Russia's negotiator said Friday that there has been a "very worrying" slowdown in progress in nuclear talks between Iran and six major powers ahead of a June 30 deadline to finalize an historic accord.

"The rate of progress... is progressively slowing down," Sergei Ryabkov was quoted by RIA Novosti as saying as he arrived for the latest round of talks in Vienna.

A French court on Friday acquitted former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn of pimping charges, drawing a line under the latest in a series of legal woes over his sexual escapades.

The 66-year-old economist merely nodded his head in acknowledgment of the verdict, the finale of a colorful trial which dragged intimate details of his sex life into the public eye.

Veteran far-right French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen on Friday sued the National Front party he founded over his exclusion from the group after a vicious row with his daughter Marine.

In the latest episode of a public family feud that has divided the party, the 86-year-old appeared in court in Nanterre near Paris seeking to overturn his suspension from the FN and his removal as honorary president of the group he founded.

The U.S.-led coalition carrying out air strikes against the Islamic State group needs to target the jihadists' command centers, but this is easier said than done, French army chief Denis Mercier said Wednesday.

He compared operations in Iraq, where French warplanes are carrying out air strikes, and Syria, where the U.S. is bombing jihadist positions, to the 2011 international intervention in Libya.

For Malian troops making their first forays into the country's north since jihadists took control, French military support provides reassurance at a time when they are strangers in their own back yard.

Islamist militias linked to al-Qaida -- some foreign fighters but most homegrown jihadists -- seized the vast expanse of desert in 2012, effectively kicking out the Malian military and government.

The first bodies from the Germanwings plane that was deliberately crashed in the French Alps were repatriated to Germany on Tuesday.

A special flight operated by Lufthansa carried the remains of 44 Germans, among the 150 onboard when the jet crashed on March 24, from the southern French city of Marseille to Duesseldorf in western Germany.

A French mother took the government to court on Tuesday for failing to stop her teenage son from leaving the country to join jihadists in Syria.

The boy, identified only as "B", was 16 when he left with three others from the town of Nice in southern France on December 27, 2013, giving no warning to his family. 

Members of a French group that said it was formed to combat Islamophobia went on trial in Paris on Monday accused of plotting terrorist attacks. 

Led by 37-year-old "emir" Mohamed Achamlane, the 15 members of Forsane Alizza, who called themselves the "knights of pride", have denied involvement in a terrorist organization. 

Sudanese security agents prevented seven senior opposition figures from traveling to a European parliament meeting in France and confiscated their passports on Monday, one of the politicians affected said.

The group had been invited to attend the meeting in Strasbourg but were stopped at Khartoum airport early on Monday as they tried to board a flight to Istanbul.

A biplane crash-landed in a field in the grounds of the chateau of Versailles on Sunday, slightly injuring two passengers, police sources said.

The tourist plane suffered a mechanical problem just after taking off from the Saint-Cyr-l'Ecole aerodrome close to the Versailles estate, west of Paris, a police source said, adding that the field belonged to the chateau but was not in an area open to the public.