By Michael Young -- thenationalnews.com -- On Thursday, Lebanon will enter the two-month constitutional period during which parliament must elect a successor to President Michel Aoun. Revealingly, Hezbollah has adopted a different attitude than the one six years ago, when it had provoked a debilitating two-year presidential vacuum as leverage to bring Mr Aoun to office. As a number of observers have remarked, Hezbollah cannot look back on its support for an Aoun presidency as a success. While this did allow the party to reinforce its alliance with a major Christian partner, strengthening Hezbollah’s leverage in the political system, it also exposed the party to the repercussions of Mr Aoun’s falling popularity. Rightly or wrongly, many Lebanese associate the economic collapse that began in 2019 with the President, even if there is plenty of blame to spread around the country’s corrupt political class.

With economic pain reaching deep into the Shiite community, Hezbollah appears to be more careful in its presidential calculations today. To an extent, conditions have also imposed this. The outcome of the parliamentary election in May led to a legislature in which none of the country’s major political alignments has a majority, making for what is often a hung parliament. Only on rare occasions can Hezbollah impose a majority, as when it compelled its reluctant Aounist allies to help ensure the re-election of Nabih Berri as Speaker. Rather than naming a presidential candidate, Hezbollah appears to be waiting and seeing if a consensus emerges around a given figure. The problem is that two of its Maronite Christian allies are competing for the presidency – Gebran Bassil, the son-in-law of Mr Aoun and head of the Free Patriotic Movement, and Suleiman Franjieh, the grandson of a former president. However, both men face major problems – Mr Bassil is under US sanctions, while Mr Franjieh provokes little enthusiasm outside a small portion of his own community. Hezbollah has faced challenges that showed antagonism towards it was growing in potentially dangerous ways

by thenationalnews.com -- James Mottram -- issam Charaf was only 9 during the 1982 Lebanon War. “The Israelis came in,” he tells The National over Zoom. “And the next day we’re having a walk in the woods, and I found something on the ground. I put it in my hand, and somebody told me: ‘Throw the ... thing!’” He did, but that didn’t stop this grenade from exploding, leaving him badly injured and in hospital for three months. “It was a near-death experience.” Nor was it the only such injury this journalist-turned-filmmaker has endured. The port explosion in Beirut on August 4, 2020, left him with 70 stitches in his back. “There’s hardly any place left [on my body] for a third accident,” he says, sighing. And yet Charaf, 49, has vividly ploughed these ghastly experiences into his second feature, Dirty Difficult Dangerous, which opens the Venice Days strand of the prestigious Venice International Film Festival on Wednesday.

Set in Beirut, this curious blend of romance, social commentary and science fiction follows two people in love: a Syrian refugee named Ahmed (Ziad Jallad) and Mehdia (Clara Couturet), an Ethiopian working as a housemaid for an elderly couple. When we first see Ahmed roaming the streets, he’s trying to sell scrap metal. Gradually, we see his scars and shrapnel emerging from his body, something Charaf knows from personal experience. Scripting the film, he began to see Ahmed’s situation as a metaphor for the trauma Lebanese people have faced over the years. “People are going crazy. And they don’t like anyone. So I thought this film could be [about] a kind of crazy situation where nobody loves no one.” The phrase “nobody loves no one” was even a potential title for the film, one he felt rang true. “The Lebanese don’t like the immigrants, the Syrians don’t like the Ethiopians, and vice versa,” he says, speaking about Lebanon's demographic tensions.

By David Sadler -- globeecho.com -- Well-informed Lebanese sources denied all information that spoke of the imminent release of Hannibal Gaddafi, son of the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, and stressed that “this misleading information coincides with the anniversary of the disappearance of Imam Musa al-Sadr and his two companions, to pressure the Lebanese authorities to release Gaddafi, the son who is arrested in Lebanon.” Since 2015″.

The sources admitted that “negotiations were launched months ago between Hannibal’s lawyer and the follow-up committee on the al-Sadr case, but they reached a dead end.” She revealed to Asharq Al-Awsat that the Lebanese side ” pledged to release Gaddafi the son, in exchange for providing accurate information about the fate of al-Sadr and his two companions and reaching them, but Hannibal insisted that only Abd al-Salam Jalloud knows al-Sadr’s fate, and that his father Muammar al-Qathafi did not meet the imam and that the latter And his two companions left Libya for Rome and disappeared there.” The sources asserted that “Hannibal is not only accused of concealing information, but is accused of being responsible for the fate of al-Sadr and his two companions.”

by saudigazette.com.sa — Saudi Gazette report BEIRUT — Saudi Ambassador to Lebanon Walid Bukhari has revealed that Saudi Arabia filed an official …