A decision by President Michel Suleiman to sign a decree that calls for parliamentary elections on June 9 was an administrative and not a political move, Baabda palace sources said Tuesday. Suleiman signed the decree on Monday along with Prime Minister Najib Miqati, drawing the ire of the March 8 majority coalition over fears that […]
Forbes came out with its latest billionaires list.
After the publication of the 2013 edition, Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal has informed the publication that he would no longer like to be included (thank-you-very-much) According to a press release from the Prince’s investment firm, Kingdom Holding Company, he sent a letter to Steve Forbes severing his relationship with the list. That means Forbes will no longer receive information from Kingdom about its finances.
Kingdom claims that it has discovered "what appear to be intentional biases and inconsistencies in the Forbes valuation process…"
Forbes response:
The prince first came on Forbes’ wealth-hunting radar in 1988, a year after our first Billionaires issue came out. The source: the prince himself, who contacted a FORBES reporter to let him know just how successful his Kingdom Establishment for Trading & Contracting company was–and to make clear that he belonged on the new list.
That outreach proved to be the first in what is now a quarter-century of intermittent lobbying, cajoling and threatening when it comes to his net worth listing. Of the 1,426 billionaires on our list, not one–not even the vainglorious Donald Trump–goes to greater measure to try to affect his or her ranking. In 2006 when FORBES estimated that the prince was actually worth $7 billion less than he said he was, he called me at home the day after the list was released, sounding nearly in tears. “What do you want?” he pleaded, offering up his private banker in Switzerland. “Tell me what you need.”
WASHINGTON, DC (Catholic Online) – If you have read the documents of 2nd Vatican Council, you will have noticed there is nothing in any of them that even closely resembles the "Spirit of Vatican II" so often evoked by dissenters. All those documents have one goal in mind: To make the Catholic worship and teaching more communicative to the people of God, or, as it is usually put, more pastoral.
As we said at the outset of this series, the old hands in the media and at Catholic outlets such as America and Commonweal still recall the brilliant, and subversive, series of Vatican II reports published in the New Yorker under the pseudonym of Xavier Rynne, who was actually a Redemptorist priest, Rev. Francis X. Murphy, who attended the Council as a journalist.
French Foreign Ministry spokesman Philippe Lalliot voiced his country’s support for the Lebanese government’s policy of disassociation from regional developments, reported the daily An Nahar Sunday. He told the daily that all Lebanese powers must respect the Baabda Declaration that was sponsored by President Michel Suleiman and which calls for sides to adhere to the […]
SHABROUH, Lebanon: Below a giant reservoir of mineral-tinted blue water in the snow-capped mountains of Shabrouh, water gushes across a spillway that runs down through a 63-meter-high jagged stone wall. This small-scale dam on a minor waterway could well be the model to alleviate the country’s water and energy shortages. The Energy and Water Ministry […]
Here, in chronological order, of Pope that were instrumental for the Church: 440-461 St. Leo I the Great He stared down Attila the Hun in 452 to prevent the sacking of Rome and later persuaded a Vandal king to spare the people. The first to rule that popes are successors to St. Peter with authority […]