by Joseph A. Kechichian – gulf news –  Tokyo: Lebanon’s Speaker Nabih Berri scheduled for Thursday and
Friday new plenary sessions to “pave the way for extending parliament’s
term” after promises to introduce and agree on a new electoral law fell
by the wayside. The last parliamentary elections in Lebanon, held
under the universally rejected 1960 electoral law, were organised in
2009. Ever since, the legislature circumvented the process by extending
its own mandate on two separate occasions, first on May 15, 2013 for 17
months, followed on November 5, 2014 by another duly approved extension
for an additional 31 months (that is until June 20, 2017), ostensibly
because deputies were deadlocked over the sorely needed new law.

According
to an unnamed member of parliament quoted in the pan-Arab daily Al
Hayat, “The session will pave the way for extension”, which is opposed
by President Michel Aoun and his parliamentary bloc [the Free Patriotic
Movement (FPM)], as well as the Kataeb Party. “This means that Speaker
Berri is once again taking the initiative after he had left the mission
of finding an electoral law to the political forces, especially to the
new cooperation channels between Aoun and Prime Minister Sa‘ad Hariri”,
both of whom have failed to reach a consensus on what to do next. The
speaker has said that it is necessary to issue a law extending
parliament’s term before an April 15 deadline, “or else the legislative
authority would slide into vacuum”, which he is unwilling to accept
because failure to doing so would result in a complete collapse of one
of the last remaining institutions still standing.

Though he
expected an electoral miracle before April 15, Nabih Berri is aware that
such an accord is nearly impossible at this late hour, given existing
gaps among stakeholders. Hezbollah,
one of the country’s leading parties, has repeatedly called for an
electoral law that is fully based on proportional representation that
will consider Lebanon to be a single district. It favoured
proportionality and was willing to tolerate several large electorate
districts but this was not particularly serious since just about all of
the remaining parties rejected the model.

by Al Jazeera Rima Majed Rima Majed is a researcher and a PhD Candidate in Political Sociology at the University of Oxford – This article represents opinion of the author

Beirut, Lebanon – Lebanese parliamentary
elections are expected to take place in May 2017. The last elections
were held eight years ago, in 2009. Although the parliament term in Lebanon
is  four years, elections have been postponed twice since 2013 under
the pretext of deadlock over electoral law, fear of instability and
security unrest. In November 2014, in an unconstitutional move, the Lebanese
parliament renewed its mandate for a second time, granting itself an
additional 31 months, ending in June 2017.

The country had already entered a political deadlock in May
2014, when the presidential seat became unoccupied after the end of
former President Michel Suleiman’s term. This situation continued for
two years and half until the election of President Michel Aoun in October 2016. This recent election of a president of the republic gave
hope that institutional life was gradually coming back to Lebanese
politics. However, despite the high hopes, most indicators today suggest
that the parliamentary elections will be postponed again, given that
the main leaders of the country have not yet been able to agree on an
electoral law that satisfies everyone’s wishes. However, regardless of the date the elections will take
place or the law that will be adopted; the majority of Lebanese voters
will probably chose the same traditional sectarian leaders and their
proposed candidates once again.This will happen at a time when corruption
has reached unprecedented levels, leaders have proved – yet again –
their unwillingness to solve any of the most basic and pressing problems
such as electricity supply, housing, water or unemployment.

The re-election of the same leaders will happen while the
majority of the Lebanese are unable to find a job in the country, have
no access to good public education or hospitalisation and are struggling
to make ends meet. This is a time when neoliberal policies have become
clearly entrenched; privatisation is discussed as the only solution for the electricity crisis,
bank loans are being promoted as the answer to the housing crisis and
wealth is more and more concentrated in the hands of a few. In fact, the
upcoming elections will be the first parliamentary elections after the rubbish crisis of 2015 when the #You_Stink movement
managed to mobilise tens of thousands of angry Lebanese on to the
streets, who accused the political elites of drowning the country in
rubbish and corruption. Despite all these conditions, the majority of the people will vote again for these same politicians.

