A gang of thieves dressed as knights and armed with a sword and an axe robbed the organizers of a medieval festival in northeast France Monday and made off with 20,000 euros ($25,000), police said.

The theft took place in the early hours of Monday as organizers were counting revenues from the festival in Bitche, near France's border with Germany, a spokesman for regional police in Lorraine said.

France, which is taking over the U.N. Security Council's rotating presidency in August, will call an emergency ministerial meeting on Syria, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Monday.

Fabius told French radio station RTL he would chair the meeting himself and that it had to be held urgently to stop President Bashar Assad's regime carrying out further massacres in Syria.

French President Francois Hollande on Saturday urged the U.N. Security Council to rapidly intervene in the Syria conflict to pre-empt an all-out civil war.

"The role of the countries of the Security Council is to intervene as quickly as possible," he said, specifically addressing Damascus allies Russia and China and warning that failure to do so would mean "chaos and civil war."

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said any military intervention in Mali's rebel occupied north would have to be undertaken by a properly-equipped and organized African force.

"There is a lot of preparatory work involved," Fabius, who is currently visiting West Africa, told Agence France Presse in an interview in the Senegalese capital Dakar.

Madonna was on the receiving end of an angry backlash from her fans on Friday for ending a Paris concert after just 45 minutes.

With the Internet awash with criticism of the U.S. pop queen, tweets posted by disappointed fans included: "Madonna branded a slut and booed in Paris," and "Only 45 minutes for 200 euros a ticket."

U.N. negotiations to draft the first international treaty on the multi-billion-dollar arms trade have ended without a deal, with some diplomats blaming the United States for the deadlock.

U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon said Friday he was "disappointed" that member states failed to clinch an agreement after several years of preparatory work and four weeks of negotiations, calling it a "setback."

World powers voiced fears Friday over an imminent all-out assault by President Bashar Assad's forces on Syria's second city Aleppo and called for "maximum pressure" to prevent a new massacre.

France echoed U.S. concerns that Assad was preparing to carry out a slaughter of his own people, and Britain warned that the expected offensive could end in a humanitarian disaster.

French officials said Wednesday that a helicopter crashed in southeastern France and that five people were killed.

Francis Mene, a security official for southern France, said the helicopter crashed while carrying out a test flight Wednesday deep in the Verdon Gorge, a popular hiking destination.

Human rights groups filed a complaint in Paris Wednesday to urge the judiciary to probe the alleged involvement of French firm Qosmos in supplying Syria's regime with surveillance equipment.

While France condemns President Bashar Assad's violent crackdown, it is vital that full information be released "on the involvement of French companies in supplying surveillance equipment to the Syrian regime," said Patrick Baudouin of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH).

France will boost support for environmentally friendly cars as part of a recovery plan to be unveiled Wednesday amid growing concern for the country's crisis-hit auto industry and top carmaker Peugeot.

Highlighting the difficulties facing the French auto sector, PSA Peugeot Citroen announced Wednesday it had suffered a first half net loss of 819 million euros ($989 million), more than reversing a year-earlier net profit of 806 million euros.