A team from Greenpeace investigated a fire at the Bourj Hammoud-Karantina dump that caused a thick black smoke that reached all the way to Beirut’s southern suburbs, the non-governmental organization said on Sunday.

The team of experts discovered that Friday’s fire was caused by the burning of tires to extract iron and sell them to make gains, Greenpeace said in a press release.

Central Bank governor Riyad Salameh has denied that Syrian nationals were smuggling money to Lebanon, rejecting claims about money laundering in Lebanese banks.

In remarks to MTV on Saturday night, Salameh said: “There is no money smuggling from Syria to Lebanon.”

Premier Najib Miqati has stressed that Lebanon’s sovereignty and security are priorities and cannot be sidestepped for the purpose of helping all Syrian refugees escaping the violence in their country.

Miqati told reporters who accompanied him to Brussels that Belgian and European Union officials asked him to provide assistance not only to the displaced Syrians in northern Lebanon but also to those in the eastern Bekaa valley.

Investigations into the Lebanese navy’s interception of weapons reportedly destined for Syrian rebels showed that no Lebanese national was involved in the case, judicial sources said Sunday.

The sources told pan-Arab daily al-Hayat that investigators are trying to find out the exact destination of the arms that were stashed in three containers aboard the Sierra Leone-flagged Lutfallah II ship.

Al-Mustaqbal bloc leader MP Fouad Saniora visited Lebanese Forces chief Samir Geagea for the first time after the LF leader escaped an assassination attempt on April 4, An Nahar daily reported Sunday.

Saniora inspected on Friday night the wall that was hit by the bullets intended to target Geagea in the sniper attack in his residence in Maarab, the newspaper said.

A proposal by three March 8 lawmakers to probe alleged spending violations made between 1993 and 2011 is aimed at taking the dispute with the March 14 opposition to new levels, highly informed parliamentary sources said Sunday.

The proposal was made on Saturday by Loyalty to the Resistance bloc MP Ali Fayyad, Development and Liberation bloc lawmaker Yassine Jaber and Change and Reform bloc MP Ibrahim Kanaan to form a parliamentary investigative committee to “probe the violations of spending made since the beginning of 1993 until the end of 2011.”

President Michel Suleiman lashed out on Saturday at Free Patriotic Movement leader MP Michel Aoun for refusing to elect a new consensus president.

Aoun said earlier in a live Twitter and Facebook session that experience “doesn’t encourage” accepting this compromise again.

Politicians and religious leaders of different affiliations gathered Saturday to pay their respects to the late head of the Druze spiritual authority Sheikh Abu Mohammed Jawad Walieddine.

The funeral of Sheikh Walieddine, who died Friday at age of 96 of natural causes, was held in the Chouf town of Baaqlin, southeast Beirut.

Internal Security forces detained 19 Egyptian workers on Saturday who joined a protest outside the Egyptian embassy in Beirut.

According to the National News Agency, Egyptian workers held a sit-in near the Labor ministry in Shiyah demanding the end of the “sponsorship system” for foreign laborers in Lebanon.

Finance Minister Mohammed al-Safadi recognized on Saturday the rightful demands of the Lebanese laborers to live in dignity in their own country.

Safadi said in a statement that the 2012 draft state budget includes a plan that would cover the social and health care costs for all workers, which would be added to the increase in salaries that the cabinet approved in January.