Federal courts have consistently trimmed back attempts by states to write their own immigration laws. The Supreme Court overturned much of the Arizona immigration law in June, and federal judges have done the same to parts of laws in several Southern states. We saw another example of this yeterday, when the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the state of Alabama and its draconian immigration law. However, the precedent set by the Supreme Court on Arizona did hold, and the “papers please” parts of immigration laws in Alabama and Georgia were upheld for the time being.

In Russia, the all-girl punk band Pussy Riot has been found guilty of protesting Vladimir Putin at a cathedral in Moscow. The charge could carry up to three years in prison.

The court case has generated international outrage about the curtailing of free speech. Prosecutors in Russia argued that Pussy Riot’s anti-Putin “punk prayer” violated religious strictures, and the court agreed. The specific charge is “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.”

On September 17, 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement first encamped in New York City’s Zucotti Park, soon renamed Liberty Square. Within weeks, Occupy groups were spreading like wildfire throughout the United States so that, even today after the breakup of the encampments, almost every major city in the United States has an active Occupy cell. In those first months, thousands took to the streets and made groundbreaking use of social media to orchestrate major actions nationwide; the United States became the latest country to develop a major people’s movement since the wave of protest began in the Middle East earlier that year. The Occupy name, and the ideas behind it, quickly became international.

Violence plagued the city of Anaheim, home to Disneyland, last night, as protests against a series of officer-involved deaths turned ugly. Protests continued into the 4th day after police shootings resulting in the deaths of two Hispanic men, the sixth this year to be shot by Anaheim police.

In what was billed as the largest mass protest in history against the retail giant, an estimated 10,000 union members and community leaders rallied on Saturday against the building of a Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market in Los Angeles’ historic Chinatown. It’s one of three Neighborhood Markets slated for Southern California, carrying with them the threat of low wages, harm to small businesses in the area and, in the eyes of the protest organizers, poverty.

Allowing Assad, who has murdered at least 10,000 of his own people in the past year or so, to receive clemency would be a gut-wrenching outcome. But if it ends the carnage, it could be seen as a positive step.

Actor Mark Ruffalo, musicians Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine) and Chris Martin (Coldplay), economists Jeffrey Sachs, Joseph Stiglitz and Larry Mishel (EPI), and Bishop Desmond Tutu have endorsed the Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) as part of the US coalition. National Nurses United, one of the leading labor groups on this issue, has taken a role in this project as well. They have planned rallies in 15 US cities over the course of the week.

Watching Mai Iskander’s film Words of Witness as the reports filtered in of the Egyptian presidential election results was somewhat surreal, a word the film’s Heba and her family also find descriptive of the situation in their homeland as the initial joy of Mubarak’s resignation becomes the much longer struggle to build democracy – or perhaps to continue wresting democracy from the hands of the regime.

The DREAM Act was not a lonely fight, and it suggests positive possibilities ahead for networked coalitions working together. It was a movement win.

The US has expelled Syria’s top diplomat in Washington, just one of many Western countries to throw out Syrian envoys after the Houla massacre. The name missing from that list is Russia, whose Foreign Minister yesterday said that the rebels share the blame with the government for the massacre. This Russian roadblock prevents serious action by the UN Security Council.