Libyan rebels shell pro Gadhafi positions just outside Brega, Libya, Sunday, April 3, 2011 (AP Photo via Yahoo!News)
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Monday, April 4, 2011
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Lebanese Stand-up Comedy: Nemr Abou Nassar
The above is a video of Lebanese stand-up comedian Nemr Abou Nassar performing his Eye of the Tiger show live in Lebanon. Checkout Nemr's Facebook page and catch the rest of the Eye of the Tiger show's part 2 and part 3.
Nemr will be performing his EPIC show in Lebanon on April 8th and 9th. Click here to buy tickets or visit any Virgin Megastore branch in Lebanon.
Nemr will be performing his EPIC show in Lebanon on April 8th and 9th. Click here to buy tickets or visit any Virgin Megastore branch in Lebanon.
Friday, April 1, 2011
Leb Web Digest 01.04.11
- Ontornet: Who we are and where do we stand
- NYTimes: Sex and the Souk
- Andrew Tabler: Syria Protests Call for Strong US Stance
- Tony Badran: Time to Rewrite America's Syria Strategy
- Daily Star: Heavy Trading in Solidere Shares
- Patrick Seale: The Syrian Time Bomb
- Christopher Hitchins: The Iraq Effect
- Jillian York: The Booming Business of Internet Censorship
- Michael Young: Hizballah, at Home Alone
Timeless Longing for Dignity, Freedom and Self-Respect
Rami G. Khoury, writing in Lebanon's Daily Star:
In the annals of modern history, a few moments stand out as pivotal to all humankind, moments when a single human being, during a fleeting moment of intense anger and humiliation, undertakes an act that manifests his or her determination to end systematic humiliation and to seek a new life of dignity and full humanity.
We can best understand the full causes and consequences of the current citizen revolts across the Arab world... by fully appreciating the incident that sparked them: the desperate act of Mohammad Bouazizi, a 24-year-old Tunisian fruit and vegetable street cart vendor who set himself on fire last December 17 to protest two consecutive and related acts that he felt accentuated his sense of abuse and humiliation by the Tunisian state authorities.
The first was when a 45-year-old female municipal police officer, Faida Hamdi, and her colleagues overturned and confiscated Bouazizi’s cart and its wares, with some reports saying she or her colleagues also slapped and spat on him. The second was when Bouazizi went to the local governor’s office in the town of Sidi Bouzid to seek redress and was refused a meeting with any official.
Publicly humiliated and defenseless in front of an uncaring structure of state authority, and prevented from earning the meager income from his street vending that he required to help feed his mother and six siblings, he ended his misery in a final act of gruesome self-immolation that was also an act of desperate self-affirmation. His personal anguish – as the ongoing Second Arab Revolt reveals – was also reflective of the pain and vulnerability of millions of other Tunisians, and several hundred million Arabs.
...
It is hard to think of a better description of the person, mindset and final desperate act of Bouazizi, whose weariness with his life-long mistreatment by the Tunisian state finally prompted him to undertake his own “individual expression of a timeless longing for dignity, freedom and self-respect.”
...
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Turkey: Dealing with Unrest in Libya and Syria
The Economist wonders if Turkey's Erdogan has a plan:
Libya has thrown AK’s much-vaunted Middle East policy into disarray and further strained ties with America and the EU. As Semih Idiz, a columnist for the daily Milliyet, observes, AK’s approach has been based on friendly relations with existing leaders, no matter how brutish. And although Turkey was quick to scent Mr Mubarak’s defeat, Colonel Qaddafi's future is less clear. Mr Erdoğan warns of a protracted and bloody civil war that could make Libya "a second Iraq." He has suggested that Colonel Qaddafi could yet be involved in a peaceful transition of power, which Turkey could help mediate.
Turkey’s attempts to sit on the fence may be partly explained by self-interest. Some 20,000 Turkish citizens worked in in Libya (they are now mostly repatriated). The country has around $15 billion worth of outstanding contracts which may be scrapped if the rebels prevail.
