Beirut is to get a new modern art museum with a design inspired by Italian campaniles and Arabic minarets.

BeMA, the Beirut Museum of Art, will feature a slender tower rising 124 metres into the sky, according to designs by the winner of an architectural competition revealed on Thursday.

An international jury has selected the Paris-based Lebanese architect Hala Wardé to oversee the complex on what the project backers describe as “a symbolically charged site that once marked the dividing lines in the Lebanese civil war”.

The art will be drawn from 2,300 works from the early 1900s to 2015 including pieces by 470 Lebanese artists collected by Lebanon’s ministry of culture, and the first exhibition is scheduled to open in 2020. One thousand works have been chosen to form the basis of the museum’s permanent collection.

A mother-of-three, Um Omar is in her mid-40s but the wrinkles and sad look on her face make her seem like a much older, tired woman. She wants to tell the story of her son but is fearful of retaliation by the Lebanese military establishment in case she is discovered. Her name has been changed to protect her identity.

Um Omar's son was detained and tortured for three years, and then released at the age of 24 with no charges against him. She shares a grievance with many Sunni Muslims in the Middle East these days, not only in Lebanon.

"We are victims in the war against terror," Um Omar says, adding that in her view Lebanese Sunnis have no leader to protect them.

"We are oppressed - the Sunni leaders are only focused on their interests and political gains, and they don't protect us. [Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan] Nasrallah protects the Shia Muslims. Walid Jumblatt protects his people - the Druze - and our leaders only call for tolerance while we face a constant crackdown by the government," she protests, accusing the military and state security apparatus.

By  Alex Lockie

In the early-morning hours of October 12, the USS Nitze fired a salvo of Tomahawk cruise missiles at radar sites in Houthi-controlled Yemen and thereby marked the US's official entry into the conflict in Yemen that has raged for 18 months. The US fired in retaliation to previous incidents where missiles fired from Iranian-backed Houthi territory had threatened US Navy ships: the destroyers USS Mason and USS Nitze, and the amphibious transport dock USS Ponce.

After more than two decades of peaceful service, this was likely the first time the US fired these defensive missiles in combat. "These strikes are not connected to the broader conflict in Yemen," Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said. "Our actions overnight were a response to hostile action."

But instead of responding to the attack with the full force of two Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers, the Navy's response was measured, limited, and in self-defense.

Jonathan Schanzer, an expert on Yemen and Iran at the Foundation for Defending Democracies, said the US's response fell "far short of what an appropriate response would be."

By Julia Tierney

The Syrian conflict has divided and destroyed many of the country’s most important cities. Should the fighting cease, they will require massive reconstruction. Yet I spoke with urban development specialists at the National Agenda for the Future of Syria who fear that the war-torn cities of Homs and Aleppo will never be rebuilt. Instead, they will be razed to the ground and another Solidere will be rebuilt in their place.

Their references to Solidere are intriguing. Solidere is the name of the private company contracted to rebuild downtown Beirut after the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). However, Beirut’s reconstruction had wide-ranging political and economic repercussions that offer an object lesson in how not to rebuild a devastated city.