SAO PAULO: Mayor Fernando Haddad’s current post was previously filled by one Gilberto Kassab. Decades earlier, the same office was held …

  A Palestinian man was on Monday the second member of the Hizbullah-affiliated Resistance Brigades to be murdered in a month at …

http://www.theguardian.com

Though Lebanon has been swept by a gentrifying and disfiguring development rush, some older monuments still stand tall. Strolling downhill from the Clemenceau neighbourhood for a coffee on the seaside Corniche, you’ll see the towering building of the Holiday Inn: bullet-riddled and rocket-pierced.

The once-plush hotel, which opened for business just two years before the Lebanese civil war broke out in 1975, has remained in Beirut’s collective memory – not for its glamour or architectural design, but as a front-line, a demarcation between east and west, and a symbol of war.

The Holiday Inn represented an affluent time for the city: the building became part of a luxury developmental bubble at a time when Beirut’s banks were growing fat on deposits from the region’s petrodollars. However, the civil war obliterated the hotel’s ambitions of becoming a social hub, with cinemas and restaurants crowned by a rooftop rotating restaurant towering over the district.

  The Internal Security Forces announced on Thursday that the second phase of the implementation of  the new traffic law will begin …