BY ZEINA KARAM, The gowns are cut low in the front, slashing down to the navel, or low in the back, swooping below the waist, inset with delicate see-through fabric. They couldn’t be further from the modest dress generally worn by women in the Muslim Arab world.

Yet these fashions come from Lebanon, a tiny Arab country of 4 million on the Mediterranean. This nation better known for military conflicts than the arts has produced an impressive crop of designers, including Reem Acra and Elie Saab, whose work is showcased at celebrity events such as the Oscars and the Golden Globes.

"Lebanon’s name has always been synonymous with war, but when it comes to fashion … these designers really make us proud," said Laura Seikaly, 39, who was among a recent crowd of bikini-clad sunbathers on a beach north of Beirut. "I guess it comes from the society itself, the way Lebanese women dress. They’re very courageous, even more than Europeans."

road trip to the South this weekend brought me and some friends up close to the remnants of one of Lebanon’s prouder former Jewish communities. For some reason the Jews of Lebanon have been a hot journalistic subject around here recently, at least ever since this article in Ha’aretz reported that a group of Lebanese Jews in exile were planning to fund the restoration of Beirut’s once-noble synagogue near downtown. (For more on that story, seen Ben Gilbert’s sharp follow-up in GlobalPost. Ben is also the highly capable editor of the regional business magazine Executive, which recently featured “The Jews of Lebanon” on its cover; this has resulted in the curious sight of a giant photograph of a menorah sitting in doctor’s office waiting rooms and on the desks of bank executives all across town.)

What we found on the way south from Saida was something less prominent, but perhaps more telling: the scattered ruins of Saida’s Jewish cemetery.

Saida, like many Middle Eastern cities, still has a neighborhood known as the Jewish Quarter. (In fact, back in the old city we had briefly puzzled over a martyr poster of a little boy — below that of a deceased resistance leader — that said, in bold script, that it was “paid for by the youth of the Jewish Quarter,” which seemed like an odd juxtaposition. Turns out the boy, tragically, fell into the sea near town and drowned.) According to Kirsten E. Schulze’s book, “The Jews of Lebanon: Between Coexistence and Conflict,” the Jewish presence in Saida dates back at least a thousand years and those who remained in the 1960s and  early 1970s had a fine relationship with their Lebanese neighbors. By 1975, though, there was only one Jewish family left in town, that of Josef and Jamila Levy.

Written by Melik Kaylan,

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A first glimpse of Baalbeck’s six 72-feet-high Corinthian columns will instantly raise your spirits and turn unease into adventure. Like the Parthenon or the Pyramids, the Baalbeck complex is one of the glorious monuments of history. No matter which angle you look from, the two lofty temples—to Jupiter and to Bacchus—seem to ride the sky and will intoxicate your faculties. You will know how it feels to be a besotted idolater.

The site sits astride a north-south thoroughfare of history, being the place where trouble flowing down from the north (Syria) meets trouble coming up from the coast (Beirut). In recent years, the Bekaa Valley was home to guerrilla training camps. The Lebanese Civil War shut down the annual Baalbeck International Festival—and its presentations of music, dance and theater—from 1975 to 1996. The Hezbollah-Israel war did the same for a year in 2006. Nowadays, when the festival is in full swing a shop set into the ancient walls sells Hezbollah banners and T-shirts.

BEIRUT: When Nadine Abi Nasr and her Italian fiance Marco decided to have a civil marriage, they turned to a travel agency for help to escape Lebanon’s tangled bureaucracy and strict religious rules. Nadia Travel provided them with a tailor-made package and return tickets for the 30-minute flight to the nearby east Mediterranean island of Cyprus, where the couple tied the knot.

Despite a long-running campaign by civic groups, civil weddings still have no legal basis in Lebanon, a tiny country of around four million people who belong to 18 different religious communities, mainly Christian and Muslim.

The Lebanese authorities recognize civil weddings only if they have been registered abroad, but such ceremonies are banned from taking place inside the country because of strong opposition from religious leaders.

