theloneprotester

Single Occupy Wall Street protester takes on 161st St. to rally against failing welfare system

2011-10-18T03:22:00.001-07:00

Occupy Wall Street became Occupy 161st St. Tuesday, with a lone protester from the downtown movement canvassing a welfare line in the South Bronx.

Abraham Weiss, a 26-year-old social worker, said he came from Zuccotti Park to the Melrose Job Center to protest New York's byzantine welfare system and rally support for the cause.

Every weekday morning, hundreds of single mothers and out-of-work fathers queue up outside the Melrose welfare center, forming a despondent line that stretches three full blocks, from Morris Ave. to the Grand Concourse.

Source http://articles.nydailynews.com/2011-10-12/local/30287625_1_welfare-system-lone-protester-fellow-protesters

Tree-sitter takes fight for rare possum to new heights

2011-07-28T23:14:00.000-07:00

A FIGHT to end logging in native forests in Victoria's central highlands has intensified, with conservationists entering a patch of forest they claim is habitat to the endangered Leadbeater's possum and forcing a halt to work there.

Dozens of demonstrators entered a logging coupe on Sylvia Creek Road in the Toolangi State Forest yesterday morning, where a lone protester has stationed himself high in the forest canopy in a move to stall timber harvesting.

Police made no move to evict the ''tree-sitter'' from his perch yesterday, leaving him huddled in a sleeping bag 50 metres above ground on the edge of a patch of freshly clear-felled forest. Long ropes were strung from the tree trunk to the loggers' bulldozers, which sat idle in the coupe below.

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A VicForests worker approached the protesters and asked them to leave the area, but they refused.

''This is one of the few areas that wasn't burnt on Black Saturday … so it's really important to all of us standing here that it is preserved for our children and for the habitat,'' Karina Doughty of local action group Warburton Environment said.

VicForests, the Victorian government's commercial forestry arm, began logging 19 hectares of forest at Sylvia Creek Road last Friday.

It had planned to log 22 hectares, but cut the coupe's size after the Department of Sustainability and Environment found it contained old-growth forest last week.

Senior VicForests employee Stuart O'Brien told demonstrators the coupe was part of a mixed-age forest that contained only a handful of old-growth, hollow-bearing trees. Those trees would be preserved, he said. ''We've done pretty extensive surveying here and we've excluded about three hectares where those old-growth trees are,'' Mr O'Brien said.

A key aim of the protesters is the preservation of the remaining habitat of the Leadbeater's possum, which is endemic to the central highlands. About 1000 of the animals are believed to exist today after as much as half of its habitat was wiped out in the Black Saturday bushfires.

VicForests is prohibited from logging hollow-bearing trees under a Department of Sustainability and Environment plan to protect the endangered possum's habitat, but conservationists say the plan is inadequate.

''So much of the forest has been so heavily hit by fires and also by past logging that the amount of habitat for Leadbeater's possum is really vanishing very quickly,'' Australian National University ecologist David Lindenmayer said.

Source http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/treesitter-takes-fight-for-rare-possum-to-new-heights-20110725-1hx5e.html

Lone protester takes stand against stopbank project

2011-04-11T21:33:00.000-07:00

Wanganui developer Dave Tulloch is fed up after seeing Horizons Regional Council building stopbanks in Wharf St.

He is completing his latest factory shed on Heads Rd and has been watching the stopbank work go ahead.

"There is no need for these stopbanks ... it doesn't flood here. It's an absolute waste of money, and I'm tired of watching them [Horizons] throw ratepayers' money down the drain, day after day."

This week, Mr Tulloch decided to erect a sign in the hope people would stop for a chat about the issue.

"It's worked too. The people who have been coming over all day from the houses around here all say it is such a waste of money, and how can we stop it?"

People driving past had also stopped in and discussed the stopbank project.

He said the sea would have to rise 6m to 10m before it would flood in the area, and if that happened, the whole of Wanganui would be under water as well.

Horizons Regional Council communications manager Caroline Rowe said the council had no comment at this point.

