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Category: Protests

  • Colorado Governor Reduces Sentence Of Truck Driver Rogel Aguilera-Mederos To 10 Years

    Just over two weeks after the cruel 110-year prison sentencing of 26-year-old truck driver Rogel Aguilera-Mederos for a 2019 crash that killed four people and injured others, Colorado Governor Jared Polis announced Thursday that he was removing 100 years from Aguilera-Mederos’s sentence and reducing his sentence to 10 years.

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  • Pressure Grows On Biden To Shut Down Trump-Era Medicare Privatization Scheme

    Calls are mounting for President Joe Biden to terminate an under-the-radar Trump-era pilot program that—if allowed to run its course—could result in the complete privatization of traditional Medicare by the end of the decade.

    A petition recently launched by Physicians for a National Program (PNHP) has garnered more than 10,000 signatures as doctors and other advocates work to raise public awareness of the Medicare Direct Contracting program, which the Trump administration rolled out during its final months in power.

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  • 2021 Was Business As Usual In DC, But Palestine Activists Scored Huge Wins

    This year was marked by a number of a political setbacks, but it also produced inspiring victories. As it comes to an end, we thought we’d take a look back on 2021. In addition to looking at Washington’s support for Israel’s violence, we wanted to take stock of what Palestine activists accomplished through their tireless work and unwavering commitment to human rights.

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  • CN Rail Wins Right To Privately Prosecute Northern B.C. Rail Blockade Participants

    CN Rail has won the right to privately pursue criminal charges against three people who participated in a 2020 rail blockade in northern B.C., despite the fact that provincial prosecutors declined to get involved. The ruling cements the B.C. Supreme Court’s ability to enforce court injunctions, with or without the participation of Crown prosecutors, who unsuccessfully fought the decision.

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  • Why Atlantans Are Pushing To Stop ‘Cop City’

    The project’s supporters, who include Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, have described the facility as a vital tool for improving police morale and fighting crime. Yet about 70 percent of the people calling in expressed their opposition to Cop City. Beyond the basic objections to such a major expansion of the city’s policing footprint, environmentalists are also up in arms, since the site’s proposed location lies within the South River Forest, which is the Atlanta area’s largest remaining green space and, scientists say, one of the city’s greatest defenses against worsening climate change.

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  • Occupy Biden – Day 3 – Demanding Executive Action

    “I don’t think my friends are stupid people. I do think that they, like many other Americans, have lost touch with what makes our country tick. Too many of them think that our job as engaged citizens means that we must vote. They’ve forgotten that voting is the barest minimum. For our country to function well, our politicians must be led to do the right thing. If we don’t do the leading, then our politicians will be led by the big monied donors who buy their allegiance.”

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  • Stopping The War Machine For One Day

    The antiwar movement had been comatose for five years, ever since Obama ascended into the White House. All subsequent U.S. bombings and drone assassinations became presumptively progressive and thus not worth denouncing. But the potential of a new war in Syria was a defibrillator shock for moribund activists.

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  • Labor Unions, Environmentalists, And Indigenous People Unite To Defeat Mining Interests In Argentina

    The people of the southern Argentinian province of Chubut are celebrating more than just the holidays this December. After a fierce struggle against a recently enacted zoning law that would have opened the province up to large-scale silver, copper, and lead mining by multinational corporations like Canadian Pan American Silver, the governor was ultimately forced to backtrack. The law in question, which was approved on December 15, was repealed last Tuesday, just five days later.

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  • After Years Of Setbacks, US Labor Demonstrates Its Power

    For many workers, the pandemic revealed the cruelty of capitalism. Mainstream media and politicians campaigned for a return to business as usual during this second year of COVID. In particular, workers, called “essential” and “heroes” during the pandemic, were expected to continue sacrificing the most while receiving the least in pay and benefits. At the same time, the world’s biggest corporations made record-breaking profits and the richest individuals saw their wealth multiply.

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  • The Radical Legacy Of New York’s Winter Rent Strike

    From 26 December 1907 to 9 January 1908, 10,000 tenants, predominantly Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe living in New York City’s Lower East Side, took part in a historic rent strike. During an economic depression causing mass unemployment and grinding poverty, landlords tried to hike rents by thirty-three percent. With their cry to ‘fight the landlord as they had the Czar’, the tenants won a partial victory, with rents significantly reduced for 2,000 households. The movement established a tradition of militant working-class housing campaigns that eventually contributed to winning vital rent controls that still protect millions of the city’s tenants today. But as the Covid crisis continues, New York City renters are again organising against rapacious landlordism.

