WITH just weeks to go, it’s still too close to call. I’m talking of course about the US presidential election. If the latest polls are anything to go by, then Kamala Harris would certainly still seem to have the edge – just.
DATES matter, especially in the Middle East. Tomorrow, October 7, is a point in case.
TO many people the words “Hezbollah” and “Iran” are synonymous. There’s good reason for this of course, given that the Lebanese Shia Islamist political party and paramilitary group is seen as Tehran’s proxy and wouldn’t exist without its backing, financial support, weapons supplies and military training ...
IT was the summer of 2006 and barely days into the war between Israel and Hezbollah. One afternoon, along with a handful of other reporters, I found myself running the gauntlet of Israeli naval bombardment and airstrikes on the road leading into the coastal city of Tyre in southern Lebanon.
IT’S a prospect that doesn’t bear thinking about, but one that many ordinary Lebanese know is a serious possibility. United Nations secretary-general Antonio Guterres knows it too, that much he made clear this week.
EVEN by the exacting standards of the Middle East’s capacity for volatility and unpredictability, this past week’s turn of events has been extraordinary ...
‘THERE is no truth in Beirut, only versions.”
HOW many times now have we heard the term used when it comes to the war in Ukraine? “Red lines” as they are dubbed, have become part of the diplomatic parlance of this conflict with both Russia, Ukraine and its Western allies on so many occasions finger-wagging warnings about the consequences of crossing them.
IN these days of the ubiquitous online “expert” and politicians’ platitudes, an old friend of mine frequently resorts to a familiar refrain in response. The jocular Latin version goes along the lines of “excrementum vincit cerebellum” or to put it more plainly, “bullshit baffles brains”.
IT’S not often these days that you see a smiling, relaxed Vladimir Putin...
