A Lebanese protester carries tires to feed the fire during a demonstration for wage increases in Beirut.

Supporters of Lebanon’s opposition blocked main roads in Beirut with burning barricades on Wednesday, paralyzing the capital in a long-running political standoff with the US-backed government.
The opposition supporters set cars and tires ablaze to block the main road to Beirut’s international airport, Reuters said.
Activists loyal to Hezbollah, blocked routes to Beirut’s main commercial district.
The scenes were reminiscent of an anti-government protest in 2007 that led to some of Lebanon’s worst internal strife since its 1975-90 civil war.
In Lebanon’s biggest political crisis since the civil war, Hezbollah has been leading a campaign against Prime Minister Fouad Siniora’s government since November 2006. The standoff has left Lebanon without a president for five months.
The opposition has backed a strike on Wednesday by the main labor union for higher wages to help offset rises in the cost of food, fuel and other goods. The government increased the minimum wage by two-thirds on Tuesday but unions want more.
Security forces were deployed ahead of a march called by union leaders for later on Wednesday.
Hezbollah, Lebanon’s most powerful faction, and its allies in the opposition have deemed Siniora’s cabinet illegitimate since all of its Muslim ministers resigned in 2006.

Spying Accusation
On Tuesday, the Western-backed government accused Hezbollah of violating Lebanon’s sovereignty by operating its own communications network and installing spy cameras at Beirut airport.
The government, supported by the United States and a number of Arab countries including Saudi Arabia, also removed the head of Beirut airport security in another challenge to Hezbollah.
The group said the communications network was part of its security apparatus and had played a major role in its war with Israel in 2006.
A UN Security Council resolution that ended the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel bans the group from rearming and rebuilding its military infrastructure in south Lebanon.
Governing coalition leaders allege Hezbollah is spying on the airport to monitor their movements.

Airport Security Chief Sacked
Lebanon’s Cabinet decided Tuesday to remove Beirut airport’s security chief over alleged ties to the Hezbollah group, the country’s information minister said.
The decision is expected to exacerbate tension between the Western-backed government and the opposition, AP reported.
Information Minister Ghazi Aridi read a statement at the end of a marathon Cabinet meeting that began Monday evening and lasted nearly 11 hours, saying the security chief, Brig. Gen. Wafiq Shoukair, would rejoin the army.
A cleric, Sheik Abdul-Amir Kabalan, had dismissed allegations of Shoukair’s links to Hezbollah and warned Monday against any government decision to punish the airport security chief.
“If there are any changes made, the airport will be out of control,“ Kabalan warned.
A Hezbollah spokesman said the group had no immediate comment on Tuesday’s Cabinet decisions. But in a televised interview aired Monday night, Hezbollah deputy leader Naim Kassem warned the government against being taken in by false allegations.
The airport is located in the Beirut suburbs where the group has wide support. Many buildings in the area overlook the runways.
Hezbollah dismissed the allegations concerning airport surveillance and fired back with its own accusations against Walid Jumblatt --the current leader of the Progressive Socialist Party of Lebanon.
The Cabinet decision came a day before a general strike called by the country’s labor unions to protest the government’s economic policies. There are concerns that the one-day strike might develop into street confrontations between opposition supporters and government troops.
The Lebanese government said on Tuesday it was launching a judicial probe into a telecommunication network which Hezbollah had set up across the country.
Aridi told reporters after the cabinet meeting that the network was illegal and the government would pursue the matter through the legal system.
A judicial probe has also been launched into the airport case.
Al-Akhbar newspaper, close to the opposition, said Tuesday that Siniora’s government was pushing toward a conflagration in the politically divided country by removing Shoukair and tackling the issue of the telecommunication network.
Lebanon for more than a year has been mired in its worst political crisis since the end of the country’s civil war in 1990 because of the standoff between the majority and the opposition.
The crisis has prevented the election of a president since Emile Lahoud stepped down as head of state in November and has raised fears of new civil strife.

File photo shows a blindfolded Palestinian man escorted by Israeli soldiers in Erez crossing near Gaza.

