Sectarian violence shakes Lebanon
Lebanese troops battled heavily-armed followers of a hard-line Sunni cleric holed up in a mosque complex in a southern port city on Monday, the second day of fighting that left at more than a dozen soldiers dead, the military said.
The fighting, some of the worst involving Lebanese troops in years, was seen as a test of the weak government's ability to contain the furies unleashed by the civil war in neighboring Syria.
Lebanese security officials say a roadside bomb exploded on the highway linking Beirut with the Syrian capital without causing casualties.