The Examiner:

A dozen protestors marched Wednesday outside the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center, demanding prosecutors drop all charges against the so-called “MTA 9,” the black teenagers accused of brutally beating a white woman on a Baltimore City bus in December.

“No grown person should be spitting on kids,” shouted Quentin Whaley Sr., 54, the father of one of the accused teens, who held a sign that read: “Drop all charges against the MTA 9.”

“If someone spit in your face, what would you do?” he asked. “This isn’t 1857. This is 2008. We won’t be chattel property.”

The protest, organized by the Baltimore branch of the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement, came a day before the teens are scheduled to stand trial today on charges they beat Sarah Kreager, 26, her boyfriend, Troy Ennis, 30, and the No. 27 route bus driver Dec. 4 as they were riding home from Robert Poole Middle School in Hampden.

Kreager suffered two broken bones in her left eye socket during the attack, police said. Two seats and the bus’s rear window were destroyed, prosecutors said.

[...]

“We’re tired of the word of a white person being considered more credible than the statements of a black person,” said Nnamdi Lumumba, the Uhuru Movement local president.

Lumumba said he organized the protest because city officials and the media have made Kreager into “the poster child for racial abuse” while ignoring her “long history of violence, drug dealing and abuse.”

[...]

“The children reported she walked on the bus with her eye already bruised and damaged,” Lumumba said. “Yet it is the children who get dragged through the mud as the people who caused the damage to her face.”

At the protest, David Johnson, an activist with the Black Community Forum Think Tank, said Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon and other city leaders are to blame for what he says is preferential treatment authorities give to white residents over black residents.

“We are witnessing a rewhitening of the city of Baltimore,” he said.

The International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement was founded in 1991 in Chicago by the African People’s Socialist Party. Its leadership has ties to former Black Panthers.

Their platform:

1. We demand National Democratic Rights and Self Determination for African people in the U.S.
2. We Demand Community Control of the Police in the African Community and the Immediate Withdrawal of the Terroristic Police and Military Forces from the African Community.
3. We Demand Community Control of the Schools and Mandatory African History in Public Schools.
4. We Demand African Community Control of Health Care.
5. We Demand Community Control of Housing
6. We Demand the Removal of Parasitic Merchants and Slumlords from the African Community.
7. We Demand an End to the Colonial Court and Prison Systems which have the Majority of African Men Incarcerated, on Probation or Parole, and the Immediate Release of all Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War.
8. We Demand an End to the Theft, Kidnapping, Sale, Abuse and Removal of African Children from their Communities under the Genocidal Foster Care System.
9. We Demand an End to the Political and Social Oppression and Economic Exploitation of African Women.
10. We Demand Reparations for African People.
11. We Demand a United Nations Supervised Plebiscite to Determine the Will of the African Community in the U.S. as to their National Destiny.
12. We Demand an End to the Political Economy of the Counterinsurgency; the Parasitic Relationship that Benefits the White Population with Millions of Dollars for Jobs, Resources and a Stabilized Economy off of the U.S. Counterinsurgency (war) on African People in the U.S.

Links:
Uhuru movement wikipedia entry
InPDUM

Previous bus attack coverage:
Inside Charm City
Michelle Malkin * 2 * 3

Senator Anthony Muse of Prince George’s County has proposed a $20 tax on the purchase of bongs and water pipes.

WBAL.com

Muse says the tobacco accessories are now subject only to the regular 6 percent state sales tax. He says the $20 tax proposal isn’t intended to raise revenue, but to act as a deterrent for young people who smoke marijuana.

Muse sponsored a new Maryland law that requires people to be at least 18, the legal smoking age, before buying tobacco accessories such as bongs. Muse says he’d like to outlaw bongs because they’re so seldom used to smoke legal products, but he knows such a bill would not pass.

Muse said the $20 tax would apply only to bongs, not to rolling papers or other items used by both marijuana and tobacco users.

“They’re not for smoking cigarettes or tobacco,” said Muse, who said his tax could double the cost of a bong. Muse said he wasn’t sure how much his $20 bong tax would raise.

Borrowing a page from other sites, like Outside the Beltway, I’ve decided to have a caption contest ocasionally. Just enter your pithy or witty caption in the comments below and I’ll post the winner in a few days.

More here.

Added to this week’s OTB Caption Jam

From The Sun:

One man was shot this afternoon during what Baltimore police said was a “home-invasion robbery gone very, very bad.”

Police have surrounded a three-story West Baltimore rowhouse in the 1700 block of Harlem Ave. in hopes of talking the gunman or gunmen into surrendering as residents were warned to stay indoors, said a city police spokesman.

During the standoff that has lasted several hours, students attending classes in five schools in the vicinity were allowed leave with school officials and city police monitoring dismissals one school at a time, said Officer Donny Moses, a police spokesman. “We didn’t want several hundred children in the streets,” he said.

The incident unfolded about 2:40 p.m. A police spokesman said at least one person was wounded by gunfire during the incident.

The Police Department’s SWAT team was deployed because law enforcement officials believe armed suspects and others are inside the home.

Frederick News-Post:

The National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center is one of several labs planned or being built for the National Interagency Biodefense Campus.

Construction on the $143 million project is on schedule at 60 percent complete, and should be finished by the end of 2008, said Kevin Anderson, the center’s acting science director.

WBAL.com:

A new Department of Homeland Security biodefense center at Fort Detrick should be open by the end of this year.

Officials tell the Frederick News-Post that labs at the center should be operating by the end of 2009.

Administrative staff will move into the building’s office spaces once construction is done, but it will take the Centers for Disease Control several months to certify the labs.

The National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center is one of several labs planned or being built for the National Interagency Biodefense Campus in Frederick.