Word: taif
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...Siniora supporters see the national unity government call as a pretext for a Hizballah power-grab. "The Taif Accord [which brokered an end to Lebanon's civil war] divides power among religious groups, regardless of demographic changes," said Rami Rayess, a spokesman for the Progressive Socialist Party, the leading Druze faction of Siniora's coalition. According to Rayess, Shi'ite parties, who represent the fastest growing part of Lebanon's population, want to flex their muscles after what they see as Hizballah's "Divine Victory" over Israel this summer. "We have the fear that national unity is a cover...
...Hizballah's threat to Israel would be neutralized if the country's border with Israel was controlled by the Lebanese army rather than by the Shi'ite militia. That's the arrangement called for in the Taif agreement that ended the 1975-90 civil war, as well as in U.N. Resolution 1559. But getting Hizballah to comply will be difficult...
...Hizballah's short-term priority, however, may be ensuring that Syrian withdrawal takes place not on the basis of Resolution 1559, which it rejects, but on the basis of the Taif Agreement brokered by the Arab League in 1989 to end the Lebanese civil war - which also mandates Syrian withdrawal, but does not require Hizballah's disarmament. Indeed, its success in fighting the 18-year Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon, which ended in 2000, won Hizballah national acclaim across the political spectrum in Lebanon. (Today, it relies on a flimsier pretext for maintaining an army, claiming that it is fighting...
...days later, however, the Syrian government issued a correction: the President hadn't really been talking about a total withdrawal but about compliance with the 1989 Taif Agreement ending Lebanon's long civil war. This wasn't the first time the Syrian government retracted or corrected or denied things that the President had said. In the days after last month's assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, Assad told Arab League President Amr Moussa that he was planning to withdraw from Lebanon, only to have the Syrian Information Minister later say that Moussa had got it wrong-Syria...
...begins to compose a fragrance, sending samples of the scent until it is refined to satisfaction. The whole process can take three months or more; prices start around $4,500 and go up depending on the rarity of the ingredients (rose extracts from the Saudi Arabian city of Taif cost $24,000 per batch). Once the perfume has been completed it is registered, and the customer receives a certificate of exclusivity...