I saw this picture while reading the news on today’s bomb threat at Barja school. It’s pretty cool that we have such anti-terrorism units. With everything that goes on in Lebanon, it would be awesome if someone came up with a new Lebanese series on the missions those special units perform.

I am sure it will do better than those silly drama series they keep coming up with.

Nahr el Bared battle would make a whole season.

I thought people like Mike Feghali come up with predictions only. I wasn’t aware they express their own opinions as well.

Put aside who he wants to hang and why, how come this guy is allowed to go on TV and incite killing of human beings? Is that allowed by the Lebanese law?

You can check out his whole interview [Here].

No offense to the Daily Star, but I counted at least 4 images out of the 19 related to non-Lebanese, with 3 of them describing the same event. Not that I mind but I am sure there were more Lebanon-related events worthy mentioning in a “Lebanon Pictures of 2011″ album.

Also, it wouldn’t harm if they added more joyful pictures as Lebanon had a relatively calm and bomb-free assassination-free year for a change.

Check the rest of the pictures [Here].

I was reading an article on Israel’s plans to build a 1-kilometer security wall along the border of its northernmost village with Lebanon to prevent potential clashes in the area, and I thought to myself:

What’s so wrong about building a wall or fences all across our borders while keeping the exiting border gates? It’s not like we want to prevent our neighbors from coming in, but it wouldn’t harm if we were in control of our borders and prevented illegal entries, specially with everything that’s going on now.

Alongside the security risks, the prime goal of such a step would be to limit the economic damages this open-borders policy has been causing due to illegal traffic of products. Of course, no changes will be made to the transit rules with our Arab neighboring countries.

I don’t believe it would harm anyone if we knew who’s coming in and out of the country. We have 375 kilometers of borders with Syria and 79 kilometers with Israel.

I love the pictures naharnet uses for its stories -_-

I was surprised to read about “phenomenal growth” and “Beirut Port among the the world’s biggest 100 international ports” in the DailyStar, especially when I’ve been hearing the complete opposite from business owners and economic reports.

Here are few excerpts from the DailyStar article:

Zakhour expressed high optimism about the growth prospects in the port’s operations saying that its business is being propelled by massive growth in transshipment that exceeded 27 percent in the first 10 months of 2011 alone, contributing some 405,000 containers.

The turmoil in neighboring Syria would not negatively affect the port, he added, but in fact may well contribute to increasing its activities.

I don’t know who Elie Zakhour, head of the Beirut International Chamber of Navigation, is trying to fool by these numbers as they are inaccurate. It’s good to be optimistic but it’s better if he gives the whole image to the Lebanese.

Here’s an excerpt of Lebanon’s Economic Report for Q3 2011 prepared by Bank Audi, in regards to Beirut Port activity:

The number of containers at the Beirut Port, another important indicator of trade activity, decreased by a yearly 4.1% to attain 439,220 containers in the first nine months of this year. The mentioned number of containers encompasses all incoming and outgoing containers at the Port, but not transshipments. As a matter of fact, the latter totaled 329,162 containers, up by 22%. However, the number of ships that used the Port of Beirut during the first nine months of 2011 declined by 5.8% and amounted to 1,648. As for revenues generated by the Port, they reached US$ 119.2 million during the first nine months of 2011, depicting a yearly 5.2% decline relative to the same period of 2010.

Fransabank, another prominent Lebanese bank, published very similar stats to Bank Audi’s report. You can check it [Here].

As you can see, Beirut Port’s activity has slowed down and revenues are down, despite a surge in transshipments mainly due to the situation in Syria. All in all, Beirut Port is not doing that bad in spite of the recent events in the Arab world and the economic recession in Europe, but its growth has slowed down when compared to last year.

[Part1] [Part2]

Every year I hear about new Michel Hayek stupid predictions, I remember this awesome La Youmal video.

Check out this really cool round-up of the top 10 of everything in 2011 by Time. [Link]

For a nice round-up of the top 10 non political Lebanese blog stories of 2011, click [Here].