The New York City schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, is once again rethinking the nation’s largest school system.

He has hired Chris Cerf, former president of Edison Schools, the commercial manager of public schools in 25 states. He has retained Alvarez & Marsal, a consulting firm that revamped the school system in St. Louis and is rebuilding the system in New Orleans. And he has enlisted Sir Michael Barber, a former adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain who is now at McKinsey & Company in London.

These consultants, often in pinstripe suits and ensconced in a conference room on the third-floor mezzanine of the headquarters of the Education Department in Lower Manhattan, are working with a small army of city education officials, all led by Mr. Klein’s chief of staff, Kristen Kane. The effort is being paid for with $5 million in private donations.

Together, the consultants and officials are re-examining virtually every aspect of the system, not quite three years after Chancellor Klein and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg charted perhaps its most exhaustive overhaul and made it a laboratory for educational experimentation, closely watched across the country.

They are evaluating everything from how textbooks and paper are bought, to how teacher training programs are chosen, to how students, teachers, principals and schools are judged. They are running focus groups of dozens of principals, and they are studying districts in England, Canada and California.

A top goal is to find ways to relax much of the very centralization put in place by the Bloomberg administration and give principals a far freer hand, provided schools can meet goals for attendance, test scores, promotion rates and other criteria.
nytimes.com

This might sound ok, but it is a sinister development. In the name of ‘smaller government’ the forces of privatization move in. It’s the same all over the globe.

Los Angeles:
A local school employee said a rough run-in with a couple of Homeland Security officers has left him with a strong sense of insecurity.

Leander Pickett, a teacher’s assistant at Englewood Elementary, said he was manhandled and handcuffed by two plain clothed Homeland Security officers in front of the school Tuesday for no reason at all.

“I would like to treat people the way I would want to be treated, and yesterday I wasn’t treated that way,” Pickett said.

Pickett has been working at Englewood for two years, and his principal and colleagues told Channel 4 they have never met a harder worker or nicer guy.

“He’s well loved by everyone because he’s willing to do anything to help children,” said the Englewood Elementary Principal Gail Brinson.

However, Tuesday afternoon Pickett’s niceness turned to anger, disappointment, and betrayal when, as Pickett was directing bus traffic, he said he was handcuffed and roughed up and humiliated by the very people that were supposed to protect him.

“I walked up to him and said, ‘Sir, you need to move.’ That’s when he said ‘I’m a police officer. I’m with Homeland Security … I’ll move it when I want to.’ That’s when he started grabbing me on my arm,” Pickett said.

However, Homeland Security tells a different story.

The department said the only reason the officers were at the school was because they pulled over to look at a map.

The department also said it’s looking into what happened, and that Pickett’s version is wrong. It claims he was antagonizing the officers.

Several people were outside of the school, watching the incident take place, and those witnesses agree with Pickett’s story.

“Mr. Pickett asked the guy blocking the bus loading zone to move, and the guy told him he would move his car when he got ready to move it,” said Englewood coach Alton Jackson.

“At that point I intervened and I went up to the gentleman and said, ‘Mr. Pickett is an employee here,’ and they said that didn’t matter,” said Englewood media specialist, Terri Dreisonstok.

“‘We’re with Homeland Security,’ and on and on they went, and pretty soon, before you know it, he’s handcuffed and slammed against a car,” Brinson said. “All the children are watching, they’re all upset.”

After about 30 minutes, the men released Pickett.

“The part that really upsets me is all these students were watching, and that and it isn’t good,” Jackson said.

Pickett said he plans to sue.

“You now you hear these stories everyday and say, ‘This will never happen to me,’ but yesterday it happened to me,” Pickett said.

“If this is Homeland Security, I think we ought to be a little afraid,” Brinson said.

The central office of Homeland Security contacted Channel 4 about the incident and stated that it considers all allegations seriously and the matter has been referred to a neutral investigative entity.
news.yahoo.com

An anti-corruption campaign group has urged governments in the West to help Africa recover part of the wealth lost through corruption.

Transparency International made the appeal in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.

The group estimated the amount of illegally appropriated money invested outside Africa to be $140bn (£80.4bn).

It called on Western governments to change their banking laws to make it easier for illegally acquired wealth to be repatriated to Africa.