Yet an even bigger challenge is being posed by neighbouring Syria, where nationwide protests have left scores of civilians dead. Mr Erdoğan is a big friend to Syria’s strongman leader, Bashar Assad, and has urged him to ease his iron grip. Should the violence spread to Syria’s Kurdish-dominated north, thousands might cross the border into Turkey, already home to 14m or so restive Kurds. Mr Erdoğan’s pious base have been incensed by the slaughter of their fellow Sunni Muslims at the hands of Mr Assad’s forces. When it comes to Syria, sitting on the fence may not be an option.
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Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Shamgen [or Levant] Banking Agreement to be Signed
Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan are set to sign a regional banking cooperation agreement aimed at supporting and facilitating trade and investments between the countries.
The agreement comes in the wake of the signing of free-trade and visa-exemption agreements recently signed by the four countries, and comes amid a regional drive for further economic integration spearheaded by the Turkish government.
In comments made at the March 2011 "Enhancing Shamgen Banking: Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan" conference in Istanbul, Turkey's Central Bank Governon, Durmus Yilmaz, remarked "Although this conference is a step toward improving relations between the banking sectors of Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan in the short term, it is expected to contribute to the formation of a single market with the inclusion of other countries in the region in an area circumscribed by the Persian Gulf, Red Sea and the Mediterranean."
The Turkish daily, Today's Zaman has more on recent developments along that front:
The agreement comes in the wake of the signing of free-trade and visa-exemption agreements recently signed by the four countries, and comes amid a regional drive for further economic integration spearheaded by the Turkish government.
In comments made at the March 2011 "Enhancing Shamgen Banking: Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan" conference in Istanbul, Turkey's Central Bank Governon, Durmus Yilmaz, remarked "Although this conference is a step toward improving relations between the banking sectors of Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan in the short term, it is expected to contribute to the formation of a single market with the inclusion of other countries in the region in an area circumscribed by the Persian Gulf, Red Sea and the Mediterranean."
The Turkish daily, Today's Zaman has more on recent developments along that front:
Related Posts:Foreign ministers [from the four participating countries] decided on June 10 of last year to set up a high-level cooperation council to boost existing legal mechanisms ... to improve trade cooperation between them. The council plans to develop a long-term strategic partnership and to create a zone of free movement of goods and persons among them. ...
The countries’ aspirations to establish the planned single market in the Middle East are interpreted as the sign of the rise of an EU-like regional economic integration. Even the name of the conference proved how appropriate those interpretations are. The word “Shamgen” is a combination of “Sham,” the way the name of the Syrian capital of Damascus is pronounced in Turkish as well as in Arabic and with the meaningless “gen” to make it sound like the Schengen area, which comprises the territories of the 25 European states that act like a single state when it comes to international travel without internal border controls and visa requirements.
...
Also speaking at the conference, Turkish Regulation and Supervision Agency (BDDK) President Tevfik Bilgin said relations between the countries in terms of banking investments are insufficient at the moment. “Investments made by Syrian, Lebanese and Jordanian bankers in Turkey and investments by Turkish banks in these three countries are very small,” he said. ...
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Communication Tools to Help Dissidents
Activists in Cario's Tahrir Square "share the power" (via cairofeb6_036)
Outlining some handy technological communication tools that can be put to good use in by-passing authoritarian regime's crackdowns on communication, this article by The Economist is definitely worth reading in full, below is an abridgment:
With a tin can, some copper wire and a few dollars’ worth of nuts, bolts and other hardware, a do-it-yourselfer can build a makeshift directional antenna. A mobile phone, souped-up with such an antenna, can talk to a network tower that is dozens of kilometres beyond its normal range (about 5km, or 3 miles). ....
... [homemade antennae's] existence has recently been valuable to the operation of several groups of revolutionaries in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere. To get round government shutdowns of internet and mobile-phone networks, resourceful dissidents have used such makeshift antennae to link their computers and handsets to more orthodox transmission equipment in neighbouring countries.
... after Egypt switched off its internet in January some activists brought laptops to places like Tahrir Square in Cairo to collect, via short-range wireless links, demonstrators’ video recordings and other electronic messages. These activists then broadcast the material to the outside world using range-extending antennae.
