Europe stepped up pressure on Syria on Tuesday as several nations recalled their ambassadors from Damascus and the EU considered new sanctions to cut the regime's access to cash.

France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands decided to bring back their envoys for consultations, joining Britain and Belgium to protest the regime's relentless opposition crackdown. The United States has closed its embassy.

France and Germany will not accept the "blocking" of international action on Syria, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Monday, after Russia and China vetoed a U.N. resolution on the crisis.

After a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Sarkozy also said he would call Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on behalf of France and Germany later Monday to discuss the international community's response to the crisis.

Prime Minister Najib Miqati is scheduled to head to France on Friday, but he seeking to avoid bringing a ministerial delegation along with him, reported the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat on Monday.

Ministerial sources explained that the premier’s decision is linked to Foreign Minister Adnan Mansour’s insistence on attending Miqati’s meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

France will not be subject to intimidation or blackmail regarding its troops in the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, reported the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat on Monday.

French sources told the daily: “France is committed to UNIFIL and the implementation of U.N. Security Council resolution 1701.”

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov that Washington will push for a U.N. Security Council vote on Syria later Saturday, a U.S. official said.

However, it was not clear what if any progress Clinton had made in bridging differences with Foreign Minister Lavrov over the terms of an amended Arab- and Western-backed draft resolution in New York.

Libya's ex-ambassador to France, Omar Brebesh, has died in the custody of a militia from possible torture, less than 24 hours after he was detained by the armed group, Human Rights Watch said on Friday.

HRW said a Tripoli-based militia from the town of Zintan detained Brebesh on January 19 and that a preliminary autopsy found the cause of death included "multiple bodily injuries and fractured ribs."

The American surrealist painter and writer Dorothea Tanning, who was married to the late German painter Max Ernst, died on Tuesday in New York, a spokeswoman said. She was 101.

"It is my sad duty to announce that Dorothea Tanning has passed away. She died peacefully in her home," Pamela Johnson, director of the Dorothea Tanning Foundation, said in a statement on Wednesday.

French presidential frontrunner Francois Hollande was targeted in a flour-throwing attack Wednesday as he wrapped up a speech about housing problems.

The Socialist candidate, tipped by opinion polls to win the April-May two-round election, was unharmed but left covered in white powder after the attack by a woman who was swiftly removed from the room in Paris.

President Nicolas Sarkozy will immediately submit a new draft of a law punishing denial of the Armenian genocide if France's top judicial body rejects it, two ministers told Agence France Presse Wednesday.

"The president told us in cabinet that he would immediately submit a new draft if there is a rejection by the Constitutional Council" of a bill approved recently by the French parliament, said one of the ministers, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

France on Tuesday pressed Syrian authorities to shed light on the death of French television reporter Gilles Jacquier, who was killed as he covered the country's 10-month-old uprising.

Foreign Minister Alain Juppe, visiting the United Nations in a push for a resolution on Syria's bloodshed, said that a report by Arab League monitors was not definitive on the origin of the fire that killed 43-year-old journalist.