Benjamin Netanyahu has ruled as Israel's prime minister for a record 12 consecutive years, partly by convincing many voters that only he can keep the Jewish state safe while defending it on the world stage.

Even if they pay their taxes to Israel, east Jerusalem's Palestinians will be barred from voting in Tuesday's election because the Jewish state does not consider them as citizens. 

The Persian New Year, Nowruz, begins on the first day of spring and celebrates all things new. But as families across Iran hurried to greet the fresh start — eating copious crisp herbs, scrubbing their homes and buying new clothes — it was clear just how little the country had changed.

A year into the coronavirus pandemic that has devastated Iran, killing over 61,500 people — the highest death toll in the Middle East — the nation is far from out of the woods. And although Iranians had welcomed the election of President Joe Biden with a profound sigh of relief after the Trump administration's economic pressure campaign, the sanctions that have throttled the country for three years remain in place.

Israel's voters, who include settlers in the occupied West Bank, Tel Aviv residents eyeing change and Arabs in annexed east Jerusalem, are days away from their fourth election in less than two years.

Shops closing, companies going bankrupt and pharmacies with shelves emptying — in Lebanon these days, fistfights erupt in supermarkets as shoppers scramble to get to subsidized powdered milk, rice and cooking oil.

Like almost every other Lebanese, Nisrine Taha's life has been turned upside down in the past year under the weight of the country's crushing economic crisis. Anxiety for the future is eating at her.

Daraa was an impoverished, neglected provincial city in the farmlands of Syria's south, an overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim backwater far from the more cosmopolitan cities of the country's heartland.

But in March 2011 it became the first to explode against the rule of President Bashar Assad. Assad's decision to crush the initially peaceful protests propelled Syria into a civil war that has killed more than a half million people, driven half the population from their homes and sucked in foreign military interventions that have carved up the country.

Chinese factories torched as mainland workers hunker down under martial law -- Beijing is being pulled into the ulcerous crisis in Myanmar, an unravelling country it had carefully stitched into its big plans for Asia.

Lebanon's worst economic downturn in decades has pushed a battered population to the brink with no solution in sight as the country's barons wrangle over forming a new government.

Lebanon is battling its worst economic crisis since the 1975-1990 civil war. The national currency is in freefall, while poverty and unemployment are on the rise.

Benjamin Netanyahu has remained in power as Israeli prime minister for a record 12 consecutive years, partly by convincing some voters that only he can keep the Jewish state safe while defending it on the world stage. 

But on March 23, the 71-year-old wily politician faces his fourth re-election contest in less than two years, after repeatedly failing to unite a coalition behind him, despite his devoted right-wing base.