A Bangladeshi opposition activist gestures to police as he challenges them to shoot him during a protest in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The protest was called by an alliance of 18 parties to denounce trials of several opposition politicians accused of mass killings and atrocities during Bangladesh’s 1971 independence war against Pakistan.
From Picture desk live: the best news pictures of the day
Photograph: A.M. Ahad/AP
A protester dressed as Che Guevara lights a flare as he takes part in an anti-austerity demonstration in Brussels, Belgium. Photograph: Eric Vidal/Reuters
Indian Sikh school students participate in a protest against the ban on wearing turban in public schools in France, in New Delhi, India.
Taken from picture desk: live, our team’s curating of the most newsworthy images of the day.
Movements that may appear to us in retrospect as a unified set of events are, in fact, irregular and scattered. Only afterwards do we see the underlying common institutional causes and movement passions that mark these events so we can name them, as the abolitionist movement, for example, or the labor movement or the civil rights movement. I think Occupy is likely to unfold in a similar way.
Francis Fox Piven on why it’s mistaken to write Occupy’s obituary this first anniversary: the lesson of history is that movements for justice are irrepressible, she claims in a comment piece for the Guardian.
Self-respect and dignity are values that characterise Togolese women, who were very active in the struggle for independence. And yet those same values are now being trampled by the political masters of Togo, who see vocal women as threats who can be abused at will. To go on a “sex strike” is therefore a way to freely vote against dictatorship, in the secrecy of one’s bedroom. The Let’s Save Togo Women’s Collective on why a sex strike is Togolese women’s best weapon against dictatorship (via Comment is Free)
Photograph: Claudio Santana/AFP/Getty Images
Santiago, Chile: students march with giant pencils during a protest to demand improvements in the quality of public education
In April last year Ahmad Mohammad left his village in northern Syria filled with its pomegranate trees, figs, and goats, and moved to Lebanon. He came back five months later with a certificate in mobile phone maintenance – a weapon more powerful than Bashar al-Assad’s helicopters and tanks.
While he was away Mohammad learned how to upload videos to YouTube – a website banned by the Syrian regime. “Nobody in Syria knew how to do this,” he said.
From ‘Syria’s video activists give revolution the upper hand in media war’
A selection of stories, photos, quotes, video and audio from guardian.co.uk, curated by James Walsh, Hannah Waldram, Carmen Fishwick and the Guardian's editorial team. We are also editors of the news tag.
“I’ll never forget the day Marilyn and I were walking around New York City, just having a...
