BEIRUT: Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti has given the Lebanese people a new reason to remember Beirut's city stadium. Exactly 17 years after the sound of heavy bombardments echoed across the Lebanese capital, Pavarotti used his booming voice on Saturday to fill the downtown stadium. The singer's first-ever concert in the Arab world drew 17,000 Lebanese, foreign and Arab fans to Beirut, which was chosen as this year's cultural capital of the Arab world. Three chartered planes brought in around 3,000 opera fans from Egypt, Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United States and the United Arab Emirates. Lebanese officials and foreign ambassadors also attended the two- hour show, which organisers described as a ``historic event''. The concert offered many people a new glimpse of the city stadium and the visions its past provokes.

In 1982, Israeli warplanes ushered in the beginning of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon by bombing the stadium, which wasthen used as an arms depot for Palestinian guerrillas loyal to PLO chairman Yasser Arafat. The stadium was rebuilt two years ago and brought out emotions for many of those present on Saturday night. ``I almost shed a tear. It was a heart-warming concert,'' said the Beirut bureau chief of the US news channel CNN, Brent Sadler, who covered the Lebanese civil war. ``I couldn't but imagine what horrific pictures we filmed inside this stadium.''

Pope beatifies 108 Poles

WARSAW: Pope John Paul II on Sunday beatified as martyrs 108 Poles killed by the Nazis during the World War II. A day after a fall that left him with a cut on the head and three stitches, the Catholic leader was wearing a white plaster on his right temple when he appeared for a mass in downtown Warsaw attended by 800,000 faithful. The 79-year-old pope declined to cut down on his programme after the stumble. His current visit to Poland, which runs until Thursday, is his longest ever to his homeland as pope. The open-air mass on Sunday washeld on a square named after Polish independence leader Jozef Pilsudski. John Paul stood on the square 20 years ago under communist rule to call for the holy spirit to ``renew the earth, this earth'' in a call to shake off communism.

No luck for matchmaker

DHAKA: A Bangladeshi man says he arranged the weddings of more than 16,000 couples but has been unable to find a spouse himself. ``I have spent my life finding matches for young men and women,'' Manu Miah told the Janakantha newspaper. ``I started my career at the age of 18... I am now 87 and still a bachelor''. Miah said others' weddings had kept him too busy, and besides, he was too poor to afford a marriage. ``Rather I found solace in picking up matches for others,'' he said.

Purdah row in Sri Lanka

COLOMBO: A recent Sri Lankan supreme court order allowing two Muslim teachers to cover their heads while teaching has led to the boycotting of classes by students in protest. The Badulla Tamil Balika Vidyalaya is heading for a showdownon this dispute after the principal requested the Muslim teachers to refrain from wearing the purdah in school. The court has ordered that the teachers be allowed to continue wearing the head cover until the fundamental rights case filed by them is determined. The principal said the practice of purdah among Muslims is different from that of wearing of a pottu (bindi) among Tamil Hindus. She said she was ``not against Muslim culture'' but was asking for ``acceptable codes'' of dress and conduct in a multicultural environment.