BEIRUT (Reuters) –By Alistair Lyon, Special Correspondent  Jad Haider is ready to pack his bags for Germany, fed up with Lebanon’s political instability, simmering sectarian strife and economic malaise. I love this country so much. It’s a beautiful country, but honestly I just can’t take it any more," said the 32-year-old university English teacher. "The energy is so negative."Jolted by last year’s war between Israel and Hezbollah  and the power struggles and Sunni-Shi’ite clashes that have followed, thousands of Lebanese — many of them young and talented — are leaving to seek jobs and new lives abroad.

"I’m not willing to stay in a country where one day you wake up and there’s a war, the next day you wake up and everything’s fine," Haider said. "This is no way to live."The scale of the hemorrhage is hard to pin down, especially in a land with a long, fluid history of migration and return, but researcher Eugen Dabbous said a survey he had helped to run had confirmed many Lebanese are heading for the exits."Sixty percent of those surveyed want to leave," he said. The project, conducted by the Lebanese Emigration Research Center, questioned about 600 residents from two groups — students or recent graduates and middle-aged people."The younger people want to leave because they don’t see a future in Lebanon, and the older group because they want to get their children out of harm’s way," Dabbous said.

BEIRUT (AFP) – Arab League chief Amr Mussa is due to return to Lebanon next month in a new bid to help resolve the country’s acute political crisis, a government minister has said. "We’re expecting him on February 8," Telecommunication Minister Marwan Hamadeh told AFP Wednesday."Regardless of progress (on resolving the crisis), his presence has become indispensable," he said.

Prime Minister Fuad Siniora and other participants in the Paris III conference "have insisted on Mussa’s return", Hamadeh added, referring to a January 25 donors’ meeting in the French capital that gathered 7.6 billion dollars in aid to help revive Lebanon’s ailing economy.Fears that Lebanon’s political crisis could slide into armed conflict grew after clashes last week between opposition and government supporters left seven people dead and about 300 injured.

JERUSALEM – Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert spent hours Thursday testifying before the commission investigating Israel’s conduct during its much-criticized war in Lebanon over the summer. The Winograd commission was appointed in the fall to try to reconstruct the government’s decisions during the war with Lebanon’s Hezbollah guerrillas and to determine if anyone should be censured.

The government has been criticized for failing to meet its two main objectives