Lebanon should stay out of the Syria conflict and Hizbullah's involvement is "not helping matters", Prime Minister-designate Tamman Salam told French daily Le Figaro in an interview published Friday.

Hizbullah has sent its fighters to help Syrian President Bashar Assad troops recapture the key town of Qusayr near the border with Lebanon.

The attack against the Lebanese army in the Bekaa town of Arsal was planned weeks in advance, reported As Safir newspaper Friday.

Widely informed military sources told the daily that most of the details of the crime were uncovered, which includes the arrest of three suspects.

A parliamentary session set to be held on Friday to vote for the extension of its mandate by around 17 months drew sharp criticism amid vows by President Michel Suleiman and Free Patriotic Movement leader MP Michel Aoun to challenge the decision.

According to al-Joumhouria newspaper the United States and several European countries slammed the move through diplomatic channels.

Caretaker Foreign Minister Adnan Mansour stated that Hizbullah is an integral part of Lebanon's national and political fabric, reported As Safir newspaper Friday.

He therefore told the daily: “We adamantly reject placing the party on any terrorist list.”

A young Lebanese man caught plotting to detonate a bomb near Chicago's iconic Wrigley Field baseball stadium was sentenced Thursday to 23 years in prison, prosecutors said.

Lebanese citizen Sami Samir Hassoun was a legal resident of the United States at the time of his 2010 arrest.

Iran last year boosted its support for global terrorism to levels not seen for two decades, the Obama administration said Thursday as it released its annual report on international trends in extremist violence. The report said the core elements of al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan are headed for defeat but stressed that the network's various affiliates remain severe threats to the U.S.

The State Department's "Country Reports on Terrorism" for 2012 left unchanged the U.S. list of "state sponsors of terrorism." Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria remain on that blacklist, although Iran was singled out as the worst offender and Syria was taken to task for the ongoing brutal crackdown on opponents of President Bashar Assad's regime.

Nigeria's security services said Thursday they had discovered a home in the northern city of Kano where Lebanese nationals had stored weapons intended to attack Israeli and Western targets in Nigeria.

The Kano state director for Nigeria's main intelligence branch, the Department of State Security (DSS), told journalists the compound's owner had ties to Hizbullah and that the home had harbored a Hizbullah "cell".

A number of Palestinian refugees who fled the war in Syria on Thursday set ablaze aid offered to them by Hizbullah in protest at the party's military intervention in the neighboring country, state-run-National News Agency reported.

The refugees at the Palestinian Ain el-Hilweh camp in Sidon called on Hizbullah to withdraw its fighters from Syria and not to interfere in Syrian affairs, NNA said.

The Russian government on Thursday earmarked 10 million dollars in aid for Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan that will be paid through the United Nations in the year 2013.

“In 2013, around 10 million dollars will be earmarked as a contribution to the budget of the the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), with around 6.5 million dollars in support for the Lebanese government and around 3.5 million dollars in support for the Jordanian government,” read a resolution issued by Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.

Police on Thursday detained a Franco-Lebanese businessman who is being probed in a high-profile political financing scandal over suspicions he was trying to flee France, a source close to the case said.

Ziad Takieddine, who is banned from leaving France as investigations into the so-called Karachi affair go on, allegedly paid 200,000 euros ($260,000) for a diplomatic passport from the Dominican Republic, the source said.