by Eliza Relman – business insider – Article represent opinion of author

It took nearly 20 years for Roger Stone to realize his dream. Since the 1980s, the self-described “dirty
trickster” who’s been in and around Republican politics for
half a century, had made it something of a mission to make Donald
Trump president. Despite parting ways with the Trump campaign in August 2015 —
Trump
says he fired Stone for hogging the media spotlight;
Stone says he quit because Trump attacked Megyn Kelly — Stone
has remained one of Trump’s most loyal true believers. And it’s
Stone’s communications with a Russian hacker and his alleged
communications with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that have
put him in the crosshairs of the FBI as investigators look for
connections between Trump’s campaign and Russian meddling in the
2016 election. Stone says he has nothing to do with Russia, but messages he has
sent to the hacker accused of a cyberattack on the Democratic
National Committee, as well as Stone’s own provocative
statements, continue to
raise questions. “It’s rare that I’m accused of something that I’m not guilty of,”
Stone told the New Yorker in 2008. Now it’s up to investigators
to test that.

Stone and the Russians

On August 12, nearly a year after he left Trump’s campaign and a
few weeks after WikiLeaks published the first set of stolen
emails from the DNC, Stone reached out through a private message
to a Twitter user named “Guccifer 2.0.” Earlier that August, Stone had written on the alt-right website

Breitbart, then controlled by Steve Bannon, that it was “a
hacker who goes by the name of Guccifer 2.0” — and not the
Russians — who hacked the DNC and fed the documents to WikiLeaks. But experts quickly linked Guccifer 2.0 back to Russia and
concluded that the so-called hacker was
the product of a Russian disinformation campaign. In his messages with Guccifer 2.0, Stone asked if the hacker
could retweet his Breitbart column about the 2016 presidential
election possibly being “rigged.” Guccifer 2.0 responded: “i’m pleased to say that u r great man.
please tell me if i can help u anyhow. it would be a great
pleasure to me.” Stone
later told Business Insider that the interaction he had with
the hacker was so “brief and banal” that he “had forgotten it. “Not exactly 007 stuff even if Gruccifer [sic] 2.0 was working
for the Russkies,” Stone said. “Meaningless.” Stone’s tweets in the days after his communications with Guccifer
2.0 have raised questions about whether he knew in advance that
Podesta’s emails would be imminently published by WikiLeaks.

By Benjamin Zheng- Business Insider

The Department of Homeland Security’s ban on large electronics
has been in effect for a week. The ban, which covers nine airlines, forbids passengers from
bringing any electronic devices larger than a cell phone into the
cabin of non-stop flights to the US from 10 airports
in the Middle East and North Africa. The ban has been an unmitigated headache for the airlines and
their customers. 

Business travelers and their laptops are
generally inseparable. Many passengers use time in transit
to work. The laptops might also contain sensitive or confidential
information companies don’t want getting out.  The ban and resulting headaches have become a major concern for
the affected airlines because repeat corporate business travelers
and their immense spending power are their single most
important block of customers.

As a result, several of airlines including industry heavyweights,
Emirates, Qatar Airways, Etihad, and Turkish Airlines have come
up with a series of work arounds to counter the ban. Based on the
latest rankings from the respected consumer-aviation website Skytrax, these four airlines also
represent the first-, second-, sixth-, and seventh-ranked
carriers in the world. Emirates, was the first of the major airlines to offer a response
to the conundrum. On March 23, Emirates announced a service that will allow
passengers to use their laptops and tablets until it’s time to
board their US-bound flights instead of checking them with their
luggage. Prior to boarding, passengers hand over their laptops and other
electronic devices to staff members to who pack them in secure
boxes before storing them in the cargo hold.

Operations at Emirates, one of the major
carriers affected, has gone relatively well apart from some
slow arriving bags at US airports, airline president Sir Tim
Clark told Business Insider. “Our aim is to ensure compliance with the new rules, while
minimizing disruption to passenger flow and impact on customer
experience,” Clark said in a statement. “Our new complimentary
service enables passengers, particularly those flying for
business, to have the flexibility to use their devices until the
last possible moment.” Even though Emirates’ work around doesn’t quite offer a perfect
solution for the problem, it does mitigate a good portion of the
hardship created for passengers by the ban.

