Foreign Minister Jebran Bassil is expected to comment on the uproar in Beirut over his meeting with his Syrian counterpart Walid al-Muallem in New York, a meeting which Education Minister Marwan Hamadeh said “falls in the context of stepping away from Lebanon's dissociation policy,” and does not serve the issue of refugees' return, al-Joumhouria daily reported Wednesday.

“Bassil-Muallem meeting has nothing to do with the return of refugees because there will be no return until safe areas are secured under a political solution. The Syrian regime has abandoned them because it wants to change Syria's demographics,” Hamadeh told the daily..

The crisis of Syrian refugees in Lebanon has taken a heavy toll on the country's society, and figures from the March 8 camp believe that the controversial issue of initiating talks with the Syrian government are “necessary to solve the crisis,” al-Joumhouria daily reported on Wednesday.

“Do we want to address the problem of displaced Syrians or not? If we want to deal with that, dialogue with the Syrian government is necessary and every other word is a kind of anesthetizing the people,” a ministerial source from the March 8 alliance told the daily.

President Michel Aoun has said from Paris he wants some 1.5 million Syrian refugees living in Lebanon to henceforth start returning to their homes, voluntarily or not.

Aoun, in a state visit to France, said that U.N. assistance given to aid Syrian refugees in "camps of misery" in Lebanon would be better used to return them to their country "from now on."

After Lebanon's highest constitutional authority decided to annul a tax hike law which people fear could affect the wage scale law, Finance Minister Ali Hassan Khalil said on Saturday the amount of money to cover the public sector salaries for September is “ensured,” al-Joumhouria daily reported Saturday.

Media office of President Michel Aoun said on Friday that remarks published in the American al-Monitor website, quoting the President during his stay in New York, included “inaccurate positions and some came out of context,” the National News Agency reported.

“The Lebanese Presidency media office confirms that the positions made by the President are no different from what he said in the speech he delivered before the UN General Assembly and during his meetings with Arab and foreign officials and the Secretary-General of the United Nations,” said the statement.

Israeli strikes hit a weapons depot by Damascus airport overnight, targeting a warehouse reportedly belonging to Hizbullah, which is allied with the Syrian government, a monitor said Friday.

"Israeli warplanes targeted with rocket fire a weapons depot belonging to Hizbullah near the airport," said Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

President Michel Aoun returned back to Beirut on Friday after taking part in the 72nd UN General Assembly session where he delivered a speech and held meetings with heads of state and officials of international organizations, the National News Agency reported.

Speaker Nabih Berri's call to slash the parliament's extension term and bring the legislative polls closer, is aimed at preventing attempts to “further postpone the elections” under a delay plight of “creating magnetic voter cards,” the pan-Arab Asharq al-Awsat reported on Friday.

Democratic Gathering bloc leader MP Walid Jumblat criticized on Thursday the fiery positions traded between the United States and North Korea saying “what a future awaits us.”

Pre-emptive security measures taken by Lebanon's military and security apparatuses have an important impact in “preserving the country's safety and sparing Lebanon from great risks,” al-Joumhouria daily reported on Thursday.

“Lebanon's safety is a red line. The series of pre-emptive operations carried out by the army, the successive arrests of terrorists and uncovering their sleeper cells had a profound effect on maintaining internal security and sparing Lebanon a lot of risk,” an unnamed military source told the daily.