AP ISLAMABAD – Federation of Pakistan Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FPCCI) President Abdul Rauf Alam has asked the business community to explore untapped trade potential of Lebanese market. While speaking to Ambassador of Lebanon to Pakistan Mona El Tannir, he said additional steps were needed to promote economic cooperation to bring masses of the […]

By Eugene Kim

Amazon is building an app that matches truck drivers with shippers, a
new service that would deepen its presence in the massive $800 billion
trucking industry, a person with direct knowledge of the matter told
Business Insider.

The app, scheduled to launch in summer 2017, is designed to make it
easier for truck drivers to find shippers that need goods moved, much
like the way Uber connects cab drivers with riders. It would also
eliminate the need for a third-party broker, who typically charges a
~15% commission for doing the middleman work.

The app will offer real-time pricing and driving directions, as well
as personalized features, such as truck stop recommendations and a
suggested “tour” of loads to pick up and drop off. It could also have
tracking and payment options in order to speed up the entire shipping
process.

This is the latest in Amazon’s rumored plan
to become a full-scale logistics company that controls the entire
delivery cycle. Over the past year, Amazon has purchased thousands of
trailer trucks and dozens of cargo planes, while launching new “last
mile” services like Amazon Flex that take packages straight to the end
consumer.

By Alex Heath

Facebook is going to start fact checking, labeling, and burying
fake news and hoaxes in the News Feed, the company announced on
Thursday. The decision comes after Facebook received heated criticism for
its role in spreading a deluge of political misinformation during the
U.S. presidential election, like one story that falsely said the Pope
had endorsed Donald Trump.

To combat fake news, Facebook has partnered with a shortlist of media
organizations, including Snopes and ABC News, that are part of an
international fact-checking network led by Poynter, a nonprofit school
for journalism located in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Starting as a test with a small percentage of its users in the United
States, Facebook will make it easier to report news stories that are
fake or misleading. Once third-party fact checkers have confirmed that
the story is fake, it will be labeled as such and demoted in the News
Feed.

A company spokesperson told Business Insider that the social network
will also use other signals, like algorithms that detect whether a story
that appears fake is going viral, to determine if it should label the
story as fake and bury it in peoples’ feeds.

By catholicherald.co.uk

Three archbishops from Iraq and Syria were refused entry into the UK
despite being invited by the country’s Syriac Orthodox Church. Archbishop Nicodemus Daoud Sharaf of Mosul, Archbishop of St
Matthew’s Timothius Mousa Shamani and Archbishop Selwanos Boutros
Alnemeh of Homs and Hama, were all refused UK visas which would have
enabled them to attend the consecration of the UK’s first Syriac
Orthodox Cathedral, last month.

Prince Charles, who has long championed the cause of persecuted Christians in the Middle East, was a guest of honour at the event at St Thomas Cathedral and a personal letter was read from the Queen. The bishops were told that they were refused entry because they did
not have sufficient funds to support themselves and because they might
not leave the UK.

Lord Alton of Liverpool, said he was incredulous when he heard the
news. He said: “When the Syrian Orthodox Patriarch told me that these
two bishops had been refused visas to come to the UK for the
consecration of the new Syrian Orthodox cathedral I greeted it with
incredulity and disbelief. Its a decision that brings shame on our
country.

“These amazingly courageous bishops come from the Mosul region of
Iraq – where Christians have been beheaded, crucified, raped and either
forcibly converted or forced to flee as their possessions have been
seized by radical Islamists. It adds insult to injury that the UK would
refuse admission to men who pose no threat and whose community has
suffered so much – especially when we still fail to bring to justice
Jihadists who have committed genocide.”

In an editorial, the Daily Express condemned the decision, saying:
“While we appreciate the necessity of efficient border controls, surely
it can’t be beyond the wit of a Home Office pencil-pusher to realise
that these men of the cloth were a special case?

“Last week we learned that 650,000 immigrants made their way to
Britain, the highest level yet. And yet somehow, while letting all these
in, officials contrived to ban these three wise men who have risked
their lives for the Christian faith.

This article represents the opinion of the author and not khazen.org – It was published by The New York – By Robin Wright & interviewed by Robin Wright

Across Lebanon, Hezbollah runs special cemeteries—some with their own Facebook pages—for its fighters. I recently visited several of them, including the new Garden of Zeinab,
named after the Prophet Muhammad’s granddaughter, where I counted a
hundred and fifteen recent graves. Each was covered with a long white
marble slab that detailed the fighter’s life; the headstone showed a
large color photograph. Khodor Safa, nineteen, was in the front row. He
died in September, “performing his jihadi duties,” the grave said. His
slab was decorated with three votive candles, artificial white flowers,
and a small Koran. Nearby, a large balloon offering
“Congratulations”—for martyrdom—was attached to the grave of Ali Hussein
Wehbi. Several families tended to other gravestones, dusting them off,
laying flowers, or sitting alongside them in plastic chairs made
available to visitors.

