The United Nations on Friday put Major General Robert Mood of Norway, a veteran of troublesome truces, in charge of the force monitoring the faltering ceasefire in Syria.

Mood was already heading for Damascus when U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon publicly announced the nomination, diplomats said.

Prime Minister Najib Miqati stated on Thursday that Lebanon “cannot rise” without its local residents and expatriates, highlighting the Lebanese cabinet’s approval of a mechanism to allow expatriates to vote in the 2013 parliamentary elections.

He urged before Lebanese expatriates in Belgium “Lebanese all over the world to register at embassies and consulates in order to be able to vote in the elections.”

The Syrian authorities are failing to respect a ceasefire pledge to withdraw troops from urban centers in accordance with an agreed peace plan, the European Union said Friday.

"We are very worried about the continued violence despite the ceasefire adopted by the Syrian regime," said a spokesman for EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.

Syria's exiled Muslim Brotherhood on Friday urged U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon to acknowledge that Damascus had failed to honor a peace plan and to suspend its membership of the world body.

"We ask Ban Ki-moon to announce that Assad's government has failed to honor the peace plan and to declare the plan finished ... at a time when dozens of innocent people are dying," the group said in a statement issued in Britain.

A suicide bomb attack in the central Damascus district of Maidan killed at least seven people and wounded another 20 on Friday, Syrian state television reported, blaming "terrorists.”

The explosion took place near Zein al-Abidin mosque and a school, the report said, blaming "terrorists," the term the authorities use for rebels involved in an uprising against the regime of President Bashar Assad.

Russian deputy foreign minister Mikhail Bogdanov said Thursday that French calls to use force in Syria under a United Nations mandate were counterproductive.

Bogdanov's comments came a day after French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said Syria's United Nations-backed peace plan was "seriously compromised" and held out the threat of seeking military action to end a brutal 13-month crackdown on dissent.

In strife-torn Syria, 7,195 candidates have registered to compete for 250 seats in parliamentary elections set for May 7, according to state news agency SANA.

The poll, in which 710 women are standing, will run amid an uprising against President Bashar Assad's regime, which broke out in March last year.

Arab League chief Nabil al-Arabi demanded on Thursday the "rapid deployment" of U.N. observers to Syria to monitor a ceasefire that is becoming ever more tenuous.

"The entire world is waiting for a truce and the observers to be deployed, but unfortunately the fighting has not stopped and every day new victims die," he said at a league ministerial meeting in Cairo.

Prime Minister Najib Miqati stated on Friday that Lebanon has long stood as an example of tolerance and democracy in the region, adding that the country is serious in implementing political, economic, and social reform.

He said: “Maintaining stability must not prevent us from implementing all forms of necessary reform, regardless how painful they may be.”

Exiled Syrian businessman Nofal Dawalibi announced in Paris on Thursday the setting up of a "transitional government to answer the needs of the Syrian opposition."

"The situation in Syria is getting worse every day. Chaos is rising," said Dawalibi, whose father Maarrouf was Syrian prime minister before President Bashar al-Assad's Baath party took power in 1963.