In Lebanon, U.S. State Department official calls Hezbollah 'unacceptable'

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BEIRUT (Reuters) - The U.S. State Department criticized Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah group on Monday for digging tunnels into Israel and stockpiling rockets, as Washington steps up efforts to isolate Tehran. In recent weeks, Israeli forces uncovered tunnels they said were dug by Hezbollah, and Lebanon complained about Israel’s construction of a barrier along disputed parts of the border. The United States, Israel’s closest ally, regards Hezbollah as a terrorist group and has pledged tougher steps to counteract Iranian influence in the region, but it has also reiterated its backing for the Lebanese government - which includes Hezbollah representatives - and army. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last week vowed to expel “every last Iranian boot” from Syria, where Iran has been fighting alongside Hezbollah, and where Israel has been carrying out strikes against both.

“While Lebanon has the right to defend itself, that is the right of the Lebanese state alone,” said David Hale, U.S. under secretary of state for political affairs, after meeting Lebanese prime minister designate Saad al-Hariri. “It is unacceptable to have a militia outside the control of the state, and unanswerable to all people of Lebanon digging attack tunnels across the blue line to Israel or assembling an arsenal of over 100,000 missiles with which to threaten regional stability,” he added. Israel, which regards Hezbollah as the biggest threat on its borders, on Sunday said it had completed efforts to find and destroy tunnels under the frontier that it said the group had dug to infiltrate fighters during a future war. Hezbollah has not commented on the tunnels. Lebanon’s National Security Council last week said an Israeli border wall that crosses into territory claimed by Lebanon, constitutes an act of aggression. However, both sides appear ready to contain matters for now. “Israel’s interest is to keep the (situation) quiet. I think for them (Hezbollah), that interest is even greater,” Lieutenant General Gadi Eizenkot said last week after completing his term as Israeli army chief.

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Hezbollah was set up by Iran in the early 1980s to fight Israel’s occupation of south Lebanon, but it retained its weapons after Israeli forces withdrew in 2000 and has become the strongest political force in the country. The last conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, fought on Lebanese soil, was in 2006. A United Nations Security Council resolution ending that conflict called for work to delineate the border, but the frontier has still not been agreed. The border dispute has also affected Lebanese plans to drill for oil and gas near an area of sea claimed by both countries.

Hale’s visit comes as Lebanese politicians continue to jostle over the formation of a new coalition government more than eight months after an election. Hezbollah is part of Lebanon’s caretaker government and is expected to be included in any new coalition formed by Hariri. Lebanon’s failure to form a new government was dragging down the economy and “endangering the country”, Hale said, and urged the caretaker government to move forward on the economy to maintain international confidence. Reporting By Angus McDowall; Additional reporting by Maayan Lubell in Jerusalem; Editing by Robin Pomeroy Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Libyan Foreign Ministry urges Lebanese authorities to explain Amal Movement's conduct

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by libyaobserver.ly --The Libyan Foreign Ministry of the Presidential Council has called for explanation by the Lebanese authorities for the desecration of the Libyan flag and the threats against Libyan delegation which was supposed to visit Beirut for the Arab Summit for Economic and Social Development. The Foreign Ministry urged in a statement Monday the Arab League to take a clear stance regarding the Lebanese conduct, expressing dismay at the disrespectful acts by Lebanon, which made Libya boycott the summit. "The Lebanese president Michel Aoun invited the Head of the Presidential Council Fayez Al-Sirraj to attend the summit and he accepted." The statement said. The statement also voiced utmost rejection to the desecration of the Libyan flag and other acts by protesters and representatives of the Shiite Amal Movement. "We have found the contradictory statements of the Lebanese officials very strange regarding the participation of the Libyan delegation at the summit, not to mention the lack of preparations for the reception of the delegation if arrived." The statement adds. A video posted on YouTube on Sunday showed a group of Shiite protesters taking down the Libyan flag from the street, ripping it up and replacing it with the flag of AMAL Movement, a Lebanese political party associated with Lebanon's Shia community. The protesters threatened a day earlier to stage nationwide protests to close the airport in a bid to prevent the Libyan delegation from taking part in the summit. The summit is scheduled to be held in Beirut on Jan. 19-20, but Nabih Berri, who heads AMAL Movement, is rejecting to invite Libya because of the disappearance of Shiite cleric and founder of the movement Moussa al-Sadr in Libya in 1978.

The Lebanese saint who unites Christians and Muslims

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By Hannah Brockhaus Annaya, Lebanon, (CNA).- St. Charbel Makhlouf is known in Lebanon for the miraculous healings of those who visit his tomb to seek his intercession – both Christians and Muslims. “St. Charbel has no geographic or confessional limits. Nothing is impossible for [his intercession] and when people ask [for something], he answers,” Fr. Louis Matar, coordinator of the Shrine of St. Charbel in Annaya, Lebanon, told CNA. Speaking in Arabic with the help of an interpreter, Mater said the shrine, which encompasses the monastery where the Maronite Catholic priest, monk, and hermit lived for nearly 20 years, receives around 4 million visitors a year, including both Christians and Muslims. Matar, who is responsible for archiving the thousands of medically-verified healings attributed to the intercession of the Maronite priest-monk, said that many miraculous cures have been obtained by Muslims.

