by AFP — BEIRUT: Lebanon kicked off Covid-19 vaccinations Sunday with jabs for health care workers and the elderly in an inoculation drive it hopes will keep the outbreak in check amid a deepening economic crisis. The country has been under lockdown since mid-January, after an unprecedented spike in cases blamed on holiday gatherings forced overwhelmed hospitals to turn away patients. Medical workers and those aged over 75 were the first to receive Pfizer/BioNTech shots at three major Beirut hospitals, a day after a shipment of 28,500 doses arrived at the capital’s airport. The World Bank has allocated $34 million to inoculate an initial two million of Lebanon’s six million inhabitants. “Finally there’s a glimpse of hope that things will get back to normal,” said medical student Dana Chatila, who was waiting in her white lab coat and mask outside the American University Medical Center where she works in the emergency department. “It’s going to take time of course, but the darkness is ending.”

The pandemic has compounded the woes of Lebanese, who are struggling with a dire economic crisis and still reeling from Beirut’s massive port blast last summer that killed more than 200 people and destroyed swathes of the capital. More than half the population lives in poverty, and rights groups have warned millions will struggle to survive without help if coronavirus restrictions last too long. Caretaker prime minister Hassan Diab said: “We hope to reach adequate community protection so life can gradually return to normal in Lebanon as soon as possible.” The first jab was given to Mahmoud Hassoun, head of the intensive care unit at Rafik Hariri Hospital, which has been at the forefront of battling the outbreak. “Hopefully this will be the beginning of the end of this plague in the country,” he told AFP. The second to roll up his shirt sleeves in front of the cameras was popular Lebanese comedian Salah Tizani, 93, known by his stage name Abu Salim. “I’m telling everyone to come and get vaccinated,” he said. “Better to get vaccinated than to be knocked down by this deadly virus.”

by Bloomberg Dubai — Lebanon’s annual inflation rate reached a record high and food prices soared by up to 400% in December, highlighting the dramatic impact on consumers and businesses of the country’s worst financial crisis in decades. Annual inflation was 84.9% in 2020, compared to just 2.9% a year earlier, according to data released by the government’s Central Administration of Statistics on Thursday. It’s the highest since 2013, when the current readings began. Consumer prices jumped 145.8% in December versus the same month of 2019.

By NAJIA HOUSSARI — arabnews.com — BEIRUT: Lebanon has launched an urgent coronavirus vaccination rollout following the arrival of the first batch of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport. The consignment of 28,500 vaccines arrived from Belgium and was transferred to the Ministry of Health for storage and distribution to approved medical centers and hospitals. Medical and nursing staff as well as paramedics working in coronavirus departments in the country’s hospitals will be among the first to be treated when the rollout begins on Sunday. About 150 people will be vaccinated in three hospitals in Beirut, with the number expected to increase to between 300 and 400 per day by next week in 17 centers across the country. At least 57 vaccination centers are expected to be operating within three weeks. Care homes for the elderly will also be included early in the vaccination program, Reda Al-Mousawi, media adviser at the Ministry of Health, said.

Lebanese hospitals have struggled in the past year amid the country’s acute financial crisis and some of the region’s highest coronavirus infection rates. The total number of virus cases in Lebanon reached 334,086 and 2,462 deaths. Dr. Abdul Rahman Bizri, an infectious disease specialist and head of the National Committee for the Administration of Corona Vaccine, told Arab News that the first people to receive the vaccine will be identified by the three hospitals, which will begin vaccinations on Sunday. “I have not been informed that the president, parliamentary speaker and the prime minister will be first to receive the vaccine,” he added. Bizri said that hospitals have rehearsed their vaccination procedures before opening their doors next week. “We have learned from the mistakes of the Americans and French, and are trying to avoid the same issues,” he said.

