Parliament approved a series of tax hikes to finance the new salary scale for public sector workers Wednesday in a heated legislative session that was adjourned before the agenda was completed. In the second day of a legislative session, held to discuss the 30-item agenda and chaired by Speaker Nabih ...

The Independent Bethan McKernan 13 July 2017 Isis has been driven from its de facto Iraqi capital of Mosul, leading Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to declare that one half of Isis’ so-called caliphate has fallen. The organisation now holds on to just nine per cent of the territory it controlled ...

While Gulen looks like a rather cuddly imam, spending his twilight years in American retirement, he has built up an extraordinary system of Islamic schools and charities in the US, UK and Turkey worth billions of dollars. His own movement has withdrawn a book where he justifies wife-beating ‘albeit as ...

A UK-wide inquiry will be held into the contaminated blood scandal that left at least 2,400 people dead, the prime minister has confirmed. A spokesman for Theresa May said it would establish the causes of the “appalling injustice” that took place in the 1970s and 1980s. Thousands of NHS patients ...

Economy Minister Raed Khoury called Tuesday for the drafting of a clear and comprehensive economic plan to be pursued by future successive governments. “We call upon the government, the Parliament and the private sector to draft a clear economic strategy which should be implemented by all future successive governments,” he ...

“Disability is a state of mind,” declared the posters decorating the Grand Serail ballroom at Tuesday’s launch of paralyzed athlete Michael Haddad’s expedition to the North Pole, hosted by Prime Minister Saad Hariri. On the posters, Haddad wears a body brace, hangs from a massive boulder, and smiles. After a ...

Central Bank Gov. Riad Salameh Tuesday reassured the public that Lebanon’s national currency is still stable thanks to the monetary policy the bank has pursued. “The Lebanese pound is stable and will remain so. In June 2017, Banque du Liban has consolidated its foreign-currency reserves. This confirms that the Central ...

CNN accused President Donald Trump of encouraging violence against journalists after he posted a video on social media showing himself body slamming and repeatedly punching a man with the cable news network’s logo superimposed on his face. In the latest escalation of his war with the US news media the ...

Three decades after it abandoned vinyl production, Sony said it would start making records again on the back of surging demand for the retro music format. A factory southwest of Tokyo will be churning out freshly pressed records by March next year, Sony Music Entertainment said Thursday. The Japanese giant ...

let’s imagine a Chinese “applied history” project, similar to the one at Harvard’s Belfer Center that helped spawn professor Graham Allison’s widely discussed book “Destined for War.” Allison’s historical analysis led him to posit a “Thucydides Trap” and the danger (if not inevitability) of war between a rising China and ...