Lebanon to hold four-phase polls from May 29

Reuters 
 
Beirut: Lebanon’s president approved yesterday a government decision to hold general elections in four rounds between May 29 and June 19 under a controversial electoral law, officials said.

They said President Emile Lahoud issued a decree confirming the dates already agreed by the government last week.

Lebanese officials have been under international pressure to hold the elections on time despite a political crisis sparked by the February 14 assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri.

Lebanon hopes to lure tourists after bomb

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Beirut’s luxury hotels have patched up the damage from a huge bombing that plunged the country into turmoil and opened their doors again hoping to lure back tourists in time for the summer.

The Feb. 14 blast that killed former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri shattered the windows and blew in the doors of hotels lining the coast, forcing them to close for some two months.

Now that Syria has pulled its troops out of Lebanon after 29 years and the country is looking forward to May elections that had been threatened by political upheaval, hopes are high Arab visitors will return to their favorite regional destination.

Before Aoun’s ‘tsunami,’ a wilderness of suspicions

By Michael Young
Daily Star staff
Thursday, May 05, 2005

So Michel Aoun returns this weekend, promising a tsunami, as he recently put it. It was typical that he failed to see, in the shadow of the East Asian killer wave, the inelegance of those words. The general surfs in on a swell of ambition, the kind that reportedly makes him believe he can cut a deal with President Emile Lahoud, to better dispose of him once Aoun is inside the walls.

Events in the past days have been confusing, even by the tortuous standards of Lebanese political life. No one has come out looking good. What is going on? Depending on which side you hear, fragments of narratives are emerging. For a confederacy of Christian former Syrian allies, at the top of which stands Lahoud, but also Deputy Parliament Speaker Michel Murr, his son Elias, the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation, and others, the controversial agreement last week that the election law of 2000 would govern the forthcoming elections at the end of May was a case of Christians being stabbed in the back. They underline, probably with some merit, that the deal came following an alliance between Walid Jumblatt, Saadeddine Hariri, Amal and Hizbullah.

Lebanon suspends warrant for returning opposition leader Aoun

BEIRUT (AFP) – A Lebanese court suspended an arrest warrant against exiled Christian opposition leader Michel Aoun, paving the way for his return from France which many fear could disrupt Lebanon’s fragile political structure.

The court also decided to delay a ruling in a 2003 case against Aoun, who is due to return to Beirut on Saturday, over comments that were deemed to have damaged Lebanon’s relations with Syria.

“The criminal court of Beirut decided to freeze the arrest warrant issued in absentia against General Aoun on October 24, 2003, as well as its terms, and to postpone a verdict in this case until July 5, 2005,” a judicial source said Thursday.