A group of French senators said Tuesday they had asked the constitutional council to examine a new law that punishes denial of the Armenian genocide, effectively suspending the legislation.

Turkey reacted furiously last week when the Senate approved the law which threatens with jail anyone in France who denies that the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turk forces amounted to genocide.

Prime Minister Najib Miqati is expected to head to Paris in February with a packed agenda as he will meet with President Nicolas Sarkozy and PM Francois Fillon during his three-day visit.

“France has always played a centrist role concerning Arab issues, because it understands the region through its relations with Lebanon… we should remain a key knot between the Arabs and France,” sources following up the visit told As Safir newspaper on Tuesday.

NATO is committed to plans to withdraw combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, the alliance chief said Monday after France decided to end its fighting role a year earlier.

"We stick to the roadmap that was outlined at the NATO summit in Lisbon in November 2010," Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told reporters at NATO headquarters after talks with Romanian President Traian Basescu.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe is to head to New York on Tuesday to press the U.N. Security Council into taking action over the Syrian regime's "crimes against humanity", his ministry said.

Juppe will seek "to persuade the Security Council to assume its responsibilities faced with the Syrian regime's worsening crimes against humanity," ministry spokesman Bernard Valero said on Monday.

Ex-Premier Saad Hariri, who was hospitalized last week following a ski accident in the French Alps, was on Sunday recovering at his home in Paris after leaving hospital a day earlier.

Hariri “left this afternoon the American Hospital in Paris, after the surgery he underwent to treat fractures in his left leg resulting from a ski accident,” said a statement released by his press office on Saturday.

European and Arab U.N. members on Saturday started rewriting a proposed Security Council resolution condemning Syria's deadly crackdown on dissent after the Arab League suspended its monitoring mission in Syria.

European countries said the withdrawal highlighted the need for U.N. action. France's foreign minister contacted his Russia counterpart in a bid to overcome Moscow's resistance to the draft resolution officially presented on Friday, diplomats said.

French troops are to resume their training of Afghan soldiers after a week-long suspension due to a renegade Afghan soldier shooting dead four French troops, President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Friday.

Sarkozy also said after talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai that French combat troops would complete their withdrawal from the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan at the end of 2013.

French police arrested Jean-Claude Mas, the founder of the breast implant company PIP at the center of an international health scare, police said Thursday.

"Jean-Claude Mas was arrested at the home of his companion ... and taken into custody," said a police source, adding that officers had picked him up on Thursday morning.

Ivory Coast President Alassane Ouattara makes his first state visit to France on Wednesday, less than a year after troops from the cocoa-rich nation's former colonial master helped evict his predecessor.

The main focus of the former IMF official's visit, which lasts until Saturday, will be the signature of a new security agreement with President Nicolas Sarkozy, whom he meets on Thursday ahead of a state dinner.

Prime Minister Najib Miqati stressed that his cabinet’s term, is linked to its capability to preserve stability, according to newspapers published on Wednesday.

“When (the cabinet) becomes incapable of maintaining stability then we can discuss this issue,” Miqati told An Nahar.