Protest

Protestors Launch 135-Foot Blimp Over NSA

June 28, 2014 Andy Greenberg, www.wired.com Resist! NSA, Protest, Reform, Surveillance, Utah

Plenty of nightmare surveillance theories surround the million-square-foot NSA facility opened last year in Bluffdale, Utah. Any locals driving by the gargantuan complex Friday morning saw something that may inspire new ones: A massive blimp hovering over the center, with the letters NSA printed on its side. Activist groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Greenpeace launched the 135-foot thermal airship early Friday morning to protest the agency’s mass surveillance programs and to announce the launch of Stand Against Spying, a website that rates members of Congress on their support or opposition to NSA reform. The full message on the blimp reads “NSA: Illegal Spying Below” along with an arrow pointing downward and the Stand Against Spying URL. “We thought it would be fun to fly an airship around the Utah data center, which in many ways epitomizes the NSA’s collect-it-all strategy,” says Rainey Reitman, an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “We wanted to have a way to symbolize that our movement is getting quite confrontational with NSA surveillance in a visceral way.”

Clearance for Gas Industry Provokes Protest at Energy Agency

June 27, 2014 Anne Meador, www.dcmediagroup.us Resist! DC, Fracking, health, Protest

A little-known regulatory agency has been the site of daily protests this week against the environmental costs and health and safety hazards associated with exporting natural gas. Roughly twenty people have been picketing every day this week outside the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the agency in charge of approving interstate gas pipelines and liquefied natural gas terminals. FERC is accused of being dysfunctional and in dire need of reform, a de facto “rubber stamp” for gas industry plans to expand their fracking operations. “They are oil and gas industry facilitators, not oil and gas industry regulators,” said Mike Tidwell, director of environmental group Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN), at a press conference in front of FERC on Monday. Protestors chanted, “Hey, FERC, yes you can, stop this dirty fracked gas plan!” and carried signs which said, “The FERC Rubberstamp Hurts Communities” and “Cove Point is All About Fracking!” They came from areas which would be affected by the approval of the conversion of Cove Point LNG into an export terminal. On Tuesday, Calvert County, Maryland residents picketed and expressed fears about their safety living in close proximity to the energy intensive and volatile process of supercooling methane gas. On Wednesday, people from Frederick County registered their anger with FERC over approving a highly polluting compressor station in Myersville which would help transport gas to Cove Point. According to CCAN, organizer of the weeklong protest, FERC reviews projects without adequately assessing their environmental, health and safety risks, nor their cumulative impacts on the climate.

Hong Kong Police Train For Occupy Central

June 27, 2014 Samuel Chan, www.scmp.com Educate! China, Hong Kong, Occupy, Police, Protest

Officers surround ‘sit-in’ and remove ‘protesters’ in drill ahead of civil disobedience movement "Protesters" blocked a road on the grounds of the Police College in Aberdeen yesterday in what force insiders described as a "major exercise" to prepare for possible trouble during the Occupy Central mass sit-in. All parking at the college was suspended for the day to facilitate the seven-hour exercise, which began at about 10am. During a simulated march, there were chants of "make way" and "stop the northeastern New Territories new-towns plan" from the 30 or so protesters, all of whom were officers. One group barged into police and another blocked the road. Officers then formed a cordon around the sit-in, while other police arrived with barricades. Protesters lying on the ground were carried to a bus nearby.

Working Women Tell Obama: $10.10 Not Enough

June 26, 2014 Emily DiVito, www.ourfuture.org Organize! Barack Obama, Minimum Wage, Protest, Women's Rights

Joanne, a food service worker at the federal Ronald Reagan Building near the White House, took time off from her job Monday to join fellow federal contractor employees at a protest outside the Smithsonian National Zoo. As she explained her monthly budget, it was clear she had nothing much to lose. “I make just around $1,000 a month,” she said, “and I pay $500 for child care, and $250 just to ride the Metro to go to work. After that, I have nothing.” Even with her husband’s support, Joanne said she struggles to get by. Her salary of “$8.90 an hour is not enough,” she said. “I have no insurance, no holidays – nothing. My dream is to go to culinary school, and President Obama, you can help me make my dreams come true.” As a Summit on Working Families was underway at the White House, Joanne was with about 200 other women who work for federal contractors protesting at the Smithsonian National Zoo.

