Saturday, July 31, 2010

"JAZZMOBILE"

"JAZZMOBILE"
SummerFest 2010 Concert Schedule Through Saturday, August 28
Presented by Jazzmobile


FREE!

THE JAZZMOBILE SUMMERFEST 2010 SCHEDULE FOLLOWS:

Manhattan: Barry Harris

  • Sat Jul 31
    139th St between 8th & Edgecombe
    3 PM HOST: The 300 Block Assoc. of West 139th St .

Manhattan: Antoinette Montague

  • Tue Aug 3
    135th St between 7th & 8th Aves
    7 PM HOST: 32nd Precinct

Manhattan: Tia Fuller

  • Wed Aug 4
    Grant’s Tomb – 122nd St & Riverside Dr
    7 PM HOST: Jazzmobile, Inc.

Manhattan: Patience Higgins

  • Fri Aug 6
    Jackie Robinson Park – 148th St & Bradhurst
    7 PM HOST: Jazzmobile, Inc.

Manhattan: Bill Saxton

  • Mon Aug 9
    118th St between 7th & Lenox Aves
    7 PM HOST: 100 Block Assoc. of West 118th St

Manhattan: Danny Mixon

  • Tue Aug 10
    138th St between 7th & Lenox Aves
    7 PM HOST: Abyssianian

Manhattan: Wycliffe Gordon

  • Wed Aug 11
    Grant’s Tomb – 122nd St & Riverside Dr
    7 PM HOST: Jazzmobile, Inc.

Manhattan: Benny Powell

  • Fri Aug 13
    Jackie Robinson Park – 148th St & Bradhurst
    7 PM HOST: Jazzmobile, Inc.

Manhattan: Steve Kroon

  • Sat Aug 14
    Bennerson Park - 64th St & Amsterdam Ave
    3 PM HOST: Amsterdam Houses Residents Assn

Bronx: Ghanniyya Greene

  • Mon Aug 16
    Co-op City-Greenway @ Section V
    7 PM HOST: Black Forum of Co-op City

Manhattan: Akiko Tsuruga

  • Wed Aug 18
    Grant’s Tomb – 122nd St & Riverside Dr
    7 PM HOST: Jazzmobile, Inc.

Bronx: Barbara King

  • Thu Aug 19
    Lyman Place between Freeman & 169th St
    7 PM HOST: New York Kids Foundation

Manhattan: Jazzberry Jam

  • Fri Aug 20
    Jackie Robinson Park – 148th St & Bradhurst
    7 PM HOST: Jazzmobile, Inc.

Manhattan: Melba Joyce

  • Sat Aug 21
    153rd St between Convent & Amsterdam
    3 PM HOST: 153/DEELY

Manhattan: JAZZMOBILE All Stars w/ GREGORY Generet

  • Mon Aug 23
    106th St between CPW & Manhattan Ave
    7 PM HOST: Duke Ellington Blvd. Neighborhood Assn

Manhattan: Jeremy Pelt

  • Tue Aug 24
    122nd St between 7th & Lenox Aves
    7 PM HOST: Community Pride

Manhattan: Jimmy Heath

  • Wed Aug 25
    Grant’s Tomb – 122nd St & Riverside Dr
    7 PM HOST: Jazzmobile, Inc.

Manhattan: Cynthia Holiday

  • Thu Aug 26
    132nd St between 7th & Lenox Aves
    7 PM HOST: 132nd St Block Assoc.

Manhattan: Antoinette Montague

  • Fri Aug 27
    Jackie Robinson Park – 145th St & Bradhurst
    7 PM HOST: Jazzmobile, Inc.

Manhattan: TBD

  • Saturday TBD East Harlem – site TBD
    3 PM HOST: TBC

Dates:

  • Saturday, July 31, 2010 @ 3:00 pm
  • Wednesday, August 4, 2010 @ 7:00 pm
  • Friday, August 6, 2010 @ 7:00 pm
  • Monday, August 9, 2010 @ 7:00 pm
  • Tuesday, August 10, 2010 @ 7:00 pm
  • Wednesday, August 11, 2010 @ 7:00 pm
  • Friday, August 13, 2010 @ 7:00 pm
  • Saturday, August 14, 2010 @ 3:00 pm
  • Monday, August 16, 2010 @ 7:00 pm
  • Wednesday, August 18, 2010 @ 7:00 pm
  • Thursday, August 19, 2010 @ 7:00 pm
  • Friday, August 20, 2010 @ 7:00 pm
  • Saturday, August 21, 2010 @ 3:00 pm
  • Monday, August 23, 2010 @ 7:00 pm
  • Tuesday, August 24, 2010 @ 7:00 pm
  • Wednesday, August 25, 2010 @ 7:00 pm
  • Thursday, August 26, 2010 @ 7:00 pm
  • Friday, August 27, 2010 @ 7:00 pm
  • Saturday, August 28, 2010 @ 3:00 pm

Friday, July 30, 2010

American Beatboxing Championships - NYPOST.com


Events
American Beatboxing Championships

*
When :

07/31/2010 7:30pm - 07/31/2010
*
Where :

Littlefield
622 Degraw St. Brooklyn, NY
*
Who :

No performers specified

Event Details
Category: Other
Eight human beat machines will participate in this championship, which will consist of solo beatboxing, backing an a cappella track and more. Competitors include Nicholas Fox, Steven Cantor and Chris Celiz. Tickets are $25-$25; call 718-855-3388 or visit americanbeatboxchampionships.com for more details.

American Beatboxing Championships - NYPOST.com.

African-American News - July 30, 2010

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African-American News - July 30, 2010

It's an alarming statistic. Alzheimer's disease is on the rise. Studies show Mississippi isn't immune, and 65-thousand people will have the illness by 2025.

Newt Gingrich went on Fox last night to peddle more of his hateful, vile garbage regarding the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque," which is not at ground zero and is not a major mosque, but an Islamic community center.

London armed police officers forced their way into the United Kingdom headquarters of The Nation of Islam.

The House of Representatives passed a historic bill Wednesday that narrows sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine convictions, which civil rights and civil liberties experts say contributed to the disproportionate imprisonment of African-Americans in recent decades.

Zuma, who was announcing the findings of the Commission on Traditional Leadership Disputes and Claims, said it was essential that the six king and queenships come to an end in order to "correct the wrongs of the past". "The apartheid regime created its own traditional leadership at the expense of authentic leadership in some communities," Zuma said ...

Howard Dean gestures during an interview with The Associated Press in this March, 2008 file photo when Dean was chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

A creative interpretation of the Greensboro lunch counter sit-in of 1960 is the first in a series of murals that will commemorate the contributions of African-Americans and Native Americans to the state.

Sherrod said Thursday she will sue a conservative blogger who posted an edited video of her making racially tinged remarks last week.

The good news arrived when the AIDS Action Coalition of North Alabama received a $2 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control.

Is it racism, preferential treatment or something else? Virginia Sen. Jim Webb wants to end federal diversity initiatives, saying those programs have "expanded so far beyond their original purpose that they now favor anyone who does not happen to be white." David Squires Urban Affairs , July 28, 2010 dp-nws-squires-column-0729-20100728 Credit U.S.

Insidious
Insidious (Art Voice)
"Insidious" lives up to his name. Ibn Shabazz's new play, Insidious , now at Road Less Traveled Theater, is a pot-boiling dark comedy that cynically revels in contemporary phobias and taboos as it twists its way through the double and triple reversals of a thrilling plot.

Posted via email from blackcotton's posterous

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Free bike helmets for delivery bicycle drivers

Free bike helmets for delivery bicycle drivers
Written by Administrator
Thursday, July 29, 2010

Delivery bicycle drivers in Washington Heights and Inwood can pick up a free bike helmet Thu., Aug. 5 from 1 to 4 pm courtesy of New York City Business Solutions and the Department of Transportation. The helmets will be distributed at 672 W. 158th St.

It is the law that all restaurant commercial bicycle operators in Manhattan wear security helmets during their delivery runs.

