Free Patriotic Movement leader MP Michel Aoun accused the March 14-led opposition of seeking to maintain the 1960s parliamentary electoral law for the 2013 elections.

He said in an interview to the FPM's facebook page: “The camp is boycotting parliament because it believes that by doing so, the 1960s law will be adopted in the June elections.”

Pope Benedict XVI met on Friday with President Michel Suleiman who is in Rome to attend the ceremony of the official appointment of Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi as cardinal.

Suleiman did not make any statement after the meeting held at the Vatican.

Speaker Nabih Berri cancelled on Friday a parliamentary session scheduled for next week, during which Armenian President Serzh Sargysyan was planned to address MPs.

“As several ministers and fellow lawmakers are attending the ceremony of appointing Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi as a cardinal at the Vatican, the session on November 27 has been cancelled,” Berri said in a statement.

Iran's parliament speaker Ali Larijani on Friday noted that “Lebanese leaders enjoy the sufficient capability to resolve their problems," adding that "some forces want to destabilize Lebanon but do not have the ability to do so."

Larijani was in Beirut as part of a regional tour aimed at finding ways to resolve the crisis in Syria, media reports said.

Interior Minister Marwan Charbel vowed on Friday that the security forces and the army will detain any gunman on the streets.

“We will ban any appearance of gunmen,” Charbel said in comments to Voice of Lebanon radio (93.3).

Sheikh Abbas Zgheib, who has been tasked by the Higher Islamic Shiite Council to follow up the case of the abducted Lebanese pilgrims in Syria in May, denied on Friday reports that they will be released soon.

“We have no information on the matter, other than the reports we hear in the media,” Zgheib said in comments published in Kuwait's As-Siyasah newspaper.

Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi will on Saturday become the fourth patriarch from Lebanon to be appointed as cardinal in the Catholic church during a ceremony at the Vatican.

Pope Benedict XVI will appoint al-Rahi and five other non-European prelates at St. Peter's Basilica where they are given red hats and gold rings.

Supporters of a pro-Palestinian Lebanese militant who has spent 28 years in French jails on Wednesday welcomed a Paris court decision that granted him parole.

But the group denounced in a statement an appeal by French prosecutors that effectively keeps Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, a former guerrilla in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), behind bars.

Thousands of Syrian refugees in Lebanon are urgently seeking temporary shelter similar to the camps set up in Turkey and Jordan, but with its troubled history of refugees, Beirut and the U.N. reject the idea.

"If no camp or emergency solution is provided, families will end up sleeping on the streets, or returning to Syria," said Ayman al-Hariri, a Syrian activist in Lebanon's northern province of Akkar, where tens of thousands of refugees are currently based.

Google celebrated the 69th anniversary of Independence Day of Lebanon on Thursday, with a homepage doodle featuring the temple of Jupiter in Baalbeck.

Lebanon celebrated Independence Day on November 22 marking 69 years of independence with an official ceremony staged in downtown Beirut.