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  • Puyallup Tribe And Community Organizations Challenge Decision Allowing Tacoma LNG Facility

    Today, the Puyallup Tribe of Indians and several community organizations filed an appeal with Pierce County Superior Court challenging a November decision by the Washington Pollution Control Hearings Board (PCHB). Despite misleading and inaccurate information used to evaluate the project, PCHB determined the Puget Sound Energy’s (PSE) air permits, issued by the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency (PSCAA) and given to the Tacoma Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) facility, were adequate.

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  • Jamaica’s Christmas Rebellion

    In late December 1831, white Jamaican planters slept restlessly in their beds. Rumors had long been circulating of disquiet among the enslaved Africans residing in plantations across the island. Before they knew it, the island would be set ablaze as tens of thousands armed themselves to fight for their freedom.

    As it became known, the Christmas Rebellion (or Baptist War, named so after the faith of many of its key conspirators) was the largest uprising of enslaved Africans in the history of the British West Indies, and directly influenced the abolition of slavery in 1833 and full emancipation in 1838.

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  • Argentine newspaper El Chubut offices torched, ransacked amid protests

    Miami, December 23, 2021 — Argentine authorities should immediately investigate the recent attack on the headquarters of the El Chubut newspaper and hold those responsible to account, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

    At around 8:40 p.m. on December 20, a group of unidentified people gathered at the newspaper’s headquarters in the city of Trelew, in the southern province of Chubut, and threw rocks and firebombs into the building, breaking windows and setting several fires, according to news reports and El Chubut politics section chief Rubén Darío Giménez, who spoke with CPJ via messaging app.

    The attackers entered the building, which also houses the outlet’s radio station, and ransacked it for several hours, damaging and stealing equipment and archival materials, Giménez said. Journalists and staff were evacuated by police, and no one was injured, he told CPJ.

    “The violent attack on the Argentine daily El Chubut needs to be condemned in the strongest terms,” said CPJ Latin America and the Caribbean Program Coordinator Natalie Southwick, in New York. “Argentine authorities must ensure that all of the individuals who participated in this attack are identified and held responsible.” 

    The attack took place amid protests against a new mining zoning ordinance, which provincial authorities passed on December 19, according to news reports. At least 16 buildings, including the offices of the Supreme Tribunal, were set on fire or damaged during the protests, those reports said.

    “From within this legitimate and popular protest, there is a group that detaches itself and attacks the newspaper,” Giménez told CPJ. “This is an intentional and premeditated attack by a group that takes advantage of the protest to engage in violence.”

    Hours before the demonstration, there had been calls on social media for people to gather in front of the newspaper’s offices, according to reporting by El Chubut. Neither Giménez nor reporting by El Chubut gave possible motives for the attack, or who might have been behind it.

    The prosecutor general of Chubut announced an investigation into the attack on El Chubut, as well as the other buildings affected, according to press reports and that report by the newspaper. Police have not made any arrests, Giménez said.

    CPJ called the Chubut prosecutor general’s office for comment, but no one answered.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Kellogg’s Strike Ends

    Members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM) who work at Kellogg’s ready to eat cereal plants in Battle Creek, Mich., Lancaster, Pa., Omaha, Neb. and Memphis, Tenn. have voted to accept the recommended collective bargaining agreement. Approval of the contract ends the BCTGM’s strike against Kellogg’s, which began on October 5, 2021.

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  • Teamsters Union Shuts Down Southern California Sanitation Workers Strike

    In coastal Orange County, south of Los Angeles, 400 sanitation workers went on strike on December 9 against Republic Services, the second-largest waste management firm in the US. The workers, members of International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) Local 396, had voted by a large majority in favor of a strike on November 23.

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  • Extinction Rebellion Block Home Office Building To Protest Nationality And Borders Bill

    The activists locked themselves to each other and to the property’s gates from about 7am on Monday. The protesters, from XR Scotland and XR Glasgow, are calling on the UK government “to end its hostile environment policy towards migrants”. They said the demonstration has been organized in response to home secretary Priti Patel’s Nationality and Borders Bill passing through the House Of Commons.

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  • Pharmacists Stage Walkout In Early Unionization Effort

    Today, a fledgling independent union of pharmacists is launching the first-ever nationwide walkout of these critical health care workers.

    After being forced to work on the pandemic front lines distributing medicines to millions of sick COVID patients, including hundreds of millions of vaccines, pharmacists have had enough, and are fighting back in unprecedented ways.

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  • Unions, Worker Advocates Call Out Backroom Deal To Sneak Amazon Into NJ Airport

    The Teamsters, along with RDWSU and other worker advocacy groups belonging to the coalition calling on New York State Governor Kathy Hochul to back new anti-trust legislation pending in the Legislature, rallied outside the Amazon Go outlet at the corner of Church and Cortland streets in Manhattan this week, before marching over to the Port Authority offices where the agency was busy behind closed doors planning a new regional hub for Amazon at Newark Airport.

