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Dispatch From Tripoli: Where Have Libya's Children Gone?
By Franklin Lamb
Tripoli residents trying to fuel a car on 8/5/11 with black market benzene— often spilling a fair bit in the process. Photo: F. Lamb
The quality of life continues to degrade in certain areas of western Libya while public anxiety noticeably rises over missing Libyan children as the first week of an unusually stressful Ramadan passes.
The shortage of gasoline has become acute and despite government efforts to curtail price gouging, one taxi driver told this observer yesterday that while the usual price of ‘benzene’ was 3.75 liters (one gallon) for $.40 (forty US cents) he is now having to pay as much as " 4 dinars for one liter of petrol!" That is roughly the equivalent of 13 US dollars for a gallon of gasoline, a huge price surge in a country long accustomed to cheap, heavily subsidized fuel. “Informal economy” (black market) fuel arrives in car trunks from the Tunisian border and its increasingly common to see fellows with a make shift funnel trying to get more benzene into their vehicle tanks than they splash and spill on neighborhood streets.
NATO'S Massacre at Majer, Libya
By Franklin Lamb
Located about 20 miles east of the ancient Roman city of Leptis Magna, six miles south of Zliten, and off Libya's southern coast across the Mediterranean from Rome, Majer was a picturesque village known for the fine quality of its dates and is claimed by locals to produce the best tarbuni (date juice) in Libya.
Family members, eyewitnesses and Libyan government officials claim that NATO's air-strikes at Majer killed 85 people, including 33 children, 32 women and 20 men. Reporters and visitors were shown 30 of the bodies in a local morgue, including a mother and two children. Officials and residents explained that approximately 50 bodies were taken to other locations for family burial and most of the injured rushed to hospitals at Tripoli.
At Majer, NATO chose to bomb three neighboring compounds and visitors examined a total of five bombed-out houses. There was no evidence of weapons at the farmhouses, but rather mattresses, clothes and books littered the area. One badly injured 15-year old young lady, Salwa Ageil Al Jaoud, had earlier written her name inside one notebook found amidst the rubble. She was later visited in hospital and attested, like the witnesses at Qana had, that there was no military presence in the homes that were bombed.
OBAMA GOING DOWN WITH DOW / OBAMAGEDDON APPROACHES
By Allen L Roland
President Obama has tied his administration to the Wall Street crime syndicate and will politically go down with Wall Street as the full extent of America’s economic and moral deficit is finally unveiled. It will eventually be referred to as Obamageddon.: Allen L Roland
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Thursday showed that
20% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as president. Forty-two percent (42%) Strongly Disapprove, giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -22 (the lowest rating of his presidency and a red flag for his re-election prospects.
Obama is paying the political price of his allegiance to an unregulated Wall Street at the expense of Main Street as the economy continues to disintegrate.
Bear Country
by Stephen Lendman
Financial markets provide early signals of future economic conditions, good or bad. Currently, they're flashing red.
On August 19, economist David Rosenberg reported the bad news about major world stock markets in bear territory, including Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Switzerland, Russia, Belgium, Portugal, India, and others heading there, including Japan, China and America.
They signal hard times getting worse, what Main Street Americans knew since 2008, mired in Depression. Tipping points for others now are evident. Low bond yields when financial stocks crashed are "classic sign(s) of (further) credit contraction." Mortgage rates also hit a record 4.17% low. Even so, "existing home sales collapsed at a 17% annual rate so far in 2011," providing more proof of America's greatest ever housing Depression, or as Rosenberg put it:
Falsified New York Times Middle East Reports
by Stephen Lendman
They appear daily like weeds on all topics. As a result, Times reports aren't fit to read, let alone print. August 18 was no exception, publishing lies about Libyan insurgent victories.
On August 18, headlining, "Libyan Rebels Gain Control of Oil Refinery as Qaddafi Forces Flee," Kareem Fahim's article was pure Pentagon propaganda, duplicitously lying to readers.