... Directional antennae, unlike the omnidirectional sort, transmit on a narrow beam. This makes it hard for eavesdroppers to notice a signal is there.
Another way of confounding the authorities is to build portable FM radio stations. ... Though these stations have a range of only a few kilometres, that is enough for the leaders of a protest to use them to co-ordinate their followers. The stations’ operators act as clearing houses for text messages, reading important ones over the air for everyone to hear.
...[a group called Access] is equipping a network of ham-radio operators with special modems that convert digital computer data into analogue radio signals that their equipment can cope with. These signals are then broadcast from operator to operator until they reach a network member in an area where the internet functions. This operator reconverts the signal into computer-readable data and then e-mails or posts the information online.
Satellites provide yet another way of getting online, though they are expensive to connect to. It is, however, beyond the authorities in most places to shut down a satellite operated by a foreign company or country. The best they can do is try to locate live satellite links using radiation-detection kit similar to that supposedly employed in Britain to seek out unlicensed televisions. The result is a game of cat and mouse between the authorities and satellite-using dissidents. Tactical Tech, for example, has trained dissidents in five countries to rig satellite dishes to computers in order to get online. It advises some users to log on only for short sessions, and to do so from a moving vehicle.
...
Incredible Relics of Early Christianity Discovered
BBCNews reports on the discovery of a set of approximately 70 lead books thought to have survived approximately 2,000 years and potentially shedding light on the life, death and crucifixion of Jesus Christ, and the subsequent birth of Christianity:
A group of 70 or so "books", each with between five and 15 lead leaves bound by lead rings, was apparently discovered in a remote arid valley in northern Jordan somewhere between 2005 and 2007.
A flash flood had exposed two niches inside the cave, one of them marked with a menorah or candlestick, the ancient Jewish religious symbol.
A Jordanian Bedouin opened these plugs, and what he found inside might constitute extremely rare relics of early Christianity....The director of the Jordan's Department of Antiquities, Ziad al-Saad, says the books might have been made by followers of Jesus in the few decades immediately following his crucifixion....The books, or "codices", were apparently cast in lead, before being bound by lead rings.
Their leaves - which are mostly about the size of a credit card - contain text in Ancient Hebrew, most of which is in code....Philip Davies, Emeritus Professor of Old Testament Studies at Sheffield University, says the most powerful evidence for a Christian origin lies in plates cast into a picture map of the holy city of Jerusalem.
"As soon as I saw that, I was dumbstruck. That struck me as so obviously a Christian image," he says.
"There is a cross in the foreground, and behind it is what has to be the tomb [of Jesus], a small building with an opening, and behind that the walls of the city. There are walls depicted on other pages of these books too and they almost certainly refer to Jerusalem."...Margaret Barker, an authority on New Testament history, points to the location of the reported discovery as evidence of Christian, rather than purely Jewish, origin.
"We do know that on two occasions groups of refugees from the troubles in Jerusalem fled east, they crossed the Jordan near Jericho and then they fled east to very approximately where these books were said to have been found," she says.
"[Another] one of the things that is most likely pointing towards a Christian provenance, is that these are not scrolls but books. The Christians were particularly associated with writing in a book form rather than scroll form, and sealed books in particular as part of the secret tradition of early Christianity."...The archaeology of early Christianity is particularly sparse.
Little is known of the movement after Jesus' crucifixion until the letters of Paul several decades later, and they illuminate the westward spread of Christianity outside the Jewish world.
Never has there been a discovery of relics on this scale from the early Christian movement, in its homeland and so early in its history.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Pope Inaugurates St. Maron Statue in Vatican City
Two women wave the Lebanese flag in front of a statue of Saint Maron, a 5th century Syrian monk, earlier inaugurated by Pope Benedict XVI and Lebanon's President Michel Suleiman, at the Vatican, Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2011. President Suleiman is scheduled to meet with the pontiff on Thursday for a private audience. (AP Photo via Daylife)
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