A heated argument has escalated into a large fistfight in the studio of the popular political talk show Sar el Waqt hosted by journalist Marcel Ghanem.

Ghanem was forced to interrupt the broadcast on Thursday night, while the fight continued outside the studio, at the premises of the MTV building in Naccache.

Ex-president Michel Aoun has described remarks voiced by caretaker PM Najib Mikati in parliament as “curtailed and lacking a lot of accuracy and correctness.”

“When he visited me to bid farewell six days before the term’s end, I told him that I was waiting for him to return to Baabda so that we issue the formation decree together, according to norms, but he went and did not come back,” Aoun said in a statement.

Shadia Ahmed panicked as rainwater flooded her shack one night, drenching her seven children. The next morning, the kids were seized by vomiting, diarrhea and other symptoms.

After an aid group administered tests for cholera in Ahmed's Syrian refugee encampment in the northern Lebanese town of Bhanine, her youngest, 4-year-old Assil, tested positive.

The U.S. has imposed sanctions on a group of individuals, firms and vessels connected to an oil smuggling outfit said to benefit Hezbollah and Iran's Revolutionary Guard.

More than a dozen companies, six individuals and 11 vessels flagged from around the world — from Djibouti to Panama — are included in the sanctions package, for allegedly participating in a scheme that included blending and exporting sanctioned Iranian oil.

Lebanon is unable to put its new exchange rate into effect after its outgoing president declared the state budget unconstitutional and refused to sign off on it, officials said.

The Finance Ministry in late September announced that Lebanon would change its pegged exchange rate to the dollar from 1,500 pounds to 15,000 starting Nov. 1, which they called a "necessary corrective action." Parliament passed the cash-strapped country's 2022 national budget in September, which included the amended rate. However, it took at least another week of bureaucracy before reaching President Michel Aoun's office.

The futile debate between caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati and Free Patriotic chief Jebran Bassil over who of the two obstructed the government formation, who should have named the ministers and why wouldn't the FPM MPs give their confidence to Mikati's government, led Thursday to another dispute in parliament as the MPs discussed the legitimacy of the caretaker government.

As parliament convened to discuss a letter by former President Michel Aoun over the legitimacy of the caretaker government, Mikati said that he would have stepped down only if Bassil hadn't called for it.

The Constitutional Council on Thursday rejected four more appeals against some results of the May 15 parliamentary elections.

At a press conference, Council chief Judge Tannous Meshleb announced that the four appeals that were dismissed are the following:

Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi has called for a special conference under the auspices of the United Nations to resolve the disagreement between the Lebanese parties.

"As long as the officials are not ready to sit together to resolve their disagreements, I have called for a special conference," al-Rahi told LBCI.

Security forces arrested at dawn Thursday the three depositors Ibrahim Baydoun, Ali al-Saheli and Catherine al-Ali as well as prominent lawyer and activist Rami Ollaik for their storming Wednesday of Credit Libanais bank in Hazmieh, the National News Agency said.

Security forces also safely evacuated the bank employees who had been held as hostages.

Free Patriotic Movement chief Jebran Bassil on Thursday reminded that caretaker PM Najib Mikati had said that there was “no need to form a government,” describing it as a “dangerous constitutional precedent.”

“He set the condition of obtaining (our) confidence in order to form the government, although his designation did not win (our) confidence, which means that he had decided not to form a government,” Bassil said after a parliamentary session dedicated to discussing ex-President Michel Aoun’s letter on the legitimacy of the caretaker cabinet.