USA Today: October 2011

2011 Miss America

Miss America

Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs (/ˈdʒɒbz/; February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American inventor and businessman widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer era. He was co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc. Jobs was co-founder and previously served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of directors of the Walt Disney Company in 2006, following the acquisition of Pixar by Disney.

In the late 1970s, Jobs—along with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Mike Markkula and others—designed, developed, and marketed one of the first commercially successful lines of personal computers, the Apple II series. In the early 1980s, Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of Xerox PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to the creation of the Apple Lisa and, one year later, the Macintosh. After losing a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985, Jobs left Apple and founded NeXT, a computer platform development company specializing in the higher-education and business markets.

In 1986, he acquired the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd, which was spun off as Pixar Animation Studios.[7] He was credited in Toy Story (1995) as an executive producer. He remained CEO and majority shareholder at 50.1 percent until its acquisition by The Walt Disney Company in 2006,[8] making Jobs Disney's largest individual shareholder at seven percent and a member of Disney's Board of Directors.[9][10] Apple's 1996 buyout of NeXT brought Jobs back to the company he co-founded, and he served as its interim CEO from 1997, then becoming permanent CEO from 2000 onwards, spearheading the advent of the iPod, iPhone and iPad. From 2003, he fought a eight-year battle with cancer, and eventually resigned as CEO in August 2011, while on his third medical leave. He was then elected chairman of Apple's board of directors.

On October 5, 2011, around 3:00 p.m., Jobs died at his home in Palo Alto, California, aged 56, six weeks after resigning as CEO of Apple. A copy of his death certificate indicated respiratory arrest as the immediate cause of death, with "metastatic pancreas neuroendocrine tumor" as the underlying cause. His occupation was listed as "entrepreneur" in the "high tech" business.

Steve Jobs

Obama usa presedent

WASHINGTON — By declaring the Iraq war over, President Barack Obama scored what his allies see as a fourth big foreign policy success in six months, starting with Osama bin Laden’s killing. But these events might play a discouragingly small role in his re-election bid, even if they burnish his eventual place in history.

American voters tend to focus heavily on domestic issues, especially in times of high unemployment. That will limit Obama’s campaign options.

His supporters are seeking ways to make the most of his foreign policy accomplishments. One approach is to contrast them with Congress’ partisan-driven gridlock on taxes, the deficit and other domestic issues.

“Look at the progress the president can make when he doesn’t have Republicans obstructing him,” said Karen Finney, a former Democratic spokeswoman who often defends the party on TV and radio.

Former Democratic strategist Rebecca Kirszner Katz distributed a similar remark on Twitter this week: “Terrorists and dictators, lacking the filibuster, have no effective defense against Barack Obama.” It referred to the stalling tactic that Senate Republicans frequently use to kill Democratic bills even though they hold only 47 of the chamber’s 100 seats.

These Democrats hope Americans will see a bold and capable president who keeps his promises when Republicans don’t create roadblocks. They note that he green-lighted a daring nighttime raid to kill bin Laden in Pakistan on May 1; approved policies that led to last month’s drone-missile killing of American-born terror advocate Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen; backed allied actions that led to Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s ouster and death; and ended U.S. involvement in Iraq on schedule.

“It is very important for any incumbent to be able to talk about promises made and promises kept,” Finney said. The list of achievements, contrasted with President George W. Bush’s erroneous claims about Iraq’s weaponry in the first place, should help Democrats shake their image of being the weaker party on national security, she said.

“That baggage is finally lifted,” Finney said.

Translating that claim into votes for Obama 13 months from now may be difficult, however. The latest Associated Press-GfK poll confirmed that Americans still place far greater emphasis on domestic issues, especially the economy, than on foreign matters, including the war on terrorism.

The poll found Obama’s overall approval rating at an all-time low, 46 percent, for the second straight month, even though 64 percent of adults approved of his handling of terrorism. Only 40 percent approved of his handling of the economy.

Ninety-three percent of those questioned said the economy was an extremely or very important issue. By comparison, 73 percent put the same emphasis on terrorism.

Democratic officials believe Obama’s foreign policy record will look even better when the Republican presidential candidates hold a debate on that topic Nov. 15. Leading contenders Mitt Romney and Rick Perry are current or former governors, and Herman Cain has never held public office. So none has extensive foreign policy experience.

Obama

Obama Funny Pictures

Obama Funny

Miss America 2011 Pictures And Videos

Miss America 2011 5 mins video

Miss America 2011 54 mins video

The Miss America Organization is one of the nation's leading achievement programs and the world's largest provider of scholarship assistance for young women. Last year, the Miss America Organization and its state and local organizations made available more than $45 million in cash and scholarship assistance.

