Kataeb Party chief Amin Gemayel Wednesday suggested an initiative to resolve the presidential void crisis in which he demanded supporting one of the top four Maronite leaders in order to elect a “strong and capable president.”

After meeting the Director of the Department of the Middle East and North Africa at the French Foreign Ministry Jean-François Girault, Gemayel said that he “proposed an initiative based on consensus among all leaders over electing a strong and capable president.”

French comedian Dieudonne told a court Wednesday he condemned last month's Paris attacks "without any ambiguity" as he stood trial on charges of condoning terrorism over a comment suggesting he sympathized with one of the gunmen.

The polemicist was arrested on January 14 after writing "I feel like Charlie Coulibaly" on Facebook, a mix of the slogan "Je suis Charlie" that became a global rallying cry against extremism and the name of one of the assailants who killed a policewoman and four Jews.

France has no plans to supply weapons to Ukraine to tackle the pro-Russian insurgency in the east of the country, Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said Wednesday.

"We have no intention of supplying lethal weapons at this time," Le Drian said, responding to a mounting debate triggered by reports that the United States is considering arming the Ukrainian government.

Iran's President Hassan Rouhani berated the world's nuclear powers Wednesday, saying atomic weapons had not kept them safe and reiterating that his country was not seeking the bomb.

Rouhani, in an unusually fiery speech, avoided explicit mention of ongoing nuclear talks between the West and Iran but accused atomic-armed states of hypocrisy.

French investigators were Wednesday interrogating a knife-wielding man who attacked three soldiers outside a Jewish center in Nice, as questions resurfaced over security measures a month after the Paris attacks.

The attacker, identified as 30-year-old Moussa Coulibaly from the poor western suburbs of Paris, was already known to police who questioned him just days before the attack, when he was turned away from Turkey last week.

The Islamic State group called for fresh attacks against France in a video released Tuesday, nearly a month after a deadly Islamist assault on a Paris magazine shocked the world.

In the video, an unidentified, masked jihadist is seen surrounded by militants calling on French Muslims to quit their country for IS' self-proclaimed "caliphate", which covers parts of Iraq and Syria.

A judge has dismissed a 15-year investigation into France for allegedly handing over top Cambodian officials to the brutal Khmer Rouge regime in 1975, a source close to the case said Tuesday.

In April that year, hundreds of Cambodians and foreigners piled into the French embassy in Phnom Penh, seen as the last remaining safe haven as the Khmer Rouge took over the capital, kicking off a bloody four-year regime that left up to two million people dead.

A knife-wielding man attacked three soldiers patrolling outside a Jewish community center on the French Riviera Tuesday, with sources saying he was expelled from Turkey only last week.

The attack took place in broad daylight in Nice as the troops were guarding the center under reinforced security measures introduced following last month's deadly jihadist attacks in Paris.

France's opposition leader Nicolas Sarkozy warned Tuesday there was a real risk of the far-right National Front taking power and eclipsing his more moderate party. 

"A victory for the National Front (FN) at the national level is no longer hypothetical," he told members of his conservative UMP party.

The former head of France's right-wing UMP party was charged Tuesday with "abuse of confidence" over a campaign finance scandal dating back to Nicolas Sarkozy's run for the presidency in 2012.

Jean-Francois Cope is the second person to be charged in the investigation, which centers on claims the party should not have paid fines leveled against Sarkozy after he broke campaign spending limits.