Missed Opportunity for Peace

With the recent prisoner exchange between Hamas and the Israeli government - that saw Gilad Shalit return back home and with the return of 1,027 Palestinian men and woman, many people are scratching their heads as how the Israeli government who regard Hamas as a terrorist organization and not representatives of the Palestinian people, bargain with them and not the moderate Fatah Palestinian Authority based in the West Bank whom the whole world considers the 'real' representative faction of the Palestinian people.

Such a prisoner exchange deal with the help of Egypt really uplifted the image of Hamas and not Fatah. Also strange is that Marwan Barghouti Barghouti - "one of the most forceful proponents of a peaceful solution of the Israel-Palestine conflict,...has made his position abundantly clear from the Israeli jail where he serves five life sentences for his involvement in a number of terrorist attacks during the Second Intifada. He has repeatedly rejected further violence against Israel and believes that the two-state solution is the only way forward."

I believe Israel not only did dropped the ball but shows they really do not want lasting peace otherwise by freeing Barghouti, a real chance for peace could have been achieved. Israel`s endgame is not clear but their intentions are cloudy and shady. How long they want to drag this along for? The Palestinian generations are rising up and growing in numbers and will demographically overtake Israel. A two-state solution has to occur and cannot wait. Legitimate leaders for peace has to be released and their voices heard.

The missed opportunity to free Marwan Barghouti

For Netanyahu, the greatest danger is a strong Palestinian leader who unifies the Palestinian people behind the two-state solution.

By Carlo Strenger
Haaretz

Published 15:52 28.Oct.11

After the great joy of seeing Gilad Shalit back home, many questions have been asked: will caving in to Hamas lead to further abductions? Hasn’t the Shalit deal strengthened hardline Hamas at the expense of pragmatic Fatah? Could Israel have done this earlier?

A New York Times editorial asked why Netanyahu is able to negotiate and cut a deal with the extremist Hamas, but not with the pragmatic Fatah. But there is an even more urgent question that, for some reason, was almost not addressed: Why did Israel miss the golden opportunity to let Marwan Barghouti out of prison?

	Jailed Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti appearing in court in Tel Aviv in 2002.
	Photo by: Archive / AP

Barghouti is one of the most forceful proponents of a peaceful solution of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and he has made his position abundantly clear from the Israeli jail where he serves five life sentences for his involvement in a number of terrorist attacks during the Second Intifada. He has repeatedly rejected further violence against Israel and believes that the two-state solution is the only way forward.

Most importantly, a number of polls have showed that Barghouti is the most popular potential contender for the presidency of the Palestinian Authority. He would win with a great margin if he ran against Ismail Haniyeh, and could be a strong unifier of all Palestinian camps.

Ostensibly, Israel should have a strong interest in liberating Barghouti: Abbas is now 76 years old; his political career is coming to an end, and Barghouti is the only strong candidate who could continue Abbas’s work towards implementing the two-state solution. He would strengthen Fatah at the expense of Hamas.

So why didn’t the Netanyahu government liberate Barghouti in the Shalit deal? This would have been a unique opportunity. It would not have required the dramatic act of a presidential pardon that has been suggested in the past and Israel would have gained a strong and reliable partner for negotiation in the future.

The answer, I think, is simple, and also applies to the NYT editorial’s question why Netanyahu can cut a deal with Hamas, but not with Fatah: Netanyahu doesn’t want the two-state solution, because believes that it is dangerous to Israel’s long-term survival.

Netanyahu does not state these views openly now, because this would put him on head-on confrontation with the international community. Hence he pays lip service to the two-state solution while doing everything to prevent its implementation.

Ultimately, Netanyahu and Hamas have one common interest: to keep pragmatic Fatah weak. This is why Hamas didn’t insist on including Barghouti in the Shalit deal. Its leadership knows that Barghouti would give Fatah a resounding victory in the next elections, and therefore prefers him in prison.

So does Netanyahu. The greatest danger for him is a strong Palestinian leader who unifies the Palestinian people behind the two-state solution. If Barghouti would be elected Palestinian president with a strong mandate, and would state his commitment to the two-state solution clearly Netanyahu’s true colors would be exposed both to the Israeli electorate and to the international community.

Netanyahu has, time and again, said that he doesn’t believe in a territorially contiguous Palestinian state. He is entitled to his views, but he should be required to make clear that he is leading Israel down a path that will destroy the two-state solution forever. He should have the integrity to state his own long-term vision that seems to be one bi-national state west of the Jordan. Because no Palestinian leader will ever accept what Netanyahu, at most, is willing to concede: a number of disconnected enclaves around the West Bank’s major population centers, some form of Bantustan-like entity; but not a viable state.

Netanyahu has been playing hide-and-seek both with the international community and with Israel’s electorate. Along the way he has driven Israel into unprecedented isolation.

If he does so out of deeply held beliefs, and not just for political survival, he should have the decency to tell the world and Israel’s electorate who he is: an ideological right-winger with an apocalyptic worldview. Then, at least, the world will know whom they are dealing with; and Israelis will have to decide, whether they want to live on the sword in a pariah state forever, or whether they want to elect a leadership that can lead Israel towards peace.

Article link: http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/strenger-than-fiction/the-missed-opportunity-to-free-marwan-barghouti-1.392512

Col. Moammar Gaddhafi: One Man with Courage

Images courtesy of libyasos.blogspot.com - please visit for all current news and info on the Green Jamahiriyah

MOAMMAR AL GADDAFI: THIS IS MY WILL ...CONTINUE THE RESISTANCE, FIGHT ANY FOREIGN AGGRESSOR AGAINST LIBYA...

(Libyasos.blogspot.com)

This is my will. I, Muammar bin Mohammad bin Abdussalam bi Humayd bin Abu Manyar bin Humayd bin Nayil al Fuhsi Gaddafi, do swear that there is no other God but Allah and that Mohammad is God's Prophet, peace be upon him. I pledge that I will die as Sunni Muslim.

When I die, I would like to be buried according to Muslim rituals, in the clothes I was wearing at the time of my death and my body unwashed, in the cemetery of Sirte, next to my family and patriots.

I would like that my family, especially women and children, be treated well after my death. The Libyan people should protect Libyan identity, achievements, history and the honourable image of its ancestors and heroes. The Libyans should not relinquish the sacrifices of the free and honorable people.

I call on Libyans to continue the resistance, and fight any foreign aggression against Libya, today, tomorrow and always.

Let the free people of the world know that we could have bargained over and sold out ourselves in return for a temporary personal security, but we chose to defend ourselves and confront the enemy in the name of duty and honour.

Even if we do not win immediately, we will give a lesson to future generations that choosing to protect the nation is an honour and selling it out is the greatest betrayal that history will remember forever despite the attempts of traitors to tell you otherwise, traitors will never manage to forge history, no matter how hard they tried.

Peace be upon all the just and honorable Libyans and friends of Libyan Jamahyria, who supported us even in their hearts.

The Forgotten Black Pharaohs of Egypt

The Black Pharaohs

An ignored chapter of history tells of a time when kings from deep in Africa conquered ancient Egypt.

By Robert Draper, National Geographic

published February 2008
National Geographic Contributing Writer
Photograph by Kenneth Garrett

In the year 730 B.C., a man by the name of Piye decided the only way to save Egypt from itself was to invade it. Things would get bloody before the salvation came.

“Harness the best steeds of your stable,” he ordered his commanders. The magnificent civilization that had built the great pyramids had lost its way, torn apart by petty warlords. For two decades Piye had ruled over his own kingdom in Nubia, a swath of Africa located mostly in present-day Sudan. But he considered himself the true ruler of Egypt as well, the rightful heir to the spiritual traditions practiced by pharaohs such as Ramses II and Thutmose III. Since Piye had probably never actually visited Lower Egypt, some did not take his boast seriously. Now Piye would witness the subjugation of decadent Egypt firsthand—“I shall let Lower Egypt taste the taste of my fingers,” he would later write.