Restaurant owners who would like to take advantage of this offer should RSVP to NYC Business Solutions and ask for Barbara Martinez at 212-822-8357.

Courtesy of the Manhattan Times

Free bike helmets for delivery bicycle drivers.

World's Oldest Twitterer Ivy Bean Has Passed

World's Oldest Twitterer Ivy Bean Has Passed

The 104-year-old's 62,265 online friends will miss her.

ivy_bean.jpg

In September 2009, she celebrated her 104th birthday, making her the "most mature" person on Twitter. But early this morning, it was tweeted and posted on her Facebook wall that Ivy Bean died.

"This is the saddest and hardest message that I have ever had to write. Mum sadly passed away at eight minutes past midnight on 28th July. We have all as a family lost a wonderful mother, grandma and great-grandma. We are all devastated and words cannot explain how we as a family are all feeling. I was with her all ... day and at the end I am sure that a little smile came on her face," her daughter Sandra Logan posted to Facebook.

This sparked a number of comments and tweets from her many fans, including British pop star Peter Andre. As Bean became ill from jaundice, the mana ger of her nursing home Pat Wright took over her Twitter account and told followers that Andre called his eldest fan daily, sending her flowers. Her other celebrity admirer included former Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

She is survived by her daughter Logan, two grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

 

 

Photo courtesy of Ivy Bean's Facebook page.

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Stop the System’s Fascist Attacks on Immigrants!

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Stop the System's Fascist Attacks on Immigrants!

 

Arizona's brutal anti-immigrant law, SB1070, goes into effect on Thursday, July 29th.Twenty other states are considering the same kind of laws.

 

Harlem

4:30 until 7:30

125th and Amsterdam Avenue

 

Washington Heights:

5:00 until 7:30

145th and Broadway

 

Come together with people from Harlem and Washington Heights to stand with our sisters and brothers in Arizona and around the country resisting this illegitimate fascist law and the whole fascist offensive it's a part of. Join us in this expression and to spread the powerful, penetrating analysis and guidance in REVOLUTION #208. (www.revcom.us ) We are building a movement for revolution.

 

We Don't Have An Immigration Problem! We Have A Capitalism Problem!

We say: "Arizona- That's Our Blood Down There!"


--
Steve Yip, P.O. Box 941, Knickerbocker Station
New York, New York 10002-0900
866-841-9139 x2670,  yipzzz@gmail.com

"Revolution:  Why It's Necessary, Why It's Possible, What's It All About"
A Talk by Bob Avakian, www.revolutiontalk.net


Posted via email from blackcotton's posterous

Has the Most Common Marijuana Test Resulted in Tens of Thousands of Wrongful Convictions?

Has the Most Common Marijuana Test Resulted in Tens of Thousands of Wrongful Convictions?

By John Kelly, AlterNet
Posted on July 28, 2010, Printed on July 28, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147613/

Raised in Montana and a resident of Alaska for 18 years, Robin Rae Brown, 48, always made time to explore in the wilderness. On March 20, 2009, she parked her pickup truck outside Weston, Florida, and hiked off the beaten path along a remote canal and into the woods to bird watch and commune with nature. “I saw a bobcat and an osprey,” she recalls. “I stopped once in a nice spot beneath a tree, sat down and gave prayers of thanksgiving to God.” For that purpose, Robin had packed a clay bowl and a “smudge stick,” a stalk-like bundle of sage, sweet grass, and lavender that she had bought at an airport gift shop in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Under the tree, she lit the end of the smudge stick and nestled it inside the bowl. She waved the smoke up toward her heart and over her head and prayed. Spiritual people from many cultures, including Native Americans, consider smoke to be sacred, she told me, and believe that it can carry their prayers to the heavens.

As darkness approached, she returned to her pickup truck to find Broward County’s Deputy Sheriff Dominic Raimondi and Florida Fish and Wildlife’s Lieutenant David Bingham looking inside the cab. The two men asked what she was doing and when she said she had been bird watching, Bingham asked whether she had binoculars. As she opened her knapsack, Officer Raimondi spotted her incense and asked if he could see it. He took the bowl and incense, asking whether it was marijuana. “No,” she recalls saying. “It’s my smudge, which is a blend of sage, sweet grass, and lavender.” “Smells like marijuana to me,” said Raimondi, who admitted he had never heard of a smudge stick. He then ordered Robin to stand by her truck, while he took the incense back to his car and conducted a common field test, known as a Duquenois-Levine, or D-L, test. The result was positive for marijuana.

Robin protested, telling them the smudge was available for purchase online for about $7 and gave them the name of a Web site that sold it — information Officer Bingham used his laptop to verify. But the men still searched her truck. After an hour and a half they finally allowed Robin to go home and told her that if a lab test confirmed the field test results, a warrant would be issued for her arrest.

Exactly 90 days later, Robin was arrested at the spa in Weston, Florida where she has worked as a massage therapist for three years. She was handcuffed in front of clients and co-workers, and charged with felony possession of marijuana. She was brought to a local police precinct in the town of Davie where she was booked and held for three hours. Unable to post the $1,000 bail because she was not allowed to call her boyfriend Michael, she was transferred to the Women’s Correctional Facility in Pompano Beach. At no time was she read her rights.

Five hours after her arrest, she was finally allowed a brief phone call and left a message for Michael to post her bail. At the jail, a female officer came in and told Robin to take off all her clothes. She had already been searched at the precinct station and had her shoes, socks and bra confiscated. “I’m on my period,” she said. “I don’t care,” said the officer, who ordered her to pull her underwear down to her ankles, squat over the floor drain and cough. The following morning at 4:30 a.m. she was released onto the streets of Pompano Beach with no idea where she was.

The next day, Robin found a lab and submitted to voluntary hair and urine tests. These came back clean. She had previously worked for 16 years as a transportation systems specialist with the Federal Aviation Administration, a job that required airport security clearances, so drug tests were nothing new to her. During those years, she was frequently required to pass random drug and alcohol tests.

She later learned that her incense had never been subjected to a confirmatory lab test. She had been arrested and jailed solely on the basis of her positive D-L test results.

The Preferred Test for Marijuana

The Duquenois test was developed in the late 1930s by a French pharmacist, Pierre Duquénois, while he was working for the United Nations division of narcotics. In 1950, he completed a study for the UN which claimed that his test was “very specific” for marijuana; it was adopted by the UN and crime labs around the world as the preferred test for marijuana.

After undergoing several modifications, including the use of chloroform, the test became known as the Duquenois-Levine test, and became widely popular. Though scientists would show in the 1960s and 1970s that the D-L test was nonspecific, meaning it rendered false positives, it remains today the most commonly used test for marijuana — used in many of the 800,000 marijuana arrests that take place each year.

The test is a simple chemical color reagent test, easy to perform but difficult to interpret. To administer the test, a police officer simply has to break a seal on a tiny micropipette of chemicals, and insert a particle of the suspected substance; if the chemicals turn purple, this indicates the possibility of marijuana. But the color variations can be subtle, and readings can vary by examiner.

The field test kits are produced by a variety of manufacturers, the most popular brands being NIK and ODV. Literature about the D-L from NIK’s makers states that it is only a “screening” test that “may or may not yield a valid result” and may produce “false positive results.” Yet, since at least 1990, arresting officers, with the support of prosecutors, have regularly bypassed lab analysts and have purported to identify marijuana at hearings and trials only on the basis of visual inspection and the nonspecific D-L field test. And the manufacturers have taken note.

In 1998, ODV reported in its newsletter with seeming satisfaction that a growing number of police departments were using its D-L field test, marketed as the NarcoPouch, as “their sole method of testing and identifying Marihuana [sic]… To have Officers properly trained in identifying Marijuana and taking the Crime Lab out of the loop is a tremendous cost saving venture for the State…and gives the individual Officers testing the material a greater sense of satisfaction in completing their own cases” (emphasis added). NIK, too, argued that depending exclusively on D-L field tests saves time and money. “Crime laboratories are so busy that drug tests take too long,” NIK states on its website. “With the cooperation of the Prosecuting Attorney, many police agencies have turned to presumptive drug testing. If the results indicate that an illegal substance is present, criminal charges may be filed.

