Protest

washington -- Mitt Romney twice emphasized his unique business background when he and eight other Republican presidential candidates faced off in a debate last week in Iowa. "I've spent the last, as I've told you, 25 years in the private sector," former Massachusetts Gov. Romney declared at one point. "I understand why jobs come and why jobs go. I've done business in 20 countries."

Dolores Huerta runs on righteous ferocity the way cars run on gasoline. The woman who co-founded the United Farm Workers union 50 years ago with Cesar Chavez has harried, prodded, hectored, rallied and protested. She's been arrested more than a score of times, and once, picketing in San Francisco, she was beaten so badly by a police officer that her spleen was ruptured. You'd be hard-pressed to tell, the way she bounces around the Central Valley, a woman on many missions. So, can she stand still next week in Washington long enough for President Obama to present her with the Medal of Freedom, along with honorees such as Toni Morrison, John Glenn and Bob Dylan?

On summer nights in the mid-1960s, while black-and-white television crackled elsewhere in his Staten Island home with news of Southern violence and Vietnam, Bobby Lasnik would stretch out in his bedroom to let the righteous soundtrack of the civil rights movement waft into his impressionable teenage soul. Tuned in to WBAI-FM, coming across the water from Manhattan, he heard baleful laments about injustice that he would carry with him for a lifetime. "Suddenly there was someone speaking a certain kind of truth to you. You'd say, 'Wow!

Re "Silencing Sebelius," Editorial, May 18 Last month, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishopscondemned Rep. Paul D. Ryan's (R-Wis.) budget as contrary to Roman Catholic social doctrine. Also, dozens of faculty members at Georgetown University issued an open letter protesting Ryan's speech at the school. Yet The Times did not editorialize on this attempt to "silence" Ryan. At issue here is not the silencing of Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, but a protest against a Catholic institution providing a forum to a Catholic who has publicly challenged the doctrines of her own faith.

More than 200 people, including about two dozen topless women, marched on the Venice Beach boardwalk Sunday afternoon to protest state laws that bar women from going bare-chested in public. Participants obtained a permit in advance and agreed to obey the law by covering their nipples with red tape, Band-Aids and other makeshift pasties. Los Angeles police hovered at the periphery as the group marched nearly a mile from Navy Court to Windward Avenue on Sunday afternoon, but did not arrest anyone for indecent exposure, a misdemeanor.

There were rock stars and rappers, and there were nurses to take blood donations. Music boomed off the sides of skyscrapers for blocks around. In between patriotism-tinged performances, earnest announcers climbed onto a stage in a square, under a sign that read "Saving Lives," and told hundreds of cheering youths about all the good things that would be done with the donated blood. Monday was Generation Day in Moscow, an event of vague origin, organized by networks of pro-Kremlin youth groups apparently to drown out another event.

Desperate? Clever? Too little, too late? It's hard to know what to make of the news that Research in Motion, the company behind BlackBerry, has taken credit for the "WAKE UP!" "protest" that took place outside an Apple store in Sydney, Australia, last week. "We can confirm that the Australian 'Wake Up' campaign, which involves a series of experiential activities taking place across Sydney and Melbourne, was created by RIM Australia," the company told The Age. Even before it was revealed who was behind the "protest," caught on video by Australian video blogger Nate Burr and viewed around the world, it was clear that it was a marketing stunt.

In a protest reminiscent of those surrounding the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida, marchers in New York City held a demonstration to demand the arrest of a New York police officer for fatally shooting an unarmed teenager after chasing him into his family's apartment. The march Thursday night in the Bronx, where 18-year-old Ramarley Graham lived, was the latest rally in what protesters say will be a relentless campaign on behalf of the teenager. "We will get justice, because I'm not going to stop.

In what has been billed as “the largest secular event in world history,” athiests will gather in Washington D.C. today to rally in support of secularism.  The event, known as the Reason Rally, also will feature a collision of estranged family members. Nate Phelps, the atheist son of Westboro Baptist Church Pastor Fred Phelps, will address the crowd as his father's church pickets the event in protest. The Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., has become infamous for using military funerals as a backdrop to promote an anti-gay, anti-military message.

