The United States has delivered six ScanEagle unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) as part of a military assistance programme, the US Embassy in Beirut announced on 2 April.
"Orient XXI is neither a daily news website nor an academic organ reserved for specialists. We want it to be ‘in-between’, aimed at a large and varied public interested in the region for many different reasons – at students as much as people with relatives or friends on the other shore, at men and women involved on a daily basis in the countless economic, cultural, and interpersonal networks linking North and South."
The recent establishment of a Private University Professors’ Union is the first step toward helping instructors in the vital private-education sector achieve benefits and other demands, but reaching that ultimate goal will likely be long and arduous.
In June this year the World Bank published a report, Benchmarking Governance as a Tool for Promoting Change: 100 Universities in MENA Paving the Way, which measures the governance structures of 100 universities in the Middle East and North Africa, or Mena, region. Public and private higher education institutions in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq were surveyed.
The announced defeat of the Syrian rebellion and the Islamic State is favoring the extension of Iranian influence in the Levant. The Iranian corridor between Beirut and Tehran via Baghdad and Damascus is now a reality. Territorial continuity was achieved symbolically at the end of May 2017, when Iranian-funded Shia militias joined on both sides of the Syrian-Iraqi border north of al-Tanf. In Iraq, Iranian allies Syria and Lebanon dominate; people support them out of fear, default, or sympathy. If the West wants to fight against the Islamic Republic's influence in the Levant, it must understand the root causes pushing more and more Lebanese Christians, Iraqi Shiites, and Syrian Sunni Arabs into the Iranian camp.
In the ongoing debate about fake press images Austrian Broadcasting Corporation writes that in the current conflict in Lebanon the iconography (of press photos) is similar to the ones of war press coverage in the past. I couldn't disagree more.