Air traffic controllers suspended on Tuesday work at Beirut's Rafik Hariri International Airport for two hours to protest the cabinet's failure to include them in the new wage scale draft-law.

Inbound and outbound flights from the airport were suspended as the air traffic will resume normally at 12:00 p.m.

Electricite du Liban's contract workers have decided to carry on with their sit-in on Wednesday after the parliament postponed taking a decision regarding a draft-law that would turn them into full-time employees, as a seven-member parliamentary panel embarked on studying two proposals regarding their demands.

The workers had staged a protest near the parliament building in downtown Beirut.

Heavy gunfire was reported at dawn on Tuesday in the occupied Shebaa Farms near the Israeli military site of Ruwayssat al-Alam.

According to the state-run National News Agency, the Israeli army opened sporadic fire on the outskirts of the occupied area for half an hour.

The army deployed heavily on Tuesday in the northern city of Tripoli as it started implementing a security plan established by the government to end violence in the area, as President Michel Suleiman urged officials to deal firmly with all who violate the peace.

Army units began deploying heavily since 6:00 a.m. in al-Qobbeh area and Jabal Mohsen.

A Detroit-area man accused of trying to travel to the Middle East to fight alongside Hizbullah in Syria's civil war will remain in custody while his case moves through court.

The government said Monday that 22-year-old Mohammad Hamdan wanted to join Hizbullah, which the U.S. considers a terrorist organization.

The army dismantled on Monday a bomb-laden car in the outskirts of the northeastern town of Arsal.

"The army's airborne regiment located a booby-trapped car in the Wadi Hmayyed area in Arsal,” the state-run National News Agency reported in the evening.

The cabinet on Monday postponed appointing Internal Security Forces acting chief Maj. Gen. Ibrahim Basbous and acting Prosecutor General Samir Hammoud as full-term civil servants following a dispute that prompted the suspension of the meeting for around an hour.

However, the council of ministers managed to approve several key resolutions after the session was resumed, including the renewal of the terms of the deputy central bank governors, accepting the $3 billion Saudi donation to the army and extending the contracts signed with Global Telecom Holding (formerly known as Orascom Telecom) and Zain (formerly known as MTC Group) -- the firms that run the state-owned mobile phone operators Touch and Alfa.

Head of the Marada Movement MP Suleiman Franjieh stated on Monday that he is keen on the election of a president within the constitutional deadline.

He said after holding talks with Speaker Nabih Berri's presidential elections committee: “We seek the election of a strong president as do all the Lebanese people.”

The Syndicate Coordination Committee, a coalition of private and public school teachers and public sector employees, on Monday pledged a “severe” response against political parties that are blocking the approval of the new wage scale in parliament, reiterating the call for a general strike Wednesday and threatening to boycott official school exams.

“Some school owners have been raising fees since three years under the pretext of the new wage scale while the scale has not been yet approved,” Nehme Mahfoud, the head of the private school teachers union, said during a press conference.

Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblat on Monday urged the army and the security forces to be firm in drawing an end to the “abnormal situation” in the northern city of Tripoli, praising also civil society's efforts to restore stability in the North.

"The state and the security and military bodies' firmness is required now more than ever to draw an end to the abnormal situation in Tripoli, because of which many innocent people have been killed,” Jumblat said in his weekly editorial in the PSP-affiliated al-Anbaa website.