Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri is seen at the governmental palace in Beirut, Lebanon, October 24, 2017. (Photo by Reuters)

Lebanon’s Prime Minister Saad Hariri has reportedly left Saudi Arabia, where he announced his surprise resignation last week, for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to hold talks with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

Hariri left Riyadh for Abu Dhabi on Tuesday, according to a report by Future TV, which is owned by the senior Lebanese politician.

Saudi Arabia’s Al-Arabiya television also confirmed the report, saying that Hariri had met with the Emirati crown prince, without further elaboration.

Hariri announced his resignation in a televised statement from Riyadh, citing many reasons, including the security situation in Lebanon, for his sudden decision. He also said that he sensed a plot being hatched against his life.

Hariri accused Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah resistance movement of meddling in Arab countries’ affairs; an allegation the two have repeatedly denied.

The surprise announcement has sparked a new political crisis at home in Lebanon, fueling speculations that the PM had been forced by the Riyadh regime into stepping down.

Lebanese Justice Minister Salim Jreissati said Tuesday that Hariri should return to the country and his resignation should be “voluntary” to be formally considered by President Aoun.

A few hours after the announcement of Hariri’s resignation in Saudi Arabia, Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qassemi vehemently rejected his remarks and said his resignation and rehashing of the “unfounded and baseless” allegations regularly leveled by the Zionists, Saudis and the US were another scenario to create new tensions in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of the Lebanese Hezbollah movement, also said the country’s prime minister had been under pressure to resign his post.

Nasrallah noted that the announcement of Hariri’s resignation came after a number of visits to Saudi Arabia, adding that the text and style of his resignation clearly showed that it was not his own text and was a Saudi text dictated to the Lebanese prime minister.

Hariri, a close Riyadh ally, became prime minister of Lebanon in November last year after reaching a deal with other factions.

That power-sharing deal saw Aoun become president and ended a long power vacuum in the country.

Back then, observers described Aoun’s rise to power as a political victory for Hezbollah, which would gradually diminish the Saudi influence in Lebanon’s political arena. Riyadh had been vigorously lobbying to prevent Lebanon’s presidency from being placed in the hands of Hezbollah’s allies.

Conan O’Brien Travels To Armenia

By Brian Steinberg

Conan O’Brien is on the road again, this time journeying to Armenia in the latest of a series of ongoing efforts to mix up his TV routine.

The results of O’Brien’s sojourn to the country, believed to have commenced on Sunday, are slated for broadcast on Time Warner’s TBS on Tuesday, November 10, at 11 p.m. and will be available a day later across digital and mobile venues operated by the network and O’Brien’s Team Coco outlets. Sona Movsesian, O’Brien’s longtime assistant who is of Armenian descent, has joined him. The visit is a first to the country for both and O’Brien’s broadcast will be the first by a host of an American late-night show from the nation.

“I think it’s every boss’s responsibility to take their assistant back to their ancestral land,” said O’Brien, in a statement provided by a spokesperson. “That’s why I’m going to make sure my next assistant was born in a five-star resort in Tuscany.” At an “upfront” presentation last May, executives from Turner Broadcasting, parent of TBS, said O’Brien was planning to do a series of road-trip specials, meaning this Armenia excursion is likely to offer a taste of things to come.

O’Brien trades in laughs, but his trips – this will be the third he has made this year – are not always something to joke about. O’Brien in February traveled to Cuba in an effort that was known to only a handful of people outside of his staff, and almost ran into a problem when his team tried to navigate through security on the island nation, which at the time was working to re-establish diplomatic ties with the United States.

The expedition also comes as TV’s late-night has become exponentially more competitive, prompting a bevy of well-known hosts to shake up their routines. Over the last two years, Jay Leno, David Letterman, Jon Stewart, Chelsea Handler, and Craig Ferguson have all stepped down from their desks, while Stephen Colbert, James Corden, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers have stepped into new jobs. Samantha Bee is expected to launch a program in January on TBS that will be paired with “Conan.” That shuffle has left O’Brien, who has hosted a late-night program with only one interruption since 1993, as a sort of elder statesman for the genre – and he has expressed a desire to experiment with the boundaries of the format.

“I still love the form, but in a world where there are more and more and more and more shows, there actually is an impetus to — all right, I want to keep changing,” he told a group of reporters last March. “I want to do something radically different than I would have done 10 years ago.”

His trips to Comic-Con in San Diego and Cuba were unscripted. O’Brien said in his March remarks that he thinks viewers get laughs out of seeing him play the “fish out of water” and trying to understand a new locale and the people who inhabit it.

An average of around 1.81 million people watched an original broadcast of the Cuba special, “Conan in Cuba,” and a rebroadcast that immediately followed, according to data from Nielsen. A night earlier, an average of 642,000 viewers tuned into O’Brien’s regular late-night program.

Source: variety.com

Lebanon’s Hariri travels to UAE after resigning as PM in Riyadh

Conan O’Brien Travels To Armenia In Latest Road-Trip Adventure

By Brian Steinberg