Risking arrest isn’t the only obstacle for Northern California protesters — under a new rule about to go into effect, political demonstrators could lose their right to ride public transportation.

In an interview with Ezra Klein (“Romney is Wall Street’s worst bet since the bet on subprime,” Washington Post, Nov. 28), Chrystia Freeland — author of The Plutocrats — commented on the sheer level of shock and disbelief among the moneyed classes after Romney’s defeat.

Russian authorities on Thursday restricted Internet access to the videos of the Pussy Riot group, judging them to be “extremist,” Russian press agencies reported. The Zamoskvoretskii court in Moscow ruled that the group’s videos, notably the anti-Putin “punk prayer” sung in February in the Moscow cathedral, was “extremist” and ordered “restricted access” to them.

As you know, two of the members of Pussy Riot have been sentenced to long terms in Russian prisons. Send them a letter and let them know they are not forgotten!

London, UK - "Todd" was 18 when he came to the United Kingdom from Lithuania in 2005 in search of a better life. But things didn't work out. By 2009, with the British economy ravaged by recession, he had lost his job and had nowhere to live. "I had really bad depression so I couldn't hold a job. I ended up sleeping rough on the streets. My mental health was deteriorating... I had suicidal thoughts," he recalls.

This trial is exemplary. Power is shamed by it, and not just once, and it will be ashamed of it in the future. Each stage of this trial has been the quintessence of the arbitrary. How did our intervention, at the start modest and rather bizarre, get transformed into such an immense misfortune? It is obvious that this would be impossible in a sane society. As a State, Russia has long appeared to be an organism eroded by illness. And this organism reacts in an unhealthy manner when one touches one of its suppurating abscesses. At first it suffered from this illness in silence. Then it found a solution in talking about it. And this trial is what it calls a discussion. This tribunal is not simply a grotesque and cruel masquerade; it is the “face” of discussion as it is practiced in our country. At the social level, to take up a problem through discussion, there must be a situation, a motivation. What is interesting is that, from the start, our situation has been depersonalized.

BERKELEY, Calif. — Hardly a stranger to political movements, this is a city that has championed free speech, no nukes, the antiwar movement and now: no sitting on the sidewalk. During years of economic downturn, cities across the country have reported rising vagrancy and rushed to pass laws banning aggressive panhandling, giving food away in public parks and even smelling foul.

The government wants Americans to believe that anarchist violence is a very real possibility at the Republican and Democratic national conventions. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have issued a bulletin to that effect.

Michael Moore, Oliver Stone and Noam Chomsky are among signatories to letter delivered to Ecuador's embassy in London. A letter signed by leading US figures in support of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's application for political asylum in Ecuador has been delivered to the country's London embassy.

Italy is considering using the army to protect the defense conglomerate Finmeccanica and the tax collection agency Equitalia, the targets of a series of attacks that are raising concerns about political violence, the interior minister said. Although protests against Italy's austerity program have been largely peaceful, last week a well-known anarchist group claimed responsibility for an attack in which a Finmeccanica executive was shot in the leg.