• About 20 people gathered on Thursday outside the Ritz-Carlton in New York City—where the Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh was said to be staying—to protest his trip to the United States for medical treatment and a deal he received that granted him immunity from prosecution for  crimes against protesters during uprisings last year.

• Thousands of Bahrainis held a peaceful anti-government protest in a suburb of the capital on Friday, demanding the release of political prisoners and political reforms in the troubled Gulf Arab state.

• Protesters defied a heavy security presence across Syria on Friday to commemorate the 30th anniversary of a deadly crackdown on Islamist opposition in the city of Hama, but were effectively prevented from turning out in the capital, Damascus.

• Several thousand people rallied in Bratislava and seven other Slovakian cities Friday to demand that early elections planned in March be postponed to allow a thorough investigation.

• Poland’s prime minister says he is suspending the ratification process for an international copyright treaty after widespread protests and attacks on government websites.

• Members of an Indian tribe in Panama are blocking roads in two provinces on the border with Costa Rica in a dispute over mineral exploitation on their lands.

• Cambodian police violently dispersed a group of around 150 women protesting forced evictions in the capital Phnom Penh on Thursday.

• Around 300 people gathered outside Budapest’s New Theater on Wednesday to protest its new director, an actor with links to far-right parties.

• Hackers associated with the activist group Anonymous posted a protest against Greece’s EU and IMF-inspired austerity policies on the website of the country’s justice ministry Friday

A march in Ådalen, Sweden, in 1931.

While many of us are working to ensure that the Occupy movement will have a lasting impact, it’s worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different. Read the rest of this article »

For too many expatriate Africans living in the West, the phrase Occupied Nigeria raises scary images of U.S. or NATO warships bearing down in AFRICOM-commando fashion, reestablishing Eurocentric hegemony over the worlds’ fifth largest supplier of crude oil. Before these early days of 2012, we had barely heard news of the spreading Occupy hashtag on the continent that helped re-popularize mass nonviolent civilian resistance around the world last year. Now #Occupy Nigeria in just two short weeks has mobilized thousands in cities across the diverse West African country, along with support demonstrations (including some of those ex-pats) in London, Los Angeles, New Jersey, and elsewhere. The widespread strike by Nigerian oil workers continues to grow, as calls for an end to economic and political corruption gain momentum.

The short-term issue which birthed the network now being called Occupy Nigeria was the hastily-announced January 1, 2012 end of the federal fuel subsidies which had enabled average Nigerians to afford gas pumped from oil reserves on their own land. This resulted in an overnight 120 percent price increase, and an outburst of fury at decades of governmental collusion with the multi-billion dollar oil industry. The initial demands of the movement—to simply return to the status quo before 2012—were quickly followed up with calls for an end to the nepotism of politicians and an improvement in infrastructure. By the end of the first week of local protests, Nigerian police had killed at least ten activists, and a call went out for a nationwide, indefinite strike which would halt the Nigerian economy. Many mainstream professional associations joined the call, including the Nigerian Labour Congress and the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association. Ongoing and intensified shut-downs promise to paralyze international oil supplies.

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Show the slightest bit of concern for the environment and you get labeled a tree hugger. That’s what poor Newt Gingrich has been dealing with recently, as the other presidential candidates attack his conservative credentials for having once appeared in an ad with Nancy Pelosi in support of renewable energy. Never mind that he has since called the ad the “biggest mistake” of his political career and talked about making Sarah Palin energy secretary. Gingrich will be haunted by the tree hugger label the rest of his life. He might as well grow his hair out, stop showering and start walking around barefoot.

But is that what a tree hugger really is? Just some dazed hippie who goes around giving hugs to trees as way to connect with nature. You might be shocked to learn the real origin of the term.

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The message written on this protester's hands reads: "Our demand is the trial."

• Thousands of Yemenis marched toward the capital on Thursday to demand President Ali Abdullah Saleh face trial for killing protesters during 11 months of demonstrations against him and to denounce a new government that would spare him prosecution.

