Two people were wounded in a shootout in a Muslim neighborhood of Beirut on Sunday, police and hospital officials said.
It was not immediately clear who fired or what caused the clash near the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, but a police official said two people -- a Palestinian and a Lebanese -- were lightly wounded and taken to the nearby Makassed hospital.
The state-run National News Agency reported a shootout between a group of Palestinians and Lebanese, adding that army troops intervened to restore order.
PHOTO: AP
It gave no further details on the cause of the clash but said that the gunmen fled the scene to an unknown location.
Clashes have become common in recent weeks as tensions escalate between rival Lebanese camps and the country's 15-month-old political crisis deepens.
But a police official, speaking on customary condition of anonymity, said it was not immediately clear whether Sunday's clash had a political background.
On Saturday night, 14 people were lightly injured in a clash between pro-government and opposition supporters in the Beirut neighborhood of Ras el-Nabaa engaged in fist fights and beat each other with sticks.
The area has in the past week been the scene of sporadic clashes between supporters of the pro-Western government and the Hezbollah-led opposition, backed by Syria.
Saturday's clashes spread to three nearby neighborhoods but ended within a couple of hours. The neighborhoods involved have a mix of Sunni and Shiite Muslims, whose loyalties are split along the political divide.
After the Sunday violence, the military warned against more such clashes and pledged firm action.
"The army command warns of the dangerous situation and will act firmly against anyone who tries to destabilize security," a military statement said.
A Shiite opposition protest over electricity cuts in south Beirut neighborhoods last month degenerated into a riot, prompting troops to open fire. Seven people were killed in that violence.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack