Despite the negative media reports, the door to a presidential settlement has been opened and what Speaker Nabih Berri "has told to his visitors reflects this," a media report said.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf told the French representative at the latest New York meeting of the five-nation group that the objective in Lebanon is not dialogue but rather the election of a president, a media report said.

A Qatari envoy visiting Lebanon has said that his country is willing to immediately deposit $1 billion in Lebanon’s central bank once a new president is elected, al-Akhbar newspaper reported on Saturday.

A U.S. plan providing monthly financial aid to the personnel of the Lebanese Army and the Internal Security Forces will not be renewed when its six-month period expires in November, a U.S. Embassy source has been quoted as saying.

“The plan will not be renewed due to the failure to approve reforms and elect a president,” media reports quoted the source as saying.

Gunmen withdrew Friday from the schools they were occupying in the Ain el-Helweh Palestinian refugee camp, as a joint Palestinian force started deploying in the camp’s al-Taamir area.

The National News Agency said a “positive atmosphere” was engulfing the deployment process and that the Palestinian force was supposed to enter into the camp’s schools.

The swift fall of the Armenian-majority enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijani troops and exodus of much of its population has stunned the large Armenian diaspora around the world. Traumatized by genocide a century ago, they now fear the erasure of what they consider a central and beloved part of their historic homeland.

The separatist ethnic Armenian government in Nagorno-Karabakh on Thursday announced that it was dissolving and that the unrecognized republic will cease to exist by year's end – a seeming death knell for its 30-year de-facto independence.

The Internal Security Forces has confirmed that a food delivery driver who opened fire outside the U.S. Embassy in Beirut last week allegedly did so because of a personal grudge against the guards at the compound.

The ISF said they had arrested the suspected shooter on Monday, identifying him only by his initials M.K. and that he later confessed to the shooting.

The efforts of Qatari envoy Abou Fahad Jassem Al-Thani gained momentum after the Saudi meetings with French Special Presidential Envoy for Lebanon Jean-Yves Le Drian, a media report said.

“The Qatari envoy will have a second round of meetings with the political parties who have influence in the presidential file, but so far he has failed to find a common denominator between the Free Patriotic Movement and the Lebanese Forces and has failed to unite them over one of the three names that he has proposed,” al-Jadeed TV quoted unnamed sources as saying.

A bus carrying illegal Syrian migrants has been stopped by security forces in the coastal area of Hamat.

“A patrol from the Intelligence Branch (of the Internal Security Forces) managed at 1am to stop a bus driven by a Lebanese national and carrying 12 Syrians who had entered Lebanon illegally via an illegal border crossing in Wadi Khaled,” the state-run National News Agency said.

Rana Hariri doesn't know when she'll be able to send her children back to school, as Lebanon's grinding economic crisis thrusts the fate of public education into uncertainty.

Lack of funding for the school system has precipitated repeated teachers' strikes and school closures, resulting in children being increasingly pulled out of the formal learning system, and in some cases being forced to work.