• Somewhere between 400 and 600 citizens gathered outside of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s inauguration ceremony at the Capitol in Madison on Monday to remind him of his promise to create 250,000 jobs and protest his rejection of a $810 million federal grant for high speed rail.

• At a rally in the Forest of Dean, UK, more than 3,000 people, backed by celebrities, bishops, leading conservationists and politicians, pledged to defend “the people’s” trees from what they fear will be a corporate land grab.

• Hundreds of people in central Afghanistan have held a demonstration to protest home invasions and the desecration of Qurans by US troops stationed in the war-ravaged country.

An interesting conversation has unfolded in the climate movement about whether college-age protesters—generally perceived as “spoiled elites” by the general public—should be replaced on the front-lines by farmers and grandmothers. Tod Brilliant of the Post Carbon Institute forwarded this argument on the Daily Kos. But Tim DeChristopher, the young activist who disrupted a federal gas and oil lease auction by posing as a bidder in 2008, took the argument in a slightly different direction on his blog:

I think college kids who protest and get a citation will definitely not get sympathy. Those who spend a night in jail probably won’t get much either. Those who get released from a night in jail to go straight back and repeat their action might start arousing some curiosity. Those who defy a judge’s strong warning that returning a third time will guarantee a year in prison will begin to actually move people. When college kids become former college kids who have been kicked out because of their activism, we’ll start making some progress. The “uppity brats” critique only sticks if anyone who wields it has ever sacrificed as much as the college kid is currently doing. I think where the direct action wing of the current movement has fallen short is that they have substituted perceived risk for actual risk, and it is not the same thing.

DeChristopher speaks from experience. The action he undertook as a student two years ago, which is still threatening to land him up to 10 years in prison and a $500,000 fine, has netted his group more praise and followers than “uppity brat” accusations.

I’d bet Peaceful Uprising has a longer list of committed grandmothers than any similar group in the country. They’re on board and ready to get arrested in part because they watched a college kid who reminds them of their sons and grandsons face 10 years in prison for defending his future. The advantage of sustained resistance is that it gives us the opportunity to bring more people on board, and it becomes less important who took the first step.

In fact, as DeChristopher argued, the Freedom Riders ignored similar warnings about the perception of well-off young white people from the North coming to the South—only to show the country that “there is something strangely powerful about watching another person put themself in harm’s way.”

More than age, income, profession, or anything else, the one thing that matters about who we put out front is stubbornness.  I’ll trade all the strategy in the world for stubbornness.

For nearly six years, the Palestinian residents of the West Bank village of Bil’in have held a weekly nonviolent demonstration against the separation wall—a barrier cutting through large portions of Palestinian land that has been declared illegal by the International Criminal Court and the Israeli High Court.

A reported 1,000 people gathered for last Friday’s weekly demonstration, declaring the last day of the decade to also be the last day of the wall on Bil’in’s land. But the pronouncement and the ensuing attempt to break through the wall were marred by the tragic death of 36-year-old Jawaher Abu Rahmah, who died as a result of being poisoned by the active ingredient in tear gas.

Abu Rahmah is survived by four brothers, one sister, and her mother, Subhiyeh, who also lost her son Bassem in 2009 during a demonstration in Bil’in. He was killed by the Israeli military when they shot him in the chest with a high-velocity tear gas canister. Another of her sons, Ashraf, was shot by Israeli forces while blindfolded and under arrest.

Subhiyeh has nevertheless rejected notions of revenge and instead called for joint Israeli-Palestinian resistance to the occupation in the face of the killing of her daughter:

I brought my children to the world with love and I educated them to believe in peace and not to act violently. Out of six children, I have four left. I’m not complaining because it’s not in our hands. God decides what will happen. I ask the people of Israel to take a firm stand against the occupation. They must support our just struggle against the fence and for the liberation of the lands we were robbed of, because only together we’ll be able to put an end to the tragedy of our two people.

Heeding the call of Jawaher’s mother, Israelis took to the streets in Tel Aviv on Saturday, gathering in front of the Defense Ministry, to protest the killing of Abu Rahmah. Approximately 200 people blocked a main traffic artery while publicly decrying the actions of their government. Tel Avive-based journalist Lisa Goldman described the protest:

Waving mourners’ posters emblazoned with photos of Jawaher Abu Rahmeh captioned in Arabic, and carrying placards with slogans in Hebrew and English, demonstrators chanted in Hebrew: “Citizens, awake! Fascism is already here!” “Barak! Barak! Minister of Defense! How many demonstrators have you killed today?!” ; in English: “Apartheid! Fight back!”; and in Arabic: “Min Ghaza el Bil’in, hurra hurra Falasteen!” (from Gaza to Bil’in, freedom, freedom for Palestine).

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People gathered at an anti-Kremlin rally in Moscow's central Triumph Square.

• Police detained three opposition leaders and more than 100 other activists in Moscow and St. Petersburg during New Year’s Eve rallies against curbs on political freedoms and a judge’s decision to keep Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the country’s best known prisoner, behind bars.

• Bus and truck drivers and powerful citizens groups took to the streets of several Bolivian cities on Thursday to protest a fuel price increase in a challenge to leftist President Evo Morales.

• Christians in Egypt staged protests in three cities yesterday to protest the government’s failure to protect them after a bombing blamed on Islamic militants that killed 21 people as worshippers left a church service 30 minutes into the new year.

• Workers in around 2,000 blackstone quarries in the Indian state of Ahmedabad have gone on an indefinite strike since Friday to protest state government’s “non-responsive” attitude towards their long-pending demands.

• About a dozen employees of New York’s Elmira Psychiatric Center gathered Wednesday evening to protest the impending layoffs of approximately 900 state employees.

• About 80 South Korean protesters rallied in downtown Seoul against the North and its nuclear ambitions.