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 […]

by By Tarek Ali Ahmad – Al Arabiya

Lebanon has broken through domestic and external challenges to emerge
as one of the region’s most tech-savvy and lucrative hubs for small
businesses and entrepreneurial start-ups. With
a raging war in the neighborhood that is spilling over its borders, an
election that refuses to kickoff, and sectarian strife that still
plagues citizens to this day – the country has persevered to halt the
“brain drain.” After Banque du Liban (BDL)
launched Circular 331 in 2013, an injection of $400 million into the
country’s start-ups – the digital scene began to flourish.

“Circular
331 has made more money available for start-ups, which has (as of
September 2016) received $46.5 million in investment,” ZRE, a real
estate development group that developed Beirut’s Digital District, General Manager Mouhamad Rabah told Al Arabiya English. Following
this, local banks in Beirut would receive seven-year interest-free
credit line from BDL that can be invested into treasury bonds with a 7
percent interest rate. This will commit the bank to invest in the
knowledge economy. As of today, Lebanon is home to over 200 startups, only second behind the United Arab Emirates, with many more set to emerge.

Brain drain

Last
year, BDL hosted one of the biggest tech conferences in the world –
Accelerate. The conference served as a “platform for the stakeholders of
the entrepreneurship sector to meet on a large scale and increase the
awareness of what is going on, both to the local community as well as
abroad.” Elsa Moughabghab, MBA Graduate with emphasis on
entrepreneurship, told Al Arabiya English. “[Citizens]
will benefit [from C-331] by creating jobs, and create/stimulate the
sector, boosting the economy, putting Lebanon on the world map in terms
of entrepreneurship, become more visible to attract foreign
entrepreneurs and investors,” she added. This
created greater awareness about Lebanon’s capabilities and talent
across the globe. A country with affordable and talented people began
attracting incubators and accelerators in Beirut.