Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has told France he is ready to attend a Paris peace conference if Israel accepts talks based on the 1967 borders, an aide told AFP on Sunday.

Nimr Hammad, a political advisor to Abbas, said the president had told French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe that he agreed officially to France's proposal to host a peace conference in Paris before the end of July.

French authorities suspended a customs inspector for having a photo taken of himself with U.S. President Barack Obama's passport as the leader entered France for the G8 summit, a union said Friday.

The inspector annoyed travelling U.S. officials by posing for a picture after stamping Obama's passport as the White House delegation arrived on May 26, local radio station France Bleu Cotentin reported.

Police questioned on Friday a French politician who sparked fury when he alleged that a former minister molested boys at a Moroccan orgy and that senior figures covered it up, officials said.

Luc Ferry, a celebrity philosopher and former education minister, claimed this week in a televised debate that he had heard about the scandal from "a prime minister" during his own time in office between 2002 and 2004.

French writer Bernard Henri Levy said he delivered a message on Thursday from Libyan rebel leaders to Israel's premier saying they would seek diplomatic ties with Israel if they came to power.

Levy told Agence France Presse he passed on the verbal message from Libya's National Transitional Council during a 90-minute meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem.

France is ready to host a Middle East peace conference before the end of July to help re-launch stalled negotiations, France's Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said on Thursday.

Speaking in Ramallah, Juppe warned that the current stalemate between Israel and the Palestinians was "untenable" and said France was willing to transform a July meeting of international donors into a broader peace conference.

Small explosions from booby-trapped products at three Ikea stores in Belgium, France and the Netherlands this week were caused by fireworks, the Swedish furniture giant said Tuesday.

The blasts Monday in stores in the western Belgian city of Ghent, Lille in northern France and Eindhoven in The Netherlands were caused by "small fireworks devices," Ikea spokeswoman Charlotte Lindgren told Agence France Presse.

EU capitals now consider the appointment of French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde as the next head of the IMF is a done deal, after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hailed her candidacy, a European official told Agence France Presse at the G8 summit.

"Lagarde? It's done," the senior source told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity as the decision depends on the IMF and not on EU or G8 leaders.

Novak Djokovic had a successful day off from tennis Monday, reaching the semifinals of the French Open when his quarterfinal opponent withdrew because of injury.

Fabio Fognini, who injured a muscle in his left leg while beating Albert Montanes on Sunday, announced Monday that he would not be able to play Djokovic, who is 41-0 in 2011 and has won 43 straight matches overall.

A French junior minister accused of sexual harassment resigned Sunday, two weeks after former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested in New York on sex crime charges.

Civil service minister Georges Tron, accused of sexually harassing staff at the town hall where he is mayor, said in his letter of resignation to President Nicolas Sarkozy that he would continue the fight to prove his innocence.

Syrian security forces killed at least eight people on Friday as anti-regime protests broke out across Syria, including in the capital Damascus, activists said.

"We have three people killed in the southern town of Dael, three others in the Damascus suburb of Qatana, one in the suburb of Zabadani and another in Jableh, located near the coastal city of Latakia," said Rami Abdul Rahman, head of the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.