The love affair with Pussy Riot shows no sign of slowing down since the trio of punk women were sentenced to 2 years in prison. Neither has the legal system’s attack on their actions, with Russia Today reporting two more members of the group now under fire.

Noble Peace Prize nominee Gene Sharp is a kindly, orchid-growing octogenarian who literally wrote the book on non-violent overthrow of dictatorships. Jailed for nine months in 1953 for protesting the Korean War draft, Sharp went on to write The Politics of Nonviolent Action and twelve other books, including the seminal From Dictatorship to Democracy, a 93-page document that lays out 198 steps to toppling dictators. Available for free download in 40 languages, From Dictatorship to Democracy was written in 1993 to aid the Burmese freedom movement.

How to Start a Revolution delves into Sharp’s influence, from Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Burma, Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan through Egypt and Syria.

The UN has vague concerns and John Bellinger, former Legal Adviser to the United States Secretary of State during the Bush administration, very specific ones about the way in which we’re using cover of a war on terrorism (which has, after all, been renamed a war against violent extremism, with no specificity to al Qaeda or terrorism) to target people we’ve got no legal basis targeting.

In 1989, Grigori Medvedev wrote The Truth About Chernobyl, describing both what happened to cause the 1986 nuclear accident and what can be learned from it. In watching the continuing BP oil disaster, it is clear we are receiving exactly the same lessons in the fraility and vulnerability of life, both human and marine, and the price that hubris and pride exacts. Medvedev called for forceful truthtelling to avoid glossing over what happened in Chernobyl and to learn from it, and the accident in the Gulf demands exactly the same.