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Venzuelans with Lebanese roots bring Latin flavors to the Beirut food scene

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A close-up photo of Firas Yorgi making an arepa on a grill.

by Rebecca Collard -- PRI's The World -- What finally pushed Firas Yordi to leave Venezuela last year wasn’t the shortage of food and medicine, or the loss of his family’s once-profitable businesses, or rising insecurity. It was a kidnapping attempt on his four-year-old son. In mid-2017, two men on a motorcycle tried to snatch him outside the family’s factory, likely for ransom. “Luckily there were many of us inside and we ran out and stopped them,” Yordi recalls. He sent his family out of the country and looked at options to leave Venezuela.

But unlike most of the 4 million Venezuelans who have sought refuge in neighboring states, Yordi ended up much further afield — in the Lebanese capital, Beirut. He became one of a growing number of Venezuelans of Lebanese descent doing a reverse migration, fleeing Venezuela's financial crisis and finding refuge in the country of their ancestors. Yordi’s father emigrated from Lebanon to Venezuela 50 years ago after fleeing escalating tensions and financial instability. By the time he arrived, Venezuela already had a sizable and successful Lebanese community.

“I never thought I would be living and working in this country,” Yordi says of Lebanon. “My father came from a very humble background. It was tough times in Lebanon back then, and violence was happening.” A history of Lebanon-Venezuela migration The first Lebanese immigrated to Venezuela in the 1860s. Then, in 1915, the Great Famine of Mount Lebanon struck. As many as 200,000 people died, and tens of thousands more fled what had been the Ottoman Empire. Thousands headed for promised lands of Latin America, where many already family. Then, in the 1960s and 70s, a third wave on Lebanese immigration headed toward South America as Lebanon’s neighbors went to war. Today, more people of Lebanese descent live outside Lebanon than within it, and millions of them are in Latin America. Lebanon’s own population is 4 million. Yordi’s family thrived in Venezuela. They had several mechanic shops and a factory that made beds and mattresses. On his phone, Yordi scrolls through pictures of their life before the crisis — scuba diving, family vacations, weddings and their two-story home with a pool. “Business was well and life was very well for years and years, but then it started to deteriorate,” he says. Things got tough, but the Yordis stayed, not wanting to give up everything they had built. Yordi tears up as he tells about his decision to leave.

Here's What People Thought of Amazon When It First Launched in the Mid-1990s

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Jeff Bezos holds a cordless power drill and reciprocating saw at a New York press conference on November 9, 1999.

by Matt Novak -paleofuture--- Amazon was founded on July 5, 1994, and launched its online store in 1995, letting people buy books from the comfort of their homes. Twenty-five years after its inception, Amazon now sells everything from taco holders shaped like dinosaurs to tongue brushes that humans can use to lick their cats. And you’d have to be living under a rock to not know about Amazon. But what did people think of Amazon in its early days—the days before the tongue brushes? Today we’ve got a sample from the mid-90s before founder Jeff Bezos was a billionaire. In November of 1995, Knight-Ridder distributed an article that was published in newspapers around the country explaining that you can find almost any book at this “Internet store” called Amazon.

Of course, hooking up to the internet was a much more novel experience in 1995. But if you had a connection, and millions of Americans were getting online in the mid-90s, you had access to over 1 million titles. The Knight-Ridder article noted a few things that might be weird to people in the year 2019. First, you could pay by credit card or you could call a toll-free number and give your credit card number over the phone. You could even fax the credit card info if that was your thing. Secondly, shipping was $3 per order plus $0.95 per book. Today, Amazon has free shipping for all orders over $25 and for anyone who subscribes to the company’s Prime membership. But what did people think of this new service on the so-called Information Superhighway? The first thing almost everyone mentioned was the impressively wide selection of books.

