This has also been expanded to include webpages and openly visible internet media when used as a form of protest.
On April 20, 2010, Deepwater Horizon, a drilling rig located in the Gulf of Mexico, exploded. The explosion killed 11 individuals who worked on the rig and resulted in an underwater oil leak which authorities were unable to plug for three months. The oil washed ashore across the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, threatening wildlife and local economy alike.
After over seven years of a harsh and bloody war between Algeria’s socialist National Liberation Front (FLN) and the French military, Algeria had finally claimed its independence from France in 1962. However, internal turmoil among the state’s leaders threatened to disrupt the country’s peace. At a FLN party congress in late May 1962, one of the leading FLN members, Ahmed Ben Bella, convinced the FLN to vote out the government-in-exile, the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA), and its leader Ben Youssef Ben Khedda.
Gibraltar is a small piece of land on the southwestern tip of Spain, yet has been the territory of Britain since the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht. Spain has been attempting to get Gibraltar back since then, causing tension between the two countries. Gibraltar wished to remain British.
The Brisbane tramways, located in Queensland, Australia, were owned by General Electric Company, a private British company. Joseph Stillman Badger, an American, was its manager. He refused to allow the formation of any industrial union among the company employees. In other parts of Australia, tramway employees in Melbourne and Adelaide faced similar opposition and they were forbidden to wear any sign of membership of the union. The higher authority claimed the wearing of badges by unionists would intimidate the non-badge-wearers.
Beginning in early 2007, foreign workers in the Northern Mariana Islands (mainly Saipan, the most populated of the islands) campaigned for the United States government to take control of the Islands' immigration policy. The Northern Mariana Islands are located in the Western Pacific, in the region of Japan and the Philippines.
The Kurdish people are the most populous ethnicity without their own nation-state in the world. The governments of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria have repeatedly disenfranchised and murdered Kurds since the end of World War One, when the Kurds were promised, and later denied, self-rule. In Turkey, where Kurds constitute 20% of the population, the ethnic Turk-dominated government long denied the existence of a Kurdish minority and has pursued an assimilationist agenda designed to quash Kurdish culture.
Throughout the 90s, Bolivia came under increasing pressure from the World Bank to privatize public goods in order to fulfill loan conditionality. In September 1999, in response to this pressure, the Bolivian government auctioned off the municipal water system ‘SEMAPA’ of Cochabamba, a city of 800,000 residents. When the auction drew only one bidder, the government signed water resources over in a 40-year concession to Aguas del Tunari, a foreign-led consortium of private investors dominated by the Bechtel Corporation.
The Klamath was one of the largest and most important rivers in the American northwest, running through Oregon and California. It was home to four Native American tribes and many fishermen and provided irrigation water for nearby farmers. Between 1902 and 1962, energy producing PacifiCorp constructed five dams on the Klamath for hydropower purposes. Although PacifiCorp has turned a consistent profit since then, the environmental damage caused by the dams has been enormous.
In Burkina Faso from December 1998 through September 2001, protesters demonstrated against the government’s supposed cover-up of journalist Norbert Zongo’s homicide. Prior to his death, Zongo, a prominent writer for an independent magazine, was known for his criticisms of the government with regards to its policy of impunity (that is, perpetrators of violent crimes are neither taken to court nor punished).
At its height, the Quebec General Strike in the spring of 1972 was the largest strike in North America’s history. The strike, which involved over 250,000 public and private service workers, was a very important moment in Quebecers’ self-determination and struggle for rights. Planning of the strike had been in motion since 1970, when Quebec’s three main union federations held joint meetings to discuss ways in which they could work together to address common struggles. At the time, many of Quebec’s working class felt disenchanted with and ignored by the government.
In the fall of 1964, student activists at the University of California at Berkeley set up information tables on campus and solicited donations for civil rights causes. However, according to existing rules at that time, fundraising for political parties was limited exclusively to the Democratic and Republican school clubs. On September 16, 1964, Dean of Students Katherine A.
On the island nation of Mauritius, three languages appear on the banknotes. Traditionally, the languages are English, Tamil, and Hindi - in that order. On October 18, 1998, the Central Bank of Mauritius released a new series of banknotes upon which the order of the latter two languages were reversed, with Hindi appearing before Tamil.
