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.”

The head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog, Mohamed ElBaradei, will go Tehran next week to discuss Iran’s nuclear programme.

Mr ElBaradei will report back to the UN Security Council at the end of April on whether Iran has complied with its demand to suspend uranium enrichment.

The demand, issued last week, has been publicly rejected by Tehran.

UN nuclear inspectors arrived in Iran on Friday to visit sites including the Natanz uranium enrichment plant.

Iran insists it has the right to civilian nuclear technology and denies Western claims that it is seeking atomic weapons.

A senior official at the watchdog, the IAEA, said Mr ElBaradei would meet senior Iranian officials for talks on confidence-building measures.

The official said the visit would provide Iran with an opportunity to come forward with information required by the IAEA “to fill in the gaps in the history of Iran’s nuclear activities”.
bbc.co.uk