Lebanon seeks funds for troubled economy at Paris conference

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BEIRUT (AP) — Lebanon hopes to secure billions of dollars for infrastructure this week at an international donor conference in Paris, as it grapples with low growth and soaring debt. Some 50 countries and international organizations are expected at the CEDRE (Cedar) conference that begins Friday, where Beirut will request up to $22 billion for an eight to 12 year investment program. Lebanon hopes an influx of cash will help revive the economy, which has been hammered by political unrest and spillover from the war in neighboring Syria. Lebanon is home to some 1.2 million refugees, accounting for nearly a quarter of its population. The civil war next door has also hindered land exports to Jordan, Iraq and oil-rich Gulf nations.

From 2007 until 2010, Lebanon’s economy grew at an average of 9 percent annually. But it hit a major downturn in 2011, when a political crisis brought down the government and the Syrian uprising stoked unrest among Lebanese factions. Since then, growth has averaged a mere 1.5 percent, according to government estimates, and rampant corruption has hollowed out infrastructure and basic services. Nearly three decades after the end of the 1975-1990 civil war, Lebanon still experiences frequent cutoffs of water and electricity. With public transport networks virtually non-existent, its aging roads are clogged with traffic. Chronic problems with waste management have sparked mass protests in recent years. “Lebanon currently is facing major economic challenges, and these challenges range from budgetary problems to balance of payment to growth to unemployment,” said Nadim Munla, senior adviser to Prime Minister Saad Hariri. “It has been characterized by many as a very difficult time,” with some calling it a “doomsday scenario,” he said. Munla said the conference will be seen as a major success if Beirut can secure funding for the first stage of its investment plans, an estimated $10 billion. He says the private sector can supply another $4 billion for the projects, which are aimed at revitalizing water, electricity, telecom and waste services. But critics fear the remainder of the financing will come from borrowing, exacerbating an already severe debt burden. French authorities have stressed that Friday’s gathering is not a classic donors’ conference, and that no figure can determine its success. Instead, it seeks to establish an investment plan around infrastructure, water, energy or education, delineate structural reforms so that investment works, and mobilize the private sector, according to the office of French President Emmanuel Macron. The conference will also adopt a follow-up mechanism to accompany the investment plan, it said.

Fears of economic collapse have mounted ahead of the first parliamentary elections in nine years, scheduled for May 6. Many worry that the Lebanese currency, which has been pegged at 1,500 to the dollar since 1997, could be devalued. Central Bank governor Riad Salameh has repeatedly dismissed those fears, saying the bank has assets worth $43.2 billion in addition to more than $11.5 billion worth of gold. The state-owned electricity company is considered one of the biggest drains on the state budget, costing about $1.5 billion a year, depending on international oil prices. Tariffs have not gone up since 1996, even though many Lebanese say they would happily pay more if they could get 24-hour power instead of relying on costly neighborhood generators. Hazar Caracalla, another adviser to the prime minister, said the Cabinet is committed to opening both electricity and telecoms to the private sector in hopes of improving services, and has already approved a framework for addressing the garbage crisis. Last week, Lebanon’s parliament approved a budget — its second since 2005 — with a fiscal deficit of $4.8 billion. The national debt at the end of 2017 stood at $80 billion, or more than 150 percent of gross domestic product.

The militant Hezbollah group, which is part of the coalition government, has expressed concerns that the conference will add to the already massive debt. Other critics have suggested the conference, which is organized by France, is aimed at boosting Hariri’s pro-Western allies ahead of next month’s vote. Munla hit back at critics, saying: “If they have an alternative, put it on the table and let’s discuss it.” Nassib Ghobril, the chief economist at Bank Byblos, Lebanon’s third largest lender, said the international community is eager to support Lebanon’s stability, but will expect the government to implement urgently-needed reforms. “The upgrade of infrastructure will help improve the competitiveness of the economy, but that’s not going to be enough without implementing structural reforms that would improve the investment climate and the business environment,” Ghobril said. ___ Associated Press writer Elaine Ganley in Paris contributed to this report

Mark Zuckerberg says he's still the best person to run Facebook after scandals: 'I think life is about learning from mistakes'

