Lebanon announced the formation of a government on Thursday ending over eight months of wrangling amid heightened fears of a major economic collapse.
The Western-backed Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri now faces a big challenge in delivering the reforms needed to address dire public finances and unlock billions of dollars in pledged aid and loans to boost growth.
Hariri, who will head a 30-member cabinet, said bold moves were needed without delay to address chronic problems facing the heavily indebted state.
"We are facing economic, financial, social and administrative challenges," Hariri said at a press conference in Beirut after the announcement.
"It has been a difficult political period, especially after the elections, and we must turn the page and start working," he said.
Vicky Khoury, a member of the Sabaa Party, which emanated from the civil society movement, said the new government should first "kick-off the economic wheel". It should "carry out economic and social reforms", he told Al Jazeera.
BREAKING: WhatsApp Voice Calls Used to Inject Israeli Spyware on Phones. A vulnerability in WhatsApp allows attackers to inject spyware on the victim's phones. This vulnerability has already been used by an Israeli intelligence company to inject spyware on to phones. The vulnerability exists on both iPhones and Android phones. WhatsApp claims to have a patch ready, Duta recommends that all users install them as soon as they are available. The malicious code, developed by the secretive Israeli company NSO Group, could be transmitted even if users did not answer their phones, and the calls often disappeared from call logs. WhatsApp is too early into its own investigations of the vulnerability to estimate how many phones were targeted using this method, a person familiar with the issue said.

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