Senate rejects slimmed-down Obama jobs bill

By ANDREW TAYLOR, Associated Press – 1 hr 51 mins ago

WASHINGTON – Despite a campaign-style push this week by President Barack Obama, the Senate on Thursday scuttled pared-back jobs legislation aimed at helping state and local governments avoid layoffs of teachers and firefighters.
Obama's three-day bus tour through North Carolina and Virginia — states crucial to his re-election race next year — didn't change any minds among Senate Republicans, who filibustered Obama's latest jobs measure to death just as they killed his broader $447 billion jobs plan last week.
The 50-50 vote came in relation to a motion to simply take up the bill and fell well short of the 60 needed to break a filibuster. Democrats Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut broke with Obama on the vote. Two Democrats who voted with the president, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Jon Tester of Montana, however, said they couldn't support the underlying Obama plan unless it's changed.
Thursday's $35 billion measure combined $30 billion for state and local governments to hire teachers and other school workers with $5 billion to help pay the salaries of police officers, firefighters and other first responders. The White House says the measure would "support" almost 400,000 education jobs for one year. Republicans call that a temporary "sugar high" for the economy.
Obama and his Democratic allies are acting like they've found a winning issue in repeatedly pressing popular ideas such as infrastructure spending and boosting hiring of police officers and firefighters. The sluggish economy and lower tax revenues have caused many teachers' jobs to be cut over the past several years.
"For the second time in two weeks, every single Republican in the United States Senate has chosen to obstruct a bill that would create jobs and get our economy going again," Obama said in a statement after the vote. "Every American deserves an explanation as to why Republicans refuse to step up to the plate and do what's necessary to create jobs and grow the economy right now."
"We cannot afford to be bailing out local governments, and we can't afford stimulus 2.0," countered Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.
After the failure of the jobs measure last week, Democrats vowed to try to resurrect it on a piece by piece basis, even though the strategy doesn't seem to have any better chance of success. But Democrats are trying to win a political advantage through repeated votes.
They're also pressing for passage of a poll-tested financing mechanism — a surcharge on income exceeding $1 million.
An AP-GfK poll taken Oct. 13-17 found 62 percent of respondents favoring the surcharge as a way to pay for jobs initiatives. Just 26 percent opposed the idea.
"Protecting millionaires and defeating President Obama are more important to my Republican colleagues than creating jobs and getting our economy back on track," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said.
Republicans say the president is more interested in picking political fights with them than seeking compromise. Still, they don't seem to be afraid of a politically weakened Obama. Not a single Republican backed the president in last week's vote
"The fact is we're not going to get this economy going again by growing the government. It's the private sector that's ultimately going to drive this recovery," Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said. "Look, if big government were the key to economic growth, then countries like Greece would be booming right now."
At the same time, several Democrats opposed the underlying measure, even though they voted in favor of at least allowing debate to begin.
"This bill fails to give taxpayers any guarantee that this money would actually be used to hire teachers and invest in our schools," Tester said. "States would get loads of money with little guidance that they spend the money on teachers."
According to the AP-GfK poll, Obama's party has lost the faith of the public on handling the economy. In the new poll, only 38 percent said they trust Democrats to do a better job than Republicans in handling the economy, the first time Democrats have fallen below 40 percent in the poll. Some 43 percent trust the Republicans more.
Immediately after the vote on Obama's plan, Democrats turned the tables and filibustered Republican-backed legislation that would prevent the government from withholding 3 percent of payments to government contractors. The legislation failed to get the 60 votes needed to end the filibuster on a 57-43 vote, even though 10 Democrats voted to advance it.
Many Democrats and President Barack Obama support the idea but opposed it Thursday because it would be paid for with $30 billion in cuts from domestic agency spending. Advocates of repealing the withholding requirement say it will help create jobs, especially from contractors on large projects with smaller profit margins.
The withholding law was passed in 2006 by a GOP-controlled Congress. Then, the idea then was to make sure contractors couldn't duck their taxes and was imposed after government investigators found that thousands of federal contractors owed taxes.
The GOP-controlled House is likely to pass the measure next week and Reid promised that the Senate would revisit the issue, though there's likely to be a split between the House and Senate over how to pay for the cost of repealing the withholding rule.
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, speaking the day after Obama returned from bus tour, said the president's jobs plan has the advantage of providing an immediate kick to the economy.
"The Republicans don't have proposals that would help the economy grow or help it create jobs now," Carney said. "That's the comparison."
Republicans also want to roll back government regulations that they say choke job growth. They backed free-trade pacts with South Korea, Colombia and Panama that were ratified this month. They also back extending tax breaks for businesses that buy new equipment and favor offering a $4,800 tax credit to companies that hire veterans.
Democrats and the White House, meanwhile, are confident that other elements of Obama's larger jobs bill, including extending cuts in Social Security payroll taxes, will pass. A 2 percentage point payroll tax cut enacted last year expires at the end of the year. Obama has proposed cutting it by an additional percentage point and extending the cut to the first $5 million of a company's payroll.

