Big week coming up for RNC court actions; City of St. Paul hiding exculpatory video evidence to ruin defense efforts

The State's elaborately staged legal farces are really spinning into full gear this week:

• UPDATE on Monday's scheduled grand jury in Minneapolis : The Grand Jury subpoenas for the six Texas activists have been withdrawn.
• Last week, CRASS, the Community RNC Arrestee Support Structure held a press conference to publicize how the City of St. Paul has refused to release the 6,000 hours of surveillance footage to defense attorneys. After the State was defeated in the August 2007 Critical Mass case via a few cell phone video clips, it's clear they need to manipulate the evidence in order to run out the clock, waste RNC arrestee legal supporters' time & effort, and scramble public perceptions about what happened.
• Court solidarity needs your help! Many cases are going on at Ramsey County Courthouse and CRASS Court Watch needs people for Monday, Tuesday, and onward. Email rnccourtwatch@gmail.com for more info.
• Help Dave Mahoney: The authorities are scapegoating Dave Mahoney (saying he is a literally a Terrorizing Finger Pointer - not to be confused with the famed Terrorist Fist Jab). It's all part of their PR strategy. Defeat the propaganda. TC Indymedia's added a button to his site.
• It sounds like Bob Fletcher watched Terrorizing Dissent as he is starting to make remarks about the young woman with the flower who got ruthlessly maced on September 1st on Kellogg Blvd. However the local press seems afraid to even mention the name of the film Indymedia helped put together.

With these and more important events unfolding, Twin Cities Indymedia wants to encourage more people to plug in and help cover what's going on. Indymedia currently has a number of HD video cameras which could be used by Indy journalistas to cover demos and other events. Please contact us if you're interested. (More broadly, working on further expanding Twin Cities Indymedia is direly needed - including organizing a real video collective). More notes from the events of last week, and upcoming events that might be of interest to IMCers, below.

• The Minnesota Independent got severely downsized, as the so-called "Center for Independent Media" shut off all the money for freelance writers just a week after the election. They did a good job covering a number of issues, but the progressive journalists there seems bitter that they were just being used as hacks to attack Republicans during election season. This makes it all the more important for Twin Cities Indymedia to serve as an outlet for more progressive and radical news.
• There was an anti-Prop 8 protest in Duluth/Superior.
• There will be a demo at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis on Saturday, November 22nd. A good opportunity for Indy journalistas to check out.
• The Starbucks at Franklin & Nicollet is moving towards unionization. Hat tip to our stalwart local Starbucks IWW organizers!
• Foodboner.org is the new spot listing free food sources in the Twin Cities. And like TC IMC it runs on Drupal; way to go!
• Activists did a demo at the home of rich executives out in Woodbury - the fruits of profits from animal testing. This kind of thing is another area where Indymedia could help cover.
• The ultra-creepy domestic military command NORTHCOM was involved in the RNC, word is spreading among progressives.
• The ACLU is working on exposing a police provocateur incident at the Denver Democratic National Convention. What can be done to raise the profile of the provocateur incidents @ the RNC?
• UPDATE: Hat tips to Laura Yuen @ MPR for addressing Bob Fletcher's love of the limelight, Roxanne Bergeron for a nice article on RNC8 members Nathanael Secor & Rob Czernik, and finally MNblue's Grace Kelly for calling out the BS on the RNC tapes.

TC Indymedia needs your help to cover what's going down in our community & start new projects, but the group's capacity is limited. Let us know what you want to see & how you can help. Or just write stories and post videos and images - that's pretty much how it works.