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Lebanese Minister Says ‘Definitely’ No Plans to Restructure Debt

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by Donna-Abu-Nasr -- bloomberg -- Lebanon’s caretaker economy minister said there are no plans to restructure debt after the finance minister was quoted as saying the move was being studied. “There’s definitely no restructuring for debt,” Raed Khoury said Thursday in a phone interview. “Bondholders and depositors are extremely safe.” Lebanese dollar bonds due 2028 plummeted after Al-Akhbar newspaper cited Finance Minister Ali Hasan Khalil as saying planned fiscal reforms include a debt overhaul. Yields jumped the most since the notes were issued in 2015. The minister didn’t immediately respond to questions sent by Bloomberg.

Caretaker Deputy Prime Minister Ghassan Hasbani also said he isn’t aware of any “tangible potential decisions” to restructure the country’s debt. "These are merely thoughts, but they require a full cabinet discussion and agreement around the budget," Hasbani said. "No one should be reacting to individual ideas before they even get translated into comprehensive plans” that will need cabinet approval, he said.

Political turmoil and sluggish economic growth are prompting questions on how long Lebanon can avoid a financial meltdown that would further destabilize an area rattled by war in Syria and tension between Israel and Hezbollah. Lebanon is one of the world’s most indebted countries, with the debt to output issue at 153 percent in 2018. "There is no need for panic,” Khoury said. “The government is committed to pay its debt forever and not only for this year. It has the means to do that.” Khoury also said: "The ballooning of the debt definitely is something unhealthy and it’s a great pressure on our budget" "The servicing of the debt is becoming more than a third of the government budget” "The central bank has enough money to defend the Lebanese pound on one hand, and it has enough foreign reserves to give any bank in Lebanon which needs any liquidity in the future. This means our monetary system is controlled and it is safe" “We have to rethink our trade policies and agreements because what’s giving us a burden on our economy is the trade deficit. It’s about $16 billion-$17 billion negative” “The finance minister didn’t mean to cause panic and his words can be interpreted in different ways”

Lebanese Speaker Proposes Postponing Arab Economic Summit in Beirut

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by aawsat.com -- Lebanese parliament Speaker Nabih Berri proposed on Wednesday the postponement of the upcoming Arab League economic summit in Beirut later this month because of Lebanon’s ongoing failure to form a new government. Berri also asserted "again the necessity of having Syria participate in such a summit", lawmakers from his parliamentary bloc quoted him as saying at a meeting. The Arab League suspended Syria's membership seven years ago after the government crackdown on mass protests against regime leader Bashar Assad. Some Arab states, including ones that had backed opposition factions, are now seeking to reconcile with Assad's state, which has recovered most of the country with Russian and Iranian help, reported Reuters. Last month, the United Arab Emirates re-opened its embassy in Damascus and Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir became the first Arab head of state to visit since the conflict began. For Syria to be reinstated, the League must reach a consensus. Egypt's foreign minister Sameh Shoukry said on Tuesday Damascus must take several steps before it can return to the League, including making political progress in defunct UN peace talks. "When this happens, we can talk about the matter. At this time, there is nothing new qualifying it," he said.

Assad's Lebanese allies, including Berri and Iran-backed Hezbollah fighting alongside the Syrian regime, have ramped up calls for Syria to join the summit. The issue remains very divisive in Lebanon with many blocs opposing the normalization of ties with Damascus. The Lebanese presidency seemed to be pressing ahead with plans to host the summit in Beirut, inviting journalists on Wednesday to apply for accreditation in time. The lack of a government has caused particular concern because Lebanon faces both structural economic problems and regional instability. The International Monetary Fund has stressed the importance of Lebanon putting its debt on a sustainable footing, while bond yields and the cost of insuring against Lebanese sovereign debt have shown signs of stress in recent months.

Experts’ take on Lebanese economic problems

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By Tina Abou Rizk (Jounieh) bytheeast.com -- -- In order to deal with its economic problems, Lebanon needs to first address corruption and the lack of transparency, think the leading economists following a “damning report” of McKinsey. The said report, released by the “Ministry of Economy”, fills “1,200” pages warning the government of a “crippling political stalemate” grip, whereby claiming an economic collapse in the country. Amid the economic problems in Lebanon, one particular figure causes disturbance, whereby revealing that the Lebanese spend an extra 50% time than what’s “needed on congested roads”, while only fifteen percent of the roads are “in good condition”. Furthermore, the report also mentions that the Lebanese infrastructure is ranked “113th out of 137 countries”. The Head of External Relations at the “Dubai International Financial Center” as well as the ex-chief economist, Dr. Nasser Saidi stated: “These numbers come from a variety of sources like the World Bank and others, so these have been assessed by various international parties”. “What’s more important is the cost of this in terms of productivity and income, because when you spend time on the road you aren’t producing anything, so congestion costs are very large in terms of both loss of business opportunities, lost income and lost productivity.”

