by Pamela Engel

It’s not clear yet who is responsible for the truck attack that
killed dozens at a Bastille Day celebration in Nice, France. But
terrorist groups have long been calling for supporters to attack
“infidels” with cars. At least 70 people were killed in the southern French city of Nice when a truck ran into a crowd celebrating the country’s national holiday on Thursday night.

The earliest information from the attack does point to terrorist
involvement. US President Barack Obama said that it appears to be a
“horrific terrorist attack.” The truck was reportedly loaded with firearms and grenades, and US officials told The Daily Beast that the terrorist group ISIS — aka the Islamic State, ISIL, or Daesh — is a top suspect in the attacks.

ISIS and Al Qaeda have publicly called for supporters to use vehicles as weapons. The Institute for the Study of War noted in a 2014 report that ISIS spokesman Abu Mohammad al-Adnani instructed supporters in a speech in September of that year.

He said:

By Brooke Anderson | Catholic News Service

AL-QAA, Lebanon — Boulos al-Ahmar had just driven the ambulance to
the scene of the explosion when more bombs detonated, killing him. When
Majed Wehbe heard the first explosions near his home, he ran to the
scene to help, only to arrive in time for the next set of explosions.

These men died as heroes, unafraid to run toward disaster to help
others, and their Christian village wants to honor their memory by
shunning the fear these explosions were designed to instill. The Lebanese frontier village is mourning the loss of five residents
to a series of explosions in late June. But within two weeks, the people
were showing their determination to bring back life.

“We will continue to have culture, activities and late-night
celebrations. We’re not just going to survive. We’re going to live our
lives,” said Bashir Mattar, the mayor of al-Qaa, a village of about
15,000, predominantly Melkite Catholic, with some Maronite Catholic and
Orthodox. They share the village with nearly 30,000 Syrian refugees who
have fled war in their country, about three miles away.

By

RFI

French Foreign Affairs Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault
told Lebanon’s rival politicians to come to an agreement on a new
president after two years of stalemate. On a two-day visit to the
country he promised that France would maintain its troops in the UN
peacekeeping force on the border with Israel.

By Michel Abu-Najm: english.aawsat.com

Paris- French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault is scheduled to
visit Beirut next Monday to compel Lebanese officials into ending the
country’s political crisis by electing a new president.

The minister, who is set to make a two-day official visit to Beirut,
“does not carry new ideas,” foreign ministry sources said. However, he
has the ability “to talk to everyone” inside Lebanon and abroad.

Paris believes that “complications” in Lebanon should not be a reason
for an end to French diplomatic action towards the presidential crisis. On the contrary, French authorities believe there is an urgent need to “mobilize their efforts” to end Lebanon’s deadlock. Yet, they have admitted that France “does not have the magic wand” to resolve Lebanon’s political crisis.

French diplomatic sources said that Ayrault, who has lately discussed
the Lebanese file with his Iranian counterpart Mohammed Javad Zarif and
Saudi Deputy Crown Mohammed bin Salman, in separate meetings held in
Paris, has come out with the impression that the two sides do not object
to a political settlement in Lebanon.

by Selina Denman

I am not trying to say anything. But at the same time, I am
trying to say everything.” So claims industrial designer Karen
­Chekerdjian, encapsulating within a single quote the ambiguity that
lies at the centre of her work.

Chekerdjian, who’s arguably
Lebanon’s most successful design export, is currently the subject of an
exhibition at Paris’s ­Institut du Monde Arabe (Arab World ­Institute).
Founded in 1980, the IMA is a collaboration between 18 Arab countries
and France, envisaged as a means of promoting cultural understanding of
the Arab world. Chekerdjian readily admits to having been entirely
shaped by the country she calls home, so it’s entirely fitting that she
should be showing here.

At the heart of the exhibition is a movie
that Chekerdjian has made about Beirut. “It shows my daily life, my
kids, my friends. It’s an opportunity to see Beirut through my eyes. And
the message is that you cannot put all Arabic countries in the same
bag,” she tells me. “The movie was very important. My work has nothing
to do with ­Europe, or with other countries in the region. It is very
specific to Beirut.”

While it’s difficult to imagine her doing
anything else, it took a while for Chekerdjian to find her calling. Her
trajectory into product and furniture design was, she admits,
“unsystematic”. Born in Beirut in 1970, she started her career in
advertising, working in film and graphic design at Leo Burnett ­Beirut,
before going on to co-found her own branding company. “I did a lot of
different things, from directing movies to graphic design,” she
explains. “But I felt like I needed more.”

By BEN HUBBARD and HWAIDA SAAD

AL
QAA, Lebanon — The mourners packed the vast hall behind the Mar Elias
Church and crowded around five white coffins, some clutching flowers or
photographs of the dead. A marching band struck up a dirge, and
relatives of the deceased raised their arms, wailing and swaying with
the rhythm.

Outside,
armored vehicles rumbled through the streets, and soldiers, police
officers and militiamen stood on rooftops and guarded intersections,
seeking on Wednesday to prevent further catastrophe from striking this
ordinarily sleepy, predominantly Christian town.

Two
days earlier, two waves of suicide bombers — four who carried out
nearly simultaneous attacks in the morning and four who attacked in
close succession in the evening — had blown themselves up here, killing five men and wounding dozens.

The attacks were a new, terrifying spillover from the civil war in neighboring Syria,
and they fractured the tenuous coexistence that had developed in Al Qaa
and beyond between Lebanese residents and the Syrians who have flooded
their towns seeking refuge from the violence at home.

here’s no place like home, especially when home is a
multi-million dollar urban condominium complex that runs
entirely off the grid.

Sol-Lux Alpha is
an ultra-luxe residence coming to San Francisco that
generates its own power via rooftop solar panels and cuts
down heating and cooling energy costs up to
90% through efficient design.

Upon completion later this year,
the four-family structure will
be so energy efficient, it could change the way buildings are
constructed in San Francisco, if not
the rest of the country.

“We feel this is a building model of the future,” John
Sarter, a developer at Off the Grid Design,
LLC, tells Tech Insider. “We have the power … to be
participants in the [energy] system, not just consumers, but
producers.”

By Farah Halime

For 34 days in the summer of 2006, the world’s attention
turned to Lebanon, where a bloody war erupted between the country’s
militant group Hezbollah and longtime enemy Israel. But for Habib
Haddad, who was hundreds of miles away from family at the University of
Southern California, searching for local-language updates was almost
impossible because he did not have access to an Arabic keyboard. Enter
Yamli, the online transliteration service he invented that allows
searches in Arabic using phonetic English.

When, in
2012, Yahoo acquired the company’s licensing rights, Haddad joined the
ranks of an impressive group of industrious Lebanese entrepreneurs who
have dominated multiple global companies across industries — telecoms,
logistics, automobiles. In total, the 35-year-old Haddad has been
involved as an engineer, angel investor or founder in no fewer than 10
companies in the Middle East. “Things that don’t work excite me,” says
Haddad, speaking over the phone from Beirut. “It’s the same reason I
live in Lebanon. A lot of things are broken in this country.”