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Title: Al Sharpton, Trayvon Martin family urge peace on 20th anniversary of LA race riots
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Blog Entry: Al Sharpton, Trayvon Martin family urge peace on 20th anniversary of LA race riots gucci outletCivil rights activist Al Sharpton tells Yahoo News that he and Trayvon Martin's parents are urging peace at events to mark the 20th anniversary of the deadly race riots that engulfed Los Angeles following the 1992 Rodney King verdict. The group is addressing a church Thursday night."Twenty years ago I came out here after that protest after the verdict and tried to discourage the violence, and 20 years later now I'm here with Trayvon's parents and we're saying we don't want violence," he said. After four white police officers were acquitted in the recorded beating of Rodney King on April 29, the city exploded into one of the deadliest riots in American history, leaving 54 dead and causing $1 billion in property damage.Sharpton, who now hosts a show on MSNBC, says much has changed since then, and he doesn't expect the racially charged debate over Martin's shooting to end in violence if George Zimmerman, who is Hispanic, is acquitted."I think even though people are angry and as concerned as I am, we don't feel like we have no options," he says. "Unlike [with] Rodney King, there's defined leadership in Trayvon Martin's case who have said from the beginning we cannot have violence."Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain in a middle-class gated community in Sanford, Florida, shot the unarmed 17-year-old after calling the cops and following him because he found him suspicious. Zimmerman says he shot him in self-defense after Martin attacked him; Zimmerman's defenders say he suspected Martin because of a string of robberies that had occurred in the neighborhood. (A recent Reuters profile of Zimmerman quotes a black neighbor defending him for finding Martin suspicious because suspects in previous robberies were young black men. She declined to be named because she feared retaliation.) Zimmerman's detractors say he singled out Martin because of his race. gucci shoes outletSharpton says he has no idea whether Zimmerman was prejudiced against Martin because of his race, but he thinks the police would have handled the situation differently if Martin had been white. Zimmerman was briefly taken into custody but not charged with any crime; police said they found his self-defense claim credible. After the outcry, a special prosecutor charged Zimmerman with second-degree murder, more than a month after the shooting."If Trayvon Martin had not been black then they would have had taken his killing a lot more seriously at the police station," he says. "If the police had arrested Zimmerman that night there would not be a Trayvon Martin case or movement...Does it mean he's guilty? No. But it does mean that he should have to go in front of a court of law and not be acquitted in the back of a police station."While U.S. officials say publicly there is no specific threat of a terror attack, behind the scenes law enforcement officials tell ABC News there are plans for a major security surge at airports and transportation hubs in advance of next week's anniversary of Osama bin Laden's death. The precautions are based on intelligence reports that al Qaeda is determined to avenge the death of bin Laden, killed by Navy SEALs last May, with a focus on aviation targets. Of greatest concern to U.S. officials is al Qaeda's Yemeni affiliate, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and its master bombmaker, Ibrahim al-Asiri, who has survived repeated U.S. efforts to kill him. gucci handbags outletIt was al-Asiri, according to U.S. officials, who designed the so-called "underwear bomb" worn by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to bring down Northwest flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. Abdulmutallab got the bomb past airport security but failed to detonate it successfully aboard the plane. Officials say al-Asiri also designed the bombs hidden in printers that were shipped from Yemen to Chicago. The bombs were intercepted in Dubai and the U.K. after they'd been placed aboard cargo planes. In a joint intelligence bulletin issued overnight, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security said the Yemen group "intends to advance plots along multiple fronts, including renewed efforts to target Western aviation." "It doesn't take a great number of people to do the kind of attack that we had on September 11," said Richard Clarke, an ABC News consultant and former White House counterterrorism official. "That was less than two dozen people and it's clear that they have that number available in places like Yemen today." Threats of a revenge attack have been monitored by the U.S. ever since last year's raid on bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Among the papers found in his home were repeated references to the importance of attacks timed to coincide with anniversaries. Said Clarke, "I think the major issue for al Qaeda is to do something, to prove that they're still alive, to do some fairly major event or series of attacks that prove that they're not down, they're not out." As a result, American law enforcement and White House officials say travelers at airports in the U.S. and Europe should expect to see enhanced security over the next several days.