North on the Nile River his soldiers sailed. At Thebes, the capital of Upper Egypt, they disembarked. Believing there was a proper way to wage holy wars, Piye instructed his soldiers to purify themselves before combat by bathing in the Nile, dressing themselves in fine linen, and sprinkling their bodies with water from the temple at Karnak, a site holy to the ram-headed sun god Amun, whom Piye identified as his own personal deity. Piye himself feasted and offered sacrifices to Amun. Thus sanctified, the commander and his men commenced to do battle with every army in their path.

By the end of a yearlong campaign, every leader in Egypt had capitulated—including the powerful delta warlord Tefnakht, who sent a messenger to tell Piye, “Be gracious! I cannot see your face in the days of shame; I cannot stand before your flame, I dread your grandeur.” In exchange for their lives, the vanquished urged Piye to worship at their temples, pocket their finest jewels, and claim their best horses. He obliged them. And then, with his vassals trembling before him, the newly anointed Lord of the Two Lands did something extraordinary: He loaded up his army and his war booty, and sailed southward to his home in Nubia, never to return to Egypt again.

When Piye died at the end of his 35-year reign in 715 B.C., his subjects honored his wishes by burying him in an Egyptian-style pyramid, with four of his beloved horses nearby. He was the first pharaoh to receive such entombment in more than 500 years. A pity, then, that the great Nubian who accomplished these feats is literally faceless to us. Images of Piye on the elaborate granite slabs, or stelae, memorializing his conquest of Egypt have long since been chiseled away. On a relief in the temple at the Nubian capital of Napata, only Piye’s legs remain. We are left with a single physical detail of the man—namely, that his skin was dark.

Piye was the first of the so-called black pharaohs—a series of Nubian kings who ruled over all of Egypt for three-quarters of a century as that country’s 25th dynasty. Through inscriptions carved on stelae by both the Nubians and their enemies, it is possible to map out these rulers’ vast footprint on the continent. The black pharaohs reunified a tattered Egypt and filled its landscape with glorious monuments, creating an empire that stretched from the southern border at present-day Khartoum all the way north to the Mediterranean Sea. They stood up to the bloodthirsty Assyrians, perhaps saving Jerusalem in the process.

Until recently, theirs was a chapter of history that largely went untold. Only in the past four decades have archaeologists resurrected their story—and come to recognize that the black pharaohs didn’t appear out of nowhere. They sprang from a robust African civilization that had flourished on the southern banks of the Nile for 2,500 years, going back at least as far as the first Egyptian dynasty.

Today Sudan’s pyramids—greater in number than all of Egypt’s—are haunting spectacles in the Nubian Desert. It is possible to wander among them unharassed, even alone, a world away from Sudan’s genocide and refugee crisis in Darfur or the aftermath of civil war in the south. While hundreds of miles north, at Cairo or Luxor, curiosity seekers arrive by the busload to jostle and crane for views of the Egyptian wonders, Sudan’s seldom-visited pyramids at El Kurru, Nuri, and Meroë stand serenely amid an arid landscape that scarcely hints of the thriving culture of ancient Nubia.

Now our understanding of this civilization is once again threatened with obscurity. The Sudanese government is building a hydroelectric dam along the Nile, 600 miles upstream from the Aswan High Dam, which Egypt constructed in the 1960s, consigning much of lower Nubia to the bottom of Lake Nasser (called Lake Nubia in Sudan). By 2009, the massive Merowe Dam should be complete, and a 106-mile-long lake will flood the terrain abutting the Nile’s Fourth Cataract, or rapid, including thousands of unexplored sites. For the past nine years, archaeologists have flocked to the region, furiously digging before another repository of Nubian history goes the way of Atlantis.

The ancient world was devoid of racism. At the time of Piye’s historic conquest, the fact that his skin was dark was irrelevant. Artwork from ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome shows a clear awareness of racial features and skin tone, but there is little evidence that darker skin was seen as a sign of inferiority. Only after the European powers colonized Africa in the 19th century did Western scholars pay attention to the color of the Nubians’ skin, to uncharitable effect.

Explorers who arrived at the central stretch of the Nile River excitedly reported the discovery of elegant temples and pyramids—the ruins of an ancient civilization called Kush. Some, like the Italian doctor Giuseppe Ferlini—who lopped off the top of at least one Nubian pyramid, inspiring others to do the same—hoped to find treasure beneath. The Prussian archaeologist Richard Lepsius had more studious intentions, but he ended up doing damage of his own by concluding that the Kushites surely “belonged to the Caucasian race.”

Even famed Harvard Egyptologist George Reisner—whose discoveries between 1916 and 1919 offered the first archaeological evidence of Nubian kings who ruled over Egypt—besmirched his own findings by insisting that black Africans could not possibly have constructed the monuments he was excavating. He believed that Nubia’s leaders, including Piye, were light-skinned Egypto-Libyans who ruled over the primitive Africans. That their moment of greatness was so fleeting, he suggested, must be a consequence of the same leaders intermarrying with the “negroid elements.”

For decades, many historians flip-flopped: Either the Kushite pharaohs were actually “white,” or they were bumblers, their civilization a derivative offshoot of true Egyptian culture. In their 1942 history, When Egypt Ruled the East, highly regarded Egyptologists Keith Seele and George Steindorff summarized the Nubian pharaonic dynasty and Piye’s triumphs in all of three sentences—the last one reading: “But his dominion was not for long.”

The neglect of Nubian history reflected not only the bigoted worldview of the times, but also a cult-like fascination with Egypt’s achievements—and a complete ignorance of Africa’s past. “The first time I came to Sudan,” recalls Swiss archaeologist Charles Bonnet, “people said: ‘You’re mad! There’s no history there! It’s all in
Egypt!’ ”

That was a mere 44 years ago. Artifacts uncovered during the archaeological salvage campaigns as the waters rose at Aswan in the 1960s began changing that view. In 2003, Charles Bonnet’s decades of digging near the Nile’s Third Cataract at the abandoned settlement of Kerma gained international recognition with the discovery of seven large stone statues of Nubian pharaohs. Well before then, however, Bonnet’s labors had revealed an older, densely occupied urban center that commanded rich fields and extensive herds, and had long profited from trade in gold, ebony, and ivory. “It was a kingdom completely free of Egypt and original, with its own construction and burial customs,” Bonnet says. This powerful dynasty rose just as Egypt’s Middle Kingdom declined around 1785 B.C. By 1500 B.C. the Nubian empire stretched between the Second and Fifth Cataracts.

Revisiting that golden age in the African desert does little to advance the case of Afrocentric Egyptologists, who argue that all ancient Egyptians, from King Tut to Cleopatra, were black Africans. Nonetheless, the saga of the Nubians proves that a civilization from deep in Africa not only thrived but briefly dominated in ancient times, intermingling and sometimes intermarrying with their Egyptian neighbors to the north. (King Tut’s own grandmother, the 18th-dynasty Queen Tiye, is claimed by some to be of Nubian heritage.)

The Egyptians didn’t like having such a powerful neighbor to the south, especially since they depended on Nubia’s gold mines to bankroll their dominance of western Asia. So the pharaohs of the 18th dynasty (1539-1292 B.C.) sent armies to conquer Nubia and built garrisons along the Nile. They installed Nubian chiefs as administrators and schooled the children of favored Nubians at Thebes. Subjugated, the elite Nubians began to embrace the cultural and spiritual customs of Egypt—venerating Egyptian gods, particularly Amun, using the Egyptian language, adopting Egyptian burial styles and, later, pyramid building. The Nubians were arguably the first people to be struck by “Egyptomania.”

Egyptologists of the latter 19th and early 20th centuries would interpret this as a sign of weakness. But they had it wrong: The Nubians had a gift for reading the geopolitical tea leaves. By the eighth century B.C., Egypt was riven by factions, the north ruled by Libyan chiefs who put on the trappings of pharaonic traditions to gain legitimacy. Once firmly in power, they toned down the theocratic devotion to Amun, and the priests at Karnak feared a godless outcome. Who was in a position to return Egypt to its former state of might and sanctity?

