Wrapped around Florent Groberg's right wrist is a scratched, black metal band he hardly ever takes off.

The soldier's bracelet is engraved with a date in 2012, along with the names and ranks of three comrades who were killed in a suicide blast in Afghanistan.

Britain and France are to strengthen police cooperation to dismantle people smuggling networks and combat undocumented migration, the French interior minister said on Monday.

Bernard Cazeneuve and his British counterpart Theresa May signed an agreement at a meeting in London on Monday night to increase cross-border cooperation in law enforcement.

The deal between Saudi Arabia and France over providing weapons to the Lebanese army has returned back to its course, reported As Safir newspaper on Tuesday.

It said that the execution of the agreement will resume after it had reached a halt a few months ago.

French President Francois Hollande is expected to hold talks with his Iranian counterpart on the ongoing deadlock in Lebanon over the election of a new president, reported As Safir newspaper on Tuesday.

Arab and French sources told the daily that Hollande will address this issue during Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's upcoming visit to Paris.

France and its allies have agreed on the need for a "precise timetable" for the departure of Syrian President Bashar Assad as they met ahead of international talks, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Wednesday.

"We worked on the details of a political transition guaranteeing the departure of Bashar Assad within a precise timetable," Fabius said in a statement.

France will host a meeting on the Syria crisis with Western and Arab allies later on Tuesday, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said.

The "working dinner" at the French foreign ministry will include "the main partners engaged with France in dealing with the Syrian crisis: Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Qatar, Turkey, Germany, the United States, Italy and Britain," Fabius said in a statement.

French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve stressed Monday his country's solidarity with Lebanon in the face of the Syrian refugee crisis during an official visit to Beirut

Cazeneuve, who arrived at dawn, met with Prime Minister Tammam Salam, Interior Minister Nouhad al-Mashnouq and a number of other officials.

More than 1,300 migrants were moved out of a disused Paris school on Friday, the last major camp in the French capital and where they had spent months in increasingly rough conditions.

Police transported the group from the school in a fleet of buses early in the morning, according to AFP journalists at the scene, taking them to hostels and special accommodation around Paris.

At least 42 people, most of them elderly, were killed when a coach collided with a lorry and caught fire in southwest France on Friday, in the country's worst road accident for three decades.

The coach was carrying a club of elderly people on an excursion when it collided with the lorry near the village of Puisseguin among the vineyards of the St Emilion region, east of Bordeaux.

Britain, France and Spain will soon present a draft resolution to the U.N. Security Council on stopping the Syrian regime from using barrel bombs, the French envoy said Thursday.

But it remains highly unlikely that Russia, Syria's ally, would support such a measure, which comes amid fierce Western criticism of Moscow's air war in Syria.