With warped vision, Gadhafi maddened Libya, West

AP – FILE - In this Saturday, June 12, 2010 file photo, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi talks during a ceremony …

By KIM GAMEL and LEE KEATH, Associated Press – 1 hr 2 mins ago

TRIPOLI, Libya – During nearly 42 years in power, Moammar Gadhafi ruled with an eccentric brutality. He was so mercurial he turned Libya into an isolated pariah, then an oil power courted by the West, then back again. At home, his whims became law and his visions became a warped dictatorship, until he was finally toppled by his own people.
The modern Middle East's longest-reigning figure, Libya's 69-year-old "Brother Leader" became the first ruler killed in the Arab Spring uprisings that swept the region this year.
After rebels overwhelmed the capital Tripoli and drove him into hiding in late August, Gadhafi vowed in messages to fight on until "martyrdom or victory" and to "burn Libya under the feet" of his enemies. And indeed, he met his end Thursday alongside his last heavily armed supporters, cornered by revolutionary fighters in Sirte, the fishing village where he was born and which he transformed during his rule into a virtual second capital city.
In the last images of him alive, a wounded Gadhafi staggered and shouted at fighters dragging him away after pulling him out of a drainage tunnel where he took refuge trying to flee Sirte with loyalists. His goateed face was bloodied, his head balding after the loss of the hairpiece that filled out his trademark bush of curly hair.
"What do you want? Don't kill me, my sons," Gadhafi said to the fighters as they grabbed him, one commander said.
Gadhafi leaves behind an oil-rich nation of 6 million traumatized by a rule that drained it of institutions after four decades when all issues came down to one man and his family. Notorious for his extravagant outfits — ranging from white suits and sunglasses to military uniforms with frilled epaulets to brilliantly colored robes decorated with the map of Africa — he styled himself as a combination Bedouin chief and philosopher king, with titles from "leader of the revolution" to "king of the kings of Africa."
He ruled by mad lurches. He was a sponsor of terrorism whose regime was blamed for blowing up two passenger jets and who then helped the U.S. in the war on terror. He was an Arab nationalist who mocked Arab rulers. He seemed to revel in infuriating leaders, whether in the West or the Middle East.
U.S. President Ronald Reagan branded him a "mad dog" after a 1986 bombing that killed U.S. servicemen in Berlin was blamed on Libya. Former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who fought a border war with Libya in the 1970s, wrote in his diary that Gadhafi was "mentally sick" and "needs treatment."
Behind the flamboyance and showmanship, associates say Gadhafi was meticulous in managing the levers of power. He intervened in decisions large and small and constantly met personally with tribal leaders and military officers whose support he maintained through lucrative posts.
The sole constant was his grip on the country. Numerous coup and assassination attempts against him over the years mostly ended with public executions of the plotters, hanged in city squares.
The ultimate secret of his longevity lay in the vast oil reserves under his North African desert nation and in his capacity for drastic changes of course when necessary.
The most spectacular U-turn came in late 2003. After years of denial, Libya acknowledged responsibility — though in a Gadhafi-esque twist of logic, not guilt — for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270 people. He agreed to pay up to $10 million to relatives of each victim.
He also announced that Libya would dismantle its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs under international supervision.
The rewards came fast. Within months, the U.S. lifted economic sanctions and resumed diplomatic ties. The European Union hosted Gadhafi in Brussels. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2008 became the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit the country in more than 50 years. Rice had a special place in the heart for Gadhafi, who in an interview once called her "my darling black African woman ... I love her very much ... Leezza, Leezza, Leezza." Tony Blair, as British prime minister, also visited him in Tripoli.
International oil companies rushed to invest in Libya's fields. Documents uncovered after Gadhafi's fall revealed close cooperation between his intelligence services and the CIA in pursuing terror suspects after the 9/11 attacks, even before the U.S. lifted its designation of Libya as a sponsor of terror in 2006.
Still, Gadhafi's renegade ways did not change. After Swiss police had the temerity to briefly arrest his son Hannibal for allegedly beating up two servants in a Geneva luxury hotel in 2008, Gadhafi's regime arrested two Swiss nationals and raked Switzerland over the coals, extracting an apology and compensation before finally releasing the men nearly two years later. European countries, eagerly building economic ties with Libya, did little to back up Switzerland in the dispute.
But Gadhafi became an instant pariah once more when he began a brutal crackdown on the February uprising in his country that grew out of the "Arab Spring" of popular revolts across the region. The U.N. authorized a no-fly zone for Libya in March, and NATO launched a campaign of airstrikes against his military forces.
"I am a fighter, a revolutionary from tents. ... I will die as a martyr at the end," he proclaimed in one of his last televised speeches during the uprising, pounding the lectern near a sculpture of a golden fist crushing a U.S. warplane.
Gadhafi was born in 1942 in the central Libyan desert near Sirte, the son of a Bedouin father who was once jailed for opposing Libya's Italian colonialists. The young Gadhafi seemed to inherit that rebellious nature, being expelled from high school for leading a demonstration, and disciplined while in the army for organizing revolutionary cells.
