern western society that anything challenging the status quo is bound to make waves. I would, however, question the intentions and principles of those willing to let their own buildings decay uninhabited for 40 years while homeless people die every winter from exposure. How to rationalise that? I struggle to find any excuse for leaving the most impoverished section of the population out in the cold, when buildings go unused and unlet for very long periods of time.

In Phoenix, more than 20,000 people marched on Saturday to protest the indiscriminate attacks and race-based raids conducted by Sheriff Joe Arpaio against residents of Maricopa County. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

• On Sunday, more than 25,000 people took to streets in protest against the government’s labor policies when the Confederation of Turkish Labor Unions, or Türk-İş, staged a wide-ranging demonstration called “Democracy and Rights for Livelihood, Peace and Freedom.”

• A group of Greenpeace activists interrupted a speech by Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff in Vancouver on Friday when several protesters stood up and began chanting loudly against his stance on Canada’s oilsands.

• More than 7,000 workers at steel giant ArcelorMittal’s plant in Algeria will intensify a strike aimed at forcing the management to revamp the ageing El Hadjar complex. Workers went on strike on Tuesday to protest the planned closure of the coking plant, which employs 320 people.

• Worker blockades of the Belgian breweries of Anheuser-Busch InBev, which began after the world’s largest beer maker announced it planned to cut 263 jobs out of its 2,700 Belgian workforce, were set to continue into a second week after the collapse of mediated talks last Thursday.

• Monday marked the third day of a hunger strike by students demanding housing for homeless tsunami survivors in West Aceh district in Indonesia.

• Jordanian prisoners in Iraq, most of whom are university students, drivers and traders, have embarked on an open hunger strike to press for their release.

• Hundreds of Proshika employees in Bangladesh staged a sit-in in front of their head office for the fifth consecutive day on Saturday and also held a protest march against police barring them from entering the building in the city’s Mirpur.

• In India, leaders of all-party Joint Action Committee (JAC) of Telangana Saturday began a hunger strike to demand that the central government immediately initiate the process for formation of the state.