BEIRUT (AP) — Lebanon hopes to secure billions of dollars for infrastructure this week at an international donor conference in Paris, as it grapples with low growth and soaring debt. Some 50 countries and international organizations are expected at the CEDRE (Cedar) conference that begins Friday, where Beirut will request up to $22 billion for […]

by businessinsider.com Mark Zuckerberg says he is still the best person to run Facebook in the wake of its series of scandals. In a question-and-answer session with journalists on Wednesday afternoon, the 33-year-old CEO was asked whether he was still the most appropriate person to lead the social network. Earlier on Wednesday, Facebook said that it […]

Staff writer, Al Arabiya — Saudi envoy Nizar Al Alula succeeded in holding a reconciliation meeting between Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri, the executive chairman of the Lebanese Forces Party, Samir Geagea and Druze leader Walid Jumblatt. The meeting between the three leaders is the first of its kind in a long time. A source commented that the meeting was the beginning of understandings between the three parties, stressing that the Saudi move aims to strengthen the Lebanese national leaders to achieve stability in Lebanon. Al Alula confirmed to the Lebanese officials whom he met with last Monday in Beirut and Baabda that “Lebanon is at the heart of the Saudi leadership and its thoughts,” the newspaper Asharq al-Awsat reported. Al Alula gave Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri an official invitation to visit the kingdom.

This article represents only the opinion of the author 

by .newyorker.com — A few days after Donald Trump was inaugurated, Jared Kushner sat down to decide how to reshape the Middle East. During the campaign, Trump had promised a sweeping transformation of the region. Steve Bannon, Trump’s senior aide and ideologist at the time, told me recently, “Our plan was to annihilate the physical caliphate of isis in Iraq and Syria—not attrition, annihilation—and to roll back the Persians. And force the Gulf states to stop funding radical Islam.” The Middle East initiative, Bannon said, was one of the few points of agreement in an otherwise fractious White House. “Jared and I were at war on a number of other topics, but not this.” Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, was put in charge of policy for the region. He had no experience in diplomacy or in Middle Eastern politics; at thirty-six, he had spent his working life managing New York and New Jersey real-estate projects and running the New York Observer, a fading tabloid. But a former senior defense official who worked with Kushner told me that he had been educating himself on the fly. “He’s not a scholar on this stuff,” the official said. “His knowledge is gained from talking to movers and shakers in that part of the world. You can read a lot of books but never get the type of education you get from talking to the Kissingers and Petraeuses of the world.” In a conference room at the White House, Kushner met with aides from the National Security Council. “We took out the map and assessed the situation,” the former defense official said. Surveying the region, they concluded that the northern tier of the Middle East had been lost to Iran. In Lebanon, Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy, controlled the government. In Syria, Iran had helped save President Bashar al-Assad from military disaster and was now bolstering his political future. In Iraq, the government, nominally pro-American, was also under the sway of Tehran. “We kind of set those to the side,” the official told me. “We thought, So then what? Our anchors were Israel and Saudi Arabia. We can’t be successful in the Gulf without Saudi Arabia.” That meant reversing the approach supported by Barack Obama, who, unlike previous Presidents, had kept the Saudis at arm’s length, objecting to their repressive internal policies, their treatment of women, and their aggressive posture toward Iran. Obama, in effect, hoped to create a kind of balance between Riyadh and Tehran. In March, 2016, he told the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg that the unsteady condition of the Middle East “requires us to say to our friends as well as to the Iranians that they need to find an effective way to share the neighborhood and institute some sort of cold peace.” Trump and Kushner wanted no such détente. “Everything we could do to strengthen our relationship with the Saudis, we were going to do,” the former defense official told me. Above all, that meant forming a new alliance with Saudi Arabia’s deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman—known in the White House and throughout the Middle East as M.B.S.

Bin Salman, though only thirty-one¸ was already one of the most powerful people in the kingdom. The son of the current monarch, he was the minister of defense, chairman of the committee that charted the kingdom’s economy, and second in line to the throne. In a country long ruled by aging kings, M.B.S. was young, tall, and transparently ambitious. He wanted to wean the kingdom from its unsustainable addiction to oil and to diversify its economy. And he promised to end the long-standing arrangement of Saudi domestic politics, in which the royal family, and its myriad princes, bought off political opposition by allowing radical Islamists to propagate their creed and even to carry out terrorist acts abroad. M.B.S. was uncompromising in foreign policy, describing the mullahs who presided over Iran as akin to Nazis. The question for many analysts around the world was whether he represented genuine reform or was merely using the language of reform to consolidate power.

