The accused attacker of British author Salman Rushdie was transformed by a trip to Lebanon in 2018, when he became more religious and less outgoing, his mother has said.

Lebanese-born Silvana Fardos, of Fairview, New Jersey, described her 24-year-old son Hadi Matar as "a moody introvert" increasingly fixated with Islam after the visit to see his estranged father. 

A judge has denied a family's attempt to sue Lebanon on allegations that the country's security agency kidnapped and tortured their family member Amer Fakhoury before he died in the U.S., and that the agency could not intervene in the case.

Fakhoury, a Lebanese American man, died in the United States in August 2020 at age 57 from stage 4 lymphoma. His family's lawsuit, filed in Washington last year against Iran, says he developed the illness and other serious medical issues while imprisoned during a visit to Lebanon over decades-old murder and torture charges that he denied.

The Foreign Ministry denounced Monday the latest Israeli attack on the coastal region of Syria.

It condemned the Israeli violation of Lebanon's airspace to fire missiles on the neighboring war-torn country.

Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea said Monday that the next president must be "confrontational".

"We want a confrontational president," Geagea said in a press conference, adding that recovery can not be achieved, unless a president who would challenge the Free Patriotic Movement and Hezbollah is elected.

The Lebanon Law Review and the German NGO Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, Rule of Law Program have organized an international legal conference in Beirut to discuss the digitization in the fight against corruption and the digitization of law in practical business practices.

More than 200 participants, including members of Parliament, international experts, and local experts have attended the conference, Lebanon Law Review said in a statement.

A settlement to return to Archbishop Mussa al-Hajj his confiscated passport and phone has been reached, according to a report by al-Akhbar newspaper.

Al-Akhbar said Monday that, in return, authorities would keep the bags of cash and medicine and the church would stop the political escalation in order to resolve the conflict calmly.

Caretaker Minister of the Displaced Issam Sharafeddine arrived Monday in Syria to discuss with Syrian authorities the repatriation of the Syrians refugees.

Accompanied by a Lebanese delegation, Sharafeddine met with Syrian officials including the Minister of Interior and Local Administration and Environment Minister Hussein Makhlouf.

Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi on Sunday stressed that the country’s next president must have a “vision” to improve the situations.

“The people need a president who would pull Lebanon out of conflicts instead of keeping it in them,” al-Rahi said in his Sunday Mass sermon.

U.S. District Attorney Jason Schmidt has told a court judge that Hadi Matar took steps to purposely put himself in position to harm "The Satanic Verses" author Salman Rushdie, getting an advance pass to the event where the author was speaking and arriving a day early bearing a fake ID.

The man accused of stabbing Salman Rushdie at a literary event has pleaded not guilty to attempted murder charges, as the severely injured author appeared to show signs of improvement in hospital.