In June 2006, the Virginia legislature went so far as to pass “emergency regulations” permitting law-enforcement officers to testify at trial for simple possession of marijuana cases solely on the basis of a D-L field test. Prior to these regulations, officers had to send suspected material to an approved lab for testing. Nothing in the new legislation specified that the field tests used had to be specific, or even accurate. Frederic Whitehurst, a North Carolina-based defense attorney and former FBI special agent with a doctorate in chemistry, considers the law to be an unconstitutional usurpation of the authority of the courts to determine what test results can be admitted as valid evidence.

The trend toward police officers using the D-L as a confirmatory test has been encouraged by the National Institute of Justice, an agency of the Department of Justice which has funded programs to transform police officers into court experts, based on their use of these faulty field tests. One such ongoing program for the Utah police claims to offer, in four days, “the necessary training” to positively identify marijuana, which would allow officers to serve as “expert witnesses in the courtroom setting.” The program briefly covers the “botany, chemistry and analysis of marijuana preparations,” after which police officers, including street detectives and crime scene lab personnel, “will assume responsibility for all of their agency’s marijuana submissions.” By the end of 2005, such submissions became the exclusive provenance of the Utah officers who had attended the training, and suspected marijuana samples were no longer accepted at the state lab for processing.

In 2009, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation trained more than 1,600 police officers in the use of the D-L test, resulting in a 98 percent reduction in the use of marijuana lab tests. This troubling program garnered the bureau a 2009 Vollmer Excellence in Forensic Science Award by the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

Test 'Should Never Be Relied Upon'

Despite its widespread use, as early as the 1960s, the D-L test had been proven incapable of definitively identifying the presence of marijuana in a seized substance. A 1968 article in the Chemistry and Pharmacy Bulletin of Japan reported that the D-L tests “lack in adequate specificity.” In 1969, M. J. de Faubert Maunder, a chemist in the Ministry of Technology, a UK government agency, documented the unreliability of the D-L test in an article in the Bulletin on Narcotics, noting that test results depended heavily on the subjective judgment of the analyst — and thus could easily vary dramatically from lab to lab. “[A] positive test is not recorded until this colour has been identified,” he wrote, “and because it is almost impossible to describe in absolute terms it is best recognised by experience.” Moreover, he reported finding twenty-five plant substances that would produce a D-L test result barely distinguishable from that of Cannabis and cautioned that the D-L test “should never be relied upon as the only positive evidence.”

Several articles in the Journal of Forensic Sciences further disproved any claims that the test could specifically identify marijuana. A 1969 study in the journal reported false positive results from “a variety of vegetable extracts.” A 1972 study found that the D-L test would test positive for many commonly occurring plant substances known as resorcinols, which are found in over-the-counter medicines. For instance, Sucrets lozenges tested positive for marijuana. This study concluded that the D-L test is useful only as a “screen” test and was not sufficiently selective to be relied upon for “identification.” Still another study, in 1974, showed that 12 of 40 plant oils and extracts studied gave positive D-L test results.

In 1975, Dr. Marc Kurzman at the University of Minnesota, in collaboration with fourteen other scientists, published a study in The Journal of Criminal Defense that concluded: “The microscopic and chemical screening tests presently used in marijuana analysis are not specific even in combination for ‘marijuana’ defined in any way.” In the 35 years since that study was published, no one has ever refuted this finding.

Indeed, recent research has confirmed Kurzman’s findings. In 2008, Whitehurst, the chemist and former FBI agent, substantiated Kurzman’s findings in an article in the Texas Tech Law Review. That same year, Dr. Omar Bagasra, director of the South Carolina Center for Biotechnology, conducted experiments in his lab also demonstrating that the D-L test is nonspecific and renders false positives. Bagasra, too, has impeccable credentials — he’s a leading pathologist and a board-certified forensic examiner.

A number of high courts have been persuaded by this evidence, and have found that the D-L test does not prove the presence of marijuana in a seized substance. In 1973, the Supreme Court of Wisconsin ruled that the D-L test “standing alone is not sufficient to meet the burden of proving the identity of the substance beyond a reasonable doubt.” The court specifically noted that the D-L field tests used in this marijuana possession case “are not exclusive or specific for marijuana.”

Similarly, in 1979, a trial judge in North Carolina blocked the marijuana conviction of Richard Tate, which was to be based on positive D-L test results. In this case, too, the trial judge found that the D-L test was “not specific for marijuana” and had “no scientific acceptance as a reliable and accurate means of identifying the controlled substance marijuana.” On that basis, the judge allowed the defendant to suppress the use of the test results as evidence. This finding was upheld by the North Carolina Supreme Court, which found that D-L test “was not scientifically acceptable because it was not specific for marijuana” and thus “the test results were properly suppressed.”

 Also in 1979, the U.S. Supreme Court in Jackson v. Virginia ruled that the results of nonspecific tests could not be the basis for prosecution or conviction. In other words, if the only evidence is a positive D-L test, then the case must be dismissed.

 As noted, even the test’s manufacturers do not claim that their product can definitively identify marijuana. The literature accompanying NIK’s NarcoPouch 908 cautions, “The results of a single test may or may not yield a valid result… There is no existing chemical reagent system, adaptable to field use, that will completely eliminate the occurrence of an occasional invalid test results [sic]. A complete forensic laboratory would be required to qualitatively identify an unknown suspect substance.”

Shoddy Science

Shoddy science, though, has muddied the waters. Several studies claim, falsely, to have validated the specificity of the D-L test. For instance, a seemingly authoritative 2000 study funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) purported to have validated the capacity of the D-L test to specifically and definitively identify marijuana. The title of the article, published in Forensic Science International, “Validation of Twelve Chemical Spot Tests for the Detection of Drugs of Abuse,” misstated the researchers’ actual findings. In fact, the study’s authors found that the twelve tests it analyzed, including the D-L, were nonspecific. “The tests,” they wrote, “are not always specific for a single drug or class.” Speaking of the D-L test, they wrote that “mace, nutmeg and tea reacted with the modified Duquenois-Levine,” meaning that they produced false positives. They also noted, echoing Maunder’s 1969 article, that the D-L test is subjective: “The actual color…may vary depending on many factors [including] the color discrimination of the analyst.”

The best-known D-L “validation” study, and thus the most damaging to defendants, was published in 1972 by John Thornton and George Nakamura in Journal of Forensic Science Society. It instantly made the D-L test the gold standard across the country for marijuana identification. But just like the NIST study, this report is internally contradictory and scientifically flawed. On the opening page of this article, the authors state that the D-L test is a “confirmation” test for marijuana. Such a test must be capable of proving the presence of the drug beyond a reasonable doubt, specifically identifying the drug to the exclusion of all other possible substances and producing neither false positives nor false negatives.

However, the researchers’ own findings contradict their conclusion and show instead that the D-L test merely screens for marijuana. The authors themselves reported that the D-L test gave false positives and was not a confirmatory test even when cystolithic hairs — visible on the leaves of marijuana and other plants — are found on the suspected substance. They claimed that “the Duquenois-Levine test is found to be useful in the confirmation of marijuana” when cystolithic hairs are observed “since none of the 82 species possessing hairs similar to those found on marijuana yield a positive test.” The problem is, as the authors noted, there are hundreds of plants with cystolithic hairs that they did not test, making their sample of eighty-two species woefully inadequate. In effect, they admitted that the botanical exam itself was nonspecific. Combining two nonspecific tests does not make a specific, confirmatory test, as the D-L and the botanical exam both could easily render false positives.

Without having proved specificity, the authors nevertheless claimed it: “The specificity of the Duquenois reaction has been established, empirically at least, over the past three decades. No plant material other than marijuana has been found to give an identical reaction.” They also noted its widespread use as if it were proof of its efficacy, mentioning that the D-L test was adopted as a preferential test by the League of Nations Sub-Committee of Cannabis and that a version of the test was proposed by the United Nations Committee on Narcotics as a specific test for marijuana. (The UN subsequently found that only gas chromatography/mass spectrometry analysis could affirmatively identify marijuana.)

