Andrew McConnell for The New York Times Leila Abdel Latif preparing to go on air at LBC studios in Jounieh, Lebanon, on New Year’s Eve, when she makes predictions about the year ahead.

By BEN HUBBARD – NYT  ADMA, Lebanon — As the clock ticked toward midnight on New Year’s Eve, Leila Abdel Latif, a Lebanese fortuneteller, sat under the glaring lights of a television studio here and unveiled to viewers across the Arab world what 2015 held in store. Wearing a black pantsuit and a diamond necklace, Ms. Abdel Latif peered through reading glasses and read from a two-inch thick stack of cards, stating her predictions one by one. Chaos would rock Beirut. Bloodshed would roil Iraq. Blacks and whites would clash in the United States. A band would win international fame for reviving the hits of Michael Jackson.

Such predictions have put Ms. Abdel Latif among the most prominent of the self-declared soothsayers who appear on competing Lebanese television channels in what has become a widely watched New Year’s Eve tradition in the Arab world. In a region where religious extremism is on the rise and many governments criminalize divination, Lebanon stands apart for giving its fortunetellers a prominent role.

Serge Hochar, who navigated Chateau Musar, his family’s winery in Lebanon, through 15 years of civil war as Musar became one of the most admired wine producers in the world, died on Wednesday in Acapulco, Mexico. He was 75. He had been vacationing with his family and died while swimming in the ocean, said Catherine Miles, a vice president of Broadbent Selections, Musar’s American importer. No cause was announced.

Mr. Hochar (pronounced HO-shar) oversaw production for Musar, but he was more than a winemaker. He was also an entrepreneur who crisscrossed six continents promoting his idiosyncratic, long-lived wines as well as the ancient wine culture of Lebanon, which had been moribund when his father, Gaston, founded Musar in 1930.

Musar’s success helped build the modern Lebanese wine industry. When the civil war ended in 1990, just five wineries were operating in Lebanon. By 2014 there were almost 50, Mr. Hochar said in an interview last spring.

  BEIRUT: Maronite Patriarch Beshara Rai has lent support for the planned dialogue between the country’s two rival Christian leaders, describing it as an “important step” toward ending the deadlock that has left Lebanon without a president for more than seven months, Bkirki officials said Friday. “Patriarch Rai has given his blessing to the [upcoming] […]

  U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has extended the mandate of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) for a period of three years from March 1, 2015, in accordance with Security Council resolution 1757, a statement on the U.N. chief’s website said. The mandate of the STL, which is based near The Hague in the Netherlands, […]

  BEIRUT: Revised entry measures approved by General Security this week will not exclude “extreme humanitarian cases” from crossing into Lebanon, a government source said Friday, adding that the criteria for these would soon be shared with the UNHCR. Lebanon’s General Security approved revised entry measures for Syrian nationals who will no longer be able […]

  The Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Friday announced that Lebanon’s chargés d’affaires in Chile and Brazil have fallen victim to robbery attacks, revealing that it has sent letters of protest to demand protection for Lebanon’s missions. The complaints were filed with the foreign ministries of the two countries, the ministry said in a statement. […]

Amal Clooney, the leading human rights barrister, was threatened with arrest by Egypian officials after she identified flaws in the country’s justice system that led to the jailing of three Al Jazeera journalists, it has emerged. British-Lebanese lawyer Mrs Clooney, who married American actor George Clooney at a lavish ceremony in Venice last September, represents Mohamed Fahmy, one the three journalists convicted of terrorism in December 2013.

On Thursday, an Egyptian court ordered the retrial of the three journalists, acknowledging major problems with their initial conviction. The sentences handed to Mr Fahmy, Al Jazeera’s Egyptian-Canadian bureau chief, as well as Australian former BBC journalist Peter Greste and Egyptian freelance producer Baher Mohamed, had provoked international outrage. In an interview, Mrs Clooney said a report she had co-authored on the independence of Egypt’s judiciary – a politically sensitive subject in the north African country – was deemed so controversial that she was warned she could be arrested if she visited Cairo. "When I went to launch the report, first of all they stopped us from doing it in Cairo," Mrs Clooney said. "They said: ‘Does the report criticise the army, the judiciary, or the government?’ We said: ‘Well, yes.’ They said: ‘Well then, you’re risking arrest.’" In Egypt, insulting the judiciary is an imprisonable offence.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) – According to the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the men killed were foreign fighters who had joined the insurgency but were caught trying to leave territory controlled by militants. These numbers were probably underestimates. "We believe that the real number of people that had been killed by ISIS is higher than the number documented," it said on its Web site.

Those who were killed for their attempted desertion were among at least 1,878 people executed in six months by the self-styled Islamic State, which enforces an extreme version of religious law on the areas it controls. The group says that of 930 of the civilians executed by ISIS were members of the Sheitaat. The Sheitaat is a Sunni Muslim tribe from eastern Syria, which fought Islamic State for control of two oilfields in August.

By Hugh Naylor, Washington Post

BEIRUT — Not so long ago, the historic downtown of Beirut was a wasteland of scorched buildings and rubble. Lebanon’s civil war, which ended in 1990, destroyed an area known for its picturesque Mediterranean vistas and Roman and Mamluk ruins.

Now, after a multibillion-dollar reconstruction project, the city center features plush apartments and posh cafes, refurbished Ottoman-era buildings and boutiques by Burberry and Versace. Yet one element seems to be lacking: people.

“Even the rich people don’t bother coming anymore,” Mohammed Younnes, 27, said

on a recent Saturday evening as he gazed at the empty tables of Grand Cafe, an eatery he manages in downtown Nejmeh Square. Businesses in the square, distinctive for an art deco clock tower with “Rolex” written on its dial, are relocating or going bankrupt.

Beirut’s shiny new downtown has struggled for various reasons. Despite the end of the civil war, violence has continued to batter the country. In 2006, war broke out with Israel, damaging Lebanon’s economy and leaving shops and restaurants empty. In addition, persistent sectarian feuds have erupted in bombings and demonstrations in central Beirut. Lately, fighters in Syria’s civil war have launched cross-border attacks into Lebanon.