By Michael Karam – The National

Someone, I forget who, once told me “everything before the
‘but’ is meaningless”. Here’s the “before” bit: In the same week that
Lebanon ended its two year political impasse by nominating Michel Aoun,
an 81-year-old former army commander, as president and appointing Saad
Hariri, the Saudi-born billionaire businessman, as the next prime
minister, it welcomed two Apple legends – Steve Wozniak, the co-founder
of the US$250 billion tech company, and Tony Fadel, an American-Lebanese
whizz-kid who essentially invented the iPod.

Mr
Wozniak and Mr Fadel headlined the Lebanese Central Bank’s “Accelerate”
conference, billed rather optimistically as the biggest tech gathering
in the Mediterranean and themed under the strapline “Innovation:
Intrapreneurship v Entrepreneurship”. (If, like me, if you are wondering
what “intrapreneurship” is, Wikipedia defines it as “the act of
behaving like an entrepreneur while working within a large
organisation”, which sounds like every Lebanese public sector worker.)

So
the conference was held in a mood of optimism not felt in the country
since the ill-fated Bashir Gemayel was elected president in 1982. Which
was probably just as well. “Accelerate” would have been planned at least
a year ago if the conference organisers had to book such stellar names,
and it would have taken some of the shine off the three days had the
event tried to sell the dynamism of a country that after two years,
still couldn’t nominate a president.

Statistician Nate Silver warned on Sunday that Hillary Clinton’s
path to capturing the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White
House now appears narrower than President Barack Obama’s path at
this point in 2012. In an appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” the FiveThirtyEight chief
claimed Clinton is a “2-to-1 favorite,” but noted that
recent polls show Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump
with a slight edge in electoral college-heavy states like
Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina.

“The electoral college math is actually less solid for
Clinton than it was for Obama four years ago, where four years
ago we had Obama ahead 320-some electoral votes. Clinton has
about 270,” Silver said. “So she’s one state away from potentially losing the electoral
college. You’d rather be in her shoes than Donald Trump’s, but
it’s not a terribly safe position.” While other polling aggregators like the New York Times’ Upshot
and HuffPost Pollster have put Clinton’s chances
of winning around 84% and 98% respectively,
Silver’s model gives Trump a greater chance of winning.

Saint Charbel #PrayForLebanon

By Paul Astih

Beirut- The workshop launched by the nominated Prime Minister Saad
al-Hariri to compose his upcoming cabinet has resembled many other
workshops launched by other nominated Prime Ministers who worked on
distributing quotas and ministerial portfolios based on sects, and
political and partisan belonging. However, Hariri’s mission may be the
hardest from years, because Lebanese political parties have raced to
partake in the rule, months before the next parliamentary elections,
aiming at taking advantage of their ministerial portfolios to draw
voters in May.

Hariri’s mission was more complicated with the coming apart of 8 and
14 March blocks and the failure of alliances composed in 2005 after the
assassination of the Former Prime Minister Rafic Al-Hariri. Meanwhile, the young Hariri cannot distribute ministries based on
political blocks anymore, but he is obliged to deal with each party as
an independent political team.

The upcoming Hariri cabinet, which is expected to see the light soon,
is the 74th cabinet in Lebanon since the independence on 1948, and the
seventh since 2015. Probably, it will be a “national unity” cabinet,
which means it will comprise all the political forces just like his
previous 30-minister government in 2009.

#LiveLoveLebanon

By Jessica Yeager, Contributor

There’s a lot riding on each college application. Now that we are getting close to application deadlines, I wanted
to share some mistakes students make that really hurt their
chances of being accepted at their dream colleges. 

1. Starting too late

My college essay (that got me into Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford,
Cornell, and Columbia) took me months to write. The one college I was rejected from (Princeton) didn’t get that
essay; instead I sent Princeton four short answers that I waited
until the weekend before to send. Not too surprising that I
didn’t get in. You really want to give yourself plenty of time to
develop your unique story, so don’t wait to start your essay.
Start today, if you haven’t already!

2. Being generic

It’s so easy for your application to look like everyone else’s,
and admissions officers literally spend only a few minutes with
your application. It’s so important that you stand out. Your
essay should tell the admissions committee something unique about
who you are and what you’ll bring to the campus that the rest of
your application doesn’t.

