Libya Worse

Latest News From Libya: BREGA, Libya – Rebels reinforced a key oil port Thursday while facing new regime airstrikes in eastern Libya, and thousands of angry mourners buried victims of a counteroffensive by Moammar Gadhafi's forces, shooting guns in the air, shouting "Down with Gadhafi!" and swearing to take vengeance.

Although there have been stirrings of a diplomatic effort to ease the crisis, an opposition spokesman flatly ruled out any negotiations with Gadhafi, saying "his hands are tainted with blood."

President Barack Obama insisted that Gadhafi leave office, declaring he had "lost the legitimacy to lead."

He pledged to hold Gadhafi and his loyalists accountable, saying the U.S. and the entire world were outraged by violence against the rebels, and he lauded U.N. sanctions meant to put international pressure on the longtime ruler.

Signaling he was digging in, Gadhafi's regime apparently has stepped up its recruitment of mercenaries from other African countries, with an official in neighboring Mali saying that 200-300 men have left for Libya in the last week.

The International Criminal Court in the Netherlands said it will investigate Gadhafi, his sons and his inner circle for possible crimes against humanity in the violent crackdown of the 17-day-old uprising that sought to topple the man who has ruled Libya for four decades.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the court's top prosecutor, said Gadhafi and several commanders and regime officials had formal or de facto control over forces that attacked protesters, and he promised "no impunity in Libya."

Army units that have joined the rebels fanned out in the oil facilities and port at Brega, armed with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers and dressed in camouflage army uniforms with checkered keffiyehs. They were backed by at least a dozen pickup trucks with mounted machine guns or towing rocket launchers. Source from Yahoo News

Zulkifli Nordin Sacks

Zulkifli Nordin today has benn sacked by Parti Keadilan Rakyat. He who Kulim-Bandar Baharu MP aslo was told to vacate his parliamentary seat immediately, said party secretary-general Saifuddin Nasution.

“We will send an official letter by fax, registered mail and e-mail on Monday to inform him of the decision. He has 14 days to appeal,” he said.

Saifuddin said the action against Zulkifli was primarily for lodging a police report against PAS’ Shah Alam MP Khalid Samad and for speaking against the party and coalition members in a television interview.

“The board views seriously the strong attacks against party policy, its stand and cooperation within the Pakatan Rakyat.

“We took into account the re-occurrence of his misdeeds, the police report and the interview,” Saifuddin told a press conference after the three-hour council meeting chaired by party president Datuk Seri Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail yesterday.

The decision to sack Zulkifli was reached unanimously by the party’s central leadership council.

“If the decision we made means that there will be one fewer representative in Parliament and if that is the price we have to pay to defend the party’s good name and the interest of our 500,000 members, then that is what we will do,” Saifuddin said.

In a separate press conference, Zulkifli said his sacking marked a “black moment” in the history for the reformation movement and the downfall of the PKR.

“The decision also shows that little pharoahs are fully controlling PKR and have an evil, narrow and anti-Islamic plan,” he said.

He claimed that he was being punished without being given a chance to defend himself according to the principles of human rights and justice.

Zulkifli, who walked out of his disciplinary hearing when the party refused his request for an all-Muslim panel, reiterated that he had the right to an all-Muslim panel since the issue involved Islamic matters.

Election in Iraq

People of Baghdad now can choose their government. Iraqis began voting Sunday to elect a new Parliament and possibly a new prime minister, an election nearly seven years after the American overthrow of Saddam Hussein that could, if peaceful, smooth the way for a final American withdrawal.From Basra in the south to Dohuk in the north, polling stations opened at 7 a.m. after a short, intense campaign that could solidify Iraq’s nascent democracy or leave the country fractured along ethnic and sectarian lines. Still, the campaign unfolded as the most open, most competitive election in the nation’s long history of colonial rule, dictatorship and war.

Despite a long delay, disputes over candidates’ qualifications, arrests and assassinations, the country’s main political blocs competed fiercely at the ballot box to win an election that remained too close to call, something rare in a region dominated by authoritarian governments.

