Harry Hagopian: A poignant story of daily realities encompassing fear, bravado, dignity, hope & optimism in the midst of despair & pessimism, an inability to recognise the human and the sacred in all of us ... One could write a whole treatise on reconciliation in the context of this story ... as it affects two bruised and wounded peoples and impacts their respective realities in different ways ... Where is the prophetic voice that we claim to possess sometimes ...?

Gaza, besieged for more than a year now, is 1,300 km from Athens as the crow flies, 2,300 km from Rome, and 3,000 km from Algiers and the South of France. Can this distance from Western capitals be what accounts for the confounding silence of the media there?

Politics is, as Bismarck said, the "art of the possible". It demands compromises. The politician is a professional, not so very different from a carpenter or a lawyer. His job is to put together majorities for enacting legislation and taking decisions. To achieve this, he has to make compromises. Some do this easily, since, in any case, principles are not really important to them. But for people of principle, it can be very hard...

In Lebanon, and contrary to the expectations of many political pundits, the majority 14th March Coalition last week proposed the outgoing Fouad Siniora as its choice to head the new government of national unity. He was duly asked by the freshly-elected president to start his consultations for the formation of a cabinet on the basis of 16+11+3 ministers from the different parties as discussed amply in my previous article ...