Military commanders ordered Chechnya's capital emptied of its surviving residents and sealed.
Streets in the capital emptied after the 1 p.m. deadline the cleric's aides had set for businesses to close and workers to go home.
Police and army armoured personnel carriers flooded on to the streets as the normally traffic-choked thoroughfares of the Indonesian capital emptied, and six explosions and a gunfight in a cinema ensued as the attackers were pursued by security forces.
As the streets of the Iraqi capital emptied today in expectation of war, President Saddam Hussein gave a defiant rebuff to President Bush's "despicable and reckless ultimatum" giving the Iraqi leader and his two sons until Wednesday to quit Iraq.
L'Eclisse captures to perfection the desolate feel of Rome, and particularly that of its modernist Eur suburb, when the capital empties out in high summer: the blinding light, the hushed streets, the screech of bus tyres on scorched tarmac and the little, repetitive noises you only notice amid the stillness.
Admittedly, the government does seem able to pay for an executive jet for President Joaquim Chissano, from which he could be seen stepping out on to a red carpet, flanked by pot plants, shortly after dawn at the capital's empty airport the other day.
For the last two years he has been living as a property guardian; paying for the privilege of sleeping in the capital's empty buildings as a security guard by another name.
Although the Italian capital is emptying out, as it does every summer, draw days — Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays — have been attracting small crowds to Mr. Valli's bar.
Before he left office on Monday, Gov. George Ryan of Illinois, a longtime supporter of capital punishment, emptied the state's death row by pardoning four condemned men and commuting the sentences of the remaining 167 prisoners.
But the 80-year-old process is decidedly low-tech and hard to scale up—and that's become a problem, because a big yellow fever outbreak that started in December 2015 in Luanda, Angola's capital, has emptied the world's strategic reserves of the vaccine.
