The Public Source

1 week ago | thepublicsource.org | Layla Yammine

When I first moved to Beirut seven years ago, I didn't go looking for coffee shops or galleries. I was after something more elemental, more urgent: a butcher, or rather my butcher. I'd been raised in a kitchen where nothing came prepackaged, where freshness wasn't a fashion trend, and where traditional culinary practices weren't a lifestyle choice. They were life itself. Meat came with bones, and bones came with a purpose. Two streets from my apartment, I discovered a tiny corner shop.

Feb 17, 2025 | thepublicsource.org | Richard Salame

Editor's Note: The black dots (●) in the text are clickable to display documents sourced in this article. The Sofa CabinetIt was late 1992. In May, a collapse in the Lebanese lira had brought crowds onto the street and forced out the short-lived government of pro-Syria premier Omar Karami. By October, a business tycoon named Rafic Hariri had ascended to the Grand Serail. Hariri had plans to fix the country’s economic problems and kick-start postwar reconstruction.

Nov 6, 2024 | thepublicsource.org | Christina Cavalcanti

On Monday morning, dozens of Sudanese women — some of whom are recognized by the UNHCR as refugees — protested in front of the agency’s headquarters in Jnah, Beirut, demanding safe evacuation to an intermediary or host country. Nearly 100 people from Sudan, Ethiopia, and Cameroon protested outside of the UN ESCWA headquarters in downtown Beirut just over two weeks prior, on October 18, with similar demands: to be recognized as refugees and to be granted safe passage to a third country.

Oct 29, 2024 | thepublicsource.org | Richard Salame

At least 67 people were killed and more than 120 others wounded in nearly three dozen Israeli strikes on the Bekaa valley on Monday, October 28, in what Lebanese broadcaster Al-Jadeed called the “most violent day” in the Bekaa valley since the start of the war. “More than two-thirds” of the victims were women and children, according to Baalbek-Hermel Governor Bachir Khodr, and Israel gave no notice ahead of these strikes.

Oct 17, 2024 | thepublicsource.org | Richard Salame

On Sunday, close to a hundred people from Sudan, Ethiopia, and Cameroon gathered outside the downtown Beirut headquarters of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), chanting “where is your humanity?” and demanding the UN evacuate them from Lebanon to a safe third country.