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Images of the protest against the increase of public transport fares in São Paulo, Brazil - 06/06/2013
The demonstration was brutally suppressed by military police-tactical force that repressed protests for about 3,5km. The protesters responded by erecting burning barricades, throwing stones, preying a bus and corporate patrimonies.
Thousands surround Bosnian parliament; numbers growing by the hour
June 6, 2013
Nearly 3,000 people have formed a chain around Bosnia’s parliament on Thursday, saying they won’t let politicians go home until they start doing their jobs instead of keeping the country paralyzed with ethnic bickering. What started as a small protest over a new law on personal identification numbers the day before has grown into a blockade of the building, with more people joining the protest every hour.
They demand a new law on personal ID numbers after the old one lapsed in February, leaving all babies born since without personal documents. The crowd has rejected the government’s offer for a temporary solution.
Media reports about a 3-month-old baby that needs urgent life-saving medical treatment abroad but can’t travel because the infant can’t get a passport sparked the initial protest Wednesday. The baby’s problem was solved when the government agreed to start issuing temporary ID numbers until a new law is passed within six months, but protesters now demand a final solution.
Police special forces were deployed to keep protesters away from parliament, but a number of young mothers with babies born after February and deprived of personal documents pushed their carriages between the protesters and the officers, making everybody stop.
Bosnian Serb lawmakers inside have expressed concern over their safety and said there won’t be a parliamentary session because of security reasons. Some parliament employees tried to escape through windows but protesters turned them back yelling “Go back to work!” Sarajevo cabdrivers are supporting the protest by blocking some of the streets around the building.
Bosniak, Serb and Croat lawmakers are at loggerheads over some digits designating regions in the 13-digit ID number. As a result, babies born since February can’t get passports or health insurance because those require a personal ID number.
The essence of the problem is that representatives of the three groups in Bosnia have never given up their wartime goals.
Bosniaks and Croats are trying to put the country together after it got divided during the 1992-95 war that took more than 100,000 lives. It now consists of a Serb ministate and another one shared by Bosniaks and Croats. The two are linked by a common parliament and government.
The Serbs are trying to keep the country divided and perhaps even secede from Bosnia the half they control. In line with this policy, the Serb lawmakers want the new ID numbers to reflect this division. The Bosniaks and the Croats claim the Serb request is further dividing the country.
Most of the problems Bosnia has are the result of this unity verses division battle. The protesters around parliament are mainly those who advocate a unified country. Nobody from the Bosnian Serb part came to join them.
The crowd is also frustrated with how ineffective the parliament is in general while the lawmakers make six times the average Bosnian salary per month. There is also more than 20 per cent unemployment and increased poverty in the country.
“This is not just about the ID number. It is about their attitude toward us. It is about how unimportant we are to them as citizens,” said Tarik Celik, 26
I know it’s a new-ish development, but I couldn’t find any photos of this demonstration in the thousands. Still, lots of news stories on it. Let me know if you find a good source for photos.
Also, I don’t know much about the history. If you do, drop some information and/or links in the reblogs.
In November, we met Ellen Sturtz, the third woman at the bottom in the first photo & the woman on the far right in the bottom photo, at a Tar Sands Blockade action in Nacogdoches, Texas.
Today, Ellen interrupted Michelle Obama during a Democratic National Convention fundraiser as she demanded that President Obama sign an executive order protecting lesbian, gay, bisexual & trans* rights.
“I want to talk about the children,” she said. “I want to talk about the LGBT young people who are … being told, directly and indirectly, that they’re second-class citizens. I’m tired of it. They’re suffering. … We’ve been asking president to sign that ENDA executive order for five years. How much longer do we need to wait?”
The First Lady responded with: “One of the things that I don’t do well is this,” she replied to loud applause. She left the lectern and approached the protester, inviting Ellen to “listen to me, or you can take the mic, but I’m leaving. You all decide. You have one choice.”
“Basically, I was asked by the first lady to be quiet, and I can’t be quiet any longer. … I was surprised by how negative the crowd seemed to be. It was actually a little unsettling and disturbing,” said Ellen.
“She obviously thought she was going to make an example of me or something. I wasn’t scared at all,” she added.
Ellen is a part of the LGBTQ rights organization GetEQUAL. Go Ellen!
Tiananmen Square Massacre Anniversary: Chinese activists call on people to wear black as government censors online searches
June 4, 2013
Activists in China are taking to social media to urge the public to wear black on the 24th anniversary of the bloody military crackdown on protesters who had camped out for weeks on Tiananmen Square.
The crackdown on pro-democracy protesters on June 4, 1989, killed hundreds, possibly more. The Chinese government has never fully disclosed what happened on that day and branded the protests a “counterrevolutionary riot.” It remains a taboo topic inside the country, but the growing use of Twitter-like sites known as Weibo and other social media – although largely censored – has made it difficult for authorities to control all information about the Tiananmen crackdown.
