Showing posts with label New York Times. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New York Times. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 24, 2021

November 24

He Convinced Voters He Would Be Like Merkel. But Who Is Olaf Scholz? Germany’s next chancellor is something of an enigma. He comes to power with a dizzying array of challenges, raising questions about whether he can fill the very big shoes of his predecessor......... Terse, well-briefed and abstaining from any gesture of triumph ........ he perfected the art of embodying her aura of stability and calm to the point of holding his hands together in her signature diamond shape. .........

“He’s like a soccer player who studied videos of another player and changed his game”

............ Rarely has a German leader come into office with so many burning crises. As soon as he is sworn in as chancellor in early December, Mr. Scholz will have to deal with a surging pandemic, tensions at the Polish-Belarussian border, a Russian president mobilizing troops on Ukraine’s eastern border, a more confrontational China and a less dependable United States. ........ and served in two governments led by Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party, most recently as her finance minister. ....... Mr. Scholz grew up in Hamburg, the city he would later run as mayor. His grandfather was a railway man, his parents worked in textiles. He and his brothers were the first in his family to go to university. ........ the youthful idealist who mellowed into a post-ideological centrist might be turning more radical again in his 60s. ........ Three years ago, when his party’s approval ratings were hovering near record lows, he told The New York Times that the Social Democrats would win the next election. ...........

Like Ms. Merkel, he has a reputation for being a safe pair of hands and a decent person with a bipartisan aura.

.......... keeping the peace in an unusual and untested three-way coalition with two ideologically divergent parties: the progressive Greens, who want to spend 50 billion euros, or about $56 billion, on a green transition, and the pro-market Free Democrats, who will control the finance ministry and with it the purse strings. .......... if things go smoothly, Mr. Scholz’ Germany could turn out to be a pivotal power for European cohesion, for more trans-Atlantic unity on fighting climate change and for confronting strategic competitors like China and Russia, and, some hope, for a revival of social democracy in different parts of the world. .......... Not since the second term of former President Bill Clinton have both the White House and the German chancellery been in the hands of center-left leaders. ......... Belarus, a Russian ally that has been funneling migrants to the Polish border in an apparent attempt to destabilize the bloc.




What the Arbery and Rittenhouse Verdicts Couldn’t Tell Us Many of us wish that the public could witness the degradation and absurdity of everyday legal proceedings. ............ An officer testified that after the shooting, Mr. Rittenhouse approached his car with his weapon strapped to his chest and his hands up in surrender, but officers ordered him to get out of the way and rushed past him to search for the shooter. Apparently, it did not enter their minds that the baby-faced white teen could be the culprit. So Mr. Rittenhouse went home, and ultimately turned himself in. ............ Anyone who has practiced criminal law or even attended a trial knows that plenty of judges are not the objective and omniscient arbiters of popular imagination: They are idiosyncratic and sometimes biased....... Convicting Kyle Rittenhouse would have sent Kyle Rittenhouse to prison — that’s all. Laws and legal procedures are not ethical codes and cannot sustain the weight of moral reckonings on a national scale. Looking to these trials to repair social damage, answer a larger question or fulfill some notion of justice is a mistake.

Beyond the futility of hope, looking to the criminal system — which was heavily influenced by slave codes and still serves to reinforce racial hierarchies — further centers it in our moral discourse.

............ The injustice extends beyond police abuse. Conspiracy theories exacerbate public health crises. The attack on voting rights by the right leads us ever closer to minority authoritarianism. And urgent warnings of climate disaster have gone unheeded for decades. A win for the prosecution in the Rittenhouse case may have felt vindicating for those on the left side of the culture wars, but it would not have addressed any of these problems. .........

Neither would it have loosened the hold of racism on our legal system.

