Today's photos

Art students paint on fabric covering a 5-meter-high wall of sandbags, surrounding the United Nations offices in Beirut, Lebanon, Wednesday, May 18, 2005. The sense of security built up over years of Lebanon's postwar calm was shattered when a series of bomb blasts hit the capital over the past three months. A U.N. mission is scheduled to arrive in Beirut later this week to conduct an inquiry on the bomb blast that killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. (AP Photo / Hussein Malla)

Lebanon's Aoun buries hatchet with jailed Geagea

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Lebanon's opposition leader Michel Aoun visited a fellow-Maronite Christian civil war foe in his prison cell near Beirut on Wednesday, drawing a line under a bloody rift that tore their community apart 15 years ago.

"This visit today ... comes to turn a page of the past that now belongs to history and to look to the future," the retired general told reporters after his one-hour meeting with former militia chief Samir Geagea in a cell at the Defense Ministry.

Aoun returned to Lebanon on May 7 after 14 years of an exile that began after Syrian troops defeated his forces in 1990.

Earlier that year, Aoun's men had battled Geagea's Lebanese Forces militia for four months. Hundreds of people were killed in the conflict, which devastated parts of a Christian enclave.

Christian opposition to run in elections despite 'unfair law'

By Majdoline Hatoum

BEIRUT: Lebanon's Christian opposition said it will contest the country's elections despite their insistence that the election process discriminates against Christians.

The opposition finally quelled speculation that it would boycott this month's polls following a meeting of its Qornet Shehwan Gathering under the aegis of Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Butros Sfeir.

Sfeir is one of the most vocal critics of the country's election law, which was devised in 2000 when Syrian hegemony was at its most pervasive in Lebanon.

Following the meeting, opposition MP Butros Harb said: "We will deal with the 2000 electoral law as a status-quo, which we refuse, but will go through elections according to the law in order to protect people's rights."