By NAJIA HOUSSARI — arabnews.com — BEIRUT: Lebanon’s Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri has again held talks with President Michel Aoun during his unexpected visit to Baabda Palace, which did not result in any progress to form a new government. Following the meeting, Hariri said that after his visits to Turkey, Egypt and France, he sensed enthusiasm for forming a government through the roadmap drawn up by French President Emmanuel Macron, which Lebanese political parties agreed to at the Pine Residence on Aug. 6, 2020, in order to save Lebanon, stop the deterioration and rebuild Beirut Port.

From Baabda Palace, he warned that “without a government of specialists non-affiliated with political parties, we cannot undertake the task of saving Lebanon.” He added: “If anyone thinks that if this government includes political members, the international community will open up to us or give us what we want, he would be wrong. The basic idea is to form a government that includes specialized ministers who do not irritate any political team and work only to complete the project presented to them.” He noted that he consulted with Aoun: “We made no progress, but I explained to him the importance of the golden opportunity that we have, so we must accelerate the formation of this government, and every political team must bear the responsibility of its stances from now on.” Hariri insists on forming “an 18-minister government made up of specialists,” and he reiterated his rejection of a blocking third: “This will not change for me.” The political discord between Hariri and Aoun had escalated after Aoun accused Hariri of being a “liar” in a leaked video of a meeting between the president and caretaker Prime Minister Hassan Diab on Jan. 11.

By Owen Kirby — thehill.com — The widely reported mob-style hit on activist and intellectual Lokman Slim on a back road in southern Lebanon last Wednesday night follows a well-known and sad pattern in Lebanese politics: When the Iranian-backed Party of God’s public standing takes a dip, someone pays, always. Someone must, of course, because the “Resistance” — the party that delivered “Divine Victory” over Israel in 2006 — can never be faulted for what has been wrought upon the much-beleaguered Lebanese people. Faulting Hezbollah was Slim’s daily sustenance. Former prime minister Saad Hariri noted in a tweet on Thursday that “Lokman Slim was perhaps clearer than everyone in pinpointing where the threat to the country is coming from… He did not compromise nor back down.” Hariri knows only too well the price of being uncompromising where Hezbollah or its patrons (read: Iran and, previously, Syria) are concerned; the life sentencing, in absentia, at the Hague in December of a Hezbollah operative for his own father’s murder is a ready reminder of the party’s reputation in this regard.

That Slim, himself a Shia, had long criticized Hezbollah’s monopoly over his own community’s social, political and economic life — and by extension Lebanon’s — and somehow lived to tell about it, until now, was a mystery to some. One theory was that by allowing a certain level of dissent within the Shia community that was never permitted to domestic foes without, Hezbollah could glean some internal democratic veneer. Besides, Hezbollah’s communal control and Lebanon’s confessional polarization has been such that the party did not worry as much about competition from within, especially from one armed with only a sharp tongue and independent mind. Not that Slim previously escaped the Party of God’s attention or ire, being regularly labeled in its print, broadcast and social media as a fifth columnist for both expressing his views and a willingness to engage with any and all in the foreign diplomatic and press corps to warn about the threats posed by Hezbollah to Lebanon’s and the region’s stability. The threats to his own person were real, as he knew, and he was not without options and opportunities to weather the periodic storms in some academic sinecure, somewhere safe; but Slim chose to remain in his own country, continuing to expose, publicly, what he knew to be true, regardless of the risks and regardless if anyone at home or abroad were listening.

BEIRUT (AP) — Lebanon’s former army chief told the lead investigator of last year’s massive Beirut port blast on Thursday that he had recommended, years before the explosion, that tons of seized ammonium nitrate stored there be sold privately or sent back to importers. The military had no use for the volatile chemical, testified Jean Kahwaji, who was army chief until 2017. Kahwaji was summoned for questioning as a witness six months after the probe began, the first army official and the most senior security official to testify in the probe. He told the lead investigator that the customs department had asked the army in late 2015 if it was interested in the stored fertilizer, which could also be used as an explosive. The army, after carrying out tests, said it had no use for the ammonium nitrate because it was a large amount and “has limited use and because it dissolves with time, it constitutes a danger if stored for a long time,” Kahwaji said.

