Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi on Friday urged his supporters to get back the weapons that France supplied to rebels in the Nafusa mountains who are battling his regime.

"March on the jebel (Nafusa) and seize the weapons that the French have supplied. If later you want to pardon them (the rebels), that's up to you," the embattled Gadhafi said in a message played over loudspeakers in central Tripoli.

France insisted Friday that weapons it supplied to rebels fighting Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi were for "self-defense" in line with a U.N. resolution, after Russia and others voiced concern.

"Civilians had been attacked by Gadhafi's forces and were in an extremely vulnerable situation and that is why medicine, food and also weapons of self-defense were parachuted," Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said.

France criticized leaked information in ex-Premier Rafik Hariri’s assassination case and urged the Lebanese cabinet to fully cooperate with the Special Tribunal for Lebanon.

French Foreign Ministry spokesman Bernard Valero said Thursday that his country was “informed” that the Lebanese authorities received a copy of the indictment.

Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood told Agence France Presse on Thursday it was open to contacts with the United States as long as its "values are respected" but said there had been "no direct contacts" in the past.

"We are willing to meet in a context of respect. If the U.S. is truly willing to respect our values and support freedom as it says it does, then we have no problem," spokesman Mahmud Ghozlan said after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said there had been "limited contacts" with the group.

A man grabbed French President Nicolas Sarkozy and yanked him off balance before being wrestled to the ground by bodyguards on Thursday, television pictures showed.

The unidentified man seized Sarkozy by the jacket as he was greeting people gathered behind a barrier in the town of Brax, southwestern France, and tugged the president forward.

Two French television journalists were flying home Thursday from Afghanistan after spending 18 months as Taliban prisoners and becoming the longest held Western hostages in the war-torn nation.

Cameraman Stephane Taponier and reporter Herve Ghesquiere of state network France 3 were seized in November 2009 in the mountains of Kapisa, an unstable region east of the Afghan capital Kabul.

A French woman claiming to have been brainwashed by the secretive Catholic society Opus Dei is suing it for allegedly keeping her illegally as a domestic servant, she told Agence France Presse Tuesday.

Catherine T., who asked not to be identified by her family name, said she joined a hoteliers' school in northeastern France in 1985, aged 14, which she later discovered was run by associates of Opus Dei.

France has begun parachuting arms shipments to Berber rebels fighting Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's forces in the highlands south of Tripoli, the French daily Le Figaro reported on Wednesday.

According to the paper, which said it had seen a secret intelligence memo and talked to well-placed officials, the air drops are designed to help rebel fighters encircle Tripoli and encourage a popular revolt in the city itself.

As Army chief Gen. Jean Qahwaji readies to visit U.S. and France, a Lebanese army delegation that recently visited Washington told officials there that the military was not willing to fight Hizbullah to serve Israel.

A high-ranking source told An Nahar daily that the delegation headed by Maj. Gen. Abdel Rahman Shehaitly was asked several questions about the alleged influence of Hizbullah on the army. But the answer was clear: “Hizbullah is a party that has a presence in Lebanon and mainly the south where it resists Israel. Is the army required to fight it to serve Israel?”

France's Christine Lagarde was named Tuesday as the first-ever female chief of the IMF, faced with an immediate crisis as violent Greek protests rocked the stability of the eurozone.

The French finance minister, respected for her leadership during the financial crises that have rocked Europe over the past three years, was chosen to replace countryman Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who resigned abruptly on May 18 after being arrested in New York for an alleged sexual assault.