During years when millions of her compatriots fled abroad to escape hardship and repression — among them her mother, husband and three children, now in their 20s — Mrs. Williams, 46, a stocky high school dropout with a gift for grassroots organizing, has lived underground in Zimbabwe, moving from safe house to safe house as she and her colleagues have built a formidable protest movement among the church women of Harare and Bulawayo, the two largest cities.

Ten people were arrested, according to St. Paul police, and pepper spray was used on protesters. On Monday, nearly 300 protesters were arrested, and 137 of them were charged with felonies, St. Paul police said.

Environmental protesters in Australia brought the world's biggest coal terminal to a standstill on Sunday by blocking railway lines and chaining themselves to rail cars.

In the latest sign of efforts to prevent dissent during the Beijing Olympics, political activists in Shanghai say they have been warned against expressing their opinions, speaking with foreigners or visiting Beijing until after the Games.

Recently, environmental activists and local residents gathered near the small Chilean town of Cochrane to protest a plan to build a series of hydroelectrical dams.

A new generation of impatient activists is vying to seize control of the Tibetan freedom movement from the Dalai Lama.

Chinese police fired teargas into crowds of monks who took to the streets of Lhasa yesterday for a second day of protests in the Tibetan capital.

Violent protests erupted in several southern Chinese fishing towns after residents heard that a chemical factory rejected as environmentally dangerous by the nearby city of Xiamen would be built in their area instead, witnesses and other residents said Monday.

Protesters who took to the streets of the Russian capital Monday to demonstrate against the weekend presidential election were roughed up and carted off in buses by throngs of riot police.

The generals, to put it mildly, can't take a joke. But the Moustache Brothers make their living mocking fools, including those who wear military uniforms.

"It's stunning in this day and age that a university would do secret research for the tobacco industry on the brains of children," said Matt Meyers of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids in Washington, D.C.

Burma's military regime has filed charges against 10 leading activists seized for orchestrating rallies against price rises last year.

The biofuels industry plans on producing record amounts of ethanol this year to meet a mandate of the new US energy law – and will need a lot of corn to do it. At the same time, global food prices are at near-peak levels. The question is, how big is the connection between those two developments?

Bill Day doesn't fancy himself an outlaw -- and with his Mr. Rogers demeanor, he definitely doesn't look the part. But soon the 73-year-old lay chaplain could spend up to a year in jail for breaking a law that he considers immoral.

Zimbabwean police dispersed hundreds of opposition demonstrators with tear gas Wednesday afternoon in the first major test of new laws granting greater political freedoms in one of Africa's most repressive nations.

Was it only four months ago that the world was pledging to stand by the brave thousands who were marching peacefully for democracy in Burma?

The remains of about 12,000 Native Americans lie in drawers and cabinets in the gym's basement. Most of them were dug up by university archaeologists and have been stored under the pool since at least the early 1960s.

A deadly game of marine chess began in the Southern Ocean off Antarctica yesterday after environmentalists closed in on a Japanese fleet that has been sent to kill 1,000 whales.

Kenyans braced themselves for further unrest yesterday after Raila Odinga, the opposition leader, called for mass action to resume around the country in defiance of a police ban on public rallies.

A senior U.S. counterterrorism official who has been battling his superiors at the Federal Bureau of Investigation over alleged ethnic discrimination says the bureau is trying to silence him ahead of speech he planned to deliver on internal problems facing the agency.

U.S. officials trumpeted an end to farm trade restrictions under NAFTA, the controversial North American trade deal, on Friday, while Mexican farmers vowed to take to the streets to protest liberalization they fear will run them into the ground.

Kinkri Devi, an illiterate and impoverished woman who had waged a long and at least partly successful fight against illegal mining and quarrying in the mountainous northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, died last Sunday in Chandigarh, India. She was 82.

A coalition of East Coast environmental and anti-nuclear groups filed a petition with U.S. regulators on Thursday to suspend all pending relicensing efforts by nuclear reactors in the United States.

Kenya's opposition leader vowed to go ahead with a "million man" protest rally Thursday that many fear could worsen a wave of political and ethnic violence that humanitarian groups say has already killed 300 people and displaced 100,000.

Today, Xie is a fierce activist for women's rights, working to inspire a quiet revolution. She wants to show a dominant male culture that the nation's women deserve respect, and are equals.

China said Saturday it may allow Hong Kong's leader to be directly elected within 10 years at the earliest, but activists seeking quicker democratic reform in the territory criticised the decision.

This fall, the 60-year-old professor of organizational behavior and Air Force veteran decided to traverse Route 1 on foot to implore House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to begin impeachment proceedings against President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

In a colorful, often clamorous pressure campaign that has relied on support from college campuses and church groups, a group of farmworkers has persuaded McDonald’s and Taco Bell to have their tomato suppliers pay their pickers more.

For two decades, Ms. Dai was best known in China for her crusade against building a dam across China's longest river.

Hundreds of demonstrators, many wearing T-shirts reading "Burger King exploits farmworkers," staged a noisy protest at the fast-food giant's Miami headquarters on Friday to press demands for a penny-a-pound pay increase for tomato pickers.

Hundreds of protesters on surfboards, swimming in the harbor and lining the docks held the Hawaii Superferry at bay for nearly two hours yesterday at Nawiliwili Harbor on Kaua'i, setting the stage for a legal showdown in a Maui courtroom this morning.

Growing tensions in France between opponents and supporters of genetically modified crops have led to violent confrontations.