Lebanese President Michel Sleiman will visit Damascus next week for talks with Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad, as the two neighbors move to establish diplomatic ties, an official said yesterday.
“The summit will be held on Aug. 13,” an official from the presidential palace told reporters.
Relations have been tense since Syria pulled its troops out of Lebanon in 2005 in the aftermath of the assassination of Lebanese billionaire and former prime minister Rafiq Hariri, ending a three-decade military presence.
Syria was widely blamed for the massive Beirut car bomb blast that killed Hariri but denies any involvement. The issue remains a key bone of contention between the two countries.
It will be Sleiman’s first official visit to Syria and the first meeting with Assad since the two leaders announced in Paris last month that they planned to establish ties.
The two neighbors have never had official diplomatic relations since their independence from France more than 60 years ago and the move is widely seen as a necessary step for Syrian recognition of Lebanese sovereignty.
Despite its 2005 troop pullout from Lebanon, Syria is believed to still wield much political power in its smaller neighbor and backs the Hezbollah-led opposition.
But Syria is gradually being welcomed back into the international fold, with a high-profile visit by Assad to Paris last month and the launching of indirect peace negotiations with Israel after an eight-year freeze.
Lebanon’s new national unity Cabinet, in which the opposition holds veto power, adopted a policy statement on Monday calling for “brotherly relations with Syria on the basis of mutual respect of sovereignty and the independence of both countries.” It also called for the demarcation of borders.
A parliamentary vote of confidence on the manifesto will allow the government to begin to function officially.
An official from speaker Nabih Berri’s office told reporters that parliament would probably meet on Friday.
The unity government was formed after a debilitating 18-month political crisis that culminated in fighting that left 65 dead in May and saw an armed Hezbollah-led takeover of large swathes of west Beirut.
Sleiman came to office after a deal struck in Qatar between the rival factions on May 21 — filling a six-month void in the presidency.
After the Doha accord, French President Nicholas Sarkozy moved to reward Assad by renewing contacts with Syria, which the West had isolated from the international community for alleged meddling in Lebanon.
Lebanon’s Western-backed ruling bloc accuses Syria of destablizing the country and being behind a series of assassinations of prominent anti-Syrian figures.
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress