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Swiss justice minister Elisabeth Kopp resigned Monday in the wake of allegations linking her husband's former company with a $1 billion money-laundering operation. Kopp, 52, said she would leave office at the end of February. She was elected in 1984 as the first woman on the seven-member Federal Council or governing cabinet, and her resignation was a major political sensation in normally tranquil Switzerland. It followed the disclosure by authorities in November that around $1 billion had been laundered in Switzerland by a so-called "Lebanon Connection" international drug ring run by Lebanese and Turks.