The Egyptian priests looked south and found their answer—a people who, without setting foot inside Egypt, had preserved Egypt’s spiritual traditions. As archaeologist Timothy Kendall of Northeastern University puts it, the Nubians “had become more Catholic than the pope.”

Under Nubian rule, Egypt became Egypt again. When Piye died in 715 B.C., his brother Shabaka solidified the 25th dynasty by taking up residence in the Egyptian capital of Memphis. Like his brother, Shabaka wed himself to the old pharaonic ways, adopting the throne name of the 6th-dynasty ruler Pepi II, just as Piye had claimed the old throne name of Thutmose III. Rather than execute his foes, Shabaka put them to work building dikes to seal off Egyptian villages from Nile floods.

Shabaka lavished Thebes and the Temple of Luxor with building projects. At Karnak he erected a pink granite statue depicting himself wearing the Kushite crown of the double uraeus—the two cobras signifying his legitimacy as Lord of the Two Lands. Through architecture as well as military might, Shabaka signaled to Egypt that the Nubians were here to stay.

To the east, the Assyrians were fast building their own empire. In 701 B.C., when they marched into Judah in present-day Israel, the Nubians decided to act. At the city of Eltekeh, the two armies met. And although the Assyrian emperor, Sennacherib, would brag lustily that he “inflicted defeat upon them,” a young Nubian prince, perhaps 20, son of the great pharaoh Piye, managed to survive. That the Assyrians, whose tastes ran to wholesale slaughter, failed to kill the prince suggests their victory was anything but total.

In any event, when the Assyrians left town and massed against the gates of Jerusalem, that city’s embattled leader, Hezekiah, hoped his Egyptian allies would come to the rescue. The Assyrians issued a taunting reply, immortalized in the Old Testament’s Book of II Kings: “Thou trustest upon the staff of this bruised reed [of] Egypt, on which if a man lean, it will go into his hand, and pierce it: So is Pharaoh king of Egypt unto all that trust on him.”

Then, according to the Scriptures and other accounts, a miracle occurred: The Assyrian army retreated. Were they struck by a plague? Or, as Henry Aubin’s provocative book, The Rescue of Jerusalem, suggests, was it actually the alarming news that the aforementioned Nubian prince was advancing on Jerusalem? All we know for sure is that Sennacherib abandoned the siege and galloped back in disgrace to his kingdom, where he was murdered 18 years later, apparently by his own sons.

The deliverance of Jerusalem is not just another of ancient history’s sidelights, Aubin asserts, but one of its pivotal events. It allowed Hebrew society and Judaism to strengthen for another crucial century—by which time the Babylonian king Nebuchadrezzar could banish the Hebrew people but not obliterate them or their faith. From Judaism, of course, would spring Christianity and Islam. Jerusalem would come to be recast, in all three major monotheistic religions, as a city of a godly significance.

It has been easy to overlook, amid these towering historical events, the dark-skinned figure at the edge of the landscape—the survivor of Eltekeh, the hard-charging prince later referred to by the Assyrians as “the one accursed by all the great gods”: Piye’s son Taharqa.

So sweeping was Taharqa’s influence on Egypt that even his enemies could not eradicate his imprint. During his rule, to travel down the Nile from Napata to Thebes was to navigate a panorama of architectural wonderment. All over Egypt, he built monuments with busts, statues, and cartouches bearing his image or name, many of which now sit in museums around the world. He is depicted as a supplicant to gods, or in the protective presence of the ram deity Amun, or as a sphinx himself, or in a warrior’s posture. Most statues were defaced by his rivals. His nose is often broken off, to foreclose him returning from the dead. Shattered as well is the uraeus on his forehead, to repudiate his claim as Lord of the Two Lands. But in each remaining image, the serene self-certainty in his eyes remains for all to see.

His father, Piye, had returned the true pharaonic customs to Egypt. His uncle Shabaka had established a Nubian presence in Memphis and Thebes. But their ambitions paled before those of the 31-year-old military commander who received the crown in Memphis in 690 B.C. and presided over the combined empires of Egypt and Nubia for the next 26 years.

Taharqa had ascended at a favorable moment for the 25th dynasty. The delta warlords had been laid low. The Assyrians, after failing to best him at Jerusalem, wanted no part of the Nubian ruler. Egypt was his and his alone. The gods granted him prosperity to go with the peace. During his sixth year on the throne, the Nile swelled from rains, inundating the valleys and yielding a spectacular harvest of grain without sweeping away any villages. As Taharqa would record in four separate stelae, the high waters even exterminated all rats and snakes. Clearly the revered Amun was smiling on his chosen one.

Taharqa did not intend to sit on his profits. He believed in spending his political capital. Thus he launched the most audacious building campaign of any pharaoh since the New Kingdom (around 1500 B.C.), when Egypt had been in a period of expansion. Inevitably the two holy capitals of Thebes and Napata received the bulk of Taharqa’s attention. Standing today amid the hallowed clutter of the Karnak temple complex near Thebes is a lone 62-foot-high column. That pillar had been one of ten, forming a gigantic kiosk that the Nubian pharaoh added to the Temple of Amun. He also constructed a number of chapels around the temple and erected massive statues of himself and of his beloved mother, Abar. Without defacing a single preexisting monument, Taharqa made Thebes his.

He did the same hundreds of miles upriver, in the Nubian city of Napata. Its holy mountain Jebel Barkal—known for its striking rock-face pinnacle that calls to mind a phallic symbol of fertility—had captivated even the Egyptian pharaohs of the New Kingdom, who believed the site to be the birthplace of Amun. Seeking to present himself as heir to the New Kingdom pharaohs, Taharqa erected two temples, set into the base of the mountain, honoring the goddess consorts of Amun. On Jebel Barkal’s pinnacle—partially covered in gold leaf to bedazzle wayfarers—the black pharaoh ordered his name inscribed.

Around the 15th year of his rule, amid the grandiosity of his empire-building, a touch of hubris was perhaps overtaking the Nubian ruler. “Taharqa had a very strong army and was one of the main international powers of this period,” says Charles Bonnet. “I think he thought he was the king of the world. He became a bit of a megalomaniac.”

The timber merchants along the coast of Lebanon had been feeding Taharqa’s architectural appetite with a steady supply of juniper and cedar. When the Assyrian king Esarhaddon sought to clamp down on this trade artery, Taharqa sent troops to the southern Levant to support a revolt against the Assyrian. Esarhaddon quashed the move and retaliated by crossing into Egypt in 674 B.C. But Taharqa’s army beat back its foes.

The victory clearly went to the Nubian’s head. Rebel states along the Mediterranean shared his giddiness and entered into an alliance against Esarhaddon. In 671 B.C. the Assyrians marched with their camels into the Sinai desert to quell the rebellion. Success was instant; now it was Esarhaddon who brimmed with bloodlust. He directed his troops toward the Nile Delta.

Taharqa and his army squared off against the Assyrians. For 15 days they fought pitched battles—“very bloody,” by Esarhaddon’s grudging admission. But the Nubians were pushed back all the way to Memphis. Wounded five times, Taharqa escaped with his life and abandoned Memphis. In typical Assyrian fashion, Esarhaddon slaughtered the villagers and “erected piles of their heads.” Then, as the Assyrian would later write, “His queen, his harem, Ushankhuru his heir, and the rest of his sons and daughters, his property and his goods, his horses, his cattle, his sheep, in countless numbers, I carried off to Assyria. The root of Kush I tore up out of Egypt.” To commemorate Taharqa’s humiliation, Esarhaddon commissioned a stela showing Taharqa’s son, Ushankhuru, kneeling before the Assyrian with a rope tied around his neck.

