REV-ENGE IS SWEET FOR ‘BETRAYED’ PASTOR

By FREDRIC U. DICKER State Editor

The Rev. Wright

Obama’s Former Preacher Speaks Out

Jeremiah Wright speaks out.

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April 30, 2008 –

ALBANY – The Rev. Jeremiah Wright would be happy to see Barack Obama’s presidential campaign derailed because the pastor is fuming that his former congregant has “betrayed” their 20-year relationship,

The Post has learned. “After 20 years of loving Barack like he was a member of his own family, for Jeremiah to see Barack saying over and over that he didn’t know about Jeremiah’s views during those years, that he wasn’t familiar with what Jeremiah had said, that he may have missed church on this day or that and didn’t hear what Jeremiah said, this is seen by Jeremiah as nonsense and betrayal,” said the source, who has deep roots in Wright’s Chicago community and is familiar with his thinking on the matter.

“Jeremiah is trying to defend his congregation and the work of his ministry by saying what he is saying now,” the source added.

“Jeremiah doesn’t care if he derails Obama’s candidacy or not . . . He knows what he’s doing. Obviously, he’s not a dumb man. He knows he’s not helping.”

The source spoke yesterday about Wright’s motivation for thrusting himself back into the news, the day after the pastor appeared at the National Press Club on Monday and embarrassed Obama by accusing the United States of terrorism.

Wright has said the reason he has begun granting interviews and making public appearances now is that he wants to defend black churches.

But the source said the preacher’s motivation is much more personal.

The source noted that the roots of Wright’s disillusionment with Obama began last year after the Illinois senator unexpectedly yanked him from participating in the public announcement of his presidential campaign.

“That’s why Jeremiah revealed . . . that he had actually been at the [announcement] hotel and prayed privately with the Obama family before the official declaration,” the source told The Post.

“Rev. Wright, as well as other senior members of his church, believe that Obama has betrayed over 20 years of their supposed friendship.”

Obama further angered Wright by trying to distance himself from the pastor ever since videos were made public earlier this year of the preacher alleging that America brought 9/11 upon itself and that people should say “God damn America,” not “God bless America.”

The source added, “After 20 years of loving Barack like he is one of their own, after he was embraced by this congregation as a brother in Christ, after his pastor was a father figure to him and gave him credibility in a city he had not grown up in and in a black community that was suspect of someone from Hawaii and Harvard, he thanks him by not allowing him to speak publicly at his announcement last year?

“A lot of people in the church believe they were there for this man when no one else was, and a lot of people don’t believe it any more when Obama claims he loves the man who did so much for him,” the source added.

fredric.dicker@nypost.com

Report: NYPD targets blacks, Hispanics on marijuana

Report: NYPD targets blacks, Hispanics on marijuana

BY ROCCO PARASCANDOLA | rocco.parascandola@newsday.com
11:56 PM EDT, April 29, 2008

The NYPD arrested more than 350,000 people for misdemeanor marijuana possession over the past decade — a tenfold increase achieved by systematically targeting young black and Hispanic men and stopping them without cause, a report released Tuesday charges.

The NYPD said the New York Civil Liberties Union, which released the report, is misleading the public “with absurdly inflated numbers and false claims about bias.”For example, between 2003 and 2006, overall marijuana arrests dipped by 25 percent compared with the previous four-year period, “a point missing from the report,” said Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, the NYPD’s top spokesman.

Report: NYPD targets blacks, Hispanics on marijuana — Newsday.com.

BELL COP SHOCKED AT DEATH

BELL COP SHOCKED AT DEATH
31-BULLET DETECTIVE WAS ‘DEVASTATED’
By CLEMENTE LISI
April 30, 2008 –

The undercover detective who fired 31 of the 50 shots at Sean Bell said he was “totally devastated” when he learned two of his bullets had killed the Queens groom on his wedding day.

Detective Michael Oliver told his lawyer, James Culleton, that he “felt horrible” about having been the one to fire the fatal shots on Nov. 25, 2006.