In 1969, as a mere 27-year-old captain, he emerged as leader of a group of officers who overthrew the monarchy of King Idris. A handsome, dashing figure in uniform and sunglasses, Gadhafi took undisputed power and became a symbol of anti-Western defiance in a Third World recently liberated from its European colonial rulers.
During the 1970s, Gadhafi proceeded to transform the nation.
A U.S. air base was closed. Some 20,000 Italians were expelled in retaliation for the 1911-41 occupation. Businesses were nationalized.
In 1975 he published the "Green Book," his political manifesto that laid out what he called the "Third International Theory" of government and society. He declared Libya to be a "Jamahiriya" — an Arabic neologism he created meaning roughly "republic of the masses."
Everyone rules, it declared, calling representative democracy a form of tyranny, and Libyans were organized into "people's committees" that went all the way up to a "People's Congress," a sort of parliament.
In the end, rule by all meant rule by none except Gadhafi, who elevated himself to colonel and declared himself "Brother Leader."
"He aspired to create an ideal state," said North African analyst Saad Djebbar of Cambridge University. "He ended up without any components of a normal state. The 'people's power' was the most useless system in the world."
In the 1970s and 1980s, Gadhafi supported groups deemed by the West to be terrorists — from the Irish Republican Army through various radical Palestinian units to militant groups in the Philippines. He embarked on a series of military adventures in Africa, invading Chad in 1980-89, and supplying arms, training and finance to rebels in Liberia, Uganda and Burkina Faso.
A 1984 incident at the Libyan Embassy in London entrenched his regime's image as a lawless one. A gunman inside the embassy opened fire on a demonstration by Gadhafi opponents outside, killing a British policewoman.
The heat was rising, meanwhile, between the Reagan administration and Gadhafi over terrorism. In 1986, Libya was found responsible for a bombing at a Berlin discotheque frequented by U.S. troops in which three people died. America struck back by sending warplanes to bomb Libya. About 40 Libyans died.
The Lockerbie bombing followed in 1988, followed a year later by a bombing that downed a French airliner over the West African nation of Niger. The West was outraged, and years of sanctions followed.
Libya's road back from pariah status began in 1999, when Gadhafi's government handed over two Libyans for trial in the Lockerbie bombing. In 2001, a Scottish court convicted one, an intelligence agent, and sentenced him to life imprisonment. The other was acquitted.
In 2002, Gadhafi looked back on his actions and told a crowd of Libyans in the southern city of Sabha: "In the old days, they called us a rogue state. They were right in accusing us of that. In the old days, we had a revolutionary behavior."
Throughout his rule, he was a showman who would stop at nothing to make his point.
His appearances at Arab League summits were an annual cause of cringing among fellow Arab rulers. At one, he argued vehemently with Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, winning the monarch's eternal hatred. At another, Gadhafi smoked cigars on the conference hall floor during speeches to show his contempt.
In a 2009 address at the United Nations, he rambled on about jet lag, then tore up a copy of the U.N. charter, saying the Security Council "should be called the terrorism council."
On state trips, he would insist on setting up a tent to stay in. He sported a personal escort of female guards — which he once explained by saying: "There are no men in the Arab world."
A 2009 U.S. diplomatic cable released by the website WikiLeaks spoke of Gadhafi's intense dislike of staying on upper floors of buildings, aversion to flying over water, and taste for horse racing and flamenco dancing.
"At night, Moammar dreams; by day, he implements," Libyans would say, referring to the bizarre rules Gadhafi would randomly impose on the country, like demanding all storefront doors be painted green, the signature color of his regime. Or like complaining that Libyans were going abroad for medical treatment and deciding it was because of a lack of Libyan doctors — so he ordered Tripoli's main medical school to take 2,000 new students regardless of qualifications, well beyond its 150-student capacity.
He even renamed the months, calling the cold month of January "Ayn al-Nar," Arabic for "Where is the Fire."
In the past decade, power was increasingly concentrated with his eight biological children, who snapped up elite military posts or lucrative business positions. His British-educated son Seif al-Islam was widely seen as being groomed as a successor. There was no immediate word on his fate Thursday.
His only daughter, Aisha, became a lawyer and helped in the defense of Saddam Hussein, Iraq's toppled dictator, in the trial that led to his hanging.
Gadhafi did spend oil revenue on building schools, hospitals, irrigation and housing on a scale his Mediterranean nation had never seen.
"He did really bring Libya from being one of the most backward and poorest countries in Africa to becoming an oil-rich state with an elaborate infrastructure and with reasonable access by the Libyan population to the essential services they required," said George Joffe of Cambridge University.
Still, about a third of Libya's people remain in poverty. Gadhafi showered benefits on parts of the country, such as Tripoli. Meanwhile, eastern Libya, ultimately the source of February's rebellion, was allowed to atrophy.
At least one of his sons, Saif al-Arab, was killed during the 2011 uprising, and another, Khamis, was believed killed. Others, along with his wife Safiya, fled to neighboring Algeria or Niger. Seif al-Islam and Muatassim, who commanded one the military units involved in the crackdown on protesters, fled into hiding when Tripoli fell.