Beijing-based rights activist Hu Jia said he had been appealing online for people to wear black T-shirts on Tuesday or light a candle at home on Monday evening to remember the event.
“Thanks to the role of Weibo, there are now more people than any other time in the past 24 years that have come to know and think about the incident,” he said.
While protests in mainland China are off-limits, tens of thousands have gathered to mark the anniversary in past years in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park. The territory – returned by the British in 1997 – operates under a separate political system that promises freedom of speech and other Western-style civil liberties.
“When the spreading of information gains momentum, sooner or later, one day a torch will be relayed from Victoria Park in Hong Kong to Tiananmen Square in Beijing,” Hu said.
Because of restrictions placed on him as an activist, Hu will be unable to leave his home to mark the anniversary. He said controls placed on him for this year’s event – the first since Xi Jinping became leader – were tighter than before.
An academic from Guangzhou, Ai Xiaoming, said she was answering an artist’s call on Google Plus for people to send photos of themselves wearing black for an online photo collection to mark the anniversary.
“More and more people would like to know the truth about the incident, which makes the authorities more nervous,” she said. “Although it’s difficult for people to get access to publications in China, they are able to get information through channels such as social media. People face suppression, detention, arrest and even conviction, but the information can’t be completely blocked. People have never stopped remembering the incident.”
Chinese police also blocked the gate of a cemetery holding the remains of victims of the Tiananmen crackdown ahead of a vigil that expected to see 150,000 people gather in Hong Kong earlier today.
Along with “today”, other censored searches on China’s most popular microblog site Sina Weibo include “tomorrow,” “that year,” “special day,” and many number combinations that could refer to 4 June 1989, such as 6-4, 64, 63+1, 65-1, and 35 (shorthand for May 35th).
‘Moral Monday’ protest in North Carolina: 151 arrested as activists decry extreme right-wing agenda
June 4, 2013
Upwards of 1,600 demonstrators amassed outside the North Carolina General Assembly in Raleigh on Monday, railing against the “extreme agenda” of the GOP-controlled legislature, WNCN reported. As attendees of the “Mega Moral Monday” protest spilled from the square outside the building and into the state Senate chambers, WRAL reported that 151 were arrested and released by 5 a.m. on Tuesday.
Monday’s demonstration is the latest in a series of “Moral Monday” events organized by the North Carolina NAACP and other civil rights groups, activists and unions. They’ve been taking place since April, though the gathering this week was by far the largest, and the arrests nearly doubled the total of the previous four protests. Organizers have decried the increasingly conservative nature of the state legislature, which has been pushing controversial issues such as voter ID, hydraulic fracking and cuts to education spending.
“The people are awake now, and we have decided to stand up,” state NAACP chapter president Rev. William Barber told the crowd Monday. “We are a movement. This is not a moment.” Republicans inside the building appeared largely unmoved, despite the raucous protests.
See Philip Radford (Greenpeace director)’s post on the environmental contingency at moral Monday’s.
For activists in Virginia: Wayside Commons 2013
Saturday, July 13th, the Wayside Center for Popular Education (1100 Mill Pond Road, Faber, Virginia 22938) is hosting the Wayside Commons, a yearly celebration and organizing opportunity for activists and organizers for social justice throughout the region.
There will be food, workshops, socializing, networking, and other activities. Childcare and interpretation will be offered.
RSVP through the title link.
If you are interested in carpooling from Richmond to Faber for this event, please contact Active-RVA either here, on our Facebook page, or at activerva@gmail.com.
Submitted by: http://active-rva.tumblr.com/
Walmart employees gather in Bentonville to show shareholders they will NOT back down, despite severe intimidation from the corrupt corporation
June 3, 2013
Striking workers protested outside Walmart’s home office in Bentonville Monday morning (June 3) as corrupt shareholders began arriving in town for this year’s annual shareholders meeting.
A Walmart spokesman lied, claiming that not all protesters are associates (as if that makes Walmarts’ heinous policies any less horrific), however the protesters report that they are all Walmart employees, and have made clear that they are protesting because they want higher wages, better benefits and more respect from the capitalist juggernaut.
Mass anti-nuclear protests held in Tokyo today
June 3, 2013
Thousands of demonstrators have rallied against the government’s consideration of restarting nuclear reactors in the Japanese capital, Tokyo.
At least 7,500 people, including disaster victims and popular figures, gathered at a park in the city centre on Sunday, shedding light to the natural disaster two years ago that killed 19,000 and sparked a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose Liberal Democratic Party has close ties with the nation’s powerful business circles, has repeatedly said he would allow reactor restarts if their safety could be ensured.
Protesters later marched through the capital, holding anti-nuclear banners including one which read: “No Nukes! Unevolved Apes Want Nukes!”
