Protest

Repairs to the aging Sagamore Bridge during the spring have slowed traffic leaving Cape Cod to a crawl most nights and backed it up for miles on Sundays, culminating in a Mother's Day morass when the stalled line of cars stretched past multiple exits on Route 6 and triggered all-day gridlock on nearby Route 6A. "Whoever conceived of this plan should be fired," said Anne Kilguss, a Boston social worker and psychotherapist with a second home in...

Unionized nurses at Boston Medical Center are protesting a new round of job cuts, following a hospital decision to shut down an acute-injury rehabilitation unit on July 1. Overall, the Boston University teaching hospital will eliminate nearly 40 positions, including 31 full-time equivalent positions at the rehab unit and about nine others from closing beds and converting double rooms to single rooms at the hospital's Newton Pavilion. With more than 300 open positions at the hospital, however, Boston Medical Center officials said many of the nurses and therapists whose jobs are...

For activists, the NATO summit in Chicago served as one big stage from which to air a broad range of grievances — not just the war in Afghanistan or other actions of the 63-year-old military alliance. In their effort to maximize turnout, organizers were quick to welcome a wide variety of interests, including Occupy protesters, immigration groups, the nation's largest nurses union and others. But after a week of protests and rallies, the all-inclusive mindset raised questions about the focus of some of the nation's major protest movements.

Dozens of anti-government protesters were detained by police Friday in this former Soviet nation as it prepares to host the finals of the Eurovision song contest. Around 25 people were dragged away by police as they gathered at a spot close to where the contest finals are to be held over the weekend in the capital, Baku. Police grabbed the scattered demonstrators as they chanted the word "freedom" and stuffed them into waiting buses. One detainee stuck his fists out of a bus window and kept chanting.

ATHENS - A stun grenade exploded in the hand of a Greek riot policeman, severing a finger. Police and demonstrators ceased combat and scoured the debris-strewn street, uniting in a frantic search for the missing digit. They found it. The finger was rushed off in a wet towel to a hospital, where doctors reattached it to the injured man. The brief scene of solidarity, witnessed by an Associated Press photographer, was one of many twists in a wild drama on the stage of central Athens this week.

IT WAS silly enough to read about the so-called library at Occupy Boston - if the works of Howard Zinn and Che Guevara can be said to constitute a library ("Occupy Boston embraces its library," G section, Nov. 22). Now the Globe would have us believe that a gathering that is 50 percent unemployed, 75 percent male, and 100 percent revolutionary is "disparate" ("At Occupy, disparate group finds harmony in protest," Page A1, Nov. 25). This group of layabouts, malcontents, and outright criminals is dispiriting, not disparate.

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras - The coup-installed president of Honduras backed down yesterday from an escalating standoff with protesters and suggested he would restore civil liberties and reopen dissident television and radio stations by the end of the week. Riot police ringed supporters of the ousted president, Manuel Zelaya, who gathered for a large-scale protest march, setting off a daylong standoff. The government of the interim president, Roberto Micheletti, declared the march illegal, sent soldiers to silence dissident broadcasters, and suspended civil liberties for 45...

The tent city occupation of Dewey Square left behind a battered patch of earth as black as a hole, stark and empty, with the sense that something had suddenly been torn out. Before dawn yesterday, with dozens of arrests but also remarkable calm, it was. For some 72 days, the Occupy Boston encampment drew populist dreamers, anticorporate crusaders, and street-weary homeless people to the site near South Station. It also drew tourists, who witnessed a small-scale pilot study in self-government and gawked at an eyesore of tents and tarps staked pell-mell in...

MONTPELIER -- Hundreds of antiwar protesters marched to the Vermont State House yesterday to highlight their opposition to the US war in Iraq and the occupation of that country. Many carried signs with themes such as "no blood for oil" or "Stop Bush. " While the rally was intended as an antiwar protest, it was also used by many as a way to speak against other aspects of US foreign and domestic policy. Many criticized US policy in Israel, or what some feel is a flawed voting system that keeps people from participating.

