23 Tuesday Apr 2013
Posted in LB Politics, Lebanon, Politics, Syria
As if Lebanese politicians have no issues to deal with in their own country…
As if they have a country in the first place…
As if they have not been exploited and led enough…
24 Sunday Mar 2013
Posted in LB Politics, Lebanon, Politics
And he finally did it. PM Najib Mikati resigned on Friday after lots of previous calls for resignations, explicitly by March 14 and implicitly – in form of threats – by Hezbollah’s camp. But Mikati did not do it to please those guys, it was simply the best action for him.
24 Wednesday Oct 2012
Posted in LB Politics, Lebanon, Politics
Tags
Assassination, Fouad Siniora, Kate Brooks, Lebanese Assassinations, Lebanese government, lebanon, March 14, Najib Mikati, New York Times, Terrorism
The Lebanese people won’t accept, after today, the continuation of the government of assassination
In a half-civilised country, if a cat was killed in the same way as Wissam Al-Hassan was killed, a government or at least a minister would resign. So no question what should happen when a security chief gets bombed.
But let’s be honest here, Lebanon is an abnormal farm that makes such a move a high-risk venture with unknown consequences. At its best, we could be looking at political vacuum. At its worst, we are taking about sectarian civil war here. And this message was clearly passed on by the US and EU that they don’t mind this Hezbollah-controlled government to keep going.
07 Sunday Oct 2012
Posted in LB Culture, Lebanon, Politics
Tags
Construction, Health and Safety in Lebanon, Human rights, Labor, Lebanese government, lebanon, Living wage, Occupational health and safety, Photo
I deeply thank Habib Battah for his blog post on The Beirut Report for highlighting an example of the bad conditions under which construction workers (foreign most of the time) live in Lebanon. Construction in general is a subject close to my heart, and “health and safety” is a main aspect of delivering construction projects, considering this industry is statistically one of the most dangerous in terms of accidents and casualties numbers (relative to other office and non-office jobs).
23 Sunday Sep 2012
Posted in Caricature of the day, LB Social, Lebanon, MB Social, MicroBlogs
Tags
Jabal Mohsen, Lebanese government, Lebanese people, Lebanese Politics, lebanon, Politics of Lebanon, Satire, YouTube
1 – This is how Lebanese government resolves all the country’s problems.
18 Tuesday Sep 2012
Posted in Foreign Policy, LB Politics, Lebanon, Politics, The rest of the world, World
A few conversations took place yesterday between the Lebanese President Michel Sleiman and Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon Ghazanfar (Ghadanfar) Roknabadi. It started with a phone call…
(ring ring ring, ring ring ring, ring ring ring…)
Ghadanfar: errr…hello
Michel: oh thanks for picking up, at last.
08 Wednesday Aug 2012
Posted in LB Politics, Lebanon, Politics
Tags
Future Movement, Lebanese Elections 2013, Lebanese government, lebanon, Marwan Charbel, Proportional Representation
The Lebanese government has passed a new draft law electoral law based on Proportional Representation (PR) yesterday, in which it divides Lebanon into 13 districts. The new draft law will have to be debated and passed by the parliament, which could make it also a totally different animal by then.
In a previous post, I concluded that Hezbollah and its M8 alliance will be the main winners from PR if Lebanon was adopted as one district. Now, the cabinet is proposing 13 districts, which could mitigate Hezbollah’s influence, but overall, they are still winning from such a proposal. Which is why Hariri and March 14 are quite vocal against PR, although I am not sure what they really want instead of it!
07 Tuesday Aug 2012
Posted in LB Politics, LB Social, Lebanon, Politics
Photo: source
Ok, so the airport road was closed again yesterday in Beirut, and reopened this morning. If there are signs of impotency of the Lebanese government, surely its helpless watching of this chaos is one of them (too many signs to list here). If the government can’t impose the rule of law and ensure the safety of its citizens, may be at least it needs to regulate that chaos.
