Damascus - French President Nicolas Sarkozy again called for Mideast peace Tuesday, following a meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on the continuing conflict between Israel and the Islamist forces of Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

"Every party should deploy and exercise pressure on Hamas so that weapons should be quiet and silent," said Sarkozy, who has faulted Hamas for prompting the Israeli attack with a week of missile attacks into Israel after a ceasefire expired December 19.

Brussels - French President Nicolas Sarkozy is welcome to mediate in the conflict raging in the Gaza Strip, but he should follow the European Union's line, officials in Brussels said Monday.

"What's important is that the (EU's) message is maintained ... if other visitors pass on the message, we're more than happy," European Commission spokesman Amadeu Altafaj said told journalists.

Paris - French President Nicolas Sarkozy left Paris on Monday on a two-day visit to the Middle East in a unilateral attempt to negotiate a ceasefire in the fighting in Gaza.

Traveling in his capacity as co-president, with Egypt, of the Union for the Mediterranean, Sarkozy is scheduled first to meet Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in the resort of Sharm el-Sheik.

He will then travel on to West Bank city of Ramallah to hold talks with the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, before meeting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert late Monday in Jerusalem.

London, Dec 18 : French president Nicolas Sarkozy made a mockery of the republican principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, denouncing the race and class discrimination that has poisoned France.

But the president''s plans to get a more ethnically diverse section of people from disadvantaged estates into France''s notoriously elitist top graduate schools, civil service, political parties and the media was greeted with caution by equality campaigners who said they would judge Sarkozy on his results.

Strasbourg, France - Nicolas Sarkozy on Tuesday defended the European Union's watered-down deal on climate change, saying the compromises that have been agreed by leaders will avoid imposing unbearable sacrifices on its citizens.

"We didn't want to impose constrictions which no country in the world could have survived socially," said the French president in his final address to the European Parliament at the helm of the bloc's rotating presidency.

Tehran - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday that he was not interested in meeting his French counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy.

"One of the European heads of states who tries to show off as world power and talk like Pharaohs recently said that he would not talk to and shake hands with someone who said that the Zionist regime (Israel) should be eliminated," Ahmadinejad said in a speech in Ahvaz, south-western Iran.

He was referring to Sarkozy's remarks that he would neither offer his hand to or share a table with him because of Ahmadinejad's antipathy toward Israel.