MOSCOW - Russian police detained about 100 people protesting Sunday outside a television station loyal to the Kremlin after it aired a documentary-style program that portrayed the opposition as paid agents of the United States. The NTV program "Anatomy of a Protest" suggested that opposition leaders were intent on overthrowing the government, and that migrant workers and others were being paid to attend recent protests against Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. The program, which aired Thursday, triggered a flood of angry tweets and comments on social networking websites.

Syrian forces fired tear gas and live ammunition to disperse thousands of protesters calling for President Bashar Assad's ouster Friday, killing two people in the northern city of Aleppo as the regime struggles to vanquish the 15-month-old conflict, opposition groups said. Crackdowns on protests, as well as other government and rebel attacks, are routine despite the deployment of more than 250 U.N. observers who have fanned out around Syria to monitor a cease-fire brokered by international envoy by Kofi Annan.

Student groups in Quebec have filed a legal motion against a provincial law aimed at ending more than three months of protests over proposed tuition hikes. Lawyers for the students and other groups filed the motion Friday in a Montreal courtroom Friday. More than 150,000 students in universities across Quebec have been on strike since February to protest the proposed tuition raise. Street protests have ended in clashes with police and more than 2,500 students have been arrested.

Lady Gaga's manager says the pop diva has no plans to tone down her act, even if that prevents her from performing in some countries on her Asian tour. The Straits Times newspaper of Singapore reported Friday that Troy Carter said Lady Gaga "plays the show as it is," and that she is not "provocative for the sake of being provocative. " Indonesian police denied a permit for her sold-out show in Jakarta after Islamic hard-liners threatened violence, saying her sexy clothes and dance moves could corrupt youth.

Rogue police officers in Papua New Guinea blockaded Parliament for several hours on Friday, a day after Prime Minister Peter O'Neill's government leveled sedition charges against the country's chief justice. Tensions between O'Neill and his opponents have been heightened since Monday, when the Supreme Court ruled that his ousted predecessor, Sir Michael Somare, is the rightful ruler of the South Pacific island nation. The situation outside Parliament House became especially tense when about 40 heavily armed police officers arrived at a staging area around the...

Fourteen activists are due back in court July 11 to face trespassing charges in connection with a demonstration they held at the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth on May 20. Members of a group called Cape Downwinders were scheduled to picket between 1 and 3 p.m. at a designated area at the site, and at approximately 1:50 p.m., some of them "crossed the line" and began walking onto another part of the property, according to Plymouth police...

Thousands of university students marched through central Mexico City on Wednesday to protest media coverage that they say favors the candidate of the former ruling party in upcoming presidential elections. The students say newspapers and television stations are tilting their coverage toward Enrique Pena Nieto, who is leading polls by double digits ahead of the July 1 vote. Many of the students were from the elite Iberoamerican University, where a May 11 appearance by Pena Nieto set off a rare wave of protests by young people against a return to the presidency of the...

WASHINGTON - Fordham University's plan to give an award to Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has drawn criticism from alumni and the leader of the Catholic Church in New York over Breyer's support for abortion rights. Cardinal Edward Egan has spoken to the Catholic university's leaders to ensure "that a mistake of this sort will not happen again," said New York Archdiocese spokesman Joseph Zwilling. More than 1,100 Fordham alumni and others have signed a petition calling for the award to be revoked, according to the Cardinal Newman Society, a conservative Catholic group based in Manassas,...

CHICAGO - The sight of Chicago police raising billy clubs against demonstrators was the kind of image that has dogged the city's police force longer than most of those who clashed with protesters have been alive. But after Sunday's clash during the NATO summit played out on television, virtually no one was talking about a "police riot," as they did in 1968 when baton-wielding officers waded into crowds of demonstrators during the Democratic National Convention. Nor was there the kind of criticism that was leveled at the Seattle police after a violence-plagued 1999 international summit.

A half dozen disabled activists shackled their wheelchairs together Monday in front of the State House - halting traffic on Beacon Street by acting as a human barricade - to protest transit fare hikes that are scheduled to take effect in July. The 30-minute standoff created a midday spectacle but ended without any arrests or violence after the protesters agreed to leave, moments after police in a van pulled within a few feet of their chairs, threatening to remove them forcibly.