By reuters – By Angus McDowall

From a sandbagged
army post near the border with Syria, Lebanese soldiers gaze through
tripod-mounted binoculars into hills where jihadist militants are
entrenched, a forgotten front in Syria’s civil war that has led to
bombings inside Lebanon.

There
is frequent fighting between the army and around 1,000-1,200 militants
dug into the hills around Arsal in a large pocket of territory
straddling the border, Lebanese General Youssef al-Dik said. Around 30
soldiers have been killed.

The
Sunni militants are members of Islamic State and the former Nusra
Front, groups fighting Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad. They regard
the mountains along the Lebanese border as a strategic base and also
consider Lebanon to be under the thumb of Assad’s ally, Shi’ite
Hezbollah.

“The
clashes are ongoing day and night. We target any gathering, activity or
anything we sense day or night with all kinds of weapons,” he told
Reuters during a visit last week.

By Middle East correspondent Matt Brown – ABC.net.au

People go about their business; shopping, visiting friends and
family, but the military has heavily fortified checkpoints at key
intersections. They are backed up by armoured personnel carriers
armed with machine guns, stationed down the backstreets, ready to quell
sectarian bloodletting, and suppress the jihadists and the stories they
tell.

In Bab al Tabane, a poor and dirty neighborhood known as a
centre of radical Sunni militancy, there are many young men who have
answered the call to arms in Syria.

One of them, Hassan Srour, a
young man in his mid-twenties, agreed to go on camera to detail his
brief but gruelling bid to join the fight.

It was the early days of the insurgency, 2012, and his brother, Hussein, had already gone over.

“My
brother … is the one who encouraged me. He would describe what was
going on, how they would bomb and kill children,” Hassan told 7.30.

Iran
sentenced Nizar Zakka, a Lebanese citizen with permanent U.S. residency,
to 10 years in prison and a $4.2 million fine after he was found guilty
of collaborating against the state, his U.S.-based lawyer announced on
Tuesday.

Zakka, an
information technology expert, was invited to Iran by a government
official a year ago, but then disappeared after attending a conference
in Tehran.

State media announced
in November that he had been detained by Iran’s powerful Revolutionary
Guards, and reported that he had ties to U.S. military and intelligence
services.

Zakka’s supporters and his U.S. lawyer Jason Poblete have said that he is innocent of any wrongdoing.

“Nizar
doesn’t recognize this process,” Poblete said in a telephone interview.
“He was there at the invitation of the Iranian government, and he was
pulled over on the side of the road by a bunch of men. He’s been treated
as a hostage ever since.”

Al Monitor – By Scott Preston a  journalist based in Beirut, Lebanon writing about
social and political issues in the Middle East. On Twitter: @scottapreston

According to the World Bank, the restoration of Syria represents an industry estimated to be worth over $200 billion. The figure has some businessmen and policymakers hoping that the anticipated boost in multinational trade will save the Lebanese economy, which has stagnated in recent years.

Two free trade agreements, a common language and historic commercial
ties are expected to give Lebanon a competitive advantage over other
countries that share a border with Syria. “In the last 10 or 15 years
when we started liberalizing the economy, at the time when Syria was
pursuing a protective planning system, Lebanon was pursuing a free trade
economy,” Nabil Sukkar, the managing director of the Syrian Consulting Bureau for Development and Investment, a consultancy specializing in market and investment expertise, told Al-Monitor.

“Lebanon became sort of the Hong Kong of Syria. A lot of business was
done in Lebanon to serve Syria, and I expect that in the post-conflict
reconstruction period, Lebanon will again become the Hong Kong of
Syria,” he said.

By Jessica Guynn

SAN FRANCISCO — George and Amal Clooney
are launching an ambitious initiative to educate Syrian refugee
children in Lebanon — and they are getting started with a big injection
of cash and brain power from Google.

The Internet giant’s philanthropic arm Google.org is donating $1 million to the Clooney Foundation for Justice — one of 51 philanthropic efforts from companies around the world announced as President Obama convenes a meeting of world leaders at the United Nations on the refugee crisis. The White House
says corporate commitments for refugee relief total $650 million and
will provide employment opportunities for 220,000 refugees and education
for 80,000 refugees.

With Google’s help, the Clooneys want to
help the more than 250,000 children — about half of the school-age
children in Lebanon — who are not in school. Some have never seen the
inside of a classroom.

“That leads to a horrible outcome a decade from now, a generation from now,” George Clooney
told USA TODAY. “Let’s not lose an entire generation of people because
they happened to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time.”