Miss America 2011

Miss Universe 2011 Pictures And Video

Miss Universe 2011
Miss Universe 2011, Leila Lopes, at a press conference after winning the contest.
Date	September 12, 2011
Presenters	Natalie Morales, Andy Cohen, Jeannie Mai, Shandi Finnessey
Venue	Credicard Hall,^[1] São Paulo, Brazil^[2]
Broadcaster	NBC, Telemundo, Rede Bandeirantes
Entrants	89^[3]
Placements	16
Withdraws	Norway, Zambia
Returns	Cayman Islands, Chile, Estonia, Montenegro, Portugal, St. Lucia, Turks & Caicos, Vietnam
Winner	Leila Lopes Angola
Congeniality	Nikolina Lončar Montenegro
Best National Costume	Sheldry Sáez Panama
Photogenic	Ronnia Fornstedt Sweden

Miss Universe 2011, the 60th anniversary of the Miss Universe pageant, was held at the Credicard Hall in São Paulo, Brazil on September 12, 2011. Ximena Navarrete of Mexico crowned her successor, Leila Lopes of Angola, at the end of this event.[4] Contestants from 89 countries and territories participated in this year's pageant, surpassing the previous record of 86 contestants in 2006.

Miss Universe 2011

Muammar Gaddafi Dead Video And Pictures

Muammar Gaddafi was killed after being captured by the Libyan fighters he once scorned as "rats," cornered and shot in the head after they overrun his last bastion of resistance in his hometown of Sirte.

His body, bloodied, half naked, Gaddafi's trademark long curls hanging limp around a rarely seen bald spot, was delivered, a prize of war, to Misrata, the city west of Sirte whose siege and months of suffering at the hands of Gaddafi's artillery and sniper made it a symbol of the rebel cause.

A quick and secret burial was due later on Friday.

"It's time to start a new Libya, a united Libya," Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril declared. "One people, one future."

A formal announcement of Libya's liberation, which will set the clock ticking on a timeline to elections, would be made on Saturday, Libyan officials said.

Two months after Western-backed rebels ended 42 years of eccentric one-man rule by capturing the capital Tripoli, his death ended a nervous hiatus for the new interim government.

U.S. President Barack Obama, in a veiled dig at the Syrian and other leaders resisting the democrats of the Arab Spring, declared "the rule of an iron fist inevitably comes to an end."

But Gaddafi's death is a setback to campaigners seeking the full truth about the 1988 bombing over Lockerbie in Scotland of Pan Am flight 103 which claimed 270 lives, mainly Americans, and for which one of Gaddafi's agents was convicted.

Jim Swire, the father of one of the Lockerbie victims, said: "There is much still to be resolved and we may now have lost an opportunity for getting nearer the truth."

"That's for Lockerbie," said the front-page headline in The Sun, Britain's best selling daily newspaper.

Confusion over Gaddafi's death was a reminder of the challenge for Libyans to now summon order out of the armed chaos that is the legacy of eight months of grinding conflict.

The killing or capture of senior aides, including possibly two sons, as an armored convoy braved NATO air strikes in a desperate bid to break out of Sirte, may ease fears of diehards regrouping elsewhere - though cellphone video, apparently of Gaddafi alive and being beaten, may inflame his sympathizers.

As news of Gaddafi's demise spread, people poured into the streets in jubilation. Joyous fighters fired their weapons in the air, shouting "Allahu Akbar."

Others wrote graffiti on the parapets of the highway outside Sirte. One said simply: "Gaddafi was captured here."

Jibril, reading what he said was a post-mortem report, said Gaddafi was hauled unresisting from a "sewage pipe." He was then shot in the arm and put in a truck which was "caught in crossfire" as it ferried the 69-year-old to hospital.

"He was hit by a bullet in the head," Jibril said, adding it was unclear which side had fired the fatal shot.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who spearheaded a Franco-British move in NATO to back the revolt against Gaddafi hailed a turn of events that few had expected so soon, since there had been little evidence that Gaddafi himself was in Sirte.

But he also alluded to fears that, without the glue of hatred for Gaddafi, the new Libya could descend, like Saddam Hussein's Iraq, into bloody factionalism: "The liberation of Sirte must signal ... the start of a process ... to establish a democratic system in which all groups in the country have their place and where fundamental freedoms are guaranteed," he said.

NATO, keen to portray the victory as that of the Libyans themselves, said it would wind down its military mission.

"KEEP HIM ALIVE"

The circumstances of the death of Gaddafi, who had vowed to go down fighting, remained obscure. Jerky video showed a man with Gaddafi's distinctive long, curly hair, bloodied and staggering under blows from armed men, apparently NTC fighters.

