The question of autonomy in the Donbass has fractured the fragile coalition, but the government must start thinking of solutions – not point fingers at paramilitaries

Violence erupted outside the parliament building in Kiev this week during protests against constitutional changes which could grant more autonomy to pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Proposed by president Petro Poroshenko, these changes would decentralise power in Ukraine, allowing local self-government in “certain districts of Donetsk and Lugansk regions”, to be determined by a separate law.

Related: Anti-autonomy protests in Ukraine – in pictures

Related: Ukrainian guardsman killed in protests against vote on rebel autonomy

Frighteningly, the main alternative to our right-wing nationalist government is an ultra-right opposition

In Ireland, the state is becoming more heavy handed by the month. Peaceful protesters are being attacked, spied on and even stalked by Gardaí under Operation Mizen. Opposition TD’s being stripped at peaceful demonstrations by authorities and then learning about their impending arrests on national television before being informed through the normal procedure. Now the Read More

The post Ireland: Fennelly Report Shines Light on PM’s Suspicious Actions appeared first on revolution-news.com.

Refugees in Austria are greeted with warm welcomes and Czech Republic now says it will no longer detain Syrian refugees citing ‘ineffective’ European asylum rules. However, Hungary is taking a heavy-handed approach, causing massive bottlenecks and unnecessary distress among the exhausted refugees who are trying to travel west to safe havens in Germany where they Read More

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by Deirdre Fulton, staff writer Common Dreams The Indigenous activists want clean water, compensation for oil pollution, and more pay for the use of native land Demanding reparations for industrial pollution and adequate compensation for use of native lands, Indigenous activists in Peru shut down 11 wells in an Amazonian oil block on Tuesday. According to the Read More

The post Seizing Wells and Going on Strike, Indigenous Activists Stand Up to Big Oil appeared first on revolution-news.com.

by Cam Fenton

More than 10,000 gathered in Toronto on July 5 for the largest and most diverse climate mobilization in Canadian history. (Project Survival / Robert van Waarden)

Earlier this summer I helped to organize the March for Jobs, Justice & the Climate — an action that brought more than 10,000 people to the streets of Toronto in one of the largest and most diverse climate mobilizations in Canadian history. More than 100 organizations supported the march — from national environmental groups to labor unions to the indigenous rights’ movement Idle No More to Toronto-based groups tackling poverty, food justice and migration. It was, as Naomi Klein put it, the “first steps of a new kind of climate movement” that reached beyond the traditional boundaries of the environmental movement.

The march was a “big tent” approach to climate organizing being put to practice, the same approach that helped the People’s Climate March bring over 400,000 people to the streets of New York City last September. It’s also an approach that we’re seeing gain more momentum in the lead-up to the Paris climate talks this December. In fact, another round of People’s Climate actions are already being planned for later this year.

Whether it’s called a big tent, intersectional organizing or building a “movement of movements,” this approach is key to the kind of transformative change required for solving the climate crisis. It’s also clear that it’s not an approach that’s going away any time soon.

During the organizing of the March for Jobs, Justice & the Climate, I learned a lot of hard lessons about the strengths and limitations of the big tent. In so doing, it became clear to me that the climate movement is struggling with this style of organizing, and that if we hope to build transformative power across and beyond social movements it’s going to take a lot more than just one big tent.

Big tents get crowded, quickly

Organizing in a big tent is a lot like hanging out in a crowded bar. It’s packed with people, everyone is talking and it’s next to impossible to get from one side to the other — especially if you’re trying to move with a group.

When you’re throwing a big party, you want a crowded bar. When you’re organizing a big mobilization, a massive tent can bring in a lot of people, but it’s going to be crowded and loud. People will struggle to be heard and those people who prefer a quiet night in may just stay home. As with the problem of trying to cross a packed bar with your friends, moving people in a big tent is also an ordeal.

(Survival Media / Fatin Chowdury)

When we started organizing the Toronto march, a big tent approach helped to open a lot of doors. Instead of starting with the same climate groups we always turn to, we worked with partners to create a frame that other movement sectors could see their struggles reflected in. By inviting a wide range of partners into the organizing space with a big, broad framework, we were successful in shifting the discourse around climate in Canada and including more voices in the conversation. At the same time, however, the sheer scale and breadth of groups involved also limited the depth of conversation that could take place.

