El analysis de La Silla Vacía:

La consulta Verde podría llegar a millón y medio. Superaría la votación de la consulta liberal que sacó un millón de votos, triplicaría la consulta del Polo y sería más o menos la mitad de la consulta conservadora. Una votación impresionante dado que tienen una maquinaria muy pequeña representada por algunos candidatos del viejo partido Opción Centro; esta votación es mayoritariamente voto de opinión.

En principio, entran al Senado cuatro candidatos, probablemente cinco: Gilma Jiménez es la mayor votación, el ex gobernador de Boyacá Jorge Eduardo Londoño, Félix José Valera, John Sudarsky y Wilfrido Uzuriaga están adentro. Y a la Cámara, entrarían por lo menos dos: Alfonso Prada y Angela María Robledo.

“Cada momento histórico tiene un candidato que simboliza la necesidad”, explica el analista Héctor Riveros, que les está ayudando a los Verdes. “Mockus podría simbolizar la reacción al relajamiento moral, a la parapolítica, a las chuzadas, al voten antes de irse a la cárcel, al le pego en la jeta, marica”.

Se defina o no la campaña alrededor del tema de la moralidad política, Mockus arranca mañana con un impulso que no tenía. Personas que pensaban antes que votar por él era perder el voto lo pensarán dos veces. El Verde le arrebató al Polo su sector más progresista y Mockus se convierte en una alternativa real para quienes quieren un rumbo realmente distinto para el país fundado en otro tipo de valores.

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Same But Different Results in Colombia’s Congressional Elections
Colombians too went to the polls on Sunday to elect a new Congress and to select two Presidential candidates in a primary. The contest was seen an indicator of electoral strength in advance of the Andean country’s Presidential elections scheduled for May 30th.

Some 14 million, out of 28 million registered Colombians, turned out to vote in an election that was peaceful but marred by allegations of vote buying and other intimidation in rural districts in the Caribbean littoral savannah and in Amazonia. By Colombian Congressional election standards, that’s a high voter turnout. Normally, it’s around 40 percent for Congressional elections and near 60 percent for presidential ones.

Parties tied to outgoing President Alvaro Uribe did very well winning a large plurality in both houses of Congress. The official Uribe party, el Partido Social de la Unidad Social – known simply as La U – won 27 Senate seats down from 31 but overall the Uribe coalition won 60 Senate seats up from 50 in the outgoing Senate. The Colombian Senate has 102 members who are elected nationally in a list voting. The biggest winner of the night was the Conservative Party whose political fortunes are seemingly on the rise after failing to even nominate a presidential candidate in the 2006 elections. They held their 23 Senate seats.

The other party that is informally part of the Uribe coalition that did well is the Partido de Integración Nacional (PIN) which won 8 percent of the vote and 8 Senate seats despite that 67 of its members are under investigation for links to para-militarism and narco-politics. This is a party that is controlled by regional caciques in rural areas particularly in the country’s northern Caribbean littoral savannah and a party that is inherently corrupt. Their performance is indicative of how far the country still has yet to travel in its efforts to turn the corner on its past and points yet again that the fundamental problem in Colombian politics remains the influence of those tied to in one or another to drug trafficking. It is deeply troubling and embarrassing to me personally that the fourth largest political force in my native Colombia is built upon such a nexus of evil.

A New Hope Emerges
The Colombian Green Party, el Partido Verde, formed last October did very well winning 5 percent of the vote nationally and sweeping in Bogotá, the country’s capital and largest city. The Green Party won at least four Senate seats, perhaps 5 when all is said and done, in its first electoral contest and is now poised to become a player in Colombian politics. The party also held a primary to decide its presidential nominee choosing between three former progressive mayors of Bogotá. The winner with about 55 percent of the vote was Antanas Mockus, the academic turned politician. He is expected to name Lucho Garzón, the most leftist of the three tenors as the former mayors are called, as his running mate.

The Greens ran very unusual campaign. They did not campaign individually but as a group. At every rally, each of the three men appeared to demonstrate that the campaign was one of ideas and not personalities. The Greens did especially well in the urban areas and very poorly in rural ones.