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  • Our Age Of Uprisings: We Are A World Remaking Itself

    The global pandemic unfolds amidst a world of uprisings. Some have seen huge numbers gather in the streets and become ungovernable, including the victorious farmer’s strike in India, the efforts to expropriate the landlords in Berlin, the mass refusal of anti-Black police violence in the US, and the mobilizations against the neoliberal regime in Chile.

    Elsewhere, in Chiapas, Kerala, Rojava and an archipelago of smaller “zones to defend,” the uprisings take more sustained forms as people reinvent or reclaim life in common. Indigenous people around the world are refusing to allow their lands and lives to be sacrificed on the altar of extractive capitalism. The great global struggle against capitalism’s climate apocalypse is escalating.

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  • Low Wages And Exploitative Conditions Are Sparking Graduate Student Strikes

    Many graduate students find themselves caught between these multiple fronts: burdened with past student debt, earning sub-living-wage pay in their present work and facing dwindling future opportunities. Universities have grown over-reliant on graduate students and other contingent faculty to maintain a pool of low-cost labor. But an upswell of organizing activity in the last year indicates that graduate students have been emboldened to take a collective stand against the precarity and untenable conditions that mar the academic experience in the U.S.

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  • Home Care Workers Protest 24-Hour Work Day In NYC

    Workers employed with the United Jewish Council (UJC) home care agency rallied to end the 24-hour work day and demand their stolen wages on the morning of December 16. While home care workers in New York are being forced to work 24-hour shifts for poverty wages, 11 hours worth of that pay is stolen by their employers. A coalition of worker’s rights organizations including the Ain’t I A Woman Campaign and the National Mobilization Against Sweatshops (NMASS) have been organizing alongside home care workers for years against these unjust labor practices.

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  • CPJ urges US House committee to drop subpoena of journalist Amy Harris’s phone records

    Washington, D.C., December 16, 2021 — The U.S. House Select Committee investigating the January 6 riot at the Capitol should drop its subpoena of journalist Amy Harris’s phone records, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

    On December 2, Harris’s telecom provider, Verizon, informed the journalist that the company had received a subpoena seeking all of the communication records associated with her phone number, including text messages and calls, from November 1, 2020, through January 31, 2021, according to the National Press Photographers Association, a professional advocacy group of which Harris is a member, and a lawsuit that Harris filed yesterday.

    The committee first filed the subpoena to Verizon on November 24, according to the lawsuit.

    In her suit, filed against the committee and its chairperson, Mississippi Representative Bennie Thompson, Harris argued that the subpoena violated her rights under the First and Fourth Amendments, pertaining to freedom of the press and unlawful searches respectively, as well as the D.C. Shield Law, which protects reporters’ unpublished source material.

    During the time included in the subpoena, Harris was covering the Proud Boys, a far-right group whose members are accused of helping to coordinate the January 6 riot.

    “The U.S. House committee investigating the January 6 riot at the Capitol must respect reporters’ rights to keep their source material confidential, which is a cornerstone of press freedom,” said CPJ U.S. and Canada Program Coordinator Katherine Jacobsen. “Subpoenaing Amy Harris’s phone records violates her rights and undermines her ability to work with her sources. The committee’s subpoena must be withdrawn.”

    In its December 2 notification to Harris, Verizon stated that it would comply with the subpoena unless it received a court order challenging that request by December 15, Harris’ lawsuit states. CPJ emailed Verizon for comment but did not immediately receive any reply.

    In an emailed statement to CPJ, National Press Photographers Association Executive Director Akili-Casundria Ramsess said that, while the organization “greatly appreciates the crucial mission of the House Select Committee,” actions like the subpoena “have a chilling effect upon the core First Amendment values critical to the democratic principles the Committee was established to protect.”

    When CPJ emailed Representative Thompson for comment, a spokesperson from his office referred CPJ to the committee’s communications director Tim Mulvey. CPJ emailed Mulvey but did not immediately receive any reply.

    Harris’s coverage of protests, politics, and other news events has been published by Rolling Stone, the Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, and other outlets, according to her personal website.  


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Kellogg’s Strikers: We Want A Clear Path Out Of Two-Tier, Set In Stone

    In contract talks with its 1,400 workers this summer, Kellogg’s proposed to remove the union logo from its cereal boxes. It’s an indication of the company’s overall plan, said strikers on the Battle Creek, Michigan picket line this weekend. “Their long-term goal is to bust the union,” said Michelle Fulcher, a warehouse crew leader at the company’s flagship plant. Kellogg’s workers in four states have been on strike since October 5. Their top issue is the company’s efforts to expand its two-tier system.

