Financial times, By Roula Khalaf, The newly built stone mansions in the village of Kfar Jos symbolise the changing fortunes of Lebanon’s Shia community, the country’s largest minority sect. Nestling at the edge of the town of Nabatiye, known as the Shia capital of southern Lebanon, Kfar Jos’s landscape has been transformed by a wave of immigrants who brought home part of the wealth earned in Africa and America.

At Nabatiye town hall, officials say almost every family in this part of the Lebanon has a member working abroad, their remittances helping to lift the living standards of one of the country’s most deprived regions. They proudly list the social and economic achievements, including the establishment of 16 bank branches, five hospitals and more than 15 schools.Signs of the Shia community’s political empowerment are visible too, with posters of revered political chiefs plastered all over town and in surrounding villages.

Among them is the late Musa Sadr, the charismatic leader who was the first, in the 1970s, to assert the Shia’s political rights and fight discrimination by the then dominant Sunni Muslims and Christian Maronites.

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By Lin Noueihed , BEIRUT (Reuters) – Rival politicians resumed talks on Friday to end Lebanon’s political crisis but were unlikely to decide to dismiss the president or agree on the fate of Hizbollah’s weapons. The "national dialogue" conference, the first top-level political gathering since Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war, was adjourned on April 3 with a promise to lay to rest a dispute over whether Emile Lahoud should stay or go.

Lahoud has been under pressure to resign from politicians, who see him as the last vestige of Syrian tutelage that ended a year ago. The president, who has appeared relaxed and assertive on television in recent weeks, has so far refused to step down.

Parliament chooses the president in Lebanon, but political sources say that even the anti-Syrian bloc, which won a majority in the 128-seat house in May-June elections, has been unable to agree on its own preferred candidate let alone one that would be acceptable to other deputies. That being the case, the sources envision two scenarios.

By Alaa Shahine, BEIRUT (Reuters) – The young, pretty actress appears before a capacity crowd at a Beirut theater and says she was forced to shave her pubic hair to please her husband in bed after finding out he was cheating on her. "My husband hates the hair. He thinks it is filthy and disgusting and forced me to remove it … and when I stopped shaving he had an affair with another woman," she says.

"But you have to love the hair if you love ‘CoCo’," she says, referring to the vagina and drawing applause and laughter from the audience. "Women’s Talk," inspired by American playwright Eve Ensler’s hit "The Vagina Monologues," is one of two plays recently shown in Beirut which openly and frankly tackle the issue of women’s sexuality, a taboo in the largely conservative Middle East.

The play, starring four young actresses and comprising 12 monologues, three of them adapted from Ensler’s work, also brings into the open such serious problems as rape, domestic violence and sexual harassment, which Arab women are discouraged from discussing in public. The audience needs to know about these issues. I don’t know why it is shameful for a woman to talk openly about her period, for example," said Lina Khoury, who wrote and directed her monologues based on interviews with women of different ages.

"We have to question the very customs and traditions in our society that are besieging and oppressing us," she told Reuters. Lebanon has long prided itself on being a bastion of freedom in the conservative Middle East and it is no surprise that such a play would open in its liberal capital. Yet even here, Khoury had to tone down some language to get the censor’s approval and waited more than a year for permission to show the play