John Owens – VOA 

John Davison, Reuters

Airstrikes by Russian warplanes on the Islamic State-held Syrian city of Raqqa killed 42 people earlier this week, including 27 civilians, the monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Friday.

Fifteen Islamic State fighters made up the remainder of the death toll, the Britain-based Observatory said, after a series of strikes on Tuesday that hit the group’s Syrian stronghold.

The bombings add to a civilian death toll from Russian strikes, which the Syrian Network for Human Rights, another monitoring group, said on Monday stood at 254 people killed in just over a month.

Beirut/Aleteia (aleteia.org/ar) – How appropriate that this was done by someone from Lebanon, and from the rocks of Lebanon, specifically from Tartej. From these rocks, Nayef Alwan, who is from Aitou al-Zgharta in Lebanon, sculpted the statue of Saint Rita. This statue will be erected at the birthplace of Saint Rita—at the entrance of the town of Cascia, Italy—which is at the intersection of the roads between Cascia and Roccaporena.

Alwan Nayef, of Lebanon, was the winner chosen out of many who had submitted miniature sculptures of the Saint to the town of Cascia. The statue was first flown to Rome, where it had its first stop before it was taken and placed upon its final base.

According to Alwan, the statue was designed, created and carved entirely in Lebanon.

Alwan indicated that the rock that was used originally weighed 76 tons. It was taken from the property of Tartej resident Mr. George Najam. Once the sculpture was completed it weighed 25 tons and stood nearly 20 feet tall. He further indicated that the work had been completed in one year.

By Elise Harris

By Staff writer, Al Arabiya News Thursday, 5 November 2015

At least 10 were killed after a car bombing targeted an office belonging to Syrian religious scholars on Thursday in the northeastern town of Arsal in Lebanon near the Syrian border, Al Arabiya News Channel reported.

The bomb detonated in the Sabil neighborhood of Arsal, in an area where militants linked to the conflict across the border in Syria have carried out attacks in the past.

Emergency services were working to rescue people from the rubble, local media said, according to Reuters news agency.

middleeastmonitor.com

Dozens of Lebanese women and their children have joined protests in central Beirut yesterday demanding the Lebanese law be amended to allow women married to foreigners to pass their nationality to their children.

The protest is part of a campaign titled “My nationality, a right for me and my family”.

The participants held banners that read “nationality is not identification papers” and “the mother is the origin”.

“We demand the Lebanese nationality law, which enshrines discrimination between women and men, be amended. We demand the law be amended so as to ensure full and complete equality between women and men and to give Lebanese women the right to grant citizenship to their families and children when the husband is a foreigner,” campaign coordinator Karima Shabbo told the Anadolu Agency.

ATHENS (Reuters) – Twenty-six people thought to be Lebanese and Syrian were winched to safety by helicopters off Cyprus in an overnight operation when their sailboat began to sink in rough seas, authorities said.

Radars picked up a distress signal from the boat sailing off the island’s south-eastern tip, which is prone to very strong sea currents. Police said a number of passengers required medical treatment for hypothermia. "The occupants of the sailboat said they had set off from Lebanon," a police spokesman said. Media reports suggested they were attempting to reach Greece, the primary gateway to the European Union for close to 600,000 migrants and refugees fleeing war this year.

mirror.co.uk

The famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon were among the seven wonders of the ancient world.

And now a Middle Eastern businessman has recreated this marvel for the modern age by recreating it inside a petrol station.

The stunning picture of luxury cars being fuelled up under canopies of leaves and flowers has gone viral on imgur, having been viewed more than a million times.

It was snapped in the trendy bar nightlife spot of Mar Mikael in Beirut.

One commenter said it was the "most aesthetically pleasing one in all of Lebanon", adding the way they hold the foliage is through metal fencing, and it basically just loops around the metal wires."Another commented: "I love when everyday things are made beautiful."

Lebanon’s parliament speaker on Wednesday called parliament to convene next week in the first attempt for months to bring deeply divided politicians together to pass laws vital to keeping the paralyzed state afloat.

Lebanese politicians, bitterly divided by their own rivalries and wider conflict in the region, have been unable to take even basic decisions, including where to dump the country’s rubbish. The paralysis of government was laid bare again in recent days when the government failed to pay the army on time.

“The resumption of legislative work has become more than a necessity for the country,” parliament speaker Nabih Berri said in a statement, calling the session for next Thursday and Friday. It was not immediately clear whether enough MPs would attend the session to secure a quorum.

Nasser Karimi and Jon Gambrell, Associated Press

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iranian state television on Tuesday claimed that a Washington-based Lebanese citizen missing in Tehran since September is actually an American spy now in the custody of authorities.However, those who know Nizar Zakka — who holds permanent-resident status in the United States — said an image of him in army-style fatigues shown on Iranian state TV came from him recently taking part in a homecoming parade as an alumnus of his military high school in Georgia.

Through a lawyer, the Zakka family said they were "shocked by these false accusations," and stressed that he has no "relation with any military, security institution or secret services whatsoever." The state TV report is the first official word in Iran about Zakka since his disappearance. It comes as four Americans are known to be held by Iranian authorities after the Islamic Republic struck a nuclear deal with world powers and amid increasingly hostile rhetoric against the U.S. in the agreement’s wake. Jim Benson, the president of Riverside Military Academy in Gainesville, said state TV even identified the wrong man in the image as Zakka.