Eideard

 
Former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi died of wounds suffered on Thursday as fighters battling to complete an eight-month-old uprising against his rule overran his hometown Sirte, Libya’s interim rulers said.

His killing, which came swiftly after his capture near Sirte, is the most dramatic single development in the Arab Spring revolts that have unseated rulers in Egypt and Tunisia and threatened the grip on power of the leaders of Syria and Yemen.

“He (Gaddafi) was also hit in his head,” National Transitional Council official Abdel Majid Mlegta told Reuters. “There was a lot of firing against his group and he died.”

Mlegta told Reuters earlier that Gaddafi, who was in his late 60s, was captured and wounded in both legs at dawn on Thursday as he tried to flee in a convoy which NATO warplanes attacked. He said he had been taken away by an ambulance…

His capture followed within minutes of the fall of Sirte, a development that extinguished the last significant resistance by forces loyal to the deposed leader.

The capture of Sirte and the death of Gaddafi means Libya’s ruling NTC should now begin the task of forging a new democratic system which it had said it would get under way after the city, built as a showpiece for Gaddafi’s rule, had fallen.

Overdue.

CONFIRMED.

A couple prayed and rubbed olive oil on their sick infant rather than seek medical care for the dying boy, prosecutors argued in the latest criminal case against members of an Oregon church that believes in faith healing.

Dale and Shannon Hickman are accused of manslaughter in the death of their son David, who was born prematurely in 2009 with underdeveloped lungs. The boy developed a bacterial infection and lived for less than nine hours…

The Hickmans are members of the Followers of Christ church, a Clackamas County church that practices faith healing and rejects doctors. The trial is the fourth time in recent years that members have faced criminal accusations that they let their children get seriously ill or die.

When David’s skin turned ashen and he could barely breathe, the Hickmans did not call for help, prosecutor Mike Regan said during opening statements Wednesday. Instead, he said, Dale Hickman anointed the baby with olive oil, a common church ritual for treating the ill.

“They were never going to call — ever,” Regan said. “Failure to act is a crime…”

The Hickmans’ lawyers said witnesses to the boy’s birth will testify that the baby showed no sign of distress until minutes before his death. And even if the Hickmans had called 911, the infant would have died before help arrived, they said. The same defense used by church members in previous trials.

The couple was being tried for their faith, said lawyer Mark Cogan.

“You, ladies and gentlemen, are our protection against tyranny,” Cogan told jurors.

The tyranny of self-delusion, of religious ideology, letting superstition govern your behavior instead of ethics, reason, often leads to confrontation with common law. As the prosecutor, Mike Regan, said – Failure to act is a crime.

We have a responsibility to the society within which we live and function to act in the broadest sense. Letting a child die with no reasonable attempt to save that small life is not excused by ideology.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

At least 53 people were killed in a fiery attack at a casino in an upscale area of Monterrey, Mexico, government and emergency officials said…

Witnesses have told investigators that up to six people entered the Casino Royale and asked for the manager, according Adrian de la Garza, the state attorney general for Nuevo Leon.

When the manager refused, they set the building on fire, he said. It’s believed a solvent was used to start the blaze, possibly gasoline, de la Garza said…

Between 20 and 30 people were trapped in the casino by debris, said Cmdr. Angel Flores with the Green Cross…

Monterrey is the capital of Nuevo Leon…Nuevo Leon and the neighboring states of Coahuila and Tamaulipas have been the scene of clashes between organized crime groups. The Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas are vying for control of trafficking routes into the United States.

In November 2010, the federal government launched the Coordinated Operation Northeast, which involves sending more security forces to the area to tackle crime.

A tactic which obviously hasn’t had the effect of diminishing violence.

An off-duty Chicago police officer dressed up as a clown for a South Side fundraiser shot and killed a teen who held him at gunpoint tonight after the event, authorities said.

The officer…was in his clown outfit for a fundraiser for a day-care business. The event, attended by a group of 50 children, was near West 87th Street and South Damen Avenue.

At 10:10 p.m. after the event ended, the officer went to his car and a teen approached him, asking him for money, authorities said. When the officer said he had no money, the teen pulled a gun on him, authorities said.

During a struggle with the teen, the officer grabbed hold of the gun, opened fire and killed him.

The officer sustained minor injuries, according to a release from police News Affairs.

Don’t carry a gun unless you’re prepared to use it. Don’t pull a gun on someone unless you’re capable of using it. Don’t get close enough to let someone take your gun away – and use it on you.

In this case – I’d say instant justice was meted out.

