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.

An explosion rocked on Monday the residence of Hussein Abou Bakr in the northern region of Akkar, reported the National News Agency.

It said that the explosion occurred in the town of Fnaidiq in the region of al-Qamoua in Akkar in the morning

Telecommunications Minister Butros Harb announced on Monday that the tariffs for landlines and mobile phones will be reduced starting April 1, “in order to better serve the people and their interests, especially those with limited income.”

He said during a press conference that the reduction will range between 30 and 50 percent of the current prices.

State Commissioner to the Military Court Judge Saqr Saqr issued around two hundred arrest and search and investigation warrants against suspects who had breached security across Lebanon.

According to the state-run National News Agency reported on Monday, Saqr issued 200 arrest and search and investigation warrants last week against 200 criminals from the northern city of Tripoli, the city of Bekaa and Beirut.

Young Syrian rebel commander Mohammed limps from an injury suffered in "insane" army shelling of his native Qalamun region as he tells of his perilous evacuation across the border into Lebanon.

Mohammed, who gave only one name, is being treated in the small border town of Arsal, which has turned into a refuge for more than 100,000 Syrians fleeing the war in their country and a makeshift rehabilitation center for scores of wounded fighters.

The Israeli army planted on Monday a surveillance device along the technical fence to spy on Lebanon, the state-run National News Agency reported.

The wireless device was installed near a post for the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon on the Adaisseh road as Israeli warplanes overflew the area, NNA said.