Inexplicably, this Thornton-Nakamura study is cited by the Drug Enforcement Administration and labs around the country as justifying the use of the D-L test alone or in combination with the microscopic visual exam for proving the presence of marijuana in a seized substance. Even some courts have erroneously ruled that the D-L test is specific and confirmatory. The most egregious example occurred in 2006. U.S. District Judge William Alsup found the D-L test to be a specific identification test and declared, grandiosely: “Despite the many hundreds of thousands of drug convictions in the criminal justice system in America, there has not been a single documented false-positive identification of marijuana or cocaine when the methods used by the SFPD [San Francisco Police Department] Crime Lab are applied by trained, competent analysts.” In fact, according to an affidavit in that case from a senior criminologist at the SFPD, its lab had, for forty years, used the D-L test in combination with a botanical exam to identify marijuana — two nonspecific tests that can each produce false positives. (A spokeswoman says that current SFPD policy is to subsequently confirm these results with gas chromatography/mass spectrometry.)

In March 2009, a committee of the National Academy of Sciences, speaking of the D-L and other tests, called the analysis of controlled substances “a mature forensic science discipline”; “one of the areas with a strong scientific underpinning”; and an area in which “there exists an adequate understanding of the uncertainties and potential errors.” These incorrect assertions relied on assurances from government witnesses that “experienced forensic chemists and good forensic laboratories understand which tests (or combinations of tests) provide adequate reliability.” The committee’s main witness was Joseph Bono, the former director of a regional DEA lab, who had previously issued a sworn affidavit, referring to the D-L and other forensic tests, which asserted that “tests and instruments that are properly used by qualified forensic chemists are incapable of producing a false positive.” But experience and competence cannot make a test specific if it is not — nor can they make it immune from false positives.

In 2008, Senator Jim Webb, D-VA, said, in announcing a proposed bill, that “the criminal justice system as we understand it today is broken, unfair.” This unfairness is visible every day in the disparate and contradictory court decisions regarding the admissibility of D-L test results. Not only have courts contradicted one another on admissibility, but some courts have even chosen to admit the results of a D-L test while ruling that it does not prove the presence of marijuana beyond a reasonable doubt. This patchwork of admissibility means that a person in one state can be convicted of possessing marijuana on the sole basis of the D-L test while a resident of another state cannot.

In 1978, the Supreme Court of Illinois in The People of the State of Illinois v. Peppe Park illustrated this confused, unconstitutional state of affairs. In denying the admission of ipse dixit (“It’s marijuana because I say it’s marijuana”) reports, the court found that “police officers may not be presumed to possess the requisite expertise to identify a narcotic substance…because it simply is far too likely that a nonexpert would err in his conclusion on this matter, and taint the entire fact-finding process.” This court cited a study that found 241 incorrect identifications of marijuana by arresting police officers. Yet in the same decision, the court erroneously claimed that “to determine accurately that a particular substance contains cannabis, all that is necessary is microscopic examination combined with the Duquenois-Levine test.”

Challenging the Test

Robin Rae Brown never even faced trial on marijuana possession charges. After she was released from jail, she retained this author as a defense expert. When I first spoke with her attorney, Bill Ullman, he had never heard of the D-L test and said he normally plea-bargained cases like Robin’s. I urged him to challenge the test and provided him with several scientific studies cited in this article, relevant court decisions, including Jackson v. Virginia, and other information. When Ullman made inquiries, he discovered that the sheriff’s department had never performed a lab test to confirm his field test results. Robin, he discovered, had been charged with a felony solely on the basis of the D-L test and Officer Raimondi’s “opinion.”

At Ullman’s insistence, the sheriff’s department finally performed a gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) analysis on Robin’s smudge, which came out negative. State Attorney Berki Alvarez immediately dropped the charges against her, noting to Ullman, “the scariness that a person could be arrested under such conditions.”

Even scarier was the lab’s revelation that it does not conduct GC/MS analysis until just before a trial, as most marijuana possession defendants plea bargain before the trial. If Robin had accepted a plea bargain, she would have been wrongfully convicted and saddled with a criminal record that could have damaged her future job prospects. How many others before and since have accepted plea bargains based on false positives from a D-L test?

“I am just now willing to share this story,” Robin wrote months after her arrest, “because it was embarrassing and I didn't want to worry my family and friends.” After some serious thought, she recently decided to file a lawsuit for wrongful arrest. “I would like to see them stop using the bogus field tests and to improve their procedures at the county crime lab,” she says. “I would like the public to be aware of the faulty field tests.”

In truth, everyone arrested on marijuana charges has a Constitutional right to a GC/MS analysis. Otherwise, they are being denied both due process and a fair trial. “It is not only unnecessary for the courts to continue to accept conclusory drug identifications based on nonspecific tests, it is also unwise for them to do so,” wrote Edward Imwinkelried, a professor of law at the University of California at Davis whose work on scientific evidence has been cited by the Supreme Court. “Conclusory drug identification testimony is antithetical and offensive to the scientific tradition, and courts should not allow ipse dixit to masquerade as scientific testimony… Even more importantly, sustaining such drug identifications places a judicial imprimatur on testimony that cannot justifiably be labeled scientific. The rejection of such identifications is necessitated not only by due process but also by the simple demands of intellectual honesty.”

Sustaining evidence from nonspecific tests like the D-L, he concludes, “is both bad science and bad law.”

This article was reported in collaboration with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.

John Kelly is a court-certified expert witness on drug tests and author of 'False Positives Equal False Justice' and the forthcoming book, 'How to Obtain a Pretrial Dismissal of Marijuana Charges or an Acquittal.' He can be contacted at: kjohn39679@aol.com.

© 2010 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/147613/

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 Boutique Sale

Enjoy 60% Off at the Manolo Blahnik Boutique Sale

pulsed 39 minutes ago

When: 7/12/10 at 10:00am to 8/15/10 at 6:00pm
Where: Manolo Blahnik Boutique
31 West 54th Street
Tags: deals

Source: Madison Avenue Spy

Oooh Manolo! And now they are 60% off at the Boutique!! Stop by this unreal sale at Manolo Blahnik; we've checked it out and its super. Heels, sandals... whatever suits your fancy.

ReTweet this and Share it on Facebook. Who can say no to 60% off Manolos!

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Racism posing as rule of law

Racism posing as rule of law


COMMENT: ILHAM RAWOOT | JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA - Jul 22 2010 17:40

I wonder what a real rape survivor might think about Sabbar Kashur being convicted of rape and sentenced to 18 months in prison for sleeping with a woman who thought he was Jewish. The Arab-Israeli man was sentenced on Thursday in Jerusalem, after being under house arrest for two years for his "rape" of a Jewish woman in 2008.

Here's what happened -- he met an Israeli Jewish woman on the street, literally, they hit it off, and then went into the closest building to have sex. Then she figured out he was Arab, which turned their consensual sex into rape in the eyes of both the unnamed woman and Judge Tzvi Segal. "It is incumbent on the court to protect the public interest from sophisticated, smooth, sweet-talking offenders who can mislead naive victims into paying an unbearable price: the sanctity of their bodies and souls," said Segal.

There are so many problems here.

First up, how many men would end up in prison for "deceiving" women that they slept with? Too many to fit our jails, I imagine. "I drive a BMW", "I like children" and "I love you" are all phrases that changed far too often in post-coital conversations around the world. But while it's not okay to lie to your partner, it's certainly not rape.

Kashur also allegedly told her he was an eligible bachelor when in fact he is married with two children. While a lock-up for men who have extra-marital affairs is not a bad idea in my book, it's still not rape.

Rape is very specifically intercourse with somebody without their consent. While the specifics may vary in different countries, the concept of without consent remains firmly in place.