BELL COP SHOCKED AT DEATH – New York Post.

ANDY TO CITY: CHECK OUT OUR PORK CHOP$

ANDY TO CITY: CHECK OUT OUR PORK CHOP$
By FREDRIC U. DICKER State Editor

April 30, 2008 — ALBANY – Attorney General Andrew Cuomo – saying his actions should set a precedent for the scandal-scarred City Council – revealed yesterday that he has blocked over 1,000 pork-barrel “member items” sent to him by the state Legislature.

“We found that many of them were out of compliance with the law,” Cuomo said of the $50 million worth of contracts for such politically popular projects as little league fields, cultural centers, clinics and economic development programs.

“With others, we didn’t believe that they met the legal requirement that they be ‘predominantly in the public interest,’ ” he said.

ANDY TO CITY: CHECK OUT OUR PORK CHOP$ – New York Post.

1 IN 3 GIVE HALF PAY TO LANDLORDS

1 IN 3 GIVE HALF PAY TO LANDLORDS
By GEMMA JONES

April 30, 2008 — More than half a million New Yorkers are handing over at least half their paychecks each week for rent, a congressman said yesterday.

In just nine years, the number of renters paying half or more of their income to their landlords has surged nearly 15 percent – with The Bronx and Staten Island the hardest hit, according to Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Brooklyn/Queens).

1 IN 3 GIVE HALF PAY TO LANDLORDS – New York Post.

Canvas Paper and Stone Opening Reception for Joseph Paul Fox’s”Mystery in Black: A Cosmic Journey”

By tyrus rochell

Vilomorph, black wood painted by Joseph Paul Fox Photo credit: Greg (Bean) Fitzgerald. All Rights Reserved Opening Reception: Friday, May 2, 2008, 6-9pm Location: Canvas Paper and Stone Gallery in The Bradhurst @ Strivers Row 2611 Frederick Douglass Blvd, Studio 2N between 139th & 140th Streets New York, NY 10030 212-694-1747 For more information, including directions, please click here to be directed to the gallery’s site. The exhibit runs through May 24, 2008. All text and imagery courtesy of Canvas Paper and Stone Gallery.

State looks to shake up Rent Guideline Board — amNY.com

amny.com/news/local/am-rent0429,0,315978.story

State looks to shake up Rent Guideline Board

By David Freedlander, amNewYork Staff Writer

dfreedlander@am-ny.com
April 29, 2008

Albany is proposing to take up a measure that would drastically reshape the Rent Guideline Board, a move that would greatly impact the approximately one million rent stabilized apartments in the city.

The legislation, proposed by state Sen. Thomas Duane (D-Manhattan) and Assemb. George Latimer (D-Westchester) and being introduced in Albany next week, would give the City Council greater say in who makes up the board, which determines bi-annually how much landlords can charge on rent stabilized apartments. The bill also seeks to eliminate the need for tenants to annually renew their leases, permitting them to stay in a unit as long as they like if they are able to pay the required rent.

click  amNY.com for more.

Genes Explain Race Disparity in Response to a Heart Drug – New York Times

Genes Explain Race Disparity in Response to a Heart Drug

By GINA KOLATA
Published: April 29, 2008

Doctors who treat patients with heart failure have long been puzzled by a peculiar observation. Many black patients seem to do just as well if they take a mainstay of therapy, a class of drugs called beta blockers, as if they do not. It is almost as if they were immune to the drugs.

Genes Explain Race Disparity in Response to a Heart Drug – New York Times.

A New Look at Race When Death Is Sought

A New Look at Race When Death Is Sought

By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: April 29, 2008

About 1,100 people have been executed in the United States in the last three decades. Harris County, Tex., which includes Houston, accounts for more than 100 of those executions. Indeed, Harris County has sent more people to the death chamber than any state but Texas itself.

A New Look at Race When Death Is Sought – New York Times.