Since 1950, the year the monastery began to formally record the miraculous healings, they have archived more than 29,000 miracles, Matar said. Prior to 1950, miracles were verified only through the witness of a priest. Now, with more advanced medical technology available, alleged miracles require medical documents demonstrating the person’s initial illness and later, their unexplainable

One of the miracles documented by Matar at the end of December, when he spoke to CNA, was that of a 45-year-old Italian woman. Suffering from a neurological disease, she was hospitalized after it was discovered she had tried to commit suicide by consuming acid. In the hospital, the doctors discovered that the damage to her esophagus and intestines was so extensive, “the last way possible to cure her was believing in God and praying,” Matar commented. The woman’s parents began to pray, inviting others to pray with them. A religious sister of the Maronite rite heard about the prayer request and gave them holy oil from St. Charbel. After they spread the oil on the suffering woman’s stomach, chest, and head, she was cured. This was just one of seven miracles archived in December, Matar said, calling each one “a phenomenon.”

“St. Charbel is a tool to reach God,” he said. The Shrine of St. Charbel is composed of the Monastery of St. Maron, where the saint lived for 19 years with great devotion to prayer, manual labor, and contemplative silence; and the nearby hermitage where he lived a rigorous asceticism and profound union with God for the last 23 years of his life. At the monastery, pilgrims can visit a church built in 1840, a small museum with artifacts and relics from the saint, and the site of his first grave. St. Charbel’s tomb, since 1952, is located inside a special cave-like chapel built into the property. Even while he was alive, Charbel’s superiors observed God’s “supernatural power” at work in his life, and even some Muslims knew him as a wonder-worker. Deeply devoted to God’s Eucharistic presence, he suffered a stroke while celebrating the Divine Liturgy of the Maronite Catholic Church on December 16, 1898, dying on Christmas Eve of that year. He was canonized in 1977 by St. Pope Paul VI.

Who Is MacKenzie Bezos?

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By Jonah Engel Bromwich and Alexandra Alter -- nytimes.com -- -- In her 25 years of marriage to Jeff Bezos, MacKenzie Bezos has been a loyal ambassador for Amazon, the company that made her and her husband the richest couple in the world. She was an integral part of its origin story, driving to Seattle in 1994 while Mr. Bezos sat in the passenger seat, working on the nascent company’s business plan. She was Amazon’s first accountant and was involved in its transformation from a small online bookseller to the e-commerce behemoth it is today, the second company in American history to be valued at over a trillion dollars. Ms. Bezos, 48, is a novelist. But Amazon has defined her public image almost wholly. The announcement this week that she and her husband would be getting a divorce may soon change that. A statement signed “Jeff & MacKenzie,” which was first posted to Mr. Bezos’s Twitter account, read: “After a period of loving exploration and trial separation, we have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends.” The couple, who have four children, wrote that they see “wonderful futures ahead, as parents, friends, partners in ventures and projects, and as individuals pursuing ventures and adventures.”

Over the last few decades, as Amazon grew, Ms. Bezos appeared with her husband at some high-profile events, including Vanity Fair’s Oscar parties and the Golden Globes; in 2012, she was a host of the Met Gala. (Amazon also underwrote the event.) But for the most part, Ms. Bezos has guarded her privacy, preferring to focus on writing and her children. She could not be reached for comment on this article. She has made infrequent forays into the public eye to promote her books and to defend her husband’s company. In 2013, she posted a scathing one-star review on Amazon of “The Everything Store,” a book about Amazon by Brad Stone, to say it was plagued by “numerous factual inaccuracies” and “full of techniques which stretch the boundaries of non-fiction.” (Mr. Stone is a veteran technology reporter. Michiko Kakutani, reviewing his book for The New York Times, said he told “this story of disruptive innovation with authority and verve, and lots of well-informed reporting.”) Little is known about Ms. Bezos, a private woman who may be awarded one of the largest divorce settlements to date. “The Book Worm” MacKenzie Tuttle, an aspiring novelist, met her husband at D. E. Shaw, a New York hedge fund where Mr. Bezos, a computer scientist by training, had become a senior vice president. She told Vogue that she took the position of administrative assistant to pay the bills while she worked on her novels, but she soon found herself enamored with the laugh of the man who worked in the next office over. As Ms. Bezos put it in a 2013 interview with Charlie Rose: “It was love at first listen.”