Source http://www.wanganuichronicle.co.nz/local/news/lone-protester-takes-stand-against-stopbank-projec/3946590/

Love was in the air

2011-03-29T21:08:00.001-07:00

An estimated 3,000 people marched through the streets of Melbourne Saturday to call on the Federal Government to lift its ban on same-sex marriage.

Organised by lobby group Equal Love, the rally is part of an ongoing, nationally-coordinated campaign for marriage equality.

Ali Hogg, convenor of Equal Love Melbourne, said she was pleased with the bigger-than-expected turn out, given it was the group’s first major demonstration in 2011.

“It was fantastic,” Hogg told MCV. “It was quite bigger than what I expected with around 3,000 people which is pretty good for our first rally of the year.”

“We were really pleased to see so many new faces at the demonstration and so many young people that were prepared to come out for marriage equality.

Among the speakers who addressed the crowd outside the State Library of Victoria were Sally Goldner from TransGender Victoria and comedian Joel Creasey.

But not all who attended were in support of equality, with a lone protestor calling on the crowd to repent.

Perched on a roof of tram stop shelter, the man waved a copy of the Bible as he addressed demonstrators.

He was later removed by police.

Hogg said the next rally will be held in August during National Day of Action, but added that an Equal Love event will be held in May coinciding with International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO).

Source http://www.mcv.gaynewsnetwork.com.au/news/love-was-in-the-air-008605.html

Protesters Occupy Roof Of Libyan Embassy In London

2011-03-17T00:22:00.001-07:00

Up to five people have gained access to the roof of the Libyan embassy in Knightsbridge. The protesters scaled the building early this morning. Police were at the scene by 2.50am.

The intruders have access to one of the embassy’s rooms, and have attempted to switch over the official flag (presumably for a rebel flag).

Police have arrested two other men who were found attempting to join the protesters and are now seeking to coax the remainder out. The news follows a similar incident on 21 February, when a lone protester was able to reach the embassy’s first-floor balcony and effect a flag switcheroo. More over on the BBC.

Source http://londonist.com/2011/03/protesters-occupy-roof-of-libyan-embassy-in-london.php

America's China Fix

2011-02-16T23:29:00.001-08:00

America's interest in China has reached the level of obsession. So much so that growing numbers of Americans now see China -- incorrectly -- as the world's leading economic power. According to Pew Research's January survey, 47% of respondents cite China has a bigger economy than the US. And this is only the tip of the iceberg. The media is fixated on China, surpassing the previous high watermarks of China coverage -- in 1972 during Nixon's détente, and 1989 when a lone protester with a shopping bag faced down a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square. Americans now consider Asia more important than Europe by a 47%-to-37% margin (in 1993, those numbers were reversed). Asked about their interest in news from overseas, 34% of Americans say they are very interested in news from China, while far fewer say the same about France (6%), Germany (11%), Italy (11%) and even Great Britain (17%).

No question -- China moves us in ways that few countries do. NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw told Rolling Stone in 1989 that he was surprised how Tiananmen Square "So penetrated the American consciousness. People everywhere I went were talking about it. I was doing a story about street gangs in Los Angeles, and one member of the Crips wanted to talk to me about what was going on in China." But those were seismic political events. What's going on today? Why can't we stop thinking about China? Sure, some of the coverage has been serious -- Hu Jintao's state visits, currency manipulation and the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to dissident, Liu Xiaobo; but most of the coverage has been of a curious strain. Take a look at the last two months alone -- the media has served up a mountain of minutiae about the country that makes our interest in the British royal family look quaint. Skimming through my newspapers and magazines this year, I've read major feature stories about China's growing interest in psychoanalysis, ballet in China's cultural revolution, China's voguish revolution (Prada will open nine new stores next year), and China's versions of Facebook called Renren and Kaixin001. CNN.com published another stupefying piece on pop culture ("In one Beijing neighborhood, Carol Chow is cashing in on ' Sex and the City ' - inspired cupcakes.") And now of course, we've arrived at the mother of all China cultural stories (no pun intended) -- whether China should help us raise our kids. Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother has occasioned a new level of compare-and-contrast with the Chinese, inviting us to wonder whether we should move from helicopter-parenting our kids to browbeating them in order to raise their math scores.

Some may find an analogy with the coverage of the Japanese back in the 1980s. Those were the years when Memoirs of a Geisha became a phenomenon on the bestseller list, Hollywood made alarmist, neurotic films like Black Rain and Rising Sun, and Newsweek published a famous cover of the Columbia Pictures icon clad in a kimono ( "Japan Invades Hollywood" the headline trumpeted ). But the narrative of that story was different. That was a foreign incursion story, more comparable to the "Red Scare" Soviet rhetoric of the Cold War period. The Japanese were at our shores, the metanarrative seemed to read, with bucketfuls of capital ready to buy up our crown jewels.

But, China's story isn't that. We aren't worried about China buying up the Empire State Building although; our Sino-mania is very much a sublimation of our anxieties about this economic rival. The reasons are simple: With its real GDP expected to grow at an annual rate of 9.5% at least until 2020, China will overtake the USA to become the world's largest economy as early as 2017, but more likely 10 or 15 years later. And, as Americans, what we are doing to respond to this is what some thinkers refer to as "situating." Simone De Beauvoir writes about this compellingly (borrowing from Jean Paul Sartre who borrowed from Martin Heidegger). The basic idea is that groups that never have been or are no longer dominant must define (or situate) themselves not independently but in relation to the group in power. In De Beauvoir's feminist masterpiece, The Second Sex, "woman" is the name not of a gender but of a situatedness around men. "No group ever defines itself as One without immediately setting up the Other opposite itself. It only takes three travelers brought together by chance in the same train compartment for the rest of the travelers to become vaguely hostile 'others'" she wrote in The Second Sex. The anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss expanded on this: "The transition from Nature to Culture is determined by man's ability to think of biological relationships as systems of oppositions; duality; alternation, and symmetry, whether presented in definite forms or in imprecise forms." And that's what we're doing with China.

Previously, when America's economic supremacy was unmatched, we didn't need to situate - others did. Now, we've had to think and struggle with the notion of a rival and a peer in the world. China isn't just an economic match to the U.S., it is the first serious challenge to the notion that liberal democracy is the only sustainable form of government. The specter of a hybrid model between communism and capitalism that seems to work is genuinely confusing to us. And unlike the Soviets, we haven't been able to appropriate the tropes of good and evil to help us organize the world into a binary formation. China is too complicated to yield to this Manichean world view. And so we're left thinking about Chinese parenting, pop culture, youth culture, technological prowess, rates of melancholy and loneliness as a way of figuring out where we're losing ground, and also what we don't like and wouldn't want about their society. It's a sort of running total of whose way is better.

It will be interesting to see if the level of China coverage subsides as we get used to the notion of a binary world. Perhaps part of what will temper this are the facts: China remains about half the size of the US economy; their economy is in danger of overheating; and per capita income remains less than a fifth that of the US. Plus, pundits have a dreadful track record when it comes to predicting the future -- Asia did not fall like dominoes after the US pulled out of Vietnam; the fall of the Soviet Union did not mark the end of history; and Y2K never came. But, we read voluminous amounts of editorials and tome-length articles telling us that each of these things were going to happen. But more optimistically, what may cause our China obsession to abate may be that we increasingly recognize that a unipolar world is an aberration. Throughout history, nations have always lived and flourished with rivals -- the Greeks and Persians, Europe and the Ottomans, the British and the Spanish, and the Americans and the Soviets. The optimistic view is that America will respond to this latest challenge the way it does best -- with imagination and innovation, with generosity and grace and a broader world view that can integrate the best ideas of its rivals. If it does that, it will remain unbeatable.

Source http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-silva/americas-china-fix_b_823997.html

Egypt protesters ready to defy ban

2011-02-09T22:49:00.000-08:00

TENS of thousands of Egyptians agitating for an end to 30 years of rule by President Hosni Mubarak are expected to defy government bans and take to the streets across the country following Friday prayers.

After three days of unprecedented unrest in Cairo, where security forces used tear gas, rubber bullets and water canons and fired live ammunition into the air to control the crowds, at least six people had been killed and dozens injured.

