Competition, pressure and harassment: France's white-collar employees are facing a growing litany of "brutal" psychological risks in the workplace, according to experts.

Despite France's labour laws, some of the strongest in the world, depression, long-term illness, professional burnout and even suicide are becoming increasingly common among service-sector workers.

As a schoolgirl, Marine Le Pen was teased that she must be a fascist because her father was one.

It is a charge the former lawyer who heads France's far-right National Front (FN) has worked hard to shake off in the political playground.

The United Nations Security Council is mulling a French draft resolution regarding the importance of electing a new head of state in Lebanon and end the presidential deadlock.

According to a report published on Monday in the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat, the Security Council is discussing ways to convince the political arch-foes to elect a new president to fortify state institutions and safeguard the country.

France suffered a political earthquake on Sunday as the far-right National Front topped the polls in European elections with an unprecedented haul of one in every four votes cast, exit polls indicated.

Average results from five polling institutes pointed to the anti-immigration, anti-EU party led by Marine Le Pen taking 24-25 percent of the popular vote and around a third, or 23-25, of France's 74 seats in the European Parliament.

French President Francois Hollande telephoned on Sunday former President Michel Suleiman to express to him his concern over the situation in Lebanon given the vacuum in the presidency, reported Voice of Lebanon radio (93.3).

It said that the French president hoped that Lebanon would elect a president “as soon as possible” and that vacuum would not last too long.

French forces clashed with former members of the Central African Republic's Seleka rebellion on Saturday, a military spokesman said.

Around 20 gunmen in pick-up trucks shot at the French troops, who returned fire, destroying one of the three vehicles, Gilles Jaron said.

Western powers on Friday appealed for a peaceful transition in Libya, voicing alarm over the chaos and violence a month before elections.

Britain, France and the United States -- the three powers who led the 2011 attacks that ousted strongman Moammar Gadhafi -- urged a "peaceful and democratic" transition in a joint statement also signed by Germany, Italy and the European Union.

Rwanda's President Paul Kagame went into private talks with France's Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius on Friday in the wings of a development forum in Gabon, a source close to the Gabonese presidency said.

The two men shook hands following weeks of newly strained ties two decades after the Rwandan genocide, according to an AFP journalist attending the third New York Forum Africa in Libreville.

The sister of al-Qaida inspired gunman Mohamed Merah who killed seven people in and around Toulouse has  left France and could be fighting in Syria, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Friday.

French authorities lost track of 35-year-old Souad Merah in March when a school at which one of her children was studying alerted them that the pupil had failed to turn up for several days.

The United States is alone in helping Nigeria locate more than 200 schoolgirls kidnapped by Islamists, Secretary of State John Kerry said Thursday, despite help on the ground from Britain, France and Israel.

With 80 military personnel sent to neighboring Chad for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions, the United States is the biggest foreign participant in the effort against the militant group Boko Haram.