Steve Jobs, Apple CEO and creative force, resigns

By RACHEL METZ and JORDAN ROBERTSON

SAN FRANCISCO – Steve Jobs, the mind behind the iPhone, iPad and other devices that turned Apple Inc. into one of the world's most powerful companies, resigned as CEO on Wednesday, saying he can no longer handle the job but will continue to play a leadership role.
The move appears to be the result of an unspecified medical condition for which Jobs took a leave from his post in January. Apple's chief operating officer, Tim Cook, was quickly named CEO of the company Jobs co-founded 35 years ago in his garage.
In a letter addressed to Apple's board and the "Apple community," Jobs said he "always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple's CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come."
The company said Jobs gave the board his resignation Wednesday and suggested Cook be named the company's new leader. Apple said Jobs was elected board chairman and Cook is becoming a member of its board.
Genentech Inc. Chairman Art Levinson, in a statement issued on behalf of Apple's board, said Jobs' "extraordinary vision and leadership saved Apple and guided it to its position as the world's most innovative and valuable technology company."
He said that Jobs will continue to provide "his unique insights, creativity and inspiration," and that the board has "complete confidence" that Cook is the right person to replace him.
""Tim's 13 years of service to Apple have been marked by outstanding performance, and he has demonstrated remarkable talent and sound judgment in everything he does," Levinson said.
Jobs' health has long been a concern for Apple investors who see him as an industry oracle who seems to know what consumers want long before they do. After his announcement, Apple stock quickly fell 5.4 percent in after-hours trading.
Jeff Gamet, managing editor of The Mac Observer online news site focused on Apple, said Jobs' departure has more sentimental than practical significance, and that he has been telegraphing the change for several years.
"All Apple really has done is made official what they've been doing administratively for a while now, which is Tim runs the show and Steve gets to do his part to make sure the products come out to meet the Apple standard," he said.
"I expect that even though there are a lot of people that right now are sad or scared because Steve is stepping back from the CEO role, that ultimately they'll be OK," Gamet said.
But Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with Global Equities Research, said Jobs' maniacal attention to detail is what set Apple apart. He said Apple's product pipeline might be secure for another few years, but predicted that the company will eventually struggle to come up with market-changing ideas.
"Apple is Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs is Apple, and Steve Jobs is innovation," Chowdhry said. "You can teach people how to be operationally efficient, you can hire consultants to tell you how to do that, but God creates innovation. ... Apple without Steve Jobs is nothing."
Earlier this month Apple became the most valuable company in America, briefly surpassing Exxon Mobil. At the market close Wednesday its market value was $349 billion, just behind Exxon Mobil's $358 billion.
Jobs' hits seemed to grow bigger as the years went on: After the colorful iMac computer and the now-ubiquitous iPod, the iPhone redefined the category of smart phones and the iPad all but created the market for tablet computers.
His own aura seemed part of the attraction. On stage at trade shows and company events in his uniform of jeans, sneakers and black mock-turtlenecks, he'd entrance audiences with new devices, new colors, new software features, building up to a grand finale he'd predictably preface by saying, "One more thing."
Jobs, 56, shepherded Apple from a two-man startup to Silicon Valley darling when the Apple II, the first computer for regular people to really catch on, sent IBM Corp. and others scrambling to get their own PCs to market.
After Apple suffered a slump in the mid-1980s, he was forced out of the company. He was CEO at Next, another computer company, and Pixar, the computer-animation company that produced "Toy Story" on his watch, over the following 10 years.
Apple was foundering as he returned as an adviser in 1996 — a year it lost $900 million as Microsoft Windows-based PCs dominated the computer market. The company's fortunes began to turn around with its first new product under Jobs' direction, the iMac, which launched in 1998 and sold about 2 million in its first 12 months.
Jobs eventually became interim CEO, then took the job permanently. Apple's popularity grew in the U.S. throughout the 2000s as the ever-sleeker line of iPods introduced many lifelong Windows users to their first Apple gadget. Apple created another sensation in 2007 with the iPhone, the stark-looking but powerful smart phone that quickly dominated the industry.
The iPad was introduced less than a year and a half ago but has already sold nearly 29 million units as it inspired myriad rivals in a tablet computer market that scarcely existed before Apple stepped in.
There have been some setbacks. Apple was swept up in a massive Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry into stock options backdating in the mid-2000s, a practice that artificially boosted the value of options grants. But Jobs and Apple emerged unscathed after two former executives took the fall and eventually settled with the SEC.
As Jobs was praised for his vision, concerns about his health persisted. The January leave was Jobs' third medical leave over several years. He had previously survived pancreatic cancer and received a liver transplant.
Shannon Cross, an analyst at Cross Research, said Cook is a good choice to replace Jobs.
"He has taken over for Jobs twice in two medical leaves and the company has functioned extremely well," she said, adding that Cook has been Jobs' "right hand guy" for many years.
Cross also said Jobs put in place a "culture of innovation" that will help Apple remain a creative force in the industry.
"Steve Jobs is an extremely strong leader and clearly has made Apple a leading consumer electronics company and one of the most innovative companies in the world," she said. "However, he didn't do it alone."

