Occupy Updates: DC Protester Says Driver "Gassed it" Into Occupiers, Project Launches to Support Street Vendors

--Three Occupy DC protesters were hit by a car yesterday as the protesters gathered to protest the Koch brothers outside the Americans for Prosperity conference. The Washington Post:

One protester, 29-year-old Jesse Folks of Riverdale, Md., told The Washington Post that he was standing in the street with other demonstrators near the convention center when the car “just gassed it into a bunch of people.”

“We were in the street, but this guy didn’t even give us a chance to get out of the way,” Folks said.

A police lieutenant says the protesters "either ran toward or jumped in front of the moving vehicle." The protesters were taken to the hospital but were not seriously injured.

--The Street Vendor Project has launched an effort to drive business to lower Manhattan street vendors that may have lost customers since the start of Occupy Wall Street. Through the project, people can "make a donation to the street vendor project and have those dollars used to buy food from these vendors for the occupy protestors," thus helping both the Occupy movement and the local vendors.

--Yesterday Occupy Philly led a march to the venue where Mitt Romney was holding a fundraiser and offering photo-ops for $2,500 a pop. Outside, the protesters held their own photo-op with a cardboard version of the GOP presidential hopeful. Here's video of the action, via ThinkProgress.

--In Boston, occupiers marched on the Israeli consulate in solidarity with the activists who were on board yesterday's Gaza-bound flotilla that was seized by the Israeli military.

--A group called Beings Beings has raised over $1,600 to distribute 10,000 harmonicas at Zuccotti Park today. From the project's Kickstarter page: "What we're suggesting is to equip the entire movement with harmonicas. By breathing slowly through these harmonicas, the historic instrument of the underclass in America, the audible qualities of both the individual and the whole will become a call used for marches, demonstrations, and sit-ins.  As thousands of people step together and breathe together, the sound that we emit will be impossible to ignore or argue, because it lacks words that can be skewed or manipulated."