South Africa Toilet Protest

June 26, 2014 BBC, www.bbc.com Resist! Africa, Police, Protest, South Africa, Toilets

Police fired rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse protesters who bared their rears during a protest over a lack of proper toilets in South Africa. Hundreds of residents barricaded a major road in Soweto protesting against bucket toilets. During the apartheid era, residents in black townships were provided with an outside bucket instead of flush toilets like those in houses in white suburbs. Protesters say the "bucket system" should no longer exist. In years following the end of white minority rule in South Africa in 1994, a government programme had aimed to replace the bucket system in informal settlements by 2007. The BBC's Pumza Fihlani in Johannesburg says while protests about the lack of basic amenities are common in South Africa, this is a rare show of displeasure.

Protesting Youth In The Age Of Neoliberal Cruelty

June 23, 2014 Henry A. Giroux, www.truth-out.org Organize! Neoliberalism, Protest, Youth

What is particularly distinctive about the current historical conjuncture is the way in which young people, particularly low-income and poor minority youth across the globe, have been increasingly denied any place in an already weakened social order and the degree to which they are no longer seen as central to how a number of countries across the globe define their future. The plight of youth as disposable populations is evident in the fact that millions of them in countries such as England, Greece, and the United States have been unemployed and denied long term benefits. The unemployment rate for young people in many countries such as Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Greece hovers between 40 and 50 per cent. To make matters worse, those with college degrees either cannot find work or are working at low-skill jobs that pay paltry wages. In the United States, young adjunct faculty constitute one of the fastest growing populations on food stamps. Suffering under huge debts, a jobs crisis, state violence, a growing surveillance state, and the prospect that they would inherit a standard of living far below that enjoyed by their parents, many young people have exhibited a rage that seems to deepen their resignation, despair, and withdrawal from the political arena. This is the first generation, as sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues, in which the “plight of the outcast may stretch to embrace a whole generation.” (Bauman 2012a; 2012b; 2012c) He rightly insists that today’s youth have been “cast in a condition of liminal drift, with no way of knowing whether it is transitory or permanent” (Bauman 2004:76).

Albuquerque Activists Hold ‘People’s Trial’ Of Police Chief For Brutality

June 23, 2014 Rory Carroll, www.theguardian.com Resist! Activism, Albuquerque, Police, Protest

Activists in Albuquerque have held a march and a “people's trial” of the city's police chief, to protest dozens of fatal police shootings. Hundreds rallied in the New Mexico city on Saturday, some carrying fake tombstones, to denounce what they called a culture of police brutality and official complicity. It was the latest event in a vocal campaign demanding reform of a police department which has recorded 40 shootings, 26 of them fatal, since 2010. Reforms are expected to be announced in coming weeks, following a Department of Justice report in April which detailed a pattern of excessive, unreasonable use of deadly force against residents. Marchers said they needed to continue to pressure local authorities to prevent more officially justified shootings. “They say ‘justified’! We say ‘homicide’!” they chanted, as they gathered at Roosevelt Park.