 
Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed Sunday in a firefight with U.S. forces in Pakistan and his body was recovered, President Barack Obama announced Sunday.

“Justice has been done,” Obama said in a dramatic, late-night White House speech announcing the death of the elusive mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the New York and Washington.

Obama said U.S. forces led the operation that killed bin Laden. No Americans were killed in the operation and they took care to avoid civilian casualties, he said.

“The United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda and a terrorist who is responsible for the murder of thousands of men, women and children,” Obama said…

U.S. officials said that after searching in vain for the al Qaeda leader since he disappeared in Afghanistan in late 2001, the Saudi-born extremist was killed in the Pakistani town of Abbotabad and his body recovered.

Having the body may help convince any doubters that bin Laden is really dead.

He had been the subject of a search since he eluded U.S. soldiers and Afghan militia forces in a large-scale assault on the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan in 2001.

The trail quickly went cold after he disappeared and many intelligence officials believed he had been hiding in Pakistan.

While in hiding, bin Laden had taunted the West and advocated his militant Islamist views in videotapes spirited from his hideaway.

Besides September 11, Washington has also linked bin Laden to a string of attacks — including the 1998 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the 2000 bombing of the warship USS Cole in Yemen.

This death alone does not mean victory. But, this death is a significant moment and hopefully may be the beginning of an end to a deadly chapter.

UPDATE: Here’s a link to the IT geek’s tweets – Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual – who live-blogged the raid without knowing what he was watching. Getting away from the city for the day, relaxing in the mountains.

Swedish authorities say they are looking for relatives of a man who might have lain dead in his apartment for over three years with no one noticing.

The elderly man’s body was found when a broadband technician showed up to do an installation in the apartment building, the Swedish news agency TT reported.

It wasn’t known when the man died, but investigators said food in his refrigerator was dated early 2008. His advanced degree of decomposition indicated he had been dead about three years, investigators said…

The man’s pension was automatically deposited in his account and his bills were paid by automatic debits.

“It is very tragic,” said Asa Johannesson of the Flemingsberg police…

“He lived alone, but there are relatives. But they obviously had no contact,” Johannesson said.

Police said there was no indication of a crime having been committed.

My kind of family. A hermit – and people who don’t get along with hermits.

A man has been shot dead at a cinema in Latvia after a fellow movie-goer objected to the volume at which he was eating his popcorn.

The assailant, 27, reportedly had a brief argument with the man, aged 43, who was sitting next to him during a screening of Black Swan in the Forum cinema, one of the largest in the city of Riga.

When the credits rolled, the younger man pulled out a legally registered firearm and shot the other man dead. Other audience members then phoned for the police and an ambulance.

The younger man – a graduate of the police academy who holds a doctorate in law from the University of Latvia – waited to be arrested.

I guess he thinks he’s got a case.

Blogging is on the decline, according to a New York Times story published this weekend — citing research from the Pew Center’s Internet and American Life Project — and it is declining particularly among young people, who are using social networks such as Facebook instead. Pretty straightforward, right? Except that the actual story said something quite different: even according to the figures used by the New York Times itself, blogging activity is actually increasing, not decreasing. And as the story points out, plenty of young people are still blogging via the Tumblr platform, even though they may not think of it as “blogging.” What blogging is really doing is evolving.

The NYT story notes that blogging among those aged 12 to 17 fell by half between 2006 and 2009 according to the Pew report, but among 18 to 33-year-olds it only dropped by two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier — which isn’t exactly a huge decline. And among 34 to 45-year-olds, blogging activity rose by six percentage points. The story also admits that the Blogger platform, which is owned by Google, had fewer unique visitors in the U.S. in December than it had a year earlier (a 2-percent decline), but globally its traffic climbed by 9 percent to 323 million.

In many ways, this “blogging is dying” theory is similar s to the “web is dead” argument that Wired magazine tried to float last year, which really was about the web evolving and expanding into different areas. It’s true that Facebook and Twitter have led many away from blogging because they are so fast and easy to use, but they have also both helped to reinforce blogging in many ways.

What’s really happening, as Toni Schneider of Automattic — the corporate parent of the WordPress publishing platform (see disclosure behind the article link) — noted in the NYT piece, is that what blogging represented even four or five years ago has evolved into much more of a continuum of publishing. People post content on their blogs, or their “Tumblrs,” and then share links to it via Twitter and Facebook; or they may post thoughts via social networks and then collect those thoughts into a longer post on a blog. Blog networks such as The Huffington Post get a lot of attention, but plenty of individuals are still making use of the longer-form publishing abilities that blogs allow…

So what we really have now is a multitude of platforms: there are the “micro-blogging” ones like Twitter, then there are those that allow for more interaction or multimedia content like Facebook, and both of those in turn can enhance existing blogging tools like WordPress and Blogger. And then there is Tumblr, which is like a combination of multiple formats. The fact that there are so many different choices means there is even more opportunity for people to find a publishing method they like. So while “blogging” may be on the decline, personal publishing has arguably never been healthier.

