Until today. For one day only, the Capitol has been consumed by what feels a bit like a single-night stand reunion tour for a band that had one good album that mostly gets played for nostalgic reasons today. The event was billed as "the largest demonstration of Tea Party support since 2010," and while it may have succeeded on that count, it also underscores how much the movement has slipped since that year of its glory.

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Unrelenting in their determination to stay in the streets, huge crowds have also gathered day after day in Ankara and Izmir as well as in other smaller cities. Three demonstrators have died and four others are currently in critical condition. This is in addition to more than 6000 injured people, including 10 who have lost eyes. The uprising has dominated the national discourse for more than two weeks as the country goes through the largest and longest urban popular revolt it has ever seen. It is now being regarded as a momentous political awakening for a whole generation.

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I found the lady in the red dress a problematic icon for the unfolding events in Gezi Park. Not because she was doing anything wrong. Nor was the scene unrepresentative. With the benefit of hindsight her unresisting pose, arms by her side against an ostensibly unprovoked attack by a policeman seems perfectly to have foretold the waves of violence visited on unarmed protesters on the streets of Turkey’s cities in the days since. What troubled me was not the photograph itself but the caption beneath it, which would have its readers believe this was a fight all about trees. This compelling image seemed to be having much success in disseminating the tree narrative. By the 29th of May, the photo was everywhere. In the best tradition of Turkish churnalism, those few who reported the incident reprinted Reuters’ incidental analysis wholesale, even after the protests had plainly grown beyond the issue of the park’s redevelopment.

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"Local and national groups will ask the investment firm to pledge to oppose the sale of the Tribune Company’s nine daily newspapers to the Koch brothers," the coalition's press release read. Activists fear that a Koch takeover of papers like the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune could give the oil billionaires yet another platform from which to further inject their conservative ideology into national discourse.

Rallies are taking place in venues including outside the Los Angeles Times headquarters in L.A.

Although for some months rumor buzz has been nearing fever pitch about the Koch takeover, Koch Industries has stated, "it is our long-standing policy not to comment on deals or rumors of deals we may or may not be exploring."

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The theatrical protest, organized by Planned Parenthood of Central North Carolina, wasn't the first time activists have employed a bit of razzle dazzle to draw attention to an issue and get people talking.

Below, a roundup of five protests that show how, sometimes, a little flare can make a big difference.

Mad, Mad Women

As noted above, the North Carolina group made a splash on Tuesday, wearing dapper vintage outfits to make their point that access to birth control is basic health care. The Republican-controlled judicial committee went on to approve the measure, which now heads for a full vote in the General Assembly, but the Mad Women caused a social media stir and brought national attention to a bill that may have otherwise flown under the radar, as Laura Basset reported for the Huffington Post:

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In the final reading of the proposal on Tuesday, the National Assembly voted 331 to 225 to adopt the bill. Soon after, anti-gay marriage protestors in Paris began to clash with riot police stationed in the area.

As reported by the Local:

Despite the requests of organizers that marchers disperse peacefully, a hard core group of around 500 refused to leave the Invalides.

Their anger soon boiled over as bottles and firecrackers were hurled at the riot police, who had blocked off a street leading to the parliament.

One officer was taken to hospital with a head wound after being hit by a brick. “The clashes were extremely violent,” one officer told French media.

Police, who responded with tear gas, made 12 arrests. The protesters also turned their ire on journalists in the vicinity, shouting “scumbags" and “collaborators” at the members of the press. At one point a mob of masked protesters chased a group of journalists down the street and a photographer from AFP was sprayed with tear gas.

Interior Minister Manuel Valls later said those arrested were linked to far-right organizations.

There were also violent clashes in the city of Lyon, where anti-gay marriage protesters took to the streets to express their anger. Police said they had made 44 arrests.

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Via the Guardian:

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To rally greater awareness and express anger at the CFAA and the proposed HR 11 bill, Anonymous Wednesday are leading a so-called "Twitter storm" -- an online protest in which Twitter users are invited to use hashtags and themed tweets in unison. The cyber-demonstration, scheduled for 5 p.m. EST, asks Twitter users to post messages decrying the CFAA with the hastag #ReformCFAA (which protest participators aim to get trending). In a Pastebin post announcing the Twitter storm, Anonymous stated, "Beginning Wednesday April 3rd we will attempt to influence the decision makers on the House Judicial Committee the strengthening the provisions of the CFAA is not what we the people want."

Anonymous also posted a number of sample Tweets that users can repost, including:

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The heavily redacted 252 pages of documents add to findings already made by the PCJF about coordination and intelligence monitoring by the DHS, the FBI, the NYPD and other law enforcement agencies and the private sector of Occupy and related protests.

"Taken together, the two sets of documents paint a disturbing picture of federal law enforcement agencies using their vast power in a systematic effort to surveil and disrupt peaceful demonstrations. The federal agencies’ actions were not because Occupy represented a 'terrorist threat' or a 'criminal threat' but rather because it posed a significant grassroots political challenge to the status quo,” stated Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the PCJF.

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During a City Council hearing earlier that day Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said, "There's nothing to indicate that [Kimani Gray's] shooting, at this time, was outside the guidelines."

Councilman Jumaane Williams, whose district includes East Flatbush, responded to the police chief that the demonstrations on Monday night were not just about Gray's death, but about years of frustration with police."People are angry," he said according to NY1. "I feel it. I hear it. I know it. And it sucks when you are trying to tell the people who can actually do something about it, and they're refusing to listen."

Original post: There was a debate on Twitter Monday night as to whether a riot or a protest was going on in Brooklyn. Although questions of when an event gets labeled a "riot" or a "protest" are interesting (is race a factor? window-breaking? the presence of riot cops?), there are no determinate answers, and what's more important, and certain, is this: Anger at the NYPD following the fatal shooting of another teenager is once again boiling over and manifesting in New York's streets.

