BEIRUT (REUTERS) – THE international community is “dismayed by repeated false accusations” that it is working to settle Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Germany’s ambassador in Beirut said on Thursday. As Syria’s army and allied forces retake more territory, officials have stepped up calls for some of the more than a million refugees registered in Lebanon […]

by AFP — Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri held talks Wednesday at the Kremlin with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “The one-hour meeting tackled the various developments in Lebanon and the region and the ties between the two countries,” Hariri’s office said. The meeting was also attended by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Putin, for his part, […]

BEIRUT, June 13 (Xinhua) — The United States has delivered the last four A-29 Super Tucano aircraft to the Lebanese army, the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon said Wednesday. The delivery took place during a ceremony on Tuesday at Hamat Air Base in Lebanon’s northern city of Batroun, in the presence of Lebanese army chief Joseph […]

BEIRUT, (Xinhua) — Tourism activity is low in Lebanese capital Beirut due to the absence of Gulf visitors, said Pierre Ashkar, president of the Syndicate of Hotel Owners in Lebanon Tuesday. Ashkar added that only 10 percent increase from the prior year is witnessed in hotel reservations for the coming three-day holiday Eid al-Fitr, marking […]

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 […]