For a single march, and the first one of it’s kind, this crowded tent wasn’t an insurmountable issue. Yet, as a movement strategy, the big tent approach needs space for people to move around and to be moved in. There needs to be enough room to move that the tent itself can be relocated through conflict, disagreement, negotiation and shared strategizing. Without this, the big tent will stagnate rapidly, accepting the lowest common denominator of agreement among the groups in the tent rather than unifying around demands that are in line with the scale of change that we really need.

There are rooms inside the tent

A lot of the value ascribed to big tent climate organizing is the idea that it’s a more inclusive approach to tackling the climate crisis, and it’s true that this approach is miles ahead of the environmental movement of the past. Unfortunately, a lot of the time the big tent feels a little too much like it’s just throwing a big sheet over already existing divisions and inequality across and within movements.

During our organizing, we started to observe that our big tent had developed a series of rooms. In the middle was a big central room that was the “official” center of the tent. It was the main organizing listserv and the weekly meetings where formal decisions were made and where everyone was welcomed. As the organizing moved forward though, smaller rooms started to pop-up.

Some of these rooms played a pivotal role in the organizing. For example, a meeting of local Toronto-based environmental and social justice groups gathered to talk about the march and how or if they would engage with the march. This meeting and the room it built within the tent helped to build alignment among groups. It also helped to clarify what kind of resources groups required to participate in the march, and created alignment among enough groups to shift the political orientation of the march to give a voice to groups typically sidelined by the climate movement like migrant justice groups, anti-poverty organizations and groups working to end police violence. A similar space was created and held by faith groups that used it to successfully mobilize a large and broad interfaith contingent for the march. In these instances, when the room held the work of a kind of caucus, it created space that helped to improve the dynamics in the big tent.

At the same time, rooms also emerged that hampered the organizing effort and threatened to undermine the goal of the big tent approach. Rooms emerged as exclusive spaces where groups with certain relationships, budgets or approaches talked to each other and made decisions that would impact the entire big tent strategy.

Most of these rooms replicated the same movement divisions that the big tent was intended to dismantle. It makes sense that these rooms would emerge and that people and groups would find themselves working with natural allies, but for a big tent climate organizing strategy to really be transformational, it has to be more than just putting a big sheet over our movements.

A coalition is not the same as a base

We started organizing the March for Jobs, Justice & the Climate by bringing together representatives from a range of groups to form some kind of a coalition to make the march happen. We had an idea for the action, a rough vision of what it could achieve and a sense — from consulting with a wide range of groups — that a massive cross-movement project might be possible. Following this strategy, we build a coalition of over a hundred groups by the day of the march. Yet, while the coalition was big and broad, it was also weak and, as I’ve outlined above, most of the alignment was on a surface level.

We lost track of the fact that in a cross-movement organizing space there are two sets of people, those people in the meetings, and those people who the people in the meetings have to explain things to. For some people that meant a collective, for others a staff team or board of directors. For most people it also meant a base, the broader community or movement that group organizes with and within. Or, put another way, every person in the room had to not only come to agreement in the room, but figured out how to translate the decisions in the room into a language that their people could speak.

This challenge played out in countless ways during the organizing process. One example was during conversations about the intersection of climate and migration. As someone who has worked between climate and social justice spaces for a lot of my adult life, I feel like I understand the links between climate change and forced migration. It’s pretty easy for me to rationalize why creating more open and just immigration policies is a fundamental part of a justice-based adaptation policy in a warming world. The problem is that I’m not representative of most of the people who make up the base of the traditional climate movement. So, when it came to working with a migrant justice group to make the case for connecting the dots between a super-storm in the Philippines and Canada’s immigration policies, we were confronted with an environmental movement that, for decades, has been obsessed with polar bears and parts per million.

