French forces have either killed or captured nearly 200 jihadists in the Sahel region of west Africa in the past year, French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said Sunday.

Ratings agency Fitch cut France's credit grade by one notch to "AA" on Friday, saying Paris's efforts to trim its fiscal deficit have fallen short to avoid a downgrade.

"The weak outlook for the French economy impairs the prospects for fiscal consolidation and stabilizing the public debt ratio," Fitch said.

Publicly, they are the best of friends working to seal a historic deal to stop Iran's march to a nuclear bomb. But behind closed doors, diplomats from France and the United States barely hide their frustration.

For years, France has been viewed as the toughest member of the group of powers known as the P5+1, after feeling burned in previous pacts under which Tehran covertly continued to advance its atomic ambitions.

Head of ODAS company Admiral Edouard Guillaud is scheduled to arrive in Beirut on Monday to finalize the list of weapons and equipment needed by Lebanon as part of the Saudi-French arms deal, reported As Safir newspaper on Saturday.

It said that he will sign the list of weapons along with Army Commander General Jean Qahwaji.

Director of the department of the Middle East and North Africa at the French Foreign Ministry Jean-François Girault is expected to travel to Iran next week as part of his ongoing efforts to resolve the vacuum in the presidency in Lebanon, reported the daily An Nahar on Saturday.

It said that he will then head to the Saudi Arabian capital Riyadh.

The signing of the final contracts for equipping the Lebanese army with French weapons might take place “next week in Beirut, not in France,” a media report said Friday, as Prime Minister Tammam Salam met French President Francois Hollande at the Élysée Palace.

“After the contracts are signed, the file will be sent to Saudi Arabia for approval and it would then pay 20% of the total amount of the grant so that the delivery process can begin,” LBCI television reported.

Mali admitted Friday that prisoners had been freed in exchange for the release of French hostage Serge Lazarevic, confirming information given to AFP earlier this week by a security source in the west African country.

"It's a fact, everyone knows, there is no need to deny reality," Justice Minister Mohamed Ali Bathily told France 24 television in response to a question on the issue, three days after Lazarevic, who was kidnapped by Islamist militants in Mali in 2011, was freed.

A French court Friday sentenced the former mayor of a small seaside village to four years in prison for concealing flood risks that led to the death of 29 people in a brutal storm.

The court ruled that Rene Marratier was aware of the risks of flooding in La Faute-sur-Mer on the western coast but "deliberately hid" them so as not to miss out on the "cash-cow" of property development.

Swiss authorities have charged a fugitive banking analyst with data theft and their transfer to several institutions abroad, including Lebanese banks, in what is considered to be one of the biggest security breaches in the country's often-secretive banking sector.

The case of Herve Falciani, a former employee of global banking group HSBC, has been making headlines in Europe since he fled Switzerland in 2008. He has been accused of stealing information between 2006 and 2007 relating to 24,000 customers of the Swiss division of HSBC.

France informed on Thursday Prime Minister Tammam Salam that it will form a parliamentary committee aimed at following up on Lebanon's needs.

Salam revealed: “Speaker Claude Bartolone informed me that a high-ranking parliamentary committee will be formed to follow up on Lebanon's military and Syrian refugee needs.”