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.

Here is a interesting report by Franklin Lopez of the Vancouver Media Co-op that aired on Democracy Now! about the developing protests around the Winter Olympics which began in Vancouver today. To thwart positive coverage of the protests, Canada has stopped at least two American journalists from entering the country this week, including John Weston Osburn of Salt Lake City and Chicago radio journalist Martin Macias.

Jackie Robinson and Martin Luther King Jr. talk before a press conference in New York City in 1962.

Writing online for Sports Illustrated this week on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, columnist Dave Zirin reminds readers that Dr. King, while perhaps not the greatest athlete himself, nonetheless embraced sports as an effective and serious platform from which to promote civil rights.  “Dr. King,” Zirin writes, “was involved in three of history’s most critical collisions of sports and politics”—Jackie Robinson’s integration of modern baseball in 1947; Muhammad Ali’s struggle against the Vietnam War and the draft board in the late 1960s; and the protests promulgated by Harry Edwards and his Olympic Project for Human Rights at the 1968 Mexico City Summer Olympics.

Dr. King, argues Zirin, embraced a broad view of sports, correctly seeing them as a powerful medium by which to convey his message.  Dr. King didn’t see “athletes” as a distinct subset of the population, that is, as mere performers who daily displayed wondrous feats of physical prowess for everyone to enjoy.  Rather, athletes were human beings who happened to be involved in sports.  In other words, Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali drew their principal identities from their humanity, not from their idiosyncratic physical talent.  It is a concept that we frequently seem to forget.

Too often today, an athlete’s visibility determines how he will be treated and accepted in society.  It was widely speculated, for example, that ex-New York Giant Plaxico Burress received a harsh, two-year prison sentence for attempted weapons possession in the second degree, because New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg wanted to make an example of the Super Bowl XLII hero.  Gilbert Arenas, erstwhile All-Star guard for the N.B.A.’s Washington Wizards, is currently embroiled in his own gun-possession brouhaha and some expect the D.C. courts to use his sentence (to be handed down on March 26) as an opportunity to send society a message similar to the one channeled through Burress.  Granted, these men did in fact willfully break the law and place themselves in legal jeopardy, and illegally possessing firearms isn’t strictly a basic Second Amendment rights issue.  Still, the notion that one’s stardom—and subsequent visibility—as a star athlete makes one’s legal situation more juridically noteworthy—and therefore riper for a harsh punishment—is ludicrous and patently unfair.

Martin Luther King Jr. recognized that a person was a man before he was a sportsman, and Zirin quotes Dr. King’s invocation of Ali to make this point: “Like Muhammad Ali puts it,” he said in 1967, “we are all–Black and Brown and poor–victims of the same system of oppression.”  That same venal system of oppression must today be transformed into the “same system of fairness and tolerance” in which one’ status as an athlete doesn’t trump his status as a person.  If we are to eliminate prejudice based on (as is commonly cited) “race, color, creed, religion, national origin, citizenship, sex, age, marital status, sexual orientation, disability, or military status,” then we also need to eliminate “fame”-based discrimination as well.

Civil rights—and unbiased jurisprudence—need to apply to everyone equally, not more harshly to others because we think their status as athlete lends more gravitas to their respective case.  Last time I checked, Lady Justice wore a robe and carried a scale, not a zebra-suit and a whistle.