January 15, 1996
Web posted at: 11:00 p.m. EST (0400 GMT)
ATHENS, Greece (CNN) -- Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou, who has been hospitalized for about two months with pneumonia, resigned on Monday.
"It is obvious that the country cannot remain incapacitated by my illness," the 76-year-old prime minister wrote in a resignation letter.
The Socialist Party central committee will meet on Wednesday to call officially on the socialist parliamentary group to elect a new leader.
The election of the new prime minister could take place as early as Thursday. The new socialist parliamentary leader will be given a mandate to form a government by the Greek president.
JERUSALEM (CNN) -- Israel sealed off Bethlehem after an Israeli man was shot and wounded in the Palestinian self-rule enclave on Monday.
An Israeli Army spokeswoman said Palestinians are not permitted to enter Israeli territory from Bethlehem, and the entry of Israeli citizens into Bethlehem is forbidden for security reasons.
Israel handed Bethlehem over to Palestinian self-rule on December 21, but after Monday's shooting Israeli security forces returned, witnesses said.
Palestinian police also arrived at the scene and were conducting a search. Palestinian witnesses said the shooting took place on Bethlehem's main road just inside the self-rule area.
MASERU, Lesotho (CNN) -- King Moshoeshoe II of Lesotho, a small mountainous kingdom surrounded by South Africa, died in a car accident Monday.
Prime Minister Ntsu Mokhehle announced the death in a broadcast to the nation and ordered national mourning until the king's burial, which was likely to be held over the weekend. It is expected that Moshoeshoe's son Letsie will succeed him.
Educated at an English school and Oxford University, Moshoeshoe was made paramount chief by the British colonial administration some 30 years ago.
He became king under the independence constitution of 1966 and served to 1990, when he was ousted by military rulers. He returned to the throne about a year ago.
BANGKOK, Thailand (CNN) -- In an apparent about-face, Vietnam assured its southeast Asian neighbors Monday that it will speed procedures for processing Vietnamese boat people being returned home. There are almost 40,000 Vietnamese people in camps around the region, more than half of those in Hong Kong. All but 1,500 of them have been interviewed by the United Nations and judged to be asylum seekers, not refugees, a United Nations official said.
At a U.N.-organized meeting on refugees, held in Bangkok, Vietnam said most of the boat people should be repatriated within six months. Officials said repatriating those in Hong Kong will take longer, but they were confident all would be gone before the colony reverts to Chinese rule in mid-1997.
In the past, Vietnam had been accused of obstructing efforts to return boat people. The communist government in Hanoi was said to be wary of welcoming back potential dissidents and those "tainted" by exposure to the outside world. Virtually all the boat people fled the country in flimsy boats in the years after the 1975 communist victory in the Vietnam war.
JAPAN (CNN) -- Ceremonies were held throughout Japan on Monday to observe the annual "Coming of Age" day, a national holiday. Twenty is the official age of maturity in Japan and many 20-year-olds spent the day at shrines, praying for a better future. At one Coming of Age observance, hundreds of people, bows in hand, fired arrows at a target. According to a centuries-old tradition, dreams will come true if archers hit their mark.
But there aren't as many of newly mature young people in Japan as there used to be. In 1995 the number of Japanese who turned 20 dropped below 2 million for the first time in four years. Even so, they are facing a tight job market; 26 percent of the Japanese women who expect to graduate from college in the spring, and 14 percent of the men, do not have jobs.
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