Supporters of President Hugo Chavez threw eggs, fruit and vegetables at the U.S. ambassador’s car Friday, and a group of motorcyclists chased his convoy for miles, at times pounding on the vehicles, a U.S. Embassy official said. No one was hurt.

Embassy spokesman Brian Penn said Venezuelan police escorts did not intervene as the car carrying Ambassador William Brownfield was pounded and pelted.

“We’re being attacked by groups of motorcyclists while we’re traveling in an embassy car,” Penn told The Associated Press by cell phone shortly before the motorcycles stopped chasing the four-car convoy.

“It’s a very violent demonstration by a small group of people who appear to be organized by the mayor’s office,” Penn said.

The Caracas mayor’s office, however, denied any involvement. “No official authorized by the mayor’s office participated,” said Luis Martinez, a spokesman for Mayor Juan Barreto.

Brownfield has faced protests at recent appearances. Chavez has repeatedly accused Washington of conspiring to overthrow him, an accusation U.S. officials have denied. The U.S. Embassy has asked the Venezuelan government to improve security for the ambassador, saying it’s legally bound to do so, Penn said.
breitbart.com

US accuses Venezuela over attack
…The US under secretary of state told Venezuelan Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez that if such an incident happens again there would be severe diplomatic consequences, department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

Supporters of Hugo Chavez are said to be behind the protests

Mr Burns said the attack was a violation of the Vienna Convention and that the action was clearly condoned by the local government, the spokesman said.

US Embassy spokesman Brian Penn said the Venezuelan police escorting the convoy did not intervene to stop the incident.

Venezuela killings spark protests
Protesters in Venezuela have taken to the streets in anger following the discovery of the bodies of three boys kidnapped on their way to school.
Police fired tear gas at demonstrators blocking a road as thousands of marchers brought Caracas traffic to a standstill, demanding justice.

After the protests, the capital’s mayor said he was replacing the chief of police with an army brigadier general.

Correspondents say there is frustration over the perceived rise in crime.

Jason, Kevin and John Faddoul – aged 12, 13 and 17 respectively – were abducted while being driven to school in February. They held dual Canadian-Venezuelan nationality.

Their driver was also killed. The kidnappers remain unidentified.

Last week, a prominent Italian businessman was kidnapped and later murdered.

Photographer shot

In the Caracas neighbourhood where the brothers grew up, residents set up road blocks to express anger and sorrow over the killings.

The protesters carried banners and shouted slogans such as: “Justice for the Faddoul brothers.”

Students also marched to the ministry of the interior.

(L-R) Kevin, John and Jason Faddoul were born in Venezuela

“Where is the justice, where is the answer for the people, how many people die here each week?” protester Cristina Alvarez told the Reuters news agency.

“At times, you don’t trust your neighbour,” university student Alejandro Linares told the Associated Press news agency.

A news photographer covering the demonstrations, Jorge Aguirre, was shot dead by an unknown gunman while covering one of the protests.

The Faddoul boys’ kidnappers had demanded the parents pay a ransom of $4.5m. The family’s lawyer said it had been too much to pay.

A farmer found the boys’ bodies in scrubland outside the city, with gunshot wounds to the neck and head.

Police investigations are so far focusing on eyewitness accounts that the youngsters and their chauffeur were seized at a fake checkpoint manned by men in police uniforms.

However, Venezuela’s attorney-general says so far he has no evidence of police involvement in any of the cases.

‘the youngsters and their chauffeur…’

Rice moves to block Chavez power play
Condoleezza Rice, the American Secretary of State, is heading a concerted, but little-publicised, diplomatic effort by Washington to thwart the ambitions of Hugo Chavez, the firebrand Venezuelan President, to create and lead an anti-American axis in Latin America.

Faced by a resurgence of Left-wing populism in the Hispanic world, the Bush administration has decided to try “to do business” even with its harshest critics, if it can block the regional power play by Mr Chavez, backed by his friend Fidel Castro, the Cuban dictator.

Ms Rice had a friendly, first meeting last month with Evo Morales, the new Bolivian President, even though he has threatened to nationalise foreign businesses and announced the end of the ban on cultivation of coca, the plant from which cocaine is produced.