Transparency International (TI) which leads a campaign against corruption worldwide, says the phenomenon is seriously undermining Africa’s fragile democracies and hindering efforts to achieve sustainable development.
bbc.co.uk

What about the trillions the Europeans stole and are stealing? Who watches the watchers?

The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.
newyorker.com

Bush administration ‘secretly plans air strikes’ as it seeks regime change in Iran
ent undercover forces into Iran, and has stepped up secret planning for a possible major air attack on the country, according to the renowned US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.

While publicly advocating diplomacy to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, Hersh reports in the next issue of The New Yorker magazine that “there is a growing conviction among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bush’s ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change”.

One former senior intelligence official is quoted as saying that Mr Bush and others in the White House have come to view Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as a potential “Adolf Hitler”. According to a senior Pentagon adviser on the “war on terror”, “this White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war”. The danger, he adds, is that “it also reinforces the belief inside Iran that the only way to defend the country is to have a nuclear capability”.

One option under consideration, Mr Hersh reports, involves the possible use of a B61 nuclear “bunker-buster” bomb against Iran’s main centrifuge plant, at Natanz. Last week the Federation of American Scientists alleged that a weapons test to be carried out in the Nevada desert in June was designed to simulate the effects of just such a bomb. Conventional explosives would be used, it said, for “a low-yield nuclear weapon ground shock simulation against an underground target”.

…For years – even decades – U.S. citizens have been the subject of a political action campaign designed and executed by Israel. Currently, Israel’s campaign is part steady-as-she-goes and part improvisation to neutralize an unexpected and – for Israel – worrying development. So far, Israel’s covert political action is succeeding hands down. Americans are gradually being indoctrinated to believe Islamists are today’s Nazis and that there is no “Israeli lobby” in America. Simply put, Israel is conducting a brilliant covert political action campaign in the United States, a campaign any intelligence service in the world would rightly be proud of.

Part one of Israeli’s political action consists simply of using that old standby debate-suppressor, the four-letter word “Nazi.” Newspapers in Israel, of course, have long used the word to describe Israel’s Muslim enemies. Recently, for example, the Jerusalem Post ran an article in which al-Qaeda is described as “yet another Nazi knockoff.” This sort of language is the stuff of Israeli journalism, and not of much concern to Americans. If the Israeli press wants to teach their readers to underestimate the Islamist threat, so be it.

But now the word “Nazi” is being gradually fed to Americans as a scientific definition of our Islamist enemies. Headlines such as “Hamas Uber Alles,” “Hitler’s Heirs in Damascus,” and “The Nazi Correction to Islamic Terror” are increasingly common in U.S. media publications found in the news files Googled daily by Americans. U.S. politicians, too, are eager to jump on the call-them-Nazis bandwagon, with Secretary Rumsfeld recently saying that leaving Iraq early would be like returning postwar Germany to the Nazis, and Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) comparing the attack on the Shia shrine in Samarra to the burning of the Reichstag by the Nazis.

The goal of using the Nazi analogy is to suppress any realistic debate about the pluses and minuses of the U.S.-Israel relationship, and to make sure any American raising questions about U.S. support for Israel is seen as siding with the “Islamofascists,” the heirs of Nazism. Any person who knows the least bit about Islam – and the Israelis know a great deal – knows it is not Nazism, yet the Internet is rife with such titles as “A Manifesto Against Islamofascism” and “Islamofascism’s Creeping Coup in Turkey.” The best capsule description of the threat posed by Islamofascists is provided by Frank Gaffney in a recent issue of The Intelligencer, the journal of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. Listen to Mr. Gaffney, and you will almost hear Muslim jackboots striking the pavement.
antiwar.com

GAZA (Reuters) – Israel shelled two Palestinian security posts in northern Gaza on Sunday, killing one person and wounding 15 as the army kept up its heaviest strikes on the strip since Jewish settlers and troops withdrew last year.

Israeli air strikes and artillery barrages have killed 15 Palestinians, mainly militants, since Friday.

Interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who won elections last month on pledges to impose final borders with or without Palestinian agreement, said there were no curbs on the army to respond to a surge of militant rocket fire on Israel.
news.yahoo.com

The massacre in Rafah is a clear message to the world that the Israeli government will not cease attacks
New Palestinian Legislative Council member, Ghazi Hamed, confirmed Saturday that the Israeli killing of six Palestinians in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah is, “a clear message to the world from the Israeli government that they will continue their work against members of the armed Palestinian resistance.”

This is a horrible crime, says Hamed, that the Quaret and the European Union should take note of. “This is the Israeli beginning of yet another series of massacres against the Palestinian people as the Israeli government boycotts the Palestinian government and attacks its people.”

The Palestinian government spoke directly to European and Arab states, and to the European Union, regarding the latest killing, giving details of what they referred to as the lastest massacre. The Palestinian government called on those instutions to pressure the Israeli government to put an immediate end to its agressions.

Responding to a question concerning the position of the European Union and the United States after a negative investigation of the new Palestinian government, Hamed said that is an unjust decision and the siege on the Palestinian people is not serving any just position. He asked, “Why are the consequences of the crimes and occupation being placed upon the Palestinian people and not upon Israel?”

Abbas: ‘Convergence’ will lead to war
Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas said Friday in an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian that Olmert’s “convergence plan” will only bring more war to the region.

Abbas added that Olmert’s plan will only endanger the chances of reaching a long term agreement, since it bypasses negotiations with the Palestinians.

Palestinian political rift grows
Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya has criticised a decision by President Mahmoud Abbas to assume control of Gaza’s border crossings.
He called the move an attempt to undermine the Hamas-led government’s control over security matters.

The government would not accept the creation of parallel structures that would diminish its authority, he added.

Mr Abbas, whose Fatah party is a political rival of Hamas, also named an ally as head of internal security.

In his new role, Rashid Abu Shbak, who is currently head of the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Preventative Security Service, will have authority over the police and emergency services.

Correspondents say that although Mr Shbak will nominally report to Hamas Interior Minister Said al-Siyam, ultimate authority rests with the president.

A Washington press corps that stood idly by while Bush and Cheney plundered the country, wrecked the environment, spied on Americans without a warrant, tortured civilians and lied the country into a war that will only get worse, woke up one morning and collectively decided: “Let’s all play Get Cynthia!”

Let’s get her for being too outspoken, bringing up the wrong issue at the wrong time, failing to get with the program, becoming a distraction, leaving House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi beside herself with rage.

Let’s get her because, hell, she practically volunteered for it, and besides, she’s an easy target, standing practically alone, fired upon at will by Republicans — who seem to think her story cancels out DeLay, Abramoff, Katrina and Iraq — and virtually undefended by Democrats, except by the rolling of eyes heavenward, as though to say, “Oh, please! We’re not responsible for HER!”

Rep. Cynthia McKinney has now apologized for her part in the face-off at Checkpoint Cynthia. It was not enough to stop the cartooning of the coverage. Already the news wires are spinning her statement as a complete about-face, an abandonment of everything else she has said about the incident. Look, she said there was racial profiling in Washington! Look, now she’s apologizing!

Journalists are reporting this story as though it were their job to “get” her, breathlessly revealing that the woman who receives more hate mail than Teddy Kennedy employs a part-time bodyguard, as though it proved something about her mental state.

But note, please, Rep. McKinney did not take back anything she has said about racial profiling in the nation’s capitol. And the fact remains that, while each day’s mail brings a new wave of personal threats, some of the people charged with protecting her affect not to recognize her. A Republican colleague offered the suggestion that she could announce “I am a Member of Congress” each time she passes a security checkpoint. But McKinney has served for eleven years, not eleven minutes.

Here’s a test of media fairness: how many times, over those eleven years, have you seen Rep. McKinney on CNN, NBC, ABC, or CBS, asked to explain her views on Iraq and the Middle East? Not once, you say? Read on for the “why come” of it all.

The leaders of her own party turn their backs while she endures the most vicious racial stereotyping I’ve seen, since the last time I looked at that old KKK rag called the “Thunderbolt” when a fellow college student stuck a copy in my face back around 1963. “I know it’s probably racist,” he said, “but it’s funny,” as if that would have made it all right.

