By  Jeremy Bender

Turkey was shaken last Friday as a faction of the military tried unsuccessfully to force President Recep Tayyip Erdogan from power. The coup attempt failed within a day, and Erdogan was quick to use the opportunity to solidify his already increasingly authoritarian rule by implementing a three-month state of emergency, temporarily suspending the European Convention on Human Rights, and removing tens of thousands of employees from military and government positions.

And as Turkey continues to takes steps toward increasingly illiberal democracy, a big winner of the failed coup is Russian President Vladimir Putin. Anna Borshchevskaya, an Ira Weiner fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, writes in The Hill that the coup attempt will force Erdogan and Putin toward a closer relationship as Turkey moves further away from the West and its demands for human rights and open democracy.

by Joseph A. Kechichian, Senior Writer Beirut: Lebanon is a largely paralysed society that is struggling with basic governance issues, some of which predate the 1975-1990 Civil War, though the chaos endured by citizens has intensified in the past twenty years.

Since its creation, Lebanon has had a relatively effective presidential system through a unique paradigm [a power-sharing system based along confessional lines].

Then in 1989, the Taif agreement which ended Lebanon’s bitter civil war shifted that very paradigm into the hands of the cabinet. The aim of Taif was to return Lebanon to operate under a functioning democracy. The options being toyed with range from federalism to administrative decentralisation and even the drastic option of dividing Lebanon into two to three separate countries.

By Reuters

Lebanon’s central bank chief said he will ensure local banks comply with a US law targeting Hezbollah’s finances, weeks after a bomb attack at a major Lebanese lender that had begun closing accounts linked to the militant group.

Riad Salameh told Reuters the US law must be enforced to keep Lebanon’s banks within the global financial system and stabilise the hugely indebted economy as neighbouring Syria’s civil war hits tourism and growth.

“Of course this (law) has created a lot of tension in the country, and the tension was not good for Lebanon, but overall we have preserved the objectives that we had in mind,” he said.Passed in December, the law threatens to bar from the US financial market any bank that knowingly engages with Hezbollah, designated a terrorist organisation by the United States. It has led to a standoff between the central bank and Hezbollah, which views it as a breach of sovereignty.

Salameh and the US Treasury have repeatedly said the Hezbollah Financing Prevention Act is not designed to hurt Lebanon’s economy or to unjustly prevent members of Lebanon’s Shiite community from accessing banking services.

Lebanese fashion designer Georges Chakra joined prestigious international fashion houses in showing his fall/winter 2016-17 Couture collection at Paris Fashion Week. His show was held at the Jardin des Tuileries in the center of the city last Tuesday. Chakra is one of the Lebanese fashion designers who for some time now have been producing the kind of refined haute couture fashion that can compete with the prestigious international fashion houses on the global stage at Paris Fashion Week.

Haute couture fashion distinguishes itself as the height of luxury, with designs being created entirely by hand with obsessive attention to detail and made from the highest quality if fabrics. They are custom-made and exclusive.