Under a broiling desert sun, tens of thousands of protesters on Saturday slowly marched five miles to the state Capitol to rally against Arizona's controversial new immigration law. There was no official crowd estimate, but the march was by far the biggest demonstration since Gov. Jan Brewer signed SB 1070 into law on April 23. The law makes it a state crime to lack immigration papers and requires police to determine the status of people they...

MOSCOW - Stiff new penalties aimed at opposition protesters were given preliminary approval Tuesday by Russian lawmakers loyal to President Vladimir Putin, the target of mass rallies and demonstrations before his March election victory. The bill, which opposition parliament members termed draconian and protested by threatening to file out of a legislative session, calls for fines of up to $50,000 and up to 200 hours of community service for organizers of rallies and demonstrations that grow violent or exceed the approved number of participants.

Re "Activist born on a church doorstep," Column One, May 17 C. Roy McMillan shows up almost every day at the last abortion clinic in Mississippi. He taunts anyone entering the clinic. What we have is another self-righteous activist who harasses women already making a tough decision - a decision that is theirs and theirs alone. A decision based on what is best for everyone involved. A decision that he has no right to interfere with. McMillan doesn't realize that he is probably the best advertisement for the pro-choice movement.

MOSCOW — Russian riot police cleared a Moscow park early Wednesday of a weeklong encampment considered a local version of the Occupy movement, and hours later clashed with antigovernment protesters outside a Stalinist skyscraper in a different part of downtown. The dispersal of several dozen protesters at the park encampment, called Occupy Abai, preceded a nighttime confrontation at Kudrinskaya Square, where several hundred protesters had gathered to oppose President Vladimir Putin.

Patricia McIntosh and her fellow La Puente residents have seen more than their fair share of city turmoil in recent years: Government officials accused of sexual harassment and excessive travel expenses. The threatened loss of municipal insurance. But when McIntosh got wind of a proposal to change the name of her beloved San Gabriel Valley city, the 82-year-old president of the La Puente Valley Historical Society had to speak out. "That's ludicrous," she said. "It'd be like coming in and saying we'd like to change the name of California.

A new report finds Occupy Los Angeles cost city taxpayers nearly $5 million, with the bulk of the money spent on policing the protest. The report presented Friday by City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana says the Los Angeles Police Department spent $1.3 million monitoring protesters during the course of their two-month demonstration outside City Hall, and another $1.3 million evicting them. An additional $500,000 was spent by the Office of Public Safety, whose security officers protect city property, according to the report.

LANSING, Mich. - Mitt Romney is making a play for his native Michigan, which last voted for a Republican for president nearly a quarter of a century ago. His task is made infinitely more difficult because of his opposition to the auto bailouts that many credit with saving the industry, a fact that was illustrated when he took the stage here Tuesday, not far from a GM plant. As protesters outside the Lansing Community College auditorium where he appeared criticized Romney's opposition to the bailouts, the presumptive GOP nominee was introduced by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican who has called the $80-billion federal loans to GM and Chrysler successful.

Tens of thousands of Muscovites on Sunday linked hands along a 10-mile stretch of roadway in the capital in the latest mass protest against Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who is expected to win the March 4 presidential election. People of all ages participated in the peaceful protest, as thousands of passing motorists slowed their vehicles and honked to welcome them. Snow fell as cars, many of them bearing white ribbons, balloons, stickers and flowers, made their way along the protest route.

A small group of demonstrators staged a silent protest during Mitt Romney's speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday. Security guards for the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, where the annual gathering of conservatives is being held, quickly threw the protesters out. Joe Gallant, 22, was among the group. Gallant said the protesters moved to the front of an overflow room where attendees were watching Romney's speech, taped their mouths, and revealed T-shirts that read, “If money is speech, then poverty is silence.” “We were just trying to get our point across that there is too much money in politics,” Gallant said.

BEIRUT - More than a year after the uprising began, only 50 people were still around to protest in a Syrian town of burned buildings and pockmarked storefronts. But for the residents of Anadan who came together to call for freedom and dignity on the morningSyria'scease-fire began last month, it was as though the revolution had begun again. "We were willing to come out like it was our first day," said Abu Ghaith, an activist in the town near Aleppo that rebels seized and lost again to government forces.