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  • Columbia Student Workers Begin Seventh Week On Strike, Defying University’s Strikebreaking Threats

    Columbia workers rejected this attempt at economic blackmail and held out on the picket line. A poll conducted by the Student Workers of Columbia union (SWC) bargaining committee found that 87 percent of union members and nearly 77 percent of supporters of the strike wished for the strike to continue. Of those who wanted to extend the strike, 98 percent indicated that they wished to do so in direct response to the threats by the administration.

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  • Reverend William Barber Leads Moral Monday Action At U.S. Capitol

    Reverend William Barber called out Senator Joe Manchin by name for playing a “trick” on his constituents by delaying a vote in the Senate on the voting rights bill. Barber said that by delaying the vote until March it would give State legislatures time to gerrymander districts and allow passage of more restrictive voting laws. He acknowledged the voting rights act had some good provisions but for the first time in the nation’s history, it would mandate voter identification at the poles.

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  • Myanmar photographer Soe Naing reportedly dies in army detention

    Bangkok, December 15, 2021 ­– Myanmar authorities must immediately disclose the status of freelance photographer Soe Naing amid reports he died in detention, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

    Soldiers took Soe Naing into custody on December 10 after he photographed a protest in Yangon against the country’s military junta government, according to reports by The Associated Press and the local independent outlet The Irrawaddy.

    Citing anonymous friends, colleagues, and family members of the photographer, those reports stated that the military yesterday disclosed to his family that Soe Naing had died in custody. Neither report stated any suspected cause of death for the journalist, who was in his 30s.

    “Myanmar authorities must immediately account for the whereabouts and status of photojournalist Soe Naing,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative. “If he died while in military detention, then those responsible must be identified and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

    The AP report said that the journalist was sent to a military interrogation center in Yangon’s Eastern Botahtaung Township following his arrest, and that his family was informed yesterday morning that he died at the Yangon Defense Service General Hospital. He was cremated the same day, according to that report.

    CPJ emailed Myanmar’s Ministry of Information for comment on the reports of Soe Naing’s death, but did not immediately receive any response. CPJ was not able to find contact information for the military interrogation center mentioned in the AP report.  

    Soe Naing and an unnamed colleague who was also arrested on December 10 had covered Myanmar’s post-coup crisis for months, and their work depicting protests and security forces’ crackdowns was sometimes published by foreign news agencies, according to The Associated Press and The Irrawaddy.

    CPJ was unable to immediately identify that colleague or determine their current status.

    Myanmar is the world’s second-worst jailer of journalists, with at least 26 members of the press held behind bars for their work, according to CPJ’s prison census, published earlier this month.

    If Soe Naing’s death is confirmed, he would be the first journalist to die in detention since the military suspended democracy and took power in a February 1 coup, according to CPJ research.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Toronto High School Students Walk Out

    Let’s give credit to the roughly 200 brave students who walked out of Marc Garneau Collegiate Institute last month. They were protesting how the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) has handled what it considers to be antisemitism within its schools.

    They were fed up with the way their Board – supposed to represent them – puts the brakes on statements, information or discussions that might offend some members of the Jewish community in Toronto who regard certain criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic. As I mentioned in an article a month ago, the Board has simply adopted the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre (FSWC) website as its own when it comes to setting out rules for what is and what is not antisemitic in TDSB schools.

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  • Workers at AHN Affiliate Warren General Hospital Vote to Strike

    Workers at Allegheny Health Network affiliate Warren General Hospital voted Saturday to strike, straining already fragile medical resources in rural northwest Pennsylvania. The 114 nurses and health care workers, who are members of the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals, issued a 10-day strike notice at the 87-bed hospital — the only acute care facility in the county. The labor agreement with workers expired in September, and negotiations were scheduled to continue Monday, hospital CEO Rick Allen said.

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  • Columbia University Strikers Raise Hell, Saying School Plans To Illegally Replace Them

    Now, the brinkmanship has heightened. Late last week, Columbia Vice President of Human Resources Dan Driscoll emailed all of the student workers telling them that only strikers who returned to work by December 10 would be assured of work assignments for the spring term. (The email also said that “striking student officers who return to work after December 10, 2021 will be appointed/ assigned to suitable positions if available.”) To the union, this was a clear threat to permanently replace striking workers — and an illegal one.

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  • Workers At Activision Blizzard Lead Week-Long Work Stoppage

    The work stoppage began on Monday when quality assurance (QA) workers at Raven Software, one of the main developers behind the hit Call of Duty video game series, began being laid off. Employees are demanding that these contractors be reinstated and given full-time contracts. The exact number of workers participating in the work stoppage is unclear, but hundreds of both remote and in-person employees across studios and states participated, with many walkouts occurring virtually.

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