The major powers are locked in a race for influence in Lebanon's presidential elections as Michel Suleiman's six-year term nears its end, As Safir newspaper reported on Tuesday.

The daily said that the United States is backing elections to choose a new president and has sent an envoy who has a specific mission to follow up the polls.

A French court sentenced four men to up to seven years in jail Monday for having tried to wage jihad abroad, at a time of concern over the mounting number of nationals going to fight in Syria.

The four were accused of having tried -- and failed -- to reach jihadist hotspots in 2009 and 2010 and of having facilitated the departure to a zone on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan of two other Frenchmen who were later killed in a U.S. army raid.

Head of al-Mustaqbal parliamentary bloc MP Fouad Saniora stressed on Monday that the political rift in Lebanon is the main cause of the poor economic growth and deflation.

“The decline in economic growth and deflation is considered a normal matter amid the current political and security situation,” Saniora said in comments published in al-Liwaa newspaper.

President Barack Obama and key European allies expressed "grave concern" Saturday over Russia's actions in Ukraine as Washington warned further military escalation could jeopardize chances of brokering a diplomatic solution to the crisis.

The White House said Obama discussed Ukraine in calls with French counterpart Francois Hollande, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Italian leader Matteo Renzi.

France said Friday there could be no referendum on the future of Crimea unless Ukraine decided to organize one.

"The territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine are non-negotiable," President Francois Hollande said after a meeting with Ukraine's former foreign minister Petro Poroshenko and Vitali Klitschko, the ex-boxer and leading figure of the protest movement that ousted the country's pro-Moscow president.

About 300 fundamentalists in Sudan branded France a "criminal" and called for jihad during a Friday rally in support of Muslims in the Central African Republic, an Agence France Presse reporter saw.

"France is the chief criminal in Central Africa," said one sign carried by the protesters, many of them bearded, outside the main mosque in central Khartoum.

France's love affairs of state hit the courts on Thursday as the president's ex-girlfriend won a privacy case on the same day that the mistress who replaced her began her own suit against the paparazzi.

Valerie Trierweiler, the former partner of French President Francois Hollande, won 12,000 euros ($16.500) damages in an action she launched over pictures of her recovering from their break-up on a tropical beach.

President Michel Suleiman reiterated on Thursday that the Baabda Declaration holds greater political significance than the new government's policy statement.

He told reporters in Paris: “A flexible phrasing of the statement will be drafted in order to resolve the dispute over the resistance.”

President Michel Suleiman and al-Mustaqbal movement leader ex-PM Saad Hariri held talks in Paris on Wednesday night, al-Joumhouria newspaper reported.

The newspaper said Thursday that the meeting was held on the sidelines of a dinner banquet thrown by deputy Speaker Farid Makari in honor of Suleiman and the delegation that accompanied him to the International Support Group for Lebanon meet.

Syria's best-known filmmaker was released after being taken in for questioning by intelligence forces at the Lebanese border as he made his way to a festival in Geneva, a friend said Wednesday.

"Mohammad Malas was held for five hours by the intelligence forces on Tuesday. He was released, but is still in Syria," the friend, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Agence France Presse.