Kahwaji said the army had no room to store it and no ability to get rid of it. He added the army then asked the customs authority to sell it to a private explosive company in Lebanon or to re-export to the country of origin at the expense of the importers. According to a local media investigation, the importers had carried out their own tests of the nearly 3,000 tons of ammonium nitrate, months after it was stored at the port, and then dropped any claims to the shipment. The chemicals ended up staying in the warehouse for six years before detonating. What sparked the explosion remains unknown. The volatile fertilizer ignited last Aug. 4, causing one of the largest non-nuclear explosion in history, disfiguring Beirut and killing 211 people. More than 6,000 were injured in the explosion.

PARIS (Reuters) – Lebanese Prime Minister-designate Saad al-Hariri on Wednesday dined with French President Emmanuel Macron to discuss the crisis in Lebanon and the difficulties in forming a new government, according to Hariri’s Twitter account. “Presidents Hariri and Macron discussed the internal Lebanese difficulties that hinder the formation of the government and the possible ways […]

By Lisa Zengarini — vaticannews.va On the occasion of the Feast of Saint Maron, patron of the Maronite Church, on February 9, Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, Prefect of the Congregation for the Oriental Churches, participated in a Divine Liturgy at the Church of the Pontifical Maronite College in Rome. At the end of the Liturgy, which was presided over by the Procurator of the Maronite Patriarch to the Holy See, Bishop Rafic El Warcha , the Argentinian prelate addressed the participants with a greeting speech in which he focused on the dramatic situation in Lebanon following the two terrible explosions which devastated Beirut on August 4.

Solidarity in the aftermath of the explosion

In his address, Cardinal Sandri remarked that in spite of the economic, social and political crisis which the Country was already facing before the disaster, Lebanese people have shown great solidarity, working hard – he said – to meet the needs of those most affected: to free the streets from the debris, give shelter to those left without a home, deliver foodstuff and clothes, repairing infrastructures.

by reuters — WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to have a chat with his Turkish counterpart, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, in the coming days, the State Department spokesman said on Wednesday. Asked if the United States is considering Turkey’s recent suggestion that it may not need to make the Russian S-400 […]

BEIRUT (AP) — In the middle of the destroyed Beirut neighborhood of Gemmayzeh, a small team in masks and gloves were sanitizing and packing oxygen machines to be sent to those in need. It’s the latest venture of a Lebanese civil group that arose with the coronavirus pandemic and has been finding new avenues to help as the country’s crises expand. “No one is exempt from COVID. Nobody. Nobody has super-power immunity,” said Melissa Fathallah, one of the founders of Baytna Baytak, Arabic for Our Home is Your Home. “We saw that our own relatives and our colleagues are suffering with this, we decided, okay, we are going to start another fundraiser and to specifically focus on the oxygen machines.” Raising more than $27,000, they currently have placed 48 machines with those who need it across the country.

Baytna Baytak, with 110 staffers, launched at the start of the pandemic with a very different initiative: Finding a home away from home for front-line workers who were worried about exposing their families to the virus. During Lebanon’s first lockdown in March, they housed 750 front-line workers in various apartments. Chloe Ghosh, a 26-year-old medical resident at a government hospital in Beirut, has been living in accommodations provided by the group since the start of the pandemic. Her family is from Tannourine, a small town 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Lebanon. For her, putting her family at risk was another burden she couldn’t fathom. “If I got COVID or anyone my age got COVID, we could survive,” Ghosh said. “But our families, no.” Her first accommodation with the group was wrecked when another disaster struck Beirut, the massive Aug. 4 explosion at the city’s port. The blast killed more than 200 people, injured 6,000 others and destroyed thousands of homes. Ghosh was unharmed. She moved to another place provided by Baytna Baytak across town in Hamra street. She now shares a four-bedroom apartment with three other medical workers who work in different hospitals around the city.