Prime Minister

SUNDAY'S parliamentary election in Russia was a dress rehearsal for next summer's presidential race, and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin now looks unassailable.For a man who was not a parliamentary candidate, the former KGB officer campaigned hard. Mr. Putin's crowning moment came when he showed his fitness and gymnastic prowess to the nation by performing vaults on television.The message was clear: Compare me with the doddering President Boris N. Yeltsin! Compare me with Yevgeni Primakov, the septuagenarian former spy chief and foreign minister, who recently underwent hip replacement surgery!

NEW DELHI, India - Sounding like a stern father mortified by the misdeeds of his children, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee visited the riot-torn state of Gujarat yesterday and called for an end to the continuing violence that has pitted Muslims against Hindus and left at least 815 people dead. "People were burned to death just yesterday," he said angrily. "In our country the funeral pyre is used after death. But a person being burned alive is beyond my imagination. Have we forgotten our human qualities?

LONDON -- Facing an erosion of support for her continued leadership, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher stunned Britain yesterday by suddenly resigning.It was an abrupt and inglorious end to 11 1/2 years in power for the longest-serving British prime minister in this century.Her decision opened the way for her Cabinet colleagues Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd and Chancellor John Major to enter the second round of the battle for the leadership of the Conservative Party against Michael Heseltine, whose challenge triggered the prime minister's downfall.

JERUSALEM -- Cleared of the threat of criminal indictment, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today faced the task of shoring up a coalition government shaken by a political corruption scandal.Israeli prosecutors decided yesterday that there was insufficient evidence to indict the prime minister in the scandal over the short-lived appointment of an attorney general in January. The decision came after a 12-week investigation and a police recommendation that Netanyahu be charged.A key Likud coalition partner, the party of Trade Minister Natan Sharansky, was meeting with Netanyahu early this morning to discuss conditions for its continued support.

JERUSALEM -- Cleared of the threat of criminal indictment, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today faced the task of shoring up a coalition government shaken by a political corruption scandal.Israeli prosecutors decided yesterday that there was insufficient evidence to indict the prime minister in the scandal over the short-lived appointment of an attorney general in January. The decision came after a 12-week investigation and a police recommendation that Netanyahu be charged.A key Likud coalition partner, the party of Trade Minister Natan Sharansky, was meeting with Netanyahu early this morning to discuss conditions for its continued support.

MOSCOW -- Giving in to a hostile Congress, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin dropped his support of acting Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar yesterday and nominated in his stead a man whose roots are in the old Soviet hierarchy.The visibly unhappy president gave the job of prime minister to Viktor Chernomyrdin after deciding that the political costs were too high to keep Mr. Gaidar, the theoretical economist who launched Russia's radical, market-oriented reforms 11 months ago and who has become the focus of conservative fury over the country's economic state.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee received a warm welcome on his arrival in Pakistan yesterday for a regional summit seen as the best chance in years to get two old enemies talking again. But Vajpayee kept his hosts guessing whether he would agree to bilateral discussions with either Pakistani leader Gen. Pervez Musharraf or Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali on the sidelines of the conference that begins today. Jamali clasped Vajpayee's hand tightly as the leaders smiled broadly for the cameras after the Indian prime minister, who at 78 suffers a leg ailment, walked haltingly from an Indian Air Force passenger jet and past a Pakistani honor guard.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- A day after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki unveiled a sweeping reconciliation plan to negotiate peace with Sunni Arab insurgent groups, violence killed 38 people around Iraq. Bomb attacks in Baghdad and Diyala province, and an explosion in Hillah, the heartland of al-Maliki's leading Islamic Dawa Party reinforced skepticism among top Shiite lawmakers about the prime minister's effort. A suicide bomber rode a bicycle into a village market near Baqubah -- in the area where U.S. forces killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, this month -- and detonated a bomb vest, killing 20 Iraqis, many of them children.

JERUSALEM -- Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat nominated a veteran peace negotiator and moderate, Ahmed Qureia, last night to fill the post of prime minister, which Mahmoud Abbas had resigned on Saturday. Qureia, 65, who is widely known as Abu Ala, did not say immediately whether he would accept. Qureia is well known to U.S. and Israeli officials, and experts say he could help advance the stalled peace process. Arafat moved quickly to recommend a new prime minister in an effort to blunt criticism that he had blocked Abbas' efforts to reform the Palestinian security services and had created obstacles that prompted a power struggle and hindered the U.S.-backed peace initiative known as the "road map."

JERUSALEM -- Fascist slogans, a jeering television audience, flying chicken parts, break-ins, death threats. Anarchy in Israel? No, it's the election campaign for the country's next prime minister.This is politics Israeli-style, down and dirty, and months before the May 17 primary. The nastiness cuts across the political spectrum, from the left to the right and everything in between. It breaches the ethnic divide in a society where Jews from Arab countries traditionally have been shut out of the power game long dominated by their countrymen of European origin.