By Nada Bakri, BEIRUT: Columnist and political activist Alia Solh, who was the eldest daughter of former Prime Minister Riad Solh, died on Thursday in Paris. She was 75. Solh died of a heart attack a few days after checking in to the American Hospital of Paris. Known as "the daughter of independence," Solh was heir to the towering legacy of Lebanon’s first prime minister, a politician who helped lead the struggle to drive French troops out of Lebanon. her father was also widely considered to be a pillar of the pan-Arabism movement.
Alia Solh started a long career of advocacy, writing about and influencing Lebanon’s po- litical life from the campus of the American University of Beirut in the early 1950s. On campus she was known for leading demonstrations for women’s rights, and she wrote extensively about Lebanese and Arab causes for a variety of publications.
When the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War entered its eighth year, Solh left Beirut to settle in Paris. "I preferred to leave and to take my memories with me, so I could tell the world about them and the Lebanon I knew, so that people would not forget the pearl that lies under the dirt," she said during a 2001 interview published by The Daily Star.
By Robert Fisk in Beirut , Walid Jumblatt may be one of the more charismatic figures in Lebanese political life but when he tells his people to avoid violence, they do as they are told. And so another sectarian killing – the murder of a 12-year-old Sunni boy and his neighbour, their bodies dumped outside Sidon on Thursday night – was transformed into a reminder that the post-civil war Lebanese can remain united.
PARIS, April 24, 2007 (AFP) – French President Jacques Chirac, who leaves office next month, is to move from the Elysee palace to a chic apartment on the capital’s Left Bank, a French newspaper reported Tuesday.
BEIRUT: With the second anniversary of the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanese territories to be marked this weekend, the Free Patriotic Movement’s (FPM) youth club at the American University of Beirut (AUB), in collaboration with detainee advocacy group SOLIDE, hosted a conference on Wednesday calling for attention to the plight of Lebanese detainees in Syrian prisons. "We consider the withdrawal of Syria from Lebanon to be incomplete if our compatriots are still being held over there," Bassam Karam, vice president of the youth club, told The Daily Star. "The message from today is that we will continue to press forward with this, and we want the United Nations to extend its mandate on the Hariri investigation to include an investigation into the detained in Syria." 
By Nadim Ladki, BEIRUT, April 26 (Reuters) – Lebanese police on Thursday found the bodies of a Sunni Muslim government supporter and a 12-year-old boy whose abduction earlier this week was linked to Lebanon’s rising sectarian tension. The bodies of Ziad Qabalan, 25, and Ziad Ghandour, 12, were found in a field north of the port city of Sidon, 40 km (25 miles) south of Beirut, after a local television station received an anonymous phone tip, police sources said. 
