Speaker Nabih Berri tasked on Thursday head of the Finance and Budget Committee MP Ibrahim Kanaan with chairing next week's joint parliamentary committees meeting, reported the National News Agency.

The meeting, scheduled for Tuesday, will tackle the new wage scale draft-law.

The government announced on Thursday that it has appointed the members of the Banking Control Commission of Lebanon (BCCL).

Information Minister Ramzi Jreij said after a cabinet session at the Grand Serail that the commission would be chaired by Samir Hammoud.

At least two people were wounded on Thursday in a landslide triggered by heavy rain in the northern Bsharri district, the state-run National News Agency reported.

NNA said the landslide in the town of Hasroun was caused by the collapse of a pond in the hilly town.

Israel began a week-long military drills along its northern border with Lebanon to test its readiness for any possible future war with Hizbullah.

The military exercises according to a high-ranking Israeli army official are in light of “Hizbullah's realization that its most strategic weapon is to move battles into Israel,” the Israeli newspaper Maariv quoted him as saying.

Mohammed Bakkar spends his days with his father and son in a small classroom in Lebanon near the Syrian border, where they cook, eat, wash and sleep, waiting for the day they can reunite with the rest of their family.

Bakkar's mother, wife and four other children are hundreds of miles away in Jordan's Azraq refugee camp, squeezed into a white prefab trailer of corrugated metal. When they fled to Jordan after government attacks in their village in Syria in 2013, they thought it would be just a few weeks until they were reunited. It has been more than two years.

French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian has said he would visit Beirut mid-April to attend a ceremony on the first shipment of $3 billion worth of weapons paid for by Saudi Arabia.

However, Le Drian told pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat in remarks published on Thursday that the delivery of helicopters, missiles, warships, telecommunications equipment and other defense material will take three years to complete.

Security measures have been boosted near the Egyptian embassy in Beirut's Bir Hassan area after receiving threats from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Interior Minister Nouhad al-Mashnouq confirmed in comments published in al-Mustaqbal newspaper on Thursday the threats.

The Petroleum Authority has been active in assessing the gas and oil reserves in ten offshore blocks despite the failure of the government to approve two essential decrees, As Safir daily reported on Thursday.

The newspaper said that the authority and a French institution completed three months ago the map of reserves in Lebanon's Exclusive Economic Zone.

The army refuses to engage in a settlement regarding former singer turned Islamist militant Fadel Shaker, who is compelled to surrender to the military intelligence.

The army said in a communique issued on Thursday that “media reports circulating concerning a settlement with the military in the case of Fadel Shmandur, who is known as Fadel Shaker, are false.”

Hizbullah politburo member Hajj Mahmoud Qmati stressed on Thursday that the party recently adopted an openness strategy towards its rivals to rectify Hizbullah's image and clarify its policies.

“The party's policy is to open up to everyone as it is certain that its national program fits all parties,” Qmati said in comments published in al-Joumhouria newspaper.