The Daily Star, BEIRUT:
Local activists renewed their campaign against mobile network providers
on Thursday, accusing them of ripping customers off. “Telecoms
companies are pioneers when it comes to the continued theft of people’s
money,” said a Civil Movement Observatory statement carried by the
National News Agency. The statement accused Lebanon’s two mobile
service providers Touch and Alfa of “infringing on people’s natural
right of access to real (reliable) communication [networks] with a
suitable price.” A September 2015 Byblos Bank report said that
Lebanon’s prepaid mobile phone users are charged the highest fees in the
Arab world.

by Abby Jackson

Harvey Mudd College, a tiny liberal-arts school in Claremont,
California, is an engineering, science, and mathematics
powerhouse. In fact,
its graduates outearn those from Harvard and Stanford about 10
years into their careers. But in addition to its reputation for producing strong graduates
in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math),
HMC also produces students — sometimes known as Mudders — who
embrace the arts. The school, which enrolls about 800 students, not only encourages
but demands that Mudders graduate with a strong liberal-arts
background, taking just as
many courses in the humanities as they must in core
introductory courses in the sciences.

HMC
describes its core curriculum as “an academic boot camp in
the STEM disciplines — math, physics, chemistry, biology,
computer science, and engineering — as well as classes in writing
and critical inquiry” that it says “gives students a broad
scientific foundation and the skills to think and to solve
problems across disciplines.” The approach closely mirrors advice from some experts on how
schools can develop students able to compete with automation,
which has become an increasingly disruptive force in the labor
market.

Self-driving cars, for example, threaten the job security of

millions of American truck drivers, and automated financial
advisers
are replacing humans at wealth-management firms. “Absolutely I think there’s value in some level of understanding
computer science,” Shon Burton, the
CEO of
HiringSolved, previously
told Business Insider. HMC
describes its core curriculum as an academic boot
camp.

Harvey
Mudd College/Facebook Burton, whose company uses artificial intelligence to make job
recruiting more efficient, said students must embrace the
humanities to become critical thinkers who improvise in ways that
robots cannot. At HMC, the computer-science program is so strong that elite
STEM-focused schools have taken note.

by YaLibnan.com

Free Patriotic Movement criticized the Lebanese Forces over its
latest proposal for privatizing the electricity sector during the
cabinet meeting that was supposed to discuss the budget at the Grand
Serail. Ever since Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea endorsed FPM founder
Michel Aoun’s presidential candidacy the relations between the 2 parties
ran very smoothly

But on Wednesday Energy Minister Cesar Abi Khalil who represents president Aoun in the cabinet criticized LF for its proposal. Geagea has recently proposed that private companies should build and operate power plants
in a partnership with the state in the electricity sector, describing
it as a necessary reform that should be included in the state budget. Education Minister Marwan
Hamadeh of the Progressive Socialist Party voiced support for the LF’s
proposal in this regard, but Justice Minister Salim Jreissati who
also represents Aoun in the cabinet rejected linking the state budget to the electricity plan stressing they are “two separate things.” Abi Khalil meanwhile told reporters sarcastically that he is
“preparing a health plan,” in an apparent jab at the LF, which holds the
health portfolio in the government. Flanked by Abi Khalil after the session, Health Minister Ghassan
Hasbani tried to play down the differences with FPM by saying : “We’re
both in good health and we always cooperate.”

by RT.com – During a trip to Beirut, US Central Command leader, General Joseph
Votel, told top Lebanese officials that declaring safe zones in Syria
would work once ground troops and other resources are in place.
President Donald Trump has long promised such a policy. On Monday, four-star General Votel met with Lebanese President Michel
Aoun, Prime Minister Saad Hariri and Defense Minister Yaacoub Sarraf to
discuss military strategy against the Islamic State (IS, formerly
ISIS/ISIL) and other jihadist forces in Syria. Syrian safe zones would be “a viable concept” in “areas that have already been secured where we already have humanitarian and stabilization activities ongoing,” Votel said, according to Foreign Policy.

However, “You’ve got to have all of the resources,”
Votel added. That would include ground troops, but the general
reportedly did not go into specifics about which country or countries
would provide the boots on the ground. Turkey is skeptical of a
safe zone in Syria, where Kurdish forces may hold an influential
position. Turkish President Recep Erdogan threatened that its Free
Syrian Army allies could attack the Kurds, an incident Votel said could “have an impact on the coalition campaign plan,” Foreign Policy reported. “We are fully engaged with our Turkish partners,” Votel added, referring to northern Syria, where Kurdish forces have advanced.

by DailyStar.com.lb Lebanon’s Industry Minister Hussein Hajj Hasan Tuesday warned of a total collapse of the industrial and trading sectors in Lebanon. Hajj Hasan, who was speaking at a conference for marble and granite factory owners at the Biel Exhibition Center in Beirut, said that “competition by foreign products … has created a dangerous situation.” […]

by Robbie Gramer, Foreign Policy

The Islamic State is now setting its sights on China, releasing
on Monday a half-hour video in which they pledged to “shed blood
like rivers” in attacks against Chinese targets. Experts say it’s
the first threat the terrorist organization has leveled against
China. “Oh, you Chinese who do not understand what people say. We
are the soldiers of the Caliphate, and we will come to you to
clarify to you with the tongues of our weapons, to shed blood
like rivers and avenging the oppressed,” an Islamic State fighter
said in the video, which was

analyzed

and translated by U.S.-based SITE Intelligence Group. The
video showed fighters, including heavily-armed children, praying,
giving speeches, and executing suspected informants. The video appeared to be the terrorist group’s “first
direct threat” against China, Michael Clarke of the Australian
National University, told


AFP



.