........ To get a sense of the way racism pervades our criminal justice system, I would recommend paying less attention to blockbuster cases and instead visiting a local criminal court on a random day and witnessing the parade of low-income people of color shuffled before the court, most of them accused of minor, victimless offenses. Pay attention as a judge decides, within minutes, how much money will be required for each person to get out of a cage. Listen to the defense lawyer describe the life circumstances of each client. And then ask what can be done. What structures, literal or figurative, must be dismantled, built or changed in order to create the change we seek? ...... That work is harder, and it’s slower, but maybe one day my clients will not be called “bodies.”

Maybe they will be afforded the same dignity and deference given to Mr. Rittenhouse.



Trump Wanted to Punish China. We’re Still Paying for It.
Family Arguments
Can Liberals Survive Progressivism?
The Novel That Riveted France During Lockdown Arrives in the U.S. “The Anomaly,” by Hervé Le Tellier, sold more than a million copies during an anomalous time. Now the genre-bending novel is translated into English.

How the $4 Trillion Flood of Covid Relief Is Funding the Future From broadband to transportation to high-tech medical manufacturing, benefits from America’s pandemic money infusion will linger. ......... Nurses wore trash bags as medical equipment. Nobody could buy toilet paper. ....... To date, the federal government has allocated $4.52 trillion in response to Covid-19 — a staggering figure, one that exceeds the entire federal budget in 2019. Most of that funding comes from just two bills: the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security, or CARES, Act, passed in March 2020 ($2.2 trillion), and the American Rescue Plan Act, or A.R.P., from March 2021 ($1.9 trillion). ....... $10 billion to Moderna and $11 billion to Pfizer. .......

one of the biggest, fastest biomedical-research efforts that we’ve ever launched

........ The record turnaround from the Covid-19 vaccine will set a new standard for how fast other treatments can be developed with the appropriate funding. “Anything that involves getting an F.D.A.-​approved drug or medical device — whether it’s heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis, cancer, lupus — all of these have the potential to benefit from these new approaches to clinical trial,” Fenton says. ........

U.S. government investment in nondefense R.& D. has fallen, slowly but significantly, over time, from 5.8 percent of the federal budget in 1966 to 1.5 percent in 2020.

....... “It felt like going back into a deployment again, where we knew a little bit of information but not the whole developed picture.” ....... Infrastructure, conjuring as it does images of potholes and rusted water pipes, often goes overlooked; politicians would rather be associated with cutting ribbons than maintaining systems. Paradoxically, that has meant the great leaps in American infrastructure often come from moments of great lack: the greater the crisis, the larger the possible investment. The Great Depression led to the New Deal, which established the Federal Housing Administration and brought electricity to the rural United States; the Great Recession led to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which directly funded improvements to 2,700 bridges and 42,000 miles of road. ......

In the 1930s, modernizing the country meant electricity. In the 2020s, it means broadband.

......... “and it’s really necessary now to think about broadband in an infrastructure space.” The digital divide is sharp in the United States: Census Bureau data shows that broadband access is concentrated in cities and in the Northeast, Florida and the West Coast. In rural areas and the South, West and Midwest, far fewer Americans have access. .........

In the South, 111 counties have broadband subscription rates at or below 55 percent.

........ a majority of counties in Alaska have zero access to broadband ......

nearly one in five tribal reservation residents had no home internet access

........ nearly $1 billion for tribes, which face some of the worst internet access in the country ........ The American Rescue Plan included $20.4 billion exclusively for broadband access, and gave states and localities about $388 billion in flexible funding that can be used for broadband. ...... broadband access in areas of upstate New York with fewer than 10 subscribers per mile, where offering service often isn’t cost-effective.




Wednesday, October 17, 2012

If Bloomberg Is Running For A Fourth Term He Should Say So

English: New York Mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg.
English: New York Mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Is Preet Bharara A House Nigger?
Could John Liu Rise From The Ashes
My First Obama Event Of The Year
John Liu Could Be Mayor
John Liu And Being Asian American
John Liu: Mayor Of NYC: 2013
John Liu: Victory
New York City

Mike Bloomberg has on many counts been an excellent Mayor. This was a guy who was a Democrat in the 1990s. He became a Republican to avoid the Democratic primary. I don't blame him. Then he ran for Mayor as an Independent. I have been an Independent myself since 2008.

