A young boy leaves a bakery with a bag of bread in the neighborhood of Nabaa in the Lebanese capital Beirut's southern suburbs. (Credit: AFP)
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The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) released a report yesterday revealing that children in Lebanon are increasingly being forced to work, while being deprived of essentials, education and health care. Children as young as six are being forced to work, UNICEF said, in 10 percent of surveyed Lebanese households and 25 percent of surveyed Syrian households. The survey also showed growing numbers of households that removed their children from schools and reduced their spending on health care and education. Many reported having to sell family possessions. “The compounding crises facing the children of Lebanon are creating an unbearable situation,” UNICEF representative in Lebanon Edouard Beigbeder said, recommending increased “investment in essential services for children — critically education, health and social protection.”
The caretaker cabinet is scheduled to meet today. The meeting’s agenda lists the mandate extension of the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL). Caretaker Foreign Affairs Minister Abdallah Bou Habib last Monday said he asked for the removal of a paragraph “expanding [UNIFIL’s] movement in the south” included in the renewal of the peacekeepers’ mandate last August. The meeting also includes a proposal to grant, for the first time, salaries to Civil Defense volunteers. A Civil Defense source told L'Orient Today that 2,124 volunteers meet the criteria set to receive a salary. The ministers are also due to discuss increasing transportation allowances for security forces personnel, granting promotions to senior members, accepting resignations and retiring eligible members. The agenda further lists the financing of official exams.
French President Emmanuel Macron’s newly appointed Special Envoy to Lebanon, Jean-Yves Le Drian, is expected to arrive in Beirut today. Macron assigned Le Drian on June 7 in order to “facilitate a consensual and effective solution” to the country’s political impasse. Le Drian’s visit follows a 12th attempt by Parliament last Wednesday to elect a successor to Michel Aoun, whose presidential term ended on Oct. 31. Two sources contacted by AFP on Sunday did not specify how long the special envoy would stay in Lebanon or with whom he might meet.
Rami Adwan is scheduled to return to Lebanon today after being suspended from his role as ambassador to France over rape and intentional violence allegations, caretaker Foreign Affairs Mininster Abdallah Bou Habib said yesterday. Bou Habib added that the Foreign Ministry will submit “all the information we received about the case to the Justice Ministry, and let the courts decide whether there was wrongdoing.” Since June 14, Lebanon’s chargé d'affaires in France, Ziad Taan, has taken over Adwan’s responsibilities. Two former embassy employees with whom Adwan had intimate relationships have accused Adwan of inflicting sexual, physical and psychological violence on them.
The Association of Banks in Lebanon yesterday announced that it has granted an “exceptional” one-year extension to the term of the head of its board of directors, Salim Sfeir. The extension of Sfeir’s four years at the head of the ABL comes shortly ahead of the June 30 expiration of his current term. Protesters associated with depositors’ rights groups decrying informal capital controls implemented by commercial banks since 2019 chanted slogans against Sfeir during a sit-in Thursday. In February, members of the Cry of the Depositors held a sit-in in Horsh Tabet, a suburb of Beirut, outside Sfeir’s home after vandalizing several banks in the capital’s Badaro neighborhood.
Auto tycoon fugitive Carlos Ghosn last month filed a 1$ billion lawsuit in Lebanon against Nissan, two other companies and 12 named individuals for defamation, slander, libel and the fabrication of material evidence, Reuters reported yesterday. A judicial source told Reuters that Lebanon’s public prosecutor has scheduled a court session on Sept. 18 to begin proceedings. In 2019, Ghosn absconded from Japan while awaiting trial for under-reporting earnings, breaches of trust and misappropriation of company funds.
In case you missed it, here’s our must-read story from yesterday: “What’s behind the call for early elections?”
Compiled by Abbas Mahfouz
Israel continues attacks on southern Lebanon, demolishes buildings in Bint Jbeil