With CIA help, NYPD moves covertly in Muslim

By MATT APUZZO and ADAM GOLDMAN

NEW YORK – Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the New York Police Department has become one of the nation's most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies, targeting ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government, an Associated Press investigation has found.
These operations have benefited from unprecedented help from the CIA, a partnership that has blurred the line between foreign and domestic spying.
The department has dispatched undercover officers, known as "rakers," into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program, according to officials directly involved in the program. They've monitored daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes and nightclubs. Police have also used informants, known as "mosque crawlers," to monitor sermons, even when there's no evidence of wrongdoing.
Neither the city council, which finances the department, nor the federal government, which has given NYPD more than $1.6 billion since 9/11, is told exactly what's going on.
Many of these operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in transforming the NYPD's intelligence unit.

Evacuations begin on tiny NC island ahead

By MARTHA WAGGONER

HATTERAS, N.C. – Tourists began evacuating from a tiny barrier island off North Carolina on Wednesday as Hurricane Irene strengthened to a major Category 3 storm over the Bahamas with the East Coast in its sights.
So far, things were going smo othly, said Tommy Hutcherson, owner of the Ocracoke Variety Store on Ocracoke Island. Cars had lined up at gas pumps to top off before leaving ahead of Irene, which had winds near 120 mph (193 kph) as of Wednesday afternoon. Irene is expected to get stronger over warm ocean waters and could become a Category 4 storm with winds of at least 131 mph (211 kph) by Thursday.
The evacuation was a test of whether people in the crosshairs of the first major hurricane along the East Coast in years would heed orders to get out of the way. As Irene churned in the Caribbean, tourists scurried from hotels in the Bahamian capital of Nassau to catch flights off the island before the airport's expected afternoon closure. Officials as far north as Rhode Island and Massachusetts in the U.S. also were getting ready for Irene.
The first ferry to leave Ocracoke Island in North Carolina arrived just before 5:30 a.m. in nearby Hatteras with around a dozen cars on board.
The 16-mile-long barrier island is accessible only by boats that can carry no more than 50 cars at a time. It is home to about 800 year-round residents and a tourist population that swells into the thousands when vacationers rent rooms and cottages. Tourists were told to evacuate Wednesday. Island residents were told to get out on Thursday.
It wasn't clear how many people on the first arriving ferry Wednesday morning were tourists, but the first two cars to drive off had New York and New Jersey plates.
Getting off the next ferry about an hour later was a family that included newlywed Jennifer Zaharek, 23, of Torrington, Conn. She and her husband, Andrew, were married Monday and planned to spend their honeymoon on the island.
"We just got to spend one day on the beach and then we went to bed early to get up for the evacuation," she said.
State workers questioned people who tried taking the ferry to the island and turned a few cars around. In addition to the ferry line to Hatteras, there were two other ferry lines that went to and from the island.
Federal officials have warned Irene could cause flooding, power outages or worse all along the East Coast as far north as Maine, even if it stays offshore. The projected path has gradually shifted to the east, and Irene could make landfall anywhere from South Carolina to Massachusetts over the weekend.
As of 2 p.m. EDT Wednesday, Irene was centered about 250 miles (402 kilometers) southeast of Nassau in the Bahamas and was moving northwest near 12 mph (19 kph).
Speaking Wednesday on ABC's "Good Morning America," Craig Fugate, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said people as far north as New England should be ready for the storm. When asked about concerns preparing the Northeast for a hurricane, which is uncommon in that part of the country, Fugate cited Tuesday's earthquake that rattled the East Coast.
