As opposition fighters are pushing towards the Libyan capital, Twitter users applaud the "Arab Spring".

Statement by the NATO Secretary-General on the situation in Libya

"The Qadhafi regime is clearly crumbling. The sooner Qadhafi realises that he cannot win the battle against his own people, the better -- so that the Libyan people can be spared further bloodshed and suffering.

The Libyan people have suffered tremendously under Qaddafi’s rule for over four decades. Now they have a chance for a new beginning. Now is the time for all threats against civilians to stop, as the United Nations Security Council demanded. Now is the time to create a new Libya – a state based on freedom, not fear; democracy, not dictatorship; the will of the many, not the whims of a few.

That transition must come peacefully. It must come now. And it must be led and defined by the Libyan people.

NATO is ready to work with the Libyan people and with the Transitional National Council, which holds a great responsibility. They must make sure that the transition is smooth and inclusive, that the country stays united, and that the future is founded on reconciliation and respect for human rights.

Qadhafi's remaining allies and forces also have a great responsibility. It is time to end their careers of violence. The world is watching them. This is their opportunity to side with the Libyan people and choose the right side of history.

We will continue to monitor military units and key facilities, as we have since March, and when we see any threatening moves towards the Libyan people, we will act in accordance with our UN mandate.



Our goal throughout this conflict has been to protect the people of Libya, and that is what we are doing.

Because the future of Libya belongs to the Libyan people. And it is for the international community to assist them, with the United Nations and the Contact Group playing a leading role. NATO wants the Libyan people to be able to decide their future in freedom and in peace. Today, they can start building that future."

It's all in the numbers

SinoTech Energy Ltd. (CTE), a provider of equipment to boost oilfield production, was sued in the U.S. by an investor claiming securities violations after its shares plummeted.


Investor Bhushan Athale alleges that Beijing-based SinoTech’s financial reports were “inaccurate because the nature, size and scope of the company’s business was materially exaggerated,” according to a complaint filed yesterday in Manhattan federal court. Athale is seeking to sue on behalf of buyers of the company’s American depositary shares since its November initial public offering.

SinoTech plunged 42 percent to $2.35 on the Nasdaq Stock Market on Aug. 16 after Alfredlittle.com published a short- seller’s note saying the company’s largest customers were probably “nothing more than empty shells” and that it’s worth less than 63 cents a share. SinoTech called the note “inaccurate and defamatory.”

Trading has been halted in the shares and the company said in a statement yesterday that it intends to “cooperate fully” with Nasdaq to address the stock market’s concerns. The trading halt has rendered the ADS “essentially worthless,” Athale said in the complaint.

Rebecca Guo, a spokeswoman for the company in Beijing, didn’t return a phone call or respond to an e-mail placed to her office outside business hours in China seeking comment on the lawsuit.

In an Aug. 17 statement, the company said it wasn’t aware of material omissions in its financial statements and that it had appointed an independent committee to investigate.

“We are outraged by this blatantly self-interested, mercenary attempt to profiteer at the expense of SinoTech and its shareholders,” Chief Executive Officer Xin Guoqiang said in the Aug. 17 statement.

The case is Athale v. SinoTech Energy Ltd., 11-CV-5831, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).

UAE = RESPONSIBLE FOR 25% OF WORLDWIDE HUMAN TRAFFICKING

The United Arab Emirates [UAE] is one of the biggest destinations for men and women, predominantly from South and Southeast Asia, trafficked for the purposes of labor and commercial-sexual exploitation. Migrant workers, who comprise more than 90 percent of the UAE's private sector workforce, are recruited from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, China, and the Philippines. Women from some of these countries travel willingly to work as domestic servants or administrative staff, but some are subjected to conditions indicative of forced labor, including unlawful withholding of passports, restrictions on movement, non-payment of wages, threats, or physical or sexual abuse.


Legally, once a foreign female domestic worker enters her employer's house, she is totally under his/her control, since the employer is usually her visa sponsor. Even today, United Arab Emirates labour laws do not recognize domestics as part of the labour force. The employer has total control over them. The immigration regulations governing the status of domestic workers and the social practices towards foreign female domestic worker in the United Arab Emirates enslave them to their employers until the duration of their contract ends.

A significant portion of the foreign female workers in UAE as well as in other Arab countries are forced to offer sex to the employer, as well as many of them are even sold to the private brothels or sex rackets by the recruiting agents or pimps.

Alina, 22-year old Kyrgyz girl arrived in United Arab Emirates in 2008, on a visit visa following a promise of a pastry job for US$ 700 by a compatriot woman who arranged for her the visa, air ticket and accommodation. An unidentified woman received Alina at the airport. Later Alina came to know that, she had been sold to the gang in UAE for US$ 32,000. The woman, who came to airport to receive Alina told her that she had to pay back the costs in prostitution. Later, Alina was taken to a place, where she saw four Uzbek women and two Afghan men. These Afghan men were working as pimp to collect customers. On the first night, Alina was raped by both the Afghan men and she was told to please at least 10 customers every day. After nine months, Alina managed to escape from the captivity of the Afghan men and decided not to return home..