AL’S JAG TOWED

AL’S JAG TOWED
By LARRY CELONA

April 29, 2008 — Dude, where’s my car?

The Rev. Al Sharpton may have felt something like the stoners in the film of that title when he emerged from a meeting in Queens yesterday with Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) – and found his 2007 Jaguar missing. Turns out it had been tagged for some $900 in tickets – and towed.

It isn’t clear who owns the car.

AL’S JAG TOWED – New York Post.

Free Cone Day at Ben & Jerry’s

Date: Tuesday, April 29th
Time: Varying Store Hours
Location: NYC Locations
Cost: Free

The only thing I like more than ice cream is free ice cream! Every year on their birthday Ben & Jerry’s celebrates by giving the public free ice cream. Seems slightly backwards, but totally true. Go to any participating scoop shop today and get your free cone!

A TIME TO HEAL AND ACT – A Town Hall Meeting on the Sean Bell Verdict

COUNCIL MEMBER LETITIA JAMES,

THE FORT GREENE ASSOCIATION,

AKILA WORKSONGS LLC &

KEVIN POWELL

PRESENT:
A TIME TO HEAL AND ACT

A Town Hall Meeting on the Sean Bell Verdict

This Tuesday, April 29, 2008, doors open at 6:30 pm

Brown Memorial Baptist Church
484 Washington Ave. @ Gates Ave.
Fort Greene/Clinton Hill, Brooklyn
Subway – C to Clinton-Washington Aves.

All in the community are invited.

We will begin a dialogue that will
move beyond words to positive actions.

Supreme Court Upholds Voter Identification Law in Indiana – New York Times

Supreme Court Upholds Voter Identification Law in Indiana

By DAVID STOUT
Published: April 29, 2008

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s voter-identification law on Monday, declaring that a requirement to produce photo identification is not unconstitutional and that the state has a “valid interest” in improving election procedures as well as deterring fraud.

Supreme Court Upholds Voter Identification Law in Indiana – New York Times.

Verdict in Sean Bell Case Draws a Peaceful Protest, but Some Demand More

Verdict in Sean Bell Case Draws a Peaceful Protest, but Some Demand More
Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

About 150 people marched along Malcolm X Boulevard in Harlem on Sunday to protest the acquittals in the Sean Bell case.

By CARA BUCKLEY and THOMAS J. LUECK
Published: April 28, 2008

The circle of people was thin but spread wide, looping an intersection in the heart of Harlem on Sunday and blocking long lines of cars and buses in four directions. In the middle of the circle stood a cluster of angry people, and in that cluster stood a young man with a bullhorn and a question.

“Why isn’t everyone else out here with us?” the man, Robert Cuffy, 22, asked. The circle of people, roughly 150 strong, stared back. It was two days after a judge acquitted three New York City detectives in the shooting death of Sean Bell, who died on the morning of his wedding day 17 months ago after the detectives fired a total of 50 bullets at his car.

Unlike some previous verdicts in police shootings, the acquittals in the Bell case have so far been largely met with a muted response. Thousands of protesters did not fill the streets, no unrest ensued. Still, on Sunday, some protesters and advocates around the city demanded federal investigations into the case and greater oversight of the police, while others puzzled over why the verdict had not yielded a stronger response.

At a news conference at the Harlem headquarters of the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, Mr. Sharpton and other activists, politicians and community leaders praised the overall peaceful response that followed the verdict, and vowed to fight the judge’s decision in strategic rather than bellicose ways.

“Some in the media seemed disappointed, they wanted us to play into the hoodlum, thug stereotypes,” Mr. Sharpton said. “We can be angry without being mad.” And while many onlookers shouted their support, others admitted restlessness and a yearning for something more.

“People are hungry for leadership that’s not there,” said Calvin B. Hunt Jr., who listened to the news conference and joined the protest that followed, marching down Malcolm X Boulevard and blocking the intersection at 125th Street. He spoke longingly of prominent black activists in the 1960s and 1970s, among them Malcolm X, Angela Davis and Huey Newton. “After the Amadou Diallo verdict, we marched till we had corns on our feet, and nothing changed,” he said. “In this verdict, there was no justice. So why should there be peace?”