Israeli daily Ha’aretz reported that Kashur posed as a man seeking a long-term romantic relationship. Surely, if that was what the woman was seeking, a quickie in the closest structure 10 minutes after they met was not one of the criteria. If the woman was so specific about who she slept with, then perhaps a meal to get to know him slightly, or at least a cup of coffee would have cleared up any racist queries she might have had.

But this is not only about sex. This is also straight-up racism posing as the rule of law. It is another means of making Arab-Israelis feel less human than Israeli Jews, just like keeping the plumbing systems in East Jerusalem in the same state as they were in the early 20th century, while upgrading those in West Jerusalem. This means that when you visit the toilet in East Jerusalem, your toilet paper can't be flushed down the toilet -- rather it needs to be thrown into a bid beside the loo. Getting to the gritty, most grossly physical aspects of humanity, through humiliation and attempt to crush dignity, is how Israel maintains its racist policies.

In the meantime, and for this end, rape survivors and those fighting sexual abuse are having their plight made a mockery of as the meaning of the truly horrendous and inhumane act of rape becomes diluted. Real rape victims are afraid to speak out, often for fear of being accused of crying wolf. Real rape victims do not get attention from police and from the justice system. But when racism is involved, and the Israeli government is trying to prove a point, then regretful sex leads to a conviction. Now a man will spend a year and a half in prison to make some unnamed woman in Israel feel innocent and pure again.

Source: Mail & Guardian Online
Web Address: http://www.mg.co.za/article/2010-07-22-racism-posing-as-rule-of-law


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Harlem Church Links With Ethiopian Coffee Growers - NYTimes.com

Raising Coffee in Ethiopia, With Help From Harlem


By TRYMAINE LEE

From a 542-square-foot office above a bustling intersection in Harlem, the Rev. Nicholas S. Richards is building what he hopes will be a 7,000-mile bridge to the eastern highlands of Ethiopia.

It is a bridge more than 200 years in the making.

In that modest two-room office off East 125th Street, the Abyssinian Fund, the only nongovernmental organization in Ethiopia formed by an African-American church, the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, finally has a home.

Mr. Richards, 26, an assistant minister at Abyssinian under the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, is the president of the recently formed Aby Fund, as he calls it, an international aid and development arm of the church. It will soon be joining forces with a co-op of 700 coffee farmers in the ancient Ethiopian city of Harrar, with a mission to improve the quality of the farmers’ lives by helping them improve the quality of their coffee beans.

The Abyssinian Fund will pay for specialized training and equipment to help the co-op’s farmers produce a higher-quality product so they can be more competitive on the international coffee market. Once their income has increased, part of what they make will then be set aside in a fund to support local development projects, like much-needed roads, schools or clinics.

Mr. Richards, members of the fund’s board of directors and congregants of the church said the mission was as much about social aid and economic development as it was about the church’s desire to reach back and reconnect with its spiritual and ancestral homeland.

Well woven into the fabric of Harlem, the Abyssinian Baptist Church has a connection to Ethiopia that goes back to the church’s founding in 1808 by free blacks and Ethiopian merchant seamen who refused to worship where blacks and whites were segregated. (Abyssinia is a historical name for Ethiopia.)

Just a year and a half ago, the Abyssinian Fund was a dream that had sprouted from a simple seed planted after Mr. Butts led a group of congregants to Ethiopia in 2007 to celebrate the church’s 200th anniversary.

The fund was inspired by the group’s reaction to the struggle and resilience of the impoverished Ethiopians they had encountered.

“Ethiopia touches your heart,” said Dori Brunson, a donor and congregant who made the journey. “The villages were so simple, so lacking in the amenities that we are so used to, and at one point I just had to walk away, and I stood there and cried.

“Even though we were born here in America, we are part of that African soil. And because of what Africa has given the world and what they stand for, we must give back.”

So far the organization has raised about $130,000, only slightly more than a third of its year-end goal. Mr. Richards has not yet hired any salaried employees or opened a field office in Harrar. Not a single training session has been held or piece of equipment shipped.

Yet Mr. Richards said there was a sense among supporters and congregants that they had crossed a threshold, having succeeded in formalizing the fund’s status in less than a year to a recognized charity with a nongovernmental organization in Ethiopia and an office in New York.

“To see our plan being transformed from just some pages to actual brick and mortar is amazing,” said Mr. Richards, sitting in the sparsely furnished, seventh-floor office, where Ethiopian art hung on the mustard-colored walls and leftover bottles of water and wine from an opening reception a few days earlier were scattered on uncluttered desktops.

The organization will operate as an independent but affiliated body of the church, much like the Abyssinian Development Corporation, which has helped create housing and prompt commercial development in Harlem, including a supermarket, schools and homeless shelters.

Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee, and the green beans the farmers grow there are prized on the multibillion-dollar international coffee market.

Coffee is the second most-traded commodity in the world, after oil, yet these farmers earn an average of $1 a day, less than $400 a year, according to aid organizations.

There has been no shortage of aid money pumped into Ethiopia from international organizations and other nations, including the United States, which, according to the State Department, gave $4.7 billion in assistance from 1999 to 2009. But Mr. Richards said the Abyssinian Fund would not function as a traditional charity, as the farmers would share the responsibility for the project’s success.

“We are going to try to the best of our ability to provide the highest level of training and the most necessary equipment that the farmers need,” he said. “But it will be the farmers’ responsibility to reinvest. Reinvestment is going to be critical.”

Instead of providing financial aid or food to the farmers, the Abyssinian Fund will hire coffee experts who are specialists in the processing and quality standards of companies like Starbucks that are the chief buyers of Ethiopia’s beans. Substandard processing has vexed the farmers’ efforts to command higher prices.

The trainers will also teach planting and harvesting techniques that help farmers grow and select only the choicest coffee beans, and the fund will provide equipment like scissors, shears and mechanized pickers to ensure that the beans are properly harvested. Many of these farmers still harvest their crops with their bare hands, Mr. Richards said.

Mr. Richards said the goal was for the farmers to double their income in five years. Helping to improve the livelihoods of the 700 farmers in the co-op, he said, could result in better conditions for as many as 3,000 people.

The fund has had to tread delicately in Ethiopia, where the government has been skeptical of the motives of some foreign aid groups.

Ethiopia is one of the poorest and most aid-dependent countries in the world, and has come under the scrutiny by human rights groups, the American government and the World Bank for what has been described as a leaky aid system, with accusations of governmental manipulation of food aid to reward political allies.

Reta Alemu Nega, a minister counselor with the Ethiopian Consulate in Manhattan, said the criticisms were the work of political enemies of the state. Nongovernmental organizations operating in Ethiopia “are not always what they present themselves to be,” he said.

But Mr. Nega said the Ethiopian government supported the work of the Abyssinian Fund. “We know the Abyssinian Church,” he said. “We know who they are.”

Mr. Richards said he had to assure the Ethiopian government that the fund would not operate in a political capacity or meddle in local politics. If so, he said he was told, the organization would be kicked out of the country.

“There’s very little concern for us about corruption because we have a direct relationship to the farming community that we are working with,” Mr. Richards said. “We know the farmers. I’ve visited the farmers. I’ve talked to them, and I’ve talked to their leaders. We don’t provide any cash. And that’s a huge way that we mitigate our exposure to corruption, because there is no cash that is being provided.”

So far, most of the money raised has come from Harlem, with donations ranging from $25 a week to one for $10,000. Other money has come from an art sale and gala featuring work by Ethiopian artists.

“Most of the people doing development work in Africa are not of African descent,” Mr. Richards said. “To have a group of African-Americans concerned about a particular nation in Africa, and doing something about it, is tremendous. This is black folk helping black folk, and it is tremendous to me.”

Harlem Church Links With Ethiopian Coffee Growers - NYTimes.com.

Sunday, July 25, 2010

The Reinvention of the Reverend

 The Reinvention of the Reverend

Why the indefatigable Al Sharpton still has work to do. And what his evolution tells us about race and politics in Obama’s America.

Photograph by Jake Chessum for Newsweek

Al Sharpton Through the Years. View the photo gallery.

if the rev. al sharpton didn’t exist, he would have had to be invented. in fact, the novelist Tom Wolfe has claimed he did invent him, in the character of the Reverend Bacon, a supporting figure in The Bonfire of the Vanities. Each generation of black America gives birth to its own incarnation of the charismatic preacher-activist who confronts the white power structure in the streets and talks circles around it on Meet the Press. Just a few months after the fictional Bacon made his appearance in 1987, the real Sharpton burst onto the national stage as the fiery advocate for Tawana Brawley, a New York teenager who claimed to have been raped by a gang of white men, including a policeman. In that incarnation he still haunts the popular imagination: a bulky, bullhorn-toting figure in a neon-hued tracksuit, topped by a preposterously high, wavy pompadour. About all that remains today is a bare suggestion of the pompadour and roughly two thirds of the 300-pound 1980s-vintage Sharpton himself, now typically clad in an impeccable custom-tailored suit. His erstwhile ally, rival, and adversary, former New York City mayor David Dinkins, maintains that of course Sharpton has “grown up and matured, as most people do if they live long enough.”

But the interesting question is whether his role is still needed in an era when the man atop the national power structure himself is black, and Sharpton now regularly meets with him—issuing not just demands but advice. If you asked Sharpton himself, he’d undoubtedly reply, are you serious? Blacks still have twice the unemployment rate of Americans overall, and young black men are still being shot by cops under circumstances that range from tragic to suspicious. The election of Barack Obama has provoked an almost hysterical reaction from the far-right media, which last week claimed as its latest victim an obscure African-American official in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Relaxing with a thick Ashton Churchill in a plush midtown cigar lounge, the once-and-still Reverend Al scoffs at the idea that there is, or ever has been, a new Sharpton. “My mission, my message, and everything else about me is the same as always,” he says. “The country may have changed, but I haven’t.”

So, taking him at his word, Sharpton—at 55, a half-generation younger than Jesse Jackson and seven years older than Obama—can serve as a marker against which to gauge the shifting river of American race relations. Contacted in May by the family of a 7-year-old girl accidentally killed by Detroit police, Sharpton called no angry press conference and declined to get himself arrested. Instead, he preached an impassioned, but hardly inflammatory, sermon whose message—“we are all responsible for our children’s safety”—could have offended no one except Mike Cox, a Republican candidate for governor of Michigan, who pronounced himself “disgusted” that Sharpton would come to his state to preach at a child’s funeral.

What has changed, though, is the center of gravity of political anger in America. Sharpton’s next big project is a march on Washington planned for Aug. 28, the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Sharpton’s “Reclaim the Dream” rally will coincide with a speech by Glenn Beck near the Lincoln Memorial. Sharpton is especially cutting about Beck’s “Take Back America” tour with Sarah Palin earlier this year. “The nerve and gall,” he expostulates. “Who are they taking America back from, and who are they giving it to?” Reclaim the Dream versus Take Back America.

And if Sharpton’s “mission” and “message” haven’t changed, his approach surely has. From last week’s fast-moving events in Washington—which found Sharpton in Hawaii, delivering a speech to a convention of dentists—the lesson he drew was about the danger of leaping to conclusions, as both the NAACP and the administration did in disowning Shirley Sherrod, Georgia’s director of rural development for the USDA, after a right-wing Web site and Fox News denounced her as a racist based on an excerpt from a months-old speech. So outrageous was this charge—in context, her point was clearly about her successful struggle to overcome prejudice—that even Beck came to her defense. But Sharpton knows all too well the temptation to seize the news cycle at its peak and check the facts later; thinking back 25 years, and with the circumstances reversed, it’s easy to picture him grabbing a bullhorn and leading a march on the USDA. He regards that sort of thing now as not just irresponsible but counterproductive. “Shirley Sherrod is an example of what happens when we play the right wing’s game: they win. We have to choose our battles wisely.”

And Sharpton also symbolizes what hasn’t changed in America, the ways in which the respective histories of black and white give rise to unsettlingly divergent world views. To this day he refuses to repudiate Brawley—long after a grand jury concluded that she had invented the rape charge, and after a local prosecutor whose name was dragged into the case won a defamation suit against Sharpton. Sharpton has been right much more often than wrong in his choice of causes, dating back at least to the 1989 murder of Yusuf Hawkins, a black teenager who paid with his life for the mistake of walking down the wrong block in Brooklyn. Many African-Americans will be forever grateful to Sharpton for taking on the thankless task of defending the victims of Bernhard Goetz, who opened fire on four unarmed black teenagers in the subway. But he has also made some grave missteps. In 1991, during a tense confrontation between blacks and Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, he notably failed to calm tensions with a remark about “the diamond merchants in Crown Heights.” In 1995 his reference to “white interlopers,” at a protest against the eviction of a popular Harlem music store, was followed by a fatal arson attack on the white-owned business that held the lease. It is his refusal to apologize over Brawley—or to pay the defamation judgment, which was eventually settled by donations from wealthy friends—that still haunts his reputation among white Americans of a certain age. Tempting as it must be to put the matter behind him, Sharpton still answers questions the same way, without apology, but artfully framing the issue in the way most favorable to him. “I listened to the child, and I believed her,” he says. “When I hear that people are still mad at me about this case, I want to ask them, ‘Have you ever been asked to help a child that’s been hurt?’ I don’t apologize for anything I did to help her. Judge me the way you will.”

Although Sharpton can give the impression he sprang fully formed from the teeming streets of Brooklyn, he spent his early years in a middle-class neighborhood, the son of a prosperous contractor who deserted the family when Sharpton was 10. Overnight, Sharpton moved with his mother, Ada, and older sister, Cheryl, onto welfare and into a housing project. There he was sustained by his memory of life on the other side of the tracks. His first experience of advocacy was in agitating to improve the dismal conditions prevailing in public housing in minority neighborhoods. “I was the only kid who’d lived somewhere else,” he says. “I knew the trash was supposed to be picked up. I had to explain to my friends that this was not the way other people lived.” His other sustenance was preaching; he was a mesmerizing speaker from the age of 4, when he gave his first sermon. (He rehearsed before his sister’s dolls, gowned in one of his mother’s housedresses.) By 7, he was touring with gospel singer Mahalia Jackson; by 10, he’d been ordained in the Pentecostal Church. (He now identifies as a Baptist.) This gave him a unique perspective on outsiderness: preaching the Gospel wasn’t exactly a route to peer acceptance for a black teenager in the 1960s.

But it brought him to the attention of some powerful figures, including Jesse Jackson, who was so impressed by the 15-year-old Sharpton that he named him New York City youth director for his economic-development program, Operation Breadbasket. Another friend he made in those years was Teddy Brown, the eldest son of soul singer James Brown. In 1973 Teddy died in a car crash, and the young Sharpton became a kind of substitute son (and, eventually, personal aide and road manager) to the singer. Sharpton took away two things from that experience: his hairstyle, copied from James Brown, which the singer made him promise never to change until after Brown’s death, a promise he kept despite the inconvenience of being a prominent black leader with straightened hair; and a wife, Kathy Jordan, a backup singer in Brown’s entourage. They had two daughters, Dominique and Ashley. It isn’t easy being Al Sharpton’s kid, says Dominique, 29: “I see him on television sometimes and I just hold my breath,” waiting to see if he will say something brash that can be “twisted around” and used against him. Sharpton and his wife amicably separated in 2004. Sharpton has weathered some minor embarrassments over finances and taxes in his career, but he is one preacher who has managed to negotiate the temptations of fame untouched by sexual scandal.

Sharpton brought remarkable gifts to his career. Jackson in his prime undoubtedly could deliver a more effective set speech, but in debate no one has a quicker mind or tongue than Sharpton. His political instincts are unmatched, and his personal charisma has been undimmed since high school, when he had to pull off the trick of charming dates whose mothers had seen him preach in church. These have not, though, translated into success as a political candidate. He has run for the U.S. Senate three times, once for mayor, and, memorably, for president, in 2004—never coming very close but occasionally rising above footnote status. He is untroubled by this record of futility because, he insists, it was never his intention to win: “I ran for office to change the debate and raise questions about social justice, and I did that.”