As it happened, Taharqa outlasted the victor. In 669 B.C. Esarhaddon died en route to Egypt, after learning that the Nubian had managed to retake Memphis. Under a new king, the Assyrians once again assaulted the city, this time with an army swollen with captured rebel troops. Taharqa stood no chance. He fled south to Napata and never saw Egypt again.

A measure of Taharqa’s status in Nubia is that he remained in power after being routed twice from Memphis. How he spent his final years is a mystery—with the exception of one final innovative act. Like his father, Piye, Taharqa chose to be buried in a pyramid. But he eschewed the royal cemetery at El Kurru, where all previous Kushite pharaohs had been laid to rest. Instead, he chose a site at Nuri, on the opposite bank of the Nile. Perhaps, as archaeologist Timothy Kendall has theorized, Taharqa selected the location because, from the vista of Jebel Barkal, his pyramid precisely aligns with the sunrise on ancient Egypt’s New Year’s Day, linking him in perpetuity with the Egyptian concept of rebirth.

Just as likely, the Nubian’s motive will remain obscure, like his people’s history.

Article link: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/02/black-pharaohs/robert-draper-text/1

The King with the Soul of Gold

From Abdullah Al Mamun`s FB wall post on GADDAFI FOREVER group,

Oct., 26 2011 3:02pm EST -

"Once upon a time there was a land where milk and honey flowed. But the king was too lazy to collect it and the people where very poor. Then one day a young man came and overthrew the lazy king. The young man began to build and develop the country. The people loved him and made him the new king. After many years the whole land shined a in golden glow. But then the warlords noticed the prosperity of the golden empire and made war with the king because they wanted the gold of his empire. The warlords destroyed the land and killed the king. After the king was dead, the warlords noticed that the golden country had lost its glory and golden glitter because the gold, the glory and the shine of the country was the soul of the King."

(Lyric by Marie Echelle)
Dedicated to Colonel Gaddhafi. Long live the fallen leader of the Green Jamahiriyah, Viva Africa, Viva Gaddhafi & Viva Green Libya Forever

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey`s Letter to the NTC Rats of Libya

Open Letter to the NTC in Libya
by: Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey 24. Oct. 2011
Pravda.ru

I cannot address you as "dear" because my human dignity refuses to allow me to address you with a term of endearment, given the inhumane, monstrous, demonic and despicable behaviour of your hordes over the last few months since February.

This letter does not mean that the struggle between good and evil in Libya is over, for evil is always evil and good always wins. The coming months and years will show very clearly what happens when foreign powers try to install bands of terrorists, rapists, racists, murderers, looters, arsonists, torturers and vandals by force.

To begin with, declaring a state of peace just because you have announced that Muammar Abu Minyar al-Qathafi was caught and killed is meaningless, for the people of Libya did not elect you, neither has there been any electoral process, nor by your behaviour have you deserved anything but deep and utter contempt by all decent human beings.

You see, to cohabit with and be considered as human beings, and not terrorist filth, you have to act like human beings and what we have seen from your gangs of rapists, torturers, murderers, arsonists, thieves, looters, racists and terrorists since February are nothing other than the most despicable outrages against the human condition and human dignity.

You see, to cohabit with and be considered as human beings, and not terrorist filth, you have to act like human beings and what we have seen from your gangs of rapists, torturers, murderers, arsonists, thieves, looters, racists and terrorists since February are nothing other than the most despicable outrages against the human condition and human dignity.

Therefore no human being will ever consider you as members of the international community unless there is a free and fair election in Libya which includes the right of the Jamahiriya system of government to present itself. Unofficial polls give to the Jamahiriya, if it is allowed to be a political party, something in the region of seventy per cent of the vote, which would constitute a massive overall and absolute majority and a crushing and humiliating defeat for yourselves, who would, upon the practice of universal suffrage, be swept from the face of the political scene. Should that be the case, would you disappear quietly?

In stating that a new era is to begin, you are saying that fighting has ceased. Why then did the international media concentrate of the celebrations yesterday in Benghazi and not in Tripoli, where only a handful of people turned out to the rally? And sooner or later you had better get the "Gaddafy dead" story right, because so far it is as risible as it is puerile:

We have him captured in a drainpipe in Sirte, dry, when the city was suffering its worst floods for decades; the murderer who is supposed to have shot him now says he found him in the street walking with children and girls, then shot him because he didn't feel like taking him alive. Then the other story was he died in a firefight between his supporters and your terrorists in Sirte, then in a firefight on a pick-up truck in Sirte, then he was lynched by your demonic mob, then he was bombed by NATO, then he was killed in an ambulance on his way to Misurat. Get the (f...reakin') city right, for God's sake! The body was at first declared not to be that of Muammar al-Qathafi (where is the scar from his appendicitis? What happened to his body hair? Why did a seventy-year-old body look like that of a 45-year-old? Why was his hair brown and not black?) and then half an hour later it was.

Conceding that the body was that of Muammar al-Qathafi, if only to allow his family to mourn in peace, then how dare you insult the good image of Islam and drag your religion down to the demonic level by parading a body in public - for children., above all, children, to see and take photographs of. What is wrong with you? Are you the spawn of Satan, or what? In fact it does not surprise me one bit because I know who you are, I know what you have done and I shall take pleasure in revealing to the world exactly what you are.

Destroying records will do you no good, they have already been copied and stored electronically and if you are ignorant enough to believe that these days a record ends with the destruction of a piece of paper, then you are even more pathetic than I thought.

As for the rest, we shall see what the Libyan people do and to what extent they accept you. Should the resistance continue, then it would appear that you are not that popular, would it not?

For the record, let us register here what Muammar al-Qathafi brought to Libya and let us judge you by what you bring. He inherited the poorest country in the world and turned it into one of the richest in Africa. He provided Libyans with literacy and a free education, and then paid for University grants. Ten per cent of Libyan students studied abroad, in Europe and the USA, paid by the state and with board and lodging paid so do not insult our intelligence by saying Gaddafi was an anti-West dictator. What dictator educates his people?

He gave each married couple 50,000 USD to settle down, he paid for half the first car, he provided interest-free bank loans, he provided free medical assistance, he built the world's most advanced irrigation system, bringing water to most of Libya, across the desert; he provided farmers with land, seeds, tools and instruction.

He inherited the poorest country in the world and gave it the highest Human Development Index in Africa. He helped free Africans from the yoke of imperialism and colonialism, he provided Africans with satellites to free them from crippling payments to western systems, he set up loans so that Africans would be freed of paying for the rest of eternity to foreign banks. He paid revenue from oil directly into the bank accounts of the Libyan people.

For these reasons Muammar al-Qathafi is a hero in the hearts and minds of millions of Libyans and in those of yet more countless millions around the world who have read his Green Book and who will take up his Legacy to study the Jamahiriya system and make his writings compulsory reading for all.

As for you, remember what you have inherited, and you will be measured for what happens to Libya. You will be measured for what you do to Libya's wealth, you will be judged for what you do to the institutions you received.

You got off to an excellent start. By declaring Sharia Law, you have alienated the vast majority of the population of the European Union - 500 million people, almost all of the United States of America, Canada... and by behaving the way you did, desecrating a human body in that way, acting like terrorists and murderers, then you have just insulted Islam to the core and do not deserve to represent Moslems.

Well, your political epitaph will be written by yourselves. I would bet that within a very short space of time, you all start fighting among yourselves and I would be surprised if many of you survive long enough to make any difference at all. What is it you say? Allahu Aklhbar. More fundamentally, your success or failure will depend on the people of Libya once your friends in terrorism, NATO, has given up and gone away, for Cameron is spending far too much of his taxpayers' money bombing Libyan children...but then again, you really could not care less could you?

What type of snivelling coward calls in foreign armies to fight for him? For the record, your bands of lunatics, fanatics and rapists would not have won one single engagement without NATO's massive terrorist bombing strikes, not one. So cut the false bravado, you know very well that once NATO goes and if the Libyan people do not want you, you will be destroyed within a fortnight.

