Junior Digest

WASHINGTON : The Obama administration maintained Friday that President Bashar Assad shouldn’t lead Syria any longer, rejecting a Russian claim that the U.S. has changed its position.

Interfax news agency quoted Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov saying Washington now accepts Moscow’s argument that Assad’s future shouldn’t be open for negotiation right now.

Assad’s Russian-backed government and Western-supported rebels recently concluded a round of peace talks and will meet again next month. Secretary of State John Kerry visited President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials in the Kremlin this week to plot the next steps.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said: “Any suggestion that we have changed in any way our view of Assad’s future is false. Assad has lost his legitimacy to govern. We haven’t changed our view on that.”

The U.S. softened demands last year for Assad’s immediate departure, but still insists he should resign at some point in a political transition process. Russia says outside powers shouldn’t try to determine Syria’s leadership. Assad has offered no indication he is willing to leave power.

At least 250,000 people — and perhaps as many as a half million — have been killed in the five-year civil war. The fighting also has spawned Europe’s worst refugee crisis since World War II and has led to the emergence of the Islamic State group.

Nicosia :  An EgyptAir plane was hijacked today while flying from the Egyptian Mediterranean coastal city of Alexandria to the capital, Cairo, and later landed in Cyprus where all passengers except four foreigners were allowed to get off the aircraft, Egyptian and Cypriot officials said.

The hijacker, who was later identified as an Egyptian man, apparently had a suicide belt with which he threatened the plane’s pilot.

The Airbus flight number MS181 had 55 passengers on board and was flying on a regular route when the hijacking took place, the Egyptians said. Egyptian state television said there was a lone hijacker and identified him as Ibrahim Samaha. It gave no further details.

The plane took off from the small Bourg el-Arab airport just outside the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria. It was flying a regular route to Cairo, a flight that normally takes up to 30 minutes.

Details were sketchy and the hijacker’s motives were also not known, but an Egyptian Aviation Ministry statement said the “hijacker” threatened that he had a belt of explosives, the weapon of choice for Islamic militants in the Middle East.

Shortly after the hijacking, the plane landed at the airport in the southern Cypriot city of Larnaca, also on the Mediterranean. Cypriot officials said there were suspicions of a bomb on board.

The official later said the hijacker later allowed an unspecified number of women and children to go free and some were disembarking. EgyptAir later said in a statement that all passengers were released by the hijacker except for the crew and four foreigners whose nationalities were not specified.

Initially a second Cypriot official said there “seems like there’s more than one hijacker” and that there were no other demands made expect that police vehicles move away from the aircraft. All the officials in Egypt and Cyprus spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to the media.

The hijacking, however, will most likely bring to the fore again the question of security at Egyptian airports, five months after a Russian aircraft crashed over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula minutes after it took off from Egypt’s Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

All 224 people on board were killed in the crash. Russia later said an explosive device brought down the aircraft and the extremist Islamic State group said it downed the plane.

@ Agency report.