I have had my policy disagreements with the Mayor, no doubt. The guy does exhibit a little bit of a class bias. But all along I have admired his entrepreneurial journey. He was a tech entrepreneur long before this city started producing those. He has been a remarkable person.

And his astounding business and management skills he has applied to the governance of the city, many times with great results. This has been a great city to live in.

But it is beneath him to take active part in the Democratic primary. For one, he is not a Democrat. I am sure the Democratic Party would love it if he were to join the party now, but I doubt he will. As a non Democrat and office holder it is unbecoming of him to play the role he has been playing.

If he keeps doing it, it is going to create a stink. His legacy is going to suffer for it. He should stay focused on governing the city. He should leave the mayoral election to the various contenders of the Democratic Party.

To be fair, I don't know much about Christine Quinn. I know her name, I have seen her picture, I know she is Speaker at the city level, and I think it is great that she is gay. But I don't know her, I have not read up on her.

But if the Mayor tries too hard, it is going to look like he or his people were the ones who planted that story in the New York Times that got Bharara all excited. A stink like that can cost a man his legacy.
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Friday, October 12, 2012

Linking Is Good Strategy

Monica Lewinsky gave birth to The Drudge Report.


It's Time People Realized That The Drudge Report Is A Major Media Property Worth Hundreds Of Millions Of Dollars
The Drudge Report recently announced that it has surpassed 1 billion pageviews per month. How many pageviews is that? It's about as many pageviews as The New York Times reportedly got per month as recently as a couple of years ago.

The Drudge Report has 14.4 million US readers per month — only slightly fewer readers than The New York Times (16.4 million), per Quantcast.

The New York Times is produced by ~1,200 journalists. The Drudge Report is produced by one.

Assuming The Drudge Report gets $1.50 per 1000 pages and has 1 billion pageviews per month, The Drudge Report should be generating revenue of $15-$20 million a year.

A range of 15x-25x earnings for the current incarnation of The Drudge Report, therefore, would produce an estimated value of $150 million to $375 million.

One of the most remarkable things about The Drudge Report is that the site's content still consists primarily of original headlines linked to stories elsewhere on the web. This is a highly innovative and efficient media model, one that takes full advantage of the amazing capabilities of the Internet.

The editorial content that Drudge creates, in other words, consists of finding and interpreting important stories from millions of information sources around the world. Rather than creating a huge newsroom itself, the Drudge Report uses the whole digital world as a newsroom. And, importantly, unlike many digital media businesses, Drudge compensates those who did the work of creating the content that Drudge links to by sending them hundreds of thousands of readers — readers that they almost certainly would not have had had Drudge not chosen to link to them.

Matt Drudge has not just created a quirky little headlines-and-links site that occasionally breaks news.
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Thursday, October 04, 2012

The First Debate



Mitt Romney is a decent debater. I must give him that. He did well.

The president stood his ground.

I did not watch it live, but thanks to the New York Times, I was able to watch it all on YouTube a few hours later. I was hoping to watch and tweet it live. Oh well.

There was not a clear winner. I guess most people stayed with who they were with before the debate began. That piles up the pressure on the future debates.

America is not about to see a dramatic uptick to its economy. Because I don't see a second stimulus on the horizon. The tax cuts in the first stimulus were a mistake. All that money should have been actively spent. The center piece of the stimulus needed to be about taking every American to gigabit broadband era.

It will be a close election, but Obama will win.
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Friday, November 18, 2011

Somewhere To Start

Day 50 Occupy Wall Street November 5 2011 Shan...Image by david_shankbone via Flickr(1) A second term for Barack Obama, with a super majority in the Senate and a majority in the House in exchange for total campaign finance reform within the first 100 days of his second term. If that is not delivered, launch a new third political party. This is me saying 2012 is about The Agenda, not Barack Obama.

