...an Iranian colony situated on the eastern Mediterranean, conveniently adjacent to Israel. Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects. The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. The Lebs maintain a precarious sectarian balance among Shiites, Sunnis, and about a dozeen flavors of Christians. It is the home of Hezbollah, which periodically starts a war with the Zionist Entity, gets Beirut pounded to rubble, and then declares victory and has a parade. The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers, a practice dating back to the heady human sacrifice days of Baal Moloch. In 2020 Hezbollahblew up a considerable portion of Beirut and many of its inhabitants when its ammonium nitrate faci8lity exploded. They blamed it on... somebody else. It wasn't them though. Trust them on that...’s Prime Minister Najib Mikati and President Michel Aoun
...president of Leb, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hizbullah...
signed a decree forming a new government in the presence of parliament speaker Nabih
KnobbyBerri
...Speaker of the Lebanese parliament, head of the Amal Shiite party aligned with Hezbollah, a not very subtle sock puppet of the Medes and Persians...
on Friday, the presidency said in a statement.
Lebanon had been without a government for over a year as it descended further into an economic meltdown.
The presidency said on Twitter earlier that Mikati would meet Aoun, but without saying if they had reached an agreement on a government.
One official source told Rooters a cabinet line-up Mikati would present to Aoun was promising. Political sources said there had been intensive contacts through the night to try to reach an agreement.
The failure to agree on a cabinet has left Lebanon without any effective government as the country has sunk deeper into a crisis which the World Bank has described as one of the sharpest implosions of modern times.
Mikati, a politician-businessman who was designated prime minister in July, has previously said he would seek to re-start negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) once his government was formed.
The cabinet formation has been derailed repeatedly by disagreements among political factions over the distribution of cabinet seats.
Mikati is the third prime minister-designate to attempt to form the government since the government resigned over a year ago in the aftermath of the Beirut port blast amidst the worsening economic meltdown.
Mikati was designated after Saad al-Hariri, a former prime minister, abandoned his efforts.
Aoun’s political adversaries have accused him and his political party, the Free Patriotic Movement
Despite its name a Christian party allied with Hizbullah, neither free nor particularly patriotic...
, of seeking effective veto power in the new government by demanding a third of the seats. Aoun has denied this repeatedly.