• Thousands of people took to the streets in Spain on Sunday to protest against corruption, precariousness, unemployment, and a political structure that favors a two-party system. The demonstrations were followed by a peaceful sit-in with hundreds camping at Madrid’s main square la “Puerta del Sol.”

• More than 170 Greenpeace activists dressed in business suits and carrying brief cases blocked the doors of a conference center in Brussels where delegates of the European Business Summit were meeting this morning. Only those representing businesses that support a 30 percent cut in Europe’s climate damaging emissions were allowed entry.

• Two activists supporting Rainforest Action Network unfurled a 35 foot banner across The Walt Disney Company’s two-story entrance arch in Burbank, CA that read “Disney: Destroying Indonesia’s Rainforests.” Dressed as Mickey and Minnie Mouse, they then blocked the main entrance gates, preventing Disney’s executives from arriving to work.

• Hundreds of protesters flooded the streets outside of JPMorgan Chase’s offices in Columbus, Ohio on Tuesday morning to protest the number of foreclosures issued by the bank since receiving federal bailout money.

• Syrian protesters gathered in the suburbs of the capital and the central city of Homs on Monday, following reports of the discovery of a mass grave containing the bodies of anti-government activists.

• About 100 students at Cobb County’s Pebblebrook High School left class early Tuesday to protest Georgia’s new immigration law, which authorizes local and state police to investigate the immigration status of certain suspects and arrest undocumented immigrants and take them to federal jails.

• Brazilians in Sao Paulo held a communal barbeque last week to protest the neighborhood elite who squashed plans for a subway station out of fear that it would have led to the arrival of “drug addicts, beggars, a different people, promoting the degradation of its sacred streets and increasing the number of police incidents.”

• In Wisconsin, more than 100,000 people packed the area around the state’s capitol Saturday to continue a month-long campaign against Governor Scott Walker’s attack on worker rights.

• Massive demonstrations rattled Yemen’s major cities on Saturday after police stormed a sit-in of nearly 100,000 protesters outside Sanaa University in the capital at dawn, leaving at least four protesters dead and over 300 others injured.

• More than 200 Saudis protested outside the Interior Ministry on Sunday to demand the release of detainees in the largest demonstration in the capital since the regional outbreak of pro-democracy unrest.

• In Kuwait, amid heavy security presence and in defiance of the warning issued by the Interior Ministry, the stateless residents (Bedouns) staged demonstrations after Friday prayers in Sulaibiya, Taima and Ahmadi areas demanding their civil rights.

• On Friday in Russia, 150 hunger strikers protested what they say is police pressure on Bashkir nationalists in the Russian republic of Bashkortostan.

• In Bahrain, thousands of people held a protest against the Bahraini monarchy outside one of the king’s palaces near Manama on Saturday, a day after a failed attempt to march on another royal palace.

• On Saturday, Azerbaijan police detained more than 30 activists of the opposition Musavat Party when nearly 200 of its members took to the street of Baku to protest against the ruling elite following a similar rally a day before.

• In Spain, thousands of employees of the high-speed AVE trains in Madrid have joined airline staff in their strike against privatization on Sunday.

• In Germany, tens of thousands formed a human chain on Saturday between the Neckarwestheim nuclear plant and the southwestern city of Stuttgart, which are 28 miles (45 kilometers) apart- some waving yellow flags with the slogan “Nuclear power – no thanks.”

Last week, Russia Today ran this interesting segment on the rise what some are calling “economic disobedience,” during these difficult times. As the Huffington Post explains:

With falling wages, cuts in benefits, and alarming public transportation fare hikes, New Yorkers are fighting back with their own brand of economic disobedience. The video below is about the People’s Transportation Program, an organization that is purchasing unlimited Metrocards and giving people free rides as a protest to the recent MTA fare increase ($104 for a monthly unlimited!).

To learn more about the People’s Transportation Program, check out this in-depth piece on the movement by our friends at the Indypendent. It appears that the group no longer has a website, but they did put out this YouTube video in 2009, which gives a brief explanation of their idea.

• DREAM Act supporters, including young immigrants and allies from across the country, gathered at the symbolic Lincoln Memorial on Monday and processed to the National Christmas Tree at the White House while singing holiday carols. The event kicked-off a week full of actions in the holiday spirit aimed at conservative lawmakers.

• A tug boat carrying supplies to an offshore Australian gas drilling rig was prevented from leaving Port of Newcastle by a local activist, who attached himself inside the tug.

• Greek unions grounded flights, kept ferries docked at ports and shut down public services today to protest wage cuts as the government sticks to conditions of an international bailout.

• Sudanese authorities arrested 46 women and six men who tried to hold a protest in Khartoum on Tuesday against the brutal police whipping of a young woman shown in a video posted on YouTube and charged them with disrupting public order.

• Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett joined over 100 people Monday to protest Governor-elect Scott Walker’s successful effort to scrap a federally financed high-speed rail line.

• Australian academics, artists and activists gathered at the Australian Embassy in London yesterday to call for the release of their countryman and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

• Some 500 secondary-school teachers picketed the governor’s office in Kyrgyzstan’s northern Talas Oblast yesterday to demand a salary increase. It was the latest in a series of such protests across the country, since teachers in a number of southern districts went on strike at the beginning of the month.

• More than a thousand people converged on Sydney’s town hall demanding that the Gillard government protect Australian-born Wikileaks frontman Julian Assange in the first offline mass action in the country since “cablegate” broke.

• Tens of thousands of students flooded the streets of London and other cities yesterday as lawmakers approved a new round of education cuts and tuition hikes.

• Thousands of commuters in Mumbai protested the suburban Western Railway for treating its commuters like “animals” on a day that is marked as International Human Rights Day. A sit-in was held in front of the Western Railway general manager’s office.

• As many as 9,000 inmates in 26 prisons across Greece launched a hunger strike to protest overcrowded detention facilities on Wednesday.

• Teachers in the La Habra City School District in Orange County, California went on strike Wednesday to protest a two-percent pay reduction, cuts to health care benefits and two required furlough days.

• Families and friends of drone attack victims came from the tribal areas of Pakistan to Islamabad on Friday, where they gathered outside the Parliament House to protest drone attacks.

• 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.

Having grown up in the Washington, D.C. area, I watched as the “war on terror” turned the streets of D.C.’s federal district into a maze of barricades, permanently parked police cars, and inexplicable no-go zones. It may be government by the people and for the people, but the people can’t get anywhere near.

I’m also a bicyclist, raised to idolize the city’s fearless bike couriers. I’ve put my bike and my body in those streets, removing one more murderous car from the congestion and a few more pounds of CO2 from the air. In return, in the name of order and hurry, I’ve been pulled over by cops and hit from behind by an impatient taxi. Security means insecurity. Transporting myself sanely means risking my life.

At 3QuarksDaily, a powerful essay by Sam Kean tells of the death of an elderly woman, a writer on a harmless bicycle, in a collision with a large military truck supposedly providing security for a diplomatic summit.

[T]he Nuclear Summit security situation showed that mentality isn’t just silly—it actually causes danger, it actually introduces hazards. Again, heads of state obviously need some protection, like bodyguards; but it was just as obvious to anyone who tried to get within a mile of the Convention Center last month that security had spilled over into paranoia. To the point that military personnel were so worried about getting their trucks into the proper place that they crushed a 68-year-old woman on a bicycle five blocks from the nearest point you could have spit on the Convention Center.

Read the rest at 3quarksdaily.