Clashes erupted on Friday between Internal Security Forces and gunmen over the destruction of cannabis crops in the town of al-Yammouneh in the eastern Bekaa valley, the National News Agency reported.
The news agency reported that the gunmen are using machineguns, medium and light weapons and B-7 rockets.

Electricite du Liban contract workers officially announced on Friday the end of their three-month strike and the resumption of work at the company after striking a deal with the government.
“We will end our strike and the committee will continue to hold meetings to follow up the implementation of the deal,” Lebnan Makhoul,a member of the EDL contract workers committee, told reporters during a press conference at the General Labor Confederation headquarters.
The General Security Department’s deportation of 14 Syrians torpedoed efforts to release 11 Lebanese Shiite pilgrims kidnapped in Syria since May, An Nahar daily reported on Friday.
The Lebanese mediator involved in negotiations to set the men free was informed that the talks reached a dead-end following major progress made to secure the safe return of the pilgrims, the newspaper said.

Al-Mustaqbal parliamentary bloc sources said Friday that the biggest loser in the end of a 35-day sit-in launched by Salafist cleric Sheikh Ahmed al-Asir in the southern city of Sidon is “the party that Hizbullah tried to mobilize.”
The sources made their remarks to An Nahar daily, a day after Popular Nasserite Movement leader Osama Saad, a Hizbullah ally, said Asir’s protest failed and reiterated accusations that ex-PM Saad Hariri’s al-Mustaqbal movement that is part of the March 14 opposition coalition supported the cleric.

An Iraqi court has rejected a request to send a Hizbullah commander to the United States for trial, a decision that likely ends the Obama administration's push to prosecute the Lebanese man held in Iraq for the 2007 killings of five American soldiers.
The U.S. believes Ali Mussa Daqduq is a top threat to Americans in the Middle East, and had asked Baghdad to extradite him even before two Iraqi courts found him not guilty of masterminding the 2007 raid on an American military base in the holy Shiite city of Karbala.

Prime Minister Najib Miqati on Thursday called on the ruling coalition and the opposition to contribute to devising a national defense strategy that would “protect the country’s unity and defend it against the domestic and external threats.”
Defending his government’s so-called “self-disassociation policy” towards the Syrian crisis, Miqati described it as “the correct choice to spare Lebanon the inferno of regional conflicts and to preserve our country in this troubled period.”

The EDL contract workers committee on Thursday announced that a meeting will be held with the General Labor Confederation and the political forces that contributed to resolving their problem, noting that “there is a positive atmosphere although some formalities remain pending.”
“We will go home but the sit-in will remain in place until we hold our meeting with the labor minister, the (political) forces concerned and the GLC,” state-run National News Agency quoted the committee as saying.

The cabinet on Thursday approved expenditure aimed at increasing the salaries of public school teachers and meeting the needs of Syrian refugees.
“Among the most prominent decisions was the approval of a draft decree on allocating L.L. 200 billion for boosting the ranks of the teachers' salary scale by four ranks,” Information Minister Walid al-Daouq told reporters after a cabinet session at the Grand Serail.

U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Maura Connelly on Thursday held a meeting with Free Patriotic Movement leader MP Michel Aoun, during which she conveyed “the grave concern of the United States over recent assassination attempts in Lebanon” and said the U.S. was “deeply disturbed by the recent deportations of 14 Syrians.”
“The Ambassador and General Aoun discussed the political and security situation in Lebanon and the current situation in Syria,” said a statement issued by the U.S. Embassy after the talks.

Two armed men briefly set free a prisoner who was being transported in a police vehicle to a hospital in Beirut but their plot failed and the suspects escaped, the National News Agency reported on Thursday.
It said the patrol was transferring the prisoner from Rafik Hariri University Hospital to al-Hayat hospital when two men identified as Fawzi Sh. and Ahmed Q. pointed their guns at the officers and whisked the man in a black Kia.
