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...12th president of Lebanon and a Maronite Christian, like all his predecessors, due to a sectarian power-sharing formula devised in 1943 when Lebanon gained independence. Since 1989, when the formula was adjusted, the President in Lebanon does not hold executive power - that authority belongs to the Prime Minister - but Suleiman stands to play an influential role as a conciliator between the country's rival political factions...
Syria is still considered the chief suspect in the assassination of Rafik Hariri, a former Prime Minister who was killed in a truck bomb explosion in February 2005. An international tribunal is being established to try Hariri's killers and the perpetrators of several other assassinations since then. Syria has denied involvement in the deaths and argues that the tribunal is nothing more than a political weapon wielded by the U.S. Still, few doubt that fences need to be mended between Lebanon and Syria, however difficult that may prove: in their 60 or so years of independent existence...
...world's largest festival it was a very European evening. The Grand Prix (second place) and the Jury Prize (the bronze) both went to true-life Italian films: respectively, Mario Garrone's Mafia expose Gomorrah and Paolo Sorrentino's Il Divo, a bio-pic of controversial former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. The Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne took the Screenplay award for their immigrant crime drama The Silence of Lorna, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, from Turkey, was named Best Director (a consolation prize here) for Three Monkeys, his study of corruption within a business and a family...
High-profile visits by political figures are relatively rare in Najaf, the quiet holy city in southern Iraq where Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani lives. Sistani, the most venerated Shi'ite religious leader in the country, shuns the limelight. But it fell his way last week nonetheless when Iraqi Prime Ministry Nouri al-Maliki and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker appeared in Najaf separately within days of each other. It raised questions whether Sistani is making a comeback as a voice in political decision-making in Iraq...
...There are criminals and then there are statesmen, and Paolo Sorrentino's Il Divo sees little difference between the two. This is a film of great visual energy about an essentially static figure: Giulio Andreotti, three times the Prime Minister of Italy, a leading light of the Christian Democratic Party, and the star of one of the country's most notorious trials, when he was charged with complicity in the death of the journalist Mino Pecarelli, who had written that Andreotti had Mafia ties and was implicated in the kidnapping and murder of his predecessor as Prime Minister, Aldo Moro...