There has been a longstanding media fascination with Sharpton’s income. He has lived an upper-middle-class, although hardly opulent, life in New Jersey and Brooklyn, sending his daughters to private schools (at the suggestion of their godmother Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s widow, who worried about their safety in a public school). But at one point in his complicated history with the IRS he claimed to be entirely without assets. Today he supports himself on income from his radio talk show, Keeping It Real With Al Sharpton, and from “love offerings” at the sermons he preaches almost every Sunday in churches all around the country. His enemies sometimes charge, bizarrely, that he has chosen a career as a peripatetic community activist for the money. “It’s amazing when people call me an opportunist,” he says. “Do you know how much money I could have made with a megachurch like T. D. Jakes or Eddie Long? Don’t you think I could have done that?” By the same token, he is too honest to pretend indifference to the ego rewards of fame: “What I do is my passion, but it’s also constant work, and if my reward is getting on television, it seems fair to me.” There are places where he draws the line on publicity, though, and one is Dancing With the Stars, whose invitation he declined in 2008. “There are enough black people dancing on TV without me,” he jokes.

Perhaps inevitably, his career has led him away from his friendship with Jackson. Although no longer close, they speak of each other respectfully, and “they work with each other really well,” says Charles Ogletree, a Harvard Law School professor. “There isn’t just one black leader. Reverend Sharpton is at the forefront right now, but there are many other names working for equality.” While Jackson takes a broad, programmatic view of the civil-rights struggle, Sharpton most often focuses on individual instances of injustice. “It’s simple,” says Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Institute at Stanford, and a friend of Sharpton’s. “If you want policies put forth, you call Obama or [Newark, N.J., Mayor] Cory Booker. But if you get beat up by the police, you’d better call Al Sharpton.” The two leaders are working toward the same end, Sharpton says, but “I’m a lot younger than Jesse. I didn’t have the experience of sitting in the back of the bus, so we faced different realities, and we see some things differently. Unfortunately, at a certain point that can become a competition.”

One area in which the competition played out was the 2008 presidential election. Both Jackson and Sharpton backed Obama for the Democratic nomination, but Jackson’s endorsement had a distinctly pro forma air. Sharpton, of course, stands on the same side of the generational line as Obama. And he was not troubled, as some other black leaders were, that Obama had no personal or family experience of the civil-rights struggle. Sharpton is descended from a South Carolina slave family, but he has been shaped by his experience in New York, whose black population, compared with those of many other American cities, has a large proportion of Caribbean and African immigrants. Two of Sharpton’s highest-profile campaigns in recent years have been on behalf of Amadou Diallo (an African peddler shot to death by police) and Abner Louima (a Haitian immigrant violently assaulted in a police station). “Obama was a community activist for many years, so our paths had crossed,” says Sharpton. “I think I had a better grasp of who he was and what he was doing than some of my peers back then. Unfortunately, there was some resentment towards him by many in leadership positions, and there still is.” The two hit it off, but Sharpton shrewdly underplayed his hand, avoiding public appearances with the candidate. Obama’s opponents “were looking for anything to discredit him, and I would have been just the ticket,” Sharpton says. Since the inauguration, though, Sharpton has been to the White House at least eight times.

Obama’s embrace of Sharpton has not been without criticism—but mostly from the left. Commentator Tavis Smiley and Princeton professor Cornel West are among those who believe Obama has failed to deliver on his promises to black Americans, and would prefer to see more agitation from the country’s most prominent agitator. Todd Boyd, a professor of African-American studies at USC, sees a cynical ploy by Obama to use Sharpton as a foil to Jackson, embracing, as he puts it, “the lesser of two evils.” For his part, Sharpton is quick to point out his disagreements with Obama, notably on the war in Afghanistan. “But,” Sharpton adds, “[Bill] Clinton passed laws like welfare reform that really hurt us, and all these people were willing to give him a pass. We get the first black president and we’re ready to knock him down before he’s in there 14 months. What has he done to hurt us?”

Even Sharpton’s most recent campaign, a protest against Arizona’s stringent immigration law, has generated controversy. “I think Latino activists who have been fighting this type of thing for years are not happy that Reverend Al is stealing their thunder,” says Boyd. “But this is what he tends to do, no matter the issue.” Still, Lillian Rodríguez López, president of the Hispanic Federation, is happy to have Sharpton’s help: “He went into Arizona with a solid plan to protest without incident or violence, so how can we complain about that?” Sharpton views the march he led in May as a logical extension of his civil-rights work. “I just can’t imagine this happening now,” he says. “Where does it end? Do they next start stopping all black people to see if we’re Haitians here illegally?”

It is, of course, the fate of people like Sharpton to be misunderstood, and his own tendency to get carried away while addressing a crowd has contributed to it at times. He says, accurately, that the innumerable marches he has held over the years have been almost entirely free of violence, except for the time an enraged onlooker stabbed him in the chest. He is also, he believes, partly a victim of history: Jackson and, before him, Martin Luther King Jr. had much more radical black figures to their left, Louis Farrakhan and Malcolm X, who made them seem moderate by comparison. There has been no one in Sharpton’s time to play that role for him. He is out there all alone, still standing on the same principle he first enunciated in his housing project in Brooklyn: poor people have the same rights as rich ones, to justice in the streets and in the courts. If he didn’t exist, we might, in fact, need to invent him.

Friday, July 23, 2010

East Harlem School Gets New Rooftop Soccer Field - NY1.com


East Harlem School Gets New Rooftop Soccer Field

By: Roger Clark


The Manchester City Football Club unveiled a new rooftop soccer field that it funded for P.S. 72 Lexington Academy in East Harlem.

The six-story high turf soccer pitch is the result of partnership between the football club and the City Soccer Initiative and will give kids across the city access to coaching and education programs.

"We want to leave a legacy for kids in New York and what better program that building a rooftop soccer pitch for kids to play, all year round eventually, on top of here," said Gary Hopkins of Manchester City Football.

Manchester City Football Club plays in England's Premier League and is touring the states preparing for the upcoming season.

"Back in England we do a lot of community work with our kids in Manchester, so we are just thrilled to come to New York to do the same,” said Hopkins.

The field makes it easier for students to learn the finer points of the game, since there aren't many places to play nearby.

"This is a dream that's been in the making, in my mind anyway, for years," said the school principal Tony Hernandez. "I'm still waiting to get pinched and woken up. Manchester City Football Club and the City Soccer Initiative have been incredibly generous to our school, to our community. Our children, our families are going to benefit from this for years to come."

"We use the game to promote healthy active lifestyles, and use the opportunity to introduce important life skills, such as how to cooperate, how to develop friendships and how to work together as a team,” said Paul Jeffries of City Soccer Initiative.

Members of the Manchester City club, who are in town for a tournament in New Jersey this weekend, paid a visit to the kids Thursday and helped break in the new pitch.

"I know Manhattan's got a lot of built up areas you know, so it's a fantastic idea to have a pitch on top of the school here,” said Manchester City player Shay Given. “As you can see, it's great for the kids."

"It's great, I've never seen something like this before,” said teammate Vladimir Weiss.

As part of the next phase of the project, a dome will be built above the field to protect it from the elements. It is set to be complete by winter.

East Harlem School Gets New Rooftop Soccer Field - NY1.com.

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Harlem's WA Condominiums faces foreclosure

clipped from therealdeal.com
Harlem's WA Condominiums faces foreclosure



From left: Brothers Trevor Whittingham, David Atkinson and the WA Condominiums
Banco Popular has filed a lawsuit to foreclose on the WA Condominiums in Harlem, after the developers allegedly defaulted on $13.2 million in loans.

According to the suit filed last Thursday, the developers, brothers Trevor Whittingham and David Atkinson, borrowed $11.1 million in 2006 to build the 35-unit luxury boutique condo, one of the high-end developments in Harlem built during the boom at 2201 Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard at 130th Street.

