By Daniel J. Graeber – UPI 

Transparency is a top priority for a Lebanese government looking to
bring bidders back to its offshore oil and gas reserves, the energy
minister said. Lebanon this week filed a request to join the Extractive Industries
Transparency Initiative, a body that aims to cast light on how countries
manage their oil, gas and mineral resources. Energy Minister Cesar Abi
Khalil said that, as the country opens itself up to foreign energy investors, accountability was essential.

“At the beginning of the new term [of office], transparency is our
main focus,” he was quoted by The Daily Star in Lebanon as saying.The effort follows a decision to put five offshore oil and gas blocks
up for auction in Lebanon’s Exclusive Economic Zone by the end of
February. State profits, the minister said, would be decided after the
bidding process is completed.

Decrees put forward by the Lebanese government outline a model for
revenue sharing, something that derailed previous efforts to court
foreign investors. Three years ago, Beirut postponed an offshore natural
gas auction after rancor erupted over the amount of revenue Beirut would get from energy companies. The Lebanese government estimates there are 95 trillion cubic feet of
natural gas and 750 million barrels of oil in its territorial waters.
The country, meanwhile, has been at odds over maritime borders in the
Mediterranean Sea. According to the Lebanese newspaper, Israel has been
the hold out in U.N.-mediated efforts to settle border disputes.

by Nick Ames California architect firm Morphosis has designed a new US Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon and the US State Department has granted the construction contract to BL Harbert of Birmingham, Alabama. A department spokesperson said “The multi-building complex will be situated on a 43-acre site in Awkar, near the current US Embassy compound. “The […]

by Naharnet Newsdesk and dailystar 

The General Directorate of General Security announced
Wednesday that it has arrested two Lebanese men, two Nepalese women and a
Palestinian man on charges of “spying for Israeli embassies abroad.” “During interrogation, the detainees confessed to the
charges, admitting that they had called phone numbers belonging to the
Israeli enemy’s embassies in Turkey, Jordan, Britain and Nepal with the
aim of spying and passing on information,” a General Security statement
said.

According to the source, the four are also charged with handing
Israeli authorities information with the aim of assassinating
pro-Hezbollah Sheikh Maher Hammoud, Sunni cleric Saheeb Habli and former
MP Oussama Saed in the southern city of Sidon, monitoring the convoy of
General Security chief Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim when moving from the
capital Beirut to his southern hometown of Kaouthariyet Es Siyad in
Sidon, and mapping army posts. The suspects allegedly confessed to gathering information on specific
security officials and targets within Lebanon, while taking pictures
and videos of “sensitive” areas in the south and sending them to Israel.

The investigations revealed that the two aforementioned
Nepalese women were actively recruiting Nepalese domestic workers in
Lebanon with the aim of spying for Israel. “They gave them the phone number of the Israeli embassy
in Nepal so that they pass on information about their employers to the
Mossad Israeli intelligence agency,” the statement added. “Following interrogation, they were referred to the
relevant judicial authorities on charges of collaborating with the
Israeli enemy and efforts are underway to arrest the rest of the
culprits,” General Security said.

Emmanuel Haddad – published in equaltimes.org

By Libyan Express  The Lebanese judiciary has found Hannibal Gaddafi, son of deceased dictator, Moamar Gaddafi, not guilty for the charges of insulting and demeaning the Lebanese judicial system. The verdict was announced by the Lebanese judge, Ghassan Al-Khori, who said that all charges related to this case are dropped and Hannibal can now have […]

By George Friedman and Jacob L. Shapiro, Mauldin Economics

In geopolitics, a deep
understanding of geography and power allows you to do two things. First,
it helps you comprehend the forces that will shape international
politics and how they will do so. Second, it helps you distinguish what
is important from what isn’t. This makes maps a vital part of our work, here at This Week in Geopolitics. So we have decided to showcase some of the best maps our graphics team (TJ Lensing and Jay Dowd) made in 2016. These four maps help explain the foundations of what will be the most important geopolitical developments of 2017.

By Thomas Schellen – Make no mistake about it, it is not a new idea that media types are today’s variant of preachers. Whether
they work in advertising or in news media, the profession features a
whole gamut of prophets, proselytizers and missionaries. The message
about this land according to Amos (the prophet, not the communications
satellites) was that its previous inhabitants were “as tall as cedars
and as strong as oaks,” promising inbound migrants a fruitful
environment (after overcoming various obstacles). Given the Middle East’s known propensity
for starting religions – just think of the “land of milk and honey” that
a bunch of tribal nomads were promised millennia ago – it cannot come
as a surprise that even within the battered Lebanese economy, the media
crisis of spring 2016 caused an uproar of concern. Several newspaper
companies announced that they were running out of money and were
threatened in their survival.

According to reports, the organizations
faced with closure or forced to downsize were the venerable An-Nahar and
As-Safir newspapers as well as the Al-Akhbar and Future media
organizations. Unconfirmed numbers from the Syndicate of Lebanese
Journalists later said that of the 2,600 journalists with membership in
the organization, 70 percent were already affected by media closures or
at risk to be so in the near term.  The crisis was exacerbated by the broad
failures of media owners to exhibit concerns for their journalists and
employees – omitting what AA President Georges Jabbour called a “CSR
spirit” (see interview) – and by ham-fisted publisher appeals of the give-us-money-or-death variety. 

The 2016 media crisis occupied the minds
of professionals and people interested in the sector throughout 2016, as
was shown in November during a media conference when a panel was tasked
with discussing if the death or the rebirth of print media was in the
Lebanese future. Putting the topic on agenda was
beneficial to move the discussion to open ground and compare the
situation in the Lebanese media with that of foreign print media
markets, especially the UK and France, according to Bachir Khoury, the
Lebanese journalist who moderated the panel. (The two markets were
represented on the panel through an editor of Le Figaro and a former
Middle East correspondent of The Guardian.)

By Naharnet After two days of search operations, the dead body of Lebanese citizen Majid Raji al-Hashem, 61, was found Tuesday buried in sand at a stone factory in the Jbeil town of Akoura, state-run National News Agency reported. Al-Hashem had gone missing at dawn Sunday. Several of the stone factory’s Syrian workers had been […]