BEIRUT: Lavish lunches in mountain-top restaurants overlooking Lebanon’s valleys. Engagement parties at high-end clubs. The joyous Christmas dinner with family and loved ones. Mark Maher is going all out for the Christmas season in Beirut — so much so that he and his friends made a shared calendar to keep track of all his plans.

Friday kicks off with sunset drinks at the swanky Hotel Albergo rooftop, followed by pub-hopping through Badaro’s bar-lined streets and capping the night off with a table at the ever-packed seaside AHM club.

GAZA CITY, PALESTINE: In Gaza City, the small but tight-knit Catholic Christian community gathered at the Holy Family Church for Christmas mass earlier this month, presided over by Archbishop Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem.
As Israel has prevented many Christians in Gaza from traveling to Bethlehem to attend midnight mass at the Church of the Nativity, they celebrated the holiday early.
“For years, I have been coming to Gaza to celebrate with the Christian community, to get close to them and support them,” Pizzaballa told Arab News.

A second round of elections would cause chaos and should be postponed following record-low turnout in parliamentary voting last week, the powerful UGTT union has claimed, saying the resulting parliament would have no legitimacy.
Only 11.2 percent of the country’s eligible voters participated in the election last week, sparking widespread criticism from the opposition, which said that President Kais Saied should step down and pledged mass protests.
The UGTT union, with more than a million members, has previously paralyzed the economy with its strikes.

CAIRO; The chairman of Egypt’s Suez Canal has affirmed the waterway is “not for sale,” in a bid to allay fears over a draft law under discussion in parliament.
On Tuesday, the legislature approved in principle a bill proposed by the government seeking to establish a sovereign wealth fund “that can carry out all economic and investment activities” for the Suez Canal Authority.
The draft bill has sparked wide debate on social media.

NEW YORK: A Jordanian human rights expert working for the United Nations has called on Libyan authorities to take urgent action to protect women and girls in the country from what she called a “continuous cycle of rampant violence and mistreatment,” compounded by “complete impunity” for those responsible.
The UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women, Reem Alsalem, said on Friday that she was “deeply disturbed at the widespread, systematic, and grave levels of violence faced by Libyan women and children, including girls.