With warped vision, Gadhafi maddened Libya, West

AP – FILE - In this Saturday, June 12, 2010 file photo, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi talks during a ceremony …

By KIM GAMEL and LEE KEATH, Associated Press – 1 hr 2 mins ago

TRIPOLI, Libya – During nearly 42 years in power, Moammar Gadhafi ruled with an eccentric brutality. He was so mercurial he turned Libya into an isolated pariah, then an oil power courted by the West, then back again. At home, his whims became law and his visions became a warped dictatorship, until he was finally toppled by his own people.
The modern Middle East's longest-reigning figure, Libya's 69-year-old "Brother Leader" became the first ruler killed in the Arab Spring uprisings that swept the region this year.
After rebels overwhelmed the capital Tripoli and drove him into hiding in late August, Gadhafi vowed in messages to fight on until "martyrdom or victory" and to "burn Libya under the feet" of his enemies. And indeed, he met his end Thursday alongside his last heavily armed supporters, cornered by revolutionary fighters in Sirte, the fishing village where he was born and which he transformed during his rule into a virtual second capital city.
In the last images of him alive, a wounded Gadhafi staggered and shouted at fighters dragging him away after pulling him out of a drainage tunnel where he took refuge trying to flee Sirte with loyalists. His goateed face was bloodied, his head balding after the loss of the hairpiece that filled out his trademark bush of curly hair.
"What do you want? Don't kill me, my sons," Gadhafi said to the fighters as they grabbed him, one commander said.
Gadhafi leaves behind an oil-rich nation of 6 million traumatized by a rule that drained it of institutions after four decades when all issues came down to one man and his family. Notorious for his extravagant outfits — ranging from white suits and sunglasses to military uniforms with frilled epaulets to brilliantly colored robes decorated with the map of Africa — he styled himself as a combination Bedouin chief and philosopher king, with titles from "leader of the revolution" to "king of the kings of Africa."
He ruled by mad lurches. He was a sponsor of terrorism whose regime was blamed for blowing up two passenger jets and who then helped the U.S. in the war on terror. He was an Arab nationalist who mocked Arab rulers. He seemed to revel in infuriating leaders, whether in the West or the Middle East.
U.S. President Ronald Reagan branded him a "mad dog" after a 1986 bombing that killed U.S. servicemen in Berlin was blamed on Libya. Former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who fought a border war with Libya in the 1970s, wrote in his diary that Gadhafi was "mentally sick" and "needs treatment."
Behind the flamboyance and showmanship, associates say Gadhafi was meticulous in managing the levers of power. He intervened in decisions large and small and constantly met personally with tribal leaders and military officers whose support he maintained through lucrative posts.
The sole constant was his grip on the country. Numerous coup and assassination attempts against him over the years mostly ended with public executions of the plotters, hanged in city squares.
The ultimate secret of his longevity lay in the vast oil reserves under his North African desert nation and in his capacity for drastic changes of course when necessary.
The most spectacular U-turn came in late 2003. After years of denial, Libya acknowledged responsibility — though in a Gadhafi-esque twist of logic, not guilt — for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270 people. He agreed to pay up to $10 million to relatives of each victim.
He also announced that Libya would dismantle its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs under international supervision.
The rewards came fast. Within months, the U.S. lifted economic sanctions and resumed diplomatic ties. The European Union hosted Gadhafi in Brussels. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2008 became the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit the country in more than 50 years. Rice had a special place in the heart for Gadhafi, who in an interview once called her "my darling black African woman ... I love her very much ... Leezza, Leezza, Leezza." Tony Blair, as British prime minister, also visited him in Tripoli.
International oil companies rushed to invest in Libya's fields. Documents uncovered after Gadhafi's fall revealed close cooperation between his intelligence services and the CIA in pursuing terror suspects after the 9/11 attacks, even before the U.S. lifted its designation of Libya as a sponsor of terror in 2006.
Still, Gadhafi's renegade ways did not change. After Swiss police had the temerity to briefly arrest his son Hannibal for allegedly beating up two servants in a Geneva luxury hotel in 2008, Gadhafi's regime arrested two Swiss nationals and raked Switzerland over the coals, extracting an apology and compensation before finally releasing the men nearly two years later. European countries, eagerly building economic ties with Libya, did little to back up Switzerland in the dispute.
But Gadhafi became an instant pariah once more when he began a brutal crackdown on the February uprising in his country that grew out of the "Arab Spring" of popular revolts across the region. The U.N. authorized a no-fly zone for Libya in March, and NATO launched a campaign of airstrikes against his military forces.
"I am a fighter, a revolutionary from tents. ... I will die as a martyr at the end," he proclaimed in one of his last televised speeches during the uprising, pounding the lectern near a sculpture of a golden fist crushing a U.S. warplane.
Gadhafi was born in 1942 in the central Libyan desert near Sirte, the son of a Bedouin father who was once jailed for opposing Libya's Italian colonialists. The young Gadhafi seemed to inherit that rebellious nature, being expelled from high school for leading a demonstration, and disciplined while in the army for organizing revolutionary cells.