They also demonstrated outside the headquarters of Tokyo Electric Power Co, operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant which was crippled by meltdowns after the March 2011 tsunami.
Kenzaburo Oe, Nobel literature laureate, was also among the protesters.
In March, more than 15,000 people gathered at the park demanding an end to atomic power two days before the anniversary of the disaster.
Japan turned off its 50 reactors for safety checks in the wake of the disaster but has restarted two of them, citing possible summertime power shortages.
Radiation from the plant, 220 kilometres northeast of Tokyo, spread over a wide area after the worst nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
(Source: iambradleymanning)
We are all Trayvon. The whole damn system is guilty! We demand justice for all victims of racism & violence.
Submit your National Hoodie Day events & other gatherings to us here, via Facebook or via email (thepeoplesrec@gmail.com). If you’re in the Bay Area, feel free to join up with us at this march.
See you there, Oakland.
#OcupaLosPinos: Mexican protesters clash with riot police on the way to protest at President Enrique Peña Nieto’s residence
Yesterday (June 1) at the Tacubaya subway station in Mexico City, a group of police confronted about 100 protesters who were heading to occupy Los Pinos President Enrique Peña Nieto resides.
This occupation, according to local reports, was part of a civil disobedience movement formed by #MéxicoSOS in response to the last year’s presidential election.
Mexico has seen an increase in youth uprisings with the Yo Soy 132 movement, a growing student/teacher mobilization calling for accessible education & recent protests against media giant Televisa’s corrupt political ties & negative social influence.
Eurozone unemployment hits new high with a quarter of under-25s jobless; overall unemployment now at staggering 12.2%
June 2, 2013
Protesters who picketed the European Central Bank on Friday are planning a second day of action across European cities as anger grows over austerity measures that many blame for taking Eurozone unemployment to an all-time high.
In rain and strong winds, members of the Blockupy movement cut off access to the ECB’s Frankfurt headquarters and vowed to keep up the disruption on Saturday in a financial hub they describe as a seat of “dictated austerity”. Their action came as official figures showed eurozone unemployment hit a new high last month with young people again the hardest hit – almost one in four are now out of work.
Unemployment in the crisis-stricken currency bloc rose to 12.2% for April, according to Eurostat, the statistics office of the EU. At 24.4%, youth unemployment was double the wider jobless rate and up from 24.3% in March. The problem was most extreme in Greece where almost two-thirds of those under-25 are unemployed. The rate was 62.5% in February, the most recently available data.
The numbers come days after eurozone leaders unveiled plans to get more young people into work as they faced warnings about the risks of civil unrest, long-term economic costs and fears that a generation could lose faith in the European project.
In Frankfurt Blockupy protesters blamed the troika of institutions it says is pushing austerity measures on southern Europe: the ECB, the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and perhaps most importantly, capitalism. Blockupy’s Roland Süss said: “With the blockade of the ECB we are making the European resistance against the devastating poverty policy visible. It’s an expression of our solidarity with the people in southern Europe whose existence is threatened by the austerity programs.”
Blockupy, a European version of the Occupy Wall Street movement, put the number of activists blocking the ECB at 3,000. There was a more conservative estimate of between 1,000 and 1,500 from police, who used pepper spray to prevent the protesters breaking into the central bank’s high-rise building. Protesters also targeted Deutsche Bank’s headquarters and Frankfurt’s airport. The movement and other anti-austerity groups are threatening rallies throughout European cities on Saturday, including London.
While France and Germany responded to growing anger at youth unemployment this week with a new jobs plan, labor market experts warn that any measures will take time to turn the tide after 24 consecutive monthly rises in the jobless level. Economists say things will get worse before they get better for the 19.4 million people in the eurozone out of work.
In the wider EU area unemployment stood at 11%, as the rate rose in all but nine countries compared with a year earlier. The biggest rises in overall joblessness on a year ago were in Greece, Cyprus, Spain and Portugal. Youth unemployment in Spain is 56.4%, in Portugal 42.5%. Italy recorded its highest overall unemployment rate since records began in 1977, at 12%, with youth joblessness at 40.5%. Economists said that the rise in unemployment was fairly broad-based with rises in so-called core countries as well, including Belgium and the Netherlands. The rate in France was 11%.
Ireland recorded one of the biggest falls in unemployment, down to 13.5% from 14.9% a year ago. That compares with a rate of 7.7% for the UK, where youth unemployment is 20.2%.
Update: Today, the clashes sparked by this outrageous reality continued in Frankfurt, Germany with thousands on the streets. See video here.
#Occupy Capitalism
The Guardian has an awesome tool for educating yourself about the first year of ‘the Arab Spring’ called ‘The Path to Protest’
For those who weren’t old enough or who weren’t interested at the time but who have since become interested (maybe for those whose interest has been sparked by the uprising in Turkey), this is a great tool to learn a little more about politics in various regions of the Middle East.