Yet he said "(r)ebel fighters claimed complete control of a sprawling (Zawiyah) oil refinery, seizing one of (Gaddafi's) most important assets after just three days of fighting and delivering the latest in a string of small victories that have suddenly put the rebels at Tripoli's door."
Reporting from Tripoli, independent Middle East/Central Asian analyst, Mahdi Nazemroaya refuted him, telling Progressive Radio News Hour listeners that:
-- Gaddafi forces are winning;
Waiting for the Endgame in Libya
FRANKLIN LAMB
Tripoli
Since this observer is not privy to any secrets around here and would not share them if he were, it’s fair enough to engage in frank discussions with former colleagues in Congress and new cyber acquaintances who work on the Hill.
I got an ear full this week from sources familiar with John Kerry’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee activities about President Obama’s semi-private views on what is happening in Libya and the President's doubts about NATO’s role in bombing this unlucky country.
Eretz Yisrael: Lawless, Corrupt and Dysfunctional
by Stephen Lendman
What do you call a country that persecutes occupied people and one-fifth of its own population for not being Jewish? An illegal occupier for over 44 years, suffocating over 1.6 million Gazans under siege! A nation practicing torture, persecution, and racism as official policies! A modern day Sparta, glorifying wars and violence!
A country spurning rule of law principles! An unparalleled regional state terrorist! A nuclear armed global threat! A society of extreme social inequality! A nation with no legitimacy for all of the above reasons, besides having stolen another people's nation violently!
It's called Eretz Yisrael - Israel, a nation where thousands of fed up Jews vote with their feet and leave regularly. Like America, Israel isn't fit to live in. One day perhaps that will be its epitaph.
Many Jews and analysts believe Zionism is destroying Judaism. In his book "Overcoming Zionism," Joel Kovel explained how it fosters "imperialist expansion and militarism (with) signs of the fascist malignancy," adding that it turned Israel "into a machine for the manufacture of human rights abuses."
Criminal Zionism will bring about lasting disaster unto Jews
By Khalid Amayreh in occupied East
Some of the victims of occupation airstrikes on Gaza
Israeli leaders have nearly lost their composure, reacting to a rare resistance attack originating from the Sinai Peninsula near the southernmost town of Um al Rushrash, renamed by the Zionists as Elat.
Appearing existentially anxious and morbidly hypochondriac, Israeli prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu was behaving in a conspicuously convulsive manner.
He vowed to murder Palestinians, saying "we must kill those trying to hurt Jews." Netanyahu, an inherently dishonest and racist politician, thought that the only way Israel could prove her military might was by ganging up on nearly helpless and virtually undefended Gazans who are languishing under a lingering blockade that has made the coastal enclave very much a modern-day version of the Warsaw Ghetto.
RIP: America's Anti-War Movement
by Stephen Lendman
On August 8, the libertarian Reason Foundation (RF) asked about the absence of anti-war sentiment in America, saying:
"The Obama administration is on pace to have more American soldiers killed in" Iraq and Afghanistan than Bush did in his first term.
Besides the shocking number of injuries, permanent impairments, physical trauma, and record number of suicides because of lengthy repeated deployments, iCasualties.org listed 630 Afghan deaths from 2001 through 2008 under Bush.
No true justice for the West Memphis Three
Mary Shaw
On August 19, three men walked out of prison in Arkansas after spending nearly 20 years behind bars for a triple murder that they maintain they did not commit. The crime involved the brutal killing of three eight-year-old boys.
Damien Echols had been on death row for the murders. Jessie Misskelley, Jr. and Jason Baldwin were both serving life sentences. They had been nicknamed the "West Memphis Three".
Their first big break came in 2007, when new forensic evidence showed that the DNA from the crime scene did not match any of the defendants. After four years of appeals, a plea agreement was reached by which the three would enter Alford pleas in exchange for having their sentences reduced to time served. Under an Alford plea, a defendant can assert his innocence while acknowledging that prosecutors have enough evidence to obtain a conviction.
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