Eleven Palestinians, including 10 Hamas fighters, were wounded during a pre-dawn incursion into the Gaza Strip by Israeli troops, Palestinian rescue workers and witnesses said.
Israeli armored vehicles and bulldozers, backed by a drone, entered the region east of the city of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza, they said, AFP reported.
Palestinian witnesses say that about 25 tanks and armored bulldozers entered an area east of Khan Younis before dawn Wednesday.
The Palestinians were injured by Israeli fire and during two raids by the drone, one of which targeted a house containing armed men, they said.
Hamas, elected to control Gaza nearly a year ago, confirmed that 10 of the wounded were fighters from the resistance movement. Israel raids the Gaza Strip almost nightly.

Palestinian Man Abused
In another development, three Israeli soldiers have been arrested by military police, charged with abusing a Palestinian man at a checkpoint, the Israeli military and a rights group said Tuesday.
The Israeli human rights group Yesh Din said soldiers detained 20-year-old Palestinian Zayd Abu Sneineh at a checkpoint in the West Bank on January 25. They handcuffed him, beat him and asked him to strip, the group said, releasing him after three hours, AP said.
The Israeli military did not respond to requests for details of the indictment, but confirmed that the three soldiers have been detained and are awaiting trial.
Yesh Din attorney Natalie Rosen said she was told the charges included severe abuse and damage to property.
Three years ago, in a slim volume entitled “Epistle to an Israeli Jewish-Zionist Leader“, Yehezkel Dror, a veteran Israeli political scientist, set out visions of how his country might look in the year 2040, as reported by “The Economist“.
He says Israel has only half of the world’s Jews, their majority in Israel itself is down to two-thirds and shrinking, and “Zionism“ has become a term of ridicule among the young. Jews abroad see Israel as increasingly backward and irrelevant to them, and Jews of different streams within Israel are at loggerheads.
Pressure is rising, both at home and abroad, for Israel to become a fully democratic, non-Zionist state and grant some form of autonomy to Arab-Israelis.

Uncertain Future
Yet whether Jewish or Arab, Zionist or otherwise, Israelis have good reason to wonder what their country will look like in 2040Ñor, for that matter, in 2020. Compared with much of its past, Israel’s present is prosperous and secure thanks to aggressive security measures in the West Bank and Gaza. But its future is as uncertain as at any time since the regime occupied Palestine six decades ago.
The war against Lebanon in 2006 was botched, but served to shake up the army. In the autumn of last year peace talks with part of the Palestinian leadership began again for the first time in seven years, though as they are looking increasingly shaky.
Moreover, talks on a Palestinian state look doomed to failure. If they do succeed, the need to give up the West Bank will re-ignite internal Jewish conflicts, but if they don’t, fears will grow that a separation from the Palestinians may no longer be possible, forcing Israel to choose between enshrining a form of apartheid and relinquishing its Jewish character. Arab-Israelis are increasingly angry about being treated as second-class citizens.
Many Jews already view Israel as spiritually impoverished and uninviting.
Some of these things are out of Israel’s hands, but Dror reckons that what happens to the country in future will depend mostly on its own decisions.

Turkey’s ruling party has said a legal effort to ban the party on the grounds that it is trying to scrap secularism is politically motivated.
The party maintains in a defense argument that a prosecutor’s allegations that the party is trying to scrap Turkey’s secular principles are baseless, AP reported.
Details of the party’s defense arguments were disclosed to the media on Tuesday, almost a week after the defense was submitted to the Constitutional Court.
Turkey’s top prosecutor accuses the party of violating constitutional protections of secularism, and wants the party disbanded.
The party, generally referred to with its Turkish acronym AK, said in its defense that it helped masses to embrace secularism rather than violate it.
“The AK Party not only respected secularism ... but it also contributed to the large masses embracing the state’s secular character,“ the defense arguments read.
The party won a new mandate in July, with nearly 47 percent of the vote, and says the case harms Turkish democracy.
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has warned that banning the party would have a “major impact“ on Turkey’s ties with the EU, which Turkey wants to join.