As Kushner grappled with the complexities of Middle East politics, he and M.B.S. began a conversation by telephone and e-mail. “They became close very fast,” a former American official who sees M.B.S. periodically said. “They see the world in the same way—they see themselves as being in the tech-savvy money world.” Kushner followed up with a visit to Riyadh, the first of three such trips; the two men stayed up nearly until dawn, discussing the future of their countries. As Kushner knew, M.B.S. was involved in a messy battle over succession to the throne, which American security officials warned might destabilize the kingdom. And M.B.S. had his own ideas about how to remake the Middle East. But, Bannon told me, the message that he and Kushner wanted Trump to convey to the region’s leaders was that the status quo had to change, and in the more places the better. “We said to them—Trump said to them, ‘We’ll support you, but we want action, action,’ ” Bannon said. No one seemed more eager to hear that message than the deputy crown prince. “The judgment was that we needed to find a change agent,” the former defense official told me. “That’s where M.B.S. came in. We were going to embrace him as the change agent.”

When Mohammed bin Salman was growing up, in Riyadh, he lived in a walled palace complex the size of a city block, sharing a mansion with his five brothers and his mother, Fahda, one of his father’s four wives. (Each wife had a mansion of her own.) For most of his childhood, his father, Salman, was the governor of Riyadh and a likely future king. The family’s home, in the Madher neighborhood, had a staff of about fifty, including servants, gardeners, maids, cooks, and drivers. Each weekday, the staff ferried the young prince to class, at a prestigious academy called the al-Riyadh Schools. On weekends, the servants sometimes escorted him and his classmates into the desert, where they erected large tents and lit bonfires under the stars. His fellow-students would gather around him and recite poems of praise, calling him Kareem—the generous one—for sponsoring the lavish parties. The young M.B.S. would smile at the encomiums, especially if they came from a son of one of Riyadh’s better families. “He treated everyone well, but even then he was aware of everyone’s status,” Mahboob Mohammed, a Pakistani who worked on the staff of one of M.B.S.’s cousins, told me. “Prince Salman always knew he was special.” Still, even for the young Salman, the future was cloudy—due, in no small part, to the uncertain line of royal succession in the House of Saud. Since 1953, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s last surviving absolute monarchies, has been ruled by six brothers, all sons of King Abdul-Aziz al Saud. Abdul-Aziz is the central figure in modern Saudi Arabia, having united the kingdom in 1932, after a series of wars. In the forties, he opened the country to large-scale oil production by Western companies and, after meeting President Franklin Roosevelt on an American destroyer in the Red Sea, struck an alliance with the United States, which has endured ever since. The Saudis guarantee access to oil; the U.S., in return, guarantees Saudi Arabia security from foreign enemies.

Abdul-Aziz was a prolific father—he bragged of having “married no fewer than a hundred and thirty-five virgins,” and he sired at least forty-two sons and fifty-five daughters. Since his death, in 1953, royal succession has been determined on the principle of agnatic seniority, whereby a king’s younger brother is preferred over his sons. In 2015, when his successor King Abdullah died, his brother Salman ascended to the throne; another, younger brother, named Muqrin, became crown prince. Muqrin, the son of a Yemeni concubine, was Abdul-Aziz’s last surviving son. As the generation of Abdul-Aziz’s sons neared its end, tensions arose over who would be the first member of the next generation to become king. Saudi kings, though absolute in their authority, have traditionally ruled by consensus among the brothers; their sons, in turn, are placed in key positions across the government. Any one of Abdul-Aziz’s hundreds of grandsons could feel entitled to the throne.

BY TOUFIC BAAKLINI, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR – THE HILL Today, over 1 billion Christians worldwide celebrate the death and resurrection of their Savior Jesus Christ, remembering that Jesus was ridiculed and persecuted in his life. Celebrants this week should remember that their brothers and sisters throughout the Middle East are joining in Christ’s suffering to this very […]

More than half the world’s economies bar women from the same jobs as men, The Wall Street Journal says. Citing a World Bank report, the newspaper said that women are often prohibited from entering higher-wage fields, sealing their economic fates. But as countries increase legal protections for women — such as enabling them to apply […]

By Yaroslav Trofimov —wsj.com DUBAI—If you want to see what a tangle of geopolitical conflicts the Middle East has become, just look at its convoluted air routes. The Qatar Airways flight from Doha to Khartoum, Sudan travels in a semicircle and takes 5½ hours. A year ago it took two hours less and flew straight across Saudi […]

PHILIP ISSA Associated Press BEIRUT (AP) — The world’s largest passenger jet landed at Beirut’s international airport on Thursday, bringing with it hopes of a sustained revival to Lebanon’s tourism and travel sectors. The one-off Emirates Airbus A380 flight from Dubai was a nod to the substantial passenger traffic between Lebanon and Gulf nations, where […]

U.S. Army Central (ARCENT) Deputy Commander Major General Terrence J. McKenrick has concluded his visit to Lebanon, the U.S. embassy said on Thursday. During his visit, he met with Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) Commander General Joseph Aoun and other senior LAF officials, accompanied by U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Elizabeth H. Richard. In his meetings, McKenrick […]

By Osama Habib, The Daily Star BEIRUT – Central Bank Governor Riad Salameh Wednesday brushed off calls for a managed devaluation of the Lebanese currency, warning that such a step would be detrimental to the national economy. “We are not considering any devaluation because we believe that it will be detrimental to confidence, detrimental to […]