(Survival Media / Fatin Chowdhury)

In our big tent, it’s not just me and a migrant justice group. We also have a labor union that has a mandate to represent and be accountable to its members. Some of these members might hold views that stem from fears around migrant workers and job security. Others — and frankly some people in the climate movement at large — may even hold racist, anti-immigrant beliefs. At the same time, the migrant justice group may have its own well-placed concerns or ambivalence about this big tent, as a result of those racist views. With that, comes another series of challenges, and that’s with only three groups in the big tent. We haven’t even started to scratch the surface of the vast majority of people not already connected to the groups we invite into our coalitions.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that bringing diverse groups together is a key first step to building a movement for climate justice, and in organizing the March for Jobs, Justice & the Climate we managed to reach farther outside the box than any mobilization of it’s kind in Canada. Nevertheless, we fell into the same big tent trap of “uniting the left” on climate and believing that an intersectional approach to climate stops when we check enough movement diversity boxes in our coalition. We lost track of the fact that behind each group is a base of people with their own opinions, views and beliefs. Even if the groups in the room agree on something, the people we email, call and try to turn out in the streets might not.

The ground beneath our feet, not the tent above our heads

In the end, the biggest lesson I learned in this process was that it may actually be the term “big tent” that’s our biggest problem. A big tent invokes the idea of one big idea or issue that sits above the rest, leaving us to unify underneath it. While it’s true that climate change connects issues like few crises our society has ever faced, it’s problematic to view it as an issue “above” the rest. Instead of looking up to the tent, we need to start thinking about the ground beneath our feet – about how we can share fault lines that connect our movements.

In geology, a fault line is the space where tectonic plates meet. Movement fault lines could be defined by the points or issues where our struggles interact. The point where things actually meet is narrow compared to the size of the mass itself, but it’s also the place where the most dynamic changes occur.

If we think about the intersection of movements like this, we can see that the kind of power that has often been ascribed to a big tent is actually found in the narrow fault line where struggles intersect and where the friction between movements already exists. This means that in these places, like the intersection of migration and climate change, there is profound potential. It also means the points where our movements intersect are only a small piece of the work that movements and the people that make them up do. Movements are like massive tectonic plates that exist behind each fault line, their seemingly subtle movement the result of the constant day-to-day work of campaigning, educating and organizing. This work makes it possible for our movements to intersect along fault lines, and we need to consider the impact of the fault line on the movement as a whole. We also need to consider that sometimes the potential for intersectional organizing is not between everyone on everything — in other words, sometimes a specific fault line may only involve two movements interacting.

(Survival Media / Robert van Waarden)

If you think about the example of the intersection of migration and climate change as a fault line, it’s easier to understand how we could overcome the challenge I outlined. Rather than try to find a way to agree on a high-level demand that ties together migration and climate change, we can look at the challenge and realize that the first step to this is the need to educate the climate movement about migrant justice and to build a deeper sense of trust across movements. From here, we can develop a strategy that starts with the fault line between climate and migrant justice movements — for example, a series of webinars as part of a joint campaign with support from movement leaders. In executing it, we could bring the climate movement and migrant justice movement together along a shared fault-line, and as trust is built and understanding developed, be in a better place to engage the labor movement along a new fault line. Step by step, we could build across movements in a way that respects where different sectors are, meets them where they are at and grows in a way that builds power from the bottom-up.

In the end, if we are constantly building alignment along fault lines, any big tent will be stronger and more valuable in the long run. After all, fault lines are the points that have raised mountains, carved shorelines and shaken the earth with powerful quakes. If we can take the time to go beyond the big tent, our movements can too. In order for this to happen the goal cannot simply be to hold up the big tent, but rather to forge a commitment to build movements together between the big tent moments. As the Paris climate talks draw near, these lessons can help us deepen our work for the long haul ahead and to truly tackle the climate crisis.

Struggling farmers say plunging food prices and soaring costs are destroying their livelihoods and leaving many on the brink of bankruptcy

French farmers have blocked the streets of Paris with over 1,500 tractors to protest over plunging food prices and soaring costs they say are killing their livelihoods.

From far-flung corners of the country, some spent days slowly chugging towards the capital, leaving behind barely surviving pig, cattle or beetroot farms.

