food riots
Egyptian court sentences 22 to prison for Mahalla riots
An Egyptian state security court sentenced 22 people to between three and five years in jail on Monday for their part in riots which shook the Nile Delta in April.
The riots in the Nile Delta textile town of Mahalla el-Kubra, the worst in the country for many years, began as protests against sudden steep rises in the price of food. Three people were killed and more than 100 people wounded in two days of clashes with riot police.
A world food crisis; empty rice bowls and fat rats
A short look at the problems in world food production and supply, and its links with rising oil prices, global warming and changes in farming techniques.
In the Chittagong hill tracts of rural south-eastern Bangladesh the bamboo is in bloom - and the local poor are hungry and facing famine. Bamboo blooms and seeds itself roughly once every 50 years; the rats love the seeds, and their high protein content causes them to breed four times faster than normal.
1918: Rice riots and strikes in Japan
From July-September 1918, Japan was swept with a wave of riots from rural fishing villages to major industrial centres and coal fields, in what was the largest upheaval in Japan to date, and the widest ranging popular disturbances since the unrest during the Meiji restoration of 1868.
1905-1918 in Japan was called the Era of Popular Violence (民衆騒擾期, minshû sôjô ki). This began with the Hibiya Incendiary Incident (日比谷焼討事件, Hibiya Yakiuchi Jiken) - a citywide riot in Tokyo that started with a banned protest in Hibiya park; against the terms of the Portsmouth Treaty which ended the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905.