Covering from December 19, 2010 to the very end of 2011, scroll through this interactive tool packed full of hundreds (perhaps thousands) of protests & news stories relevant to protests across the Middle East just after the inception of ‘the Arab Spring’.
Hundreds of thousands of indigenous people displaced across Cambodia, Vietnam & Thailand
June 2, 2013
Cambodia
More than 400,000 people have been forcibly evicted from their lands since 2003, often without compensation, as the nation sells off its territory to sugar and rubber barons and property developers. Villagers who protest have been beaten, imprisoned and murdered – such as the environmental campaigner Chut Wutty, who was killed last year – as more than one-tenth of land has been transferred in the past few years from small-scale farmers to agribusiness, rights groups claim. A recent Global Witness report – and investigation by the Guardian – found that Deutsche Bank and the International Finance Corporation were bankrolling massive government-sponsored land grabs in both Cambodia and Laos through two Vietnamese companies, HAGL and VRG, which had been granted recent economic land concessions. Villagers reported having little food to eat and no chance of jobs, as hardly any positions were offered by the companies.
Vietnam
The state can take land away from citizens for economic development, national security or defense reasons, or in the public interest. But in recent years the government has grabbed land to make way for eco-parks, resorts and golf courses, much to the anger of the public. Last year, around 3,000 security forces were deployed in the northern Hung Yen province after villagers protested against a 70-hectare land grab to make way for an “eco-urban township”. Around the same time, a family of four fish farmers protested against a state eviction squad armed with homemade shotguns and land mines – a bold move in this one-party nation. While the prime minister declared the fish farmers’ eviction illegal, a court recently handed down a five-year jail sentence to those involved in the protest for making a “bad impact on the social order … [of] the country as a whole”.
Thailand
The Bajau people in the southern resort island of Phuket are facing eviction after living on and around the beaches of Rawai for the past 200 years. Thai landowners claim they want the land back to build houses and a “sea gypsy village” in which tourists can buy fish and see how this once nomadic seafaring tribe now lives on land. The Bajau communities have so far refused to move, but could be forcibly evicted if no resolution is reached. The Bajau people in neighboring areas, such as Khao Lak, have also been forced off their land by resorts and hotels over past decades, while Burmese Bajau people around the Mergui islands are reportedly being moved out by authorities keen to develop the area for tourism.
Protesters & riot police clash for a second day in Istanbul on Saturday, a day after environmental protest flared into a massive outcry against Turkey’s government!
June 1, 2013
The unrest, which has spread to other cities, marks one of the biggest protests since Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan first came to power in 2002.
On Saturday police fired tear gas at protesters gathering in Taksim Square, the epicenter of the demonstrations that have left dozens of people injured and have earned Turkey a rare rebuke from its ally Washington. Hours earlier, several hundred protesters waving Turkish flags advanced despite police firing water cannon and crossed the Bosphorus Bridge to the European side of the city, according to local media.
The unrest erupted into anti-government demonstrations after police on Friday moved into Taksim to break up a protest against the razing of a nearby park. Clashes raged during the night, as thousands of people marched through the city, some banging pots and pans as residents shouted support from the windows.
Others held up cans of beer in defiance of a recent law, supported by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which restricts the sale of alcohol and prohibits it during the nighttime hours. Critics of the law see it as a sign of creeping conservatism in predominantly Muslim but staunchly secular Turkey.
The unrest on Taksim Square, where a sit-in has been held for several weeks to protest against plans to raze a nearby park in order to build a shopping mall. Critics say that the park is the last patch of greenery in the commercial area. Its razing is part of a wider, controversial construction project that aims to turn the area around Taksim – a traditional gathering point for protests and a popular tourist destination – into a pedestrian zone.
After several days of growing protests at the square last week, riot police moved in to break it up on Friday with tear gas and water cannon. Protesters responded by hurling stones, chanting: “Government resign!””The trees, it’s the drop that made the vase overflow,” said Ozkan, a philosophy student in Istanbul.
“People are sick and tired of everything that this government is doing to them.”
As tear gas blanketed the area, thousands of people poured out into the streets in support of the demonstrators in other Turkish cities, including in the capital Ankara, the western cities of Izmir and Mugla and Antalya in the south.
Authorities said that a dozen people were being treated in hospitals for injuries received in the clashes, but Amnesty International said more than 100 protesters were reportedly injured.
More than 60 people have been detained as a result of the unrest, according to regional authorities. Even in Washington, the State Department said it was concerned about the number of people injured as a result of the protests.
Thousands have voiced support for the protesters on social media in recent days, while Amnesty International urged Turkey to “halt brutal police repression” and investigate abuse claims.
See these photos & more from this movement at this Tumblr devoted to the current protest uprising in Turkey.
