By Thanassis Cambanis

I used to feel smug about Lebanon’s dysfunction when I moved here from New York three years ago. I knew the country well as a frequent long-term visitor. I had reported the 2006 war from the battlefields in Lebanon’s south and subsequently criss-crossed it while researching a book. However familiar and modern Lebanon seemed, I was convinced that it lay in the category of failed states, its problems of an entirely different nature than those facing the United States.

hen two critical things changed, evaporating my smugness and leaving in its place a sort of dread that I fear might never leave me. I began to really live here, raising my family and establishing a home. Soon after, I realized the paralysis and failures that mar Lebanon are not so far removed from the pathologies of the United States.

Lebanese police on Sunday arrested the suspected mastermind behind blasts in southern district of the capital that killed dozens of people in November, a security source said.

The man, identified as Abu Talha, was accused of being the chief "coordinator" of a "cell that prepared a string of explosions in Lebanon" including in Beirut’s Burj al-Barajneh district, the security source said.

He was seized in a special operation carried out by an elite unit of the Internal Security Forces (ISF) in the northern port city of Tripoli, the source told AFP.

The explosions in the densely populated neighbourhood of Burj al-Barajneh on November 12 killed 44 people. They were claimed by the Islamic State jihadist group.

According to the security source, Abu Talha "was in communication with IS in Raqa," the de facto Syrian capital of the jihadist group’s self-styled "caliphate".

Al Bawaba

Lebanese bombshell Maya Diab turned heads on Friday night after performing on the TV singing competition Star Academy.

The sexy senorita made three wardrobe changes on the night, leaving less to the imagination with each new outfit.

First Maya came out dressed in a see-through fishnet dress, which showed off her long pins and more than what some of us might have wanted to see.

by dailyStar.com.lb

Sierra Leone reportedly informed Lebanon that it has agreed to take in the small Mediterranean country’s trash, local daily As-Safir said Saturday.

The Lebanese Foreign Ministry received a letter Thursday from Sierra Leone authorities informing it of the country’s willingness to accept Lebanon’s waste.

The letter, which was originally directed to Holland’s Howa BV firm, is allegedly signed by an adviser for Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma.

As-Safir newspaper said that Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital, consented on the condition that the waste be free of toxins, underlining that the approval remains at a preliminary stage until Sierra Leone’s government and president confirm the deal.

Lebanon is bound by the U.N. Basel Convention on hazardous waste

The Associated Press, Beirut Saturday, 9 January 2016 Lebanese security officials say masked gunmen have shot and killed a police intelligence officer and wounded his wife in an attack on the officer’s car in a town near the Syrian border. The officials say the officer, Zaher Izzedine, died instantly in Friday’s attack while his wounded […]

Article: Rene Wadlow

Khalil Gibran, born 6 January 1883, is one of the most quoted prose poets, especially his 1923 work The Prophet. In The Prophet, we are told that Almustafa, a holy man, has been living in exile, in a city called Orphalese for twelve years. A ship is coming to take him home to the island of his birth. People gather and ask him for his final words of wisdom — on love, on work, on joy, on children. The book has become bedside reading for all those who consider themselves “spiritual but not religious”.

But there is also an earlier Gibran writing in Arabic, a critic of the political and religious conditions of his day — a set of four short stories bound together as Spirits Rebellious. (1) Soon after the publication of the original Arabic version of Spirits Rebellious in 1908, considerable agitation developed. The book was publicly burned in the Beirut market place by Maronite Church and Ottoman State officials who judged it fiercely dangerous to the peace of the country. Gibran’s bitter denunciation of both religious and political injustice brought his anticipated exile from the country. As he was already living in Paris to study art at the time, it meant not returning to Lebanon rather than having to leave. However, he was also excommunicated from the Church, which can be considered serious in a country where much civil identity and justice was based on religious membership — not to mention the popular idea that God did not allow excommunicated souls into his Heaven.

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Syrian rebels said President Bashar al-Assad’s opponents are under international pressure to make concessions that would prolong the conflict, underscoring their doubts about a new U.N.-led drive for peace talks planned to begin this month.

by middleeastmonitor.com The Lebanese Parliament has postponed presidential elections for the 34th times due to the lack of quorum, Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri announced on Wednesday. “The Iranian-Saudi crisis has big implications,” Berri said, adding: “After we have been striving to elect a President of the Republic, our top ambition has turned to maintain dialogue.” […]

Pamela Engel

A former US defense secretary who served under four presidents referred the young aides on US President Barack Obama’s national-security and foreign-policy teams as "dangerously naive" in an article published on Thursday in Politico magazine.

The article describes the disillusionment of many of Obama’s top advisers who feel that the president’s rhetoric has not matched up to his policies, especially in the Middle East.

"Many Obama supporters started out believing that the president had grand ambitions for replacing George W. Bush’s militaristic posture with a more enlightened and progressive approach to the world before coming to believe they had misread a president who was not the idealistic internationalist they had thought he was," Michael Crowley wrote for the magazine.