By AFP The United States is cautiously optimistic that Lebanon is on the point of breaking a political deadlock and appointing its first president in two years. “This stalemate on the issue of the presidency is hurting Lebanon and hurts the region and we hope it will move forward,” Secretary of State John Kerry said […]

By Robert Fisk
in Beirut @indyvoices

Maybe it’s because I live in Lebanon, and return to Beirut from Aleppo and Damascus, that the place seems so “normal”. While all around this little jewel, the Middle East burns – Syria, the occupied West Bank, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, increasingly Egypt and, alas, Turkish Kurdistan
– Lebanon glistens brightly in the darkness, largely untarnished by the
horrors on the other side of its borders. Or so it seems.

We might be forgiven for believing that this little paradise still
exists in the Arab world. True, Lebanon has no president, no functioning
government and constant power cuts (I currently have three electricity
outages a day, sometimes totalling six hours, without a generator).
Reading by candlelight might seem as romantic as Milton – preferably
without its physical effect on him – but it gets a little boring after a
while.

True, the Syrian war has stained Lebanon. Mosque bombings, the
attempted destruction of the Iranian embassy by suicide killers, the
brief capture of the Lebanese town of Ersal by Isis and the beheading of
Lebanese soldiers who were seized there, seemed to foreshadow a replay
of the country’s old civil war. Hezbollah fighters from southern Lebanon receive military funerals when they are driven home by the dozen from the Syrian battlefields. Sunni and Alawite (Shia) gunmen have fought in the northern city of Tripoli.

by

Over the past two years, Lebanese politics has been crippled by the
inability of the country’s political forces to agree on a successor to
former president, General Michel Sulaiman, whose six-year term had come
to an end in May 2014. Since then, Lebanon’s political class has looked
beyond their borders for a solution to their problems, hoping that a
regional power-broker would come to their rescue. However, with the key
regional actors preoccupied with other pressing issues, most notably the
conflict in Syria and Iraq, Lebanon’s leaders finally decided to rely
on their own political skills to agree on a presidential candidate. This
endeavour led earlier this year to shaking up the alliances within the
two main political camps in major ways. Sa’ad Hariri, leader of the
March 14 Alliance and former premier, took his allies off guard last
year when he backed the bid of Sulaiman Frangieh, a nominal member of
the opposing March 8 alliance for presidency. Meanwhile, one of Hariri’s
main allies within the March 14 camp, Samir Geagea of the Lebanese
Forces, supported the bid of General Michel Aoun, a nominal coalition
partner of Frangieh.

By Bob Fredericks

Donald Trump has raged against the media throughout his campaign,
calling the press biased — and a poll released Wednesday says a majority
of Americans agree. Even voters who don’t support the GOP presidential nominee said the press has it in for him.

Like many recent surveys, the Quinnipiac University poll found that
Hillary Clinton is leading the race for the White House with 47 percent
of the vote, compared to Trump’s 40 percent when third-party candidates
are included. But 55 percent of voters told pollsters Trump was right when he
charged the media is biased against, compared to 42 percent who said it
wasn’t. Republicans and independents were overwhelmingly with Trump on that issue — and so were 20 percent of Democrats.

“Donald Trump made the charge, and American likely voters agree:
There is a media bias against the GOP contender,” said pollster Tim
Malloy. Trump has made attacks on the media a cornerstone of his outsider
campaign, eliciting cheers and anger at his rallies when he excoriates
media outlets and even individual reporters.

“Let’s be clear on one thing, the corporate media in our country is
no longer involved in journalism – they are a political special interest
no different from a lobbyist,” he railed in a recent speech in Florida.

Former
Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri endorsed Michel Aoun
for the vacant presidency,

Long
an opponent of the Iran-backed Shi’ite group Hezbollah, Hariri would
become prime minister again under the plan that could reshape Lebanese
politics. It has drawn opposition in his party and a final decision has
not yet been taken, allies said.

The
presidency, which is reserved for a Maronite Christian in the country’s
sectarian power-sharing arrangements, has been vacant for 2 1/2 years
due to political conflicts. Aoun, a veteran politician in his 80s, has
long coveted the post.

It was not immediately clear if
Aoun’s candidacy would enjoy enough support among other politicians to
secure the necessary two-thirds quorum for the vote in the 128-seat
parliament.

The next scheduled parliamentary session to elect a president is set for Oct. 31.

نفتقد القادة العظماء من لبنان # فخر الدين المعني الثاني# الرئاسة اللبنانيًّة
Lebanese Presidency

By Jack Moore – Newsweek

Saudi authorities executed a prince in Riyadh on Tuesday after a
court found him guilty of murder, according to the Saudi state news
agency. Prince Turki Bin Saud Al-Kabir was the first member of royalty
executed in the Gulf Kingdom since 1975. How did Kabir become the first Saudi royal to be executed for more than four decades?

Kabir pleaded guilty
to the shooting and killing of fellow Saudi citizen Adel bin Suleiman
bin Abdulkareem Al-Muhaimeed during a mass brawl, according to Saudi
state media. A court found him guilty three years ago for the incident
in the al-Thumama region, on the outskirts of Riyadh. Because the victim’s family rejected offers of money in return for clemency, he was sentenced to the death penalty.

The
country’s General Court sentenced him to death, a ruling supported by
the Supreme Court, before a royal decree ordered the sentence be carried
out. Saudi state news did not say how authorities carried out the
execution but capital punishment is regularly carried out in public in the kingdom.

by  Rafi Letzter

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are set to face off tonight in
the third and final presidential debate of the 2016 election.

In August, The New York Times
reported that Clinton’s campaign brought in psychology
experts to help her prepare for her first debate with Donald
Trump — which is weird, because that’s not really what
psychologists do.

Here is the relevant part of The Times’ article (emphasis mine):

“Hillary Clinton’s advisers are … seeking insights about Mr.
Trump’s deepest insecurities as they devise strategies to
needle and undermine him … at the first
presidential debate … Her team is also getting advice from
psychology experts to help create a personality
profile of Mr. Trump to gauge how he may respond to
attacks and deal with a woman as his sole adversary on the debate
stage. They are undertaking a forensic-style
analysis of Mr. Trump’s performances in the Republican
primary debates, cataloging strengths and weaknesses as well as
trigger points that caused him to lash out in
less-than-presidential ways.”

There’s not a tremendous amount of information here, but
it’s enough to work from if we want to find research relevant to
the work these psychologists (or “psychology experts”) are
reportedly doing. The strange part is that there isn’t much to
find.

By Gulf news, Joseph A. Kechichian, Senior Writer

Beirut: Nabih Berri, the Speaker of the Lebanese Parliament and the
highest-ranking Shiite leader, accused Free Patriotic Movement (FPM)
founder General Michel Aoun and Future Movement leader and former prime
minister Saad Hariri of seeking to “topple political Shiism” in Lebanon.

His
strong warning — that such an attempt might lead to a new “civil war”
in the country — prompted Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah to distance
himself and his party from ally Aoun in what was little short of a
political tsunami.

The pro-Hezbollah Al Akhbar daily quoted aides
to Berri lamenting Hariri’s choice, which apparently “triumphed [as] he
revived the 1943 pact with Aoun”. “We will be outside of power — among
the ranks of the opposition,” it said, continuing: “What they [Aoun and
Hariri] are doing will lead to a civil war and we will fight to defend
ourselves and Hezbollah!”