His sentiments were shared by some others in the crowd. A poet who gave his name as Thug Love said gang members from the Bloods and Crips should unite to “police and protect their own community” the way the Black Panthers did decades ago. A concert promoter, who goes by the name Goddess Isis, said that the news conference sounded to her like “politics as usual,” and that the community needed grass-roots leaders with concrete solutions to ongoing problems, like police harassment.

“We are on our own here,” she said.

But Nkrumah Pierre, a banker who lives on Long Island and who marched in the protest on Sunday, said: “We’ve progressed to the point where we don’t need to act out in violence. This is an intelligent protest, and a strategic protest.”

Still, others on Sunday called for changes within the system, in particular the ways in which the city’s police are monitored.

At a news conference outside Police Department headquarters in Lower Manhattan, civil rights advocates and lawmakers — including Norman Siegel, the former executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union; State Senator Eric Adams of Brooklyn; and Marq Claxton of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care — called for the appointment of a permanent statewide special prosecutor, to supersede district attorneys in cases of police shootings or alleged police brutality.

Too often, the advocates said, district attorneys have close relationships with the police, muddying prosecutorial independence. The advocates also said the timing of the proposal was influenced by the ascension of David A. Paterson to governor.

“For the first time we realistically have someone in the governor’s seat that understands the need for these reforms,” Mr. Siegel said.

The proposal, Mr. Siegel said, was loosely patterned on the former Office of the Special State Prosecutor for Corruption, created under Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller in the early 1970s on the recommendation of the Knapp Commission, which uncovered corruption in the Police Department. That office was disbanded in 1990.

Risa Heller, a spokeswoman for Mr. Paterson, said the governor would review the recommendation. “Like all New Yorkers, the governor takes the issue of police wrongdoing very seriously, but he also believes that the overwhelming majority of police officers perform their duties honorably and conscientiously,” Ms. Heller said.

In Harlem, one of the protesters, Melanie Brown, who is 29 and lives near the street in Queens where Mr. Bell was killed and two of his friends, Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield, were wounded, said she believed that every response, no matter how seemingly small, helped.

“What happens next happens,” she said, as protesters chanted and hoisted aloft Pan-African flags, striped in red, black and green. “Right now this is a unity thing.”

Verdict in Sean Bell Case Draws a Peaceful Protest, but Some Demand More – New York Times.

The Lounge

CALL FOR ‘POLICE PROSECUTOR’
By ZACHARY GOELMAN and ANDY GELLER

April 28, 2008 — A coalition of civil-rights advocates called yesterday for the creation of a permanent state special prosecutor to investigate suspected cases of police misconduct and brutality.

The group, which includes Norman Siegel, former head of the New York Civil Liberties Union, and state Sen. Eric Adams, an ex-cop, told a news conference they expect Gov. Paterson will support their proposal.

CALL FOR ‘POLICE PROSECUTOR’ – New York Post.

Paterson Is the New Focus of Activists in Bell Case

By SARAH GARLAND
Staff Reporter of the Sun
April 28, 2008

Civil rights groups are aiming to rouse the activist side of Governor Paterson this week in the aftermath of a not guilty verdict for three detectives who killed an unarmed black man, Sean Bell.

Doubting that federal prosecutors will bring new civil rights charges against the detectives, the activists are resting their hopes for action on the former state senator from Harlem, who once protested alongside them after the 1999 shooting of another unarmed black man, Amadou Diallo.

Paterson Is the New Focus of Activists in Bell Case – April 28, 2008 – The New York Sun.

Victims of Genital Mutilation Face Deportation

By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN
Staff Reporter of the Sun
April 28, 2008

A federal appeals court in Manhattan will hear arguments tomorrow on whether three women who were forced to undergo genital mutilation in West Africa should be granted safe harbor in America.