The Also Rans
For the Colombian Liberal Party, the elections are a mixed bag. Once the majority party, they won just 18 percent of the vote but remain the largest opposition party. Their share of the vote has been decimated by defections not just to the Uribist factions (Alvaro Uribe hails from the Liberal party) but also other dissidents such as Germán Vargas Lleras’ Cambio Radical party which won 8 percent of the vote that translates into 9 Senate seats and seems poised to make a serious run in the upcoming Presidential elections. Vargas Lleras, the grandson of a much beloved former President, leads an independent movement that supports Uribe’s security policies but not his economic ones. His choice for Vice President was Elsa Noguera, a 37 year old economist from Barranquilla who is also handicapped.

The hard left faltered. The Polo Democrático Alternativo (PDA), a group that counts many former guerrillas, saw its share of the vote fall to just 10 percent, down from 22 percent just four years. The head of the party, Jaime Dussán, resigned this morning in the wake of the defeat. Dussán a fixture in the Colombian Senate since 1998 also lost his seat. The other big loser of the night was Sergio Fajardo, the former mayor of Medellín, who has been mounting an independent civic campaign for the presidency. His lists failed to win 2 percent of the vote, embarrassingly coming behind the Colombian evangelical party MIRA which won 2.5% percent. Neither Fajardo nor the MIRA made the threshold for a Senate seat.

Late Night Drama: The Conservative Primary
The five person Conservative primary was a two person race between Noemí Sanín, a former Foreign Minister and a long-standing politician of note, and Andrés Felipe Arias, a former Minister of Agriculture who at 38 has positioned himself as the most loyal of Uribe’s henchmen. Known as “Uribito” – or little Uribe, Arias has promised to meticulously follow Uribe’s policies if elected and perhaps even have Uribe serve in the Cabinet.

The contest between Sanín and Arias for the Conservative nomination remains as of this hour undecided. At one point last night just three votes separated the two. Arias, incidentally, was unable to vote due to a registration mishap. For most of the night, Arias led though the vote difference was no more than three thousand at any one point despite over 3 million ballots casted in this primary. By early morning, Sanín had pulled ahead by some 5,000 votes with 93 percent of electoral tables reporting.

A Ballot Disaster
At last count, ten percent of all ballots have been declared invalid. Not surprising, I found the ballot extremely confusing and soiled one of the three so much that I had to ask for another one. The paper ballot was different from the ones we have long used in the country which clearly differentiate the various party lists. Instead this ballot lacked the usual marks of distinction as well as the customary photographs of the candidates and grouped three separate elections onto one ballot. Colombia reserves seats for members of ethnic minorities such as indigenous groups and Afro-Colombians and traditionally these are elected apart by members of those constituencies. In this election, the Colombian Electoral Registry used one ballot for all three elections causing undue confusion. Ten percent of ballots cast aside is simply unacceptable and taints the election.

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Vive La Indifference!
French voters, 52 percent of them anyway, went to the polls in a first round of regional elections. Indifference was the biggest winner. The abstention rate for the ballot is a record low for a French regional election. Beyond that, the election saw a drubbing of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s right of centre UMP (Union for a Popular Movement). Not surprising given that unemployment is at a 10-year-high and the rampant cronyism that pervades the Sarkozy Administration.

Results released by the French Interior Ministry with about 80 percent of the votes counted showed the Socialists and their allies, who already control 20 of the 22 regions of mainland France, winning about 29 percent of the vote. Mr. Sarkozy’s Union for a Popular Movement had 26 percent to 27 percent. The French Green party and a likely ally of the Socialists, Europe Ecologie, did very well pulling in 11.6 percent, while the right-wing party of Jean Marie Le Pen National Front (FN) scored an impressive comeback with 11.7 percent of the vote after being written off for dead. Indeed, the FN nearly tripled its voting percentage over its 2007 results helped by the low turnout. Another minor party, the Democratic Movement, was trailing badly with 4.3 percent of the vote, behind the far-left Trotskyite party.

The election was for 1,880 seats on regional governments in mainland France and in overseas regions from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. It will have little bearing on President’s Sarkozy ability to govern as it does not affect the National Assembly. Still for the French President, this was a stinging rebuke bound to be compounded in next week’s second round round-offs.

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Voters in Colombia are heading to the polls to elect new legislators.

And one of the 2,500 candidates for congress is Francisco Javier Lozano Neiva – who belongs to a party called “PAIS” – composed mostly of social leaders and indigenous groups.