That means two weeks, the same time it will take you to read this letter no doubt, if indeed you have not asked someone educated by Gaddafi to read it for you.

Remember, any electoral process without the Jamahiriya being given a chance is considered void in the hearts and minds of the international community. As for your partners, NATO, a lawsuit is being drawn up for them, for their war crimes. I shall then see whether I decide to draw one up against yourselves.

That would be all. I am not going to use a closing statement because I only close a letter with respect to whom I consider at least as fellow human beings.

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

Pravda.Ru

Walkthrough the Universe

SPACE.COM Presents:
The History & Structure of the Universe (Infographic) Image Album
by Karl Tate Date: 20 October 2011 Time: 11:01 AM ET

The Illuminated Universe Credit: Illustration: Karl Tate, based on a photo of Galaxy M74 (NASA, ESA, and Hubble Heritage Collaboration) and the engraving "Awakening of the Pilgrim" from "The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology" by Camille Flammarion, 1888

Our journey toward understanding the nature of our universe began thousands of years ago and had its roots in religion and philosophy. Around 2,300 years ago, careful observers in the Mediterranean deduced that the Earth must be round and must orbit the sun.

With no way for these early theories to be proved correct, however, they could not stand against the more flattering notion that the Earth was at the center of everything and that the cosmos existed to support human life and destiny.

When Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei invented the astronomical telescope some 1,900 years later, it was finally possible to make precise observations about the planets and stars. A science of the structure and history of the entire universe, called "cosmology," emerged. FIRST UP: What We Know Now>>

The Whole Enchilada

Credit: Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute

Our current understanding of the history of the universe is visualized above, with time running from left to right. We think that immediately after its creation at the time of the Big Bang, the universe expanded dramatically – an event called inflation.

Our Earth formed when the universe was around 9.2 billion years old. The expansion of the universe continues today and is accelerating. In this series of infographics, we will first look at the structure of the universe at larger and larger scales and find out a little about how we came to our current understanding of it. In the second part of our sequence, we will begin with the Big Bang and move forward in time to see how the universe has evolved to the present day. NEXT: First Stop, Earth>>

The Earth Is Round

Credit: Earth image: NASA; Eratosthenes portrait: unknown artist

Our first stop is the planet we call home. The knowledge that the Earth is shaped like a ball is actually quite old.

About 2,500 years ago, Greek travelers reported that different constellations were visible in the sky when one went far to the north or south. Keen observers also would have noticed that during an eclipse of the moon, the shadow cast by the Earth has a round edge. A few centuries later, the scholar Eratosthenes estimated the size of the Earth by noting the difference between the lengths of shadows cast by the sun in locations a few hundred miles apart.

By assuming that the sun was so far away that its rays of light were parallel, Eratosthenes could use simple geometry to calculate the circumference of the Earth. It is not known how accurate his measurement was, but it may have been off from the true figure by no more than a few percentage points. NEXT: The Solar System>>

Earth Is a Planet

Credit: Karl Tate, SPACE.com; Johannes Kepler portrait: unknown artist

Now we pull back to see the Earth in the context of the inner solar system. Early ideas about the movements of the sun, Earth and planets were derived from theological, astrological and philosophical notions of how God must have ordered the world.

Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus caused an uproar in the mid-1500s by suggesting the Earth moved around the sun and not, as leaders of Christianity taught, the sun around the Earth. For centuries the planets were thought to move because they were embedded in nested "crystal spheres" that rotated around a central point.

However, it was noted in the 16th century that comets moved in such a way that would crash them through those crystal spheres. Replacing the spheres was the idea of "epicycles," circles superimposed on circles, mathematically influencing each other to result in the observed planetary motions.

Finally, in 1609, German mathematician Johannes Kepler published his theories of planetary motion, which established that bodies in our solar system move in orbits shaped like ovals rather than circles. NEXT: Planets Are Other Worlds>>

The Planets Are Worlds

Credit: Karl Tate, SPACE.com; Galileo Galilei: portrait by Ottavio Leoni

From the earliest eras of human pre-history, the entire universe was thought to encompass only the elements visible to the naked eye: Earth, its moon and sun, five points of light that moved and were called "planets," plus a distant sphere upon which the stars and the glowing band of the Milky Way were embedded.

Theories of astrology and, later, astronomy were devised to explain the movements of these celestial objects, but their true nature could only be guessed at. When in 1609 the Italian astronomer Galileo finally trained a crude telescope on the heavens, he discovered that the planets were other worlds. Several of these worlds were found to have moons of their own.

With the aid of the telescope, previously unknown planets were discovered in our solar system: Uranus in 1781 and Neptune in 1846. With the telescope it became possible to study smaller bodies such as comets and asteroids, and also the stars and nebulas on the distant celestial sphere. NEXT: A Sea of Stars>>

The Stars Are Suns

Credit: Diagram of local stars: Karl Tate, based on public domain data plot; Friedrich Bessel portrait: Christian Albrecht Jensen

In the 17th century, the invention of the telescope by Galileo and the discovery of the laws of motion by Kepler prompted the realization that stars were just like the sun, all obeying the same laws of physics. In the 19th century, spectroscopy — the study of the wavelengths of light that are emitted by objects — made it possible to investigate the gases that stars are made of.

Scientists also figured out in the 19th century how to measure the distances to stars. When an object is viewed from different vantage points, the object appears to shift relative to the more distant background. The shift is called "parallax." As the Earth orbits the sun, it provides a changing vantage point for observing the stars. Since the stars are so much more distant than objects in our own solar system, the parallax shift is very small and hard to measure.

The German mathematician and astronomer Friedrich Bessel was the first to successfully measure the parallax of the star 61 Cygni and estimated its distance from Earth to be 10.4 light-years. (Later estimates adjusted this distance to 11.4 light-years.) NEXT: The Galaxy and Dark Matter>>

A Galaxy Held Together by Dark Matter

Credit: Milky Way Galaxy map: Robert Hurt; Fritz Zwicky photo via University of Virginia Dept. of Astronomy

The layout of our galaxy is difficult to figure out from our vantage point, which is embedded in it. By studying the shapes of distant galaxies and carefully measuring the objects that we see in our own galaxy, we have inferred that ours is a barred-spiral galaxy.

A central bar-shaped core composed of stars (and harboring an extremely large black hole) is surrounded by spiraling arms, also formed of stars as well as gas and dust. We are located in a spur, or branch, that stretches between major spiral arms. The exact configuration of spiral arms is still debated by astronomers, but a recent survey found that our Milky Way galaxy has two major arms, which branch out into four arms toward the outside.

The spiral arms of our galaxy are thought to be a kind of density wave that travels around the flat disk. Material bunches up, and stars are formed along the arms. Everything in the galaxy orbits around its center, and the arms are not solid structures. Our solar system travels into and out of the spiral arms as it orbits.

While studying the rotation of galaxies, it was noted that they do not rotate as we would expect them to based on the gravitational pull of the matter we can see. Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky suggested in 1934 that there must be a large amount of invisible, or "dark," matter present, making spiral galaxies more massive than they appear.

Since that time astrophysicists have searched for this dark matter, often speculating that it might consist of exotic particles unlike anything we know on Earth. Current estimates show that our universe is mostly composed of unknown forms of dark matter and dark energy, with familiar atoms being only a tiny fraction of the total. NEXT: Galaxies Filled With Stars>>

Galaxies Are Made of Stars

Credit: Milky Way Galaxy map: Robert Hurt; Edwin Hubble photo via NASA

The Milky Way, a faint ribbon of light that spans the sky, has been known throughout history. Its true nature was not discovered until the 17th century, when Galileo Galilei studied the Milky Way with a telescope and determined that the ribbon was composed of a multitude of stars. Small fuzzy patches of light can be seen in the sky; these were called nebulae.

By the 18th century it was speculated that the Milky Way was a huge system of stars bound together by gravity, but the nature of the nebulae remained unknown. They could have been small clouds of gas within the Milky Way, or perhaps they were external to our galaxy. It could not be proved whether or not the Milky Way constituted the entire universe.