"It's a reminder that we don't always get to pick the next disaster," Fugate said.
Ocracoke is part of North Carolina's Outer Banks, a roughly 200-mile stretch of fragile barrier islands off the state's coast. Pristine beaches and wild mustangs attract thousands of tourists each year. Aside from Ocracoke, the other islands are accessible by bridges to the mainland and ferries. The limited access can make the evacuation particularly tense. Officials in counties covering the rest of the Outer Banks were to decide later Wednesday or Thursday whether to evacuate.
All the barrier islands have the geographic weakness of jutting out into the Atlantic like the side-view mirror of a car, a location that's frequently been in the path of destructive storms over the decades. In 1999, Hurricane Floyd made landfall as a Category 2 storm and caused a storm surge that wiped out scores of houses and other properties on the Outer Banks.
Irene had already wrought destruction across the Caribbean, giving a glimpse of what the storm might bring to the Eastern Seaboard. In Puerto Rico, tens of thousands were without power, and one woman died after trying to cross a swollen river in her car. Thousands were evacuated because of flooding in the Dominican Republic. In Cuba, the storm sent waves crashing over a seawall in Baracoa, causing ankle-deep flooding in parts and damaging some sidewalks.
Hurricane conditions were already present in the southeastern Bahamas, forecasters said. The capital of Nassau buzzed with preparations Wednesday, as the government and some resorts set up emergency shelters. Many visitors scrambled to get off the island, waiting in long lines to catch planes before the airport closed.
"I've been through one hurricane and I don't want to see another," said Susan Hooper of Paris, Illinois, who was cutting short a trip with her husband, Marvin, to celebrate their 23rd wedding anniversary.
It's been more than seven years since a major hurricane, considered a Category 3 with winds of at least 111 mph (179 kph), hit the East Coast. Hurricane Jeanne came ashore on Florida's east coast in 2004.
People were keeping an eye on the storm farther north. At the Breakers Resort Inn in Virginia Beach, Va., manager Jimmy Capps said some customers have canceled, but he's urging most to wait until Thursday, when the storm's path will be more certain than it is now. He said the 56-room inn is still about 80 percent booked for the weekend.
In Massachusetts, country music star Kenny Chesney bumped a concert ahead two days to miss Irene, and state officials were making sure communications systems were working and sandbags were stocked. In Rhode Island, officials stockpiled sandbags and cleared storm drains to prepare for possible flooding.
Tourist enclaves in Georgia and South Carolina, though, were not expecting as much of a hit. Managers at Georgia's Cumberland and Sapelo islands said they planned to remain open as Irene approaches. In South Carolina, Gov. Nikki Haley said she didn't anticipate evacuations.
"What we can say is tourists can comfortably stay on the coast. If something changes, we'll have another news conference," she said.
North Carolina Gov. Beverly Perdue urged coastal residents to be prepared and fill up their gas tanks, collect their prescription drugs and have cash in case the region is without power or other basics. Hurricane kits also should include water, canned food and other supplies.
Still, Perdue tried not to discourage vacationers from visiting North Carolina's coast, saying at this point the state's southern beaches would avoid the brunt of the storm and predicted Irene would pass the state by Sunday morning — leaving intact the week leading up to the Labor Day holiday.
Perdue defended comments she made Tuesday asking the media not to scare away tourists and urging vacationers to keep visiting North Carolina.
"You will never endanger your tourists, but you also don't want to overinflate the sense of urgency about the storm. And so let's just hang on," she said
Cheryl Tuverson of Drexel Hill, Pa., was staying on Hatteras Island with a large group, including her two children, and had no plans to hang on. She recalled staying through a storm during a previous visit to the area and said she wouldn't do it again.
"This time, we'll leave," she said. "We're supposed to leave Saturday, but we'll leave Friday."