In 1969, as a mere 27-year-old captain, he emerged as leader of a group of officers who overthrew the monarchy of King Idris. A handsome, dashing figure in uniform and sunglasses, Gadhafi took undisputed power and became a symbol of anti-Western defiance in a Third World recently liberated from its European colonial rulers.
During the 1970s, Gadhafi proceeded to transform the nation.
A U.S. air base was closed. Some 20,000 Italians were expelled in retaliation for the 1911-41 occupation. Businesses were nationalized.
In 1975 he published the "Green Book," his political manifesto that laid out what he called the "Third International Theory" of government and society. He declared Libya to be a "Jamahiriya" — an Arabic neologism he created meaning roughly "republic of the masses."
Everyone rules, it declared, calling representative democracy a form of tyranny, and Libyans were organized into "people's committees" that went all the way up to a "People's Congress," a sort of parliament.
In the end, rule by all meant rule by none except Gadhafi, who elevated himself to colonel and declared himself "Brother Leader."
"He aspired to create an ideal state," said North African analyst Saad Djebbar of Cambridge University. "He ended up without any components of a normal state. The 'people's power' was the most useless system in the world."
In the 1970s and 1980s, Gadhafi supported groups deemed by the West to be terrorists — from the Irish Republican Army through various radical Palestinian units to militant groups in the Philippines. He embarked on a series of military adventures in Africa, invading Chad in 1980-89, and supplying arms, training and finance to rebels in Liberia, Uganda and Burkina Faso.
A 1984 incident at the Libyan Embassy in London entrenched his regime's image as a lawless one. A gunman inside the embassy opened fire on a demonstration by Gadhafi opponents outside, killing a British policewoman.
The heat was rising, meanwhile, between the Reagan administration and Gadhafi over terrorism. In 1986, Libya was found responsible for a bombing at a Berlin discotheque frequented by U.S. troops in which three people died. America struck back by sending warplanes to bomb Libya. About 40 Libyans died.
The Lockerbie bombing followed in 1988, followed a year later by a bombing that downed a French airliner over the West African nation of Niger. The West was outraged, and years of sanctions followed.
Libya's road back from pariah status began in 1999, when Gadhafi's government handed over two Libyans for trial in the Lockerbie bombing. In 2001, a Scottish court convicted one, an intelligence agent, and sentenced him to life imprisonment. The other was acquitted.
In 2002, Gadhafi looked back on his actions and told a crowd of Libyans in the southern city of Sabha: "In the old days, they called us a rogue state. They were right in accusing us of that. In the old days, we had a revolutionary behavior."
Throughout his rule, he was a showman who would stop at nothing to make his point.
His appearances at Arab League summits were an annual cause of cringing among fellow Arab rulers. At one, he argued vehemently with Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, winning the monarch's eternal hatred. At another, Gadhafi smoked cigars on the conference hall floor during speeches to show his contempt.
In a 2009 address at the United Nations, he rambled on about jet lag, then tore up a copy of the U.N. charter, saying the Security Council "should be called the terrorism council."
On state trips, he would insist on setting up a tent to stay in. He sported a personal escort of female guards — which he once explained by saying: "There are no men in the Arab world."
A 2009 U.S. diplomatic cable released by the website WikiLeaks spoke of Gadhafi's intense dislike of staying on upper floors of buildings, aversion to flying over water, and taste for horse racing and flamenco dancing.
"At night, Moammar dreams; by day, he implements," Libyans would say, referring to the bizarre rules Gadhafi would randomly impose on the country, like demanding all storefront doors be painted green, the signature color of his regime. Or like complaining that Libyans were going abroad for medical treatment and deciding it was because of a lack of Libyan doctors — so he ordered Tripoli's main medical school to take 2,000 new students regardless of qualifications, well beyond its 150-student capacity.
He even renamed the months, calling the cold month of January "Ayn al-Nar," Arabic for "Where is the Fire."
In the past decade, power was increasingly concentrated with his eight biological children, who snapped up elite military posts or lucrative business positions. His British-educated son Seif al-Islam was widely seen as being groomed as a successor. There was no immediate word on his fate Thursday.
His only daughter, Aisha, became a lawyer and helped in the defense of Saddam Hussein, Iraq's toppled dictator, in the trial that led to his hanging.
Gadhafi did spend oil revenue on building schools, hospitals, irrigation and housing on a scale his Mediterranean nation had never seen.
"He did really bring Libya from being one of the most backward and poorest countries in Africa to becoming an oil-rich state with an elaborate infrastructure and with reasonable access by the Libyan population to the essential services they required," said George Joffe of Cambridge University.
Still, about a third of Libya's people remain in poverty. Gadhafi showered benefits on parts of the country, such as Tripoli. Meanwhile, eastern Libya, ultimately the source of February's rebellion, was allowed to atrophy.
At least one of his sons, Saif al-Arab, was killed during the 2011 uprising, and another, Khamis, was believed killed. Others, along with his wife Safiya, fled to neighboring Algeria or Niger. Seif al-Islam and Muatassim, who commanded one the military units involved in the crackdown on protesters, fled into hiding when Tripoli fell.

