With the no-fly zone over Libya, Gaddafi has had to change his methods for brutalizing people. He has now taken to patrolling residential areas with tanks and assassinating any civilians who leave their homes with snipers. He is getting away with this because he knows the Western collation won’t bomb civilian areas.
A US fighter plane has crashed over Libya, but both pilots ejected and have survived. Locals apparently rushed to help them and greeted the men with emphatic gratitude. Lucky. It would have been a very different story if Gaddafi’s guys had found them instead.
The West still can’t decide who is going to take the reins of this operation from now on. Cameron is keen for Nato to oversee things, which certainly would spread the responsibility. But France is worried that Nato has a bad reputation for messing things up in the Arab world, so it might piss everyone off too much if they got involved.
In an apparent response to all those who have been asking why we are sticking our noses into Libya and ignoring other areas of the world - our foreign secretary, William Hague, has spoken out. In a conference today, he warned that African leaders who suppress their people will now find it increasingly hard to get away with their actions.
As much of the Middle East continues to see a wave of uprisings against corrupt dictatorships, Hague warned that this spirit was likely to spread south into Africa next. He specifically mentioned President Mugabe, and implied that he should be watching his back.
Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe, is widely considered to be as nasty as they come and so crooked he needs to sleep on a spiral staircase. He has allegedly been torturing Zimbabweans for even watching youtube footage of riots in the Middle East.
Hague also pointed out that if all these militant dictators are thrown out; Africa and the Middle East could become stable, democratic and ‘free’ – which would be great for the rest of the world in terms of trading etc. Which gives us good reason to help the process along. So he says.
Finally… a prominent green campaigner and journalist, George Monbiot, has said that he has changed his mind about nuclear power being a bad thing after all. In a mighty u-turn, he says that even after Japan’s Fukushima plant was essentially fucked into a cocked hat last week, barely anyone was actually harmed by radiation leakage and that this had been enough to convert him.
See you tomorrow.
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