BEIRUT
Last of Syrian troops leave Lebanon today
The last Syrian troops will leave Lebanon today after 29 years of their presence, a senior Lebanese military officer said, as Damascus yields to fierce international and domestic pressure after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
“Tomorrow everything will be over,” the official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity Saturday.
Saturday night, the largest number of Syrian troops to leave in one batch vacated at least 10 positions in the northern part of the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon.
JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia
Conservatives win majority in elections
Candidates backed by conservative clerics dominated the final stage of Saudi Arabia’s landmark municipal elections, according to results announced Saturday.
In the kingdom’s commercial capital of Jiddah, the seven winning candidates were those whose names appeared on what was dubbed the “golden list” – the picks of fundamentalist clerics.
Five of the six winners in Buraydah, capital of ultraconservative Qassem province, also received a clerical nod, and the holy city of Medina also saw Islamist candidates faring well.
SAN’A, Yemen
Sentence upheld in missionaries’ deaths
A Yemeni court on Saturday upheld the death sentence of a Muslim extremist convicted of assassinating a prominent politician in 2002 and helping to plot an attack that killed three American missionaries in a hospital days later.
The court, however, overturned the verdicts and prison sentences of six men who had been accused of aiding Ali al-Jarallah in the assassination of the Socialist Party’s deputy secretary-general, Jarallah Omar.
MOSCOW
Nationalist sought in attack on official
Russian prosecutors are investigating the possible role of extreme nationalists in last month’s attempted assassination of the head of the state- controlled electricity monopoly.
Anatoly Chubais, who is also a liberal politician, survived the March 17 attack in which assailants sprayed his car with automatic gunfire and detonated a roadside bomb as he was being driven to work outside Moscow.
The Kommersant newspaper, quoting a prosecutor, said police were searching for 25-year-old far-right activist Ivan Mironov in the attack.
The daily said Mironov stood unsuccessfully for election to parliament in 2003 as a member of Rodina, or Homeland, a leading nationalist party that stormed to success in those elections as the third biggest political force in Russia.
NORTHERN CYPRUS
Government resigns, ceding to new leader
The government of the breakaway Turkish Cypriot state in northern Cyprus resigned Saturday, making way for Prime Minister Mehmet Ali Talat to take over as president following his election win.
Talat, 53, won April 17 presidential elections and replaces the breakaway state’s 81-year- old founder, Rauf Denktash. Denktash accepted Talat’s resignation as prime minister Saturday, a formality that allows him to take over the presidency today. Denktash did not run in the election.
