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.
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.
BEIRUT (Reuters) JAN 25 – The death toll in clashes between government loyalists and opposition followers at a Beirut University on Thursday rose to four, an opposition-run television station reported. NBN said two of the dead were students loyal to the opposition, which includes the Shi’ite Muslim Hezbollah and Amal.
Saudi Arabia, the United States, France, EU and other international donors pledged more than 7.6 billion dollars in aid to Lebanon to support the government. The pledges were made Thursday during a one-day international donors’ conference held in Paris. In his opening speech, Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora thanked the participants from some 40 countries for their support, and appealed to foreign donors for further financial support, which he said was vital for Lebanon
BEIRUT (AFP) JAN 24 – Calm returned to Lebanon as roads were cleared and Beirut airport reopened after the opposition called off a general strike that sparked deadly street fights ahead of a donor conference in Paris. Traffic moved freely Wednesday after tractors and cleaners worked all night to clear tyres, sand and rubble from streets blocked in an opposition show of force on Tuesday aimed at ousting the Western-backed government.