Some two
thousand Hezbollah fighters have died and at least six thousand have
been wounded since 2012, when the Shiite movement intervened in Syria’s
civil war, on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad. That’s a staggering
proportion, given the size of its deployment: Hezbollah keeps about five thousand
fighters in Syria, with another three thousand deployed as needed,
according to Lebanese officials and sources close to Hezbollah. Losses
have been especially heavy since last summer, when the battle for
Aleppo, once Syria’s commercial hub and largest city, escalated.
Hezbollah had to recruit hard to replenish its ranks. The scuttlebutt in
Beirut is that standards have been lowered, training expedited, and
religious indoctrination made less rigorous.

Naim
Qassem, a cleric who wears a white turban and has a trim beard to
match, is Hezbollah’s second-in-command. From Hezbollah’s
public-relations office, two fighters drove me, in a black Chevrolet
S.U.V. with draperies on the windows, to meet Qassem in Beirut’s poor
southern suburbs, the movement’s stronghold. The flags of Hezbollah and
Lebanon were in a corner of the meeting room; a plate of dates and
almonds was on a table. Attendants brought in rotating trays of tea,
juice, and water as we talked. I asked Qassem if the intervention was
worth the increasing costs, human and political.

“Since
in the West you like to use metaphors and examples, I will give you
one,” he said. “You have a house, and in this house there is a fighter,
his wife, and children, and there is an enemy attacking this house. You
have a garden and a wall, and a hundred metres away you have an olive
grove. Is it better to protect the olive trees or the house? Near the
olive grove the fighter will die. But if they get to the house, the
house will be destroyed and everyone will die. We went to Syria, near
the olive trees.” Qassem added, “We believe that as important as the
losses or the sacrifices in Syria are, they are much less than if Syria
had disintegrated.”

By Alex Griswold

I fear I may have been the victim of persistent auditory and
visual hallucinations throughout the election. After all, I’m pretty
sure I heard Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
promise– not once, but several times over the course of many months–
that she would accept the results of the 2016 presidential election.

I then seem to recall that after her loss to Donald Trump, she followed through on that promise.
“We must accept this result and then look to the future,” she said (or
did she?). “Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an
open mind and the chance to lead.”

But I find that hard to reconcile with what I’ve seen since
then: namely, Clinton and her campaign doing everything in their power
to delegitimize Trump’s victory and work towards getting the results of
the election overturned.

First, it was the quixotic attempt by Green Party candidate Jill Stein
to challenge the results of the election in three states, which
would’ve then handed Clinton the election. The Clinton campaign should
have been content to let Stein defraud hapless supporters out of
millions of dollars on behalf of a recount doomed to fail. But instead,
the Clinton campaign announced that they were joining the effort.

Then there was the Clinton campaign’s statement Monday, announcing that they were backing efforts for members of the electoral college to receive intelligence briefings
about the government’s conclusion that Russians hacked the DNC in an
effort to elect Trump. “Electors have a solemn responsibility under the
Constitution and we support their efforts to have their questions
addressed,” said campaign chairman John Podesta. Again,
the request comes at the same time that Clinton supporters are calling
on electors to ignore their state’s results in order to stop Trump.

You can see why I’m questioning my own sanity: the Clinton
campaign’s stance is all over the map. They aren’t contesting the
election… but they do support a recount? They put out a statement saying
they believe it’s mathematically impossible for them to win… but they think it’s worth spending millions for voters learn exactly how much they lost by?

by alaraby.co.uk

This article does not represent khazen.org opinions

The Lebanese public have become accustomed to political
stasis with a lack of effective executive power in the country’s
parliament becoming the norm these days.

After a period of over two years without a president, a
position constitutionally ascribed to a Maronite Christian, Freedom and
Patriotic Movement leader Michel Aoun, was finally nominated to the position at the beginning of November. 

Over a month after his appointment the the cabinet is still needed yet to establish a cabinet due in part to political wrangling between the country’s rival political parties.

While Aoun’s son-in-law and political heir apparent, current acting Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil,
has said that all of Lebanon’s diverse political parties will be
represented in a future cabinet, members of the Lebanese public have
grown tired of waiting.

This is certainly the case for Mohamed and Omar Kabbani,
identical twins, who together form renowned Lebanese graffiti crew
Ashekman.

Rather than embrace apathy, Ashekman have come up with
their own tongue in cheek critique of the current status quo of
political stasis. 

By albawaba.com

Lebanon’s Alaa Najd has been announced the winner of the first season of Project Runway ME on MBC4 and MBC Masr 2.

The
grand show finale took place at Dubai Design District (d3) where each
designer showcased their final collections. The live studio audience
included Arab celebrities and socialites, members of the press, fashion
bloggers and social media influencers. Meanwhile, guest judging this
episode – alongside international designer Elie Saab and Tunisian
fashion icon and media personality Afef Jnifen – was Algerian-French
actress and former fashion model Farida Khelfa.

The finalists included Rayan Atlas from Algeria, Selim Chebil from Tunisia, Issa Hesso from Syria and of course, Najd.

Commenting on his win, Najd thanked MBC Group along with the entire Project Runway ME team,
including the members of the jury, led by the world-renowned celebrity
designer Elie Saab, who was the head of the judging panel.

He described Saab as “a father figure,
an inspiration to us all, and the perfect mentor. We couldn’t have asked
for someone better to leads us all.”