The brief footage showed him being hauled by his hair from the hood of a truck. To the shouts of someone saying "Keep him alive," he disappears from view and gunshots are heard.

"While he was being taken away, they beat him and then they killed him," a senior source in the NTC told Reuters before Jibril spoke of crossfire. "He might have been resisting."

Officials said Gaddafi's son Mo'tassim, also seen bleeding but alive in a video, had also died. Another son, heir-apparent Saif al-Islam, was variously reported to be surrounded, captured or killed as conflicting accounts of the day's events crackled around networks of NTC fighters rejoicing in Sirte.

In Benghazi, where in February Gaddafi disdainfully said he would hunt down the "rats" who had emulated their Tunisian and Egyptian neighbors by rising up against an unloved autocrat, thousands took to the streets, loosing off weapons and dancing under the old tricolor flag revived by Gaddafi's opponents.

Mansour el Ferjani, 49, a Benghazi bank clerk and father of five posed his 9-year-old son for a photograph holding a Kalashnikov rifle: "Don't think I will give this gun to my son," he said. "Now that the war is over we must give up our weapons and the children must go to school.

Accounts were hazy of his final hours, as befitted a man who retained an aura of mystery in the desert down the decades as he first tormented "colonial" Western powers by sponsoring militant bomb-makers from the IRA to the PLO and then embraced the likes of Tony Blair and Silvio Berlusconi in return for investment in Libya's extensive oil and gas fields.

There was no shortage of fighters willing to claim they saw Gaddafi, who long vowed to die in battle, cringing below ground, like Saddam eight years ago, and pleading for his life.

One description, pieced together from various sources, suggests Gaddafi tried to break out of his final redoubt at dawn in a convoy of vehicles after weeks of dogged resistance.

However, he was stopped by a French air strike and captured, possibly some hours later, after gun battles with NTC fighters who found him hiding in a drainage culvert.

NATO said its warplanes fired on a convoy near Sirte about 8:30 a.m. (2:30 a.m. ET), striking two military vehicles in the group, but could not confirm that Gaddafi had been a passenger. France later said its jets had halted the convoy.

(Additional reporting by Taha Zargoun in Sirte, Barry Malone, Yasmine Saleh and Jessica Donati in Tripoli, Brian Rohan in Benghazi, Jon Hemming in Tunis, Edmund Blair and Yasmine Saleh in Cairo, Samia Nakhoul in Amman, Christian Lowe in Algiers, Tim Castle, Peter Apps and William Maclean in London, David Brunnstrom in Brussels, Alister Bull, Jeff Mason and Laura MacInnis in Washington and Vicky Buffery in Paris; Writing by Alastair Macdonald; Editing by Giles Elgood)

gaddafi dead

Gaddafi Killed Pictures And Videos

Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi[1] (Arabic: مُعَمَّر القَذَّافِي‎ Muʿammar al-Qaḏḏāfī About this sound audio (help·info);[variations] 7 June 1942 – 20 October 2011), commonly known as Muammar Gaddafi play /ˈmoʊ.əmɑr ɡəˈdɑːfi/ or Colonel Gaddafi, was the autocratic rulerof Libya, from 1969 when he seized power in a military coup, until 2011 when rebelling Libyan volunteers overthrew him in a civil war. Gaddafi's 42 years in power made him the fourth longest-ruling non-royal leader since 1900, as well as the longest-ruling Arab leader.He variously styled himself as 'the Brother Leader', 'Guide of the Revolution', and the 'King of Kings'.

After seizing power in 1969, he abolished the Libyan Constitution of 1951 and civil liberties enshrined in it. He imposed laws based on the political ideology he had formulated, called the Third International Theory and published in The Green Book. Gaddafi and his relatives took over much of the economy. Gaddafi sent his troops to neighboring countries as well as to back up his allies such as Idi Amin. While his attempts to buy and manufacture nuclear weapons failed, he succeeded to acquire chemical weapons. Gaddafi organized, armed, and financed political extremists and violence around the world, which eventually led to international sanctions against Gaddafi.Six days after the capture of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein by United States troops, renounced his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs and welcomed international inspections to verify that he would follow through on the commitment.Gaddafi wanted to make himself powerful ruler of a United States of Africa and he served as Chairperson of the African Union (AU) in 2009-2010.

