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Showing posts from May, 2015

Levantine days

I've been thinking a lot about Rafik Hariri today. He was the former Prime Minister of Lebanon who was assassinated in a massive car bombing ten years ago. Other car bombs followed in its wake, like echoes, murdering those who would investigate Hariri's death. Wissam Eid, who performed remarkable cell-phone metadata analysis to tie the assassination to Hezbollah, survived a 2006 car bomb but not a 2008 follow-up. Brigadier General Wissam al-Hassan, Hariri's former chief of protocol, was killed three years ago by another huge car bomb in downtown Beirut that killed eight and wounded 120. Both the Hariri and al-Hassan assassinations happened within a kilometer of where I sit and type, the Saifi Urban Gardens in downtown Beirut, a rather nice modern hostel with rooms for $50/night. Large swathes of Beirut are rather nice and modern. No, that's too half-hearted; extremely nice and ultra modern. There is, very apparently, a ton of money in this city. A Ferrari dealership