by David Choi — Business insider — After years of diplomatic wrangling, months of preparation, and weeks of uncertainty, President Donald Trump met North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in a landmark summit in Singapore on Tuesday. Moments after shaking Kim’s hand, Trump said “we will have a terrific relationship.” “I feel really great,” Trump said alongside Kim. “We’re going to have a great discussion.” Kim apparently echoed the sentiment: “It was not easy to get here … the old prejudices and practices worked as obstacles on our way forward, but we overcame all of them and we are here today,” Kim said through his interpreter.

Hours before meeting Kim, Trump railed against naysayers who criticized his decision to entertain Kim on an international stage. Kim’s regime has been condemned by human-rights groups and security experts for numerous violations over the years. “The fact that I am having a meeting is a major loss for the U.S., say the haters & losers,” Trump said in a tweet. “We have our hostages, testing, research and all missile launches have stopped, and these pundits, who have called me wrong from the beginning, have nothing else they can say! We will be fine!” Despite the talks marking the first time a sitting US president met with a North Korean leader, some foreign-policy experts denounced the US-North Korean meeting and theorized it would give Kim and his regime the global diplomatic legitimacy it has long craved. The US, as part of a longstanding posture of isolating the North, has previously rejected the notion of meeting with that country’s leader. Former US officials have also thrown cold water on the summit, which they say was hastily arranged. Summits typically are not held until after extensive backchannel negotiations between lower level officials. Trump’s approach, however, has turned the typical diplomatic norms upside down, rankling policy experts. “This is what happens when you jump too early to a summit,” Victor Cha, the former director for Asian affairs for the National Security Council and the former nominee for US ambassador of South Korea, said to The Washington Post in May. “If this breakdown means North Korea is no longer beholden to their missile-testing moratorium, that takes us to a very bad place.”

by arabnews.com – BEIRUT: Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri has criticized a top Iranian general for comments he reportedly made recently in which he praised Iran-backed groups for making gains in last month’s parliamentary elections. The Iran-backed Hezbollah and its allies gained more than half the seats of the 128-member parliament in the May 6 […]

by the dailystar.com.lb –– Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri has brought a first draft of the structure of Lebanon’s new government to President Michel Aoun, a presidential source said Sunday, signaling progress in the thorny issue of government formation. The source said that the draft was discussed with Aoun over dinner Saturday. “They spoke about the […]

by middleeastmonitor.com — The Lebanese army has installed electronic gates at the entrances to the Palestinian Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp in southern Lebanon, residents say according to a report by The New Arab. The gates, which are placed at four main entrances and smaller exit points, are the latest measure to ramp up security at […]

article does not necessarily represents khazen.org 

Alexandra Ma — by businessinsider.com — The ways that China has been monitoring and ranking its citizens, secretly imprisoning ethnic minorities, and ignoring its LGBT community have been widely documented in the West. But citizens in China itself may have no idea that any of these things are going on. Beijing has a rich playbook of tactics to keep its 1.4 billion citizens from learning about the country’s repression and abuse of human rights. They include paying people to flood the internet with pro-government social media posts, setting up police surveillance points to watch over ethnic communities, and banning content criticising the Chinese government. Here are the four most commonly used tricks in Beijing’s playbook.

1. Planting social media posts to distract from controversial news

China pays two million people to fabricate pro-government social media posts and insert them in real time, many of which immediately after controversial events, a Harvard University report found in 2016. The commentators — known as the “50 cent party,” because they are allegedly paid 50 Chinese cents ($0.08/£0.06) per post — publish around 448 million posts a year, the researchers found. About half of them are stealthily inserted into social media sites in real time, while the others are posted on government sites. Some examples include: “Respect to all the people who have greatly contributed to the prosperity and success of the Chinese civilization! The heroes of the people are immortal.” “Carry the red flag stained with the blood of our forefathers, and unswervingly follow the path of the CCP!” “I love China.” Jennifer Pan, one of the authors of the Harvard paper, told Business Insider: “On social media, instead of engaging on controversial issues, China puts out massive amounts of happy, positive cheerleading posts. These posts seem aimed at distracting the public from controversial and central issues of the day.”

When deadly riots broke out between Uighur ethnic minorities and Chinese police in Xinjiang, northwestern China in 2013, officials in the southeastern city of Ganzhou — located about 2,000 miles away — ordered 50 cent workers to immediately create hundreds of online posts lauding China’s economic development in an attempt to divert people from the topic. The instructions were revealed after an anonymous source leaked emails describing the strategy. An online commentator paid to publish pro-government posts also revealed anonymously in 2012: “When transferring the attention of netizens [Chinese people on the internet] and blurring the public focus, going off the topic is very effective.” This tactic also “dilutes the quality of conversations,” Sophie Richardson, the China director of Human Rights Watch, told Business Insider.

by businessinsider.com — Harrison Jacobs — North Koreans understand that their government regularly lies to them and feeds them propaganda that contradicts their current situation, but few understand the true discrepancy between their country and the outside world, according to North Korean defector Kim Young-il. Kim, the 39-year-old founder of People for Successful Corean Reunification (PSCORE), escaped […]

aawsat.com — Lebanese Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri condemned on Friday Foreign Minister Jebran Bassil for his “unilateral” decision to freeze the residency applications of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees employees in Lebanon. Hariri’s aide, Nadim al-Mounla revealed that the PM had highlighted to the minister the severity of his decision, urging him to reverse […]

by catholicherald.co.uk — Chartres sonne, Chartres t’appelle! Gloire, honneur au Christ-Roi!” Under a radiant sky a stream of singing pilgrims stretches across the French countryside. It is Pentecost weekend and roughly 12,000 people are walking from Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris to Chartres, the cathedral town about 50 miles south of the capital. The pilgrimage, which […]

by Robert Fisk Tarshish, central Lebanon independent.co.uk — — Rarely are journalists lost for words. But how do you describe the destruction of entire mountains, the slashing down of tens of thousands of pine trees, the very shape of the landscape changed by more than 3,000 quarries which have ripped apart the geography of Lebanon and made a new map of its blessed and ancient land – the Massacre of the Mountains? Is that good enough for a story which should shock the world if it occurred in Europe or America? I call it the Castration of Lebanon. Its fruits are dirt and crumbled rock and contaminated lakes. The tops of entire mountainsides – millions of tons of sand and rock – have been ripped away by diggers, excavators and bulldozers to provide concrete for Beirut’s canyons of grotesque high-rise apartments: for its villas and gated city suburbs and the Lebanese Mediterranean coastal hotels. Greed, corruption, poverty and a shameful, selfish, confessional government are to blame. Even now, as Lebanon’s sectarian parties fight for seats in a new cabinet, their nation is being physically torn apart. All they need to do is pass a law – just one piece of legislation – to stop this anarchy.

“Your Lebanon is a political knot, a national dilemma, a place of conflict and deception,” the nation’s most famous poet, Khalil Gibran, wrote in despair of his country almost a hundred years ago. “My Lebanon is a place of beauty and dreams of enchanting valleys and splendid mountains….Your Lebanon is empty and fleeting, whereas my Lebanon will endure forever.” Not any more. Come with me to Mayrouba, high on a mountain above Bikfaya, where Elias Saadeh stands on a plateau of mud and broken rock and roads – government highways – which end suddenly in sheer 500-foot chasms of stone, carved and hacked at by giant cranes and stone cutters whose claws have grooved out the inside of these mountains. Ridges, valleys and watercourses have disappeared. “There is not a building in the ‘new’ Beirut,” Saadeh says cynically, “which does not have part of Mayrouba in its walls and foundations. They call our land here ‘gold sand’ – the best you can buy to build apartment blocks, and it’s the most expensive. But this is crazy. “More than 120,000 of our pine trees have been cut down. We had thirty water ‘ein’ (wells) – but today we only have two left and they are both polluted.”

The two of us stare out towards mountains we’ve known and looked at for decades – but the mountains are not there. For this is now a lunar landscape whose creeping fog and damp winds prove that image reflects reality. We are looking at a lost land. Why? “Because the people who did this are not educated,” Elias says. “Because they only see the dollar. These people make $5,000 a day. They made people rich, but they remained uneducated. They have never learned how to love land. “They don’t give a shit about the nation, about wild life or the environment – nothing! Now we are going towards desertification.” Saadeh sounds like a modern-day Gibran. The poet’s body lies scarcely a hundred miles to the north, sealed into a cave, his tomb weighted down with chains in case his worshippers try to take his bones. “Splendid mountains” indeed.

by SPUTNIK news — Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri plans to attend the opening of the 2018 FIFA World Cup. “The prime minister will visit Moscow next Wednesday and will be present at the opening of the FIFA World Cup,” Russia’s press service said, adding that Hariri could also hold a bilateral meeting with Russian President […]