India's prime minister announced Friday that New Delhi had ordered 36 Rafale fighter jets from France in a multi-billion-euro agreement that has been years in the making.

Standing alongside his counterpart Francois Hollande on a visit to France -- the first leg of his maiden trip to Europe -- Narendra Modi finally relieved the frantic speculation over whether tortuous, years-long negotiations on buying the jets would ever bear fruit.

Three months after appointing an openly gay diplomat as France's ambassador to the Vatican, Paris is still waiting for the green light from Rome.

Such a delay is unusual. Normally, the Vatican takes less than a month and a half before deciding whether to accept an ambassador. 

France's defense ministry on Friday dismissed claims by self-proclaimed Islamic State cyberjihadists that they had posted classified army documents online when they hacked into a major television channel.

The militants shut down transmissions at TV5Monde from late Wednesday to Thursday and hijacked its website and social networks, posting documents on its Facebook page purporting to be the ID cards and CVs of relatives of French soldiers involved in anti-IS operations.

The founder of France's far-right National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, vowed Friday to hit back at his daughter Marine, as a family and political feud grew increasingly bitter.

Marine, the party president, "is blowing up her own party ... it's not me killing myself, it's she who is shooting herself in the foot," the 86-year-old told RTL radio.

French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian is expected to kick off a two-day visit to Lebanon later this month to oversee the delivery of French arms to Lebanese military under a Saudi financed deal.

According to An Nahar newspaper, Le Drian will arrive in Beirut on April 20 to attend a ceremony on the delivery of the first shipment of $3 billion worth of weapons to the army.

The "unprecedented" cyber-attack on French television channel TV5Monde represents a major "step up" in the Internet warfare being waged by highly specialized jihadist hackers, experts said Thursday.

Since January's three-day Islamist attacks in Paris that killed 17 people, hackers have launched hundreds of assaults on French websites, from denial of service attacks that snarl up web traffic to full-scale hacks.

The deputy chief of France's far-right National Front Thursday urged elderly founder Jean-Marie Le Pen to resign after he made controversial comments that forced his daughter and party leader Marine to publicly split with him.

Long rumbling in the background, the father-daughter feud burst into the open Wednesday with Marine accusing her controversy-loving father of committing "political suicide" when he said Nazi gas chambers were a "detail of history" or called for closer ties with Russia to protect the "white world."

France's economy will expand at a slower rate than earlier thought in 2016 and 2017, the finance ministry said in new forecasts published Wednesday.

Growth is expected to reach 1.5 percent for both years, rather than 1.7 percent previously forecast for 2016 and 1.9 percent for 2017.

French television network TV5Monde was forced to broadcast only pre-recorded programs Thursday after an "unprecedented" hack by self-proclaimed Islamic State militants, who also hijacked its websites and social networks.

The Paris-based company, whose programs are broadcast in more than 200 countries worldwide, was the target of a cyber-attack that is "unprecedented for us and unprecedented in the history of television," TV5Monde boss Yves Bigot told AFP.

Nearly half of European jihadists known to have traveled to territory held by the extremist Islamic State group are French, a report by the country's upper house Senate revealed Wednesday.

Just over 1,430 French people have made their way to Iraq and Syria, representing 47 percent of jihadists from Europe that are known and accounted for, Senator Jean-Pierre Sueur, who spearheaded a parliamentary probe into jihadist networks, told reporters.