Sometimes Gadaffi spoke about socialism. Later, he practised neo-conservative capitalism (one reason why many people joined the uprising against him. A reason which the National Transitional Council does not talk about now. As some of them used to be Gadaffi’s enforcers of capitalism, which they continue to enforce now).
Sometimes Gadaffi said good things about women’s rights. Sometimes not so good things. Etc.
Which of the ideas will people now be jailed for? If someone now, advocates women’s rights with words which sound vaguely similar to one of Gadaffi’s old speeches, will she, or he, then be branded an old regime supporter, and be jailed? Etc.
The National Transitional Council enacted the law on Wednesday before elections set for June, when Libyans will vote for an assembly to form a permanent government and write a constitution.
“Glorification of Muammar Gadaffi, his regime, ideas and his children is punishable by a prison sentence”, according to the text of a new law read out by an official.
The law also threatens imprisonment of anyone who “offended the February 17 revolution, anyone who insults the Islamic religion
In Saudi Arabia, which supported, or rather: helped to hijack, the anti-Gadaffi movement, the regime’s religious police considers women driving cars an “insult to Islam”. Will something similar happen in Libya now?
or the state and its institutions,” referring to the start of the Nato-backed uprising in the country last year.
The NTC also enacted a law that allows for the confiscation of property and possessions of 200 of the former leader’s supporters.
And it dropped a ban against parties based on religion, tribe or ethnicity.
Sappho the Ancient Greek poet, muse and claimed by some as the worlds first feminist, became a gay icon for women. Soon her birthplace, Lesbos, was adopted as a name for gay women all over the world.
This video from the USA is called Xena – Sappho’s Love Ode.
It is inspired by this poem by ancient Greek poetess Sappho from Lesbos island; translated by Edith Wharton:
That man seems to me peer of gods, who sits in thy presence, and hears close to him thy sweet speech and lovely laughter; that indeed makes my heart flutter in my bosom. For when I see thee but a little, I have no utterance left, my tongue is broken down, and straightway a subtle fire has run under my skin, with my eyes I have no sight, my ears ring, sweat pours down, and a trembling seizes all my body; I am paler than grass, and seem in my madness little better than one dead. But I must dare all, since one so poor …
A coalition of human rights groups blasted Greek authorities on Wednesday for publishing personal details of 12 HIV-positive women who allegedly worked as prostitutes.
Their names, photographs and medical records were released on the official website of the Greek police, which accused the women of intentionally causing serious bodily harm.
Athens said they were among 17 HIV-positive women arrested in recent days during a crackdown on unlicensed brothels.
A coalition of rights groups including HIV-supporters group Positive Voice said it was unclear whether the women – some of whom were from Russia and eastern Europe – were aware they had HIV.
“This is an appalling violation of human rights and medical confidentiality – an unprecedented action of stigmatisation,” they declared in a statement.
The organisations warned that putting the womens’ names and photographs in the public domain would “fuel a culture of discrimination not only against HIV-positive individuals, but against specific vulnerable groups such as migrants, women, and prostitutes.”
Prostitution is legal in Greece, but only a fraction of brothels are believed to operate with a license.
Authorities recently toughened Aids testing laws for prostitution in response to a sharp rise in Aids cases last year.
The women were among 130 women screened for the Aids virus by the state-run Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP), which says that 954 new HIV infections were reported in 2011, a 57 per cent increase from the previous year.
The CDCP says that the number of cases involving drug users increased 15-fold in 2011 to 241 and that they are concerned about the overlap between drug use and illegal prostitution.
Health Minister Andreas Loverdos warned of a rise in cases of men pressuring prostitutes to have sex with them without a condom with offers of more cash.
“This is an exploded bomb. It is a problem that should have been limited but it now involves Greek society. It’s a problem that we cannot erase but only try to contain.”
Greece is the busiest transit point for gangsters trafficking vulnerable women into the European Union from the former socialist bloc.
German Finance Minister Threatens Greek Voters 36 Hours Before the Elections: here.
This video is called Antoine de Saint-Exupery – Top 10 Quotes.
From Associated Press:
‘Little Prince’ discovery offers new insight
May 03, 2012 — 12:05 PM
PARIS — Newly-discovered draft pages of Antoine de Saint-Exupery‘s “The Little Prince” — that may shed new, political insight on the classic book — have been put on display at a Paris auction house for the first time.
Following their surprise discovery in private hands two months ago in France, the handwritten pages about the young, curious prince who embarks on interplanetary adventures, will be auctioned off later this month after a rare public viewing.
“It’s incredible. No one knew they even existed two months ago, and now someone can own them,” auction specialist Benoit Puttemans said Thursday. “They’re the only pages from ‘The Little Prince‘ in the world apart from the manuscript in the New York (Morgan) library.”
The text comprises of near unreadable, annotated writings on two translucent paper sheets, that, when put to the light both read “Fidelity Onion Skin” — the watermark on Saint-Exupery’s signature paper.
