by arabnews.com — RANDA TAKIEDDINE  — A gathering of Lebanese anti-government protesters getting haircuts in front of the central bank building in Beirut last week attracted many jokes and much amusement. The protesters were expressing their rejection of a potential move by banks to take a proportion of their depositors’ money — known as a “haircut” — as a result of the country’s ongoing financial crisis. The demonstrators were having fun and enjoying this original way of protesting despite their fears over the uncertainty of the outcome of their popular uprising against corruption and the failures of the political classes. Salim Sfeir, the head of the Association of Banks in Lebanon, said in an interview with Reuters that a haircut would not solve the problem and, on the contrary, would scare off customers. The Lebanese diaspora has plenty of money overseas and this money would never come back if there was a haircut, Sfeir said. The Lebanese economy is experiencing its worst crisis since the civil war began in 1975. Government debt amounts to $88.4 billion — 150 percent of Lebanon’s gross domestic product. However, despite the liquidity crisis that is endangering the country, Lebanon last week settled a maturing $1.5 billion Eurobond, signaling to the market that, despite the political and economic crisis, it has not defaulted.

But the political stalemate — with the political class denying the people’s demands for a new government of honest, independent people — is aggravating the financial situation. The banks were shut at the beginning of the protest for two weeks. They reopened last week but limited weekly withdrawals to $1,000 and restricted transfers abroad. Added to that, depositors can only withdraw money in Lebanese pounds, which they can change for US dollars with an exchange agent. As a result of this unofficial market, the dollar rate reached as high as 2,000 Lebanese pounds, even though the currency is officially pegged to the dollar at 1,500. These measures have created panic among the people. A growing fear surfaced about the possibility of banks failing to give money to their depositors. The confidence of nonresident depositors has been lost. Banks have been targeted by many protesters, some shouting at central bank governor Riad Salame to “give us back the stolen money.” Rumors have spread in the cities, with crowds rushing to the banks to withdraw money. The central bank said last week that it was allowing banks to borrow dollars without limits at 20 percent interest to secure depositors’ needs, but stressed that the funds should not be sent abroad. The Institute of International Finance said that deposits had dropped by more than $10 billion dollars since the end of August. An important part of this money was sent abroad, while more than $4 billion of it is being kept in people’s homes.

Hezbollah and its allies are dragging their feet with no concern for the demands of the people. Randa Takieddine

by bangkokpost.com — PARIS – A French-Lebanese engineer has been chosen as secretary general of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi auto alliance, part of a new business framework announced a year after former boss Carlos Ghosn was arrested. Hadi Zablit, 49, will oversee industrial cooperation projects to improve the efficiency and financial performance of the partnership, a source […]

by courant.com — By BY BASSEM MROUE — Overnight confrontations between supporters and opponents of Lebanon’s president — mostly fistfights and stone throwing — erupted in cities and towns across the country, injuring dozens of people, and 16 people were detained for their involvement, the Lebanese Red Cross and the army said Wednesday. The nationwide uprising against the country’s ruling elite has remained overwhelmingly peaceful since it began Oct. 17, but as the political deadlock for forming a new government drags on, tempers have risen. President Michel Aoun has yet to hold consultations with parliamentary blocs on choosing a new prime minister after the government resigned a month ago. Outgoing Prime Minister Saad Hariri , who was Aoun’s and the militant Hezbollah’s favorite to lead a new Cabinet, withdrew his candidacy for the premiership, saying he hoped to clear the way for a solution to the political impasse after over 40 days of protests. Protesters have resorted to road closures and other tactics to pressure politicians into responding to their demands for a new government.

The prolonged deadlock is awakening sectarian and political rivalries, with scuffles breaking out in areas that were deadly front lines during the country’s 1975-90 civil war. The most recent violence first began Sunday night after supporters of the two main Shiite groups, Hezbollah and the Amal Movement of Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, attacked protesters on Beirut’s Ring Road. That thoroughfare had in the past connected predominantly Muslim neighborhoods in the city’s west with Christian areas in the east. Intense clashes took place Tuesday night between people in the Shiite suburb of Chiyah and the adjacent Christian area of Ein Rummaneh, where stones were hurled between supporters of Hezbollah and rival groups supporting the right-wing Christian Lebanese Forces. A shooting in Ein Rummaneh in April 1975 triggered the 15-year civil war that killed nearly 150,000 people. Also on Tuesday night, supporters and opponents of Aoun engaged in fistfights and stone throwing in the northern city of Tripoli, Lebanon’s second largest, injuring 24 people; seven were hospitalized.

by dailystockdish.com — A man has been sentenced to death in the case of a British woman who was raped and killed in Beirut nearly two years ago, Lebanon’s national news agency said. Tarek Houshi, a local Uber driver, was sentenced over the death of Rebecca Dykes, the National News Agency said. It was not […]

by famagusta-gazette.com —Lebanon’s central bank has paid the buyers of its Eurobond 1.5 billion U.S. dollars that were due on Thursday. The eight-year Eurobond has a yield rate of 5.45 percent, reported Elnashra, an online independent newspaper. Lebanese experts previously voiced their fears about Lebanon’s possible default on the Eurobond due to the financial crisis […]

by dailystar.com.lb –Emily Lewis– BEIRUT: Lebanese residents are taking matters into their own hands to encourage investment in local products as the country plunges deeper into a financial crisis and the Lebanese pound depreciates. “Our country is like a badly managed company. It’s time for the people to help in whatever way we can to save Lebanon,” Imad Jomaa, the president of media enterprise JGroup told The Daily Star Friday. Since early November, Jomaa’s company has offered free advertising for any business offering Lebanese-made products at a discount of 50 percent. Adverts for Lebanese merchandise have appeared on billboards, online platforms and local TV channels, accompanied by the hashtag which translates into #BuyLebanese. Jomaa said that 200 companies have reached out to JGroup to benefit from the offer – 95 percent of which did not have funds to advertise, so the company helped them “showcase their products to the Lebanese audience,” Jomaa said.

JGroup’s initiative is one of many launched by Lebanese entrepreneurs, activists and NGOs to encourage people to choose Lebanese-made products in increasingly tough economic times. Last April, Sylva Abi Hanna started a Facebook page called “Buy Lebanese [products] from Lebanese [people] in Lebanese [pounds]” to encourage people to buy products made in Lebanon using the national currency. In recent weeks a lack of dollar liquidity has pushed unofficial U.S. dollar-Lebanese pound exchange rates way above the official peg of 1,507.5 that was put in place in 1997. On Thursday, the black market rate reached more than LL2,300 to the dollar at some exchange shops. The frequency of Abi Hanna’s posts increased with the start of the nationwide protests that erupted on Oct. 17, calling for end to a corrupt political class, economic mismanagement and looting of public funds. “I neglected my page for a while, but I believe now more than ever that it’s important to encourage Lebanese products from Lebanese owners. This is my way to do my part as much as I can,” Abi Hanna explained to The Daily Star.

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.”