30 Monday Jul 2012
Posted in LB Politics, Lebanon, Politics
That was me, but more than one year ago:
Soon, they (the government) won’t be able to blame the previous Hariri policies, and as time progresses, their argument against the previous Hariri policies will weaken. They are in charge now, and responsible for steering the economy, cleaning up the state and politics from corruption. It goes without saying that the new lineup could ultimately end up in an explosive manner.
I must admit, I didn’t expect the government to be that bad, and the country to be falling apart as it is now. The government was supposed to contain political parties that defend the ‘vulnerables’, ‘deprived’, ‘socialism’ as featured by their names, or just do ‘Reform and Change’!
26 Tuesday Jun 2012
Posted in LB Politics, Lebanon, Media Monitoring, Social Media
Tags
Aljadeed, Attack on Aljadeed TV, Beirut, Lebanese government, Lebanese Media, lebanon, Social Media, Storify
This is a new trial on this blog, with the below post being one of my new Storify postings.
Storify is a social media website that allows me to publish main posts from social media with ease in one post. Tonight, the big event in Beirut was the attack on Aljadeed TV and subsequent riots that followed in the capital.
In general, my Storify postings will aim to give an chronological overview of a certain current affair, possibly a ‘breaking news’ type, including relevant commentary or views of pundits or general public as appropriate from facebook, twitter and other social media.
Where there are more than one link in one tweet/post, and you wish to see more details of the links, please click first on the date/time of the tweet/post which will take you to the original source…
Excuse the clumsiness of my first Storify posting… Continue reading »
07 Thursday Jun 2012
Posted in LB Politics, LB Social, Lebanon, MB Social, MicroBlogs
Tags
Angry Lebanese, Beirut, Hezbollah, Ikhtak Malla Balad, Lebanese government, Lebanese people, lebanon, Satire, YouTube
I want to introduce to you Mr. Sodico, an angry bird – sorry Lebanese – speaking about his country and the resistance in it in the below video. The video is in the Lebanese slang, so apologies for non-Arabic readers.
28 Monday May 2012
Tags
Asbestos, Hazardous waste, Health and Safety in Lebanon, Lebanese government, lebanon, Occupational health and safety, Safety
As if the Lebanese government is in short of methods of how to kill its own people. Every now and then, we get either environmental disasters like dumping hazardous waste in the ecosystem or health disasters like having to deal with corrupted food.
18 Wednesday Apr 2012
This is how organised corruption works in Lebanon: you get the Public Works Ministry to contract out cleaning part of the public beach to a contractor, with the main benefit going to some lucky connected developer owning the nearby sea-resort, while the sponsor of this contract gets paid out from selling the surplus of the beach sand, or the whole sand they extract and transport away.
02 Friday Dec 2011
Posted in LB Politics, Lebanon, Politics
Tags
Hezbollah, Lebanese government, lebanon, March 14, Michel Aoun, Nabih Berri, Najib Mikati, Saad Hariri, Special Tribunal for Lebanon, Walid Jumblatt
What an end for a story climax, the completion of challenge of the 2011 funding of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL). It ended peacefully this time, with the least damages possible to all parties concerned, by the announcement of PM Najib Mikati on Wednesday 30th November 2011 that he wired the required $32m to the STL. No further details were given; he told us that he just did it! No news where the money came from and how. Rumours spread that it will be covered from donations, or from the High Commission for Relief (HRC) budget, or may be from some dodgy black box type account! Anyway, HRC denied the news that it was funding the STL from its budget, but I couldn’t think of a better relief to avoid a better disaster!
Continue reading »
16 Wednesday Nov 2011
Posted in LB Politics, Lebanon, Politics, Syria
I think last Friday’s speech for the Secretary General of Hezbollah Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah was one of the most important ones. It had some important (and destructive) subliminal messages, but because Nasrallah has become so anticipated recently, the coverage to the speech was less sizeable or even exotic. Take what he said:
any likelihood of a new Israeli war on Lebanon is considered a means of [intimidation]. Unless there is no plan for waging war on the entire region, we rule out the possibility of a war on Lebanon [in the near future].