The developers also borrowed $2 million project loan and a $2.6 million acquisition loan from MTM Realty, which was later assigned to Puerto Rico-based Banco Popular.

From left: Brothers Trevor Whittingham, David Atkinson and the WA Condominiums

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

About New York - A Smell of Pot and Privilege in the City - NYTimes.com

A Smell of Pot and Privilege in the City
By JIM DWYER

The Bloomberg administration has quietly been fixing up its sons and daughters with cool summer internships, as reported Tuesday in The New York Times. Which is probably fine: It is hard to see nepotism as much of a sin when it is really just another chapter of Darwinism, the drive possessed by all creatures to finagle a better future for their offspring.

No matter how much Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg preached about meritocracy, no one expected that the laws of nature would be repealed when he was elected.

Sure enough, a Freedom of Information Act request showed that tucked among hundreds of summer interns picked through a competitive process were dozens of the children of City Hall insiders or of Mr. Bloomberg’s friends. They reflected the mayor’s social and political circles: mostly white, many quite wealthy, coming from private high schools and Ivy League colleges.

In short, these are not residents of Stop and Frisk New York.

Mayor Bloomberg promised to lead a government that looked like the city; in reality, he leads one that looks like his mirror, an administration in which key managers are overwhelmingly white and male. It is one thing if this means the annual crop of interns is heavily salted with young Bloombergians.

It is quite another when those managers are shaping policies that wind up leading to the deprivation of liberty of people who do not look like them.

Among the biggest but least discussed expansions of government power under Mr. Bloomberg has been the explosive increase in arrests for displaying or burning marijuana.

No city in the world arrests more of its citizens for using pot than New York, according to statistics compiled by Harry G. Levine, a Queens College sociologist.

Nearly nine out of ten people charged with violating the law are black or Latino, although national surveys have shown that whites are the heaviest users of pot. Mr. Bloomberg himself acknowledged in 2001 that he had used it, and enjoyed it.

On the Upper East Side of Manhattan where the mayor lives, an average of 20 people for every 100,000 residents were arrested on the lowest-level misdemeanor pot charge in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

During those same years, the marijuana arrest rate in Brownsville, Brooklyn, was 3,109 for every 100,000 residents.

That means the chances of getting arrested on pot charges in Brownsville — and nothing else — were 150 times greater than on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

No doubt this is, in large part, a consequence of the stop-and-frisk practices of the Police Department, which Mr. Bloomberg and his aides say have been an important tool in bringing down crime.

Nowhere in the city is that tactic used more heavily than in Brownsville. On average, the police conducted one stop and frisk a year for every one of the 14,000 people who live there, an analysis by The New York Times found. More than 99 percent of the people were not arrested or charged with any wrongdoing.

Brownsville has the highest marijuana arrest rate in the city. The top 10 precincts for marijuana arrests averaged 2,150 for every 100,000 residents; the populations in those precincts are generally 90 percent or more nonwhite.

Mr. Bloomberg’s neighborhood has the lowest rate of marijuana arrests; the 10 precincts with the lowest rates averaged 67 arrests per 100,000 residents. The population in most of those neighborhoods was 80 percent white.

A few weeks ago, Mr. Bloomberg talked about proposals that would allow marijuana to be distributed for putatively medical purposes.

He said it was a Trojan horse for complete legalization.

“I mean, the idea of medical marijuana, we all know what that means: It means everybody is going to qualify,” he said. “The worst thing is the hypocrisy of saying it’s medical marijuana. If you want to legalize it, let’s have that debate, but that’s what you’re really talking about. It has nothing to do with medicine.”

In truth, in New York, the debate was over before it began.

For blacks and Latinos, it is very, very illegal.

But not in Mr. Bloomberg’s neighborhood.

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

About New York - A Smell of Pot and Privilege in the City - NYTimes.com.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

An Open Letter To Black Leadership by Minister Louis Farrakhan

FinalCall.com News

Minister Louis Farrakhan
An Open Letter To Black Leadership by Minister Louis Farrakhan
By The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan
Updated Jul 20, 2010 - 11:18:59 AM

Minister Louis Farrakhan
NATIONAL REPRESENTATIVE OF THE HONORABLE ELIJAH MUHAMMAD
AND
THE NATION OF ISLAM

IN THE NAME OF ALLAH, THE BENEFICENT, THE MERCIFUL.
I BEAR WITNESS THAT THERE IS NO GOD BUT ALLAH AND I BEAR
WITNESS THAT MUHAMMAD IS HIS MESSENGER

AN OPEN LETTER
TO BLACK LEADERSHIP

July 19, 2010

To the Spiritual, Political, Educational, and Economic Leaders and to our Sports and Entertainment Giants:

May this open letter find you well and in good spirit as we search for a solution to the many problems that we face as a people.

Most of you have benefited in some way from a relationship that you have with members of the Jewish Community. Some of you have become very wealthy and are able to live in the best manner that you choose because of this friendship. However, have you ever noticed that no matter how rich and powerful some of us have become, we have never been shown how to network with the wealthy and learned of our people, pooling our resources that we may produce for our people that which would grow us from a begging position as little children to become masters of our own destiny?

The Jewish people have maximized their wealth by networking with their people and others in America and the World, thus they have become masters in banking, trade, commerce and have parlayed their wealth to become masters in every field of human endeavor. At the same time, we as their friends amass wealth for ourselves, our families and a few people who benefit from us but never have we done anything collectively to benefit the masses of our people.

It is not that we would not desire to do this; it is because we have not been shown how. Our distrust and disunity prohibits us from doing what the Jewish people have done.

These books that the Historical Research Department of the Nation of Islam has published, “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews: How Jews Gained Control of the Black American Economy Volume 2” and “Jews Selling Blacks” are being shared with our people to show us how we were completely undone and how others have benefited from what has happened and continues to happen to us. We cannot deal effectively with our so-called friends as men and women without this vital knowledge.

Whenever the Light of Truth has been shone on them, they reach for you to defend them against the Truth that uncovers the horror that has been done to us. They have always been successful pitting us against each other thus keeping them from facing the Truth of their real relationship with us. As they call upon you to denounce me as an anti-Semite and, because of the favor you believe you owe them for what they have done to help make life comfortable for you; I am asking you to stand down. I am asking you to read this research and then discuss it with your Jewish friends. Would you condemn me as an anti-Semite for exposing the research that shows them as being anti-Black? I am asking you to stand down and let them come out to me to defend their record and history of their relationship with us that we compiled from that which was written by their own scholars, historians, and Rabbis.

If you become an apologist for them in this hour, you will be seen by the masses of our people as a modern day Uncle Tom who believes you owe more to them than to the masses of our suffering people. If you attack me at their insistence you will be seen as an enemy of the rise of our people as well as an enemy of your own rise; for you can never be free to rise above the limitations placed on you by them until you know the absolute Truth of your relationship with them. Being an apologist for them will be dangerous for you as the masses of our people are awakening and are increasingly angry at the reality of our condition. No matter how popular you may be and desirous you may be to defend your so-called friends, it is dangerous for any of us to defend those who are the architects of White supremacy and are the architects of the destruction of us as a people.

Most of you are afraid to face such a formidable and powerful enemy. So, I implore you to stand to the side and let them come out to defend themselves and argue against the Truth that I and we speak and write.

I will prove to you and them that Allah (God) is Present and He is with me. As David went out to Goliath and defeated him in the face of the fear of King Saul and the Children of Israel, likewise, I can assure you that I will be victorious over your and my enemies with the Help of Allah (God) and His Christ (Mahdi).

Thank you for reading these words.

I Am Your Brother and Servant,

Respectfully and Sincerely Submitted,

The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan
Servant to the Lost-Found
Nation of Islam in the West

HMLF/km


Note: See related links:

Minister Louis Farrakhan's Letter To ADL's Abraham Foxman (06-24-2010)

Jewish leaders demand Farrakhan denounce "Secret Relationship" book (07-11-2010)