Creepy crawlies, in the form of a venomous spider infestation, has forced a school in Britain to close a week before Halloween.

The Dean Academy, a secondary school in southwest England's Gloucestershire, said it was closing Wednesday to get rid of the false widow spiders. The spiders are commonly mistaken for their relative, the black widow spider, whose bite can be fatal.

An attack by rebels near Damascus has caused a power outage across Syria, state news agency SANA quoted the electricity minister as saying.

"A terrorist attack on a gas pipeline that feeds a power station in the south has led to a power outage in the provinces, and work to repair it is in progress," Emad Khamis said.

The injury toll from Wednesday's clashes between the rival Tripoli neighborhoods of Bab al-Tabbaneh and Jabal Mohsen rose to eight in the evening, with no sign of the fighting dying down.

“A man called Ahmed al-Basha was wounded in the al-Baqqar as gunfire was heard on the fighting frontiers of Bab al-Tabbaneh, al-Baqqar, al-Rifa and Jabal Mohsen,” state-run National News Agency reported.

The Phalange party on Monday urged national leaders to “get liberated” from their political stances and form a new cabinet to deal with the pending crises in the country.

"The country cannot handle more stalling and procrastination,” the party's political bureau said in a released statement after its weekly meeting.

Four rockets struck the Bekaa city of Hermel on Monday after they were fired from Syrian territory, Agence France Presse quoted a security source as saying.

"Four rockets launched from inside Syrian territory hit separate areas of the town of Hermel," which lies some 10 kilometers from the border with Syria, the source told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Two Turkish pilots kidnapped near Beirut's airport in August were shown in a video broadcast by LBCI television on Tuesday, saying they wished they could be back home.

The video showed Murat Akpinar and Murat Agca both saying they were in good health but adding that they wished they could be home with their families for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha that began on Tuesday.

The family of Monsignor Mansour Labaki urged on Saturday Christian figures in the country to intervene with high authorities at the Vatican to allow an appeal in the case of the Maronite father.

Labaki was charged by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the Vatican with sexually abusing several minors, LBCI television reported on Tuesday, quoting the French magazine La Croix.

Renowned Lebanese singer Wadih al-Safi passed away on Friday after a battle with illness.

Al-Safi, 92, died at Bellevue Medical Center in al-Metn's neighborhood of al-Mansourieh, al-Jadeed television reported.

Special Tribunal for Lebanon Pre-Trial Judge Daniel Fransen confirmed on Thursday an indictment against Hassan Habib Merhi who is accused of being involved in the February 14, 2005 Beirut attack that killed former Premier Rafik Hariri and 22 others.

The confirmed indictment and an arrest warrant were transmitted confidentially to the Lebanese authorities on August 6 so that they could search for, arrest and transfer the accused to STL custody, announced the tribunal in a statement on Thursday.

The head of Israel's armed forces has painted a grim picture of a future war in which the country could come under simultaneous attack in many ways, including from Hizbullah.

"The war could open with a surgical missile strike on the general staff building in the heart of the Kiriya (defense ministry complex) in Tel Aviv," Lieutenant General Benny Gantz told a conference in remarks broadcast by public radio on Wednesday.