Pierre Issa arrived at a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron on August 6 with 10 stitches on his face, two chipped teeth and a few broken bones. "I wasn't sure if I could make it today, so I wrote you an open letter just in case," Issa recalled telling Macron.
Issa -- a bespectacled 63-year-old who is Secretary General of Lebanon's non-sectarian National Bloc party -- was one of thousands of people who were injured in the August 4 explosion at the Beirut port which laid waste to large parts of the capital.