Benghazi’s Local Elections: A Message of Confidence to the Rest of Libya and the World

[Iterate]

7. Most encouraging.

It's been a steady stream of good "news", but I hesitate to call it "news" since much of it isn't widely disseminated. New national budget...number of detainees cut in half as the vetting continues...normalized relations across the Maghreb...training sessions for legal professionals...decades old problems flair up but then get set on a path to resolution. There was even some doubt if people would register, because so many didn't have a clue as how to organize an election. Now we know, the registration has worked.

Being now out of the habit of collecting links for some of those news items , I'll just grab another small item, a current one:

Tunisia supermarket expands to Libya
May 22, 2012 10:43 am by Borzou Daragahi
...

Officials of the company said at a meeting on Thursday that plans for opening the stores were initiated some time ago but were interrupted by revolutions that overthrew Tunisian president Zein el-Abidine Ben Ali and Gaddafi.

“We wanted to expand our business for three years, but since the Tunisian revolution and the Libyan revolution, it has been very difficult for us to commence with our project,” said Emad Bouaasida, director of international development for Monoprix Tunisia, according to the news website Tunisia Live.
...

The uprising badly hurt the Tunisian supermarket chain, which was under the control of the former leader’s family. Some of its stores were vandalised and looted. Income fell from from 10.5m Tunisian dinars ($6.7m) to 5.4m Tunisian dinars. The company currently employees 4,000 people.

http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2012/05/22/tunisia-supermarket-expands-to-libya/

I know, I know. It was all about harissa sauce.