LCCC ENGLISH DAILY NEWS BULLETIN

Bible Of the Day
Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint Matthew 18,15-20.
If your brother sins (against you), go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have won over your brother. If he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, so that 'every fact may be established on the testimony of two or three witnesses.' If he refuses to listen to them, tell the church. If he refuses to listen even to the church, then treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector. Amen, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again, (amen,) I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything for which they are to pray, it shall be granted to them by my heavenly Father. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them."

Will Israel ignore calls for an international probe into its deadly raid?

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Lebanon-Syria Summit 2 Days ahead of National Dialogue
Naharnet/President Michel Suleiman said he will hold summit talks with Syrian President Bashar Assad in Damascus on June 15, only two days ahead of a new round of all-party national talks. Suleiman on Monday told Cabinet ministers of his desire to visit Damascus next week at the head of a ministerial delegation. Cabinet sources told the daily An-Nahar on Tuesday that the visit will not change the path of ongoing work between the two governments. Beirut, 08 Jun 10, 10:03

Hariri to Meet Mubarak Tuesday, Heads to Turkey Thursday
Naharnet/Prime Minister Saad Hariri travels to Cairo on Tuesday for talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak following a trip to Washington late last month.
Hariri will return to Beirut on Tuesday afternoon. On Thursday, the premier will travel to Istanbul for talks with top Turkish officials. Beirut, 08 Jun 10, 07:50

Cabinet Ministers Khalife, Nahhas Fight on South Council
Naharnet/An unexpected wrangle has developed during Monday's Cabinet meeting between Telecommunications Minister Charbel Nahhas and Health Minister Mohammed Jawad Khalife over the Council for the South. The 2010 state budget was the main topic of debate. Cabinet will convene again on Tuesday in a bid to finalize the draft budget. The verbal dispute broke out when Nahhas said that the operational budget of the Council for the South should be accounted for in the 2010 draft budget. Health Minister Mohammed Jawad Khalife on Tuesday said Nahas suggested that the South Council becomes part of a comprehensive budget plan. "This is contrary to normal institutional practices," Khalife argued. "Normally the competent minister makes suggestions and the rest of the ministers vote," he explained. State Minister Jean Oghassabian, for his part, stressed that all the barriers facing the finance ministry have been removed. "All obstacles facing the finance ministry have been removed paving way for the approval of the remaining budget clauses," Oghassabian told the Voice of Lebanon radio on Tuesday. An-Nahar newspaper on Tuesday said agreement was reached to abide by further transparency in dealing with expenditure matters within the state budget.Beirut, 08 Jun 10, 09:01

Report: Gunmen Demand $4 Million after Storming Zein al-Atat's Home
Naharnet/Unknown assailants have stormed the home of herbal expert Zein al-Atat in eastern Lebanon, asking his father and brother to provide them with $4 million within 24 hours, al-Akhbar daily reported Tuesday. The newspaper quoted a security official as saying that the incident took place in the Bekaa town of Talya at dawn Sunday. "After the gunmen left the house, they opened fire at it, damaging a car parked outside," the official said. One of the neighbors told al-Akhbar that al-Atat family had received threatening phone calls to secure the money within the deadline. The neighbor said that despite the proximity of the house to the Talya police station and a Lebanese army checkpoint, "security presence was marginal" after the incident. Security forces opened an investigation into the assault, al-Akhbar said. Beirut, 08 Jun 10, 09:47

Geagea about Jumblat: We Still Have Same Political Views
Naharnet/Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea has reportedly said that Progressive Socialist Party chief Walid Jumblat didn't completely fall out of the March 14 forces. "MP Walid Jumblat didn't politically distance himself much from us, and his latest TV appearance confirms that," Ad-Diyar daily quoted Geagea as saying about the Druze leader. The LF chief reportedly said that Jumblat still had the same March 14 views in terms of the resistance, ties with Iran and continued contacts with Saudi Arabia. According to Geagea, the most important statement that the PSP leader made on Marcel Ghanem's Kalam al-Nas talk show last Thursday was not to give Israel any excuse to carry out a new aggression on Lebanon.
Beirut, 08 Jun 10, 09:05