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by businessinsider.com Mark Zuckerberg says he is still the best person to run Facebook in the wake of its series of scandals. In a question-and-answer session with journalists on Wednesday afternoon, the 33-year-old CEO was asked whether he was still the most appropriate person to lead the social network. Earlier on Wednesday, Facebook said that it now estimates data from 87 million user profiles were impromperly used by the political research firm Cambride Analytica. "Yes," he responded. "I mean — I think life is about learning from mistakes, and working out what you need to do to move forward." Zuckerberg repeatedly admitted on the call that he and the company had made mistakes, but suggested that some missteps were inevitable: "If we got this right we would've messed something else up." There has been calls from a major Facebook shareholder for Zuckerberg to stand down as chairman of the board. Zuckerberg said that to his knowledge, there have been no discussions among the board for him to step down: "Not to my knowledge."

Saudi envoy unites Lebanon’s head of factions, Hariri, Geagea and Jumblatt

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Staff writer, Al Arabiya -- Saudi envoy Nizar Al Alula succeeded in holding a reconciliation meeting between Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri, the executive chairman of the Lebanese Forces Party, Samir Geagea and Druze leader Walid Jumblatt. The meeting between the three leaders is the first of its kind in a long time. A source commented that the meeting was the beginning of understandings between the three parties, stressing that the Saudi move aims to strengthen the Lebanese national leaders to achieve stability in Lebanon. Al Alula confirmed to the Lebanese officials whom he met with last Monday in Beirut and Baabda that "Lebanon is at the heart of the Saudi leadership and its thoughts," the newspaper Asharq al-Awsat reported. Al Alula gave Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri an official invitation to visit the kingdom.

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Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman from Childhood to Power

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This article represents only the opinion of the author 

by .newyorker.com -- A few days after Donald Trump was inaugurated, Jared Kushner sat down to decide how to reshape the Middle East. During the campaign, Trump had promised a sweeping transformation of the region. Steve Bannon, Trump’s senior aide and ideologist at the time, told me recently, “Our plan was to annihilate the physical caliphate of isis in Iraq and Syria—not attrition, annihilation—and to roll back the Persians. And force the Gulf states to stop funding radical Islam.” The Middle East initiative, Bannon said, was one of the few points of agreement in an otherwise fractious White House. “Jared and I were at war on a number of other topics, but not this.” Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, was put in charge of policy for the region. He had no experience in diplomacy or in Middle Eastern politics; at thirty-six, he had spent his working life managing New York and New Jersey real-estate projects and running the New York Observer, a fading tabloid. But a former senior defense official who worked with Kushner told me that he had been educating himself on the fly. “He’s not a scholar on this stuff,” the official said. “His knowledge is gained from talking to movers and shakers in that part of the world. You can read a lot of books but never get the type of education you get from talking to the Kissingers and Petraeuses of the world.” In a conference room at the White House, Kushner met with aides from the National Security Council. “We took out the map and assessed the situation,” the former defense official said. Surveying the region, they concluded that the northern tier of the Middle East had been lost to Iran. In Lebanon, Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy, controlled the government. In Syria, Iran had helped save President Bashar al-Assad from military disaster and was now bolstering his political future. In Iraq, the government, nominally pro-American, was also under the sway of Tehran. “We kind of set those to the side,” the official told me. “We thought, So then what? Our anchors were Israel and Saudi Arabia. We can’t be successful in the Gulf without Saudi Arabia.” That meant reversing the approach supported by Barack Obama, who, unlike previous Presidents, had kept the Saudis at arm’s length, objecting to their repressive internal policies, their treatment of women, and their aggressive posture toward Iran. Obama, in effect, hoped to create a kind of balance between Riyadh and Tehran. In March, 2016, he told the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg that the unsteady condition of the Middle East “requires us to say to our friends as well as to the Iranians that they need to find an effective way to share the neighborhood and institute some sort of cold peace.” Trump and Kushner wanted no such détente. “Everything we could do to strengthen our relationship with the Saudis, we were going to do,” the former defense official told me. Above all, that meant forming a new alliance with Saudi Arabia’s deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman—known in the White House and throughout the Middle East as M.B.S.

