Head of the Mustaqbal Movement MP Saad Hariri held talks on Tuesday with French President Francois Hollande in Paris on the latest local and regional developments.

The former premier said after the meeting at the Elysee Palace that the presidential elections should take place before parliamentary ones.

A former French intelligence officer who defected to Al-Qaida was targeted by U.S. strikes in Syria last month, U.S. press group McClatchy said, in a report almost immediately denied by Paris.

According to the report, European intelligence sources describe the former agent -- who allegedly defected from either French military intelligence services or the country's foreign spy agency the DGSE -- as the "highest ranking defector ever to go over to the terrorist group."

A 15-year-old French girl was in police custody Sunday after she disappeared from her family home in southern France, suspected of wanting to travel to Syria to wage jihad.

Assia Saidi was "found on Saturday night by her parents in a bar, near Marseille station, where she had been working for a few days," a source close to the investigation told Agence France Presse.

Three allies of French former president Nicolas Sarkozy were charged on Saturday in connection with a probe into the financing of his 2012 presidential campaign.

The so-called "Bygmalion affair" concerns invoices for events staged by PR company Bygmalion during the campaign that were allegedly charged to Sarkozy's UMP party rather than the campaign coffers.

An Israeli tourist who was arrested in front of the Notre Dame Cathedral while flying a drone above some of Paris' main attractions, was slapped with a 400-euro ($500) fine on Thursday, after spending the night in jail.

The 24-year-old tourist had launched the drone, equipped with a Go-Pro camera, above the famous Gothic church on Wednesday morning, and sent it hovering over the historic Hotel Dieu hospital and a police station, a police source told Agence France-Presse.

An asylum seeker suffered serious burns after setting himself alight inside a French courthouse when his final chance at obtaining asylum was thrown out, according to police and witnesses.

A police source said the man was a Chadian national who had arrived in France via Syria.

The United States will renew its military assistance to French forces in the Sahel region of Africa but will require Paris to pay Washington for the cost of any future aid, U.S. defense officials said Thursday.

The US military has provided intelligence, surveillance drones, transport planes and refueling tankers to French troops since early 2013 after France intervened in Mali to roll back Islamist militants.

U.S. and French defense chiefs on Thursday discussed the possibility of France taking part in the American-led air war against Islamic State jihadists in Syria, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said.

Algeria is hunting 15 suspects in the kidnapping and beheading of French tourist Herve Gourdel on terrorism, kidnapping and murder charges, a judicial source said on Thursday.

The fugitives are all Algerians and include the head of Jund al-Khilifa, or "Soldiers of the Caliphate," a group linked to Islamic State jihadists in Iraq and Syria, the source told Agence France-Presse.

Announced with much fanfare two weeks ago, the return of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy to front-line politics has quickly become bogged down by legal woes and sniping from rivals.

Putting an end to one of the worst-kept secrets in France, Sarkozy announced on his Facebook page on September 19 that he was running for the head of his conservative UMP party to offer disenchanted voters a "new political choice."