Ahmadinejad: No Talks on Nuclear Issue if Sanctioned
Naharnet/Iran will not agree to talks on its nuclear program if the U.N. Security Council adopts fresh sanctions, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday.
"I have said that the U.S. government and its allies are so mistaken that if they think they can brandish the stick of resolution and then sit down to talk with us, such a thing will not happen," the Iranian leader told a news conference in Istanbul. "We will talk to everyone if there is respect and fairness but if someone wants to talk to us rudely and in a domineering manner the response is known already," he added. His warning came as the U.N. Security Council prepared to hold new closed-door consultations Tuesday on a fourth sanctions resolution against the Islamic Republic after its 15 members failed to reach a consensus on a meeting on Monday. The council's five council permanent members -- Britain, France, China, Russia and the United States -- are co-sponsoring the sanctions draft and are aiming to hold a vote later this week. Ahmadinejad, who is in Turkey for the summit of an Asian security grouping, urged Western powers not to dismiss a nuclear fuel swap deal brokered by Turkey and Brazil last month. The deal "was an opportunity for the U.S. government and its allies...I hope they will put this to good use. Opportunities will not be repeated," he said. The United States and other world powers have given a cool reaction to the deal under which Iran agreed to ship 1,200 kilograms (2,640 pounds) of its low-enriched uranium to Turkey in return for high-enriched uranium fuel for a Tehran reactor.(AFP) Beirut, 08 Jun 10, 10:25

Erdogan makes turkeys of the Arabs
Tony Badran , June 8, 2010
Now Lebanon/
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan (L) visits an activist who was injured during the flotilla raid in a hospital in Ankara on June 3, 2010. (AFP photo)
As the dust begins settling after the Gaza flotilla affair, it has become increasingly clear that Turkey�s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) resorted in a premeditated way to populist demagoguery during the episode in order to serve narrower political goals.
Populism in the Arab world is second nature and despite its disastrous track record, it never seems to go out of fashion. Non-Arab regional players like Iran have understood this and have cynically used populism to their advantage. And so, when Turkey�s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, declared recently that Gaza �is a historical cause for us,� one could be forgiven for snickering.
Since its rise to power in 2002, the AKP has steadily and systematically sought to marginalize its domestic opponents and secure total control over all power centers in Turkey. Just before the flotilla fiasco, a poll was released showing that the AKP had lost ground to its rival, the Republican People�s Party (CHP). Erdogan exaggerated when he described Gaza as a �historical cause,� but he calculated that the confrontation there would be a perfect instrument to whip up Islamic and nationalist fervor to his party�s benefit.
Turkey is going through an identity crisis. Erdogan has all but demolished the legitimacy of the Kemalist state. And yet the state�s remaining secularist framework makes it very difficult to locate that legitimacy in Islam, the public and political uses of which are constrained by the constitution. Erdogan has had to walk a fine line in redefining Turkish frames of reference and political identity. The AKP seeks to restore as much of a pan-Islamic framework as possible, and foreign policy offers ways of bypassing domestic constraints. It is perhaps in that light that Erdogan�s peculiar emphasis that Turkey is not a �nation of tribes� and not a �rootless adolescent country� should be read. What was outwardly a crisis with Israel may in fact be a domestic Turkish affair through and through.
If Turkey is in an identity crisis, the predicament of the Arabs is no less flagrant and fundamental. What the flotilla episode reaffirmed was the ease with which the Arabs can be used as instruments for the projection of power by the region�s non-Arab powers and traditional centers of regional influence, such as Turkey and Iran.
There was something deliciously ironic in seeing two pillars of Arab nationalism sinking off the shores of Gaza. At the heart of the romantic Arab nationalist narrative was the notion that the Arabs � united by an Arab identity � were burning with a desire to emancipate themselves from the Turkish yoke. Palestine later became the center of this Arab tale. The struggle against the Turks was featured in history books, and for years Arab popular culture highlighted Turkish brutality in television series and the like. Now, effortlessly, the Turks have become champions of the Arabs and of their mythical �central cause.�
This not only has highlighted the shallowness of the Arab nationalist narrative, it also, at least conceptually, has appeared to restore what for centuries was the natural order of politics in the region, which Arab nationalism was supposed to alter but did not. Take Syria for example. The Syrians are giddy at the prospect of being drafted back into a resurgent Turkish realm. Little wonder. Syria�s historical role is to function as a buffer state for powers to the north, east and south.
The appeal of sectarianism also puts the lie to Arab nationalism�s supposed secularism. As Turkey seeks to paint itself as Hamas� patron, some Arab states have reasoned that this represents a Sunni counterweight to Iran�s patronage of the Islamist group. But while such transnationalism finds assets in the fractured Levant, it creates problems for established states, namely Egypt, bordering Gaza, where the recent political developments played out. As much as Israel, Egypt finds itself a target of this Turkish resurgence � not to mention Iran�s. It was only fitting that we were reminded the other day by Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah of the need for the ideas and values (such as �the culture of resistance�) of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini�s Islamic Revolution to be spread throughout the Arab and Islamic states. This also happened to follow Nasrallah�s hint of an operational capacity in the Red Sea. Just as Iran�s Islamic Revolution was expansionist by definition, the AKP�s �neo-Ottomanism� also posits a Turkish-dominated realm. As the potential for Iranian-Turkish competition grows and the Levant once again assumes its historical function as a contested space between more powerful nations vying for regional influence, the Arab states are becoming ever more secondary, their populations easily manipulated by regional populist leaders like Erdogan.
**Tony Badran is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Will Israel ignore calls for an international probe into its deadly raid?
June 8, 2010 /Now Lebanon/Israel plans to hold internal probes of its deadly raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla that would fall far short of calls for an international inquiry into last week�s commando operation that triggered international outrage after nine activists were killed in the raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla. The probes will look exclusively into the legality of Israel's naval blockade of Gaza and the May 31 raid that sought to break it, Israeli minister without portfolio Benny Begin told public radio on Tuesday. Israeli media criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for restricting the probe's mandate to theoretical legal questions. "It is not supposed to investigate whether the blockade policy as a whole is either effective or justified... And that is the recipe by means of which the government is trying to ensure the failure of the investigation into the flotilla events," Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot said on Tuesday. Defense Minister Ehud Barak has made it clear that the commandos who carried out the deadly raid should not be put on the stand. "I insist that the combatants, who carried out a task that we imposed on them and who had to make decisions in split seconds about whether to pull the trigger without taking legal considerations into account, not be questioned," he said. Israel is reportedly considering a team made up of Israeli jurists and former diplomats as well as two foreign observers.
The decision taken by senior ministers still has to be ratified by the full cabinet. -AFP/ NOW Lebanon

