Staff writer, Al Arabiya News

Germany is to study plans to export Lebanon’s garbage, Beirut-based paper The Daily Star reported on Saturday, alleviating the tiny Middle Eastern country’s waste disposal problem.

The capital and nearby areas have faced an acute trash problem over the last couple of weeks, after the nearby landfill –which had reached full capacity - closed. Amid sweltering summer heat, trash soon began to build up in the streets, prompting an outcry from the city’s two million residents.

When nearby municipalities refused to accept Beirut’s garage, the cabinet began to mull the idea of exporting it abroad.

By Joseph A. Kechichian,Senior Writer

Beirut: Amid news reports that highlighted how Lebanese officials added a garbage crisis to their growing list of woes that further sank the country into unresolvable dilemmas, comes a devastating new World Bank report that highlights what ails it.

Relying on solid data from the 2004-2011 period, and supplemented with projections for more recent years, “Lebanon:
Promoting Poverty Reduction And Shared Prosperity,” provides a systematic diagnosis that will upset many. It affirms in its primary conclusions what stifles institutions, prevents growth, and denies the creation of effective wealth for a majority of the population instead of concentrating wealth in the hands of about 4,000 families that financially rule the country.

By Maya Jaggi

Places have some kind of memory," the late writer WG Sebald once told me, "in that they activate memory in those who look at them. It's an old notion: this isn't a good house, because bad things have happened in it."

These words came to mind as I had a preview tour of Beit Beirut (Beirut House), a ruined beauty of a Levantine apartment building, in the Lebanese capital's Ashrafieh district, that is to become an extraordinary Museum of Memory. A four-storey landmark on the corner of Independence Avenue and Damascus Road, its yellow walls are pitted and pockmarked by bullets and mortars from the civil war of 1975-1990.