A six-metre-high inflatable balloon depicting Donald Trump as a snarling baby flew in Parliament Square, London, on Tuesday before what is expected to be one of the city's largest protests against a foreign leader
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Tank Man: what happened at Tiananmen Square? – video explainer
Thirty years ago, a Chinese man, carrying his shopping, stood in front of a column of tanks from the People’s Liberation Army in Tiananmen Square, Beijing. Tank Man, as he became known, became an iconic image from the protests. His stand was the culmination of weeks of clashes between Chinese pro-democracy protesters and the government, during which thousands of people are thought to have been killed
• Beijing falls silent as tight security surrounds Tiananmen Square anniversary
Continue reading...Sudan: opposition rejects army’s plan for snap elections
Military council called fresh elections after deadly crackdown on protest sit-in on Monday
Democracy campaigners in Sudan have rejected a plan by military authorities to hold elections within nine months, one day after heavily armed paramilitaries attacked a protest camp in the capital, Khartoum.
More than 35 people are thought to have been killed and several hundred injured at the sit-in, which had been at the centre of a campaign to bring democratic reform to Sudan. The death toll is expected to rise.
Continue reading...Sudan paramilitaries raped and assaulted protesters and medics
Witnesses describe attacks in Khartoum during deadly assault on pro-democracy sit-in
Paramilitaries who killed 35 people when they attacked pro-democracy protesters in Khartoum on Monday also committed multiple sexual assaults, beat up medical staff and volunteers at clinics, looted and destroyed property in hospitals and threatened doctors and medical workers with reprisals if they provided care to the wounded, witnesses have said.
Hundreds were injured in the attack on a sit-in in the centre of the Sudanese capital and in clashes afterwards as the paramilitaries, from the feared Rapid Support Forces (RSF) spread through the city to quell sporadic unrest.
Continue reading...Beijing falls silent as tight security surrounds Tiananmen Square anniversary
Thirty years after bloody crackdown in China, visitors have IDs checked and journalists are warned against taking pictures
China has been marking 30 years since its deadly crackdown on student demonstrators in Beijing with silence and extra security measures.
The government has worked to suppress discussion of one of the darkest chapters in its history, when Beijing deployed tanks and troops to put down a countrywide movement calling for democratic reforms.
Continue reading...Hundreds of opposition members arrested in Cameroon
Security forces take 351 into custody after protesters call for release of their party leader
Hundreds of members of Cameroon’s main opposition party are being held in custody after the country’s security forces carried out mass arrests during a series of anti-government protests over the weekend.
Two people were injured and 351 arrested on Saturday in four regions of the central African country in protests against its octogenarian president, Paul Biya, and his government. Several senior opposition leaders were among those arrested. Only a handful of people have been released.
Continue reading...China continues to deny Tiananmen, but we won’t let the world forget | Rowena Xiaoqing He
On the 30th anniversary of the massacre, commemorations to those who were killed will show the Chinese government we will not be silenced
He was just a kid, but he cried like an old man in despair.” Liane was trying hard to steady her emotions when she described to me how she had attempted to hold back a young boy whose unarmed brother had been shot by soldiers during the 1989 Tiananmen massacre.
Liane was a student from Hong Kong when the 1989 Tiananmen movement erupted and she went to Beijing to support the demonstrations. On the night of 3 June, when 200,000 soldiers equipped with tanks and AK-47s were deployed against unarmed civilians, she was outside the Museum of the Chinese Revolution on the north-east corner of Tiananmen Square. She fainted after she failed to stop the young boy from dashing toward the soldiers, and was carried away covered with blood.
Continue reading...Rebecca Solnit: ‘Every protest shifts the world’s balance’
Two hundred years after the Peterloo massacre, which led to the founding of the Manchester Guardian, protest is shaping our political moment. Where do we go from here?
Scale it up and it’s revolution; scale it down and it’s individual non-cooperation that may be seen as nothing more than obstinacy or malingering or not seen at all. What we call protest identifies one aspect of popular power and resistance, a force so woven into history and everyday life that you miss a lot of its impact if you focus only on groups of people taking stands in public places. But people taking such stands have changed the world over and over, toppled regimes, won rights, terrified tyrants, stopped pipelines and deforestation and dams. They go far further back than the Peterloo protests and massacre 200 years ago, to the great revolutions of France and then of Haiti against France and back before that to peasant uprisings and indigenous resistance in Africa and the Americas to colonisation and enslavement and to countless acts of resistance on all scales that were never recorded.
They will go far forward from this moment. And at this moment, with organisations addressing the climate crisis, reinvigorated feminism in many parts of the world, antiracist and human rights campaigns focused on specific groups and issues, protest is a force running through everything – and running against a lot of things, since this is also an age of authoritarianism and a consolidation of wealth among a global superelite.
Continue reading...Protesters take to Brazil’s streets – in pictures
Tens of thousands of students, academics and teachers have marched throughout the vast South American country in protest against ultraconservative president Jair Bolsonaro’s cuts to education, including moves to dramatically reduce funding for federal universities
Continue reading...Led by Donkeys show their faces at last: ‘No one knew it was us’
The four men behind the nationwide Brexit billboard phenomenon finally reveal their identities – in the pub where it all began
The Birdcage pub in Stoke Newington, north London, seems an unlikely birthplace for a rebellion. On a midweek afternoon, the bar is almost empty. Spring sunshine streams through the windows; Spandau Ballet provide a gentle soundtrack; black-hatted men from the local ultra-Orthodox Jewish community pass by outside.
