LAS VEGAS — A 24-year-old Arab American from Michigan beat out 50 other women to take the 2010 Miss USA title last night.

Rima Fakih of Dearborn, Mich., won the pageant at the Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino on the Las Vegas Strip after strutting confidently in an orange and gold bikini, wearing a strapless white gown that resembled a wedding dress and saying health insurance should cover birth control pills.

When asked how she felt about winning the crown, she said, “Ask me after I’ve had a pizza.”

Fakih, a Lebanese immigrant, told pageant organizers her family celebrates both Muslim and Christian faiths.

Rima Fakih – Miss USA 2010

It is a no-brainer that Hummus is 100% Lebanese.  Anyone dare to disagree?

Source: CNN

Lebanon set a record for the largest plate of hummus Saturday in the continuing gastronomic war with Israel over the regional delicacy.

The war has played out publicly for years with two sides outdoing each other for the title of world’s best or world’s largest hummus dish.

On Saturday, about 300 Lebanese chefs in the village of al-Fanar — about 8 km (5 miles) east of Beirut — lay claim to the latter title with a dish that weighed 11.5 tons. That’s 23,042 pounds or 10,452 kg.

The achievement more than doubled the previous record — set in January in the Arab-Israeli village of Abu Gosh.

The January dish weighed in at more than 4 tons — the same as four average family cars.

Local media said a Guinness Book of World Record representative certified the results Saturday.

The Lebanese chefs used 8 tons of boiled hummus, 2 tons of tahini, 2 tons of lemon juice and 154 lbs (70 kg) of olive oil for their dish, local media said.

Hummus, a regional delicacy, made of chickpeas, sesame paste and garlic, among other ingredients, is loved equally by Arabs, Jews and Christians living in the Middle East.

Yet, in spite of their shared appreciation, the origin of the dish is a source of heated debate with the Lebanese claiming ownership and Israelis denying that they have exclusive rights to the name.

Lebanon has been seeking approval from the European Union to register hummus as a national dish.

“What we have been trying to do is just what the Greeks have done with feta cheese,” said Fadi Abboud, president of The Association of Lebanese Industrialists, in January.

In 2002, the European Commission gave Greece a “protected designation of origin” right to the name “feta,” for the white sheep and goat’s milk cheese made there. Similar cheeses from outside the country must use terms like “Greek-style cheese”.

Abboud maintains that Israeli companies are depriving Lebanese companies of huge potential earnings by exporting hummus made using traditional Lebanese recipes.

The Israelis see things differently.

“Trying to make a copyright claim over hummus is like claiming for the rights to bread or wine,” said Shooky Galili, an Israeli whose blog, dedicated to all things hummus, bears the credo “give chickpeas a chance.”

“Hummus is a centuries old Arab dish — nobody owns it, it belongs to the region,” said Galili, who believes the rivalry is about control over the hummus market. Globally, the market is worth $1 billion, according to Abboud.

However, Galili is hopeful that the so-called “hummus war” will be beneficial for relations in the long run.

“If you enter any good hummus restaurant in this region, you will see Jews and Muslims, Palestinians and Israelis sitting at the same table, eating the same food. I think in the end this rivalry will show that we in the Middle East have far more in common than the things that divide us.”

(CNN) — When Olympic skier Chirine Njeim tells people she’s from Lebanon, they often laugh in disbelief.

Now at the Vancouver Winter Games, and competing alongside two other athletes from her home country, Njeim still has to convince people she’s telling the truth.

“A coach from another country asked me in the elevator the other day where I was from. I said, ‘Lebanon’ and he just started laughing,” Njeim, who is competing in the Ladies Giant Slalom Wednesday, told CNN.

“I think people think of Lebanon as a desert with sand and camels, but nobody thinks of it as a place that has snow … He was shocked. He just laughed at me … ” she said.

Little did that coach know, there has long been downhill skiing in Lebanon — and world-class ski resorts to boot.

“Skiing in Lebanon is very popular,” explained Ezzad Kraytem, Secretary General of Lebanon’s Olympic Committee. “The slopes are only 20 minutes away from the coast, so you can go to the beach and ski in the same day.”

That means there’s a clear view of the Mediterranean Sea from the slopes of Mount Lebanon on most days, according to Kraytem.

Lebanon currently boasts six resorts: The Cedars at Mount Makmel is the largest, while Farya Mzaar is the favored destination of the jet-set (it’s also where Njeim got her start aged three).

Two of the resorts are members-only private mountains. And an expensive seventh resort is in the works, according to Ronald Sayegh, of Ski Lebanon.

