Lebanon’s caretaker PM pleads for new government
Outgoing deputy Mossad chief blasts Trump, PM for failing to focus on primary threats of nuclear program
BEIRUT (Reuters) – Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Hassan Diab threatened on Saturday to stop performing his duties to pressure politicians to form a new government, citing an incident in which shoppers fought over milk to illustrate the parlous state of the economy.
Diab’s cabinet resigned on the back of the August 4 Beirut Port explosion that devastated swaths of the capital. Prime minister-designate Saad Hariri was nominated in October but has failed to form a new cabinet since due to political deadlock between him and President Michel Aoun.
An ongoing financial crisis, which erupted in 2019, has wiped out jobs, raised warnings of growing hunger and locked people out of their bank deposits. A new cabinet could implement reforms needed to trigger billions of dollars of international aid.
“If seclusion helps with cabinet formation then I am ready to resort to it, although it goes against my convictions for it disrupts the entire state and is detrimental to the Lebanese,” Diab said in a televised speech.
“Doesn’t the scramble for milk constitute a sufficient incentive to transcend formalities and roughen out the edges in order to form a government?” Diab said in reference to the supermarket fight.
A video of the squabble went viral on social media, leaving many people shocked at the desperate state of the economy.
Groups of protesters have been burning tires to block roads across the country on a daily basis since the Lebanese currency tumbled to a new low on Tuesday, enraging a population long horrified by the country’s financial meltdown.
The collapse of the Lebanese pound, which fell to 10,000 to the dollar on Tuesday, was the last straw for many who have seen prices of consumer goods such as diapers and cereals nearly triple since the financial crisis erupted.
On Saturday demonstrators protested in front of the banking association, demanding access to their deposits, and then walked to the parliament building in downtown Beirut to express their frustration at the deteriorating economic conditions.
“Social conditions are aggravating, financial conditions are putting a severe strain on the country, political conditions are increasingly complex,” Diab added in his speech.
“The country is confronted with enormous challenges that a normal government cannot face without political consensus so how can a caretaker government face these challenges?”
Outgoing deputy Mossad chief “A” has said that former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo’s 12 principles for resolving the standoff with Iran were so unrealistic that they were “like seeking to transform the Iranians into Meretz.”
In the second part of an interview A gave to Yediot Aharonot, which was published Friday, he criticized both the Trump administration and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for allowing secondary threats from the Islamic Republic to cloud their focus on the primary existential threat of its nuclear program.
His criticism of Pompeo’s 12 principles was that it injected addressing Tehran’s precision guided missiles smuggling to Hezbollah and Syria and its other destabilizing regional activities into the nuclear standoff.
“How does this stay consistent with the fact that you said ‘for the State of Israel, the existential threat is the nuclear issue – not the other things?’” he asked rhetorically.
This criticism in no way paints A as a dove.
In the same interview, A lambastes England, France and Germany (the E3) for “hypocrisy and misplaced cynicism, which we saw in their dealing with Iran... which was unbelievably troubling. I am talking about their readiness to take a public position which is completely inconsistent with their knowledge that this group [Iran] are liars who are preparing, enabling and seeking nuclear capabilities.”
The comments A made about the E3 were in the context of justifying the publicizing of the Mossad’s January 2018 raid on Iran’s nuclear archive.
According to A, while some other leaks to the media about Mossad activities were counterproductive, publicizing the archive raid was crucial, because it forced the E3 and the rest of the world to confront the truth about Iran’s nuclear intentions.
Despite his criticism of the E3 and his support for the nuclear archive raid, A also disagreed with Trump pulling out of the nuclear deal in May 2018.
He said that Israel could have kept the deal running until 2025, since he confirmed that Iran was staying within the uranium enrichment limits, and then undertaken a military attack or other covert operations to set the ayatollahs back.
A also details how former Mossad chief Meir Dagan moved him from the Tsomet recruiting spies unit into the Caesarea lethal operations unit, initially against his will, but with his subsequent admission
that it was the right move.
Later, former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo appointed him to head the Caesarea unit and current Director Yossi Cohen, who he knew previously from Tsomet, promoted him to be deputy of the spy service.
A expressed disappointment with Netanyahu’s decision to tap D, the deputy chief of the Mossad before him, as the next director.
A said he had more experience than D, but that D was picked since A was known for being an independent operator and Netanyahu wanted a Mossad chief who would not argue with him.
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UR, Iraq (Reuters) - Pope Francis walked down a narrow alleyway in the holy city of Najav to hold a historic meeting with Iraq’s top Shi’ite cleric and visited the birthplace of the Prophet Abraham on Saturday to condemn violence in the name of God as “the greatest blasphemy.”
The inter-religious events, one in a dusty, built-up city and the other on a desert plain 200 km. away, reinforced the main theme of the pope’s risky trip to Iraq – that the country has suffered far too much, and the killing has often been sectarian.
“From this place, where faith was born, from the land of our father Abraham, let us affirm that God is merciful and that the greatest blasphemy is to profane his name by hating our brothers and sisters,” Francis said at the ancient site of Ur where Abraham was born.
With the desert wind blowing his white cassock, Francis, sitting with Muslim, Christian and Yazidi leaders, spoke within sight of the archaeological dig of the 4,000-year-old city that comprises a pyramid-style Ziggurat, a residential complex, temples and palaces.
Hours earlier in Najaf, Francis met Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a visit that sent a strong signal for inter-religious dialog and coexistence.
Sistani, 90, is one of the most influential figures in Shi’ite Islam, both within Iraq and beyond, and their meeting was the first between a pope and such a senior Shi’ite cleric.
