Blogs & Ecology

“It’s exciting that I can finally see the Maps of Lebanon, even the small village where I live got a label!” notes Elie El Khoury about Google Maps adding Lebanese maps with labels.

“Valet dude takes the car and parks it 2 meters away, they don't even let you park it yourself in some restaurants, they confiscate all parking spots by placing these yellow thingies, either you have to go park it back in your house or give it to them,” explains Liliane about the Lebanese laziness and dependency on valet parking.

“Mathematics is extracted from the physical world but refined by the human mind and then employed in the physical world in ways that are useful to the physical world … Mathematics lies in the human brain,” writes Lebanese Inner Circle, quoting Sir Michael F. Atiyah, renowned mathematician and Abel prize winner, in a post about Atiyah's lecture at the American University of Beirut.

“In the past, they see their glorious history, as it was them who made the Great Arab Revolt and fought the colonialist over centuries, and provided the revolutionaries with weapons wherever they were present. In the present, they only see marginalization and dependency,” notes Prof Rami Zurayk about the Bedouins of Lebanon.

“Fruit isn’t sectarian: there are no Maronite oranges, or Druze pears. So I can just see how fruit would have been a happy, happy choice for the Lebanese post office,” writes Diamond in Sunlight in the second of three posts about Lebanese stamps (post 1 and post 3), images included.

“It’s becoming more like an annual ritual here! The ministry of transport and public works is as usual unprepared and obviously has been dealing with bad subcontractors,” writes Rami in this post with photos of the terrible traffic jams and flooding that followed the rain in Beirut.

Blacksmiths of Lebanon updates us on the security situation in Lebanon in this post entitled Saturday Security Briefs.

It's been a year since the first Palestinian refugees were allowed to return to the Nahr al-Bared camp in Lebanon. Palestinian Haitham Sabbah has an update and videos in this post.

Reflecting on the meanings of Arabic names, A Diamond's Eye View of the World shares this list of the names of mostly Lebanese personalities - and how their names translate into English.

Arabs and Globalisation reports: ‘Just like the Greeks did, when they sued French dairy farms (and won) for using the word “Feta” to describe the cheese they sold, Lebanon is gearing up its own litigation forces to sue Israeli companies over marketing Hummus, Falafel, and Babaghanouj as “Israeli products.”‘

A Diamond's Eye View of the World, an American who lives/lived in Lebanon, draws our attention to Lumeta’s Internet mapping project, which “includes this lyrical (okay, slightly alien-looking) map of Internet usage in the Middle East.”

Forty five days after the first bombing of a bus transporting army soldiers in Lebanon, another bomb exploded in Tripoli today, killing at least four soldiers and wounding over 20 people.  The initial report indicates that the bomb was planted in a car targeting a bus carrying army soldiers in the city north of Lebanon.

A remote control car bomb ripped through a military bus this morning killing four soldiers and a civilian in the northern city of Tripoli, Lebanon. Today’s bombing is the second deadly attack targeting troops in northern Lebanon in less than two months. Twenty five other people were injured in the blast, which tossed the car a few meters from the blast site during morning rush hour. This attack follows the deadly attack on the Lebanese army that took place on August 13, 2008. During the August 13 attack, 18 soldiers and civilians were killed by a roadside bomb near a bus carrying troops on a busy Tripoli street.

Homosexuality is one of the topics you would find on the black list of any Middle East government and almost in all of its societies and cultures. And while the presence of homosexuality can be spotted in every country in the region, governments and societies are still intolerant to such life style. Intolerance can even reach a point of denial as it was witnessed during Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinajad’s speech at Columbia University in 2007.

While the people in Lebanon were under the impression that the latest negotiations between the leading political groups might translate into a glimpse of a brighter and calmer days to come, two people were killed and four injured in a clash between two rival Christian parties in Bsarma village in Koura, north Lebanon.