The only customers are four men sitting at a table in an alcove. It was at this spot, more than five months ago, that this group of friends came up with an idea born from their collective despair over the “lies, lunacy and hypocrisy” of the Brexit process.
Continue reading...China wants us to forget the horrors of Tiananmen as it rewrites its history | Louisa Lim and Ilaria Maria Sala
The state is enforcing a collective amnesia about not only recent political events but those that happened thousands of years ago
Remembering the deaths of 4 June 1989 is no neutral task. It is a civic duty, a burden and an act of resistance in countering a state-level lie that risks spreading far beyond China’s borders.
On that day the Communist party sent tanks to clear protesters from Tiananmen Square in the centre of Beijing, killing hundreds of people, maybe more than a thousand. In the intervening years, China has systematically erased the evidence and memory of this violent suppression using its increasingly hi-tech apparatus of censorship and control.
Continue reading...Germany’s AfD turns on Greta Thunberg as it embraces climate denial
Rightwing populists to launch attack on climate science in vote drive before EU elections
Germany’s rightwing populists are embracing climate change denial as the latest topic with which to boost their electoral support, teaming up with scientists who claim hysteria is driving the global warming debate and ridiculing the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg as “mentally challenged” and a fraud.
The Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD) is expected to launch its biggest attack yet on mainstream climate science at a symposium in parliament on Tuesday supported by a prominent climate change denial body linked by researchers to prominent conservative groups in the US.
Continue reading...Alyssa Milano calls for sex strike as protest over Republican abortion laws
- Actor provokes storm with call to regain ‘bodily autonomy’
- GOP-held legislatures in quest to overturn Roe v Wade
The actor Alyssa Milano ignited a social media storm with a call for women to join her in a sex strike, to protest against strict abortion laws passed by Republican-controlled state legislatures.
Related: Abortion: judge strikes down Kentucky restriction but governor to appeal
Continue reading...Thousands march in Cardiff calling for Welsh independence
Demonstrators say Brexit and austerity have increased support for leaving the UK
Thousands have demonstrated in Cardiff to call for an independent Wales in what organisers said was the first such march in Welsh history.
Some protesters said they had been lifelong supporters of independence, while others said they were converted by Brexit and austerity. A recent poll for ITV Wales showed that 12% of people support self-government.
Continue reading...Pakistani campaigner says he could be killed if UK deports him
Azeem Wazir left Pakistan in 2015 over involvement in protest against blasphemy laws
A Christian man who has been living in Bristol for four years says he is at risk of being killed if he is deported to Pakistan after protesting against the country’s draconian blasphemy laws.
Azeem Wazir is being held in Colnbrook immigration removal centre near London, and may be deported as soon as Friday following his arrest last week.
Continue reading...Paris hospital attacked by May Day protesters, say officials
Staff say they stopped attempt to enter intensive care, but intruders smashed computers
French officials say medical staff narrowly averted “a catastrophe” after May Day demonstrators reportedly stormed a Paris hospital and attempted to force their way into an intensive care unit.
About 50 protesters – some wearing gilets jaunes (yellow vests) and others with masks – entered the hospital after the admission of a riot police officer who was hit in the face by a paving stone towards the end of a traditional union-led 1 May march.
Continue reading...Clashes as May Day protesters march in cities across Europe
Worst violence occurs in Paris but trouble also flares in Berlin, Gothenburg and St Petersburg
Police and protesters have clashed, sometimes violently, in cities across Europe as tens of thousands of trade unionists, anti-capitalists and other demonstrators marched in traditional May Day rallies.
The worst confrontations were in Paris, where riot police fired teargas and stingball grenades as a 40,000-strong crowd, included gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protesters and an estimated 2,000 masked and hooded “black bloc” activists, marched from Montparnasse station to Place d’Italie.
Continue reading...May Day: teargas and arrests in protests across Europe – video report
Police and protesters have clashed in cities across Europe as tens of thousands of trade unionists, anti-capitalists and other demonstrators march in traditional May Day rallies. The worst confrontations were in Paris, where riot police fired teargas and stingball grenades as a 40,000-strong crowd marched from Montparnasse station to Place d'Italie
Continue reading...National Guard armoured vehicle drives into protesters in Venezuela – video
Hundreds of demonstrators in Caracas have confronted military vehicles on a road outside La Carlota airbase. One of the vehicles fired a water cannon at protesters crowded around it. At one point, the vehicle accelerated over a median barrier and appeared to hit demonstrators
- Venezuela opposition leader claims coup is under way – live news
- Venezuela: Guaidó supporters flock to military base in new bid to oust Maduro
- US declares support for Venezuela coup attempt
Unrest in Caracas – in pictures
The Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó took to the streets with activist Leopoldo López and a small contingent of heavily armed soldiers early on Tuesday in a call for the military to rise up and oust the socialist leader, Nicolás Maduro. Events started when Guaidó appeared in an early morning video surrounded by heavily armed soldiers backed by armoured vehicles. Guaidó said soldiers who had taken to the streets were protecting Venezuela’s constitution. Information minister Jorge Rodríguez said on Twitter that Maduro’s government was confronting a small ‘coup attempt’ led by military ‘traitors’ backed by rightwing opponents
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