Perfect service, $500 a night and captivity

The Rixos hotel housed top government officials, foreign journalists and state television facilities but is still in control of forces loyal to Moammar Gadhafi.

Tripoli's Hotel Rixos was a safer reporting base than the front lines but no longer, writes Jeremy Peters.
WITH a 1600-square-metre spa, helicopter service upon request and a self-described ''culture of service perfection'', the Rixos is Tripoli's premier hotel. The reporters called it the ''Hotel California'' - a place where you could check out any time you liked, but never without a government minder or spies watching your every movement.
At the weekend, the 120-room, $500-a-night oasis in the centre of the Libyan capital became a prison for the journalists working from there. Armed government forces have refused to let journalists leave. And even if they wanted to, a raging gun battle outside would most likely prevent them from getting very far.
As a result, journalists from CNN, Reuters, the BBC and other international news organisations were holed up inside with no electricity or air conditioning, forced to stand clear of windows because of stray bullets.

''It's just become so dangerous being here,'' said CNN's Matthew Chance, the cable channel's senior international correspondent, who was still able to broadcast an occasional update and provided regular commentary via Twitter.

West must take share of blame for Gaddafi

In the name of business a blind eye was often turned to his predatory behaviour.
FOR all practical purposes, the rule of Muammar Gaddafi is in its final days. After Ben Ali of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, the fall of Gaddafi marks the end of the third Arab dictator within the space of eight months. The biggest lesson for the West is to not support dictators when it suits, and for the remaining Arab rulers to reform or face a fate similar to the fallen dictators.
As is normally the case with dictators, Gaddafi had increasingly become delusional. At the helm for 42 years, he thought that he had become infallible and that, with the exception of his equally delusional son Saif al-Islam, there was nobody to replace him. His rule was based on fear, torture, patronage, self-adulation and aggrandisement. He plundered Libya's oil wealth in pursuit of bizarre and idiosyncratic ideas and practices that demeaned Libya internationally and stigmatised the Arab people as a whole. In this, he was not much different from many other Arab authoritarian rulers.
Yet, he stayed in power not simply because he was able to deceive the Libyan people and the world for so long. There was also the matter of the West's love-hate relationship with him. They loathed him because he was, as the late US president Ronald Reagan put it, ''the mad dog'' of the Arab world, and therefore an unpredictable rogue and supporter of international terrorism who needed to be watched and feared.

Wiki war: 3500 unpublished leaks destroyed forever as Assange hits out

Former WikiLeaks staffer and one of the founders of OpenLeaks, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, holds his book Inside WikiLeaks. Photo: AP

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's former right-hand man has irrevocably destroyed 3500 unpublished files leaked to the whistleblower site including the complete US no-fly list, five gigabytes of Bank of America documents and detailed information about 20 neo-Nazi groups.
Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who left WikiLeaks last year after a falling out with Assange, revealed the document destruction in an interview with Der Spiegel.
WikiLeaks has hit back, accusing Domscheit-Berg of being in bed with US intelligence agencies and of jeopardising the leaking of “many issues of public importance, human rights abuses, mass telecommunications interception, banking and the planning of dozens of neo-nazi groups”.

Libya rebels launch assault on capital Tripoli as Gaddafi's son captured

Libyan rebels have launched a final assault on Tripoli to oust Muammar Gaddafi, moving into the centre of the city and as the International Criminal Court confirmed the capture of the strongman's son Seif al-Islam.
However, senior rebel figure Mahmud Jibril said there were still pockets of resistance in and around Tripoli, Libya's capital, and warned his forces to be cautious.
"The fight is not over yet," he said on rebel television Al-Ahrar. "God willing, in few hours our victory will be complete."
Thousands of residents poured onto the streets to welcome the rebels, congregating at the site which they renamed Martyrs Square near the water front in the centre of Tripoli.
Sky News showed scenes of jubilant crowds gathered there, many waving the red, black and green flag of anti-regime forces, dancing in joy and shouting "Allahu Akbar" (God is greatest). Some fired rifles into the air.

As many of the men flashed V-for-victory signs and shouted "tell Muammar (Gaddafi) and his sons that Libya has men," a Sky correspondent said people were lighting fires with posters of the Libyan strongman and the solid green flag of the regime that they had torn down.
Similar scenes of jubilation were witnessed in Benghazi, the rebels' bastion in the east, where delirious residents danced and proclaimed the end of the regime of the "tyrant" Gaddafi.
US President Barack Obama said in a statement that the "surest way for the bloodshed to end is simple: [Muammar Gaddafi] and his regime need to recognise that their rule has come to an end".

Defiant ... Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Photo: Reuters

Survey’s surprising finding: tea party less popular than atheists and Muslims

In an op-ed article in the New York Times, Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, and David E. Campbell, a political scientist at Notre Dame, say they have collected data indicating that the tea party is "less popular than much maligned groups like 'atheists' and 'Muslims.'"
But Campbell says the tea party was really an afterthought in their research.
"We didn't go into this study to look at the tea party," Campbell said in an interview with The Ticket.
The professors were following up on research they conducted in 2006 and 2007 for their book "American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us" and decided to add the tea party and atheists to their list of survey queries. By going back to many of the same respondents, the professors gleaned several interesting facts about the tea party.