Following the deployment of riot police in central Cairo, about 1000 people had been arrested.

Inspired by popular unrest in Tunisia - which forced an end to the regime of president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali this month - protest leaders are making similar use of websites such as Facebook to mobilise crowds of mainly young people disaffected by Mr Mubarak's failure to introduce basic freedoms.

Despite government attempts to block access to Facebook, one page with more than 405,000 members - which led the call for the first protests on Tuesday when 90,000 people took to the streets - has called for another mass protest today.

Fearful that Mr Mubarak, 82, will use presidential elections due later this year to hand power to his son Gamal, protesters have been demanding an end to the state of emergency laws that have been in place since Mr Mubarak came to power in 1981 following the assassination of Anwar Sadat.

Protesters have urged Mr Mubarak to step down and Gamal Mubarak to announce he will not be a candidate for the presidency. They have also called for an emergency caretaker government to be appointed until elections can be held.

One factor driving the protesters is the dire poverty of the majority of Egypt's 80 million people, who live amid terrible overcrowding without basic services such as electricity and running water.

Using the slogan ''Tunis is the answer'' - a play on the Muslim Brotherhood's slogan ''Islam is the answer'' - protest leaders have sought to show the wider public that the unrest is being driven by secular sentiment, not religious fervour.

''The continuation of demonstrations is something that the people will decide,'' Abdel Rahman Youssef, one of the leaders of the National Association for Change, a sponsor of the protests, told the Bloomberg News Agency. ''I think people will continue in a peaceful manner to seek their rights.''

Investors nervous about the regime's ability to control the protests sent Egypt's benchmark EGX30 index tumbling to its lowest point since 2009.

Mr Mubarak's National Democratic Party reiterated its assertion that the protests were engineered by the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest opposition movement. ''The brotherhood organisation is illegal, and a number of parties are exploiting the enthusiasm of youth to achieve chaos,'' it said.

Abdel Moneim Said, a member of the NDP and the chairman of Al-Ahram, which publishes the state-owned newspaper of the same name, said: ''The state is strong. There is a history of there being a moment of exhaustion, and there is a kind of resilience on the part of the government. It happened with the terrorist groups.''

Cabinet spokesman Magdy Rady said on Wednesday that while people were free to express their opinions, ''free speech has its rules''.

''The police respected the citizens' rights to protest and went out to protect them,'' he said. ''Some political activists took advantage of the demonstrations to promote their own interests.''

With the regime receiving billions of dollars in annual aid payments from the US, the protests have caused unease in Washington. Egypt has played a central role in US strategic planning across the region. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the US supported the ''universal rights'' of Egyptian citizens, but called for protesters and authorities to refrain from violence.

■ Thousands of Yemenis, apparently inspired by events in Tunisia and Egypt, staged a mass demonstration yesterday, calling on President Ali Abdullah Saleh to end his 32-year reign.

The protests were staged by the Common Forum opposition in four parts of the capital, Sanaa.

Source http://www.theage.com.au/world/egypt-protesters-ready-to-defy-ban-20110127-1a6ua.html

Call for release of Black Panther activist Mumia AbuJamal

2011-01-20T00:21:00.000-08:00

Osagyefo Tongogara is a lone activist who can be often seen in the area of Trafalgar Square, Parliament and Downing street in Whitehall doing his one man protest for people who he strongly believes are wrongly convicted of crimes. He voiced his support for Black Panther Activist Mumia Abu-Jamal who was sentenced to Death row for killing a policeman in 1981.

Tongogara spoke and said "We have no confidence in the capitalist court system, Mumias case has been acknowledged by Amnesty International as 'In violation of the minimum international standards for fair trials, contradictory evidence, several altered testimonies and the racism of the judge conspired for Mumia's conviction, even through someone else has confessed to the crime"..

Its been 30 years since Mumia has been sentenced and Tongogara continues his lone protest for his freedom and of others of what he says are wrongful convictions. Even though Tongogara has never met Mumia he has heartwarming support for him and anyone else in oppression.

Source http://www.demotix.com/news/554800/call-release-black-panther-activist-mumia-abujamal