It wasn’t funny, it was disgusting…
counterpunch.org

Racial Profiling from the Halls of Congress to the Studios of MSNBC: The Assault on Cynthia McKinney
Joe Scarborough, political hack and host of Scarborough Country on MSNBC, went on yet another odious rant on April 3. This time his scurrilous remarks were aimed at six-term Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. The Congresswoman is accused of punching a Capitol Hill security officer in the chest (with cell phone in hand). After McKinney skirted a metal detector (members of Congress are not required to go through metal detectors) an officer, according to a witness, asked McKinney to stop several times. The officer claimed that he didn’t recognize the six-term Congresswoman (although each officer is given pictures of members of Congress); it seems that the confusion was due to McKinney’s new haircut. What would they have done to Dick Cheney in hunting gear? McKinney’s lawyers allege that a skirmish ensued after the officer “harassed” the Congresswoman and forcefully grabbed her by the arm. The Washington Post quoted McKinney, “Let me be clear: This whole incident was instigated by the inappropriate touching and stopping of me, a female black congresswoman.”

If you were watching Scarborough Country, you wouldn’t have heard McKinney’s claim, because Scarborough dove right into slanderous commentary and demonizing drivel: “How do you solve a problem like Cynthia McKinneyThe six-term Congresswoman from Georgia has long been considered an embarrassing fact of life for constituents, Congressman and Capitol Hill police.” Scarborough went on to misquote McKinney, asserting that the Congresswoman claimed that George Bush knew about 9/11 and didn’t do anything about it because it helped Bush’s family’s stock portfolio. Scarborough ended his diatribe with words of reassurance, “The good news, saying stupid things is not a crime.” That’s right, because Joe Scarborough, media guardian of Natalie Holloway and defender of creationism, would have jailed a long time ago.

…The war’s coming home indeed, in the form of people dreadfully wounded in body and spirit. Thousands of tragedies that will unwind, often violently, for years to come. But for now, for the most part, it’s pictures on TV, not tears and terror on the hearthrug. So the Democrats in Congress aren’t too worried about pressure from their antiwar constituents, even though the mere possibility of a primary challenge by Cindy Sheehan put the wind up Diane Feinstein. The awful six-termer, Jane Harman, faces a primary challenge from Marcy Winograd in southern California, after a couple of unions defied orders and endorsed Winograd. Meanwhile, at the other end of the country in Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman faced a decidedly cool audience at a big Democratic dinner at the end of March and got bailed out by his brother senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, who told the crowd to haul out their check books and make sure Lieberman gets returned for another term.

What kind of a signal is this? Here is Obama, endlessly hailed as the brightest rising star in the Democratic firmament, delivering (at a closely watched political dinner, with Lieberman’s primary opponent, Ned Lamont, sitting in the crowd) a ringing endorsement to his “mentor”, Lieberman, Bush’s closest Democratic ally on the war in Iraq, and overall pretty much a symbol of everything that’s been wrong with the Democratic Party for the past twenty years. What a slimy fellow Obama is, as befits a man symbolizing everything that will continue to be wrong with the Democratic Party for the next twenty years. Every time I look up he’s doing something disgusting, like distancing himself from his fellow senator Dick Durbin for denouncing the torture center at Guantanamo, or cheerleading the nuke-Iran crowd.
counterpunch.org

A senior official in the Iraqi government has for the first time admitted the country is in a state of civil war.

Deputy interior minister Hussein Ali Kamal said Iraq had been in “undeclared” civil war for the past year.

He told reporters: “Actually Iraq has been in an undeclared civil war for the past 12 months.

“On a daily basis Shias, Sunnis, Kurds and Christians are being killed and the only undeclared thing is that a civil war has not been officially announced by the parties involved. Civil war is happening but not on a wide scale.”

Mr Kamal’s admission mirrors the words of former Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi who last month said Iraq was in civil war. Mr Allawi warned that the violence was reaching the point of no return and Europe and the USA would not be spared the consequences.

But British ministers have repeatedly denied civil war is either imminent or inevitable. Criticising anti-war protesters, Defence Secretary John Reid recently suggested those who argued that Iraq was on the brink of civil war were siding with the terrorists.
itv.com

U.S. Study Paints Somber Portrait of Iraqi Discord
WASHINGTON, April 8 — An internal staff report by the United States Embassy and the military command in Baghdad provides a sobering province-by-province snapshot of Iraq’s political, economic and security situation, rating the overall stability of 6 of the 18 provinces “serious” and one “critical.” The report is a counterpoint to some recent upbeat public statements by top American politicians and military officials.

