A French court Tuesday fined a British journalist 1,000 euros ($1,100) for flying a drone over central Paris and confiscated the machine, as authorities scramble to explain a recent series of mysterious overflights.

Tristan Redman, 34, from the Qatar-based network Al-Jazeera, was arrested last month in the Bois de Boulogne park on the western edge of the French capital along with two other journalists.

Authorities have denied a French expert on jihadists entry to Lebanon and accused him of links to extremist groups, diplomatic and security sources said Tuesday.

Romain Caillet, a researcher with the French Institute for the Near East, is a specialist on jihadist movements including the Islamic State group and had been based in Lebanon for five years.

Leaders of France, Germany and Russia have agreed with Ukraine on the dispatch of OSCE monitors to 10 flashpoint sites on the country's eastern frontline to shore up a shaky truce, Ukraine said Tuesday.

In a readout of a four-way telephone conversation published by the Ukrainian presidency, President Petro Poroshenko, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande, and Russian President Vladimir Putin "supported Ukraine's suggestion to put monitors to all locations of ceasefire violations."

Cash-strapped France, desperate to cut its budget deficit in line with EU rules, said Tuesday it was selling part of its stake in defense group Safran for 1.0 billion euros.

Paris offloaded 16.5 million shares in the group, representing 3.96 percent of the firm's capital, the economy and finance ministries said in a statement.

The latest issue of Charlie Hebdo -- the satirical weekly which has become the top-selling newspaper in France since its offices were attacked by Islamist gunmen in January -- takes a dig at the country's far-right National Front.

The cover of the weekly, seen by Agence France-Presse before it goes on sale on Wednesday, shows two thuggish skinhead party members sporting angel wings and one of them, with a harp, declaring: "Utterly un-demonized."

France will "not tolerate the slightest infringement" of the Minsk peace accord in Ukraine warned President Francois Hollande following a meeting with NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg in Paris Monday.

"The Minsk accord is the only possible basis to re-establish peace," Hollande told reporters.

Syria's exiled opposition praised France on Sunday for maintaining its "exemplary" opposition to President Bashar Assad after a group of French lawmakers made a controversial visit to Damascus this week.

"The position of France has always been exemplary, and your country has consistently held to the side of the Syrian people against any attempt to rehabilitate the regime in Damascus under false pretenses," the group's leader, Khaled Khoja, wrote in a letter to the French government.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame got a mixed reception from protesters in Paris Friday as he visited the U.N. cultural agency on his first trip to the city since accusing France of "participating" in genocide.

He is not due to meet with French officials during his visit for a meeting of the International Telecommunication Union, a U.N.-specialized agency for information and communication technologies, where he is co-chair of the broadband commission.

Syrian leader Bashar Assad no longer wants to "remain isolated in the face of the terrorist threat", one of the French lawmakers who met him in Damascus on a much-decried private trip said Friday.

Senator Francois Zocchetto was one of several lawmakers who travelled to the Syrian capital and met with high-ranking officials including Assad on Wednesday.

Syrian leader Bashar Assad cannot "credibly" be part of any future government combating the threat from the Islamic State (IS) group in the country, Britain and France said Friday.

Assad is "stoking injustice, disorder and extremism" in Syria, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond and his French counterpart Laurent Fabius wrote in a joint editorial published by newspapers Le Monde and Al-Hayat.