U.S. Ambassador David Hale on Monday warned the Lebanese against being dragged into the region’s crises and said Lebanon needs a “fully functioning governance” so that international assistance becomes effective. “Upholding the Baabda Declaration and adopting a true policy of dissociation from the conflict in Syria are essential,” Hale said following talks with Premier Tammam […]

  Crowds of music lovers shrugged off the tense security situation in Lebanon and flocked to Downtown Beirut Saturday night for the 2014 Fete da la Musique.   “Thank you all for being here despite the shitty situation in the country, it shows that you’ve got real heart,” Oak, the eponymous lead singer of a […]

  General Security chief Abbas Ibrahim warned that Friday’s suicide bombing against a security forces checkpoint in the Dahr al-Baydar region in the eastern Bekaa was not a “verbal warning, but an actual terrorist attack,” reported the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat on Sunday.   He told the daily: “We are in a constant battle with the […]

  Lebanese security forces detained 12 men in a Beirut hotel on Friday, in what local news media reported was a move to capture members of the Sunni militant group ISIS who were suspected of plotting to assassinate a leading Shiite political figure.   Security forces blocked off numerous streets in Hamra, the main commercial […]

  Security chief Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim said he narrowly escaped a suicide car bombing that killed an ISF officer and wounded 32 people at a Lebanese police checkpoint on the Beirut-Damascus highway Friday morning. "The explosion in Dahr al-Baidar occurred moments after the convoy I was in passed through the checkpoint," General Security Director-General Ibrahim […]

  The Maronite bishops synod reiterated on Thursday Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi’s stance regarding the ongoing presidential vacuum, considering that the delay in electing a new head of state violates the constitution and the national pact.   “The absence of the head of state poses a threat to the country,” the synod said after its […]

  Let’s look at the reality on the ground in the Middle East: Iraq and Syria are effectively partitioned along sectarian lines; Lebanon and Yemen are close to fracturing; Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia survive intact but as increasingly authoritarian states.   In the current, chaotic moment, we see two post-imperial systems collapsing at once: […]

  Prosecutors claimed to have identified one of the “key players” and leaders of the cell that assassinated former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, as the trial of five members of Hezbollah accused of complicity in the infamous bombing resumed Wednesday.   Senior prosecution counsel Graham Cameron described Hassan Habib Merhi, the last suspect to have […]

    One person was killed and three others were wounded on Wednesday afternoon when the wall of an old building collapsed in the Beirut region of Ashrafieh. Internal Security Forces announced on its account on the social media website Twitter that the wall of an old building collapsed on four Syrian workers during the demolition […]

Earlier this week, roughly 800 insurgents — many of them linked to the extremist al-Qaeda offshoot ISIS — took over the country’s second-largest city, Mosul, after 30,000 Iraqi troops fled.

Iraqi officials in Baghdad conceded that the fighters commandeered military arsenal, released hundreds of prisoners from jail, and seized up to $430 million from the city’s central bank.