Former Lebanese PM Hassan Diab leaves for US days before port blast questioning

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by thenationalnews.com -- Lebanon’s former prime minister, Hassan Diab, has left the country for the US days before he was scheduled to appear for questioning at the investigation into the Beirut port blast. Mr Diab said from a plane that he was visiting the US for four weeks, travelling via Istanbul, on a planned trip to see his two sons who are studying medicine in America. His wife, a lecturer at the Lebanese American University, has stayed in Lebanon. Mr Diab said he had made it clear that he intended to travel after a government was formed. He will be unable to appear for questioning despite having been summoned by Judge Tarek Bitar to a hearing scheduled for Monday.

Mr Diab had been out of office less than a week before his departure on Tuesday after 13 months of leading a caretaker government. He earlier failed to appear for questioning when summoned on August 26, prompting Mr Bitar to issue an “enforceable summons” for him to appear next Monday. In December, Mr Diab was charged, alongside three other former ministers, with negligence in connection to the explosion at Beirut port on August 5, 2020, in which more than 200 people were killed. He resigned as prime minister, alongside his cabinet, in the days after the blast.

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Lebanese cancer patients face frantic search for medication

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QLEIAT, Lebanon (AP)  by By BASSEM MROUE and FAY ABUELGASIM — Saydi Mubarak and her mother share a bond that goes beyond a close mother-daughter relationship: They were both diagnosed with breast cancer a year ago and underwent months of chemotherapy at a Beirut hospital, together facing the anxiety, the hair loss and the uncertainty for the future. Now they share the fear of not being able to get the medication they need to complete their treatment because in Lebanon, where a devastating economic crisis has upended daily life, there are almost no drugs to be found. The small Mediterranean country — once a medical hub in the Middle East — is grappling with severe shortages in medical supplies, fuel and other necessities. The economic crisis, described as one of the world’s worst of the past 150 years, is rooted in decades of corruption and mismanagement by a political class that has accumulated debt and done little to encourage local industries, forcing the country to rely on imports for almost everything.

But those imports are hard to come by since the Lebanese pound has lost more than 90% of its value since 2019, and the Central Bank’s foreign reserves are drying up. The crisis was worsened by a massive explosion that destroyed the country’s main port last year. For months, pharmacy shelves have been bare, exacerbated by panic buying and suppliers holding back drugs, hoping to sell them later for higher prices amid the uncertainty. Hospitals are at a breaking point, barely able to secure diesel to keep generators and life-saving machines operating day to day. The drug shortages threaten tens of thousands of people, including cancer patients. In desperation, many have taken to social media or turned to travelers coming from abroad. Visitors and Lebanese expats these days often arrive with suitcases full of pills, vials and other medical supplies for relatives and friends.

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Gemayel on the Anniversary of Bachir Gemayel Assassination: 39 Years and Yet Your Dream Has Not Been Achieved

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by kataeb.org -- Resigned Kataeb lawmaker Nadim Gemayel on Tuesday stressed the need to continue with the struggle for a better Lebanon, saying that 39 years have passed and yet the torch of martyr President Bachir Gemayel hasn’t been extinguished yet. “September 14, 1982; 39 years have passed and yet the dream did not come true, 39 years have passed and yet your flame did not stamp out, 39 years and still following your footsteps and fighting for the cause of Lebanon,” Gemayel wrote on Twitter on the occasion of Bachir's 39th anniversary assassination. "Peace to your soul and to the souls of all the martyrs who passed away on that day," he said.

President Michel Sleiman: في شباط ٢٠١٩ وازاء تريث لبنان بالتبادل التجاري مع ايران

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في شباط ٢٠١٩ وازاء تريث لبنان بالتبادل التجاري مع ايران خوفاً من العقوبات زار وزير الخارجية جواد ظريف لبنان ليعرض تسهيلات للاستيراد والدفع بالعملة الوطنية وازاء تريث لبنان مرة ثانية ارسلوا بواخر النفط لبيعها بالليرة اللبنانية ….

Dystopian new movie ‘Costa Brava’ is Lebanese director’s ‘love letter to Beirut’

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By REBECCA ANNE PROCTOR -- arabnews.com -- DUBAI: A busy traffic scene in downtown Beirut set to the backdrop of the crumbling silos destroyed in last year’s devastating port explosion tells the tale of a city fighting to get through another day. Life is anything but normal in the bustling Mediterranean city, and from the dockyard debris a crane lifts a foreboding large statue onto a truck as people hurl curses toward it. The statue is transported into the Lebanese mountains to be placed among piles of trash at a new landfill site that surrounds the home of the Badri family. This is the opening scene of Lebanese director Mounia Akl’s first fiction-feature film, “Costa Brava,” which premiered on Sept. 5 at the Venice Film Festival. The film also segues from Akl’s acclaimed 2015 short movie “Submarine” about Lebanon’s 2015 garbage crisis and the corruption behind it.

The opening images, with the sinister Beirut port silos lurking in the background, were not at first intended to be included in her film — a script she began writing four years ago. The 32-year-old filmmaker’s haunting and upsetting feature was originally meant to depict a dystopian Lebanon in 2030 at its worst. “I tried to imagine this dystopian future where none of our problems had been solved and the country was an extreme version of itself,” she told Arab News. “It was somehow a way for me to imagine the worst for myself in the same way you sometimes want to explore your trauma in a cathartic way. It was a way for me to imagine the worst in my mind as a way of avoiding the worst happening in my mind and in life.”

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No 'magic wand' to fix Lebanon crisis, new prime minister says

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By Maha El Dahan -- reuters -- BEIRUT, (Reuters) - Lebanon's new Prime Minister Najib Mikati, who took office last week promising to revive IMF talks to unlock aid, said on Monday there was no time to lose and no easy path to tackle one of history's worst economic meltdowns. The new government, formed after more than a year of political stalemate, met for the first time on Monday, replacing a caretaker administration that had quit in the aftermath of last year's Beirut port explosion that killed hundreds, injured thousands and left large swathes of the capital destroyed. read more "It is true that we don't have a magic wand. The situation is very difficult," Mikati, a billionaire-turned-politician told the cabinet, according to a statement published after the government's first meeting. Lebanese hope the new administration will plot a path out of a crisis that has sunk the currency by some 90% since late 2019 and forced three quarters of the population into poverty.

Mikati pledged to help resolve shortages of fuel and medicine, supplies of which have dried up as the import-dependent nation's hard currency reserves have run out. State electricity is available for a few hours a day, if at all, and most Lebanese homes and establishments increasingly rely on private generators. A generator at a dentist's clinic in Tyre exploded on Monday leaving seven people injured, a reflection of the safety hazards of relying heavily on the alternative source of power.

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