Thousands of young college students in the streets — some tearing down street signs and tipping a news van –  were confronted by riot police and pepper spray before being dispersed late Wednesday evening. Another unruly mass of Occupy Wall Street protesters? No, it was Penn State students protesting the firing of a football coach.

After charges of sexual abuse by former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky were filed last Saturday, Penn State’s Board of Trustees met Wednesday evening and announced the immediate firing of head football coach Joe Paterno and President Graham Spanier for their complicit knowledge in the alleged sexual abuse. Following the announcement, thousands of students gathered in support of Paterno — endearingly known as JoePa — to protest the administration’s decision. At some point in the evening, the protest turned into a riot — which is sadly not the first at the so-called #1 party school.

Admittedly, the student protest-turned-riot does not speak for all of Penn State. As is often the case, the physical damage was inflicted by only a small number of people. Many students, alumni, faculty, and staff are, rather understandably, shocked and dealing with the news in a variety of ways — some extremely positive, like holding a “blue-out” at Saturday’s game to support victims of child abuse. Nevertheless, the events of Wednesday night show a culture rooted in violence, searching for meaning.

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The end has to start somewhere. That’s what brought A Ride Till the End’s Jacob George, Jerrad Hardin, and Russ Ritter to Bluestockings bookstore on New York’s Lower East Side yesterday, with their luggage-laden bikes in the back. For the next few weeks, they’ll be making their way down to Washington, D.C. on a Bikes Not Bombs Bicycle Tour, arriving in time for the planned occupation of Freedom Plaza that will mark the 10th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, they’ll be a mobile speakers bureau and art collective, telling their stories in public and playing music, and raising money (in conjunction with Bikes Not Bombs up in Boston) to provide bikes for returning war vets who want to ride. At the heart of what they’re doing is a call for peace and, through it, a means of healing.

You can join them. I hope I will be able to. But in the meantime, you can listen to the whole Bluestockings event, including songs and stories from George’s recent return to Afghanistan with Voices for Creative Nonviolence, here:

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It has been a year since I came back to Bogotá after two years living in Egypt, where I got to know some of the young people leading nonviolent protests and cultural activities. If I had been part of the Mubarak government, I couldn’t have planned it better; I left Cairo just five months before the revolution began. As I followed the news of what was happening there in February and March, I was here in Colombia, but a part of me was over there, hoping to see change, waiting to be part of it.

Cairo was a tough place to be—so hot, so brown, and hard for a woman, especially a woman who comes from green mountains, from a country with uncountable rivers, lagoons, and lakes. But what I missed the most while living there was my bike. I never saw a woman cycling, nor a businessman. Bread deliverers were on bikes, along with the very badly-paid workers risking their lives on a daily basis by crossing the 23-kilometer-long bridges that go through Giza and Zamalek to Heliopolis. Besides them, it was just a few foreigners living in wealthy neighborhoods dared to use a “steel horse” to go around on weekends.

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In a new effort to teach young people about how to resolve problems without resorting to violence, students at Champlain College in Vermont have designed a video game called Breakaway, that uses soccer as a backdrop to get into some serious issues. As an recent Inter Press Service article explains:

The game was released in June 2010 just in time for the FIFA World Cup in South Africa. Since its inception, it has been hailed by critics, fans and players as a masterly attempt to create new discourses and open doors around the contentious issues of gender violence, racial stereotyping and fair team play.

Endorsed by Cameroonian football star Samuel Eto’o, Breakaway is the first narrative-driven interactive online game of its kind and is currently being distributed free around the world via the internet and youth organizations.

[...]

Breakaway is premised on the ideal of ‘fair play’, and the player is forced to make choices based on a host of situations before he or she is allowed to advance in the game.

[...]

Less than six months after its release, Breakaway is making monumental progress. The game’s designers have already recorded over a thousand registered users from 95 different countries.

The game can be played for free here, so check it out and spread the word.

One, two, three strikes you’re out at the old ball game, as the song goes.

But it took just one strike for Dan Moore and Sarah Szekeresh to get booted from the Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati, Ohio, last Wednesday after unfurling a banner protesting SB1070, Arizona’s recent bill targeting immigration, over the center field wall during an Arizona Diamondbacks game against the Cincinnati Reds.

Moore and Szekeresh were then arrested for disorderly conduct and spent six hours in jail. The fourth-degree misdemeanor carries a penalty of up to $250 and 30 days in jail. The pair pled not guilty and will have a bench trial on October 4.

In an interview with Waging Nonviolence, Moore said that talking about his arrest misses the point. “Immigrant families get arrested every day for bogus reasons, and these criminal records cause significant damage to their lives,” he tells WNV. “All this talk about being arrested – when I can go home and continue my job and my life – just dramatizes the true catastrophe going on in immigrant communities around deportation. Families get ripped apart. It’s hard to pity myself.”

Szekeresh felt similarly, telling the Cincinnati Enquirer, “It’s not about me.”

The risk of arrest is a real concern for undocumented people. “It highlights the role that allies can play in the struggle for immigration reform,” said Moore. “Immigrants have owned much of it, but when it comes to tactics that would expose undocumented people to unnecessary risks and even deportation, allies must also step up. We must work to responsibly escalate the struggle.”

Protests have followed the Arizona Diamondbacks across the country. “We don’t have ambassadors between states,” explained Moore. “Baseball games are as close as we get, and these actions communicate to people in Arizona that anti-immigrant hate will not be welcome here. It won’t be normalized.” That message, disseminated by the AP, reappeared in local Arizona newspapers.

