BEIRUT: The European Union will allocate an additional 12 million euros ($14.89 million) in humanitarian assistance for Syrian refugees and the most vulnerable Lebanese host families over the winter season, an EU statement said Tuesday. The bulk of the extra funding, amounting to 10 million euros, will be used to help some half a […]

  BEIRUT: There is no coordination between the Lebanese and Syrian armies, a Lebanese Army source was cited as saying Monday by Turkey’s Anadolu news agency. The report did not elaborate, but it contradicts statements made by Syrian Ambassador to Lebanon Ali Abdul-Karim Ali, and General Security chief Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim. Ibrahim on Saturday […]

  Allying themselves with the Shiite militant group Hezbollah, some Lebanese Christians are standing their ground against ISIS. RAS BAALBEK, Lebanon—Rifaat Nasrallah sits impatiently on a sofa in his home in the small village of Ras Baalbek sipping coffee and chain smoking Marlboro Lights. A handgun casually stuck in the waistband of his jeans, he […]

  Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi slammed on Monday “cold-blooded” lawmakers for violating the constitution by causing a vacuum at the presidential palace and extending their own term. MPs are using their power to cause paralysis in the presidency because of personal and foreign interests, said al-Rahi in his opening statement at the 48th meeting of […]

 Antonio Socci
Libero

November 9, 2014
Shahzad Masih was 28 years old and his wife, Shama, 25, two young Catholics with four children.  She was pregnant with the fifth.  She was working in a job in a brick making factory known for exploiting its workers, whose owner, a Muslim, had already brutally beat her.  She worked in Kasur, near Lahore, in that Pakistan where Christians are considered as trash.  Last November 4th the two young people were falsely accused of having profaned pages of the Koran.  They were tortured for two days, lynched by a furious mob and at the end thrown into an oven and burned.  These slaughters are not rare.  It is a continual horror that Christians undergo at the hands of a people and a State that daily humiliates them and threatens them with death by means of the notorious blasphemy laws.  Pakistan is not a small country. It has the atomic bomb and has 180 million inhabitants, making it the sixth most populous nation in the world and the second most populous among Muslim nations after Indonesia.  The fiery ordeal underwent by these two Christians in such a savage way was reported even in our own newspapers.  But there was no action taken, neither by individuals, nor associations, nor institutions.

By Laila Bassam and Sylvia Westall

(Reuters) – On mountains close to the Syrian border, members of Lebanon’s minority Druze sect say they are ready to defend their towns and villages with arms if the civil war next raging door gets much nearer.

"Here in the east, the danger has become very close to us, it is right in our faces and in our lives," said Ali Fayik, a regional official speaking in the predominantly Druze town of Rashaya, set in steep mountains with a panorama over the region. Fresh battles over the border late last week killed at least 31 members of pro-government forces and around 14 insurgents, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said on Saturday.

 The town is in a sensitive area close to the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and home to various religious communities which fought one another in Lebanon’s own 1975-90 civil war. On the other side of the mountain range, Sunni Islamist fighters linked to al Qaeda and hostile to groups including the Druze, are battling Syria’s army as well as other insurgents.

As speculation rises that the United States and its allies killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State (ISIS), in airstrikes over the weekend, supporters of the jihadist group are following instructions to keep quiet online. The group’s main forum is down and prominent social media accounts linked to ISIS are urging other supporters not to talk about the news.

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Analyzing social media accounts, the Quilliam Foundation said female supporters of the Islamic State were using sites like Instagram, Twitter, Ask.fm, VK and Facebook to lure others with "the promise of an Islamist utopia". "While other groups like Al Qaeda have had women supporters before, Islamic State has recruited females and is getting women to go out to live in the caliphate," Charlie Winter, programs officer at the Quilliam Foundation, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.Islamic State declared a caliphate across vast swathes of Syria and Iraq earlier this year, after sweeping into the conflict-ridden region and driving out Christians, Shi’ite Muslims and other communities.

Determined to re-draw the map of the Middle East, the group are engaged in nation building and are calling on people from all over the world to help them create a new society. "They call for lawyers, doctors, engineers and people who can help form a working administrative state and among those are women as they need wives for their fighters," Winter said.

  I do not support the principle of extending the Lebanese parliament’s term, whether out of greed to stay in a post, or authority, or prestige or any of the other things claimed by those who oppose extending the parliament’s term. After all, I am also one of the latter group because, like them, I […]