United Nations Special Coordinator for Lebanon Joanna Wronecka on Thursday visited the Bekaa and Baalbek. She met with local Lebanese authorities, the UNHCR Lebanon Representative and visited a UNHCR community support project.

"The Immortals" have spoken: the 388-year-old Academie Francaise, custodian and promoter of the French language, has a new leader in the form of author Amin Maalouf.

The French-Lebanese writer, 74, becomes only the 33rd person to occupy the post of "perpetual secretary" since the body's founding under King Louis XIII in 1635.

Hundreds of Lebanese Armenians scuffled with riot police on Thursday outside the Azerbaijan Embassy in northern Beirut during a protest against the Azerbaijani military offensive that recaptured Nagorno-Karabakh from the enclave's separatist Armenian authorities.

Protesters waved flags of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, and burned posters of Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the demonstration in the Ein Aar suburb of the Lebanese capital.

Central Bank interim governor Wassim Mansouri on Thursday reassured that the bank will continue to pay the salaries of the public sector in U.S. dollars, which “provides stability to 400,000 families.”

“This is not a long-term stability but rather fragile stability, and if no president is elected the economic situations will further deteriorate,” Mansouri warned, following a meeting with the Economic and Social Council of Lebanon.

The driver of a van carrying illegal Syrian migrants on Thursday ran over a Lebanese soldier and tried to flee an army patrol before being killed in the incident, an army statement said.

“As an army patrol was trying to stop a Hyundai van carrying Syrians who had illegally entered Lebanon in the al-Qbour al-Beed area on the northern border, the vehicle driver ran over a member of the patrol and tried to flee the site despite the firing of warning shots in the air by the rest of the patrol members,” the statement said.

French Special Presidential Envoy for Lebanon Jean-Yves Le Drian has met in Saudi Arabia with Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan, the Saudi foreign ministry said.

The talks tackled “the bilateral ties between the kingdom and France, means to intensify common coordination in several fields, in addition to discussing the latest developments of the Lebanese file and the regional and international events,” the ministry added.

Hezbollah is not against “domestic and foreign consensus on the Joseph Aoun choice” for the presidency, but its concern is not solely focused on the new president, seeing as its eyes are on “the army chief who will replace Joseph Aoun once he is elected as president or sent to retirement,” informed political sources said.

“The party’s officials are constantly talking about keenness on protecting the back of the resistance, and accordingly Hebzollah’s attention is now focused on the name of the new army chief more than it is focused on the presidency,” the sources told Kuwait’s al-Anbaa newspaper.

After his dialogue initiative failed, Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri said he no longer has anything to say.

"The presidential problem is between the Maronites," Berri charged, in remarks published Thursday in al-Joumhouria newspaper.

More than 11,000 Palestine Refugees children in South Lebanon will not be able to join their peers at the beginning of the school year on 2 October. This is a quarter of refugee school children and is due to violence and clashes in the Ain el-Helweh camp, the largest in the country.

“UNRWA was forced to take this decision given all our eight schools inside the camp have been taken over by armed groups. They have sustained significant destruction and damage. Other schools – outside the camp- are currently being used by displaced families,” said Dorothée Klaus, Director of UNRWA Affairs in Lebanon.

A Lebanese military court has sentenced an official with the extremist Islamic State group to 160 years in prison for carrying out deadly attacks against security forces and planning others targeting government buildings and crowded civilian areas, judicial officials said Wednesday.

The officials said Imad Yassin, a Palestinian in his 50s, confessed to all 11 charges against him, including joining a "terrorist organization," committing crimes in Lebanon's largest Palestinian refugee camp of Ain el-Helweh, shooting at Lebanese soldiers, and transporting weapons and munitions for militant groups.