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On August 27, fierce battles erupted in Tripoli's districts after the Seventh Brigade, an armed group based in Tarhouna, 65km southeast of the capital, launched a surprise offensive against rival militias. A truce was reached the next day but clashes resumed shortly after, forcing authorities to close Tripoli's only functioning airport. … On Monday, the social media website Facebook was blocked in Tripoli and the surrounding cities. Libyan utility LPTIC, which owns the two state-run telecoms firms, said in a statement that a lack of security had led to outages. Maintenance engineers were unable to reach some stations which had...

Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), asked Muammar Gaddafi to underwrite CAIR's efforts in the United States during a September 2009 audience with the Libyan dictator. According to an account of the meeting in a Libyan news website, Awad was joined by two other leading CAIR officials in praising Gaddafi's leadership and asking him to help underwrite a program to distribute 1 million copies of the Quran to government officials and the general public in America and to help start up a new foundation Awad was trying to launch

Can we ignore Sen. Obama's silence about Muammar Kaddafi? We know that Louis Farrakhan has said positive things about Barack Obama. And he's not the only one. This is the same Louis Farrakhan who has travelled to Libya to meet with and say positive things about Kaddafi, who has long-standing ties to terrorism. And that's not all. The former pastor at Obama's church, Jeremiah Wright, has not only said positive things about Farrakhan. In the 1980s, he went on a trip with Farrakhan to ... you guessed it, Libya, to meet with Kaddafi. With all of Obama's ties to Kaddafi...

TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has defended the use of landmines by weak countries countering aggression by stronger adversaries, and said the Ottawa treaty banning anti-personnel mines should be amended or scrapped. "Powerful countries do not need landmines to protect themselves. Mines are the means of self-defense of the weak countries," Gaddafi, whose country began a two-year term on the U.N. Security Council this month, said in a statement. Eighty percent of states have signed the 1997 convention banning antipersonnel mines. Libya, along with 37 other nations including the United States, China and Russia, has not signed the...

Columbia University’s Middle East Program had a very special guest for their conference today, noted Libyan strongman/babe magnet/erstwhile terrorist Muammar Gaddafi, who lectured them on democracy. NEW YORK (Reuters) - Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi lectured a U.S. audience on democracy on Thursday and said Libya is the only real democracy in the world. Via a video link, Gaddafi addressed an unprecedented gathering of U.S. and Libyan academics prompted by a thaw in relations since the former pariah state decided in 2003 to abandon nuclear weapons and took responsibility for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. He touted Libya’s political system as superior...

LONDON (Reuters) - Libya expects the United States to remove it soon from its list of state sponsors of terror, clearing a major obstacle to investment in some of the world's most coveted oilfields, a top Libyan official said on Wednesday. He was "positive and confident" the former pariah state would be wiped from the list, with the expected backing of the Oasis Group of U.S. oil firms that have just negotiated their return to fields they were forced to abandon in 1986. "I would expect logically they will be willing to put the right message across to the U.S....

Reprinted from NewsMax.com Monday, Jan. 16, 2006 12:38 a.m. ESTMu'ammar Qaddafi Urges Suicide Bombings Libyan leader Mu'ammar Qaddafi is urging his people to become suicide bombers as the best defense against an attack on his country by the U.S. or any other major power. In a rambling New Years Day address recently translated by the Middle Eastern Media Research Institute, the Libyan strongman told his people: "We don't need missiles, airplanes, tanks, or cannon in order to fight in Palestine or Iraq . . . If the enemy is a superpower like NATO, America, Russia or China, which occupies Libya,...

LIBYA’S COVERT RELATIONSHIP WITH CANADA Though the world, awestruck, is becoming accustomed to the idea of a moderate Mu’ammar Al-Qadhafi offering his friendship to the international community, Libya has maintained quieter ties with the West since the state was ostracized for terror in the 1980s. Canada has maintained relations with the pariah North African nation since the 1960s, when Al-Qadhafi set off the country’s populist “revolution.” From 1986 on, Canada, along with the U.N., the U.S., and other Western countries, imposed sanctions on the country following numerous Libya-sponsored terror attacks, including the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie,...

Taking bets - Gaddafi wins the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. Makes a speech in which he credits Al Gore for his change of heart.

TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Libya made clear on Saturday it wanted to come in from the cold after decades as a pariah state, and the United States and Britain promised to reward its decision to abandon banned weapons programs. Almost 15 years to the day since its agents brought down a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie, Muammar Gaddafi's state opened the prospect of an end to sanctions and a return of U.S. oil firms with a pledge on Friday to stop seeking weapons of mass destruction. Britain said it had been close to an atomic bomb. Some U.S. officials cautioned that...

MI6 hired Al Qaeda men to kill Gaddafi: ex-official By Martin Bright LONDON: The British government will this week go to unprecedented lengths to stop a renegade counter-intelligence officer, David Shayler, from making his most devastating claim yet : that the Libyan Islamic cell paid by British intelligence agents to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi in February 1996 were members of Al Qaeda. The Libyan cell is believed to have included one of Osama bin Laden's most trusted lieutenants, Anas al-Liby, who remains on the US government's most wanted list with a reward of $25 million for his capture. Al-Liby lived in...