Using the newly constructed 100-inch telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory in California, American astronomer Edwin Hubble studied stars called Cepheids, which brighten and dim in a pattern related to their intrinsic brightness, making them suitable for use as a yardstick in estimating cosmic distances. In a 1925 paper, Hubble concluded that some of the nebulae were external to the Milky Way, and were giant galaxies in their own right, revealing a universe much larger than our own home galaxy. NEXT: Universe Gets Organized>>

Massive Organization

Credit: Diagram: Karl Tate based on NASA illustration; Brent Tully photo via Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii

It was first noticed in the latter half of the 19th century that there is a large group of nebulas in the constellation Virgo. Later it was discovered that these nebulae are separate galaxies external to our Milky Way.

One hundred years later, astronomers speculated that the apparent alignment of these galaxies might indicate a higher level of cosmic structure, variously dubbed a "metagalaxy" or "supercluster." In 1982 astronomer R. Brent Tully published an analysis of the distances to the supercluster member galaxies, showing that they were indeed part of a larger organization.

The distances were determined by noting the redshift of the spectra of light from the galaxies. (See "Time Zero: The Big Bang" later in this gallery for a fuller explanation of redshift.) NEXT: Largest Structures in Space>>

The Largest Structures in Space

Credit: Credit: 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey, Anglo-Australian Observatory; Margaret Geller photo via Harvard University Dept. of Astronomy

The largest structures that we know of are the galactic filaments – also called supercluster complexes – that surround vast voids in space. The galaxies in a filament are bound together by gravity.

When the first of these structures was discovered by Margaret Geller and John Huchra in 1989, it was dubbed "the Great Wall." A much larger structure, the "Sloan Great Wall," was discovered in 2003 by J. Richard Gott III and Mario Jurić.

Current research into the large-scale structure of the universe utilizes data gathered by redshift surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. These efforts use digital camera sensors to photograph regions of the sky, capturing millions of distant objects along with the data needed to map them in 3-D space. NEXT: The Farthest We Can See>>

The Farthest We Can See

Credit: Simulation of observable universe: Karl Tate, SPACE.com; Alan Guth photo via Brookhaven National Laboratory

The observable universe is everything that we can detect. It is a sphere 93 billion light-years in diameter, centered on Earth. We cannot perceive the entire universe at once, due to the slowness of the speed of light compared with the vast scale of the universe.

As we look out into space, we see objects as they were at earlier and earlier times in history. Also, because of the accelerating expansion of the universe, distant objects are much farther away than their age would have us think. For example, the edge of the observable universe is estimated to be about 46 billion light-years away, even though the universe itself is only 13.7 billion years old.

The true extent of the universe is unknown. It could be much bigger than the observable universe – perhaps even infinite in size. However, light from the most-distant regions would never be able to reach us; the space it must pass through is simply expanding too fast.

Our current picture of the observable universe owes a lot to American physicist Alan Guth, who in the 1980s worked out how a universe resembling our own might have emerged from the Big Bang event which created it. Next, we will reset the clock to time zero and see how the universe evolved from its beginning to today. NEXT: The Big Bang>>

The Big Bang: 13,750,000,000 years ago

Credit: Karl Tate, SPACE.com

In the early 20th century, Belgian astronomer and Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre calculated that the universe is expanding. By mathematically running the expansion backward, he theorized that everything in the universe once must have been compacted into a small, dense object, which he called "the primeval atom."

This atom exploded, an event that astronomer Fred Hoyle flippantly called "The Big Bang." The expansion of the universe explains why the light from distant objects is shifted toward the red end of the spectrum, a phenomenon called "redshift."

Just as the Doppler effect causes sound from moving vehicles to change pitch, redshift causes light from moving stars to change color as its wavelength gets stretched by expanding space. The farther an object is from Earth, the more the intervening space has expanded, and the more the object's light will have been shifted toward red.

American astronomer Edwin Hubble later proved with observations that redshift was indeed related to distance, and the correlation is now known as Hubble's law. NEXT: Universe's First Second>>

Earliest Fraction of a Second

Credit: Map of Cosmic Microwave Background temperature fluctuations from Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data; Alan Guth photo via Brookhaven National Laboratory

Astronomers in the 1970s had a problem understanding the early universe. When they probed deep space with radio telescopes, they discovered a faint background glow of microwave radiation.

Variations in the density of the microwave signal were interpreted as variations in the density of matter in the early universe. Surprisingly, the background glow of radiation was found to be uniform in every direction. This seemed unreasonable; scientists expected to find regions of space with different densities and temperatures, because these regions seemed too far apart to have evolved together.

American physicist Alan Guth proposed an explanation in 1980. He theorized that in the tiny fraction of time just following the Big Bang, the universe underwent extremely rapid expansion. In a flash, its volume increased by a factor of 10^78 (the number 10 followed by 78 zeroes). Almost immediately the universe cooled slightly and the event, called "inflation," was over.

The inflationary model explains why the universe appears uniform in all directions: Everything in it evolved together before inflation. It has other staggering implications, too: The part of space that we can see must be just a tiny patch in what must be a vast universe that we can never directly detect. NEXT: The First Three Minutes>>

0.001 Second to 3 Minutes After the Big Bang

Credit: Graphic: Karl Tate based on image of data plot from collision of gold ions, Brookhaven National Laboratory Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider

Following inflation, the cooling but still unimaginably hot universe experienced a phase transition. Elementary particles were created from a form of matter called quark-gluon plasma.

A thousandth of a second following the Big Bang, vast amounts of matter and antimatter annihilated each other (leaving behind the material that exists in the universe today). Within three minutes the temperature of the universe dropped to about a billion degrees, and atoms could begin to form, starting with the simplest elements: hydrogen and helium.

The quark-gluon plasma of the early universe is still theoretical and is thought to be possible because of a theory called Quantum Chromodynamics. American physicist Murray Gell-Mann was among the first to formulate this theory.

The basic nuclear particles – protons and neutrons – are thought to be made from still more-fundamental particles called "quarks," which are never found traveling alone except under very high temperatures like those that existed just after the Big Bang. Physicists are trying to re-create on Earth the plasma that is thought to have comprised the early universe; they are using particle accelerators to smash subatomic particles together at high energy. NEXT: 3 Minutes to 379,000 Years>>

3 Minutes to 379,000 Years After the Big Bang

Credit: NASA, ESADuring this period, the early universe was hot and opaque.

Starting at about 379,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe cooled enough so that light could separate from matter and travel freely. In short, the universe became transparent. This photo shows galaxy UDFy-38135539, one of the oldest and earliest galaxies yet found, appearing just after the Dark Age at about 480 million years after the Big Bang. NEXT: The First Billion Years>>

150 Million to 1 Billion Years After the Big Bang

Credit: Artist's conception of a quasar: NASA/ESA; Maarten Schmidt photo: California Institute of Technology

In the 1960s Dutch astronomer Maarten Schmidt identified strange deep-space objects, very bright in radio wavelengths, which he termed "quasi-stellar radio sources."

U.S. astrophysicist Hong-Yee Chiu named the phenomena "quasars." Quasars had been picked up in the 1950s by large Earth-bound antennas called radio telescopes. When Schmidt measured the quasars' distance by studying the redshift of their spectrum, what he found was astonishing. The objects were billions of light-years away, and therefore had to be incredibly bright to be detected on Earth.

Later study showed that the mysterious quasars were active galaxies that had formed very early in the history of the universe. Gravitational collapse had caused matter to coalesce, eventually forming giant black holes with the mass of billions of suns.

A black hole sits at the center of a quasar, collecting matter and heating it to become high-temperature plasma that can be shot out into huge jets traveling close to the speed of light.that light could separate from matter and travel freely. In short, the universe became transparent.