3. Burning yourself out

This one starts even before you start filling out your
application. So many students think the only way to get into
Harvard or Yale is by joining 17 clubs, playing
three sports, volunteering at the local hospital a few hours
a week, and taking seven AP courses. Usually this only leads to burnout and isn’t a guarantee that
you’ll get into your dream college. In fact, schools may
interpret it as not really knowing yourself and what you want to
do.
Focusing on a few interests you really care about and going
deep can really set you apart. 

by Nick Miriello and Kathleen Caulderwood, VICE News

If you want to know how the Islamic State group is doing, you
don’t have to follow the Mosul offensive. Just take a look at the recent output of the terrorist
organization’s propaganda machine. A 34-minute audio recording from Islamic State leader Abu
Bakr al-Baghdadi released Thursday — the first message
from Baghdadi in nearly a year — emphasized
violence and war, themes that have become increasingly
common in the group’s messages as its attempts at
statehood falter.

From its very inception, IS has built its legend through
its robust propaganda arm. But as the terrorist group loses
ground on its caliphate (its interpretation of an Islamic state)
and the territory in Iraq and Syria it spent the last two years
conquering, IS is running out of clear, tangible successes to
promote. The once-feared propaganda operation has suffered as a
result, showing a dramatic dip in production and a telling shift
in content since January, according to two recent analyses by
U.S. counterterrorism researchers
.

“Statehood is essential to the IS brand,” said Mara Revkin,
a resident fellow at Yale Law School’s Center for the Study of
Islamic Law and Civilization who studies Islamic legal systems
and governance by militant groups. “But as IS prepares to lose
Mosul, the question is whether this brand will remain attractive
to potential recruits and financiers now that the group has
failed to live up to its slogan of ‘remaining and
expanding.’”

A study published in early
October by the Combating Terrorism Center
at West Point gives some insight into how these ground losses
have already affected IS propaganda exercises. Researchers
focused on “official” visual media produced by IS and distributed
through its official online channels since
January 2015, analyzing roughly 9,000 images and videos. What
they observed in that period paints a stark decline for the once
expanding caliphate.

Emile Simpson, Foreign Policy

In his masterful account Strategy: A History, Sir
Lawrence Freedman defines strategy as “the art of creating
power.” This is a useful lens through which to consider one of
this year’s key geopolitical trends: Russia’s return to the
Middle East.

Apart from its close ties to the Syrian regime, which date back
to the 1970s, Moscow has had no substantial role in the Middle
East since 1972, when President Anwar Sadat kicked Soviet
advisors out of Egypt.

Why return now? At a general level, it’s clear that Russian
President Vladimir Putin wants to challenge the notion of a
U.S.-led world order and encourage the return to a multipolar
one, though there are certain self-imposed constraints on his
ambitions.

Although he has intervened in Georgia and Ukraine, he doesn’t
seem willing to start a wider war by attacking any Eastern
European states that are already members of NATO. In the Middle
East, however, Putin has a theater to undermine Western
influence, and to create power for himself, without the risk of
triggering a war with the West.

As any demagogue knows, one way to create power out of nothing is
to find a division and then exploit it. In the Middle
East, the fundamental division Russia has exploited is the one
between the West’s aversion to Islamists, on the one hand, and
human rights abuses on the other. The conflict between these aims
often produces equivocation in Western foreign policy. It also
opens up political space where Russia can operate by investing in
repression and discounting democracy.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) — A Pakistani prosecutor says a court in
Peshawar has ordered that National Geographic’s famed green-eyed
‘Afghan Girl’ be deported. Sharbat Gulla was arrested 10 days ago over having allegedly
forged ID papers and staying in Pakistan illegally.

Gulla gained international fame in 1984 as an Afghan refugee
girl, after war photographer Steve McCurry’s photograph of her,
with piercing green eyes, was published on National Geographic’s
cover. He found her again in 2002.

Prosecutor Mohsin Dawar said on Friday that she faces deportation
after five days, when her 15-day jail term is to expire. He says
the court also fined Gulla a sum of 110,000 rupees, which is
about $1,100. Gulla gained international fame in 1984 as an Afghan refugee
girl, after war photographer Steve McCurry’s photograph of her,
with piercing green eyes, was published on National Geographic’s
cover. He found her again in 2002.