Nargis, an Uzbek woman, who came to Dubai six years, back from Thailand, where, she had been sold to sex racket by her own boyfriend. Here is her story:

"It was 2003. I met my boyfriend at my girl-friend's house. He had been dating me for two months already when he told me he was going to marry me. My boyfriend told me we could earn some money for our wedding if we went to work in Greece at his friend's company. He said, we would stay in Greece for three months, and return home after earning enough of money. I was extremely happy. I could not believe all that was happening to me. He took my passport and all necessary papers and said that he would take care of visa and travel arrangements. As I was having highest trust and confidence on my boyfriend, I did not ask to see the tickets or documents. Few days later, we boarded on a flight, which was first going to Thailand and then to Greece, that what exactly my boyfriend said. But, surprisingly, the travel stopped at Bangkok and my boyfriend said we needed to spend a night in the city hotel to catch the flight for Greece the next day. I had no fear or confusion, as was sure, my boyfriend would never deceive me.

"He took me to a hotel and said that he was going to see his friend in Bangkok and would be back soon. Two hours later an Uzbek man came asked to accompany him to another hotel, where my boyfriend was waiting. I was confused and was not really realizing, what was happening. When I reached another hotel, the same man told me that, I was his property. I could not understand, I kept saying that it was a misunderstanding and that my boyfriend would be very upset seeing him saying such indecent things to me. But, to my utter surprise, the man told me that my boyfriend had already sold me to him and from now on he would have my documents and I had serve the clients this man would arrange for me. Onwards, everyday, I had to wait for the instruction from that man in my mobile phone, and had to rush to the hotel or apartment, as he instructed, to attend customers.

"Sheikh Hashim had his nick name Tony. He was running a medium type transport business in Dubai and was also investing is real estate. Tony, at the age of just 34, was able to make a few million dollars from the business, as he was a distant relative of the Emirs of UAE. On the first night, for some reason, Tony became emotionally weak to me, as he possibly was not expecting such warm behavior from a mere hooker. Most part of the night, we were chatting, singing, drinking and easting Arabian kebab. When I was leaving Tony's apartment, he very decently handed me the money in envelop. This was a real shock to me, seeing such softness and decency in any Arab man. In my own knowledge [as I also attended few Arab customers in Thailand], Arabs are very rude by nature. But, Tony was an exception.

"Gradually, Tony introduced me to at least 20-25 young Sheikhs, all of whom are his friends or even class-mates. This was, I rather turned into a posh hooker, serving the rich Arab elites. Few months later, Tony asked me if I could bring in more young girls from my country. I readily nodded. And just in 4 days, I was sent back to Uzbekistan for bringing few more 'Russian Virgins' for the harem of the Arab sheikhs.

You’re only sorry we caught you…..

Senator Bernie Sanders, a staunch critic of oil speculators, leaked the information to a major newspaper in a move that has unsettled both regulators and Wall Street alike.

In a June 16 e-mail reviewed by Reuters, a senior policy adviser to Sanders discusses how his office received private data with the names and positions of traders and forwarded it exclusively to a Wall Street Journal reporter.

The e-mail, which also attaches two files with the data, was sent to Public Citizen's Tyson Slocum asking him to review it and speak with the newspaper about his observations.

In a statement from Sanders provided to Reuters, Sanders said he felt the data needed to be publicly aired.

"The CFTC has kept this information hidden from the American public for nearly three years," he said. "This is an outrage. The American people have a right to know exactly who caused gas prices to skyrocket in 2008 and who is causing them to spike today."

The leaked information has sparked concern at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is legally prohibited from releasing confidential information that identifies trader positions and identities.

The leak also raises broader questions as U.S. regulators gear up to collect massive new amounts of private data from market players on everything from swaps and hedge funds to blueprints for how large financial firms can be liquidated. The breach of data could make Wall Street less reluctant to hand over sensitive information if they fear it is not appropriately safeguarded.

Republicans have already raised concerns in recent hearings about the Treasury's new Office of Financial Research created by Dodd-Frank, and whether its collection of data from hedge funds and banks may constitute a regulatory overreach.

Although the CFTC is barred from releasing confidential data, the law does require the CFTC to hand over such information if a Congressional committee acting within its proper authority requests it. Once it is in the hands of Congress, there is nothing to prevent lawmakers from releasing it publicly.

