Rebels battled Moammar Khadafy’s forces Monday on a deadlocked front in eastern Libya and welcomed the first supply ship in five days to reach the besieged western port city of Misrata.
The heavy fighting was reported south of Ajdabiya, a rebel-held town about 90 miles south of Benghazi, the rebel headquarters in the east.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said it would use the chartered ship in Misrata as a floating platform as its team works to reduce the danger of unexploded weapons on the streets of Misrata, visit prisoners detained by the rebels and help reunite families that lost contact when the city center was bombed.
Meanwhile, an overcrowded ship carrying up to 600 people trying to flee Libya sank just outside the port of Tripoli, the U.N. refugee agency said Monday, citing witness accounts. Aid officials were still trying to confirm the fate of those who were aboard when the vessel broke apart Friday.
TUNISIA: Woman who said soldiers raped her flees.
A Libyan woman who became a symbol of her country’s repression after security forces tried to silence her allegations of rape at the hands of Khadafy militiamen said Monday that she has escaped to neighboring Tunisia with the help of a defecting soldier.
The woman, Eman al- Obeidy, told CNN on Monday that a soldier and his family had driven her in a military car to a rebel-held border crossing Thursday. She hid her face behind a traditional head covering, she said, and crossed the border as a refugee. She said she continued to fear pursuit by agents of Moammar Khadafy and hoped to find protection from a Western government.
EGYPT: Protest organizer will pen book.
Wael Ghonim, the former Google executive and Egyptian revolutionary who coined the term “Revolution 2.0,” now has a deal to write a book with that name.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has bought the rights to publish Ghonim’s book, which will tell “the inside story of the Egyptian revolution and the lessons of the Arab Spring,” the New York publisher said in a statement.
The 30-year-old former Google executive was one of the people who mobilized protesters through technology and social media.
The book is set to be released Jan. 25.
YEMEN: Protesters fired on; 4 killed.
Security forces and government supporters opened fire on protesters Monday in the city of Taiz, witnesses said, while a doctor confirmed that four people were killed and scores injured after almost a month of stalled negotiations over how and when President Ali Abdullah Saleh would leave office.
Protesters said that a large march was headed toward the municipal education offices in the center of the city when it came under fire. A doctor at a field hospital said that 88 others were wounded by gunshots, 13 remaining in critical condition.
