TRIPOLI, Libya — Ousted Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's wife and other relatives fled to Algeria Monday, the Algerian foreign ministry said. - The Algerian government said Gadhafi's wife, daughter, two of his sons and their children entered the neighboring country on Monday. It did not say whether Gadhafi himself was with the family. It said the U.N. secretary-general and Security Council and the head of Libyan rebel National Transition Council were informed. The report came as battles raged on two sides of Sirte, the southern city that is the headquarters of Gadhafi's tribe and his regime's last major bastion. The rebels were consolidating control of Tripoli, the capital. Despite effectively ending his rule, the rebels have yet to find Gadhafi or his family members — something that has cast a pall of lingering uncertainty over the opposition's victory.

Al Jazeera: Gaddafi family members flee to Algeria
PressTV: 'Gaddafi, 2 sons in town south of Tripoli'

Taking away dead is a priority as Tripoli struggles with a shortage of medicine, water, fuel and food.

The shots came from two of the high-rise buildings, long bursts of Kalashnikov fire which made the rebel fighters on the ground scatter in alarm. The stubborn resistance at Abu Salim hospital, the last redoubt of the Gaddafi loyalists in Tripoli, was not yet over. The scale of the fighting is now much reduced, but the bodies keep piling up – civilians caught up in the crossfire during the fierce violence of the past few days; fighters from both sides killed in action; those summarily executed, black men by the rebels for being alleged mercenaries, and political prisoners by the regime. Outside Bab al-Aziziyah, Muammar Gaddafi's fortress stormed last week, the dead, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, many with their hands tied behind their back, some gagged, have been left on display on the roadside by the revolutionaries. Inside Abu Salim, the dead from the mortuary, some with marks of manacles on their wrists, spill into other rooms at the hospital. Yesterday brought the news of another massacre, the remains of 53 people in a warehouse on the outskirts of the city, shown to a Sky News reporter.

Jason Ditz: Rights Group: Evidence Emerges of Revenge Killings Across Tripoli
Patrick Martin: Evidence mounts of atrocities by Libyan “rebels”
Stephen Lendman: Rebel Assassins Terrorizing Libyans

Progressive Radio News Hour Guests for August 25, 27 and 28, 2011. Progressive Radio News Hour Guests The Progressive Radio News Hour Guests for August 25, 27 and 28, 2011. Thursday, August 25 at 10AM US Central time: Gilad Atzmon. Atzmon is an Israeli-born musician/writer/activist critic of Israeli repression against Palestinians and its Arab citizens. He's also the author of "The Wandering Who?" His new book and Middle East/North African issues will be discussed. Middle East issues will be discussed.

Stephen Lendman: Palestinian Right of Self-Defense

The Wandering Who? is out soon. You can now pre-order the book on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk. You can find Gilad's articles on AWIP here.

The international development minister, Alan Duncan, has been forced to remove a video from a government website in which he accused Israelis of a “land grab” in the middle-east, after protests from Jewish leaders.

The minister made his remarks in a recording during a visit to the region earlier this year. He announced British aid to support primary education for 35,000 Palestinian children, help to create 8,000 jobs in the area and “direct payments” to 215,000 people so they can buy food, medicine and other essentials. Mr Duncan, Conservative MP for Rutland and Melton, also accused Israeli settlers of “deliberately” taking water away from the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. In the video, Mr Duncan declared:

“The wall is a land grab. It hasn't just gone along the lines of the proper Israel boundary. “It's taken in open land which actually belongs to Palestine. Israeli settlers can build what they want and then immediately get the infrastructure so that takes the water deliberately away from Palestinians here.”

The Board of Deputies wrote to Mr Duncan – and the Foreign Secretary William Hague - and demanded that he take the video down. Shortly afterwards, the footage was removed.

The US Congress is controlled by the 'Zionist lobbies' who work in the interest of Israelis, Lawrence Davidson, professor of History at West Chester University, has told Press TV. - “What we've got here is a congress, the US Congress, that is really, literally controlled by various Zionist lobbies in the United States on the issue of relationships with Israel,” Davidson said in a Sunday interview with Press TV's US desk. “What the Congress does in terms of Israel is what the Zionists tell them they want done and of course take their decrees from Israelis,” he stated. He further pointed to the US hypocrisy in supporting “Zionists” when they sought the UN recognition of Israel and Washington's warning of Palestinians against taking similar initiative at the United Nations. The PA is to formally submit a request to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for membership in the world body on September 20, when the UN General Assembly will commence its 66th session.

