By Middle East correspondent Adam Harvey, Tom Hancock and Cherine Yazbek in Beirut -- abc.net.au --They are articulate and optimistic and extremely patriotic. They do not want to move away. They want to transform Lebanon into a place where you do not have to leave to find a job. They blame their nation's dire economy on a political system that is still dominated by the civil war that ended 30 years ago, before they were born. Wartime militias turned into political parties and the protesters on the streets of Lebanon say they looked after their own interests, and not that of the nation. The ABC went to the heart of the protests to speak to the twentysomethings who want something better for Lebanon.

Olivia Yacoub is a 22-year-old Lebanese Australian who came home after completing her master's degree in Melbourne. She has been here for 18 months but will probably have to leave again to find work in her field of expertise, food science. "It is such a beautiful, chaotic country. There is something so special about this country," she said. "That's what driven me to leave Australia where I could have easily found work, and come back to Lebanon and hope that I can work here and live with my family." Ms Yacoub said she would like to build a career in Lebanon without having to depend on family funds or political connections to find a job. "I've lost a lot of friends and family members who've had to leave to find work overseas. It's really sad," she said. Ms Yacoub would also like the Government to change a law that prevents Lebanese women from passing their nationality to their children. Currently, citizenship is only a right for the children of Lebanese men. "I'm protesting for very simple things. I want to be able to give my future children Lebanese nationality. I want to be able to live in a Lebanon that has 24/7 electricity, and has clean water and clean air," she said.

This year anti-Government demonstrations have swept more than a dozen countries, including Hong Kong, Chile, Bolivia and Spain. "People overseas are really fighting for this, so we're not on our own," Ms Yacoub said. "I'm very hopeful that we will be able to live in a better Lebanon, the Lebanon that we deserve."

By Zerina Kapetanovic, Ranveer Chandra, Tusher Chakraborty, and Andrew Nelson -sinews.siam.org ---

The global demand for food is expected to increase by 70% by the year 2050 compared to 2010 levels. Achieving this increase in food production has become even more challenging as the resources we rely on are starting to diminish. For instance, water levels are receding, the amount of arable land is decreasing, and climate change has become more imminent. Data driven agriculture techniques can help alleviate the world’s food problem by reducing waste in resources, increasing yield, and ensuring sustainable farming practices. In particular, studies have shown that precision irrigation techniques can increase yield by 45% all the while reducing water intake by 37% [1]. Such results extend to other precision agriculture techniques as well. While the efficacy of data driven agriculture has been demonstrated, these techniques are sparsely adopted in today’s farming practices. This is primarily due to the expensive cost of data collection and the challenging environment of typical farming locations.

To enable data driven agriculture, a seamless data collection system is needed. In other words, this would be an end-to-end IoT system where sensors collect data, such as soil moisture or temperature, and stream to the cloud to perform data analytics. In turn, providing insights for farmers to enable precision agriculture techniques. For example, soil moisture data can be used to determine where water should be applied and where it is not needed. However, enabling an IoT system for agriculture faces several significant challenges, those being power, connectivity, and overall system cost.

by aljazeera.com -- Leila Molana-Allen -- Lebanon has close to $1.5bn in public debt that it may decide to repay on Thursday. The country's escalating financial crisis and weeks-long anti-government protests are adding more pressure to an already difficult situation. At $86bn, Lebanon's sovereign debt is the world's third-highest relative to gross domestic product (GDP). The country's beleaguered economy is expected to contract by 0.2 percent this year. In an effort to calm protesters and to reduce the deficit from the current 11 percent to 0.6 percent by 2020, the government recently proposed a reform package. However, because talk of a tax on the internet partly fuelled the initial protests, ministers avoided tax increases on individuals and instead proposed using a bank contribution of $3.4bn to alleviate the deficit, alongside other proposals. For protesters however, many of whom want the wholesale removal of the prevailing political class, the move was too little, too late.

While anti-government protests have lowered confidence in the economy still further, the crisis was in motion well before the demonstrations began. The situation was compounded after Prime Minister Saad Hariri resigned on October 29, leaving in place a caretaker government without the bureaucratic powers to introduce the necessary economic reforms. On Tuesday protesters gathered around the central bank, wearing masks of Central Bank governor Riad Salameh's face and chanting "Thief, thief, Salameh is a thief!" The following day they were back, this time with a Beirut hairdresser offering free haircuts in front of the building "to show them how to give a haircut", according to a poster advertising the event. The scene references proposals by some economists that the central bank should confiscate a certain percentage from the highest depositors' accounts, a financial haircut on those who benefitted the most from high interest rates, in order to relieve the debt burden. "We have to find a solution, and the solution must not be [borne by] the poor people,' said protester Enas Sherry. "They benefitted from the interest, which was very high over the years, so they have to pay what they took from us."

'A regulated Ponzi scheme'

by coindesk.com -- Leigh Cuen  -- News of Lebanese banks shuttering to prevent a bank run was met with predictable enthusiasm from the global bitcoin commentariat. People in Lebanon can no longer send foreign currencies, mainly dollars and euros, abroad. Further, due to heavily restricted banking access and limited liquidity provided by established grassroots networks, most Lebanese civilians also struggle to acquire bitcoin. Long-time bitcoiner Ali Askar, currently on the ground in Lebanon, told CoinDesk a few Telegram and WhatsApp groups for local traders have nearly doubled in size over the past year, with one such private group reaching roughly 300 members this past weekend. Following news of the banking limitations, the Beirut-based car dealership Rkein Motors promptly started accepting bitcoin payments this week. Clearly, awareness is spreading.

However, a stark disconnect between daily bitcoin users and the rest of the populace continues in a region plagued by economic and political conflict. “Bitcoin will not help the people. It will help the politicians because they are the filthy rich ones who have access to money,” one anonymous bitcoin trader with family in Lebanon told CoinDesk. He uses a European bank account to buy bitcoin, then sends it to people on the ground in Lebanon. “It [bitcoin] could help them, perhaps, if they were sitting at home with 24 hours worth of electricity and internet, and they could work online to get paid for their online work. That’s a utopian scenario,” he added. “In Lebanon, the internet is very expensive. Electricity doesn’t come often. We sometimes have electricity for just six hours a day.”