• Several thousand Eyptian activists gathered in Cairo after Friday prayers today for a mass protest against the ruling military and its handling of a series of clashes between security forces and demonstrators that killed 17 people and drew international criticism.

• In Somalia, residents of Sool’s provincial capital of Las Anod took to the streets and went on strike on Thursday, bringing the city to a standstill, to show solidarity with prisoners staging a hunger strike at the city’s main prison.

• On Thursday, holiday strikes to protest austerity measures paralyzed ground traffic in Belgium.

• Camped outside Hungary’s public broadcaster, a small group of television editors is on hunger strike to protest what they say is widespread news manipulation by the government.

• In Pakistan, more than 2,500 members of seven labor unions from across the country gathered at the Railways Headquarters on Wednesday to stage a sit-in against the government’s ‘inability’ to rescue the Railways.

• In Sudan, dozens of students held a protest assembly at Jackson Square on Tuesday in the heart of Khartoum to show solidarity with the month-long Manasir protest against the the Merowe Hydropower Project.

• A group of asylum seekers who survived last weekend’s boat disaster off the Indonesian island of Java have begun a hunger strike after being moved to a detention centre where as many as 12 people are sharing each cell.

• In Kuwait, police used tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannons, and smoke bombs to disperse a large protest on Monday by the country’s stateless people in Taimaa. Around 30 men who entered a hunger strike were arrested.

• Dozens of Bahraini Shiite employees fired over pro-democracy protests rallied on Wednesday demanding a return to work, a day after authorities said 181 would be reinstated.

• Thousands of angry Egyptian women joined a fifth day of protests in downtown Cairo to voice outrage over what they said was the military’s abuse and mistreatment of female demonstrators.

• The leaders of the rebellious Wukon village in southern China have reached a tentative resolution with senior provincial officials after a tense 10-day stand-off, which saw the villagers erect blockades around all of its entrances–effectively living outside government control–to protest their lack of basic needs.

• As many as 30,000 people protested plans for a coal-fired power plant in Guangong province, China’s most affluent and open-minded region. Residents stormed local government offices and blocked a busy highway that runs from the manufacturing hub of Shenzhen to the city of Shantou.

• A group of women from the Ukrainian topless-protest group Femen recounted their ordeal in neighboring Belarus, where on Monday they were kidnapped, beaten and abused by local security officials for a protest in Minsk in which they bared their breasts to bring attention to President Aleksander Lukashenko’s crackdown on the opposition.

• After six days of protest, armed with 97,000-plus signatures, queers in Seoul, South Korea got the result they were hoping for. The Seoul Municipal Council’s passage of a Students Rights Ordinance with all clauses intact, including ones that affect the well-being of queer students.

• Demonstrators from Argentina’s UATRE farm hands union, blocked access to the Pan-American highway along some of Buenos Aires City’s main access routes to protest the passage of the controversial Farm Worker Statute, which was debated and approved today at the Senate today.

• For the second time in two weeks, former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich was temporarily drowned out by Occupy protesters as he made his final push to the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses. “Mic Check,” they announced, continuing, “Put people first!”

As Occupy Wall Street’s birthday party got going at midday today, the mood was mixed—not unlike the mood with which, in a series of improvisations, the movement began three months earlier on September 17. I talked with organizers I’d known from the movement’s first planning meetings, who were milling around Duarte Square, an open space a mile north of the old encampment at Zuccotti Park. Cars were rushing by along Canal Street toward the Holland Tunnel, spewing exhaust. The square was full; lots of music, planning, anticipating, sign-making, puppeteering, the works. Usual protest stuff. But uncertain.

