(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.

A Lebanese citizen picks up the shattered glass of a shop in the damaged shopping center in Zalka, in the northern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2005, after an overnight explosion rocked the center and the Promenade Hotel. Explosives experts and judicial investigators inspected the debris Tuesday at the site in a Christian district of Beirut, which wounded at least five people. A series of blasts have hit Lebanon in recent months, the most devastating being the Feb. 14 bomb that assassinated former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and 20 others. No arrests have been made in connection with the attacks. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

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(CNN) — Two people were wounded late Monday when an explosion rocked a commercial center in a Christian suburb north of Beirut, according to a Lebanese security source and local media reports.The blast went off in a parking lot adjacent to the Hotel Promenade in Zalka and about 60 feet from a Starbucks cafe, the security source said.However, the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation cited another source who said the bomb had been placed inside a building in the Cite Moussa commercial center.The blast happened just before 11 p.m. (4 p.m. ET). Video from the LBC showed army troops cordoning off the area and ambulance crews responding to the scene.The blast appeared to have caused extensive damage to the outside walls of a building. Just last month a powerful explosion rocked a Christian area of Beirut. Hours after U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice paid a surprise visit, the second major blast in two weeks shook the Lebanese capital on July 22. No deaths were reported.On July 12 Lebanon’s outgoing deputy Prime Minister Elias Murr was among 12 people wounded by a blast that tore through a Christian neighborhood in northern Beirut. At least two people were killed.

 BEIRUT, 21 August (IRIN) – As Lebanese trucks started to cross the border into Syria last week, following several months of being stranded at checkpoints, fears remain that the crisis is far from over. Stricter Syrian customs inspections starting last June resulted in a massive backup of trucks carrying Lebanese products out of the country in July. According to Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, however, the problem is now resolved. “It has been confirmed that the situation is fine,” said Mahmoud Fawaz, the prime minister’s press officer. “There are routine checks but that is normal.” Privately, though, officials say the flow of traffic has yet to return to normal and there are still often delays. “Sometimes it is fine and the trucks and cars are passing through, but other times, it is just like before with the restrictions and hours of waiting,” said a Lebanese security source. “The situation is definitely not like it used to be between the two countries.”  Many Lebanese claimed Syria implemented the stricter inspection regime for political reasons. Lebanon’s only land outlet to export products to the rest of the Arab markets is through Syria since the border with Israel remains closed. According to officials, land exports make up some 60 percent of Lebanon’s entire exports and by slowing the trucks, Syria severely damaged the economy. Lebanese officials, truckers, unions and associations remain angry at the losses already amassed and Damascus’ failure to produce a valid excuse for what they say are violations of the trade agreements between the two countries. The president of the Federation of Agricultural Producers in Lebanon Antoine Howayek said that direct losses had been “between $300,000 and $500,000 per day, but it is the indirect losses that are worse. The prices have dropped and that is a long-term disadvantage.”

 (UPI) The Palestinian Hamas movement in Lebanon said Saturday the factions were working on forming a special Palestinian authority in Lebanon.The Hamas representative in Lebanon, Osama Hamdan, said in the Rashidiya refugee camp in southern Lebanon — during a rally celebrating the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza — that a meeting was held among all the Palestinian factions to form such an authority in the country.He said that relations with Lebanon have never been properly organized, adding he hoped that the relationship between Beirut and Palestinian refugees would be organized in the next few days in order for our people to live with dignity until we return to Palestine.Almost 400,000 Palestinian refugees live in camps in Lebanon, where they have been prevented from working in the country since 1982. The government cites the threat of settlement and losing their right to return to their original homes they were forced to flee during the 1948 Middle East war when the Jewish state was established.

KABUL (AFP) – Taliban rebels freed a Lebanese hostage and two US soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan, exactly one month before the country’s landmark parliamentary polls. Both incidents involved reconstruction projects, highlighting the threat that the former Islamic regime still poses to Afghanistan’s fragile road to democracy and its recovery from decades of war.The new US ambassador to Kabul pledged that the militants, who were ousted by American-led forces in late 2001, would not be allowed to disrupt the historic elections despite a rise in violence.The Taliban had threatened to kill hostage Safieddine Mohammad Rida, who was abducted on Sunday while working for a Lebanese company that sells diesel engines, if his employers did not pull out of Afghanistan. He was freed early Thursday and handed over to authorities in the southeastern province of Zabul, officials and the rebels themselves told AFP.It was unclear if the firm had yielded to the Taliban’s demands, although Lebanon‘s foreign ministry said Wednesday the firm’s owner had agreed with the hostage’s family that he was willing to withdraw from Afghanistan.Rida told the BBC his kidnappers had talked about a deal but he was unable to confirm it. “I am not sure what deal the company has made with the Taliban. I haven’t spoken to the company yet”, the BBC quoted him as saying.Afghanistan’s Interior Minister Ali Ahmed Jalali denied reports of a deal. “Nothing was paid. No deal was done,” he told reporters in Kabul.