In February 2011, following revolutions in neighbouring Egypt and Tunisia, protests against Gaddafi's rule began. These escalated into an uprising that spread across the country, with the forces opposing Gaddafi establishing a government based in Benghazi named the National Transitional Council(NTC). This led to the 2011 Libyan Civil War. Gaddafi's brutal violence against dissidents led the international community to evacuate foreign citizens and to cut diplomatic ties, which was followed by a international military intervention to enforce a UN Security Council resolution calling for a no-fly zone and protection of Libyans. The assets of Gaddafi and his family were frozen, and both Interpol and the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants on 27 June for Gaddafi, his son Saif al-Islam, and his brother-in-law Abdullah al-Senussi, concerning crimes against humanity. Gaddafi and his forces lost the Battle of Tripoli in August, and on 16 September 2011 the NTC took Libya's seat at the UN, replacing Gaddafi. Gaddafi retained control over parts of Libya, most notably the city of Sirte, to which it was presumed that he had fled. Although Gaddafi's forces initially held out against the NTC's advances, Gaddafi was killed as Sirte fell to the rebel forces on 20 October 2011

gaddafi killed

gaddafi killed

gaddafi killed

gaddafi killed

gaddafi killed

Libya's ex-leader Col Muammar Gaddafi has been killed after an assault on his birthplace of Sirte, officials say.

The circumstances of his death are not yet clear. Video has emerged purporting to show Col Gaddafi being captured alive and bundled on to a truck.

Fighters loyal to the National Transitional Council (NTC) said they found him hiding in a hole, and shot him when he tried to escape.

Col Gaddafi was toppled in August after 42 years in power.

Western leaders welcomed the news.

US President Barack Obama said this was a "momentous day" for Libya, now that tyranny had fallen. He said Libya had a "long and winding road towards full democracy", but the US and other countries would stand behind it.

The colonel was fighting in Sirte alongside his two sons, Mutassim and Saif al-Islam, according to reports.

Officials say Mutassim was killed in battle on Thursday.

The NTC's Justice Minister Mohammad al-Alagi told the AP news agency Saif al-Islam had been captured and taken to hospital with a leg wound.

Golden gun

Nato, which has been running a bombing campaign in Libya for months, said it had carried out an air strike earlier on Thursday that hit two pro-Gaddafi vehicles near Sirte.

The French jets involved stopped the convoy "from progressing as it sought to flee Sirte", said Defence Minister Gerard Longuet, but he added that it "was not destroyed by the French intervention", but by Libyan fighters.

At the scene

Caroline Hawley BBC News, Tripoli

There is a mood of sheer exhilaration in Tripoli - tracer fire is lighting up the early evening sky, and fireworks are going off.

People young and old, fighters and civilians, are pouring towards Martyrs' Square in their cars, some of them draped in flags, flashing V for victory signs.

There is relief that this chapter of Libya's history has ended. This is a moment that most Libyans never dreamed of.

And for the new authorities there is also huge relief. There were fears that with Col Gaddafi in hiding and issuing audio messages, he could have directed a new insurgency.

Proof of Col Gaddafi's fate came in grainy pieces of video, first circulated among NTC fighters and then broadcast by international news channels.

The first videos showed a bloodied corpse, with some channels picking up footage they said showed the colonel's body being dragged through the streets.

An NTC fighter told the BBC he found Col Gaddafi hiding in a hole in Sirte, and the former leader begged him not to shoot.

The fighter showed reporters a golden pistol he said he had taken from Col Gaddafi.

Arabic TV channels showed images of troops surrounding two large drainage pipes where the reporters said Col Gaddafi was found.

Later, another video emerged of the colonel being bundled on to the back of a pick-up truck after being captured alive.

NTC fighters said he was shot when he tried to escape.

None of the video footage has been independently verified.

Later, the NTC's acting Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril confirmed Col Gaddafi's death: "We have been waiting for this moment for a long time. Muammar Gaddafi has been killed."

Mr Jibril promised that NTC chief Mustafa Abdul Jalil would give more details of how Col Gaddafi was killed.

He said Mr Abdul Jalil would also later officially announce the "liberation of the country", allowing the NTC to begin pushing through democratic reforms that will lead to elections.

"I think it's for the Libyans to realise that it's time to start a new Libya, a united Libya, one people, one future," Mr Jibril said.

'United Libya'

Libyans gathered in towns and cities across the country to celebrate the reports of the colonel's death.

The BBC's Gabriel Gatehouse has visited the drain where Col Gaddafi was reportedly found by NTC forces

Groups of young men fired guns in the air, and drivers honked horns in celebration.

His death came after weeks of fierce fighting for Sirte, one of the last remaining pockets of resistance.

World leaders urged the NTC to carry through its promise to reform the country.

UK Prime Minister David Cameron, who had taken a leading role in Nato's intervention, said it was "a day to remember all of Col Gaddafi's victims".

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called it a "historic" moment, but warned: "The road ahead for Libya and its people will be difficult and full of challenges."