Latest Civil disobedience Stories
By Chris Buckley DONGZHOUKENG, China (Reuters) - Riot police patrolled a southern Chinese township where tension prevailed on Monday nearly a week after demonstrations over land compensation were ended by police opening fire on protesters. China has confirmed police shot dead three people "in alarm" during an attack on Tuesday on a wind power plant in the Guangdong province township of Dongzhoukeng. Newspaper reports said the official who ordered the shooting had been detained. Two...
By Arthur Spiegelman LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - He has led civil rights marches, scolded the nation's leaders and even run for president, but the Rev. Al Sharpton now wants to do something completely different -- star in his own television sitcom. Sharpton, in an interview with Reuters on Friday, confirmed a report in Daily Variety that he would soon be filming a pilot for a family show called "Al in the Family" that would revolve around his larger-than-life personality. "I don't know if...
By Malgorzata Rakowiec GDYNIA, Poland (Reuters) - Rough seas on Thursday forced Greenpeace activists to give up a blockade of a ship they say carried 25,000 tonnes of genetically modified (GMO) Argentinian soya to Poland. In part of a campaign for a wider ban on GMO crops, protestors tied themselves and a rubber dinghy to the ship's anchor chain after it moored, preventing it from docking. They were forced to call off the protest after five hours as the weather worsened in the Baltic...
PARIS (Reuters) - Urban violence has dropped to normal levels in France after three weeks of unrest in its run-down suburbs, police said on Thursday. Ninety-eight vehicles were set ablaze on Wednesday night, a sharp drop from the peak of the violence when about 1,400 vehicles were torched on the night of November 6. Police detained 33 people during the night. "The situation has returned to normal because about 100 vehicles are set on fire each night in France," a police spokesman...
By Sophie Louet PARIS (Reuters) - France's worst rioting in nearly 40 years seemed to be waning on Sunday, police said, though youths torched vehicles in the southwestern city of Toulouse. Cars set ablaze in France were down by a quarter on Saturday on the previous night and fears that violence would grip central Paris proved unfounded after rallies were banned in the capital. "Things could calm down very, very quickly," national police service chief Michel Gaudin told reporters in...
MANILA (Reuters) - Security personnel at a coal-fired power plant in the northern Philippines broke up a Greenpeace protest with clubs and stones, injuring four activists, the environmental group said on Thursday.Police detained a dozen other activists, charging them with "illegal trespassing" for forcing their way into the plant compound during a climate change protest in Masinloc town, about 150 km (95 miles) northwest of Manila.A local court freed them without bail after nearly 8...
PARIS -- France's government is policing cyberspace as well as rundown suburbs in the battle to end two weeks of rioting.Young rioters are using blog messages to incite violence and cellphones to organize attacks in guerrilla-like tactics they have copied from anti-globalisation protesters, security experts say.Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has diverted resources to monitoring blogs -- short for Web logs -- in an effort to anticipate the movements of the protesters, who have set fire...
By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the U.S. government to provide medical records on Guantanamo prisoners who are being force-fed while on a hunger strike and to notify their lawyers about forced feedings. U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler acted after lawyers representing about a dozen men held at the prison for foreign terrorism suspects at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, expressed urgent concern over their deteriorating...
By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The International Committee of the Red Cross expressed concern on Friday about the two-month-old hunger strike by Guantanamo Bay prisoners, some of whom are being force-fed, as the U.S. military said 26 were on strike but their lawyers insisted the figure exceeded 200. The strike that began on August 8 over conditions and lack of legal rights is the most widespread of a handful of such protests since the prison camp at the U.S. naval base at...
By Stephanie Nebehay GENEVA (Reuters) - The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said on Friday that prisoners were on hunger strike at the U.S. Guantanamo Bay prison camp and that the situation there was serious. But spokeswoman Antonella Notari declined to comment on Thursday's statement by a defense lawyer that the action involved 200 of 500 prisoners and that 21 were being force-fed. The humanitarian agency, which last visited the U.S. naval base in Cuba in late...
