General wants Egypt to hold vote next year
CAIRO – Egypt’s military chief called on the country Tuesday to adhere to the timetable of a political road map that envisions presidential elections by next spring, saying this would allow Egyptians to focus on challenges to national security.
Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi was speaking during a ceremony to honor troops ahead of the national commemoration of Egypt’s Oct. 6 crossing of the Suez Canal during the 1973 war with Israel.
The 40th anniversary is on Sunday, when the military plans air shows and other celebrations. Supporters of Mohammed Morsi, the Islamist president whom el-Sissi ousted, are, for their part, planning protest rallies. The July 3 coup against Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected president, followed mass demonstrations calling on him to resign.
Fears of renewed violence highlight the turmoil that continues to engulf Egypt and which may threaten to derail the military-backed road map announced after the coup that ends with presidential elections by early next year.
Team arrives in Syria to begin U.N. mission
BEIRUT — An advance group of international inspectors arrived in Syria on Tuesday to begin the ambitious task of overseeing the destruction of President Bashar Assad’s chemical weapons program.
Twenty inspectors from a Netherlands-based chemical weapons watchdog group crossed into Syria from neighboring Lebanon on their way to Damascus, to begin their complex mission of finding, dismantling and ultimately destroying an estimated 1,000-ton chemical arsenal.
The experts have about nine months to complete the task, which has been endorsed by a U.N. Security Council resolution that calls for Syria’s chemical stockpile to be eliminated by mid-2014. It is the shortest deadline that experts from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons have ever faced .
Associated Press