Libyan rebels hunt Gadhafi, try to secure Tripoli

By BEN HUBBARD and KARIN LAUB

TRIPOLI, Libya – Libyans hunting Moammar Gadhafi offered a $2 million bounty on the fallen dictator's head and amnesty for anyone who kills or captures him as rebels battled Wednesday to clear the last pockets of resistance from the capital Tripoli.
While some die-hard loyalists kept up the fight to defend Gadhafi, his support was crumbling by the hour. His deputy intelligence chief defected, and even his foreign minister said his 42-year rule was over.
A defiant Gadhafi vowed from hiding to fight on "until victory or martyrdom," in an audio message early Wednesday.
He may have little choice. Asked by the British broadcaster Channel 4 if a negotiated settlement or safe passage for Gadhafi from Libya was still possible, Foreign Minister Abdul Ati al-Obeidi said: "It looks like things have passed this kind of solution."
Rebel leaders were beginning to set up a new government in the capital. Their interim administration, the National Transitional Council, has been based in the eastern city of Benghazi, which fell under rebel control shortly after the outbreak of widespread protests in February.
"Members of the council are now moving one by one from Benghazi to Tripoli," said Mansour Seyf al-Nasr, the Libyan opposition's new ambassador to France.
Rebel officials are eager to prove they can bring a stable political future to Libya, and that their movement is more than an often-fractious collection of tribes, ethnicities and semiautonomous militias. Mahmoud Jibril, the head of the opposition government, outlined plans for a new constitution and elections and said officials were talking to the U.N. about sending up to 200 monitors to help ensure security in Tripoli.
But the capital was far from pacified. A day after rebels captured Gadhafi's vast Bab al-Aziziya compound, the symbolic center of his regime, loyalists were firing into the compound from an adjacent neighborhood where intense clashes broke out. Pro-regime snipers cut off the road to the airport. Four Italian journalists were kidnapped on the highway to Tripoli around the city of Zawiya, 30 miles west of the capital.
Tripoli's streets were largely empty of civilians. Rebels manned checkpoints every few hundred yards, but little could be seen beyond the debris of days of fighting and weeks of accumulated garbage.
Rebels found no sign of Gadhafi after storming his compound Tuesday, but rumors churned of his possible whereabouts. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said there was no evidence he had left Libya, but rebel officials acknowledged they could not find him.
"He might be in Sirte or any other place," Jibril said in Paris, where he met French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Sirte, a coastal city 250 miles from Tripoli, is Gadhafi's hometown and a bastion of regime support.
Khaled al-Zintani, spokesman for the rebel military council for the western mountains, said it has set up an operations room with intelligence officers, military defectors and security officers who are trying to find Gadhafi, his family, regime members and his forces. They are collecting information on the location, size and direction of any convoys.
The operations center is in the western mountains, the staging base for the rebels who marched on Tripoli.
Mohammed al-Herizi, an opposition official, said a group of Tripoli businessmen has offered a $2 million reward for the arrest or killing of Gadhafi. The rebels themselves are offering amnesty for anyone who kills him or hands him over.
"The biggest prize is to offer amnesty, not to give money," rebel spokesman Col. Ahmed Bani said.
Gadhafi vowed not to surrender. Speaking to a local television channel, apparently by phone, he called on residents of the Libyan capital and loyal tribesmen to free Tripoli from the "devils and traitors" who have overrun it.
Al-Sadeq al-Kabir, a rebel spokesman, denied media reports that Gadhafi had offered a cease-fire.
The rebels have taken control of much of Libya with the help of a relentless NATO air campaign that included about 7,500 strike attacks against Gadhafi's forces. His defenses around Tripoli melted away as the rebels rapidly advanced and entered the capital Sunday.
Jibril said a commission created with members from around Libya would write a new constitution, which would be put up for a referendum. He didn't specify a timetable but said that once a constitution is adopted, elections for parliament would be held within the next four months, and its president would be Libya's interim leader until a presidential election sometime later.