Jeffrey Deitch, the director of Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) commissioned Blu, an Italian street artist, to paint a mural on the Geffen Contemporary building as part of the “Art in the Streets” exhibit about graffiti, which was planned to open April 17, 2011. While Blu painted the mural on December 8, 2010, Deitch decided to remove the mural within mere hours after he started painting it, and the mural was completely whitewashed by the next day, Thursday December 9.
Late seminal gay artist David Wojnarowicz created video work “A Fire in My Belly” as an expression of his outrage at the 1980’s AIDS epidemic, his own AIDS diagnosis, and the death of his lover and mentor, Peter Hujar. Curator Jonathon Katz included “A Fire in My Belly” in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery show, Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, in Washington, DC.
In 1988 Burmese students led mass demonstrations against the oppressive military junta of Burma (the country now referred to as Myanmar). The result was 3,000 civilians dead after a governmental crackdown and a prevailing junta. Shortly after, as the “rallying symbol for the population,” pro-democracy leader Aung Sun Suu Kyi was confined to her house by the junta, not to be seen by the public for 12 out of the next 18 years.
The direct action campaign against nuclear testing in Amchitka Island began with an organization called the Society for Pollution and Environmental Control (SPEC), which grew from a group of ecologists, journalists, and activists in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. When the United States announced an underground test of a 1-megaton nuclear bomb on Amchitka Island, Alaska, SPEC began their protests.
The Virgin Islands is a group of islands between the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. The northeastern islands are known as the British Virgin Islands (BVI) while the southwestern islands are known as the Virgin Islands of the United States. Due to the natural beauty of the islands, developers and government officials have historically had an interest in strengthening the tourist industry.
On March 9, 2007, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf suspended Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry from his duties on the Court in response to Chaudhry’s challenges to his Presidency. Interpreted as an attempt to reduce the power and independence of the judicial branch, the Pakistani legal community organized immediately to reverse the decision. Lawyers from across the political spectrum immediately organized protests and rallies throughout the country.
In February 1931, in the face of an economic crisis, the Chilean Congress granted President Carlos Ibáñez Del Campo authority to enact any necessary measures to keep Chile from further depression. As the value of exports dropped and unemployment rose, Ibáñez increased taxes, stopped public works projects, and cut governmental wages. He also announced that he would maintain order with military force if necessary.
In October of 2007, the Japanese Ministry of Defense proposed a cut in the salaries of Japanese workers employed on United States Military installations. Japan was struggling under huge national debt and the Defense Ministry saw the abolition of a workers’ allowance as a way to save a significant amount of money. The Defense ministry would have been projected to save about 10 billion yen a year with the salary cuts. On the other side, the allowance made up about 10% of each worker’s salary.
When the United States proposed an expansion of its military base in the Pyeongtaek region of South Korea in 2001, it threatened to be the third time that the people of the region were to be displaced from their land. The people who lived in Pyeongtaek, primarily farmers, were first evicted when the Japanese occupied the region in World War II. Then they were forcibly displaced a second time in 1952, when the United States built its military base, Camp Humphreys.
In the early 1990s the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) was a confederation made up of six constituent republics: Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia. However, the ethnic groups from each of these regions were spread throughout the SFRY, which blurred the borders between the constituent republics and made politics in each region much more complicated. For instance, Bosnia-Herzegovina was 44% Bosnian Muslims, 31% Serbs, and 17% Croats. In order to provide federal representation to each constituent republic, the leadership
The Republic of Equatorial Guinea is a small country in Middle Africa that was a colony of Spain (Spanish Guinea) until 1968. Since a violent military coup in 1979, President Teodoro Obiang has ruled the country with the Democratic Party of Equatorial Guinea. In 2008, journalist Peter Maas called Obiang “Africa’s Worst Dictator” due to rampant corruption within the government and accusations from human rights groups of murder and torture.
In July 1977 Z.A Bhutto, the democratically elected president of Pakistan, was removed from power by the Pakistani military, which was at that point under the control of General Muhammad Zia-ul Haq. General Zia promised to hold an election within ninety days of seizing power, yet upon taking office he suspended the constitution and dissolved many of the country’s legislative bodies. Over the next years, Zia repeatedly postponed the promised national elections, leaving the country in the hands of a de-facto military dictatorship.
In late 1967 East Los Angeles housed a school system entrenched in racism. The Mexican American community had the highest high school dropout rate and lowest college attendance among any ethnic group. The poor facilities and constant underestimation of student capabilities by teachers created an atmosphere hostile to learning. The oppressive conditions coupled with the inability to make changes compelled students, activists, and teachers to meet and discuss the situation.