However, economic problems are also linked with the country’s electricity quality, for Lebanon stands as the “world’s fourth-worst quality of electricity”, as a fellow associate from the “Chatham House”, Nadim Shehadi, said: “Electricity in Lebanon is just more expensive, but everyone has 24-hour electricity if they can afford it”. “If you measure electricity supply by state provision then it’s the worst in the world, but if you measure it by what’s available to people, it’s not so bad. There are sometimes indicators that have to take into account the fact that Lebanon is a mixture of private sector, illegal activity and government sector, and sometimes illegal activity compensates for the government sector.”

Why Big Data And Machine Learning Are Important In Our Society

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by Terence Mills, forbes.com -- The singularity is near, or maybe we're already in it. Whatever the case is, machine learning and big data will have a tremendous influence on our society. The machine minds are coming online, and you had better learn to adapt if you want to succeed. But what are big data and machine learning? Keep reading to find out.

Big Data And Machine Learning

Computers have certain capacities. They have a memory to store information. They have computational power, with some machines performing more "flops" per second than others. What happens when these machines face such a large amount of data that traditional techniques of analysis start to fail? That's the world of big data, and it's a world we're living in now.

The Last Polymath

Thomas Young was a physicist who lived from 1773-1829 in London. According to Andrew Robinson in his book The Last Man Who Knew Everything, Young was the world's last true polymath. You might be a smart person, but we know in our modern world that you have to be a specialist to survive. No one is a jack-of-all-trades anymore.The world has become too complex for humans to even try to know everything. That's what big data is: It's the realization that there exist piles of data where traditional human methods of analysis fail. The world is too complicated for the human mind to make sense of every part of it. This presents a serious challenge and a tremendous opportunity for enterprising people who can apply automate techniques to help solve problems. A simple example is the stock market. You can look at all sorts of information about the stock market, and once in a while you might come up with a good trade, but you can't possibly keep up with computerized trading platforms that execute thousands of trades per second. It's just too much information for your mind to process. You need a computerized solution to take in all the information that is relevant to the problem.

Why Is Machine Learning Important?

Donald Trump's daughter is Instagram official with her Lebanese boyfriend

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by emirateswoman.com --American President, Donald Trump’s youngest daughter Tiffany Trump, just made her relationship with billionaire Michael Boulos Instagram official. The first daughter posted a throwback picture of her and her boyfriend in the Red Room at the White house. Michael’s family is originally Lebanese, but he was born in Lagos, Nigeria and attended an elite international school in the nation’s largest city. He is the heir of multibillion-dollar Nigerian conglomerate Boulos Enterprises, which trades in vehicles, equipment, retail, and construction. Michael moved from Nigeria to London to complete his undergraduate degree, but he regularly visits Lebanon with his family every summer. His father, Massad Boulos, even ran for the Lebanese parliamentary elections in 2018 before withdrawing his nomination.

Scarlett Johansson: Deepfake pornographers prey on the vulnerable

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Scarlett Johannson. Credit: Georges Biard/Wikimedia CC BY SA 3.0

Denver, Colo., (CNA).- In a 25-year film career, Scarlett Johansson has portrayed a cartoon mermaid princess, a comic book superhero, an Indian python, and a punk-rock porcupine. She has not portrayed a porn star. Nevertheless, her image has been digitally-generated in dozens of “deepfake” pornographic videos, which have been viewed more than 1 million times. The actress said recently there is no way to fight back, and that online pornographers prey on the vulnerable for profit. “The Internet is just another place where sex sells and vulnerable people are preyed upon,” Johansson told the Washington Post Dec. 30. “Nothing can stop someone from cutting and pasting my image or anyone else’s onto a different body and making it look as eerily realistic as desired.” Johansson has been the victim of digital technology that digitally replaces the faces of pornographic actors with those of celebrities, creating synthetic but convincing videos in which the digitally imposed person appears to be engaging in pornographic sexual acts. One program, FakeApp, is freely available to download and does not require programming skills; it can be used by anyone with the kind of computer capable of running detailed video games.

Bluefin tuna goes for $3 million

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A 278kg (612lbs) bluefin tuna sold Saturday for more than $3 million in an auction at Japan’s most famous fish market. The winning bidder, Kiyoshi Kimura, who owns a chain of sushi restaurants known as Sushi Zanmai, admitted that he paid five times more than he expected for the high-quality fish. The bluefin tuna is an endangered species. Sushi wholesalers and merchants usually pay top prices for the best catch at the market’s first auction of the new year to generate publicity.