The U.K. government is set to introduce new ‘anti-extremism’ measures targeting immigrants and religious freedoms, the Telegraph reported on Sunday.

According to a leaked draft of the Home Office’s new strategy, which is due out later this month, the government will call for “a ban on radicals working unsupervised with children over fears the young could be brainwashed,” the Telegraph reported.

It will also propose restrictions on Sharia courts, demand that staff at job centers identify “vulnerable claimants who may become targets for radicalization,” and require immigrants working towards citizenship to learn English and absorb “British values.”

The Telegraph continues:

Thousands are gathering in London on Wednesday, protesting the conservative Tory government’s ‘oppressive and draconian’ austerity program.

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According to the Guardian, organizers expect a crowd of around 5,000—including a large student bloc—to rally at Trafalgar Square, while another 2,000 are expected for a separate march from Downing Street through Westminster.

The demonstrations were scheduled to coincide with the Queen’s Speech, an annual event marking the formal start to the Parliamentary year, in which the Queen of England outlines what UK citizens can expect from the government in the upcoming year. Earlier this month, the UK elections brought a surprise lurch to the right, with the Conservative Party gaining full control of the government and Prime Minister David Cameron sweeping back to power with more muscle behind him than before.

During the campaign, Cameron vowed to cut welfare spending, weaken labor unions, and implement pro-business reforms in the education and healthcare sectors.

Or, as anti-austerity organizers put it in their call-to-action, “the new Government is going to try to: smash the welfare state by £12bn, privatise the [National Health Service], raise tuition fees, decimate local services, make strike action illegal, scapegoat migrants, worsen the housing crisis and to crush all dissent that stands in their way.”

Writing about “Tory brutality” in a People’s Assembly blog post on Tuesday, Ruby Utting wrote:

While the Tories appear to have backpedaled on a plan to repeal the country’s Human Rights Act, the speech delivered Wednesday by Queen Elizabeth II indicates that the party intends to follow through on many other campaign promises.

One Tory proposal, for example, would cut the housing benefit for 18-21 year olds—a plan the social service organization St. Mungo’s Broadway said would “make it extremely difficult for young people in vulnerable situations.”

“Democracy doesn’t end at the ballot box and it never ever has.”
—Hannah Sketchley, Campaign Against Fees and Cuts

Wednesday’s rally and march are in direct opposition to that platform, known as the Conservative Party Manifesto.

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“It really is to remind the Conservative government…that there’s absolutely masses of people who are out there who they don’t represent and are ready to put up a fight if they do things which they mention in their manifesto,” said Hannah Sketchley, a spokeswoman for the Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC), which organized the event in Trafalgar Square. “Democracy doesn’t end at the ballot box and it never ever has.”

Signaling growing momentum behind the opposition movement, other anti-austerity demonstrations are planned for Saturday, May 30 and Saturday, June 20.

Taking a cue from the Syriza-led Greek government and their challenge the austerity policies that dominate European economics, activists across the continent are focusing their ire on a summit of the European Central Bank (ECB) later this week.

Ahead of the meeting in Frankfurt, Germany, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras assured the citizens of Greece that, despite pressure from European lenders, they will not go back on their pledge to roll back extreme reform measures agreed to by the previous administration.

“Whatever obstacles we may encounter in our negotiating effort, we will not return to the policies of austerity,” Tsipras told daily Ethnos in an interview on Monday.

“The key for an honorable compromise,” the Syriza party leader continued, “is to recognize that the previous policy of extreme austerity has failed, not only in Greece, but in the whole of Europe.”

Pivoting on the ongoing negotiations between the recently elected Syriza government and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the ECB, and the European Union, activists from across Europe are preparing to descend on Frankfurt, Germany where Tsipras will join other officials for the ECB summit set to begin on Wednesday.

The international Blockupy movement has announced a mass demonstration, including a march, blockades and sit-ins, during the opening ceremony of the new ECB headquarters on Wednesday, March 18.

In an interview with Charlie Rose that aired on CBS News’ 60 Minutes Sunday night, Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad said American airstrikes that began last year against Islamic State (or ISIS) inside his country are doing little to benefit his own fight against the militant force but are having the undesirable side effect of increasing the number of fighters from across the region (and the world) who are flocking to join the group.

“How much of a benefit are you getting from American airstrikes in Syria reducing the power of ISIS?” Rose asked in the interview that took place just days ago in Damascus.

Al-Assad responded by pointing out that the U.S. government and its allies want to “sugar coat the situation” inside Syria by telling the world that ISIS “is being defeated” and that airstrikes are making things better. “Actually, no,” said Assad, “you have more recruits [coming to ISIS]. Some estimates that they have 1,000 recruits every month in Syria. And Iraq — they are expanding in Libya and many other al Qaeda affiliate organizations have announced their allegiance to ISIS. So that’s the situation.”

The idea of foreign militants who have flocked to the civil war in Syria is one that Assad also spoke about last month in an interview with Foreign Affairs when he explained that defeating ISIS would not be problematic for the Syrian Army if it wasn’t for the constant flow of new recruits, both from inside Syria and those flowing across the nation’s now porous borders. Most of these, he said, are financed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar. “We don’t have a problem militarily,” he explained. “The problem is that they still have this continuous supply, mainly from Turkey.”

