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• TRIPOLI, Lebanon (AP) -- In a rundown district of Lebanon's second largest city, residents have adapted to waging war with their neighbors.
• Whenever violence breaks out, they string large cloths across intersections to block snipers' view, sleep in hallways to take cover from mortar shells and abandon apartments close to the front line.
• The sectarian fighting between the two neighborhoods stretches back four decades to Lebanon's civil war. But it has become more frequent and increasingly lethal since the start of the Syrian conflict in 2011. The two districts support opposite sides.
• The latest round between Bab Tabbaneh and Jabal Mohsen over the past week has been the bloodiest yet, leaving at least 28 dead and more than 200 wounded.
• Bab Tabbaneh is mostly Sunni, while Jabal Mohsen is home to most of Tripoli's Alawites, followers of an offshoot of Shiite Islam.
• ___

• WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Republican Party, having lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, confronts a dilemma that's easier to describe than to solve: How can it broaden its appeal to up-for-grabs voters without alienating its conservative base?
• There's no consensus yet on how to do it. With the next election three years away, Republicans are tiptoeing around policy changes even as they size up potential candidates who range from tea party heroes to pragmatic governors in Republican- and Democratic-leaning states.
• There's a partial road map, but it's more than two decades old, and the other party drafted it. Democrats, sick of losing elections and being tagged as out-of-touch liberals, moved their party toward the center and rallied behind Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton in 1992.
• Strategists in both parties say Clinton's achievement, however impressive, may look modest compared to what a Republican leader must do to construct a new winning formula, given the nation's changing demographics.

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