BEIRUT (AP) — Lebanon’s former army chief told the lead investigator of last year’s massive Beirut port blast on Thursday that he had recommended, years before the explosion, that tons of seized ammonium nitrate stored there be sold privately or sent back to importers. The military had no use for the volatile chemical, testified Jean Kahwaji, who was army chief until 2017. Kahwaji was summoned for questioning as a witness six months after the probe began, the first army official and the most senior security official to testify in the probe. He told the lead investigator that the customs department had asked the army in late 2015 if it was interested in the stored fertilizer, which could also be used as an explosive. The army, after carrying out tests, said it had no use for the ammonium nitrate because it was a large amount and “has limited use and because it dissolves with time, it constitutes a danger if stored for a long time,” Kahwaji said.

Kahwaji said the army had no room to store it and no ability to get rid of it. He added the army then asked the customs authority to sell it to a private explosive company in Lebanon or to re-export to the country of origin at the expense of the importers. According to a local media investigation, the importers had carried out their own tests of the nearly 3,000 tons of ammonium nitrate, months after it was stored at the port, and then dropped any claims to the shipment. The chemicals ended up staying in the warehouse for six years before detonating. What sparked the explosion remains unknown. The volatile fertilizer ignited last Aug. 4, causing one of the largest non-nuclear explosion in history, disfiguring Beirut and killing 211 people. More than 6,000 were injured in the explosion.

PARIS (Reuters) – Lebanese Prime Minister-designate Saad al-Hariri on Wednesday dined with French President Emmanuel Macron to discuss the crisis in Lebanon and the difficulties in forming a new government, according to Hariri’s Twitter account. “Presidents Hariri and Macron discussed the internal Lebanese difficulties that hinder the formation of the government and the possible ways […]

By Lisa Zengarini — vaticannews.va On the occasion of the Feast of Saint Maron, patron of the Maronite Church, on February 9, Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, Prefect of the Congregation for the Oriental Churches, participated in a Divine Liturgy at the Church of the Pontifical Maronite College in Rome. At the end of the Liturgy, which was presided over by the Procurator of the Maronite Patriarch to the Holy See, Bishop Rafic El Warcha , the Argentinian prelate addressed the participants with a greeting speech in which he focused on the dramatic situation in Lebanon following the two terrible explosions which devastated Beirut on August 4.

Solidarity in the aftermath of the explosion

In his address, Cardinal Sandri remarked that in spite of the economic, social and political crisis which the Country was already facing before the disaster, Lebanese people have shown great solidarity, working hard – he said – to meet the needs of those most affected: to free the streets from the debris, give shelter to those left without a home, deliver foodstuff and clothes, repairing infrastructures.

by reuters — WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to have a chat with his Turkish counterpart, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, in the coming days, the State Department spokesman said on Wednesday. Asked if the United States is considering Turkey’s recent suggestion that it may not need to make the Russian S-400 […]

BEIRUT (AP) — In the middle of the destroyed Beirut neighborhood of Gemmayzeh, a small team in masks and gloves were sanitizing and packing oxygen machines to be sent to those in need. It’s the latest venture of a Lebanese civil group that arose with the coronavirus pandemic and has been finding new avenues to help as the country’s crises expand. “No one is exempt from COVID. Nobody. Nobody has super-power immunity,” said Melissa Fathallah, one of the founders of Baytna Baytak, Arabic for Our Home is Your Home. “We saw that our own relatives and our colleagues are suffering with this, we decided, okay, we are going to start another fundraiser and to specifically focus on the oxygen machines.” Raising more than $27,000, they currently have placed 48 machines with those who need it across the country.

Baytna Baytak, with 110 staffers, launched at the start of the pandemic with a very different initiative: Finding a home away from home for front-line workers who were worried about exposing their families to the virus. During Lebanon’s first lockdown in March, they housed 750 front-line workers in various apartments. Chloe Ghosh, a 26-year-old medical resident at a government hospital in Beirut, has been living in accommodations provided by the group since the start of the pandemic. Her family is from Tannourine, a small town 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Lebanon. For her, putting her family at risk was another burden she couldn’t fathom. “If I got COVID or anyone my age got COVID, we could survive,” Ghosh said. “But our families, no.” Her first accommodation with the group was wrecked when another disaster struck Beirut, the massive Aug. 4 explosion at the city’s port. The blast killed more than 200 people, injured 6,000 others and destroyed thousands of homes. Ghosh was unharmed. She moved to another place provided by Baytna Baytak across town in Hamra street. She now shares a four-bedroom apartment with three other medical workers who work in different hospitals around the city.

By Natasha Turak – cnbc.com — Saudi Arabia has announced new judicial reforms, putting the kingdom on a path to codified law — a huge step in the deeply conservative country whose legal system is based on Islamic law. “The Personal Status Law, the Civil Transactions Law, the Penal Code for Discretionary Sanctions, and the Law of Evidence represent a new wave of judicial reforms in the Kingdom,” Saudi state news agency SPA quoted Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as saying late Monday. “The new laws represent a new wave of reforms that will … increase the reliability of procedures and oversight mechanisms as cornerstones in achieving the principles of justice, clarifying the lines of accountability,” the crown prince said in a statement. He said the new laws will be announced over the course of 2021.

