Prime Minister Tammam Salam called for a cabinet session next Thursday as the country faces a number of pressing issues.

The agenda of the session includes 39 articles, including the waste disposal crisis, the wages of public sector employees, and other economic concerns.

Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari suspended his head of immigration Friday, the government announced, with the department under investigation over the approval of a visa to Islamist Lebanese cleric Ahmed al-Asir.

Asir, wanted in Lebanon over deadly clashes with the army and other cases, was arrested on Saturday at Beirut's airport as he tried to board a plane to Nigeria using a fake Palestinian passport with a valid visa.

Detained Islamist cleric Ahmed al-Asir has confessed to interrogators that he spent two weeks in northern Lebanon when he was on the run, revealing that Lebanese and Palestinian figures had financed his political movement prior to the deadly Abra clashes, a report said on Friday.

Investigations have revealed that Asir sought refuge at places run by Islamist clerics in the North for a period of two weeks, LBCI television said, noting that the said religious figures will be summoned for interrogation.

The Lebanese General Security on Friday announced arresting a young man who tried to travel to Turkey to join the extremist Islamic State group, which has seized vast swathes of Syria and Iraq.

“As part of its efforts to monitor the activities of terrorist groups, especially militants who brainwash Lebanese youths into joining and fighting alongside such groups, the General Directorate of General Security arrested Lebanese national O. H.,” it said in a statement.

Progressive Socialist Party chief Walid Jumblat denounced the “barbaric” behavior that the security forces used in confronting Wednesday's protests of the You Stink campaign, assuring that the demonstrations are “righteous.”

“The protests carried out by some youth in downtown Beirut are legal and righteous, but the barbaric way used to disperse them are strongly rejected and condemned,” said Jumblat via twitter on Friday.

Iran is seeking to transfer state-of the-art weaponry from storehouses in Syria to Hizbullah, the Israeli Foreign Ministry director-general Dore Gold told The Jerusalem Post from Berlin.

The weapons include the SA-22 (Pantsir- S1) air defense system and the Y‑akhont anti-ship cruise missile, said Gold, who is on his first trip to a European capital for high-level talks.

French officials have been holding talks with their counterparts in Beirut away from the media spotlight to follow up the delivery of French weapons to the Lebanese army under a Saudi grant, al-Joumhouria daily reported on Friday.

Lebanon received in April the first shipment of $3 billion worth of French arms under the Saudi-financed deal to boost the country's defensive capabilities to combat terror threats.

Prime Minister Tammam Salam is expected to call for a cabinet session next week for “refusing to give up to paralysis,” his sources said Friday.

The sources quoted Salam as saying that “giving up to the logic of paralysis” is not part of his “dictionary.”

President Barack Obama wrote in a letter to Congress that the U.S. will uphold sanctions targeting Iran's non-nuclear activities, such as its support for Hizbullah.

Obama promised Democratic lawmakers that the U.S. will continue to keep economic pressure on Iran — and keep military options open — if his administration's nuclear deal with Tehran goes through.

The Free Patriotic Movement reached an agreement on Thursday for Jebran Bassil to be elected as its president.

Bassil, who is also the country's foreign minister, will succeed his father-in-law MP Michel Aoun as chief of the FPM.