The U.S. embassy in Prague on Thursday blasted a decision by the Czech Republic’s justice minister not to extradite a Lebanese national to the U.S. to face weapons charges.

The move came on the same day that five Czech citizens who went missing in Lebanon in July returned home, leading to speculation that the Czech government did a deal for their release.

Prague’s Municipal Court allowed the extradition of Ali Taan Fayad, also known as Ali Amin, and two citizens of Ivory Coast last year but Justice Minister Robert Pelikan has the final say and on Thursday refused to extradite them.

The three were arrested in Prague 2014 while allegedly trying to sell weapons to undercover U.S. law enforcement agents who pretended to be from a Colombian terrorist group.

"We are dismayed by the Czech government decision to release Ali Fayad and Khaled El Merebi," the embassy said in a statement.

Jeff Desjardins, Visual Capitalist

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Lebanon has weathered five years of Middle Eastern turmoil remarkably well but its stability should not be taken for granted and it needs long-term financial help to cope with a huge number of Syrian refugees, a senior U.N. official said.

U.N. Special Coordinator for Lebanon Sigrid Kaag, speaking before a Syria donors’ conference in London, said on Wednesday that the refugee crisis must be recognized as long-term and the response must move beyond meeting humanitarian needs.

"Our big message is really the need for sustainable, long-term predictable financing, and very much a focus on not only humanitarian but also what we call stabilization support … job creation," Kaag told Reuters.

Reuters

Lebanon’s army killed six gunmen and arrested 16 suspected militants, including a commander from the Islamic State group, in a raid in the town of Arsal near the border with Syria on Wednesday, it said.

An army statement said soldiers carried out a special operation against what it called a terrorist cell that was planning to attack army posts and kidnap people in Arsal.

Another army unit stormed an IS-run field hospital in the same area and detained 16 militants, it said, including a man named Ahmad Noun who was described as a "dangerous terrorist".

A security source said earlier that the army had arrested Abu Bakr al-Raqqawi, a local commander of the Islamic State group, and three high profile insurgents. It was not immediately clear if Raqqawi was Noun’s nom de guerre.

VOA – Reuters

BEIRUT—

Beirut stinks. And now it’s getting dangerous.

Six months ago, Lebanon’s dysfunctional government shut the main landfill site for garbage from the capital, without providing an alternative.

Since then, rubbish collection has halted and festering trash has piled up in the city streets, causing what researchers and campaigners now say is a public health emergency.

Officials say they will resolve the crisis by paying a foreign company to ship rubbish abroad, although even the minister in charge calls the plan "crazy."

Activists say it is proof that a governing system, set up 25 years ago to share power among feuding sectarian groups and end a multisided civil war, has become so inefficient and corrupt that it is no longer capable of providing even basic services.

Halim Shebaya

Huffington Post

In potentially the most abrupt U-turn in Lebanese politics since the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding in February 2006 between Hizbullah’s Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and the Free Patriotic Movement’s former-PM General Michel Aoun, Lebanese Forces leader Dr. Samir Geagea stunned his March 14 allies by endorsing (see video below) Aoun’s nomination for the Lebanese Presidency on the 20th of January 2016.

Lebanon has been without a President since May 2014. As per Lebanese custom, the President should be Maronite (Eastern Catholic) and is elected by the convening of Parliament with a minimum of a two-thirds quorum. This quorum has been unavailable since Aoun (backed by March 8 coalition) has refused to send his parliamentary bloc without the assurance that he – or someone he nominates – is elected as President.

by Francesca Fearon

reuters

Five Czech citizens who went missing in Lebanon in July are now with the Lebanese security services, a security source told Reuters on Monday.

The Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the five, who went missing in eastern Lebanon last year, were found late on Monday.

"We will send a plane for them as soon as possible," the Czech foreign minister, Lubomir Zaoralek, on a visit to Oman, said on his Twitter account.

The disappearance, which Czech authorities treated as a possible kidnapping, may have been related to organized crime and the drugs and arms trade, Lebanon’s interior minister said in July.

Asharq Al-Awsat

London- Iran has taken advantage of the freedom powered by the Lebanese media and the absence of effective supervision over the content of Radio-TV broadcasting to establish a wide-ranging network of media space and ground stations, in addition to the printed and electronic media.

The campaign that was launched last week against Saudi Arabia, from two local newspapers, at the same time and with the same content, indicates the size of Iranian infiltration in the Lebanese media.

Moreover, Iran is exploiting the weakness of the Lebanese media opposing it and the deterioration of its financial conditions in order to bring top journalists to its side. It also reinforces its pro-media, which is the only media that does not suffer from the financial crisis that hit the Lebanese media in general, and especially the media opposing Tehran.

Wild Banana

Tanya Lewis

Next time you bite into a slice of watermelon or a cob of corn, consider this: These familiar fruits and veggies didn’t always look and taste this way.

Genetically modified foods, or GMOs, inspire strong reactions nowadays, but humans have been tweaking the genetics of our favorite produce for millennia.

While GMOs may involve splicing genes from other organisms (such as bacteria) to give plants desired traits — like resistance to pests, selective breeding is a slower process whereby farmers select and grow crops with those traits over time.

From bananas to eggplant, here are some of the foods that looked totally different before humans first started growing them for food.