Hunger Strike

More than 400 North Koreans being held in a Thai immigration facility have launched a hunger strike, demanding that they be sent to South Korea, Thai police and an activist group said. Thai immigration police Lt. Col. Pricha Daengsirirat said South Korean diplomats came to help negotiate with the refugees at the detention center in Bangkok, the capital. The officer said delays in the resettlement were not the fault of Thai authorities.

Three Irish nationalist prisoners ended a monthlong hunger strike in Northern Ireland, officials said. The three inmates in Maze prison near Belfast accepted food after one said he was told that the appeal of his murder conviction will be heard, according to a member of the British Parliament who met with the prisoners. Ulster officials said no concessions were granted to the members of the Irish National Liberation Army, a splinter group of the outlawed Irish Republican Army.

A Santa Monica environmental activist remained hospitalized Thursday after collapsing this week at the end of a 26-day hunger strike protesting the giant Playa Vista development. Jerry Rubin, director of the Los Angeles Alliance for Survival, was rushed to Saint John's Hospital and Health Center in Santa Monica on Tuesday night suffering from starvation and dehydration. Doctors placed him on intravenous fluids and ordered him to drink some juice.

Two additional hunger strikers starved to death, bringing to 38 the number of deaths in a protest by leftist militants against Turkey's new high-security prisons. Zeynep Arikan, 33, died in a house in an Istanbul suburb where about 10 other militants are also fasting, the prisoner support group Ozgur Tayad said. Ali Riza Demir, 27, another hunger striker, died hours later. Both had consumed only sugared or salted water for months.

A group of 25 people protesting the actions of the South Korean government ended a four-day hunger strike Wednesday at a South-Central Los Angeles church. The demonstrators, who ranged from students and businessmen to ministers and a 12-year-old girl, began their fast Sunday to coincide with a hunger strike begun a day earlier by a young South Korean woman. The woman, a 20-year-old college student named Im Suk Yong, was denied permission to return to her country after visiting North Korea.

August Spivey, a Native American activist of Newport Beach, began a hunger strike Wednesday to protest a Bowers Museum program honoring black soldiers who fought the Indians. After eating two eggs over easy, potatoes and rye bread--his last meal for perhaps two weeks--Spivey, a 53-year-old Cherokee, stood outside the Santa Ana museum with a sign hanging from his neck: "Hunger Strike--Buffalo Soldiers Voluntarily Participated in Holocaust of Indians."

An American journalist convicted by Iran of spying for the U.S. has gone on a hunger strike to protest her eight-year prison sentence, her father said Saturday. Reza Saberi said his daughter, Roxana, 31, began her hunger strike in Tehran's Evin Prison on Tuesday. She was sentenced last weekend after a one-day trial in which she was found guilty of charges that she had used her role as a reporter to spy for U.S. intelligence services.

Irom Sharmila's mother has a simple dream: sitting down to a meal with her daughter. Irom hasn't willingly ingested food or water for 11 years, in protest of a law granting legal immunity to the armed forces for human rights abuses. As the anniversary of her hunger strike nears, her mother imagines what might be. "I'm still waiting for her to come home," said Shakhi Devi, 78, holding an album of her daughter's photos. She rarely visits the 39-year-old, the world's longest-serving hunger striker, because it's too painful.

The Rev. Allan Boesak, a prominent anti-apartheid leader, said today he has begun an indefinite fast in solidarity with black detainees staging a hunger strike to demand their freedom.