"The mission of protecting civilians is not over," Jibril said. "The other bigger and more fierce battle has not started yet. It is the rebuilding of Libya."
In the postwar period, a new army will be created, he said, and the National Transitional Council planned "to call on all those who took up arms to join either the new army or the new police force that we will constitute in coming days."
The rebels said they also have an environment team that tries to detect bodies of combatants and clean the city of rotting animals.
Fighting continued, however, and not just in Tripoli. Jibril said pro-government forces were shelling a number of southern cities.
Residents of the port town of Zwara, about 70 miles west of the capital, said they had suffered through four days of shelling. All roads to the city had been cut off, and rebels said they were running low on supplies.
As they are routed elsewhere, Gadhafi's forces "take their revenge by shelling our town," Sefask al-Azaabi, a rebel, said by telephone. "We are appealing to the (rebel) military council to send us reinforcements or this town will be finished in no time."
In Tripoli, rebel fighters were using Gadhafi's captured compound as a staging area, loading huge trucks with ammunition and discussing deployments, but they had yet to control all of Bab al-Aziziya.
Pro-Gadhafi snipers repeatedly fired on the fighters from tall buildings in the Abu Salim neighborhood, a regime stronghold, rebel Mohammed Amin said.
He said the rebels had surrounded Abu Salim, home to the country's most notorious prison and scene of a 1996 massacre of protesting political prisoners, but had been unable to push into it. But late Wednesday night, al-Kabir, the rebel spokesman, said rebels released thousands of inmates from Abu Salim, many of them political prisoners who had been held there for years.
Matthew VanDyke, a writer from Baltimore missing since March in Libya, was among those who escaped, his mother said. VanDyke called her and said he had been held in solitary confinement, but fellow prisoners helped him escape to a compound where he borrowed a phone. He had traveled to Libya to write about the uprising against Gadhafi.
The rebels claim they control the Tripoli airport but were still clashing with Gadhafi forces around it. Associated Press reporters said the road leading to the airport was closed because of heavy fire by pro-regime snipers.
Rebels said pro-Gadhafi forces to the south and northeast were firing rockets and shelling rebel positions inside the airport and had set a plane on fire.
Inside Gadhafi's compound, two young rebel fighters searched through a heap of pill packages in a building they said had served as a pharmacy. A broken TV, its screen shattered, lay on the ground in the courtyard. A dozen young fighters posed for pictures next to a gold-colored statue of a clenched fist squeezing a plane — a memorial to the 1986 U.S. airstrikes on the compound in retaliation for a bombing at a German disco frequented by U.S. servicemen.
The rebels also targeted other symbols of the regime, including the homes of some of Gadhafi's children.
About 200 people ransacked the beachfront villa of Gadhafi's son Saadi, driving off with four of his cars — a Lamborghini, a BMW, an Audi and a Toyota station wagon, said Seif Allah, a rebel fighter who joined in the looting, taking a bottle of gin and a pair of Diesel jeans.
After a five-hour gunbattle with guards, rebels also ransacked the mansion of Gadhafi's daughter Aisha.
Clothes and DVDs were strewn on the floor of the master bedroom, including a DVD about getting in shape after childbirth. In a sitting area, a gold-colored statue of a mermaid — a mermaid with Aisha's face — framed a sofa.
At the once-luxurious Rixos Hotel near Abu Salim and Bab al-Aziziya, dozens of foreign journalists were freed after being held captive for days by pro-government gunmen.
The hotel was where rotating tours of journalists had lived for the past six months, closely watched by government minders and taken on approved tours. But it became a de facto prison after the rebels swept into the city because a team of gunmen refused to let the journalists leave.
Heavy gunbattles had raged all around the hotel since Sunday, and a gunman even ran through the lobby at one point. Near-constant power outages left reporters without air conditioning in the sweltering summer heat, and in their final days at the Rixos they had to scrounge the hotel to find food and water.
As the rebels drew closer, most of the guards left, leaving just a pair of increasingly nervous gunmen. The journalists were suddenly freed Wednesday after the International Committee of the Red Cross stepped in to negotiate their release.

