Friday, February 18, 2011

No Ukrainian nurse can help Libya's Gaddafi. Cheering the protesters

So, it appears that the Arab youth are mad as hell. 

And, Libya's Gaddafi is now at the receiving end of the  raging emotions that have been bottled up for 41 long years.  Yes, it was in 1969, almost 42 years ago, this maniac took over the country

But, Gaddafi will clearly not go away without putting up a fight, and he has quickly resorted to dirty tricks:

The mainstay of the unrest is in regional towns and cities, where many people live in poverty.
Foreign journalists operate under restrictions in Libya, so it has been impossible to independently verify much of the information coming out of the country.
But the BBC has confirmed that several websites - including Facebook and al-Jazeera Arabic - have been blocked.
And the airport in Benghazi, the country's second largest city, has been closed, amid reports that protesters have taken it over.
Residents in Benghazi told the BBC that electricity has been cut off, and tanks are posted outside the court building.
Benghazi protesters have told international media they have learnt from Tunisia and Egypt, and are determined to depose Col Gaddafi.
Media outlets loyal to Col Gaddafi had earlier conceded that security forces had killed 14 protesters in Benghazi on Thursday, though other accounts put the death toll much higher.
 The news channel that US cable corporations refuse to carry, Al Jazeera, also has a similar report:

Marchers mourning dead protesters in Libya's second-largest city have reportedly come under fire from security forces, as protests in the oil-exporting North African nation entered their fifth day.
Mohamed el-Berqawy, an engineer in Benghazi, told Al Jazeera that the city was the scene of a "massacre," and that four demonstrators had been killed on Friday.
"Where is the United Nations ... where is (US president Barack) Obama, where is the rest of the world, people are dying on the streets," he said. "We are ready to die for our country."
I hope my intro class students are tuned in--one of the two short stories that I have assigned for their final projects is Hisham Matar's "Naima."  Matar writes in the Guardian:
I appeal to Colonel Gaddafi and his security forces: for the sake of the mothers, for the sake of those who died, for the sake of Libya, please don't shoot and torture your people.
I blogged before that Matar knows well about this dictator and his cronies ...

So, why the Ukrainian nurse in the heading you ask?  Thank WikiLeaks for that

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