Moore and Szekeresh planned their action with the help of both immigrant communities and activists in other cities, including those promoting MoveTheGame.org, a website petitioning Major League Baseball to change the venue of the July 2011 All-Star Game, currently scheduled for Phoenix.

Over at Foreign Policy magazine, Stephen Walt wrote about an interesting development in the tennis world that relates to nonviolence. In the men’s doubles championship finals at the U.S. Open today, the number one ranked Bryan brothers faced an unlikely duo: Rohan Bopanna of India and Aisam-ul-Haq Qureshi of Pakistan. As Walt notes:

Bopanna and Qureshi view their partnership as symbol of the possibility of improved relations between their two countries — among other things, they sometimes wear t-shirts reading “Stop War, Start Tennis” — and their success at this year’s tournament even got the two countries’ U.N. ambassadors to sit together at one of their recent matches.

While the Bryan brothers prevailed in an extremely close match just minutes ago, in Bopanna and Qureshi I’ve found a team that I will be rooting for in the future.

It seems those noisy buzzing plastic trumpets (known as vuvuzelas) that are being blown incessantly at the World Cup have attracted the attention of French union workers looking for a way to make this week’s planned protests against government austerity measures more boisterous. According to Reuters, the chief executive of France’s exclusive importer of vuvuzelas has been flooded with thousands of orders in recent days, “many from unionists requesting speedy delivery.”

On the one hand this could be a great idea, incorporating what’s clearly become a new way for a group of people to completely dominate an event. On the other hand, there is evidence that this plastic noise trinket can cause hearing damage, which is not a good way for any activist to try and make a point. As always, we’ll let the French be our test market when it comes to protesting, since they love it so much.

As the World Cup began in South Africa on Friday, Palestinians from the town of Bil’in formed a “national football team” and marched, along with dozens of Israeli and international activists, to the separation wall.

Sporting Palestinian uniforms, the players erected a goal next to the wall and began playing. After kicking several soccer balls over the fence to land that was once owned by the village, Israeli soldiers responded as they have in the past, by fired tear gas at the participants. According to the Friends of Freedom and Justice – Bil’in:

They then came through the fence, and arrested 6 journalists, four of whom were soon released… The tear gas canisters fired also caused large fires on the dry ground around the olive trees. Soldiers fired more canisters, aiming for the groups of villagers attempting to put out the flames.

While Ahlul Bayt News Agency said that the nonviolent protesters “did nothing but kick footballs,” the video above clearly shows that several of the youth involved did unfortunately throw rocks as well.

• Protests against the Israeli raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla continued around the world over the weekend. Several thousand people gathered outside Downing Street in London on Saturday. Thousands of Moroccans marched in the kingdom’s capital of Rabat on Sunday. Hundreds marched to Capitol Hill in Ottawa. And hundreds more marched to the Israeli embassy in Dublin (see above). In other news, the U.S. rock band Pixies has canceled a concert in Tel Aviv and dockworkers in Sweden are enacting a week long boycott of Israeli goods.

• Hundreds gathered outside BP’s DC headquarters on Friday to call for a “Citizens Arrest” of CEO Tony Hayward on the charges of criminal negligence. Meanwhile, several dozen people converged on a BP service station in Pensacola on Sunday to mobilize support for a boycott and a minor league baseball team in Viera, FL is changing the name of “batting practice” or “BP” for short to “hitting rehearsal.”

• A group of New York City immigrant advocates calling on lawmakers to pass the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act or “DREAM” joined high school and college students for a hunger strike in Washington Square Park on Friday. Some of the demonstrators had been fasting since Tuesday.

• About 100 people rallied on the California-Mexico border Thursday to protest the death of a migrant after a U.S. immigration officer shot him with a stun gun.

• Eight people were arrested after chaining themselves together outside the federal building in Santa Ana, CA on Thursday as part of a protest against Arizona’s recent immigration legislation. They were also calling on Santa Ana to declare itself a sanctuary city.

• Alabama fisherman, who’ve been idled by the massive ban on fishing in the oiled waters of the Gulf of Mexico, formed a blockade of the Mississippi Sound to protest BP’s hiring of more recreational boaters than commercial fishermen to aid in the cleanup.

• Around 400 workers from Chicago’s Hyatt Regency hotel staged a brief but pointed walkout last Wednesday to protest poor working conditions.

Having grown up in the Washington, D.C. area, I watched as the “war on terror” turned the streets of D.C.’s federal district into a maze of barricades, permanently parked police cars, and inexplicable no-go zones. It may be government by the people and for the people, but the people can’t get anywhere near.

I’m also a bicyclist, raised to idolize the city’s fearless bike couriers. I’ve put my bike and my body in those streets, removing one more murderous car from the congestion and a few more pounds of CO2 from the air. In return, in the name of order and hurry, I’ve been pulled over by cops and hit from behind by an impatient taxi. Security means insecurity. Transporting myself sanely means risking my life.

At 3QuarksDaily, a powerful essay by Sam Kean tells of the death of an elderly woman, a writer on a harmless bicycle, in a collision with a large military truck supposedly providing security for a diplomatic summit.

[T]he Nuclear Summit security situation showed that mentality isn’t just silly—it actually causes danger, it actually introduces hazards. Again, heads of state obviously need some protection, like bodyguards; but it was just as obvious to anyone who tried to get within a mile of the Convention Center last month that security had spilled over into paranoia. To the point that military personnel were so worried about getting their trucks into the proper place that they crushed a 68-year-old woman on a bicycle five blocks from the nearest point you could have spit on the Convention Center.

Read the rest at 3quarksdaily.