By BEN HUBBARD and KARIN LAUB, Associated Press – 13 mins ago

TRIPOLI, Libya – Libyans hunting Moammar Gadhafi offered a $2 million bounty on the fallen dictator's head and amnesty for anyone who kills or captures him as rebels battled Wednesday to clear the last pockets of resistance from the capital Tripoli.
While some die-hard loyalists kept up the fight to defend Gadhafi, his support was crumbling by the hour. His deputy intelligence chief defected, and even his foreign minister said his 42-year rule was over.
A defiant Gadhafi vowed from hiding to fight on "until victory or martyrdom," in an audio message early Wednesday.
He may have little choice. Asked by the British broadcaster Channel 4 if a negotiated settlement or safe passage for Gadhafi from Libya was still possible, Foreign Minister Abdul Ati al-Obeidi said: "It looks like things have passed this kind of solution."
Rebel leaders were beginning to set up a new government in the capital. Their interim administration, the National Transitional Council, has been based in the eastern city of Benghazi, which fell under rebel control shortly after the outbreak of widespread protests in February.
"Members of the council are now moving one by one from Benghazi to Tripoli," said Mansour Seyf al-Nasr, the Libyan opposition's new ambassador to France.
Rebel officials are eager to prove they can bring a stable political future to Libya, and that their movement is more than an often-fractious collection of tribes, ethnicities and semiautonomous militias. Mahmoud Jibril, the head of the opposition government, outlined plans for a new constitution and elections and said officials were talking to the U.N. about sending up to 200 monitors to help ensure security in Tripoli.
But the capital was far from pacified. A day after rebels captured Gadhafi's vast Bab al-Aziziya compound, the symbolic center of his regime, loyalists were firing into the compound from an adjacent neighborhood where intense clashes broke out. Pro-regime snipers cut off the road to the airport. Four Italian journalists were kidnapped on the highway to Tripoli around the city of Zawiya, 30 miles west of the capital.
Tripoli's streets were largely empty of civilians. Rebels manned checkpoints every few hundred yards, but little could be seen beyond the debris of days of fighting and weeks of accumulated garbage.
Rebels found no sign of Gadhafi after storming his compound Tuesday, but rumors churned of his possible whereabouts. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said there was no evidence he had left Libya, but rebel officials acknowledged they could not find him.
"He might be in Sirte or any other place," Jibril said in Paris, where he met French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Sirte, a coastal city 250 miles from Tripoli, is Gadhafi's hometown and a bastion of regime support.
Khaled al-Zintani, spokesman for the rebel military council for the western mountains, said it has set up an operations room with intelligence officers, military defectors and security officers who are trying to find Gadhafi, his family, regime members and his forces. They are collecting information on the location, size and direction of any convoys.
The operations center is in the western mountains, the staging base for the rebels who marched on Tripoli.
Mohammed al-Herizi, an opposition official, said a group of Tripoli businessmen has offered a $2 million reward for the arrest or killing of Gadhafi. The rebels themselves are offering amnesty for anyone who kills him or hands him over.
"The biggest prize is to offer amnesty, not to give money," rebel spokesman Col. Ahmed Bani said.
Gadhafi vowed not to surrender. Speaking to a local television channel, apparently by phone, he called on residents of the Libyan capital and loyal tribesmen to free Tripoli from the "devils and traitors" who have overrun it.
Al-Sadeq al-Kabir, a rebel spokesman, denied media reports that Gadhafi had offered a cease-fire.
The rebels have taken control of much of Libya with the help of a relentless NATO air campaign that included about 7,500 strike attacks against Gadhafi's forces. His defenses around Tripoli melted away as the rebels rapidly advanced and entered the capital Sunday.
Jibril said a commission created with members from around Libya would write a new constitution, which would be put up for a referendum. He didn't specify a timetable but said that once a constitution is adopted, elections for parliament would be held within the next four months, and its president would be Libya's interim leader until a presidential election sometime later.
