–         مواليد غادير

 (IRIN) – The latest blast to hit yet another commercial neighbourhood of the Lebanese capital, Beirut, has been a blow to local businesses, costing them around $50 million in losses, according to Lebanese officials. A powerful explosion rocked Lebanon on Tuesday after weeks of calm, bringing fear and chaos to the country’s capital. The bomb injured eight people, but there were no fatalities. The blast went off in Zalka, one of the capital’s Christian suburbs and a mixed residential and commercial area on a main street that leads to Lebanon’s Christian heartland. Shop owners have been hard hit. Liza Mohayaian, who works in the Vero Moda clothes store, arrived at work to find the shop and its stock destroyed, costing thousands of US dollars to replace. “It is a terrorist and cowardly attempt to shake the Lebanese people’s faith and scare away tourists by targeting market places and crowded areas,” she said, amid the smoking ruins of her shop. These shops were not the only ones to suffer. The Zalka area teems with restaurants and cafes that are usually filled with customers. In fact, the neighbourhood is showing surprising resilience and two days after the explosion, as shops and restaurants re-opened as usual. But with the border truck crisis with Syria barely over and people still recovering from previous blasts, the latest blow to the Lebanese summer season may have caused more damage than is immediately apparent.

 UNITED NATIONS (AP)

(Reuters) – A mortar fired from Lebanon slammed into a northern Israeli community on Thursday, an Israeli military source and witnesses said.Witnesses said the mortar struck a chicken coop, causing some damage but no casualties. An Israeli military source said that troops, investigating an explosion in Margaliot where smoke was seen rising, found a mortar had been fired from neighboring Lebanon. In Beirut in Lebanon, a spokesman for Hizbollah, a Shi’ite guerrilla group, said it had no information on the attack. Hizbollah was instrumental in ending Israel’s 22-year military occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000. It has since then seldom targeted Israeli civilian targets, but has clashed periodically with the Israeli military, mainly in a border area known as Shebaa Farms. The most recent lethal clash there was on June 30 when Israel said it killed a Hizbollah fighter in a helicopter strike near Kfar Shouba, a day after Hizbollah mortar and gunfire killed an Israeli officer in the Shebaa Farms area.

 (BUSINESS WIRE)  The long awaited ADSL service in Lebanon is to be launched in 2006. An immediate healthy uptake of the ADSL service is expected, which will contribute towards enhancing the position of the regulated legal ISPs. As expected from a country with a high educational level and a relatively open society, Lebanon has one of the highest Internet penetration rates in the Arab World. The operations of the 6 main ISPs, in addition to the black market Internet providers contributed to the growth in Internet subscribers at a CAGR of 18.2% over the period 2000-2004. By end of 2004 the total Internet subscribers stood at around 195,000 (a penetration rate of 5.3%), of which some 70,000 were subscribers of black market ISPs.This 43-pages report, which has 30 detailed exhibits, provides a detailed analysis of the Lebanese Internet, Data and content markets and profiles all the major data operators and ISPs in the country.  “Between 2005 and 2009, we project Lebanon’s Internet market to grow by a CAGR of 14.8% to reach 400,000 accounts in 2009 (a penetration rate of 10.1%). The number of Internet users is expected to reach the 1 million users milestone in 2009 (a user penetration rate of 25.2%) compared to around 656,000 in 2004 (a user penetration rate of 17.5%).” Mr. Andrawes Snobar, Arab Advisors Senior Research Analyst wrote in the report.