France has joined the United States in warning Lebanon that its failure to fund the Special Tribunal for Lebanon would negatively impact French-Lebanese bilateral ties.

In an interview with pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat published on Tuesday, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said: “We ask the Lebanese government to allow the international tribunal to carry out its work and renew its mandate.”

Speaker Nabih Berri snapped back at former Premier Saad Hariri on Monday saying the Mustaqbal movement leader should have practiced his hobby of diving rather than being involved in politics.

“Hariri has revealed in his electronic interviews a number of his personal hobbies, one of which is diving,” Berri said in a statement.

A senior U.S. official will on Monday launch a three-country campaign to firm up sanctions against Syria and to tackle transnational organized crime, the U.S. Treasury Department said.

Assistant Secretary Daniel Glaser will travel to Beirut, Moscow and Amman for a week-long visit.

In the impoverished Jabal Mohsen area of the port city of Tripoli in north Lebanon, a small Alawite community is watching anxiously as Syrian President Bashar Assad fights to stay in power.

"Syria is our neighbor, our brother, our mother," Abdul Latif Saleh, mayor of Jabal Mohsen, told Agence France Presse.

During talks with Premier Najib Miqati in London, British Prime Minister David Cameron on Monday urged Lebanon to honor its international obligations concerning the U.N.-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon.

Cameron pressed Miqati on the “need for Lebanon to meet (its) international obligations on (the) Tribunal,” British Ambassador to Lebanon Tom Fletcher said on his Twitter account after the two men’s meeting.

An injured Syrian citizen without any identification papers entered the Lebanese territories on Monday, the National News Agency reported.

The Lebanese Red Cross transferred the man from the Qaa border town to al-Salam Hospital in Qbayat.

March 14 general-secretariat coordinator Fares Soaid said on Monday that Syria’s supporters in Lebanon would fall if the Assad regime collapses.

In remarks to Voice of Lebanon radio station (93.3), Soaid said: “If the Syrian regime collapses in the coming months, the Lebanese figures that revolve in its orbit will fall with it.”

March 14 MPs have rejected to become “false witnesses” in Speaker Nabih Berri’s renewed initiative to launch the national dialogue, saying the all-party talks would end up in the vicious cycle of Hizbullah’s arms.

In remarks to pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat published on Monday, MP Elie Marouni said that the March 14-led opposition “rejects to become the false witness of a dialogue that is called for by the March 8 forces.”

The ringleader of the gang that kidnapped the seven Estonian tourists, Wael Abbas, stayed in the custody of the Syrian authorities for 20 days before being handed over to Lebanon’s General Security Department last week, official sources said.

The sources told pan-Arab daily al-Hayat published Monday that Syrian authorities questioned Abbas over his fake Venezuelan passport and other documents after Qatar arrested him at Doha airport and deported him to Syria.

In a humble workshop in the southern coastal town of Sarafand, the Khalifa family runs the last of Lebanon's glass blowing enterprises and is fighting to keep this millennial heritage alive.

"Our profession has been passed on from generation to generation, and six of us Khalifas today are glass-blowers," says Ali Khalifa, 48, who for decades has painstakingly created vases, flutes and jugs with his relatives.