Anthony Lawson: The Death of American Democracy - MUST SEE VIDEO

A more severe crash than the one triggered by the collapse of Lehman Brothers could be on the way, according to alarm signals in the credit markets. - Insurance on the debt of several major European banks has now hit historic levels, higher even than those recorded during financial crisis caused by the US financial group's implosion nearly three years ago. Credit default swaps on the bonds of Royal Bank of Scotland, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank and Intesa Sanpaolo, among others, flashed warning signals on Wednesday. Credit default swaps (CDS) on RBS were trading at 343.54 basis points, meaning the annual cost to insure £10m of the state-backed lender's bonds against default is now £343,540. The cost of insuring RBS bonds is now higher than before the taxpayer was forced to step in and rescue the bank in October 2008, and shows the recent dramatic downturn in sentiment among credit investors towards banks. "The problem is a shortage of liquidity – that is what is causing the problems with the banks. It feels exactly as it felt in 2008," said one senior London-based bank executive.

EU Observer: IMF issues warning about European banks - The head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Christine Lagarde on Sunday (28 August) called into question the health of European banks amid a stark warning about a global economic slowdown. Speaking to international bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Lagarde said the weakest EU lenders may need forced capital injections to stop the eurozone crisis spreading to other countries. Without "urgent" recapitalisation, "we could easily see the further spread of economic weakness to core countries, or even a debilitating liquidity crisis," she said, according to Bloomberg.

Investigation finds Taliban attackers may not have been to blame for death of 25-year-old Ahmed Omed Khpulwak in July. - A BBC journalist who died during a Taliban suicide attack may have been shot dead by US special forces, an independent investigation has found. Ahmed Omed Khpulwak was one of more than 20 people killed in attacks on a TV station in Uruzgan province, in the south of Afghanistan, on 28 July. The Taliban was initially blamed for the 25-year-old's death, but an investigation by the Kabul-based Afghanistan Analysts' Network (AAN) said Khpulwak may have been killed by US weaponry once the Taliban attackers were already dead.

Full video on http://www.youtube.com/user/TheParadigmShift. This video is mandatory viewing to all supporters of the war(s). Narration used in the video is DAHLIA WASFI. Her website is http://www.liberatethis.com/

Gore Flings Barnyard Epithet at 'Organized' Climate Change Critics. - Climate skeptics have "polluted" public debate on global warming using the same tactics tobacco companies once employed to deny the health risks of smoking, former Vice President Al Gore said last week.

"Some of the exact same people -- by name, I can go down a list of their names -- are involved in this," Gore said Thursday at an Aspen Institute forum in Aspen, Colo. "And so what do they do? They pay pseudo-scientists to pretend to be scientists to put out the message: 'This climate thing, it's nonsense. Man-made CO2 doesn't trap heat. It's not -- It may be volcanoes.' Bullshit! 'It may be sun spots.' Bullshit! 'It's not getting warmer.' Bullshit!"

The Week: Al Gore's 'expletive-laden' climate change rant

Raw Story: Al Gore compares climate change skeptics to racists - Al Gore continued his criticism of climate change skeptics in an interview with Climate Reality Project collaborator Alex Bogusky on UStream, going as far as to compare them to the racists of the 20th century.

Federal prosecutors filed a motion Friday, asking District Judge Leonie Brinkema to clarify and possibly reconsider, her July 29 ruling that a New York Times reporter would not be required to reveal confidential sources during the espionage trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling. In the motion, the government's lawyers again argued that James Risen's testimony about the sources for his reporting on CIA efforts to undermine Iran's nuclear program is critical to making their case against Sterling, who's charged with illegally revealing CIA operations to Risen.

American democracy is a wide-open system, given First Amendment freedoms, the flood of money that corrupts the electoral process, and a wide array of media organizations and political journals that can be used to disseminate and amplify various views, even when they have no basis in fact. This situation allows small groups of people to have a profound impact on public attitudes and policy discourse, provided that they are well-organized, well-funded, and stay on message. Here's an excerpt from a Center for American Progress press release:

Following a six-month long investigative research project, the Center for American Progress released a 130-page report today [.pdf] which reveals that more than $42 million from seven foundations over the past decade have helped fan the flames of anti-Muslim hate in America. Over the past few years, the Islamophobia network (the funders, scholars, grassroots activists, media amplifiers, and political validators) have worked hard to push narratives that Obama might be a Muslim, that mosques are incubators of radicalization, and that "radical Islam" has infiltrated all aspects of American society -- including the conservative movement.