This photo shows galaxy UDFy-38135539, one of the oldest and earliest galaxies yet found, appearing just after the Dark Age at about 480 million years after the Big Bang. NEXT: The Universe, Age 9 Billion Years>>

9 Billion Years After the Big Bang

Credit: Artist's conception of a young solar system: NASA/JPL-California Institute of Technology; Albert Einstein photo via United States Library of Congress

The earliest stars formed when the universe was only 300 million years old. They were short-lived and supermassive, composed mostly of hydrogen and helium and containing no metals.

These first stars exploded into supernovas, and successive generations were created from the remains of the earlier suns. Analysis of the spectrum of the light from our sun shows that it is rich in metals, and therefore could have been created only following many generations of stars.

The sun's power source was a mystery until German physicist Albert Einstein worked out in 1905 that matter could be converted into energy, with his famous equation E=mc^2. In 1920 British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington suggested that the sun might be powered by a nuclear fusion reactor, generating heat and light energy by converting hydrogen into helium.

Study of the spectrum of light from the sun and other stars led to a confirmation that nuclear fusion processes created the atomic elements from which our world is composed. NEXT: The Modern Universe>>

The Universe Now

Credit: NASA

Scientists have put together an impressive picture of the origin, history and nature of our universe. However, we do not know everything there is to know. Many open questions remain in the fields of physics and cosmology.

For example:

What is dark matter, and does it actually exist?

Why does the universe's expansion seem to be accelerating?

What is the actual shape and size of the universe, and how many dimensions does it have?

What is the ultimate fate of the universe?

SOURCES: NASA, Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute, "Space, Our Final Frontier" by John Gribbin (2001), "The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn" by Lucio Russo (2004), "The Inflationary Universe" by Alan H. Guth (1997)

Ignominious end to Gaddafi

image: The Sun

Ignominious end for dictator Gaddafi as he is buried with his son Mutassim in unmarked desert grave at dawn
By DAILY MAIL REPORTER
Last updated at 5:55 PM on 25th October 2011

Muammar Gaddafi, who for 40 years ruled Libya with fear and violence, was unceremoniously buried at dawn today in an unmarked desert grave.

His inglorious end was witnessed by only two members of Libya's National Transitional Council, who were sworn never to reveal his secret resting place.

As the despot was buried with his son, Mutassim, reports claimed that his favourite son, Saif, was making a desperate bid for the Niger border.

Final Muslim prayers were said over the bodies by Khaled Tantoush, Gaddafi's personal cleric, who was arrested with him.

The rites were also attended by two of Gaddafi's cousins, Mansour Dhao Ibrahim, once leader of the feared People's Guard, and Ahmed Ibrahim.

All were captured with Gaddafi after their convoy was attacked by Nato war planes as they tried to flee Sirte, Gaddafi's home town, just after it had fallen.

Abdel Majid Mlegta, an NTC spokesman, said: 'The NTC officials were handed the body after the sheikh completed the early morning ceremony and are taking him somewhere very far away into the desert.'

'Only two trusted people were assigned to this secret mission,' he added. 'These are not guards, but very trusted NTC people.'

The funeral closed the book on Gaddafi's 42-year rule and the eight-month civil war to remove him, but did not silence international calls for an investigation into his brutal end...

(Click here to read the full article)

Boeing`s 787 DREAMLINER

The much anticipated 787 Dreamliner is here and the first maiden passenger voyage is slated for tomorrow (Wed., Oct., 26, 2011) by Japan`s All Nippon Airways, carrying 250 passengers from Tokyo to Hong Kong.

Considered the most advanced sophisticated piece of avionics to fly the open skies from Boeing, it was built with a "visionary design" to rival competitors in the aviation industry.

7 reasons the 787 Dreamliner is special

By Pamela Boykoff, CNN
11:59 AM EST, Tue October 25, 2011

The first All Nippon Airways (ANA) Boeing 787 Dreamliner is displayed during a press preview at Tokyo's Haneda airport on September 28.

(image CNN)
Hong Kong (CNN) -- Boeing's 787 Dreamliner makes its first passenger flight Wednesday, carrying about 250 passengers from Tokyo to Hong Kong on Japan's All Nippon Airways. Boeing has spent years and billions of dollars developing a plane with what it calls "visionary design." As the first customers prepare to fly on the Dreamliner, CNN looks at what sets the 787 apart from the planes before it.

1. It's Plastic (sort of)
The Dreamliner is made of 50% composite materials, carbon-fiber enforced polymers that are both lighter and more durable than traditional aluminum. Composite materials have been used before in passenger planes but never to this extent. They comprise both the wings and the fuselage of the 787. Most of the features listed below could not have been built in an airplane made mostly of traditional aluminum.

2. The Air Inside
The cabin pressure on the 787 is higher and the humidity higher than other airplanes. Basically, passengers on board will feel like they are at an altitude of 6,000 feet, 2,000 feet lower than a standard flight. The changes will cut down on passenger fatigue, dry eyes and headaches, Boeing said. They are made possible by the new material, which is less prone to corrosion and structural fatigue than traditional aluminum.

3. More Space
Boeing's Chief Pilot Randy Neville said he believed this is the first feature passengers will notice about the new plane. You are "not being squeezed into a tube," he said. "You'll have a wide open area." There is also more room for overhead luggage.

4. Fuel Efficiency
The 787 is 20% more fuel efficient than similarly-sized aircraft, a change which allows airlines to save money and deploy the plane on longer routes, Boeing said. "On an aircraft of that size, even a slight reduction in fuel burn makes a big difference to overall cost," said Paul Sheridan, Head of Risk Advisory at Ascend. Another plus, according to aviation experts, the longer range will allow carriers to introduce more point-to-point routes, so passengers will have more options and fewer layovers.

5. Intuitive Cockpit
Neville feels Boeing has worked hard to make operating the 787 as natural as possible for pilots. "The flight deck is laid out so it is very intuitive to operate all the controls," he said. One example: The Head-Up Display (HUD) used by pilots is displayed on glass, so they can see the data without having to lose sight of what's going on outside.

6. Bigger Windows
Clearly a case where bigger is bigger, the Dreamliner has windows that are 19 inches tall and 30% bigger than the on similarly-sized aircraft. Say goodbye to those plastic shades as well. The Dreamliner is the first commercial plane to have electronic dimmers at each seat. The flight attendants can also darken or lighten all the shades automatically, so never again will a small child wake up half the plane by deciding to let in a little sunlight.

7. Uniformity
Don't expect much difference from one Dreamliner to the next, Sheridan said. Boeing purposely limited the extent that carriers could customize the new plane in order to appeal to banks and leasing companies that are behind many purchases. If all the planes are similar, it's easier to hire them out to airlines or resell if needed.

Speared Mastodon Bone Reveals Earlier Human Development

(Images and diagrams are courtesy of NationalGeograpgic & Science/AAAS)

Scientists used DNA and radiocarbon dating to demonstrate that the point came from a mastodon bone shaped into a weapon by humans and used a startling 13,800 years ago. That's nearly 1000 years before the Clovis culture, long considered to be the first culture in the New World. - Pre-Clovis Mastodon Hunters Make a Point, Science 21 October 2011: Vol. 334 no. 6054 p. 302.

Speared Mastodon Bone Hints at Earlier Americans

National Geographic
by: Brian Handwerk, October 21, 2011

A newly analyzed mastodon rib bone shows that Native Americans were using bone-pointed weapons to take down big game nearly a thousand years earlier than thought, according to a new study.

Images of the rib in close-up (A) and as a whole (D) show a broken projectile point still stuck where a hunter drove it in 13,800 years ago. The weapon, also made of bone, can be seen in a digital reconstruction (B) and an x-ray image (C).

The rib was found near Manis, Washington State, in the late 1970s and has been an object of debate ever since. Radiocarbon analysis, DNA samples, genetics work, and other modern techniques recently revealed its true age, according to the study, published Friday in the journal Science.