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Machine learning provides insight into the human brain

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by physicsworld.com --A research collaboration headed up at the National University of Singapore (NUS) has successfully employed machine learning to investigate the cellular architecture of the human brain. The approach uses functional MRI (fMRI) data to automatically estimate brain parameters, enabling neuroscientists to infer the cellular properties of different brain regions without having to surgically probe the brain. The researchers say that their technique could potentially be used to assess treatment of neurological disorders or develop new therapies (Science Advances 10.1126/sciadv.aat7854). “The underlying pathways of many diseases occur at the cellular level, and many pharmaceuticals operate at the microscale level,” explains team leader Thomas Yeo. “To know what really happens at the innermost levels of the human brain, it is crucial for us to develop methods that can delve into the depths of the brain non-invasively.” Currently, most human brain studies employ non-invasive approaches such as MRI, which limits examination of the brain at a cellular level. To bridge this gap between non-invasive imaging and cellular insight, researchers around the world have used biophysical brain models to simulate brain activity. However, many of these models rely on overly simplistic assumptions, such as assuming that all brain regions have the same cellular properties, which is known to be incorrect.

Yeo and his team, working with researchers from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Universitat Barcelona and UMC Utrecht, analysed imaging data from 452 participants of the Human Connectome Project. In contrast to previous modelling work, they allowed each brain region to have distinct cellular properties and exploited machine learning algorithms to automatically estimate the model parameters. “Our approach achieves a much better fit with real data,” says first author Peng Wang. “Furthermore, we discovered that the micro-scale model parameters estimated by the machine learning algorithm reflect how the brain processes information.”

The researchers found that brain regions involved in sensory perception, such as vision, hearing and touch, exhibited cellular properties opposite to those from brain regions involved in internal thought and memories. The spatial pattern of the human brain’s cellular architecture closely reflects how the brain hierarchically processes information from the surroundings. This form of hierarchical processing is a key feature of both the human brain and recent advances in artificial intelligence. “Our study suggests that the processing hierarchy of the brain is supported by micro-scale differentiation among its regions, which may provide further clues for breakthroughs in artificial intelligence,” says Yeo. Moving forward, the NUS researchers plan to apply their approach to examine the brain data of individual participants, to better understand how individual variation in the brain’s cellular architecture may relate to differences in cognitive abilities. They hope that these latest results will provide a step towards the development of individualized treatment plans with specific drugs or brain stimulation strategies.

Lebanese director’s film scores a BAFTA nomination

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middleeastmonitor.com --Congratulations are in order for Nadine Labaki. It’s been announced that the Lebanese director’s Capharnaüm is up for another prestigious award. The politically-charged film, which already took home the Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize, has just been nominated for the Best Film Not in the English Language at the 2019 BAFTA Awards, set to take place on February 10, 2019. Capharnaüm will compete against films including Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma, Hirokazu Koreeda’s Shoplifters, Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War, and Marcello Fonte’s Dogman. Congratulations are in order for Nadine Labaki. It’s been announced that the Lebanese director’s Capharnaüm is up for another prestigious award. The politically-charged film, which already took home the Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize, has just been nominated for the Best Film Not in the English Language at the 2019 BAFTA Awards, set to take place on February 10, 2019.

Capharnaüm will compete against films including Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma, Hirokazu Koreeda’s Shoplifters, Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War, and Marcello Fonte’s Dogman. “And another one!” wrote Labaki on Instagram. “We’re extremely proud to announce that #Capharnaum is nominated for a @BAFTA for Best Foreign Language Film! Thank you from the bottom of our hearts to the British Academy of Film and Television Arts for such an immense honor.” The nomination marks Labaki’s first-ever nod for a BAFTA Award. It’s also Lebanon’s first nomination. In fact, Labaki is the third Arab director to ever be recognized at the annual BAFTA ceremony, alongside Morocco’s Ismaël Ferroukhi who earned a nomination for Le Grand Voyage in 2005, and Saudi filmmaker Haifaa Al-Mansour, who received a nod for Wadjda in 2013.

Capharnaüm tells the story of a neglected 12-year-old boy in Beirut, who takes his parents to court for giving him life in a world of pain and suffering. It received a 15-minute standing ovation following its premiere at Cannes in May. Labaki, who made her directorial debut with 2007’s critically acclaimed Caramel (in which she also played the lead role), is also hotly tipped to enter the Oscars race with Capharnaüm, with nominations set to be announced on January 22. “Making movies is what I’m good at,” the director told Vogue Arabia during her cover interview this October. “Cinema is the means through which I can best express myself. I use it to limit the effects of the destruction all around us and to assume my responsibility as a member of this society but also as an artist. I believe equally in the importance of the artist’s commitment to defend her society’s causes as I believe in cinema’s ability to effect change.” The politically-charged film has so far received nominations for the Golden Globe Awards (it lost to Roma) and the Critics’ Choice Awards, set to take place on Sunday, January 13, 2019.