The administration is also likely to adopt an initially conciliatory approach towards Ollanta Humala – if he wins the Peruvian vote next weekend. But the prospect is viewed with alarm in Washington.

Roger Noriega, the assistant secretary of state for Western hemisphere affairs until last year, said: “He seems to have a military populist instinct that will undermine the recent democratic restoration.”

Mr Noriega, who remains close to the administration, said he believed that Mr Chavez’s role in the Morales victory and the Humala campaign has “probably been decisive”.

Moderate Left-wing presidents have also won recent elections in Chile, Uruguay and Brazil, but Washington maintains good relations with all three governments.

The next headache for America is looming in Mexico, where the anti-capitalist message of Andres Lopez Obrador has made him front-runner for July’s presidential vote.

Since Evo Morales took office, the joke is no longer on them. “Look,” President Morales tells me, “60 years ago, our grandparents didn’t even have the right to walk into the main square – not even in the gutter. And then we got into parliament – and now we’re here.”

He looks around apologetically at the long Rococco state room we are meeting in – at the ormolu chairs we are sitting on. He has installed a portrait of Che Guevara in the presidential suite but, apart from that, the palace remains as it was under his neo-liberal predecessors.

“It’s been a great victory – now this is a stronghold for the indigenous people. And we’re not going to stop,” Mr Morales says.

“The most important thing is the indigenous people are not vindictive by nature. We are not here to oppress anybody – but to join together and build Bolivia, with justice and equality.”

In truth, the Morales presidency is fast getting beyond the “peace, love and understanding” phase. The first indigenous leader to run Bolivia has been two months in office, but he does not feel like he is in power – yet.

“How does it work now? I’ll tell you,” he says.

“You want to issue a decree to help the poor, the indigenous people, the popular movements, the workers… but there’s another law. Another padlock. It’s full of padlocks that mean you can’t transform things from the palace… I feel like a prisoner of the neo-liberal laws.”
bbc.co.uk

You ought to be ashamed of yourself. This is the message of Lent, and it is a basic part of Christian belief. There is an absolute difference between God, who is absolutely good, and us, who are defined by our endless fallibility.

This is where Christianity differs from the myriad “spiritualities” on offer today. Every form of new age therapy will tell you the same flattering half-truth: you are special, you are deep, you can attain fuller inner peace and strength, and you can discover the divine by deepened self-awareness. There is an obvious overlap between holistic spirituality and a consumerist culture: buy this because you’re worth it. Express yourself, with the help of this new product. Discover new depths to your personality by taking a holiday in Turkey.

All this celebration of the self is rooted in the Enlightenment belief in the natural goodness of humanity. It also draws on Romanticism, for it suggests that one’s natural goodness is not “standard issue” but totally distinctive: it must be discovered through a unique inner journey. “Discover your unique inner goodness” is perhaps the central message of the age. And there is an increasing appetite to receive this message in spiritual form, in the language of belief. The growth of such spirituality has put the concept of secularisation in doubt: it still makes sense in terms of church decline but fails to account for the rise of the alternative religious market.

The cult of self-development is not entirely to be rubbished. There are worse myths to live by. It generally emphasises mental and physical health, quiet reflection, respect for others of all types and the freedom of the individual to find his or her own path in life. There is plenty of good here. There is much to be said for the rejection of authoritarian structures, moral rules, the dead hand of traditional dogma.

Yet the cult of self-celebration is based in a lie. And Lent is the nailing of that lie. The lie is that we can, with the right formulas and techniques, nurture our inner goodness. But in reality we are not naturally good. There is something wrong with us, deep down. There is a bias towards evil. This perhaps sounds melodramatic, but that is the fault of our unfamiliarity with our religious tradition. It used to be taken for granted in Christian cultures that we are constitutionally flawed. Our natural desire is not holy but dangerous.