And these are not only the self-interested arguments of the Syrian president. Foreign policy experts and journalists have continually warned (here, here, here) that western intervention and the ongoing presence of the U.S. military in the region and the ongoing airstrikes have acted, and would continue to act, as an easy recruiting tool for ISIS – not only in Syria and Iraq, but elsewhere across the region.

In the end, Assad agreed with the premise put forth by Rose that no military solution exists to the Syrian civil war that has now gone for more than four years. “Every conflict,” Assad said, “Even if it’s a war, should end with a political solution.”

The U.S. is set to announce new regulations on offshore oil and gas drilling as an increased safeguard against disasters like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, according to reports from Obama administration officials who spoke to the New York Times on Friday.

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The announcement, which could come as soon as Monday, is set to be timed with the five-year anniversary of the spill, which killed 11 people and poured millions of barrels of oil into the ocean.

However, environmental organizations remained unconvinced, particularly as the new rules follow President Barack Obama’s stated support of expanded drilling operations in the Arctic and Atlantic.

Bob Deans, a spokesperson for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), told the Times, “Industry and government have taken measures over the past five years to reduce some of the risk in what is an inherently dangerous operation at sea. That’s a far cry from saying it’s safe. And the last thing we need is to expose Atlantic or Arctic waters to a BP-style blowout.”

The regulations are reportedly the biggest to be put forward by the Obama administration in response to the spill and include stricter safety requirements on blowout preventers—the “last line of protection to stop explosions in undersea oil and gas wells,” which played a main role in the 2010 disaster when a supposedly fail-safe blowout preventer malfunctioned, the Times writes.

However, as noted by climate activists, “a panel appointed by President Obama to investigate the spill concluded that the chief cause of the disaster, which left the Gulf Coast soaked in black tar, was not the blowout preventer but a broad systemic failure of oversight by the companies involved in drilling the well and the government regulators assigned to police them.”

Even as millions and millions of Americans—represented by thousands of labor, environmental, family farm, consumer, faith, Internet freedom and other advocacy organizations—continue to stand firmly in opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, those backing the TPP, including President Obama and a large majority of the Republican caucus, still have two dedicated demographic groups pledging their allegiance to the cause and arguing the so-called “free trade agreement (FTA)” would be good for average workers and the economy overall: billionaires and Wall Street titans.

As Zach Carter of the Huffington Post reports:

News of the letter, which can be read in full here, came on the same day as new trade data released by the U.S. Census Bureau, covering the full first three years of the bilateral trade deal between the U.S. and South Korea, revealed that the U.S. goods trade deficit with that country has more than doubled since the agreement, first signed in 2007 and amended in 2010, was implemented.

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What the new data shows, according to the advocacy group Public Citizen, is economic outcomes that are the opposite of the Obama administration’s “more exports, more jobs” promise used to push through that deal, which are the same promises the administration and those supporting TPP are now using as they attempt to persuade Congress to approve Fast Track authority and ram it through Congress without debate or amendment.

The new economic statistics, explains Public Citizen, offer a damning indictment of the promises on which such deals are sold:

Despite those figures and the collapse of the U.S. manufacturing sector in the age of neoliberal globalization, the repeated line from TPP supporters is that these deals are ‘job creators.’ As the letter from the billionaire elites to the New York Congressional Delegation stated, “TPP would be a catalyst for creating new  jobs in the United States, attracting more foreign investment to this country, and  benefitting American workers in a broad range  of industries.”

But that’s simply not what the evidence from past FTAs shows, said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, in a statement on Tuesday.

“Who’s going to buy the argument about Fast Track and the TPP creating ‘more exports, more jobs’ when Obama’s only major trade deal, used as the TPP template, was sold under that very slogan and yet has done the opposite?”

And Dave Johnson, from the Campaign for America’s Future, explained in a Tuesday post how none of this “just happened” by accident, but that corporate-friendly trade policies have created these ‘job-killing’ conditions:

In his reporting for Huffington Post, Carter makes it clear that it wasn’t only billionaires who signed the letter urging for Fast Track and TPP approval. Some, he told his readers, were “merely millionaire CEOs” like Goldman Sach’s Lloyd Blankfein, Kenneth Chenault of American Express, and JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon.

With thousands of workers planning to descend on McDonald’s annual shareholder meeting on May 21 to demand higher wages and fairer treatment, the fast food giant has announced it will ban all media from the corporate event—a move that union leaders called “extremely shocking and troubling.”

“We can’t think of a single other company who has dared to ban the press from an annual meeting,” the AFL-CIO told the Guardian on Monday. “What does the company have to hide?”

“We call on McDonald’s to reverse their decision and allow the media,” Vineeta Anand, the AFL-CIO chief investment research analyst, told the Guardian. “Sunshine is the best disinfectant, when you shine a light on a company it changes their behaviour. They are acting like some sort of secret society.”

“McDonald’s is not an insignificant company, they are one of the nation’s best-known household names and it is extremely shocking and troubling that a company of its size would ban the press,” Anand added.

Reporters will only be able to watch the event via livestream. The company has previously banned media from its shareholder meetings, but this year’s decision is unusual because it was ordered by McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook, who has previously said he wants to reshape the corporation into a “modern, progressive burger company.”

A McDonald’s spokesperson, Heidi Baker, said the move was not done as a response to the upcoming Fight for $15 demonstrations, but to “accommodate our valued shareholders.”