The leaked data contains long and short positions held by oil traders in 2008, the same year that oil prices spiked to $147 a barrel. Critics at the time accused oil speculators of driving up prices, leading lawmakers to later insert a provision into the Dodd-Frank Wall Street overhaul law compelling the CFTC to place stricter limits on how many commodity contracts any one trader can control.

Among the kinds of traders accused of excessive speculation included passive long investors such as pension funds, which often seek exposure to commodities markets indirectly by going through an intermediary swap dealer such as such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

Free Speech is like a river; let it flow; for if you dam it; you run the risk of drowning

For the past eight months, the world has watched, captivated, as from one country to the next, youth have manipulated the digital tools that have become part and parcel of their everyday lives to serve their activism. The world too has witnessed as, in each country, state actors have made various attempts to quash the use of such tools.



In each case, governments have learned from what came before. While Tunisia's Ben Ali sought to open up the internet, promising an end to censorship in a speech just one day before fleeing the country, Egypt's Mubarak took from his failure what not to do, preferring instead to clamp down on social media sites one by one, eventually shutting down the internet entirely. Though Libyan leader Gaddafi followed in Mubarak's footsteps, finding it easy to shut down dissent among the five per cent of the country's population that actually has access to the internet, Syria's Assad took a new approach altogether, opening up access only to then use it against social media users.


But while it comes as no surprise that despots might find new weapons in the digital space, what's more troubling is the ways in which democratic governments have adapted to the use of digital tools for protest, seemingly taking lessons from their authoritarian counterparts.


Cameron calls for crackdowns


Following days of rioting in London, British Prime Minister David Cameron proposed looking at "whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality" and noted that he had "asked the police if they need any other new powers", going on to suggest that Twitter, Facebook, and BlackBerry ought to consider removing messages that might spur further unrest in the country.


Cameron's calls came just two days after member of Parliament, David Lammy, urged in a tweet for BlackBerry to suspend its encrypted messenger service; BlackBerry responded via Twitter that the company had engaged with authorities to assist in any way possible.

While Twitter took a public stand for its users free expression, and Facebook took measures to remove "any credible threats of violence" from its platform, BlackBerry has remained largely silent, burned, perhaps, by the media frenzy of 2010 that surrounded its negotiations with the Indian and UAE governments. Still, all three companies have plans to meet with UK Home Secretary Theresa May.

Though the UK police no doubt have the right to pursue any individual inciting violence, those powers already exist; tacking on additional measures to censor speech will likely have the opposite effect as intended.


San Francisco transit company 'pulls a Mubarak'

Amid the news of protests in the UK, a smaller protest was allegedly being planned in the US city of San Francisco. The protest reportedly would have been modelled after a July demonstration during which protesters disrupted Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) services in response to the fatal shooting of passenger Charles Blair Hill, by BART police, on July 3. Though the protest never happened, BART authorities took preemptive steps to quell it nonetheless, shutting down mobile services on several subway platforms in an attempt to block communications.

The move drew ire from civil liberties groups as well as from passengers and the public at large, prompting Anonymous to go after the transit company, taking down one of their sites and publicly displaying user information gleaned by hacking another. On Twitter, the move drew comparisons between the Mubarak government and the BART authorities, inspiring the hashtag "#MuBARTek".

BART authorities explained the measure by claiming that only certain areas of the subway platforms are available for "expressive" activities, and that paid areas of the platforms are off-limits to expression. And yet, by making available the use of mobile phones in the first place, the action of cutting off access to prevent a potential protest constitutes prior restraint on the right to free expression of all BART customers.

From Tahrir to the States


Both recent incidents indicate an alarming precedent being set. Cameron's consideration of broad censorship powers echoes similar measures once proposed -and rejected - in Turkey, while the actions of BART authorities have been conducted only by the most extreme of despots.

These are not isolated examples of chilling restrictions on free speech emanating from democracies. In fact, 2011 has been full of prime examples: In July, the Israeli parliament enacted a law banning calls for boycott amidst a growing movement; the law effectively forces self-censorship upon Israeli bloggers, who not only risk penalties for their own writing but also for comments posted to their sites, for which they may be liable.

In India, the world's largest democracy, a new regulation will soon prohibit intermediaries - that is, any site or content host - from hosting a slew of content, including anything that might be "racially or ethnically objectionable", or that "harms minors in any way". The overbroad statute will no doubt scare many intermediaries into submission, resulting in chilling effects on free expression.

And from the UK to South Africa and in numerous nations in between, plans intended to hamper piracy and protect intellectual property continue to put the interests of the entertainment industry before the rights of citizens, instituting in many cases regulations that could block or remove offending sites.

Indeed, it seems that the sentiments expressed by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just eight months ago have in many places - including the United States - fallen by the wayside. Rather than moving toward internet freedom, we're moving toward increased internet censorship everywhere.


Jillian York is director for International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. She writes a regular column for Al Jazeera focusing on free expression and Internet freedom. She also writes for and is on the Board of Directors of Global Voices Online.

