French President Francois Hollande has contested claims he has put cooperation with Angela Merkel on ice until after Germany's general election and praised the chancellor, a German news weekly reported Sunday. "That is wrong, that is not my position," Der Spiegel quoted Hollande as having told the Luxembourg foreign minister at a meeting Friday at the Elysee presidential palace in Paris.

Two of Chancellor Angela Merkel's most prominent opponents have urged France's ruling Socialists to call a halt to the "German bashing" that has soured the two countries' partnership. Ties between the nations, whose post-war reconciliation has driven European integration, sunk to a new low this weekend after France's Socialists accused Merkel of "selfish intransigence" in her response to the eurozone debt crisis, in a leaked party document.

The Socialist Party of French President Francois Hollande pilloried German Chancellor Angela Merkel for her "selfish" insistence on austerity as the solution to Europe's debt crisis. In a document on Europe released Friday and due to be presented at a party congress in June, the Socialist party accused Merkel of being obsessed with "Berlin's trade balance and her electoral future". Since his election a year ago, Hollande has vowed to tip the main focus of Europe's economic recovery efforts towards growth rather than austerity.

By Madeline Chambers BERLIN (Reuters) - German opposition parties accused Chancellor Angela Merkel's government on Tuesday of protecting tax dodgers, seizing on the shock revelation that a top football manager had turned himself in to tax authorities and making it an election issue. Uli Hoeness, the Bayern Munich president and an associate of Merkel, revered and reviled in Germany for his footballing success and blunt style, said he was trying to make up for a mistake by telling officials about a secret Swiss bank account.