By Daily Mail - They've been enjoying a relaxing couple of days in Barcelona. And amid rumours she's pregnant, Amal Clooney certainly looked excited to enjoy some time with her loved ones as she arrived in the city on Wednesday with husband George, 55,  and the actor's parents Nick and Nina. The human rights lawyer - who turned 39 on Friday - kept warm in a cosy loose fitting sweater dress as the group arrived at the airport, and appeared to be sporting a fuller figure in the casual outfit.

Amal had a big smile on her face as she led the way out of the airport, wrapped up warm for the chilly weather. She layered a loose cream jumper dress under a casual black coat and added black opaque tights and a chic pair of knee-high boots. A knitted cap and Altuzarra Bullrope Hobo bag completed the look, while the beauty added a touch of makeup and left her hair loose around her shoulders.

A dressed down George was seen chatting to airport staff before taking charge of the luggage. The next night the foursome were seen grabbing dinner at Barcelona's swanky Rooftop Smokehouse Restaurant. Amal looked amazing with her jet black mane down and a black skirt, holding hands with her 55-year-old spouse as she walked in black heels.

A source told InTouch last month that the dark-haired fashionista, who is of Lebanese-British descent, 'is pregnant with twins: a boy and a girl.'  The couple, who got engaged in April 2014 before tying the knot in Venice, Italy on September 27 of that year, 'feel like they’ve hit the family jackpot' in light of the big news, the source told the magazine.

Egyptian Minister of International Cooperation Sahar Nasr

By Sayed Badr 

Egypt and Lebanon are set to sign soon around 15 official documents, including agreements and memoranda of understanding, aimed to enhance means of bilateral cooperation in all economic fields. Egyptian Minister of International Cooperation Sahar Nasr met Friday with Fath Allah Fawzi, Chairman of the Egyptian-Lebanese Businessmen Friendship Association (ELBA). The two officials discussed current preparations for the convention of the 8th session of the Egyptian-Lebanese Joint Higher Committee (ELJHC) to be chaired by the prime ministers of both countries.

Nasr, who chairs the ministerial preparatory committee, indicated that both countries gave due regard to the convention of the ELJHC, given that it has been 7 years since the committee was last held in 2010. The role of ELJHC is to eliminate obstacles hindering the increase of bilateral trade and to identify causes which stand as obstacles to the flow of trade, the Egyptian minister said, stressing the necessity of the activation of the joint business council.

By Matthew DeBord

Ghosn — born in Lebanon, raised in Lebanon and Brazil, educated in France — became CEO of Renault-Nissan in 2001 and for a decade and a half has been responsible for this French-Japanese hybrid, which not incidentally sells a lot of cars and trucks in the US. At the Detroit auto show last month, Ghosn held a roundtable discussion with the media and spent a fair amount of time, in the days before Trump's inauguration, visibly grappling with the "America First" idea. 

 It isn't complicated.
"If there is free trade, it should be good for me," Ghosn said when asked to describe what American First means — with the "me" being the Trump's USA. He added that part two of his understanding of American First is that it prioritizes "American jobs."

Simple.  For the most part, Ghosn took a cautiously flexible attitude toward what Renault-Nissan might be up against if Trump's policies favor domestic US manufacturing.

For starters, Nissan builds cars in both Tennessee and Mississippi, but jobs in those reliable GOP states won't help Trump.  That's because Trump needs the hiring to happen in Michigan and Ohio, which are the states he sought out during the 2016 election and will need again to get re-elected in 2020.  So some new jobs might be better than others, and Ghosn might not gain much by pointing out that there were exactly zero car factories in Tennessee before Nissan landed in Smyrna back in 1983 (GM followed in the 1990s with its Spring Hill factory).

Published in NYT - Beirut: There was once a nice sea view at the Al Jazira beach club, and umbrellas of palm fronds sticking from the sand are reminders of nicer days. Nowadays, the place is surrounded by an ever-growing garbage dump. “It used to be a beach,” said Hassan, a Syrian man who works as a caretaker at the club and insisted on being identified only by his first name because of a lawsuit concerning the city. “There was sea. There were rocks. I used to fish.”

Just up the shoreline, Mohammad Jradi, who has been fishing the waters of the Mediterranean off Beirut for 20 years, said the trash had driven even the fish away. “All over the world, they have solutions for this, but not here,” he said. There is no end, it seems, to Lebanon’s trash crisis, a potent symbol of the dysfunctional, sect-based politics that define this tiny country. When trash piles built up across this city two years ago, enveloping Beirut in a nasty stench, they spawned a protest movement, called ‘You Stink,’ against the political class. Now, the latest episode of the crisis has become a uniquely Lebanese story, entwining bird migration, civil aviation, mysterious gunmen and the long story of Lebanon’s struggle to become a functioning state that can at least take care of its trash, more than 25 years after emerging from a long civil war.

Last year, as a Band-Aid solution to the garbage crisis, the municipality opened the Costa Brava landfill on the shoreline, not far from Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport. And so for many visitors to Beirut, a city whose shabby-chic architecture, great cuisine and French colonial influences are otherwise enchanting, the first thing to greet them was a strong whiff of garbage.