France has renewed its efforts to push for the election of a president in Lebanon during a visit for its Senate president, Gererad Larcher, to Iran, reported al-Joumhouria newspaper on Monday.

Sources monitoring the presidency told the daily that Larcher had expressed after meeting Iranian officials his fears over the situation in Lebanon.

U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter on Saturday visited France's Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier in the Gulf where it is being used to launch strikes on Islamic State targets in Syria and Iraq, the French defense ministry said.

It was the first visit by a U.S. Pentagon chief to the French flagship aircraft carrier, which is at the heart of a stepped-up air campaign against the jihadists in Syria and Iraq.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius on Friday demanded that talks on Syria's future yield assurances that President Bashar Assad will leave power.

"There must be safeguards regarding the exit of Bashar Assad," Fabius told the U.N. Security Council after the adoption of a resolution endorsing a peace process.

Two men held in Austria for suspected links to the Paris attacks are not French, a source close to the investigation told AFP Thursday, denying media reports about their nationality.

The two men arrested at the weekend at a refugee center in the western city of Salzburg "are not French, but are an Algerian and a Pakistani," the source said, asking not to be named.

American F-22s, British Typhoons and French Rafales -- three of the world's most sophisticated fighter jets -- roar through the skies over Virginia in the eastern United States in a show of aerial might.

They are a world away from the deserts of northern Syria and Iraq, where all three militaries are part of a U.S.-led coalition bombing the Islamic State group.

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen on Thursday removed a photograph of the decapitated body of U.S. journalist James Foley from her Twitter account after his parents accused her of using it for political gain.

Le Pen tweeted the images Wednesday in response to a journalist who compared her National Front (FN) party to the Islamic State jihadist group which killed Foley.

A 29-year-old man was arrested in the Paris region on Tuesday as part of the vast investigation into last month's attacks on the city that left 130 dead, a judicial source said.

The probe has seen 2,700 police raids and 360 people placed under house arrest since the attacks by the Islamic State group, which triggered a nationwide state of emergency.

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy said Monday he will shake up the leadership of his opposition Republicans party after the weekend's regional elections, with an eye on his possible bid for the presidency in 2017.

Sarkozy is sidelining the right-wing party's outspoken number two, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, who has been openly critical of his approach.

A French nursery school teacher who claimed on Monday he was stabbed in his classroom by an Islamic State supporter has admitted to prosecutors that he invented the story. 

The 45-year-old teacher at a school in Aubervilliers, northeast of Paris, was hospitalized with light stab wounds in his side and throat. 

France's far-right National Front (FN) failed to win a single region in elections Sunday despite record results in the first round, as voters flocked to traditional parties to keep them out of power.

The leader of the anti-immigration FN, Marine Le Pen, lost out to the right-wing opposition in the northern Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie region after the ruling Socialists pulled out of the race before the second round.