S&P’s $2 Trillion gaffe downgrading democracy and upgrading oligarchy

Eleven days after lowering the credit rating on the U.S. for the first time, Standard & Poor’s is suffering a downgrade among global investors as American bonds are proving world beaters -- undermining S&P’s mathematical assumptions -- and prompting disbelief among political scientists months after the company upgraded China because of the stability fostered by Communist Party rule.
China has been upgraded five times by S&P since 1999, Bloomberg data show. “We believe the Chinese authorities would respond to future threats to financial stability with timely measures, based on our observations over the past two years,” S&P said Dec. 16 in a statement.

Since S&P, the New York-based subsidiary of McGraw-Hill Cos., dropped the U.S. to AA+ from AAA on Aug. 5, the yield on the 10-year Treasury note, a benchmark for everything from home mortgages to car loans, has declined to as low as 2.03 percent from a high this year of 3.77 percent, with American debt on pace in August for the biggest monthly gain since December 2008. Interest rates on American bonds are lower today than on most of the countries with AAA ratings by S&P and the Treasury recently financed its outstanding debt at the lowest cost ever.

If anything, the decision from S&P, the largest ratings provider, resulted in an upgrade of U.S. securities as the American bond market outperformed world bond indexes during the period since the downgrade by S&P. Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings, the two next biggest rating companies, affirmed their AAA rankings on the U.S.

“The market has upgraded U.S. Treasuries,” said Andrew Johnson, the head of investment-grade fixed-income in Chicago at Neuberger Berman Fixed Income LLC, which oversees $85 billion. “Treasuries are still where people run to hide at least temporarily and that’s what we’ve seen over the past week.”

S&P made its decision, saying the U.S. government is becoming “less stable, less effective and less predictable,” even after acknowledging to the Treasury Department a $2 trillion error in its calculations that by its own methodology could have prevented any change from a AAA rating. Since S&P still insisted on downgrading the U.S. eight months after raising China’s rating, the company’s credibility has come under increasing scrutiny.

“It was really kind of bizarre that they’ve become political analysts,” said Thomas Mann, a congressional scholar at the Washington-based Brookings Institution. “I certainly never look to any of the three rating agencies as a source of expertise, knowledge or wisdom on the political system.”

When Warren Buffett was asked about S&P’s decision, the billionaire chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. said the U.S. should have been upgraded to “quadruple-A.”

The cut left the U.S., whose currency accounts for about 60 percent of the world’s reserves, rated below at least 15 other nations and on the same level as Belgium, which hasn’t had a government since June 2010.

your person in panama

About a mile long, several hundred feet wide and more than 100 feet deep, the excavation is an initial step in the building of a larger set of locks for the Panama Canal that should double the amount of goods that can pass through it each year.

The $5.25 billion project, scheduled for completion in 2014, is the first expansion in the history of the century-old shortcut between the Atlantic and Pacific. By allowing much bigger container ships and other cargo vessels to easily reach the Eastern United States, it will alter patterns of trade and put pressure on East and Gulf Coast ports like Savannah, Ga., and New Orleans to deepen harbors and expand cargo-handling facilities.

Right now, with its two lanes of locks that can handle ships up to 965 feet long and 106 feet wide — a size known as Panamax — the canal operates at or near its capacity of about 35 ships a day. During much of the year, that can mean dozens of ships are moored off each coast, waiting a day or longer to enter the canal.


The new third set of locks will help eliminate some of those backlogs, by adding perhaps 15 passages to the daily total. More important, the locks will be able to handle “New Panamax” ships — 25 percent longer, 50 percent wider and, with a deeper draft as well, able to carry two or three times the cargo.


No one can predict the full impact of the expansion. But for starters, it should mean faster and cheaper shipping of some goods between the United States and Asia.


Dean Campbell, a soybean farmer from Coulterville, Ill., for instance, expects the expansion will help him compete with farmers in South America — which, he said, “has much poorer infrastructure for getting the grain out.”

The canal expansion “will have a definite impact on us,” Mr. Campbell said. “We think in general it will be a good thing, we just don’t know how good.”


Jean Paul Rodrigue, a professor of global studies and geography at Hofstra University who has studied the expansion project, said that the shipping industry was waiting to see how big the impact would be. “They know it’s going to change things, but they’re not sure of the scale.”

For now the hole, parallel to the existing smaller Pacific locks and about a half-mile away, is a scene of frenetic activity by workers and machines laboring in the tropical haze. At one end, giant hydraulic excavators scoop blasted rock into a parade of earth movers that dump it topside on a slowly growing mountain of rubble. At the other, where the machines have finished their work, a pack of about 50 men buzzes over the rock floor, preparing it to serve as a foundation for a bed of concrete.