(2) Wealth Equity Tax of 10% on all corporations with a valuation over a billion dollars.

(3) Nationalize Zuccotti Park.

Jeff Sachs: New York Times: The New Progressive Movement: Following our recent financial calamity, a third progressive era is likely to be in the making. This one should aim for three things. The first is a revival of crucial public services, especially education, training, public investment and environmental protection. The second is the end of a climate of impunity that encouraged nearly every Wall Street firm to commit financial fraud. The third is to re-establish the supremacy of people votes over dollar votes in Washington....... The progressive era took 20 years to correct abuses of the Gilded Age. The New Deal struggled for a decade to overcome the Great Depression, and the expansion of economic justice lasted through the 1960s. The new wave of reform is but a few months old. ...... The young people in Zuccotti Park and more than 1,000 cities have started America on a path to renewal. The movement, still in its first days, will have to expand in several strategic ways. Activists are needed among shareholders, consumers and students to hold corporations and politicians to account. Shareholders, for example, should pressure companies to get out of politics. Consumers should take their money and purchasing power away from companies that confuse business and political power. The whole range of other actions — shareholder and consumer activism, policy formulation, and running of candidates — will not happen in the park..... To put it simply: tax the rich, end the wars and restore honest and effective government for all....... Finally, the new progressive era will need a fresh and gutsy generation of candidates to seek election victories not through wealthy campaign financiers but through free social media. A new generation of politicians will prove that they can win on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and blog sites, rather than with corporate-financed TV ads. By lowering the cost of political campaigning, the free social media can liberate Washington from the current state of endemic corruption. .... A new generation of leaders is just getting started. The new progressive age has begun.
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Monday, June 13, 2011

Going To War With Communications Technology

Mobile phone evolution (Japan 1997-2004)Image via WikipediaNovember 2005: Barackface: Pentagon, Hexagon: The Pentagon masterminds the physical wars the US wages. .... I propose a Hexagon, a physical building, perhaps not as large, as an appendage to the US State Department structure, preferably in New York City somewhere, perhaps in Queens. ..... This is about waging a war with communications technology. This is about spreading democracy the grassroots way. This is about the immigrants in New York City taking the lead for their respective countries.

March 2006: Barackface: Long War: This Long War might give an opportunity to instead master a war with communications technology. Because if you don't, you are practically gearing for a hot war with China. I would think that is a total no no.
New York Times: U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors: The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks. ...... The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.” ......... Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet. ....... liberation-technology movement sweeping the globe. ...... stealth wireless networks that would enable activists to communicate outside the reach of governments in countries like Iran, Syria and Libya ....... $50 million to create an independent cellphone network in Afghanistan using towers on protected military bases inside the country. It is intended to offset the Taliban’s ability to shut down the official Afghan services, seemingly at will. ........ has brought together an improbable alliance of diplomats and military engineers, young programmers and dissidents from at least a dozen countries, many of whom variously describe the new approach as more audacious and clever and, yes, cooler ....... operatives who have been burying Chinese cellphones in the hills near the border with North Korea, where they can be dug up and used to make furtive calls ...... a separate infrastructure where the technology is nearly impossible to shut down, to control, to surveil ....... disempowers central authorities from infringing on people’s fundamental human right to communicate ...... “No matter how much circumvention the protesters use, if the government slows the network down to a crawl, you can’t upload YouTube videos or Facebook postings,” Mr. Anderson said. “They need alternative ways of sharing information or alternative ways of getting it out of the country.” ........ a project that would modify Bluetooth so that a file containing, say, a video of a protester being beaten, could automatically jump from phone to phone within a “trusted network” of citizens. ....... By the end of 2011, the State Department will have spent some $70 million on circumvention efforts and related technologies ...... “The Afghans wanted the Cadillac plan, which is pretty expensive” ...... From the activist geeks on L Street in Washington to the military engineers in Afghanistan, the global appeal of the technology hints at the craving for open communication. ..... “I don’t think this revolution could have taken place without the existence of the World Wide Web.”
The military action in Libya was necessary - to prevent a Rwanda, to send a signal to dictators elsewhere - but it is not scalable. You could not take it to Saudi Arabia, not Iran, not Russia, not certainly China. But you can take these stealth communication tools everywhere. The phone is mightier than the sword.
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Monday, April 04, 2011

