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The Tea Party Base Falls for Rick Perry

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Kragar8/24/2011 1:48:46 pm PDT

Journalists in Hotel Are Free

“Rixos crisis ends. All journalists are out!,” Matthew Chance, a CNN correspondent, tweeted as he and the others were allowed to depart the hotel with the aid of Red Cross workers who took them away. The journalists had been held captive there since the weekend, when rebel forces first invaded Tripoli in what has proved to be a decisive turn in the six-month-old conflict.

Mr. Chance said after the release that the loyalists, having realized that their leader’s grip on power had dissolved, “essentially just capitulated.”

The elation at the Rixos news was tempered later in the day, however, with word that four Italian journalists had been abducted outside of Tripoli and their driver killed. Italian consular officials said they had been in contact with the journalists, who were being held by Qaddafi loyalists at an unspecified location inside the Libyan capital.