From Cairo: Everyone’s Right To Protest

June 22, 2014 Comrades from Cairo, www.roarmag.org Resist! Egypt, Freedom of Speech and Assembly, Protest

Having hijacked the popular protests of June 30, 2013 against the Muslim Brotherhood to ride back into power, the military establishment is now using every means at its disposal to silence all forms of dissent and annihilate the hard-won political space of the past three years. Violence and intimidation have always been the principal tools of the police force, but in Sisi’s Egypt the judiciary has been given a new leading role in the suppression of freedoms. Their tool is the Protest Law, which in its seven months of life has been used to round up, detain and sentence thousands of participants in peaceful protests — and to target specific and influential activists within them. The most noted example today is Alaa Abd El Fattah. On November 26, 2013, around two hundred protesters gathered outside Egypt’s Parliamentary Upper House were attacked by police with water canons, batons, plainclothes thugs, and tear gas. Fifty people were arrested, and once the women, journalists and lawyers were released, twenty-four men were left in jail. The following night, the police violently arrested Alaa from his home. Now, Alaa and the twenty-four have been sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

Groups Allege Human Rights Violation By Detroit Water Turn-Off

June 20, 2014 The Blue Planet Project, www.blueplanetproject.net Resist! Detroit, Human Rights, Protest, Water

Maude Barlow, founder of the Blue Planet Project and Chair of Food & Water Watch, recently visited Detroit, Michigan in the United States and heard firsthand accounts from residents who were having their water services cut off by the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD). This report was produced from information gathered by Maude Barlow, the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization, and the Detroit People’s Water Board. The Detroit People’s Water Board is campaigning to have these essential services restored to the thousands of households currently without water service pursuant to a just and affordable rate structure, and to prevent future cut-offs. Read the Submission to the Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation regarding water cut-offs in the City of Detroit, Michigan

African Firm Is Selling Pepper-Spray Bullet-Firing Drones

June 20, 2014 Leo Kelion, www.bbc.com Educate! Drones, Dystopia, Protest, Tear Gas

The maker of a drone that fires pepper spray bullets says it has received its first order for the machine. South Africa-based Desert Wolf told the BBC it had secured the sale of 25 units to a mining company after showing off the tech at a trade show. It is marketing the device as a "riot control copter" that can tackle crowds "without endangering the lives of security staff". But the International Trade Union Confederation is horrified by the idea. "This is a deeply disturbing and repugnant development and we are convinced that any reasonable government will move quickly to stop the deployment of advanced battlefield technology on workers or indeed the public involved in legitimate protests and demonstrations," said spokesman Tim Noonan. He added that the ITUC would now try to identify which company had ordered the drones.

Repressing World Cup Protests: A Booming Business For Brazil

June 19, 2014 Anna Feigenbaum, www.wagingnonviolence.org Educate! Brazil, Corporatism, Profit, Protest, world cup

On June 12, Brazilian police fired tear gas on a group of 50 unarmed marchers blocking a highway leading to the World Cup arena in São Paulo. On June 15 in Rio de Janeiro another 200 marchers faced floods of tear gas and stun grenades in their approach to Maracana stadium. Armed with an arsenal of less lethal weapons and employing tactics imported from U.S. SWAT teams in the early 2000s, police clad in riot gear are deploying forceful tactics, wielding batons and releasing chemical agents at close range. In Brazil, this style of protest policing is not only a common form of political control, but also a booming business. World Cup and related economic protests occurring across the country are bringing in big profits for Rio-based company Condor Nonlethal Technologies. As part of the World Cup’s massive security budget Condor scored a $22-million contract, providing tear gas, rubber bullets, Tasers and light and sound grenades to police and private security forces. Selling riot control and public order weaponry to law enforcement, military and United Nation buyers, Condor’s business has grown by over 30 percent in the past five years.

LGBTQ Activists Protest At DNC Fundraiser

June 19, 2014 El Hispanic News, www.elhispanicnews.com Resist! Barack Obama, DNC, Immigrant Rights, LGBTQ, Protest

Today outside Gotham Hall, where the Democratic National Committee’s LGBT Leadership Committee held one of its largest fundraising events of the year, LGBTQ and immigrant rights groups GetEQUAL, Queer Undocumented Immigrant Project, a project of United We Dream, Immigration Equality, and Make the Road New York risked arrest in order to call on President Obama and the Democratic Party to stop deportations and grant administrative relief to undocumented immigrants in the United States. President Obama was on-site as the keynote speaker. Though the protesters blocked the street in front of the fundraiser as the presidential motorcade passed by, the New York Police Department refused to arrest them. Barack Obama’s administration is responsible for over two million deportations — more than any other administration in U.S. history. Many of those deportations have been LGBTQ immigrants, who face extraordinary discrimination within the detention system and who are often deported to countries in which they face harassment, abuse, violence and sometimes, death due to their sexual orientation or gender identity.