The meeting took place at the humble home Sistani has rented for decades, near the golden-domed Imam Ali shrine in
Najaf. Francis had to walk about 30 meters along an alleyway to get to it after leaving his car.
The pope’s visit to Iraq has been intensely blanketed in security and the roads his convoy traveled along on Saturday were closed to other traffic. Pickup trucks mounted with machine guns and even tanks
were stationed in some places along the routes.
After the meeting, Sistani called on world religious leaders to hold great powers to account and for wisdom and sense to prevail over war. He added Christians should live, as should all Iraqis, in peace and coexistence.
Although Abraham is considered the father of Christians, Muslims and Jews, no Jewish representative was present at the inter-religious event in Ur.
In 1947, Iraq’s Jewish community numbered 150,000. Now their numbers are in single figures.
A local church official said
Jews were contacted and invited but the situation for them was “complicated,” particularly as they have no structured community. However, in similar past events in predominantly Muslim countries, a senior foreign Jewish figure has attended.
“Hostility, extremism and violence are not born of a religious heart: they are betrayals of religion,” the pope said at Ur. “We believers cannot be silent when terrorism abuses religion; indeed, we are called unambiguously to dispel all misunderstandings.”
Islamic State terrorists, who tried to establish a caliphate covering several countries, ravaged northern Iraq from 20142017, killing Christians as well as Muslims who opposed the insurgents.
Iraq’s Christian community, one of the oldest in the world, has been particularly devastated, falling to about 300,000 from about 1.5 million before the US invasion and the brutal Islamist militant violence that followed.
At Ur, Francis praised young Muslims for helping Christians repair their churches “when terrorism invaded the north of this beloved country.”
Later, in a homily at a Saturday evening service at Baghdad’s Chaldean Cathedral of Saint Joseph, Francis again paid tribute to “those of our brothers and sisters who here too have suffered prejudice and indignities, mistreatment and persecutions for the name of Jesus.”
The pope, whose visit to Iraq began on Friday, travels on Sunday north to Mosul, a former Islamic State stronghold, where churches and other buildings still bear the scars of conflict.
Myanmar security forces used tear gas and stun grenades to break up a protest in Yangon on Saturday, just hours after a United Nations special envoy called on the Security Council to take action against the ruling junta for the killings of protesters.
The Southeast Asian country has been plunged in turmoil since the military overthrew and detained elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi on February 1, with daily protests and strikes that have choked business and paralyzed administration.
Sporadic protests were staged across Myanmar on Saturday and local media reported that police fired tear gas shells and stun grenades to break up a protest in the Sanchaung district of Yangon, the country’s biggest city. There were no reports of casualties.
More than 50 protesters have been killed since the coup, according to the United Nations – at least 38 on Wednesday alone. Protesters demand the release of Suu Kyi and the respect of November’s election, which her party won in a landslide, but which the army rejected.
“How much more can we allow the Myanmar military to get away with?” special envoy Christine Schraner Burgener told a closed meeting of the 15-member UN Security Council on Friday, according to a copy of her remarks reviewed by Reuters.
“It is critical that this council is resolute and coherent in putting the security forces on notice and standing with the people of Myanmar firmly, in support of the clear November election results.”
A junta spokesman did not answer calls requesting comment.
The army says it has been restrained in stopping the protests, but has said it will not allow them to threaten stability.
Several hundred people gathered in Sydney on Saturday to protest against the coup, singing and holding up three fingers, a salute that has come to symbolize solidarity and resistance across Myanmar.
“We would like to urge the Australian government to work closely with the US, UK and EU governments and take strong action against these Myanmar military dictators,” said protest organizer Thein Moe Win.
In Myanmar’s southern town of Dawei, protesters chanted “Democracy is our cause” and “The revolution must prevail.”
People have taken to Myanmar’s streets in their hundreds of thousands at times, vowing to continue action in a country that spent nearly half a century under military rule until democratic reforms in 2011 that were cut short by the coup.
“Political hope has begun to shine. We can’t lose the momentum of the revolution,” one protest leader, Ei Thinzar Maung, wrote on Facebook. “Those who dare to fight will have victory. We deserve victory.”
On Friday night, authorities disturbed the grave of a 19-year-old woman who became an icon of the
protest movement after she was shot dead wearing a T-shirt that read “Everything will be OK,” a witness and local media said.
One witness said the body of Kyal Sin, widely known as Angel, was removed on Friday, examined
and returned, before the tomb was re-sealed in Myanmar’s second city of Mandalay. The independent Mizzima news service also reported the event.
The killing of protesters has drawn international outrage.
“Use of violence against the people
of Myanmar must stop now,” South Korean President Moon Jae-in said in a tweet, calling for the release of Suu Kyi and other detainees and for the restoration of democracy.
The US and some other Western countries have imposed limited sanctions on the junta and the independent UN human rights investigator on Myanmar, Thomas Andrews, has called for a global arms embargo and targeted economic sanctions.
The army took power over allegations of fraud in last year’s election which had been dismissed by the electoral commission. It has promised to hold a new election at an unspecified date.
That plan is rejected by protesters and by a group representing lawmakers elected at the last election that has begun to issue statements in the name of a rival civilian administration.
On Friday, it listed four demands – the end of the junta, the release of the detainees, democracy and the abolition of the 2008 constitution, which left significant political representation and control in the hands of the military.
A civil disobedience campaign of strikes running parallel with the protests has been supported by many government workers including a trickle of policemen.
Authorities in Myanmar have asked India to return eight policemen who sought refuge across the border to avoid taking orders from the junta, an official in northeast India said on Saturday.
India’s Foreign Ministry responded to a request for comment by referring to a statement given at a media briefing on Friday which said the ministry was still “ascertaining the facts.” (Reuters)