France and the United States on Friday urged Moscow to help de-escalate the Ukraine crisis or face "new measures" by the Western powers, the French presidency said in a statement.

French leader Francois Hollande spoke by phone with U.S. President Barack Obama and the two called on Russia "to quickly appeal to the armed separatist groups (in east Ukraine) to halt their military actions".

Western countries decried on Friday the Dahr al-Baydar suicide bombing that targeted an Internal Security Forces checkpoint which killed one and injured several.

The U.S. embassy in Beirut condemned the attack on its twitter account reiterating “support to Lebanon in its fight against terrorism.”

A photo of France's foreign minister Laurent Fabius posing as a dapper weather man to raise awareness of a major climate conference was instantly hijacked and ridiculed Thursday by amused netizens.

Wearing black trousers, a smart white shirt and bow tie, Fabius smiles slightly as he points to a weather map on the front cover of the weekly Le Parisien Magazine, due out on Friday but part of which is already online.

France on Friday called for the formation of a unity government in Iraq with or without Shiite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to fight Sunni jihadists advancing towards Baghdad.

Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said the offensive by fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) that has brought them close to the capital posed an unprecedented threat.

France called Thursday for an urgent but also political response from Iraq to the offensive by jihadist ISIL forces, and said it was "ready" to contribute to reinforcing the democratic opposition in Syria. 

The Iraq crisis, where ISIL forces have seized control of large swathes of the country north of Baghdad, is "a dramatic consequence of the situation in Syria", said the French presidency in a statement.

Iran hopes to start drafting a nuclear agreement with world powers Wednesday but accepts tough negotiations lie ahead on a raft of issues, one of its top negotiators said.

Abbas Araqchi said Iran still hoped its differences with the six powers can be settled by a July 20 target date for a comprehensive deal, but that it "won't be a catastrophe" if the negotiations have to be extended for another six months.

Germany's deputy chancellor Sigmar Gabriel hinted in a newspaper interview on Wednesday that France and Italy could be given more time to get their finances in order.

In comments which could restart a debate over austerity and growth in Europe, Gabriel struck a conciliatory tone to countries struggling to meet the EU's strict fiscal rules.

Chemical weapons such as chlorine have been used in a "systematic manner" in Syria, according to an initial report by a team from the world's watchdog investigating alleged attacks there.

The report has not been publicly released, but the United States delegate to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) quoted from it at an OPCW meeting on Tuesday, according to a copy of the statement seen by Agence France Presse.

A brutal vigilante assault on a Roma teenager who is now fighting for his life has shocked France, with President Francois Hollande dubbing the savage beating an "unspeakable and unjustifiable" act.

Accused of robbery, the 16-year-old called Darius was dragged into a basement in a town north of Paris Friday, savagely beaten by a dozen residents of a housing estate and left unconscious in a supermarket trolley where he was later discovered.

Germany's federal police on Sunday announced the arrest of a French national suspected of fighting for radical jihadists in Syria.

A spokesman told Agence France Presse that the man was picked up in Berlin late Saturday after flying in from Istanbul and was believed to have spent time in Syria where he allegedly joined the jihadist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.