Millions of workers across India held a 24-hour strike on September 2nd in protest against planned labor law reforms India – Unions say labor reforms planned by Modi’s government will put jobs at risk, and are demanding it scrap changes that would make it easier to lay off workers and shut down unproductive factories. Gurudas Read More

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On Friday September 4th the first two trials take place, the first of 53 of which are due against people who lived in Utopia occupied in Seville in May 2012 by families who were homeless or about to lose  their homes. by Gladys Martinez Lopez

Max and Jesus will go to the criminal courts in Seville accused of squatting (illegal in Spain under the term ‘usurpation’) in May 2012 a building of Ibercaja Bank that had remained empty for two years . More than 30 families, many of them homeless or about to lose by failing to pay the mortgage, were rehoused in the building, which they called Corrala Utopia, and many continued giving the place life until it was exicted in April 2014…..

read on here + en castellano:   http://wp.me/pIJl9-6O7

by Douglas Lucas At a time when a new megaleak seems to hit the Internet every week, the imprisonment of journalist Barrett Brown is causing many to ask if it is legally safe to share hyperlinks to leaked document troves containing credit card or personal identifying information—the kind of content the Dallas native is locked up in Read More

The post Barrett Brown vs. the Dept of Justice – Defining the Right To Link appeared first on revolution-news.com.

by Marianna Olinger

Women at the fifth annual Margarida’s march in Brazil on August 13. (WNV/Mídia NINJA)

In recent weeks, the mainstream media has forwarded a narrative that the political crisis in Brazil is a result of internal corruption and the lack of economic growth over the last year, which is blamed on the Workers’ Party. The corruption charges have been fueled by an investigation — known as Lava Jato, or Car Wash — in which a number of directors of the state-owned oil company Petrobras are accused of taking bribes from construction companies and funneling funds to parties of the ruling coalition. What is rarely mentioned though, is that Brazil is experiencing, once again, a historical divide. Part of the population wants to turn left and another right.

The complex situation is much more ideological than most commentators acknowledge. Some believe President Dilma Rousseff and the Workers’ Party haven’t been following the dictates of neoliberalism closely enough, while others argue the opposite — that corporations have far too much power.

The latest Brazilian presidential elections took place on October 2014. President Rousseff was re-elected in a second-round runoff against her contender Aécio Neves — leader of PSDB, the party of former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. It originated as a social democratic left-leaning party, but grew to be one of the main representatives of the bank lobby and Washington Consensus-like policies in the country. The election was a narrow victory for Rousseff, and some argue that she would not have been re-elected if social movements on the left had not turned out to support her at the last minute — as they did — when faced with the possibility of having neoliberals back in charge.

While social movements were successful in helping to re-elect President Rousseff, the results of the congressional elections were a disaster for those fighting for social justice. Brazil elected the most conservative pro-corporate Congress since the end of the military dictatorship in the early 1980s. In its first six months the ultra-conservative lower house has voted against ending corporate funding in political campaigns, and in favor of increasing outsourcing, lowering the criminal age from 18 to 16 years-old, and finally, on August 12, an anti-terrorism law that opens the road to the further criminalization of social movements. And they are not finished: Two bills that social movements struggled for years to get passed — regarding net neutrality and limiting the sale and use of firearms by civilians — are next in line for review in the legislature.

The situation is not simple. If the Workers’ Party governments have been responsible for major progress related to social justice since former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s first mandate started in 2002, they have also followed neoliberal prescriptions on economic and financial matters. Social movements are not particularly pleased that corporate profits are skyrocketing while many people still struggle for food, basic education, housing, transportation and health. In addition, conflicts over land, which disproportionately victimize the most vulnerable — poor, black and indigenous populations — both in rural and urban areas are intensifying.

An ideological face-off

There are plenty of reasons for Brazilians to be discontent with the current state of affairs. Both right-leaning and left-leaning groups have taken their claims to the streets. The left in Brazil — as in most parts of the world — is diverse, fragmented and, more often than not, in disagreement on tactics and strategies. Organized social movements — including unions, students and the landless and homeless workers — have been protesting non-stop since June 2013, when the free transportation protests led millions to the streets. These predominantly red-colored marches draw less attention from the mainstream media. Although not necessarily pro-government, they are certainly against the impeachment process being called for by the conservative and corporate-friendly opposition.

Despite not always agreeing on how to position themselves in relation to the president or the ruling coalition, movements tend to agree on matters of social justice, the need for a better wealth distribution, agrarian reform, demilitarization of the police, democratization of the media, and ending corporate financing of political campaigns — which would arguably turn the country more to the left. Needless to say, private owned banks and most multinational corporations are not supportive of such a turn.

