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 […]

by Thomas Schellen

When compared with the banking sector and
the initiatives taken by Banque du Liban (BDL), the year was
unnervingly quiet for the country’s insurance industry. Preliminary
information on the performance of insurance companies suggests that the
4 percent growth in gross premiums to $1.2 billion at the end of the
third quarter was low when compared with growth rates achieved in most
of the past ten years. However, growth was not devastatingly low when
one compares it to the inflation rate in the Lebanese economy, which
edged into positive territory this year, but was too small to provide
the economy with growth incentives.

According to figures by the Association
des Compagnies d’Assurances au Liban (ACAL), premium growth rates in
several lines of non-life insurance were negative at end of September
2016. Indications of positive premiums growth came only from two small
business lines, miscellaneous and public liability insurance and from
motor, medical, and life premiums. Granted, the latter three lines are
the high-volume lines and represent some 93 percent of total insurance
sector turnover in 2016, but at growth rates of 7 percent for life
insurance – which includes savings contracts – and 6 and 3 percent,
respectively, in motor and medical premiums, no single coverage line or
subsector of insurance was reporting figures that could be described as
encouraging. 

By dailynewsegypt Known for his passion for exploring the unknown and his ambition to leave an affluent legacy by enriching people’s lives was his life-long dream, young businessperson Reda Garghour closed his eyes for the last time on Friday in a skiing accident. The 47-year-old Canadian-Lebanese businessperson was a partner and one of the founders […]

By Naharnet

Lebanese Forces leader Samir
Geagea announced Monday that a “middle-ground” solution will be reached
regarding the stalled electoral law. “We will end up with a hybrid electoral law, half of
which is based on the winner-takes-all system and the other half on
proportional representation, and this is what we are working on together
with the other parties because it’s a solution that satisfies most
parties,” Geagea said in an interview with Al-Arabiya Al-Hadath
television.

“We and our allies have a lot of cards and we will never
accept an extension of the current parliament’s term or parliamentary
elections under the 1960 law,” Geagea added. Speaker Nabih Berri and Interior Minister Nouhad
al-Mashnouq have recently warned that the country seems to be heading to
parliamentary elections under the controversial 1960 electoral law due
to the parties’ failure to agree on a new law.

By Nabih Bulos

The bird hunters stepped nonchalantly over plastic bottles,
wrappers and other detritus, unconcerned by the noise they made as they
patrolled this shabby-looking section of Lebanon’s coastline. But,
save for the occasional passenger jet lumbering out of Beirut’s
international airport a mere 500 feet away, the sky above the Costa
Brava landfill was empty. “Not a bird … not a single one,” boasted one hunter. His
words marked the end of the third workday for Lebanon’s state-appointed
“bird repellers” — the government’s answer to a months-long trash
crisis in this capital by the sea. 

The problem came to a head this month when local media
outlet LBC reported a passenger plane from Lebanon’s national carrier,
Middle East Airlines, had almost slammed into a flock of seagulls
seconds after it landed on  Beirut-Rafic Hariri International
Airport’s west runway.   “Today we face an emergency,
there is a danger posed to civil aviation movement by the
birds,” Lebanon Transport Minister Yousef Fenianos said in a press
briefing. “Thank God, up until now, the flights have not encountered any
real danger.”

The birds have been gathering in steadily
increasing numbers since March,  when authorities opened a controversial
landfill in the Costa Brava, despite warnings by civil society groups,
environmentalists and the local pilots’ union of the dangers of
establishing such a site so close to the airport. A number of
international civil aviation organizations stipulate dumps should be
placed more than five miles away from runways.

By Staff Writer, Al Arabiya Lebanese security forces stopped the suicide bomber from detonating his device in one of Beirut’s busiest streets on Saturday night. The would-be attacker, Omar Assi, from the southern city of Sidon, attempted to detonate an 8kg shrapnel-filled bomb belt at a Costa coffee shop in the Hamra district, which is […]