Bin Salman, though only thirty-one¸ was already one of the most powerful people in the kingdom. The son of the current monarch, he was the minister of defense, chairman of the committee that charted the kingdom’s economy, and second in line to the throne. In a country long ruled by aging kings, M.B.S. was young, tall, and transparently ambitious. He wanted to wean the kingdom from its unsustainable addiction to oil and to diversify its economy. And he promised to end the long-standing arrangement of Saudi domestic politics, in which the royal family, and its myriad princes, bought off political opposition by allowing radical Islamists to propagate their creed and even to carry out terrorist acts abroad. M.B.S. was uncompromising in foreign policy, describing the mullahs who presided over Iran as akin to Nazis. The question for many analysts around the world was whether he represented genuine reform or was merely using the language of reform to consolidate power.

As Kushner grappled with the complexities of Middle East politics, he and M.B.S. began a conversation by telephone and e-mail. “They became close very fast,” a former American official who sees M.B.S. periodically said. “They see the world in the same way—they see themselves as being in the tech-savvy money world.” Kushner followed up with a visit to Riyadh, the first of three such trips; the two men stayed up nearly until dawn, discussing the future of their countries. As Kushner knew, M.B.S. was involved in a messy battle over succession to the throne, which American security officials warned might destabilize the kingdom. And M.B.S. had his own ideas about how to remake the Middle East. But, Bannon told me, the message that he and Kushner wanted Trump to convey to the region’s leaders was that the status quo had to change, and in the more places the better. “We said to them—Trump said to them, ‘We’ll support you, but we want action, action,’ ” Bannon said. No one seemed more eager to hear that message than the deputy crown prince. “The judgment was that we needed to find a change agent,” the former defense official told me. “That’s where M.B.S. came in. We were going to embrace him as the change agent.”

When Mohammed bin Salman was growing up, in Riyadh, he lived in a walled palace complex the size of a city block, sharing a mansion with his five brothers and his mother, Fahda, one of his father’s four wives. (Each wife had a mansion of her own.) For most of his childhood, his father, Salman, was the governor of Riyadh and a likely future king. The family’s home, in the Madher neighborhood, had a staff of about fifty, including servants, gardeners, maids, cooks, and drivers. Each weekday, the staff ferried the young prince to class, at a prestigious academy called the al-Riyadh Schools. On weekends, the servants sometimes escorted him and his classmates into the desert, where they erected large tents and lit bonfires under the stars. His fellow-students would gather around him and recite poems of praise, calling him Kareem—the generous one—for sponsoring the lavish parties. The young M.B.S. would smile at the encomiums, especially if they came from a son of one of Riyadh’s better families. “He treated everyone well, but even then he was aware of everyone’s status,” Mahboob Mohammed, a Pakistani who worked on the staff of one of M.B.S.’s cousins, told me. “Prince Salman always knew he was special.” Still, even for the young Salman, the future was cloudy—due, in no small part, to the uncertain line of royal succession in the House of Saud. Since 1953, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s last surviving absolute monarchies, has been ruled by six brothers, all sons of King Abdul-Aziz al Saud. Abdul-Aziz is the central figure in modern Saudi Arabia, having united the kingdom in 1932, after a series of wars. In the forties, he opened the country to large-scale oil production by Western companies and, after meeting President Franklin Roosevelt on an American destroyer in the Red Sea, struck an alliance with the United States, which has endured ever since. The Saudis guarantee access to oil; the U.S., in return, guarantees Saudi Arabia security from foreign enemies.

Abdul-Aziz was a prolific father—he bragged of having “married no fewer than a hundred and thirty-five virgins,” and he sired at least forty-two sons and fifty-five daughters. Since his death, in 1953, royal succession has been determined on the principle of agnatic seniority, whereby a king’s younger brother is preferred over his sons. In 2015, when his successor King Abdullah died, his brother Salman ascended to the throne; another, younger brother, named Muqrin, became crown prince. Muqrin, the son of a Yemeni concubine, was Abdul-Aziz’s last surviving son. As the generation of Abdul-Aziz’s sons neared its end, tensions arose over who would be the first member of the next generation to become king. Saudi kings, though absolute in their authority, have traditionally ruled by consensus among the brothers; their sons, in turn, are placed in key positions across the government. Any one of Abdul-Aziz’s hundreds of grandsons could feel entitled to the throne.

