I think your best bet for the most current news about the situation in Libya is probably al-Jazeera’s live blog. The latest is that Tripoli’s citizens themselves have joined the uprising. This has major implications for the political future of the country, says Professor Juan Cole:

This development, with the capital creating its own nationalist mythos of revolutionary participation, is the very best thing that could have happened. Instead of being liberated (and somewhat subjected) from the outside by Berber or Cyrenaican revolutionaries, Tripoli enters the Second Republic with its own uprising to its name, as a full equal able to gain seats on the Transitional National Council once the Qaddafis and their henchmen are out of the way. There will be no East/West divide. My hopes for a government of national unity as the last phase of the revolution before parliamentary elections now seem more plausible than ever. Tellingly, Tunisia and Egypt both recognized the TNC as Libya’s legitimate government through the night, as the Tripoli uprising unfolded. Regional powers can see the new Libya being born.

I’ll take Professor Cole’s analysis over that of almost every Western journalist and anchor, since he speaks the languages and can read and hear the primary sources.

If I were Basher al-Assad of Syria I’d be looking at my hole card right about now and thinking about a way to get out of my country. If I were a general in Syria’s Army I’d be really really nervous, because if al-Assad leaves I’ll have no line to power left other than military force, and we’ve seen over the past several months that the demonstrators in Syria are willing to die.

I remember when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and when the USSR gave up control of Eastern Europe two years later. I sat slack-jawed in front of the television. Assumptions of a lifetime had just been turned upside down. I’m feeling somewhat the same now as I watch all this in Egypt and Libya and Syria and Tunisia.