by Annahar – Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, Hariri said that his decision to rescind his resignation was based on Lebanon’s rival political parties abiding to a “dissociation policy that will save Lebanon.” Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, Hariri said that his decision to rescind his resignation was based on […]

Arab filmmakers have been sending out a number of submissions for Oscars every year, but not all of them have made the cut. In one such, Lebanese director Ziad Doueiri’s latest film The Insult bagged a nomination for Oscars at the 90th Academy Award in the Best Foreign Language Film category. Starring Adel Karam, Kamel […]

Article 97: Voting for a list and the preferential vote

1 – Each voter is to vote for one list from those competing and is entitled to choose a single candidate as their preferential vote in the respective administrative district.

2 – In the case that a voter does not choose a preferential vote, the list voted for will still be counted. In the case that a voter chooses more than one preferential vote, the preferential vote will not be counted and only the list will be counted.

3 – In the case that a voter chooses a preferential vote from a different list than they have voted for or from a list of a different administrative district, the preferential vote will not be counted and only the list will be counted.

4 – In the case that a voter does not vote for a complete list and only chooses a preferential vote, both the list that the preferential vote is from and the preferential vote will be counted.

Article 98: The proportional representation

1 – The number of MPs taken from each list will be determined by the percentage of votes each list gains.

2 – The percentage of the seats earned by a list will be determined by the number of voters in each electoral district relative to the number of seats.

3 – Lists which do not receive a high enough percentage of votes to earn a seat will be eliminated and votes will be counted again based on the lists that met the threshold percentage to earn a seat.

4 – The remaining seats will be distributed to the eligible lists that gained the largest percentage of votes remaining from the first division. This process shall be repeated in the same manner until all seats are distributed. If one seat remains and two eligible lists have the same percentage, the seat will be awarded to the list that gained the largest number of seats. In the event that the two lists have the same percentage for the available seat, the seat will be given to the list whose candidate received the highest number of preferential votes. In the event that two candidates from two different lists receive the same percentage of votes, the candidate from the list which received more overall preferential votes will earn the seat. And so on.

5 – After it is determined how many seats each list will be assigned, the candidates will be sorted from first to last, based on the percentage of preferential votes each candidate earned in their respective administrative district. The percentage of preferential votes for each candidate will be determined by the number of overall preferential votes cast in their administrative district. In the event that two candidates receive the same number of preferential votes, the candidate who is older will advance. If the candidates receive the same of preferential votes and are the same age, the winner will be determined by a “coin-toss.”

6 – The distribution of seats for the winning candidates will be determined with the highest vote getters from the top of each list. The first seat will be allocated to the candidate who receives the highest percentage of preferential votes and the second seat to the second-ranked candidate on the list and so on.

7 – The seats will be distributed based on the following:

– Seats in each district will be filled by winning candidates for a certain sect until the quota is complete. Once the quota is complete, the candidates who did not earn a seat will be eliminated.

– If a list has not been completely filled with the specified quota and the distribution process reaches a candidate belonging to a list that has fulfilled its quota of seats, the seat will be passed on to the next eligible candidate.

SOURCE: AP NEWS AGENCY – Lebanon is campaigning to get at least five times more women elected to parliament this spring in its first vote in nearly 10 years, the country’s first women’s affairs minister says. With diverse religious groups and women in prominent positions in the business world and the media, but female politicians […]

SEATTLE (Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc will open its checkout-free grocery store to the public on Monday after more than a year of testing, the company said, moving forward on an experiment that could dramatically alter brick-and-mortar retail. The Seattle store, known as Amazon Go, relies on cameras and sensors to track what shoppers remove from […]

by middleeastmonitor.com — Lebanon has thwarted a planned Daesh cell by detaining a militant and turning him into an informant, Interior Minister Nohad Machnouk said on Friday. The Iraqi man, identified only by the initials A.Z., had been sent by Daesh to Lebanon to form a new cell to carry out attacks, Machnouk said. The Intelligence […]

  by UN Interim Force in Lebanon – UNIFIL Head of Mission and Force Commander Major General Michael Beary attended separate meetings in Beirut today with the President of Lebanon, Michel Aoun; the Speaker of Parliament, Nabih Berri; and the Prime Minister, Saad Hariri. In his first meetings of 2018 with top Lebanese leaders, discussions focused on […]

