French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe urged the Syrian opposition to stop "tearing itself apart" in an interview published on Friday, in which he also opposed providing Syrian rebels with arms.

"There are some opponents whose attitudes are seriously weakening the opposition -- as long as they continue to tear themselves apart and fight amongst themselves," Juppe said in an interview with French newspaper Le Monde.

France banned soldiers stationed in the southwest from wearing uniform outside barracks on Friday after three paratroopers were mysteriously shot dead in twin cold-blooded attacks.

"Security advice has been given, particularly at the entrances of military bases," an army spokesman told Agence France Presse, adding that soldiers "have notably been asked not to wear their uniform outside barracks."

President Michel Suleiman received on Thursday United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon’s “strategic revision” of the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, reported the daily An Nahar on Friday.

It said that the six-page report is aimed at guaranteeing that the international force will be able to complete its peacekeeping mission in Lebanon.

Several hundred people including key figures in the opposition Syrian National Council rallied in Paris Thursday to mark the anniversary of Syria's revolt and denounce President Bashar al-Assad.

"Long live a free Syria!" the Socialist mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, told the crowd gathered outside Paris city hall. "The suffering, the horror that this people have been living through for a year is unsustainable."

Three French soldiers were killed Thursday when a gunman on a scooter opened fire on them near a military base in the southwestern city of Montauban and fled, officials said.

The motive for the shooting was not immediately clear but officials said they believed the shooter, who was being hunted by police, had acted alone and described the attack as a "criminal act".

China's Syria envoy Zhang Ming was to hold meetings Wednesday and Thursday in Paris, the French foreign ministry said, but he was not due to meet top-level officials.

Western nations including France have been at loggerheads with China and Russia over the unrest in Syria, with the two powers blocking United Nations Security Council resolutions on the crisis.

France has sent its senior human rights envoy to countries bordering Syria to collect evidence to level against the regime in the International Criminal Court, diplomats said Wednesday.

Ambassador Francois Zimeray is "in the region" to collect testimony from Syrian refugees and witnesses to the fighting in order that France can lodge a complaint with the court against Bashar al-Assad's regime, they said.

Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea criticized on Wednesday Free Patriotic Movement chief MP Michel Aoun’s statements, saying that his “disastrous” tenure in rule has been rife with corruption.

He told Free Lebanon radio: “Aoun is the last person who is entitled to speak about honor.”

Fifty years after losing the Algerian war, France is still suffering fallout from a conflict that shamed its armed forces and fuels bitter political rows even in its latest election battle.

Though French officials are keen to play down the 50th anniversary on March 18 of the ceasefire that ended the conflict, the war's legacy has reared its head in the run-up to France's April-May two-round presidential vote.

Jocko Besne, father of hundreds of thousands of the world's most productive dairy cattle, has died in France of natural causes aged 27, the farming cooperative which raised him said.

Jocko was the sire -- literally in at least 161,888 and perhaps as many as 400,000 cases -- of the Prim'Holstein race of cattle, the main French strain of the black and white Holstein or Friesian breed of milk-producing cows.