A pro-impeachment march in São Paulo on August 15. (WNV/Mídia NINJA)

On the other side, the pro-impeachment protests, which often call for the return of military rule, have drawn attention for their nationalistic use of the colors of Brazil’s green and yellow flag and how its militants wear the national soccer team’s T-shirts. These events have been led by right-wing ultra-conservative groups, although there are anti-government groups that would not fit this description. The protests seem to be a response to the growth of left-leaning social movements in the streets and policies that directly target those most in need.

If the numbers and frequency of the actions are carefully analyzed, it is difficult to say whether the red protests are smaller or larger than their green and yellow counterparts. In terms of the socio-economic profile of participants, those at the anti-government protests are predominantly white, and middle or upper-middle class, while the anti-impeachment and pro-social justice protests tend to be predominantly working class, with many black, mixed race and indigenous participants. Perhaps coincidentally, the protests seem to be echoing the tight results of the last national elections. Some of the key points disputed in the elections are once again being debated.

What the national and international mainstream coverage has failed to acknowledge is that the pro-impeachment marches too often resemble pro-fascist, dictatorial demonstrations in how often they praise racist, misogynist, aggressive speeches. The number of people calling for a military coup is downplayed even though the most prominent groups leading these marches openly defend such an approach. Some of them have liaised closely with the National Rifle Association in the United States in their crusade to increase militarization and the use of firearms among civilians in Brazil.

At a pro-impeachment march in São Paulo on March 15 a man holds a sign that says: “I’d rather clean toilets than sell myself for the misery allowance,” referring to Bolsa Família, the government’s basic income program. (Flickr/Alice Vergueiro)

Brazil has been recognized internationally for its conditional cash transfer program — the Workers’ Party main accomplishment since 2002 — which has taken over 20 million people out of extreme poverty since its inception. Regardless of this fact, there is a widespread view among the middle and upper-middle classes that the program is a populist attempt to guarantee that the Workers’ Party stays in power. For the most conservative sectors of society, who have found a space to voice their concerns in the green and yellow marches, the Workers’ Party destroyed the country by giving easy money to the lazy poor and flooded Brazil with corruption, as some of the signs at their marches illustrate.

They also often argue that “good criminals are the ones who are dead” and that the number of police — who are shamefully known as some of the most violent in the world, responsible for thousands of killings every year — should be increased to protect “good citizens.” Signs warning against the “communist threat” can be regularly found at the pro-impeachment demonstrations. Other racist, misogynistic and fascist slogans are also repeatedly seen in the marches described by the Guardian as “good-humored” family events. The New York Times coverage of the same “carnivalesque” march acknowledged the violent speeches — that included a call for the president to “kill herself” and the return of military rule — but portrayed such speeches as the exception.

Hope but no guarantee

On August 13, a few days before the two most recent national demonstrations for and against impeachment, 100,000 peasant women with the National Coalition of the Agriculture Workers and 12 other partner movements organized their fifth annual demonstration in Brasília with no coverage in the mainstream media. During the event — called “Margarida’s march” as a tribute to Margarida Maria Alves, a former union activist murdered in 1983 by a land owner in the northern region of the country — social movements stated their support for President Rousseff and the Workers’ Party, while pushing for their own agenda.

The Margaridas march approaches the Congress in Brasilia on August 13. (WNV/Mídia NINJA)

Human rights activists have been particularly scared of the conservative wave in the Congress, which — fueled by the weapons and private security lobbies — have been working hard to guarantee their agenda gets priority in the government. Social movements and activists have been searching constantly for more creative ways of engaging the population by building narratives that point to possible ways out of the current crisis, calling for a culture of solidarity and collective support. Arts and culture festivals have also been organized by social movements that have brought out tens of thousands in cities all over the country as well in recent weeks, with little or no coverage from the mainstream media in the country.

