Lebanon

The State Department has completed a preliminary report on whether Israel misused American-made cluster bombs in civilian areas of Lebanon. State Department spokesman Kurtis Cooper said Saturday that the report would be forwarded to Congress on Monday but declined to disclose the findings, emphasizing that they were preliminary. "We take our obligations under the Arms Control Act seriously," Cooper said. "Our forwarding to Congress of a preliminary assessment is an indication of that.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert testified for more than six hours Thursday before a commission investigating the performance of Israel's government and military during last summer's conflict in Lebanon. Olmert's office declined to comment on what the prime minister told the panel during the closed-door hearing, but he had been expected to defend the government's decisions during the war with Hezbollah guerrillas and to characterize the outcome as a win for Israel.

Hundreds of Lebanese police and soldiers ringed a university as students returned for the first time since a political spat in the cafeteria mushroomed into street riots that killed four people and inflamed Sunni-Shiite Muslim tensions. Security guards at Beirut Arab University searched all students and denied entry to those without student IDs. In the clashes of Jan.

Badgered by Hezbollah and jeered as a puppet of the U.S. government, Lebanon's prime minister on Tuesday blamed American support of Israel for an increasingly violent political crisis that has shredded this country's stability. His voice rising in frustration during an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Fouad Siniora said the troubles in his nation would subside if U.S.

Lebanese troops exchanged fire with Israeli forces at the border for the first time since a summer war between Hezbollah guerrillas and Israel. Lebanese officials said their troops opened fire on an Israeli army bulldozer that had crossed the frontier near the village of Maroun el Ras. Israel confirmed the exchange but denied its troops had entered Lebanon. There were no reports of injuries on either side.

Bombs exploded on two commuter buses Tuesday as the vehicles rumbled through a rainy morning rush hour in this tiny Christian village, the blasts echoing like thunder and killing three people in the latest violence to rip through a rapidly destabilizing Lebanon. The attacks rattled the country as people braced for today's commemoration of the two-year anniversary of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri's slaying.

Two years to the minute after former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was blasted to death with a massive car bomb, thousands of his followers lapsed into quiet Wednesday as church bells clanged and a muezzin sang the call to prayer: "God is great."

Officials here Tuesday linked a pair of deadly bombings last month to a group they said was composed of Syria-backed Sunni Arab veterans of the Iraq insurgency. Lebanese government officials said Tuesday that four Syrian nationals belonging to Fatah al-Islam, a self-proclaimed Sunni militant group, had been arrested and confessed to the bombings that killed three people in a mostly Christian district in the mountains overlooking the capital.

A poignant scene in "Beaufort," Israel's most popular new film, shows a young Israeli commander in Lebanon freezing in fear as a fellow soldier is caught in a rain of mortar rounds. "Liraz, get me inside, Liraz!" shouts the wounded soldier to the commander, who hovers in a doorway a few feet away, his eyes betraying a sense of shock and terror. The drama is not about Israel's 34-day war against Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon last summer.

As Lebanon braced for possible civil unrest, hundreds of people marched here Friday behind the coffins of two Sunni Muslim youths killed this week. The 12-year-old boy and 25-year-old man were kidnapped Monday in what is widely believed to be a vendetta stemming from the January killing of a Shiite Muslim student. Their disappearance near the Shiite-dominated southern suburbs raised fears of a worsening of sectarian relations, already fragile after fighting early this year.