To Zimbabwe Through Ivory Coast

Laurent Gbagbo, Président de la République (Cô...Image via Wikipedia
New York Times: U.N. and France Strike Leader’s Forces in Ivory Coast: The United Nations and France went on the offensive Monday against Ivory Coast’s strongman, Laurent Gbagbo, striking his forces in a significant ratcheting-up of the months-long campaign to force him to cede power. ..... France, which has over 1,500 troops stationed in the former colony, announced that it would carry out attacks on Mr. Gbagbo’s military hardware at the request of the United Nations, joining an operation “aimed at neutralizing heavy weapons that are used against the civilian population and United Nations personnel in Abidjan,” a statement from the French presidency said..... Mig-24 helicopters had been deployed against Gbagbo military bases to “render harmless” the mortar-launchers “that are firing” on the United Nations headquarters in Abidjan and on “the civilian population.” ..... Mr. Gbagbo has refused to step down after losing an election last November to Alassane Ouattara, who was recognized as the winner by international organizations. .... Gbagbo, a former university historian who has transformed himself into a hardline autocrat over the course of a long political career.
This was never just about Tunisia. Egypt was a huge victory, but it was never just about Egypt. This thing could really grow. I want Mugabe out. I am thinking China. I am thinking Russia.

The techies of the world have to aim for the Chinese firewall. There has got to be a way in. They have managed to block sites. But they can't take the internet down. So break in. Just do it.

This is about Syria, and Iran. This is about Jordan.

But the Arab world is not enough. This democracy wave has to also engulf Africa.

The Fuck With Mugabe

Libya was a major turning point. The world sent a clear message that when people peacefully protest they will be protected.
Official portrait of Vladimir PutinImage via Wikipedia
A Rwanda Was Prevented

When the Russian president reprimanded Putin that is when I knew this wave will also crash against the Russian shores. But Russia is a big country, and we will have to build plenty of momentum elsewhere. Elsewhere is the Arab world and Africa.

Reports signal growing rift between Russia’s governing duo
Russian President Criticizes Putin's Libya Remarks
Medvedev criticizes Putin over Libya remarks
Medvedev Criticizes Putin For Calling Libya Action Crusade
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Saturday, March 19, 2011

The Military Options








The no fly zone has been announced. If Gaddafi continues to fly planes, shoot them down. Bomb the airports that those planes came out of. Bomb the air bases. Bomb the control towers. Bomb the command center in Tripoli.

If you only bomb the planes in the sky, you are agreeing to play the cat and mouse game that Gaddafi wants to play with you. When he announced a ceasefire he lied. That was his way of saying just give me 48 more hours, and I will have Benghazi by then. Then there would be nothing for you to do.

This dude is not going to do the ceasefire thing. It is the nature of the beast.
Muammar al-Gaddafi Mouammar Kadhafi Colonel Qu...Image by Abode of Chaos via Flickr
You bomb the planes in the sky. And if there are reports - as there are - that he has, if anything, accelerated military action on the ground, then that would be a clear signal that he has not understood the concept of the no fly zone. The concept is to protect Libyan civilians. If he continues to attack civilians, you look for all movements on the ground by the Gaddafi forces, and you conduct aerial strikes upon them. There are open roads that his forces use. They are not hard to find. These are not exactly the jungles of Vietnam. There is nowhere to hide. This is a freaking desert. There are open skies.

But if there is action on the ground on his part, you attack his military establishments in Tripoli. You hit the core of his military organization. You hit the presidential palace, because that is where the orders are coming from.

All this until all military action on his part ceases, not very likely. Instead the guy is threatening to go into a whole different direction. He is threatening military action against France.