…The lie that our natural desires are healthy has become the orthodoxy. To question it is to seem medieval, odd, reactionary, guilt-ridden. But we must question it if we are to have a substantial idea of goodness, or God. The whole point of the Christian God is that he is better than us, that we are lost without him. He does for humanity what it cannot do for itself. Christianity is capable of being utterly realistic about our natural depravity, without pessimism. It allows us, at Easter especially, to proclaim our frailty and shame as good news.
guardian.co.uk

This is one of the places Christianity goes off the track. It is amazing how a mistaken idea can unleash such evil consequences all down the history. The struggle to characterize ‘human nature’ is at the heart of all the struggles we face. For people with a ‘bias towards evil’ and ‘natural depravity’ need strong-arm leaders to control them, and ‘supernatural’ forces to ‘save’ them. Remember the sign outside Springfield Methodist Church on “The Simpsons”? ‘Sunday Sermon…The Miracle of Shame.’

Ancient pyramid found under crucifixion site
Archaeologists claim to have discovered a massive sixth century pyramid beneath a crucifixion re-enactment site.

Built by the Teotihuacans, the pyramid was abandoned almost 1,000 years before Catholics began re-enacting the crucifixion at Iztapalapa in 1833 to give thanks for protection during a cholera epidemic.

During the Good Friday ritual, which now draws up to a million spectators, a wooden cross is raised and a man chosen to portray Christ is tied to the cross.

An African student was shot dead in St Petersburg with a hunting rifle emblazoned with a swastika early yesterday in an apparently planned racist attack that has horrified Russia.

The shooting, the fourth such assault on someone from an ethnic minority in the country in a week, has been blamed on a rise in skinhead groups and the extreme right in Russia’s second largest city.

Witnesses said the gunman shot Lamzar Samba, 28, a communications student from Senegal, in the back of the neck when he and a group of foreign students were leaving the Apollo nightclub.
guardian.co.uk

A judge who attacked the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for pursuing a case against a 10-year-old boy who was accused of shouting racist taunts in the playground has been criticised for trivialising the seriousness of racial abuse.

The boy appeared before Judge Jonathon Finestein at Salford youth court after allegedly calling an 11-year-old boy a “Paki” and “bin Laden” last year.

The boy, from Irlam, Manchester, is also said to have chanted: “He is on the run, pull the trigger and shoot the nigger, five, four, three, two, one.”

However, Justice Finestein said the case should not have reached the courts and described the decision to prosecute as “political correctness gone mad”.

He said they were just “boys in the playground” and he used to be called “fat” at school but said the headteacher would have just given the children “a good clouting” and sent them on their way.
guardian.co.uk

Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, one of the most prestigious centres of academic and sporting achievement in America, was engulfed in scandal yesterday as police stepped up an investigation into allegations of a savage rape of a hired stripper at a party attended by members of its lacrosse team.

The elite campus has been in turmoil, with noisy protests erupting daily, ever since police divulged details of the case last week. Tensions deepened with the release on Wednesday of an e-mail from one of the team members sent just after the alleged rape, in which he fantasised about killing strippers and cutting off their skin.

Exposed by the crisis are deeply sensitive issues of race and class, which far exceed the familiar town-and-gown factors that divide many universities from surrounding communities. The accuser is black and is a student at nearby North Carolina Central University. The town of Durham is 43 per cent African-American, but only 11 per cent of Duke’s students are black. All but one of the lacrosse team members is white.

…The refusal of the lacrosse players to co-operate with investigators has added to the anger in the town. At the outset, they switched first names in an effort to confuse police. However, DNA has now been sampled from 46 of the team’s 47 members. The only member not subjected to a test is black.

The accuser claimed that she went to a small suburban home rented by the lacrosse players near campus on 13 March to dance at an alcohol-fuelled party. Late in the evening, she told police, she was cornered in a bathroom and raped by three white men.
independent.co.uk

…Is this really our world, where it is no longer strange to see pictures of breasts on the side of buses? Where it is considered hip for middle-class men and women to visit swanky lap-dancing clubs while remaining oblivious to the continuum of exploitation that links those polished performers with the crack-addicted working girls on the street corner. Where celebrity magazines detail at length the copulation techniques of minor celebrities, but their readers remain unable to choose on any given night whether they’d rather sleep alone – a third of young women say that they have been coerced into sex. Similar data for young men does not exist, but I wonder how often they too feel pinioned by expectation.

This is what sexual liberation, co-opted by commerce, has delivered for women and men. A few years ago Germaine Greer pointed out that while in the 70s she had fought for women’s right to say yes to sex and not to be judged for their appetites, nowadays she felt appalled that women no longer had the right to say no, for fear of being branded inhibited and repressed.

