Pope Francis is planing to kick off a tour to the Middle East that would include Lebanon, to express the Vatican’s solidarity with the people of the region, who are confronting tremendous challenges. According to As Safir newspaper published on Tuesday, the pontiff’s visit to Lebanon is on his 2014 schedule, where he is set […]

Lebanon has banned the screening of a film about homosexuality and another on short-term "pleasure marriages" practiced in some Muslim communities, in a blow to its reputation as a bastion of tolerance in a deeply conservative region. The films, which had been due to be shown at the Beirut International Film Festival that opened last […]

Assaad Assaad sold everything to escape poverty in Lebanon, but now he is back, after watching his wife and three children, and his dreams of a better life, perish at sea. The 36-year-old, who could now pass for 50, was among 18 shell-shocked Lebanese who returned on Sunday after surviving a shipwreck off Indonesia that […]

Last week, the day after Lebanese president Michel Sleiman met Barack Obama at the United Nations to discuss the Syrian conflict, The New York Times thought it timely to publish an article titled In Beirut, Where Fashion Lives Dangerously. The article discussed the apparently innocuous question of the survival of couture in a conflict-ridden country. […]

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s decision to mount two risky capture raids against Al Qaeda operatives in North Africa reflects a reduced role for lethal CIA drone strikes and a growing role for the Pentagon in leading counter-terrorism operations, U.S. officials said Sunday. In storming the coastal Somalia home of a leader of Shabab, the […]

President Michel Suleiman’s repeated denials that he is seeking the extension of his term does not mean that this possibility has been taken off the table, diplomatic sources told the Kuwaiti daily al-Anba on Sunday. They said that his term, which ends in 2014, may indeed be extended until the Syrian crisis is resolved. Foreign […]

By Brooke Anderson The Daily Star

KAWEISHRA, Lebanon: The Turkish-language signs and red flags bearing white crescents and stars in this small mountainous village might make you think you’ve made a wrong turn. In fact, you’ve just entered the town of Kaweishra – Kavashra in Turkish – one of Lebanon’s few Turkmen villages.

“We’re the last Turkmen village where everyone still speaks Turkish,” Kaweishra mayor Mustafa Khodar says, sitting at the local Turkish restaurant Yildizlar, one of several local businesses inspired by his ancestral homeland.

BEIRUT: The Beirut Municipal Council’s first public hearing to discuss urban planning Wednesday ended in a heated debate over a controversial plan to build an underground parking lot in Ashrafieh’s Jesuit Park. Signs written in English welcomed members of the public to the “town hall meeting,” where council members presented a series of projects aimed […]

The State Department says all non-emergency workers who were ordered out of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut last month are being allowed to return to their jobs. The department told all non-essential U.S. personnel to leave Lebanon on Sept. 6 because of fears that an American-led strike on neighboring Syria would unleash more bloodshed in […]

BEIRUT: The administration of the Beirut International Film Festival announced in a Thursday press release that Lebanon’s censor has denied permission to screen the Lebanese short “Wahibatouka al-Moutaa” (“I Offered You Pleasure”) and the French feature “L’Inconnu du Lac” (Stranger by the Lake). The 13th edition of the festival commenced Wednesday evening and will close […]