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First, though, the obvious weather irony: climate change didn’t exactly come out in support of that rally. In the midst of the warmest years and some of the warmest winters on record, the demonstration, which focused on stopping the Keystone XL Pipeline -- it will bring tar-sands oil, some of the “dirtiest,” carbon-richest energy available from Alberta, Canada, to the U.S. Gulf Coast -- was the coldest I’ve ever attended. I thought I’d lose a few fingers and toes while listening to the hour-plus of speakers, including Senator Sheldon Whitehouse from Rhode Island, who were theoretically warming the crowd up for its march around the (other) White House.

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Troops deployed in the two riot-torn Suez Canal cities of Port Said and Suez stood by and watched Monday night as thousands took to the streets in direct defiance of a night curfew and a state of emergency declared by the president a day earlier. Residents of those two cities and Ismailiya, a third city also the emergency, marched through the streets just as the curfew came into force at 9 p.m.

The display of contempt for the president's decision was tantamount to an outright rebellion that many worried could spread to other parts of the country. Already, protesters across much of Egypt are battling police, cutting off roads and railway lines, and besieging government offices and police stations as part of a growing revolt against the rule of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood group.

At least 60 people have been killed since Friday.

Morsi's opponents protest that Islamists have monopolized power and not lived up to the ideals of the pro-democracy uprising that ousted authoritarian leader Hosni Mubarak nearly two years ago.

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A new study from CUNY's Joseph A. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies, based largely on a sample of protesters interviewed during a mass May Day rally last year, found that the majority of participants were white and well-educated (76 percent of respondents had a four-year degree). Two-thirds of Occupy protesters had professional jobs, the sociology study found, with nearly a third living in households with incomes of $100,000 or more. Meanwhile, nearly a third of the protesters had been laid off or lost a job and a similar number said they had more than $1,000 in credit card or student loan debt. A significant number of respondents were precariously or underemployed and 10 percent of respondents were unemployed and seeking work.

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Ahead of the presidential inauguration in Washington Monday, an NSSE that will draw 3,000 law enforcement officers and some 13,000 military troops to the area, the National Lawyers Guild has released  a report based on last year's Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., and Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., highlighting First and Fourth Amendment violations imported with this sort of event policing. The report notes:

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The goal of this petition is to force the Obama Administration to produce legislation that limits access to guns. While a national dialogue is critical, laws are the only means in which we can reduce the number of people murdered in gun related deaths.

Powerful lobbying groups allow the ownership of guns to reach beyond the Constitution's intended purpose of the right to bear arms. Therefore, Congress must act on what is stated law, and face the reality that access to firearms reaches beyond what the Second Amendment intends to achieve.

The signatures on this petition represent a collective demand for a bipartisan discussion resulting in a set of laws that regulates how a citizen obtains a gun.

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However, while austerity-hit countries such as Spain and Portugal saw a high turnout of striking workers, wealthier countries like Germany and Denmark experienced only piecemeal action.

To combat a three-year financial crisis over too much debt, governments across Europe have had to cut spending, pensions and benefits and raise taxes. As well as hitting income and living standards, these measures have also led to a decline in economic output and rapidly rising unemployment.

The 17 countries that use the euro are expected to fall into recession when official figures are released Thursday. Meanwhile, unemployment across the eurozone has reached a record 11.6 percent with countries like Spain and Greece hitting the 25 percent mark.

With no end in sight to the economic hardship, workers were trying to take a stand on Wednesday.

`'There is a social emergency in the south," said Bernadette Segol, Secretary General of the European Trade Union Confederation. `'All recognize that the policies carried out now are unfair and not working."

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Just days before the Chicago NATO summit last May, Senakiewicz drunkenly told undercover agents that he had two homemade explosives hidden in his Chicago residence in a hollowed-out Harry Potter book. A search of his home found the bombs to be as fictitious as the boy wizard -- there weren't even any Harry Potter books at the address. But the 24-year-old anarchist, who Tuesday pleaded guilty to one felony count of falsely making a terrorist threat, could face deportation.

The Chicago Tribune reported:

At a hearing in the Leighton Criminal Court Building, Judge Nicholas Ford imposed the 4-year prison term and recommended that Senakiewicz be admitted into a prison boot camp. If he successfully completes the program he could be released in as little as 6 months, but prosecutors said the Polish native would be subject to deportation on completing his sentence.

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Reports conflict over whether rocks were thrown, but Twitter images testify that an "Obama Biden" campaign sign was burned. No one was arrested or injured -- in the context of the Oxford campus's history of racist violence, it's a stretch to call last night's incident a "riot."

In the video below, an amateur videographer notes of the crowd, "it's majority white people. That's all I've got to say about that":

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The order, announced by the Interior Ministry, is the most sweeping attempt to quash the kingdom’s anti-government uprising since martial law rules were in effect during the early months of unrest last year. It sharply increases pressure on political groups from Bahrain’s Shiite Muslim majority, which has led the protests seeking a greater political voice in the Sunni Muslim-ruled nation.

Tougher steps against opposition groups could raise complications for Washington and other Western allies that have stood by Bahrain’s monarchy during more than 20 months of unrest. The U.S. has important military bonds with Bahrain, which hosts the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet, but it also has called for increased efforts at dialogue to ease the tensions.

Shiites comprise about 70 percent of Bahrain’s 525,000 citizens, but claim they face systematic discrimination such as being denied top political and security posts. The Sunni monarchy has made a series of concessions — including giving more powers to the elected parliament — but opposition groups say the reforms do little to loosen the ruling family’s hold on power.

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