By Dana Halawi BEIRUT (Thomson Reuters Foundation)

When Lina met her husband she was drawn by his warmth and quiet nature. At 19 she was keen to settle down and start a family, but she never imagined the nightmare ahead. "Marriage turned my life into a real mess," she says after 17 years of misery with a husband who she says repeatedly beat her up, abused her and left her in fear of her life. "

He used to invite his girlfriends over to our place without caring at all about my feelings," she added. "If I complained about his behavior he’d ask me to leave the house or even threaten to kill me." On one occasion she says her husband also beat their 10-year-old son up when he stepped in to protect her. Lina, a 36-year-old mother of three, is one of a handful of women in Lebanon who has dared to speak out about an issue that is strongly taboo throughout the Middle East.

By Hugh Naylor

BEIRUT — In a nation living in the shadow of war, Wael Abu Faour has become a celebrity by going after purveyors of rotten fish and crooked nose jobs.

The health minister has led a high-profile campaign in this small Arab country to clean up restaurants and slaughterhouses, lower prescription drug prices and shutter shady plastic surgery clinics.

Seen as sleaze-free in a country steeped in corruption, Abu Faour has become increasingly popular, regularly appearing on television talk shows and the front pages of newspapers. But he also has accumulated enemies who charge that his campaign is political opportunism and deflects attention from more pressing issues, such as the influx of over a million refugees from war-torn Syria.

  Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi will reportedly demand the ambassadors to Lebanon of the five permanent United Nations Security Council members to press their countries to end the presidential deadlock in Lebanon. The Security Council’s five permanent members are the United States, China, Russia, Britain and France. According to An Nahar newspaper published on Tuesday, […]

  BEIRUT: Classes will resume normally at a Tripoli Lebanese University branch rocked by protests in the past weeks over the appointment of a Christian director, the education minister said. “As of Thursday, normal classes will resume in the Faculty of Economics and Business,” Education Minister Elias Bou Saab told a news conference at the […]

  Parliament’s bureau is scheduled to meet on Tuesday to set the stage for a legislative session that Speaker Nabih Berri intends to call for mid-April to discuss several draft-laws. But the meeting, which will be chaired by Berri, is expected to be marred by disputes among the representatives of the parliamentary blocs, mainly over […]

By Monty Munford

DANIEL ESTRIN, Associated Press

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Israeli liberals woke up after national elections with a demoralizing feeling: Most of the country, in a deep and possibly irreversible way, does not think like they do.

There had been a sense of urgency among moderate Israelis, and even an ounce of hope, that widespread frustration with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s six straight years in office would lead voters to pull Israel away from what they perceive as its rightward march toward international isolation, economic inequality and a dead end for peace with the Palestinians.

But as the results trickled in on Wednesday, they showed Likud with a shocking lead that has all but guaranteed Netanyahu a third consecutive term. Netanyahu called it a victory "against all odds." The liberals’ optimism has been replaced with despair – and an infuriating belief that the masses may never understand that logic shows the current path is suicidal.

The Economist

The coffin contains the body of the latest young fighter killed on the front lines of the war with Islamic State (IS).

But few worshippers at Najaf’s Imam Ali mosque pay it heed. On one side women weep and wail at the shrine of Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad who became Islam’s fourth caliph, and whose murder can be seen as the beginning of the divide between Sunni and Shia.

On the other a group of pilgrims from Iran sits in quiet prayer. The sermon booming from the loudspeakers is discussing marriage, not war. The ground around the building is packed with families and scattered with the leftovers from picnics.

Last summer the residents of Najaf, in Iraq’s Shia heartland, were in mortal fear of IS. Its fighters had swarmed out of their redoubts in Syria and north-west Iraq to take control of much of the Sunni part of the country.

They were little more than a dozen kilometres from taking Baghdad and also threatened Erbil, the capital of the autonomous Kurdish region in the north. In June IS declared the re-establishment of the caliphate–the single state held to rule over all Muslims. But unlike the caliphate of Ali, this would be one which had highly exclusive definitions of what a Muslim is: Shias need not apply, and a lot of Sunnis would not make the grade, either.

BEIRUT—Islamic State attacks on Syria’s Assyrian population have driven the Christian minority into Lebanon, further straining the impoverished nation and raising concerns that Christianity is being depleted in the Middle East as refugees move on to Europe.

The Lebanese government, which early this year tightened visa regulations in a bid to stem the tide of Syrian refugees, this month granted the Assyrians an exception, citing the Islamic State campaign that began in late February. More than 1.2 million Syrians have overwhelmed the country of four million, along with 500,000 Palestinian and Iraqi refugees.