“The quality of the snow is one of the main reasons professional skiers love our slopes. Powdery on the surface and hard underneath,” explained Joanne Zarife, a manager at the five-star Intercontinental hotel at Mzaar.

Even though the slopes face north, preserving the snow, the region’s sunshine makes the air mild, even warm, she told CNN.

“The terraces at the bottom are constantly filled with apres-skiers enjoying a cold drink under the tanning sun,” said Zarife.

“Skiing is getting more and more popular, [there is] more international tourism,” said Sayegh. “More political stability draws more people here.”

A lot of expats living in the region come back to ski, Lebanese locally come, Europeans, Australians and South Africans … ” he said.

“A lot more people now know there’s beautiful skiing in Lebanon,” said Njeim.

Last year a record 50,000 people visited the country’s ski resorts, according to Tony Khoury, President of the Lebanese Ski Federation and Head of the Lebanese Olympic Delegation at Vancouver.

At more than 3,000 meters, the peaks of Lebanon’s tallest skiing mountains at The Cedars resort top the highest point of the Whistler Blackcomb resort (2,284 meters approximately), one of the main venues of the Vancouver Games.

Skiing only came to Lebanon in the 1930s though, brought by a student returning from Switzerland where he had developed a passion for the sport at school. In the 1950s, the sport’s appeal really opened up, after chairlifts arrived.

And today it’s not just downhill skiing that draws the crowds. From just ten snowboarders in 1991, today anywhere from 30 to 60 percent of visitors are riders, according to Ski Lebanon. Lebanon’s high, sunny plateaus also make it ideal for cross-country skiing and snowshoeing, they say.

Exposed to the best of country’s ski scene an early age, Njeim was quickly hooked. As a child she would watch the sport on television and tell her friends that she wanted to race in the Olympics.

“People thought it was kind of hilarious,” Njeim recalled with fondness.

Press freedom is suffering in Lebanon, despite a modicum of maneuverability allowed by the law and the government’s non-interference with journalists, Information Minister Tarek Mitri claimed.

“Journalists come to complain to me about being harassed at work, even if they belong to the same party or religious sect as the media’s owners or officials,” he said of reporters, editors, anchors and others laid off in droves the last six months of 2009 some, admittedly, for their political affiliations.

The statement and details of incidents endangering Lebanese media were published in the International World Press Freedom Review for 2009.

IPI World Press Freedom Review 2009 Cover

The downloadable review (http://www.freemedia.at/singleview/4765/) was produced by the Vienna-based International Press Institute (IPI) and takes aim at all manner of abuses against journalists, notably in the Middle East and North Africa region.

The report said 110 journalists were killed in 2009 because of their work – the second highest figure in the decade since 2006, when 46 of those died in Iraq.

“The freedoms that we all enjoy are indivisible, and when there are invasions of those freedoms anywhere – and that includes the developed world where corporations are sometimes at least as powerful as governments to control thought, if not always their own solvency – we must act as not only watchdog but as bloodhound in defense of those freedoms,” wrote Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the report’s foreword.

Most of Lebanon’s media outlets are unduly influenced in their journalism content by powerful political figures to whom they are financially and politically beholden, observed IPI’s Naomi Hunt.

“I love these officials’ concern with the public good as they one-up each other, as if their ministries were corruption-filled dumps before they assumed their portfolios and then turned into masterpieces when they joined the cabinet,” wrote Sanaa El Jack in Lebanon’s Arabic-language daily An-Nahar.

El Jack, a columnist for An-Nahar and editor/correspondent for the pan-Arab daily Asharq Al-Awsat, is no stranger to scathing criticism of Hezbollah and factions previously referred to as the opposition before current Prime Minister Saad Hariri formed his government of national unity, which includes them.

Sanaa El Jack (Abu-Fadil)

Shiite El Jack’s reward for her outspokenness?

Assailants slashed her tires and poured petrol on her car’s engine in front of her home in June 2009 on a street straddling Sunni and Shiite Muslim neighborhoods where tensions have run high following urban clashes in May 2008 pitting then pro- and anti-government forces against each other.

Unidentified assailants also pelted former legislator and journalist Bassem El Sabaa’s home with rocks that night. He is another outspoken Shiite ally of the current Sunni premier who heads the Western-backed Future Movement.

Hariri’s family owns interests in print and broadcast media, including Future TV, whose reporter Omar Harqous (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/magda-abufadil/pro-syrian-assailants-bat_b_147129.html) was battered and nearly crippled in late 2008. The station has been attacked on several occasions.