Pulled from drain pipe, Gadhafi was shown no mercy

AP – A man holds a photo said to be the body of Moammar Gadhafi after announcement of the former leader's …

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By CHRISTOPHER GILLETTE and KIM GAMEL, Associated Press – 1 hr 2 mins ago

SIRTE, Libya – Dragged from hiding in a drainage pipe, a wounded Moammar Gadhafi raised his hands and begged revolutionary fighters: "Don't kill me, my sons." Within an hour, he was dead, but not before jubilant Libyans had vented decades of hatred by pulling the eccentric dictator's hair and parading his bloodied body on the hood of a truck.
The death Thursday of Gadhafi, two months after he was driven from power and into hiding, decisively buries the nearly 42-year regime that had turned the oil-rich country into an international pariah and his own personal fiefdom.
It also thrusts Libya into a new age in which its transitional leaders must overcome deep divisions and rebuild nearly all its institutions from scratch to achieve dreams of democracy.
"We have been waiting for this historic moment for a long time. Moammar Gadhafi has been killed," Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril said in the capital of Tripoli. "I would like to call on Libyans to put aside the grudges and only say one word, which is Libya, Libya, Libya."
President Barack Obama told the Libyan people: "You have won your revolution."
Although the U.S. briefly led the relentless NATO bombing campaign that sealed Gadhafi's fate, Washington later took a secondary role to its allies. Britain and France said they hoped that his death would lead to a more democratic Libya.
Other leaders have fallen in the Arab Spring uprisings, but the 69-year-old Gadhafi is the first to be killed. He was shot to death in his hometown of Sirte, where revolutionary fighters overwhelmed the last of his loyalist supporters Thursday after weeks of heavy battles.
Also killed in the city was one of his feared sons, Muatassim, while another son — one-time heir apparent Seif al-Islam — was wounded and captured. An AP reporter saw cigarette burns on Muatassim's body.
Bloody images of Gadhafi's last moments raised questions over how exactly he died after he was captured wounded, but alive. Video on Arab television stations showed a crowd of fighters shoving and pulling the goateed, balding Gadhafi, with blood splattered on his face and soaking his shirt.
Gadhafi struggled against them, stumbling and shouting as the fighters pushed him onto the hood of a pickup truck. One fighter held him down, pressing on his thigh with a pair of shoes in a show of contempt.
Fighters propped him on the hood as they drove for several moments, apparently to parade him around in victory.
"We want him alive. We want him alive," one man shouted before Gadhafi was dragged off the hood, some fighters pulling his hair, toward an ambulance.
Later footage showed fighters rolling Gadhafi's lifeless body over on the pavement, stripped to the waist and a pool of blood under his head. His body was then paraded on a car through Misrata, a nearby city that suffered a brutal siege by regime forces during the eight-month civil war that eventually ousted Gadhafi. Crowds in the streets cheered, "The blood of martyrs will not go in vain."
Thunderous celebratory gunfire and cries of "God is great" rang out across Tripoli well past midnight, leaving the smell of sulfur in the air. People wrapped revolutionary flags around toddlers and flashed V for victory signs as they leaned out car windows. Martyrs' Square, the former Green Square from which Gadhafi made many defiant speeches, was packed with revelers.
In Sirte, the ecstatic former rebels celebrated the city's fall after weeks of fighting by firing endless rounds into the sky, pumping their guns, knives and even a meat cleaver in the air and singing the national anthem.
The outpouring of joy reflected the deep hatred of a leader who had brutally warped Libya with his idiosyncratic rule. After seizing power in a 1969 coup that toppled the monarchy, Gadhafi created a "revolutionary" system of "rule by the masses," which supposedly meant every citizen participated in government but really meant all power was in his hands. He wielded it erratically, imposing random rules while crushing opponents, often hanging anyone who plotted against him in public squares.
Abroad, Gadhafi posed as a Third World leader, while funding militants, terror groups and guerrilla armies. His regime was blamed in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland and the downing of a French passenger jet in Africa the following year, as well as the 1986 bombing of a German discotheque frequented by U.S. servicemen that killed three people.