The first page contains a piece of text that’s partly retained in chapter 19 of the published work. But the second leaf of the work is completely original.
The little prince arrives on Earth and meets the first person on the planet, a completely new character, who’s described as an “ambassador of the human spirit.”
This “ambassador” is almost too busy to speak to his inquisitive interlocutor, saying he’s looking, in vain, for a missing six-letter word. The meaning of this is not immediately clear.
“That’s typical Saint-Exupery. You see here he loved to playfully make words up. The surprise auction of original pages and text is a first in history,” added Puttemans.
It’s not the first time “The Little Prince” has surprised.
In 1943, the text turned from a scribbled manuscript by a relatively unknown author, into a literary phenomenon that has since sold 140 million copies, in about 260 languages.
After The Bible, “The Little Prince” is the most translated book in history, according to the Paris-based Saint-Exupery Foundation.
Sadly, the author would never know the extent of his book’s success: he died shortly after its first publication in a mysterious plane crash in 1944 while on active service in World War II.
For a man known for his pacifist views and political engagement against the war, it was an especially tragic end. But though it killed him, war, was, ironically enough, thought to have shaped much of his writing, including “The Little Prince.”
This is a view shared by many Saint-Exupery enthusiasts, including Paris-based 20th century manuscript expert Olivier Devers.
“At the beginning of the (published) book, the narrator draws a boa constrictor eating an elephant. It’s strange. How can a small snake eat one of the largest animals on earth? But you can see the snake being peace, and the elephant being war. He dreamt that the small idea of peace could eat up the war that was going on.”
For Devers, however, this thought is only speculation, and it’s the two annotated pages on sale this month that provide the “only direct reference” to his work’s anti-war meaning.
“He was a dreamer, he dealt with the war by floating up and dreaming. The six-letter word the “ambassador” is looking for but can’t find has a humanist meaning. If you look at the context, you see that the word he can’t find is “guerre,” (or “war”). It’s even more powerful because he doesn’t say it.”
The new pages will go under the hammer at Artcurial auction house, Paris on May 16.
Things go well for peregrine falcons in the Netherlands. This species is growing rapidly in recent years. In 2008 there was an estimated breeding population of about 50 pairs. Two years later the number had almost doubled to about 95. In 2011 the counter stood at about 117. This year the exact numbers are unknown, but recently also the city of Utrecht for the first time is home to a nesting pair.
The Utrecht couple is causing a lot of commotion. This is because they have chosen the roof of the new provincial administration building. Such tall buildings resemble the natural breeding ground of a peregrine, rocks and cliffs. Due to the nesting couple, putting the new provincial logo on the roof has been postponed. Because disturbance of peregrine falcons is, like disturbance of all birds, prohibited by law. Fortunately, the provincial government promised to leave the breeding pair alone.
Exclusive Investigation: The Truth Behind the Official Story of Finding Bin Laden
Thursday, 03 May 2012 09:07
A few days after US Navy Sealskilled Osama bin Laden in a raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a “senior intelligence official” briefing reporters on the materials seized from bin Laden’s compound said the materials revealed that bin Laden had, “continued to direct even tactical details of the group’s management.” Bin Laden was, “not just a strategic thinker for the group,” said the official. “He was active in operational planning and in driving tactical decisions.” The official called the bin Laden compound, “an active command and control center.”
The senior intelligence official triumphantly called the discovery of bin Laden’s hideout, “the greatest intelligence success perhaps of a generation,” and administration officials could not resist leaking to reporters that a key element in that success was that the CIA interrogators had gotten the name of bin Laden’s trusted courier from al-Qaeda detainees at Guantanamo. CIA Director Leon Panetta was quite willing to leave the implication that some of the information had been obtained from detainees by “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Such was the official line at the time. But none of it was true. It is now clear that CIA officials were blatantly misrepresenting both bin Laden’s role in al-Qaeda when he was killed and how the agency came to focus on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
In fact, during his six years in Abbottabad, bin Laden was not the functioning head of al-Qaeda at all, but an isolated figurehead who had become irrelevant to the actual operations of the organization. The real story, told here for the first time, is that bin Laden was in the compound in Abbottabad because he had been forced into exile by the al-Qaeda leadership.
Truthout has been able to reconstruct the real story of bin Laden’s exile in Abbottabad, as well as how the CIA found him, thanks in large part to information gathered last year from Pakistani tribal and ISI sources by retired Pakistani Brig. Gen. Shaukat Qadir. But that information was confirmed, in essence, in remarks after the bin Laden raid by the same senior intelligence official cited above – remarks that have been ignored until now.
In his campaign to win the election as a war president, Barack Obama flatters the worst vices of chauvinism and panders to the most vulgar and brutal idea of the qualities that define a leader and the actions that ennoble a country. No alchemy of eloquence can atone for the confession of moral surrender involved in such a boast: here.
Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s new film chronicling the CIA’s hunt for Osama bin Laden, which opened in select theaters December 19, has largely received rave reviews and garnered a host of awards and nominations as the year’s best movie. It is a shameful work, and this reception says far more about the state of the media and the popular culture industry in the US than it does about the film itself: here.
Opinion: Pakistan must release the Osama bin Laden report: here.
Seymour Hersh on death of Osama bin Laden: ‘It’s one big lie, not one word of it is true’: here.
Sworn testimony by an FBI supervisor has confirmed that the FBI recruited an informant close to Osama bin Laden in the early 1990s, who was later employed by the CIA. Both agencies concealed this fact from the commission established to investigate the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001: here.
FAMED INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER ALLEGES U.S. HIDING THE TRUTH ABOUT OSAMA BIN LADEN’S DEATH “The most blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders — General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI — were never informed of the US mission … the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US … and … while Obama did order the raid and the [SEAL] team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration’s account were false.” [London Review of Books]
Nearly four years since the US Special Forces raid that resulted in the murder of Osama bin Laden, an extraordinary political exposure by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published Sunday in the London Review of Books has torn the mask off the official narrative by the US government: here.
The 10,000-word essay by Seymour Hersh on the US killing of Osama bin Laden, published Sunday by the London Review of Books, is a devastating blow to the entire narrative of the US “war on terror,” as it has been elaborated by both the Bush and Obama administrations: here.
Report from Pakistan that Brigadier Usman Khalid went to the US seeking a $25m reward adds credence to Seymour Hersh exposé: here.
THE KILLING OF OSAMA BIN LADEN! – –US version is a ‘fairy tale’ that ‘might have been written by Lewis Carroll’: here.
Residents of song contest city in Azerbaijan driven out of their homes for music festival.
“It was like a bomb exploded.” The Azeri Shirin Baji Rzayeva (58) had some experiences in her life. Soviet tanks in the streets of Baku and later the Karabakh war with Armenia. But when two weeks ago, in the middle of the night, a bulldozer destroyed the roof of her home, she was terrified.
Her whole street is now a ruin. Everywhere there are concrete blocks, loose stones and pieces of wood. The roof of the old apartment is a gaping hole. The sun shines directly on the kitchen table inside. “I hope that visitors of the Eurovision Song Contest will also see this. Our president treats people like animals,” says Rzayeva with a distorted face.
After winning the Eurovision Song Contest, the controversial president of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev rapidly increased construction. … Millions are spent on expensive hotels, marble walls and brand new office buildings with shiny windows. The world’s tallest building is under construction and currently they are finishing building the extremely elitist Crystal Hall, where the contest will take place in late May.
Last month, 280 families were driven from their apartments for a new boulevard near the Crystal Hall. Then, it was the turn of the whole Shamsi Badalbayli street where Rzayeva had lived for decades with her family.
Azerbaijan: How President’s Daughters Ended Up Owning Mega-Million Dollars Holding Company: here.
Eurovision 2012: Azerbaijan’s gays not welcome at home: here.
Royal Air Force Typhoon jets based at RAF Northolt will be roaring across London and the home counties tomorrow and Saturday as part of Operation Exercise Olympic Guardian, which lasts until May 10.
It is the first time fighter jets have been stationed at the west London site since World War Two and marks a major escalation of the UK capitalist state’s militarisation this summer, under the guise of Olympic Games security.
Military chiefs warn that residents in south-east England will notice an increase in often loud air activity, especially on May 4th and 5th.
Defence Secretary Phillip Hammond claimed the deployment of the Typhoon jets, which can travel at 1,370 miles per hour, underlines the ‘commitment of the Ministry of Defence and our armed forces to keeping the public safe at a time when the world will be watching us’.
Air Vice-Marshal Stuart Atha, described as ‘air component commander for Olympics air security’, said: ‘What we have is just prudent precautionary measures in place in the unlikely event that a threat from the air does manifest itself.’
He claimed the operation ‘would not set a precedent for any sort of enduring military commitment’.
Exercise Olympic Guardian is taking place on land, sea and air in the London and Weymouth areas between May 2nd and May 10th.
Operations will also include:
• Royal Navy Sea King helicopters based at RAF Northolt
• RAF Puma helicopters and Royal Navy airborne early warning helicopters stationed at a Territorial Army centre in Ilford, east London
• The berthing of HMS Ocean at Greenwich, with a number of Royal Navy Lynx helicopters on board
• The deployment of HMS Bulwark and other ships to Weymouth Bay and Portland Harbour
• The operation of fast jets and helicopters over Greater London and the Home Counties
• 13,500 military personnel will be involved in protecting the games
Bow resident seeks to evict London Olympics missile base. East London resident hires lawyers questioning freeholder’s right to lease water tower site to army: here.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 