He had to flee his home in 2005 after paramilitaries attacked his town, committing a massacre of civilians.

And now the experience is pushing Neiva to try to stop the cycle of violence and political corruption in Colombia

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It’s stunning to read that in San Francisco, gay men are open targets for hate:

A video made by three cousins from Hayward charged with an alleged anti-gay shooting with a BB rifle last month in San Francisco shows 11 other attacks in a single night, authorities said Friday.

The men have been charged in San Francisco with a hate crime and assault for allegedly firing a BB rifle Feb. 26 at the face of a man they believed was gay. The man, who was walking on 16th Street near Guerrero Street, was not badly hurt and later identified the three suspects.

The three were freed on $50,000 bail soon after their arrest. But on Friday, Mohammad Habibzada, Shafiq Hashemi and Sayed Bassam, all 24, appeared in court and were immediately rearrested. They were all being held late Friday on $450,000 bail.

They were returned to custody after prosecutors viewed a video that police found in the three men’s car when they were arrested.

Brian Buckelew, spokesman for District Attorney Kamala Harris, said the video showed the 16th Street attack and BB rifle shootings aimed at 11 other men. Police say the video depicts the suspects laughing as they fire.

Investigators say they have been unable to find any of the additional alleged victims. Still, Buckelew said prosecutors may file additional charges against each of the three defendants.

The defendants’ attorneys would not comment outside court Friday. The defendants, who have not entered pleas, are scheduled to return to court April 8.

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In this Worldfocus signature story, we take another look at the drastic consequences of climate change. The Maldives, an island chain off the southwest coast of India, find themselves being consumed by rising sea levels. The Maldives has set the goal of being the world’s first carbon-neutral country by the end of this decade.

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World Focus speaks to Mohammed Waheed Hassan, the Vice President of the Islamic Republic of the Maldives, the low-lying Indian Ocean archipelago of coral atolls that has put global climatic change on the forefront of its development strategy out of the stark reality that if seas continue to rise the nation will disappear under the waves.

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The International Red Cross has warned that Zimbabwe could be facing a very severe food crisis.

The charity says that more than 2.7 million people, a quarter of the country’s population, are in “dire need” of food aid.

There are already more than two million people who need food aid in the country and that number is going to rise because the harvest has failed, the group says.

They are appealing for donors to contribute more than $20 million USD in funding.

There is also concern about the possible impact of food shortage on the estimated one million children left orphaned after their parents died of AIDS.

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The conservative city state of Singapore has opened two casinos in the hopes of attracting tourists. But criticism of the projects remain. 101 East looks at the debate over casinos in Singapore.

One of the casinos is owned by the Las Vegas Sands Corporation. The other is owned by Singapore’s Resorts World Sentosa.

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More than 30,000 people have joined demonstrations in Athens as workersd held a nationwide strike to show their anger over the country’s deepening financial crisis.

Street clashes erupted on the sidelines of the protest in the capital, with masked youths smashing shop fronts and knocking police off motorbikes.

More from the Wall Street Journal:

Violence broke out between police and protesters in central Athens on Thursday as an estimated 30,000 people gathered to demonstrate against the government’s austerity program as part of a nationwide general strike.

Riot police fired tear gas after clashing with several hundred anarchists, who responded by throwing projectiles. Hooded youths representing Greece’s anarchist movement also attacked shop fronts, smashed the windows of one hotel and set alight a car just off one of the city’s main streets. Black smoke from the burning car billowed over the student district of Athens, the site of frequent violent protests.

Greece’s two umbrella unions, the private-sector GSEE and the public-sector ADEDY, called the strike to protest the €4.8 billion ($6.55 billion) package of spending cuts and tax increases that the government announced March 3, and which was voted into law March 5. The communist-backed PAME union held a separate protest with more than 5,000 people.

The strike has affected public transport, government ministries and state-owned companies, while all flights into and out of the country have been grounded, and all ferry and rail services have been suspended.

On the streets of Athens, normal workday activity was muted. Strike posters hung on street lights and road signs announced a protest rally. Morning news shows on local television were replaced with alternative programming.

“No to unjust and antisocial measures,” said ADEDY on its Web site. “The current policies are bankrupting the lives of salaried workers and pensioners.”

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