I guess Mathew is inspired to post his comments as a reaction to the ancient newspaper practice of having someone write headlines other than the journalist who wrote the article. The NY TIMES article contains a boatload of contradictions to the headline. Something that always trips my trigger.

Even the analysis of growing use of social networks is incorrect – since the fastest growth is among geezers my age. Damned if I know why, though.

Thanks to Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), taxpayers are footing a $500 million bill for a NASA rocket that the agency has no plans or desire to continue developing. The Orlando Sentinel reports that pork legislation inserted into a spending bill by Shelby earlier this year [2010] is requiring NASA to spend millions on the canceled Ares I rocket program through March, even while the agency can’t find funds to begin a much-needed modernization of the famed Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida:

At the root of the problem is a 70-word sentence inserted into the 2010 budget — by lawmakers seeking to protect Ares I jobs in their home states — that bars NASA from shutting down the program until Congress passed a new budget a year later. [...]

But Congress never passed a 2011 budget and instead voted this month to extend the 2010 budget until March — so NASA still must abide by the 2010 language.[...]

The language that keeps Constellation going was inserted into the 2010 budget last year by U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican who sought to protect the program and Ares jobs at Marshall Space Flight Center in his home state.

His office confirmed that the language was still in effect but did not respond to e-mails seeking details.

Nearly all of the money for the program will go to two defense contractors building the Ares rocket, Alliant Techsystems (ATK) and Lockheed Martin, with ATK receiving the bulk. Defense contractors have been a consistent source of financial support for Shelby’s campaigns, contributing to him at higher rates than to other politicians in his state. In particular, Shelby’s 2010 reelection campaign was the top recipient of funds from ATK’s PAC, receiving the maximum $10,000. And the company’s employees appear to have given more to Shelby than to any other politician in the 2010 election cycle.

Shelby certainly has a flair for the dramatic when it comes to extracting pork money for defense contractors in his state. In a “nearly unprecedented” move in February, Shelby placed a blanket hold on every single presidential nominees being considered by the Senate — more than 70 in total, including “top Intelligence officers at the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security as well as the number three civilian at the Pentagon” — in order to pressure to Obama administration to do the bidding of Northrop Grumman on a $40 billion contract for which they were being considered.

One of the hilarious aspects of KoolAid Party derring-do will be butting head-to-head with the Republican establishment over serious money. That is, after all, what it’s about for Republicans and most Democrats.

True Believers will continue to funnel their dollars and beliefs to cynical politicians who will take every penny, add it to the larger pile coming from corporate treasuries and carry on as they feel they are so ordained from on high. The seat of political power ain’t moving from Wall Street to Main Street. Not yet.

Ila with her parents – in November

A nine-year-old East Timorese girl, Ila Amaral, has died because no Australian hospital would give her a life-saving operation.

For more than 12 months Dan Murphy, a doctor who runs a clinic for the poor in Dili, tried to convince Australian hospitals to accept her for surgery to correct her defective mitral heart valve.

“I blame myself first – I was unable to find the words to make things move for her,” Dr Murphy told the Herald by telephone from the Bairo Pite Clinic, where Ila died last week.

A Victorian cardiologist, Noel Bayley, examined Ila in Dili in November. He said she needed open heart surgery. A cardiac team from Sydney had offered to travel to East Timor to perform the operation but permission to use local facilities was refused by Timorese authorities.

Dr Murphy appealed to the US Navy to be allowed to use one of the 12 operating rooms on the hospital ship USN Mercy when it was in Dili late last year but that was also refused.

“The navy people didn’t want to allow the operation … because of the negative publicity if it didn’t go well and she died,” he said.

After failing to get a hospital in Australia to accept Ila, Dr Murphy appealed to others in the US and then a small cardiac hospital that is opening in Vietnam.

“All in all. a massive effort for something ridiculously simple as correcting a small girl’s problem failed,” he said…

Thousands of Australians donated to a fund to pay for the surgery; but, no hospital in Oz could – or would – shortcut the red tape standing in the way of her operation. The government was no help. Hospital administrators were no help.

Ila Amarai has died.