Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will visit France, Germany and Canada next month, the foreign ministry said Wednesday, on a tour expected to focus on attracting investment to the country.

Modi won a landslide election victory last May on a pledge to revive India's economic fortunes, and has embarked on an ambitious drive to attract more foreign investment to the country of 1.2 billion people.

India took delivery Wednesday of the first two refitted Mirage fighter jets out of a total 51 in the pipeline at a ceremony at the Istres airbase in southern France, as talks for more modern Rafales dragged on.

Signed in 2011 after five years of talks, the contract is worth 1.4 billion euros to be shared by Thales and Dassault, according to an Indian defense ministry document cited by the French business website LaTribune.fr.

The Spanish government said Wednesday it was hunting for the authors of malicious jokes on Twitter about the victims of the air crash in the French Alps.

"If they were all Germans and Catalans, what is the tragedy?" wrote one user, flagging the Tweet with the hashtag #Germanwings.

Flags flew at half-mast and workplaces fell silent Wednesday as Spain grieved for the 150 people, including at least 51 Spaniards, killed in a plane crash in the French Alps.

Mourners stood still for a minute's silence at noon at countless points around the country, including both houses of parliament in Madrid, theaters and football fields.

Kataeb Party leader Amin Gemayel blamed Iran on the spread of crises in the region and criticized Free Patriotic Movement leader MP Michel Aoun over his “illogical” stance from the presidential deadlock.

“The (region's) crises began since Iran started to spread its influence in Iraq, Syria and in Lebanon through Hizbullah,” Gemayel told pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat in an interview published on Wednesday.

Investigators on Wednesday made the first breakthrough in the probe into the crash of an airliner in the French Alps, as President Francois Hollande vowed everything would be done to explain the tragedy that killed 150 people.

Officials from the BEA crash investigation agency said they had extracted "usable data" from one of the Germanwings Airbus A320's two "black boxes" found among the debris, with recordings from the cockpit, but still had no explanation for the mysterious crash.

A prominent Jewish figure urged the United States on Tuesday to beware surging anti-Semitism in Europe and warned that seven decades after World War II Jews on the continent are having to look over their shoulders once more.

World Jewish Congress (WJC) president Ronald Lauder told a congressional committee in Washington that the United States could not sit by quietly, with events such as the recent attack in France underlining the growing threat.

A French court on Tuesday sentenced two Kurds to five years in prison and seven others to lesser terms in an extortion case linked to the Kurdish armed group PKK.

Investigators probed an extortion racket linked to the Kurdistan Workers' Party's (PKK) campaign to raise funds among the Kurdish diaspora through a so-called revolutionary tax.

The head of France's far-right National Front party has said she will ask the French people to vote on pulling out of the EU if she is elected president in 2017. 

"My idea is to tell the French people that if they elect me," in 2017, "six months later there will be a referendum," Marine Le Pen told Greek TV channel Mega. 

An Israeli cabinet minister visiting Paris warned Tuesday against concluding a "bad accord" on Iran's nuclear program, telling French daily Le Monde his country shares France's wariness of trusting Tehran.

"We believe it would be a bad accord with severe gaps in it," said Israeli Intelligence Minister Youval Steinitz, who met French President Francois Hollande's diplomatic adviser on Monday.