Ok, let’s examine these words meticulously. Continue reading »
14 Monday Nov 2011
Posted in Arab Spring, Arab World, LB Politics, Lebanon, Politics, Syria
Tags
Addounia TV, Aljazeera, Arab League, arab spring, Lebanese government, lebanon, Michel Sleiman, Propaganda, syria, Tv, YouTube
In response to Syria’s crackdown on its uprising, and with all its decay, the Arab League [of dictators] has marked a historic milestone in its career by suspending Syria’s activities in its organisation. Before the ongoing Arab Spring, this move took place only once when Egypt was expelled due to its unilateral peace initiative with Israel in 1979 (& Libya in 2011); how times change. This is really a big slap in the face, with Syria being ‘the beating heart of the Arab Nation’.
It might be a brave move on the face of it in Syria’s case, but it can only show the Arabs fear from the growing Iranian influence in the region, or simply the delusional rising power of Qatar, or a mix of both (you can check the legal basis of the decision here).
08 Tuesday Nov 2011
Posted in LB Politics, LB Social, Lebanon, Politics
The daily commute in Beirut massively imbalanced against the use of any public transport methods (or may be the lack of them!). Traffic jam is a real problem over there where the bulk of commuters use their cars for their daily movements. Lebanon is so desperate for alternative and new public transport systems. Without looking at traffic figures, I see the proposal as a combination of many solutions, which are existent somewhere else, tested and proven. Executing one of them rather all of them could render the implemented solution redundant:
1. Park and Ride: building parking outside the city of Beirut, where cars park for the day or longer, and passengers from outside the city take the bus to centre. This ‘Park and Ride’ system exists in tight cities like Oxford in UK. Parking and ride fees are subsidised to reduce the problems of the congestion and parking spaces in the city. Potential locations will be near the main access points to Beirut: Khaldeh, Choueifat, Kfarchima, Hadath, Furn Al Shebak, Sin El Fil, Jdaideh, Hazmiyeh, Dowra and others.
03 Thursday Nov 2011
Posted in Arab Spring, Arab World, LB Politics, Lebanon, Media Monitoring, Politics, Social Media, Syria
I don’t confirm the authenticity of the above photo, but obviously I thought it’s intriguing enough to post it on my blog. It was posted on the page of the Local Coordination Committee for the Midan area in Damascus.
27 Thursday Oct 2011
Posted in LB Culture, LB Politics, Lebanon, Politics
Tags
Addounia TV, Al-Manar, Censorship, Lebanese government, lebanon, LIRA, Michel Sleiman, Press, Social Media, Stop LIRA, Tv, twitter, Walid Jumblatt
A quasi-government Lebanese body, which is desperate for regulation and review itself, is planning to regulate the ‘electronic websites’. The National Council for Audio-Visual Media (NCAVM) announced this week its intention to create a register for websites. They didn’t specify for what type of websites and what are the criteria, though I can only speculate the initiative is targeted at the main sites that deals with news and politics, which became in the recent years as close as they can be to the ‘Main Stream Media’.
These websites would be the likes of Lebanonfiles.com, beiruobserver.com, cedarnews.net, elnashra.com, nowlebanon.com, Naharnet.com, 14march.org, Lebanonfiles.com, and many others including the websites of the main TV channels, newspapers and political parties. Saying that, media is not just ‘politics; it’s advertisement, films, entertainment, documentaries, social and cultural shows – all published or broadcasted. This move by the NCAVM to create a register has a lot of problems and unwanted consequences:
16 Saturday Jul 2011
Posted in Caricature of the day
17 Friday Jun 2011
Posted in Caricature of the day
By Armand Homsi in Annahar newspaper, Lebanon – 17.06.2011 Continue reading »
15 Wednesday Jun 2011
Posted in Caricature of the day
Follow @TheZako
By Armand Homsi in Annahar newspaper, Lebanon – 15.06.2011
12 Sunday Jun 2011
Posted in Caricature of the day
05 Sunday Jun 2011
Posted in Caricature of the day
In Al-Joumhouria newspaper, Lebanon – 04.06.2011
Continue reading »
24 Tuesday May 2011
Posted in Caricature of the day
