The global spectre of state violence against political dissent, with paramilitary law enforcement units advancing against citizens they are employed to protect in cities such as Cairo, Bangkok and Kiev is daily news. But in some developing countries, the police are being used to put down indigenous opposition to the alliance of state and corporate power over resource extraction.
Taiwan’s national legislature has taken a small but important step to curb rampant government surveillance of citizens and politicians through revisions of the Communication Security and Surveillance Act and the criminal code.
Fears are growing in Russia that the Kremlin is preparing a crackdown on rights activists following the end of the Sochi Winter Olympics.
Car accident in Omar Mokhtar Avenue in downtown Tripoli. Nobody was injured but there’s a bumper hanging off the back of a car. In just a few seconds, a group gathers around.
Street protests are snowballing in Romania against a Canadian-led gold mining project in the Rosia Montana area in the Apuseni Mountains. More than 20,000 people joined a protest march in Bucharest on Sunday, and thousands in other Romanian cities took to the streets.
On Aug. 14, the 42
nd anniversary of Bahrain’s independence from Britain, an online group called Tarmarod (“rebellion” in Arabic) officially joined Bahrain’s democracy movement that began in February 2011.
Since Jun. 3, inhabitants of the village Zurawlow in Grabowiec district in southeastern Poland have been occupying a field in their locality where the U.S. company Chevron plans to drill for shale gas. The farmers’ resistance is just the latest blow to shale gas proponents in the country.
For more than 100 days, detainees at American detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been on hunger strike, drawing international attention back to the prison that U.S. President Barack Obama vowed during his first presidential campaign to close down.
Tent cities are being set up by Palestinians all over the West Bank to protest against Israeli settlements, building on a protest during the visit of U.S. President Barack Obama last month.
Local activists have begun protests in Slovakia after a government ministry appeared to give its backing to a controversial uranium mining project despite reassurances to people living near the proposed site that no mining would be allowed to take place.
An indefinite struggle continues against the Kudankulam nuclear power plant in the southern Indian state Tamil Nadu despite a government crackdown on protests.
–“We demand an immediate end to the military operation in Khyber Agency because it has not brought any results during the past three years,” says Iqbal Afridi from the Pakistan Tehreek Insaf party. “The military operations are killing the local population while the militants remained unharmed.”
When India was admitted to the world’s nuclear power industry nearly five years ago, many believed that this country had found a way to quickly wean itself away from dependence on coal and other fossil fuels that power its economic growth.
This December will see the first anniversary of unrest which left at least 15 dead in the oil town of Zhanaozen in western Kazakhstan. As Catherine Ashton, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy visits the Kazakhstan capital Astana on Nov. 30, concerns are being raised that the last year has seen a serious erosion of rights in this Central Asian country, with political, civil and media liberties being curbed, as the authorities in Astana construct their narrative about what went wrong in Zhanaozen.
A popular Serbian proverb quips that when it comes to politics there are as many opinions as there are people in this central European country of seven million.
Before business could get under way, the controversy had to be dealt with. That appeared to be the strategy of the South Korean government just before the opening of the high profile International Union of Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Conservation Congress here on Thursday.
Romanian President Traian Basescu is close to being impeached after the Parliament suspended him Friday. The political crisis, however, distracts from citizens’ calls for a more responsive political class and a halt to declining standards of living.
More than 100 people gathered Wednesday outside the gates of Chevron's sprawling headquarters in upscale San Ramon in the San Francisco Bay area of California, where police and security barred those without passes to the shareholder meeting from entering.