Air France on Wednesday said it had cancelled its Paris-Damascus service "until further notice" because of unrest linked to ongoing protests against Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime.

"Because of the situation in Syria, Air France has decided to suspend its flights to Damascus until further notice," a spokesman said, after the airline had already cancelled two flights to Damascus earlier in the week.

The international community is exerting pressure on the Lebanese government to protect Syrian refugees and provide them with humanitarian assistance after the U.N. refugee agency said Monday that as many as 2,000 Syrians crossed into Lebanon over the last two days.

An Nahar daily said Tuesday that the international community has also asked Lebanese authorities not to hand over refugees to the Syrian regime if it asks for their repatriation because their lives could be under threat.

The European Union on Monday urged more international action on getting humanitarian aid into Syria and called for Russia to recognize the need for new Syrian leadership, as Paris urged Vladimir Putin to mark his return to the Russian presidency by dropping Moscow's support for the Syrian regime.

"We need to see some action on Syria from the international community in order to get humanitarian aid that's so desperately needed into Homs right now," EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton told reporters in Prague.

A pair of Swiss policemen cast a suspicious eye as a creature in a space helmet with a camera mounted on top and carrying an astronaut's backpack wanders around Basel's St. Johann Park.

But what appears to be a visiting extra-terrestrial turns out to be a maverick designer, Jan Torpus, who is pushing the boundary between the real world and fantasy in a project he calls "augmented reality."

Chinese stars dot the front rows, a new designer from the country joins the runway calendar, and its retailers scout the city for talent: China's love affair with style is on full view at Paris Fashion Week.

Outside the French capital's Rodin Museum on Friday, paparazzi clustered around after the Dior show poring over a hand-out from the company, matching names to the faces of the Chinese celebrities they had just snapped.

Air France cancelled its Paris-Damascus flight on Monday because of unrest linked to ongoing protests against Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime.

"Flight AF-570 is cancelled because of the situation in Syria," a spokesman told Agence France Presse, saying no decision had yet been taken on flights later in the week.

The bodies of American journalist Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik, killed in the bombardment of a rebel flashpoint in Syria last week, were flown into Paris from Damascus Sunday.

Relatives of Ochlik, who was 28, were there to meet his coffin as the regular Air France flight, via Amman, touched down at Charles de Gaulle airport in the French capital, an airport source said.

A strong 6.6-magnitude earthquake hit southeast of the Loyalty Islands in the French Pacific territory of New Caledonia late Saturday but there was no tsunami alert, seismologists said.

The quake struck 260 kilometers east-southeast of the town of Tadine on the island of Mare at 11:19 pm local time (12:19 GMT) at a relatively shallow depth of 15 kilometers, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

French Interior Minister Claude Gueant, a hardliner close to President Nicolas Sarkozy, came under fire again Saturday for the second time in a month for comments deemed racist by liberals.

At a meeting late Friday in support of Sarkozy's bid for a new term as president, Gueant condemned proposals by the president's socialist opponent Francois Hollande to give the vote in local elections to immigrants.

The bodies of two Western journalists killed in Syria were handed over to the French ambassador and to a Polish diplomat in Damascus on Saturday, an Agence France Presse correspondent reported.

Veteran US reporter Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times and French photographer Remi Ochlik were killed in a rocket attack in the rebel Baba Amr neighborhood of Homs on February 22.