Future TV News Channel (Abu-Fadil)

Hariri’s father Rafiq, a former prime minister, was assassinated by a car bomb in 2005 and several journalists have since been targeted by groups allied with Syria – the major power broker in Lebanon until that year – and Iran. Both countries still have active allies within Lebanese media and political ranks.

Key among those felled: senior An-Nahar columnist Samir Kassir and the paper’s publisher Gebran Tueni, both targets of car bombs in 2005.

Feisty Gebran Tueni (Rodriguez)

But condemnations of attacks on journalists by Minister Mitri, his predecessor Ghazi Aridi, the Press Syndicate, the Journalists Union, the state-run National Audiovisual Media Council, and various media-related organizations have been mostly of the lip service variety.

Class action suits are a rarity in a country where patronage is key, where journalists’ unions are run by intractable octogenarians re-elected for decades, where non-cronies are barred from union membership, where reporters are woefully underpaid and often juggle several jobs to keep afloat, where media operate along political/sectarian lines, albeit in a relatively freer environment than other Arab countries, and, where journalism is taught primarily by non-practicing ivory tower types, with professional media instructors relegated to academia’s back benches.

The Catholic observatory UCIP LIBAN tasked with defending Lebanese media against violations of their freedom and rights, has often criticized attacks on journalists.

In March 2009 it condemned an attack on TV presenter Neshan Derharoutounian by three assailants north of Beirut who broke his jaw, one of his fingers and badly bruised him. The cause remains unknown.

Long a proponent of free thought and expression, UCIPLIBAN previously identified the following constraints on news collection and dissemination:
1. Political censors – general political parameters that crimp journalists’ style and modus operandi.
2. Security apparatus’ censors – using national security as a cover to terrorize reporters.
3. Ruling regime’s censors – fear of the ruler’s fear for his fate.
4. Controlling party’s censors – pressures leading to cheerleading in the media for the ruling regime.
5. Trade union/association censors – learning how to slalom between thorny issues, to avoid taboos, and to abide by ethics codes (such as they are).
6. Self-censorship – drawing on all taboos and harmful precedents befalling colleagues to ensure one’s survival.
7. Ghost censors – inability to distinguish between what is permissible, and what is not, resulting in insipid and safe coverage.
8. Readers’ censorship – fear of losing one’s audience and a resultant cryptic writing style.

UCIPLIBAN also pinpointed these costs paid by Lebanese journalists in performing their duties:
1. Internal disciplinary actions imposed by various media and external punishments imposed by unions.
2. Fines exacted according to media laws. (Print laws were last amended in 1994, and date back to 1962. Broadcast laws were also last amended in 1994. All are out of sync with the 21st Century).
3. Moral and physical persecution of journalists seeking to uncover the truth.
4. Political persecution and prevention of journalists from exercising their political presence, the danger of covering political dissidents, and the stifling of political reporters.
5. Religious and sectarian persecution by insular communities wanting to prevent journalists other than their own ilk from knowing much about them, and resorting to professional harassment and physical or material attacks.
6. Racial and ethnic persecution barring certain journalists from covering news outside their ethnic circles.

Compounding the problem is the convergence of media and politics whereby journalists enter the political fray and become legislators. It is not considered a conflict of interest in Lebanon.

Six journalists ran during the 2009 parliamentary elections. Three allies of Prime Minister Hariri won, including Gebran Tueni’s daughter Nayla who followed in her assassinated father’s footsteps into the family newspaper and legislature.

Nayla Tueni election poster

The National Observatory of the Freedom of Opinion and Expression in its 2008 report claimed Lebanese journalists felt objectivity was a rarity, freedom in short supply, and harassment on the job increasing.

It also accused the media of fomenting conflicts and sedition in line with political paymasters’ desires, a charge repeatedly leveled during a highly incendiary parliamentary campaign.

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Lebanon’s Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said on Tuesday the powerful Shi’ite guerrilla group would hit Israel’s Ben Gurion airport if the Jewish state struck Beirut’s international airport in any future war.

“If you hit Rafik al-Hariri international airport in Beirut, we will hit Ben-Gurion airport in Tel Aviv,” Nasrallah said via a live video-link to thousands of cheering Shi’ite followers.

“If you hit our ports, we will bomb your ports, and if you hit our oil refineries, we will bomb your oil refineries.”

Ben-Gurion airport lies in the town of Lod, near Tel Aviv.

Nasrallah’s comments came amid recent increased anti-Israeli comments in the region including from Syrian, Iranian and Lebanese leaders.

