Former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright said Thursday that France had eavesdropped on her when she was in government as she dismissed European concerns about Washington's snooping.

"This is not a surprise to people -- countries spy on each other," Albright said at the Center for American Progress, a think tank.

French, U.N. and Malian forces were engaged in a major operation aimed at preventing a resurgence of Islamist rebels in Mali, the French military said Thursday.

"We have engaged, with the Malian army and (U.N. mission) MINUSMA, in a large-scale operation" in the so-called Niger Loop, an area hugging a curve of the Niger River between Timbuktu and Gao, French general staff spokesman Colonel Gilles Jaron said.

Iran has temporarily halted its production of enriched uranium to 20 percent purity as it has sufficient stocks to fuel its Tehran research reactor, a lawmaker was quoted Thursday as saying.

"There is no production at all ... as right now there is no need for the production of 20 percent (enriched) uranium," the parliament website reported conservative MP Hossein Naqavi Hosseini as saying.

The U.S. intelligence chief said Tuesday that articles published by the French newspaper Le Monde about America's espionage activities abroad "contain inaccurate and misleading information."

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said the specific allegation that the National Security Agency collected more than 70 million "recordings of French citizens' telephone data" was false.

Greek authorities have sought help from Interpol to identify a young blonde girl whose discovery in a Roma camp has sparked worldwide concern and interest in other child disappearance cases.

The cross-border police agency said it has sent out the girl's photo and DNA profile to all of its 190 member countries.

A French court on Tuesday gave the go-ahead for a Franco-Moroccan gay couple to marry, going against a government ruling that homosexuals from Morocco and 10 other countries cannot tie the knot.

France legalized same-sex marriage in May after months of intense and sometimes violent protests, and the couple -- Dominique and Mohammed -- immediately got to work planning their official union for September in the town of Jacob-Bellecombette in the Alps.

A Roma schoolgirl whose deportation to Kosovo caused an outcry in France on Monday begged the government to allow her to return with her family.

French President Francois Hollande said on Saturday Leonarda Dibrani could go back to France to continue her schooling after she was deported to Kosovo, but she has refused to return without her family.

France's Socialist-led government was in disarray on Monday as lingering controversy over the deportation of a Roma family and a divisive primary vote in Marseille exposed deep-lying tensions in the ruling coalition.

President Francois Hollande's weekend intervention in a row over the fate of 15-year-old Leonarda Dibrani and her family has exacerbated divisions between right and left within the government alliance of the Socialist Party and the Greens.

French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said Monday he was "shocked" by claims the U.S. has secretly monitored phone calls in France, and that he had asked Washington for clear answers.

"I am deeply shocked.... It's incredible that an allied country like the United States at this point goes as far as spying on private communications that have no strategic justification, no justification on the basis of national defense," he told journalists in Copenhagen.

The White House on Monday brushed off France's complaints about new allegations of eavesdropping by a top U.S. espionage agency, saying "all nations" conduct spying operations.

French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault earlier said he was "deeply shocked" by reports that the U.S. National Security Agency had secretly monitored tens of millions of phone conversations within France and demanded an explanation.