Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet will head to Beirut on Tuesday to follow-up the investigation into the abduction of seven Estonian tourists in the Bekaa valley in March.

An Nahar newspaper reported on Friday that Paet will visit Lebanon to get the latest updates on the probe into the kidnapping and the location of the abductees.

France is committed to helping Estonia free its seven citizens kidnapped in Lebanon but patience is required to solve the sensitive case, France's European affairs minister said Thursday in the Estonian capital Tallinn.

"France as the country that knows Lebanon better than any other country in Europe has assisted and is assisting Estonia with all the means we have in the Lebanon kidnapping case," minister Laurent Wauquiez told reporters.

Prime Minister Najib Miqati is expected to kick off a regional tour that would include Syria, Saudi Arabia and Turkey after his new cabinet receives parliament’s vote of confidence.

As Safir daily said Monday that Damascus would be Miqati’s first stop. The premier might also visit France, it said.

European police have arrested six suspected members of a multi-national drug trafficking and money laundering ring and confiscated millions in cash, two police agencies in Europe said.

“More than eight European arrest warrants were issued against German, Dutch, Colombian, Lebanese and Turkish nationals suspected of being active members of this large and highly complex network,” the Hague-based European police and judicial co-operation agencies Europol and Eurojust said on Wednesday.

France on Tuesday urged Lebanon's new government to honor its international commitments, including maintaining support for the U.N.-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon.

"The formation of the Lebanese government ... is an important step for Lebanon and the Lebanese," the French foreign ministry said in a statement, referring to a new cabinet dominated by Hizbullah and its allies.

U.S. sources have informed caretaker Prime Minister Saad Hariri about a plan to assassinate him in Beirut, “which was supposed to be carried out in May,” Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Rai reported.

In a report published Monday, the newspaper said the U.S. warnings to Hariri “coincided with similar warnings from the Saudi and French authorities.”

Iran plans to triple its capacity to purify uranium later this year when it transfers the work from the central city of Natanz to the Fordo site, the country's nuclear chief said on Wednesday.

"We will transfer the 20 percent enrichment from Natanz to the Fordo site this year, under the supervision of the (International Atomic Energy) Agency," Fereydoon Abbasi Davani was quoted as saying by state television's website.

The U.N. Security Council will on Wednesday discuss a resolution proposed by European nations condemning the Syrian government's deadly crackdown on opposition protests.

Russia and China have strongly opposed Security Council action on Syria, but Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron said: "If anyone votes against that resolution, or tries to veto it, that should be on their conscience."

Syrian Ambassador to France Lamia Shakkour on Tuesday denied that she had quit her post, in interviews with Syria’s state TV and Al-Arabiya TV, shortly after the France 24 network aired an audio statement purportedly from her saying she was quitting.

In her phone interview with Al-Arabiya, Shakkour said her voice was imitated by the person who called France 24, stressing that she did not speak to any television.

Just in time for Global Smurfs Day and a Smurfs movie in 3-D comes a little blue book from a French academic that has some fans of the sock-topped comic book characters seeing red.

Antoine Bueno, who lectures at the high-brow Paris Institute of Political Studies, thought he was just having fun when he penned his 177-page analysis of the politics of Smurfland that's just been published in France.