Only moments before the polls opened, four bombs exploded in Baghdad, reverberating across the city. It was not immediately clear how much damage they caused.

By all accounts, no single party or coalition was expected to win an outright majority, setting the stage for a period of turmoil — months, not weeks, politicians here say — as parties try to cobble together the majority of seats in the country’s new 325-member Parliament to select a new prime minister.

The incumbent, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite who has refashioned himself as a nationalist leader over the last four years, with mixed results, faced formidable challenges from a bloc of Shiite parties once allied with him and from another led by a former interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi.

For the first time, the Sunni minority that under Mr. Hussein dominated Iraqi politics is expected to participate in force, potentially reshaping the country’s political landscape. The election could also begin to resolve — or worsen — the delicate questions of political control in disputed regions like Kirkuk and Nineveh, where Arab and Kurdish aspirations conflict.

The competition among the main Shiite parties, divided this time, could be decisive. Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric whose followers fought against the American military and Mr. Maliki’s government, urged Iraqi Shiites to vote. “Participation in the election is a sort of political resistance,” he said in remarks broadcast on television in Iran, where he is said to be studying to become an ayatollah.

Voting began in an atmosphere that was at once hopeful and fearful. A series of attacks in the past week appeared intended to disrupt the election, as the extremist group Islamic State of Iraq repeatedly vowed to do, denouncing the election as antithetical to their extremist vision of Islam.

The threats — circulated in leaflets in Diyala and Anbar — were a throwback to the volatile elections of 2005, when suspicion and insurgency kept people away from the polls, especially Sunnis.

“Iraq’s enemies are going to try and exploit this change to attack the Iraqi people,” the spokesman for the Baghdad Operations Command, Maj. Gen. Qassim Atta, said Saturday, even as new attacks struck in Baghdad, in Musayyib to the south and in the Shiite holy city Najaf, killing at least four and wounding dozens more.

Those followed a series of attacks on Thursday near polling stations in Baghdad, Mosul and Diyala that killed at least 12 people and wounded scores. The most serious of those involved a car bomb that exploded in a parking lot near the shrine of Imam Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad.

A shop owner in Najaf, Hussein Ali, worried that the latest bombings exposed the shortcomings of the security forces, who failed to detect the explosives on Saturday despite already heightened security around the shrine. “I won’t go to vote because I am afraid for myself and my family,” he said.

Iraq’s security forces, however, are far stronger than they were when the last parliamentary elections were held in 2005, and they saturated cities and towns across the country, closing internal borders and imposing a curfew on vehicles, even bicycles, that left the streets largely deserted.

“We are in a battle now, and our enemies will use whatever means they can to try and keep the Iraqi people from voting,” General Atta said. “We need to expect the worst in order to be prepared for it.”

Unlike any of Iraq’s elections and referendums before — for a Provisional Assembly, for a Parliament, for a Constitution and provincial assemblies — Iraqis controlled the streets and borders. The American military, already largely withdrawn from the cities, provided assistance and planning but remained behind the scenes.

Something new also emerged, though. A tried and tested reliance on violence turned into defiance. Even in the aftermath of the latest of an untold number of attacks, other voters in Najaf sounded determined, like the country itself, to carrying on with the vote regardless of efforts to derail it.

Abed al-Nabi Mahmoud, a taxi driver, described the attacks that still scar Iraq as “old and inactive.”

“We will vote and win,” he said as if addressing those who carry out the attacks, “and you will lose.”

In Falluja, a city in Anbar devastated by American assaults in 2004, then isolated in a cauldron of bloodshed when Al Qaeda ran rampant, a similar determination reflected an important shift in the mood of Sunnis.

After boycotting the last parliamentary elections in 2005, they were left disproportionately underrepresented in Parliament, fueling anger and, many argue, the insurgency that plunged the country into civil war. Now, despite a murky process to disqualify prominent Sunni candidates, the Sunnis who once resisted the American-sponsored government of Mr. Maliki vowed to make their voices heard.

