WASHINGTON (AP) - Citing hopeful signs from Lebanon to Afghanistan (news -
web sites), President Bush (news - web sites) said Tuesday that democracy is
beginning to spread across the Middle East and that authoritarian rule is
"the last gasp of a discredited past." ......


BEIRUT (Reuters) - Hundreds of thousands of flag-waving Lebanese flooded
central Beirut Tuesday for a pro-Syrian rally called by Hizbollah that
dwarfed previous protests demanding that Syrian troops quit Lebanon.....
Nasrallah said no one in Lebanon feared the United States, whose troops left
Lebanon in 1984, a few months after a suicide bomber killed 241 Marines at
their Beirut headquarters. "We have defeated them in the past and if they
come again we will defeat them again," he said, drawing chants of "Death to
America" from the demonstrators. As the mainly Shi'ite Muslim crowds .....