Beirut (AsiaNews) – The peace plan proposed by Jared Kushner and the US administration, presented as “the deal of the century” for peace between Israelis and Palestinians and throughout the Middle East, is actually “the slap of the century,” this according Maronite Patriarch Card Bechara al-Rahi. During his homily yesterday in Gherfine (Jbeil) during the […]

At 121 months, the U.S. economy is believed to have entered the longest expansion in the nation’s history, pending confirmation from official growth figures. It’s been a gradual climb higher, with the economy growing on average 2.3% each year since June 2009. In that time, unemployment has fallen to near its lowest level in half […]

by Dana Halawi BEIRUT, (Xinhua) — Lebanese economists dismissed on Monday a recent warning from the Global credit rating agency Moody’s that Lebanon may risk rescheduling its debt because of slow capital inflows and weaker deposits growth. “Lebanon is solvent and it does not need to reschedule its debt. The country is paying its debt […]

The Daily Star BEIRUT: A number of Lebanese expatriates working in Kazakhstan are set to arrive in Beirut Tuesday afternoon after they were involved in a brawl at their workplace last week, a source from the Lebanese Foreign Ministry said. “The plane is supposed to leave around 5 or 6 [a.m. Tuesday],” the source told […]

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Two aides to a Lebanese Druze minister were killed on Sunday when his convoy came under fire in an area of support for a rival Druze faction, in what the minister called an assassination attempt. Saleh al-Gharib, Lebanon’s minister of state for refugee affairs, is close to pro-Syrian Druze leader Talal Arslan. […]

BY CHRIS TAYLOR mashable.com — — For our summer vacation, my wife drove us hell-for-leather between National Parks, driven by the urge to collect every stamp in her Parks Passport. We eagerly snapped up the new National Parks Geek merch. Our dog was sworn in as a #BarkRanger. And I was deputized photographer, urged to get shots of thousand-year-old petroglyphs and cave dwellings, not to mention the 200 million-year-old tree trunks. We came home. My wife pored over her passport and stamps. The magnets and decals went on fridges and cars. The dog wore his Bark Ranger badge around the neighborhood with beaming pride. And my photos? We haven’t looked through them yet. I doubt we ever will. If we really need to see that petroglyph or that tree again, it would be faster to Google them — where we’d find a more pleasingly professional shot. If you’re anything like me, here’s the exact number of times in any given year that you pore over your Apple Photos, Google Photos or similar library: approximately never. Who has the time? Despite the encouragement those companies give us to store all our images with them, it sits there as ones and zeros — billions of merely theoretical photos expending massive amounts of energy on cloud servers, costing each of us a few bucks every month. Or worse, the photos are consigned to death row on a single vulnerable hard drive, awaiting its inevitable failure. Sure, you might dip into the archive for a minute or two every now and then. Wearing your Instagram or Facebook hats, you pluck an image from obscurity, elevating them to the relative stardom of a few Likes. In the social archives, at least, you might look back at them more often. But you’re lucky if this elevation happens to more than one in a hundred snaps.

The average picture you take will fade into forever, and it’s high time we got real about this. We live in an age of digital abundance, one that has devalued photos more than anything. The Snapchat-and-Stories generation treats them as expendable and ephemeral, but Gen Xers are no better — we just fool ourselves into thinking we’re preserving history in these dusty, pricy digital archives. But what exactly are we preserving, and for whom? Will our descendants, beset on all sides by ever more media, even bother to look? If we don’t, why would they?

The Apple design boss instrumental in creating the iPhone is exiting the company after an almost three-decade run. Jony Ive is starting his own design firm, LoveFrom, and will count his soon-to-be-former employer as a key client. Ive led design on several Macs, the iPod, iPad and Apple Watch, as well as the “spaceship” Apple […]

BEIRUT, (Xinhua) — Lebanese President Michel Aoun said on Friday that his country will ask the United Nations to extend the mandate of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) for one year, the Presidency’s website said. The cooperation between the Lebanese army and the UNIFIL has achieved stability and security on the southern borders, […]

by trtworld.com —Walid Jumblatt, the president of the Progressive Socialist Party of Lebanon, berated the leaders of the Gulf countries for participating in the Bahrain conference, warning them against “betraying” Palestinians, while reminding them of the unflinching Ottoman position on Palestinian independence. Organised by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of US President Donald Trump, the “Peace to Prosperity” economic workshop in Bahrain was promoted as a peace plan for Palestine and even described as “the deal of the century.” While the conference failed to bring all stakeholders of the Palestine-Israel conflict to the negotiation table, Palestinians rejected Kushner’s deal outright. Jumblatt’s scathing criticism of the conference and of pro-Israel Arab leaders came as another blow to Kushner’s attempts to generate interest toward his deal from the Arab world. “Under Sultan Abdul Hamid (II), (Theodor) Herzl asked him to buy Palestine to transport the Jews (there), and the Sultan refused,” Jumblatt wrote on Twitter. “Today in Bahrain, the grandson of Herzl, Jared Kushner, will ask Arabs to sell Palestine to transport Palestinian families to Jordan to Sinai to Lebanon to Syria to the diaspora,” he continued. “Will the Arabs do what the Ottomans rejected?” the Lebanese leader asked.

Herzl is the founding father of Zionism, the official ideology of Israel, whose picture is hung in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, in Jerusalem. In 1896, Herzl wrote “The Jewish State,” which is considered one of the most influential Zionist texts, outlining the road map for Israel. He also organised the first Zionist congress in Switzerland’s Basel. Jumblatt reminded his Arab counterparts about the time when Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II refused to accept a Zionist settlement in Palestine, defying various odds during his reign between 1876 and 1909. Herzl had tirelessly worked to implement the Zionist plan, meeting notable political figures across the world, which included Abdul Hamid II.