The age of the rib could help rewrite human history in the Americas, where the first well-established culture has been thought to be the Clovis people, named for finds near Clovis, New Mexico.

"We're starting to put together kill sites, camp sites—the whole gamut of the kinds of sites you'd expect to find that show pre-Clovis people were" in North America, said study leader Michael Waters, director of Texas A&M University's Center for the Study of the First Americans.

"If you take these sites together, and also look at the modern genetic evidence we have, it starts pointing toward a story that suggests people entered what's now the Lower 48 United States around 15,000 years ago—well before Clovis."

Moammar Gaddhafi: LONG LIVE THE KING

(video courtesy of Inominex)

The Vatican Calls For a 'Central World Bank"

image: PrisonPlanet

Now the Vatican of all people, are calling for a global bank to manage the world`s currency...the same Vatican who they themselves are a global bank with huge reserves and assets that are unimaginable. There is more to the Vatican than meets the eye...and is playing directly into the hands of the globalist bankers and their cronies.

Vatican calls for global authority on economy, raps “idolatry of the market”

By Philip Pullella, Reuters
Mon Oct 24, 2011 9:08am EDT

The Vatican called on Monday for the establishment of a “global public authority” and a “central world bank” to rule over financial institutions that have become outdated and often ineffective in dealing fairly with crises. The document from the Vatican’s Justice and Peace department should please the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrators and similar movements around the world who have protested against the economic downturn.

“Towards Reforming the International Financial and Monetary Systems in the Context of a Global Public Authority,” was at times very specific, calling, for example, for taxation measures on financial transactions. “The economic and financial crisis which the world is going through calls everyone, individuals and peoples, to examine in depth the principles and the cultural and moral values at the basis of social coexistence,” it said.

It condemned what it called “the idolatry of the market” as well as a “neo-liberal thinking” that it said looked exclusively at technical solutions to economic problems. “In fact, the crisis has revealed behaviours like selfishness, collective greed and hoarding of goods on a great scale,” it said, adding that world economics needed an “ethic of solidarity” among rich and poor nations.

“If no solutions are found to the various forms of injustice, the negative effects that will follow on the social, political and economic level will be destined to create a climate of growing hostility and even violence, and ultimately undermine the very foundations of democratic institutions, even the ones considered most solid,” it said.

It called for the establishment of “a supranational authority” with worldwide scope and “universal jurisdiction” to guide economic policies and decisions.

Asked at a news conference if the document could become a manifesto for the movement of the “indignant ones”, who have criticised global economic policies, Cardinal Peter Turkson, head of the Vatican’s Justice and Peace department, said: “The people on Wall Street need to sit down and go through a process of discernment and see whether their role managing the finances of the world is actually serving the interests of humanity and the common good. “We are calling for all these bodies and organisations to sit down and do a little bit of re-thinking.”

Read the full story here.

RIP Col. Moammar Gaddafi

LONG LIVE THE GREEN JAMAHIRRIYAH, FOR TRUTH & JUSTICE TO PREVAIL AND DOWN WITH THE RATS AND TRAITORS

I don`t want to die, but if it needs to be, in order to keep this land, my people, all thousands, who are all my children then so be it...and I will fight till my last breath to keep our freedom."

- Col. Moammar Gaddafi, April 5, 2011

Who shot Gaddafi? New video shows blood pouring from dictator immediately before death but mystery surrounds coup de grace

Gaddafi's widow demands inquiry into death as new video emerges of moment dictator was dragged from hiding place

Eldest son Saif critically injured but 'fleeing across the desert' towards Niger

Gadhafi's autopsy reveals he was shot in head

Libya's most gruesome tourist attraction: Our man comes face-to-face with Gaddafi's battered and bloodied corpse

The Great Queen Nefertari (QV66)

From the burial tomb of Queen Nefertari, an ode dedicated to his love by Ramesses II

Ramesses II, who said of Nefertari - "the one for whom the sun shines," wrote:

My love is unique, no one can rival her for she is the most beautiful woman alive.

Just by passing, she has stolen my heart away.

Slender necked & breasted she is,

Her hair, the color of pure lapis.

Gold is nothing compared to her arms, but her fingers are like lotus flowers.

Her buttocks are full but her waist is narrow...

For she is the one for whom the sun shines...

...Alas... the eyes, the gateway to the splendid soul...

Image (CorbisImages): Queen Nefertari, the beloved wife of Ramses II, is depicted wearing a golden vulture's-wing headress and worshipping a group of sacred cattle in a wall painting in her tomb in the Valley of the Queens at Thebes, Egypt. The goddess Neith is depicted to the right of Nefertari. | Detail of: Mural Painting of Queen Nefertari in her Tomb in the Valley of the Queens.

Nefertari`s tomb (QV66, Valley of the Queens): (Egyptians.blogspot)

Video of Ramses II`s Great Royal wife Nefertari's tomb Qv66 in the Valley of Queens:

video courtesy of & uploaded by atharona`s channel (11/10/2010)

Video of Nefertari's Temple of Hathor:

video courtesy of & uploaded by atharona`s channel (11/10/2010)

So why are we in Uganda now?

“The US is...concerned about Chinese penetration in the region that they are going to gobble all the economical resources and earn influence on the regional governments. So the US maybe want to stop this Chinese advancement in central Africa...”(Eric Margolis, RT)


UGANDA: Soldier during a training course in the western Ugandan Army base of Bihanga. (AFP Photo/Marc Hofer) 

Strings attached: US in Uganda
RT News
Published: 19 October, 2011
Eric Margolis

The US denies an interest in Uganda’s oil, but there are many other reasons for its presence in the region. None of them altruistic, claims war correspondent Eric Margolis.

American “aid” to Uganda is being offered without any third-party help, which is a sure sign that the effort is for its own sake, rather than humanitarian reasons.
The White House is deploying a hundred troops in the African country with the official aim of helping the authorities in a fight against a guerilla group that has been dragging on for two decades.

But award-winning war correspondent Eric Margolis told RT that if Washington had humanitarian interests in mind it would not be going in alone.

Various interests of the US are to be found in Central Africa, states Margolis.
Firstly, it is the growing conflict in Somalia, with which the US is a close ally, the correspondent suggested. It may be also Kenya, another beneficiary of US military financing.

Ethiopia is an ally as well. The American presence in Africa also includes its base in the tiny East African nation of Djibouti, but most troops there are not on combat missions.

But an internal African problem may not be the sole attraction for the newly expanded US contingent in the region. It may be also linked to some kind of geopolitical game, Margolis continued.

“The US is also concerned about Chinese penetration in the region that they are going to gobble all the economical resources and earn influence on the regional governments. So the US maybe want to stop this Chinese advancement in central Africa,” he said.

Also the US defense secretary has claimed he is worried about the links between Uganda’s Lord Resistance Army and Al-Qaeda.
LRA is a guerrilla group accused of widespread atrocities across several countries, which began its attacks in Uganda more than 20 years ago. In 2003, the LRA had 3,000 armed troops and 2,000 people in support roles.

Many also think this is not the right time to get involved in a new foreign military expedition of a really marginal interest, because of the deep financial troubles in which the US now finds itself.

However, the fact that economic turmoil does not stop the Pentagon from a new operation can only mean it is highly interested in this new game.

One way or another, the US is going to aid the African country all alone, while it could be much more legitimate for them to find a third-party, uninterested ally, the correspondent suggested.

“It could be more legitimate, if the US did it in conjunction with disinterested nations – Russia, for example, or South Africa and Turkey. But the fact that they’re doing it on their own means they are doing it for the interests of their own policy,” Margolis said.

The first American troops already arrived in Uganda last week and will soon deploy elsewhere throughout the region once other nations in the area approve the action. Meanwhile, US military operations continue in Central Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere.

In June, the Pentagon moved to send nearly $45 million in military equipment to Uganda and Burundi, another country contributing in Somalia. The aid included four small drones, body armor and night-vision and communications gear, and is being used in the fight against al-Shabab.