Anyone interested in following Middle East news and issues from original sources is in luck. The Mideast pulsates with English-language media, and the rest of the world is frequently obsessed with covering the Middle East. (Newspapers in general are doing much better in the developing world than in the West.) So no one who gives half a wink's attention to Mideast news can miss the lavish amount of news sources on the matter.

Almost every Middle East nation has at least one English-language newspaper or news service (reclusive Syria and America-reviling Iran included). Eventually I'll catalog all those news sources by country here at About. Meanwhile, here's the first of what will be periodic skims of noteworthy items in the Middle East press, blogs included--or about the Middle East from the rest of the world's press and blogs.

• Jewish lobby lecture tour: Egypt's Daily News features a piece about Stephen Walt lecturing at the American University in Cairo about the Israeli lobby: “The Israel lobby is an interest group like any other interest group in the US," he tells his audience. "However, it is influential in the US, has a profound impact on our foreign policy in the Middle East in particular and its influence has not been good for the US, other countries in the region and Israel.” Walt, you may remember, is the Harvard professor and co-author, with John Mearsheimer of Chicago University, of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). The book triggered a controversy even before it hit American bookstores in 2007, though its subject was neither original nor mysterious. It was Henry Kissinger, remember, who first used the terms "Israel's lawyers" (in Years of Upheaval, his 1982 memoir), a phrase Aaron David Miller reprises for his absorbing chapter on the Israeli lobby in his recent The Much Too Promised Land. The Walt-Mearsheimer may have had its American controversies, but so far, according to Mearsheimer, it's been translated into Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, and Turkish.

• Most-livable Arab countries: Charlotte, N.C., San Antonio, Texas, and Chattanooga, Tenn., may be among the best places to live in the United States. In the Middle East, Bahrain's Daily News reports, it's Bahrain, the tiny country that could--and that was just this week patting itself on the back for appointing the first Jewish woman ambassador (to the United States, as it turned out). "About two per cent of the urban population reside in 'impoverished and overcrowded' areas, according to figures from the UN," the paper notes. "Only Kuwait and the UAE match the percentage and the figures rise as high as between 10pc and 20pc in Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Syria.

• Lebanon's comeback: In a sign of possible stability for Lebanon, Saudi Arabia's Arab News reports on a boomlet in Saudi tourists heading back to Lebanon. Flight "reservations are up for the Saudi summer vacation season after numbers fell dramatically following the July War of 2006 that sent many Saudis scrambling for evacuation," the paper says. "Saudis make up the largest tourist segment in Lebanon, estimated at 30 percent of Arab tourists; many own summer homes in Lebanon." In reality, tensions in Lebanon between Hezbollah's Shiites and the country's Sunnis are still high. On Saturday, the Lebanese army intercepted and "shot dead a man they suspected of planning a suicide bombing at an army checkpoint near a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon."

• Barack Obama's Jewish problem: The Jewish Daily Forward asks: "Does Barack Obama Really Have a Jewish Problem?" The piece notes a recent New York Times article summing up pretty rancid views of Obama among Florida's Jewish community, but warns that "as the discussion of Jewish ambivalence toward Obama reaches new levels of intensity, some observers are saying that the hand wringing is creating a skewed and potentially damaging picture of American Jewry whose support for Obama is, by several measures, quite strong."

• And just in case you forgot, clocks leap ahead one hour in Pakistan and in Morocco on Sunday, among other places.