The irony in all this that the extremists examined in this report have gone to great lengths to convince Americans that there is a vast Islamic conspiracy to subvert American democracy, impose sharia law, and destroy the American way of life. Instead, what we are really facing is a well-funded right-wing collaboration to scare the American people with a bogeyman of their own creation, largely to justify more ill-advised policies in the Middle East. [H/T: xymphora]

Raw Story: Report: Foundations paid $42 million to spread anti-Muslim propaganda
Nahida Izzat: Eureka... !!! it's Eurabia!

The boy, small and frail, is struggling to stay awake. His head lolls to the side, at one point slumping on to his chest. "Lift up your head! Lift it up!" shouts one of his interrogators, slapping him. But the boy by now is past caring, for he has been awake for at least 12 hours since he was separated at gunpoint from his parents at two that morning. "I wish you'd let me go," the boy whimpers, "just so I can get some sleep." During the nearly six-hour video, 14-year-old Palestinian Islam Tamimi, exhausted and scared, is steadily broken to the point where he starts to incriminate men from his village and weave fantastic tales that he believes his tormentors want to hear.

In the case of Islam, the boy in the video, his lawyer, Ms Lasky, believes the video provides the first hard proof of serious irregularities in interrogation. In particular, the interrogator failed to inform Islam of his right to remain silent, even as his lawyer begged to no avail to see him. Instead, the interrogator urged Islam to tell him and his colleagues everything, hinting that if he did so, he would be released. One interrogator suggestively smacked a balled fist into the palm of his hand. By the end of the interrogation Islam, breaking down in sobs, has succumbed to his interrogators, appearing to give them what they want to hear. Shown a page of photographs, his hand moves dully over it, identifying men from his village, all of whom will be arrested for protesting.

Stephen Lendman: Israeli Persecution of Palestinian Children
Stephen Lendman: Israel Shooting and Electric-Shocking Palestinian Children
Stephen Lendman: Israel Toughening Conditions for Palestinian Detainees
PIC: UN official: Israel killed 1,300 Palestinian children since 2000
AWIP: Israel harasses Palestinian children
AWIP: Israel's War on Jerusalem's Children: 1,200 Arrested in One Year

An Italian radio program's story about Iceland’s on-going revolution is a stunning example of how little our media tells us about the rest of the world. We may remember that at the start of the 2008 financial crisis, Iceland literally went bankrupt. The reasons were mentioned only in passing, and since then, this little-known member of the European Union fell back into oblivion. As one European country after another fails or risks failing, imperiling the Euro, with repercussions for the entire world, the last thing the powers that be want is for Iceland to become an example. Here's why:

Five years of a pure neo-liberal regime had made Iceland, (population 320 thousand, no army), one of the richest countries in the world. In 2003 all the country’s banks were privatised, and in an effort to attract foreign investors, they offered on-line banking whose minimal costs allowed them to offer relatively high rates of return. The accounts, called IceSave, attracted many UK and Dutch small investors. But as investments grew, so did the banks’ foreign debt. In 2003 Iceland’s debt was equal to 200 times its GNP, but in 2007, it was 900 percent. The 2008 world financial crisis was the coup de grace. The three main Icelandic banks, Landbanki, Kapthing and Glitnir, went belly up and were nationalised, while the Kroner lost 85% of its value with respect to the Euro. At the end of the year Iceland declared bankruptcy.

Contrary to what could be expected, the crisis resulted in Icelanders recovering their sovereign rights, through a process of direct participatory democracy that eventually led to a new Constitution. But only after much pain.

Prison Director Knut Bjarkeid and police lawyer Pål-Fredrik Hjort Kraby do not wish to comment on the matter. However, Professor of Psychology, Frode Thuen, tells VG he is “stunned”, alleging the women who write such letters need some form of help.

“There is every reason to believe that these are quite misguided and deranged women who struggle with themselves. They often have a kind of notion that they can make a difference, a desire for a type of healing, salvation and care. They think they should get him on back on track and take some sort of responsibility for his rehabilitation.”

Other experts are slightly puzzled. There is little research why some members of the public wish to contact a mass murderer.