A Saudi official told Reuters that reforms are designed to meet the needs of the modern world while adhering to Sharia. The announcement is the latest in a series of dramatic economic and social reforms launched by the 35-year-old crown prince aimed at modernizing the kingdom. It fits into his Vision 2030 agenda, which aims to diversify the economy away from oil and attract foreign talent and investment, and comes as Saudi Arabia pitches itself as a destination for international business headquarters. “This is an important step on the path towards global best practices that give businesses the confidence to invest,” Tarek Fadlallah, Middle East CEO at Nomura Asset Management, told CNBC on Tuesday. Having no codified legal system often resulted in inconsistency in court rulings and drawn-out litigation procedures. The announcement made a specific mention of women in Saudi Arabia, who have long held a lower status to men in terms of legal and economic rights, and whom the crown prince described as being particularly harmed by the lack of written laws over certain issues. “Discrepancies in court rulings has led to a lack of clarity in the rules governing the incidents and practices, and has hurt many, mostly women,” the SPA quoted the crown prince as saying.

By NAJIA HOUSSARI — arabnews.com —  BEIRUT: Jean Obeid, the veteran Lebanese MP and former journalist who twice ran for the presidency, died on Monday from complications related to COVID-19. He was 81. Obeid, born in the village of Alma in northern Lebanon, was minister of education, youth, sports, and foreign affairs in the governments of Rafik Hariri. In 1987, during the civil war, he was abducted by gunmen in West Beirut and released unharmed after four days. A member of a prominent Maronite family, Obeid had a successful career as a journalist before entering politics. He was an MP from 1991 until 2005, and returned to parliament in 2018 when he won a seat representing Tripoli. Lebanon began gradually relaxing its three-week virus lockdown on Monday despite a high number of COVID-19 cases.

The Ministry of Health recorded 54 deaths and 2,081 new COVID-19 cases on Sunday, bringing the cumulative death toll to 3,616 and the total number of cases to 319,917 since Feb. 21, 2020. Arab News obtained a report by the Crisis Observatory at the American University of Beirut (AUB) referring to three alarming indicators that suggest a new wave of COVID-19 is underway. According to the report, positive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests reached 22 percent during the past two weeks, the highest rate in the world. The World Health Organization (WHO) advises against the return to normality or semi-normality before this percentage drops to 5 percent or below.

By BY BILL MURPHY JR. — inc.com — Imagine if you only ever had one job since you were a teenager, and it went on to make you extraordinarily wealthy and powerful–far beyond most people’s wildest dreams. In other words, imagine being Mark Zuckerberg. Now, imagine that you might be flat-out wrong about something that could ultimately mean the end of Facebook. Here’s why this matters now. There are only a few forces on the planet powerful enough to take on Facebook. National governments might be among them, maybe. But otherwise, we’re looking at the other tech behemoths. As it happens, one of those behemoths, Apple, has all-but declared war on Facebook, while another, Google, looks as if it’s gearing up to join the fight. My colleague Jason Aten has done a great job recently chronicling the battle:

Apple is set to change its privacy rules so that app developers will have to request permission before tracking most users. That runs squarely into Facebook, where the entire business model basically involves tracking users in order to sell “personalized ads.” Who tells you ‘no?’ Apple’s move could be an existential threat; at least Facebook seems to think it is. I can’t predict how it will all turn out. But, a lot of people could have predicted something like this would eventually happen. The reason? It’s simple, and it’s a byproduct of Zuckerberg’s meteoric success. In short, like every highly successful leader, Zuckerberg has always run the risk of surrounding himself with people who owe their success to him, and who therefore can’t effectively tell him, “no.” Because of his background — again, having only really done one thing: built Facebook — he’s probably even more at risk of this phenomenon than many others. In retrospect, it was obvious from the beginning, 17 years ago this month.

by naharnet.com — Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi on Sunday called for organizing a U.N.-sponsored international conference on Lebanon. “The collapsed situation of Lebanon — which according to the constitution is a founding member of the Arab League and a founding member of the U.N. — requires that its cause be raised in an international conference […]

By Yardena Schwartz — nbcnews.com — — As Israel outpaces Western nations in its Covid-19 vaccination effort, it has become a role model for a world aching to return to life as it once was. The country has inoculated a third of its population of 9 million in little more than a month, and over 80 percent of those 60 and older. But if you ask most Israelis, the country’s handling of the coronavirus has been anything but a success story. A recent poll by the nonpartisan Israel Democracy Institute found that just 24 percent of Israelis approve of the government’s management of the crisis. While Israel boasts the world’s highest vaccination rate, it is also battling the world’s third-worst infection rate. Despite the vaccination campaign, January was Israel’s deadliest month, with 1,433 people dying from the virus — a third of the 5,000 fatalities since the pandemic began. Israelis have also experienced some of the world’s strictest and longest national lockdowns, with residents mostly confined to their homes for a cumulative four months.