BEIRUT: Inspectors from the Lebanese Ministry of Labor carried out raids on shops, factories and establishments employing illegal foreign labor, especially Syrian workers across the country on Wednesday. The ministry has given employers a month to regularize the situation of their foreign workers. Lebanon hosts 938,531 Syrian refugees registered with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), and they are not allowed ...

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri said on Wednesday that U.S. sanctions targeting Hezbollah MPs moved in a “new direction” from existing measures, but would not affect government work. The sanctions against two Hezbollah MPs and one of the Shi’ite Muslim movement’s top security officials widen a U.S. campaign that Washington says has designated 50 Hezbollah-linked individuals and ...

Lebanon regrets the US imposition of sanctions on two Hezbollah members in the Lebanese parliament and will pursue the matter with American authorities, President Michel Aoun said on Wednesday. The United States announced new sanctions against the two lawmakers from the Hezbollah movement on Tuesday, as well as on one of the group’s top security officials, drawing expressions of concern from Lebanese ...

The Lebanese President Micel Aoun received Monday House Speaker Nabih Berri at Baabda palace, discussing with him the latest developments. Media reports mentioned that Berri is keen on finding a solution for the matter and that besides his meeting with Aoun, he has been convening with other officials and political parties at his residence in Ain Al-Tineh for the same ...

Lebanese ministerial sources warned on Sunday from a possible dispute between President Michel Aoun and Prime Minister Saad Hariri over referring the shooting of two members of the Lebanese Democratic Party in the Druze area of Aley more than a week ago, to a senior Judicial Council. The source told Asharq Al-Awsat that Aoun supports referring the case to the ...

Whenever Lebanon was teetering on the financial brink in the 1990s, the country’s then prime minister, the late Rafic Hariri, boarded his private Boeing twin-aisle aircraft and flew to Riyadh. The kingdom would arrange emergency help that staved off the economic pressures, until the next crisis loomed. Lebanon’s already large public debt has multiplied many times since then, and Hariri’s ...

The White House released on June 22 the first half of its long-awaited Middle East peace plan, the so-called deal of the century, which President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner and other members of the administration had reportedly been working on since November 2017. Of the $50 billion in the economic portion of the plan, the lion’s share would be invested in the Palestinian ...

A human rights group has condemned Lebanon’s order for Syrian refugees to demolish their hard shelters as tantamount to “illegitimate pressure” on them to return to their war-torn country. Lebanon, a country of some four million people, says it hosts at least 1.5 million Syrians on its soil after they fled the long-running war in neighbouring Syria, many living in informal settlements in the ...

Acting US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Satterfield held high level talks in Beirut on Tuesday in an effort to launch negotiations between Israel and Lebanon over demarcation of the maritime border between the two countries. Satterfield, who on Friday won Senate confirmation as Washington’s ambassador to Turkey, met with Lebanese Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil and ...

London (CNN Business)Stocks and oil prices shot higher Monday after the United States and China announced a cease fire in their trade war. Yet the fragile truce does little to alleviate pressure on a global economy wounded by earlier exchanges of fire that hit manufacturing and trade. President Donald Trump agreed at the G20 summit in Japan to hold off on new tariffs, but US ...