TUNISIA

Libyan rebels battled on Tuesday around Muammar Gaddafi's headquarters, where a son of the veteran leader had emerged overnight to confound reports of his capture and to rally cheering loyalists for a rearguard fightback.

Libyans around the world, in places such as Greece, Turkey and Sudan, celebrated the arrival of rebels in Tripoli over the weekend.

Moammar Gadhafi's regime will fall within 10 days, but Gadhafi will not surrender, Libya's former prime minister predicted on Monday.

After six months of battling with Moammar Gadhafi's forces, Libyan rebels finally broke through on Monday, capturing 95 percent of Tripoli and many key members of Gadhafi's circle, including two of his sons. But the big question remains - where in the world is Moammar Gadhafi?

The implosion of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's 41-year-old rule will put a new spring in the step of the Arab revolutions and demonstrate once again that these entrenched autocratic governments are not invincible.

Libyan government tanks shelled parts of central Tripoli Monday after rebels swept into the heart of the city and crowds took to the streets to celebrate the expected downfall of Muammar Gaddafi.

Explosions and gunfire rang out in Tripoli after dawn as opponents of Muammar Gaddafi rose up in the capital, declaring a final push to topple the Libyan leader after a six-month war reached the city's outskirts.

Libyan rebels seized an oil refinery in Zawiyah Thursday and took control of Sabratha further west on the main highway from Tripoli to Tunisia as NATO aircraft struck targets in the capital.

Rebels to the west and east of Tripoli battled Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi's forces Wednesday night for control of oil facilities vital to the civil war's outcome. The United States also deployed two more Predator drones for surveillance operations.

Libyan rebels launched an assault on Zawiyah's oil refinery on Wednesday to drive the last of the forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi out of the city west of Tripoli and tighten their noose around the capital.

Benghazi Council Says Dictator's Departure Is Only Option

Forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi fired a Scud missile for the first time in Libya's civil war, a U.S. defense official said, after rebel advances left the Libyan leader isolated in his capital.

Libyan rebels said on Monday they had seized a second strategic town near Tripoli within 24 hours, completing the encirclement of the capital in the boldest advances of their six-month-old uprising against Muammar Gaddafi.

For 12 hours, Libyan rebel Ahmed Oraybee had been moving from one building to the next in the town of Zawiyah, trying to hunt down the pro-government snipers stalking its neighbourhoods.

Muammar Gaddafi urged Libyans Monday to free the country from "traitors," as rebels in the west began to strangle a major lifeline to his capital.

Libyan regime denies talking to insurgents about dictator's departure.

"Just Like a Woman," a movie starring Sienna Miller, is the first in Oscar-nominated director Rachid Bouchareb's planned trilogy about the changing relationship between Americans and the Arab world.

Rebels on the eastern front of Libya's civil war lost 11 men in the past 24 hours fighting to capture the strategic oil terminal and refinery at Brega on the Mediterranean coast, hospital sources said.

Syrian forces killed at least 30 people and moved into a town near the Turkish border on Tuesday, an activist group said, even as Turkey's foreign minister pressed President Bashar al-Assad to halt assaults on protests against his rule.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has an unspoken pact with the Turkish electorate: he delivers rapid economic growth, jobs and money, and voters let him shape what kind of democracy this Muslim nation of 74 million people becomes.

The images of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak attending court proceedings lying down on a hospital stretcher, placed inside a meshed cage full of defendants, complete the story of mighty backlash. The court proceedings were televised live across the world, adding insult to his injury. But the majority of Egyptians are reckoning that Mubarak, who ruled the country with an iron fist, has got his comeuppance.