Fasateen (Dresses) follows the lives of three very different Beiruti women. Meet Aliya, a single mother; Lama, the bored, flirtatious housewife to a rich husband; and Karma, a single career woman with a secret. Fasateen – because life isn’t a dress rehearsal.
You can follow Fasateen here on Yahoo! Screen. News episodes are released on Tuesdays, with 2 alternative endings on Thursdays.
The 10th Lebanese Film Festival is kicking off tonight at Metropolis Cinema (Sofil) and will last till August 26th. Make sure to check their program here.
via Dominique Sarkis
According to this article in L’Orient Le Jour, the municipality of Bhamdoun is currently forbidding Syrian workers from roaming the streets of the village at night starting 8PM till 6AM in the morning!
One of the municipal employees claimed they started posting this announcement after one Syrian worker attacked a boy a while ago!
But what if those Syrian workers suddenly started dressing nicely and looked like Syrian businessmen instead, will the municipality have no problem then since people of upper social classes are supposed to be behave better? What kind of discrimination against workers is that?!
Marie Claire published yesterday yet another article on Lebanese women obsession with their look and how Beirut is becoming the new plastic surgery capital of the world…
It’s not surprising anymore to see foreign magazines writing about this subject, but what really caught my attention is a comment made by Mr. Maher Mezher (Head of marketing at FNB, the bank that offers plastic surgery loans) on the matter:
Maher Mezher of First National Bank says: ‘You cannot find a job in Lebanon if you are not good-looking. People will reject you socially.’
Seriously?!
… that was actually the title of a recent article at the Huffington Post by David J Constable.
I visited a nightclub one evening to witness the dolls and their dates myself. In Taïga Sky, a rooftop nightclub in Batroun (30 miles from Beirut) everyone is smoking, bouncing on the spot and eyeing each other up, not in a complimentary way but diamond gazes of fierce competitorship. The top trump card here is a tan and a good set of pins, and in that respect it’s no different from the techno cattle clubs in the UK, however in Lebanon the women look like Cleopatra, with a dark natural beauty beyond anything Max Factor can supply and into the billion dollar industry of plastic surgery. Their partners are a mixture of bodybuilders in Lycra t-shirts or fat, pony-tailed Arabic mafiosi. It’s as captivating as it is frightening.
Back in Beirut, in the VIP corner of Le Capitole, another five-star rooftop bar, I see the wives and girlfriends of artists. They must be the better-halves of surgeons as surely no one can afford to spend that much of their own cash on reconstructive surgery and blow-me-up operations. There are benefits to marrying/dating/having sex with a plastic surgeon, as these well-ironed and unwrinkled faces suggest to me that they don’t reach the age limit of nightclub entry, such is their youthful appearance, bronzed with potions and powders.
You can read the rest of the article here.
It’s amazing how some foreign journalists are willing to judge the whole Lebanese society based on a few visits to some of the country’s posh bars and clubs!
I just learned Al-Shayaa is soon bringing Shack Shack to Lebanon! In case you’re not familiar with it, Shake Shack is a pretty famous burger joint in New York and several other cities in the states, and has expanded to the Middle East over the last couple of years with restaurants opening in Dubai and Kuwait.
From what I read online by people who have tried the burgers at Shake Shack, it seems like they taste really good! So I really can’t wait for them to open here.
Now of course the question is where will Shake Shack be located and when is the opening taking place?
photo via GadgetLam
Update:
According to Raja, Shake Shack will be opening at Beirut City Centre.
Kaspersky Labs recently discovered a new malware called “Gauss” with a module that aims to capture Lebanese bank accounts login credentials. And the targeted banks included Bank of Beirut, EBLF, Blom Bank, Byblos Bank, Fransabank, and Credit Libanais.
The article suggests the malware has been created by the US and Israeli governments and was not intended to steal money from client accounts, but rather to trace the source of funding to certain individuals (Hezbollah members I suppose).
The spyware, dubbed Gauss after a name found in one of its main files, also has a module that targets bank accounts in order to capture login credentials. The malware targets accounts at several banks in Lebanon, including the Bank of Beirut, EBLF, BlomBank, ByblosBank, FransaBank and Credit Libanais. It also targets customers of Citibank and PayPal.
The researchers don’t know if the attackers used the bank component in Gauss simply to spy on account transactions, or to steal money from targets. But given that the malware was almost certainly created by nation-state actors, its goal is likely not to steal for economic gain, but rather for counterintelligence purposes. Its aim, for instance, might be to monitor and trace the source of funding going to individuals or groups, or to sabotage political or other efforts by draining money from their accounts.
Still, that doesn’t seem like the only purpose for that malware, since the people at Kaspersky are still working to crack the larger part of its code and identify what is it responsible for.
Make sure to read the very interesting and worrying report from Wired.com here.
I know protecting your network from a nation-state-created malware is quite hard, but I hope Lebanese banks are now taking the necessary measures to protect themselves from such attacks and eventually safeguard our information.
Thank you Ibrahim Lahoud