The values of the market have turned sex into a competitive sport: better, faster, in ever more inventive contortions. The raunch culture identified by the American writer Ariel Levy puts forward pole-dancing lessons and no-strings liaisons as evidence of liberation, because women are, apparently, now able to consume sex on an equal footing with men. Female sexuality is celebrated as increasingly voracious, yet the images of women presented by advertisers are eager to please, easy to satisfy and as challenging as a blow-up doll.

But how does the white noise of public sex affect personal sexual development? There is some evidence that teenagers are becoming more confident about reporting rapes and sexual assaults. But if younger women know that they have the right not to be abused, they still don’t think they have the right to satisfying, respectful sex, as the brilliant movie Kidulthood, about the lives of adolescents growing up in west London, documents starkly.

To desire and be desired can be many things: funny, awkward, transforming, sacred and profane. To be honest about what turns you on demands a particularly intimate bravery. But for all we are overinformed about how other people while away their bedroom hours, about what’s hot and what’s not, men and women are no closer to developing a common erotic language. Indeed, it seems that that private language is being gradually eradicated from the public domain by the megaphone imperialism of cultural sexism.
guardian.co.uk

WASHINGTON – The White House faced a barrage of questions Friday over the timing of President Bush’s decision to declassify intelligence that was then leaked to the press by Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff.

In a tense briefing, White House spokesman Scott McClellan was asked repeatedly to explain his statement from three years ago that portions of a prewar intelligence document on Iraq were declassified on July 18, 2003.

Ten days earlier, Cheney’s top aide, I. Lewis Libby, had leaked snippets of intelligence from the document to New York Times reporter Judith Miller to rebut allegations by Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson, Libby told prosecutors, according to documents revealed this week.

Libby, Cheney’s former chief of staff, said he had passed the information to Miller after being told to do so by Cheney, who advised Libby that Bush had authorized it, said a court filing by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald.

McClellan told reporters July 18, 2003, that the material being released on Iraq “was officially declassified today.” On Friday, McClellan interpreted his own words to mean that’s when the material was “officially released.”

Asked when it was declassified, McClellan refused to answer, saying the matter was part of Fitzgerald’s ongoing CIA leak probe that has resulted in Libby’s indictment.
news.yahoo.com

The Plame game
The latest revelation about George W Bush’s involvement in the Valerie Plame scandal is unlikely to be the smoking gun that finishes off his administration, writes David Fickling.

Coverage of the debate over the recent paper by professors Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago that examines the influence of Israel and its supporters in Washington over US foreign policy has been, mostly, absent from US media. But the paper generated vigorous debate in the British and international media and on the Internet. Since the working paper’s release, there have been several more attacks on it, but also more support for the professors’ position on the need to look hard at the US-Israel relationship.

…Editor Mary-Kay Wilmers, who is Jewish, said that while the support of people like David Duke was “unsettling,” it did not detract from the debate the authors were attempting to start.

‘I don’t want David Duke to endorse the article,’ [she] told The Observer from France on Friday. ‘It makes me feel uncomfortable. But when I re-read the piece, I did not see anything that I felt should not have been said. Maybe it is because I am Jewish, but I think I am very alert to anti-Semitism. And I do not think that criticising US foreign policy, or Israel’s way of going about influencing it, is anti-Semitic. I just don’t see it.’
csmonitor.com

JERUSALEM (AFP) – The Israeli military launched three air raids overnight against targets in the Gaza Strip, a spokesman said.

“Our helicopters launched three attacks. Two targeted two offices at Beit Lahya (north) where activists of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades were meeting to plan rocket strikes against Israel, and another attack was against a helicopter pad inside Gaza City,” the military spokesman said.
news.yahoo.com

At Least Six Killed in Israeli Strike On Alleged Training Camp in Gaza
JERUSALEM, April 7 — Israeli military aircraft fired on a car carrying suspected gunmen Friday night in the southern Gaza Strip as it left what military officials said was a training camp for members of an armed Palestinian group at war with Israel. At least six people were killed, including two children.

The death toll was one of the largest from an Israeli airstrike in recent years. Hours later, the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas called the airstrike part of an “unjustified Israeli escalation.”