The day began with revolutionary forces bearing down on the last of Gadhafi's heavily armed loyalists who in recent days had been squeezed into a block of buildings of about 700 square yards.
A large convoy of vehicles moved out of the buildings, and revolutionary forces moved to intercept it, said Fathi Bashagha, spokesman for the Misrata Military Council, which commanded the fighters who captured him. At 8:30 a.m., NATO warplanes struck the convoy, a hit that stopped it from escaping, according to French Defense Minister Gerard Longuet.
Fighters then clashed with loyalists in the convoy for three hours, with rocket-propelled grenades, anti-aircraft weapons and machine guns. Members of the convoy got out of the vehicles, Bashagha said.
Gadhafi and other supporters fled on foot, with fighters in pursuit, he said. A Gadhafi bodyguard captured as they ran away gave a similar account to Arab TV stations.
Gadhafi and several bodyguards took refuge in a drainage pipe under a highway nearby. After clashes ensued, Gadhafi emerged, telling the fighters outside, "What do you want? Don't kill me, my sons," according to Bashagha and Hassan Doua, a fighter who was among those who captured him.
Bashagha said Gadhafi died in the ambulance from wounds suffered during the clashes. Abdel-Jalil Abdel-Aziz, a doctor who accompanied the body in the ambulance during the 120-mile drive to Misrata, said Gadhafi died from two bullet wounds — to the head and chest.
A government account of Gadhafi's death said he was captured unharmed and later was mortally wounded in the crossfire from both sides.
Amnesty International urged the revolutionary fighters to give a complete report, saying it was essential to conduct "a full, independent and impartial inquiry to establish the circumstances of Col. Gadhafi's death."
The TV images of Gadhafi's bloodied body sent ripples across the Arab world and on social networks such as Twitter.
Many wondered whether a similar fate awaits Syria's Bashar Assad and Yemen's Ali Abdullah Saleh, two leaders clinging to power in the face of long-running Arab Spring uprisings. For the millions of Arabs yearning for freedom, democracy and new leadership, the death of one of the region's most brutal dictators will likely inspire and invigorate the movement for change.
As word spread of Gadhafi's death, jubilant Libyans poured into Tripoli's central Martyr's Square, chanting "Syria! Syria!" — urging the Syrian opposition on to victory.
"This will signal the death of the idea that Arab leaders are invincible," said Egyptian activist and blogger Hossam Hamalawi. "Mubarak is in a cage, Ben Ali ran away, and now Gadhafi killed. ... All this will bring down the red line that we can't get these guys."
Thursday's final blows to the Gadhafi regime allow Libya's interim leadership, the National Transitional Council, to declare the entire country liberated.
It rules out a scenario some had feared — that Gadhafi might flee into Libya's southern deserts and lead a resistance campaign. Following the fall of Tripoli on Aug. 21, Gadhafi loyalists mounted fierce resistance in several areas, including Sirte, preventing the new leadership from declaring full victory. Earlier this week, revolutionary fighters gained control of one stronghold, Bani Walid.
Information Minister Mahmoud Shammam told AP that Muatassim Gadhafi was killed in Sirte. Abdel-Aziz, the doctor who accompanied Gadhafi's body in the ambulance, said Muatassim was shot in the chest. Also killed was Gadhafi's Defense Minister Abu Bakr Younis.
Justice Minister Mohammed al-Alagi said Seif al-Islam Gadhafi had been wounded in the leg and was being held in a hospital in the city of Zlitan, northwest of Sirte. Shammam said Seif was captured in Sirte, but the senior NTC leadership did not immediately confirm.
The National Council will declare liberation on Saturday, Mohamed Sayeh, a senior council member, said. That begins a key timetable toward creating a new system: The NTC has always said it will form a new interim government within a month of liberation and will hold elections within eight months.
But the revolutionary forces are an unruly mix of militias from Libya's major cities, and already differences have emerged between them. Revolutionaries from Tripoli, Misrata and Benghazi — Libya's second-largest city that has served as the rebel capital during the civil war — have exchanged accusations that each is trying to dominate the new rule.
Also, Islamic fundamentalists have taken an increasingly prominent role, pushing for some form of Islamic state in Libya, causing friction with more secular leaders.
"Libyans aim for multiparty politics, justice, democracy and freedom," said Libyan Defense Minister Jalal al-Degheili. "The end of Gadhafi is not the aim, we say the minor struggle is over. The bigger struggle is now coming. This will not happen unless all the Libyan people are ... united."