It is like this. A criminal with a gun is on rampage at a department store. The police decide to take action. When he is finally surrounded and it is decided gunning him down is the only way to end the rampage, he sends a message that he is going to come next for the police station - maybe he will blow up the building - if the police try to gun him down.

Do you weigh his words? Do you want to think if it is worth taking the chances? Or do you get further confirmed in your suspicious that what you are facing is a criminal?

Gaddafi has done what Bin Laden did not do. At least Bin Laden went into hiding before he started issuing his tireless fatwas. Gaddafi is issuing his threats against entire countries and he is doing it without going into hiding.

This guy is not the president of Libya. He has no formal title. By his own admission he has no claim to any kind of representation to Libyan sovereignty. This guy is a criminal first, last and foremost.

It is not Al Qaeda that took over Benghazi. The people who took over Benghazi are people who aspire to turn Libya into a modern democracy. I wish that upon all Arab countries.

The uprising in Benghazi was not violent. Gaddafi's army units in Benghazi defected. Can't blame them.
Muammar al-Gaddafi, pictured in 2009Image by BlatantNews.com via Flickr
The way this drama is going to end is this guy Gaddafi is going to commit suicide. As days have passed, he has become even less and less compromising. That is a warning sign. My judgment is he will kill as many people as possible before he will kill himself.

Exile is no longer an option for him. He has killed too many people. If he is captured alive, he gets to go to the International Criminal Court. But I doubt he will want to get captured alive.

The choice is between putting the mad dog to sleep and letting him kill a few thousand more people before he kills himself.

I wish it were otherwise. I wish he would do the ceasefire thing. That there would be no more attacks on civilians anywhere in Libya. Then the people of Libya would have the option to protest peacefully or keep him as their leader.

The international community does not have a democracy agenda. It is the Libyan people who have a democracy agenda. Liberty rings from within the human heart.

Christian Science Monitor: With Libya, is ‘Obama doctrine’ on war emerging?
New York Times: In Yemen, Opposition Encourages Protesters
BBC: French military jet opens fire in Libya
New York Times: Allies Open Push in Libya to Block Qaddafi Assaults
Voice Of America: Fresh Protests in Yemen Despite State of Emergency
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Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Don't Let Benghazi Fall





New York Times: Specter of Rebel Rout Helps Shift U.S. Policy on Libya: some military analysts have called a no-drive zone, to prevent Colonel Qaddafi from moving tanks and artillery into Benghazi..... the world had only days, or even hours, to head off a Qaddafi victory...... “What everybody is focused on is drawing a line, literally in the sand, around Benghazi, to prevent Qaddafi’s forces from capturing the city and staging a bloodbath,” said Tom Malinowski, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch. “If Qaddafi wins, it could kill the moment in the entire Middle East.” ....... Libya’s deputy to the United Nations, Ibrahim Dabbashi, who last month broke with the Qaddafi regime, warned that if the international community did not intervene in the next 10 hours, there was a risk of genocide

Hindustan Times: Gaddafi announces 'decisive battle' today: Misrata, the country's third city, has a population of half a million people. It lies 150 kilometres (90 miles) from the capital Tripoli.

BBC: Libya: Red Cross pulls out of Benghazi fearing attack: Government forces say they have captured Ajdabiya, the last town before Benghazi, but the rebels deny this..... "We are extremely concerned about what will happen to civilians, the sick and wounded, detainees and others who are entitled to protection in times of conflict," said Simon Brooks, head of the ICRC mission in Libya. ..... Jalal al-Gallal of the rebels' Transitional National Council in the city said there would be a "massacre" if they did not intervene. ..... "He [Gaddafi] will kill civilians, he will kill dreams, he will destroy us," he told the BBC. "It will be on the international community's conscience." ..... "Let's save the martyred Libyan people together. Time is now counted in days, or even hours. The worst would be for the Arab League's call and the Security Council's decisions to fail because of armed force." .... Asked about targeted strikes, she said all options were on the table.

