For those interested in following things, there's a blog aggregator here and I've found that this blog also has good up-to-date postings, even though I think the authors are both in Canada.
This news site is pretty pro-March 14 (that's the government), which you can probably see from headlines like "Hezbollah chief inspires renewed violence in Beirut." But all English-language news sites that I know of are pretty pro-government. Well, except for the English site of Al-Manar, Hezbollah's TV station.
The Daily Star is probably a good thing to check out tomorrow, but doesn't seem very up-to-date at the moment.
I've been unable to access Naharnet, the English site of An-Nahar, the newspaper most closely linked to March 14 (its former editor and publisher was Gebran Tueni, who was assassinated in 2005), but the Arabic site is still up, so I'm not sure what's going on there.
This blog by a journalist is also pretty good and a bit less pro-March 14, and the always cynical Angry Arab also has running updates, most of which are just his thoughts, but worth reading.
Saad Hariri is on TV right now, appealing directly to Hassan Nasrallah to stop "dividing Muslims" and to "lift the siege on Beirut," and accusing him of essentially treating fellow Lebanese as if they were Israel, i.e. The Enemy.
Jesus H. Christ. There are people shooting RPGs in the streets, and these assholes are too busy blaming each other to stop it.
The name is really only one syllable, with a first sound that's very hard for English-speakers to pronounce, sort of an AAA in the back of your throat, and the change between that sound and the OON that follows is what makes some people give it two syllables. So it's sort of exactly the way it looks: AAOUN. Or maybe AOWN. Or AAOON. But that first sound is hard to describe in writing.
I heard from another friend, who, um, knows a little something about what real fighting is like, and he says that although "thugs" have been shooting outside his apartment for five hours, he doesn't have any idea what they're shooting at, since (a) it's not a mixed neighborhood and (b) nobody's shooting back at them.
He says he's hearing occasional RPGs and even these. Pretty heavy weaponry for what seems to be mostly just a bunch of guys showing off their new guns.
He also says it seems more amateurish than military, which makes it more dangerous.
The blogger who calls himself Charles Malik says Amal and Future Movement militias are controlling different sections of the neighborhood where I usually stay when I'm there. (It's mostly a Sunni, Future Movement neighborhood, but there's a section near the corniche that for many years has been populated by supporters of Amal, one of the Shi'ite parties with a rather notorious reputation during the civil war.)
I guess the Revolution will be televised.