The report, 10 pages of briefing points titled “Provincial Stability Assessment,” underscores the shift in the nature of the Iraq war three years after the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Warnings of sectarian and ethnic frictions are raised in many regions, even in those provinces generally described as nonviolent by American officials.

There are alerts about the growing power of Iranian-backed religious Shiite parties, several of which the United States helped put into power, and rival militias in the south. The authors also point to the Arab-Kurdish fault line in the north as a major concern, with the two ethnicities vying for power in Mosul, where violence is rampant, and Kirkuk, whose oil fields are critical for jump-starting economic growth in Iraq.

The patterns of discord mapped by the report confirm that ethnic and religious schisms have become entrenched across much of the country, even as monthly American fatalities have fallen. Those indications, taken with recent reports of mass migrations from mixed Sunni-Shiite areas, show that Iraq is undergoing a de facto partitioning along ethnic and sectarian lines, with clashes — sometimes political, sometimes violent — taking place in those mixed areas where different groups meet.

The War Gets More Grim Every Day
I have been covering the war in Iraq ever since it began three years ago and I have never seen the situation so grim. I was in the northern city of Mosul last week protected by 3,000 Kurdish soldiers, but even so it was considered too dangerous to send out heavily armed patrols in day time. It is safer at night because of a rigorously enforced curfew. In March alone the US military said 1,313 people were killed in sectarian attacks. Many bodies, buried in pits or thrown in the rivers, are never found. The real figure is probably twice as high. All over the country people are on the move as Sunni and Shi’ites flee each other’s areas.

I was in Lebanon at the start of the civil war there in 1975. Baghdad today resembles Beirut then. People are being hauled from their cars and murdered solely because of their religious identity. A friend called to say that he had a problem because his two half brothers had been born in Fallujah, the Sunni Muslim stronghold, and this was on their identity cards. If they were picked up by Shiah militiamen or Interior Ministry troops a glance at their place of birth alone could get them killed.

Fleeing one danger in Baghdad it is easy to become victim of another. The same friend had taken his mother and two sisters to the passport office in central Baghdad so they could leave the country. While they were there a large bomb went off killing 25 policemen outside and breaking his sister’s leg. Now the family cannot leave the country because his sister is in hospital and his mother is too frightened to return to the passport office to get a new passport.

President George W. Bush and Tony Blair have for the last three years continually understated the gravity of what is taking place in Iraq. It has been frustrating as a journalist to hear them claim that much of Iraq is peaceful when we could not prove them wrong without being killed or kidnapped. The capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the handover of sovereignty in 2004, the elections and new constitution in 2005 have all been spuriously oversold to the outside world as signs of progress.

The formation of national unity government in Iraq is now being presented as an antidote to the present surge in violence. “Terrorists love a vacuum”, said the Defence Secretary John Reid yesterday citing his experience in Northern Ireland. But one Iraqi official remarked caustically that the three main communites the Sunni, Shia and Kurds — do not “hate each other because they do not have a government, but rather they do not have a government because they already hate each other.”

U.S. Marine reported shot by Iraqi
BAGHDAD, Iraq – An Iraqi soldier allegedly shot and killed a U.S. Marine at a base near the Syrian border, the U.S. military said Friday.

Another U.S. Marine then wounded the Iraqi soldier.

The shootings occurred Thursday near Qaim, 200 miles west of Baghdad, the U.S. statement said.

”An Iraqi army soldier allegedly shot and killed the U.S. Marine on a coalition base” near Qaim, the statement said. ”The Iraqi soldier was shot by another U.S. Marine.”

The incident is under investigation, the statement said. No further details were released, and Pentagon officials said they had no further information.

An earlier statement said the Iraqi was evacuated to a U.S. military in Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad. The soldier’s condition was unknown.

”Just as we as American military men and women trust one another with our lives, we also trust our Iraqi counterparts, and that trust has not wavered,” the statement added.

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.