“This is our chance,” one resident in Falluja, Amman Khudeir, said ahead of the vote on Saturday. “If we don’t seize it now, we’ll lose it forever.”

Iraqi-Americans to vote in Iraq’s election

News From Iraq:Iraqi Americans across Michigan are to vote today at polling sites in Warren and Dearborn for Iraq’s parliamentary election.

Iraqi immigrants and Iraqi Americans born in the U.S. are eligible to vote if they have proof of their Iraqi ancestry, said election organizers. Polls are open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. today, Saturday, and Sunday.

Voters inside Iraq and in other countries with sizeable Iraqi populations are to also vote in the election.

Aziz Hanna, who is in charge of voting for Iraqi Americans in Michigan, said thousands are expected to vote in Michigan, which has the highest concentration of Iraqi Americans in the U.S. There are also Iraqi-American voting centers in California, Washington, D.C., Tennessee and Illinois.

Campaign fliers that advertise Iraqi political parties have been put up in recent weeks at stores and centers in Sterling Heights, Warren, West Bloomfield, Dearborn and Detroit.

Malaysia Politics: More PKR MP Leave

Latest Update From Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: Bagan Serai MP Mohsin Fadzli Samsuri quit PKR on Wednesday to become an independent.

Announcing his decision in a press conference at the PNB service apartment here, Mohsin said he decided to quit the party as he felt betrayed and sabotaged.

Also present at the conference was former PKR secretary-general Salehuddin Hashim Mohsin is the third PKR MP to quit over two weeks following the resignation of Bayan Baru MP Zahrain Hashim and Nibong Tebal MP Tan Tee Beng. In the 2008 general election, Mohsin beat former Deputy Defence Minister Datuk Zainal Abidin Zin from Umno by 3,413 votes.

White House New Social Secretary

Juliana Smoot

News from CNN in Washington - The White House announced a new social secretary Saturday, a day after confirming that Desiree Rogers planned to step down from the position. Julianna Smoot, who is chief of staff for the office of U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk, will replace Rogers.

"Julianna shares our commitment to creating an inclusive, dynamic and culturally vibrant White House, and Michelle and I are pleased to have her join our team," President Barack Obama said in a statement.

Rogers' office came under scrutiny in recent months after a couple who lacked an invitation were allowed into Obama's first state dinner. In an interview with CNN on Friday, Rogers said she was leaving voluntarily and that her decision was unrelated to the fallout over the security breach."It has nothing to do with that," she said. "It's Secret Service's job to handle security. Not the Social Secretary's office."

The president and first lady acknowledged Rogers' exit in a statement Friday that did not mention last November's party-crashing incident. "When she took this position, we asked Desiree to help make sure that the White House truly is the People's House," they said, "and she did that by welcoming scores of everyday Americans through its doors, from wounded warriors to local schoolchildren to NASCAR drivers.

"She organized hundreds of fun and creative events during her time here, and we will miss her. We thank her again for her service and wish her all the best in her future endeavors." In an e-mail to CNN earlier on Friday, Rogers said, "It has been incredible setting the foundation for the [White House] for this historical presidency. Headed back to private sector."

"I accomplished initially what I came to do," Rogers told CNN later. "I like strategy. I like building something. It's built... the foundation of the [social secretary's ]office is good and solid."

Rogers did not say where she'll be working. She said she'll be "around to work on the transition" to a new social secretary at the White House.

She summed up her experiences at the White House in another note: "330 events. Halloween for 3,000. Easter egg roll for 30,000. Music series with performances and the performers teaching the students during the day. Latin, jazz, country, civil rights. "

In December, the White House was accused of stonewalling as Congress investigated the party-crasher security breach at Obama's first state dinner. At issue was whether the White House was protecting Rogers from testifying about how Tareq and Michaele Salahi were able to crash the first White House state dinner. The couple did not have an invite but were allowed in. Rogers' office planned the dinner. At the time, Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan said his agency would take the heat for the incident.