By Eric Auchard FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Lebanon’s intelligence service may have turned the smartphones of thousands of targeted individuals into cyber-spying machines in one of the first known examples of large-scale state hacking of phones rather than computers, researchers say. Lebanon’s General Directorate of General Security (GDGS) has run more than 10 campaigns since at least 2012 aimed mainly at Android phone users in at least 21 countries, according to a report by mobile security firm Lookout and digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

The cyber attacks, which seized control of Android smartphones, allowed the hackers to turn them into victim-monitoring devices and steal any data from them undetected, the researchers said on Thursday. No evidence was found that Apple phone users were targeted, something that may simply reflect the popularity of Android in the Middle East. The state-backed hackers, dubbed “Dark Caracal” by the report’s authors – after a wild cat native to the Middle East – used phishing attacks and other tricks to lure victims into downloading fake versions of encrypted messaging apps, giving the attackers full control over the devices of unwitting users. Michael Flossman, the group’s lead security researcher, told Reuters that EFF and Lookout took advantage of the Lebanon cyber spying group’s failure to secure their own command and control servers, creating an opening to connect them back to the GDGS. “Looking at the servers, who had registered it when, in conjunction with being able to identify the stolen content of victims: That gave us a pretty good indication of how long they had been operating,” Flossman said in a phone interview.

Dark Caracal has focused their attacks on government officials, military targets, utilities, financial institutions, manufacturing companies, and defense contractors, according to the report. The researchers found technical evidence linking servers used to control the attacks to a GDGS office in Beirut by locating wi-fi networks and internet protocol address in or near the building. They cannot say for sure whether the evidence proves GDGS is responsible or is the work of a rogue employee. The malware, once installed, could do things like remotely take photos with front or back camera and silently activate the phone’s microphone to record conservations, researchers said. Responding to a question from Reuters about the claims made in the report, Major General Abbas Ibrahim, director general of GDGS, said he wanted to see the report before commenting on its contents. He added: “General Security does not have these type of capabilities. We wish we had these capabilities.” Ibrahim was speaking ahead of the report’s publication.

FLYING BENEATH THE RADAR

The EFF/Lookout team said they uncovered spy tools and a massive trove of hundreds of gigabytes of data stolen from the phones of thousands of victims that included text messages, contacts, encrypted conversations, documents, audio and photos. Targets were located mainly in Lebanon and the surrounding region, including Syria and Saudi Arabia, but not Iran or Israel, two frequent targets of government cyber spy attacks. Victims also lived in five European countries, Russia, the United States, China, Vietnam and South Korea, researchers said. The researchers notified Google , the developer of the Android operating system, late in 2017. Google worked closely with the researchers to identify the apps associated with this attack, none of which were available on the Google Play Store for Android phone users, a company spokesman said. Google Play Protect, the internet company’s unified security system that runs on many Android smartphones, has been updated to protect users from these malicious apps and is in the process of removing them from any affected phones, the spokesman said.

The attackers borrowed code to create their own malicious software from developer sites, while relying heavily on social engineering to trick people to click on links that sent them to a site called SecureAndroid, a fake Android app store. There, users were encouraged to download fake, but fully functioning versions of encrypted messaging apps and privacy tools including WhatsApp, Viber and Signal, that Flossman said promised victims secure software “better than the original”. Lookout found links between the Lebanon-linked attacks and ones tied to the Kazakh government in Central Asia in 2016 in a report called “Operation Manual” by EFF and other experts. The two research groups agreed to team up and now believe the Kazakh group was a customer of the Lebanon-based hackers. (Reporting by Eric Auchard in Frankfurt with additional reporting by Laila Bassam in Beirut; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

by Derek Hawkins – Huffington Post WASHINGTON — When the White House released the results of a test on Donald Trump’s mental aptitude Tuesday, showing he aced it without signs of cognitive decline, there was one person out there brimming with pride despite not knowing the president. That person was Ziad Nasreddine — who designed the test. The […]

TYRE, Lebanon (Reuters) – Masoud, a Hamadryas baboon, was kept as a pet in a house near a highway in south Lebanon until 10 days ago, when an animal activist rescued him. But his journey towards freedom is still an uncertain one and, for now, he spends his days in a small cage in the […]