Celebrating Lebanese Independence Day a Crime

That’s according to the UAE’s Gulf News newspaper. The article just mentions the celebrations held at the Lebanese Consulate in Dubai. But here is the interesting part, check out the URL of the article:

http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/uae/crime/lebanese-expats-celebrate-66th-independence-day-1.531573

Not only that, here’s a screenshot of the website:

Screenshot from the GulfNews website

I’ve sent both Gulf News and the Lebanese Consulate a heads-up on the article. Let’s see what happens next.

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EDL All Charged Up

It appears that Electricite du Liban (EDL) will finally take action against customers that fail to pay their bills:

EDL has a launched a web site which lists the names and addresses of all those who have failed to pay their dues to the company. The area covers Beirut, Sheyah and Antelias regions. According to a statement recently released by the company, EDL will be compelled to cut off power as of next month on all those who failed to pay their bills on time.

Oh, and EDL will also be filing lawsuits against the parties involved. Will that change anything? Probably not. Plus, the large amounts of defaulters will ensure that the Lebanese judicial system will grind to a halt. But my favorite thing of all has to be EDL’s “website“.

If you haven’t seen it, you must take a look at it. It seems to have been designed by a first-year web design student. Its horrible and you really can’t get any useful information from it. Even their “name and shame” list is impossible to get to; requiring such specific knowledge of someone’s electricity bill that it really questions the whole point of posting the information online. I mean, if I am not paying my bills, I will probably know that and wouldn’t need a website to confirm my status.

The EDL Website: Hopeless, Just Like the Company (www.edl.gov.lb)

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You Called Me What?

You heard me, a Zionist:

[Lebanon’s Consul General in Sydney, Robert Naoum] has lost his bid to stop a website calling him a Zionist after a court ruled the comments were not defamatory.

The comment was made by Nabil Dannawi, a Sydney resident on his Arabic website, www.alankabout.com. However the judge did state the comments made against Naoum were:

…no more and no less than a series of unstructured and irrelevant rantings…

The Consul General was definitely unhappy – he tried to appeal the verdict but the courts refused to review the case. To add more salt to the wound, Naoum was also forced to pay Dannawi’s legal fees totaling AUD60,000 (US$49,760). Ouch! I wonder if that’s covered by a diplomat’s allowance.

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Elections Online

The Lebanese government seems to becoming more “e“.

The interior ministry on Tuesday announced it has set up a website for the 2009 elections in Lebanon.

Unfortunately, they used a web address which cant be easily remembered and I am unable to make out the acronym. The website is www.dgps.gov.lb.

Why couldn’t they come up with something like intikhabat.gov.lb? You know, something that can be easily remembered. To make things worse, what does DGPS stand for? I’m guessing its French although the website is only available in Arabic.

Not only that, but the website is anti-Firefox!

Its definetly a conspiracy!

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