Protest

The recent events at the Viqarunnisa Noon School and College (VNC), a prestigious girls educational institution in the Bangladesh capital Dhaka, has stirred much buzz in the Bangladeshi blogosphere. Porimol Joydhor, a teacher of Bangla department of the school's Bashundhara campus, was accused of raping a female student of class ten at VNC while giving her private tuition in his premises.

More than 1,400 people were arrested by the police in today’s Bersih 2.0 rally which was organized to push for electoral reforms in Malaysia. Police used teargas to disperse a crowd which reached up to 50,000 according to the organizers. Bersih means clean in the local language.

A project to build an open-pit iron ore mine in Centro Chato - a village of 3,144 inhabitants according to the 2000 census [es] - in central Uruguay has divided Uruguayans. While some see it as an opportunity for employment and economic growth, others are concerned about the environmental consequences and question whether the country will actually benefit from the mine’s profits.

Several students have staged one-person “SlutWalk” protests at Korea University’s front gate, demanding the school expel three male students from its medical school on charges of sexually assaulting a drunken female student during a school trip. South Korea's Wiki Tree site posted photos [ko] of the protests.

On the 5th of June,  Rumana Manzur, an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Dhaka University, became the victim of a horrific case of domestic violence when she was brutally attacked by her husband Hassan Syed, who allegedly beat her mercilessly, tried to gouge out her eyes and bit off part of her nose in a fit of rage. It is being said that their 5 year old daughter was in the room and is a witness to this inhuman act.

In South Korea, entertainers are changing the political landscape by spearheading protests in social media. Among several influential comedians and actors, actress-activist Kim Yeo-jin, has been the most controversial figures for several weeks now for her active on-and-offline political engagement.

Jing Gao from the Ministry of Tofu reports on a riot in Chaozhou City. The riot was triggered off by local factory owner's violence act on a Sichuan rural migrant worker.

Three films which give a rare glimpse inside the North Korea have been introduced during the North Korea Freedom Week, an annual event jointly held in Seoul and Washington hosting lectures and film screenings focusing human rights abuses in the North. Mike Paarlberg posted a detailed introduction to the films in the City Paper blog.

This post is part of our special coverage Egypt Revolution 2011.

Last February, Sheryl Stolberg of The New York Times wrote an article about the political science professor, Gene Sharp, whose ideas were credited by her as being an inspiration for the Egyptian revolution, as well as many other uprisings in the region.

Written by Scilla Alecci

This post is part of our special coverage Japan Earthquake 2011.