Religious faiths have their own regulations governing marriage, divorce and inheritance, and mixed Christian-Muslim weddings in Lebanon are frowned upon and downright discouraged unless one of the potential spouses converts.

Here’s the full list of countries polled, accompanied by opinion results on whether Obama “will do the right thing in world affairs”: U.S. (74), Canada (88), Britain (86), France (91), Germany (93), Spain (72), Poland (62), Russia (37), Turkey (33), Egypt (42), Jordan (31), Lebanon (46), Palestinian territories (56), China (62), India (77), Indonesia (71), Japan (85), Pakistan (13), South Korea (81), Argentina (61), Brazil (76), Mexico (55), Kenya (94), Nigeria (88).

The Survey did not cover Syria, but in Lebanon there are some interesting trends. For one thing, the Favorability rating  here (now at 55%) for the United States has been steadily climbing, although not by much, which seems to support the notion that Lebanon has long been an outlying proponent of George W. Bush in the region. (In 2005, Bush helped encourage Lebanon’s effort to oust Syrian troops from the country.) Lebanon emerges as the only polled country which gave Bush a higher confidence rating than Bin Laden among its Muslim citizens in recent years, although this surely relates as much to Bush’s support for the anti-Syrian movement as it does to so much of the Muslim population’s support here for Nasrallah. No room for Bin Laden’s shenanigans here.

Other points:

-The Obama support is highly polarized: “Only 2% of Lebanese Shia express a positive attitude toward the U.S., barely an improvement from last year’s 0%. But a remarkably high 90% of Lebanese Sunni hold a positive view of the U.S., up from 62% in 2008. Sunnis now have more favorable views of the U.S. than the country’s Christian population – 66% of Lebanese Christians express a positive opinion of the U.S., down from 75% in 2008.”

-Lebanon shows some of the most dramatic change in its Muslim citizens’ response to a question about whether suicide bombing is ever justified. In 2002, 72% of the country’s Muslims answered yes; today that figure is 38%.

Written by Don Duncan, Beirut] – The firecracker smoke has cleared from Beirut’s streets and the purple electoral ink has faded from the thumbs of Lebanese voters. It’s been over a month since Lebanon went to the polls and regardless of political affiliation, it is clear that there was one big loser across the board – the women of Lebanon. The number of women elected as MPs has fallen from six to just four out of 128 seats in the Lebanese parliament.

“It was a major, major setback for women, at least in terms of representation,” says Lina Abou-Habib, director of the Center for Research and Training on Development Action, a social justice NGO. “It is also a setback in the sense that the way that the women who enter parliament do so through patriarchal channels and yet again this has been reproduced, reiterated, reinforced, exacerbated in the latest parliamentary elections.” Lebanon was at the forefront of women’s empowerment in the Middle East when it extended suffrage to women in 1952, the third country in the region to do so after Israel in 1948 and Syria in 1949. Since then, Lebanon has been sliding down the scale. With only 3 percent of its parliamentary seats currently occupied by women, Lebanon now languishes at the bottom of the table of parliamentary representation of women in the Middle East – side by side with conservative Gulf states like Oman (0%), Bahrain (2.7%) and Yemen (0.3%). At the top of the scale is Iraq whose parliament has a 25% quota for women MPs, Tunisia with 22.8% and Lebanon’s neighbor Syria with 12.4%.

Many people point to Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war and numerous other periods of domestic tumult for putting the brakes on advancement for women and subjecting women’s rights to the volatilities of the country’s infamous sectarian political culture. “The issue then was how to help Lebanon and how to save Lebanon from those difficult times and it was all-consuming,” says Strida Geagea, one of Lebanon’s current women MPs. “Women’s rights were a secondary issue and weren’t raised enough.”

