Something was missing when Father Roy Bourgeois and several companions traveled through South America last month: fear.

Or rather, as he said it, almost reverently, "FEAR-R-R-R" - a big, lingering, life-shaping word, clotted with grief and inexpressible rage. As he spoke the word, it was alive with the memory of midnight knocks and disappeared loved ones, the reality of life under the oligarchies and terror regimes that subdued the poor in Latin America for so long.

When I talked to Bourgeois the other day, he couldn't conceal his wonderment at its absence: "I remember the fear that I had when I left there years ago. To see fear replaced by hope . . ."

Indeed, something remarkable is happening in the Southern Hemisphere, news of which we in El Norte get only in heavily filtered, ludicrously distorted doses. Women and indigenous people are suddenly ascending to ranks of power. In Uruguay, a former human-rights attorney is now defense minister. Unimaginable possibility is dawning, and the wounded and imprisoned of earlier decades are grieving openly for the first time and crying "Nunca mas!" - never again.

NEW ORLEANS –– In a moment captured from a page of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, thousands of disenchanted citizens marched across the Crescent City Connection Bridge on Saturday, seeking the right of displaced New Orleans citizens to vote in the election scheduled April 22.

After fiery speeches delivered on the grounds of the Ernest M. Morial Convention Center by leaders of the civil rights movement, politicians and celebrities, such as Rev. Jesse Jackson, the president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, Rev. Al Sharpton, president of the National Action Network, and celebrity Judge Greg Mathis, the marchers crossed the Crescent City Connection Bridge, spanning the Mississippi River, where thousands of New Orleans citizens were stranded after Hurricane Katrina and the floodwaters of the Gulf of Mexico caused devastation in the city last summer.

Is President Bush guilty of war crimes?

To even ask the question is to go far beyond the boundaries of mainstream U.S. media.

A few weeks ago, when a class of seniors at Parsippany High School in New Jersey prepared for a mock trial to assess whether Bush has committed war crimes, a media tempest ensued.

Typical was the response from MSNBC host Tucker Carlson, who found the very idea of such accusations against Bush to be unfathomable. The classroom exercise “implies people are accusing him of a crime against humanity,” Carlson said. “It’s ludicrous.”

In Tennessee, the Chattanooga Times Free Press thundered in an editorial: “That some American ‘educators’ would have students ‘try’ our American president for ‘war crimes’ during time of war tells us that our problems are not only with terrorists abroad.”

The standard way for media to refer to Bush and war crimes in the same breath is along the lines of this lead-in to a news report on CNN’s “American Morning” in late March: “The Supreme Court’s about to consider a landmark case and one that could have far-reaching implications. At issue is

Ohio is reeling with a mixture of outrage and hilarity as Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell has revealed that he has owned stock in the Diebold voting machine company, to which Blackwell tried to award unbid contracts worth millions while allowing its operators to steal Ohio elections. A top Republican election official also says a Diebold operative told him he made a $50,000 donation to Blackwell's "political interests."

A veritable army of attorneys on all sides of Ohio's political spectrum will soon report whether Blackwell has violated the law. But in any event, the revelations could have a huge impact on the state whose dubiously counted electoral votes gave George W. Bush a second term. Diebold was the vendor in three Ohio counties in 2004. Because of Blackwell's effort, 41 counties used Diebold machines in Ohio's highly dubious 2005 election, and now 47 counties will use Diebold touchscreen voting machines in the May 2006 primary, and in the fall election that will decide who will be the state's new governor.

Can't you get an extremely large group of Ohio voters,especially Blacks, who were disenfranchised to come together to sue Kenneth Blackwell for preventing them from voting which is a part of the American Constitution. He committed a federal offense by interfering with their right to vote. He should be in prison along with Katherine Harris of Florida but nobody has the balls to pull them both into court. I would if I had a valid reason but neither one did anything to me personally except to help get George W Bush in office.