White House Press Legend, who is Daughter of Lebanese Immigrants, Quits Amid Israel Row
Naharnet/Veteran 89-year-old White House correspondent, Helen Thomas, who covered every president from John Kennedy to Barack Obama, retired Monday amid a storm over explosive remarks about Israel. Thomas, a daughter of Lebanese immigrants, who blazed a trail for female reporters covering U.S. politics, ended her career after apologizing for saying last month that Israel should "get the hell out of Palestine." Her honorary center front-row seat at the White House briefing room was poignantly empty on Monday, as she became a story herself after half-a-century of sharply holding presidents and press secretaries to account. The retirement of Thomas, the longest-serving White House reporter, was announced by Hearst Corp., where she worked as a newspaper columnist after spending most of her career with United Press International (UPI).
"Helen Thomas announced Monday that she is retiring, effective immediately," Hearst News Service said.
Thomas had spent the weekend in the eye of a political firestorm, over remarks she made about Israel during a May 27 "Jewish Heritage Celebration" at the White House, which surfaced last week in a YouTube video. Asked at the event by the website RabbiLive.com whether she had any "comments on Israel," Thomas replied: "Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine.
"Remember these people are occupied and it's their land, not German and not Poland," Thomas said. "They can go home, Poland, Germany, and America and everywhere else."
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs on Monday described the remarks as "offensive and reprehensible" and Thomas issued an apology on her website, HelenThomas.org.
"I deeply regret my comments I made last week regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians," she said.
"They do not reflect my heart-felt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon," Thomas said. The White House Correspondent's Association (WHCA) board said Monday that Thomas's comments were "indefensible."
"Many in our profession who have known Helen for years were saddened by the comments, which were especially unfortunate in light of her role as a trailblazer on the White House beat," the board said. The board noted Thomas was not currently a member of the association and said "the incident does revive the issue of whether it is appropriate for an opinion columnist to have a front row seat in the briefing room." Thomas had been scheduled to deliver a June 14 graduation address at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland, outside Washington, but the school said Sunday it had cancelled her appearance. Thomas posed what now seems likely to be her final question to a U.S. president -- Obama, during a news conference in the East Room at the White House on May 27. "Mr. President, when are you going to get out of Afghanistan? Why are we continuing to kill and die there? What is the real excuse? And don't give us this Bushism, 'if we don't go there, they'll all come here.'"
Thomas, who won multiple journalism awards and was awarded a string of honorary degrees, arrived at the White House in 1960, after covering Kennedy's campaign and traveled the world following subsequent presidents. Her latest book "Listen Up Mr. President" was published in 2009.(AFP) Beirut, 08 Jun 10, 08:10