Syrian and Lebanese officials have accused Israel repeatedly in the past few weeks of pushing for a war in the region, against the backdrop of an Iranian nuclear program Israel views as a threat to its very survival.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking on a visit to Moscow, said on Tuesday “we are not planning any war” and accused Tehran of stoking fears as Western powers weigh additional sanctions against Iran to press for a stop to its atomic development.

Iran says its nuclear program is solely to generate electricity. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently said Israel should be finished off if it launched military action in the region.

Last year Nasrallah threatened to attack Tel Aviv if Israel were to bomb Beirut’s southern suburbs, a bastion of the powerful Shi’ite military and political group.

Hezbollah fought against Israel in a 34-day war in 2006 after the group captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid. Some 1,200 people in Lebanon, mostly civilians, were killed and 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers, died.

Israel pounded Beirut’s southern suburbs as well as mainly Shi’ite southern Lebanon where Hezbollah maintains a stronghold and from which Israel withdrew in 2000.

Israeli bombing also hit bridges, roads, airport runways, ports, factories, power and water networks, and military installations, and the eastern Bekaa Valley.

“SEEKING REVENGE”

Nasrallah was speaking at an event marking the second anniversary of the assassination of military commander Imad Moughniyah.

The Shi’ite group has blamed Israel for the 2008 bombing that killed him in Damascus, and has vowed revenge. Israel has denied involvment, and said that it has since foiled several Hezbollah attempts to kidnap Israelis abroad.

Nasrallah said he knew some Israelis were hoping Hezbollah would strike a “modest target” as revenge for Moughniyah.

“I would like to assure you that in the past two years, we had many modest targets between our hands, but we didn’t go forward. Why? Because we are seeking revenge for … Imad Moughniyah.”

The fiery leader said Israel was no longer in a position to launch a war that did not guarantee its absolute victory, after the fallout from the 2006 war against Hezbollah and its three-week military offensive in Gaza last year.

(Additional reporting by Laila Bassam in Beirut and Allyn Fisher-Ilan in Jerusalem; Editing by Michael Roddy)

DAMASCUS (Reuters) – Syrian users of Facebook said on Friday the authorities had blocked access to the social network Web site as part of a crackdown on political activism on the Internet.

“Facebook helped further civil society in Syria and form civic groups outside government control. This is why it has been banned,” women’s rights advocate Dania al-Sharif told Reuters.

“They cut off communications between us and the outside world. We are used to this behavior from our government,” said Mais al-Sharbaji, who set up a Facebook group for amateur Syrian photographers.

There was no comment form the government, which has intensified a campaign against bloggers, virtual opinion forums and independent media sites in recent months.

Syria has been under emergency rule since the Baath Party took power in a 1963 coup. No public criticism of the party and the powerful security apparatus is allowed. Scores of dissidents have been jailed over the past year.

Thousands in Syrian use Facebook to communicate with relatives and friends abroad. The social network also links groups with political and cultural interests. Syrians who have pages on the site include businessmen with links to the ruling class and pro-government commentators.

Ammar al-Qurabi, head of the National Association for Human Rights, said little independent political content published by Syrians on the Internet is now tolerated.

“We have asked officials and they said Facebook could become a conduit for Israeli penetration of our youth, but the real reason for blocking the forum because it provides for criticism of the authorities,” Qurabi said.

“There is now an ‘Internet political crimes’ ward at one prison. Internet cafes have been required to limit their communications services,” said Qurabi.

Activists who have published Internet articles are often summoned for interrogation and several have been arrested. Dozens of sites have been banned for what officials deem as subversive activity.

Even Microsoft Hotmail is regularly blocked. There is no access to scores of newspapers on the Web, such as the Lebanese daily an-Nahar and al-Quds al-Arabi, which is published in London by veteran Palestinian journalist Abdel-Bari Atwan.

The Internet started spreading in Syria only when President Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father, Hafez al-Assad, in 2000. Bashar held the title of head of the Syrian Computer Society before becoming president.

source: Reuters (Fri Nov 23, 2007 4:54pm EST)

The U.S. Navy is sending three warships to the eastern Mediterranean Sea in a show of strength during a period of tensions with Syria and political uncertainty in Lebanon.

…

Another military officer, speaking on condition of anonymity because full details about the ship movements are not yet public, said a Navy destroyer, the USS Cole, was headed for patrol in the eastern Mediterranean and that the USS Nassau, an amphibious warship, would be joining it shortly. The officer said a third ship would go later, but he did not identify it.

…

National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said the deployment of the Cole is meant as “a show of support for regional stability.” He added that President Bush is concerned about the situation in Lebanon.