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Located in the Montes de Maria region of Colombia’s Bolivar department on the Caribbean coast, the community of Mampuján has experienced the full force of Colombia’s past and ongoing armed conflicts. Their most decisive event, however, occurred on March 11, 2000, during the height of violence in this zone, when the members of the community of Mampuján were displaced from their original location by a group of right-wing paramilitaries, known as the Heroes of Montes de Maria. The community members were rounded up, accused of supporting guerrilla forces, and commanded to leave Mampuján immediately. Three hundred families fled, and 11 campesinos from the surrounding area of Las Brisas were massacred.

Since this time, the majority of the community has resettled in temporary housing, located about seven kilometres away in New Mampuján, where they live a reality very similar to that of the other 5 million internally displaced persons living in Colombia.

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• Building on the largest opposition rally in years Monday, Russian protests spread to more cities on Tuesday as demonstrators denounced federal election results—resulting in hundreds of arrests.

• On Tuesday, thousands of young Yemenis in Sanaa continued their sit-in, despite President Saleh’s signed agreement that he would step down, declaring that their revolution is far from over. This followed demonstrations which erupted on Sunday, as residents of Taiz marched in protest of immunity provisions given to the outgoing President.

• Greenpeace activists infiltrated a French nuclear plant Monday and hung a banner on a reactor building in an attempt to expose nuclear national security weaknesses.

• Dozens of Occupy D.C. members were arrested late Sunday in an act of civil disobedience when they refused to dismantle a structure that they were building for shelter.

• Thousands protested at the UN Climate Conference in Durban, South Africa on Sunday, calling for a strong international plan to address climate change.

• Animal rights advocates in Taipei, Taiwan gathered by the hundreds on Sunday, condemning the conditions of animal shelters throughout the country.

• In India on Sunday, thousands marched and several began a hunger strike to show their support for the decommissioning of a damn in the interest of protecting local farmers.

• Kashmir witnessed protests and sit-ins on Saturday as residents of Srinagar decried the police’s use of pepper guns in breaking up demonstrations the day before.

• On Saturday, secular Tunisians held a counter-rally in front of Parliament, opposing a group of Islamists who were calling for female university students to wear a full-face veil.

• Thousands in India blocked train tracks Saturday, agitating for compensation to be given to victims of the industrial accident at Bhopal in 1984.

• The Occupy Wall Street movement marked its two-month anniversary on Thursday with a series of actions in New York City, including a massive rally in Foley Square and march across the Brooklyn Bridge in which an estimated 32,000 people participated.  There were also major protests, which led to scores of arrests, in cities across the country, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, Las Vegas, Atlanta, Miami, Denver, Houston, Dallas, Seattle, St. Louis, Boston, Milwaukee, Nashville, Columbia (South Carolina), and Washington, D.C.

• Tens of thousands of people are rallying in Egypt today as part of the ongoing protests calling for a quicker transition from military to civilian government.

• In San Francisco, 95 protesters were arrested on Wednesday after occupying a Bank of America branch in the financial district. The demonstrators pitched a tent inside the branch before they were detained.

• Workers of Nigeria’s state-run power firm on Wednesday protested the deployment of armed troops to their offices across the country in the wake of an order by their union to launch a pay strike.

• Thousands of Kuwaitis stormed parliament on Wednesday after police and elite forces beat  up protesters marching on the Prime Minister’s home to demand he resign and calling for the dissolution of the parliament over corruption.

• On Tuesday, Palestinian activists describing themselves as ‘freedom riders’ were dragged by police off an Israeli bus they planned to ride into Jerusalem.

• As many as 10,000 students and Occupy activists overflowed UC Berkeley’s Sproul  Plaza on Tuesday night following a daylong classroom walkout and established a small camp in defiance of the university’s edict that no tents be erected.

• Student leaders in Colombia have called off a monthlong boycott of classes at public universities after the government met their demand to withdraw educational reform legislation.

• Some 1,000 Iranian students created a human chain Tuesday around the Isfahan uranium conversion facility to protest a recent UN report charging that Tehran may be developing nuclear weapons.

• More than 40 veterans of the Chornobyl cleanup have gone on hunger strike in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk to protest planned pension cuts.