A decision in the case, by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, will decide whether female immigrants to New York who have had parts of their genitalia removed in accordance with the custom of their native countries are protected against deportation.

Victims of Genital Mutilation Face Deportation – April 28, 2008 – The New York Sun.

Victims of Genital Mutilation Face Deportation

By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN
Staff Reporter of the Sun
April 28, 2008

A federal appeals court in Manhattan will hear arguments tomorrow on whether three women who were forced to undergo genital mutilation in West Africa should be granted safe harbor in America.

A decision in the case, by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, will decide whether female immigrants to New York who have had parts of their genitalia removed in accordance with the custom of their native countries are protected against deportation.

Victims of Genital Mutilation Face Deportation – April 28, 2008 – The New York Sun.

 

 

Bill Would Shift Power Over Rent Regulations to Council

Bill Would Shift Power Over Rent Regulations to Council

By BENJAMIN SARLIN
Special to the Sun
April 28, 2008

State and city lawmakers are preparing to push for new legislation, supported by tenant advocacy groups, that would give the City Council greater power over rent regulations.

Under the bill, members of the Rent Guidelines Board, which votes on rent increases for rent-stabilized apartments, would have to be approved by the City Council. The change could turn the organization’s composition into a political issue: The nine board members now are appointed by the mayor alone and must include two supporters of tenants’ interests, two supporters of landlords, and five who represent the general public.

click The New York Sun for full story.

Insects Talk on the Plant-Phone

 

Dutch ecologist Roxina Soler and her colleagues have discovered that subterranean and aboveground herbivorous insects can communicate with each other by using plants as telephones. Subterranean insects issue chemical warning signals via the leaves of the plant. This way, aboveground insects are alerted that the plant is already ‘occupied’.

Source: sciencedaily.com

Via the ‘green telephone lines’, subterranean insects can also communicate with a third party, namely the natural enemy of caterpillars. Parasitic wasps lay their eggs inside aboveground insects. The wasps also benefit from the volatile signals emitted by the leaves, as these reveal where they can find a good host for their eggs. The communication between subterranean and aboveground insects has only been studied in a few systems. It is still not clear how widespread this phenomenon is.

Source: sciencedaily.com

 

Soon!!!!!!!!!!

Sean Bell verdict sticks to script

Sean Bell verdict sticks to script

Updated Saturday, April 26th 2008, 1:23 AM

It is the nightmare that keeps recurring.

Whether its Amadou Diallo and the 41-shot barrage in the Bronx, or Timothy Stansbury opening the roof door of his public housing building only to be gunned down without warning, or the 50 shots unleashed on Sean Bell.

It’s all become predictable – after much public fanfare, sometimes even a trial, our courts say no crime was involved in these heart-breaking shootings of unarmed black men.

Anyone who spent time in the Sean Bell trial knows the prosecutors were only going through the motions. The absymal New York Knicks had a better game plan this season, and far more desire, than the prosecutors of Detectives Michael Oliver, Gescard Isnora and Marc Cooper.

click Sean Bell verdict sticks to script  for more.

Baseball Dares to Be Different

Baseball Dares to Be Different
No Longer Hidebound, Team Managers Toss Their Own Rule Books

By DARREN EVERSON
April 25, 2008; Page W1

Aside from when they take umbrage with an umpire, baseball managers are obedient, orthodox people. For years, they’ve all basically managed the same way, arranging their hitters and deploying their pitchers in strict adherence to accepted practice. Even those nose-to-nose spats scream conformity.

But a number of major-league managers have been more creative this season, making moves that challenge the sport’s sacred status quo. Pitchers — generally the weakest hitters on National League teams — are often batting before stronger-hitting position players in the Milwaukee Brewers’ and St. Louis Cardinals’ lineups. Three teams, influenced by nasty pregame weather reports, have used relievers as starting pitchers. And on the Atlanta Braves, the pitchers aren’t always pitchers.

click  WSJ.com  for full story.