Interior Minister Marwan Charbel warned that the situation in Lebanon could remain fragile as long as Syria is engulfed in violence but stressed that Lebanese security forces are exerting all efforts to preserve stability.

In remarks to several Beirut newspapers published Wednesday, Charbel said: “Anything could take place at the security level in Lebanon as long as the situation in Syria is volatile and as long as there is lack of internal consensus.”

U.S. President Barack Obama on Tuesday said Russia and China understood the dangers of a Syrian civil war but had not yet "signed on" to a plan to prod President Bashar Assad from power.

Obama said after meeting Presidents Vladimir Putin and Hu Jintao at the G20 summit in Mexico that he hoped work could take place on a political transition plan to present to the Syrian people in the next two weeks.

The United Nations is to keep unarmed monitors in Syria despite the escalation of hostilities which led to the suspension of patrols, top U.N. officials said Tuesday.

Major General Robert Mood, head of the U.N. Supervision Mission in Syria (UNSMIS), told the U.N. Security Council the nearly 300 monitors were "morally obliged" to stay despite facing intensive attacks, diplomats said.

The United States on Tuesday added Syria to a blacklist of countries failing to abide by conventions barring human trafficking and slavery, a move which leads to sanctions and cuts in U.S. aid.

"The government of Syria does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and is not making significant efforts to do so," the 2012 Trafficking in Persons report said.

Egypt's ousted strongman Hosni Mubarak suffered a stroke in prison on Tuesday as authorities mulled transferring him to hospital, state media reported.

Mubarak did not lose consciousness during the stroke, the official MENA news agency reported. It had previously that doctors treated the former president with a defibrillator earlier because his "heart stopped."

Scores of "gullible" Filipinos are being tricked into going to work in Syria each month despite an official ban on travel to the violence-wracked country, the Philippine government said Tuesday.

The Filipinos, mostly women who go and work as maids, are being duped into working in Syria with false promises of high salaries and assurances that they will be safe, Labor Department spokesman Nicon Fameronag told Agence France Presse.

Doctor Moussa Abou Hamad will be released from custody after being detained from allegedly being responsible for the death of a pregnant woman, reported the National News Agency.

He will be released on a bail of L.L. 50 million, said Voice of Lebanon radio.

Factions of the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp demanded on Tuesday that an investigation be launched in the recent unrest in the camp that resulted in the deaths of Ahmed al-Qassem and Fouad Loubani.

They announced in a statement: “We will continue our sit-in away, but we will refrain from blocking roads in the camp, until our demands are met.”

The legal problems of Ukraine's jailed former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko mounted on Tuesday after a top prosecutor said he was planning to charge her over the murder of a deputy in 1996.

Deputy Prosecutor General Renat Kuzmin said in a newspaper interview the only obstacle in the way of charging was Tymoshenko's current hospitalization for severe back pains but expressed confidence the case would come to court.

Greece began a second day of coalition talks on Tuesday under the gun from financial markets and world powers after elections won by a pro-euro party that also reflected rising anger against austerity.

The New Democracy conservatives were negotiating a possible coalition with socialists Pasok and the Democratic Left party after clinching a narrow victory against radical leftists Syriza who want Greece's EU-IMF bailout deal torn up.