Even for crisis-torn Lebanon, this has been a horrible 12 months. A deep economic crisis sparked huge street protests and then a massive explosion in August devastated the capital Beirut.

By Melkar el Khoury (Lebanese writer & activist)

- Federalism: A Constitutional Model of Governance -

A major supplier of arms to Azerbaijan, Israel has come under diplomatic fire from Armenia over the struggle between the Caucasus neighbors in disputed Nagorno-Karabakh.

The marriage of convenience between Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan has confounded sceptics by withstanding Russian and Turkish rivalries in Syria and Libya.

Sheikh Nawaf al-Ahmed Al-Sabah, appointed Kuwait's ruler after the death of his half-brother, is an elder statesman who has held high office for decades but earned a reputation for being modest and low-key.

Anti-government protests that erupted in Iraq a year ago lasted several months before being crushed, at a cost of 560 lives and 30,000 injured.

Armenia and Azerbaijan, two ex-Soviet republics in the Caucasus, are locked in a decades-long territorial dispute with deadly fighting erupting Sunday.

Fifty years since Gamal Abdel Nasser's death, controversy over the legacy of the charismatic Egyptian president who championed Arab unity lives on in Egypt as deep divisions beset the Middle East.

Hadi Ahmed wearily sets up a tent in Yemen's Marib province, after fleeing fighting yet again in the government's last northern stronghold which is under intense pressure from Huthi rebels.

The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain are due on Tuesday to sign at the White House historic deals normalising ties with Israel, the third and fourth Arab countries to do so.