Lebanese economy minister calls on UAE to invest in Lebanon

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BEIRUT, (Xinhua) -- Lebanese Economy and Trade Minister Mansour Bteish on Thursday called on the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to invest in productive sectors in Lebanon, the National News Agency reported. "UAE's investment in productive sectors will contribute to creating job opportunities in the country while increasing exports from Lebanon," Bteish said during his meeting with the Emirati Ambassador to Lebanon Hamad Saeed Al Shamsi. Lebanon is suffering from a deteriorated economy and Lebanese President Michel Aoun said last year that the unemployment rate in Lebanon has soared to a staggering 46 percent while attributing the high figure to the "grave economic situation and presence of Syrian refugees." Moreover, the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation International reported earlier this year that around 4,700 young people immigrate abroad on a monthly basis since the beginning of 2019 in search for better opportunities outside Lebanon. The country needs to attract investments in its productive sectors in a bid to create growth and more job opportunities for the youths. The two officials have also discussed bilateral ties and ways of boosting economic and trade relations.

The big Facebook outage offers a behind-the-scenes look at how the social network's AI 'sees' your photos and interprets them for blind users

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Mark Zuckerberg

by nsider.com -- An image outage across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp gives a behind-the-scenes look at how Facebook's AI sees your photos. The outage, which started on Wednesday and affected Facebook's 1.5 billion-plus daily active users and rendered Instagram all but unusable, stopped social-media images from loading and left in their place descriptions like: "image may contain: table, plant, flower, and outdoor" and "image may contain: tree, plant, sky."

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These descriptions, or tags, show how Facebook's artificial intelligence interprets images. On Twitter, people shared screenshots of how their photos were tagged. "To be fair, 'one person, beard' is pretty much a spot-on description of me," Zack Whittaker, an editor at TechCrunch, wrote.

So, what's going on?

Facebook automatically scans all photos on the social network with facial- and image-recognition software powered by AI to detect who or what is being pictured. This is then used in the company's accessibility efforts to describe photos to people who are blind or otherwise visually impaired, and who are accessing the site via a screen reader. In short, Facebook uses machine learning to automatically interpret photos, then reads this interpretation aloud to blind users. The photo outage meant that we got an in-your-face look at those interpretations, too.

At times, it appeared the AI incorrectly tagged the photo, as in the case of the Fortune reporter Danielle Abril's where the photo description read: "5 people, including Danielle Abril, people smiling, people standing, hoes and indoor." Hopefully there was a gardening tool in the photo — we've reached out to Abril but did not immediately hear back. So while there could be a benign explanation here, it's still a stark reminder of just how much data Facebook is gathering at all times, even when we don't realize it's happening. Thanks to its increasingly sophisticated AI technology, Facebook can even gather information from something as innocuous as a vacation photo.

Christians in the Mirror - Official Trailer

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Patriarch Cardinal Bechara Rahi: Kushner's peace plan is "the slap of the century"

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Beirut (AsiaNews) - The peace plan proposed by Jared Kushner and the US administration, presented as "the deal of the century" for peace between Israelis and Palestinians and throughout the Middle East, is actually "the slap of the century," this according Maronite Patriarch Card Bechara al-Rahi. During his homily yesterday in Gherfine (Jbeil) during the consecration of the St Stephen Church, the patriarch said that "The deal of the century is indeed the slap of the century, both for the Palestinian cause and for the return of Syrian refugees to their country, where they can continue to write their own history, on their own territory, preserving their own history and strengthening their own civilisation.”

On 25 June, Kushner, son-in-law and adviser to US President Donald Trump, presented a plan in Bahrain that provides for the distribution of US$ 50 billion in investments to help the economy in the Palestinian territories and in all the countries with a large number of refugees (Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan). According to the cardinal, the plan is an attempt at "settlement and naturalisation" of Palestinian refugees in the countries that host them, "masked with financial aid.” Palestinians have already strongly criticised the plan. Even “if the intention to provide financial were sincere," explained Mgr Rahi, “it is preferable in the case of Palestinians to help them build their own state and return home, and in the case of Syrians, to help return home to rebuild their homes, their entity and their institutions.”

US economic expansion breaks record

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At 121 months, the U.S. economy is believed to have entered the longest expansion in the nation’s history, pending confirmation from official growth figures. It’s been a gradual climb higher, with the economy growing on average 2.3% each year since June 2009. In that time, unemployment has fallen to near its lowest level in half a century, but the wealth gap has ballooned, with a recent Deutsche Bank analysis finding the “typical American family is poorer than pre-crisis”. Some analysts are now forecasting a downturn in light of mixed global data and trade tensions.