Best Acne Advice

Best Acne Advice

It seems finding acne treatments that work is becoming very difficult. There are some great treatments for acne out there buy unfortunately everyone and their dog seems to claim their solution fits best.

This is one of the reasons I created this website; to sort through all the B.S. and do the necessary research for myself...for my readers.

If you have arrived here after exhausted efforts to cure your acne, then no doubt you have heard the B.S I'm talking about.

Here on natural health remedies we do things differently. We have only one goal in mind from the outset; and that is to sift through all the crap and get down to the facts; "what bloody treatments are best...period"

Okay let's get started shall we:

First off, I'm not going to give you a rundown of what Acne is, why you have it or blah blah blah. If you have acne then I don't need to tell you what the bloody hell it is...you know that already, besides, we are just focusing today on acne treatments that work.

The Absolute Best Remedy:

Okay, I know that you may have been looking for a magical solution to your acne problems, but let me tell you something; you can get rid of your acne with many treatments but if you want it to stay away forever, then you MUST change your diet and look after your skin beforehand.

The following list is compulsory on your quest, it is the holy grail of acne cure and anybody that tells you any different are either trying to sell you a product or are not as well informed as they think they are.

· Eat Healthy
· Wash your hands regularly
· Watch your stress levels
· Make sure to get enough sleep
· Exercise often and wash straight afterwards

Now the above 5 things may not seem like the solution for you for whatever reasons but it is imperative that you follow those steps, after all, you came here looking for acne treatments that work and that is exactly what is provided.

The next step in the process:

Home Remedy:

The very first place you should begin your treatment is at home. Home treatments are as good, and in some cases even better than any remedy you can find on the store shelf or at your local pharmacy. All our writers on this website firmly believe in natural remedies and through experience we have found this to be proven time and again.

Opening and working with your backed up pores:

This is the first step and to do this effectively you can stand in a hot steamy shower for 15 minutes or lay a hot washcloth around the affected area for about 10 minutes.

Next, clean off oil and any dead skin whilst killing any acne bacteria:

There are a couple of ways this can be done effectively. Never use soap at this stage as of the process as this can dry your skin diminishing the overall effect of this process. Instead, use a face wash like

Dove or even plain water will do. Once you have completed this process you want to rinse the affected area with warm water, then cool water to close the open pores. Make sure to pat dry...no scrubbing.

It's time now to kill off access bacteria:

Go get yourself a cotton ball and some aspirin tablets. Now, crush two tablets into a bowl of water and let them dissolve. Use the cotton ball to apply the dissolved aspirin onto the affected area making sure to only pat, no rubbing.

This process can be repeated once or twice a day and should clear most moderate outbreaks of acne. It is very important to not let your face dry out whilst performing this treatment.

Avoid touching the affected area as much as you can and never burst any pimples as this can lead to further infection. If you follow the above two steps to the letter then you will begin to see dramatic changes...period.

Find the best treatments and advice over at Natural Health Remedies. All ailments reviewed from Natural remedies for hot flashes right on up to treatment for boils, weight loss, sleeping disorders among others. The best advice...period!