A grand jury indicted three [NYPD] police detectives — two black men and a white man — in the killing of an unarmed 23-year-old black man [Sean Bell] who died in a burst of 50 police bullets outside a Queens strip club hours before he was to be wed last year.

Two were charged with manslaughter, one with reckless endangerment. One officer reloaded and kept firing…

This is not so much about race but about class, and about how out-of-control thugs with badges are used to maintain the existing class structure and how their violent actions are never ever used against members of the ruling class. Do you think they would have opened fire if Sean Bell was a white middle-aged male wearing an expensive business suit? Well of course they wouldn’t have.

[tags]Sean Bell[/tags]

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Channel 62 interviews ANSWER LA organizer Carlos Alvarez at the office about the antiwar march and rally, which is today at noon at Hollywood and Vine, marching to Hollywood and Highland.

Performing live: Grammy-Award winning Ozomatli, Ben Harper, Jackson Browne, Hip-hop acts Skim, Rebels to the Grain and the Nomads.
Speakers:

Helga Aguayo, of Palmdale, California, wife of Agustín Aguayo, a conscientious objector court-martialed in Germany, sentenced just last week to 8 months in military prison for refusing to deploy on a 2nd tour to Iraq.

Vicky Castro, member of Gold Star Families for Peace, whose son Army Spc. Jonathan Castro 21, of Corona, California died in Mosul, Iraq in 2004.

Jabbar Magruder, Army National Guard, California Regional Coordinator, Iraq Veterans Against the War

April Fitzsimmons, former U.S. Air Force analyst, Veterans for Peace

Ron Kovic, Vietnam war veteran. author of Born on the Fourth of July and Academy Award-winning movie.

Martin Sheen, award-winning actor (”The West Wing”)

There will also be a demo in DC today and in SF on Sunday.

Let’s get in the streets.

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From Scoble

The attention of the world’s biggest venture capitalists has left the computer world and moved to the world of environmentalism.

Who’s leading this charge? John Doerr. The VC behind Google and many of the world’s hottest companies.

This is huge and means hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars will soon be working towards stopping global warming, creating new and better forms of renewable energy, and shaping opinion in corporate America about climate change.

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Biofuel isn’t as green as you might think. Plus, if farmers grow huge amounts of biofuel stock rather than food crops, then the price of food will rise. Also, large amounts of gasoline and petroleum-based fertilizers are used to grow it.

It’s also heavily subsidized, 51 cents per gallon, and that’s going to biofuel plants in the midwest. It’s not rocket science to see that many of the beneficiaries of this largesse are Republicans. Since biofuel is about the only renewable energy source that the Bushies have enthusiastically endorsed, well yes, color me suspicious.

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The next-warmest winter on record was in 2004, and the third warmest winter was in 1998.The ten warmest years on record have occurred since 1995.

What else needs to be said?

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