MENAFN – Kuwait News Agency (KUNA)) BEIRUT, Sept 16 (KUNA) — Lebanese Foreign Ministry Sunday strongly rejects any derogatory remarks directed at Kuwait and its leader His Highness the Amir Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah is not be accepted. A statement by the ministry said, “we should not be directing such harmful remarks at such […]

By Lina Younis – NNA –– The Bachir Gemayel Foundation and the Kataeb Ashrafieh District Branch on Friday marked the 36th commemoration of the martyrdom of President Bachir Gemayel and his comrades, during a ceremony in Ashrafieh attended by MP Nadim Gemayel and his sister, Yumna, and martyrs’ families. Attending the ceremony had also been […]

ZAHLE, Lebanon, (Xinhua) — Arak, a Lebanese local alcoholic beverage, has witnessed a remarkable slowdown in production in the past few years because of stiff competition from imported alcoholic beverages. “The taste of people has changed tremendously,” Joseph Haddad, owner of a small Arak factory in Zahle, told Xinhua that young people today prefer to […]

by Sarah Diaa, Staff Reporter,  — gulfnews — Dubai: Despite strong warnings about citizenship-by-investment programmes, a growing number of expatriates in the UAE are buying second passports, spurred by mounting concerns over geopolitical instability in the region. According to Savory & Partners, a Dubai-based firm that offers citizenship-by-investment services, the top nationalities seeking a second passport in […]

BEIRUT,  (Xinhua) — The Chinese market has opened its doors to receive Lebanon’s wine products after great efforts by the Lebanese ministries of agriculture and foreign affairs, said Louis Lahoud, director general of the ministry of agriculture, on Thursday. “We are about to coordinate with the Chinese embassy in Lebanon to market our Lebanese wine […]

BEIRUT, (Xinhua) — Beirut airport’s manager and general director of civil aviation must be suspended from their jobs for failing to fulfill their responsibilities and duties, Lebanese anti-corruption official said Wednesday. A software error at Beirut-Rafic Hariri International Airport (RHIA) led to flights delays, causing great chaos and congestion in the airport’s departure halls on […]

By Jeffrey T. Lewis and Luciana Magalhaes SÃO PAULO—Brazil’s leftist former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in jail for corruption, on Tuesday formally gave up his quixotic battle to run again in October’s election from his cell, naming former São Paulo Mayor Fernando Haddad as his replacement in the campaign. “Starting today, Fernando Haddad […]

BEIRUT,  (Xinhua) — The Rafic Hariri International Airport in Lebanese capital Beirut is not in need for expansion but only needs to be properly organized to host increasing passengers, said Parliament Member Yassin Jaber on Tuesday. “It is not necessary to pay 100 million U.S. dollars to expand the airport in the midst of the […]

by middleeastmonitor.com — Lebanese President Michel Aoun said Monday that the US decision to cut funding for the UN refugee agency UNRWA was the beginning to settle Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Speaking to reporters during his flight from Lebanon to France, Aoun said he will discuss the UNRWA issue during his visit to the European […]

By Vivian Yee and Hwaida Saad —nytimes.com —  JIYEH, Lebanon — They call it the ladies’ beach. The name is demure; the scene, not so much — at least not once they pass the parking lot, the man checking tickets at the front gate and the dim corridor at whose far end blazes a rectangle of bronze sand and sea. Hijabs are unwound from heads, veils tugged from faces. Jeans and abayas evaporate, divulging string bikinis, tankinis and swim shorts. Under spindly cabanas by azure waves, two women lie chest down on lounge chairs, their bare backs implying bare fronts. All around them, gallons of tanning oil glisten on acres of copper skin. When a man on a Jet Ski buzzes past, a female lifeguard warns him off with a staccato of whistle blasts. “Men,” said Nada, a school bus supervisor from Beirut who was treading the Mediterranean just offshore, “are suffocating.”

In Lebanon, a sliver of a country on the Mediterranean coast where summer sticks to your skin like moist Saran wrap, the beach is less a luxury than a utility. It is hard to imagine going without. Public and pay-by-the-day beaches line the coast from Tyre in the south to Tripoli in the north, and every other billboard on the highways out of Beirut seems to display a bikini model promoting a tanning aid. (S.P.F., evidently, is not in style.) But many observant Muslim women consider it “haram” — forbidden — to expose their bodies in front of men who are not their husbands or, in some cases, close relatives. Other women may cover themselves in deference to conservative families and communities.

For them, a mixed-gender beach is to be avoided; those who go with their families roast in the sun fully clothed in hijabs and long-sleeved shirts and pants or abayas, the full-length caftans popular among devout Lebanese Muslim women. Hence the emergence of ladies’ beaches like this one, the Bellevue Beach Club in the seaside town of Jiyeh — a salt-tinged hiatus from the male gaze for $18 a day, just 20 minutes down a trash-perfumed highway from Beirut. “When you see me on Facebook, I look completely different,” she said, her hair loose and ropy in the water. “You wouldn’t recognize me.” After next year, when she planned to make the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that every Muslim who can afford it is supposed to undertake at least once, she said she would avoid even the ladies’ beach; she, like many women who have completed the hajj, would adopt more modest attire. And she frowned on the women who had brought their young sons, who are allowed up to age 8 on the beach. She did not want her sons or grandsons to get used to seeing women’s bodies. But still. “I love to swim,” she said, smiling and shrugging, “so I have no other choice.” Nada and Ms. Amhaz agreed on one point: absolutely no beach selfies, not even to share with their husbands. “No, no!” they exclaimed, high-fiving. “My husband doesn’t need pictures,” Ms. Amhaz said. “He sees everything anyway.”