Lebanon is stifling your digital freedom
By Imad Atalla
Daily Star
Tuesday, June 08, 2010
No one has noticed, but the Lebanese government is writing yet another chapter in the endless mockery of our rights as private citizens and social entrepreneurial agents of progress and change. The state is extending censorship over the remainder of our liberties into the last frontier of freedom � the internet and its supposed neutrality.
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a cost effective and sometimes free way of long-distance voice calling and video conferencing. It is also illegal in Lebanon, according to the telecoms law of 2002. Unlike Instant Messaging, VoIP allows users to speak from phone to phone via the internet. While extremely economical for average consumers and businesses, it greatly reduces revenues to the (monopolistic) landline network and, in some cases, wireless telephone companies � read Ogero, MTC, Alfa, and the Finance Ministry as the direct beneficiaries of long-distance communication revenues.
Last week the Telecommunications Ministry began implementing the short-sighted telecoms law to the letter: It activated new hardware and software equipment to enforce the ban on VoIP communications. The new equipment, which was tested in recent months, now effectively blocks internet telephony for good.
As a consequence, part of my office-to-office business communications and videoconferencing with companies outside and inside Lebanon have come to a halt. And this is probably the case with many others, such as telemarketing centers, outbound support centers, and businesses that also use VoIP.
Unlicensed international outbound calling outlets, present in every neighborhood, are probably nearing bankruptcy as I write. International inbound call centers, licensed by Minister Gibran Bassil in 2008, must also be affected. It is not clear why Skype, an online albeit not phone-to-phone service, hasn�t been blocked yet, even though the service is in clear violation of Lebanon�s telecoms law.
Even if you have never used VoIP, you should be very concerned about your diminishing cyber liberties. Unlike the haphazard and farcical General Security directorate�s model of intellectual censorship, which tells you what you can and cannot say, the Telecommunications Ministry has decreed a form of censorship telling you what you can and cannot do over the internet.
Blocking VoIP in the 21st century is similar to blocking television broadcasts in the 1980s. You have every right to be outraged. Rampant political corruption and bad governance in Lebanon notwithstanding, this telecoms aggression fulfills the national motto of serving the plutocracy of wealth and power at the expense of average citizens and small business owners. Blocking VoIP to safeguard state revenue from international calls amounts to a financial transfer from consumers directly to the government and the few, never audited, telecoms monopolists the government controls.
Typically, consumers switch to the competition if a service provider constrains service usage. But in our case the government has a complete monopoly over the industry. It owns the water pipe, and all we get is a lousy drop in exchange for paying exorbitant prices that are among the highest in the world.
Lebanon thus joins a host of dictatorial or pseudo-democratic countries that in the past have blocked, or continue to block, VoIP. The list includes such honorees as Belize, Panama, China and the United Arab Emirates. In many cases around the world, VoIP blockades were made to censor freedom of expression, to protect corrupt practices, to harness national security, or to pave the way for the provision of the same VoIP services, but this time by those who blocked it! In other words, do not be surprised if Ogero soon starts offering VoIP as the sole provider to the Lebanese market.
The government treats telecoms as a revenue source rather than as a public utility like water and electricity. This stifles the growth of a robust digital economy, and VoIP is only a small example. Compare your internet speed and the price you pay with those in Jordan, for instance, and you�ll realize that you�re being taken for a digital ride.
Faster services for lower fees are easy to realize; unfortunately the evidence came in 2006 through the microwave transmission that was installed in the Barouk during Marwan Hamadeh�s tenure as telecommunications minister � however scandalous it was to allegedly buy bandwidth from Israel.
Lebanon�s private sector and consumers need technology and state-of-the-art tools to compete in world markets. Lebanese professionals are competent enough to market their skills in telemedicine, telemarketing, IT, and specialized remote support industries. However, they lack the technology infrastructure to compete. The digital economy could invigorate the job market and generate tax revenue to the treasury.
The degree of trampling over civil liberties has increased by yet another megabit, and you, the private citizen, are swallowing each and every bit, one slow bit at a time. In any normal country, one would contact his or her parliamentarian to complain, or write to the ministry in protest. For the technically savvy, one option around the blockade is to set up an encrypted VPN or Bound-IP to thwart Ogero from blocking your VoIP. But introducing such measures requires knowhow, aside from being a violation of the telecoms law.
Where do civil society groups stand on this core issue? Are they still busy creating awareness about how to lobby local municipalities for water and decent roads? This is not necessarily a call for telecoms privatization, it is high time for a digital user protest and concerted lobbying efforts by consumers, entrepreneurs, and activists alike.
**Imad Atalla is head of the Prontis Corporation, a software firm, and publisher and editor of Kazamaza magazine. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.

