Free Patriotic Movement leader MP Michel Aoun said on Saturday that officials are working on resolving the cabinet crisis, stressing that his party is not linked to the red diesel scandal.

“We are working on legalizing the cabinet’s decree concerning the transportation allowance instead of raising the issue to the Shura Council,” Aoun said during a dinner banquet for his party’s Engineers Association.

Prime Minister Najib Miqati reiterated on Saturday that the cabinet crisis requires the efficiency of its members in order to be solved.

“Keep the faith… and let’s all work together for the national interest of our country,” Miqati said on twitter.

A severe snowstorm lashing Lebanon since Friday has caused considerable damage to crops, blocked major roads and downed power lines in several areas.

Strong winds in the northern district of Akkar blocked the international highway of al-Abdeh-Abboudiyeh after it toppled trees. The residents later reopened it.

The Permanent Military Tribunal headed by Brig. Gen. Nizar Khalil on Friday sentenced to death Haitham al-Sahmarani, a retired Internal Security Forces first sergeant, on charges of collaboration with Israel.

Upon his arrest in 2009 Sahmarani confessed to collaborating, along with his wife, with the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency.

New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who strove to capture untold stories in Middle East conflicts from Libya to Iraq, died Thursday in eastern Syria after slipping into the country to report on the uprising against its president.

Shadid, shot in the West Bank in 2002 and kidnapped for six days in Libya last year, apparently died of an asthma attack, the Times said. Times photographer Tyler Hicks was with him and carried his body to Turkey, the newspaper said.

March 14 general-secretariat coordinator Fares Soaid has said that Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah didn’t clarify in his speech on Thursday whether his party would heed the demand of the March 14 opposition to integrate its arms in the state.

“We waited for an answer from him on the March 14’s proposal for Hizbullah to abide by the conditions of the state, i.e. the cooperation with the international tribunal to hand over the suspects and the handing over of the arms so that they could be placed under the state’s care,” Soaid said in remarks published Friday.

The U.N. General Assembly voted 137 to 12 on Thursday to approve a resolution calling for an immediate halt to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's violent crackdown on dissent.

China, Russia and Iran were among the nations that opposed the text.

Speaker Nabih Berri stressed on Thursday that Lebanon is committed to the drilling of oil within all of its maritime borders.

He said that “Lebanon is determined to invest in its petroleum and gas wealth.”

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has said the U.S. is closely monitoring the activities of Hizbullah after a failed bomb plot in Bangkok and attacks on Israeli embassy staff in India and Georgia.

Napolitano told lawmakers Wednesday that the Homeland Security Department has contacted Jewish organizations around the country and is working with the FBI and other law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblat on Wednesday declared the death of the Taef Agreement which ended the 1975-1990 civil war in Lebanon, calling on Syria’s ruling Baath Party to leave power.

At a seminar organized by the Friends of Kamal Jumblat Association on the topic of “The Rise of Islamists and Fundamentalism to Power in the Arab Countries”, Jumblat reassured that “the revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya -- which were liberated from the chains of the regime -- are not in danger.”