by AFP – Bulldozers worked atop the roof of the Brasserie du Levant on
Wednesday, knocking down portions of the massive concrete building as
neighbours looked on quietly. Established in the 1930s, the factory brewed the Lebanese beer Laziza for decades before closing in the mid-1990s. In its place will come “Mar Mikhael Village” — dozens of apartments
and townhouses, as well as retail spaces, named after the eastern
district that has become a hybrid of loud bars and sleepy residential
streets. Residents of the neighbourhood have already begun complaining about
the noise pollution and dusty construction site created by the project. In designs posted on the architectural firm’s website, the sleek
development continues to feature the arched sign reading “Levant
Brewery” that hung at the complex’s entrance for decades. But a video posted online by local activist Ghassan Salameh on
Tuesday showed bulldozers knocking the sign back down onto the roof,
producing a cloud of dust. “It got really real when we started seeing the sign come down and the windows being dismantled,” Salameh told AFP.

Speaking in an interview on MTV Lebanon on Friday, Lebanese Tourism Minister and Deputy Chairman of Tashnag, a Lebanese Armenian party, Avadis Kadanian said as an individual he he would prefer Armenia over Lebanon after he was asked to make a choice between the two countries. He also said he prefers Edith Piad over Fairuz. […]

BAR ELIAS, LEBANON: by reuters —  At the entrance of a rural town in Lebanon’s Bekaa
valley, a blue sign says “Welcome to Bar Elias, population 50,000” but
in the past six years, that number has more than doubled with Syrians
seeking shelter from the war across the border. “They are our guests,” said Mayor Mawas Araji. “But we don’t have the capacity to serve them as we should.” The
refugee crisis has drained public services in the historically poor
area in Lebanon’s farming heartland, Araji said. Yet perhaps the most
glaring strain has been the garbage mountain rising among the hills, or
the open water canals overflowing with trash in the winter. With the
influx of people, Bar Elias now handles 40 extra tons of refuse every
day, in a country that already had no national waste disposal plan. Since
the Syrian conflict began in 2011, at least 1.5 million people have
poured into Lebanon — around a quarter of the country’s population —
where most languish in severe poverty.

Makeshift settlements have
popped up all around the country as the Lebanese government has long
rejected setting up refugee camps. To stem the flow of Syrians making
the perilous journey to Europe by boat, the EU has funneled billions
into Syria’s neighboring countries, giving Lebanon €147 million ($157 )
between 2014 and 2016. For government officials, the need for foreign
funding is clear in cases like Bar Elias, where aid groups have warned
of dire environmental hazards. The EU funded a €4.5 million ($4.8
million) waste management facility set to open next month in the town,
around 12 km from the Syrian border. The massive hangar will process
150 tons of waste daily from Bar Elias and two nearby towns, creating
several jobs, Araji said. “For us, this was a dream.” Nestled between
the fields of Bar Elias, Hassan Ibrahim, 62, lives amid hundreds of
cramped tents pitched haphazardly in the mud. “We’ve appointed
someone here to collect the garbage … so when the municipality comes,
everything is ready,” said Ibrahim, who escaped shelling in Aleppo five
years ago. But in another makeshift camp a few streets away, Maamar
Al-Alawi seems less cheerful. Across from her tent, a large cesspit is
brimming with sewage water and rubbish.

During heavy rainfall, the gutters also spill over with floating plastic bags. “It’s
all garbage on top of garbage,” said Al-Alawi, who cleans around her
family’s spot every day in vain. “You go into the tent, and it stinks.” As
well as the dangers of open dump sites and burning waste, trash also
often fills irrigation canals that feed nearby vegetable fields,
according to the EU-funded agency that designed the Bar Elias facility. Lebanon
has been plagued by a waste disposal crisis, regardless of refugees,
with politicians repeatedly failing to agree a solution, sparking
several mass protests in recent years.

BEIRUT (Reuters)  (Reporting by Tom Perry; editing by John Stonestreet) – Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri said Lebanon was close to “breaking point” due to the strains of hosting 1.5 million Syrian refugees, and he feared unrest could spiral from tensions between them and Lebanese communities. Refugees who fled the six-year-long conflict in neighboring Syria make […]

SourceNaharnet Prime Minister Saad Hariri held a meeting on Thursday with Saudi Deputy Crown Prince, Second Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister Mohammed bin Salman at the latter’s office in Riyadh, Hariri’s press office said in a statement. The meeting with the Saudi deputy, who is leading a massive campaign to introduce reforms to the […]