Oil Wealth Fuels Gaddafi’s Drive For Reinvention:
TRIPOLI, Libya — Brother Leader Moammar Gaddafi still exhorts his people to greatness from billboards, banners and murals. But these days a different kind of command is driving Libya’s transformation as the newly opened country taps into oil wealth: “izala,” Arabic for “raze it to the ground.”
Surveyors are spraying [...]

Tony Blair on the recent allegations that Saudi Prince Bandar pocketed a $2 billion commission on an arms deal with BAe:
“This investigation, if it had it gone ahead, would have involved the most serious allegations in investigations being made into the Saudi royal family,” Blair said at a meeting of the Group of Eight nations [...]

Libya’ Jamahiriyya system, which has bred a completely dysfunctional decentralized system topped by an all-powerful dictator, is 30. The BBC has a recap, while the NYT attends a conference where Libya introduces economic — but just economic — reforms. Now where have I heard that before?

After the green book, Qadhafi launches the green laptop:
With the project scheduled to be completed by June 2008, Libya could become the first nation in which all school-age children are connected to the internet through educational computers, Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the One Laptop per Child project, told the The New York Times on Wednesday.
The [...]

Reading about the state of human rights and freedom of press in Libya sometimes makes Mubarak’s Egypt look like a paradise…
Here’s the recently released Reporters Without Borders report about its fact-finding visit to Libya in September. An Arabic version is also available here.
When you get the chance, also check out reports by Human Rights on [...]

HRW, which has recently gotten unprecedented access into Libya, is calling for full disclosure on the 1996 massacre that took place at the Abu Salim prison:
In the summer of 1996, stories began to filter out of Libya about a mass killing in Tripoli’s Abu Salim prison. The details remained scarce, and the government initially denied [...]

A Briton was a member of the A.Q. Khan network. Where will the trail end?

Muammar Qadhafi is into Lionel Richie. Say no more.

A nice overview on how surprisingly little has changed in Libya in the three years since Qadhafi abandoned his nuke program:
Yet despite having accumulated a foreign-exchange hoard worth $45 billion on annual oil sales now running at $20 billion, Libya has much the same drab, shambolic air as when diplomatic isolation, trade sanctions and centrally [...]

Unpredicted random news from Libya: Qadhafi decided to name a new prime minister and create a whole bunch of new ministries (he must have woken up in a bad mood or something):
Mahmudi replaces former premier Shukri Ghanem, who had held the post since 2003. Ghanem is no longer part of the cabinet but will head [...]

Human Rights Watch has just issued the first in a three-part report on human rights in Libya, a rare look into the bizarro world that is Qadhafi’s Libya. The HRW researchers that worked on the report are the first activists to get access to political detainees, senior government officials and dissidents in a long time [...]

… never fails to entertain:
“The Israelis are idiots and the Palestinians as well,” Kadhafi said Wednesday in the speech at the closing session of the two-day summit in Algiers which is usually reserved for a reading of the final resolutions.
“The Jews are dying by the dozen because they are in the West Bank and the [...]

“Accusing Libya of being a country that sponsors terrorism is a very dangerous thing. That has psychological repercussions. Libya could argue, ‘Since I am still on the terrorist list, why not commit terrorism, which I am accused of anyway? Why should I pay the price without getting something in return?’”
Colonel Muammar Qadhafi, interview with Time.

Qadhafi is canceling Libya’s “day of revenge,” when the country
celebrates its independence from the its former colonial master, Italy,
and replacing it with a “day of friendship.” And he’s also agreed to
allow former Italian pieds-noir who were exiled to come back:
Giovanna Ortu, born in Libya in 1939 and head of the
association of exiles, said: “For six [...]

There is still surprisingly little in-depth reporting about what led to Libya’s makeover — but plenty of reaction Some on the left are complaining that Bush and Blair are embracing a crackpot dictator. Others on the right are rejoicing that this makes the Bush policies look good. Those in the middle tend to be more [...]

In a completely unexpected announcement, Libya’s Muammar Qadhafi has said that he would give up his WMD program, allow inspectors unconditional access and sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The news was broken by British PM Tony Blair, who also broke the news last week that Saddam Hussein had been captured. According to Blair,
“Libya came to [...]