At first glance, China may seem like a strange target for the
Islamic terrorist group. It has no real military footprint in the
Middle East, and while Beijing is getting more involved in the
region’s energy business, it’s not involved in the U.S.-led
anti-ISIS coalition in Iraq and Syria. But experts say China
entered the terrorist group’s crosshairs over its treatment of
ethnic minority Muslims, the Uighurs, who are concentrated in the
western Chinese province of Xinjiang. Beijing is taking an increasingly hard line against unrest
there. On Monday, thousands of police — backed by helicopters and
armored vehicles — staged a mass rally, the fourth this year, as
a show of force,


Reuters

reported

. A Xinjiang Communist Party
official pulled no punches as 1,500 cops were dispatched to
problematic cities.

by Edwin Mora breitbart.com

Director Ava DuVernay celebrated her decision to wear a gown to the 2017 Oscars by a designer from Lebanon, which she proudly described as “a majority Muslim country.” Lebanon was founded as a Christian “sanctuary” state in the Middle East, and its religious makeup is so controversial the nation has not held a census since 1932. Although various assessments that use other metrics have determined that Lebanon is a slightly Muslim-majority country, Tom Harb, co-chairman of the Middle East Christian Committee, believes otherwise.

In Lebanon, “Christians are the majority including [Lebanese people] abroad,” Harb told Breitbart News, adding that there has been “no census since 1932.” “The Muslims in Lebanon refused the Lebanese diaspora to be counted because they count for more than 70 percent of the Christian Population,” he explained. “A small sign of solidarity. I chose to wear a gown by a designer from a majority Muslim country. Thanks to @AshiStudio of Lebanon. #Oscars,” director Ava DuVernay wrote on Twitter on Sunday, the day of the awards.

The move to wear a dress from Lebanese brand Ashi Studio was a deliberate snub towards President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting immigration from seven terrorism-linked countries, which she has protested in the past. Lebanon is not among the countries on the list.
 Intended as a sanctuary for Christians in the Middle East, Lebanon was established over territory from the crumbling Ottoman Empire.

By PHILIP ISSA BEIRUT (AP) — Clashes erupted in a densely-packed Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon on Tuesday, wounding at least four people, including a three-year-old boy with a bullet-wound to the head, Palestinian security officials said. The Palestinian officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief reporters. One […]

Image Luis Vazquez

by -Dr Joseph A. Kechichian – Gulfnews

The Lebanese seldom trust each other, especially at the political
level. And while the country is nominally a democracy, its unique
power-sharing formula allocates influence to most communities in a
more-or-less harmonious fashion. That’s the theory of the
consociationalism mechanism that determines Maronite, Sunni and Shiite
authority. In reality, the parliamentary democratic republic is
hostage to itself, and while the 1989 Ta’if Accords, that suspended the
1975-1990 Civil War, removed the built-in majority previously enjoyed by
Christians and brought parity between Christians and Muslims, the
parliament’s 128 seats are all confessionally distributed.

Because
of the country’s demographic make-up, each religious community has an
allotted number of seats, even if candidates must receive a plurality of
the total vote cast, which includes followers of all confessions. This
deliberately-designed system is meant to minimise inter-sectarian
competition and maximise cross-confessional cooperation. In other words,
and while every candidate is theoretically opposed by a coreligionist
[for example, two or more Sunnis competing over a Sunni seat must seek
support from outside of their own faith in order to win], the process
produces the mother-of all gerrymandering loads.

Over the years,
multi-member constituencies emerged, which “secured” most of the 128
seats, irrespective the person who filled the post. In the Baabda-Aley
district, for example, the predominantly Druze area of Aley (in the
Chouf Mountains) were combined in 2000 with the predominantly Christian
area of Baabda, into a single constituency. Likewise, while several
seats in the South are allocated to Christians, they have to appeal to a
predominantly Shiite electorate, which means the latter chose Christian
parliamentarians.

Christian politicians have claimed that
constituency boundaries were extensively gerrymandered in the elections
of 1992, 1996, 2000, 2005 and 2009. They insisted that past
rearrangements favoured the election of Shiites, for example, from
Shiite-majority constituencies (where Hezbollah is strong and can
prevent the opposition to challenge it), while allocating many Christian
members to Muslim-majority districts.

by Daily star.com.lb BEIRUT: A General Security officer was sentenced to life in prison with hard labor on Wednesday for the murder of his neighbors in the Mt. Lebanon town of Ashkout. Although the murder was the result of a long-running dispute between General Security Sgt. Maj. Tony Abboud and his neighbors, Judge Rami Abdallah […]