Bloomberg: Qaddafi Hits Rebel Capital, Son Says War ‘Finished’ in 48 Hours: Qaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, scoffed at yesterday’s United Nations Security Council discussions about authorizing a no-fly zone. “It’s too late,” he said in an interview with EuroNews television, according to a transcript on its website. “In 48 hours, we will have finished our military operation. We are at the gates of Benghazi.” ..... Libyan government forces continued to fight pockets of rebel resistance Ajdabiya, a city 100 miles (160 kilometers) from Benghazi, and attacked the blockaded city of Misrata, the last rebel holdout near Tripoli. ...... “The situation in Benghazi is calm,” Essam Gheriani, a spokesman for the rebels, said by phone yesterday from the city. “We are not concerned by what Saif al-Islam said. Our armed forces have taken all the necessary measures to protect Benghazi. Qaddafi has been trying to take over Misrata for two weeks. How would he manage in Benghazi that is a much bigger city than Misrata?” ...... “I don’t believe that any member of the Security Council could take the position of a spectator when people are being killed daily and cities demolished,” he said. “What are they waiting for before intervening?” ..... at Qaddafi-paid African mercenaries are headed toward Benghazi in a convoy of 400 vehicles. The Security Council needs to impose the no-fly zone, and go further in authorizing air attacks on Qaddafi’s ground troops, within “10 hours.” ..... In his EuroNews interview, Qaddafi said rebels should flee to Egypt while they can. “We have no intention of killing them or taking revenge on these traitors who have betrayed our people,” he said. “We say to them that they can run into Egypt quite safely because Libya no longer belongs to them. A lot of them have already left for Egypt.” ...... Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini proposed the convening of a European, Arab and African summit to discuss the almost monthlong fighting in Libya ..... David Cameron said leaving Qaddafi in power would send a “terrible message” not only to the Libyan people but also to those in the region who desire democracy

Voice Of America: Libya’s Opposition Tries to Define Itself to Gain Western Support: Despite anxiety and fear, Benghazis still widely support the 11-person provisional transitional council -- a group of men and women who lead the opposition. .... Council spokesman Abdul Hefda Ghoga offers this explanation. “We would like to assure everybody that once Gadhafi is gone it will be a much better place than it has been for the last 40 years. We will have true democracy in Libya. There will be a civil state that is independent and enjoys its civil rights,” he said. ...... Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi portrays the rebels as religious extremists. "It is a small group from Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt and Palestine who entered cities, they entered Zentan, Zawiyah and Benghazi and then what happened? They recruited youngsters, juveniles under the age of 20 upon whom the law cannot even apply," he said. ..... In Benghazi, there is little talk of establishing any kind of Islamic caliphate. For out of work Faraj Saber, it is all about having more of a voice…and a choice. “We should have more democracy, election…nobody rule us or control us for five years, fours years, not 40 years, like Gadhafi,” Saber said ..... “Once we are through this stage, we will work on developing a national dialogue among all Libyan forces in order to put the basis for the next stage. And we will have to develop together a civil organization to establish a constitution and then we will look on how to move into an election period,” Ghoga said.



Voice Of America: Libyan Forces Pound Rebel Areas, UN Security Council Meets: Ajdabiya is the last large town on the road to the opposition's eastern stronghold of Benghazi. The Libyan government urged Benghazi residents to hand over weapons and support a government advance on the city.

Reuters: Rebels fight to stall Gaddafi's army in east: "There are a couple of tanks there that sporadically fire at the city. But Ajdabiyah's city centre and other access points are peaceful and not one man from Gaddafi's force wanders around." ..... Earlier on Wednesday, weary government soldiers returning from the frontlines told journalists that they were meeting renewed resistance from rebel positions near the city. ..... The rebel army, made up largely of young volunteers with little training and defectors from the government military, has been hammered by the artillery, tanks and warplanes of Gaddafi's troops and looks now to be relying on guerrilla hit-and-run tactics to stay in the fight.

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