 ‘Some 30,000 tourists from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates arrived via Syria on Sunday,’ an official at the Masnaa border checkpoint told the German Press Agency, dpa. The Ministry of Tourism  expects 2 million Arabs and other nationalities to come by the end of 2009. ‘This will be a record,’ said tourism ministry director Nada Sardouk. About 1.3 million tourists visited Lebanon in 2008, up 30 per cent from the previous year, the ministry’s records show. An official at Beirut International Airport  told dpa that planes are arriving packed with tourists from Gulf states. ‘I can say people are flocking into the country to spend their summer vacations, and our airport staff are working around the clock to speed up their entry,’ he said. The tourism boom is visible in the capital’s hotels, beach resorts  and restaurants.

Pierre Achkar, head of Lebanon’s Hotel Association, said occupancy in most hotels  in Beirut reached to 90 per cent in mid-July. Car rental owners are also delighted with business. ‘This is a season the likes of which we have never witnessed before,’ said Ali Chabani, owner of a taxi and car rental firm. I can say Beirut is reclaiming its position as the Jewel of the Middle East for tourists from he Arab world and Europe,’ Sardouk said. This year’s summer festivals, which include famous names like rock group Deep Purple, have also added to the attractions for visitors. Nada Attayeh, a Jordanian national, said she came to Lebanon to see her favourite group perform in the ancient city of Baalbeck.

‘I bought my tickets two months ago to watch Deep Purple play on July 25. At the same time I came to enjoy the nightlife in Beirut,’ she said. Famous bars and restaurants are crowded with visitors who usually stay well into the night, dancing and enjoying the music. ‘We are fully booked every day until the end of September,’ a waiter at the famous open-air dance club Sky Bar told dpa. La Creperie restaurant located at the sea front of Kaslik overlooking the bay of Jounieh  is also receving many tourists daily from European countries, Arab, Americas and Australia has informed us their manager: "It is just different from any other previous year where tourists are not only the Lebanese from aborad but it is Arabs, Europeans Americans from all over"

(AFP) – 47 minutes ago

BEIRUT — The United States has pledged another 30 million dollars to the rebuilding of a Palestinian refugee camp destroyed in a battle between Islamists and the Lebanese army, a UN refugee agency said on Monday.

"The amount of 25 million dollars (18 million euros) will be allocated towards the reconstruction of Nahr al-Bared camp and five million dollars (four million euros) towards the Relief and Early Recovery Appeal," said the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).

The grant raises to 71.8 million dollars (51 million euros) the amount donated by the United States to the reconstruction of the camp in north Lebanon that was almost completely destroyed in a 15-week battle between the army and an Al-Qaeda-inspired militant group in 2007.

The UN refugee agency has collected over 92 million dollars (65 million euros) of the estimated 450 million dollars (290 million euros) needed to rebuild the camp and 15 nearby villages.

More than 400 people, including 168 soldiers, were killed in the Nahr al-Bared battles and the camp’s 31,000 residents were transferred to nearby camps, some of whom have since returned.

BEIRUT, July 20 (Xinhua) — Lebanese Foreign Minister Fawzi Salloukh said Monday that his ministry is cooperating with the army and the UN Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) to investigate Saturday’s clashes in south Lebanon, local LBC TV reported.

    "The Lebanese Foreign Ministry is carrying out necessary contacts with army officers, while the investigation is still going on" about the incident between UNIFIL and the residents of Khirbet Selm village Saturday, Salloukh said.

    About 14 UNIFIL soldiers were wounded on Saturday when Lebanese Shiite protesters prevented them from searching a location suspected of containing arms.

    Salloukh said the "UNIFIL did not coordinate with the Lebanese army when it entered the village for search, thinking that the army was already deployed there," adding "but today coordination is present between them."

    Ammunition depot in an abandoned house in the village of Khirbet Selm, 20 kilometers from the Israeli border, exploded on Tuesday in an area widely seen under control of Shiite Lebanese group of Hezbollah.

    The UNIFIL patrols were attacked by around 100 protesters from Khirbet Selm village. They hurled stones to the windows of UNIFIL vehicles and the two sides were engaged in fistfights.

    However, military sources told As-Safier daily Monday that "UNIFIL had no right, under UN resolution 1701, to raid houses or set up checkpoints without prior coordination with the Lebanese army."