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This Easter, don’t forget persecuted Christians in the Middle East

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BY TOUFIC BAAKLINI, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - THE HILL

Today, over 1 billion Christians worldwide celebrate the death and resurrection of their Savior Jesus Christ, remembering that Jesus was ridiculed and persecuted in his life. Celebrants this week should remember that their brothers and sisters throughout the Middle East are joining in Christ’s suffering to this very day, facing ridicule and persecution that is driving them to leave the lands they have lived in for thousands of years. In our lifetimes, it is possible for the places that Christianity was born in to die out. In the past year alone, attacks on Coptic Christians in Egypt have been widespread. Twenty-four people were killed in a suicide bombing at St. Peter and St. Paul's Church, Cairo's largest Coptic cathedral, followed by a series of violent anti-Coptic acts in the town of Al Arish, driving Copts from the city.

Last year, on Palm Sunday, a sequence of suicide bombings killed a total of 47 Coptic Christians in churches in the Nile Delta and Alexandria. In May of last year as well, the Islamic State again targeted Copt Christians, this time attacking a bus en route to an Egyptian monastery, where 10 masked gunmen killed 29 individuals, both adults and children. In Syria, Christian communities have dropped from a pre-war population of 2 million to around 900,000 today. Christians are regularly threatened by a myriad of Salafi-Jihadist and Islamist forces, and are in a hostage situation with a regime that exploits them. Their churches have been targets of mortar rounds, their people have been beheaded and crucified and their priests and children kidnapped. Since the onset of Turkey’s “Olive Branch” operation in Afrin against Kurdish militias, the 250 Christian families living there have been under threat by the Turkish-backed Islamist forces that have attack their churches and forced conversions. The situation in Iraq, although better with the near-defeat of ISIS, is still precarious for Christians. Recently, in the city of Mosul that was cleansed of its 30,000-strong Christian population in 2014, a mass grave with the remains of 40 Christians was discovered. In Baghdad, a Christian family of three was brutally stabbed to death in gang-related violence and a young father of two children was gunned down. These incidences highlight how terrorists target Christians because they are easy targets with no militias backing them and a weak central government that struggles to enforce the rule of law and protect them. In the heartland of Christianity in Iraq, the many Christian villages of the Nineveh Plains sit in ruins almost a year since their liberation from ISIS. Only about half of the Christian population has returned, with many choosing to remain in refugee camps in Kurdistan or seek a new life abroad because their homes are destroyed. The security situation is tense too, with Kurdish, Iranian and Iraqi Forces entrenching themselves. This Palm Sunday saw joyous celebrations take place in Christian towns, a sign of hope and life in the midst of much despair.

The situation in Lebanon is better, since Christians make up an estimated 40 percent of the population, but the growing power of the Iranian-backed Shi’a militia and political party has hijacked the historically moderate Shi’a population with their brand of radicalism and threatens Lebanon’s stability everyday with its involvement in the Syrian civil war and threats to Israel. If Israel responds with a military operation, the proceeding war will only harm Lebanon’s civilian population and push Christians to join their almost 10 million-strong diaspora abroad. Additionally, influx of more than 1.5 million Syrian refugees in a country of only 4 million people has overwhelmed their resources and further strained the political situation. This Easter, it is important to not only mourn for these persecuted Christians, but learn and act. These Christians are divided among various Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, and other denominations with their own unique histories, cultures and languages. Learning about this diversity does them justice and also widens our understanding of the diversity of the greater Middle East too. Many organizations, such as In Defense of Christians and Aid to the Church in Need, work to protect and rebuild these communities. Supporting them and getting involved with their work is important before it’s too late. This Easter, let us embody the true meaning of the holiday and help give life to communities under attack. Toufic Baaklini is a Lebanese-American with more than 30 years of business experience in finance and development. Baaklini is the president of In Defense of Christians and has committed years of service to preserving the historic Christian communities of the Middle East.

Pay inequity is a global phenomenon

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More than half the world’s economies bar women from the same jobs as men, The Wall Street Journal says. Citing a World Bank report, the newspaper said that women are often prohibited from entering higher-wage fields, sealing their economic fates. But as countries increase legal protections for women — such as enabling them to apply for passports and credit — the gap in wealth shrinks, “as does the gap between men and women entering the labor force.” And, while women find greater economic equity in wealthier countries, the U.S. scores among the lowest on paid parental leave policies. The failure to require such leave can mark females as a employment liability, the report says.