The Native American Grandmother Who Beat The Redskins

June 19, 2014 Hunter Walker, www.businessinsider.com Educate! History, Indigenous Rights, Protest, Racism

The woman who was the driving force behind the cases that led the U.S. Patents and Trademarks Office to cancel the federal trademarks for the Washington Redskins Wednesday is 69-year-old grandmother and longtime Native American activist, Suzan Harjo. "Suzan has been fighting this since 1992. Native American people have been fighting this since 1972. ... The reason it has come up recently is because Suzan has worked really hard to bring this in the public eye," Amanda Blackhorse, one of the five Native American plaintiffs in the case filed before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, told Business Insider. "She's just a tremendous woman. She's a strong Native American woman, and I'm so happy to have met her and to have been a part of all this because this is what we need to do," Blackhorse added. Harjo was born in Oklahoma and is of Cheyenne and Muscogee ancestry. In a conversation with Business Insider shortly after the U.S. Patents and Trademarks Office's decision was announced, Harjo said she became involved with political activism while she was still in school.

1,500 Protest For Worker’s Rights In NC, 20 Arrested

June 18, 2014 NCNAACP, www.naacpnc.org Resist! North Carolina, Protest, Protestors Arrested, Worker's Rights

In a fourth week of peaceful protest at the North Carolina General Assembly during this legislative session, more than 1,500 people from across the state gathered on Monday to challenge the state legislature's extreme agenda and the regressive policies passed last year that have hurt workers. Members of the North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, labor unions, the fast food workers' organization Raise Up, as well as teachers' and women's groups highlighted the many ways in which budget proposals from state lawmakers are devastating for the poor, working people and most vulnerable residents of the state. Yesterday, the Forward Together Movement introduced youth organizers who are kicking off Moral Freedom Summer - in which 50 trained organizers will be anchored in 50 communities across North Carolina to register and mobilize voters. "The main reason for the short session is to pass budgets, but the budgets that we've seen pass here violate the constitutional principle to govern for the good of the whole," said Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, president of the North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, during the rally on Halifax Mall.

Protests, Democracy, And Kinship Organizations In China

June 18, 2014 Macabe Keliher and Hsin-Chao Wu, www.possible-futures.org Resist! China, Kinship, Protest, Rebellion, Wukan

In the spring of 1992, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping toured southern China. This was the trip that furthered the opening of China’s state-run economy, and in which Deng made the famous speech about socialism with Chinese characteristics. He emphasized private ownership, foreign investment, and reforming the rural countryside. Two decades later the region has largely fulfilled Deng’s prophecy of catching up to the four Asian tigers—Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore—although this has not been without social consequences. The economy of Southern China has been growing at a tremendous rate, especially in the province of Guangdong, which has enabled some to become very rich. As a result, growth has outstripped regulation, allowing those with connections, wealth, and power to exploit loopholes as well as villagers. Here, the lack of legal constraints favors the few and fails the vast majority of the population. The impoverished are making their voices heard. A 2005 government report on “mass incidents” said popular uprisings increased from 10,000 in 1993 to 60,000 in 2003. More recently, the Chinese Academy of Governance reported that the number of protests doubled from 2006 to 2010, reaching 180,000. Sun Liping at Qinghua University in Beijing also estimates that there were nearly 200,000 protests in 2010. Some of these “mass incidents” were labor disputes involving a few hundred workers, while others included entire villages of tens of thousands of people.

«1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 »

assetto corsa mods

Daily movement news and resources