On August 13, for the first time since President Rousseff began her second term in office, she had an open meeting with the leadership of various social movements. The meeting was part of an effort to broaden the dialogue with social movements, which have voiced dissatisfaction with the lack of communication with the president. The movements want the agenda that was promised to them during her campaign. “It was that agenda that we elected,” said Alexandre Conceição, one of the coordinators of the Landless Workers Movement as he addressed the president during the meeting. “The current adjustment policies that have been put forward by your government are not what we voted for. This economic program is neoliberal.”

Vagner Freitas, the president of the Coalition of the Workers Unions, or CUT, the largest confederation of unions in the country, was emphatic that the only way the economy will recover is by broadening social welfare. “Fiscal adjustment should reduce taxation of the poor and increases it on the wealthiest,” he said, when he addressed the president. “The people in this room are the ones who have the power to transform this country; it is not the market that is going to guarantee governability.”

Flags of the Workers Unions Coalition, or CUT, wave in the crowd as a spokesperson for the Landless Workers Movement’s youth faction, Levante Popular, speaks in Rio de Janeiro’s anti-impeachment march on August 20. (WNV/ Mídia NINJA)

The president of the National Students Coalition, or UNE, Carina Vitral, voiced the movements’ concern with the recently approved anti-terrorism law, that — among other things — legalizes incarcerating people for “blocking traffic” in the streets. Eleonice Sacramento, a representative of the National Coalition of Artisanal Fisherwomen spoke up for the protection of traditional communities, including indigenous groups, and their territories, knowledge and culture. They have been increasingly targeted by the agribusiness and mining industries, resulting in a significant increase in conflicts over land in northern Brazil.

“The people who are asking for impeachment do not represent the Brazilian people,” said Guilherme Boulos, the coordinator of the Homeless Workers Movement, which has been responsible for some of the largest protests since 2013 and relies on organized occupations of vacant land and buildings in urban areas. “The poor won’t pay for the economic crisis.” He went on to call for the taxation of the 1 percent and warned President Rousseff that the only way out of the crisis is “through the left.”

What’s next?

On August 20, as a response to the pro-impeachment protests, over two dozen social movements took to the streets again. The march organizers estimated that more than 100,000 people participated in demonstrations in a dozen cities. São Paulo saw the largest demonstration, with approximately 60,000 people in the streets. In contrast to the Margarida’s march the week before, these actions were not unified around the president. Even the UNE, which is often accused of blindly defending the Workers’ Party government, spoke out. “We came here to say that this government needs to be more connected to the people and we do not agree with the adjustments that resulted in cuts to the education budget,” Vitral noted in her speech during the protest.

In addition to the larger movements that led these demonstrations, smaller community groups joined the marches. In São Paulo a group from Osasco staged a performance calling attention to persistent police violence, which left 18 people dead on August 13 in another massacre carried out by police officers on the outskirts of the state capital.

Protesters carry signs in homage of the people killed in the massacre led by police officers in São Paulo’s march anti-impeachment on August 20. (WNV/ Midia NINJA)

Adriana Magalhães, press spokesperson for CUT in São Paulo, described the organizing of the demonstrations on August 20 as an exercise to find unity among groups with different perspectives in an interview with the recently created independent journalists network Jornalistas Livres. “What unites us is the idea that another economic policy is possible, one that does not negatively impact the workers, as do the adjustment policies proposed by Minister Levy,” she explained. Levy, who is the current finance minister, was the president of the second largest private bank in Brazil before he joined the government, and had been the target of social movements.

While the claims of corruption coming from the Lava Jato investigation continue to dominate the mainstream media, it is unlikely that they will lead to the president’s impeachment given that 28 out of the 32 political parties in Brazil received funds from corporations accused of corruption in the case, including the main opposition parties on the right.

The big question for the left at this point is how to unite around a democratic project that is oriented toward social justice and reasonable distribution of wealth in a country that is divided by prejudice, elitism and racism — in addition to facing systemic corruption fueled by private corporations’ interests.

A National Peoples Conference, called by social movements, parties and independent activists from the left, will take place in Belo Horizonte on September 5. The conference is meant to be the national launching of a left front to build a positive agenda to counteract the right-wing movements, according to a press release announcing the event.

The reality is that no one seems to have the answer. While artists, activists and other progressives keep searching for creative ways to solve the current puzzle, the quasi-schizophrenic nature of the current government coalition — which claims to govern for the less privileged, but continues to facilitate unprecedented profits for banks and other corporate powers — is not making this an easy task.