The dangers of identity politics
Tuesday, June 08, 2010
Editorial/Daily Star
Multitudinous and contentious versions of identity still continue to flourish among the Lebanese, and these would-be faces still get in the way of constructing even minimal characteristics of a state or addressing the real problems in this nation�s public space.
Many Lebanese still gaze back with pride at their Phoenician past, seeing a glorious people who invented the first major alphabet and were master sailors, fishermen and traders. Well, actually, even the Phoenicians of the city-states of Tyre, Byblos and Sidon spent hundreds of years at war with one another. Some marvel at the marked presence today of Phoenician DNA among the Lebanese populace, but we wonder whether anyone could identify the genetic marker for internecine strife in those protein strands?
Nothing against the Phoenicians, but the violent aspect of their history also embodies the same fear and hatred of the �Other� that has time after time erupted to drive this nation backwards instead of moving it forward.
We have many examples of identity politics rising up in Lebanon just since the foundation of the modern state in 1943. We have witnessed a wave of resistance to former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser�s pan-Arabism; the 1975-90 Civil War has scarred us with stories of identity costing our fellow Lebanese their lives; even now, civil strife has exploded � and more lives have been lost � because someone belonged to this tribe or that.
To be sure, there is nothing wrong with knowing one�s history; indeed, not enough Lebanese know the story of the Phoenicians or the other peoples who inhabited these lands throughout the millennia. Sadly, not many people at all know this history. For their part, the Phoenicians left a rich legacy, with many of our words and place names still preserving their Phoenician ancestry. However intellectually stimulating these elements of identity might be, the politics of identity stands as a ridiculous and dangerous approach to the issues facing the Lebanese public today. Phoenician or Arab, Christian or Muslim, nobody gets electricity 24 hours per day. What can Phoenician history of vibrant coastal city-states do today for Lebanon�s despoiled beaches? What will identity do to improve the quality of the water off the coast? Will this identity or that make the fish safe to eat? Will it stop the poisoning of much of our soil and our food production? Are there uniquely Phoenician or Arab solutions to provide us with electricity?
Lebanese people need to put the pointlessness of these identity debates in context � even in a country as close as Cyprus, no one there will see a Lebanese as anything but a Lebanese, no matter whatever illusory designation a Lebanese might wish to employ. And yet the debate goes on �

Helen Thomas unlikely to hold her plum press seat
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line/2010/06/helen_thomas_wont_hold_her_sea.html
The White House Correspondents' Association is debating what to do about Helen Thomas in the wake of the explosion of outrage over her claim that Jews should "get the hell out of Palestine" and go back to Europe.
The WHCA has not commented publicly on her remarks, but in an e-mail circulated late last night, CNN's Ed Henry, who's also the secretary of the WHCA, described them as "shocking and indefensible."
That makes it unlikely that Thomas will be allowed to continue to hold her plum seat in the White House press room, which, unsurprisingly, was empty today:
In the e-mail, Henry sharply criticized Thomas' remarks as "offensive," noting that there's "a lot of frustration" among members of the WHCA, and "rightly so." But he also noted that many journalists he's spoken with "do not want this one awful episode to define her entire career." And Henry reminded colleagues that the White House would have a say as to whether she keeps her seat. "That power comes at the discretion of the White House itself," he wrote.
But Robert Gibbs just weighed in at the press briefing, describing her comments as "reprehensible." And a conservative colleague just gave me another very good reason why it's unlikely that she'll be allowed to keep it: If she stays, right-wingers will use it to savage the press as anti-Israel.
"They can't let her sit up front because people like me will just use it to bludgeon them," the colleague told me.
Like I said above, the WHCA is currently debating what to do, but it's hard to believe she won't be a goner within hours.
By Greg Sargent | June 7, 2010; 11:49 AM ET
Categories: Foreign policy and national security , Political media