Lebanon

28 Aug 2020; MEMO: The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) is planning two donor conferences to fundraise for efforts to rebuild Beirut after a massive explosion devastated the city on 4 August, Agence France Presse (AFP) reported.

BEIRUT, Aug. 27 (Xinhua) -- Audrey Azoulay, director-general of UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), announced on Thursday that the UNESCO has launched the initiative "Beirut" to attract funds to be used in rehabilitating Beirut's heritage buildings, LBCI local TV channel reported.

"We should implement measures to preserve the national heritage of Lebanon and we will be holding a meeting for donors' country by the end of September for this purpose," Azoulay said during her meeting with Caretaker Culture Minister Abbas Mortada.

BEIRUT, Aug 27 (NNN-XINHUA) — United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) Director-General Audrey Azoulay said on Thursday that 159 private and public schools as well as 85,000 students were affected by Beirut’s explosions, Xinhua news agency reported.

“We need approximately US$22 million to rehabilitate destroyed walls in these schools,” Azoulay said during her tour at the Port of Beirut after her visit to schools in Achrafieh, an area heavily affected by the explosions, al-Jadeed TV channel reported.

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Canada has offered to join Lebanon’s investigation into this month’s seismic Beirut port blast but under conditions that ensure a credible and transparent probe that “gets to the bottom of things”, the visiting foreign minister said on Thursday.

Lebanese President Michel Aoun initially promised a swift investigation into why highly explosive material stored unsafely for years detonated on Aug. 4, killing at least 180 people and injuring some 6,000, but later said the process would take time.

26 Aug 2020; MEMO: Lebanon yesterday rejected an Israeli-led push to make reforms to the UNIFIL peacekeeping force which patrols the UN-demarcated Blue Line separating the countries who are technically still at war.

The latest call for reforming the peacekeeping force comes only days before the UN Security Council is set to vote on whether to renew the UNIFIL mandate on 31 August.

TRIPOLI, Aug 24 (NNN-AGENCIES) – Twenty-two bodies of illegal migrants were retrieved by the Libyan Red Crescent, in the coastal city of Zwara, chief of mission for the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in Libya said, yesterday.

“These painful deaths are the result of the increasingly hardening policy towards people fleeing conflict and extreme poverty, and a failure to humanely manage migration flows,” Federico Soda tweeted.

BEIRUT, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Pierre Ashkar, president of the Syndicate of Hotels Owners in Lebanon, announced on Monday that 2,060 restaurants and 163 hotels were severely damaged by Beirut port's explosions, Elnashra news website reported.

Ashkar noted that the cost of fixing the hotels damage ranges between 100,000 U.S. dollars and 14 million U.S. dollars per hotel while adding that it is hard to assess the indirect losses caused by the full or partial closure of hotels.

BEIRUT (AP) — The 10 firefighters who received the call shortly before 6 p.m. — about a big fire at the nearby port of Beirut — could not know what awaited them.

The brigade of nine men and one woman could not know about the stockpile of ammonium nitrate warehoused since 2013 along a busy motorway, in the heart of a densely populated residential area — a danger that had only grown with every passing year.

BEIRUT, Aug 21 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Still reeling from a deadly port blast that ravaged their Beirut homes and businesses, Lebanese wearily braced themselves for a new coronavirus lockdown due to start on Friday.

Lebanon is to partially close down for two weeks from Friday to stem a string of record daily infection rates that have brought the number of COVID- 19 cases to 10,952, including 113 deaths.

TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Libya’s internationally recognised government in Tripoli announced a ceasefire on Friday and the leader of a rival parliament in eastern Libya also appealed for a halt to hostilities.

The statements offered hope for a deescalation of a conflict that has wracked the country since a 2011 uprising, displacing hundreds of thousands, slashing oil production, and opening space for migrant smugglers and militants.