PARIS (AFP) – Cecilia Sarkozy, whose husband Nicolas was elected Sunday as France’s new president, is a fiercely independent former model and PR executive unlikely to fit easily into the discreet role of first lady. I don’t see myself as a first lady. It bores me. I prefer going round in combat trousers and cowboy boots. I don’t fit the mould," the elegant 49-year-old brunette has said. Her arrival at the Elysee will certainly send in a blast of modernity after 12 years of the Chiracs, whose bourgeois respectability sat well with the Louis XV furniture of the 18th century palace. Like the defeated Socialist candidate Segolene Royal, Cecilia and her husband are in a relationship that flies in the face of presidential convention but which in many ways reflects the changing sociology of France.
Of Jewish-Spanish ancestry, Cecilia’s foreign roots match those of Sarkozy, who is half Hungarian and quarter Jewish. In 2004 she made a point of saying she did "not have a drop of French blood in my veins."Cecilia was conspicuously absent from Sarkozy’s election campaign — setting tongues wagging and reawakening memories of 2005 when the couple split for several months.As if to quell the gossip, she was photographed voting with Sarkozy and celebrating his victory in round one two weeks ago, but was again absent from his side when he voted in the decisive second round on Sunday.
When Sarkozy entered government in 2002, Cecilia had an office in the interior ministry, but in early 2005 she disappeared from view and it was revealed she had left him for an advertising executive in New York.
Picture of President elect Sarkozy, Nicolas Sarkozy (2R), France’s UMP political party presidential candidate, poses with his wife Cecilia (2L), and her daughters Judith (L) and Jeanne-Marie Martin (R) as they leave a polling station in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris, April 22, 2007. REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer (FRANCE)
A few months later they were reconciled.
PARIS – Conservative Nicolas Sarkozy won the French presidency by a comfortable margin Sunday and immediately signalled his victory would mean friendly relations with the United States. His socialist opponent, Segolene Royal, conceded defeat for her hopes of becoming France’s first woman president. With nearly 70 percent of ballots counted, Sarkozy had just over 53 percent of the vote, according to the Interior Ministry.
He began his February 28 news conference by supporting Jacques Chirac’s 12-year-old diplomacy. He said that among his priorities is to re-launch the peace process between the Palestinians and Israelis to establish an independent and viable Palestinian State and enhance the security of Israel. He stressed his commitment to a utterly independent Lebanon without foreign interventions. He also voiced support for the International Tribunal to prosecute the perpetrators of assassinations since the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. He criticized the Israeli war on Lebanon, describing it as disproportionate to Hezbollah’s provocation.
BEIRUT, Lebanon – Hezbollah’s leader praised an Israeli government report that said Israel’s summer war against the guerrillas was a failure. But the Lebanese government criticized the findings, saying the report did not address the massive destruction wrought on this country. 
TEL AVIV (AFP) – Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert faced a new battle on Thursday, with tens of thousands of protestors expected to call on him to quit at the first mass street rally since a scathing Lebanon war report. Several thousand people had filled Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square by early evening to call for Olmert to resign in the wake of a government inquiry that roasted his handling of the 34-day war last summer.
JERUSALEM (Reuters) – A member of Ehud Olmert’s cabinet quit on Tuesday, opening the first crack in Israel’s government after the prime minister vowed to ride out a scathing reprimand by an inquiry into last year’s costly Lebanon war. Announcing he was stepping down, Eitan Cabel, a minister without portfolio from the Israeli leader’s main governing partner, the Labour Party, told a news conference: "I cannot sit in a government headed by Ehud Olmert."
By Kim Ghattas, In the southern suburbs of Beirut, pictures of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of Iran’s Islamic revolution, are not an uncommon sight. 
