A spontaneous Friday-night phenomenon of mass youth bicycle rides from Zhengzhou, the capital of central China's Henan province, to the nearby historical city of Kaifeng seemingly got out of control Nov. 8, prompting a crackdown from authorities. The ostensible goal of the 50-kilometer "Night Riding Army" (akin to Critical Mass in the West) was midnight partaking of Kaifeng's famous soup dumplings, guàn tāng bāo. The rides were initially celebrated by the authorities, with one write-up in the official People's Daily cheering on the "youthful adventures." But when an unprecedented 100,000 joined the ride (by some accounts, double that), provincial police responded by closing the road between the two cities to non-motorized vehicles, and bike-share apps were set to remotely lock any bike taken out of designated zones in Zhengzhou. And it seems that a dissident political element had crept into the event. While some cyclists carried Chinese flags, sang the national anthem, and shouted slogans in support of the Communist Party, others raised hand-made banners with subversive messages in coded homonyms such as "Freedom, I am fucking coming!" (RadiiChina, The Guardian, NBC, Reuters, CNN)

The Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders released a statement Aug. 2 urging Russia to refrain from designating groups advocating for the rights of indigenous peoples and national minorities as "extremist organizations." The statement follows a decision by Russian authorities a week earlier to thusly classify 55 such organizations. The Ministry of Justice cited a June ruling by Russia's Supreme Court banning "structural divisions" of the so-called "Anti-Russian Separatist Movement," which was defined as an "international public movement to destroy the multinational unity and territorial integrity of Russia." Involvement in the movement may result in a sentence of up to six years in prison—despite the fact that no such movement formally exists.

The results are in from Mexico's June 2 presidential election and Claudia Sheinbaum of the ruling left-populist National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) has won by some 60%, handily defeating a rival backed by an alliance of the country's more traditional political parties. The former mayor of Mexico City as well as an environmental scientist with a PhD in energy engineering from UC Berkeley, Sheinbaum was a researcher with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) when it earned a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Despite this prestigious and somewhat technocratic background, her status as the chosen hier of incumbent populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador has caused her victory to be viewed with suspicion if not panic in elite quarters. Both the peso and Mexican stock exchange slided on the news.

Well, this is ironic multiple ways. Israel was forced to apologize to Morocco after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was seen in a video displaying a map of the Middle East and North Africa—that failed to show the occupied (and illegally annexed) territory of Western Sahara as within the kingdom's borders. Netanyahu brandished the map in a May 30 interview with a French TV channel, showing what he called "the Arab world" in green, a swath of near-contiguous territory from Iraq to Mauritania—contrasting small, isolated Israel, "the one and only Jewish state." The point, as usual, being Israel's supposed vulnerability and (by implication, at least) delegitimization of Palestinian claims—as if all Arabs were an undifferentiated mass and 7 million Palestinians could decamp for Jordan or Egypt and be content. (The operative word in Israeli political rhetoric being "transfer.")

A group of armed men opened fire at a concert hall in a Moscow suburb on the night of March 22, killing at least 133 people and injuring scores more. Video footage posted online showed at least two masked men in camo entering the Crocus City Hall in Krasnogorsk, repeatedly firing assault rifles as they advance. Another graphic video appears to show four men firing into the crowd in the seating area before a fire breaks out. The crowd was waiting for the popular Russian rock band Piknik to take the stage. After a few minutes of shooting, a grenade or an incendiary bomb was apparently thrown, and the venue was engulfed in flame. Footage published by the official TASS news agency showed a column of smoke billowing from the roof of the venue. 

Although winning no coverage in English-language media, labor actions are spreading across China in the current economic downturn in the People's Republic. On Jan. 22, workers hung banners outside the headquarters of the Guilin No. 3 Construction Company in Guangxi province to demand payment of outstanding wages owed to hundreds of employees. On the same day, migrant workers in Jinan, Shandong province, raised banners in the city's central business district demanding payment of backlogged wages by the China Railway Construction Corporation. By definition, such actions are not authorized by the state-controlled All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU).

Some 100 fighters in armored vehicles crossed into Russia from Ukrainian territory May 22 and seized the town of Kozinka in Belgorod oblast. They were only driven out after Russian forces responded with fighter planes and artillery, and Moscow says its troops are still "mopping up saboteurs." Two groups claimed responsibility for the raid, both said to be made up of Russians who are fighting for Ukraine. One is the self-proclaimed Freedom of Russia Legion, which released a video message to coincide with the attack, calling on Russians to take up arms "to put an end to the Kremlin's dictatorship."

President Guillermo Lasso dissolved Ecuador's opposition-controlled National Assembly on May 17—just one day after his impeachment trial began. The impeachment proceedings are of course suspended, and Lasso is to rule by decree, subject to oversight only by the Constitutional Court, until new presidential and legislative elections are held. His office issued a communique asserting that Lasso acted under Article 148 of the Ecuadoran Constitution, which states: "The President of the Republic will be able to dissolve the National Assembly…if it repeatedly without justification obstructs implementation of the National Development Plan or because of a severe political crisis and domestic unrest." The so-called "muerte cruzada" (mutual death) provision, introduced in 2008, has never been used in Ecuador before.