"The mission of protecting civilians is not over," Jibril said. "The other bigger and more fierce battle has not started yet. It is the rebuilding of Libya."
In the postwar period, a new army will be created, he said, and the National Transitional Council planned "to call on all those who took up arms to join either the new army or the new police force that we will constitute in coming days."
The rebels said they also have an environment team that tries to detect bodies of combatants and clean the city of rotting animals.
Fighting continued, however, and not just in Tripoli. Jibril said pro-government forces were shelling a number of southern cities.
Residents of the port town of Zwara, about 70 miles west of the capital, said they had suffered through four days of shelling. All roads to the city had been cut off, and rebels said they were running low on supplies.
As they are routed elsewhere, Gadhafi's forces "take their revenge by shelling our town," Sefask al-Azaabi, a rebel, said by telephone. "We are appealing to the (rebel) military council to send us reinforcements or this town will be finished in no time."
In Tripoli, rebel fighters were using Gadhafi's captured compound as a staging area, loading huge trucks with ammunition and discussing deployments, but they had yet to control all of Bab al-Aziziya.
Pro-Gadhafi snipers repeatedly fired on the fighters from tall buildings in the Abu Salim neighborhood, a regime stronghold, rebel Mohammed Amin said.
He said the rebels had surrounded Abu Salim, home to the country's most notorious prison and scene of a 1996 massacre of protesting political prisoners, but had been unable to push into it. But late Wednesday night, al-Kabir, the rebel spokesman, said rebels released thousands of inmates from Abu Salim, many of them political prisoners who had been held there for years.
Matthew VanDyke, a writer from Baltimore missing since March in Libya, was among those who escaped, his mother said. VanDyke called her and said he had been held in solitary confinement, but fellow prisoners helped him escape to a compound where he borrowed a phone. He had traveled to Libya to write about the uprising against Gadhafi.
The rebels claim they control the Tripoli airport but were still clashing with Gadhafi forces around it. Associated Press reporters said the road leading to the airport was closed because of heavy fire by pro-regime snipers.
Rebels said pro-Gadhafi forces to the south and northeast were firing rockets and shelling rebel positions inside the airport and had set a plane on fire.
Inside Gadhafi's compound, two young rebel fighters searched through a heap of pill packages in a building they said had served as a pharmacy. A broken TV, its screen shattered, lay on the ground in the courtyard. A dozen young fighters posed for pictures next to a gold-colored statue of a clenched fist squeezing a plane — a memorial to the 1986 U.S. airstrikes on the compound in retaliation for a bombing at a German disco frequented by U.S. servicemen.
The rebels also targeted other symbols of the regime, including the homes of some of Gadhafi's children.
About 200 people ransacked the beachfront villa of Gadhafi's son Saadi, driving off with four of his cars — a Lamborghini, a BMW, an Audi and a Toyota station wagon, said Seif Allah, a rebel fighter who joined in the looting, taking a bottle of gin and a pair of Diesel jeans.
After a five-hour gunbattle with guards, rebels also ransacked the mansion of Gadhafi's daughter Aisha.
Clothes and DVDs were strewn on the floor of the master bedroom, including a DVD about getting in shape after childbirth. In a sitting area, a gold-colored statue of a mermaid — a mermaid with Aisha's face — framed a sofa.
At the once-luxurious Rixos Hotel near Abu Salim and Bab al-Aziziya, dozens of foreign journalists were freed after being held captive for days by pro-government gunmen.
The hotel was where rotating tours of journalists had lived for the past six months, closely watched by government minders and taken on approved tours. But it became a de facto prison after the rebels swept into the city because a team of gunmen refused to let the journalists leave.
Heavy gunbattles had raged all around the hotel since Sunday, and a gunman even ran through the lobby at one point. Near-constant power outages left reporters without air conditioning in the sweltering summer heat, and in their final days at the Rixos they had to scrounge the hotel to find food and water.
As the rebels drew closer, most of the guards left, leaving just a pair of increasingly nervous gunmen. The journalists were suddenly freed Wednesday after the International Committee of the Red Cross stepped in to negotiate their release.