Syria’s supporters in Lebanon struck back against the ”cedar revolution” this week with a show of strength that easily dwarfed anything their opponents have been able to muster. They drove into Beirut in cars, waving Lebanese flags, and in battered buses decorated with pictures of the Syrian-backed President, Emile Lahoud.
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/ 11 February 2005
Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s most traditional absolute monarchies, took a tentative step towards democracy on Thursday when male citizens went to the polls in the first municipal elections the country has witnessed for 40 years. Candidates have splashed out money on advertising and laid on feasts for potential voters, but the authorities’ ”progressive step” has left reformers disappointed.
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/ 24 September 2004
Egypt is pressing ahead with ”very progressive” ideas for reform, but changing the way the president is elected is not one of them, at least for the time being, a spokesperson for the governing party said this week. President Hosni Mubarak’s fourth six-year term ends in October next year and opposition groups are pressing for a free election and a choice of candidates.
The weekend carnage in Khobar came less than a month after Saudi Arabia vowed to ”strike with an iron fist” against militants who carried out attacks and said it was making every effort to protect foreigners in the kingdom. ”The government is doing all it can to protect all residents,” Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal told a news conference. Such assurances have been heard before and will no doubt be heard again.
”Why are most Africans, unless forced by dire necessity to earn their livelihood with ‘the sweat of their brow’, so loath to undertake any work that dirties the hands?” ”The all-encompassing preoccupation with sex in the African mind emerges clearly in two manifestations…” These statements, I think you’ll agree, are thoroughly offensive.
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/ 25 November 2003
They call it Shouting Valley — a remote spot in the Golan Heights where Syrians go to meet their relatives on the opposite side. Across the valley they can see each other and wave, but it is not easy to talk. Brian Whitaker hears talk in Damascus of a strategy to put the focus on a dangerous area.
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/ 10 October 2003
Syria’s youthful president sounded resolute and defiant this week in his first public comment on the Israeli air raid that struck deep into his country’s territory. ”We can, with full confidence, say that what happened will only make Syria’s role more effective and influential,”’ Bashar al-Assad told the pan-Arab newspaper al-Hayat.
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/ 8 September 2003
A new tape purporting to be from Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network has threatened an onslaught against the United States so devastating it would obliterate memories of the September 11 suicide attacks.
As FBI agents launched an investigation into the bombing of the UN headquarters in Iraq, Paul Bremer, the US’s top civilian administrator, highlighted three groups of suspects — Ba’athist supporters of Saddam Hussein, members of the Iraqi Ansar al-Islam organisation, or foreign Islamic militants.
The White House last night announced the capture of a man described as the mastermind of the Bali bombing: al-Qaeda’s chief representative and operational planner in south-east Asia.