Lebanon is one of the most diverse nations in the Middle East. The country is home to many religious communities and serves as an experiment in Middle East pluralism. In part because of Lebanon’s pluralistic makeup, it has been in a near-constant state of conflict for decades.

AP is reporting that Nawaz Sharif’s party has pulled out of cabinet positions from the coalition government with the PPP led by the late Benazir Bhutto’s husband Asif Zardari.

When I was recently in Saudi Arabia, I visited the impressive campus of King Saud University which sports more than 80,000 students and is making major investments in the science infrastructure of the country. We also visited SAGIA, the Saudi Arabia General Investment Authority, which is helping to oversee and implement the Kingdom’s competitiveness agenda….

Note from Steve Clemons. My colleague Nir Rosen who has been one of America’s most significant chroniclers of the Islamic dimensions of America’s war in the Middle East is now a regular contributer to The Washington Note. Please welcome him.

(That’s Matt Cooper on the left next to the great Al Franken) I’m into “Facebook Journalism.

Many of the most senior members of the foreign policy Illuminati assembled in London last week, and neoconservative high priest Robert Kagan and neo-realist national security strategist Kurt Campbell had a collision that simply must be recorded for posterity.

Catherine Mann of the Brandeis University Business School is the latest addition to an impressive roster of people opposed to any flirtation with a rollback of the gas tax. I signed up last week.

Ilan Goldenberg has posted links to a huge dump of FOIA-obtained documents that the Department of Defense has made available to the New York Times and to the public. Goldenberg makes an appeal: We need help from our readers. Let me know if you find anything interesting.

That’s the latest death toll — now expected to grow higher as more than 30,000 are still missing — from the cyclone that hit Burma.