As the world is witnessing, there are a lot of people in the streets in Brazil right now, but there is no unity around what they want. If Rousseff does not seriously commit to the left — which guaranteed her reelection — she will ultimately become more vulnerable to impeachment maneuvers in the most conservative Congress in Brazil’s recent history.

A young Syrian refugee boy found lying face-down on a beach near Turkish resort of Bodrum was one of at least 12 Syrians who drowned attempting to reach Greece These heartbreaking pictures of the tiny body of a refugee boy who died alongside his brother on the perilous journey across the Mediterranean today highlight the Read More

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A polar-bear puppet the size of a double-decker bus descends on Shell’s headquarters on London’s Southbank on Tuesday. Actor Emma Thompson is among 64 activists and puppeteers who manoeuvred the bear to stand close to Shell’s front entrance. Protesters want the polar bear to remain there until Shell’s Arctic drilling window ends later this month. Six protesters are inside the bear, chained to it so it cannot be removed

Actor campaigns against the ‘selfishness and greed’ of Shell’s bid for Arctic oil as part of a week-long demonstration in London

A bus-sized polar bear and Emma Thompson have joined a week-long protest against Arctic drilling at Shell’s headquarters in London.

The British actor visited the Arctic last year and said that she had got out of bed at 4am on Wednesday to take part in the protest because of the risk of climate change to her grandchildren and the threat posed to the polar region’s fragile environment by drilling.

Related: I’ve been dismissed as a silly girl and an activist for hire, but it won’t stop me fighting for the Arctic | Charlotte Church

Gaza could become uninhabitable in less than five years in wake of 2014 conflict and ongoing de-development, according to new UNCTAD report UNCTAD’s report on assistance to the Palestinian people states that Gaza could become uninhabitable by 2020 if current economic trends persist. In addition to eight years of economic blockade, in the past six Read More

The post Gaza Could Become Uninhabitable in Less than Five Years appeared first on revolution-news.com.

The anti-Islam group says it will carry on its protest against the construction of the Victorian city’s first mosque

The far-right group United Patriots Front will return to Bendigo, Victoria, in three weeks, the group’s leader, Sherman Burgess, has threatened.

About 300 protesters took over central Bendigo last Saturday, lashing out against a legal decision by the Victorian civil and administrative tribunal to approve construction of Bendigo’s first mosque.

Related: Fights break out as rival protests clash over Bendigo mosque

Refugees escaping war and violence in the Middle East who make it to Europe still endure a journey fraught with danger and inhumane treatment. Tens of thousands of people greeted refugees with open arms as they passed through Austria en route to their final destinations in Germany where they are being welcomed in large numbers. Read More

The post Train of Hope: Refugees Welcomed in Austria & Germany, Delayed in Hungary appeared first on revolution-news.com.

Originally posted at The Local.de Two neo-Nazis racially abused a woman and her two children on a Berlin city train before urinating on them, police said on Monday Aug, 25th. The woman and her two children – aged around five and 15 – were travelling on the city’s ring line at around 9:45pm on Saturday Read More

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Around 20,000 people marched through Vienna on Monday to show their support for the increasing numbers of people arriving in Austria. Holding up large banners reading ‘Refugees welcome’ and ‘No person is illegal’, demonstrators of all ages rallied at the city’s Westbahnhof railway station. The march took place as a service was held at the city’s cathedral to remember the 71 people who were found dead in an abandoned truck last week

• Read: Vienna stages protest welcoming refugees

Over 100,000 Irish Water protesters turned up on Saturday for another massive show of opposition towards the unfair second tax on the nation’s water supply. The high numbers were a definite message to the unpopular Fine Gael and Labour government. The movement which is made up of many parts, will not be going anywhere until Read More

The post Massive Right to Water Protest in Dublin as Political Policing of Activists Continues appeared first on revolution-news.com.

Demonstrators carry banners saying: ‘I don’t want Europe to be a mass grave’

About 20,000 people took to the streets of Vienna on Monday to demonstrate against ill-treatment of refugees, police said, after the bodies of 71 people were found in an abandoned truck last week.

Related: Austria defends border checks amid migration crisis