Some 150,000 protesters took to the streets in cities across Israel on the night of July 30—the biggest demonstrations the country has seen in decades—to demand action on rising rents, low salaries, and the high cost of living. The demonstrations—held in 12 cities including Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa—shows that the popular protest movement that has emerged over the past two weeks is only gaining momentum. Activist Daphni Leef, who initiated the first "tent village" protest in Tel Aviv, told a crowd of some 100,000 outside the city's art museum that "we don't want to replace the government, but to do more than that. We want to change the rules of the game." Noam Shalit, the father of captured soldier Gilad Shalit, also spoke at the rally.

Ollanta Humala was sworn in as Peru's president on July 28—with his populist base and the resource industries both seemingly afraid of being betrayed. "We're worried," said Mario Huaman, head of the General Workers' Confederation of Peru (CGTP), the country's largest labor group, which endorsed Humala in the election. "We’ll listen very carefully to what he says in the coming days and see if he shares our views. Then we'll decide our plan of action, our plan to fight. He promised change." Similar reservations were expressed by Renee Ramirez, general secretary of the Unitary Syndicate of Education Workers in Peru (SUTEP): "The new government has built up such great hopes that if it doesn't follow through there’ll be a big divorce. We’re not going to keep quiet. We threw our weight behind Humala but we didn't write him a blank check."

It appears that the hacker groups Anonymous and LulzSec have teamed up to issue a call to boycott PayPal, evidently if not quite logically in response to FBI raids in which 14 accused Anonymous members were arrested across the country. The only connection between the raids and the boycott seems to be that the 14 are charged in connection with a "distributed denial of service attack" against PayPal, which took down the company's website for four days in December. Here is the cyber-outlaws' joint communique, with jargon and propaganda words in bold:

Jim Lobe on InterPress Service informs us that Israeli pundit Caroline Glick was among those cited in the manifesto of accused Oslo bomber Anders Behring Breivik. Now Glick has a screed in the Jerusalem Post of July 28 with the oxymoronic title "Breivik and totalitarian democrats." In it, she acknowledges that she was cited by Breivik, and frets that this demonstrated commonality of ideas is being used to discredit opponents of multiculturalism:

Forebodings are in the air about tomorrow's Friday demonstration in Cairo's Tahrir Square following two violent clashes between protesters and regime elements in Egypt over the past days. On June 23, knife-wielding thugs—apparently supporters of the ruling military council—set on thousands of activists determined to march on the defense ministry. A day before the march, the military accused the April 6 Movement, one of the youth groups that launched the uprising against Hosni Mubarak, of seeking to turn people against the army. In verbiage redolent of the Mubarak regime, a senior army general was quoted as saying the group had received training abroad to destabilize the state. (Financial Times, July 24) Then, on July 26, clashes broke out between police and workers at an industrial free trade zone in the Suez Canal city of Ismailia, injuring at least 38 people. It was the second day of a strike by the workers, who are demanding a raise in the minimum wage. Suez Canal zone workers have been staging a series of protests and labor actions since the beginning of June. (The National, UAE, July 28)

This seems utterly Orwellian, and has received frustratingly little media attention. In recent days, several seemingly less-than-reliable sites have headlined the story in lurid terms (Alexander Higgins Blog, Above Top Secret, Rumor Mill News, Examiner.com). They are mostly quoting each other and contradicting themselves, saying that Japan has "passed a law" (implying a vote of the Diet) or that the Japanese government has "issued an order" (implying mere bureaucratic promulgation) mandating "censorship" of "negative stories" about the Fukushima disaster. It all seems to go back to two short paragraphs toward the end of a May 16 story on the (reliable) website Japan Focus, which cites and links to a page (in Japanese) of Tokyo's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications:

The Israeli troll-o-sphere appears to be abuzz with ghastly cheerleading for the Oslo attacks. J.J. Goldberg notes the phenomenon in a July 24 comment for The Forward: "Judging by the comments sections on the main Hebrew websites, the main questions under debate seem to be whether Norwegians deserve any sympathy from Israelis given the country’s pro-Palestinian policies, whether the killer deserves any sympathy given his self-declared intention of fighting Islamic extremism and, perhaps ironically, whether calling attention to this debate is in itself an anti-Israel or anti-Semitic act."

For all the endless paranoia about neocon conspiracies to destabilize the Syrian regime (and Arab regimes in general), there are still plenty of politicians in the West who fear instability more than they dislike dictators. Generally, these are the paleocons or "pragmatists" of the Old Right, but this tendency also infects some politicians of the left. NPR noted on June 29 that during a "fact-finding" trip to Syria, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) was quoted by Damascus' official news agency SANA saying: